The Other Queen Read online

  “Wife!” I reprimand her.

  Bess turns her gaze to me. She is not soft and weeping anymore; she is critical and plain. “I will do what I can,” she says. “I will always do what I can for our safety and for our fortune. But let this be a lesson to you. Never ever work against Cecil. He commands England; he has a spy network that covers every house in the land. He tortures his suspects and he turns them to his service. He knows all the secrets; he sees everything. See what happens to his enemies? The Northern lords will go to the scaffold, Norfolk could lose his fortune, and we…” She holds up the letter. “We are under suspicion at the very least. You had better make it clear to the queen and to Cecil that we know nothing of what the Northern lords planned, that they told us nothing, that we know nothing of what they are planning now, and make sure you say that Cecil had a copy of every letter that Norfolk ever sent, the moment that the Scots queen received it.”

  “He did not,” I protest stupidly. “How could he?”

  “He did,” she says crisply. “We are not such fools as to do anything without Cecil’s permission. I made sure of it.”

  I take a long moment to understand that the spy in my household, working for a man that I hate, whose downfall I have planned, is my beloved wife. I take another moment to understand that I have been betrayed by the woman I love. I open my mouth to curse her for disloyalty but then I stop. She has probably saved our lives by keeping us on the winning side: Cecil’s side.

  “It was you that told Cecil? You copied the letter to him?”

  “Yes,” she says shortly. “Of course. I report to him. I have done so for years.” She turns away from me to the window and looks out.

  “Did you not think that you were being disloyal to me?” I ask her. I am exhausted; I cannot even be angry with her. But I cannot help but be curious. That she should betray me and tell me of it without the least shame! That she should be so barefaced!

  “No,” she says. “I did not think I was being disloyal, for I was not disloyal. I was serving you, though you don’t have the wit to know it. By reporting to Cecil I have kept us, and our wealth, safe. How is that disloyal? How does it compare to plotting with another woman and her friends against the peace of the Queen of England in your wife’s own house? How does it compare to favoring another woman’s fortune at the price of your own wife’s safety? How does it compare to dancing attendance on another woman every day of your life, and leaving your own wife at risk? Her own fortune half-squandered? Her lands in jeopardy?”

  The bitterness in her voice stuns me. Bess is still looking out the window, her mouth full of poison, her face hard.

  “Bess…wife…You cannot think I favor her above you…”

  She does not even turn her head. “What shall we do with her?” she asks. She nods to the garden and I draw a little closer to the window and see the Scots queen, still in the garden, with a cloak around her shoulders. She is walking along the terrace to look out over the rich woods of the river valley. She shades her eyes with her hand from the low autumn sun. For the first time I wonder why she walks and looks to the north, like this, every day. Is she looking for the dust from a hard-riding army, with Norfolk at their head, come to rescue her and then take her down the road to London? Does she think to turn the country upside down once more in the grip of war, brother against brother, queen against queen? She stands in the golden afternoon light, her cloak rippling behind her.

  There is something in the set of her head, like a beautiful figure in a tableau, that makes one long for an army in the fields below her, an army to rescue her and take her away. Even though she is my prisoner I long for her escape. She is too fine a beauty to wait on a tower without rescue. She is like a princess in a child’s fairy tale; you cannot see the picture that she makes and not want to set her free.

  “She has to be free,” I say unguardedly to Bess. “When I see her like this, I know she has to be free.”

  “She is certainly a trouble to keep,” she says unromantically.

  1569, SEPTEMBER,

  TUTBURY CASTLE:

  MARY

  Bothwell,

  They are taking me to Tutbury Castle now. The Northern lords and Howard will rise for me on October 6th. If you can come, you shall command the army of the North and we will ride out in battle again with everything to win. If not, wish me luck. I need you. Come.

  Marie

  I swear by Our Lady, this is the last time that I will ever be taken back to this hateful prison of Tutbury Castle. I go quietly now, but this is the last time they will take me up this twisting road to this stinking prison where the sun never shines into my room and where the wind blows steadily and coldly over the flat fields. Elizabeth hopes that I will die of the cold and the damp here, or of disease from the fetid mists from the river, but she is wrong. I will outlive her. I swear I will outlive her. She will have to murder me if she wants to wear black for me. I will not weaken and die to convenience her. I will enter the castle now but I shall leave it at the head of my own army. We will march on London and I shall imprison Elizabeth and we shall see how long she lasts in a damp castle of my choosing.

  They can rush me back here, they can march me all the way back to Bolton Castle if they like, but I am a queen of the tides and the current is flowing fast for me now. They will not keep me prisoner for more than another week. They cannot keep me. This is the end for the Shrewsburys; they do not know it yet but they are about to be destroyed. The Northern lords will come for me with Norfolk at their head. The date is set, it is to be October 6th, and I shall date my reign from that day. We will be ready. I am ready now. Then my jailers will be my prisoners and I shall treat them as I wish.

  Norfolk will be calling up his tenants now; thousands will answer his call. The Northern lords will muster their great army. All the Shrewsburys achieve by bringing me here, to their most miserable dungeon, is to imprison me somewhere that I will be easy to find. Everyone knows that I am kept at Tutbury; everyone knows the road to the castle. The Northern army will come for me within weeks, and the Shrewsburys can choose whether to die in defense of their dirty castle or surrender it to me. I smile at the thought of it. They will come to me and ask me to forgive them and to remember that they have always treated me kindly.

  I respect the earl himself: no one could fail to admire him; and I like Bess well enough, she is a good-hearted woman, though very vulgar. But this will be the end of them, perhaps the death of them. Anyone who stands in my way, between me and my freedom, will have to die. October 6th is the day and they must be ready, as I am ready: for victory or for death.

  I did not choose this road. I came to Elizabeth in need, as a kinswoman imploring her help. She treated me as an enemy and now she treats her own lords and her own cousin as enemies. Everyone who thinks she is a great queen should note this: in triumph she was suspicious and ungenerous. In danger she is filled with panic. She has driven me to despair and she has driven them into rebellion. She will have no one to blame but herself when they storm her castle and throw her into the Tower and put her on her mother’s scaffold. She and her archadvisor Cecil have such suspicious, embittered minds that they have imagined their own undoing and so brought it about. Like fearful, suspicious people always do, they have dreamed the worst and made it real.

  I have a letter from my ambassador, the Bishop John Lesley of Ross, who is in London, watching the unraveling of Elizabeth’s power. I found it tucked into my saddle when we mounted helter-skelter for the ride to Tutbury. Even in the terrified rush to get from Wingfield Manor to Tutbury Castle there was time for a loyal man to serve me. The Shrewsburys’ own grooms are already turned to my side. Bess and her husband are betrayed in their own household. The place is full of spies, well paid with Spanish gold, waiting to serve me. Lesley’s note, scribbled in a mixture of French and code, tells me of panic in London, of Elizabeth in a frenzy of fear at hourly reports of an uprising which is breaking out all over the country.

  The Northern lords are comman