The Queen's Fool Read online

  “Here’s to us,” Robert said, raising his glass in an ironic toast. “A heartbroken queen, an absent king, a lost baby, a queen in waiting and two fools and a reformed traitor. Here’s health.”

  “Two fools and an old traitor,” Will said, raising his glass. “Three fools together.”

  Summer 1558

  Almost by default, I found myself back in the queen’s service. She was so anxious and suspicious of everyone around her that she would be served only by people who had been with her from the earliest days. She hardly seemed to notice that I had been away from her for more than two years, and was now a woman grown, and dressed like a woman. She liked to hear me read to her in Spanish, and she liked me to sit by her bed while she slept. The deep sadness that had invaded her with the failure of her second pregnancy meant that she had no curiosity about me. I told her that my father had died, that I had married my betrothed, and that we had a child. She was interested only that my husband and I were separated — he in France, safe, I hoped, while I was in England. I did not name the town of Calais, she was as mortified by the loss of the town, England’s glory, as she was shamed by the loss of the baby.

  “How can you bear not to be with your husband?” she asked suddenly, after three long hours of silence one gray afternoon.

  “I miss him,” I said, startled at her suddenly speaking to me. “But I hope to find him again. I will go to France as soon as it is possible, I will go and look for him. Or I hope he will come to me. If you would help me send a message it would ease my heart.”

  She turned toward the window and looked out at the river. “I keep a fleet of ships ready for the king to come to me,” she said. “And horses and lodgings all along the road from Dover to London. They are all waiting for him. They spend their lives, they earn their livings in waiting for him. A small army of men does nothing but wait for him. I, the Queen of England, his own wife, waits for him. Why does he not come?”

  There was no answer that I could give her. There was no answer that anyone could give her. When she asked the Spanish ambassador he bowed low and murmured that the king had to be with his army — she must understand the need of that — the French were still threatening his lands. It satisfied her for a day, but the next day, when she looked for him, the Spanish ambassador had gone.

  “Where is he?” the queen asked. I was holding her hood, waiting for her maid to finish arranging her hair. Her beautiful chestnut hair had gone gray and thin now, when it was brushed out it looked sparse and dry. The lines on her face and the weariness in her eyes made her seem far older than her forty-two years.

  “Where is who, Your Grace?” I asked.

  “The Spanish ambassador, Count Feria?”

  I stepped forward and handed her hood to her maid, wishing that I could think of something clever to divert her. I glanced at Jane Dormer who was close friends with the Spanish count and saw a swift look of consternation cross her face. There would be no help from her. I gritted my teeth and told her the truth. “I believe he has gone to see the princess.”

  The queen turned around to look at me, her eyes shocked. “Why, Hannah? Why would he do that?”

  I shook my head. “How would I know, Your Grace? Does he not go to present his compliments to the princess now and then?”

  “No. He does not. For most of his time in England she has been under house arrest, a suspected traitor, and he himself urged me to execute her. Why would he go to pay his compliments now?”

  None of us answered. She took the hood from the waiting woman’s hands and put it on, meeting her own honest eyes in the mirror. “The king will have ordered him to go. I know Feria, he is not a man to plot willfully. The king will have ordered him to go.”

  She was silent for a moment, thinking what she should do. I kept my gaze down, I could not bear to look up and see her, facing the knowledge that her own husband was sending messages to her heir, to her rival, to his mistress.

  When she turned back to us her expression was calm. “Hannah, a word with you, please,” she said, extending her hand.

  I went to her side and she took my arm and leaned on me slightly as we walked from the room to her presence chamber. “I want you to go to Elizabeth,” she said quietly, as they opened the doors. There was hardly anyone outside waiting to see her. They were all at Hatfield. “Just go as if for a visit. Tell her you have recently come back from Calais and wanted to see how she did. Can you do that?”

  “I would have to take my son,” I temporized.

  “Take him,” she nodded. “And see if you can find out from Elizabeth herself, or from her ladies, what Count Feria wanted with her.”

  “They may tell me nothing,” I said uncomfortably. “Surely, they will know I serve you.”

  “You can ask,” she said. “And you are the only friend that I can trust who will gain admission to Elizabeth. You have always passed between us. She likes you.”

  “Perhaps the ambassador was making nothing more than a courtesy visit.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But it may be that the king is pressing her to marry the Prince of Savoy. She has sworn to me that she will not have him but Elizabeth has no principles, she has only appearances. If the king promised to support her claim to be my heir, she might think it worth her while to marry his cousin. I have to know.”

  “When d’you want me to go?” I asked unwillingly.

  “At first light tomorrow,” she said. “And don’t write to me, I am surrounded by spies. I will wait for you to tell me what she is planning when you come back to me.”

  Queen Mary released my arm and went on alone into dinner. As the noblemen and the gentry rose to their feet as she walked toward the high table in the great hall I noticed how small she seemed: a diminutive woman overwhelmed by her duties in a hostile world. I watched her step up to her throne, seat herself and look around her depleted court with her tight determined smile and thought — not for the first time — that she was the most courageous woman I had ever known. A woman with the worst luck in the world.

  It was a merry ride to Hatfield for Danny and me. He rode the horse astride before me until he grew too tired, and then I strapped him to my back and he slept, rocked by the jolting. I had an escort of two men to keep me safe; since the epidemic of illness of the winter, and the hardship of one bad harvest after another, the roads were continually threatened by highwaymen, bandits or just vagrants and beggars who would shout for money and threaten violence. But with the two men trotting behind us, Daniel and I were lighthearted. The weather was fine, the rain had stopped at last, and the sun was so hot by midday that we were pleased to break our fast in a field, sheltering in a wood, or sometimes by a river or stream. I let Danny paddle his feet, or sit bare-arsed in the water while it splashed around him. He was steady on his feet now, he made little rushes forward and back to me, and he continually demanded to be lifted upward to see more, to touch things, or simply to pat my face and turn my gaze this way and that.

  As we rode I sang to him, the Spanish songs of my childhood, and I was certain that he heard me. His little hand would wave in time to the music, he would give a little wriggle of pleasure when I started singing, but he never joined in the tune. He remained as silent as a leveret in hiding, as a fawn in the bracken.

  The old palace at Hatfield had been the royal nursery for generations, chosen for its clean air and proximity to London. It was an old building, small-windowed and dark-beamed, and the men led the way to the front door so that Danny and I might dismount and go inside while they took the horses away to the ramshackle stable block at a little distance from the house.

  There was no one in the hall to greet us but a boy bringing in logs for the fire which was kept going, even in midsummer. “They’re all in the garden,” he said. “Acting a play.”

  His gesture directed me to a door at the rear of the hall and with Danny in my arms I opened it, followed the stone corridor to another door and then stepped out into the sunshine.

  What playacting