The Queen's Fool Part 31

"Lord Robert says to tell you that John Dee is arrested for casting the queen's horoscope," he said, his breath tickling my ear. "He said to burn any books or letters of his."

In the next second he was gone and all my peace of mind gone with him. I turned and walked into dinner, my face a mask, my heart hammering, the back of my hand rubbing feverishly at my cheek, thinking of nothing but the book that John Dee had sent to my father and which he had forwarded, like an arrow to our door.

That night I lay in bed, unsleeping, my heart pounding with terror. I could not think what I should do to protect myself, to protect my father's fortune which was still stored in the dusty shop off Fleet Street. And what if John Dee told them that I had scryed for him? What if some spy had reported on the afternoon in Princess Elizabeth's rooms when he had drawn up the astrological charts on the queen herself? What if they knew about handsome Sir William, leaning against the door and being a.s.sured that I would run errands for him and for Elizabeth?

I watched the dawn turn my little window pale with light, and by five in the morning I was on the steps at the river gate, scanning the water for a pa.s.sing wherry boat which might take me into the city.

I was lucky. An old boatman, starting his day's work, came across at my hail and took me on board. The soldier sleepily guarding the pier did not even see that I was not a real lad in livery.

"Lechery?" he asked with a wink, guessing from the hour that I had been with some palace kitchenmaid.

"Oh aye, most vile," I said cheerfully, and jumped into the boat.

I paid my fare and scrambled ash.o.r.e at the Fleet stairs. I approached the street carefully, trying to see if the door of our shop had been forced. It was too early for our intrusive neighbor to spot me, only a few dairymaids were calling their cows out of the backyards to take them to the meadows for their gra.s.s, there was no one to pay any attention to me.

Even so, I hesitated in the opposite doorway for long moments, watching the street and making sure that no one was watching me before I crossed the dirty cobblestones and let myself into the shop and closed our door quickly behind me.

It was dark and dusty inside the shop with the shutters closed. I could see that nothing had been disturbed, n.o.body had come here yet, I was in time. The package labeled "for Mr. John Dee" in my father's hand had been taken in by our neighbor and left on the counter, as incriminating as a brand for the burning.

I untied the string and broke my father's seal. Inside were two books; one was a set of tables which showed, as far as I could tell, the positions of the planets and stars, the other was a guide to astrology in Latin. The two of them in our shop, addressed to John Dee, a man arrested for casting the date of the queen's death, was enough to have both my father and me hanged for treason.

I took them to the empty fireplace and crumpled up the wrapping paper, ready to burn them, my hands shaking in my haste. I rubbed at the tinderbox for long minutes before it caught, my fear rising at every moment. Then the flint sparked, and lit the tinder, and I could light a candle and take the flame to the paper in the grate. I held it under the corner of the wrapping paper and watched the flame lick it until it was blazing bright yellow.

I took up the books, planning to tear out a handful of pages at a time and burn each one. The first book, the one written in Latin, fluttered open in my hand. I took a fat handful of soft paper pages. They yielded to my fingers as if they had no power, as if they were not the most dangerous thing in the world. I tried to tear them from the fragile spine, but then I hesitated.

I could not do it. I would not do it. I sat back on my heels with the book in my hand with the light of the fire flickering and dying down and realized that not even when I was in mortal danger could I bring myself to burn a book.

It went against the grain of me. I had seen my father carry some of these books across Christendom, strapped to his heart, knowing that the secrets they contained were newly named as heretical. I had seen him buy books and sell books and, more than that, lend and borrow them just for the joy of seeing their learning go onward, spread outward. I had seen his delight in finding a missing volume, I had seen him welcome a lost folio back to his shelves as if it were the son he had never had. Books were my brothers and sisters; I could not turn against them now. I could not become one of those that see something they cannot understand, and destroy it.

When Daniel's joy in the scholars.h.i.+p of Venice and Padua made my own heart leap with enthusiasm, it was because I too thought that someday everything could be known, nothing need be hidden. And either of these two books might contain the secret of the whole world, might hold the key to understanding everything. John Dee was a great scholar, if he took so much trouble to get hold of these volumes and send them in secret, they would be precious indeed. I could not bring myself to destroy them. If I burned them I was no better than the Inquisition which had killed my mother. If I burned them, I became as one of those who think that ideas are dangerous and should be destroyed.

I was not one of those. Even at risk to my life, I could not become one of those. I was a young woman living at the very heart of a world that was starting to ask questions, living at a time when men and women thought that questions were the most important thing. And who could say where these questions might take us? The tables that had come from my father for John Dee might contain a drug which would cure the plague, they might contain the secret of how to determine where a s.h.i.+p is at sea, they might tell us how to fly, they might tell us how to live forever. I did not know what I held in my hands. I could no more have destroyed it than I could have killed a newborn child: precious in itself, and full of unknowable promise.

With a heavy heart I took the two books and tucked them behind the more innocuous t.i.tles on my father's shelf. I supposed that if the house was searched I could claim ignorance. I had destroyed the most dangerous part of the package: the wrapping, John Dee's name written in my father's hand. My father was far away in Calais and there was nothing directly to link us to Mr. Dee.

I shook my head, weary of lying in order to rea.s.sure myself. In truth, there were a dozen connections between me and Mr. Dee if anyone wanted to examine them. There were a dozen connections between my father and the scholar. I was known as Lord Robert's fool, as the queen's fool, as the princess's fool, I was connected with everyone whose name was danger. All I could hope for was that the fool's motley hid me, that the sea between England and Calais s.h.i.+elded my father, and that Mr. Dee's angels guided him, and would protect him even when he was on the rack, even if his jailers gave him his f.a.ggot of kindling and made him carry it to the stake.

It was scant consolation for a girl who had spent her girlhood on the run, hiding her faith, hiding her s.e.x, hiding herself. But there was nothing I could do now except to go on the run again, and my horror of running from England was greater than my terror of being caught. When my father had promised me that this would be my home, that I would be safe here, I had believed him. When the queen had put my head in her lap and twisted my hair into curls around her fingers, I had trusted her as I had trusted my mother. I did not want to leave England, I did not want to leave the queen. I brushed the dust off my jerkin, straightened my cap, and slipped out again to the street.

I got back to Hampton Court in time for breakfast. I ran up the deserted garden from the river and entered the palace by the stable door. Anyone seeing me would have thought that I had been riding in the early morning, as I so often did.

"Good day," one of the pages said and I turned on him the pleasant smile of the habitual liar.

"Good day," I replied.

"And how is the queen this morning?"

"Merry indeed."

Like the curtains at the windows of her confinement chamber, shutting out the summer sun, the queen grew paler and faded through every day of the tenth month of her waiting. In contrast, as Elizabeth's confidence grew her very presence, her hair, her skin, seemed to s.h.i.+ne more brightly. When she swept into the confinement chamber, taking a stool to talk lightly, sing to her lute, or st.i.tch incredibly fine baby clothes, the queen seemed to shrink into invisibility. The girl was a radiant sparkling beauty, even as she sat over her sewing and demurely bowed her flaming head. Beside her, hand on her belly, always waiting in case the child should move, Mary was becoming little more than a shadow. As the days wore on, through the long long month of June, she became like a shadow waiting for the birth of a shadow. She seemed hardly to be there at all, her baby seemed hardly to be there at all. They were both melting away.

The king was a driven man. Everything directed him toward a steady fidelity to his wife: her love for him, her vulnerable condition, the need to appease the English n.o.bility and keep the council favorably disposed toward Spanish policy as the country sneered at the sterile Spanish king. He knew this, he was a brilliant politician and diplomat; but he could not help himself. Where Elizabeth walked, there he followed. When she rode, he called for his horse and galloped after her. When she danced, he watched her and called for them to play the music again. When she studied, he loaned her books and corrected her p.r.o.nunciation like a disinterested schoolmaster, while all the time his eyes were on her lips, on the neck of her gown, on her hands clasped lightly in her lap.

"Princess, this is a dangerous game," I warned her.

"Hannah, this is my life," she said simply. "With the king on my side I need fear nothing. And if he were to be free to marry, then I could look to no better match."

"Your sister's husband? While she is confined with his child?" I demanded, scandalized.

Her downcast eyes were slits of jet. "I might think, as she did, that an alliance between Spain and England would dominate all of Christendom," she said sweetly.

"Yes, the queen thought that, and yet all that has happened is that she has brought the heresy laws on the heads of her subjects," I said tartly. "And brought herself to solitude in a darkened room with her heart breaking and her sister outside in the suns.h.i.+ne flirting with her husband."

"The queen fell in love with a husband who married for policy," Elizabeth decreed. "I would never be such a fool. If he married me it would be quite the reverse. I would be the one marrying for policy and he would be the one marrying for love. And we would see whose heart broke first."

"Has he told you he loves you?" I whispered, aghast, thinking of the queen lost in her loneliness of the enclosed room. "Has he said he would marry you, if she died?"

"He adores me," Elizabeth said with quiet pleasure. "I could make him say anything."

It was hard to get news of John Dee without seeming overly curious. He had simply gone, as if he had never been, disappeared into the terrible dungeons of the Inquisition in England at St. Paul's, supervised by Bishop Bonner, whose resolute questioning was feeding the fires of Smithfield at the rate of half a dozen poor men and women every week.

"What news of John Dee?" I asked Will Somers quietly, one morning when I found him rec.u.mbent on a bench, basking like a lizard in the summer suns.h.i.+ne.

"He's not dead yet," he said, barely opening an eye. "Hush."

"Are you sleeping?" I asked, wanting to know more.

"I'm not dead yet," he said. "In that, he and I have something in common. But I am not being stretched on the rack, nor being pressed with a hundred rocks on my chest, nor being taken for questioning at midnight, at dawn, and as a rough alternative to breakfast. So not that much in common."

"Has he confessed?" I asked, my voice a little breath.

"Can't have done," Will said pragmatically. "Because if he had confessed he would be dead, and there his similarity to me would be ended, since I am not dead but merely asleep."

"Will..." "Fast asleep and dreaming, and not talking at all."

I went to find Elizabeth. I had thought of speaking to Kat Ashley but I knew she despised me for my mixed allegiances, and I doubted her discretion. I heard the blast of the hunting horns and I knew that Elizabeth would have been riding. I hurried down to the stable yard and was there as the hounds came streaming in, with the riders behind them. Elizabeth was riding a new black hunter, a gift from the king, her cap askew, her face glowing. The court was all dismounting and shouting for their grooms. I sprang forward to hold her horse and said quietly to her, unheard in the general noise, "Princess, do you have any news of John Dee?"

She turned her back to me and patted her horse's shoulder. "There, Sunburst," she said loudly, speaking to the horse. "You did well." To me in an undertone she said: "They are holding him for conjuring and calculing."

"What?" I asked, horrified.

She was absolutely calm. "They say that he attempted to cast the queen's astrology chart, and that he summoned up spirits to foretell the future."

"Will he speak of any others, doing this with him?" I breathed.

"If they charge him with heresy you should expect him to sing like a little blinded thrush," she said, turning to me and smiling radiantly, as if it were not her life at stake as well as mine. "They'll rack him, you know. No one can stand that pain. He will be bound to talk."

"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 appet.i.te 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 Ma.s.ses 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 f.a.ggots. 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 Ma.s.s 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 G.o.d, Hannah, I will save this country from sin even though it cost life after life. We have to turn back to G.o.d 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..."

There was a scream from the back of the court and we all turned to look. A lady in waiting was running, holding her skirts away from her pounding feet, toward the queen. "Your Grace!" she whimpered. "Save me! It is the fool! He is run mad!"

Will Somers was bent down in a squat, his great long legs folded up. Beside him in the gra.s.s was a frog, emerald green, blinking his fat eyes. Will blinked too, mirroring his actions.