Philippa Gregory - The Queen's Fool

I could feel the color draining from my face and my heart start to race. After surviving so long, to put myself into danger, to step up to the rack! “Your Grace!” I stammered. “I am innocent…”

There was a scream from the back of the court and we all turned to look. A lady in waiting was running, holding her skirts away from her pounding feet, toward the queen. “Your Grace!” she whimpered. “Save me! It is the fool! He is run mad!”

Will Somers was bent down in a squat, his great long legs folded up. Beside him in the grass was a frog, emerald green, blinking his fat eyes. Will blinked too, mirroring his actions.

“We are racing,” he said with dignity. “Monsieur le Frog and I have a wager that I shall get to the end of the orchard before him. But he is playing a long game. He is trying to out-strategy me. I would wish someone to tickle him with a stick.”

The court was convulsed, the woman who had screamed had turned and was laughing too. Will, squatting like a frog, knees up around his ears, goggle-eyes blinking, was inescapably funny. Even the queen was smiling. Someone fetched a stick and stood behind the frog and gave it a little poke.

At once the frightened thing leaped forward. Will leaped too in a great unexpected bound. Will was clearly in the lead with his first hop. With a roar the courtiers ran into two lines to form a track, and someone prodded the frog once more. This time he was more alarmed and took three great bounds and started to crawl as well. The ladies flapped their skirts to keep him on course as Will bounded behind him, but the frog was clearly gaining. Another touch of the stick and he was off again, Will in hot pursuit, people shouting odds and bets, the Spaniards shaking their heads at the folly of the English but then laughing despite themselves and throwing down a purse of coins on the frog.

“Someone tickle Will!” came a shout. “He’s lagging back.”

One of the men found a stick and went behind Will who leaped a little faster, to keep out of the way. “I’ll do it!” I said and snatched the stick from him and mimed a great beating when the stick hit the ground behind Will and never so much as touched his breeches.

He went as fast as he could have done, but the frog was thoroughly frightened and seemed to know that the thick thorn hedge threaded with bean flowers at the end of the orchard was a safe haven. He bounded toward it and Will arrived a mere toad’s nose behind. There was a great roar of applause and a chink of coins being exchanged. The queen held her belly and laughed out loud, and Jane Dormer slipped an arm around her waist to support her, and smiled to see her mistress so happy for once.

Will unfolded himself from the ground, his gangling legs stretching out at last, his face creased with a smile as he took his bow. The whole court moved on, talking and laughing about Will Somers’s race with a frog, but I delayed him, a hand on his arm.

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked at me steadily, no trace of the fool about either of us. “Child, you cannot change a king, you can only make him laugh. Sometimes, if you are a very great fool, you can make him laugh at himself, and then you may make him a better man and a better king.”

“I was clumsy,” I confessed. “But Will, I spoke to a woman today and the things that she told me would have made you weep!”

“Far worse in France,” he said quickly. “Worse in Italy. You of all people should know, child, that it is worse in Spain.”

That checked me. “I came to England thinking that this was a country that would be more merciful. Surely the queen is not a woman to burn a priest’s wife.”

He dropped an arm over my shoulders. “Child, you are a fool indeed,” he said gently. “The queen has no mother to advise her, no husband who loves her, and no child to distract her. She wants to do right and she is told by everyone around her that the best way to bring this country to heel is to burn a few nobodies who are destined for hell already. Her heart might ache for them but she will sacrifice them to save the rest, just as she would sacrifice herself for her own immortal soul. Your skill, my skill, is to make sure that it never occurs to her to sacrifice us.”

I turned a face to him which was as grave as he would have wished. “Will, I have trusted her. I would trust her with my life.”

“You do rightly,” he said in mock approbation. “You are a very true fool. It is only a fool who trusts a king.”

In July the court should have been on progress, traveling round the great houses of England, enjoying the hunting and the parties and the pleasures of the English summer, but still the queen said nothing about when we might leave. Our setting out had been delayed day after day waiting for the birth of the prince, and now, twelve weeks late, nobody truly believed that the prince would come.

Nobody said anything to the queen — that was the worst of it. Nobody asked her how she was feeling, whether she was ill, if she was bleeding or sick. She had lost a child which meant more to her than the world itself, and nobody asked her how she did, or if they could comfort her. She was surrounded by a wall of polite silence, but they smiled when she had gone by, and some of them laughed behind their hands and said that she was an old and foolish woman and that she had mistaken the drying-up of her courses for a pregnancy! and what a fool she was! and what a fool she had made of the king! and how he must hate her for making him the laughingstock of Christendom!

She must have known how they spoke of her, and the bitter twist of her mouth showed her hurt; but she walked with her head high through a summertime court which was buzzing with malice and gossip, and she still said nothing. At the end of July, still without a public word from the queen, the midwives packed up their dozens of bandages, put away the embroidered white silk layette, packed away the bonnets, the little bootees, the petticoats and the swaddling bands and finally carried the magnificent wooden cradle from the birthing room. The servants took down the tapestries from the windows and the walls, the thick Turkish rugs from the floor, the straps and the rich bedding from the bed. Without any word of explanation from the doctors, from the midwives or from the queen herself, everyone realized that now there was no baby, now there was no pregnancy, and the matter was closed. The court moved in an almost silent procession to Oatlands Palace and took up residence so quietly that you would have thought that someone had died in hiding, of shame.

John Dee, charged with heresy, conjuring and calculing, disappeared into the terrible maw of the Bishop’s Palace in London. It was said that the coalhouses, the woodstores, the cellars, even the drains below the palace were serving as cells for the hundreds of suspected heretics waiting to be questioned by Bishop Bonner. In the neighboring St. Paul’s Cathedral, the bell tower was crammed with prisoners who scarcely had a place to sit, let alone lie down, deafened by the ringing of the bells in the arches over their heads, exhausted by brutal interrogation, broken by torture and waiting, with dreadful certainty, to be taken out and burned.

I could hear nothing of Mr. Dee, not from Princess Elizabeth, nor from any of the gossips around court. Not even Will Somers, who usually knew everything, had heard of what had happened to John Dee. He scowled at me when I asked him and said, “Fool, keep your own foolish counsel. There are some names better not mentioned between friends, even if they are both fools.”

“I need to know how he fares,” I said urgently. “It is a matter of some… importance to me.”

“He has disappeared,” Will said darkly. “Turns out he was a magician indeed that he could vanish so completely.”