Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  ‘Yes, it is time,’ was all he said. His voice was a thread. ‘You will be well, my child?’

  I put the book on the seat of my chair and knelt at his bedside. Effortfully he put his hand on my head for a blessing. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I whispered. ‘I will be all right. I have the shop and the press, I can earn a living, and Daniel will always look after me.’

  He nodded. Already he was drifting away, too far to give advice, too far to remonstrate. ‘I bless you, querida,’ he said gently.

  ‘Father!’ My eyes were filled with tears. I dropped my head to his bed.

  ‘Bless you,’ he said again and lay quietly.

  I levered myself back to my chair and blinked my eyes. Through the blur of tears I could hardly see the words. Then I started to read. ‘Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all of the house of Israel, speedily, yea soon; and say ye, Amen.’

  In the night when the nurse knocked on my door I was dressed, seated on my bed, and waiting for her to call me. I went to his bedside and saw his face, smiling, illuminated and without fear. I knew he was thinking of my mother and if there was any truth in his faith, or even in the faith of the Christians, then he would be greeting her soon in heaven. I said quietly to the nurse, ‘You can go and fetch the doctor Daniel Carpenter,’ and heard her patter down the stairs.

  I sat beside his bed and took his hand in mine and felt the slow pulse flutter like the heart of a small bird under my fingers. Downstairs, the door quietly opened and shut and I heard two pairs of footsteps come in.

  Daniel’s mother stood in the bedroom doorway. ‘I don’t intrude,’ she said quietly. ‘But you won’t know how things should be done.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘I have read the prayers.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘You’ve done it right, and I can do the rest. You can watch, and learn, so you know how it is done. So that you can do it for me, or for another, when my time comes.’

  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.

  ‘Goodbye, Father,’ I said softly. ‘Goodbye, Father. Goodbye.’

  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 grey 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 harbour and greeted travellers 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 some day soon I should feel more able to decide, that some day soon I should recover my optimism, that some day, 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 harbour 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 harbour was almost blocked by incoming ships; as soon as the men m