The Queen's Fool Part 37

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

Summer 1556 It was a long hot summer, that first summer in Calais. I greeted the suns.h.i.+ne as if I were a pagan ready to wors.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 Ba.s.sin 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sed him on the stairs or in the narrow rooms, would make him tremble, and when he touched my fingers as he pa.s.sed me a plate or a gla.s.s 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 b.u.t.ter, 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."

She found a sulky and unwilling pupil. I was not naturally gifted at housekeeping. I did not want to know how to scour a bra.s.s pan with sand so that it glittered. I did not want to take a scrubbing brush to the front step. I did not want to peel potatoes so that there was no waste at all, and feed the peelings to the hens that we kept in a little garden outside the city walls. I wanted to know none of these things, and I did not see why I should learn them.

"As my wife you will need to know how to do such things," Daniel said reasonably enough. I had slipped out to waylay him where his road home from work crossed the marketplace before the great Staple Hall, so that I could speak with him before he entered the house and we both fell under his mother's rule.

"Why should I know? You don't do them."

"Because I will be out at work and you will be caring for our children and preparing their food," he said.

"I thought I would keep a printing shop, like my father."

"And who would cook and clean for us?"

"Couldn't we have a maid?"

He choked on a laugh. "Perhaps, later on. But I couldn't afford to pay wages for a maid at first, you know, Hannah. I am not a wealthy man. When I set up in practice on my own we will have only my fees to live on."

"And will we have a house of our own then?"

He drew my hand through his elbow as if he were afraid that I might pull away at his answer.

"No," he said simply. "We will find a bigger house, perhaps in Genoa. But I will always offer a house to my sisters and to my mother; to your father too. Surely, you would want nothing less?"

I said nothing. To tell the truth, I did want to live with my father, and with Daniel. It was his mother and his sisters I found hard to bear. But I could hardly say to him that I would choose to live with my father but not with his mother.

"I thought we would be alone together," I said mendaciously.

"I have to care for my mother and sisters," he said. "It is a sacred trust. You know that."

I nodded. I did know it.

"Have they been unkind to you?"

I shook my head. I could not complain of their treatment of me. I slept every night in a truckle bed in the girls' room and every night as I fell asleep I heard them whispering in the big bed at my side, and I imagined they were talking about me. In the morning they drew the curtains of the bed so that I should not see them as they dressed. They emerged to comb and plait each other's hair before the little mirror and cast sideways glances at my growing mop of hair only half covered by my cap. My dresses and linen were all new and were the focus of much silent envy, and occasional secret borrowing. They were, in short, as spiteful and as unkind as girls working in concert can be, and many nights I turned my face into my hay mattress and cried in silence for sheer frustrated anger.

Daniel's mother never said a word to me that could be cited against her to her son. She never said a thing that I could quote in a complaint. Insidiously, almost silently, she made me feel that I was not good enough for Daniel, not good enough for her family, an inadequate young woman in every domestic task, an awkward young woman in appearance, a faulty young woman in religious observation, and an undutiful daughter and potentially a disobedient wife. If she had ever spoken the truth she would have said that she did not like me; but it seemed to me that she was absolutely opposed to speaking the truth about anything.

"Then we surely can live happily together," Daniel said. "Safe at last. Together at last. You are happy, aren't you, my love?"

I hesitated. "I don't get on very well with your sisters, and your mother does not approve of me," I said quietly.

He nodded, I was telling him nothing he did not know. "They'll come round," he said warmly. "They'll come round. We have to stay together. For our own safety and survival we have to stay together, and we will all learn to change our ways a little and to be happy."

I nodded, hiding my many, very many, reservations. "I hope so," I said and watched him smile.

We were married in late June, as soon as all my gowns were made and my hair long enough for me to be - as Daniel's mother said - pa.s.sable, at l'Eglise de Notre Dame, the great church of Calais, where the vaulting columns looked like those of a French cathedral but they ran up to a great English church tower set square on the top. It was a Christian wedding with a Ma.s.s afterward and every one of us was meticulous in our observation of the rituals in church. Afterward, in the privacy of the little house in London Street, Daniel's sisters held a shawl as a chuppah over our heads as my father repeated the seven blessings for a wedding, as far as he could remember them, and Daniel's mother put a wrapped gla.s.s at Daniel's feet for him to stamp on. Then we drew back the shutters, opened the doors and held a wedding feast for the neighbors with gifts and dancing.

The vexed question of where we would sleep as a married couple had been resolved by my father moving to a bunk alongside the printing press in the little room created by thatching the backyard. Daniel and I slept in Father's old room on the top floor, a thin plaster wall between us and his sleepless mother on one side, and his curious sisters, awake and listening, on the other side.

On our wedding night we fell upon each other as a pair of wanton lovers, longing for an experience too long denied. They put us to bed with much laughter and jokes and pretended embarra.s.sment, and as soon as they were gone Daniel bolted the door, closed the shutters and drew me into the bed. Desperate for privacy we put the covers completely over our heads and kissed and caressed in the hot darkness, hoping that the blankets would m.u.f.fle our whispers. But the pleasure of his touch overwhelmed me and I gave a breathy little cry. At once, I stopped short and clapped a hand over my mouth.

"It doesn't matter," he said, prising my fingers from my lips to kiss them again.

"It does," I said, speaking nothing but the truth.

"Kiss me," he begged me.

"Well, very quietly..."

I kissed him and felt his mouth melt under mine. He rolled underneath me and guided me to mount him. At the first touch of his hardness between my legs I moaned with pleasure and bit the back of my hand, trying to teach myself to stay silent.

He turned me so that I was underneath him. "Put your hand over my mouth," I urged him.

He hesitated. "It feels as if I am forcing you," he said uncomfortably.

I gave a little breathy laugh. "If you were forcing me I would be quieter," I joked, but he could not laugh. He pulled away from me and dropped on to his back, and he pulled me to lie beside him, my head on his shoulder.

"We'll wait till they are all asleep," he said. "They cannot wake all night."

We waited and waited but his mother's heavy tread did not come up the stairs until late, and then we heard, with embarra.s.sing clarity, her sigh as she sat on the side of her bed, the "clip, clop" as she dropped one wooden clog then another on the floor. Then we heard with a sharpness which showed us how thin the walls must be, the muted rustle of her undressing and then the creak of the ropes of the bed as she got under the covers.

After that it was impossible. If I even turned the bed creaked so loud that I knew she would hear it. I pressed my mouth to his ear and breathed, "Let us make love tomorrow when they are all out," and I felt the nod of his silent a.s.sent. Then we lay, burning up with desire, sleepless with l.u.s.t, not touching, not even looking at each other, on our bridal night.

They came for the sheets in the morning, and would have flown them like a bloodstained flag from the window to prove the consummation of the marriage but Daniel stopped them. "There's no need," he said. "And I don't like the old ways."

The girls said nothing but they raised their eyebrows at me as if they well knew that we had not bedded together at all, and suspected that he could not feel desire for me. His mother, on the other hand, looked at me as if it proved to her that I was not a virgin and that her son had brought a wh.o.r.e into her home.

It was a bad wedding night and a sour wedding morning and, as it happened, they did not go out all day but stayed at home, and we could not make love that day, nor the next night, nor the next night either.

Within a few days I had learned to lie like a stone beneath my husband, and he had learned to take his pleasure as quickly as he could in silence. Within a few weeks we made love as seldom as possible. The early promise of our night of lovemaking on the boat that had left me dizzy with satisfied desire could not be explored or fulfilled in a bedroom with four nosy women listening.

I came to hate myself for the rise of my desire and then my embarra.s.sment that they would hear us. I could not bear to know that every word I said, every s.n.a.t.c.hed breath, even the sound of my kiss was audible to a critical and intent audience. I shrank from his sisters' knowledge that I loved him, I flinched from their intimacy with something that should be exclusive, just to us. On the first morning after we had finally made love, when Daniel came downstairs, I caught the glance his mother flickered over him. It was a look of utter possession, as a farmer might look at a healthy bull at stud. She had heard my cry of pleasure half silenced the night before and she was delighted at his prowess. To her I was nothing more than a cow who should soon be in calf, the credit for it all was to her son, the prestige of founding a family would come to her.

After that I would not come downstairs at the same time as Daniel. I felt scorched by the bright glances of his sisters which flicked from his face to mine and back again, as if to read how we had been transformed into man and wife by the m.u.f.fled exchanges of the night. I would either get up before the others, and be downstairs with the kindling laid on last night's embers, boiling the breakfast gruel before anyone else was up, or I would wait until he had eaten his breakfast and gone.

When I came down late, his sisters would nudge each other and whisper.

"I see you keep court hours still," Mary said spitefully.

Her mother made a gesture with her hand to silence her. "Leave her alone, she will need to rest," she said.

I shot a quick glance at her, it was the first time she had defended me against Mary's acid tongue, and then I saw it was not me, Hannah, that she was defending. It was not even Daniel's wife - as though anything that belonged to Daniel was illuminated by the glow he cast in this household - it was because she hoped I was breeding. She wanted another boy, another boy for the House of Israel, another little d'Israeli to continue the line. And if I could produce him soon, while she was still young and active, she could bring him up as her own, in her own house, under her supervision and then it would be: "my son's little boy, my son the doctor, you know."

If I had not served for three years at court I would have fought like a cat with my mother-in-law and my three dear sisters-in-law; but I had seen worse and heard worse and endured worse than they could ever have dreamed. I knew that the moment I complained to Daniel about them I would bring down on my own head all his worry and all his love for them, for me, and for the family he was trying to make.

He was too young a man to take the responsibility of keeping a family safe in such difficult and dangerous times. He was studying his skill as a physician, every day he had to advise men and women who were staring death in the face. He did not want to come home at night to a coven of women torn apart by malice and envy.

So I held my tongue and when his sisters were witty at my expense, or even openly critical of the bread I had bought at market, of my wasteful kitchen practices, of the printers' ink on my hands, of my books on the kitchen table, I said nothing. I had been at court and seen the ladies in waiting vying for the attention of the queen. I knew all about female malice, I had just never thought that I would have to live with it at home.

My father saw some of it and tried to protect me. He found me translation work to do, and I would sit at the bookshop counter and work from Latin to English or from English to French while the smell of the ink from the press drifted in rea.s.suringly from the yard outside. Sometimes I helped him to print, but the complaints from Mrs. Carpenter if I got ink on my ap.r.o.n or, worse, on my gown, were so extreme that both my father and I tried to avoid arousing her indignation.

As the summer wore on and Daniel's mother gave me the pick of the food, the breast of the scrawny French chickens, the fattest sweetest peaches, I realized that she was waiting for me to speak to her. In the last days of August she could not bear to wait any longer.

"Have you got something to tell me, daughter?" she asked.

I felt myself stiffen. I always flinched when she called me "daughter." I never wanted another mother but the one who bore me. In truth, I thought it an impertinence of this unlovable woman to try to claim me for her own. I was my mother's child and not hers, and if I had wanted any other mother then I would have chosen the queen who had laid my head in her lap, and stroked my curls and told me that she trusted me.

Besides, I knew Daniel's mother now. I had not observed her for the whole of the summer without learning her particular route to things. If she called me "daughter" or praised how I had combed my hair under my cap she was after something: information, a promise, some kind of intimacy. I looked at her without a glimmer of a smile, and waited.

"Something to tell me?" she prompted. "A little news that would make an old woman very, very happy?"

I realized what she was after. "No," I said shortly.

"Not yet sure?"

"Sure I am not with child, if that is what you mean," I said flatly. "I had my course two weeks ago. Did you want to know anything more?"

She was so intent on what I was saying that she ignored my rudeness. "Well, what is the matter with you?" she demanded. "Daniel has had you at least twice a week ever since your wedding day. No one can doubt him. Are you ill?"

"No," I said through cold lips. She would, of course, know exactly how often we made love. She had listened without any sense of shame, she would go on listening. It would not even occur to her that I could take no pleasure in his touch or his kiss knowing that she was just the other side of the thinnest of walls, ears p.r.i.c.ked. She would not have dreamed that I had hoped for pleasure. As far as she was concerned the matter was for Daniel's pleasure and for the making of a grandson for her.

"Then what is the matter?" she repeated. "I have been waiting for you to tell me that you are with child any day these last two months."

"Then sorry I am, to so disappoint you," I said, as cold as Princess Elizabeth in one of her haughty moods.

In a sudden movement she s.n.a.t.c.hed my wrist, and twisted it round so that I was forced to turn and face her, her grip biting into the skin. "You're not taking something?" she hissed. "You've not got some draught to take to stop a child coming? From your clever friends at court? Some s.l.u.t's trick?"

"Of course not!" I said, roused to anger. "Why would I?"

"G.o.d knows what you would or would not do!" she exclaimed in genuine distress, flinging me from her. "Why would you go to court? Why would you not come with us to Calais? Why be so unnatural, so unwomanly, more like a boy than a girl? Why come now, too late, when Daniel could have had his pick of any girl in Calais? Why come at all if you're not going to breed?"

I was stunned by her anger, it knocked the words out of me. For a moment I said nothing. Then slowly I found the words. "I was begged for a fool, it was not my choice," I said. "You should reproach my father if you dare with that, not me. I wore boy's clothes to protect me, as you well know. And I did not come with you because I had sworn to the Princess Elizabeth that I would be with her at her time of trial. Most women would think that showed a true heart, not a false one. And I came now because Daniel wanted me, and I wanted him. And I don't believe a word you say. He could not have the pick of the girls of Calais."

"He could indeed!" she said, bridling. "Pretty girls and fertile girls too. Girls who would come with a dowry and not in breeches, a girl who has a baby in the cradle this summer and knows her place, and would be glad enough to be in my house, and proud to call me mother."

I felt very cold, like fear, like a dreadful uncertainty. "I thought you were talking in general," I said. "D'you mean that there is a particular girl who likes Daniel?"

Mrs. Carpenter would never tell the whole truth about anything. She turned away from me and went to the breakfast pot hanging beside the fireplace and took it off the hook as if she would go out with it and scour it again. "D'you call this clean?" she demanded crossly.

"Daniel has a woman he likes, here in Calais?" I asked.

"He never offered her marriage," she said grudgingly. "He always said that you and he were betrothed and that he was promised."

"Is she Jew, or Gentile?" I whispered.

"Gentile," she said. "But she would take our religion if Daniel married her."

"Married her?" I exclaimed. "But you just said he always said he was betrothed to me!"

She brought the pot to the kitchen table. "It was nothing," she said, trying to slide away from her own indiscretion. "Only something she once said to me."

"You spoke to her about Daniel marrying her?"

"I had to!" she flared up. "She came to the house when he was in Padua, her belly before her, wanting to know what would be done for her."

"Her belly?" I repeated numbly. "She is with child?"

"She has his son," Daniel's mother said. "And a fine healthy boy, the very picture of him as a baby. n.o.body could doubt whose child he is, not for a moment, even if she were not a lovely girl, a good girl, which she is."

I sank to the stool at the table and looked up at her in bewilderment. "Why did he not tell me?"

She shrugged. "Why would he tell you? Did you tell him everything in all these long years when you made him wait for you?"

I thought of Lord Robert's dark eyes on me, and the touch of his mouth on my neck. "I did not lie with another and conceive a child," I said quietly.

"Daniel is a handsome young man," she said. "Did you think he would wait like a nun for you? Or did you not think of him at all, while you played the fool and dressed like a wh.o.r.e and ran after who knows who?"

I said nothing, listening to the resentment in her tone, observing the rage in her flushed cheeks and the spittle on her lips from her hissing speech.

"Does he see his child?"

"Every Sunday at church," she said. I caught her quickly hidden smile of triumph. "And twice a week, when he tells you he is working late, he goes to her house to dine with her and to see his child."

I rose up from the table.

"Where are you going?" she asked, suddenly alarmed.

"I am going to meet him as he walks home," I said. "I want to talk with him."

"Don't upset him," she said eagerly. "Don't tell him that you know of this woman. It will do you no good if you quarrel. He married you, remember. You should be a good wife and wink at this other. Better women than you have turned away and seen nothing."

I thought of the look of blank pain on Queen Mary's face when she heard Elizabeth's lilting laugh at the king's whisper in her ear.

"Yes," I said. "But I don't care about being a good wife any longer. I don't know what to think or what to care for."

I suddenly noticed the pot with the smear of gruel along the side and I s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and threw it at the back door. It hit the wood with a resounding clang and bounced to the floor. "And you can scour your own d.a.m.ned pot!" I shouted at her shocked face. "And you can wait forever for a grandson from me."

I stormed from the house and across the marketplace, not seeing the stalls and the usual traders. I made my way across the fish quay, not even hearing the catcalls of the fishermen at my rapid pace and my uncovered head. I came to the door of the physician's house in a rush and then realized that I could not hammer on it and demand to see Daniel. I would have to wait. I hitched myself up on to a low stone wall of the opposite house and settled down to wait for him. When pa.s.sersby smiled or winked at me I glared at them, brazen, as if I were in my lad's clothes again and had forgotten how to smooth down my skirts and cast down my eyes.

I did not consider what I would say to him, nor did I plan what I might do. I just waited like a dog waits for his master. I just waited in pain, as a dog will do with its paw caught in a trap and there is nothing to do but to wait; not understanding what the pain is, not knowing what can be done. Just enduring. Just waiting.