The Queen's Fool Read online

  Daniel mastered himself, and came back to me.

  “You do wrong to taunt me, Hannah Green,” he said, his voice trembling with his intensity. “Whatever else, we are promised to one another. You hold my life in your hands and I hold yours in mine. We should not disagree. This is a dangerous world for us. We should cleave together for our own safety.”

  “There is no safety,” I said coldly. “You have lived too long in this quiet country if you think there is ever any safety for such as us.”

  “We can make a home here,” he said earnestly. “You and I can be married and have children who will be English children. They will know nothing but this life, we need not even tell them of your mother, of her faith. Nor of our own.”

  “Oh, you’ll tell them,” I predicted. “You say you won’t now, but once we have a child you won’t be able to resist it. And you’ll find ways to light the candle on Friday night and not to work on the Sabbath. You’ll be a doctor then, you will circumcise the boys in secret and teach them the prayers. You’ll have me teach the girls to make unleavened bread and to keep the milk from the meat and to drain the blood from the beef. The moment you have children of your own you will want to teach them. And so it goes on, like some sickness that we pass on, one to another.”

  “It’s no sickness,” he whispered passionately. Even in the midst of our quarrel, nothing would make us raise our voices. We were always aware of the shadows in the garden, always alert to the possibility that someone might be listening. “It is an insult to call it a sickness. It is our gift, we are chosen to keep faith.”

  I would have argued for the sake of contradicting him, but it went against the deeper grain of my love for my mother and her faith. “Yes,” I said, surrendering to the truth. “It is not a sickness, but it kills us just as if it were. My grandmother and my aunt died of it, my mother too. And this is what you propose to me. A lifetime of fear, not Chosen so much as cursed.”

  “If you don’t want to marry me, then you can marry a Christian and pretend that you know nothing more,” he pointed out. “None of us would betray you. I would let you go. You can deny the faith that your mother and your grandmother died for. Just say the word and I shall tell your father that I wish to be released.”

  I hesitated. For all that I had bragged of my courage, I did not dare to tell my father that I would overthrow his plans. I did not dare to tell the old women who had arranged all of this, thinking only of my safety and Daniel’s future, that I wanted none of it. I wanted to be free; I did not want to be cast out.

  “I don’t know,” I said, a girl’s plea. “I’m not ready to say… I don’t know yet.”

  “Then be guided by those who do,” he said flatly. He saw me bridle at that. “Look, you can’t fight everyone,” he advised me. “You have to choose where you belong and rest there.”

  “It’s too great a cost for me,” I whispered. “For you it is a good life, the home is made around you, the children come, you sit at the head of the table and lead the prayers. For me it is to lose everything I might be and everything I might do, and become nothing but your helpmeet and your servant.”

  “This is not being a Jew, this is being a girl,” he said. “Whether you married a Christian or a Jew, you would be his servant. What else can a woman be? Would you deny your sex as well as your religion?”

  I said nothing.

  “You are not a faithful woman,” he said slowly. “You would betray yourself.”

  “That’s a dreadful thing to say,” I whispered.

  “But true,” he maintained. “You are a Jew and you are a young woman and you are my betrothed, and all these things you would deny. Who do you work for in the court? The king? The Dudleys? Are you faithful to them?”

  I thought of how I had been pledged as a vassal, begged as a fool and appointed as a spy. “I just want to be free,” I said. “I don’t want to be anybody’s anything.”

  “In fool’s livery?”

  I saw my father looking toward us. He could sense that we were far from courtship. I saw him make a little tentative move as if to interrupt us, but then he waited.

  “Shall I tell them that we cannot agree and ask you to release me from our betrothal?” Daniel asked tightly.

  Willfully, I was about to agree, but his stillness, his silence, his patient waiting for my reply made me look at this young man, this Daniel Carpenter, more closely. The light was going from the sky and in the half darkness I could see the man he would become. He would be handsome, he would have a dark mobile face, a quick observing eye, a sensitive mouth, a strong straight nose like mine, thick black hair like mine. And he would be a wise man, he was a wise youth, he had seen me and understood me and contradicted my very core, and yet still he stood waiting. He would give me a chance. He would be a generous husband. He would want to be kind.

  “Leave me now,” I said feebly. “I can’t say now. I have said too much already. I am sorry for speaking out. I am sorry if I angered you.”

  But his anger had left him as quickly as it had come, and that was another thing that I liked in him.

  “Shall I come again?”

  “All right.”

  “Are we still betrothed?”

  I shrugged. There was too much riding on my answer. “I haven’t broken it,” I said, finding the easiest way out. “It’s not broken yet.”

  He nodded. “I shall need to know,” he warned me. “If I am not to marry you, then I could marry another. I shall want to marry within two years; you, or another girl.”

  “You have so many to choose from?” I taunted him, knowing that he had not.

  “There are many girls in London,” he returned. “I could marry outside our kin, well enough.”

  “I can see them allowing that!” I exclaimed. “You’ll have to marry a Jew, there’s no escape from that. They will send you a fat Parisian or a girl with skin the color of mud from Turkey.”

  “I would try to be a good husband even to a fat Parisian or to a young girl from Turkey,” he said steadily. “And it is more important to love and cherish the wife that God gives you than to run after some silly maid who does not know her own mind.”

  “Would that be me?” I asked sharply.

  I expected his color to rise but this time he did not blush. He met my eyes frankly and it was I who looked away first. “I think you are a silly maid if you turn from the love and protection of a man who would be a good husband, to a life of deceit at court.”

  My father came up beside Daniel before I could reply, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “And so you two are getting acquainted,” he said hopefully. “What d’you make of your wife-to-be, Daniel?”

  I expected Daniel to complain of me to my father. Most young men would have been all a-prickle with their pride stinging, but he gave me a small rueful smile. “I think we are coming to know each other,” he said gently. “We have overleaped being polite strangers and reached disagreement very quickly, don’t you think, Hannah?”

  “Commendably quick,” I said, and was rewarded by the warmth of his smile.

  Lady Mary came to London for the Candlemas feast, as had been planned; it seemed that no one had told her that her brother was too sick to rise from his bed. She rode in through the palace gate of Whitehall with a great train behind her, and was greeted at the very threshold of the palace by the duke, with his sons, including Lord Robert, at his side, and the council of England bowing low before her. Seated high on her horse, her small determined face looking down at the sea of humbly bowing heads, I thought I saw a smile of pure amusement cross her lips before she put down her hand to be kissed.

  I had heard so much about her, the beloved daughter of the king who had been put aside on the word of Anne Boleyn, the whore. The princess who had been humbled to dust, the mourning girl who had been forbidden to see her dying mother. I had expected a figure of tragedy: she had endured a life which would have broken most women; but what I saw was a stocky little fighter with enough wit about