The Other Queen (22 page)

The countess comes into my rooms, her face as kindly as flint. “Your Grace, you are going on a journey again. You will be glad to be away from here, I know.”

“Going where?” I ask. I can hear the fear in my voice; she will hear it too.

“Ashby-de-la-Zouche, Leicestershire,” she says shortly. “With the Earl of Huntingdon.”

“I prefer to stay here. I will stay here.”

“It must be as the queen commands.”

“Bess…”

“Your Grace, I can do nothing. I cannot deny my sovereign’s commands for you. You should not ask it of me. Nobody should ask it of me.”

“What will Huntingdon do with me?”

“Why, he will house you better than we can do here,” she says reassuringly, as if she is telling a fairy story to a child.

“Bess, write to Cecil for me, ask him if I can stay here. I ask you—no, I command you—to write to him.”

She keeps the smile on her face but it is strained. “Now, you don’t even like it here! You must have complained of the smell from the midden a dozen times. And the damp! Leicestershire will suit you far better. It is wonderful hunting country. Perhaps the queen will invite you to court.”

“Bess, I am afraid of Henry Hastings. He can wish me nothing but harm. Let me stay with you. I demand it. I command you. Write to Cecil and tell him I demand to stay with Lord Shrewsbury.”

But the way I say her husband’s name, “Chowsbewwy,” suddenly triggers her rage.

“You have spent half my husband’s fortune, my own fortune,” she spits out. “The fortune I brought to him on my marriage. You have cost him his reputation with his queen; she doubts our loyalty because of you. She has ordered him to London for questioning. What do you think they will do to him? They think we favor you.” She pauses, and I see the evil flash of her jealousy, the envy of an older woman for my youth, for my looks. I had not thought that she felt this. I had not known that she saw how her husband is with me. “They think that my husband favors you. It will not be hard to find witnesses to say that he favors you. Exceptionally.”

“Alors, Bess, you know very well—”

“No, I don’t know,” she says icily. “I don’t know anything about his feelings for you, or yours for him, or your so-called magic, your so-called charm, your famous beauty. I don’t know why he cannot say no to you, why he squanders his wealth on you, even my own fortune on you. I don’t know why he has risked everything to try to set you free. Why he has not guarded you more closely, kept you to your rooms, cut down your court. But he cannot do it anymore. You will have to resign yourself. You can try your charms on the Earl of Huntingdon and see how they work on him.”

“Huntingdon is Queen Elizabeth’s man,” I say desperately. “You know this. He is her kin. He courted her for marriage. He is the next heir to her throne after me and my boy. Do you think I can charm him?”

“God knows, you are welcome to try,” she says sourly, curtsies and walks backwards to the door.

“Or what?” I ask as she goes. “Or what? What will become of me in his keeping? You are sending me to my death and you know it. Bess!Bess!”

Icannot sleep. I cannot eat either as it happens. I cannot sit quietly in my chair or take any pleasure in riding out. I have bought four days of safety for her by arguing that they have not a strong-enough guard, that with the Northern army on the march—who knows where?—they dare not ride out with her. They could take her straight into an ambush. No one knows how many men have joined the Northern lords.

No one knows where they are now. Hastings, grumbling, has sent for more of his men.

“Why bother?” Bess asks me, her brown eyes cold. “Since she has to go anyway. Why see that Hastings has a strong guard? I should have thought you would have wanted her to be rescued.”

I want to tell her, “Because I would say anything to keep her under the same roof as me for another day.” But that would make no sense at all. So I remark, “The news from all around is that Westmorland and Northumberland are on the move and their army is more than two thousand strong. I don’t want to send them out into trouble. It does us no good at all if they go from here into an ambush.”

Bess nods, but she does not look convinced. “We don’t want her trapped here,” she says. “The army will swarm to her like wasps to a jam pot. Better she goes than they set siege to us here. Better that she goes sooner rather than later. We don’t want her here. We don’t want her army coming here for her.”

I nod. The newlywed husband and wife that we were only months ago did not want her here, interrupting our happiness. But us? Now we are divided in our wishes. Bess thinks only of how to get herself and her fortune safe through this dangerous time. And for some reason, I cannot think at all. I cannot plan at all. I think I must have a touch of the gout that I had before. I have never felt so light-headed and so weary and so sick. I seem to spend hours looking out the window across the courtyard to where her shutters are closed. I must beill. I can think of nothing but that I have only four days left with her under my roof, and I can’t even devise a reason to go across the courtyard and speak to her. Four days and I may spend them like a dog sitting outside a shut door, not knowing how to get in.

I am howling inside my head.

It is dawn when I hear the hammering on the great house gate. I am awake at once, certain that it is the Northern army come for her. George does not move; he lies like a stone, though I know he is wide awake; he never seems to sleep these days. He lies and listens with his eyes shut; he will not talk to me or give me any chance to talk to him. Even now, with the hammering at the door, he does not move—he is a man who has had someone else to open his door for all his life. I get crossly out of bed, pull a robe around my nakedness, tie the strings, and run to the door and down the stairs to where the gate-keeper is swinging open the gate and a mud-stained rider clatters into the courtyard, his face white in the dawn light. Thank God it is a messenger from London and not a force from the North. Thank God they have not come for her and no one here to face them but me in my nightgown and my husband left abed, lying like a gravestone.

“Name?” I demand.

“From Cecil.”

“What is it?”

“War,” he says shortly. “Finally it is war. The North is up; the lords Westmorland and Northumberland have declared against the queen, their men out, their banners unfurled. They are riding under the banner of the five wounds of Christ; every Papist in the country is flocking to join them. They have sworn to restore the true religion, to pay proper rates to working men, and”—he nods to the royal lodgings—“free her and put her back on her throne.”

I clutch the robe to my throat; the chill air is as icy as dread. The mist coming off the water meadows is as wet as rain. “They are coming here? You are sure?”

“For certainty. Here. Your orders,” he says, digging into his satchel and thrusting a crumpled letter at me. With a breath of relief, as if paper alone can save me, I recognize Cecil’s writing.

“How far are they? How strong the army?” I demand, as he swings down from the saddle.

“I didn’t see them, thank God, on my way here, but who knows?” he says tersely. “Some say they will take York first, others Durham. They could take York and restore the kingdom of the North. It will be the great wars all over again, but worse. Two queens, two faiths on crusade, two armies, and a fight to the death. If the Spanish land their army for her, which they can do within days from the Spanish Netherlands, it will be all over, and we will be dead.”

“Get what you want from the kitchen, but say nothing to them,” I tell him and go back to my bedroom at a run. George is sitting up in bed, his face grim.

“Wife?” he asks.

“Read this,” I say, thrusting it at him and climbing on the bed.

He takes the letter and breaks the seal. “What’s happening?”

“The messenger says that the lords of the North have their army and are on the march,” I say briefly.

“They have declared war. They are coming here for her.”

He shoots a quick look at me and spreads the letter. “This is from Cecil. He says we are to get away south immediately. We have to take her to the castle at Coventry at once for safekeeping. He will command us from there. We have to get south before they rescue her. We must go at once.” He jumps from the bed. “Sound the alarm,” he says. “I shall have to rouse the guard and take her at once. And you go to her and tell her she has to make ready to leave at once.”

I pause at the doorway, struck by a bitter thought. “I wager she knows all about it,” I say suddenly.

“They will have told her when they visited. When you let her talk with them in private. She will be in their confidence. She will have had secret letters. She has probably been waiting for them all this last week.”

“Just get her ready to leave.”

“What if she won’t go?”

“Then I will have to tie her to her horse,” he says. “An army of fifty could take this place in an hour. And half our servants would free her for love, and open the gates for her. If they set a siege we are lost.”

I am so glad to hear of his planned brutality to her that I am halfway out the door before the thought strikes me. “But wait, my lord. Wait! What if they win?”

He checks in his rapid dressing, the laces for his riding trousers in his hands. “If they win?”

“What if the army of the North takes and holds the North? What if Westmorland and Northumberland are victorious and march on London? What if the Spanish arrive to support them? What if Howard brings in the east of the country and the Cornish get up for the old religion, the Welsh too? What if they defeat Elizabeth, and we are imprisoning the future queen? What if you are tying the next Queen of England to her horse? Then we are traitors and will die in the Tower.”

My husband shakes his head, baffled. “I serve the queen,” he says flatly. “I have given my word as a Talbot. I have to do as my king commands. I don’t serve the side that I guess might win. I serve the king.

Whatever it costs me. If Mary Queen of Scots is victorious and becomes Mary Queen of England, then I will serve her. But till then, I serve the crowned queen, Elizabeth.”

He understands nothing but loyalty and honor. “Yes, yes, once she is crowned queen you change sides and then it is the honorable thing to do. But how will we and our children and our fortunes be secure.

Now. In these dangerous days. While everything hangs in the balance. When we cannot tell which queen will be crowned in London.”

He shakes his head. “There is no safety,” he says. “There is no safety for anyone in England now. I just have to follow the crown.”

I go then, and order them to wake the castle and turn out the guard. The great bell starts tolling like a heart booming with fear. I send them running to the kitchen to get all the stores loaded on wagons, I shout for my steward of the household to pack the most valuable goods, as we will have to take them with us, and then I go to her quarters, to the other queen’s rooms, shaking with anger that she should bring such dire trouble upon us this day, and so much more trouble to come in the days that will follow.

And as I run I open the little piece of paper that came for me, scribbled with my name, in the package from London. It is from Cecil.

If you are in danger of being captured by the army of the North, she must be killed. Hastings will do it, or if he is dead you must command your husband in the queen’s name. Or anyone whose loyalty you trust, whose silence you can guarantee. If there is no one left alive but you women, you will have to do it yourself. Carry a knife. Burn this.

At last! I think, Good God! At last! as I hear the bell tolling, and know at once that the war has started.

At last they have come for me, and only a day to spare before I would have been kidnapped by that brute Hastings. I wake and dress, as fast as I can, my hands trembling with laces, and start to pack the things I must take with me, burning the letters from my ambassador, from my betrothed, from the Spanish ambassador, from his agent Ridolfi, from Bothwell. I wait for the countess or for Shrewsbury to come and beg me to hurry, hurry to run away from this castle that they cannot defend. I shall travel with them. I shall obey their orders. I dare not defy them and risk Hastings’ snatching me from them. My only safety is to stay with Shrewsbury until my army catches us.

I won’t leave Shrewsbury until I am safe with my own army. I dare not. He has been my only friend in England; I have seen no other man that I can trust. And he has never been anything but kind to me. He has never been anything but honorable. A woman with a man like this at her side would be safe. God knows how much I long to be safe.

Westmorland has sworn to me he will come wherever I am. Only if they take the road to London and to the Tower must I make my escape. If Elizabeth, in her fear, tries to put me in the dungeon where she herself waited for her death sentence, I must get away.

I don’t need to resist them, for while this war is waging, it does not matter where they take me. The lords will demand my freedom as part of their settlement with Elizabeth, wherever I am hidden. They will demand the right to our religion and the right to my freedom, and with the North up in arms she will be forced to agree. The North has always been another kingdom; Elizabeth’s rule has never run north of the Trent. No Tudor has ever ventured farther than York. If the northerners defy her she will have to make an agreement with them, whatever her preferences.

Beyond all this is a greater plan, an ambitious plan that I do not sanction. I dare not sanction it. I will not make war against a queen on her throne. But of course they all think that if a battle is joined, and it goes their way, then they can march on London. They can take me to the very throne of England itself. This is what Philip of Spain and his ambassador want. This is why his banker Roberto Ridolfi has paid over a fortune in Spanish gold. To put me on the throne not only of Scotland, but of England too. This is nothing more than my right. Elizabeth is a disowned bastard of the late King Henry; I am the granddaughter of his sister. I am the true heir and I should have the throne. I was raised to claim it as my own. They call it the