Philippa Gregory: The Queen's Fool

That silenced me, and we looked at each other in some sort of shock at the distance we had come in so little a time.

“Do you want another girl?” I asked, a little shaken.

“I don’t know another girl,” he said sulkily. “But I don’t want a girl who doesn’t want me.”

“It’s not you I dislike,” I volunteered. “It’s marriage itself. I would not choose marriage at all. What is it but the servitude of women hoping for safety, to men who cannot even keep them safe?”

My father glanced over curiously and saw the two of us, face to face, aghast in silence. Daniel turned away from me and took two paces to one side, I leaned against the cold stone of the doorpost and wondered if he would stride off into the night and that would be the last I would see of him. I wondered how displeased my father would be with me if I lost a good offer through my impertinence, and if we would be able to stay in England at all if Daniel and his family considered themselves insulted by us newcomers. We might be family and entitled to the help of our kin, but the hidden Jews of England were a tight little world and if they decided to exclude us, we would have nowhere to go but on our travels again.

Daniel mastered himself, and came back to me.

“You do wrong to taunt me, Hannah Green,” he said, his voice trembling with his intensity. “Whatever else, we are promised to one another. You hold my life in your hands and I hold yours in mine. We should not disagree. This is a dangerous world for us. We should cleave together for our own safety.”

“There is no safety,” I said coldly. “You have lived too long in this quiet country if you think there is ever any safety for such as us.”

“We can make a home here,” he said earnestly. “You and I can be married and have children who will be English children. They will know nothing but this life, we need not even tell them of your mother, of her faith. Nor of our own.”

“Oh, you’ll tell them,” I predicted. “You say you won’t now, but once we have a child you won’t be able to resist it. And you’ll find ways to light the candle on Friday night and not to work on the Sabbath. You’ll be a doctor then, you will circumcise the boys in secret and teach them the prayers. You’ll have me teach the girls to make unleavened bread and to keep the milk from the meat and to drain the blood from the beef. The moment you have children of your own you will want to teach them. And so it goes on, like some sickness that we pass on, one to another.”

“It’s no sickness,” he whispered passionately. Even in the midst of our quarrel, nothing would make us raise our voices. We were always aware of the shadows in the garden, always alert to the possibility that someone might be listening. “It is an insult to call it a sickness. It is our gift, we are chosen to keep faith.”

I would have argued for the sake of contradicting him, but it went against the deeper grain of my love for my mother and her faith. “Yes,” I said, surrendering to the truth. “It is not a sickness, but it kills us just as if it were. My grandmother and my aunt died of it, my mother too. And this is what you propose to me. A lifetime of fear, not Chosen so much as cursed.”

“If you don’t want to marry me, then you can marry a Christian and pretend that you know nothing more,” he pointed out. “None of us would betray you. I would let you go. You can deny the faith that your mother and your grandmother died for. Just say the word and I shall tell your father that I wish to be released.”

I hesitated. For all that I had bragged of my courage, I did not dare to tell my father that I would overthrow his plans. I did not dare to tell the old women who had arranged all of this, thinking only of my safety and Daniel’s future, that I wanted none of it. I wanted to be free; I did not want to be cast out.

“I don’t know,” I said, a girl’s plea. “I’m not ready to say… I don’t know yet.”

“Then be guided by those who do,” he said flatly. He saw me bridle at that. “Look, you can’t fight everyone,” he advised me. “You have to choose where you belong and rest there.”

“It’s too great a cost for me,” I whispered. “For you it is a good life, the home is made around you, the children come, you sit at the head of the table and lead the prayers. For me it is to lose everything I might be and everything I might do, and become nothing but your helpmeet and your servant.”

“This is not being a Jew, this is being a girl,” he said. “Whether you married a Christian or a Jew, you would be his servant. What else can a woman be? Would you deny your sex as well as your religion?”

I said nothing.

“You are not a faithful woman,” he said slowly. “You would betray yourself.”

“That’s a dreadful thing to say,” I whispered.

“But true,” he maintained. “You are a Jew and you are a young woman and you are my betrothed, and all these things you would deny. Who do you work for in the court? The king? The Dudleys? Are you faithful to them?”

I thought of how I had been pledged as a vassal, begged as a fool and appointed as a spy. “I just want to be free,” I said. “I don’t want to be anybody’s anything.”

“In fool’s livery?”

I saw my father looking toward us. He could sense that we were far from courtship. I saw him make a little tentative move as if to interrupt us, but then he waited.

“Shall I tell them that we cannot agree and ask you to release me from our betrothal?” Daniel asked tightly.

Willfully, I was about to agree, but his stillness, his silence, his patient waiting for my reply made me look at this young man, this Daniel Carpenter, more closely. The light was going from the sky and in the half darkness I could see the man he would become. He would be handsome, he would have a dark mobile face, a quick observing eye, a sensitive mouth, a strong straight nose like mine, thick black hair like mine. And he would be a wise man, he was a wise youth, he had seen me and understood me and contradicted my very core, and yet still he stood waiting. He would give me a chance. He would be a generous husband. He would want to be kind.

“Leave me now,” I said feebly. “I can’t say now. I have said too much already. I am sorry for speaking out. I am sorry if I angered you.”

But his anger had left him as quickly as it had come, and that was another thing that I liked in him.

“Shall I come again?”

“All right.”

“Are we still betrothed?”

I shrugged. There was too much riding on my answer. “I haven’t broken it,” I said, finding the easiest way out. “It’s not broken yet.”

He nodded. “I shall need to know,” he warned me. “If I am not to marry you, then I could marry another. I shall want to marry within two years; you, or another girl.”

“You have so many to choose from?” I taunted him, knowing that he had not.

“There are many girls in London,” he returned. “I could marry outside our kin, well enough.”

“I can see them allowing that!” I exclaimed. “You’ll have to marry a Jew, there’s no escape from that. They will send you a fat Parisian or a girl with skin the color of mud from Turkey.”

“I would try to be a good husband even to a fat Parisian or to a young girl from Turkey,” he said steadily. “And it is more important to love and cherish the wife that God gives you than to run after some silly maid who does not know her own mind.”

“Would that be me?” I asked sharply.

I expected his color to rise but this time he did not blush. He met my eyes frankly and it was I who looked away first. “I think you are a silly maid if you turn from the love and protection of a man who would be a good husband, to a life of deceit at court.”