The Other Queen Read online

  In the meantime I will have to send to my steward at Chatsworth and tell him to take some of the smaller pieces of silver down to London and sell them for cash. I cannot wait for the rents at quarter day; I have to buy things in Tutbury and pay extra servants, and for this I need more coin than I earn. I could laugh at my own sense of loss when I write to him to sell half a dozen silver plates. I have never used them but they are mine, hoarded away in my own treasure room. To sell them for their value as scrap is as painful to me as a personal loss.

  At midday the hunting party comes home. If they have killed on the hunt then the meat goes straight to the kitchens and is an essential addition to the provisioning of this great household. We dine all together in my lodgings, on this sunny side of the courtyard, and in the afternoon the queen often sits with me in my presence chamber, for the light is better for sewing, and the room brighter, and her women can sit with mine and we can all talk.

  We talk as women always do: inconsequentially but with enthusiasm. She is the greatest needlewoman I have ever met; she is the only woman I have ever known whose ability and love of sewing matches mine. She has wonderful pattern books that arrive, travel-stained but intact, from Edinburgh Castle, and she falls on them like a child and shows me the pictures and explains them to me. She has patterns for Latin inscriptions and classical designs that all mean different things. They are beautiful and all carry hidden meanings, some of them secret codes, and she says that I can copy them out.

  Her designer joins our household after a few days—he had been left behind at Bolton Castle. He sets to work for us both, drawing up designs, and I watch him as he sketches freehand on canvas the wonderful symbolic flowers and heraldic beasts as she commands him. She can say to him, “And put an eagle over it all,” and his chalk arcs like a child scribbling in the sand, and suddenly, there is an eagle! With a leaf in its beak!

  It is a great thing, I think, to have an artist such as this man in your train. She takes him quite for granted, as if it were natural that a man of great talent, a truly fine artist, should do nothing but sketch designs for her to sew. I think of King Henry using Hans Holbein to draw designs for his masques, which would be broken up the day after the dance was done, and employing great musicians to write songs for his chamber or the way that the poets spend their talents writing plays for Queen Elizabeth. Truly, these are the luxuries of kings. Of all the riches that have surrounded this spoiled young woman from childhood, this employment of such a gifted man gives me the best sense of what her life has been like until now. Everything she has had around her has been supreme, the best of the very best; everyone who works for her, or follows in her train, is the most talented or charming or skilled. Even the design for her embroidery must be a work of art before she will touch it.

  Together we work on a new cloth of estate for her. It will hang over her chair to proclaim her royalty. Hertapissier has already started stitching the dark red background. In gold curly script the letters will say. “En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  She is seated on the best chair, between the window and the fire. I am on a lower chair, though this is my own room in my own house, and our ladies-in-waiting are on stools and benches near the windows for the light.

  “It was my mother’s motto,” she says. “It means, ‘In my end is my beginning.’ I have been thinking of it in these troubled days and decided to take it as my own. When I lost my husband and was no longer Queen of France, then I began my life as Queen of Scotland. When I fled from Scotland, my new life in England begins. Soon another phase of my life will start. I will return to my throne; perhaps I shall remarry. In every end is a new beginning. I am like a queen of the sea, I am a queen of tides. I ebb, but I also flow. One day I shall cease to be queen on earth of any kingdom and be a queen in heaven over all kingdoms.”

  I scowl at my women, whose heads bob up like rabbits at this un-seemly and Papistical assurance.

  “Should you like to do the gold lettering?” she offers. “The silk is such a pleasure to work with.”

  Despite myself, my hands go out to touch it. The silk is very fine, I have never worked with anything so beautiful, and I have loved needlework with a passion for all my life. “How is it so smooth?”

  “It is spun gold,” she says. “Real gold thread. That is why it glitters so. Do you want to sew with it?”

  “If you wish,” I say, as if I don’t much mind.

  “Good!” she says, and she beams as if she is genuinely delighted that we will work together. “You will start at that end and I shall start at this and bit by bit we shall come closer and closer together.”

  I smile in reply; it is impossible not to warm to her.

  “And at the end we shall meet in the middle, head to head and the greatest of friends,” she predicts.

  I draw up my chair and the fine fabric loops from her lap to mine. “Now,” she says quietly, when we are settled with our gold thread. “Do tell me all about my cousin the queen. Have you been much to her court?”

  Indeed, I have. I don’t boast but I let her know that I have been a senior lady-in-waiting at the queen’s court, at her side from the earliest days of her reign, her friend when she was nothing more than a princess, friends with her friends, loyal informant to her advisor.

  “Oh, so you must know all her secrets,” she says. “Tell me all about her. And tell me about Robert Dudley. Was she really so desperately in love with him as they all said?”

  I hesitate at that. But she leans forward to engage me. “Is he still so very handsome?” she whispers. “She offered him to me, you know, in marriage, when I first came to Scotland. But I knew she would never part with him. She is lucky to have such a loyal lover. It is a rare man who can love a queen. He has devoted his life to her, has he not?”

  “Forever,” I say. “From the moment she came to the throne and formed her court. He came to her then and he has never left. They have been hand in glove for so long that they finish each other’s sentences, and they have a hundred secret jokes, and sometimes you see her just glance towards him, and he knows exactly what she is thinking.”

  “Then why does she not marry him, since he is free?” she asks. “She made him an earl so that she could propose him for me. If he was good enough for me he must be more than good enough to marry her.”

  I shrug. “The scandal…,” I say very quietly. “After his wife’s death. The scandal has never gone away.”

  “Can she not defy the scandal? A queen of courage can live down a scandal.”

  “Not in England,” I say, thinking. And probably not in Scotland either. “A queen’s reputation is her crown; if she loses one she loses the other. And Cecil is against him,” I add.

  She widens her eyes. “Cecil commands her in even this?”

  “He does not rule her,” I say carefully. “But I have never known her to go against his advice.”

  “She trusts him with everything?”

  I nod. “He was her steward when she was a princess with few prospects. He managed her small fortune and he saw her through the years when she was under suspicion of treason by her half sister Queen Mary. He kept her safe. He guided her away from the rebels whose plans would have destroyed her. He has always stood by her; she trusts him as a father.”

  “You like him,” she guesses from the warmth in my voice.

  “He has been a true friend to me also,” I say. “I have known him since I was a young woman living with the Grey family.”

  “Yet I hear he is ambitious for his own family. Building a great house, seeking alliances? Matching himself with the nobility?”

  “Why not?” I ask. “Does not God Himself command us to use our talents? Does not our own success show that God has blessed us?”

  She smiles and shakes her head. “My God sends trials to those He loves, not wealth, but I see that your God thinks like a merchant. But of Cecil—does the queen always do as he commands?”

  “She d