Christie Dickason - The King’s Daughter

I had seen him smile and wave for mile after mile at the cheering crowds that lined our route to London, even when his throat was dry and his eyelashes caked with the dust stirred up by so many feet. Once, as we prepared with our mother to meet yet another matched set of mayor and aldermen, he said to me over the basin of water and towels offered so that we could clean our hands and faces, ‘I don’t know why they cheer. I’ve done nothing to prove myself to them yet.’

‘You’ve missed a streak of dirt, just there.’ I pointed, testing our wonderful intimacy.

‘I promise to reward their hopes,’ his voice said through the towel. His face reappeared, shiny and damp. ‘I must not disappoint them. Their hopes put me in their debt.’

‘You could never disappoint.’ I did not quite dare to push back a lock of hair, darkened with water, which had fallen over his brow.

He shook his head, but smiled with pleasure all the same at my vehemence. ‘Oh, my Elizabella, our father disappoints them already, and he hasn’t yet reached London.’

I shrugged. I still felt too shy to try to tell him how superior he was to our father in every way. Except perhaps in his reported indifference to his books. But then, that was a weakness I shared. I was also thinking how much Henry knew that I did not, and how he lived in a larger world than mine. A little startled by his disrespect towards our father, I was also thinking how much he must trust me to say such things to me. He was looking at me with his serious eyes, warming me, sharing his knowledge and candour with me, his younger sister, as an equal.

Henry?

In my bed, I turned and turned his ring on my finger, remembering how he had given it to me in Scotland, up on the crags above Edinburgh. We were breathless from riding. Henry had brought a young eagle he was training to hunt. He handed the bird to his falconer, then we perched on rocks on the Cat Nick. It was a rare moment of sunshine. The dark dragon island crouching in the Firth of Forth behind us had been brushed with light. The backs of a pair of gulls wheeling and screaming below our feet, flashed white in the sun.

‘We don’t know what waits for us, Elizabella,’ he had said.

‘In England?’

He nodded. Together we watched the neatly folded ears of my favourite greyhound bounce up into view from the long grass of the slope to our right, then disappear again.

‘The king has been quick to send me instruction on how to conduct myself as a prince, but is less generous with information about our new country.’ Henry tossed a pebble over the edge of the cliff. ‘The English Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, has written to me offering—if I understand him right through his careful words—to help me learn what I need to know. But he’s preoccupied at this moment with smoothing the accession of our father.’

‘England will be an adventure,’ I said. ‘Won’t you be grateful to escape from Stirling to see more of the world?’

‘Of course.’ He tossed another stone. ‘But I feel the weight of it as well.’

I nodded, but in truth, I felt a pang. Of course, Henry would feel the weight of our new life. He would one day become king of England and Scotland, after our father. I, on the other hand, was merely a daughter, fit only for marrying off to some foreign prince or other. Mrs Hay had not put it so bluntly but that was what she meant about ‘preparing me for my future’.

‘We cannot know the future,’ said Henry. ‘We may hope, but we can’t ever be certain.’

He shifted sideways and reached into the pocket hung inside his breeches. ‘I had these made.’ He showed me two rings, identical except in size, of twisted gold wires, each topped by a small, square gold seal engraved with a ship in full sail.

He put one of the rings on my finger. ‘If ever you are truly afraid, send me this ring.’

He put the second ring on his own hand. ‘And, if I am in need, I will send mine to you. “I am in danger,” the ring will say. “Come at once! I need your help.”’

‘I will come!’ I said.

Looking down at our two hands wearing identical rings, I felt myself grow until I was as vast and solid as one of the mountains marching into the distance beyond the city. I became a crouching dragon. I was as strong as the wind that blew at our backs and scoured the clouds from the blue sky. My brother Henry had not only promised me his help if I ever needed it, he believed that I might be able to help him.

We kissed each other gravely to seal our pact.

I am trying, Henry, though you never sent your ring. You may not even know that you need my help.

In the shadows of my bed, I saw him dying under the knives of the friends of my man in the forest. I saw myself clawing at a locked prison door. Then turned into a headless chicken like the one I had seen in the farmyard at Combe, the broken-off head tossed onto the midden, the yellow eye still staring out sideways, the wings flapping as if flight were still possible. Chicken and head, too far apart. Nothing in its proper place. The outlines of the world had wavered like reflections on a pond struck by a stone. A curious dog wandered up to sniff at the head. I had imagined it crunching the head in its teeth and screamed at it to go away.

My golden brother, help me! Be warned, save yourself, but don’t let anyone harm me neither. Lead me forth.

The next morning, breakfast followed prayers, as always. All day, from my high window, I listened to the usual daily sounds of the estate. No men-at-arms came marching down the avenue. No messenger arrived from London on a foam-flecked horse.

If I had imagined that my man in the forest was a spirit, perhaps I had imagined the man as well. Perhaps I was mad.

After supper, I looked into my glass. Pale, yes. A little red around the eyes from lack of sleep. But otherwise as usual.

‘Do you think that mad people know that they are mad?’ I asked Anne.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Well, perhaps…There’s an old mad woman in the village. You could go ask her whether she knows if she’s mad…or else my aunt would surely know. She knows everything.’

When the late, falling sun had shrunk to a small hot red coin just above the horizon, and I was pacing the muddy gardens with Anne trotting after me, I heard hoof beats on the avenue.

If they had come to arrest me, I would be ready. I was waiting in dry petticoat and clean shoes, still a little breathless, when Lord Harington sent for me a short time later, to come to his study.

I was not mad, after all.

‘My neighbours had horses stolen from his stables last night.’ My guardian’s agitation was as great as my own. A moderate man of middling size, with a permanent air of mild anxiety, Lord Harington seemed swollen that evening with barely contained emotion. I watched his surprisingly luxuriant moustaches heaving as they framed his words. The peak of curling, greying hair that rose from his square forehead quivered like a torch flame. ‘It’s possible that one of our horses was taken also…one of yours, in fact. We fear some great rebellion.’

His brows collided ferociously above the fear in his eyes. ‘A groom is also missing,’ he said. ‘Perhaps dead, perhaps run off to join the rebels. No one can be trusted!’

Missing, I thought. Not yet caught. I felt guilt shouting from every muscle of my face.

I tried to listen to what my guardian was saying, but his words scrambled themselves into a confusion of devils and explosions, gunpowder, intended murder. Papists…

He paced as if running from his words, spilling them behind him in the air like a shower of live sparks.

Rebellion all around us. Murder and devastation in London. Thirty barrels of gunpowder…Opening of Parliament…another Papist plot to kill the king. Deaths beyond number…