The Queen's Fool Read online

  “The letter?” she asked me, without turning her head.

  “It’ll be public news within the day,” I said. “I am sorry to tell you, Lady Elizabeth, that your cousin Lady Jane Grey has been executed and her husband… and Lord Robert Dudley too.”

  The hands she held out to the pageboy were perfectly steady, but I could see her eyes darken. “She has done it then,” she observed quietly. “The queen. She has found the courage to execute her own kin, her own cousin, a young woman she knew from childhood.” She looked at me, her hands as steady as the pageboy’s who patted at her fingers with the monogrammed linen. “The queen has found the power of the ax. No one will be able to sleep. Thank God I am innocent of any wrongdoing.”

  I nodded but I hardly heard the words. I was thinking of Lord Robert going out to his death with his dark head held high.

  She took her hands from the towel and turned from the table. “I am very tired,” she said to her cousin. “Too tired to travel any further today. I have to rest.”

  “Lady Elizabeth, we have to go on,” he said.

  She shook her head in absolute refusal. “I cannot,” she said simply. “I will rest now and we will leave early tomorrow.”

  “As long as it is early,” he conceded. “At dawn, Your Ladyship.”

  She gave him a smile that went no further than her lips. “Of course,” she said.

  However she prolonged the journey it had to end, and ten days after we had first set off we arrived at the house of a private gentleman in High-gate, late in the evening.

  I was housed with Lady Elizabeth’s ladies, and they were up at dawn preparing for her entry into London. As I saw the white linen and petticoats and the virginal white gown being brushed and pressed and carried into her chamber I remembered the day that she greeted her sister into the city of London, wearing the Tudor colors of white and green. Now she was driven snow, all in white, a martyr-bride. When the litter came to the door she was ready, there was no delaying when there was a crowd collecting to see her.

  “You’ll want the curtains closed,” Lord Howard said gruffly to her.

  “Keep them back,” she said at once. “The people can see me. They can see what condition I am in when I am forced out of my house for a fortnight’s journey in all weathers.”

  “Ten days,” he said gruffly. “And could have been done in five.”

  She did not deign to answer him, but lay back on her pillows and lifted her hand to indicate that he could go. I heard him swear briefly under his breath and then swing into the saddle of his horse. I pulled my horse up behind the litter and the little cavalcade turned out of the courtyard to the London road and into the city.

  London was stinking of death. At every street corner there were gallows with a dreadful burden swinging from the cross-bar. If you peeped up you could see the dead man, face like a gargoyle, lips pulled back, eyes bulging, glaring down at you. When the wind blew, the stink from the corpses swept down the street and the bodies swayed back and forth, their coats flailing around them as if they were still alive and kicking for their life.

  Elizabeth kept her eyes straight to the front and did not look left or right, but she sensed the dangling bodies at every corner; half of them were known to her, and all of them had died in a rebellion that they believed she had summoned. She was as pale as her white dress when she first got into the litter, but she was blanched like skimmed milk by the time we had ridden down King’s Street.

  A few people called out to her: “God save Your Grace!” and she was recalled to herself and raised a weak hand to them with a piteous face. She looked like a martyr being dragged to her death and, under this avenue of gallows, no one could doubt her fear. This was Elizabeth’s rebellion and forty-five swinging corpses attested to the fact that it had failed. Now Elizabeth would have to face the justice that had executed them. No one could doubt she would die too.

  At Whitehall they rolled the great gates wide for us at the first sight of our cavalcade walking slowly toward the palace. Elizabeth straightened up in the litter and looked toward the great steps of the palace. Queen Mary was not there to greet her sister, and neither was anyone of the court. She arrived to silent disgrace. A single gentleman-server was on the steps and he spoke to Lord Howard, not to the princess, as if they were her jailers.

  Lord Howard came to the litter and put out his hand for her.

  “An apartment has been prepared for you,” he said shortly. “You may choose two attendants to take with you.”

  “My ladies must come with me,” she argued instantly. “I am not well.”

  “The orders are two attendants and no more,” he said briefly. “Choose.”

  The coldness of the voice that he had used with her on the journey was now barbed. We were in London, a hundred eyes and ears were on him. Lord Howard would be very certain that no one would see him show any kindness to his traitor cousin. “Choose.”

  “Mrs. Ashley and…” Elizabeth looked around and her eye fell on me. I stepped back, as anxious as any other turncoat not to be linked with this doomed princess. But she knew through me she had a chance to reach the queen. “Mrs. Ashley and Hannah the Fool,” she said.

  Lord Howard laughed. “Three fools together then,” he said under his breath and waved the gentleman to go ahead of the three of us into Elizabeth’s apartments.

  I did not wait to see Elizabeth settled in her rooms before I sought out my fellow fool Will Somers. He was dozing in the great hall on one of the benches. Someone had draped a cloak over him as he slept, everyone loved Will.

  I sat on the bench beside him, wondering if I might wake him.

  Without opening his eyes he remarked: “A pair of fools we must be; parted for weeks and we don’t even speak,” and he sat bolt upright and hugged me around the shoulders.

  “I thought you were asleep,” I said.

  “I was fooling,” he said with dignity. “I have decided that a sleeping fool is funnier than one who is awake. Especially in this court.”

  “Why?” I asked warily.

  “Nobody laughs at my jests,” he said. “So I tried to see if they would laugh at my silence. And since they prefer a silent fool, they will love a sleeping fool. And if I am asleep I will not know if they are laughing or not. So I can comfort myself that I am very amusing. I dream of my wit and then I wake up laughing. It’s a witty thought, is it not?”

  “Very,” I said.

  He turned to me. “The princess has come, has she?”

  I nodded.

  “Ill?”

  “Very. Truly ill, I think.”

  “The queen could offer her an instant cure for all pain. She has become a surgeon, she specializes in amputations.”

  “Please God it does not come to that,” I said quickly. “But Will, tell me — did Robert Dudley make a good death? Was it quick?”

  “Still alive,” he said. “Against all the odds.”

  I felt my heart turn over. “Dear God, they told me he was beheaded.”

  “Steady,” Will said. “Here, put your head between your knees.”

  From a long way off I heard his voice ask me:

  “Better now? Swoony little maid?”

  I straightened up.

  “Blushing now,” Will observed. “Soon be out of breeches with the blood flowing this fast, my little maid.”

  “You are sure he is alive? I thought he was dead. They told me he was dead.”

  “He should be dead, God knows. He’s seen his father and his brother and his poor sister-in-law all taken out and executed underneath his window and yet he’s still there,” Will said. “Perhaps his hair is white with shock but his head’s still on his shoulders.”

  “He’s alive?” I could still hardly believe it. “You’re sure?”

  “For the moment.”

  “Could I visit him without trouble?”

  He laughed. “The Dudleys always bring trouble,” he said.

  “I mean without being suspected.”

  He