Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (258 page)

“Yes,” I said honestly, pulling my hand from him to brush a smut off my cheek. “I have spent my life running from this fear and now it seems that I have to walk toward it.”

*  *  *

I waited till the queen was going to bed that evening and was kneeling before her prie-dieu in the corner of her bedroom. I knelt beside her but I did not pray. I was going over in my mind what I could say to persuade her not to do this dreadful thing. For a full hour she was on her knees and when I peeped through my half-closed eyelids I could see that her face was turned up to the statue of the crucified Christ and the tears were pouring down her cheeks.

Finally she rose from her knees and went to her chair at the fireside. I drew the poker from the embers where it had been heating, and thrust it into the mug of ale to warm it for her. When I put it in her hands her fingers were icy cold.

“Your Grace, I have something to ask you,” I said very quietly.

She looked at me as if she hardly saw me. “What is it, Hannah?”

“I have never asked you for anything in the years I have been with you,” I reminded her.

She frowned slightly. “No, you haven’t. What is it you want now?”

“Your Grace, I have heard that your prisons are holding three good men on charges of heresy. Bishop Latimer and Bishop Ridley and Archbishop Cranmer.”

She turned her face to the small fire in the hearth so I could not see her expression, but her voice was flat.

“Yes. It is true that those men are charged.”

“I want to ask you to show mercy,” I said simply. “It is an awful thing to put a good man to death. And everyone says that these are good men. Just mistaken men…just disagreeing with the church’s teaching. But they were good bishops to your brother, Your Grace, and they are ordained bishops in the Church of England.”

She said nothing for a long time. I did not know whether to press the case or to leave it. The silence started to frighten me a little. I sat back on my heels and waited for her to speak and I could hear my own breathing coming too quickly, too lightly for an innocent person. I could feel my own danger coming toward me, like a dog on a scent, and the scent it was following was the sweat of my fear which was prickling me in the armpits and growing cold and damp down my spine.

When she turned to me, she was not like the Mary I loved at all. Her face was like a mask of snow. “They are not good men, for they deny the word of God and the rule of God, and they win others to their sin,” she hissed at me. “They can repent their sins and be forgiven, or they can die. It is to them you should be speaking, Hannah, not me. This is the law: not a human law, not any law, not my law, but the law of the church. If they do not want to be punished by the church then they should not sin. I do not set myself up as judge here, it is the church that decides and they must obey it, as I do.”

She paused for a moment, but I could say nothing against her conviction.

“It is men like them that have brought down the wrath of God on England,” she said. “Not a good harvest, not a wealthy year since my father turned against the church and not a healthy child born into the cradle of England since he put my mother aside.”

I could see her hands trembling and her voice shook with her rising passion. “Do you not see it?” she asked. “You of all people? Do you not see that he put my mother aside and never again got another healthy legitimate child?”

“Princess Elizabeth?” I breathed.

The queen laughed a loud harsh laugh. “She’s not his,” she said derisively. “Look at her. She is a Smeaton, every inch of her. Her mother tried to pass off her bastard as the king’s own child, but now she is grown and behaves like the child of a lute player and a whore, everyone can see her parentage. God gave my father only one healthy child: me; and then my poor father was turned against me and my mother. Since that day there has not been a moment’s good fortune for this country. They persuaded him to destroy the word of God, the abbeys and the nunneries, and then my brother took England deeper into sin. See the price we have paid? Hunger in the country and sickness in the towns.

“God must be appeased. Only when this sin is rooted out of the country will I be able to conceive a child and be able to give birth. No holy prince could come to a country such as this. The wrong that my father started, which my brother continued, has to be reversed. It all has to be turned back.”

She broke off, panting. I said nothing, I was stunned by her passion.

“You know, sometimes I don’t think I have the strength to do it,” she went on. “But God gives me the strength. He gives me the resolution to order these dreadful judgments, to say that they shall continue. God gives me the strength to do His work, to send sinners to the fires so that the land may be cleansed. And then you—who I have trusted!—you come here to me when I am praying, to tempt me to error, into weakness, asking me to deny God and my holy work for Him.”

“Your Grace…” My voice caught in my throat. She rose to her feet and I jumped up. I had cramp in my right leg from kneeling for so long and it gave way beneath me so I sprawled down. I was half on the floor looking up at her and she looked at me as if God himself had struck me down.

“Hannah, my child, you are halfway to mortal sin yourself to ask this of me. Don’t take one step further, or I shall send for the priests to wrestle with your soul.”

I could smell the smoke, I tried to tell myself it was from the fire in the grate, but I knew it was the smoke of my mother burning, the smoke of the other English men and women burning in the market places up and down the countryside, and soon they would take out Bishop Latimer and Bishop Ridley and the crowd would watch them as Dr. Ridley would tell his friend to be of good heart as they would light such a candle in England that would never be put out. I scrabbled at the queen’s feet like a cripple and she pulled her skirts away from me as if she could not bear me to touch her, and she went from the room without another word, leaving me on the floor, smelling smoke and crying for sheer terror.

Christmas was celebrated at court with much weighty ceremony but no joy, just as Elizabeth had predicted. Everyone remembered that last year Queen Mary had swirled around the court with her stomacher unlaced and her big belly carried proudly before her. Last year we had been waiting for our prince. This year we knew that there could not be one, for the king had left the queen’s bed and her red eyes and thin body attested to the fact that she was sterile and alone. All autumn there had been rumors of plots and counterplots, it was said that the English people could not tolerate to be ruled by a Spanish king. Philip’s father was going to hand over the empire to his son and then most of Christendom would be under his command. People muttered that England was an outlying island to him, that he would rule it through the barren queen who did not cease to adore him though everyone knew he had taken a mistress and would never come home to her again.

The queen must have heard at least half of this gossip, the council kept her informed of the threats that were made against her husband, against herself, against her throne. She grew very quiet and withdrawn and determined. She held to her vision of a peaceful religious country where men and women would be safe in the church of their fathers, and she tried to believe that she could bring this about if she did not waver from her duty, however much it might cost her. The queen’s council passed a new law which said that a heretic who repented on the stake had changed his mind too late—he should still be burned to death. Also, anyone who sympathized with his fate would be burned too.

The cold wet winter turned to a wetter spring. The queen waited for letters which came more and more infrequently and brought her little joy.

One evening in early May she announced her intention of spending the whole night in prayer and sent me and all her ladies away. I was glad to be excused from yet another long silent evening when we sewed by the fireside and tried not to notice when the queen’s tears drenched the linen shirt that she was stitching for the king.

I was walking briskly to the chamber that I shared with three of the other maids when I saw a shadow by a doorway in the gallery. I did not hesitate, I would never pause for someone waiting to speak to me, and he had to fall into step beside me and keep to my rapid pace.

“You must come with me, Hannah Verde,” he said.

Even at the sound of my full name I did not pause.

“I only obey the queen.”

Like a slow flag unfurling he held before me a rolled scroll and dropped one end to let it fall open. Almost despite myself I felt my feet slow and stop. I saw the seals at the bottom and my name at the top, Hannah Verde, alias Hannah Green, alias Hannah the Fool.

“What is this?” I asked, though I knew.

“A warrant,” he said.

“A warrant for what?” I asked, though I knew.

“For your arrest, for heresy,” he said.

“Heresy?” I breathed, as if I had never heard the word before, as if I had not been waiting for this moment every day since they had taken my mother.

“Yes, maid, heresy,” he said.

“I will see the queen about this.” I half turned back to run to her.

“You will come with me,” he said and took my arm and waist in a grip which I could not have fought even if my strength had not been bleeding away in my terror.

“The queen will intercede for me!” I whimpered, hearing my voice as weak as a child’s.

“This is a royal warrant,” he said simply. “You are to be arrested for questioning and she has given her authority.”

*  *  *

They took me to St. Paul’s in the city and they kept me overnight in a prison room with a woman who had been racked so badly that she lay like a rag doll in the corner of the cell, her arm bones and leg bones broken, her spine disjointed, her feet pointing outward like the hands of a clock showing a quarter to three. From her bloodied lips came a moan like the sigh of the wind. All night she breathed out her pain like a breeze in springtime. With us also was a woman whose nails had been pulled from her fingers. She nursed her broken hands in her lap and did not look up when they turned the key in the door and thrust me inside. She had her mouth pursed in a funny little grimace, then I realized they had cut out her tongue as well.

I hunkered down like a beggar on the threshold, my back to the door. They said nothing to me: the broken moaner and the dumb one without fingernails. In my terror, I said nothing to them. I watched the moonlight stroll across the floor, illuminating first the woman whose body was twisted like a dolly, and then shining on the fingers of the woman who cupped her hands in her lap and pursed her lips. In the silver light her fingertips looked as black as nibs dipped in printers’ ink.

The night passed in the end, though I thought that it would last forever.

In the morning the door swung open and neither woman raised her head. The stillness of the racked woman made her look as if she were dead, perhaps she was. “Hannah Verde,” the voice outside said.

I tried to rise to my feet in obedience but my legs buckled beneath me from sheer terror. I knew that I could not have my fingernails torn out without screaming for mercy, telling everything I knew. I could not be tied to the rack without betraying my lord, Elizabeth, John Dee, every name I had ever heard whispered, names that had never even been mentioned. Since I could not even stand on my own two feet when they summoned me, how would I ever defy them?

The guard scooped me up in his arms, dragged me along, my feet scrabbling like a drunkard’s on the stones behind us. He stank of ale, and a worse smell, smoke and burning fat which clung to his woolen cape. I realized that the smell was from the fires, the smoke from the kindling and the brands, the fat from the bubbling skin of dying men and women. As the realization came to me I felt my stomach rebel and I choked on vomit.

“Here, watch out!” he said irritably, and thrust my head away from him so he banged my face against the stone wall.

He dragged me up some steps, and then across a courtyard.

“Where?” I said faintly.

“Bishop Bonner,” he said shortly. “God help you.”

“Amen,” I said promptly, as if accurate observation now would save me. “Dear God, Amen.”

I knew I was lost. I could not speak, let alone defend myself. I thought what a fool of a girl I had been not to go with Daniel when he would have saved me. What an arrogant child I had been to think that I could weave my way through these plots and not attract notice. Me, with olive skin and dark eyes, and a name like Hannah?

We came to a paneled door, monstrous with hammered nails. He tapped on it, opened it at a call from within, and walked in, arms tight around me as if we were mismatched lovers.

The bishop was sitting at a table facing the door; his clerk had his back to the door. A chair was set at a distance facing both table and bishop. The jailor dumped me roughly into it and stood back, closed the door and set himself before it.

“Name?” the bishop asked wearily.

“Hannah Verde,” the jailor answered, while I searched for my voice and found it was lost in terror.

“Age?”

He reached forward and prodded my shoulder.

“Seventeen,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Seventeen,” I said, a little louder. I had forgotten the meticulous recordkeeping of the Inquisition, the bureaucracy of terror. First they would take my name, my age, my address, my occupation, the name of my father and my mother, their address, their occupations, the names of my grandparents and their address and occupations, and then, and only then, when they had everything named and labeled, they would torture me until I spilled out everything I knew, everything I could imagine, and everything that I thought they might want to know.

“Occupation?”

“Fool to the queen,” I said.

There was a splashing noise in the room, a childish damp warmth in my breeches, and a shameful stable smell. I had pissed myself for fear. I bowed my head, mortification overlaying my terror.

The clerk raised his head as if alerted by the warm sharp smell. He turned and observed me. “Oh, I can vouch for this girl,” he said as if it were a matter of very little interest.

It was John Dee.

I was beyond recognizing him, beyond wondering how he came to be the bishop’s clerk having been the bishop’s prisoner. I just met his neutral look with the blank eyes of a girl too frightened to think for herself.

“Can you?” asked the bishop doubtfully.

John Dee nodded. “She is a holy fool,” he said. “She once saw an angel in Fleet Street.”

“That must be heretical,” the bishop maintained.

John Dee considered it for a moment, as if it were not a matter of life and death to me. “No, a true vision I think, and Queen Mary thinks the same. She will not be best pleased when she discovers we have arrested her fool.”

That gave the bishop pause. I could see him hesitate. “The queen’s orders to me are to root out heresy wherever I find it, in her household, in the streets, and to show no favor. The girl was arrested with a royal warrant.”

“Oh well, as you wish,” John Dee said negligently.

I opened my mouth to speak but no words came. I could not believe that he would defend me so halfheartedly. Yet here he was, turning his back to me once more and copying my name into the Inquisition’s ledger.

“Details,” Bishop Bonner said.

“Subject was seen to look away at the elevation of the Host on the morning of 27 December,” John Dee read in a clerkly mutter. “Subject asked the queen to show mercy to heretics before the court. Subject is a familiar to Princess Elizabeth. Subject has a knowledge of learning and languages unbecoming in a woman.”

“How d’you plead?” Bishop Bonner asked me.

“I did not look from the elevation of the Host…” I started, my voice weary and hopeless. If John Dee was not going to support me then I was a dead woman on this one charge alone. And once they started to investigate my journey across Europe and the family of my betrothed, I would be identified as a Jew and that would mean the death of me, of my father, of Daniel, of his family, and of their friends, men and women I did not even know, families in London, in Bristol, in York.

“Oh! This is nothing but malice,” John Dee exclaimed impatiently.

“Eh?” the bishop said.

“Malicious complaint,” John Dee said briskly and pushed the ledger away. “Do they really think we have the time for maids’ gossip? We are supposed to be rooting out heresy here, and they bring us the quarrels of waiting maids.”

The bishop glanced at the paper. “Sympathy with heretics?” he queried. “That’s enough for burning.”

John Dee raised his head and smiled confidently at his master. “She’s a holy fool,” he said, laughter in his voice. “It’s her task in life to ask the questions that no sane man would ask. She talks nonsense, she is
supposed
to talk nonsense, shall we ask her to account for singing fiddle-dee-dee? Billycock sat on billycock hill? I think we should send out a very stiff letter to say that we will not be mocked by nonsensical accusations. We will not be used for the settling of servants’ rivalries. We are hunting out enemies of the faith, not tormenting half-wit girls.”

“Let her go?” the bishop asked, his eyebrows raised.

“Sign here,” John Dee said, sliding a paper across the desk. “Let’s get rid of her and get on with our work. The child is a fool, we would be fools to question her.”

I held my breath.

The bishop signed.

“Take her away,” John Dee said wearily. He swung round in his seat to face me. “Hannah Verde, also known as Hannah the Fool, we are releasing you from an inquiry into heresy. No charge to answer. D’you have wit enough to understand that, child?”

“Yes, sir,” I said very quietly.

John Dee nodded to the jailor. “Release her.”

I pushed myself up from the chair, my legs were still too weak to hold me. The guard slid a hand around my waist and kept me on my feet. “The women in my cell,” I said quietly to John Dee. “One is dying, and the other has had her fingernails ripped out.”

John Dee burst into a crack of laughter as if I had told him the most delightfully bawdy jest, and Bishop Bonner gave forth a great bellow.

“She is priceless!” the bishop shouted. “Anything else I can do for you, fool? Any complaints about your breakfast? About your bed?”

I looked from the red roaring face of the bishop to the twinkling smile of his clerk and shook my head. I bowed my head to the bishop, and to the man I had once been honored to know, and I left them with their bloodstained hands to interrogate innocent people and send them out to be burned.

*  *  *

I did not see how to get back to the court at Greenwich. When they turned me roughly out into the dirty street I wandered around at the back of St. Paul’s and stumbled blindly until I felt I had put a safe distance between the tower’s ominous reaching shadow and my frightened weaving steps. Then I slumped in a doorway like a vagrant and shook, as if I had the ague. A householder shouted at me to clear off and take the plague with me, and I moved on one doorway and collapsed again.

The bright sunshine burned into my face and showed me that it was past midday. After a long time on the cold step, I pushed myself up and walked a short way. I found I was crying like a baby and had to stop once more. Step by step I went on, pausing when my legs buckled underneath me until I found my way to our little shop off Fleet Street and hammered on our neighbor’s door.

“Dear God, what has become of you?”

I managed a twisted smile. “I have a fever,” I said. “I forgot my key, and lost my way. Would you let me in?”

He stepped back from me. In these times of hardship everyone was afraid of infection. “Do you need food?”

“Yes,” I said, too low for pride.

“I will leave you something on the doorstep,” he said. “Here’s the key.”

I took it wordlessly, and staggered to the shop. It turned in the lock and I stepped into the shuttered room. At once the precious scent of printers’ ink and dry paper surrounded me. I stood, inhaling it, the very perfume of heresy, the familiar beloved odor of home.

I heard the scrape and clink of a dish on the doorstep and went to fetch a pie and a little mug of ale. I ate sitting on the floor behind the counter, hidden from the shuttered windows, my back against the warm folios, smelling the perfume of the cured-leather binding.

As soon as I had eaten, I put the bowl back on the doorstep and locked the door. Then I went into my father’s print shop and store room and cleared the volumes from the bottom shelf. I did not want to sleep in my own little trestle bed. I did not even want to sleep in my father’s bed. I wanted to be closer to him than that. I had a superstitious terror that if I went to bed I would be dragged from sleep by Bishop Bonner again, but if I was in hiding with my father’s beloved books then they would keep me safe.