“Heresy?”

“So I’m told.”

She tossed her reins to her groom and walked toward the palace, leaning on my shoulder.

“They’ll burn him?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Princess, what shall we do?”

She dropped her arm around my shoulder and gripped it hard, as if she were holding me to my senses. I could feel that her hand did not tremble for a moment. “We will wait. And hope to survive this. Same as always, Hannah. Wait, and hope to survive.”

“You will survive,” I said with sudden bitterness.

Elizabeth turned her bright face to me, her smile merry but her eyes were like chips of coal. “Oh yes,” she said. “I have done so, thus far.”


In mid-June the queen, still pregnant, broke with convention to release herself from the confinement chamber. The physicians could not say that she would be any worse for being outside, and they thought walking in the air might give her an appetite for her meals. They were afraid that she was not eating enough to keep herself and her baby alive. In the cool of the morning or in the shadowy evening she would stroll slowly in her private garden attended only by her ladies and the members of her household. She was changing before my eyes from the deliciously infatuated woman that Prince Philip of Spain had wedded and bedded, and loved into joy, back to the anxious prematurely aged woman that I had first met. Her new confidence in love and happiness was draining away from her, with the pink of her cheeks and the blue of her eyes, and I could see her drawn back to the loneliness and fearfulness of her childhood, almost like an invalid slipping toward death.

“Your Grace.” I dropped to one knee as I met her in the privy garden one day. She had been looking at the fast flow of the river past the boat pier, looking, and yet not seeing. A brood of ducklings was playing in the current, their mother watchful nearby, surveying the little bundles of fluff as they paddled and bobbed. Even the ducks on the Thames had young; but England’s cradle, with that hopeful poem at the bed-head, was still empty.

She turned an unseeing dark gaze to me. “Oh, Hannah.”

“Are you well, Your Grace?”

She tried to smile at me but I saw her lips twist down.

“No, Hannah, my child. I am not very well.”

“Are you in pain?”

She shook her head. “I should be glad of pain, of labor pains. No, Hannah. I feel nothing, not in my body, not in my heart.”

I drew a little closer. “Perhaps these are the fancies that come before birth,” I said soothingly. “Like when they say women have a craving for eating raw fruit or coal.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She held out her hands to me, as patient as a sick child. “Can’t you see, Hannah? With your gift? Can you see, and tell me the truth?”

Almost unwillingly I took her hands and at her touch I felt a rush of despair as dark and as cold as if I had fallen into the river which flowed beneath the pier. She saw the shock in my face, and read it rightly at once.

“He’s gone, hasn’t he?” she whispered. “I have somehow lost him.”

“I wouldn’t know, Your Grace,” I stumbled. “I’m no physician, I wouldn’t have the skill to judge…”

She shook her head, the bright sunlight glinting on the rich embroidery of her hood, on the gold hoops in her ears, all this worldly wealth encasing heartbreak. “I knew it,” she said. “I had a son in my belly and now he is gone. I feel an emptiness where I used to feel a life.”

I still had hold of her icy hands, I found I was chafing them, as people will chafe the hands of a corpse.

“Oh, Your Grace!” I cried out. “There can be another child. Where one has been made you can make another. You had a child and lost him, hundreds of women do that, and go on to have another child. You can do that too.”

She did not even seem to hear me, she let her hands lie in mine and she looked toward the river as if she would want it to wash her away.

“Your Grace?” I whispered, very quietly. “Queen Mary? Dearest Mary?”

When she turned her face to me her eyes were filled with tears. “It’s all wrong,” she said, and her voice was low and utterly desolate. “It has been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother took my father from us and broke my mother’s heart, and nothing can put it right again. It’s been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother won my father to sin and led him from his faith so that he lived and died in torment. It’s all wrong, Hannah, and I cannot put it right though I have tried and tried. It is too much for me. There is too much sadness and sin and loss in this story for me to put right. It is beyond me. And now Elizabeth has taken my husband from me, my husband who was the greatest joy of my life – the only joy of my life – the only man who ever loved me, the only person I have ever loved since I lost my mother. She has taken him from me. And now my son has gone from me too.”

Her darkness flowed through me like a draft of the deepest despair. I gripped her hands as if she were a drowning woman, swept away in a night flood.

“Mary!”

Gently she pulled her hands from me, and walked away, alone again, as she always had been, as now she thought she always must be. I ran behind her, and though she heard my footsteps she did not pause or turn her head.

“You could have another child,” I repeated. “And you could win your husband back.”

She did not pause or shake her head. I knew that she was walking with her chin up and the tears streaming down her cheeks. She could not ask for help, she could not receive help. The pain in her heart was that of loss. She had lost the love of her father, she had lost her mother. Now she had lost her child and every day, in full view of the court, she was losing her husband to her pretty younger sister. I fell back and let her go.


For the long hot month of July the queen said nothing to explain why her baby was not coming. Elizabeth inquired after her health every morning with the most sisterly concern, and remarked every day in her sweet clear voice:

“Gracious, what a long long time this babe is taking to be born!”

Every day people came out from London to say Masses for the queen’s safe delivery, and we all stood up in church three times a day to say “Amen.” The news they brought from London was that of a city of horrors. The queen’s belief that her baby would not come until England was cleansed of heresy had taken a vicious turn. In the hands of her Inquisitors, Bishop Bonner and the rest of them, there was a savage policy of secret arrests and cruel tortures. There were rumors of unjust trials of heretics, of maidservants being taken up in their ignorance and when they swore that they would not surrender their Bible, being taken to the stake and burned for their faith. There was a vile story of a woman pregnant with her first child who was accused of heresy and charged before a court. When she would not bow her head to the dictates of the Roman Catholic priest they put her on a stake and lighted the pyre. In her terror she gave birth to the child then and there, and dropped it on to the faggots. When the baby slithered from her shaking thighs to the ground, crying loud enough to be heard over the crackle of the flames, the executioner forked the naked child back into the fire with a pitchfork, as if he were a crying bundle of kindling.

They made sure that these stories did not reach the queen but I was certain that if she knew she would put a stop to the cruelty. A woman waiting for her own child to be born does not send another pregnant woman to the stake. I took my chance one morning, when she was walking.

“Your Grace, may I speak with you?”

She turned and smiled. “Yes, Hannah, of course.”

“It is a matter of state and I am not qualified to judge,” I said cautiously. “And I am a young woman, and perhaps I don’t understand.”

“Understand what?” she asked.

“The news from London is very cruel,” I said, taking the plunge. “I am sorry if I speak out of turn, but there is much cruelty being done in your name and your advisors do not tell you of it.”

There was a little ripple at my temerity. At the back of the group of ladies I saw Will Somers roll his eyes at me.

“Why, what do you mean, Hannah?”

“Your Grace, you know that many of the great Protestants of the land have gone quietly to Mass and their priests have put away their wives and become obedient to the new laws. It is only their servants and the foolish people in the villages who do not have the wit to tell a lie when they are examined. Surely you would not want the simple people of your country to be burned for their faith? Surely, you would want to show them mercy?”

I expected her smile of acknowledgment, but the face she turned to me was scowling. “If there are families who have turned their coat and not their faith then I want their names,” she said, her voice hard. “You are right: I don’t seek to burn servants, I want them all, masters and men, to turn again to the church. I would be a sorry Queen of England if I did not insist on the same law for rich and for poor. If you know the name of a priest with a wife in hiding, Hannah, then you had better tell me now or you will be risking your own immortal soul.”

I had never seen her so cold.

“Your Grace!”

It was as if she did not hear me. She put her hand on her heart and she cried out: “Before God, Hannah, I will save this country from sin even though it cost life after life. We have to turn back to God and from heresy and if it takes a dozen fires, if it takes a hundred fires, we will do it. And if you, even you, are hiding a name then I will have it from you, Hannah. There will be no exceptions made. Even you shall be questioned. If you will not tell, I shall have you questioned…”

I could feel the color draining from my face and my heart start to race. After surviving so long, to put myself into danger, to step up to the rack! “Your Grace!” I stammered. “I am innocent…”