The Queen's Fool Read online

  “Can’t we get away?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not fast enough, not far enough. If I could have got on a Spanish warship then, perhaps… but the duke has the sea between here and France held down by English warships, he was ready for this, and I was unprepared. I am trapped.”

  I remembered John Dee’s map spread out in the duke’s study and the little counters which signified soldiers and sailors on ships all around Norfolk, and Lady Mary trapped in the middle of them.

  “Will you have to surrender?” I whispered.

  I had thought she was frightened; but at my question the color rushed into her cheeks, and she smiled as if I had suggested a challenge, a great gamble. “You know, I’m damned if I will!” she swore. She laughed aloud as if it was a bet for a joust rather than her life on the table. “I have spent my life running and lying and hiding. Just once, just once I should be glad to ride out under my own standard and defy the men who have denied me, and denied my right and denied the authority of the church and God himself.”

  I felt my own spirits leap up at her enthusiasm. “My la… Your Grace!” I stumbled.

  She turned a brilliant smile on me. “Why not?” she said. “Why should I not, just once, fight like a man and defy them?”

  “But can you win?” I asked blankly.

  She shrugged, an absolutely Spanish gesture. “Oh! It’s not likely!” She smiled at me as if she were truly merry at the desperate choice before her. “Ah, but Hannah, I have been humbled to dust by these men who would now put a commoner such as Lady Jane before me. They once put Elizabeth before me. They made me wait on her as if I were her maid in her nursery. And now I have my chance. I can fight them instead of bowing to them. I can die fighting them instead of crawling to them, begging for my life. When I see it like this, I have no choice. And I thank God, there is no better choice for me than to raise my standard and to fight for my father’s throne and my mother’s honor, my inheritance. And I have Elizabeth to think of, too. I have her safety to secure. I have her inheritance to pass on to her. She is my sister, she is my responsibility. I have written to her to bid her come here, so that she can be safe. I have promised her a refuge, and I will fight for our inheritance.”

  Lady Mary gathered her rosary beads in her short workmanlike fingers, tucked them into the pocket of her gown and strode toward the door of the great hall where her armies of gentlemen and soldiers were breaking their fast. She entered the head of the hall and mounted the dais. “Today we move out,” she announced, loud and clear enough for the least man at the back of the hall to hear her. “We go to Framlingham, a day’s ride, no more than that. I shall raise my standard there. If we can get there before Lord Robert we can hold him off in a siege. We can hold him off for months. I can fight a battle from there. I can collect troops.”

  There was a murmur of surprise and then approbation.

  “Trust me!” she commanded them. “I will not fail you. I am your proclaimed queen and you will see me on the throne, and then I will remember who was here today. I will remember and you will be repaid many times over for doing your duty to the true Queen of England.”

  There was a deep low roar, easily given from men who have just eaten well. I found my knees were shaking at the sight of her courage. She swept to the door at the back of the hall and I jumped unsteadily ahead of her and opened it for her.

  “And where is he?” I asked. She did not have to be told who I was asking for.

  “Oh, not far,” Lady Mary said grimly. “South of King’s Lynn, I am told. Something must have delayed him, he could have taken us here if he had come at once. But I cannot get news of him. I don’t know where he is for sure.”

  “Will he guess that we are going to Framlingham?” I asked, thinking of the note that had gone to him, naming her destination here, its spiral on the paper like a curled snake.

  She paused at the doorway and looked back at me. “There is bound to be one person in such a gathering who will slip away and tell him. There is always a spy in the camp. Don’t you think, Hannah?”

  For a moment I thought she had trapped me. I looked up at her, my lies very dry in my throat, my girl’s face growing pale.

  “A spy?” I quavered. I put my hand to my cheek and rubbed it hard.

  She nodded. “I never trust anyone. I always know that there are spies about me. And if you had been the girl I was, you would have learned the same. After my father sent my mother away from me there was no one near me who did not try to persuade me that Anne Boleyn was true queen and her bastard child the true heir. The Duke of Norfolk shouted into my face that if he were my father he would bang my head against the wall until my brains fell out. They made me deny my mother, they made me deny my faith, they threatened me with death on the scaffold like Thomas More and Bishop Fisher — men I knew and loved. I was a girl of twenty and they made me proclaim myself a bastard and my faith a heresy.

  “Then, all in a summer’s day, Anne was dead and all they spoke of was Queen Jane and her child, Edward, and little Elizabeth was no longer my enemy but a motherless child, a forgotten daughter, just like me. Then the other queens…” She almost smiled. “One after another, three other women came to me and I was ordered to curtsey to them as queen and call them Mother, and none of them came close to my heart. In that long time I learned never to trust a word that any man says and never even to listen to a woman. The last woman I loved was my mother. The last man I trusted was my father. And he destroyed her, and she died of heartbreak, so what was I to think? Will I ever be a woman who can trust now?”

  She broke off and looked at me. “My heart broke when I was a little more than twenty years old,” she said wonderingly. “And d’you know, only now do I begin to think that there might be a life for me.”

  She smiled. “Oh, Hannah!” she sighed and patted me on the cheek. “Don’t look so grave. It was all a long time ago and if we can triumph in this adventure then my story is ended happily. I shall have my mother’s throne restored, I shall wear her jewels. I shall see her memory honored and she will look down from heaven and see her daughter on the throne that she bore me to inherit. I shall think myself a happy woman. Don’t you see?”

  I smiled uncomfortably.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I swallowed on my dry throat. “I am afraid,” I confessed. “I am sorry.”

  She nodded. “We are all afraid,” she said frankly. “Me too. Go down and choose a horse from the stable and get a pair of riding boots. We are an army on the march today. God save us that we may make Framlingham without running into Lord Robert and his army.”

  Mary raised her standard at Framlingham Castle, a fortress to match any in England, and unbelievably half the world turned up on horseback and on foot to swear allegiance to her and death to the rebels. I walked beside her as she went down the massed ranks of the men and thanked them for coming to her and swore to be a true and honest queen to them.

  We had news from London at last. The announcement of King Edward’s death had been made shamefully late. After the poor boy had died, the duke had kept the corpse hidden in his room while the ink dried on his will, and the powerful men of the country considered where their best interests lay. Lady Jane Grey had to be dragged on to the throne by her father-in-law. They said she had cried very bitterly and said that she could not be queen, and that the Lady Mary was the rightful heir, as everyone knew. It did not save her from her fate. They unfurled the canopy of state over her bowed head, they served her on bended knee despite her tearful protests, and the Duke of Northumberland proclaimed her as queen and bent his sly head to her.

  The country was launched into civil war, directed against us, the traitors. Lady Elizabeth had not replied to the Lady Mary’s warnings, nor come to join us at Framlingham. She had taken to her bed when she had heard the news of her brother’s death and was too sick even to read her letters. When Lady Mary learned of that, she turned away for a moment to hide the hurt in her face. She had count