The Other Queen Read online

  Bess does not even defend herself. “If Norfolk had not engaged to marry the Queen of Scots in secret, then he would not have been in trouble,” she says stoutly. “It is nothing to do with Cecil’s ambitions. It is all Norfolk’s own fault. His own ambitions. Perhaps now that he has withdrawn, we can all be at peace again.”

  “What d’you mean, withdrawn?” I ask.

  She has to hide a smile. “It seems your great friend is not very gallant to his ladylove. Not very chivalrous at all. Not only has he given her up and broken off the betrothal; apparently he also suggested that she should take his place in the Tower, as surety for his good behavior. It seems that there is one man at least who does not long to die for love of her. One who would happily see her in the Tower for treason. One man who is quite prepared to walk away from her and make a better life for himself without her at all.”

  1570, JUNE,

  CHATSWORTH:

  BESS

  There is no peace for a woman who tries to run a proper household with a spendthrift guest and a husband who is a fool. The greater the queen’s freedom, the greater the expense for us. Now I am told that she can entertain visitors, and every sensation-seeking gawper in the country comes to watch her dine and help themselves to some dinner as they do. Her wine bill alone is more in a month than mine is in a year. I cannot begin to balance the accounts; they are beyond me. For the first time in my life I look at my books without pleasure but with absolute despair. The pile of bills grows all the time and she brings in no income at all.

  Out goes the money on the queen: her luxuries, her servants, her horses, her pets, her messengers, her guards, the silk for her embroidery, the damask for her gowns, the linen for her bed, the herbs, the oils, the perfumes for her dressing table. The coal for her fire, the best wax candles, which she burns from midday till two in the morning. She has them burning while she is asleep, lighting empty rooms. She has silken carpets for her table—she even puts my best Turkey carpets on the floor. She has to have special goods for her kitchen, sugars and spices all have to come from London, her special soap for her laundry, the special starch for her linen, the special shoes for her horses. Wine for the table, wine for her servants, and—unbelievably—best white wine for her to wash her face. My accounts for keeping the Scots queen are a joke; they have only one side: expenditure. On the income side of the page there is nothing. Not even the fifty-two pounds a week we were promised for her. Nothing. There are no pages of receipts, since there are no receipts. I begin to think there never will be, and we will go on like this until we are utterly ruined.

  And I can now say with certainty we will be ruined. No house in the land could keep a queen with limitless numbers of servants, with numberless friends and hangers-on. To keep a queen you need the income of a kingdom and the right to set a tax, and that we do not have. We were once a wealthy couple, wealthy in land, rents, mines, and shipping. But all these businesses have a balance of money coming in slowly and quickly going out. It was a balance which I managed superbly well. The Scots queen has thrown this balance all wrong. Quickly, amazingly quickly, we are becoming poor.

  I shall have to sell land on a great scale. The little borrowings and sales I have bodged together since she arrived will no longer suffice. I shall have to raise mortgages. I shall have to enclose and put up the rents for tenants who are already behind in their payments, having wasted the winter in chasing around with the Northern army, which was her fault too. I shall have to levy extra payments on houses that are still missing men—hanged or run away for Mary Stuart. She will force me to be a harsh landlord and I shall get the blame for it. I shall have to take common land away from good villages and enclose it for crops. I shall have to drive people from their fields and make their gardens into sheep runs. I shall wring cash from the land as if it were a damp rag. This is not how to run a good estate. This is not how to be a good landlord. I shall become greedy in my need for money, and they will hate me and blame me for it and say I am a hard landlord and a harsh money-grabbing woman.

  And she is not just expensive. She is a danger. One of my servants, John Hall, comes to me, his eyes down but his palm eager. “I thought you should know, my lady. I thought you would want to be informed.”

  Will I ever again hear a muttered preamble like this and think it is going to be nothing more than a broken vase? Will I ever get back to the time when I feel only irritation? Now, and forever, I am going to feel my heart pound with dread, waiting for the news that she has escaped or that she has sent out a letter or received a guest who will ruin us.

  “What is it?” I ask sharply.

  “I thought you would be glad to know I was loyal.”

  I itch to slap him. “And you will be rewarded,” I say, though every bribe is just another cost. “What is it?”

  “It is the queen,” he says, as if I could not have guessed. “There is a plot to release her. The gentlemen offered me a gold sovereign to bring her to the high moor and they would ride away with her.”

  “And she agreed?” I ask.

  “I haven’t asked her yet,” he says. “I thought I should come straight to you. I am loyal to you, my lady, whatever bribe I am offered.”

  “You shall have two guineas for this,” I promise. “So who are the gentlemen? What are their names?”

  “Sir Thomas Gerard is the man,” he says. “But it was his friend met me at the inn, a gentleman called Rolleston. But whether there is a greater man behind them, I don’t know. I know another man who would be glad of the information.”

  I wager you do, I think miserably; there are more spies than shepherds in England these days. The disloyalty of the people has become so intense that everyone keeps a servant to watch every other. “Perhaps you could sell to another buyer. But you are my man and serve me only. Go back to this Rolleston and tell him that you need to know who is in the plot. Say that it isn’t safe to go ahead without knowing who is engaged. Tell him you will do it, and ask him for a keepsake to show to the queen. Then come back to me.”

  “Lead them on?”

  I nod.

  “And you will entrap them?”

  “If we have to. Perhaps they mean nothing. Perhaps it will all come to nothing.”

  1570, JUNE,

  CHATSWORTH:

  MARY

  Husband Bothwell,

  I will be safe. Cecil himself is coming here to Chatsworth to make the agreement with me. I am to be restored to my throne in Scotland. I will ensure your release the moment I am back, and then they shall see what a neighbor they have. They will reap the whirlwind and we two shall be the storm that breaks on them.

  Marie

  I spend my afternoons in the Chatsworth gardens, in a moated stone tower that stands alone, surrounded by a lake stocked with golden carp and dappled by overhanging willows. The stone steps lead down from my tower to the little stone bridge which reflects in the water beneath it, a dark green arch looking up at gray stone walls. Dragonflies hover over the water like blue arrowheads and swallows dip and drink.

  Shrewsbury calls it my bower and says that it is my own kingdom till I have another. He has promised I shall spend my days here, quite undisturbed. He leaves a guard on the shore side of the bridge, not to keep me in, but to make sure no one troubles me in the afternoons when I laze on a day bed in the shade of an arch where the white Tudor roses are just in bud, slowly unfurling white petals.

  I lie on my silk cushions, listening to my lute player who sings me the dreamy songs of the Languedoc, songs of love and longing, impossible romantic stories of poor men adoring cruel mistresses, the birds singing with him. There are skylarks in the parkland; I hear them caroling with each wingbeat as they climb their way heavenwards. I would not even know that they were named skylark but for Shrewsbury. He showed me them in flight, pointed out the little bird on the ground, and then taught me to listen for their aspiring, soaring song. He told me that they sing as they fly upwards, each wingbeat bringing out another glorious burst of melody, and