Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  ‘I will see him hanged for this!’ she shouted into his face. ‘I will name him as a dealer with the devil, and she is nothing more than a witch and a whore.’

  ‘You will do nothing but make yourself a laughing stock,’ he said steadily. ‘Amy, you know what you are like. Be calm.’

  ‘How can I be calm when you shame me before your own friends?’

  ‘You are not shamed …’ he started.

  ‘I hate you!’ she suddenly screamed.

  John Dee and I shrank back against the wall and glanced longingly at the door, wishing to be away from this uproar.

  With a wail she tore herself from his grip and threw herself face down on the bed. She was screaming with grief, quite beside herself. John Dee and my lord exchanged an aghast look. There was a little tearing noise and I realised she had bitten the counterpane and was ripping it with her teeth.

  ‘Oh, for the sake of God!’ Robert took her shoulders and pulled her up from the bed. At once she went for his face with her nails, her hands clenched like a cat’s unsheathed claws. Robert grabbed her hands and bore her down till she fell on the floor, kneeling at his feet, her wrists in his grip.

  ‘I know you!’ she swore up at him. ‘If it is not her, then it is another. There is nothing about you but pride and lust.’

  His face, suffused with temper, slowly calmed, but he kept a tight hold of her hands. ‘I am a sinner indeed,’ he said. ‘But thank God, I at least am not crazed.’

  Her mouth trembled and then she let out a wail, looking up into his flinty face, the tears pouring from her eyes, her mouth drooling sobs. ‘I am not crazed, I am ill, Robert,’ she said despairingly. ‘I am sick of grief.’

  He met my eyes over her head. ‘Fetch Mrs Oddingsell,’ he said briefly. ‘She knows what to do.’

  I was transfixed for the moment, watching Amy Dudley grinding her teeth, scrabbling at her husband’s feet. ‘What?’

  ‘Get Mrs Oddingsell.’

  I nodded and went from the room. Half the household was busy on the landing outside the chamber. ‘Go to your work!’ I said abruptly, and then I ran down the long gallery to find Mrs Oddingsell seated before a mean fire at the cold end of the chamber.

  ‘Her ladyship is crying, and his lordship sent for you,’ I said baldly.

  She got to her feet at once, without surprise, and went quickly down the room. I half-ran beside her. ‘Has this happened before?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘Easily distressed by him.’

  I took that in, made allowances for a servant’s loyal lies. ‘Was she always like this?’

  ‘When they were young and in love it passed for passion. But she was only at peace when he was in the Tower – except for when the princess was imprisoned too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She was ill with jealousy, then.’

  ‘They were prisoners!’ I exclaimed. ‘They were hardly dancing in masques together.’

  Mrs Oddingsell nodded. ‘In her mind they were lovers. And now, he is free to come and go. And she knows that he is seeing the princess. He will break her heart. It is no figure of speech. She will die of this.’

  We were at Dr Dee’s door. I put a hand on her arm. ‘Are you her nurse?’ I asked.

  ‘More like her keeper,’ she said and quietly went in.

  The scrying was abandoned for the night, but the next day, when Lady Dudley kept to her room and was not to be seen, Dr Dee asked for my help in translating a prophecy that he thought might apply to the queen. I had to read a set of apparently disconnected Greek words to him which he carefully wrote down, each one having a numerical value. We met in the library, a room cold with disuse. Robert called for a fire to be lit in the grate and a servant came in and threw open the shutters.

  ‘It looks like code,’ I observed when they had finished and we were alone again.

  ‘It is the code of the ancients,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they even knew the code for life.’

  ‘A code for life?’

  ‘What if everything was made of the same things?’ he asked me suddenly. ‘Sand and cheese, milk and earth? What if beyond the illusion of difference, beyond their clothes as it were, there was only one form in the world, and one could see it, draw it, even recreate it?’

  I shook my head. ‘What then?’

  ‘That form would be the code of everything,’ he said. ‘That would be the poem at the heart of the world.’

  Danny, who had been sleeping on the broad footstool beside me as I wrote, stirred in his sleep and sat up, smiling around him. His beam widened when he saw my face. ‘Hello, my boy,’ I said gently.

  He slid down and toddled towards me, keeping a cautious hand on his chair, and then mine, to hold himself steady. He took hold of a fold of my gown and looked up attentively into my face.

  ‘He’s very quiet,’ John Dee said softly.

  ‘He does not speak,’ I said, smiling down at his upturned face. ‘But he is no fool. I know he understands everything. He will fetch things, and he knows their names. He knows his own name – don’t you, Danny? But he will not speak.’

  ‘Was he always like this?’

  The fear clenched at my heart: that I did not know what this child was like, and that if I admitted I did not know, someone might take him away from me. He was not my child, not born of my body, but his mother had put him into my arms and his father was my husband, and whatever I owed to my husband Daniel in terms of love and duty might be redeemed by my care for his son.

  ‘I don’t know, he was with his wet nurse in Calais,’ I lied. ‘She brought him to me when the city was under siege.’

  ‘He might be frightened,’ John Dee suggested. ‘Did he see the fighting?’

  My heart contracted, I could feel it like a pain. I looked at him incredulously. ‘Frightened? But he is only a little baby. How would he know when he was in danger?’

  ‘Who knows what he might think or understand?’ John Dee said. ‘I don’t believe that children know nothing but what is taught them, as if they were empty pots for the filling. He will have known one home and one woman caring for him, and then he might have been afraid, running through the streets to look for you. Children know more than we allow, I think. He might be afraid to speak now.’

  I leaned over him, and his bright dark eyes looked back at me, like the liquid eyes of a little deer. ‘Daniel?’ I asked.

  For the first time I thought of him as a real person, someone who might think and feel, someone who had been in the arms of his mother and felt himself thrust violently from her, into the arms of a stranger. Someone who had seen his mother ridden down by a horse and gored by a lance, who had seen his mother die in the gutter and then felt himself carried like an unwanted parcel on a boat, unloaded without explanation in England, jolted and jogged on the back of a horse to some cold house in the middle of nowhere, with no-one he knew.

  This was a child who had seen his mother die. This was a child without a mother. I leaned over him, I could feel the prickle of hot tears underneath my eyelids. This was a child whose grief and fear I, of all people, could understand. I had hidden my own childhood fear behind all the languages of Christendom, in becoming fluent in every tongue. He, so much smaller, so much more afraid, had gone mute.

  ‘Danny,’ I said gently. ‘I will be your mother. You will be safe with me.’

  ‘Is he not your child?’ John Dee asked. ‘He looks so like you.’

  I looked up at him and I was tempted to trust him with the truth but fear kept me silent.

  ‘Is he one of the Chosen People?’ John Dee asked quietly.

  Silently, I nodded my head.

  ‘Circumcised?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not in Calais, and here it is impossible.’

  ‘He might need the outward sign of being one of the People,’ Dee suggested. ‘He might need to be among his people before he can speak.’

  I looked at him in bewilderment. ‘How would he know?�