I felt the world become blurred around me and I realized I was about to faint. I plumped down on to the cold step and put my head in my hands. “Lord Robert,” I whispered into my knees. “My lord.”

It was impossible that he was dead, that bright dark-eyed vitality gone forever. It was impossible to think that the executioner could slice off his head as if he were an ordinary traitor, that his dark eyes and his sweet smile and his easy charm would not save him at the block. Who could bring themselves to kill bonny Robin? Who could sign such a warrant, what headsman could bear to do it? And it was all the more impossible since I had seen the prophecy in his favor. I had heard the words as they had come out of my mouth, I had smelled the candle smoke, I had seen the flickering bob of the flame and the mirrors which ran reflection into glimmer all the way back into Mr. Dee’s darkness. I had known then that he would be beloved by a queen, that he would die in his bed. I had been shown it, the words had been told to me. If my Lord Robert was dead then not only was the great love of my life dead, but also I had been taught in the hardest way possible that my gift was a chimera and a delusion. Everything was over in one sweep of the ax.

I got to my feet and staggered back against the stone wall.

“Are you sick, fool?” came the cool voice of one of Lord Howard’s men. His Lordship glanced over indifferently.

I gulped down the lump that was in my throat. “May I tell Lady Elizabeth about Lady Jane?” I asked him. “She will want to know.”

“You can tell her,” he said. “And I should think she would want to know. Everyone will know within a few days. Jane and the Dudleys died on the block before a crowd of hundreds. It’s public business.”

“The charge?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“Treason,” he said flatly. “Tell her that. Treason. And pretending to the throne.”

Without another word being said, everyone turned to the litter where Lady Elizabeth, her hand outstretched to Mrs. Ashley, the other holding to the side of the door, was laboriously descending.

“So die all traitors,” said her cousin, looking at the white-faced girl, his own kin, who had been a friend to every man who now swung on the gibbet. “So die all traitors.”

“Amen,” said a voice from the back of the crowd.


I waited till she had dined before I found my way to her side. She was dipping her fingers in the basin of water held out to her by the yeoman of the ewery and then holding them for a pageboy to pat dry.

“The letter?” she asked me, without turning her head.

“It’ll be public news within the day,” I said. “I am sorry to tell you, Lady Elizabeth, that your cousin Lady Jane Grey has been executed and her husband… and Lord Robert Dudley too.”

The hands she held out to the pageboy were perfectly steady, but I could see her eyes darken. “She has done it then,” she observed quietly. “The queen. She has found the courage to execute her own kin, her own cousin, a young woman she knew from childhood.” She looked at me, her hands as steady as the pageboy’s who patted at her fingers with the monogrammed linen. “The queen has found the power of the ax. No one will be able to sleep. Thank God I am innocent of any wrongdoing.”

I nodded but I hardly heard the words. I was thinking of Lord Robert going out to his death with his dark head held high.

She took her hands from the towel and turned from the table. “I am very tired,” she said to her cousin. “Too tired to travel any further today. I have to rest.”

“Lady Elizabeth, we have to go on,” he said.

She shook her head in absolute refusal. “I cannot,” she said simply. “I will rest now and we will leave early tomorrow.”

“As long as it is early,” he conceded. “At dawn, Your Ladyship.”

She gave him a smile that went no further than her lips. “Of course,” she said.


However she prolonged the journey it had to end, and ten days after we had first set off we arrived at the house of a private gentleman in High-gate, late in the evening.

I was housed with Lady Elizabeth’s ladies, and they were up at dawn preparing for her entry into London. As I saw the white linen and petticoats and the virginal white gown being brushed and pressed and carried into her chamber I remembered the day that she greeted her sister into the city of London, wearing the Tudor colors of white and green. Now she was driven snow, all in white, a martyr-bride. When the litter came to the door she was ready, there was no delaying when there was a crowd collecting to see her.

“You’ll want the curtains closed,” Lord Howard said gruffly to her.

“Keep them back,” she said at once. “The people can see me. They can see what condition I am in when I am forced out of my house for a fortnight’s journey in all weathers.”

“Ten days,” he said gruffly. “And could have been done in five.”

She did not deign to answer him, but lay back on her pillows and lifted her hand to indicate that he could go. I heard him swear briefly under his breath and then swing into the saddle of his horse. I pulled my horse up behind the litter and the little cavalcade turned out of the courtyard to the London road and into the city.


London was stinking of death. At every street corner there were gallows with a dreadful burden swinging from the cross-bar. If you peeped up you could see the dead man, face like a gargoyle, lips pulled back, eyes bulging, glaring down at you. When the wind blew, the stink from the corpses swept down the street and the bodies swayed back and forth, their coats flailing around them as if they were still alive and kicking for their life.

Elizabeth kept her eyes straight to the front and did not look left or right, but she sensed the dangling bodies at every corner; half of them were known to her, and all of them had died in a rebellion that they believed she had summoned. She was as pale as her white dress when she first got into the litter, but she was blanched like skimmed milk by the time we had ridden down King’s Street.

A few people called out to her: “God save Your Grace!” and she was recalled to herself and raised a weak hand to them with a piteous face. She looked like a martyr being dragged to her death and, under this avenue of gallows, no one could doubt her fear. This was Elizabeth’s rebellion and forty-five swinging corpses attested to the fact that it had failed. Now Elizabeth would have to face the justice that had executed them. No one could doubt she would die too.

At Whitehall they rolled the great gates wide for us at the first sight of our cavalcade walking slowly toward the palace. Elizabeth straightened up in the litter and looked toward the great steps of the palace. Queen Mary was not there to greet her sister, and neither was anyone of the court. She arrived to silent disgrace. A single gentleman-server was on the steps and he spoke to Lord Howard, not to the princess, as if they were her jailers.

Lord Howard came to the litter and put out his hand for her.

“An apartment has been prepared for you,” he said shortly. “You may choose two attendants to take with you.”

“My ladies must come with me,” she argued instantly. “I am not well.”

“The orders are two attendants and no more,” he said briefly. “Choose.”

The coldness of the voice that he had used with her on the journey was now barbed. We were in London, a hundred eyes and ears were on him. Lord Howard would be very certain that no one would see him show any kindness to his traitor cousin. “Choose.”

“Mrs. Ashley and…” Elizabeth looked around and her eye fell on me. I stepped back, as anxious as any other turncoat not to be linked with this doomed princess. But she knew through me she had a chance to reach the queen. “Mrs. Ashley and Hannah the Fool,” she said.

Lord Howard laughed. “Three fools together then,” he said under his breath and waved the gentleman to go ahead of the three of us into Elizabeth’s apartments.


I did not wait to see Elizabeth settled in her rooms before I sought out my fellow fool Will Somers. He was dozing in the great hall on one of the benches. Someone had draped a cloak over him as he slept, everyone loved Will.

I sat on the bench beside him, wondering if I might wake him.

Without opening his eyes he remarked: “A pair of fools we must be; parted for weeks and we don’t even speak,” and he sat bolt upright and hugged me around the shoulders.

“I thought you were asleep,” I said.

“I was fooling,” he said with dignity. “I have decided that a sleeping fool is funnier than one who is awake. Especially in this court.”

“Why?” I asked warily.

“Nobody laughs at my jests,” he said. “So I tried to see if they would laugh at my silence. And since they prefer a silent fool, they will love a sleeping fool. And if I am asleep I will not know if they are laughing or not. So I can comfort myself that I am very amusing. I dream of my wit and then I wake up laughing. It’s a witty thought, is it not?”

“Very,” I said.

He turned to me. “The princess has come, has she?”

I nodded.

“Ill?”

“Very. Truly ill, I think.”

“The queen could offer her an instant cure for all pain. She has become a surgeon, she specializes in amputations.”

“Please God it does not come to that,” I said quickly. “But Will, tell me – did Robert Dudley make a good death? Was it quick?”

“Still alive,” he said. “Against all the odds.”

I felt my heart turn over. “Dear God, they told me he was beheaded.”

“Steady,” Will said. “Here, put your head between your knees.”

From a long way off I heard his voice ask me:

“Better now? Swoony little maid?”

I straightened up.

“Blushing now,” Will observed. “Soon be out of breeches with the blood flowing this fast, my little maid.”