Philippa Gregory - The Queen’s Fool

“My mother is waiting for us.” Daniel’s breath was warm against my hair as he leaned against me at the rail of the ship. I leaned back again and felt his cock stir inside his breeches at my touch and I pressed back, wanton and desiring him once more. I looked to where he was looking and saw her, formidable, arms folded across a broad chest, scrutinizing the deck of the ship as if to see whether her reluctant daughter-in-law had done her duty and arrived this time.

When she saw Daniel she raised a hand in greeting, and I waved back. I was too far away to see her face, but I imagined her carefully schooling her expression.

“Welcome to Calais,” she said to me as we came down the gangplank. Daniel she wordlessly enfolded into an adoring embrace.

He struggled to be free. “I have to see to them unloading the press,” he told her, and went back on board and swung down into the hold. Mrs. Carpenter and I were left alone on the quayside, an island of awkward silence among the men and women bustling around us.

“He found you then,” she said, with no great pleasure.

“Yes,” I said.

“And are you ready to marry him now?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to get out of those clothes,” she said. “They’re respectable people in Calais, they won’t like the sight of you in breeches.”

“I know,” I said. “I left in a hurry or I would have changed before I came.”

“That would have been better.”

We were silent again.

“Did you bring your wages?”

“Yes.” I was nettled by her tone. “All of my wages for the last two quarters.”

“It will cost you all of that to buy stockings and gowns and shifts and caps, you will be surprised at the price.”

“It can’t be more expensive than London.”

“Much more,” she said flatly. “So much has to be shipped in from England.”

“Why do we not buy French?” I asked.

She made a little face. “Hardly,” she said, but did not trouble to explain.

Daniel appeared and looked pleased that we were talking. “I think I have everything unloaded,” he said. “Your father is going to stay here with the things while I fetch a wagon.”

“I’ll wait with him,” I said hastily.

“No,” he said. “Go home with Mother, she can show you our house and you can get warm.”

He wanted to ensure that I was comfortable. He did not know that the last thing I wanted to do was to go home with his mother and sit with his sisters and wait for the men to finish their work and come home. “I’ll get the wagon with you then,” I said. “I’m not cold.”

At a glance from his mother he hesitated. “You can’t go to the carter’s yard dressed like that,” she said firmly. “You will shame us all. Wrap your cloak around you and come home with me.”

Home was a pretty enough little house in London Street squashed in beside others in a row near the south gate of the town. The top floor was divided into three bedrooms; Daniel’s three sisters shared the big bed in the room which faced the back of the house, his mother had a tiny room all to herself, and my father had the third. Daniel mostly lived with his tutor, but would sleep on a truckle bed in my father’s room when he stayed overnight. The next floor served as a dining room and sitting room for the family, and the ground floor was my father’s shop facing the street, and at the back a little kitchen and scullery. In the yard behind, Daniel and my father had built and thatched a roof, and the printing press would be reassembled and set up in there.

All three of Daniel’s sisters were waiting to greet us in the living room at the top of the stairs. I was acutely conscious of my travel-stained clothes and dirty face and hands, as I saw them look me up and down and then glance in silence at each other.

“Here are my girls,” their mother said. “Mary, Sarah and Anne.”

The three of them rose like a row of moppets and dipped a curtsey as one, and sat down again. In my pageboy livery I could not curtsey, I made a little bow to them and saw their eyes widen.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Mrs. Carpenter said.

“I’ll help,” Anne said and dived out of the room. The other two and I regarded each other with silent dislike.

“Did you have a good crossing?” Mary asked.

“Yes, thank you.” The tranced night on the deck and Daniel’s insistent touch seemed to be a long way away now.

“And are you going to marry Daniel now?”

“Mary! Really!” her sister protested.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t ask. It’s been a long enough betrothal. And if she is to be our sister-in-law we have a right to know.”

“It’s between her and Daniel.”

“It’s a matter for all of us.”

“Yes, I am,” I said, to bring their wrangling to an end.

They turned their bright inquisitive faces toward me. “Indeed,” said Mary. “You’ve left court then?”

“Yes.”

“And will you not go back?” the other one, Sarah, asked.

“No,” I said, keeping the regret from my voice.

“Won’t you find it awfully dull here, after living at court? Daniel said that you were the queen’s companion and spent all the day with her.”

“I shall help my father in the shop, I expect,” I said.

They both looked aghast as if the thought of working with books and the printing press was more daunting than marrying Daniel and living with them.

“Where are you and Daniel going to sleep?” Mary asked.

“Mary! Really!”

“Well, they can hardly bed down on the truckle bed,” she pointed out reasonably. “And Mother can’t be asked to move. And we have always had the best back bedroom.”

“Daniel and I will decide,” I said with an edge to my voice. “And if there is not enough room for us here we will set up our own house.”

Mary gave a little scream of shock as her mother came up the stairs.

“What is it, child?” she demanded.

“Hannah has not been in the house five minutes and already she says she and Daniel will live elsewhere!” Mary exclaimed, halfway to tears. “Already she is taking Daniel away from us! Just as I knew she would! Just as I said – she will spoil everything!” She leaped to her feet, tore open the door and ran up the stairs leading to her room, leaving the wooden door to bang behind her. We heard the creak of the rope bed as she flung herself on to it.

“Oh, really!” her mother exclaimed in indignation. “This is ridiculous!”

I was about to agree, and then I saw that she was looking accusingly at me.

“How could you upset Mary on your very first day?” she demanded. “Everyone knows that she is easily upset, and she loves her brother. You will have to learn to mind your tongue, Miss Hannah. You are living with a family now. You have not the right to speak out like a fool any more.”

For one stunned moment I said nothing to defend myself. Then: “I am sorry,” I said through my teeth.

It was a long hot summer, that first summer in Calais. I greeted the sunshine as if I were a pagan ready to worship it, and when Daniel told me he was persuaded by the new theory that the earth revolved around the sun in the great vastness of space, and not the other way around, I had to acknowledge that it made perfect sense to me too, as I felt myself unfold into the heat.

I loitered in the squares, and dawdled at the fish quay to see the dazzle of sunlight on the ripples of the harbor. They called it le Bassin du Paradis, and in the bright sunlight I thought it was paradise indeed. Whenever I could, I made an excuse to leave the town and slip out through the gates where the casual sentries watched the townspeople coming and going and the country people arriving. I strolled in the little vegetable plots outside the city walls to sniff at the freshness of the growth in the warm earth, and I pined to go further, down to the beach to see the waves breaking on the shore, across the marshlands where the herons stood eyeing their own tall reflections, out to the country where I could see the darkness of the woods against the light green meadows.

It felt like a long summer and it was a breathtakingly tedious season for me. Daniel and I were under the same roof but we had to live as maid and suitor, we were hardly ever left alone together. I longed for his touch, for his kiss, and for the pleasure that he had given me on the night that we sailed to France. But he could hardly bear to come near me, knowing that he must always step back, knowing that he must never do more than kiss my lips or my hand. Even the scent of me, as I passed him on the stairs or in the narrow rooms, would make him tremble, and when he touched my fingers as he passed me a plate or a glass I would long for his caress. Neither of us would show our desire to the bright curiosity of his sisters, but we could not wholly hide it, and I hated the way their gaze flicked from one of us to the other.

I was out of my breeches and into a gown in the first week and soon experiencing a constant tuition in how a young lady should behave. It seemed there was a tacit agreement between my father and Daniel’s mother that she should coach me in the skills that a young woman should possess. Everything my mother had taught me of domestic skills I appeared to have left behind when we fled from Spain. And since then, no one had taught me how to brew and bake, how to churn butter, how to squeeze the whey from cheese. No one had taught me how to lay down linen in henbane and lavender in a linen chest, how to set a table, how to skim for cream. My father and I had lived, agreeably enough, as a working man and his apprentice. At court I had learned sword fighting, tumbling and wit from Will Somers, political caution and desire from Robert Dudley, mathematics from John Dee, espionage from Princess Elizabeth. Clearly, I had no useful skills for a young doctor’s home. I was not much of a young woman and not much of a wife. Daniel’s mother had awarded herself the task of “taking me in hand.”