Christie Dickason - The King’s Daughter

Something terrible had been averted, even if the details were blurred. The consuming darkness had been defeated. Demons had been slain. Those captured alive would soon be executed. The king declared that the anniversary of his deliverance would become a yearly holiday. Each year, on the fifth of November, the fires would burn. The threat to Henry and the Members of Parliament dropped from mention.

Once it was believed that all of the Gunpowder Plotters, as they became known, were either dead or in the Tower, I was returned to Combe. Lady Anne, left behind to avoid advertising my flight, was still agog with scraps of news. She lacked the discretion of Mr Hopkins, or perhaps his wariness, and eagerly poured her snippets into my ear.

The leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, had been killed at Holbeche House, not far beyond Coventry, with several others, including Thomas Percy, a cousin of the Duke of Northumberland.

Robert Catesby, I thought. ‘Robin…’

‘He was a known Papist trouble-maker,’ said Anne. ‘Even though he was a gentleman. A single bullet struck down both him and Thomas Percy, whose cousin the Duke of Northumberland lives at Syon and has been himself examined by Lord Salisbury and the king, your father.’ I felt in her the same feverish excitement I had found in Coventry.

‘My uncle had such a wondrous fire lit here,’ she went on happily. ‘He even permitted me to watch the dancing, though of course, I was not allowed to romp in a field with the tenant farmers.’ She leaned closer. ‘I did manage to snatch a mug of eau de vie distilled by our estate manager, but don’t tell Uncle.’ She looked at me for approval. She so seldom had daring to offer me.

‘What of the other plotters?’ I didn’t want to mention Digby by name.

‘You must ask Uncle. I know only what I hear on the estate.’

I went to ground, and waited. I wondered what my father had meant by ‘a sight to clear her thoughts’.

Christmas passed with the social restraint and well-fed decorum you would expect in a household where the Papish word ‘mass’ caused unease. In a house that had once been a Catholic abbey, we marked the holiday merely by praying more often, to a Protestant God, in the chapel built for monks.

But although my Protestant guardian spoke only of ‘Christ Tide’, the old, forbidden word ‘mass’ lived on in the kitchen, gardens and stable yard. Other, even older spirits had their gifts too. Protecting holly springs hung in the horses’ stalls. Mistletoe sprouted in the dairy. I left an appeasing plate of sweet, twisted anise-flavoured Jumbles in a corner of my bedchamber for the ghostly abbot, and found them half-eaten the next morning.

I used the more-frequent prayers to beg Henry to respond to my letter, if he had ever received it. Seven weeks had passed. Neither Abel nor Clapper had yet returned from London.

I sometimes caught Lord Harington studying me with a frown. Whether I imagined pity or coldness in his eyes, I felt the same quiver of terror. I tried to distract myself by playing with my monkey and my dogs. I rode whenever the bleak damp January weather allowed. I was never left alone again.

Like an animal, I felt a storm coming. I fell asleep at night with the fragment of granite from the Edinburgh crags in one hand, and Belle’s furry warmth hugged close with my other, whenever I managed to smuggle her past Lady Harington and her fear that the little dog might soil the bed linen.

At the end of January, the king sent men-at-arms to take me to London.

From my chamber in the Bishop’s house at Paul’s, beside the Cathedral, I listened all day to the distant sound of the scaffold being built in the Churchyard. I had arrived in London by night, as furtively as I had fled to Coventry. Lord Harington sent me off from Combe professing ignorance of why the king had sent for me in secret. Besides the men-at-arms and the necessary grooms, only my old nurse, Alison Hay, had ridden beside me. Not even Anne was allowed to attend me.

As I rode away, I looked over my shoulder at my guardian. After more than two years, I still did not know whether I was merely a costly burden to him or whether true affection lurked in all his well-meaning severity.

Hammering, sawing. Faint and distant, but I knew what they meant. In the next two days, the Gunpowder Plotters were to die, some here at Paul’s and some at the Tower. Listening to the sound of hammers, I tried to decide whether I had seen more than concern on Harington’s face when I left Combe.

The hammering paused. In the brief silence, I understood why I had been brought to London. I was to be seized without warning and beheaded, along with the Plotters! That was why I had travelled in such secrecy, lest my fate raise a wake of protest among the common people who had cheered so loudly for Henry and me. Their cheers had meant nothing, just as my father said.

I saw now why not even my mother knew I was in London—for she had neither visited nor sent a greeting. I saw whyI hadn’t been allowed to go to Whitehall or to send a message to anyone. And why Anne had been kept behind, so she would not be tainted with my crimes. The king feared me, his oldest daughter, enough to kill me as his own mother had been killed, for the safety of the English crown.

I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions. But however much I fought it, the conviction that I was right twisted its roots deeper and deeper into my head.

Mrs Hay woke me in what felt like the middle of the night. ‘You are sent for.’

The windows were still dark, with no hint yet of winter sunrise. The air was cold.

I gripped her hands. ‘Do you know why? Tell me! I won’t cry out, I swear.’ My heart pounded. If I were to die, I needed time to ready myself. This wasn’t fair! Not possible…‘Where must I go?’ I could not imagine dying.

‘To the Bishop’s little study.’

‘Not to the Churchyard?’

‘I was told the study, here in the Bishop’s house.’

‘Only the Bishop’s study?’ I burst into tears.

‘Oh…!’ Mrs Hay stared, uncertain what to do. She hadn’t held me for more than six years. Then she reached out and clutched my head to her breast. ‘No. No! You mustn’t think such things!’ She smoothed my wild hair. ‘How can you think it?’

I heard a pause while she did indeed think how the thought might have occurred. A new spasm of terror quivered through me.

‘What does the king want with me?’

Mrs Hay sounded less confident than before. ‘His majesty’s at Whitehall, not here. And means to go hunting, or so I’m told.’ She stroked my head again. ‘Four of those Papist fiends are to die today. Grant, Digby, Wintour and Bates. No one else.’

Digby. I was here because of him. Digby must be the reason. I could not think straight.

She fingered a russet tangle at the back of my head, then began to unpick it, hair by hair. ‘I’ll attend you in the Bishop’s study, if they let me.’ As she lifted my heavy hair in both hands to shake it out, I felt a cold draft on my nape.

‘I’ll wear my hair loose today,’ I said. I smelled fear in my armpits. I put my hands on my neck as if to hold my head in place.

A gentleman wearing the Bishop of London’s livery led us to the study, a small room overlooking Paul’s Churchyard on the far side of the Bishop’s house from the chamber where I had slept. Apart from the bishop’s man, Mrs Hay and myself, the room was empty. I had half-expected Cecil to be there. I felt him twined into my fate but did not yet know how.

The bishop’s man gestured towards the window. With Mrs Hay beside me, I looked down through the diamonds of watery glass at the blurred bulk of the scaffold I had heard being built.