The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  “Princess, this is a dangerous game,” I warned her.

  “Hannah, this is my life,” she said simply. “With the king on my side I need fear nothing. And if he were to be free to marry, then I could look to no better match.”

  “Your sister’s husband? While she is confined with his child?” I demanded, scandalized.

  Her downcast eyes were slits of jet. “I might think, as she did, that an alliance between Spain and England would dominate all of Christendom,” she said sweetly.

  “Yes, the queen thought that, and yet all that has happened is that she has brought the heresy laws on the heads of her subjects,” I said tartly. “And brought herself to solitude in a darkened room with her heart breaking and her sister outside in the sunshine flirting with her husband.”

  “The queen fell in love with a husband who married for policy,” Elizabeth decreed. “I would never be such a fool. If he married me it would be quite the reverse. I would be the one marrying for policy and he would be the one marrying for love. And we would see whose heart broke first.”

  “Has he told you he loves you?” I whispered, aghast, thinking of the queen lost in her loneliness of the enclosed room. “Has he said he would marry you, if she died?”

  “He adores me,” Elizabeth said with quiet pleasure. “I could make him say anything.”

  It was hard to get news of John Dee without seeming overly curious. He had simply gone, as if he had never been, disappeared into the terrible dungeons of the Inquisition in England at St. Paul’s, supervised by Bishop Bonner, whose resolute questioning was feeding the fires of Smithfield at the rate of half a dozen poor men and women every week.

  “What news of John Dee?” I asked Will Somers quietly, one morning when I found him recumbent on a bench, basking like a lizard in the summer sunshine.

  “He’s not dead yet,” he said, barely opening an eye. “Hush.”

  “Are you sleeping?” I asked, wanting to know more.

  “I’m not dead yet,” he said. “In that, he and I have something in common. But I am not being stretched on the rack, nor being pressed with a hundred rocks on my chest, nor being taken for questioning at midnight, at dawn, and as a rough alternative to breakfast. So not that much in common.”

  “Has he confessed?” I asked, my voice a little breath.

  “Can’t have done,” Will said pragmatically. “Because if he had confessed he would be dead, and there his similarity to me would be ended, since I am not dead but merely asleep.”

  “Will…” “Fast asleep and dreaming, and not talking at all.”

  I went to find Elizabeth. I had thought of speaking to Kat Ashley but I knew she despised me for my mixed allegiances, and I doubted her discretion. I heard the blast of the hunting horns and I knew that Elizabeth would have been riding. I hurried down to the stable yard and was there as the hounds came streaming in, with the riders behind them. Elizabeth was riding a new black hunter, a gift from the king, her cap askew, her face glowing. The court was all dismounting and shouting for their grooms. I sprang forward to hold her horse and said quietly to her, unheard in the general noise, “Princess, do you have any news of John Dee?”

  She turned her back to me and patted her horse’s shoulder. “There, Sunburst,” she said loudly, speaking to the horse. “You did well.” To me in an undertone she said: “They are holding him for conjuring and calculing.”

  “What?” I asked, horrified.

  She was absolutely calm. “They say that he attempted to cast the queen’s astrology chart, and that he summoned up spirits to foretell the future.”

  “Will he speak of any others, doing this with him?” I breathed.

  “If they charge him with heresy you should expect him to sing like a little blinded thrush,” she said, turning to me and smiling radiantly, as if it were not her life at stake as well as mine. “They’ll rack him, you know. No one can stand that pain. He will be bound to talk.”

  “Heresy?”

  “So I’m told.”

  She tossed her reins to her groom and walked toward the palace, leaning on my shoulder.

  “They’ll burn him?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Princess, what shall we do?”

  She dropped her arm around my shoulder and gripped it hard, as if she were holding me to my senses. I could feel that her hand did not tremble for a moment. “We will wait. And hope to survive this. Same as always, Hannah. Wait, and hope to survive.”

  “You will survive,” I said with sudden bitterness.

  Elizabeth turned her bright face to me, her smile merry but her eyes were like chips of coal. “Oh yes,” she said. “I have done so, thus far.”

  In mid-June the queen, still pregnant, broke with convention to release herself from the confinement chamber. The physicians could not say that she would be any worse for being outside, and they thought walking in the air might give her an appetite for her meals. They were afraid that she was not eating enough to keep herself and her baby alive. In the cool of the morning or in the shadowy evening she would stroll slowly in her private garden attended only by her ladies and the members of her household. She was changing before my eyes from the deliciously infatuated woman that Prince Philip of Spain had wedded and bedded, and loved into joy, back to the anxious prematurely aged woman that I had first met. Her new confidence in love and happiness was draining away from her, with the pink of her cheeks and the blue of her eyes, and I could see her drawn back to the loneliness and fearfulness of her childhood, almost like an invalid slipping toward death.

  “Your Grace.” I dropped to one knee as I met her in the privy garden one day. She had been looking at the fast flow of the river past the boat pier, looking, and yet not seeing. A brood of ducklings was playing in the current, their mother watchful nearby, surveying the little bundles of fluff as they paddled and bobbed. Even the ducks on the Thames had young; but England’s cradle, with that hopeful poem at the bed-head, was still empty.

  She turned an unseeing dark gaze to me. “Oh, Hannah.”

  “Are you well, Your Grace?”

  She tried to smile at me but I saw her lips twist down.

  “No, Hannah, my child. I am not very well.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  She shook her head. “I should be glad of pain, of labor pains. No, Hannah. I feel nothing, not in my body, not in my heart.”

  I drew a little closer. “Perhaps these are the fancies that come before birth,” I said soothingly. “Like when they say women have a craving for eating raw fruit or coal.”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She held out her hands to me, as patient as a sick child. “Can’t you see, Hannah? With your gift? Can you see, and tell me the truth?”

  Almost unwillingly I took her hands and at her touch I felt a rush of despair as dark and as cold as if I had fallen into the river which flowed beneath the pier. She saw the shock in my face, and read it rightly at once.

  “He’s gone, hasn’t he?” she whispered. “I have somehow lost him.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Your Grace,” I stumbled. “I’m no physician, I wouldn’t have the skill to judge…”

  She shook her head, the bright sunlight glinting on the rich embroidery of her hood, on the gold hoops in her ears, all this worldly wealth encasing heartbreak. “I knew it,” she said. “I had a son in my belly and now he is gone. I feel an emptiness where I used to feel a life.”

  I still had hold of her icy hands, I found I was chafing them, as people will chafe the hands of a corpse.

  “Oh, Your Grace!” I cried out. “There can be another child. Where one has been made you can make another. You had a child and lost him, hundreds of women do that, and go on to have another child. You can do that too.”

  She did not even seem to hear me, she let her hands lie in mine and she looked toward the river as if she would want it to wash her away.

  “Your Grace?” I whispered, very quietly. “Queen Mary? Dearest Mary?”

/>   When she turned her face to me her eyes were filled with tears. “It’s all wrong,” she said, and her voice was low and utterly desolate. “It has been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother took my father from us and broke my mother’s heart, and nothing can put it right again. It’s been going wrong since Elizabeth’s mother won my father to sin and led him from his faith so that he lived and died in torment. It’s all wrong, Hannah, and I cannot put it right though I have tried and tried. It is too much for me. There is too much sadness and sin and loss in this story for me to put right. It is beyond me. And now Elizabeth has taken my husband from me, my husband who was the greatest joy of my life — the only joy of my life — the only man who ever loved me, the only person I have ever loved since I lost my mother. She has taken him from me. And now my son has gone from me too.”

  Her darkness flowed through me like a draft of the deepest despair. I gripped her hands as if she were a drowning woman, swept away in a night flood.

  “Mary!”

  Gently she pulled her hands from me, and walked away, alone again, as she always had been, as now she thought she always must be. I ran behind her, and though she heard my footsteps she did not pause or turn her head.

  “You could have another child,” I repeated. “And you could win your husband back.”

  She did not pause or shake her head. I knew that she was walking with her chin up and the tears streaming down her cheeks. She could not ask for help, she could not receive help. The pain in her heart was that of loss. She had lost the love of her father, she had lost her mother. Now she had lost her child and every day, in full view of the court, she was losing her husband to her pretty younger sister. I fell back and let her go.

  For the long hot month of July the queen said nothing to explain why her baby was not coming. Elizabeth inquired after her health every morning with the most sisterly concern, and remarked every day in her sweet clear voice:

  “Gracious, what a long long time this babe is taking to be born!”

  Every day people came out from London to say Masses for the queen’s safe delivery, and we all stood up in church three times a day to say “Amen.” The news they brought from London was that of a city of horrors. The queen’s belief that her baby would not come until England was cleansed of heresy had taken a vicious turn. In the hands of her Inquisitors, Bishop Bonner and the rest of them, there was a savage policy of secret arrests and cruel tortures. There were rumors of unjust trials of heretics, of maidservants being taken up in their ignorance and when they swore that they would not surrender their Bible, being taken to the stake and burned for their faith. There was a vile story of a woman pregnant with her first child who was accused of heresy and charged before a court. When she would not bow her head to the dictates of the Roman Catholic priest they put her on a stake and lighted the pyre. In her terror she gave birth to the child then and there, and dropped it on to the faggots. When the baby slithered from her shaking thighs to the ground, crying loud enough to be heard over the crackle of the flames, the executioner forked the naked child back into the fire with a pitchfork, as if he were a crying bundle of kindling.

  They made sure that these stories did not reach the queen but I was certain that if she knew she would put a stop to the cruelty. A woman waiting for her own child to be born does not send another pregnant woman to the stake. I took my chance one morning, when she was walking.

  “Your Grace, may I speak with you?”

  She turned and smiled. “Yes, Hannah, of course.”

  “It is a matter of state and I am not qualified to judge,” I said cautiously. “And I am a young woman, and perhaps I don’t understand.”

  “Understand what?” she asked.

  “The news from London is very cruel,” I said, taking the plunge. “I am sorry if I speak out of turn, but there is much cruelty being done in your name and your advisors do not tell you of it.”

  There was a little ripple at my temerity. At the back of the group of ladies I saw Will Somers roll his eyes at me.

  “Why, what do you mean, Hannah?”

  “Your Grace, you know that many of the great Protestants of the land have gone quietly to Mass and their priests have put away their wives and become obedient to the new laws. It is only their servants and the foolish people in the villages who do not have the wit to tell a lie when they are examined. Surely you would not want the simple people of your country to be burned for their faith? Surely, you would want to show them mercy?”

  I expected her smile of acknowledgment, but the face she turned to me was scowling. “If there are families who have turned their coat and not their faith then I want their names,” she said, her voice hard. “You are right: I don’t seek to burn servants, I want them all, masters and men, to turn again to the church. I would be a sorry Queen of England if I did not insist on the same law for rich and for poor. If you know the name of a priest with a wife in hiding, Hannah, then you had better tell me now or you will be risking your own immortal soul.”

  I had never seen her so cold.

  “Your Grace!”

  It was as if she did not hear me. She put her hand on her heart and she cried out: “Before God, Hannah, I will save this country from sin even though it cost life after life. We have to turn back to God and from heresy and if it takes a dozen fires, if it takes a hundred fires, we will do it. And if you, even you, are hiding a name then I will have it from you, Hannah. There will be no exceptions made. Even you shall be questioned. If you will not tell, I shall have you questioned…”

  I could feel the color draining from my face and my heart start to race. After surviving so long, to put myself into danger, to step up to the rack! “Your Grace!” I stammered. “I am innocent…”

  There was a scream from the back of the court and we all turned to look. A lady in waiting was running, holding her skirts away from her pounding feet, toward the queen. “Your Grace!” she whimpered. “Save me! It is the fool! He is run mad!”

  Will Somers was bent down in a squat, his great long legs folded up. Beside him in the grass was a frog, emerald green, blinking his fat eyes. Will blinked too, mirroring his actions.

  “We are racing,” he said with dignity. “Monsieur le Frog and I have a wager that I shall get to the end of the orchard before him. But he is playing a long game. He is trying to out-strategy me. I would wish someone to tickle him with a stick.”

  The court was convulsed, the woman who had screamed had turned and was laughing too. Will, squatting like a frog, knees up around his ears, goggle-eyes blinking, was inescapably funny. Even the queen was smiling. Someone fetched a stick and stood behind the frog and gave it a little poke.

  At once the frightened thing leaped forward. Will leaped too in a great unexpected bound. Will was clearly in the lead with his first hop. With a roar the courtiers ran into two lines to form a track, and someone prodded the frog once more. This time he was more alarmed and took three great bounds and started to crawl as well. The ladies flapped their skirts to keep him on course as Will bounded behind him, but the frog was clearly gaining. Another touch of the stick and he was off again, Will in hot pursuit, people shouting odds and bets, the Spaniards shaking their heads at the folly of the English but then laughing despite themselves and throwing down a purse of coins on the frog.

  “Someone tickle Will!” came a shout. “He’s lagging back.”

  One of the men found a stick and went behind Will who leaped a little faster, to keep out of the way. “I’ll do it!” I said and snatched the stick from him and mimed a great beating when the stick hit the ground behind Will and never so much as touched his breeches.

  He went as fast as he could have done, but the frog was thoroughly frightened and seemed to know that the thick thorn hedge threaded with bean flowers at the end of the orchard was a safe haven. He bounded toward it and Will arrived a mere toad’s nose behind. There was a great roar of applause and a chink of coins being exchanged. The queen held her belly and laughed out loud, and Jane
Dormer slipped an arm around her waist to support her, and smiled to see her mistress so happy for once.

  Will unfolded himself from the ground, his gangling legs stretching out at last, his face creased with a smile as he took his bow. The whole court moved on, talking and laughing about Will Somers’s race with a frog, but I delayed him, a hand on his arm.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He looked at me steadily, no trace of the fool about either of us. “Child, you cannot change a king, you can only make him laugh. Sometimes, if you are a very great fool, you can make him laugh at himself, and then you may make him a better man and a better king.”

  “I was clumsy,” I confessed. “But Will, I spoke to a woman today and the things that she told me would have made you weep!”

  “Far worse in France,” he said quickly. “Worse in Italy. You of all people should know, child, that it is worse in Spain.”

  That checked me. “I came to England thinking that this was a country that would be more merciful. Surely the queen is not a woman to burn a priest’s wife.”

  He dropped an arm over my shoulders. “Child, you are a fool indeed,” he said gently. “The queen has no mother to advise her, no husband who loves her, and no child to distract her. She wants to do right and she is told by everyone around her that the best way to bring this country to heel is to burn a few nobodies who are destined for hell already. Her heart might ache for them but she will sacrifice them to save the rest, just as she would sacrifice herself for her own immortal soul. Your skill, my skill, is to make sure that it never occurs to her to sacrifice us.”

  I turned a face to him which was as grave as he would have wished. “Will, I have trusted her. I would trust her with my life.”

  “You do rightly,” he said in mock approbation. “You are a very true fool. It is only a fool who trusts a king.”

  In July the court should have been on progress, traveling round the great houses of England, enjoying the hunting and the parties and the pleasures of the English summer, but still the queen said nothing about when we might leave. Our setting out had been delayed day after day waiting for the birth of the prince, and now, twelve weeks late, nobody truly believed that the prince would come.