The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  When they were all gone she walked up to a window embrasure where no one could hear us and beckoned for me. “Hannah?”

  “Yes, Your Grace?” I went to her side at once.

  “Isn’t it time you were out of your pageboy livery? You will be a woman soon.”

  I hesitated. “If you will allow it, Your Grace, I would rather go on dressed as a pageboy.”

  She looked at me curiously. “Don’t you long for a pretty gown, and to grow your hair, child? Don’t you want to be a young woman? I thought I would give you a gown for Christmas.”

  I thought of my mother plaiting my thick black hair and winding the plaits around her fingers and telling me I would become a beauty, a famously beautiful woman. I thought of her chiding me for my love of rich cloth, and how I had begged for a green velvet gown for Hanukkah.

  “I lost my love of finery when I lost my mother,” I said quietly. “There’s no pleasure in it for me without her to choose and fit the dresses on me, and tell me that they suit me. I don’t even want long hair without her here to plait it for me.”

  Her face became tender. “When did she die?”

  “When I was eleven years old,” I lied. “She took the plague.” I would never risk revealing the truth that she had been burned as a heretic, not even with this queen who looked so gravely and sorrowfully into my face.

  “Poor child,” she said gently. “It is a loss that you never forget. You can learn to bear it, but you never forget it.”

  “Every time something good happens to me I want to tell her. Every time something bad happens I want her help.”

  She nodded. “I used to write to my mother, even when I knew that they would never allow me to send my letters to her. Even though there was nothing in them that they could have objected to, no secrets, just my need for her and my sorrow that she was far from me. But they would not let me write to her. I just wanted to tell her that I loved her and I missed her. And then she died and I was not allowed to go to her. I could not even hold her hand and close her eyes.”

  She put her hand to her eyes and pressed her cool fingertips against her eyelids, as if to hold back old tears.

  She cleared her throat. “But this cannot mean that you never wear a gown,” she said lightly. “Life goes on, Hannah. Your mother would not want you to grieve. She would want you to grow to be a woman, a beautiful young woman. She would not want her little girl to wear boy’s clothes forever.”

  “I don’t want to be a woman,” I said simply. “My father has arranged a marriage for me, but I know I am not yet ready to be a woman and a wife.”

  “You can’t want to be a virgin like me,” she said with a wry smile. “It’s not a course many women would choose.”

  “No,” I said. “Not a virgin queen like you, I have not dedicated myself to being a single woman; but it’s as if…” I broke off. “As if I don’t know how to be a woman,” I said uncomfortably. “I watch you, and I watch the ladies of the court.” Tactfully I did not add that of them all, I watched the Lady Elizabeth, who seemed to me to be the epitome of the grace of a girl and the dignity of a princess. “I watch everyone, and I think I will learn it in time. But not yet.”

  She nodded. “I understand exactly. I don’t know how to be a queen without a husband at my side. I have never known of a queen without a man to guide her. And yet I am so afraid of marrying…” She paused. “I don’t think a man could ever understand the dread that a woman might feel at the thought of marriage. Especially a woman like me, not a young woman, not a woman given to the pleasures of the flesh, not a woman who is even very desirable…” She put a hand out to prevent me from contradicting her. “I know it, Hannah, you needn’t flatter me.

  “And worse than all of these things, I am not a woman who finds it easy to trust men. I hate having to sit with the men of power. When they argue in council, my heart thumps in my chest, and I am afraid that my voice will shake when I have to speak.

  “And yet I despise men who are weak. When I look at my cousin Edward Courtenay that the Lord Chancellor would have me marry, I could laugh out loud at the thought of it. The boy is a puppy and a vain fool and I could never, never debase myself to lie under such a one as him.

  “But if one married a man who was accustomed to command…” She paused. “What a terror it would be,” she said quietly. “To put your heart in the keeping of a stranger! What a terror to promise to obey a man who might order you to do anything! And to promise to love a man till death…” She broke off. “After all, men do not always consider themselves bound by such promises. And what happens then to a good wife?”

  “Did you think you would live and die a virgin?” I asked.

  She nodded. “When I was a princess I was betrothed over and over again. But when my father denied me and called me his bastard, I knew that there would be no offers of marriage. I set away all thoughts of it then, and all thoughts of my own children too.”

  “Your father denied you?”

  “Yes,” the queen said shortly. “They made me swear on the Bible to my own bastardy.” Her voice shook, she drew a breath. “No prince in Europe would have married me after that. To tell you the truth, I was so ashamed I would not have wanted a husband. I could not have looked an honorable man in the face. And when my father died and my brother became king, I thought I could be like a dowager, like a favorite old godmother, his older sister who might advise him, and I thought he would have children that I might care for. But now everything has changed and I am queen, and even though I am queen I find I still cannot make my own choices.” She paused. “They have offered me Philip of Spain, you know.”

  I waited.

  She turned to me as if I had more sense than her greyhound, as if I could advise her. “Hannah, I am less than a man and less than a woman. I cannot rule as a man, and I cannot give the country the heir that it has a right to desire. I am a half prince. Neither queen nor king.”

  “Surely, the country only needs a ruler it can respect,” I said tentatively. “And it needs years of peace. I am new-come to this land but even I can see that men don’t know what is right and wrong any more. The church has changed and changed again within their lifetimes and they have had to change and change with it. And there is much poverty in the city, and hunger in the country. Can’t you just wait? Can’t you just feed the poor and restore the lands to the landless, set men back to work and get the beggars and the thieves off the roads? Bring back the beauty to the church and give the monasteries back their lands?”

  “And when I have done that?” Queen Mary asked, a strange shaking intensity in her voice. “What then? When the country is safe inside the church again, when everyone is well fed, when the barns are full and the monasteries and nunneries are prosperous? When the priests are pure in their living and the Bible is read to the people as it should be? When the Mass is celebrated in every village, and the matins bells ring out over all the fields every morning as they should do, as they always have done? What then?”

  “Then you will have done the task that God called you to, won’t you?…” I stammered.

  She shook her head. “I will tell you, what then. Then illness or accident befalls me and I die childless. And the bastard of Anne Boleyn and the lute player Mark Smeaton steps up to claim the throne: Elizabeth. And the moment she is on the throne she throws off her mask and shows herself for what she is.”

  I could hardly recognize the hiss of her voice, the hatred in her face. “Why, what is she? What has she done to upset you so?”

  “She has betrayed me,” she said flatly. “When I was fighting for our inheritance, hers as well as mine, she was writing to the man who was marching against me. I know that now. While I was fighting for her as well as for myself she was making an agreement with him for when I was dead. She would have signed it on my execution block.

  “When I took her into London at my side they cheered the Protestant princess, and she smiled at the cheers. When I sent her teachers and scholars to explain to her th
e errors of her faith she smiled at them, her mother’s sly smile, and told them that now she understood, now she would receive the blessing of Mass.

  “And then she comes to Mass like a woman forced against her conscience. Hannah! When I was no older than her I had the greatest men of England curse me to my face and threaten me with death if I did not conform to the new religion. They took my mother from me and she died ill and heartbroken and alone, but she never bowed the knee to them. They threatened me with the scaffold for treason! They threatened me with fire for heresy! They were burning men and women for less than I was saying. I had to cling to my faith with all my courage and I did not renounce it until the Emperor of Spain himself told me that I should do so, that I must renounce it, because to keep it was my death sentence. He knew they would kill me if I did not renounce my faith. But all I have done to Elizabeth is to beg her to save her own soul and be my little sister once more!”

  “Your Grace…” I whispered. “She’s only young, she will learn.”

  “She’s not that young.”

  “She will learn…”

  “If she is going to learn then she chooses the wrong tutors. She conspires with the kingdom of France against me, she has a band of men who would stop at nothing to see her inherit. Every day someone tells me of another foul plot, and always, the tendrils come back to her. Every time I look at her now, I see a woman steeped in sin, just like her mother, the poisoner. I can almost see her flesh going black from the sin from her heart. I see her turning her back on the Holy Church, I see her turning her back on my love, I see her rushing toward treason and sin.”

  “You said she was your little sister,” I reminded her. “You said you loved her as if she was your own child.”

  “I did love her,” the queen said bitterly. “More than she remembers. More than I should have done, knowing what her mother did to mine. I did love her. But she is not the child that I loved any more. She is not the little girl that I taught to write and read. She has gone wrong. She has been corrupted. She is steeped in sin. I cannot save her; she is a witch and the daughter of a witch.”

  “She’s a young woman,” I protested quietly. “Not a witch.”

  “Worse than a witch,” she accused. “A heretic. A hypocrite. A whore. I know her for all these. A heretic because she takes the Mass; but I know her to be a Protestant, and she is forsworn with her eyes on the Host. A hypocrite because she does not even own to her faith. There are brave men and women in this land who would go to the stake for their error; but she is not one of them. When my brother Edward was on the throne she was then a shining light of the reformed religion. She was the Protestant princess in her dark gowns and her white ruffs and her eyes turned down and no gold or jewels in her ears or on her fingers. Now he is dead she kneels beside me to see the raising of the Host, and crosses herself, and curtsies to the altar, but I know it is all false. It is an insult to me, which is nothing; but it is an insult to my mother who was pushed aside for her mother, and it is an insult to the Holy Church, which is a sin against God himself.

  “And, God forgive her, she is a whore because of what she did with Thomas Seymour. The whole world would know it; but that other great Protestant whore hid the two of them, and died in hiding it.”

  “Who?” I asked. I was appalled and fascinated, all at once, remembering the girl in the sunlit garden and the man who held her against a tree and put his hand up her skirt.

  “Katherine Parr,” Queen Mary said through her teeth. “She knew that her husband Thomas Seymour had been seduced by Elizabeth. She caught them at it in Elizabeth’s chamber, Elizabeth in her shift, Lord Thomas all over her. Katherine Parr bundled Elizabeth off to the country, out of the way. She faced down the gossip, she denied everything. She protected the girl — well, she had to, the child was in her house. She protected her husband, and then she died giving birth to his child. Fool. Foolish woman.”

  She shook her head. “Poor woman. She loved him so much that she married him before my father was cold in the ground. She scandalized the court, and she risked her place in the world. And he rewarded her by tickling a fourteen-year-old girl in her house, under her supervision. And that girl, my Elizabeth, my little sister, wriggled under his caresses and protested that she would die if he touched her again, but never locked her bedroom door, never complained to her stepmother and never found a better lodging.

  “I knew of it. Good God, there was such gossip even I, hidden away in the country, heard of it. I wrote to her and said she should come to me, I had a home, I could provide for us both. She wrote me very sweetly, very fair. She wrote to me that nothing was happening to her and that she did not need to move house. And all the time she was letting him into her chamber in the morning, and letting him lift the hem of her gown to see her shift, and one time, God help her, letting him cut her gown off her, so that she was all but naked before him.

  “She never sent to me for help, though she knew I would have taken her away within the day. A little whore then, and a whore now, and I knew it, God forgive me, and hoped that she might be bettered. I thought if I gave her a place at my side, and the honor which would be hers, then she would grow into being a princess. I thought that a young whore in the making could be unmade, could be made anew, could be taught to be a princess. But she cannot. She will not. You will see how she behaves in the future when she has the chance of a tickling once again.”

  “Your Grace…” I was overwhelmed by the spilling out of her spite.

  She took a breath and turned to the window. She rested her forehead against the thick pane of glass and I saw how the heat from her hair misted the glass. It was cold outside, the unbearable English winter, and the Thames was iron-gray beyond the stone-colored garden beneath the pewter sky. I could see the queen’s reflected face in the thick glass like a cameo drowned in water, I could see the feverish energy pulsing through her body.

  “I must be free of this hatred,” she said quietly. “I must be free of the pain that her mother brought me. I must disown her.”

  “Your Grace…” I said again, more gently.

  She turned back to me.

  “She will come after me if I die without heir,” she said flatly. “That lying whore. Anything I achieve will be overturned by her, will be spoiled by her. Everything in my life has always been despoiled by her. I was England’s only princess and the great joy of my mother’s heart. A moment, an eyelid blink, and I was serving in Elizabeth’s nursery as her maid, and my mother was deserted and then dead. Elizabeth, the whore’s daughter, is corruption itself. I have to have a child to put between her and the throne. It is the greatest duty I owe to this country, to my mother and to myself.”

  “You will have to marry Philip of Spain?”

  She nodded. “He, as well as any other,” she said. “I can make a treaty with him that will hold. He knows, his father knows, what this country is like. I can be queen and wife with a man like him. He has his own land, his own fortune, he does not need little England. And then I can be queen of my own country and wife to him, and a mother.”

  There was something in the way she said “mother” that alerted me. I had felt her touch on my head, I had seen her with the children that tumbled out from dirty cottages.

  “Why, you long for a child for yourself,” I exclaimed.

  I saw the need in her eyes and then she turned away from me to the window and the view of the cold river again. “Oh yes,” she said quietly to the cold garden outside. “I have longed for a child of my own for twenty years. That was why I loved my poor brother so much. In the hunger of my heart I even loved Elizabeth when she was a baby. Perhaps God in his goodness will give me a son of my own now.” She looked at me. “You have the Sight. Will I have a child, Hannah? Will I have a child of my own, to hold in my arms and to love? A child who will grow and inherit my throne and make England a great country?”

  I waited for a moment, in case anything came to me. All I had was a sense of great despair and hopelessness, nothing m
ore. I dropped my gaze to the floor and I knelt before her. “I am sorry, Your Grace,” I said. “The Sight cannot be commanded. I can’t tell you the answer to that question, nor any other. My vision comes and goes as it wishes. I cannot say if you will have a child.”

  “Then I will predict for you,” she said grimly. “I will tell you this. I will marry this Philip of Spain without love, without desire, but with a very true sense that it is what this country needs. He will bring us the wealth and the power of Spain, he will make this country a part of the empire, which we need so much. He will help me restore this country to the discipline of the true church, and he will give me a child to be a godly Christian heir to keep this country in the right ways.” She paused. “You should say Amen,” she prompted me.

  “Amen.” It was easily said. I was a Christian Jew, a girl dressed as a boy, a young woman in love with one man and betrothed to another. A girl grieving for her mother and never mentioning her name. I spent all my life in feigned agreement. “Amen,” I said.

  The door opened and Jane Dormer beckoned two porters into the room, carrying a frame between them, swathed in linen cloth. “Something for you, Your Grace!” she said with a roguish smile. “Something you will like to see.”

  The queen was slow to throw off her thoughtful mood. “What is it, Jane? I am weary now.”

  In answer, Mistress Dormer waited till the men had leaned their burden against the wall, and then took the hem of the cloth and turned to her royal mistress. “Are you ready?”