Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  When the queen’s rage subsided it was worse, because she slumped to the floor and hugged her knees to her chest and buried her face, like a little girl after a beating. We could not make her stand up or even open her eyes for hours. She hid her face from us, deep in despair and filled with shame at how low she had been brought by love. Sitting beside her on the cold wooden floor, with nothing to say that could help her in her pain, I saw the skirt of her gown slowly darken as her tears soaked into the velvet, and she never made a sound.

  She did not speak for a night and a day, and the day after she was stony-faced like a statue of despair. When she emerged to sit on her throne in the empty room it was to find that the Spaniards were openly rebelling against being forced to stay, and all the English men and women of the court were angry too. Life in the queen’s service was not what it had been when the king had arrived and taken her with love; not what a court should be. Instead of literature and music, sport and dancing, it was like a nunnery ruled by a mortally sick abbess. No-one spoke above a whisper, no feasts ever took place, there were no entertainments or gaiety, and the queen sat on her throne with a face of blank misery and retired to her rooms to be on her own whenever she could. Life at court had become long days of hopeless waiting for the king to return. We all knew that he never would.

  With no man to torment, and no chance of making the queen more miserable than she was already, Princess Elizabeth took the opportunity to leave the court at Greenwich and go to her palace at Hatfield. The queen let her go, without a word of affection. Any love she had felt for Elizabeth the child had been worn out by the disloyalty of Elizabeth the young woman. Elizabeth’s flirtation with the king while Mary had been enduring the last weeks of a failed pregnancy had been the final act of wilful unkindness that would ever hurt her sister. In her heart Mary saw this as the final proof that Elizabeth was the daughter of a whore and a lute player. What other girl would treat her sister as Elizabeth had done? In her heart she denied kinship with Elizabeth, she denied her as her sister, she denied her as her heir. She took back the love that she had constantly offered the younger woman, and she excluded her from her heart. She was glad to let her go and would not have cared if she had never seen her again.

  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 of 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 marvellous 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 marvellous 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 sa