Philippa Gregory - The other queen

“Then if you do all this, why did you not know when she was plotting under your very roof?”

“She is clever,” I say. “And every man who sees her wants to serve her.” At once I wish I had bitten back the words. I have to take care. I can see the color rising under the rouge in the queen’s cheeks. “Misguided men, foolish men, those who forget what you and yours have done for them. They seek to serve her from their own folly.”

“They say she is irresistible,” she remarks idly, encouraging me to agree.

I shake my head. “I don’t find her so,” I say, tasting ugly words in my mouth before I speak them. “I find her often sickly, often bad-tempered, often moody, not very pleasing, not a woman I could admire.”

For the first time she looks at me with interest and not with hostility. “What? You don’t find her beautiful?”

I shrug. “Your Grace, remember I am newly married. I love my wife. You know how smart and neat and steady is Bess. And you are my queen, the most beautiful and gracious queen in the world. I have never looked at another woman but you and my Bess these past three years. The Queen of Scots is a burden you asked me to carry. I do it to the best of my ability. I do it for love and loyalty to you. But there is no question of me enjoying her company.”

For a moment I can almost see her, my exquisite Queen Mary, as if I have summoned her with my lies. She is standing before me, her pale face downturned, the dark eyelashes against her perfect cheek. I can almost hear the third crowing of a cock as I deny my love for her.

“And Bess?”

“Bess does her best,” I say. “She does her best for love of you. But we would both rather be at court with you than living at Tutbury with the Scots queen. It is an exile for us both. We have both been unhappy.” I hear the ring of truth in my voice at that, at least. “We are both very unhappy,” I say honestly. “I don’t think either of us knew how hard this would be.”

“The expense?” she jeers.

“The loneliness,” I say quietly.

She sighs as if she has come to the end of a piece of hard work. “I was sure all along that you were faithful, whatever anyone said. And my good Bess.”

“We are,” I say. “We both are.” I begin to think that I may walk out of this room a free man.

“Hastings can take her to his house until we decide what is to be done with her,” she says. “You can go back to Chatsworth with Bess. You can start your married life all over again. You can be happy again.”

“I thank you,” I say. I bow low and walk backwards towards the door. There is no point in mentioning the huge debt she owes me for the queen’s keep. There is no point in telling her that Bess will never forgive me for the loss of this fortune. No point in repining that we cannot start married life all over again, it is spoiled, perhaps forever. I should be glad just to get out of here without an escort of guards to take me to the Tower, where my friends wait for the death sentence.

At the door, I hesitate. “Has Your Grace decided what is to become of her?”

The queen shoots me a hard, suspicious look. “Why would you care?”

“Bess will ask me,” I say feebly.

“She will be held as a prisoner until we can judge what to do,” she says. “She cannot be tried for treason: she is no subject of mine, so she cannot be accused of treason. She cannot be returned to Scotland now; clearly she cannot be trusted. She has made my life impossible. She has made her own life impossible. She is a fool. I don’t want to keep her imprisoned forever, but I don’t see what else I can do with her. It is that or her death, and clearly I cannot kill a fellow queen and my cousin. She is a fool to force this dilemma upon me. She has raised the stakes to victory or death and I can give her neither.”

“She would make a peace agreement with you, I think,” I say cautiously. “She would hold to a peace treaty with you. She always speaks of you with the deepest of respect. This uprising was none of her making and she was preparing to return to Scotland as an ally of yours.”

“Cecil says she cannot be trusted,” she says shortly. “And she herself has taught me not to trust her. And hear this, Talbot: I would take Cecil’s opinion before that of a man who permitted her to court, betroth herself, and plan a rebellion under his very roof. At the very least you were too trusting with her, Shrewsbury. I pray to God it is nothing worse. She has fooled you; I hope she has not seduced you.”

“I swear she has not,” I say.

She nods, unimpressed. “You can go back to your wife.”

I bow. “I am always loyal,” I say from the doorway.

“I know what you do,” she says bluntly. “I know every single thing that you do, trust Cecil for that. But I don’t know what you think anymore. I used to know what you all thought, but now you are grown mysterious, all of you. You have all lost your fidelity. I don’t know what you all want. You are opaque to me now, where once you were all so clear.”

I find I cannot answer her. I should be a clever courtier and have some words of reassurance or even flattery. But she is right. I no longer understand myself, nor the world that Cecil has made. I have grown mysterious to myself.

“You can go,” she says coldly. “Everything is different now.”

My husband the earl comes home from London in tight-lipped silence. He is as white as if he was suffering from an attack of the gout again. When I ask him if he is ill, he shakes his head in silence. I see then that he has taken a deep wound to his pride. The queen has humiliated him before the other nobility. She could have done nothing worse to this rightly haughty man than imply that he cannot be trusted, and this is what she has done to him.

She might as well have put him on the rack as tell him, before the others, that he no longer has her confidence. This is one of the greatest noblemen in Britain and she treats him as if he is some lying servant that she might dismiss from his place for stealing. This is a queen who uses torture indeed.

I don’t know why Elizabeth should turn so cruel, making old friends into enemies. I know she is nervous, prone to deep fears; in the past I have seen her sick for fear. But she has always before been acute in knowing her friends, and she has always counted on them. I cannot think what has thrown her from her usual habit of using flattery and guile, desire and sweetness to keep her court around her, and the men dancing to her tune.

It has to be Cecil who has shaken her from her old, safest course. It has to be Cecil, who halted the proper return of the Scots queen to her throne and who has imprisoned two lords, declared another a runaway traitor, and now tells the queen that my husband is not to be trusted. Cecil’s enmity against the other queen, against all Papists, has grown so powerful that he is prepared to behead half of England to defeat them. If Cecil, my true and faithful friend, now thinks that my husband is against him, if he is prepared to use all his power against us, then we are in danger indeed. This return of my husband from London is nothing more than a temporary relief, and everything that I counted on is unreliable; nothing is safe.

I walk across the courtyard, a shawl over my head for warmth, the cold and damp of Tutbury creeping into my bones through my winter boots. I am summoned to the stables, where the stack of hay has fallen so low that we will not be able to get through the winter. I shall have to get more sent from Chatsworth or buy some in. We cannot afford to buy in fodder; I can barely afford to cart it across the country. But truly, I am thinking of nothing but how I shall manage if my husband is accused. What if Cecil recalls him to London, just as they released and then recalled Thomas Howard? What if Cecil arrests my husband, as he has dared to arrest Thomas Howard? What if he puts him in the Tower along with the others? Who would have thought that Cecil would have grown so great that he could act against the greatest lords of the land? Who would have thought that Cecil would claim that the interests of the country are different from those of her great lords? Who would have thought that Cecil could claim that the interests of the country are the same as his?

Cecil will stand my friend, I am sure of that. We have known each other too long for betrayal now; we have been each other’s benchmark for too long in this life. We are cut from the same cloth, Cecil and I. He will not name me as a traitor and send me to the Tower. But what of my husband the earl? Would he throw down George?

I have to say that if Cecil knew for certain that George had joined with his enemies, he would act at once and decisively. I have to say that I would not blame him. All of us children of the Reformation are quick to defend what we have won, quick to take what is not ours. Cecil will not let the old lords of England throw him down for no better reason than he was a steward when they were nobility. Neither would I. We understand that about each other, at least.

My husband the earl does not understand either of us. He cannot be blamed. He is a nobleman, not a self-made man like Cecil. He thinks he needs only to decide something and it shall be. He is used to raising his head and finding what he wants to his hand. He does not know, as Cecil and I know from our hard childhoods, that if you want something, you have to work at it night and day. Then, when you have it, you have to work night and day to keep it. Right now, Cecil will be working night and day towards the death of the Queen of Scots, the execution of her friends, and the breaking of the power of the old lords who support her claim and hate him.