Philippa Gregory - The Queen's Fool

“She is my sister,” Mary replied. “I taught her to walk. I held her hands while she stumbled. Am I now to send her to hell?”

Jane Dormer shrugged her disagreement, and picked up her sewing.

“I shall pray for guidance,” the queen said quietly. “I must find a way to live with Elizabeth.”

The cold days turned warmer in March and the skies grew pale earlier in the mornings and later at night. The court stayed on tiptoe, watching to see what would happen to the princess. She was examined almost daily by the councillors but the queen would not see her face to face. “I cannot,” she said shortly, and I knew then that she was nerving herself to send Elizabeth to trial, and from there it would be a short walk to the scaffold.

They had enough evidence to hang her three times over but still the queen waited. Just before Easter I was glad to get a letter from my father asking me if I could absent myself from court for a week and come to the shop. He said he was unwell and needed someone to open and close the shutters for him, but I was not to worry, it was just a passing fever and Daniel came every day.

I was a little irritated at the thought of Daniel in constant attendance, but I took the letter to the queen and when she gave me leave, packed a spare pair of breeches and a new clean linen shirt, and made my way to the princess’s apartment.

“I have been given leave to go to my home, to my father,” I said as I knelt before her.

There was a clatter from the room above. The royal cousin Lady Margaret Douglas’s kitchen had been moved over Elizabeth’s bedroom, and they had not been asked to work quietly. Judging from the noise, they had been given extra pans just to bang together. Lady Margaret, a sourfaced Tudor, would have a strong claim to the throne if Elizabeth were to die and she had every reason to drive the princess into irritable exhaustion.

Elizabeth flinched at the crash. “Going? When will you return?” she asked.

“Within the week, your ladyship.”

She nodded and to my surprise I saw that her mouth was working, as if she were about to cry. “Do you have to go, Hannah?” she asked in a small voice.

“I do,” I said. “He is ill, he has a fever. I have to go to him.”

She turned away and brushed her eyes with the back of her hand. “Good God, I am weak as a child losing a nursemaid!”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. I had never seen her so low. I had seen her swollen and sick on her bed and yet even then I had seen her eyes gleam with bright cunning. “What is it?”

“I am frozen to my very bones with fear,” Elizabeth said. “I tell you, Hannah, if fear is cold and darkness I am living in the wastes of the Russias. No one sees me but to interrogate me, no one touches me but to position me for questioning. No one smiles at me, they stare as if they would see my heart. My only friends in the whole world have been exiled, imprisoned or beheaded. I am only twenty years old and I am utterly alone. I am only a young woman and yet I have no one’s love and care. No one comes near me but Kat and you, and now you tell me you are leaving.”

“I have to see my father,” I said. “But I’ll come back as soon as he is well.”

The face she turned to me was not that of the defiant princess, the hated Protestant enemy at this passionately Catholic court. The face she turned to me was that of a young woman, alone with no mother or father, and no friends. A young woman trying to find the courage to face a death that must come soon. “You will come back to me, Hannah? I have become accustomed to you. And I have no one about me but you and Kat. I ask it of you as a friend, not a princess. You will come back?”

“Yes,” I promised. I took her hand. She had not exaggerated about feeling cold, she was as icy as if she were dead already. “I swear I will come back.”

Her clammy fingers returned my grip. “You will think me a coward, perhaps,” she said. “But I swear to you, Hannah, that I cannot keep up my courage without a friendly face by me. And I think soon I shall need all the courage I can summon. Come back to me, please. Come back quick.”

My father’s shop had the shutters up though it was only early in the afternoon. I quickened my step as I turned down the street and I felt for the first time a fear clutch at my heart at the thought that he was a mortal man, just like Robert Dudley, and that none of us could say how long we would live.

Daniel was putting the bolt on the last shutter and he turned around at the rapid sound of my footsteps.

“Good,” he said shortly. “Come inside.”

I put my hand on his arm. “Daniel, is he very ill?”

He covered my hand briefly with his own. “Come inside.”

I went into the shop. The counter was bare of books, the printing room quiet. I went up the rickety stairs at the rear of the shop and looked toward the little truckle bed in the corner of the room, fearing that I would see him there, too ill to stand.

The bed was heaped with papers and a small pile of clothes. My father was standing before it. I recognized at once the signs of packing for a long journey.

“Oh, no,” I said.

My father turned to me. “It’s time for us to go,” he said. “Did they give you permission to come away for a week?”

“Yes,” I said. “But they expect me back. I came running down here in terror that you were ill.”

“That gives us a week,” he said, disregarding my complaint. “More than enough time to get to France.”

“Not again,” I said flatly. “You said we were to stay in England.”

“It’s not safe,” Daniel insisted, coming into the room behind me. “The queen’s marriage is to go ahead, and Prince Philip of Spain will bring in the Inquisition. Already the gallows are up on the street corners, and there is an informer in every village. We cannot stay here.”

“You said we would be English.” I appealed past him to my father. “And the gallows are for traitors, not for heretics.”

“She will hang traitors today and heretics tomorrow,” Daniel said firmly. “She has discovered that the only way to make herself safe on the throne is through blood. She executed her own cousin, she will execute her own sister. Can you doubt that she would hesitate for a moment to hang you?”

I shook my head. “She is not executing Elizabeth, she is struggling to show her mercy. It is not about Elizabeth’s religion, it is about her obedience. And we are obedient subjects. And she is fond of me.”

Daniel took my hand and led me to the bed, which was covered with rolls of manuscript. “See these? Every one is now a forbidden book,” he said. “These are your father’s fortune, they are your dowry. When your father came to England these were his library, his great collection, now they would serve only as evidence against him. What are we to do with them? Burn them before they burn us?”

“Keep them safe for better times,” I said, incurably the daughter of a librarian.

He shook his head. “There is nowhere safe for them, and there is nowhere safe for their owner in a country ruled by Spain. We have to go away and take them with us.”

“But where do we have to go now?” I cried. It was the wail of a child who has been too long traveling.

“Venice,” he said shortly. “France, then Italy, and then Venice. I shall study at Padua, your father will be able to open a print shop in Venice, and we will be safe there. The Italians have a love of learning, the city is filled with scholars. Your father can buy and sell texts again.”

I waited, I knew what was coming next. “And we will marry,” he said. “We will marry as soon as we arrive in France.”

“And your mother and your sisters?” I asked. It was living with them that I dreaded as much as marriage.