Philippa Gregory: The Queen's Fool

I knelt before her. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

When I looked up I saw that she was exhausted. “I wish I could bring my husband home so easily,” she said. “But I don’t believe he will ever come home to me again.”

The queen was too ill to transact the business herself, the fever was always worse after dinner and she could barely breathe for coughing; but she scrawled an assent on a bill on the Treasury for money and Lord Robert assured me that the business would go through. We met in the stable yard, he was riding to Hatfield and in a hurry to be off.

“Will he come to you here at court?” he asked casually.

I hesitated, I had not thought of the details of our meeting. “I suppose so,” I said. “I should leave a message for him at his old house, and at my old shop in Fleet Street.”

I said nothing more, but a deeper worry was starting to dawn on me. What if Daniel’s love for me had not grown, like mine, in absence? What if he had decided that I was dead and that he should make a new life elsewhere in Italy or France as he had so often said? Worse than that: what if he thought I had run away with Lord Robert and chosen a life of shame without him? What if he had cast me off?

“Can I get a message to him as he is released?” I asked.

Lord Robert shook his head. “You will have to trust that he will come and find you,” he said cheerfully. “Is he the faithful type of man?”

I thought of his years of steady waiting for me, and how he had watched me come to my love of him, and how he had let me go and return to him. “Yes,” I said shortly.

Lord Robert sprang up into the saddle. “If you see John Dee would you tell him that Princess Elizabeth wants that map of his,” he said.

“Why would she want a map?” I asked, immediately suspicious.

Lord Robert winked at me. He leaned from his horse and spoke very low. “If the queen dies without naming Elizabeth as her heir then we may have a battle on our hands.”

His horse shifted and I stepped back quickly. “Oh no,” I said. “Not again.”

“No fight with the people of England,” he assured me. “They want the Protestant princess. But with the Spanish king. D’you think he’d let such a prize slip away if he thought he could come over and claim it for himself?”

“You are arming and planning for war again?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Why else would I want my soldiers back?” he demanded. “Thank you for your help with that, Hannah.”

I choked on my shock. “My lord!”

He patted the horse’s neck and tightened the rein. “It’s always a coil,” he said simply. “And you are always in it, Hannah. You cannot live with a queen and not be enmeshed in a dozen plots. You live in a snake pit and I tell you frankly, you have not the aptitude for it. Now go to her. I hear she is worse.”

“Not at all,” I said stoutly. “You can tell the princess that the queen has rallied and is better today.”

He nodded, he did not believe me at all. “Well, God bless her anyway,” he said kindly. “For whether she lives or dies she has lost Calais, she has lost her babies, she has lost her husband and lost the throne and lost everything.”

Lord Robert was gone for more than a week and so I could have no news of the release of the English captives. I went to our old print shop and pinned a note on the door. The times were so bad and rents so poor in London that still no one had taken the shop, and many of my father’s books and papers would still be stacked, untouched, in the cellar. I thought that if Daniel did not come to me, and if the queen did not recover, then this might be my refuge once again. I might set up as a bookseller once again, and hope for better times.

I went to Daniel’s old house which was at Newgate, just past St. Paul’s. The neighbors there had not heard of the Carpenter family, they were new in the city. They had come hoping to find work after their farm in Sussex had failed. I looked at their cold pinched faces and wished them well. They promised to tell Daniel, if he should come, that his wife had been seeking him and was waiting for him at court.

“What a handsome boy,” the woman said, looking down at Danny who was holding my hand and standing at my side. “What’s your name?”

“Dan’l,” he said, thumping his chest with his fist.

She smiled at me. “A forward child,” she said. “His father won’t recognize him.”

“I hope he will,” I said a little breathlessly. If he had not received my letter, Daniel would not even know that I had his son safely with me. If he came to me on his release, our whole life as a family could start again. “I certainly hope he will,” I repeated.

When I got back to court there was a scurry around the queen’s apartments. She had collapsed while dressing for dinner and been put to bed. The doctors had been called and were bleeding her. Quietly, I handed Danny to Will Somers who was in the privy chamber, and I went inside the guarded doors to the queen’s bedchamber.

Jane Dormer, white as a sheet and visibly ill herself, was at the head of the bed, holding the queen’s hand as the physicians were picking fat leeches off her legs and dropping them back into their glass jar. The queen’s thin legs were bruised where their vile mouths had been fixed on her, the maid twitched down the sheet. The queen’s eyes were closed in shame at being so exposed, her head turned away from the anxious faces of her physicians. The doctors bowed and got themselves out of the room.

“Go to bed, Jane,” the queen said weakly. “You are as sick as I am.”

“Not until I have seen Your Grace take some soup.”

The queen shook her head and waved her hand to the door. Jane curtseyed and went out, leaving the queen and I alone.

“Is that you, Hannah?” she asked without opening her eyes.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Will you write a letter for me, in Spanish? And send it to the king without showing it to anyone?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

I took some paper and a pen from the table, drew up a little stool and sat beside her bed. She dictated to me in English and I translated it into Spanish as I wrote. The sentences were long and fluent, I knew that she had been waiting a long time to send him this letter. In all the nights when she had wept for him, she had composed this letter to be sent from her deathbed, knowing that he was far away, joyously living his life in the Netherlands, courted by women, fawned on by men, and planning marriage with her sister. She wrote him a letter like the one her mother wrote to her father from her deathbed: a letter of love and constancy to a man who had offered nothing but heartache.

Dearest Husband,Since it has pleased you to stay far from me in my illness and my sorrow, I write to you these words which I wish I might have said to your beloved face.You could not have had and never will have a more loving and faithful wife. The sight of you gladdened my heart every day that we were together, my only regret is that we spent so much time apart.It seems very hard to me that I should face death as I have faced life: alone and without the one I love. I pray that you will never know the loneliness that has walked step by step with me every day of my life. You still have a loving parent to advise you, you have a loving wife who wanted nothing more than to be at your side. No one will ever love you more.They will not tell me, but I know that I am near to death. This may be my last chance to bid you farewell and to send you my love. May we meet in heaven, though we could not be together on earth, praysYour wifeMary R.

The tears were running down my cheeks by the time I had written this to her dictation but she was calm.

“You will get better, Your Grace,” I assured her. “Jane told me that you are often ill with autumn sickness. When the first frosts come, you will be better and we will see in Christmas together.”