Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  Will unfolded himself from the ground, his gangling legs stretching out at last, his face creased with a smile as he took his bow. The whole court moved on, talking and laughing about Will Somers’ race with a frog, but I delayed him, a hand on his arm.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He looked at me steadily, no trace of the fool about either of us. ‘Child, you cannot change a king, you can only make him laugh. Sometimes, if you are a very great fool, you can make him laugh at himself, and then you may make him a better man and a better king.’

  ‘I was clumsy,’ I confessed. ‘But Will, I spoke to a woman today and the things that she told me would have made you weep!’

  ‘Far worse in France,’ he said quickly. ‘Worse in Italy. You of all people should know, child, that it is worse in Spain.’

  That checked me. ‘I came to England thinking that this was a country that would be more merciful. Surely the queen is not a woman to burn a priest’s wife.’

  He dropped an arm over my shoulders. ‘Child, you are a fool indeed,’ he said gently. ‘The queen has no mother to advise her, no husband who loves her, and no child to distract her. She wants to do right and she is told by everyone around her that the best way to bring this country to heel is to burn a few nobodies who are destined for hell already. Her heart might ache for them but she will sacrifice them to save the rest, just as she would sacrifice herself for her own immortal soul. Your skill, my skill, is to make sure that it never occurs to her to sacrifice us.’

  I turned a face to him which was as grave as he would have wished. ‘Will, I have trusted her. I would trust her with my life.’

  ‘You do rightly,’ he said in mock approbation. ‘You are a very true fool. It is only a fool who trusts a king.’

  In July the court should have been on progress, travelling round the great houses of England, enjoying the hunting and the parties and the pleasures of the English summer, but still the queen said nothing about when we might leave. Our setting out had been delayed day after day waiting for the birth of the prince, and now, twelve weeks late, nobody truly believed that the prince would come.

  Nobody said anything to the queen – that was the worst of it. Nobody asked her how she was feeling, whether she was ill, if she was bleeding or sick. She had lost a child which meant more to her than the world itself, and nobody asked her how she did, or if they could comfort her. She was surrounded by a wall of polite silence, but they smiled when she had gone by, and some of them laughed behind their hands and said that she was an old and foolish woman and that she had mistaken the drying-up of her courses for a pregnancy! and what a fool she was! and what a fool she had made of the king! and how he must hate her for making him the laughing-stock of Christendom!

  She must have known how they spoke of her, and the bitter twist of her mouth showed her hurt; but she walked with her head high through a summertime court which was buzzing with malice and gossip, and she still said nothing. At the end of July, still without a public word from the queen, the midwives packed up their dozens of bandages, put away the embroidered white silk layette, packed away the bonnets, the little bootees, the petticoats and the swaddling bands and finally carried the magnificent wooden cradle from the birthing room. The servants took down the tapestries from the windows and the walls, the thick Turkish rugs from the floor, the straps and the rich bedding from the bed. Without any word of explanation from the doctors, from the midwives or from the queen herself, everyone realised that now there was no baby, now there was no pregnancy, and the matter was closed. The court moved in an almost silent procession to Oatlands Palace and took up residence so quietly that you would have thought that someone had died in hiding, of shame.

  John Dee, charged with heresy, conjuring and calculing, disappeared into the terrible maw of the Bishop’s Palace in London. It was said that the coalhouses, the woodstores, the cellars, even the drains below the palace were serving as cells for the hundreds of suspected heretics waiting to be questioned by Bishop Bonner. In the neighbouring St Paul’s Cathedral, the bell tower was crammed with prisoners who scarcely had place to sit, let alone lie down, deafened by the ringing of the bells in the arches over their heads, exhausted by brutal interrogation, broken by torture and waiting, with dreadful certainty, to be taken out and burned.

  I could hear nothing of Mr Dee, not from Princess Elizabeth, nor from any of the gossips around court. Not even Will Somers, who usually knew everything, had heard of what had happened to John Dee. He scowled at me when I asked him and said, ‘Fool, keep your own foolish counsel. There are some names better not mentioned between friends, even if they are both fools.’

  ‘I need to know how he fares,’ I said urgently. ‘It is a matter of some … importance to me.’

  ‘He has disappeared,’ Will said darkly. ‘Turns out he was a magician indeed that he could vanish so completely.’

  ‘Dead?’ My voice was so low that Will could not have heard the word, he guessed the meaning from my aghast face.

  ‘Lost,’ he said. ‘Disappeared. Which is probably worse.’

  Since I did not know what a lost man might say before he disappeared I never slept more than a few hours every night, waking up with a start at every sound outside the door, thinking that they had come for me. I started to dream of the day they had come for my mother, and between my childhood terror for her and my own fears for myself I was in a sorry state.

  Not so the Princess Elizabeth. She might never have heard of John Dee. She lived her life at the court with all the Tudor glamour she could exploit, walking in the garden, eating her dinner in the hall, attending Mass sitting one place behind her sister, and always, always, meeting the glance of the king with an unspoken promise.

  Their desire for each other lit up the court. It was an almost palpable heat. When she walked into the room everyone could see him tense like a hound when he hears the hunting horn. When he walked behind her chair she would give a little involuntary shiver, as if the very air between them had caressed the nape of her neck. When they met by accident in the gallery they stood three feet apart, as if neither of them dared to go within arm’s length, and they skirted each other, moving one way and then another as if in a dance to music that only they could hear. If she turned her head to one side he would look at her neck, at the pearl swinging from her earlobe, as if he had never seen such a thing before. When he turned his head she would covertly steal a glance at his profile, and her lips would part in a little sigh as she looked at him. When he helped her down from the saddle of her horse, he held her against him after her feet had touched the ground and the two of them were shaking by the time he released her.

  There was not a word spoken between them that the queen could not have heard, there was no caress that anyone could see. The simple proximity of day-to-day life was enough to set them both aflame, his hands on her waist, her hands on his shoulder in a dance, the moment when they stood close, eyes locked. There was no doubt that this woman would escape any punishment while this king was ruling the country. He could barely let her out of his sight, he was not likely to send her to the Tower.

  The queen had to watch all this. The queen, worn thin to gauntness, with a flat belly, had to watch her younger sister summon the king by merely raising her plucked eyebrow. The queen had to watch the man she still passionately loved at another woman’s beck and call, and that woman, Elizabeth, the unwanted sister who had stolen Mary’s father, was now seducing her husband.

  Queen Mary never showed a flicker of emotion. Not when she leaned from her chair and made a smiling remark to Philip and then realised that he had not even heard her, he was so absorbed in watching Elizabeth dance. Not when Elizabeth brought him a book she was reading and composed a Latin motto for the dedication, extempore before the whole court. Not when Elizabeth sang him a tune which she had written for him, not when Elizabeth challenged him to a race while out hunting, and the two of them outstripped the court and were missing for half an hour. Mary had all the dignity o