Philippa Gregory - The Queen's Fool

It was near ten o’clock at night by the time we had finished and a late spring moon, all warm and yellow, had risen and was lighting the street. My father swung himself into the back of the wagon, Daniel and I rode on the box. Our neighbor shook hands all round and bade us farewell. Daniel signaled for the horses to start and they leaned against the traces and the wagon eased forward.

“This is like last time,” Daniel remarked. “I hope you don’t jump ship again.”

I shook my head. “I won’t.”

“No outstanding promises?” he smiled.

“No,” I said sadly. “The queen does not need my company, she does not want anyone but the king and I think he will never come home to her. And though the Princess Elizabeth’s household is charged with treason, she has the favor of the king. She might be imprisoned but she won’t be killed now. She is determined to survive and wait.”

“She does not fear that the queen might pass her over and give the crown to another — Margaret Douglas or Mary Stuart, perhaps?”

“She had her future foretold,” I said to him in a tiny whisper. “And she was assured that she will be the heir. She does not know how long she will have to wait but she is confident.”

“And who foretold her future?” he asked acutely.

At my guilty silence he nodded. “I should think you do indeed need to come with me this time,” he said levelly.

“I was accused of heresy,” I said. “But released. I have done nothing wrong.”

“You have done enough to be hanged for treason, strangled for a witch, and burned as a heretic three times over,” he said without a glimmer of a smile. “By rights you should be on your knees to me, begging me to take you away.”

I was half a moment from outraged exclamation when I saw that he was teasing me and I broke into an unwilling laugh. At once he gleamed and took my hand and brought it to his lips. The touch of his mouth on my fingers was warm, I could feel his breath on my skin, and for a moment I could see nothing and hear nothing and think of nothing but his touch.

“You need not beg,” he said softly. “I would have come for you anyway. I cannot go on living without you.”

Our road took us past the Tower. I felt, rather than saw, Daniel stiffen as the lowering shadow of Robert Dudley’s prison fell on us.

“You know, I could not help loving him,” I said in a small voice. “When I first saw him I was a child, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my life and the son of the greatest man in England.”

“Well, now you are a woman and he is a traitor,” Daniel said flatly. “And you are mine.”

I shot a sideways smile at him. “As you say, husband,” I said meekly. “Whatever you say.”

The ship was waiting as Daniel had arranged and we had a few hours of hard work loading the pieces of the dismantled press and the barrels and boxes of books and papers before finally we were all aboard and the sailors cast off, the barges took us in tow, and the ship went slowly downriver, helped by the ebbing tide. My father had brought a hamper of food and we sat on the deck, sometimes shrinking from a passing sailor running to obey an order, and ate cold chicken and a strange strong-tasting cheese and a hard crunchy bread.

“You’ll have to get used to this fare,” Daniel laughed at me. “This is Calais food.”

“Shall we stay in Calais?” I asked.

He shook his head. “It’s not safe for us forever,” he said. “Soon Queen Mary will turn her attention there too. The place is riddled with runaway Protestants and Lutherans and Erastians and all sorts of heretics, anxious to have a quick exit to France, or Flanders or Germany. Plotters too. And the kingdom of France has its own battle with the Huguenots or anyone who is not an orthodox son of the church. Between the two powers I think that people like us will be squeezed out.”

I felt the familiar sense of injustice. “Squeezed out to where now?” I asked.

Daniel smiled at me and put his hand over my own. “Peace, sweetheart,” he said. “I have found a home for us. We are going to go to Genoa.”

“Genoa?”

“They are making a community of Jews there,” he said, his voice very low. “They are allowing the People to settle there. They want the trade contacts and the gold and trustworthy credit that the People bring with them. We’ll go there. A doctor can always find work, and a bookseller can always sell books to the Jews.”

“And your mother and sisters?” I asked. I was hoping he would tell me that they would stay in Calais, that they had found husbands and homes in the town and we could visit them once every two years.

“Mary and my mother will come with us,” he said. “The other two have good posts and want to stay in Calais, whatever the risks to them. Sarah is courting with a Gentile and may marry him.”

“Don’t you mind?”

Daniel shook his head. “When I was in Venice and Padua I learned much more than the new sciences,” he said. “I changed my mind about our people. I think now that we are the yeast of Christendom. It is our task to go among the Christians and bring them our learning and our skills, our ability with trade and our honor. Perhaps someday we shall have a country of our own once more, Israel. Then we shall have to rule it kindly, we know what it is to be ruled with cruelty. But we were not born to be hidden and to be ashamed. We were born to be ourselves, and to be proud of being the chosen to lead. If my sister marries a Christian then she will bring her learning and her wisdom to her family and they will be the better Christians for it, even if they never know that she is a Jew.”

“And shall we live as Jews or Gentiles?” I asked.

His smile at me was infinitely warm. “We shall live as suits us,” he said. “I won’t have the Christian rules that forbid my learning, I won’t have Jewish rules that forbid my life. I shall read books that ask if the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun, and I shall eat pork when it is well reared and properly killed and well cooked. I shall accept no prohibitions on my thoughts or my actions except those that make sense to me.”

“And shall I?” I asked, wondering where this independence would take us.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Your letters and everything you have ever said makes sense to me only if I see you as my partner in this venture. Yes. You shall find your own way and I hope we will agree. We shall find a new way to live and it will be one that honors our parents and their beliefs, but which gives us a chance to be ourselves, and not just their children.”

My father, seated a little away from us and carefully not listening to our conversation, enacted an unconvincing yawn. “I’m for sleep,” he said. He put his hand on my head. “Bless you, child, it is good to have you with me once more.” He wrapped his cape around himself and laid down on the cold deck.

Daniel stretched out his arm to me. “Come here and I will keep you warm,” he said.

I was not in the least cold but I did not tell him that as I went into the circle of his arm and let myself stretch out against the mystery of his male body. I felt him gently kissing my cropped hair and then I felt and heard his breath against my ear.

“Oh, Hannah,” he whispered. “I have dreamed of having you for so long I could cry like a girl for desire.”

I giggled. “Daniel,” I said, trying the unfamiliar name on my lips. I turned my face up toward him and felt the warmth of his mouth on mine, a kiss which melted the very marrow of my bones so that I felt we were dissolving into one another like some alchemical mixture, an elixir of pleasure. Under his cape his hands caressed my back and then fumbled under my jerkin and linen and stroked my breasts, my throat, my belly, and I felt myself stretch out like a petted cat and whisper “Daniel” once more and this time it was an invitation. Gently, his hands explored the contours of my body like a stranger in a new land. Shyly, but with gathering curiosity I let my fingers explore the soft fine hair of his chest, the warmth of his skin beneath his breeches, and then the extraordinary shape of his cock which rose and pulsed at my touch as Daniel groaned with desire.