The Queen's Fool Read online

  When they were all gone she walked up to a window embrasure where no one could hear us and beckoned for me. “Hannah?”

  “Yes, Your Grace?” I went to her side at once.

  “Isn’t it time you were out of your pageboy livery? You will be a woman soon.”

  I hesitated. “If you will allow it, Your Grace, I would rather go on dressed as a pageboy.”

  She looked at me curiously. “Don’t you long for a pretty gown, and to grow your hair, child? Don’t you want to be a young woman? I thought I would give you a gown for Christmas.”

  I thought of my mother plaiting my thick black hair and winding the plaits around her fingers and telling me I would become a beauty, a famously beautiful woman. I thought of her chiding me for my love of rich cloth, and how I had begged for a green velvet gown for Hanukkah.

  “I lost my love of finery when I lost my mother,” I said quietly. “There’s no pleasure in it for me without her to choose and fit the dresses on me, and tell me that they suit me. I don’t even want long hair without her here to plait it for me.”

  Her face became tender. “When did she die?”

  “When I was eleven years old,” I lied. “She took the plague.” I would never risk revealing the truth that she had been burned as a heretic, not even with this queen who looked so gravely and sorrowfully into my face.

  “Poor child,” she said gently. “It is a loss that you never forget. You can learn to bear it, but you never forget it.”

  “Every time something good happens to me I want to tell her. Every time something bad happens I want her help.”

  She nodded. “I used to write to my mother, even when I knew that they would never allow me to send my letters to her. Even though there was nothing in them that they could have objected to, no secrets, just my need for her and my sorrow that she was far from me. But they would not let me write to her. I just wanted to tell her that I loved her and I missed her. And then she died and I was not allowed to go to her. I could not even hold her hand and close her eyes.”

  She put her hand to her eyes and pressed her cool fingertips against her eyelids, as if to hold back old tears.

  She cleared her throat. “But this cannot mean that you never wear a gown,” she said lightly. “Life goes on, Hannah. Your mother would not want you to grieve. She would want you to grow to be a woman, a beautiful young woman. She would not want her little girl to wear boy’s clothes forever.”

  “I don’t want to be a woman,” I said simply. “My father has arranged a marriage for me, but I know I am not yet ready to be a woman and a wife.”

  “You can’t want to be a virgin like me,” she said with a wry smile. “It’s not a course many women would choose.”

  “No,” I said. “Not a virgin queen like you, I have not dedicated myself to being a single woman; but it’s as if…” I broke off. “As if I don’t know how to be a woman,” I said uncomfortably. “I watch you, and I watch the ladies of the court.” Tactfully I did not add that of them all, I watched the Lady Elizabeth, who seemed to me to be the epitome of the grace of a girl and the dignity of a princess. “I watch everyone, and I think I will learn it in time. But not yet.”

  She nodded. “I understand exactly. I don’t know how to be a queen without a husband at my side. I have never known of a queen without a man to guide her. And yet I am so afraid of marrying…” She paused. “I don’t think a man could ever understand the dread that a woman might feel at the thought of marriage. Especially a woman like me, not a young woman, not a woman given to the pleasures of the flesh, not a woman who is even very desirable…” She put a hand out to prevent me from contradicting her. “I know it, Hannah, you needn’t flatter me.

  “And worse than all of these things, I am not a woman who finds it easy to trust men. I hate having to sit with the men of power. When they argue in council, my heart thumps in my chest, and I am afraid that my voice will shake when I have to speak.

  “And yet I despise men who are weak. When I look at my cousin Edward Courtenay that the Lord Chancellor would have me marry, I could laugh out loud at the thought of it. The boy is a puppy and a vain fool and I could never, never debase myself to lie under such a one as him.

  “But if one married a man who was accustomed to command…” She paused. “What a terror it would be,” she said quietly. “To put your heart in the keeping of a stranger! What a terror to promise to obey a man who might order you to do anything! And to promise to love a man till death…” She broke off. “After all, men do not always consider themselves bound by such promises. And what happens then to a good wife?”

  “Did you think you would live and die a virgin?” I asked.

  She nodded. “When I was a princess I was betrothed over and over again. But when my father denied me and called me his bastard, I knew that there would be no offers of marriage. I set away all thoughts of it then, and all thoughts of my own children too.”

  “Your father denied you?”

  “Yes,” the queen said shortly. “They made me swear on the Bible to my own bastardy.” Her voice shook, she drew a breath. “No prince in Europe would have married me after that. To tell you the truth, I was so ashamed I would not have wanted a husband. I could not have looked an honorable man in the face. And when my father died and my brother became king, I thought I could be like a dowager, like a favorite old godmother, his older sister who might advise him, and I thought he would have children that I might care for. But now everything has changed and I am queen, and even though I am queen I find I still cannot make my own choices.” She paused. “They have offered me Philip of Spain, you know.”

  I waited.

  She turned to me as if I had more sense than her greyhound, as if I could advise her. “Hannah, I am less than a man and less than a woman. I cannot rule as a man, and I cannot give the country the heir that it has a right to desire. I am a half prince. Neither queen nor king.”

  “Surely, the country only needs a ruler it can respect,” I said tentatively. “And it needs years of peace. I am new-come to this land but even I can see that men don’t know what is right and wrong any more. The church has changed and changed again within their lifetimes and they have had to change and change with it. And there is much poverty in the city, and hunger in the country. Can’t you just wait? Can’t you just feed the poor and restore the lands to the landless, set men back to work and get the beggars and the thieves off the roads? Bring back the beauty to the church and give the monasteries back their lands?”

  “And when I have done that?” Queen Mary asked, a strange shaking intensity in her voice. “What then? When the country is safe inside the church again, when everyone is well fed, when the barns are full and the monasteries and nunneries are prosperous? When the priests are pure in their living and the Bible is read to the people as it should be? When the Mass is celebrated in every village, and the matins bells ring out over all the fields every morning as they should do, as they always have done? What then?”

  “Then you will have done the task that God called you to, won’t you?…” I stammered.

  She shook her head. “I will tell you, what then. Then illness or accident befalls me and I die childless. And the bastard of Anne Boleyn and the lute player Mark Smeaton steps up to claim the throne: Elizabeth. And the moment she is on the throne she throws off her mask and shows herself for what she is.”

  I could hardly recognize the hiss of her voice, the hatred in her face. “Why, what is she? What has she done to upset you so?”

  “She has betrayed me,” she said flatly. “When I was fighting for our inheritance, hers as well as mine, she was writing to the man who was marching against me. I know that now. While I was fighting for her as well as for myself she was making an agreement with him for when I was dead. She would have signed it on my execution block.

  “When I took her into London at my side they cheered the Protestant princess, and she smiled at the cheers. When I sent her teachers and scholars to explain to her th