Philippa Gregory - The other queen

So what did you think of her?” I ask Cecil when they have met half a dozen times to talk and finally all the documents are signed and sealed and the horses at the door and Cecil is ready to leave.

“Most beautiful,” he says. “Most charming. A real heart stealer. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted her gone from your door, even if she were not prohibitively expensive.”

I nod.

“Clever,” he says. “Not educated like our queen—no scholar, no tactician—but clever and with a constant eye to her own interests. Cunning, I don’t doubt, but not wise.”

He pauses, smiles at me.

“Elegant,” he says. “In her mind as well as her stature. Perfect on a horse, paradise on a dance floor, sweet as a nightingale when she sings, beautiful as a portrait. A delight. A very picture of a queen. As a woman, a pleasure to watch, a lesson in charm. The men who say there is no more beautiful queen in Europe speak nothing but the truth. More than that, I think she is the most beautiful woman I have ever met. Engaging, desirable. Perhaps perfection. And so young, and such a radiance about her—a woman who could turn your heart right over.”

I blink. Then to my embarrassment I feel hot tears rise under my eyelids and I blink again and brush them away like dust. I have seen my own husband fall in love with this damned siren, but I thought that Cecil, with his incorrigible hatred of Papists, of the French, of female vanity, would be immune. But it seems that even he can be seduced by a smile and an upward glance. The way she looks up at a man would make any honest woman want to slap her. But even in my jealousy I cannot deny her beauty.

“She is,” I admit. “She is perfection.” I am aware I have gritted my teeth and I unlock my jaw and smile at this new and most unlikely recruit to the huge circle of men who are in love with Mary Queen of Scots. “I must say, I did not expect you, of all people, to fall for her too.” I try to speak cheerfully but I feel very heavy in my heart at this sudden new suitor.

“Oh, she is irresistible,” Cecil says. “I feel the magic. Even I, with so many reasons to dislike her, feel her peculiar, powerful charm. She is a queen beyond queens. But Bess, not so fast; ask me what else would I say of her.”

He smiles at me, understanding everything. “Let me think. What else do I see in this perfect princess? She is untrustworthy, an unreliable ally but a frightening enemy. A determined Papist and foe to everything we have done and hope to do in England. She would bring back the church and drive us back into superstition. There is no doubt in my mind that she would burn us Protestants until all opposition to her was ashes. And she lies like a bargee and deceives like a whore. She sits like a spider at the center of a web of plots that corrupts or ensnares almost every man in the country. I would call her the most dangerous enemy to the peace of the commonwealth that we have ever faced. She is enemy to the peace of England, she is enemy to our queen, she is my enemy. I will never forget the danger that she poses nor forgive her for the threat that she is to my queen and to my country.”

“You will get rid of her to Scotland soon?” I ask urgently. “You will make her queen and restore her?”

“Tomorrow,” he says grimly. “She might as well be in Scotland as here. She is as great a danger to us in Scotland as here, I don’t doubt. Wherever she is she will be surrounded by men so far gone in love with her that they are ready to die for her; she will be a focus for Spanish plots and French betrayal. Whether she goes to Scotland or to hell, I have to get her out of our country, or out of this life, before she costs the lives of more innocent men, before her plots take the queen’s life, before she destroys us all.”

“I don’t think she would take the queen’s life,” I observe. It is hard for me to be just to her, but I have to say it. “She has a great respect for the sanctity of royal blood. There is no doubt in her mind that an ordained monarch is sacred. She would oppose Elizabeth, but she would never have her killed.”

Cecil shakes his head. “The men she plots with would see both women dead, to serve their cause. That is why she is so dangerous. She is an active, energetic fool in the hands of wicked men.”

They try to make sure that I have no time alone with Bishop Lesley, but I need only a moment, and I seize that moment when he is mounting his horse in the stable yard, and Bess deep in conversation with her great friend William Cecil.

“This agreement will send me back to Scotland with an army for my protection,” I say quickly to him. “You will watch that Cecil and Elizabeth hold to it. This is my future. You will ensure that they don’t double-cross us.”

“Trust me,” he says. He hauls himself into the saddle. “If you are not back in Scotland by next spring, then Philip of Spain himself will come to restore you to your throne. I have his word on it.”

“His own word?”

“As good as,” he says. “Ridolfi has his promise. Ridolfi is the center of the Great Enterprise and will bring everything together. He won’t fail you, and nor will I.”

Places that I find hidden and treasonous letters to the Queen of Scots:

1. Under a stone in the garden, brought to me by the gardener’s lad who is too simple to understand that the shilling stuck on the outside of the letter was payment to take it in secret to her.

2. Baked inside special Christmas bread for her from my own pastry maker.

3. Sewn inside a gown of silk as a gift from friends in Paris.

4. Pasted into the leaves of a book from a spy in the Spanish Netherlands.

5. Folded into a bolt of damask from Edinburgh.

6. Flown in by one of her own homing pigeons from God knows where, but I am especially worried by this, for the bird was not spent from a long flight: whoever sent it out must be close at hand.

7. Tucked into her saddle where I find it as I lift her up to go riding. She laughed, as if it does not matter.

8. In the collar of her lapdog. These two last must be men in my household acting as couriers for her friends. The homing bird she trained herself, pretending to me that she wanted tame doves. I gave them to her myself, more fool I.

“This must stop,” I tell her. I try to sound stern but she has been washing her dog and she has a linen apron over her gown, her headdress is laid aside, and her hair is falling down from its pins. She is as beautiful as a laundry maid in a fairy story and she is laughing at the dog splashing in the bathwater and wriggling as she tries to hold him.

“Chowsbewwy!” she exclaims with pleasure at seeing me. “Here, Mary, take little Pкche, he is too naughty, and too wet.”

With a lunge the little dog struggles to be free and shakes himself vigorously, drenching us all. The queen laughs. “Take him! Take him!Vite! Vite! And get him dry!”

I regain my solemn expression. “I daresay you would not like it if I took him away from you for good.”

“Not at all,” she replies. “But why would you dream of doing such a cruel thing? How has Pкche offended you?”

“Or if I refused to give you books, or new material for a gown, or did not let you walk in the garden?”

She rises to her feet and strips off her linen apron, a gesture so domestic and ordinary that I almost catch her hand and kiss it as if we were newlyweds in our own little house. “My lord, are you offended with me for something?” she asks sweetly. “Why do you threaten me so? Is something wrong? Has Bess complained of me?”

I shake my head. “It is your letters,” I say. “You must authorize men to write to you. I find letters everywhere. The guards bring me one practically every day.”

She shrugs, a typical gesture which says, in her French way, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” “Pouf! What can I do? England is full of people who want to see me free. They are bound to write to me to ask if they can help.”

“This will ruin us,” I say urgently to her. “Ruin you, as well as me. D’you not think that Cecil has a spy in this very castle? D’you not think he knows that you write every day, and that people write to you? D’you not think he reads what you have written and all the letters that come for you? He is the spymaster of England; he will know far more than I do. And even I know that you are in constant correspondence with the French and with the Spanish and that men, whose names I don’t know, write in code to you all the time, asking you if you are safe, if you need anything, if you are going to be set free.”

“I am a queen,” she says simply. “A princess of the blood. The King of Spain and the King of France, the Holy Roman Emperor are my kinsmen. It is only right and proper that the kings of Europe should write to me. And it is a sign of the criminal kidnap that I endure that any of their agents should think it better to send to me in secret. They should be free to write to me openly, but because I am imprisoned, for no reason, for no reason at all, they cannot. And as for the others—I cannot help that loyal hearts and reverent minds write to me. I cannot prevent their writing, nor should I. They wish to express their love and loyalty and I am glad to have it. There can be nothing wrong in that.”