Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Mrs Carpenter said.

  ‘I’ll help,’ Anne said and dived out of the room. The other two and I regarded each other with silent dislike.

  ‘Did you have a good crossing?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ The tranced night on the deck and Daniel’s insistent touch seemed to be a long way away now.

  ‘And are you going to marry Daniel now?’

  ‘Mary! Really!’ her sister protested.

  ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t ask. It’s been a long enough betrothal. And if she is to be our sister-in-law we have a right to know.’

  ‘It’s between her and Daniel.’

  ‘It’s a matter for all of us.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said, to bring their wrangling to an end.

  They turned their bright inquisitive faces towards me. ‘Indeed,’ said Mary. ‘You’ve left court then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And will you not go back?’ the other one, Sarah, asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, keeping the regret from my voice.

  ‘Won’t you find it awfully dull here, after living at court? Daniel said that you were the queen’s companion and spent all the day with her.’

  ‘I shall help my father in the shop, I expect,’ I said.

  They both looked aghast as if the thought of working with books and the printing press was more daunting than marrying Daniel and living with them.

  ‘Where are you and Daniel going to sleep?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Mary! Really!’

  ‘Well, they can hardly bed down on the truckle bed,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘And Mother can’t be asked to move. And we have always had the best back bedroom.’

  ‘Daniel and I will decide,’ I said with an edge to my voice. ‘And if there is not enough room for us here we will set up our own house.’

  Mary gave a little scream of shock as her mother came up the stairs.

  ‘What is it, child?’ she demanded.

  ‘Hannah has not been in the house five minutes and already she says she and Daniel will live elsewhere!’ Mary exclaimed, halfway to tears. ‘Already she is taking Daniel away from us! Just as I knew she would! Just as I said – she will spoil everything!’ She leaped to her feet, tore open the door and ran up the stairs leading to her room, leaving the wooden door to bang behind her. We heard the creak of the rope bed as she flung herself on to it.

  ‘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 harbour. 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 market place 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 c