Christie Dickason - The King’s Daughter

He mounted. I looked up at him. ‘Let no one but my brother see that letter,’ I repeated. With one hand on Clapper’s neck, I walked beside them out of the stable yard.

Clapper’s hoofs rang like gunshots in the cold morning air. I looked up at the house. No curious faces appeared at the windows. It made no difference now, in any case. The absence of man and horse could not be kept secret for long on this small estate.

From the gate of the main courtyard, I watched Abel trot away up the long tree-lined avenue burdened with treason, my life tucked inside his jacket. Even on Clapper, he seemed a frail vessel to carry so much weight.

I could not bear to go back into the dense vaulted shadows of Combe Manor, once an abbey, now turned private house. I felt that God had never quite loosed His chilly grip on the place, even though He had been turned out more than sixty years before. I limped around the brick-paved courtyard along the walls of the three wings of the house. Still not ready to fall back under God’s stern eye, I turned right into the gardens lying in the elbow of the river Smite, where I soaked my shoes leaving a dark ragged trail through the dew on the grass. I was not good at waiting.

The Haringtons returned before sundown. They brought no news of disturbance abroad nor death in London. Lady Harington, short, wiry and as sharp-eyed as a sparrow hawk, at once spotted my wet shoes and sent me to change them. I waited for Lord Harington to ask me about Abel White and Clapper. But he said nothing about the absence of either horse or groom. We prayed as we always did before every meal. I would have begged to eat in my bed again but Lord Harington always fussed so much over my health that it seemed easier to brave the table than his concern.

Supper passed as quietly and tediously as always. The Haringtons, never talkative, chewed and sipped quietly as if a demon might not, at this very moment, be crashing about doing damage I could not bear to imagine.

I half-raised my spoon of onion and parsnip stew then set it back down on my plate. A pent-up force seemed to distend my chest. Any moment, it would burst upwards and escape like lightning flashing along my hair.

‘What news?’ I wanted to shout. ‘What is happening in the world outside Combe?’

At Dunfermline and Linlithgow palaces, when I was merely the girl-child of a Scottish king who already had two surviving sons, I had stolen time for games in the stables with the grooms, including Abel, and with the waiting footmen, maids and messengers. I had known all the kitchen family and listened while they thought I played. I heard all their gossip, suitable for my ears, and otherwise. Now that I was at last old enough to understand what I heard, I had been elevated into an English princess, third in line to the joint crowns of England and Scotland. Who must be kept safely buried in this damp green place where everyone treated me with tedious and uninformative respect.

I knocked over my watered ale.

Lord Harington gazed at me in concern with his constantly anxious eyes. ‘Are you certain that your injuries yesterday weren’t more serious than you say, your grace?’

‘Perhaps a little more shaken,’ I muttered. Though I sometimes thought him a tiresome old man, Lord Harington was kind. I did not like lying to him. I didn’t know what I would tell him when he at last asked why Clapper was gone.

Then it occurred to me that he might be pretending that all was well. He might have been instructed to lull me into false security until men-at-arms could arrive from London to arrest me. I caught my glass as it almost toppled a second time.

When we were preparing for bed, Anne gave a little cry. ‘What did you do to your arm?’

I looked down at the line of fingertip bruises along the bone. I brushed at them as if they were smudges of ash. ‘I must have done it yesterday while riding.’

I wondered suddenly if Anne had been set by her uncle to spy on me.

For a second sleepless night, I lay in my bed in the darkness, waiting, not knowing what I was waiting for. I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the ghostly abbot if he should decide to visit. Tonight, however, I didn’t fear him. My head was too crowded to deal with one thing more. I lay thinking how past events, which seemed to have nothing at all to do with you, could shape your life.

I could hear again Mrs Hay’s whispers of treason and danger as she readied me for bed.

Ruthven. Gowrie. Morton. The names thumped in my pulse.

Treachery and knives. Ruthven and Gowrie, kidnappers and possible murderers. The child king, my father, no older than I was, standing courageously against his attackers. Morton, the regent who betrayed him and died on the scaffold. My father signing execution warrants when only a child.

‘Never listen to the gossip that calls him a coward,’ Mrs Hay had warned me. ‘His majesty had a terrible life for a wee bairn, royal or not. Being made king so young did him no favours. That Scotland you pine for is a fierce and wild place, ruled by unruly chiefs who call themselves “nobles”…I don’t know what you do to make knots in your hair like this!’

I always wanted to tell her that if I were a boy, I would have liked to be one of those unruly chiefs.

But I was her golden girl, her royal pet, her child, her life. I was her Responsibility, she said, which was a fearful weighty thing, which she carried nevertheless with a whole heart. She had to prepare me for my future without making false promises of joy in this life, though she was generous on behalf of the Hereafter.

So I stopped telling her what I felt. When very young, I had tried to tell her what I truly thought about a good many things but soon learned that she would only look stricken, as if someone had accused her of failure, and tell me to remember who I was. And to be grateful that my father wanted me kept safe as he himself had never been.

Tediously safe, I had thought. Until today, when the demons had arrived at Combe.

Henry? Can you hear me? We are both in danger.

I pressed my thoughts out into the night. I often spoke to my brother as one spoke to God. Even though I loved Henry more than I loved God, I told myself that God could never be jealous. Jealousy was a mortal weakness. God knew that Henry deserved to be loved. He was God’s perfect, shining knight.

I had seldom seen the king, my father. But, so far as I remembered him before he set off on his separate journey to London, he cut a poor figure beside his eldest son. Our father was thick-bodied and short-legged where Henry, though not over-tall, was slim, fair and well-formed. Our father was awkward and given to coarse wit, where Henry had a soldier’s bearing and the seriousness of a full-grown man.

I knew that I was not alone in my high opinion of my brother. At all the great houses where we had stopped on our progress south, we were entertained by poetry and songs praising us both, but chiefly Henry, who would one day be king. At Althorpe one poet, Mr Jonson, wrote in his entertainment that Henry was:

The richest gem, without a paragon…

Bright and fixed as the Arctic Star…

The poets did no more than speak for the people. Everywhere we went on our journey south, the cheers swelled when Henry appeared, the noble, handsome heir to the throne of England. Every boy in England wanted to be like Henry. Surely, no girl ever had a finer brother.

Look over the strict ocean and think where

You may but lead us forth.

I needed my brother’s level-headed advice. I needed him to lead me forth. I whispered the poet’s words to myself now. ‘ You must not be extinguished .’

Though some people were said to find him stand-offish, or even cold, I had seen at once, when we met at Holyrood, that Henry’s supposed chilliness grew from a modest reserve that took little delight in trumpeting his virtues. He was far more modest than I (who made the most of little) even though he had many more virtues to be modest about.