The Other Queen (35 page)

At almost every village I see the quick, half-hidden movement as the good men and women cross themselves too and their lips whisper the words of a Hail Mary. These are my people; I am their queen.

We have been defeated by Elizabeth and her traitorous army once, but we will not be defeated again.

And we will come again. We will come under the flag of the Pope. We will be unbeatable. She can be very sure of that.

“We will go from Chatsworth on to Wingfield,” Shrewsbury says to me as we stop to dine on a riverbank, a simple meal of roast meats, breads, and cheeses. “Chatsworth is so much Bess’s house, she begrudges every penny she spends there if it is not on her eternal rebuilding and refashioning. I would rather have you under my own roof, and Wingfield Manor has been in my family for generations. And from Wingfield, if you can agree with the queen, I am to escort you to Edinburgh.”

“I will agree,” I say. “How can I refuse her? She has me as her prisoner; there is nothing worse that she can do against me. We are both entrapped. The only way I can be free, and that she can be free of me, is for us to agree. I have nothing with which to bargain against her. I am forced to agree.”

“Even to her holding your son?” he asks.

I turn to him. “I have been thinking of that, and there is a solution I would consider, if you would help me?”

“Anything,” he says at once. “You know I would do anything for you.”

I savor the words for a moment, then I go to the main question. “Would you serve as his guardian? If Prince James were to live with you, in your house, would you care for him, as you have done for me?”

He is astounded. “I?”

“I would trust you,” I say simply. “And I would trust no one else. You would guard him for me, wouldn’t you? You would care for my boy? You would not let them corrupt him? You would not let them turn him against me? You would keep him safe?”

He slips from his stool and kneels on the carpet that they have laid on the riverbank under my chair. “I would lay down my life to keep him safe,” he says. “I would devote my life to him.”

I give him my hand. This is the last card in the pack that I have to play to get myself back to Scotland and ensure at the same time that my son is safe. “Can you persuade Cecil that James shall come to you?”

I ask. “Propose it to him as your own idea?”

He is so in love with me that he does not stop to think that he should ask his wife first, or that he should beware when an enemy of his country asks for a special favor.

“Yes,” he says. “Why would he not agree? He wants a settlement, we all do. And I would be honored to care for your son. It would be as if…to guard him for you would be like…” He cannot say it. I know he is thinking that to raise my son would be as if we had married and had a child together. I cannot encourage him to speak like this; I have to keep him carefully placed: in his marriage, in the esteem of his peers, in the trust of his queen, in his position in England. He is of no use to me if they think of him as disloyal. If they think too badly of him they will take me from him and not trust him with my son.

“Don’t say it,” I whisper passionately, and it silences him at once. “Some things must never be said between us. It is a matter of honor.”

This checks him, as I knew it would. “It is a matter of honor to us both,” I say to make sure. “I cannot bear that men should accuse you of taking advantage of your position as my guardian. Just think how dreadful it would be if people should say that you had me at your mercy and dishonored me in your thoughts.”

He almost chokes. “I would never! I am not like that!”

“I know. But it is what people would say. People have said terrible things about me, for all of my life.

They might accuse me of trying to seduce you, so that I could escape.”

“No one could think such a thing!”

“You know that is what they think already. There is nothing that Elizabeth’s spies will not say against me.

They say the worst things about me. They would not understand what I feel…for you.”

“I would do anything to protect you from slander,” he declares.

“Then do this,” I say. “Persuade Cecil that you can guard my son James, and I can get back to Scotland. Once I am back on my throne I will be safe from scandal and from Cecil’s spies alike. You can save me. And you can keep James safe. Keep him safe for love of me. It can be our secret. It can be the secret of our two hidden hearts.”

“I will,” he says simply. “Trust me, I will.”

It is agreed, thank God, it is agreed and will shortly be sealed and signed. The queen is to be returned to Scotland and I shall be guardian to her son. Nothing less than this duty would console me for the loss of her. But to stand as father to her boy will be everything. I shall see her beauty in him, and I will raise him as she would wish. My love for her will be invested in him; she will see a good young man come from my care. She will be proud of him; he will be a boy of my making, and I will forge him into a good prince for her. I will not fail her in this. She trusts me and she will find me trustworthy. And it will be such a joy to have a little boy in the house, a boy whose mother is a woman of such beauty, a boy that I can love for his mother’s and for his own sake too.

It seems that our troubles may be over. The riots in Norwich have been put down with rapid brutality and those Catholics who have heard of the papal bull against Elizabeth are not hurrying forward to put their heads into a noose. Norfolk is to be released from the Tower. Cecil himself argued that though his offense is great, his crimes do not amount to treason. He is not to face trial, nor the death sentence. I am more relieved by this than I show to Bess when she tells me.

“Are you not pleased?” she asks, puzzled.

“I am,” I say quietly.

“I thought you would have been delighted. If they do not accuse Norfolk, then there can be no shadow over you, who did so much less.”

“It is not that which pleases me,” I say. I am irritated by her assumption that all I think of is my own safety. But I am always irritated by her these days. She cannot say a word that does not grate on me.

Even when I know that this is unfair, I find that the way that she walks into a room sets my teeth on edge.

She has a way of putting down her feet, heavily like a woman going to market, a way of carrying her eternal accounts books, a way of being always so busy, so hardworking, so efficient. She is more like a housekeeper than a countess. There is no grace about her. She utterly lacks any elegance.

I know, I know, I am wickedly unfair to blame Bess for lacking the charm of a woman raised in a court and born to greatness. I should remember that she is the woman I married for choice, and she has good looks, good health, and good spirits. It is unfair to complain that she does not have the looks of one of the most beautiful women in the world or the manners of the queen of one of the finest courts in Europe.

But we have such a being in our house; such a paragon smiles at me each morning; how can I help but adore her?

“So what pleases you?” Bess asks encouragingly. “This is good news, I think. I expected you would be happy.”

“What pleases me is that I shall be spared his trial.”

“His trial?”

“I am still Lord High Steward of England,” I remind her, a touch sourly, “whatever your friend Cecil thinks of me and would do against me if he could. I am still Lord High Steward and if a peer of the realm is to be tried for treason, then I would be the judge who would sit on his case.”

“I hadn’t thought,” she said.

“No. But if your good friend Cecil had brought my true friend Norfolk to trial for his life, it would have been I who would have been forced to sit with the axe before me and bring in a verdict. I would have had to tell Norfolk, a man I have known from his boyhood, that I found him guilty, when I knew he was innocent, and that he was to be hanged and disemboweled while still alive and cut into pieces. D’you not think I have been dreading this?”

She blinks. “I didn’t realize.”

“No,” I say. “But when Cecil attacks the old lords, this is the consequence. We are all torn by his ambition. Men who have loved each other all their lives are thrown one against the other. Only you and Cecil don’t see this, for you don’t understand that the old lords are as a family of brothers. Newcomers cannot know this. You look for conspiracies; you don’t understand brotherhood.”

Bess does not even defend herself. “If Norfolk had not engaged to marry the Queen of Scots in secret, then he would not have been in trouble,” she says stoutly. “It is nothing to do with Cecil’s ambitions. It is all Norfolk’s own fault. His own ambitions. Perhaps now that he has withdrawn, we can all be at peace again.”

“What d’you mean, withdrawn?” I ask.

She has to hide a smile. “It seems your great friend is not very gallant to his ladylove. Not very chivalrous at all. Not only has he given her up and broken off the betrothal; apparently he also suggested that she should take his place in the Tower, as surety for his good behavior. It seems that there is one man at least who does not long to die for love of her. One who would happily see her in the Tower for treason. One man who is quite prepared to walk away from her and make a better life for himself without her at all.”

There is no peace for a woman who tries to run a proper household with a spendthrift guest and a husband who is a fool. The greater the queen’s freedom, the greater the expense for us. Now I am told that she can entertain visitors, and every sensation-seeking gawper in the country comes to watch her dine and help themselves to some dinner as they do. Her wine bill alone is more in a month than mine is in a year. I cannot begin to balance the accounts; they are beyond me. For the first time in my life I look at my books without pleasure but with absolute despair. The pile of bills grows all the time and she brings in no income at all.

Out goes the money on the queen: her luxuries, her servants, her horses, her pets, her messengers, her guards, the silk for her embroidery, the damask for her gowns, the linen for her bed, the herbs, the oils, the perfumes for her dressing table. The coal for her fire, the best wax candles, which she burns from midday till two in the morning. She has them burning while she is asleep, lighting empty rooms. She has silken carpets for her table—she even puts my best Turkey carpets on the floor. She has to have special goods for her kitchen, sugars and spices all have to come from London, her special soap for her laundry, the special starch for her linen, the special shoes for her horses. Wine for the table, wine for her servants, and—unbelievably—best white wine for her to wash her face. My accounts for keeping the Scots queen are a joke; they have only one side: expenditure. On the income side of the page there is nothing. Not even the fifty-two pounds a week we were promised for her. Nothing. There are no pages of receipts, since there are no receipts. I begin to think there never will be, and we will go on like this until we are utterly ruined.

And I can now say with certainty we will be ruined. No house in the land could keep a queen with limitless numbers of servants, with numberless friends and hangers-on. To keep a queen you need the income of a kingdom and the right to set a tax, and that we do not have. We were once a wealthy couple, wealthy in land, rents, mines, and shipping. But all these businesses have a balance of money coming in slowly and quickly going out. It was a balance which I managed superbly well. The Scots queen has thrown this balance all wrong. Quickly, amazingly quickly, we are becoming poor.

I shall have to sell land on a great scale. The little borrowings and sales I have bodged together since she arrived will no longer suffice. I shall have to raise mortgages. I shall have to enclose and put up the rents for tenants who are already behind in their payments, having wasted the winter in chasing around with the Northern army, which was her fault too. I shall have to levy extra payments on houses that are still missing men—hanged or run away for Mary Stuart. She will force me to be a harsh landlord and I shall get the blame for it. I shall have to take common land away from good villages and enclose it for crops. I shall have to drive people from their fields and make their gardens into sheep runs. I shall wring cash from the land as if it were a damp rag. This is not how to run a good estate. This is not how to be a good landlord. I shall become greedy in my need for money, and they will hate me and blame me for it and say I am a hard landlord and a harsh money-grabbing woman.

And she is not just expensive. She is a danger. One of my servants, John Hall, comes to me, his eyes down but his palm eager. “I thought you should know, my lady. I thought you would want to be informed.”

Will I ever again hear a muttered preamble like this and think it is going to be nothing more than a broken vase? Will I ever get back to the time when I feel only irritation? Now, and forever, I am going to feel my heart pound with dread, waiting for the news that she has escaped or that she has sent out a letter or received a guest who will ruin us.

“What is it?” I ask sharply.

“I thought you would be glad to know I was loyal.”

I itch to slap him. “And you will be rewarded,” I say, though every bribe is just another cost. “What is it?”

“It is the queen,” he says, as if I could not have guessed. “There is a plot to release her. The gentlemen offered me a gold sovereign to bring her to the high moor and they would ride away with her.”

“And she agreed?” I ask.

“I haven’t asked her yet,” he says. “I thought I should come straight to you. I am loyal to you, my lady, whatever bribe I am offered.”

“You shall have two guineas for this,” I promise. “So who are the gentlemen? What are their names?”

“Sir Thomas Gerard is the man,” he says. “But it was his friend met me at the inn, a gentleman called Rolleston. But whether there is a greater man behind them, I don’t know. I know another man who would be glad of the information.”