Philippa Gregory - The Queen's Fool

When I sealed it up I was certain, as I had known in my heart for the last few months, that there was no safety for anyone in Queen Mary’s England any more.

There was a tap at the door. My heart plunged with the familiar terror, but then I could see, through the shutters, the silhouette of our next-door neighbor.

I opened the door to him. “Slept well?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I said.

“Ate well? They are a good baker’s?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Better now?”

“Yes. I am well.”

“Are you going back to court today?”

For a moment I hesitated, then I realized that there was nowhere else for me to go. If I went missing from court it was tantamount to a confession of guilt. I had to go back and act the part of an innocent woman rightly freed, until Daniel should come for me and then I could get away.

“Yes, today,” I said brightly.

“Would you see this gets to the queen?” he asked, abashed but determined. He offered me a trade card, an illustrated label which assured the reader that he could supply all the books that were moral and improving and approved by the church. I took it, and thought wryly that at my last visit to the shop I had made a comment about the paucity of reading that the church permitted. Now I would not speak a word against it.

“I will put it in her hands,” I lied to him. “You can depend upon it.”

I came back to a subdued court. The maids in waiting that I slept with had thought that I had gone to my father’s shop. The queen had not missed me. Only Will Somers cocked an inquiring eyebrow at me when I came into dinner and made his way over to my bench. I shifted up, and he sat down beside me.

“Are you well, child? You’re white as a sheet.”

“I’ve just got back,” I said shortly. “I was arrested.”

Any other person in the court would have found an excuse to move elsewhere to take his dinner. Will planted both elbows on the table. “Never!” he said. “How come you got out again?”

A little unwilling giggle escaped me. “They said I was a fool, and could not be held responsible.”

His crack of laughter made all the neighboring tables turn their heads and smile. “You! Well that’s good news for me. I shall know what to plead. And that’s what they truly said?”

“Yes. But, Will, it is no laughing matter. There were two women in there, one half dead from the rack and the other with her fingernails torn out of her hands. The whole house was packed from cellar to attic with men waiting their trial.”

His face grew somber. “Hush, child, there is nothing you can do about it now. You did what you could, and speaking out is perhaps what led you there.”

“Will, I was most afraid,” I said quietly.

His warm big hand took my cold fingers in a gentle grasp. “Child, we are all of us afraid. Better times coming, eh?”

“When will they come?” I whispered.

He shook his head without saying anything; but I knew that he was thinking of Elizabeth and when her reign might begin. And if Will Somers was thinking of Elizabeth with hope, then the queen had lost the love of a man who had been a true friend indeed.

I counted the days, waiting for Daniel’s arrival. Before I had gone downriver to Greenwich, I had put the letter in the hand of a shipmaster who was sailing to Calais that morning. I recited to myself his progress. “Say: it takes a day to Calais, then say a day to find the house, then say Daniel understands, and leaves at once, he should be with me inside a week.”

I decided that if I heard nothing from him within seven days that I would go to the shop, pack the most precious books and manuscripts in as large a box as I could manage, and take a passage to Calais on my own.

In the meantime I had to wait. I attended Mass in the queen’s train, I read the Bible to her in Spanish in her room every day after dinner, I prayed with her at her bedtime. I watched her unhappiness turn to a solid-seated misery, a state that I thought she would live and die in. She was in despair, I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day. It was clear that nothing could be done to lift the shadow which was on her; and so I, and everyone else, said and did nothing.

One morning, as we were coming out of Mass, the queen leading the way, her ladies behind her, one of the queen’s newest maids in waiting fell into step beside me. I was watching the queen. She was walking slowly, her head drooped, her shoulders bowed as if grief were a weight that she had to carry.

“Have you heard? Have you heard?” the girl whispered to me as we turned into the queen’s presence chamber. The gallery was crowded with people who had come to see the queen, most of them to ask for clemency for people on trial for heresy.

“Heard what?” I said crossly. I pulled my sleeve from the grip of an old lady who was trying to waylay me. “Dame, I can do nothing for you.”

“It is not for me, it is my son,” she said. “My boy.”

Despite myself, I paused.

“I have money saved, he could go abroad if the queen would be so good as to send him into exile.”

“You are pleading for exile for your son?”

“Bishop Bonner has him.” She needed to say nothing more.

I pulled back from her as if she had the plague. “I am sorry,” I said. “I can do nothing.”

“If you would intercede for him? His name is Joseph Woods?”

“Dame, if I asked for mercy for him my own life would be forfeit,” I told her. “You are at risk in even speaking to me. Go home and pray for his soul.”

She looked at me as if I were a savage. “You tell a mother to pray for her son’s soul when he is innocent of anything?”

“Yes,” I said bleakly.

The maid in waiting drew me away impatiently. “The news!” she reminded me.

“Yes, what?” I turned from the uncomprehending pain on the old woman’s face, knowing that the best advice to her would be to take the money she had saved for her son’s release and buy instead a purse of gunpowder to hang around his neck so that he did not suffer for hours in the fire but blew up as soon as the flames were lit.

“The Princess Elizabeth is accused of treason!” the maid in waiting hissed at me, desperate to tell her news. “Her servants are all arrested. They’re tearing her London house apart, searching it.”

Despite the heat of the crowd, I felt myself freeze, right down to my toes in my boots. “Elizabeth? What treason?” I whispered.

“A plot to kill the queen,” the girl said in a breath of ice.

“Who else with her?”

“I don’t know! Nobody knows! Kat Ashley, for certain, perhaps all of them.”

I nodded, I knew somebody who would know. I extricated myself from the train that was following the queen into her presence chamber. She would be in there for at least two hours, listening to one claim after another, people asking her for favors, for mercy, for places, for money. At every plea she would look more weary, older by far than her forty years. But she would not miss me while I ran down the gallery to the great hall.

Will was not there, a soldier directed me to the stable yard and I found him in a loose box, playing with one of the deerhound puppies. The animal, all long legs and excitement, clambered all over him.

“Will, they’re searching the Princess Elizabeth’s London house.”

“Aye, I know,” he said, lifting his face away from the puppy, which was enthusiastically licking his neck.

“What are they looking for?”

“Doesn’t matter what they were looking for, what matters is what they found.”

“What did they find?”