The Queen's Fool Read online

  Dearest Husband,Since it has pleased you to stay far from me in my illness and my sorrow, I write to you these words which I wish I might have said to your beloved face.You could not have had and never will have a more loving and faithful wife. The sight of you gladdened my heart every day that we were together, my only regret is that we spent so much time apart.It seems very hard to me that I should face death as I have faced life: alone and without the one I love. I pray that you will never know the loneliness that has walked step by step with me every day of my life. You still have a loving parent to advise you, you have a loving wife who wanted nothing more than to be at your side. No one will ever love you more.They will not tell me, but I know that I am near to death. This may be my last chance to bid you farewell and to send you my love. May we meet in heaven, though we could not be together on earth, praysYour wifeMary R.

  The tears were running down my cheeks by the time I had written this to her dictation but she was calm.

  “You will get better, Your Grace,” I assured her. “Jane told me that you are often ill with autumn sickness. When the first frosts come, you will be better and we will see in Christmas together.”

  “No,” she said simply. There was not a trace of self-pity in her tone. It was as if she were weary of the world. “No. Not this time. I don’t think so.”

  Winter 1558

  Lord Robert came to court with the queen’s council to press her to sign her will and name her heir. Every man in the council had been at Hatfield the previous month, all their advice for Queen Mary had been dictated by the queen in waiting.

  “She is too sick to see anyone,” Jane Dormer said truculently.

  She and I stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway to the queen’s apartments. Lord Robert winked at me but I did not smile back.

  “This is her duty,” said the Lord Chancellor gently. “She has to make a will.”

  “She made one,” Jane said abruptly. “Before she went into confinement last time.”

  He shook his head and looked embarrassed. “She named her child as heir, and the king as regent,” he said. “But there was no child. She has to name the Princess Elizabeth now, and no regent.”

  Jane hesitated, but I stood firm. “She is too ill,” I maintained. It was true, the queen was coughing up black bile, unable to lie down as her mouth filled with the stuff. Also, I did not want them to see her on her sickbed, still weeping for her husband, for the ruin that Elizabeth had made of her hopes.

  Lord Robert smiled at me, as if he understood all of this. “Mistress Carpenter,” he said. “You know. She is queen. She cannot have the peace and seclusion of a normal woman. She knows that, we know that. She has a duty to her country and you should not stand in her way.”

  I wavered, and they saw it. “Stand aside,” said the duke, and Jane and I stood unwillingly back and let them walk in to the queen.

  They did not take very long, and when they were gone I went in to see her. She was lying propped up on her pillows, a bowl at her side to catch the black bile which spewed from her mouth when she coughed, a jug of squeezed lemons and sugar to take the taste from her lips, a maid in attendance but no one else. She was as lonely as any beggar coughing out her life on a stranger’s doorstep.

  “Your Grace, I sent your letter to your husband,” I said quietly. “Pray God he reads it and comes home to you and you have a merry Christmas with him after all.”

  Queen Mary did not even smile at the picture I painted. “He will not,” she said dully. “And I would rather not see him ride past me to Hatfield.” She coughed and held a cloth to her mouth. The maid stepped forward and took it from her, offered her the bowl, and then took it away.

  “I have another task for you,” she said when she could speak again. “I want you to go with Jane Dormer to Hatfield.”

  I waited.

  “Ask Elizabeth to swear on her immortal soul that if she inherits the kingdom she will keep the true faith,” she said, her voice a tiny thread but the conviction behind the words as strong as ever.

  I hesitated. “She will not swear,” I said, knowing Elizabeth.

  “Then I will not name her my heir,” she said flatly. “Mary Stuart in France would claim the throne with French blessing. Elizabeth has the choice. She can fight her way to the throne if she can find enough fools to follow her, or she can come to it with my blessing. But she has to swear to uphold the faith. And she has to mean it.”

  “How will I know that she means it?” I asked.

  She was too weary to turn her head to me. “Look at her with your gift, Hannah,” she said. “This is the last time I will ask you to see for me. Look at her with your gift and tell me what is the best thing for my England.”

  I would have argued but simple pity for her made me hold my tongue. This was a woman clinging on to life by the thinnest thread. Only her desire to do her duty to God, to her mother’s God, and to her father’s country was keeping her alive. If she could secure Elizabeth’s promise then she could die knowing that she had done the best she could to keep England safe inside the Holy See.

  I bowed and went from the room.

  Jane Dormer, still recovering from her own fever and exhausted from nursing the queen, riding in a litter, and I, with Danny astride before me, made our way north to Hatfield and noted sourly the number of fine horses who were going in the same direction as us, from the ailing queen to the thriving heir.

  The old palace was ablaze with lights. There was some sort of banquet in progress as we arrived. “I cannot break bread with her,” Jane said shortly. “Let us ask to see her, and leave.”

  “Of course we can dine,” I said practically. “You must be starving, I am, and Danny needs to eat.”

  She was white-faced and trembling with emotion. “I will not eat with that woman,” she hissed. “Who d’you think is in there? Half the nobility of England clamoring for a place, her greatest friends now, the very ones who sneered at her and despised her and named her as a bastard when our queen was in her power.”

  “Yes,” I said flatly. “And the man you love, Count Feria, the Spanish ambassador, who once demanded her death, among them. Now he brings love letters from the queen’s own husband. Betrayal is no new thing in England. If you won’t break bread with men with false hearts you will starve to death, Jane.”

  She shook her head. “You have no sense of what is right and wrong, Hannah. You are faithless.”

  “I don’t think faith can be measured in what you eat,” I said, thinking of the bacon and shellfish I had eaten contrary to my people’s law. “I think faith is in your heart. And I love the queen and I admire the princess, and as for the rest, these false men and women, they will have to find their own ways to their own truths. You go and eat in the kitchen if it pleases you. I am going in to dine.”

  I could have laughed at her astounded face. I lifted Danny up on to my hip and, braced against his weight, I walked into the dining hall at Hatfield.

  Elizabeth had the trappings of queenship already, as if she were an actor practicing a part in the full costume. She had a gold canopy over a wooden chair so thickly carved and heavy that it might almost have been a throne. On her right hand she had the Spanish ambassador, as if to flaunt that connection; on her left hand was seated the most favored lord at this court, my Lord Robert. Beside him was the right-hand man of the Grand Inquisitor of London, the scourge of Protestantism, Dr. John Dee, on the other side of the Spanish ambassador was the princess’s cousin, who had once arrested her, now dearly beloved to his kin. Beyond him was a quietly ambitious man, a staunch Protestant: William Cecil. I looked at Elizabeth’s table and smiled. Nobody would be able to guess which way this cat might jump judging by those honored with seats beside her. She had put Spanish and English, Catholic and Protestant advisors side by side, who could deduce what was in her mind?

  John Dee, looking down the hall, caught my smile and raised his hand to me in greeting. Lord Robert followed the direction of his gaze, saw me, and beckoned me