Philippa Gregory - The Queen's Fool

I rose up from the table.

“Where are you going?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.

“I am going to meet him as he walks home,” I said. “I want to talk with him.”

“Don’t upset him,” she said eagerly. “Don’t tell him that you know of this woman. It will do you no good if you quarrel. He married you, remember. You should be a good wife and wink at this other. Better women than you have turned away and seen nothing.”

I thought of the look of blank pain on Queen Mary’s face when she heard Elizabeth’s lilting laugh at the king’s whisper in her ear.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t care about being a good wife any longer. I don’t know what to think or what to care for.”

I suddenly noticed the pot with the smear of gruel along the side and I snatched it up and threw it at the back door. It hit the wood with a resounding clang and bounced to the floor. “And you can scour your own damned pot!” I shouted at her shocked face. “And you can wait forever for a grandson from me.”

I stormed from the house and across the marketplace, not seeing the stalls and the usual traders. I made my way across the fish quay, not even hearing the catcalls of the fishermen at my rapid pace and my uncovered head. I came to the door of the physician’s house in a rush and then realized that I could not hammer on it and demand to see Daniel. I would have to wait. I hitched myself up on to a low stone wall of the opposite house and settled down to wait for him. When passersby smiled or winked at me I glared at them, brazen, as if I were in my lad’s clothes again and had forgotten how to smooth down my skirts and cast down my eyes.

I did not consider what I would say to him, nor did I plan what I might do. I just waited like a dog waits for his master. I just waited in pain, as a dog will do with its paw caught in a trap and there is nothing to do but to wait; not understanding what the pain is, not knowing what can be done. Just enduring. Just waiting.

I heard the clock strike four and then half past before the side door opened and Daniel came out, calling a farewell and closing the door behind him. He had a flask of some green liquid in one hand, and when he came to the gate he started in the wrong direction, away from home. I was in a sudden terror that he was going to visit his lover, and that I, like some suspicious wife, would be caught spying on him. At once I crossed the road and ran up to him.

“Daniel!”

“Hannah!” His pleasure in seeing me was unfeigned. But after one glance at my white face he said: “Is there something wrong? Are you ill?”

“No,” I said, my lip trembling. “I just wanted to see you.”

“And now you do,” he said easily. He drew my hand through his arm. “I have to take this to Widow Jerrin’s house, will you come with me?”

I nodded, and fell into step beside him. I could not keep up. The fullness of my petticoats under my gown prevented me from striding out as I had done when I was a pageboy. I lifted my skirts out to one side but they still hobbled me as if I was a mare, hog-tied in the horse-breaking ring. Daniel slowed down and we walked in silence. He stole a glance at me and guessed from my grim expression that all was not well, but he decided to deal first with the delivery of the medicine.

The widow’s house was one of the older buildings inside the crisscrossing streets of the old town. The houses were packed in under the sheltering bulk of the castle, all the little alleyways overshadowed by the jutting first storeys of the houses that lined them, running north and south and intersected by the next road going east-west.

“When we first came here, I thought I would never find my way round,” he said, making conversation. “And then I learned the names of the taverns. This has been an English town for two hundred years, remember. Every street corner has a ‘Bush’ or a ‘Pig and Whistle’ or a ‘Travelers Rest.’ This street has a tavern called ‘The Hollybush.’ There it is.” He pointed to the building with a battered sign swinging outside it.

“I’ll only be a moment.” He turned to a narrow doorway and tapped on the door.

“Ah, Dr. Daniel!” came a woman’s croaking voice from within. “Come in, come in!”

“Ma’am, I cannot,” he said with his easy smile. “My wife is waiting for me and I will walk home with her.”

There was a laugh from inside the house and a remark that she was a lucky girl to have him, and then Daniel emerged, pocketing a coin.

“Now,” he said. “Shall I walk you home around the city walls, m’lady? Get a breath of sea air?”

I tried to smile at him but I was too heartsore. I let him lead me to the end of the street and then along a lane. At the very end of the lane was the towering wall of the town, shallow stone steps running up the inside. We climbed them, up and up, until we got to the ramparts and could look northward toward the horizon where England lay. England, the queen, the princess, my lord: they all seemed a long way away. It seemed to me in that moment that I had known a better life as a fool to a queen than I had being a fool to Daniel and to his stone-hearted mother and his poisonous sisters.

“Now,” he said, matching his steps to mine as we walked along the wall, seagulls crying over our heads and the waves slapping at the stones. “What is the matter, Hannah?”

I did not turn the conversation round and round like a woman would do. I went straight to the heart of it, as if I were still a troubled pageboy and not a betrayed wife. “Your mother tells me that you have got a Calais woman with child,” I said bluntly. “And that you see her and her child three times a week.”

I could feel his stride falter, and when I looked up at him he had lost the color from his cheeks. “Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”

“You should have told me.”

He nodded, marshaling his thoughts. “I suppose I should have done. But if I had told you, would you have married me and come to live with me here?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not.”

“Then you see why I did not tell you.”

“You cozened me and married me on a lie.”

“I told you that you were the one great love of my life, and you are. I told you that I thought we should marry to provide for my mother and for your father, and I still think that we did the right thing. I told you that we should marry so that we might live together, as the Children of Israel, and I could keep you safe.”

“Safe in a hovel!” I burst out.

Daniel recoiled at that: the first time that I had told him directly that I despised his little house. “I am sorry that is what you think of your home. I told you that I hope to provide better for us later.”

“You lied to me,” I said again.

“Yes,” he said simply. “I had to.”

“Do you love her?” I asked. I could hear the pitiful note in my own voice and I pulled my hand from his arm, filled with resentment that love should have brought me so low that I was whimpering at betrayal. I took a step away from him so he could not wrap me close and console me. I did not want to be a girl in love any more.

“No,” he said bluntly. “But when we first came to Calais, I was lonely and she was pretty and warm and good company. If I had any sense I would not have gone with her, but I did.”

“More than once?” I asked, wounding myself.

“More than once.”

“And I suppose you didn’t make love to her with a hand over her mouth so your mother and sisters couldn’t hear?”

“No,” he said shortly.

“And her son?”

His face warmed at once. “He is a baby of about five months old,” he said. “Strong, and lusty.”

“Does she take your name?”

“No. She keeps her own.”