The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  “Ah, at last! A girl who can speak Spanish!” she exclaimed and gave me her hand to kiss. “If you could only read it!”

  I thought for a moment. “I can read it,” I said, considering it reasonable that the daughter of a bookseller should be able to read her native tongue.

  “Oh, can you? And Latin?”

  “Not Latin,” I said, having learned of the danger of pride in my education from my encounter with John Dee. “Just Spanish and now I am learning to read English too.”

  Lady Mary turned to her maid in waiting. “You will be pleased to hear that, Susan! Now you will not need to read to me in the afternoons.”

  Susan did not look at all pleased to hear that she was to be supplanted by a fool in livery, but she took a seat on a stool like the other women and took up some sewing.

  “You shall tell me all the news of the court,” the Lady Mary invited me. “Perhaps we should talk alone.”

  One nod to the ladies and they took themselves off to the bay window and seated themselves in a circle in the brighter light, talking quietly as if to give us the illusion of privacy. I imagined every one of them was straining to hear what I might say.

  “My brother the king?” she asked me, gesturing that I should sit on a cushion at her feet. “Do you have any messages from him?”

  “No, Lady Mary,” I said, and saw her disappointment.

  “I was hoping he would have thought of me more kindly, now he is so ill,” she said. “When he was a little boy I nursed him through half a dozen illnesses, I hoped he would remember that and think that we…”

  I waited for her to say more but then she tapped her fingertips together as if to draw herself back from memories. “No matter,” she said. “Any other messages?”

  “The duke sends you some game and some early salad leaves,” I said. “They came in the cart with the furniture, and have been taken round to your kitchens. And he asked me to give you this letter.”

  She took it and broke the seal and smoothed it out. I saw her smile and then I heard her warm chuckle. “You bring me very good news, Hannah the Fool,” she said. “This is a payment under the will of my late father which has been owed to me all this long while, since his death. I thought I would never see it, but here it is, a draft on a London goldsmith. I can pay my bills and face the shopkeepers of Ware again.”

  “I am glad of it,” I said awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

  “Yes,” she said. “You would have thought that King Henry’s only legitimate daughter would have had her fortune in her own hands by now, but they have delayed and withheld until I thought they wanted me to starve to death here. But now I come into favor.”

  She paused, thoughtful. “The question which remains, is, why I am suddenly to be so well treated.” She looked speculatively at me. “Is Lady Elizabeth given her inheritance too? Are you to visit her with such a letter?”

  I shook my head. “My lady, how would I know? I am only a messenger.”

  “No word of it? She’s not at court visiting my brother now?”

  “She wasn’t there when I left,” I said cautiously.

  She nodded. “And he? My brother? Is he better at all?”

  I thought of the quiet disappearance of the physicians who came so full of promises and then left after they had done nothing more than torture him with some new cure. On the morning that I had left Greenwich, the duke had brought in an old woman to nurse the king: an old crone of a midwife, skilled only in the birthing of children and the laying out of the dead. Clearly, he was not going to get any better.

  “I don’t think so, my lady,” I said. “They were hoping that the summer would ease his chest but he seems to be as bad as ever.”

  She leaned toward me. “Tell me, child, tell me the truth. Is my little brother dying?”

  I hesitated, unsure of whether it was treason to tell of the death of the king.

  She took my hand and I looked into her square determined face. Her eyes, dark and honest, met mine. She looked like a woman you could trust, a mistress you could love. “You can tell me, I can keep a secret,” she said. “I have kept many many secrets.”

  “Since you ask it, I will tell you: I am certain that he is dying,” I admitted quietly. “But the duke denies it.”

  She nodded. “And this wedding?”

  I hesitated. “What wedding?”

  She tutted in brief irritation. “Of Lady Jane Grey to the duke’s son, of course. What do they say about it at court?”

  “That she was unwilling, and he not much better.”

  “And why did the duke insist?” she asked.

  “It was time that Guilford was married?” I hazarded.

  She looked at me, as bright as a knife blade. “They say no more than that?”

  I shrugged. “Not in my hearing, my lady.”

  “And what of you?” she asked, apparently abandoning interest in Lady Jane. “Did you ask to come to this exile? From the royal court at Greenwich? And away from your father?” Her wry smile indicated to me that she did not think it likely.

  “Lord Robert told me to come,” I confessed. “And his father, the duke.”

  “Did they tell you why?”

  I wanted to bite my lips to hold in the secret. “No, my lady. Just to keep you company.”

  She gave me a look that I had never seen from a woman before. Women in Spain tended to glance sideways, a modest woman always looked away. Women in England kept their eyes on the ground before their feet. One of the many reasons why I was glad of my pageboy clothes was that masquerading as a boy I could hold my head up, and look around. But Lady Mary had the bold look of her father’s portrait, the swaggering portrait, fists on hips, the look of someone who has been bred to think that he might rule the world. She had his gaze: a straight look that a man might have, scanning my face, reading my eyes, showing me her own open face and her own clear eyes.

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked bluntly.

  For a moment I was so taken aback I could have told her. I was afraid of arrest, of the Inquisition, afraid of suspicion, afraid of the torture chamber and the heretic’s death with kindling heaped around my bare feet and no way to escape. I was afraid of betraying others to their deaths, afraid of the very air of conspiracy itself. I rubbed my cheek with the back of my hand. “I am just a little nervous,” I said quietly. “I am new to this country, and to court life.”

  She let the silence run and then she looked at me more kindly. “Poor child, you are very young to be adrift, all alone in these deep waters.”

  “I am Lord Robert’s vassal,” I said. “I am not alone.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps you will be very good company,” she said finally. “There have been days and months and even years when I would have been very glad of a merry face and an uplifted voice.”

  “I am not a witty fool,” I said cautiously. “I am not supposed to be especially merry.”

  Lady Mary laughed aloud at that. “And I am not supposed to be given especially to laughter,” she said. “Perhaps you will suit me very well. And now, you must meet my companions.”

  She called her ladies over to us and named them to me. One or two were the daughters of determined heretics, holding on to the old faith and serving a Roman Catholic princess for pride, two others had the dismal faces of younger daughters with scanty dowries whose chance of service to an out-of-favor princess was only slightly better than the marriage they would have been forced to undertake if they had been left at home. It was a little court with the smell of desperation, on the edge of the kingdom, on the edge of heresy, on the edge of legitimacy.

  After dinner the Lady Mary went to Mass. She was supposed to go alone, it was a crime for anyone else to observe the service; but in practice, she went openly and knelt at the very front of the chapel and the rest of her household crept in at the back.

  I followed her ladies to the chapel door and then I hovered in a frenzy of worry as to what I should do. I had assured the king and Lord Rob
ert that my father and I were of the reformed faith, but both the king and Lord Robert knew that Lady Mary’s household was an island of illegal Papist practices in a Protestant kingdom. I could feel myself sweating with fear as the meanest housemaid slipped past me to say her prayers, and I did not know the safest thing for me to do. I was in a terror of being reported to the court for being a Roman Catholic, and yet how could I serve in this household as a steadfast Protestant?

  In the end, I compromised, by sitting outside where I could hear the mutter of the priest and the whispered responses, but no one could actually accuse me of attending the service. All the time that I perched on the drafty window seat I felt ready to leap up and run away. Constantly my hand was at my face, wiping my cheek as if I could feel the smuts from the fires of the Inquisition sticking to my skin. It made me sick in my belly not to know the safest place to be.

  After Mass I was summoned to Lady Mary’s room to hear her read from the Bible in Latin. I tried to keep my face blank as if I did not understand the words, and when she handed it to me to put it on its stand at the end of the reading, I had to remind myself not to check the front pages for the printer. I thought it was not such a good edition as my father printed.

  She went to bed early, walking with her candle flickering before her, down the long shadowed corridor, past the dark drafty windows of the house, looking out over the darkness of the empty land beyond the tumbling-down castle walls. Everyone else went to bed too, there was nothing to wait up for, nothing was going to happen. There would be no visitors coming to see the popular princess, there would be no mummers or dancers or peddlers drawn by the wealth of the court. I thought that it was no wonder that she was not a merry princess. If the duke had wanted to keep Lady Mary in a place where she would be rarely visited, where her heart and spirits were sure to sink, where she would experience coldness and loneliness every day, he could not have chosen a place more certain to make her unhappy.

  The household at Hunsdon turned out to be as I had thought: a melancholy place of outsiders, ruled by an invalid. Lady Mary was plagued with headaches, which often came in the evening, darkening her face as the light drained from the sky. Her ladies would notice her frown; but she never mentioned the pain and never drooped in her wooden chair nor leaned against the carved back, nor rested against the arms. She sat as her mother had taught her, upright like a queen, and she kept her head up, even when her eyes were squinting against dim candles. I remarked on her physical frailty to Jane Dormer, the Lady Mary’s closest friend and lady in waiting, and she said briefly that the pains I saw now were nothing. When it was the Lady’s time of the month, she would be gripped with cramps as severe as those of childbirth, which nothing could ease.

  “What ails her?” I asked.

  Jane shrugged. “She was never a strong child,” she said. “Always slight and delicate. But when her mother was put aside and her father denied her, it was as if he had poisoned her. She could not stop vomiting and voiding her food, she could not get out of bed but she had to crawl across the floor. There were some who said she had been poisoned indeed, by the witch Boleyn. The princess was near to death and they would not let her see her mother. The queen could not come to her for fear of never being allowed back to her own court. The Boleyn woman and the king destroyed the two of them: mother and daughter. Queen Katherine hung on for as long as she could but illness and heartbreak killed her. Lady Mary should have died too — she suffered so much; but she survived. They made her deny her faith, they made her deny her mother’s marriage. Ever since then she has been tormented by these pains.”

  “Can’t the doctors…?”

  “They wouldn’t even let her see a doctor for many years,” Jane said irritably. “She could have died for want of care, not once but several times. The witch Boleyn wanted her dead and more than once I swear she sent poison. She has had a bitter life: half prisoner, half saint, always swallowing down grief and anger.”

  The mornings were the best times for Lady Mary. After she had been to Mass and broken her fast she liked to walk, and often she chose me to walk with her. One warm day in late June she commanded me to walk at her side and to name the flowers and describe the weather in Spanish. I had to keep my steps short so that I did not stride ahead of her, and she often stopped with her hand to her side, the color draining from her face. “Are you not well this morning, my lady?” I asked.

  “Just tired,” she said. “I did not sleep last night.”

  She smiled at the concern on my face. “Oh, it is nothing worse than it has always been. I should learn to have more serenity. But not to know… and to have to wait… and to know that he is in the hands of advisors who have set their hearts…”

  “Your brother?” I asked when she fell silent.

  “I have thought of him every day from the day he was born!” she burst out passionately. “Such a tiny boy and so much expected of him. So quick to learn and so — I don’t know — so cold in his heart where he should have been warm. Poor boy, poor motherless boy! All three of us, thrown together, and none of us with a mother living, and none of us knowing what would happen next.

  “I had more care of Elizabeth than I did of him, of course. And now she is far from me, and I cannot even see him. Of course I worry about him: about what they are doing to his soul, about what they are doing to his body… and about what they are doing to his will,” she added very quietly.

  “His will?”

  “It is my inheritance,” she said fiercely. “If you report, as I imagine you do, tell them I never forget that. Tell them that it is my inheritance and nothing can change that.”

  “I don’t report!” I exclaimed, shocked. It was true, I had sent no report, there was nothing in our dull lives and quiet nights to report to Lord Robert or his father. This was a sick princess on a knife blade of watching and waiting, not a traitor spinning plots.

  “Whether or no,” she dismissed my defense, “nothing and no one can deny me my place. My father himself left it to me. It is me and then it is Elizabeth. I have never plotted against Edward, though there were some who came to me and asked me in my mother’s name to stand against him. I know that in her turn Elizabeth will never plot against me. We are three heirs, taking precedence one after another to honor our father. Elizabeth knows that I am the next heir after Edward, he came first as the boy, I come second as the princess, the first legitimate princess. We all three will obey our father and we stand to inherit one after the other as my father commanded. I trust Elizabeth, as Edward trusts me. And since you promise that you don’t report, you can make this reply if anyone asks you: tell them that I will keep my inheritance. And tell them that this is my country.”

  Her weariness was gone, the color had flamed into her cheeks. She looked around the small walled garden as if she could see the whole kingdom, the great prosperity which could be restored, and the changes she would make when she held the throne. The monasteries she would restore, the abbeys she would found, the life she could breathe back into it. “It is mine,” she said. “And I am an English queen-to-be. No one can put me aside.”

  Her face was illuminated with her sense of destiny. “It is the purpose of my life,” she said. “Nobody will pity me ever again. They will see that I have dedicated my life to being the bride of this country. I will be a virgin queen, I shall have no children but the people of this country, I shall be their mother. There shall be no one to distract me, there shall be no one to command me. I shall live for them. It is my holy calling. I shall give myself up for them.”

  She turned from me and strode back to the house and I followed her at a distance. The morning sun burning off the mist made a lightness in the air all around her, and I had a moment’s dizziness as I realized that this woman would be a great queen for England, a queen who had a real vision for this country, who would bring back the richness and beauty and charity that her father had stripped out from the churches and from the daily life. The sun was so bright around her yellow silk hood that it
was like a crown, and I stumbled on a tussock of grass and fell.

  She turned and saw me on my knees. “Hannah?”

  “You will be queen,” I said simply, the Sight speaking in my voice. “The king will die within a month. Long live the queen. Poor boy, the poor boy.”

  In a second she was by my side, holding me up. “What did you say?”

  “You will be queen,” I said. “He is sinking fast now.”

  I lost my senses for a moment and then I opened my eyes again and she was looking down at me, still holding me closely.

  “Can you tell me any more?” she asked me gently.

  I shook my head. “I am sorry, Lady Mary, I barely know what I said. It was not said knowingly.”

  She nodded. “It is the Holy Spirit which moves you to speak, especially to speak such news to me. Will you swear to keep it secret between us?”

  For a moment I hesitated, thinking of the complicated webs of loyalties that were interwoven around me: my duty to Lord Robert, my honor for my father and mother and our kin, my promise to Daniel Carpenter, and now this troubled woman asking me to keep a secret for her. I nodded. It was no disloyalty not to tell Lord Robert something he must already know. “Yes, Lady Mary.”

  I tried to rise but I dropped back to my knees with dizziness.

  “Wait,” she said. “Don’t get up till your head is clear.”

  She sat beside me on the grass and gently put my head in her lap. The morning sunshine was warm, the garden buzzed with the sleepy noise of bees and the distant haunting call of a cuckoo. “Close your eyes,” she said.

  I wanted to sleep as she held me. “I am not a spy,” I said.

  Her finger touched my lips. “Hush,” she said. “I know that you work for the Dudleys. And I know you are a good girl. Who better than I to understand a life of complicated loyalties? You need not fear, little Hannah. I understand.”

  I felt her soft touch on my hair, she wound my short-cropped curls around her finger. I felt my eyes close and the sinews of my back and neck unknot as I realized I was safe with her.