The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

“I questioned you in English and you answered in Spanish,” he said. He saw the alarm in my face. “It’s all right,” he said. “Whatever secrets you have, they are safe. You said nothing that could not be heard by anyone. But you told me about the queen and the princess.”

  “What did I say?” I demanded.

  He hesitated. “Child, if the angel who guides you wanted you to know what words were spoken then he would have let you speak them in your waking state.”

  I nodded.

  “He did not. Perhaps it is better that you do not know.”

  “But what am I to tell Lord Robert when I see him?” I demanded. “And what can I say to the queen about her baby?”

  “You can tell Lord Robert that he will be free within two years,” John Dee said firmly. “And there will be a moment when he thinks everything is lost, once more, at the very moment everything is just starting for him. He must not despair then. And you must bid the queen to hope. If any woman in the world could be granted a baby because she would be a good mother, because she loved the father, and because she desired a child, it would be this queen. But whether she will have a son in her womb as well as her heart, I cannot tell you. Whether she will have a child from this birth or not, I cannot tell you.”

  I got to my feet. “I shall go then,” I said. “I have to take the horse back. But, Mr. Dee—”

  “Yes?”

  “What about the Princess Elizabeth? Will she inherit the throne as her own?”

  He smiled at me. “Do you remember what we saw when we first scried?”

  I nodded.

  “You said that there will be a child but no child, I think that is the queen’s first baby which should have been born but still has not come. You said that there will be a king, but no king — I think that is this Philip of Spain whom we call king but who is not and never will be king of England. Then you said there will be a virgin queen all-forgotten, and a queen but no virgin.”

  “Is that Queen Jane, who was a virgin queen and now everyone has forgotten her, and now Mary who called herself a virgin and is now a married queen?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Perhaps. I think the princess’s hour will come. There was more, but I cannot reveal it to you. Go now.”

  I nodded and went from the room. As I closed the door behind me I saw his dark absorbed face in the mirror as he leaned forward to blow out the candles and I wondered what else he had heard me say when I had been in my tranced sleep.

  “What did you see?” Elizabeth demanded impatiently the moment I closed the door.

  “Nothing!” I said. I could almost have laughed at the expression on her face. “You will have to ask Mr. Dee. I saw nothing, it was just like falling asleep.”

  “But did you speak, or did he see anything?”

  “Princess, I cannot tell,” I said, moving toward the door and pausing only to drop her a little bow. “I have to take my horse back to the stable or they will miss her, and start to look for me.”

  Elizabeth nodded my dismissal and just as I was about to open the door there was a knock on it from the outside, in the same rhythm that Kat Ashley had used earlier. In a moment Kat was at the door and had opened it. A man swung into the room and she shut the door smartly behind him. I shrank back as I recognized Sir William Pickering, Elizabeth’s friend of old, and fellow-conspirator from the time of the Wyatt rebellion. I had not even known that Sir William was forgiven and back at court — then I realized that he was probably neither forgiven, nor allowed at court. This was a secret visit.

  “My lady, I must go,” I said firmly.

  Kat Ashley stopped me. “You will be asked to take some books to Mr. Dee. He will have some papers for you to take to Sir William at a house I will tell you,” she said. “Take a look at him now so that he remembers you again. Sir William, this is the queen’s fool, she will bring you the papers you need.”

  If it had not come from Kat Ashley, I might not have remembered Lord Robert’s warning; but my lord had been very clear with me, and his words confirmed my own sense of terror at whatever they were brewing here.

  “I am sorry,” I said simply to Kat Ashley, avoiding even looking at Sir William, and wishing that he had never seen me. “But my Lord Robert told me to take no messages for anyone. It was his order. I was to tell you about the ribbons and to run no errands after that. You must excuse me, Princess, sir, Mrs. Ashley, I cannot assist you.”

  I went quickly to the door and let myself out before they could protest. When I was safely away and down the corridor I drew breath and realized then that my heart was pounding as if I had run from some danger. When I saw that the door stayed shut and I heard the quiet shooting of the well-oiled bolt and the thud of Kat Ashley’s bottom on the wooden panels, I knew that there was danger there indeed.

  It was June and Queen Mary’s baby was more than a month overdue, a time when anyone might start to worry; and the petals falling from the hawthorn in the hedgerows blew across the roads like snow. The meadows were rich with flowers, their perfume heady in the warm air. Still we lingered at Hampton Court, though usually the royal court would have moved on by now to another palace. We waited though the roses came into bloom in the gardens, and every bird in England had a baby in the nest but the queen.

  The king went around with a face like thunder, exposed to sharp wit in the English court and to danger in the English countryside. He had guards posted night and day on the roads to the palace, and soldiers at every pier on the river. It was thought that if the queen died in childbirth there would be a thousand men at the gate of the palace to tear the Spanish apart. The only thing that could keep him safe then would be the goodwill of the new queen, Elizabeth. No wonder the princess swished around the court in her dark gown as if she were a black cat, the favored resident of a dairy, overfed on cream.

  The Spanish noblemen of the king’s court grew more irritable, as if their own manhood had been impugned by the slowness of this baby. They were frightened of the ill will of the people of England. They were a small band under siege with no hope of relief. Only the arrival of the baby would have guaranteed their safety, and the baby was dangerously late in coming.

  The ladies in the queen’s train became sulky; they felt as if they were being made to look like fools, sitting around with little pieces of sewing in their hands, making napkins and bibs and gowns for a baby that did not come. The younger girls, who had been hoping for a merry spring at court with May balls and picnics and masques and hunting, begrudged sitting with the queen in the stuffiness of a darkened room while she prayed for long hours in silence. They emerged from her confinement chamber with faces like spoiled children to say that nothing had happened again today, all day; and the queen seemed no nearer to her time than when she had entered her confinement two months ago.

  Only Elizabeth seemed unaffected by the anxious atmosphere of the palace as she walked briskly around the gardens with her long stride, her copper hair flying behind her, a book in her hands. No one walked with her, no one publicly befriended her, no one risked being closely identified with this most problematic princess, but everyone was more aware than ever that as matters now stood, she was the heir to the throne. The birth of a son, would mean that Elizabeth was again unwanted, a threat to everyone’s peace. But while there was no son, then she was the next queen. And whether she was the next monarch, or whether she was an unwanted princess, the king could not take his eyes off her.

  At dinner every night, King Philip bowed his head to her before he closed his eyes for grace, in the morning he smiled at her and wished her good day. Sometimes, when there was dancing, she took to the floor with the young ladies of the court, and he sat back in his chair and watched her, his eyes veiled, his face revealing nothing of his thoughts. She never returned his look directly these days, she shot him a cool dark gaze from under lowered eyelids and moved carefully in the paces of the dance, her neck poised, her slim waist shifting from side to side, in time to the music. When she curtsied toward the empty throne of her
sister at the end of the dance she kept her face down but her smile was one of absolute triumph. Elizabeth knew that Philip could not take his eyes from her, however guarded his expression. She knew that Mary, tired, despairing of her son, was hardly a rival worth vanquishing; but Elizabeth’s young glad pride leaped up to the challenge of humiliating her older sister by filling her brother-in-law with baffled desire.

  I was going to my dinner in the great hall on a cool evening in the first days of June when I felt a touch on my hand. It was a little pageboy, servant to Sir William Pickering, and I threw a quick glance up the stairway to see who else might have seen him before I bent my head to his whisper.

  “Lord Robert says to tell you that John Dee is arrested for casting the queen’s horoscope,” he said, his breath tickling my ear. “He said to burn any books or letters of his.”

  In the next second he was gone and all my peace of mind gone with him. I turned and walked into dinner, my face a mask, my heart hammering, the back of my hand rubbing feverishly at my cheek, thinking of nothing but the book that John Dee had sent to my father and which he had forwarded, like an arrow to our door.

  That night I lay in bed, unsleeping, my heart pounding with terror. I could not think what I should do to protect myself, to protect my father’s fortune which was still stored in the dusty shop off Fleet Street. And what if John Dee told them that I had scryed for him? What if some spy had reported on the afternoon in Princess Elizabeth’s rooms when he had drawn up the astrological charts on the queen herself? What if they knew about handsome Sir William, leaning against the door and being assured that I would run errands for him and for Elizabeth?

  I watched the dawn turn my little window pale with light, and by five in the morning I was on the steps at the river gate, scanning the water for a passing wherry boat which might take me into the city.

  I was lucky. An old boatman, starting his day’s work, came across at my hail and took me on board. The soldier sleepily guarding the pier did not even see that I was not a real lad in livery.

  “Lechery?” he asked with a wink, guessing from the hour that I had been with some palace kitchenmaid.

  “Oh aye, most vile,” I said cheerfully, and jumped into the boat.

  I paid my fare and scrambled ashore at the Fleet stairs. I approached the street carefully, trying to see if the door of our shop had been forced. It was too early for our intrusive neighbor to spot me, only a few dairymaids were calling their cows out of the backyards to take them to the meadows for their grass, there was no one to pay any attention to me.

  Even so, I hesitated in the opposite doorway for long moments, watching the street and making sure that no one was watching me before I crossed the dirty cobblestones and let myself into the shop and closed our door quickly behind me.

  It was dark and dusty inside the shop with the shutters closed. I could see that nothing had been disturbed, nobody had come here yet, I was in time. The package labeled “for Mr. John Dee” in my father’s hand had been taken in by our neighbor and left on the counter, as incriminating as a brand for the burning.

  I untied the string and broke my father’s seal. Inside were two books; one was a set of tables which showed, as far as I could tell, the positions of the planets and stars, the other was a guide to astrology in Latin. The two of them in our shop, addressed to John Dee, a man arrested for casting the date of the queen’s death, was enough to have both my father and me hanged for treason.

  I took them to the empty fireplace and crumpled up the wrapping paper, ready to burn them, my hands shaking in my haste. I rubbed at the tinderbox for long minutes before it caught, my fear rising at every moment. Then the flint sparked, and lit the tinder, and I could light a candle and take the flame to the paper in the grate. I held it under the corner of the wrapping paper and watched the flame lick it until it was blazing bright yellow.

  I took up the books, planning to tear out a handful of pages at a time and burn each one. The first book, the one written in Latin, fluttered open in my hand. I took a fat handful of soft paper pages. They yielded to my fingers as if they had no power, as if they were not the most dangerous thing in the world. I tried to tear them from the fragile spine, but then I hesitated.

  I could not do it. I would not do it. I sat back on my heels with the book in my hand with the light of the fire flickering and dying down and realized that not even when I was in mortal danger could I bring myself to burn a book.

  It went against the grain of me. I had seen my father carry some of these books across Christendom, strapped to his heart, knowing that the secrets they contained were newly named as heretical. I had seen him buy books and sell books and, more than that, lend and borrow them just for the joy of seeing their learning go onward, spread outward. I had seen his delight in finding a missing volume, I had seen him welcome a lost folio back to his shelves as if it were the son he had never had. Books were my brothers and sisters; I could not turn against them now. I could not become one of those that see something they cannot understand, and destroy it.

  When Daniel’s joy in the scholarship of Venice and Padua made my own heart leap with enthusiasm, it was because I too thought that someday everything could be known, nothing need be hidden. And either of these two books might contain the secret of the whole world, might hold the key to understanding everything. John Dee was a great scholar, if he took so much trouble to get hold of these volumes and send them in secret, they would be precious indeed. I could not bring myself to destroy them. If I burned them I was no better than the Inquisition which had killed my mother. If I burned them, I became as one of those who think that ideas are dangerous and should be destroyed.

  I was not one of those. Even at risk to my life, I could not become one of those. I was a young woman living at the very heart of a world that was starting to ask questions, living at a time when men and women thought that questions were the most important thing. And who could say where these questions might take us? The tables that had come from my father for John Dee might contain a drug which would cure the plague, they might contain the secret of how to determine where a ship is at sea, they might tell us how to fly, they might tell us how to live forever. I did not know what I held in my hands. I could no more have destroyed it than I could have killed a newborn child: precious in itself, and full of unknowable promise.

  With a heavy heart I took the two books and tucked them behind the more innocuous titles on my father’s shelf. I supposed that if the house was searched I could claim ignorance. I had destroyed the most dangerous part of the package: the wrapping, John Dee’s name written in my father’s hand. My father was far away in Calais and there was nothing directly to link us to Mr. Dee.

  I shook my head, weary of lying in order to reassure myself. In truth, there were a dozen connections between me and Mr. Dee if anyone wanted to examine them. There were a dozen connections between my father and the scholar. I was known as Lord Robert’s fool, as the queen’s fool, as the princess’s fool, I was connected with everyone whose name was danger. All I could hope for was that the fool’s motley hid me, that the sea between England and Calais shielded my father, and that Mr. Dee’s angels guided him, and would protect him even when he was on the rack, even if his jailers gave him his faggot of kindling and made him carry it to the stake.

  It was scant consolation for a girl who had spent her girlhood on the run, hiding her faith, hiding her sex, hiding herself. But there was nothing I could do now except to go on the run again, and my horror of running from England was greater than my terror of being caught. When my father had promised me that this would be my home, that I would be safe here, I had believed him. When the queen had put my head in her lap and twisted my hair into curls around her fingers, I had trusted her as I had trusted my mother. I did not want to leave England, I did not want to leave the queen. I brushed the dust off my jerkin, straightened my cap, and slipped out again to the street.

  I got back to Hampton Court in time for breakfast. I ran up the d
eserted garden from the river and entered the palace by the stable door. Anyone seeing me would have thought that I had been riding in the early morning, as I so often did.

  “Good day,” one of the pages said and I turned on him the pleasant smile of the habitual liar.

  “Good day,” I replied.

  “And how is the queen this morning?”

  “Merry indeed.”

  Like the curtains at the windows of her confinement chamber, shutting out the summer sun, the queen grew paler and faded through every day of the tenth month of her waiting. In contrast, as Elizabeth’s confidence grew her very presence, her hair, her skin, seemed to shine more brightly. When she swept into the confinement chamber, taking a stool to talk lightly, sing to her lute, or stitch incredibly fine baby clothes, the queen seemed to shrink into invisibility. The girl was a radiant sparkling beauty, even as she sat over her sewing and demurely bowed her flaming head. Beside her, hand on her belly, always waiting in case the child should move, Mary was becoming little more than a shadow. As the days wore on, through the long long month of June, she became like a shadow waiting for the birth of a shadow. She seemed hardly to be there at all, her baby seemed hardly to be there at all. They were both melting away.

  The king was a driven man. Everything directed him toward a steady fidelity to his wife: her love for him, her vulnerable condition, the need to appease the English nobility and keep the council favorably disposed toward Spanish policy as the country sneered at the sterile Spanish king. He knew this, he was a brilliant politician and diplomat; but he could not help himself. Where Elizabeth walked, there he followed. When she rode, he called for his horse and galloped after her. When she danced, he watched her and called for them to play the music again. When she studied, he loaned her books and corrected her pronunciation like a disinterested schoolmaster, while all the time his eyes were on her lips, on the neck of her gown, on her hands clasped lightly in her lap.