Philippa Gregory - The Queen’s Fool

Lord Robert rode out at noon, a cold March day, and his wife got up from her sick bed to see him go. She stood, silent again, like a woman made of snow, in the hall of the house as he clapped his hat on his head and swung his cape around his shoulders.

“I am sorry that you have been ill for all of my visit,” he said brightly, as if speaking to a little-known host. “I have not seen you since dinner that first night.”

She hardly seemed to hear him. She managed a blank smile, more like a grimace.

“I will hope that you are in better health and spirits when I come again.”

“When will that be?” she asked quietly.

“I cannot say. I will send you a message.”

It was as if his refusal to make a promise was a spell that made her come to life. She stirred, and glared at him. “If you do not come soon, I shall write to the queen and complain of you,” she threatened, her voice low and angry. “She knows what it is like to be abandoned by a false husband who runs after every pretty face. She knows what sort of woman her sister is. She has suffered from Elizabeth’s ways as I have suffered. I know about that, you see. I know what you and the princess are to each other.”

“It is treason to say such a thing,” he remarked quietly, in a pleasant tone. “And such a letter would be evidence of your treason. We have just got this family out of the Tower, Amy, don’t plunge us back in again.”

She bit her lip and the color flooded into her cheeks. “At any rate your whore shall not stay here with me!”

Robert sighed and looked across the hall toward me. “I have no whore here,” he said with elaborate patience. “I barely have a wife here, as you well know. The honorable lady, Mrs. Carpenter, will stay here until I send for her to work for me at court.”

Amy Dudley let out a little shriek of rage and then clapped her hand over her mouth. “You call what she does ‘work?’”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “As I say. And I will send for her. And I will come to visit you again.” He lowered his voice and his tone was gentle. “And I shall pray, for your sake and for mine, that when I see you again you are composed. This is no way for us, Amy. You must not behave like a madwoman.”

“I am not mad,” she hissed at him. “I am angry. I am angry with you.”

He nodded, he would not argue with her, and clearly it mattered to him very little one way or the other what she chose to call it. “Then I shall pray for you to recover your temper rather than your wits,” he said. He turned for the front door where his horse was waiting.

Lady Dudley completely ignored John Dee as he went past, though he paused and bowed, as calm as ever. When they were both gone she suddenly seemed to realize that in a moment she would be too late and she hurried out after them to the top of the steps. She flung open the big double doors and the wintry sunshine poured into the dark hall. I was dazzled and half closed my eyes, seeing her as a shadow at the top of the steps. For a moment it seemed to me that she was not on a broad stone step but on a very knife edge of life and death, and I stepped forward and put out my hand to steady her. At my touch she whirled around and she would have fallen down the stone steps if John Dee had not caught her arm and held her.

“Don’t touch me!” she spat at me. “Don’t you dare to touch me!”

“I thought I saw…”

John Dee released her and looked carefully at me. “What did you see, Hannah?”

I shook my head. Even when he drew me quickly to one side, almost out of earshot, I did not speak. “It is too vague,” I said. “I am sorry. It was as if she was balanced on the very edge of something, and she might fall, and then she nearly did fall. It is nothing.”

He nodded. “When you come to court we will try again,” he said. “I think you still have your gift, Hannah. I think the angels are still speaking to you. It is just our dull mortal senses that cannot hear them.”

“You are delaying my lord,” Lady Dudley said sharply to him.

John Dee looked down the steps to where Lord Robert was swinging into his saddle. “He will forgive me,” he said. He took her hand and was going to bow over it, but she pulled it away from him.

“Thank you for my visit,” he said.

“Any friend of my lord’s is always welcome,” she said through lips that hardly moved. “Whatever sorts of company he chooses to keep.”

John Dee went down the steps, mounted his horse, raised his hat to her ladyship, smiled at me, and the two men rode away.

As she watched them go I could feel the anger and resentment toward him bleeding out of her like a wound until all that was left was the hurt and the injury. She stood straight until they rounded the corner of the park and then she buckled at the knees and Mrs. Oddingsell took her arm to lead her inside and up the stairs to her chamber.

“What now?” I asked when Mrs. Oddingsell came out, carefully shutting the door behind her.

“Now she will weep and sleep for a few days and then she will get up and be like a woman half dead: cold and empty inside, no tears to shed, no anger, no love to give. And then she will be like a hound on a short leash until he comes back, and then her anger will spill out again.”

“Over and over?” I asked, inwardly horrified at this cycle of pain and anger.

“Over and over again,” she said. “The only time she was at peace was when she thought they would behead him. Then she could grieve for him and for herself and for the love they had shared when they were young.”

“She wanted him to die?” I asked incredulously.

“She is not afraid of death,” Mrs. Oddingsell said sadly. “I think she longs for it, for them both. What other release can there be for them?”

I waited for news from court, but I could hear nothing except common gossip. The baby which was due in March was late, and by April people were starting to say that the queen had made a mistake again, and there was no child. I found myself on my knees in the Philipses’ little chapel every morning and evening, praying before a statue of Our Lady that the queen might be with child and that she might be, even now, in childbirth. I could not imagine how she would be able to bear it if she were to be once more disappointed. I knew her for a courageous woman, no woman braver in the world, but to come out of the confinement chamber for the second time and tell the world that once again it had been a ten-month mistake and there was no baby – I could not see how any woman could bear the humiliation of it, least of all the Queen of England with every eye in Europe on her.

The gossip about her was all malice. People said that she had pretended to be pregnant on purpose to try to bring her husband home, people said that she had plans to smuggle in a secret baby and pass him off as a Roman Catholic prince for England. I did not even defend her against the spiteful whispers that I heard every day. I knew her, as none of them did, and I knew that she was utterly incapable of lying to her husband, or lying to her people. She was utterly determined to do right by her God, and that would always come first for her. The queen adored Philip and would have done almost anything in the world to have him by her side. But she would never have sinned for him nor for any man. She would never deny her God.

But as the weather warmed, and the baby did not come, I thought that her God must be a harsh deity indeed if he could take the prayers and the suffering of such a queen and not give her a child to love.

Mistress Boy,

The queen is to come out of her confinement soon, and I need you here to advise me. You may bring me my blue velvet missal which I left in the chapel at my seat and come at once.

Robt.

I went to the chapel, with Danny walking before me. I had to stoop low so that he could hold my fingers with both his hands, and walk with my support. My back ached by the time we got to the chapel and I sat in Robert’s chair and let Danny make his way down one of the pews, steadying himself on the seat. I would never have believed that I would have stooped till my back ached for the amusement of a small boy, and yet when I had the missal and we walked back to our chamber I bent low again to let Danny hold on to my fingers. I prayed in silence that perhaps even now, the queen might have a son and might know joy like this, such a strange, unexpected joy – the happiness of caring for a child whose whole life was in my hands.

He was not an ordinary child. Even I, who knew so little about children, could tell that. Like a house with shuttered windows the child had shielded himself, and in closing doors and windows, had shut himself away from the life of the world outside. I felt that I was standing outside, calling for a response that might never come. But I was determined to go on calling to him.

The court was at Richmond and the moment I arrived I knew that something had happened. There was an air of suppressed excitement in the stables, everyone was gossiping in corners and there was no one to take our horses, not even the Dudley grooms.

I threw the reins to the nearest young man, and with Danny on my hip strode up the flagged path to the garden entrance of the palace. There were more people whispering in groups and I felt a clutch of fear at my heart. What if one of Elizabeth’s many plots had brought a rebellion right here to the heart of a royal palace and she had the queen under arrest? Or what if the queen had gone into labor with this late-conceived baby, and it had been the death of her as so many people had warned her that it would be?

I did not dare to ask a stranger, for fear of the reply I might get, so I pushed on, walking faster and faster, through the entrance to the inner hall, looking for a friendly face. Looking for someone to ask, someone that I could trust. At the back of the hall was Will Somers, sitting all alone, very isolated from the other whispering groups of people. I went up to him and touched him gently on the shoulder.