The Other Queen Read online

  I am a queen at bay.

  1568, WINTER,

  BOLTON CASTLE:

  GEORGE

  They have her ringed with torches, like a witch held in by fire, ready for burning. As I run up, my breath is coming hard and my chest is tight, my heart is pounding from the sudden alarm, I sense the stillness around her as if they are all frozen by an enchantment. As if she were a witch indeed and the mere sight of her has turned them all to stone. Her hand holds back her hood from her face and I can see her dark hair, cropped jagged and short as an urchin’s, the white oval of her face, and her dark luminous eyes. She looks at me, unsmiling, and I cannot look away. I should bow, but I cannot bow. I should introduce myself, at this, our first meeting, but I am lost for words. Someone should be here to present me; I should have a herald to announce my titles. But I feel as if I am naked before her: it is just her and just me, facing each other like enemies across the flames.

  I stare at her and take in every aspect of her. I just stare and stare like a schoolboy. I want to speak to her, to introduce myself as her new host and her guardian. I want to seem an urbane man of the world to this cosmopolitan princess. But I gag on words, I can find neither French nor English. I should reproach her for this wanton attempt at escape, but I am struck dumb, as if I am powerless, as if I were horrified by her.

  The blazing torches give her a crimson halo, as if she were a burning saint, a fiery saint of red and gold, but the sulfurous smell of the smoke is the very stink of hell. She looks like a being from unearthly regions, neither woman nor boy, a gorgon in her cold forbidding beauty, a dangerous angel. The sight of her, ringed with fire, strange and silent, fills me with wordless terror as if she were some kind of portent, a blazing comet, foretelling my death or disaster. I am most afraid, though I don’t know why, and I stand before her and I can say nothing, like an unwilling disciple terrified into adoration, though I don’t know why.

  1568–9, WINTER,

  TUTBURY CASTLE:

  BESS

  Mary, this most troublesome queen, delays as long as she can. Someone has told her that Tutbury Castle is no fit place for a queen of the blood and now Her Grace refuses to come here and demands to be sent to her good cousin’s court, where she knows well enough that they are celebrating the twelve days of Christmas with feasts and dancing and music, and at the heart of it all will be Queen Elizabeth, with a light heart and light feet, darting around and laughing because the Scots, the greatest threat to the peace of her country, are all falling out amongst themselves, and the greatest rival to her power, the other Queen of England, their queen, is a prisoner without plans for release. Or honored guest, as I believe I am to call her, as I set about making Tutbury something more than a rapidly improvised dungeon.

  I must say that Mary Queen of Scots is not the only one who would rather be at Hampton Court this Christmas season and can find little joy in the prospect of a long cold winter at Tutbury. I hear from my friends who send me all the gossip that there is a new suitor for Elizabeth’s hand, the Austrian archduke who would ally us with Spain and the Hapsburgs, and Elizabeth is beside herself with the sudden surging of lust for her last chance to be a wife and a mother. I know how the court will be: my friend Robert Dudley will be smiling but guarded—the last thing he wants at court is a rival to his constant courtship of the queen. Elizabeth will be in a fever of vanity, every day will bring new pretty things to her rooms, and her women will rejoice in the spoil of her castoffs. Cecil will manage everything to the outcome of his choosing, whatever that may be. And I should be there, watching and gossiping with everyone else.

  My son Henry, at service in Robert Dudley’s household, writes me that Dudley will never allow a marriage which would displace him from Elizabeth’s side, and that he will oppose Cecil as soon as that old fox shows his hand. But I am for the marriage—any marriage. Pray God that she will have him. She has left it as late as any woman dare; she is thirty-five, dangerously old to give birth to a first child, but she will have to grit her teeth and do it. We have to have a son from her; we have to have an heir to the throne of England. We have to see where we are going.

  England is a business, an estate like any other. We have to be able to plan ahead. We have to know who will inherit and what he will get; we have to foresee what he will do with his inheritance. We have to see our next master and know what his plans will be. We have to know whether he will be Lutheran or Papist. Those of us living in rebuilt abbeys and dining off church silver are especially anxious to know this. Please God this time she settles on this suitor, marries him, and gives us a new steady Protestant master for the trade of England.

  Elizabeth is a hard mistress to serve, I think, as I command the carpenters to mend the gaps in the floorboards. This would have been our first Christmas at court, for me and my lord the earl. Our first Christmas as newlyweds, the first Christmas I would have been a countess at court, where I should have sparkled like a snowflake and taken great joy in settling old scores from my newly raised position. But instead, the queen allowed my husband the earl only a couple of days with me before dispatching him to Bolton Castle to fetch the Scots queen while I set to work on this hovel.

  The more I repair this half-ruined wreck of a house, the more ashamed of it I am, though God knows it is no fault of mine. No house of mine would ever fall into disrepair like this. All of my properties—most of which came to me through the good management of my second husband, William Cavendish—were renovated and rebuilt as soon as we acquired them. We never bought anything without improving it. Cavendish prided himself on parceling together plots of land and swapping one farm for another till he made a handsome estate, which I would then run at a profit. He was a careful man, a great businessman, an older man, over forty when he married me, his bride of nineteen.

  He taught me how to keep an accounts book for our household and make it up every week, as faithfully as reading a sermon on Sunday. When I was little more than a girl, I used to bring my household book to him like a child with her schoolwork, and he would go through it with me on a Sunday evening, as if we were saying our prayers together, like a pious father and daughter, our heads side by side over the book, our voices murmuring the numbers.

  After the first month or so, when he saw that I had such an aptitude and such a love for the figures themselves, as well as the wealth they represented, he let me see the accounts book for the small manor he had just bought, and said that I could keep it too, to see if I would manage it well. I did so. Then, as he bought more properties, I took care of them. I learned the wages of field laborers as well as house-maids; I learned how much we should pay for carting as well as for washing the windows. I started to run his farms as I ran our house and I kept the books for them all the same.

  He taught me that it means nothing to own land or money as the old lords own their estates and waste them from one generation to another. Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have. He taught me to love the order of a well-kept accounts book and how the bottom of the page at the end of each week should show the balance between money coming in and money going out, so that you know, and know to a penny, whether you are ahead in the world or behind.

  Cavendish told me that this is not how the great lords do it. Many of their stewards do not even keep the books like this, the new way, with receipts and expenses put side by side for comparison, and this is why, at the end of the day, we will do better than them. He told me that they treat their houses and their lands and their tenants and their fortunes as if they were all a great mass that cannot be calculated. So—since this is what they believe—they never try to calculate their wealth. They inherit and pass it on wholesale, without inventory. They lose and gain without keeping account. They have no idea whether a townhouse should rent out at a greater profit than a wheatfield. When they are taxed they guess at what they are worth; when they borrow money they cannot calculate their fortu