The Queen's Fool Read online

  I had not expected his wife Amy at the quayside, but she was there, hand over her eyes, scanning the deck for him. I saw her before she saw him and said, “Your wife,” in his ear.

  He went quickly down the gangplank to her, he did not take her in his arms nor greet her with any sign of affection, but he listened intently to her and then he turned to me.

  “I have to go to court, I have to explain to the queen what has happened at Calais,” he said briefly. “Heads will have to roll for this, perhaps mine.”

  “My lord,” I breathed.

  “Yes,” he said savagely. “I don’t seem to have done much to advance my family. Hannah, you go with Amy, she is staying with friends in Sussex. I shall send for you there.”

  “My lord.” I went a little closer. “I don’t want to live in the country,” was all I could say.

  Robert Dudley grinned at me. “I am sure, sweetheart. I cannot stand it myself. But you must endure it for a month or two. If the queen beheads me for incompetence, then you can make your own way where you please. All right? But if I survive this, I will open my London house and you shall come back to my service. Whatever you wish. How old is the child?”

  I hesitated, realizing I did not know. “He’s nearly two,” I said.

  “You married his father?” he asked.

  I looked him in the face. “Yes.”

  “And named him?”

  “Daniel, for his father.”

  He nodded. “Amy will take care of you,” he said. “She likes children.” A snap of his fingers summoned his wife to his side. I saw her shake her head in disagreement, and then lower her eyes when she was overruled. When she shot me a look of pure hatred I guessed that he had ordered her to care for me and my son, when she would rather have gone with him to the queen’s court.

  She had brought his horse. I watched him swing up into his saddle, his men mount up around him. “London,” he said succinctly and rode his horse north toward whatever fate had for him.

  I could not get the measure of Amy Dudley as we rode through the icy countryside of England in those cold days of January 1558. She was a good rider but she seemed to take little pleasure in it, not even on the days when the sun rose like a red disk on the horizon and when a few robins hopped and hid in the leafless hedgerows, and the frost in the morning made the blood sing. I thought it was the absence of her husband that made her so sulky; but her companion, Mrs. Oddingsell, did not try to cheer her, they did not even speak of him. They rode in silence, as women accustomed to it.

  I had to ride behind them, all the way from Gravesend to Chichester, with the baby strapped on my back and every evening I was aching from my buttocks to my neck with the strain. The extraordinary child had barely made a noise from the moment that his mother had half flung him at me as the French cavalry rode her down. I had changed his clout with some linen lent to me on board ship, and wrapped him in a sailor’s woolen knitted vest and generally lugged him around as if he were a box that someone had insisted I carry against my will. He had not uttered one word of inquiry or protest. Sleeping, he had rested against me, nestled in as if he were my own; awake, he sat on my lap or on the floor at my feet, or stood, one hand holding firmly on to my breeches. He said not one word, not in French, the language of his mother, nor in English. He regarded me with solemn dark eyes and said nothing.

  He seemed to have a certainty that he should be with me. He would not fall asleep unless I was watching him, and if I tried to put him down and move away from him he would raise himself up and toddle after me, still silent, still uncomplaining, but with a little face which became more and more crumpled with distress as he got left behind.

  I was not a naturally maternal woman, I had not been a girl for dolls, and of course there had been no baby brother or sister for me to nurse. Yet I could not help but admire this small person’s tenacity. I had suddenly come into his life as his protector, and he would ensure that he stayed by my side. I started to like the feeling of his fat little hand stretching trustfully up for mine, I started to sleep well with him nestled against my side.

  Lady Amy Dudley did nothing to help me with him in the long cold ride. There was no reason that she should, she did not want me nor him. But it would have been kind of her to order one of the men to take me on a pillion saddle behind him, so that I might have held the child in my arms and eased my aching back. She must have seen that at the end of a long day in the saddle I was so exhausted that I could barely stand. It would have been kind of her to see me housed quickly, to have made sure that there was gruel for the baby. But she did nothing for me, nothing for him. She eyed us both with a glaring suspicion and said not one word to me, other than an order to be ready to leave at the appointed time.

  I felt the universal smugness of women with children and reminded myself that she was barren. I thought too that she suspected her husband of being the father of my child, and that she was punishing the two of us for her jealousy. I decided that I must make clear to her soon that I had not seen his lordship for years, and that I was now a married woman. But Amy Dudley gave me no chance to speak with her, she treated me as she treated the men who rode with her, as part of the cold landscape, as one of the ice-trimmed trees. She paid no attention to me at all.

  I had plenty of time to think as we went slowly south and west on the frozen roads, winding through villages and past fields where it was clear that hunger had hold of the land. The great barn doors stood open, there was neither hay nor straw to keep. The villages were often in darkness, the cottages empty. Some small hamlets were utterly deserted, the people despairing of making a living on the poor land in the continuously bad weather.

  I went down the empty roads with my eyes on the country which was bleak and so cursed; but my mind was on my husband and the town I had left. Now that our flight was over and we had arrived in a comparative safe haven, I was sick with fear for Daniel. Now I had time to realize that Daniel and I had lost each other again, and we had lost each other so finally that we might never meet. I did not even know if he was alive. We were trapped in countries at war with each other, and we had parted during the most bitter fighting that Christendom had ever seen. It would be impossible for me to return to him at Calais and for all I knew he could have been killed in that first vicious charge into the city, or he could be ill with the many contagious diseases that a wounded army would bring. I knew that he would think it his duty to go out to help the injured and the sick, and I could only pray for the unlikely hope that the French would show mercy to an enemy doctor in the town which had been a thorn in their side for two centuries.

  The arrival of the army would be followed by the French Catholic church, alert for heresy in a town which had once been proudly Protestant. If Daniel had escaped death during the fighting, if he had escaped disease from the soldiers, he might still be taken as a heretic if someone accused him of being a Jew.

  I knew that worrying about him helped neither of us, at all; but it was impossible to stop myself, as I rode along the cold hard roads. I could not get a letter into Calais until some sort of peace was declared and that would not be for months. Worse, I could not expect to hear from him, he would have no idea where I had gone or even if I were alive. When he went to my shop in the city wall to look for me, as he surely would do, he would find the place sacked or burned out, and not even Marie, supposing she had survived, would be able to tell him where I was. And then he would find that little Daniel’s mother was dead and that the boy was missing too. He would have no reason to guess that I and his son were together in safety in England. He would think that he had lost his wife and his child in one dreadful battle.

  I could not enjoy my safety when I knew that he might still be in danger, there could be no happiness for me until I knew that he was alive. I could not settle in England, I did not think I could settle anywhere until I knew that Daniel was safe. I rode along the cold roads, the weight of his son strapped awkwardly on my back, and I started to wonder at my own discomfort. S