The Queen's Fool Read online

  “Ah, at last! A girl who can speak Spanish!” she exclaimed and gave me her hand to kiss. “If you could only read it!”

  I thought for a moment. “I can read it,” I said, considering it reasonable that the daughter of a bookseller should be able to read her native tongue.

  “Oh, can you? And Latin?”

  “Not Latin,” I said, having learned of the danger of pride in my education from my encounter with John Dee. “Just Spanish and now I am learning to read English too.”

  Lady Mary turned to her maid in waiting. “You will be pleased to hear that, Susan! Now you will not need to read to me in the afternoons.”

  Susan did not look at all pleased to hear that she was to be supplanted by a fool in livery, but she took a seat on a stool like the other women and took up some sewing.

  “You shall tell me all the news of the court,” the Lady Mary invited me. “Perhaps we should talk alone.”

  One nod to the ladies and they took themselves off to the bay window and seated themselves in a circle in the brighter light, talking quietly as if to give us the illusion of privacy. I imagined every one of them was straining to hear what I might say.

  “My brother the king?” she asked me, gesturing that I should sit on a cushion at her feet. “Do you have any messages from him?”

  “No, Lady Mary,” I said, and saw her disappointment.

  “I was hoping he would have thought of me more kindly, now he is so ill,” she said. “When he was a little boy I nursed him through half a dozen illnesses, I hoped he would remember that and think that we…”

  I waited for her to say more but then she tapped her fingertips together as if to draw herself back from memories. “No matter,” she said. “Any other messages?”

  “The duke sends you some game and some early salad leaves,” I said. “They came in the cart with the furniture, and have been taken round to your kitchens. And he asked me to give you this letter.”

  She took it and broke the seal and smoothed it out. I saw her smile and then I heard her warm chuckle. “You bring me very good news, Hannah the Fool,” she said. “This is a payment under the will of my late father which has been owed to me all this long while, since his death. I thought I would never see it, but here it is, a draft on a London goldsmith. I can pay my bills and face the shopkeepers of Ware again.”

  “I am glad of it,” I said awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

  “Yes,” she said. “You would have thought that King Henry’s only legitimate daughter would have had her fortune in her own hands by now, but they have delayed and withheld until I thought they wanted me to starve to death here. But now I come into favor.”

  She paused, thoughtful. “The question which remains, is, why I am suddenly to be so well treated.” She looked speculatively at me. “Is Lady Elizabeth given her inheritance too? Are you to visit her with such a letter?”

  I shook my head. “My lady, how would I know? I am only a messenger.”

  “No word of it? She’s not at court visiting my brother now?”

  “She wasn’t there when I left,” I said cautiously.

  She nodded. “And he? My brother? Is he better at all?”

  I thought of the quiet disappearance of the physicians who came so full of promises and then left after they had done nothing more than torture him with some new cure. On the morning that I had left Greenwich, the duke had brought in an old woman to nurse the king: an old crone of a midwife, skilled only in the birthing of children and the laying out of the dead. Clearly, he was not going to get any better.

  “I don’t think so, my lady,” I said. “They were hoping that the summer would ease his chest but he seems to be as bad as ever.”

  She leaned toward me. “Tell me, child, tell me the truth. Is my little brother dying?”

  I hesitated, unsure of whether it was treason to tell of the death of the king.

  She took my hand and I looked into her square determined face. Her eyes, dark and honest, met mine. She looked like a woman you could trust, a mistress you could love. “You can tell me, I can keep a secret,” she said. “I have kept many many secrets.”

  “Since you ask it, I will tell you: I am certain that he is dying,” I admitted quietly. “But the duke denies it.”

  She nodded. “And this wedding?”

  I hesitated. “What wedding?”

  She tutted in brief irritation. “Of Lady Jane Grey to the duke’s son, of course. What do they say about it at court?”

  “That she was unwilling, and he not much better.”

  “And why did the duke insist?” she asked.

  “It was time that Guilford was married?” I hazarded.

  She looked at me, as bright as a knife blade. “They say no more than that?”

  I shrugged. “Not in my hearing, my lady.”

  “And what of you?” she asked, apparently abandoning interest in Lady Jane. “Did you ask to come to this exile? From the royal court at Greenwich? And away from your father?” Her wry smile indicated to me that she did not think it likely.

  “Lord Robert told me to come,” I confessed. “And his father, the duke.”

  “Did they tell you why?”

  I wanted to bite my lips to hold in the secret. “No, my lady. Just to keep you company.”

  She gave me a look that I had never seen from a woman before. Women in Spain tended to glance sideways, a modest woman always looked away. Women in England kept their eyes on the ground before their feet. One of the many reasons why I was glad of my pageboy clothes was that masquerading as a boy I could hold my head up, and look around. But Lady Mary had the bold look of her father’s portrait, the swaggering portrait, fists on hips, the look of someone who has been bred to think that he might rule the world. She had his gaze: a straight look that a man might have, scanning my face, reading my eyes, showing me her own open face and her own clear eyes.

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked bluntly.

  For a moment I was so taken aback I could have told her. I was afraid of arrest, of the Inquisition, afraid of suspicion, afraid of the torture chamber and the heretic’s death with kindling heaped around my bare feet and no way to escape. I was afraid of betraying others to their deaths, afraid of the very air of conspiracy itself. I rubbed my cheek with the back of my hand. “I am just a little nervous,” I said quietly. “I am new to this country, and to court life.”

  She let the silence run and then she looked at me more kindly. “Poor child, you are very young to be adrift, all alone in these deep waters.”

  “I am Lord Robert’s vassal,” I said. “I am not alone.”

  She smiled. “Perhaps you will be very good company,” she said finally. “There have been days and months and even years when I would have been very glad of a merry face and an uplifted voice.”

  “I am not a witty fool,” I said cautiously. “I am not supposed to be especially merry.”

  Lady Mary laughed aloud at that. “And I am not supposed to be given especially to laughter,” she said. “Perhaps you will suit me very well. And now, you must meet my companions.”

  She called her ladies over to us and named them to me. One or two were the daughters of determined heretics, holding on to the old faith and serving a Roman Catholic princess for pride, two others had the dismal faces of younger daughters with scanty dowries whose chance of service to an out-of-favor princess was only slightly better than the marriage they would have been forced to undertake if they had been left at home. It was a little court with the smell of desperation, on the edge of the kingdom, on the edge of heresy, on the edge of legitimacy.

  After dinner the Lady Mary went to Mass. She was supposed to go alone, it was a crime for anyone else to observe the service; but in practice, she went openly and knelt at the very front of the chapel and the rest of her household crept in at the back.

  I followed her ladies to the chapel door and then I hovered in a frenzy of worry as to what I should do. I had assured the king and Lord Rob