Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (225 page)

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 Robert 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.

She, in her turn, was far away in the past. “I used to sit like this when Elizabeth took her afternoon nap,” she said. “She would rest her head in my lap and I would plait her hair while she slept. She had hair of bronze and copper and gold, all the colors of gold in one curl. She was such a pretty child, she had that shining innocence of children. And I was only twenty. I used to pretend to myself that she was my baby, and that I was happily married to a man who loved me, and that soon we would have another baby—a son.”

We sat in silence for long moments, and then I heard the door of the house bang open. I sat up and saw one of Lady Mary’s ladies burst out of the shadowy interior and look wildly around for her. Lady Mary waved and the girl ran over. It was Lady Margaret. As she came close I felt Lady Mary’s posture rise, her back straighten, she steadied herself for the news I had foretold. She would let her companion find her here, seated simply in the English garden, her fool dozing beside her, and she would greet the news of her inheritance with words from the Psalms that she had prepared. She whispered them now: “This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.”

“Lady Mary! Oh!”

The girl was almost speechless with her desire to tell, and breathless from her run. “At church just now…”

“What?”

“They didn’t pray for you.”

“Pray for me?”

“No. They prayed for the king and his advisors, same as always, but where the prayer says ‘and for the king’s sisters,’ they missed you out.”

Lady Mary’s bright gaze swept the girl’s face. “Both of us? Elizabeth too?”

“Yes!”

“You are sure?”

“Yes.”

Lady Mary rose to her feet, her eyes narrowed with anxiety. “Send out Mr. Tomlinson into Ware, tell him to go on to Bishop Stortford if need be, tell him to get reports from other churches. See if this is happening everywhere.”

The girl bobbed a curtsey, picked up her skirts and ran back into the house.

“What does it mean?” I asked, scrambling to my feet.

She looked at me without seeing me. “It means that Northumberland has started to move against me. First, he does not warn me how ill my brother is. Then, he commands the priests to leave Elizabeth and me from the prayers; next, he will command them to mention another, the king’s new heir. Then, when my poor brother is dead, they will arrest me, arrest Elizabeth, and put their false prince on the throne.”