Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (224 page)

“Daughter, come home to me. I will ask Lord Robert to release you, we can close the shop, we can leave England. You are not trapped here…”

“Lord Robert himself asked me to go,” I said simply. “And I already said I would.”

His gentle hand caressed my cropped hair.
“Querida,
you are unhappy?”

“I am not unhappy,” I said, finding a smile for him. “I am being foolish. For look, I am being sent to live with the heir to the throne, and Lord Robert himself has asked me to go.”

He was only partly reassured. “I shall be here, and if you send for me I shall come to you. Or Daniel will come and fetch you away. Won’t you, Daniel?”

I turned in my father’s arms to look at my betrothed. He was leaning against the wooden railing that ran around the jetty. He was waiting patiently, but he was pale and he was scowling with anxiety.

“I would rather fetch you away now.”

My father released me and I took a step toward Daniel. Behind him, bobbing at the jetty, their boat was waiting for them. I saw the swirl of water and saw the tide was ready to turn; we could go upstream almost at once. He had timed this moment very carefully.

“I have agreed to go to serve Lady Mary,” I said quietly to him.

“She is a Papist in a Protestant country,” he said. “You could not have chosen a place where your faith and practices will be more scrutinized. It is me who is named for Daniel, not you. Why should you go into the very den of lions? And what are you to do for Lady Mary?”

He stepped closer to me so we could whisper.

“I am to be her companion, be her fool.” I paused and decided to tell him the truth. “I am to spy for Lord Robert and his father.”

His head was so close to mine that I could feel the warmth of his cheek against my forehead as he leaned closer to speak into my ear.

“Spy on Lady Mary?”

“Yes.”

“And you have agreed?”

I hesitated. “They know that Father and I are Jews,” I said.

He was silent for a moment. I felt the solidity of his chest against my shoulder. His arm came around my waist to hold me closer to him and I felt the warmth of his grip. A rare sense of safety came over me as he held me, and for a moment I stood still.

“They are going to act against us?”

“No.”

“But you are a hostage.”

“In a way. It feels more as if Lord Robert knows my secret and trusts me with his. I feel bound to him.”

He nodded for a moment, I craned my neck to look up into his scowling face. For a moment I thought he was angry then I realized that he was thinking hard. “Does he know my name?” he demanded. “Of my mother, of my sisters? Are we all at risk?”

“He knows I am betrothed, but not of you by name. And he knows nothing of your family,” I said, with quick pride. “I have not brought danger to your door.”

“No, you keep it all to yourself,” he said with a brief unhappy smile. “And if you were questioned you could not keep it secret for long.”

“I would not betray you,” I said quickly.

His face was troubled. “No one can remain silent on the rack, Hannah. A pile of stones will crush the truth out of most people.” He looked down the river over my head. “Hannah, I should forbid you to go.”

He felt my instantaneous move of disagreement. “Don’t quarrel with me for nothing, for clumsy words,” he said quickly. “I did not mean forbid like a master. I meant I should beg you not to go—is that better? This road leads straight into danger.”

“I am in danger whatever I do,” I said. “And this way, Lord Robert will protect me.”

“But only while you do his bidding.”

I nodded. I could not tell him that I had volunteered to walk into this danger, and I would have risked worse for love of Lord Robert.

Gently he released me. “I am sorry you are here, and unprotected,” he said. “If you had sent for me I would have come sooner. This is a burden that you shouldn’t have to bear alone.”

I thought of the terror of my childhood, of my wild apprenticeship in fear on our flight through Europe. “It is my burden.”

“But you have kin now, you have me,” he said with the pride of a young man made head of his family too young. “I shall bear your burdens for you.”

“I bear my own,” I said stubbornly.

“Oh yes, you are your own woman. But if you would condescend to send for me if you are in danger, I would come and perhaps be allowed to help you escape.”

I giggled at that. “I promise that I will.” I held out my hand to him in a gesture which suited my boy’s clothing. But he took my hand and drew me close to him again and bent his head. Very gently he kissed me, full on the lips, and I felt the warmth of his mouth on mine.

He released me and stepped back to the boat. I found I was slightly dizzy, as if I had gulped down strong wine. “Oh, Daniel!” I breathed, but he was climbing into the boat and did not hear me. I turned to my father and caught him hiding his smile.

“God bless you, daughter, and bring you home safe to us,” he said quietly. I knelt on the wooden pier for my father’s blessing and felt his hand come down on my head in the familiar, beloved caress. He took my hands and raised me up. “He is an attractive young man, isn’t he?” he demanded, a chuckle behind his voice. Then he wrapped his cape around himself and went down the steps to the fishing smack.

They cast off and the little boat traveled swiftly across the darkening water, leaving me alone on the wooden pier. The mist hanging on the river and the gathering dark hid their silhouette, and all I could hear was the splash of the oars and the creak of the rowlocks. Then that sound was gone too and all that was left was the smack and suck of the rising tide and the quiet whistle of the wind.

Lady Mary was at her house at Hunsdon, in the county of Hertford-shire. It took us three days to get to her, riding northward out of London, on a winding road through muddy valleys and then climbing arduously through hills called the North Weald, journeying some of the way with another band of travelers, and staying overnight on the road, once at an inn, once at a grand house that had been a monastery and was now in the hands of the man who had cleansed it of heresy at some profit to himself. These days they could offer us no rooms better than a hayloft over the stable, and the carter complained that in the old days this had been a generous house of good monks where any traveler might be sure of a good dinner and a comfortable bed, and a prayer to help him on his way. He had stayed here once when his son had been sick nearly to death and the monks had taken him into their care and nursed him back to health with their own herbs and skills. They had charged him not a penny, but said that they were doing the work of God by serving poor men. The same story could have been told up and down the country at every great monastery or abbey on the roads. But now all the religious houses were in the possession of the great lords, the men of court who had made their fortunes by advising that the world would be a better place if wealth was stripped from the English church and poured into their own pockets. Now the feeding of the poor at the monastery gates, the making of free medicines in the nunnery hospitals, the teaching of the children and the care of the old people of the village had gone the way of the beautiful statues, the illuminated manuscripts, and the great libraries.

The carter muttered to me that this was the case all around the country. The great religious houses, which had been the very backbone of England, had been emptied of the men and women who had been called by God to serve in them. The public good had been turned to private profit and there would never be public good again.

“If the poor king dies then Lady Mary will come to the throne and turn it all back,” he said. “She will be a queen for the people. A queen who returns us to the old ways.”

I reined back my pony. We were on the high road and there was no one within earshot but I was always fearful of anything that smacked of intrigue.

“And look at these roads,” he went on, turning on the box of the cart to complain over his shoulder. “Dust in summer and mud in winter, never a pot hole filled in, never a highwayman pursued. D’you know why not?”

“I’ll ride ahead, you’re right, the dust is dreadful,” I said.

He nodded and motioned me forward. I could hear his litany of complaint receding in the distance behind me:

“Because once the shrines are closed there are no pilgrims, and if there are no pilgrims then there is no one on the roads but the worst sort of people, and those that prey on them. Never a kind word, never a good house, never a decent road…”

I let the mare scramble up a little bank where the ground was softer beneath her small hooves and we ranged ahead of the cart.

Since I had not known the England that he said was lost, I could not feel, as he did, that the country was a lesser place. On that morning in early summer it seemed very fine to me, the roses twining through the hedgerows and a dozen butterflies hovering around the honeysuckle and the beanflowers. The fields were cultivated in prim little stripes, like the bound spine of a book, the sheep ranging on the upper hills, little fluffy dots against the rich damp green. It was a countryside so unlike my own that I could not stop marveling at it, the open villages with the black-and-white beamed buildings, and the roofs thatched with golden reeds, the rivers that seemed to melt into the roads in glassy slow-moving fords at every corner. It was a country so damp that it was no wonder that every cottage garden was bright green with growth, even the dung hills were topped with waving daisies, even the roofs of the older houses were as green as limes with moss. Compared to my own country, this was a land as sodden as a printer’s sponge, damp with life.

At first I noticed the things that were missing. There were no twisted rows of vines, no bent and bowed olive trees. There were no orchards of orange trees, or lemons or limes. The hills were rounded and green, not high and hot and rocky, and above them the sky was dappled with cloud, not the hot unrelieved blue of my home, and there were larks rising, and no circling eagles.

I rode in a state of wonder that a country could be so lush and so green; but even among this fertile wealth there was hunger. I saw it in the faces of some of the villagers, and in the fresh mounds of the graveyards. The carter was right, the balance that had been England at peace for a brief generation had been overthrown under the last king, and the new one continued the work of setting the country into turmoil. The great religious houses had closed and thrown the men and women who served and labored in them on to the roads. The great libraries were spilled and gone to waste—I had seen enough torn manuscripts at my father’s shop to know that centuries of scholarship had been thrown aside in the fear of heresy. The great golden vessels of the wealthy church had been taken by private men and melted down, the beautiful statues and works of art, some with their feet or hands worn smooth by a million kisses of the faithful, had been thrown down and smashed. There had been a great voyage of destruction through a wealthy peaceful country and it would take years before the church could be a safe haven again for the spiritual pilgrim or the weary traveler. If it ever could be made safe again.

It was such an adventure to travel so freely in a strange country that I was sorry when the carter whistled to me and called out, “Here’s Hunsdon now,” and I realized that these carefree days were over, that I had to return to work, and that now I had two tasks: one as a holy fool in a household where belief and faith were key concerns, and the other as a spy in a household where treason and tale-bearing were the greatest occupations.

I swallowed on a throat which was dry from the dust of the road and also from fear, I pulled my horse alongside the cart and we went in through the lodge gates together, as if I would shelter behind the bulk of the four turning wheels, and hide from the scrutiny of those blank windows that stared out over the lane and seemed to watch for our arrival.

*  *  *

Lady Mary was in her chamber sewing blackwork, the famous Spanish embroidery of black thread on white linen, while one of her ladies, standing at a lectern, read aloud to her. The first thing I heard, on reaching her presence, was a Spanish word, mispronounced, and she gave a merry laugh when she saw me wince.

“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.”