Philippa Gregory - The Queen's Fool

I slipped down from the wagon and I leaned back against the forewheel, closing my eyes. I could imagine the scene as brightly as if it were noon, Elizabeth arguing and delaying and struggling for every extra minute, all the way from the watergate to the room they would have prepared for her in the Tower. I could see her fighting for every grain of sand in the hourglass, as she always did, as she always would do. I could see her bartering words for every moment. And finally, I could see her in her room, looking down on the green where her mother had her head swept from her body with the sharpest French sword they could find, and I could see her watching them build the scaffold that would be her own death place.

Daniel was by my side. “I have to go to her,” I said. I opened my eyes as if I had wakened from a dream. “I have to go. I promised I would go back to her, and now she is near death. I cannot betray a promise to a dying woman.”

“You will be identified with her and with him,” he whispered passionately. “When they come to hang the servants you will be among them.”

I did not even answer him, something nagged in my mind. “What was that you said about Wyatt?”

He flushed, I saw that I had caught him out. “Nothing.”

“You did. When I saw the barge. You said something about Wyatt. What about him?”

“He has been tried and found guilty and sentenced to death,” Daniel said abruptly. “They have his confession to convict Elizabeth.”

“You knew this? And kept it from me?”

“Yes.”

I drew my cloak around my dark breeches, and went around to the back of the wagon.

“Where are you going?” He put his hand out and grabbed me at the elbow.

“I am getting my bag, I am going to the Tower, I am going to Elizabeth,” I said simply. “I will stay with her till her death and then I will come to find you.”

“You can’t travel to Italy on your own,” he said in sudden rage. “You cannot defy me like this. You are my betrothed, I have told you what we are doing. See, my sisters, my mother, all obey me. You have to do the same.”

I gritted my teeth and squared up to him as if I were in truth a young man and not a girl in breeches. “See, I do not obey you,” I said bluntly. “See, I am not a girl like your sisters. See, even if I were your wife you would not find me biddable. Now take your hand off my arm. I am not a girl to be bullied. I am a royal servant, it is treason to touch me. Let me go!”

My father climbed out of the wagon and Daniel’s sister Mary tumbled out after him, her face bright with excitement.

“What is happening?” my father asked.

“The Lady Elizabeth has just been taken to the Tower,” I explained. “We saw the royal barge go in by the watergate. I am certain she was on board. I promised I would go back to her. I was going to break that promise to come with you. But now she is in the Tower and under sentence of death. I cannot leave her. I am honor bound to go to her and I will go.”

My father turned to Daniel, waiting for his decision.

“It is nothing to do with Daniel,” I went on, trying to keep the rage from my voice. “There is no need to look to him. This is my decision.”

“We will go to France as we planned,” Daniel said steadily. “But we will wait at Calais for you. We will wait for Elizabeth’s execution, and then you will come to us.”

I hesitated. Calais was an English town, part of the English settlement which was all that remained of the great English kingdom in France. “Don’t you fear the Inquisition in Calais?” I asked. “If they come here, their writ will run there too.”

“If it comes we can get away to France,” he said. “And we should have warning. Do you promise you will join us?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling my rage and my fear roll away from me. “Yes, I can promise I will come when it is over, when Elizabeth is safe or dead I will come to you.”

“I shall come back for you when I hear that she is dead,” he said. “And then we can fetch the printing press and the rest of the papers at the same time.”

My father took my hands in his. “You will come, querida?” he asked gently. “You won’t fail?”

“I love you, Father,” I whispered. “Of course I will come to you. But I love Lady Elizabeth too, and she is afraid, and I promised to stay near her.”

“You love her?” he asked, surprised. “A Protestant princess?”

“She is the bravest cleverest woman I have ever known, she is like a quick-witted lion,” I said. “I love the queen, no one could help loving the queen, but the princess is like a flame of fire, no one could help wanting to be near her. And now she will be afraid, and facing death, and I must be with her.”

“What is she doing now?” one of Daniel’s sisters demanded in a delighted hiss from the rear of the wagon. Mary stepped up to the side, and I heard their scandalized whispers.

“Give me my bag and let me go,” I said shortly to Daniel. I stepped up to the rear of the wagon and said “Good-bye” to the lot of them.

Daniel dropped my bag on the cobbles. “I will come for you,” he reminded me.

“Yes, I know,” I said, with as little warmth in my voice as his.

My father kissed my forehead, and put his hand on my head to bless me, then he turned without another word and got back into the wagon. Daniel waited till he was seated inside, and then he reached for me. I would have pulled away, but he pulled me close and he kissed me fiercely on the mouth, a kiss so full of desire and anger that I flinched away from him and only realized, when he abruptly let me go and swung on to the driver’s box, that I wanted that kiss from him, and that I wanted more. But it was too late to say anything, too late to do anything. Daniel flicked the reins and the wagon rolled past me, and I was left in the cold London morning with nothing but a small bag at my feet, a hot bruised mouth, and a promised duty to a traitor.

Those days and then weeks in the Tower with the princess were the worst ones of my life in England, the worst days for Elizabeth too. She went into a sort of trance of unhappiness and fear which nothing could lift. She knew that she was going to die, and in the very same spot where they had beheaded her mother Anne Boleyn, her aunt Jane Rochford, her cousin Catherine Howard, and her cousin Jane Grey. There was a lot of family blood already soaked into that earth, and soon hers would join it. That spot, unmarked by any stone on the green inside the walls of the Tower, overshadowed by the White Tower, was the dying ground for the women of her family. She felt doomed the moment she came close to it, she was certain that her red-rimmed eyes were looking on the place of her death.

The warder of the Tower, first frightened by the drama of her arrival — which Elizabeth had milked to its utmost, seating herself on the watergate steps and refusing to go in out of the rain — became yet more alarmed when she sank into a fear-filled despair, which was even more convincing than her theatrics. They allowed her to walk in the warder’s garden, inside the safety of the great walls, but then a little lad peeped through the gate with a posy of flowers and the second day he was there again. By the third day the queen’s councillors in their fear and their malice decided that it was not safe to allow her even the relief of that exercise, and she was returned to her rooms. She prowled up and down like the lion that I had named her for, and then she lay on her bed and looked up at the tester for long dull hours, saying nothing.

I thought she was preparing herself for death and I asked if she would want to see a priest. She gave me a look that had no life in it at all, she looked as if she was dying from her eyes downward. All her sparkle was drained from her, all that was left was dread.