The Queen's Fool Read online

  I went down to the great gate to bid the princess farewell. She was wearing her solemn black-and-white gown, the livery of the Protestant princess, since her way took her through London and the London citizens would turn out for her and cheer. She gave me a roguish wink as she put her boot in a stable lad’s cupped hands and let him throw her up into the saddle.

  “I wager you’d rather come with me,” she said wickedly. “I don’t see you having a very merry Christmas here, Hannah.”

  “I will serve my mistress in good times and bad,” I said steadily.

  “You’re sure your young man will wait for you?” she teased me.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “He says he will.” I was not going to tell Elizabeth that watching Mary destroyed by her love for her husband was not a great incentive for me to marry. “I am promised to him when I can leave the queen.”

  “Well, you can come to me, at any time, if you wish,” she said.

  “Thank you, Princess,” I said and was surprised by my pleasure in her invitation, but nobody could resist Elizabeth’s charm. Even in the shadow of a darkened court Elizabeth was a sparkle of sunshine, her smile utterly undimmed by her sister’s loss.

  “Don’t leave it too late,” she warned me with mock seriousness.

  I went closer to her horse’s neck so that I could look up at her. “Too late?”

  “When I am queen they will all be rushing to serve me, you want to be at the head of that queue,” she said frankly.

  “It could be years yet,” I rejoined.

  She shook her head, she was supremely confident on this crisp autumn morning. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “The queen is not a strong woman and she is not a happy woman. D’you think King Philip is going to come running home to her at the first opportunity, and make a son and heir on her? No. And in his absence I think my poor sister will just fade away from grief. And when that happens they will find me, studying my Bible, and I will say—” She broke off for a moment. “What did my sister plan to say when they told her she was queen?”

  I hesitated. I could remember very vividly her words in those optimistic days when Mary had promised she would be the virgin queen and restore the England of her mother to its true faith and happiness. “She was going to say: ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes,’ but in the end they told her when we were on the run and she had to fight on her own for her throne, rather than be granted it.”

  “I say, that’s good,” Elizabeth said with appreciation. “‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.’ That’s excellent. I’ll say that. You’ll want to be with me when that happens, won’t you?”

  I glanced around to make sure we were not overheard but Elizabeth knew there was no one in earshot. In all the time I had known her she had never put herself at risk — it was always her friends who ended up in the Tower.

  The small cavalcade was ready to go. Elizabeth looked down at me, her smiling face bright under her black velvet hat. “So you’d better come to me soon,” she reminded me.

  “If I can come, I will. God keep you, Princess.”

  She leaned down and patted my hand as a gesture of farewell. “I shall wait,” she said, her eyes dancing. “I shall survive.”

  King Philip wrote frequently but his letters were no reply to Mary’s tender promises of love and demands that he should come back to her. They were brisk letters of business and orders to his wife as to what she should do in her kingdom. He did not respond to her pleading with him to come home, not even to tell her, at the very least, when he would come home, nor would he allow her to join him. At first he wrote warmly, bidding her to find things with which to distract herself, to look forward to the days when he would be with her again; but then, as every day he received another letter begging him to come back, warning him that she was ill from unhappiness, sick from the loss of him, he became more businesslike. His letters were merely instructions as to how the council should decide one matter or another, and the queen was forced to go to council meetings with his letter in her hands and lay before them the orders of a man who was king only in name, and force them through on her own authority. They did not welcome her as she came red-eyed into the chamber, and they were openly doubtful that a prince of Spain, fighting his own wars, had English interests at heart. Cardinal Pole was her only friend and companion; but he had been exiled from England so long, and was so suspicious of so many Englishmen, that Mary came to feel like an exiled queen among enemies instead of the commander of English hearts as she once had been.

  In October I was looking for Jane Dormer before dinner, and failing everywhere else I put my head around the door to the queen’s chapel in case the lady in waiting had taken a few moments for prayer. To my surprise I saw Will Somers, kneeling before a statue of Our Lady, lighting a candle at her feet, his head bowed, his fool’s peaked hat crumpled in his hand, his fist clenched over the little bell to keep it silent.

  I had never thought of Will as a devout man. I stepped back and waited for him at the doorway. I watched him as he bowed his head low, and then crossed himself. With a heavy sigh, he got to his feet and came down the aisle a little stooped, and looking older than his thirty-five years.

  “Will?” I said, coming to meet him.

  “Child.” His habitual sweet smile came readily to his lips but his eyes were still dark.

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “Ah, I wasn’t praying for me,” he said shortly.

  “Then who?”

  He glanced around the empty chapel and then drew me into a pew. “D’you have any influence with Her Grace, d’you think, Hannah?”

  I thought for a moment, then honestly, regretfully, I shook my head. “She listens only to Cardinal Pole and to the king,” I said. “And before everyone, to her own conscience.”

  “If you spoke from your gift, would she listen to you?”

  “She might,” I said cautiously. “But I cannot command it to serve me, Will, you know that.”

  “I thought you might pretend,” he said bluntly.

  I recoiled. “It’s a holy gift! It would be blasphemy to pretend!”

  “Child, this month there are three men of God in prison charged with heresy, and if I am not mistaken they will be taken out and burned to death: poor Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop Latimer, and Bishop Ridley.”

  I waited.

  “The queen cannot burn good men who are ordained bishops of her father’s church,” the fool said flatly. “This must not happen.”

  He looked at me and he put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me. “Tell her that you have had a gift of Sight and that they must be sent into exile,” he urged me. “Hannah, if these men die then the queen will make an enemy of every man of compassion. These are good men, honorable men, her father’s own appointments. They have not changed their faith, the world has changed around them. They must not die on the queen’s order, she will be shamed forever if she does this. History will remember nothing but that she was the queen who burned bishops.”

  I hesitated. “I dare not, Will.”

  “If you will do it, I will be there,” he promised me. “I’ll help you. We’ll get through it somehow.”

  “You told me yourself never to meddle,” I whispered urgently. “You told me yourself never to try to change the mind of the king. Your master beheaded two wives, never mind bishops, and you didn’t stop him.”

  “And he’ll be remembered as a wife-killer,” Will predicted. “And everything else about him that was so brave and loyal and true will be forgot. They will forget that he brought peace and prosperity to the country, that he made an England that we could all love. All they will remember of him will be that he had six wives and beheaded two of them.

  “And all they will remember of this queen is that she brought the country floods and famine and fire. She will be remembered as England’s curse when she was to have been our virgin queen, England’s savior.”

  “She won’t listen to me…”