The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  I waited, I knew what was coming next. “And we will marry,” he said. “We will marry as soon as we arrive in France.”

  “And your mother and your sisters?” I asked. It was living with them that I dreaded as much as marriage.

  “They are packing now,” he said.

  “When do we leave?”

  “In two days’ time, at dawn. Palm Sunday.”

  “Why so soon?” I gasped.

  “Because they have come asking questions already.”

  I stared at Daniel, unable to take in the words, but already filled with horror as my worst fears started to take shape. “They came for my father?”

  “They came to my shop looking for John Dee,” my father said quietly. “They knew that he sent books to Lord Robert. They knew that he had seen the princess. They knew that he had foretold the young king’s death, and that is treason. They wanted to see the books that he asked me to store here.”

  I was twisting my hands together. “Books? What books? Are they hidden?”

  “I have them safe in the cellar,” he said. “But they will find them if they take up the floorboards.”

  “Why are you storing forbidden books?” I cried out in frustrated anger. “Why store John Dee’s books for him?”

  His face was gentle. “Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together. John Dee and Lord Robert and even Daniel here and I, even you, my child, are all scholars steeped in knowledge that has suddenly become against the law. To stop us reading forbidden books they will have to burn every manuscript. But to stop us thinking forbidden thoughts they will have to cut off our heads.”

  “We are not guilty of treason,” I said stubbornly. “Lord Robert is still alive, John Dee too. And the charges are treason, not heretical thinking. The queen is merciful…”

  “And what happens when Elizabeth confesses?” Daniel snapped at me. “When she names her fellow traitors, not just Thomas Wyatt but Robert Dudley, John Dee, perhaps even you. Have you never taken a message or run an errand for her? Could you swear to it?”

  I hesitated. “She would never confess. She knows the price of confession.”

  “She is a woman.” He dismissed her. “They will frighten her and then promise her forgiveness, and she will confess to anything.”

  “You know nothing about her, you know nothing about this!” I flared up. “I know her. This is not a young woman who is easily frightened, and more than that, her fear does not lead her to tears. If she is afraid she will fight like a bated cat. She is not a girl who gives up and weeps.”

  “She is a woman,” he said again. “And she is enmeshed with Dudley and Dee and Wyatt and the rest of them. I warned you of this. I told you that if you played a double game at court you would bring danger on yourself and danger to us all, and now you have led danger to our door.”

  I was breathless with rage. “What door?” I demanded. “We have no door. We have the open road, we have the sea between us and France and then we have to cross France like a family of beggars because you, like a coward, are afraid of your own shadow.”

  For a moment I thought Daniel would strike me. His hand flew up and then he froze. “I am sorry you call me a coward before your father’s face.” He spat out the words. “I am sorry you think so lowly of me, your husband-to-be, and the man trying to save you and your father from a traitor’s death. But whatever you think of me, I am commanding you to help your father pack and be ready.”

  I took a breath, my heart still hammering with rage. “I am not coming,” I said flatly.

  “Daughter!” my father started.

  I turned to him. “You go, Father, if you wish. But I am not running away from a danger that I don’t see. I am a favorite at the palace with the queen and I am in no danger from her, and too small a person to attract the attention of the council. I don’t believe you are in any danger either. Please don’t throw away what we have started here. Please don’t make us run away again.”

  My father took me into his arms and held my head against his shoulder. I felt myself rest against him and for a moment I longed to be the little girl who went to him for help, who had known that his judgment was always right. “You said we would stay here,” I whispered. “You told me this was to be my home.”

  “Querida, we have to go,” he said quietly. “I truly believe they will come: first for the rebels, and then for the Protestants, and then for us.”

  I lifted my head and I stepped back from him. “Father, I cannot spend my life running away. I want a home.”

  “My daughter, we are the people who have no home.”

  There was a silence. “I don’t want to be one of the people without a home,” I said. “I have a home at court, and friends at court, and my place there. I don’t want to go to France and then Italy.”

  He paused. “I was afraid you would say that. I don’t want to force you. You are free to take your own decision, my daughter. But it is my wish that you come with me.”

  Daniel walked the few paces to the attic window, then he turned and looked at me. “Hannah Verde, you are my betrothed wife and I order you to come with me.”

  I drew myself up and faced him. “I will not come.”

  “Then our betrothal will be ended.”

  My father raised a hand in dissent, but he said nothing.

  “So be it,” I said. I felt cold.

  “It is your wish that our betrothal is ended?” he asked again, as if he could not believe that I would reject him. That hint of arrogance helped me to my decision.

  “It is my wish that our betrothal is ended,” I said, my voice as steady as his own. “I release you from your promise to me, and I ask you to release me.”

  “That’s easily done,” he flared. “I release you, Hannah, and I hope that you never have cause to regret this decision.” He turned on his heel and went to the stair. He paused. “But nonetheless, you will help your father,” he said, still commanding me, I noticed. “And if you change your mind you may come with us. I would not be vengeful. You can come as his daughter and as a stranger to me.”

  “I shan’t change my mind,” I said fiercely. “And I don’t need you to tell me to help my father. I am a good daughter to him and I would be a good wife to the right man.”

  “And who would the right man be?” Daniel sneered. “A married man and a convicted traitor?”

  “Now, now,” my father said gently. “You have agreed to part.”

  “I am sorry you think so badly of me,” I said icily. “I shall care for my father and I will help him leave when you bring the wagon.”

  Daniel clattered down the stairs and then we heard the shop door bang, and he was gone.

  Over the next two days we worked in an almost unbroken silence. I helped my father tie his books together, the manuscripts we rolled into scrolls and packed in barrels, and pushed them behind the press in the printing room. He could take only the core of his library; the rest of the books would have to follow later.

  “I wish you would come too,” he said earnestly. “You’re too young to be left here on your own.”

  “I’m under the protection of the queen,” I said. “And hundreds of people at court are the same age as me.”

  “You are one of the chosen to bear witness,” he said in a fierce whisper. “You should be with your people.”

  “Chosen to witness?” I demanded bitterly. “More like chosen never to have a home. Chosen to be always packing our most precious things and leaving the rest behind? Chosen to be always one skip ahead of the fire or the hangman’s noose?”

  “Better one skip ahead,” my father said wryly.

  We worked all through the last night, and when he would not stop to eat, I knew that he was mourning for me as a daughter that he had lost. At dawn I heard the creaking of wheels in the street and I looked out of the downstairs window, and there was the dark shape of the wagon lumbering toward u
s with Daniel leading a stocky pair of horses.

  “Here they are,” I said quietly to my father, and started to heave the boxes of books through the door. The wagon halted beside me and Daniel gently put me aside. “I’ll do that,” he said. He lifted the boxes into the back of the cart, where I saw the glimpse of four pale faces: his mother and his three sisters. “Hello,” I said awkwardly, and then went back to the shop.

  I felt so wretched I could hardly carry the boxes from the rear of the printing shop out to the cart and hand them over to Daniel. My father did nothing. He stood with his forehead leaning against the wall of the house.

  “The press,” he said quietly.

  “I will see that it is taken down, sheeted and stored safely,” I promised. “Along with everything else. And when you decide to come back, it will be here for you and we can start again.”

  “We won’t come back,” Daniel said. “This country is going to be a Spanish dominion. How can we be safe here? How can you be safe here? Do you think the Inquisition has no memory? Do you think your names are not on their records as heretics and runaways? They will be here in force, there will be courts in every city up and down the land. Do you think you and your father will escape? Newly arrived from Spain? Named Verde? Do you really think you will pass as an English girl called Hannah Green? With your speech, and your looks?”

  I put my hands to my face, I nearly put them over my ears.

  “Daughter,” my father said.

  It was unbearable.

  “All right,” I said furiously, in anger and despair. “Enough! All right! I’ll come.”

  Daniel said nothing in his triumph, he did not even smile. My father muttered, “Praise God,” and picked up a box as if he were a twenty-year-old porter and loaded it on the back of the wagon. Within minutes everything was done and I was locking the front door of the shop with the key.

  “We’ll pay the rent for the next year,” Daniel decided. “Then we can fetch the rest of the stuff.”

  “You’ll carry a printing press across England, France and Italy?” I asked nastily.

  “If I have to,” he said. “Yes.”

  My father climbed in the back of the wagon and held out his hand for me. I hesitated. The three white faces of Daniel’s sisters turned to me, blank with hostility. “Is she coming now?” one of them asked.

  “You can help me with the horses,” Daniel said quickly and I left the tailgate of the wagon and went to the head of the nearest horse.

  We led them, slipping a little clumsily on the cobbles of the side street, until we came out to the solid track of Fleet Street and headed toward the city.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To the docks,” he said. “There is a ship waiting on the tide, I have booked our passage to France.”

  “I have money for my own passage,” I said.

  He threw me a dark smile. “I already paid for you. I knew you would come.”

  I gritted my teeth at his arrogance and tugged on the reins of the big horse and said, “Come on then!” as if the horse were to blame, and as it felt the even ground of the street under its hooves it started a steady walk and I swung up on to the driving box of the wagon. A few moments later and Daniel joined me.

  “I did not mean to taunt you,” he said stiffly. “I only meant that I knew you would do the right thing. You could not leave your father and your People, and choose to live among strangers forever.”

  I shook my head. In the cold morning light with the fog curling off the Thames I could see the great palaces that faced out over the river, their pleasure gardens running down to the water’s edge. All of them were places I had enjoyed, a favored guest in the queen’s train. We entered the city, just stirring to start the day, and I saw the smoke from the ovens uncurling from the bakers’ chimneys, past the church of St. Paul’s scented once more with incense, and then we headed along the familiar route toward the Tower.

  Daniel knew I was thinking of Robert Dudley as the shadow of the curtain wall fell over our little wagon. I looked up, past the wall to where the great white tower pointed like a raised fist shaken at the sky as if to say that whoever held the Tower, held London; and justice and mercy had nothing to do with it.

  “Perhaps he’ll slither free,” Daniel said.

  I turned my head away. “I’m leaving, aren’t I?” I said inconsequentially. “That should be enough for you.”

  There was a light at one of the windows, a little candle flame. I thought of Robert Dudley’s table drawn up to the window and his chair before it. I thought of him sleepless in the night, trying to prepare for his own death, mourning those he had brought to theirs, fearful for those who still waited, like the Princess Elizabeth, watching for the morning when they would be told that this was their last day. I wondered if he had any sense of me, out here in the darkness, driving away from him, longing to be with him, betraying him with every step of the big horses’ hooves.

  “Stay,” Daniel said quietly, as if I had shifted in my seat. “There is nothing you can do.”

  I subsided and looked dully at the thickness of the walls and the forbidding gated entrances as we skirted all around the breadth of the Tower and came back to the riverside at the last.

  One of Daniel’s sisters poked her head up from the back of the wagon. “Are we nearly there?” she asked, her voice sharp with fear.

  “Nearly,” Daniel said gently. “Greet your new sister, Hannah. This is Mary.”

  “Hello, Mary,” I said.

  She nodded at me and stared as if I were some freak show at Bartholomew’s fair. She took in the richness of my cloak and the fine quality of my linen and then her eyes went down to the shine on my boots and my embroidered hose and breeches. Then without another word she turned and dropped down to the body of the wagon and whispered to her sisters and I heard their muffled laughter.

  “She’s shy,” Daniel said. “She doesn’t mean to be rude.”

  I was absolutely certain that she was determined to be rude but there was no point in telling him. Instead I wrapped the cloak a little closer around myself and watched the dark flow of the water as we plodded down the road to the dockside.

  I glanced back upriver and then I saw a sight that made me put my hand out to Daniel. “Stop!”

  He did not tighten the rein. “Why? What is it?”

  “Stop, I say!” I said abruptly. “I have seen something on the river.”

  He paused then, the horses turned a little as they were pulled up, and I could see the royal barge, but with no standard flying. Queen Mary’s own barge, but not with the queen on board, the drumbeat keeping the rowers in time, a dark figure at the front of the boat, two hooded men, one at the rear, one at the prow, scanning the banks in case of trouble.

  “They must have Elizabeth,” I guessed.

  “You can’t possibly tell,” Daniel said. He shot a glance at me. “And if they do have her? It’s nothing to do with us. They’d be bound to arrest her now that Wyatt…”

  “If they turn into the Tower then they have her on board and they are taking her to her death,” I said flatly. “And Lord Robert will die too.”

  He went to flick the reins to make the horse move on, but I clamped my hand on his wrist. “Let me see, damn you,” I spat at him.

  He waited for a moment. As we watched the barge turned, struggled against the onrush of the tide and then headed toward the Tower. The dark watergate — a heavy portcullis, which protected the Tower from the river — rolled up; this visit was prearranged to be secret and silent. The barge went in, the watergate came down, there was utter silence except the plash of the dark water running by us. It was as if the hushed barge and the two dark watching men at prow and stern had never been.

  I slipped down from the wagon and I leaned back against the forewheel, closing my eyes. I could imagine the scene as brightly as if it were noon, Elizabeth arguing and delaying and struggling for every extra minute, all the way from the watergate to the room they would hav
e prepared for her in the Tower. I could see her fighting for every grain of sand in the hourglass, as she always did, as she always would do. I could see her bartering words for every moment. And finally, I could see her in her room, looking down on the green where her mother had her head swept from her body with the sharpest French sword they could find, and I could see her watching them build the scaffold that would be her own death place.

  Daniel was by my side. “I have to go to her,” I said. I opened my eyes as if I had wakened from a dream. “I have to go. I promised I would go back to her, and now she is near death. I cannot betray a promise to a dying woman.”

  “You will be identified with her and with him,” he whispered passionately. “When they come to hang the servants you will be among them.”

  I did not even answer him, something nagged in my mind. “What was that you said about Wyatt?”

  He flushed, I saw that I had caught him out. “Nothing.”

  “You did. When I saw the barge. You said something about Wyatt. What about him?”

  “He has been tried and found guilty and sentenced to death,” Daniel said abruptly. “They have his confession to convict Elizabeth.”

  “You knew this? And kept it from me?”

  “Yes.”

  I drew my cloak around my dark breeches, and went around to the back of the wagon.

  “Where are you going?” He put his hand out and grabbed me at the elbow.

  “I am getting my bag, I am going to the Tower, I am going to Elizabeth,” I said simply. “I will stay with her till her death and then I will come to find you.”

  “You can’t travel to Italy on your own,” he said in sudden rage. “You cannot defy me like this. You are my betrothed, I have told you what we are doing. See, my sisters, my mother, all obey me. You have to do the same.”

  I gritted my teeth and squared up to him as if I were in truth a young man and not a girl in breeches. “See, I do not obey you,” I said bluntly. “See, I am not a girl like your sisters. See, even if I were your wife you would not find me biddable. Now take your hand off my arm. I am not a girl to be bullied. I am a royal servant, it is treason to touch me. Let me go!”