Philippa Gregory - The Queen’s Fool

“I know it,” Queen Mary said quietly. “Along with other traitors. I wish to hear of none of them. Those who have been found guilty must die to keep the country safe.”

“I know you will be just, and I know you will be merciful,” I prompted her.

“I certainly will be just,” she repeated. “But some, Elizabeth among them, have outworn mercy from me. She had better pray that she can receive it from God.”

And she touched her horse’s flank with her whip and the court broke into a canter and there was nothing more to be said.

In the middle of May, the proposed month of the queen’s wedding, as the weather grew warmer, still the scaffold was not built for Elizabeth, still Philip of Spain did not come. Then, one day, there was a sudden change at the Tower. A Norfolk squire and his blue-liveried men marched into the Tower to make it their own. Elizabeth went from door to window, in a frenzy of fear, craning her head at the arrow-slit, peering through the keyhole of the door trying to see what was happening. Finally, she sent me out to ask if he had come to oversee her execution, and she asked the guard on the door if the scaffold was being built on the green. They swore it was not, but she sent me to look. She could trust nobody, she could never be at peace until she saw with her own eyes, and she would not be allowed to see.

“Trust me,” I said briefly.

She caught my hands in her own. “Swear you won’t lie to me,” she said. “I have to know if it is to be today. I have to prepare, I am not ready.” She bit her lip, which was already chapped and sore from a hundred nips. “I’m only twenty, Hannah, I am not ready to die tomorrow.”

I nodded, and went out. The green was empty, there were no sawn planks awaiting a carpenter. She was safe for another day. I stopped at the watergate and fell into conversation with one of the blue-liveried men. The gossip he told me sent me flying back to the princess.

“You’re saved,” I said briefly, coming in through the door of her cramped room. Kat Ashley looked up and made the sign of a cross, the old habit forced out of her by her fear.

Elizabeth, who had been kneeling up at the window, looking out at the circling seagulls, turned around, her face pale, her eyelids red. “What?”

“You’re to be released to Sir Henry Bedingfield,” I said. “And to go with him to Woodstock Palace.”

There was no leap of hope in her face. “And what then?”

“House arrest,” I said.

“I am not declared innocent? I am not received at court?”

“You’re not on trial and you’re not executed,” I pointed out. “And you’re away from the Tower. There are other prisoners still left here, in a worse state.”

“They will bury me at Woodstock,” she said. “This is a trick to get me away from the city so I can be forgotten. They will poison me when I am out of sight and bury me far from court.”

“If the queen wanted you dead she could have sent for a swordsman,” I said. “This is your freedom, or at least a part-freedom. I should have thought you would be glad.”

Elizabeth’s face was dull. “D’you know what my mother did to her mother?” she asked in a whisper. “She sent her to a house in the country, and then to another – a smaller meaner place, and then to another, even worse – until the poor woman was in a damp ruin at the end of the world and she died ill, without a physician, starving, with no money to buy food, and crying for her daughter who was not allowed to come to her. Queen Katherine died in poverty and hardship while her daughter was a servant in my nursery, waiting on me. Don’t you think that daughter remembers that? Isn’t that what will happen to me? Don’t you see this is Mary’s revenge? Don’t you see the absolute precision of it?”

“You’re young,” I said. “Anything could happen.”

“You know I get ill, you know that I never sleep. You know that I have lived my life on the edge of a knife ever since they accused me of bastardy when I was just two years old. I can’t survive neglect. I can’t survive poison, I can’t survive the assassin’s knife in the night. I don’t think I can survive loneliness and fear for much longer.”

“But Lady Elizabeth,” I pleaded with her. “You said to me, every moment you have is a moment you have won. When you leave here, you have won yourself another moment.”

“When I leave here I go to a secret and shameful death,” she said flatly. She turned from the window and went to her bed and knelt before it, putting her face in her hands against the embroidered coverlet. “If they killed me here at least I should have a name as a martyred princess, I would be remembered as another greater Jane. But they do not even have the courage to send me to the scaffold. They will come at me in secret and I will die in hiding.”

I knew I could not leave the Tower without trying to see Lord Robert. He was in the same quarters, tucked opposite the tower, with his family crest carved by his father and his brother in the mantelpiece. I thought it a melancholy room for him to live in, overlooking the green where they had been executed, his death place.

His guard had been doubled. I was searched before I was allowed to his door, and for the first time I was not left alone with him. My service to Elizabeth had tainted my reputation of loyalty to the queen.

When they swung open the door he was at his desk at the window, the evening sun was streaming hot in the window. He was reading, the pages of the little book tipped to the light. He turned in his seat as the door opened and looked to see who was coming in. When he saw me he smiled, a world-weary smile. I stepped into the room and took in the difference in him. He was heavier, his face puffed up with fatigue and boredom, his skin pale from his months of imprisonment, but his dark eyes were steady and his mouth twisted upward in what had once been his merry smile.

“It is Mistress Boy,” he said. “I sent you away for your own good, child. What are you doing disobeying me by coming back?”

“I went away,” I said, coming into the room, awkwardly conscious of the guard behind me. “But the queen commanded me to bear the Lady Elizabeth company, so I have been in the Tower with you all this time, but they did not allow me to come to you.”

His dark glance flared with interest. “And is she well?” he asked, his voice deliberately neutral.

“She has been ill and very anxious,” I said. “I came to see you now because tomorrow we leave. She is to be released under house arrest to Sir Henry Bedingfield and we are to go to Woodstock Palace.”

Lord Robert rose from his seat and went to the window to look out. Only I could have guessed that his heart was hammering with hope. “Released,” he said quietly. “Why would Mary be merciful?”

I shrugged my shoulders. It was against the queen’s interest, but it was typical of her nature. “She has a tenderness for Elizabeth even now,” I volunteered. “She thinks of her still as her little sister. Not even to please her new husband can she send her sister to the scaffold.”

“Elizabeth was always lucky,” he said.

“And you, my lord?” I could not keep the love from my voice.

He turned and smiled at me. “I am more settled,” he said. “Whether I live or die is beyond my command, and I understand that now. But I have been wondering about my future. You told me once that I should die in my bed. D’you still think so?”

I glanced awkwardly at the guard. “I do,” I said. “I think that, and more. I think you will be the beloved of a queen.”

He tried to laugh but there was no joy in that little room. “Do you, Mistress Boy?”

I nodded. “And the making of a prince who will change the history of the world.”

He frowned. “Are you sure? What d’you mean?”

The guard cleared his throat. “Beg pardon,” he said, embarrassed. “Nothing in code.”

Lord Robert shook his head at the idiocy of the man but curbed his impatience. “Well,” he said, smiling at me. “It’s good to know that you think I will not follow my father out there.” He nodded at the green beyond the window. “And I am becoming reconciled to prison life. I have my books, I have my visitors, I am served well enough, I have learned to mourn my father and my brother.” He reached out to the fireplace and touched their carved crest. “I regret their treason, but I pray that they are at peace.”

There was a tap on the door behind us. “I can’t go yet!” I exclaimed, turning, but it was not another guard who stood there, it was a woman. She was a pretty brown-haired woman with a creamy lovely skin and soft brown eyes. She was dressed richly, my quick survey took in the embroidery on her gown and the slashing of velvet and silk on her sleeves. She held the ribbons of her hat casually in one hand, and a basket of fresh salad leaves in the other. She took in the scene, me with my cheeks flushed and my eyes filled with tears, my master Lord Robert smiling in his chair, and then she stepped across the room and he rose to greet her. She kissed him coolly on both cheeks, and turned to me with her hand tucked into his arm as if to say: “Who are you?”

“And who is this?” she asked. “Ah! You must be the queen’s fool.”

There was a moment before I replied. I had never before minded my title. But the way she said it gave me pause. I waited for Lord Robert to say that I was a holy fool, that I saw angels in Fleet Street, that I had been Mr. Dee’s scryer, but he said nothing.

“And you must be Lady Dudley,” I said bluntly, taking the fool’s prerogative since I had to take the name.

She nodded. “You can go,” she said quietly, and turned to her husband.

He stopped her. “I have not yet finished my business with Hannah Green.” He seated her in his chair at his desk and drew me to the other window, out of earshot.