Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (391 page)

“I cannot live like a dead woman,” she whispers, though we are alone and there is no sound in the garden but the haunting late afternoon song of the thrush. “I cannot give up on my own cause, on my own life. I cannot lie like a corpse in my coffin and hope that someone is kind enough to carry me to Scotland or to London. I have to be alive. I have to act.”

“But you promised,” I insist like a child. “How can I trust anything, if I hear you promise on your honor as a queen, if I see you sign your name and place your seal, and then I find that it means nothing? You mean none of it?”

“I am imprisoned,” she says. “Everything means nothing until I am free.”

I am so angry with her and I feel so betrayed that I turn my back on her and take two hasty steps away. It is an insult to a queen: men have
been banished from court for far less than turning their back. I check when I realize what I have done, but I don’t turn to face her and kneel.

I feel like a fool. All this time I have been thinking the best of her, reporting to Cecil that I have intercepted messages and she has not received them. I have told him I am sure she has not invited them, that she attracts conspiracies but does not conspire herself, and all this time he has known that she was writing treasonous, rebellious instructions, planning to overthrow the peace of the country. All this time he has known that he was right and I was wrong, that she was an enemy and my tenderness towards her was itself a folly, if not treason. She has played the part of a devil and I have trusted her and helped her against my own interests, against my own friends, against my fellow Englishmen. I have been a fool for this woman, and she has abused my trust and abused my household and abused my fortune and abused my wife.

“You have shamed me,” I burst out, still turned away from her, my head bowed and my back to her. “Shamed me before Cecil and the court. I swore that I could keep you safe and away from conspiracy and you have made me false to my oath. You have done whatever wickedness you pleased and you have made a fool of me. A fool.” I am out of breath; I end in a sob of mortification. “You have played me for a fool.”

Still she says nothing, and still I don’t turn to look at her.

“I told them that you were not plotting, that you could be trusted with greater freedom,” I say. “I told them that you had entered into a treaty with the queen and made a promise to Morton and you had sworn these on your honor. I said that you would never break your word. Not your word of honor as a queen. I promised this on your behalf. I said that you had given your word. I said that was as good as a gold coin. I told them that you are a queen, a queen
par excellence
, and a woman incapable of dishonor.” I take a shuddering breath. “I don’t think you know what honor is,” I say bitterly. “I don’t think you know what honor means. And you have dishonored me.”

Gently, like a petal falling, I feel her touch. She has come up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder. I don’t move and gently she lays her cheek against my shoulder blade. If I turned, I could take her in my arms and the coolness of her cheek would be like a balm on my red and angry face.

“You have made a fool of me before my queen, before the court, and before my own wife,” I choke out, my back tingling under her touch. “You have dishonored me in my own house, and once I cared for nothing more than my honor and my house.”

Her hand on my shoulder grows firmer; she gives a little tug on my jacket and I turn to look at her. Her dark eyes are filled with tears, her face twisted with grief. “Ah, don’t say so,” she whispers. “Chowsbewwy, don’t say such things. You have been a man of such honor to me; you have been such a friend to me. I have never had a man serve me as you have done. I have never had a man care for me without hope of return. I can tell you that I love—”

“No,” I interrupt. “Don’t say another word to me. Don’t make another promise to me. How should I hear anything you say? I cannot trust anything you say!”

“I don’t break my word!” she insists. “I have never given my true word. I am a prisoner: I am not bound to tell the truth. I am under duress and my promise means noth—”

“You have broken your word, and with it, you have broken my heart,” I say simply, and I pull away from her grip and walk away from her without looking back.

1571, OCTOBER, SHEFFIELD CASTLE: BESS

A
cold autumn, and the leaves falling early from the trees, as if the weather itself will be hard on us this year. We have escaped disaster by a whisper, a whisper, nothing more. The Queen of Scots’ spy and plotter, Roberto Ridolfi, had every great power in Christendom in alliance against us. He had visited the Pope in Rome, the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, the King of Spain, and the King of France. They all sent either gold or men or both, ready for an invasion which was to murder Queen Elizabeth and put Queen Mary on the throne. Only Ridolfi’s boastful whisper of the plot reached the keen ears of William Cecil and saved us.

Cecil took the Queen of Scots’ bishop to stay with the Bishop of Ely as a house guest. It must have been a merry party. He took his servant to the Tower and broke him on the rack, under the stones, and by hanging him from the wrists. The man—an old servant of the Queen of Scots—told the torturers everything they asked, and probably more besides. Then Norfolk’s men were taken into the Tower and sang their songs as their fingernails were pulled out. Robert Higford showed them the hiding place for the letters, under the tiles of the roof. William Barker told them of the plot. Lawrence Bannister decoded the Queen of Scots’ letters to her betrothed, Norfolk, filled with love and promises. Then finally they took the Queen of Scots’ friend and ambassador, Bishop John Lesley, from his stay in Cambridgeshire to the harsher hospitality of the Tower and gave him a
taste of the pain that had broken lesser men, and he told them everything.

Another round of arrests of men named as traitors and Norfolk himself was thrown back in the Tower again. It is unbelievable, but it seems that after giving his complete submission to our queen Elizabeth, he went on writing and plotting with the other queen and was deep in the toils of the Spanish and the French, planning the overthrow of our peace.

I do believe we were within a day of a Spanish invasion that would have destroyed us, murdered Elizabeth, and put this most true heir to Bloody Mary Tudor—Bloody Mary Stuart—on the throne of England, and the fires in Smithfield would have been burning hot for Protestant martyrs once more.

Thank God Ridolfi was a braggart; thank God the King of Spain is a cautious man. Thank God the Duke of Norfolk is a fool who sent out a fortune in gold by an unreliable courier and the plotters betrayed themselves. And thank God Cecil was there, at the center of the web of his spies, knowing everything. For if the other queen had her way, she would be in Whitehall now, Elizabeth would be dead, and England, my England, would be lost.

My husband the earl has grown dark along with the colder nights and drawn in as they have done, into silence. He visits the queen in her rooms only once a week and asks her with bleak courtesy if she is well, if she has everything she needs, and if she has any letters that she would like dispatched by him, if she has any requests or complaints for him or for the court.

She replies with equal coldness that she is unwell, that she requires her freedom, that she demands Elizabeth honor the agreement to send her home to Scotland, and that she has no letters to send. They part as formally as enemies forced to dance together and joined for a moment by the movement of the dance and then released again.

I should be rejoicing that their friendship has ended so abruptly and so badly, I should be laughing in my sleeve that the faithless
queen should have been faithless to him. But it is hard to take pleasure in this prison. My husband the earl has aged years in these last few days; his face is grooved with sorrow and he hardly speaks. She is lonely, now that she has lost his love, and once again she comes to sit with me in the afternoons. She comes quietly, like a maidservant in disgrace, and I must say I am surprised that his disapproval should hit her so hard. Anyone would think that she had cared for him. We have working candles lit by five o’clock, and she says that she is dreading the darker nights and gray mornings. The midsummer tide of her good fortune has quite drained away; her luck has run dry. She knows that she will spend another winter in captivity. There is no chance now that they will send her back to Scotland. She has destroyed her own hopes and I am afraid that my house will be cursed with this sad ghost forever.

“Bess, what is happening in London?” she asks me. “You can tell me. I can hardly make any use of the information. I should think everyone knows more than me already.”

“The Duke of Norfolk is arrested, again charged with plotting with the Spanish, and returned to the Tower of London,” I say to her.

She goes white. Aha, I think meanly, so for once you are not ahead of us all. Her spies and informants must be lying low. She did not know of this.

“Bess, no! Is this true?”

“He is accused of being part of a plot to release you,” I say. “You would know more of this than I.”

“I swear—”

“Don’t,” I say coldly. “Save your breath.”

She falls silent. “Ah Bess, if you were in my shoes you would have done the same thing. He and I—”

“Did you really persuade yourself that you loved him?”

“I thought he would save me.”

“Well, you have led him to his death,” I say. “And that’s a thing I wouldn’t have done. Not even in your shoes.”

“You don’t know what it is to be queen,” she says simply. “I am a queen. I am not like other women. I have to be free.”

“You have condemned yourself to a lifetime of imprisonment,” I predict. “And him to death. I would not have done that in your shoes, queen or not.”

“They can prove nothing against him,” she says. “And even if they forge evidence, or torture false testimony from servants, he is still the queen’s cousin. He is of royal blood. She will not condemn her own family to death. A royal person is sacred.”

“What else can she do?” I demand, driven to irritation. “All very well for you to say that she can’t do it, but what choice does she have? What choice does he leave her? If he will not stop plotting, after making a full submission and being forgiven, if you will not stop plotting, after giving your sworn word, what can she do but end it? She cannot spend the rest of her life waiting for your assassin to arrive and kill her.”

“She cannot kill him; he is her cousin and of royal blood. And she will never be able to kill me,” she declares. “She cannot kill a fellow queen. And I would never send an assassin. So she can never end this.”

“You have become each other’s nightmare,” I say. “And it is as if neither of you can ever wake.”

We sit in silence for a moment. I am working on a tapestry of my house at Chatsworth, as accurate as a builder’s drawing. Sometimes I think this will be all I have left of Chatsworth when I have to sell my pride and my joy to a buyer at a breakdown price. All I will have left of the years of my happiness is this tapestry of the house I loved.

“I have not heard from my ambassador for weeks,” the queen says quietly to me. “John Lesley, Bishop of Ross. Is he arrested? Do you know?”

“Was he part of the plot?” I ask.

“No,” she says wearily. “No. There was no plot that I know of. And certainly he was not part of it. And even if he had received a letter from someone, or met with someone, then he cannot be arrested,
since he is an ambassador. He has rights, even in such a kingdom as this, where spies make proclamations and commoners pass laws.”

“Then he has nothing to fear,” I say unkindly. “And neither do you. And neither does the Duke of Norfolk. He is safe, and according to you, so are you and the ambassador: all of you untouchable in either the sanctity of your bodies or the innocence of your conscience. That being so, why are you so pale, Your Grace, and why does my husband not ride with you in the mornings anymore? Why does he never seek you out and why do you not send for him?”

“I think I’ll go back to my rooms now,” she says quietly. “I am tired.”