Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  ‘You can send him to a nurse. And you can be a fool in petticoats as well as breeches. There are many fools in petticoats, after all. You will not be an exception.’

  I bit the inside of my lip to keep myself calm despite my sense of danger. ‘My lord, he is only a baby still, and he does not speak. He is in a strange country and we neither of us know anybody. Please let him stay with me. Please let me keep him.’

  ‘If you insist on staying with him then you will have to remain here in the country with Amy,’ he warned me.

  I measured the price I must pay to be Danny’s mother and to my own surprise, I found it worth paying. I would not leave him, whatever it cost me.

  ‘Very well,’ I said. I stepped back against the wall, out of the way of the porters carrying two great chairs and a table to the back of the wagon.

  Lord Robert scowled at me, he had not thought I would put the child before my own ambition. ‘Oh, Hannah, you are not the woman I hoped you would be. A faithful wife and a devoted mother is not much use to me! Very well! I will send for you when I need you, probably May. You can bring the boy,’ he forestalled me. ‘But come as soon as I send for you. I will need your ears and your eyes at court.’

  Lord Robert rode out at noon, a cold March day, and his wife got up from her sick bed to see him go. She stood, silent again, like a woman made of snow, in the hall of the house as he clapped his hat on his head and swung his cape around his shoulders.

  ‘I am sorry that you have been ill for all of my visit,’ he said brightly, as if speaking to a little-known host. ‘I have not seen you since dinner that first night.’

  She hardly seemed to hear him. She managed a blank smile, more like a grimace.

  ‘I will hope that you are in better health and spirits when I come again.’

  ‘When will that be?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I cannot say. I will send you a message.’

  It was as if his refusal to make a promise was a spell that made her come to life. She stirred, and glared at him. ‘If you do not come soon, I shall write to the queen and complain of you,’ she threatened, her voice low and angry. ‘She knows what it is like to be abandoned by a false husband who runs after every pretty face. She knows what sort of woman her sister is. She has suffered from Elizabeth’s ways as I have suffered. I know about that, you see. I know what you and the princess are to each other.’

  ‘It is treason to say such a thing,’ he remarked quietly, in a pleasant tone. ‘And such a letter would be evidence of your treason. We have just got this family out of the Tower, Amy, don’t plunge us back in again.’

  She bit her lip and the colour flooded into her cheeks. ‘At any rate your whore shall not stay here with me!’

  Robert sighed and looked across the hall towards me. ‘I have no whore here,’ he said with elaborate patience. ‘I barely have a wife here, as you well know. The honourable lady, Mrs Carpenter, will stay here until I send for her to work for me at court.’

  Amy Dudley let out a little shriek of rage and then clapped her hand over her mouth. ‘You call what she does “work”?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘As I say. And I will send for her. And I will come to visit you again.’ He lowered his voice and his tone was gentle. ‘And I shall pray, for your sake and for mine, that when I see you again you are composed. This is no way for us, Amy. You must not behave like a mad woman.’

  ‘I am not mad,’ she hissed at him. ‘I am angry. I am angry with you.’

  He nodded, he would not argue with her, and clearly it mattered to him very little one way or the other what she chose to call it. ‘Then I shall pray for you to recover your temper rather than your wits,’ he said. He turned for the front door where his horse was waiting.

  Lady Dudley completely ignored John Dee as he went past, though he paused and bowed, as calm as ever. When they were both gone she suddenly seemed to realise that in a moment she would be too late and she hurried out after them to the top of the steps. She flung open the big double doors and the wintry sunshine poured into the dark hall. I was dazzled and half-closed my eyes, seeing her as a shadow at the top of the steps. For a moment it seemed to me that she was not on a broad stone step but on a very knife edge of life and death, and I stepped forward and put out my hand to steady her. At my touch she whirled around and she would have fallen down the stone steps if John Dee had not caught her arm and held her.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she spat at me. ‘Don’t you dare to touch me!’

  ‘I thought I saw …’

  John Dee released her and looked carefully at me. ‘What did you see, Hannah?’

  I shook my head. Even when he drew me quickly to one side, almost out of earshot, I did not speak. ‘It is too vague,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. It was as if she was balanced on the very edge of something, and she might fall, and then she nearly did fall. It is nothing.’

  He nodded. ‘When you come to court we will try again,’ he said. ‘I think you still have your gift, Hannah. I think the angels are still speaking to you. It is just our dull mortal senses that cannot hear them.’

  ‘You are delaying my lord,’ Lady Dudley said sharply to him.

  John Dee looked down the steps to where Lord Robert was swinging into his saddle. ‘He will forgive me,’ he said. He took her hand and was going to bow over it, but she pulled it away from him.

  ‘Thank you for my visit,’ he said.

  ‘Any friend of my lord’s is always welcome,’ she said through lips that hardly moved. ‘Whatever sorts of company he chooses to keep.’

  John Dee went down the steps, mounted his horse, raised his hat to her ladyship, smiled at me, and the two men rode away.

  As she watched them go I could feel the anger and resentment towards him bleeding out of her like a wound until all that was left was the hurt and the injury. She stood straight until they rounded the corner of the park and then she buckled at the knees and Mrs Oddingsell took her arm to lead her inside and up the stairs to her chamber.

  ‘What now?’ I asked when Mrs Oddingsell came out, carefully shutting the door behind her.

  ‘Now she will weep and sleep for a few days and then she will get up and be like a woman half-dead: cold and empty inside, no tears to shed, no anger, no love to give. And then she will be like a hound on a short leash until he comes back, and then her anger will spill out again.’

  ‘Over and over?’ I asked, inwardly horrified at this cycle of pain and anger.

  ‘Over and over again,’ she said. ‘The only time she was at peace was when she thought they would behead him. Then she could grieve for him and for herself and for the love they had shared when they were young.’

  ‘She wanted him to die?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘She is not afraid of death,’ Mrs Oddingsell said sadly. ‘I think she longs for it, for them both. What other release can there be for them?’

  Spring 1558

  I waited for news from court, but I could hear nothing except common gossip. The baby which was due in March was late, and by April people were starting to say that the queen had made a mistake again, and there was no child. I found myself on my knees in the Philipses’ little chapel every morning and evening, praying before a statue of Our Lady that the queen might be with child and that she might be, even now, in childbirth. I could not imagine how she would be able to bear it if she were to be once more disappointed. I knew her for a courageous woman, no woman braver in the world, but to come out of the confinement chamber for the second time and tell the world that once again it had been a ten-month mistake and there was no baby – I could not see how any woman could bear the humiliation of it, least of all the Queen of England with every eye in Europe on her.

  The gossip about her was all malice. People said that she had pretended to be pregnant on purpose to try to bring her husband home, people said that she had plans to smuggle in a secret baby and pass him off as a Roman Catholic prince for England. I did not even defend her against the spiteful whispers th