The Queen's Fool Read online

  Quietly she approached the bed. “How now, old friend?” she said. “I have come to bid you farewell.”

  My father said nothing but he smiled at her. Gently she slid her arm under his shoulders and raised him up, turned him on his side so that he could face the wall, his back to the room. Then she sat by his side and recited all the prayers for the dying that she could remember.

  “Good-bye, Father,” I said softly. “Good-bye, Father. Good-bye.”

  Daniel cared for me as he had promised he would. As son-in-law, all my father’s goods became his by right; but he signed them over to me in the same day. He came to the house and helped me to clear the few possessions that my father had kept through our long travels, and he asked Marie to stay on for the next few months. She could sleep downstairs in the kitchen, and would keep me company, and keep me safe at nights. Mrs. Carpenter frowned her disapproval at my unfeminine independence; but she managed to hold her peace.

  She made the preparations for the Requiem Mass and then the secret Jewish ceremony, done the same day, behind our closed door. When I thanked her she waved me away. “These are the ways of our People,” she said. “We have to remember them. We have to perform them. If we forget them, we forget ourselves. Your father was a great scholar among our People, he had books that had been all but forgotten and he had the courage to keep them safe. If it were not for men like him then we would not know the prayers that I said at his bedside. And now you know how it is done, and you can teach your children, and the way of our People can be handed down.”

  “It must be forgotten,” I said. “In time.”

  “No, why?” she said. “We remembered Zion by the rivers of Babylon, we remember Zion in the gates of Calais. Why should we ever forget?”

  Daniel did not ask me if I would forgive him and if we could start again as man and wife. He did not ask me if I was longing for a touch, for a kiss, longing to feel alive like a young woman in springtime and not always like a girl fighting against the world. He did not ask me if I felt, since my father was dead, that I was terribly alone in the world, and that I would always be Hannah alone, neither of the People, nor a wife, and now, not even a daughter. He did not ask me these things, I did not volunteer them, and so we parted kindly on my doorstep, with a sense of sadness and regret, and I imagine he went home and called on the way at the house of the plump fair-haired mother of his son, and I went into my house and closed my door and sat in darkness for a long time.

  The cold months were always hard for me, my Spanish blood was still too thin for the damp days of a northern coastal winter, and Calais was little better than London had been under driving rain and gray skies. Without my father I felt as if some of the chill of the sea and the skies had crept into the very blood of my veins, and into my eyes, since I wept unaccountably for no reason. I gave up dining properly, but ate like a printer’s lad with a hacked-off slice of bread in one hand and a cup of milk in the other. I did not observe the dietary restrictions as my father liked us to do, I did not light the candle for the Sabbath. I worked on the Sabbath, and I printed secular books and jest books and texts of plays and poems as if learning did not matter any more. I let my faith drift away with my hopes of happiness.

  I could not sleep well at night but during the day I could hardly set type for yawning. Trade in the shop was slow; when the times were so uncertain no one cared for any books except prayer books. Many times I went down to the harbor and greeted travelers coming from London and asked them for news, thinking that perhaps I should go back to England and see if the queen would forgive me and welcome me back to her service.

  The news they brought from England was as dark as the afternoon skies. King Philip was visiting his wife in London but he had brought her little joy, and everyone said he had only gone home to see what he could have from her. There was some vile gossip that he had taken his mistress with him and they danced every day under the queen’s tortured gaze. She would have had to sit on her throne and see him laughing and dancing with another woman, and then endure him raging against her council who were dragging their heels in the war against France.

  I wanted to go to her. I thought that she must feel desperately friendless in a court that had become all Spanish and wickedly joyful once more, headed by a new mistress of the king’s and laughing at the English lack of sophistication. But the other news from England was that the burning of heretics was continuing without mercy, and I knew there was no safety for me in England — nor anywhere, come to that.

  I resolved to stay in Calais, despite the cold, despite my loneliness, stay and wait, and hope that someday soon I should feel more able to decide, that someday soon I should recover my optimism, that someday, one day, I should find once more my sense of joy.

  Summer 1557

  By early summer the streets were filled with the sound of recruiting officers marching along, drumming and whistling for lads to volunteer for the English army to fight the French. The harbor was a continual bustle of ships coming and going, unloading weapons and gunpowder and horses. In the fields outside the city a little camp had sprung up and soldiers were marched here and there, and bawled at, and marched back again. All I knew was that the extra traffic through the city gate did not bring much extra trade. The officers and men of this ramshackle hastily recruited army were not great scholars, and I was afraid of their bright acquisitive gaze. The town became unruly with the hundreds of extra men coming through and I took to wearing a pair of dark breeches, tucked my hair up under my cap, and donned a thick jerkin, despite the summer heat. I carried a dagger in my boot and I would have used it if anyone had come against me or broken into the shop. I kept Marie, my father’s nurse, as my lodger and she and I bolted the door at six o’clock every night and did not open it until the morning, blowing out our candles if we heard brawling in the street.

  The harbor was almost blocked by incoming ships; as soon as the men marched from the fields outside the town toward the outlying forts, the camp immediately filled with more soldiers. The day the cavalry troops clattered through the town I thought that our chimney pot would be shaken from the roof by the noise. Other women of my age lined the streets, cheering and waving as the men went by, throwing flowers and eyeing the officers; but I kept my head down. I had seen enough death; my heart did not leap to the whistle of the pipes and the urgent rattle of the drums. I saw Daniel’s sisters walking arm-in-arm on the ramparts in their best dresses, managing to look modestly down and all around them at the same time, desperate for some attention from any passing English officer. I could not imagine feeling desire. I could not imagine the excitement that seemed to have gripped everyone but me. All I felt was worry about my stock if the men ran out of control, and gratitude that I had chosen by luck a house which was one yard inside the city gate instead of one yard outside.

  By midsummer the English army, marshaled, half trained and wholly wild for a fight, moved out of Calais, led by King Philip himself. They launched an attack on St. Quentin, and in August stormed the town and won it from the French. It was a resounding victory against a hated enemy. The citizens of Calais, ambitious to reclaim the whole of the lost English lands in France, went mad with joy at this first sign, and every returning soldier was laden with flowers and had a horn of wine pressed into his willing hand and was blessed as the savior of his nation.

  I saw Daniel at church on Sunday when the priest preached the victory of God’s chosen people over the treacherous French, and then, to my amazement, he prayed for the safe delivery of the queen of a son and heir to the throne. For me, it was better news even than the taking of St. Quentin, and for the first time in long months I felt my heart lift. When I thought of her carrying a child in her womb again I felt my downturned face lift up and smile. I knew how glad she must be, how this must bring her back to the joy she had felt in early marriage, how she must think now that God had forgiven the English and she might become a gentle queen and a good mother.

  When Daniel came up to me as we all lef