The Queen's Fool Part 39

He responded to me as if I had grown a head from beneath my shoulders, become a monstrous strange being from a faraway island. "Hannah, what will you do with your life?" he said anxiously. "I cannot be always with you, who will protect you when I am gone?"

"I shall go back to royal service, I shall go to the princess or to my lord," I said.

"Your lord is a known traitor and the princess will be married to one of the Spanish princes within the month."

"Not her! She's not a fool. She would not marry a man and trust him! She knows better than to put her heart into a man's keeping."

"She cannot live alone any more than you can live alone."

"Father, my husband has betrayed me and shamed me. I cannot take him back as if nothing had happened. I cannot live with his sisters and his mother all whispering behind their hands every time he comes home late. I cannot live as if I belonged here."

"My child, where do you belong if not here? If not with me? If not with your husband?"

I had my answer: "I belong nowhere."

My father shook his head. A young woman always had to be placed somewhere, she could not live unless she was bolted down in one service or another.

"Father, please let us set up a little business on our own, as we did in London. Let me help you in the printing shop. Let me live with you and we can be at peace and make our living here."

He hesitated for a long moment, and suddenly I saw him as a stranger might see him. He was an old man and I was taking him from a home where he had become comfortable.

"What will you wear?" he asked finally.

I could have laughed out loud, it mattered so little to me. But I realized that it signified to him whether he had a daughter who could appear to fit into this world or whether I would be, eternally, out of step with it.

"I will wear a gown if you wish," I said to please him. "But I will wear boots underneath it. I will wear a jerkin and a jacket on top."

"And your wedding ring," he stipulated. "You will not deny your marriage."

"Father, he has denied it every day."

"Daughter, he is your husband."

I sighed. "Very well. But we can go, can we? And at once?"

He rested his hand on my face. "Child, I thought that you had a good husband who loved you and you would be happy."

I gritted my teeth so the tears did not come to my eyes and make him think that I might soften, that I might still be a young woman with a chance of love. "No," I said simply.

It was not an easy matter, stripping down the press again and moving it from the yard. I had only my new gowns and linen to take with me, Father had a small box of his clothes, but we had to move the entire stock of books and ma.n.u.scripts and all the printing equipment: the clean paper, the barrels of ink, the baskets of bookbinding thread. It took a week before the porters had finished carrying everything from the Carpenters' house to the new shop, and for every day of that week my father and I had to eat our dinner at a table in silence while Daniel's sisters glared at me with aghast horror, and Daniel's mother slammed down the plates with utter contempt as if she were feeding a pair of stray dogs.

Daniel stayed away, sleeping at his tutor's house, coming home only for a change of clothes. At those times I made sure that I was busy with my father out the back, or packing up books under the shop counter. He did not try to argue with me or plead with me and, willfully, I felt it proved that I was right to leave him. I felt that if he had loved me he would have come after me, asked me again, begged me to stay. I willed myself to forget his stubbornness and his pride, and I made very sure to keep my thoughts from the life we had promised ourselves when we had said we would become the people we wanted to be and not be tied by the rules of Jew, or Gentile, or the world.

I had found a little shop at the south city gate: an excellent site for travelers about to leave Calais and travel through the English Pale to venture into France. It was the last chance they would have to buy books in their own language, and for those who wanted maps or advice about traveling in France or in the Spanish Netherlands we carried a good selection of travelers' tales, mostly fabulous, it must be said, but good reading for the credulous. My father already had a reputation inside the city and his established customers soon found their way to the new premises. Most days he would sit in the sun outside the shop on one of the stools and I would work inside, bending over the press and setting type, now that there was no one to scold me for getting ink on my ap.r.o.n.

My father was tired, his move to Calais and then the disappointment of my failed marriage had wearied him. I was glad that he should sit and rest while I worked for the two of us. I relearned the skill of reading backward, I relearned the skill of the sweep of the ink ball, the flick of the clean sheet and the smooth heave on the handle of the press so that the typeface just kissed the whiteness of the paper and it came away clean.

My father worried desperately about me, about my ill-starred marriage, and about my future life, but when he saw that I had inherited all of his skill, and all of his love of books, he began to believe that even if he were to die tomorrow, I might yet survive on the business. "But we must save money, querida," he would say. "You must be provided for."

Autumn 1556 The first month in our little shop, I absolutely rejoiced in my escape from the Carpenter household. A couple of times I saw Daniel's mother or two of his sisters in the market, or at the fish quay, and his mother looked away as if she could not see me, and his sisters pointed and nudged each other and stared as if I were a visiting leper and freedom was a disease that they might catch if they came too close. Every night in bed I spread myself out like a starfish, hands and feet pointing to each corner, rejoicing in the s.p.a.ce, and thanked G.o.d that I might call myself a single woman once more with all the bed to myself. Every morning I awoke with an utter exultation that I need not fit myself to someone else's pattern. I could put on my sound walking boots underneath the concealing hem of my gown, I could set print, I could go to the bakehouse for our breakfast, I could go with my father to the tavern for our dinner, I could do what I pleased; and not what a young married woman, trying to please a critical mother-in-law, had to do.

I did not see Daniel until midway through the second month and then I literally ran into him as I was coming out of church. I had to sit at the back now; as a deserting wife I was in a state of sin which nothing would remove but full penitence and a return to my husband if he would be kind enough to have me. The priest himself had told me that I was as bad as an adulteress, worse, since I was in a state of sin of my own making and not even at another's urging. He set me a list of penances that would take me until Christmas next year to complete. I was as determined as ever to appear devout and so I spent many evenings on my knees in the church and always attended Ma.s.s, head shrouded in a black shawl, seated at the back. So it was from the darkness of the meanest pew that I stepped into the light of the church door and, half dazzled, b.u.mped into Daniel Carpenter.

"Hannah!" he said, and put out a hand to steady me.

"Oh, Daniel."

For a moment we stood, very close, our eyes meeting. In that second I felt a jolt of absolute desire and knew that I wanted him and that he wanted me, and then I stepped to one side and looked down and muttered: "Excuse me."

"No, stop," he said urgently. "Are you well? Is your father well?"

I looked up at that with an irrepressible giggle. Of course he knew the answers to both questions. With spies like his mother and sisters he probably knew, to the last letter, what pages I had on the press, what dinner we had in the cupboard.

"Yes," I replied. "Both of us. Thank you."

"I have missed you sorely," he said, quickly trying to detain me. "I have been wanting to speak with you."

"I am sorry," I said coldly. "But I have nothing to say, Daniel, excuse me, please."

I wanted to get away from him before he led me into talking, before he made me feel angry, or grieved, or jealous all over again. I did not want to feel anything for him, not desire, not resentment. I wanted to be cold to him, so I turned on my heel and started to walk away.

In two strides he was beside me, his hand on my arm. "Hannah, we cannot live apart like this. It is wrong."

"Daniel, we should never have married. It is that which was wrong; not our separation. Now let me go."

His hand dropped to his side but he still held my gaze. "I shall come to your shop this afternoon at two," he said firmly. "And I shall talk with you in private. If you go out I shall wait for your return. I will not leave things like this, Hannah. I have the right to talk with you."

There were people coming out of the church porch, and others waiting to enter. I did not want to attract any more attention than I had already earned by being the deserting bride of Calais.

"At two o'clock, then," I said, and dipped him a tiny curtsey and went down the path. His mother and his sisters, coming into church behind him, drew their skirts back from the very paving slabs of the path where I was walking, as if they were afraid they would get the hems dirty by being brushed by me. I smiled at them, brazening it out. "Good morning, Miss Carpenters," I said cheerily. "Good morning, Mrs. Carpenter." And when I was out of earshot I said: "And G.o.d rot the lot of you."

Daniel came at two o'clock and I drew him out of the house and up the stone stairs beside our house that went up to the roof of the gateway of the city walls that overlooked the English Pale and then south toward France. In the lee of the city walls, just outside, were new houses, built to accommodate the growing English population. If the French were ever to come against us these new householders would have to abandon their hearths and skip inside the gates. But before the French could come close, there were the ca.n.a.ls which would be flooded from the sea gates, the eight great forts, the earth ramparts, and a stubborn defense plan. If they could get through that, they would have to face the fortified town of Calais itself and everyone knew that it was impregnable. The English themselves had only won it, two centuries ago, after a siege lasting eleven months and then the Calais burghers had surrendered, starved out. The walls of this city had never been breached. They never would be breached, it was a citadel that was famous for being impossible to take either by land or sea.

I leaned against the wall and looked south to France, and waited.

"I have made an agreement with her and I will not see her again," Daniel said steadily, his voice low. "I have paid her a sum of money and when I set up in practice on my own I will pay her another. Then I will never see her or her child again."

I nodded but I said nothing.

"She has released me from any obligation to her, and the master of her house and his wife have said they will adopt her child and bring him up as if he were their grandson. She will see no more of me and he will not want for anything. He will grow up without a father. He will not even remember me."

He waited for me to respond. Still I said nothing.

"She is young and..." He hesitated, searching for a word which would not offend me. "Personable. She is almost certain to marry another man and then she will forget me as completely as I have forgotten her." He paused. "So there is no reason why you and I should live apart," he said persuasively. "I have no pre-contract, I have no obligation, I am yours and yours alone."

I turned to him. "No," I said. "I set you free, Daniel. I do not want a husband, I do not want any man. I will not return to you, whatever agreement you and she have made. That part of my life is over."

"You are my wedded wife," he said. "Married by the laws of the land and in the sight of G.o.d."

"Oh! G.o.d!" I said dismissively. "Not our G.o.d, so what does that mean to us?"

"Your father himself said the Jewish prayers."

"Daniel!" I exclaimed. "He could not remember them all, not even he and your mother racking their brains together could remember all the words of the blessings. We had no rabbi, we had no synagogue, we did not even have two witnesses. All that bound us was such faith that we could bring to it - there was nothing else. I came to it with my faith and trust in you, and you came to it with a lie in your mouth, a woman hidden behind you and your child in her cradle. Whatever G.o.d we invoked - it was meaningless."

He was ashen. "You speak like an alchemist," he said. "We swore binding oaths."

"You were not free to make them," I snapped.

"You are following reason to its end and coming to madness," he said desperately. "Whatever the rights or wrongs of the wedding, I am asking you to make a marriage now. I am asking you to forgive me and love me, like a woman, not anatomize me like a scholar. Love me from your heart, not from your head."

"I am sorry," I said. "I will not. My head and my heart are indivisible. I will not cut myself up into parts so that my heart can have its way and my head think it wrong. Whatever this decision costs me I take it entire, as a whole woman. I shall pay the price but I will not return to you and to that house."

"If it is my mother and my sisters..." he started.

I raised my hand. "Peace, Daniel," I said gently. "They are what they are and I don't like them; but if you had kept faith with me I would have found some way to live with them. Without our love, it all means nothing."

"So what will you do?" he asked, and I could hear the despair in his voice.

"I shall stay here with my father, and when the time serves, we shall return to England."

"You mean when the false princess comes to the throne and the traitor that you love comes out of the Tower," he accused me.

I turned my head away from him. "Whatever happens, it will be no concern of yours what I do," I said quietly. "Now, I want to go."

Daniel put his hand on my arm, I could feel the heat of his palm through the thin linen of my sleeve. He was hot with torment. "Hannah, I love you," he said. "It is death to me, if you will not see me."

I turned back to him and met his gaze straight, like a lad, not like a woman meeting her husband's eyes. "Daniel, you have no one but yourself to blame," I said flatly. "I am not a woman to be played with. You were false to me and I have cut my love for you out of my heart and out of my mind and nothing, nothing will restore it. You are a stranger to me now and for always. It is over. Go your way and I will go mine. It is finished."

He gave a hoa.r.s.e raw-throated sob and turned on his heel and plunged away. I went as quietly and as quickly as I could back to the shop, I went up the stairs to the little empty bedroom in which I had celebrated being free, and I put myself facedown on the little bed, pulled a pillow over my head and cried silently for the love I had lost.

That was not the last I saw of him, but we did not speak intimately again. Most Sundays at church I would glimpse him, meticulously opening his missal and saying his prayers, observant to every movement of the Ma.s.s, never taking his eyes from the Host and the priest, as all of us always did. In their pew his mother and his sisters stole little glances at me, and once I saw them with a pretty vapid-looking fair-haired young woman with a baby on her hip and I guessed that she was the mother of Daniel's child and that Daniel's mother had taken it upon herself to bring her grandson to church.

I turned my head away from their curious glances but I felt an odd swimmy feeling that I had not known for years. I leaned forward and gripped the smooth time-worn wood of the pew and waited for the sensation to pa.s.s but it grew stronger. The Sight was coming to me.

I would have given anything for it to pa.s.s me by. The last thing I wanted was to make a spectacle of myself in church, especially when the woman was there with her child; but the waves of darkness seemed to wash down from the rood screen, from the priest behind it, from the candles in the stone arched windows, wash down and engulf me so that I could not even see my knuckles whiten as I gripped the pew. Then I could only see the skirt of my gown as I dropped to my knees and then I could see nothing but darkness.

I could hear the sound of a battle and someone screaming: "Not my baby! Take him! Take him!" and I felt myself say: "I can't take him." And the insistent voice cried again: "Take him! Take him!" and at that moment there was a dreadful crash like a forest falling, and a rush of horses and men and danger, and I wanted to run but there was nowhere to run, and I cried out with fear.

"You're all right now," came a voice and it was Daniel's beloved voice and I was in his arms, and the sun was s.h.i.+ning warmly on my face, and there was no darkness, nor terror, nor that terrible crash of falling wood and the clatter of hooves on stones.

"I fainted," I said. "Did I say anything?"

"Only *I can't take him,'" he said. "Was it the Sight, Hannah?"

I nodded. I should have sat up and pulled away from him but I rested against his shoulder and felt the seductive sense of safety that he always gave me.

"A warning?" he asked.

"Something awful," I said. "My G.o.d, an awful vision. But I don't know what. That's what it's like, I see enough to feel terror but not enough to know."

"I had thought you would lose the Sight," he said quietly.

"It seems not. It's not a vision I would want."

"Hush then," he soothed. He turned his face to one side and said, "I will take her home. You can leave us. She needs nothing."

At once I realized that behind him was a small circle of people who had gathered for curiosity to see the woman who had cried out and fainted in church.

"She's a seer," someone said. "She was the queen's holy fool."

"She didn't foresee much then..." someone said with a snicker and made a joke about me coming from England to marry a man and then leave him within three months.

I saw Daniel flush with anger and I struggled to sit up. At once his arm tightened around me. "Be still," he said. "I am going to help you home and then I am going to bleed you. You are hot and feverish."

"I am not," I contradicted him at once. "And it is nothing."

My father appeared beside Daniel. "Could you walk if we both helped you?" he asked. "Or shall I fetch a litter?"

"I can walk," I said. "I am not ill."

The two of them helped me to my feet and we went down the narrow path to the lane that led to the city gate and our shop. At the corner I saw a knot of women waiting, Daniel's mother, his three sisters, and the woman with a baby on her hip. She was staring at me just as I stared at her, each of us measuring the other, examining, judging, comparing. She was a broad-hipped pink milk-fed young woman, ripe as a peach, with pink smiling lips and fair hair, a broad face which denied deception, blue slightly protruding eyes. She gave me a smile, a shy smile, half apologetic, half hopeful. The baby she held against her was a true Jewish boy, dark-haired, dark-eyed, solemn-faced, with sweet olive skin. I would have known him for Daniel's child the moment I had seen him, even if Mrs. Carpenter had not betrayed the secret.

As I looked at her I saw a shadow behind her, a shadow that was gone as quickly as I turned my gaze to it. I had seen something like a horseman, riding behind her, bending low toward her. I blinked, there was nothing there but this young woman, her baby held close, and Daniel's womenfolk looking at me, looking at them.

"Come on, Father," I said, very weary. "Get me home."

Winter 1556a1557 Of course within days the word was out that I had fainted in church because I was pregnant, and for the next weeks I had women coming into the printing shop and asking for volumes which were stored on high shelves so that I would have to come out from behind the counter and stretch up, so that they could see my belly.

By winter they had to acknowledge that they were wrong and that the bookseller's daughter, the odd changeling woman, had not yet received her comeuppance. By Christmas it was all but forgotten and by the long cold spring I was almost accepted as yet another eccentric in this town of runaways, vagabonds, ex-pirates, camp followers and chancers.

Besides, there were greater interests for the most inveterate gossips that year. King Philip's long desire to drag his wife's country into war against France had finally triumphed over her better sense, and England and France were declared enemies. Even sheltered as we were behind the stout walls of Calais it was terrifying to think that the French army could ride up to the bastions which encircled the Pale. The opinion of our customers was divided between those who thought the queen a fool ruled by her husband and mad to take on the might of France, and those who thought that this was a great chance for England and Spain to defeat the French as they had done once before, and this time to divide the spoils.

Spring 1557 The spring storms kept s.h.i.+ps in port and made news from England late and unreliable. I was not the only person who waited every day on the quayside and called to incoming s.h.i.+ps: "What's the news? What's the news in England?" The spring gales threw rain and salt.w.a.ter against the tiles and windows of the house and chilled my father to his very bones. Some days he was too cold and weary to get out of bed at all and I would kindle a little fire in the grate in his bedroom and sit by his bed and read to him from the precious sc.r.a.ps of our Bible. On our own, and quietly, lit only by candlelight, I would read to him in the rolling sonorous language of our race. I read to him in Hebrew and he lay back on his pillows and smiled to hear the old words that promised the land to the People, and safety at last. I hid from him as best as I could the news that the country we had chosen for our refuge was now at war with one of the strongest kingdoms in Christendom, and when he asked I emphasized that at least we were inside the town walls and that whatever might happen elsewhere to the English in France, or to the Spanish just down the road at Gravelines, at least we knew that Calais would never fall.

In March, as the town went mad for King Philip who traveled through the port on his way to Gravesend, I paid little attention to the rumors of his plans for war and his intentions toward the Princess Elizabeth. I was growing very anxious for my father, who did not seem to be getting any stronger. After two weeks of worry, I swallowed my pride and sent for the newly licensed Dr. Daniel Carpenter, who had set up an independent practice at a little shop on the far side of the quay. He came the moment that the street urchin delivered my message, and he came very quietly and gently as if he did not want to disturb me.

"How long has he been ill?" he asked me, shaking the sea fret off his thick dark cape.

"He is not really ill. He seems tired more than anything else," I said, taking the cape from him and spreading it before the little fire to dry. "He doesn't eat much, he will take soup and dried fruit but nothing else. He sleeps by day and night."

"His urine?" Daniel asked.

I fetched the flask that I had kept for his diagnosis and he took it to the window and looked at the color in the daylight.

"Is he upstairs?"

"In the back bedroom," I said and followed on my lost husband's heels up the stairs.