Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  I went to Daniel’s old house which was at Newgate, just past St Paul’s. The neighbours there had not heard of the Carpenter family, they were new in the city. They had come hoping to find work after their farm in Sussex had failed. I looked at their cold pinched faces and wished them well. They promised to tell Daniel, if he should come, that his wife had been seeking him and was waiting for him at court.

  ‘What a handsome boy,’ the woman said, looking down at Danny who was holding my hand and standing at my side. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Dan’l,’ he said, thumping his chest with his fist.

  She smiled at me. ‘A forward child,’ she said. ‘His father won’t recognise him.’

  ‘I hope he will,’ I said a little breathlessly. If he had not received my letter, Daniel would not even know that I had his son safely with me. If he came to me on his release, our whole life as a family could start again. ‘I certainly hope he will,’ I repeated.

  When I got back to court there was a scurry around the queen’s apartments. She had collapsed while dressing for dinner and been put to bed. The doctors had been called and were bleeding her. Quietly, I handed Danny to Will Somers who was in the privy chamber, and I went inside the guarded doors to the queen’s bedchamber.

  Jane Dormer, white as a sheet and visibly ill herself, was at the head of the bed, holding the queen’s hand as the physicians were picking fat leeches off her legs and dropping them back into their glass jar. The queen’s thin legs were bruised where their vile mouths had been fixed on her, the maid twitched down the sheet. The queen’s eyes were closed in shame at being so exposed, her head turned away from the anxious faces of her physicians. The doctors bowed and got themselves out of the room.

  ‘Go to bed, Jane,’ the queen said weakly. ‘You are as sick as I am.’

  ‘Not until I have seen Your Grace take some soup.’

  The queen shook her head and waved her hand to the door. Jane curtseyed and went out, leaving the queen and I alone.

  ‘Is that you, Hannah?’ she asked without opening her eyes.

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’

  ‘Will you write a letter for me, in Spanish? And send it to the king without showing it to anyone?’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace.’

  I took some paper and a pen from the table, drew up a little stool and sat beside her bed. She dictated to me in English and I translated it into Spanish as I wrote. The sentences were long and fluent, I knew that she had been waiting a long time to send him this letter. In all the nights when she had wept for him, she had composed this letter to be sent from her deathbed, knowing that he was far away, joyously living his life in the Netherlands, courted by women, fawned on by men, and planning marriage with her sister. She wrote him a letter like the one her mother wrote to her father from her deathbed: a letter of love and constancy to a man who had offered nothing but heartache.

  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, prays

  Your wife

  Mary 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