The Queen's Fool Read online

  She turned her head away. “I am too tired,” she said. “You can come back when I am better.”

  I rose from my kneeling position by the bed and stepped backward. Kat Ashley jerked her head toward the door to send me from the room.

  “And you can tell those who have come to take her that she is near death!” she said bluntly. “You can’t threaten her with the scaffold, she is slipping away all on her own!” A half sob escaped her and I saw that she was drawn as tight as a lute string with anxiety for the princess.

  “No one is threatening her,” I said.

  She gave a little snort of disbelief. “They have come to take her, haven’t they?”

  “Yes,” I said unwillingly. “But they have no warrant, she is not under arrest.”

  “Then she shall not leave,” she said angrily.

  “I’ll tell them she is too ill to travel,” I said. “But the physicians will want to see her, whatever I say.”

  She made a little irritable puffing noise and stepped closer to the bed to straighten the quilt. I glimpsed a quick bright glance from beneath Elizabeth’s swollen eyelids, as I bowed again and let myself out of the room.

  Then we waited. Good God, how we waited. She was the absolute mistress of delay. When the physicians said she was well enough to leave she could not choose the gowns she would bring, then her ladies could not pack them in time for us to set off before dusk. Then everything had to be unpacked again since we were staying another day, and then Elizabeth was so exhausted she could see no one at all the next day, and the merry dance of Elizabeth’s waiting began again.

  During one of these mornings, when the big trunks were being laboriously loaded into the wagons, I went to the Lady Elizabeth to see if I could assist her. She was lying on a daybed, in an attitude of total exhaustion.

  “It is all packed,” she said. “And I am so tired I do not know if I can begin the journey.”

  The swelling of her body had reduced but she was clearly still unwell. She would have looked better if she had not powdered her cheeks with rice powder and, I swear, darkened the shadows under her eyes. She looked like a sick woman enacting the part of a sick woman.

  “The queen is determined that you shall go to London,” I warned her. “Her litter arrived for you yesterday, you can travel lying down if you will.”

  She bit her lip. “Do you know if she will accuse me when we get there?” she asked, her voice very low. “I am innocent of plotting against her, but there are many who would speak against me, slanderers and liars.”

  “She loves you,” I reassured her. “I think she would take you back into her favor and into her heart even now, if you would just accept her faith.”

  Elizabeth looked into my eyes, that straight honest Tudor look, like her father, like her sister. “Are you telling me the truth?” she asked. “Are you a holy fool or a trickster, Hannah Green?”

  “I am neither,” I said, meeting her gaze. “I was begged for a fool by Robert Dudley, against my wishes. I never wanted to be a fool. I have a gift of Sight which comes to me unbidden, and sometimes shows me things that I cannot even understand. And most of the time it doesn’t come at all.”

  “You saw an angel behind Robert Dudley,” she reminded me.

  I smiled. “I did.”

  “What was it like?”

  I giggled, I couldn’t help it. “Lady Elizabeth, I was so taken with Lord Robert that I hardly noticed the angel.”

  She sat up, quite forgetting her pose of illness, and laughed with me. “He is very… he is so… he is indeed a man you look at.”

  “And I only realized it was an angel afterwards,” I said to excuse myself. “At the time I was just overwhelmed by the three of them, Mr. Dee, Lord Robert, and the third.”

  “And do your visions come to pass?” she asked keenly. “You scried for Mr. Dee, didn’t you?”

  I hesitated with a sense of the ground opening into a chasm under my feet. “Who says so?” I asked cautiously.

  She smiled at me, a flash of small white teeth as if she were a bright fox. “Never mind what I know. I am asking what you know.”

  “Some things that I see have come to pass,” I said, honestly enough. “But sometimes the very things I need to know, the most important things in the world, I cannot tell. Then it is a useless gift. If it had warned me — just once—”

  “What warning?” she asked.

  “The death of my mother,” I said. I would have bitten back the words as soon as they were spoken. I did not want to tell my past to this sharp-minded princess.

  I glanced at her face but she was looking at me with intense sympathy. “I did not know,” she said gently. “Did she die in Spain? You came from Spain, did you not?”

  “In Spain,” I said. “Of the plague.” I felt a sharp twist of pain in my belly at lying about my mother, but I did not dare to think of the fires of the Inquisition with this young woman watching me. It was as if she could have seen the flicker of their reflected flames in my eyes.

  “I am sorry,” she said, very low. “It is hard for a young woman to grow up without a mother.”

  I knew she was thinking of herself for a moment, and of the mother who had died on the scaffold with the names of witch, adulteress and whore. She put away the thought. “But what made you come to England?”

  “We have kin here. And my father had arranged a marriage for me. We wanted to start again.”

  She smiled at my breeches. “Does your betrothed know that he will be getting a girl who is half boy?”

  I made a little pout. “He does not like me at court, he does not like me in livery, and he does not like me in breeches.”

  “But do you like him?”

  “Well enough as a cousin. Not enough for a husband.”

  “And do you have any choice in the matter?”

  “Not much,” I said shortly.

  She nodded. “It’s always the same for all women,” she said, a hint of resentment in her voice. “The only people who can choose their lives are those in breeches. You do right to wear them.”

  “I’ll have to put them aside soon,” I said. “I was allowed to wear them when I was little more than a child but I…” I checked myself. I did not want to confide in her. She had a gift, this princess, the Tudor gift, of opening confidences.

  “When I was your age, I thought I would never know how to be a young woman,” she said, echoing my thought. “All I wanted to do was to be a scholar, I could see how to do that. I had a wonderful tutor and he taught me Latin and Greek and all the spoken languages too. I wanted to please my father so much, I thought he would be proud of me if I could be as clever as Edward. I used to write to him in Greek — can you imagine? The greatest dread of my life was that I would be married and sent away from England. The greatest hope of my life was that I might be a great and learned lady and be allowed to stay at court. When my father died I thought I would be always at court: my brother’s favorite sister, and aunt to his many children, and together we would see my father’s work complete.”

  She shook her head. “Indeed, I should not want your gift of Sight,” she said. “If I had known that I would come to this, under the shadow of my sister’s displeasure, and my beloved brother dead, and my father’s legacy thrown away…”

  Elizabeth broke off and then turned to me, her dark eyes filled with tears. She stretched out her hand palm upward, and I could see that she was shaking slightly. “Can you see my future?” she asked. “Will Mary greet me as a sister and know that I have done no wrong? Will you tell her that I am innocent in my heart?”

  “If she can, she will.” I took her hand, but kept my eyes on the pale face which had so suddenly blanched. She leaned back against the richly embroidered pillows. “Truly, Princess, the queen would be your friend. I know this. She would be very happy to hear of your innocence.”

  She pulled her hand away. “Even if the Vatican named me a saint, she would not be happy,” she said. “And I will tell you why. It isn’t my a