The Queen's Fool Read online

  “Oh, really!” her mother exclaimed in indignation. “This is ridiculous!”

  I was about to agree, and then I saw that she was looking accusingly at me.

  “How could you upset Mary on your very first day?” she demanded. “Everyone knows that she is easily upset, and she loves her brother. You will have to learn to mind your tongue, Miss Hannah. You are living with a family now. You have not the right to speak out like a fool any more.”

  For one stunned moment I said nothing to defend myself. Then: “I am sorry,” I said through my teeth.

  Summer 1556

  It was a long hot summer, that first summer in Calais. I greeted the sunshine as if I were a pagan ready to worship it, and when Daniel told me he was persuaded by the new theory that the earth revolved around the sun in the great vastness of space, and not the other way around, I had to acknowledge that it made perfect sense to me too, as I felt myself unfold into the heat.

  I loitered in the squares, and dawdled at the fish quay to see the dazzle of sunlight on the ripples of the harbor. They called it le Bassin du Paradis, and in the bright sunlight I thought it was paradise indeed. Whenever I could, I made an excuse to leave the town and slip out through the gates where the casual sentries watched the townspeople coming and going and the country people arriving. I strolled in the little vegetable plots outside the city walls to sniff at the freshness of the growth in the warm earth, and I pined to go further, down to the beach to see the waves breaking on the shore, across the marshlands where the herons stood eyeing their own tall reflections, out to the country where I could see the darkness of the woods against the light green meadows.

  It felt like a long summer and it was a breathtakingly tedious season for me. Daniel and I were under the same roof but we had to live as maid and suitor, we were hardly ever left alone together. I longed for his touch, for his kiss, and for the pleasure that he had given me on the night that we sailed to France. But he could hardly bear to come near me, knowing that he must always step back, knowing that he must never do more than kiss my lips or my hand. Even the scent of me, as I passed him on the stairs or in the narrow rooms, would make him tremble, and when he touched my fingers as he passed me a plate or a glass I would long for his caress. Neither of us would show our desire to the bright curiosity of his sisters, but we could not wholly hide it, and I hated the way their gaze flicked from one of us to the other.

  I was out of my breeches and into a gown in the first week and soon experiencing a constant tuition in how a young lady should behave. It seemed there was a tacit agreement between my father and Daniel’s mother that she should coach me in the skills that a young woman should possess. Everything my mother had taught me of domestic skills I appeared to have left behind when we fled from Spain. And since then, no one had taught me how to brew and bake, how to churn butter, how to squeeze the whey from cheese. No one had taught me how to lay down linen in henbane and lavender in a linen chest, how to set a table, how to skim for cream. My father and I had lived, agreeably enough, as a working man and his apprentice. At court I had learned sword fighting, tumbling and wit from Will Somers, political caution and desire from Robert Dudley, mathematics from John Dee, espionage from Princess Elizabeth. Clearly, I had no useful skills for a young doctor’s home. I was not much of a young woman and not much of a wife. Daniel’s mother had awarded herself the task of “taking me in hand.”

  She found a sulky and unwilling pupil. I was not naturally gifted at housekeeping. I did not want to know how to scour a brass pan with sand so that it glittered. I did not want to take a scrubbing brush to the front step. I did not want to peel potatoes so that there was no waste at all, and feed the peelings to the hens that we kept in a little garden outside the city walls. I wanted to know none of these things, and I did not see why I should learn them.

  “As my wife you will need to know how to do such things,” Daniel said reasonably enough. I had slipped out to waylay him where his road home from work crossed the marketplace before the great Staple Hall, so that I could speak with him before he entered the house and we both fell under his mother’s rule.

  “Why should I know? You don’t do them.”

  “Because I will be out at work and you will be caring for our children and preparing their food,” he said.

  “I thought I would keep a printing shop, like my father.”

  “And who would cook and clean for us?”

  “Couldn’t we have a maid?”

  He choked on a laugh. “Perhaps, later on. But I couldn’t afford to pay wages for a maid at first, you know, Hannah. I am not a wealthy man. When I set up in practice on my own we will have only my fees to live on.”

  “And will we have a house of our own then?”

  He drew my hand through his elbow as if he were afraid that I might pull away at his answer.

  “No,” he said simply. “We will find a bigger house, perhaps in Genoa. But I will always offer a house to my sisters and to my mother; to your father too. Surely, you would want nothing less?”

  I said nothing. To tell the truth, I did want to live with my father, and with Daniel. It was his mother and his sisters I found hard to bear. But I could hardly say to him that I would choose to live with my father but not with his mother.

  “I thought we would be alone together,” I said mendaciously.

  “I have to care for my mother and sisters,” he said. “It is a sacred trust. You know that.”

  I nodded. I did know it.

  “Have they been unkind to you?”

  I shook my head. I could not complain of their treatment of me. I slept every night in a truckle bed in the girls’ room and every night as I fell asleep I heard them whispering in the big bed at my side, and I imagined they were talking about me. In the morning they drew the curtains of the bed so that I should not see them as they dressed. They emerged to comb and plait each other’s hair before the little mirror and cast sideways glances at my growing mop of hair only half covered by my cap. My dresses and linen were all new and were the focus of much silent envy, and occasional secret borrowing. They were, in short, as spiteful and as unkind as girls working in concert can be, and many nights I turned my face into my hay mattress and cried in silence for sheer frustrated anger.

  Daniel’s mother never said a word to me that could be cited against her to her son. She never said a thing that I could quote in a complaint. Insidiously, almost silently, she made me feel that I was not good enough for Daniel, not good enough for her family, an inadequate young woman in every domestic task, an awkward young woman in appearance, a faulty young woman in religious observation, and an undutiful daughter and potentially a disobedient wife. If she had ever spoken the truth she would have said that she did not like me; but it seemed to me that she was absolutely opposed to speaking the truth about anything.

  “Then we surely can live happily together,” Daniel said. “Safe at last. Together at last. You are happy, aren’t you, my love?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t get on very well with your sisters, and your mother does not approve of me,” I said quietly.

  He nodded, I was telling him nothing he did not know. “They’ll come round,” he said warmly. “They’ll come round. We have to stay together. For our own safety and survival we have to stay together, and we will all learn to change our ways a little and to be happy.”

  I nodded, hiding my many, very many, reservations. “I hope so,” I said and watched him smile.

  We were married in late June, as soon as all my gowns were made and my hair long enough for me to be — as Daniel’s mother said — passable, at l’Eglise de Notre Dame, the great church of Calais, where the vaulting columns looked like those of a French cathedral but they ran up to a great English church tower set square on the top. It was a Christian wedding with a Mass afterward and every one of us was meticulous in our observation of the rituals in church. Afterward, in the privacy of the little house in London Street, Daniel’s sisters held a shawl as a chuppah