The Queen's Fool Read online

  I glanced up at him, his dark face was scowling with anxiety.

  “Are you all right?” my father asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course I am.”

  Daniel took his cape from his shoulders. “You say, ‘of course,’” he complained. “But the town is full of the roughest of soldiers, and you are dressed as a woman now, you don’t have the protection of the queen and you don’t even know your way around.”

  I disengaged myself from Daniel’s arms and pulled out a stool from the shop counter. “I survived crossing half of Christendom,” I said mildly. “I should think I could manage for two hours in Calais.”

  “You’re a young lady now,” my father reminded me. “Not a child passing as a boy. You shouldn’t even be out on your own in the evening.”

  “Shouldn’t be out at all except to go to market or church,” Daniel’s mother supplemented robustly from her perch on the stairs.

  “Hush,” Daniel said gently to her. “Hannah is safe, that’s the main thing. And hungry, I’m sure. What do we have left for her, Mother?”

  “It’s all gone,” she said unhelpfully. “You had the last of the potage yourself, Daniel.”

  “I didn’t know that was all there was!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t we save some for Hannah?”

  “Well, who knew when she would come home?” his mother asked limpidly. “Or whether she was dining out somewhere?”

  “Come on,” Daniel said impatiently to me, pulling at my hand.

  “Where to?” I asked, slipping from the stool.

  “I am taking you to the tavern to get dinner.”

  “I can find her some bread and a slice of beef,” his mother offered at once at the prospect of the two of us going out alone together to dine.

  “No,” Daniel said. “She’s to have a proper hot dinner and I’ll take a mug of ale. Don’t wait up for us, Mother, nor you, sir.” He slung his cloak around my shoulders and swept me out of the door before his mother could suggest that she came too, and we were out in the street before his sisters had time to remark that I was not properly dressed for an evening out.

  We walked in silence to the tavern at the end of the road. There was a tap room at the front of the building but a good parlor for travelers at the back. Daniel ordered some broth and some bread, a plate of meats and two mugs of small ale, and we sat down in one of the high-backed settles, and for the first time since I had come to Calais I felt that we might talk alone and uninterrupted for more than a snatched moment.

  “Hannah, I am so sorry,” he said as soon as the maid had put our drinks before us, and gone. “I am deeply, deeply sorry for what I have done.”

  “Does she know you are married?”

  “Yes, she knew I was betrothed when we first met, and I told her I was going to England to fetch you and we would be married when we returned.”

  “Does she not mind?”

  “Not now,” he said. “She has become accustomed.”

  I said nothing. I thought it most unlikely that a woman who had fallen in love with a man and borne his child would become accustomed within a year to him marrying someone else.

  “Did you not want to marry her when you knew she was carrying your child?”

  He hesitated. The landlord came with the broth and bread and meat and fussed around the table, which gave us a chance for silence. Then he left and I took a spoonful of broth and a mouthful of bread. It was thick in my mouth but I was not going to look as if I had lost my appetite through heartache.

  “She is not one of the People,” Daniel said simply. “And, in any case, I wanted to marry you. When I knew she was with child I was ashamed of what I had done; but she knew I did not love her, and that I was promised to you. She did not expect me to marry her. So I gave her a sum of money for a dowry and I pay her every month for the boy’s keep.”

  “You wanted to marry me, but not enough to stay away from other women,” I remarked bitterly.

  “Yes,” he admitted. He did not flinch from the truth even when it was told baldly out of the mouth of an angry woman. “I wanted to marry you, but I did not stay away from another woman. But what about you? Is your conscience utterly clear, Hannah?”

  I let it go, though it was a fair accusation. “What’s the child named?”

  He took a breath. “Daniel,” he said and saw me flinch.

  I took a mouthful of broth and crammed the bread down on top of it and chewed, though I wanted to spit it at him.

  “Hannah,” he said very gently.

  I bit into a piece of meat.

  “I am sorry,” he said again. “But we can overcome this. She makes no claims against me. I will support the child but I need not go and see her. I shall miss the boy, I hoped to see him grow up, but I will understand if you cannot tolerate me seeing her. I will give him up. You and I are young. You will forgive me, we will have a child of our own, we will find a better house. We will be happy.”

  I finished my mouthful and washed it down with a swig of ale. “No,” I said shortly.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘No.’ Tomorrow I shall buy a boy’s suit and my father and I will find new premises for the bookshop. I shall work as his apprentice again. I shall never wear high-heeled shoes again, as long as I live. They pinch my feet. I shall never trust a man again, as long as I live. You have hurt me, Daniel, and lied to me and betrayed me and I will never forgive you.”

  He went very white. “You cannot leave me,” he said. “We are married in the sight of God, our God. You cannot break an oath to God. You cannot break your pledge to me.”

  I rose to it as if it were a challenge. “I care nothing for your God, nor for you. I shall leave you tomorrow.”

  We spent a sleepless night. There was nowhere to go but home and we had to lie side by side, stiff as bodkins in the darkness of the bedroom with his mother alert behind one wall, and his sisters agog on the other side. In the morning I took my father out of the house and told him that my mind was made up and that I would not live with Daniel as his wife.

  He responded to me as if I had grown a head from beneath my shoulders, become a monstrous strange being from a faraway island. “Hannah, what will you do with your life?” he said anxiously. “I cannot be always with you, who will protect you when I am gone?”

  “I shall go back to royal service, I shall go to the princess or to my lord,” I said.

  “Your lord is a known traitor and the princess will be married to one of the Spanish princes within the month.”

  “Not her! She’s not a fool. She would not marry a man and trust him! She knows better than to put her heart into a man’s keeping.”

  “She cannot live alone any more than you can live alone.”

  “Father, my husband has betrayed me and shamed me. I cannot take him back as if nothing had happened. I cannot live with his sisters and his mother all whispering behind their hands every time he comes home late. I cannot live as if I belonged here.”

  “My child, where do you belong if not here? If not with me? If not with your husband?”

  I had my answer: “I belong nowhere.”

  My father shook his head. A young woman always had to be placed somewhere, she could not live unless she was bolted down in one service or another.

  “Father, please let us set up a little business on our own, as we did in London. Let me help you in the printing shop. Let me live with you and we can be at peace and make our living here.”

  He hesitated for a long moment, and suddenly I saw him as a stranger might see him. He was an old man and I was taking him from a home where he had become comfortable.

  “What will you wear?” he asked finally.

  I could have laughed out loud, it mattered so little to me. But I realized that it signified to him whether he had a daughter who could appear to fit into this world or whether I would be, eternally, out of step with it.

  “I will wear a gown if you wish,” I said to please him. “But I will wear boots underneath i