The Queen's Fool Read online

  One morning, as we were coming out of Mass, the queen leading the way, her ladies behind her, one of the queen’s newest maids in waiting fell into step beside me. I was watching the queen. She was walking slowly, her head drooped, her shoulders bowed as if grief were a weight that she had to carry.

  “Have you heard? Have you heard?” the girl whispered to me as we turned into the queen’s presence chamber. The gallery was crowded with people who had come to see the queen, most of them to ask for clemency for people on trial for heresy.

  “Heard what?” I said crossly. I pulled my sleeve from the grip of an old lady who was trying to waylay me. “Dame, I can do nothing for you.”

  “It is not for me, it is my son,” she said. “My boy.”

  Despite myself, I paused.

  “I have money saved, he could go abroad if the queen would be so good as to send him into exile.”

  “You are pleading for exile for your son?”

  “Bishop Bonner has him.” She needed to say nothing more.

  I pulled back from her as if she had the plague. “I am sorry,” I said. “I can do nothing.”

  “If you would intercede for him? His name is Joseph Woods?”

  “Dame, if I asked for mercy for him my own life would be forfeit,” I told her. “You are at risk in even speaking to me. Go home and pray for his soul.”

  She looked at me as if I were a savage. “You tell a mother to pray for her son’s soul when he is innocent of anything?”

  “Yes,” I said bleakly.

  The maid in waiting drew me away impatiently. “The news!” she reminded me.

  “Yes, what?” I turned from the uncomprehending pain on the old woman’s face, knowing that the best advice to her would be to take the money she had saved for her son’s release and buy instead a purse of gunpowder to hang around his neck so that he did not suffer for hours in the fire but blew up as soon as the flames were lit.

  “The Princess Elizabeth is accused of treason!” the maid in waiting hissed at me, desperate to tell her news. “Her servants are all arrested. They’re tearing her London house apart, searching it.”

  Despite the heat of the crowd, I felt myself freeze, right down to my toes in my boots. “Elizabeth? What treason?” I whispered.

  “A plot to kill the queen,” the girl said in a breath of ice.

  “Who else with her?”

  “I don’t know! Nobody knows! Kat Ashley, for certain, perhaps all of them.”

  I nodded, I knew somebody who would know. I extricated myself from the train that was following the queen into her presence chamber. She would be in there for at least two hours, listening to one claim after another, people asking her for favors, for mercy, for places, for money. At every plea she would look more weary, older by far than her forty years. But she would not miss me while I ran down the gallery to the great hall.

  Will was not there, a soldier directed me to the stable yard and I found him in a loose box, playing with one of the deerhound puppies. The animal, all long legs and excitement, clambered all over him.

  “Will, they’re searching the Princess Elizabeth’s London house.”

  “Aye, I know,” he said, lifting his face away from the puppy, which was enthusiastically licking his neck.

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Doesn’t matter what they were looking for, what matters is what they found.”

  “What did they find?”

  “What you would expect,” he said unhelpfully.

  “I expect nothing,” I snapped. “Just tell me. What did they find?”

  “Letters and pamphlets and all sorts of seditious nonsense in Kat Ashley’s box. A May-day plot cooked up between her and the princess’s new Italian lute player and Dudley—” He broke off as he saw my aghast face. “Oh, not your lord. His cousin, Sir Henry.”

  “Lord Robert is not under suspicion?” I demanded.

  “Should he be?”

  “No,” I lied instantly. “How could he do anything? And anyway, he is loyal to Queen Mary.”

  “As are we all,” Will said smartly. “Even Tobias the hound, here. Well, Tobias is more loyal because he can’t say one thing and think another. He gives his love where he eats his dinner which is more than others I could mention.”

  I flushed. “If you mean me, I love the queen and I always have done.”

  His face softened. “I know you do. I meant her pretty little sister who has not the patience to wait her turn; but has been plotting again.”

  “She’s guilty of nothing,” I said at once, my loyalty to Elizabeth as reliable as my love of the queen.

  Will laughed shortly. “She’s an heir in waiting. She’d attract trouble like a tall tree attracts lightning. And so Kat Ashley and Signor the lute player are for the Tower, half a dozen of the Dudley household with them. There’s a warrant out for Sir William Pickering, her old ally. I didn’t even know he was in England. Did you?”

  I said nothing, my throat tightening with fear. “No.”

  “Better not to know.”

  I nodded, then I felt my head nodding and nodding again, in trying to look normal I was looking ridiculous. I felt that my face was a folio of fear that anyone could read.

  “What’s the matter, child?” Will’s tone was kindly. “You’re white as snow. Are you enmeshed in this, little one? Are you seeking a charge of treason to match your charge of heresy? Have you been a fool indeed?”

  “No,” I said, my voice coming out harshly. “I would not plot against the queen. I have not been well this last week. I am sick. A touch of fever.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t spread,” Will said wryly.

  I held to my lie of fever and took to my bed. I thought of Elizabeth who seemed to be able to summon ill health as an alibi when she needed one, and I knew the pangs of a terror which made me sweat so much that I would have passed for a sick girl indeed.

  I heard the news from my roommates. Cardinal Pole headed the inquiry into the conspiracy and every day another man was arrested and taken for questioning. First Sir Henry Dudley, who had been betraying his own country to the French in return for their help. He had pockets full of French gold and the promise of a small army of mercenaries and French volunteers. From then they followed the trail to a traitor at the court of the Exchequer who had promised to steal money to pay for the army and the weapons. Under questioning he revealed that they were planning to send the queen to her husband in the Low Countries, and put Elizabeth on the throne. Then the cardinal discovered that Kat Ashley and William Pickering were old friends, and had met at the very heart of the court, Sir William had been smuggled into the country, into the Hampton Court itself.

  Kat Ashley’s box in Elizabeth’s London house held the first draft of a pamphlet urging Englishmen to rise up against the Catholic queen and put the Protestant princess on the throne.

  Cardinal Pole started to look around Elizabeth’s friends and acquaintances for who might have a press that would have printed such a pamphlet in secret. I thought of the sheeted press in the printer’s shop off Fleet Street and wondered how soon it would be before they came for me.

  The cardinal, inspired by God, determined and intelligent, was following a trail which would take in many English Protestants, many friends and servants to Elizabeth, and would lead him inevitably to me, as to many others. Whenever one man was arrested and taken for questioning there was another man who might mention that the queen’s fool was always with the princess. That someone had told someone that the queen’s fool would run an errand or take a message, that she was known by sight to Sir William Pickering, that she was a trusted retainer of the Dudley family for all that she was said to serve the queen.

  If Cardinal Pole took me to his quiet thickly curtained room and made me stand before his dark polished table and tell him of my history I knew he would pick it apart in a moment. Our flight from Spain, our arrival in England, my father’s disappearance leaving his press behind: everything pointed to our guilt