Philippa Gregory - The Queen's Fool

“Oh, Elizabeth,” Mary whispered. “If you would confess your sins and turn to the true church I would be so very happy. All I want, all I have ever wanted, is to see this country in the true faith. And if I never marry, and if you come after me as another virgin queen, as another Catholic princess, what a kingdom we could build here together. I shall bring the country back to the true faith and you shall come after me and keep it under the rule of God.”

“Amen to that, Amen,” Elizabeth whispered, and at the joyful sincerity in her voice I thought of how often I had stood in church or at Mass and whispered “Amen,” and that, however sweet the sound was, it could always mean nothing.

These were not easy days for the Lady Mary. She was preparing for her coronation but the Tower, where the Kings of England usually spent their coronation night, was filled with traitors who had armed against her only a few months before.

Her advisors, especially the Spanish ambassador, told her that she should execute at once everyone who had been involved in the rebellion. Left alive, they would only become a focus of discontent; dead they would be soon forgotten.

“I will not have the blood of that foolish girl on my hands,” the Lady Mary said.

Lady Jane had written to her cousin and confessed that she had been wrong to take the throne but that she had acted under duress.

“I know Cousin Jane,” the Lady Mary said quietly to Jane Dormer one evening, while the musicians plucked away at their strings and the court yawned and waited for their beds. “I have known her since she was a girl, I know her almost as well as I know Elizabeth. She is a most determined Protestant, and she has spent her life at her studies. She is more scholar than girl, awkward as a colt and rude as a Franciscan in her conviction. She and I cannot agree about matters of religion; but she has no worldly ambition at all. She would never have put herself before one of my father’s named heirs. She knew I was to be queen, she would never have denied me. The sin was done by the Duke of Northumberland and by Jane’s father between them.”

“You can’t pardon everyone,” Jane Dormer said bluntly. “And she was proclaimed queen and sat beneath the canopy of state. You can’t pretend it did not happen.”

Lady Mary nodded. “The duke had to die,” she agreed. “But there it can end. I shall release Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, and Jane and her husband Guilford can stay in the Tower until after my coronation.”

“And Robert Dudley?” I asked in as small a voice as I could make.

She looked around and saw me, seated on the steps before her throne, her greyhound beside me. “Oh are you there, little fool?” she said gently. “Yes, your old master shall be tried for treason but held, not executed, until it is safe to release him. Does that content you?”

“Whatever Your Grace wishes,” I said obediently, but my heart leaped at the thought of his survival.

“It won’t content those who want your safety,” Jane Dormer pointed out bluntly. “How can you live in peace when those who would have destroyed you are still walking on this earth? How will you make them stop their plotting? D’you think they would have pardoned and released you if they had won?”

The Lady Mary smiled and put her hand over the hand of her best friend. “Jane, this throne was given to me by God. No one thought that I would survive Kenninghall, no one thought that I would ride out of Framlingham without a shot being fired. And yet I rode into London with the blessing of the people. God has sent me to be queen. I shall show His mercy whenever I can. Even to those who know it not.”

I sent a note to my father that I would come on Michaelmas Day, and I collected my wages and walked through the darkening streets to him. I strode out without fear in new good-fitting boots and with a little sword at my side. I wore the livery of a beloved queen, no one would molest me, and if they did, thanks to Will Somers, I could defend myself.

The door of the bookshop was closed, candlelight showing through the shutters, the street secure and quiet. I tapped on the door and he opened it cautiously. It was Friday night and the Sabbath candle was hidden under a pitcher beneath the counter, burning its holy light into the darkness.

He was pale as I came into the room and I knew, with the quick understanding of a fellow refugee, that the knock on the door had startled him. Even when he was expecting me, even when there was no cause to fear, his heart missed a beat at the knock in the night. I knew this for him, because it was true for me.

“Father, it is only me,” I said gently and I knelt before him, and he blessed me and raised me up.

“So, you are in service to the royal court again,” he said, smiling. “How your fortunes do rise, my daughter.”

“She is a wonderful woman,” I said. “So it is no thanks to me that my fortunes have risen. I would have escaped her service at the beginning if I could have done, and yet now I would rather serve her than anyone else in the land.”

“Rather than Lord Robert?”

I glanced toward the closed door. “There is no serving him,” I said. “Only the Tower guards can serve him and I pray that they do it well.”

My father shook his head. “I remember him coming here that day, a man you would think who would command half the world, and now…”

“She won’t execute him,” I said. “She will be merciful to all now that the duke himself is dead.”

My father nodded. “Dangerous times,” he said. “Mr. Dee remarked the other day that dangerous times are a crucible for change.”

“You have seen him?”

My father nodded. “He came to see if I had the last pages of a manuscript in his possession, or if I could find another copy for him. It is a most troubling loss. He bought the book and it is a prescription for an alchemical process, but the last three pages are missing.”

I smiled. “Was it a recipe for gold? And somehow incomplete?”

My father smiled back. It was a family joke that we could live like Spanish grandees on the proceeds of the alchemist books that promised to deliver the recipe for the philosopher’s stone: the instructions to change base metal into gold, the elixir of eternal life. My father had dozens of books on the subject and when I was young I had begged him to show me them, so that we might create the stone and become rich. But he had showed me a dazzling collection of mysteries, pictures and poems and spells and prayers, and in the end, no man any the wiser or the richer. Many men, brilliant men, had bought book after book trying to translate the riddles that were traditionally used to hide the secret of alchemy, and none of them had ever come back to us to say that they had found the secret and now would live forever.

“If any man ever finds it, and can make gold, it will be John Dee,” my father said. “He is a most profound student and thinker.”

“I know that,” I said, thinking of the afternoons when I had sat on his high stool and read passage after passage of Greek or Latin while he translated as swiftly as I spoke, surrounded by the tools of his craft. “But do you think he can see into the future?”

“Hannah, this man can see around corners! He has created a machine that can see over buildings or around them. He can predict the course of the stars, he can measure and predict the movements of the tides, he is creating a map of the country that a man can use to navigate the whole coastline.”

“Yes, I have seen that,” I concurred, thinking that I last saw it on the desk of the queen’s enemies. “He should have a care who uses his work.”

“His work is pure study,” my father said firmly. “He cannot be blamed for the use that men make of his inventions. This is a great man, the death of his patron means nothing. He will be remembered long after the duke and all of his family are forgotten.”