P. Chisholm - An Air of Treason

“Do you think I could marry you?” she asked after a moment, “I’m good at cheese and butter and I’ve got some bits of monkish gold I found and a shilling to my dowry?”

Dodd managed not to sputter. “Ah…no, Kat, I’m a married man mesen and ye’re by far too young for me but I’ll see ye wed tae a good man of yer ain if ye like. When yer old enough.” She frowned, puzzled so he said it more southron and she went and dug a hole in the floor under the place with the curds and pulled out a leather bag and slung it round her skinny body.

“I’m ready,” she said. “You can’t bury my grandam the way you are, so we’ll set fire to the cottage and that’ll do it.”

She had good sense. Dodd got his poor feet dry again, hobbled out and pulled the dog’s corpse into the cottage to lie next to the old woman. Harry Hunks could be buried by the foxes and the buzzards and ravens. Then they got the coals under the earthenware curfew going again, both lit handfulls of dry reeds they pulled from the thatch and the roof was dry enough and so the fire flowered where they lit it all about and it made him feel better. There was something clean about fire. He knew a couple of prayers from the Reverend Gilpin but he’d never seen the point in them. He told the ghosts of the Grandam and the dog not to let Harry Hunks walk and he warned God not to play the little maid false again.

Henry Carey Baron Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, first of that name, was sitting in the college garden, looking at the fallen leaves clotting the grass and worrying. He had his walking stick with him which he generally didn’t use in public because he hated to admit that he had arthritis in his knees, as if he were old.

He saw his seventh son before Robin saw him, as his bench was in a shadow between yew trees. The boy…no, even a fond father had to admit that the youngest of his sons was long past full grown, in fact, in his prime, tall, well-built with a breezy swagger that he supposed his sons had picked up from him since they all had it. In fact, of all of them, Robin reminded him of nothing so much as himself when he was a young man, although with the useful addition of his wife’s ingenuity. He knew he didn’t have that wild streak. He was profoundly grateful that Mary Boleyn had been so much less determined than her sister, that she had been married off to the complaisant William Carey while pregnant with him, the King’s bastard. If she had hung onto her virtue the way her younger sister Ann had done, well, he might have been King Henry the IX and had a much worse life, his sons would have been Princes of the Blood Royal and even more trouble than they were anyway. Or more probably they wouldn’t even exist because he would have been married off as a child to some thin-blooded crazy barren Hapsburg or Valois Princess, or God-forbid, Mary Queen of Scots herself and then…He shuddered. No Annie Morgan to marry in a whirlwind. Being a King.

Thank God for bastardy, that was all he could say. His half-sister and cousin, Ann Boleyn’s volcanic daughter, wove and politicked her way to the throne and was the finest Queen any nation had ever had since…Well, no nation had ever had such a Queen. Some fools might have been resentful at being barred the throne, he was not, he loved his firecracker of a half-sister and would do anything for her. Which was why he was Lord Chamberlain, of course, in charge of her palaces and her security, in charge of protecting her sacred person. It was the uttermost trust she could place in anyone. People called him nothing but a knight of the carpet, but when it mattered he had taken Lord Dacre’s hide in the revolt of the Northern Earls. What did he care if men thought him a fool? It made them less careful of him when they plotted.

And here he was, looking at his youngest son who was now a danger to the Queen. He was digging up the early days of her Court when she had been, frankly, a menace, a cocotte, and a flirt who scandalised the Court and the nation and the foreigners in Europe as well. And Robin was doing his considerable best to stir that dirty puddle on the Queen’s own orders.

Insanity. He had urged her to leave it, not to repeat the deadly mistake of 1566, her previous visit to Oxford. So she had used his youngest son as her tool because he had a fine mind and Walsingham had taught him a few things during those months he had spent at the Scottish Court with Walsingham’s embassy and then nineteen months in France for polish, also with Walsingham’s household. Three months he had taken to learn fluent French, a very diligent student for the first time in his life, and then sixteen months to cut a scandalous swath through the French ladies of the Court that even the French had found noteworthy. Perhaps he too had left a scatter of unknown bastard Hunsdon grandchildren among the French aristocracy, adding English yeast and Tudor blood to Parisian style.

Hunsdon smiled. He hoped so. And the boy had spent an astonishing amount of money as the French grandes dames taught vanity, luxury, and extravagance to an apt pupil. His time in a Parisian debtor’s prison had taught him very little about economy, something about power.

And here he came, a little off balance because he wasn’t wearing his sword.

Hunsdon frowned. Why? Why had his son disarmed? Had he worked it all out or made a terrible mistake?

He was on his feet, thumbs in his swordbelt, unaware how much his broad frame made him look like his royal sire-although he had never suffered the gluttony born of misery that had swelled King Henry and given him leg-ulcers and turned him into a monster.

Robin came right up to him and genuflected very properly and respectfully on one knee to his father. Hunsdon had to resist the impulse to raise and hug his son who had been so near death from poison only a couple of days before. He was wary. Generally, his son was only that respectful when there was trouble brewing. Or he wanted money.

Robin stood in front of him and hesitated. Their eyes were on a level. It was always a surprise when the baby of the family did that to you.

“Well?” said Hunsdon, guessing one reason why his son might have left his sword behind.

“Was it you, my lord?” Robin’s voice was strained and soft in the quiet garden, his face unreadable. “Was it you killed Amy Dudley for the Queen?”

For a moment it was hard for Hunsdon to speak.

“If it was you, father,” Robin went on gently, “If it was you…I’ll take my leave and say no more about it.”

This was tricky. The Queen had used a good young hound to find an old trail and he had done very well, far better than she could have expected. But he had to be careful. The Queen had given her orders. On the other hand…

“Do you really think I could have done a such a dishonourable thing?”

“For your sister the Queen? Yes. I would do it for Philadelphia if she needed me to.”

Hunsdon couldn’t help smiling although it might be misinterpreted. Robin and Philly as the two youngest had always been close and had constantly got into terrible scrapes together. Only the absolute cold truth would do here, that was obvious, although it had to be edited.

“Well, Robin, it’s true I would have done it if she asked me, despite the wickedness and dishonour, but the fact of the matter is that she didn’t ask me to and I didn’t kill Amy Dudley. On my word of honour.”

Robin looked no happier, standing tense with his fist where his swordhilt would have been.

“I had hoped you would say you had done the killing, father,” came Robin’s voice, softened to a breath of sound that the wind in the red and yellow leaves could cover, so he had to strain to hear it.