The Queen's Fool Read online

  “Princess, this is a dangerous game,” I warned her.

  “Hannah, this is my life,” she said simply. “With the king on my side I need fear nothing. And if he were to be free to marry, then I could look to no better match.”

  “Your sister’s husband? While she is confined with his child?” I demanded, scandalized.

  Her downcast eyes were slits of jet. “I might think, as she did, that an alliance between Spain and England would dominate all of Christendom,” she said sweetly.

  “Yes, the queen thought that, and yet all that has happened is that she has brought the heresy laws on the heads of her subjects,” I said tartly. “And brought herself to solitude in a darkened room with her heart breaking and her sister outside in the sunshine flirting with her husband.”

  “The queen fell in love with a husband who married for policy,” Elizabeth decreed. “I would never be such a fool. If he married me it would be quite the reverse. I would be the one marrying for policy and he would be the one marrying for love. And we would see whose heart broke first.”

  “Has he told you he loves you?” I whispered, aghast, thinking of the queen lost in her loneliness of the enclosed room. “Has he said he would marry you, if she died?”

  “He adores me,” Elizabeth said with quiet pleasure. “I could make him say anything.”

  It was hard to get news of John Dee without seeming overly curious. He had simply gone, as if he had never been, disappeared into the terrible dungeons of the Inquisition in England at St. Paul’s, supervised by Bishop Bonner, whose resolute questioning was feeding the fires of Smithfield at the rate of half a dozen poor men and women every week.

  “What news of John Dee?” I asked Will Somers quietly, one morning when I found him recumbent on a bench, basking like a lizard in the summer sunshine.

  “He’s not dead yet,” he said, barely opening an eye. “Hush.”

  “Are you sleeping?” I asked, wanting to know more.

  “I’m not dead yet,” he said. “In that, he and I have something in common. But I am not being stretched on the rack, nor being pressed with a hundred rocks on my chest, nor being taken for questioning at midnight, at dawn, and as a rough alternative to breakfast. So not that much in common.”

  “Has he confessed?” I asked, my voice a little breath.

  “Can’t have done,” Will said pragmatically. “Because if he had confessed he would be dead, and there his similarity to me would be ended, since I am not dead but merely asleep.”

  “Will…” “Fast asleep and dreaming, and not talking at all.”

  I went to find Elizabeth. I had thought of speaking to Kat Ashley but I knew she despised me for my mixed allegiances, and I doubted her discretion. I heard the blast of the hunting horns and I knew that Elizabeth would have been riding. I hurried down to the stable yard and was there as the hounds came streaming in, with the riders behind them. Elizabeth was riding a new black hunter, a gift from the king, her cap askew, her face glowing. The court was all dismounting and shouting for their grooms. I sprang forward to hold her horse and said quietly to her, unheard in the general noise, “Princess, do you have any news of John Dee?”

  She turned her back to me and patted her horse’s shoulder. “There, Sunburst,” she said loudly, speaking to the horse. “You did well.” To me in an undertone she said: “They are holding him for conjuring and calculing.”

  “What?” I asked, horrified.

  She was absolutely calm. “They say that he attempted to cast the queen’s astrology chart, and that he summoned up spirits to foretell the future.”

  “Will he speak of any others, doing this with him?” I breathed.

  “If they charge him with heresy you should expect him to sing like a little blinded thrush,” she said, turning to me and smiling radiantly, as if it were not her life at stake as well as mine. “They’ll rack him, you know. No one can stand that pain. He will be bound to talk.”

  “Heresy?”

  “So I’m told.”

  She tossed her reins to her groom and walked toward the palace, leaning on my shoulder.

  “They’ll burn him?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Princess, what shall we do?”

  She dropped her arm around my shoulder and gripped it hard, as if she were holding me to my senses. I could feel that her hand did not tremble for a moment. “We will wait. And hope to survive this. Same as always, Hannah. Wait, and hope to survive.”

  “You will survive,” I said with sudden bitterness.

  Elizabeth turned her bright face to me, her smile merry but her eyes were like chips of coal. “Oh yes,” she said. “I have done so, thus far.”

  In mid-June the queen, still pregnant, broke with convention to release herself from the confinement chamber. The physicians could not say that she would be any worse for being outside, and they thought walking in the air might give her an appetite for her meals. They were afraid that she was not eating enough to keep herself and her baby alive. In the cool of the morning or in the shadowy evening she would stroll slowly in her private garden attended only by her ladies and the members of her household. She was changing before my eyes from the deliciously infatuated woman that Prince Philip of Spain had wedded and bedded, and loved into joy, back to the anxious prematurely aged woman that I had first met. Her new confidence in love and happiness was draining away from her, with the pink of her cheeks and the blue of her eyes, and I could see her drawn back to the loneliness and fearfulness of her childhood, almost like an invalid slipping toward death.

  “Your Grace.” I dropped to one knee as I met her in the privy garden one day. She had been looking at the fast flow of the river past the boat pier, looking, and yet not seeing. A brood of ducklings was playing in the current, their mother watchful nearby, surveying the little bundles of fluff as they paddled and bobbed. Even the ducks on the Thames had young; but England’s cradle, with that hopeful poem at the bed-head, was still empty.

  She turned an unseeing dark gaze to me. “Oh, Hannah.”

  “Are you well, Your Grace?”

  She tried to smile at me but I saw her lips twist down.

  “No, Hannah, my child. I am not very well.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  She shook her head. “I should be glad of pain, of labor pains. No, Hannah. I feel nothing, not in my body, not in my heart.”

  I drew a little closer. “Perhaps these are the fancies that come before birth,” I said soothingly. “Like when they say women have a craving for eating raw fruit or coal.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She held out her hands to me, as patient as a sick child. “Can’t you see, Hannah? With your gift? Can you see, and tell me the truth?”

  Almost unwillingly I took her hands and at her touch I felt a rush of despair as dark and as cold as if I had fallen into the river which flowed beneath the pier. She saw the shock in my face, and read it rightly at once.

  “He’s gone, hasn’t he?” she whispered. “I have somehow lost him.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Your Grace,” I stumbled. “I’m no physician, I wouldn’t have the skill to judge…”

  She shook her head, the bright sunlight glinting on the rich embroidery of her hood, on the gold hoops in her ears, all this worldly wealth encasing heartbreak. “I knew it,” she said. “I had a son in my belly and now he is gone. I feel an emptiness where I used to feel a life.”

  I still had hold of her icy hands, I found I was chafing them, as people will chafe the hands of a corpse.

  “Oh, Your Grace!” I cried out. “There can be another child. Where one has been made you can make another. You had a child and lost him, hundreds of women do that, and go on to have another child. You can do that too.”

  She did not even seem to hear me, she let her hands lie in mine and she looked toward the river as if she would want it to wash her away.

  “Your Grace?” I whispered, very quietly. “Queen Mary? Dearest Mary?”