The Other Queen Read online

  But he is right to hear dismissal in my voice. This was my husband. I gave him my heart, as a good wife should, and I trusted him with the inheritance of my children and all my fortune, as a good wife must. Now I have my heart and my fortune back safely. This is goodbye.

  JUNE 1ST, 1572,

  LONDON:

  GEORGE

  The queen has finally screwed herself to the point that none of us dreamed she would ever reach. She has ordered the death of her cousin and it is to be tomorrow. She summons me to Westminster Palace in the afternoon and I wait among the other men and women in her presence chamber. I have never known the mood so somber at court. Those who have had secret dealings with the other queen are fearful, and with good reason. But even those whose consciences are clear are still nervous. We have become a court of suspicion, we have become a court of doubt. The shadows that Cecil has feared for so long are darkening the very heart of England.

  Queen Elizabeth crooks her finger towards me and rises from her throne and leads me to a window overlooking the river where we can stand alone.

  “There is no doubt of her guilt,” she says suddenly.

  “Her guilt?”

  “His, I mean his. His guilt.”

  I shake my head. “But he did nothing more than send the money and know of the plans. He did submit himself to you. He did not take arms against you. He obeyed.”

  “And then plotted again,” she says.

  I bow. I take a little sideways glance at her. Under the white powder her skin is lined and tired. She holds herself like a queen unbowed but for once anyone can see the effort.

  “Could you pardon him?” I ask. It is a risk to raise this, but I cannot let him face his death without a word.

  “No,” she says. “It would be to put a knife in the hand of every assassin in the country. And what is to stop him plotting again? We cannot trust him anymore. And, God knows she will weave plots till the very moment of her death.”

  I feel myself freeze at the threat to her. “You would not accuse her next? You would not allow Cecil to accuse her?”

  The queen shakes her head. “She is a queen. She is not subject to my laws unless I know that she has conspired to kill me. There is no evidence that she plotted my death. No other accusation can stand against her.”

  “If she could be set free…”

  “She will never be free,” she says bluntly. “This plot with Ridolfi has cost her that, at least. The Scots would not have her back now if I begged them, and I can release her to no one. She has shown herself as my enemy. I shall keep her imprisoned forever.”

  “In the Tower?”

  The face she turns to me is hard like a basilisk’s. “I shall leave her with you for the rest of her life,” she says. “That can be your punishment as well as hers.”

  Istumble from her presence chamber before she can curse me with worse, and I go home to my London house. I cannot sleep. I get up from my bed and walk the quiet streets. No one is about but whores and spies and neither of them trouble me tonight.

  I find my way to the Tower. The thick walls are black against the silver quietness of the river, and then I see the royal barge coming swiftly downriver with the royal standard discreetly lashed. The queen too is restless tonight.

  The barge goes silently in the watergate, where she herself once went in as a traitor and cried in the rain and said she would go no farther. I walk to the little barred gate in the great wall, and a porter recognizes me and lets me in. Like a ghost I stand in the shadow of the great walls and see the queen go quietly into the Tower. She has come to see the duke, her cousin, her closest kin, on the very eve of his death. There is no doubt in my mind that she will forgive him. No one could send Thomas Howard to his death if they had seen his pride humbled, and his handsome face lined with pain, but at the very door of his chamber, she shies away. She cannot bear to see him, but she decides to spend the night under the same roof: he in his cell, she in the royal chamber. He will never even know that she is there, sharing his agony. She knows he will be awake: praying and preparing for his death at dawn, writing to his children, begging them to care for each other. He has no idea that she is so close to him as he readies himself for death on her orders. But she is housed beside him, sleepless as he is sleepless, watching for dawn through the windows of the same building, hearing the light rain drizzle on the same roof. God knows what is going through her mind; she must be in an agony of indecision to undertake such a vigil with him.

  She knows that he has to die. All her advisors say that she must harden her heart and have him executed. He may be her cousin and beloved to her, but he is a known and declared rebel. Alive, he would be a figurehead for every traitor, every day, for the rest of her reign. Forgiven, he would make every spy hope for forgiveness, and how would Cecil rule by terror if we were known to have a merciful queen? Cecil’s England is darkened by apprehension. He cannot have a queen who turns kind. Howard is a challenge to the rule of terror whether he likes it or not. He has to die.

  But this is her cousin that she has loved from childhood. We all know and love him. We all have a story about his temper or his wit, about his absurd pride and his wonderful taste. We have all relished his lavish hospitality; we have all admired his great lands, the fidelity of his servants, the devotion that he showed to his wives; this is a man I have been proud to call my friend. We all care for his children, who will be orphans tomorrow, another generation of heartbroken Howards. We all want this man to live. Yet tomorrow I will stand before his scaffold and witness his execution and then go down the river and tell his cousin the queen that he is dead.

  I am thinking of all this as I walk along the cold lane around the White Tower, and then I check as two women are coming the other way. In the flicker of the torchlight I see the queen, walking with a lady-in-waiting behind her, a yeoman of the guard behind the two of them, his torch smoking in the cold air from the river.

  “You here too?” she says quietly to me.

  I take my hat from my head and I kneel on the wet cobbles.

  “Sleepless too, old man?” she says with a ghost of a smile.

  “Sleepless and sad,” I say.

  “I too,” she says with a sigh. “But if I forgive him, I sign my own death warrant.”

  I stand up. “Walk with me,” she says and puts her hand in my arm. We go together, slowly, the white stonework of the Tower beside us gleaming in the moonlight. Together we walk up the steps to the open grass of Tower Green, where the scaffold is new-built and smelling of fresh wood, like a stage waiting for players, expectant.

  “Pray God it stops here,” she says, looking at the scaffold where her own mother put down her head. “If you can stop her plotting, Shrewsbury, this can be the last man who dies for her.”

  I cannot promise. The other queen will go to her grave demanding her freedom, asserting the sanctity of her person. I know this now, as I know her: she is a woman I have loved and studied for years.

  “You would never execute her?” I say, very low.

  The white face Elizabeth turns to me is that of a gorgon in her cold forbidding beauty, a dangerous angel. The torch behind her gives her a halo of gold like a saint, but the flicker of smoke smells of sulfur. The sight of her, a queen triumphant, ringed with fire, strange and silent, fills me with wordless terror as if she were some kind of portent, a blazing comet, foretelling death.

  “She says her person is sacred but it is not sacred,” she says quietly. “Not anymore. She is Bothwell’s whore and my prisoner; she is not a sanctified queen anymore. The common people call her a whore; she has destroyed her own magic. She is my cousin but—see here—tonight she has taught me to kill my own kin. She has forced me to put my own family on the block. She is a woman and a queen as I am, and she herself has shown me that a woman and a queen is not immune from assassins. She herself has shown me how to put a knife to the throat of a queen. I pray that I will not have to execute her. I pray that it stops here, with my cousin, with my beloved