The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  I glanced up at him, his dark face was scowling with anxiety.

  “Are you all right?” my father asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course I am.”

  Daniel took his cape from his shoulders. “You say, ‘of course,’” he complained. “But the town is full of the roughest of soldiers, and you are dressed as a woman now, you don’t have the protection of the queen and you don’t even know your way around.”

  I disengaged myself from Daniel’s arms and pulled out a stool from the shop counter. “I survived crossing half of Christendom,” I said mildly. “I should think I could manage for two hours in Calais.”

  “You’re a young lady now,” my father reminded me. “Not a child passing as a boy. You shouldn’t even be out on your own in the evening.”

  “Shouldn’t be out at all except to go to market or church,” Daniel’s mother supplemented robustly from her perch on the stairs.

  “Hush,” Daniel said gently to her. “Hannah is safe, that’s the main thing. And hungry, I’m sure. What do we have left for her, Mother?”

  “It’s all gone,” she said unhelpfully. “You had the last of the potage yourself, Daniel.”

  “I didn’t know that was all there was!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t we save some for Hannah?”

  “Well, who knew when she would come home?” his mother asked limpidly. “Or whether she was dining out somewhere?”

  “Come on,” Daniel said impatiently to me, pulling at my hand.

  “Where to?” I asked, slipping from the stool.

  “I am taking you to the tavern to get dinner.”

  “I can find her some bread and a slice of beef,” his mother offered at once at the prospect of the two of us going out alone together to dine.

  “No,” Daniel said. “She’s to have a proper hot dinner and I’ll take a mug of ale. Don’t wait up for us, Mother, nor you, sir.” He slung his cloak around my shoulders and swept me out of the door before his mother could suggest that she came too, and we were out in the street before his sisters had time to remark that I was not properly dressed for an evening out.

  We walked in silence to the tavern at the end of the road. There was a tap room at the front of the building but a good parlor for travelers at the back. Daniel ordered some broth and some bread, a plate of meats and two mugs of small ale, and we sat down in one of the high-backed settles, and for the first time since I had come to Calais I felt that we might talk alone and uninterrupted for more than a snatched moment.

  “Hannah, I am so sorry,” he said as soon as the maid had put our drinks before us, and gone. “I am deeply, deeply sorry for what I have done.”

  “Does she know you are married?”

  “Yes, she knew I was betrothed when we first met, and I told her I was going to England to fetch you and we would be married when we returned.”

  “Does she not mind?”

  “Not now,” he said. “She has become accustomed.”

  I said nothing. I thought it most unlikely that a woman who had fallen in love with a man and borne his child would become accustomed within a year to him marrying someone else.

  “Did you not want to marry her when you knew she was carrying your child?”

  He hesitated. The landlord came with the broth and bread and meat and fussed around the table, which gave us a chance for silence. Then he left and I took a spoonful of broth and a mouthful of bread. It was thick in my mouth but I was not going to look as if I had lost my appetite through heartache.

  “She is not one of the People,” Daniel said simply. “And, in any case, I wanted to marry you. When I knew she was with child I was ashamed of what I had done; but she knew I did not love her, and that I was promised to you. She did not expect me to marry her. So I gave her a sum of money for a dowry and I pay her every month for the boy’s keep.”

  “You wanted to marry me, but not enough to stay away from other women,” I remarked bitterly.

  “Yes,” he admitted. He did not flinch from the truth even when it was told baldly out of the mouth of an angry woman. “I wanted to marry you, but I did not stay away from another woman. But what about you? Is your conscience utterly clear, Hannah?”

  I let it go, though it was a fair accusation. “What’s the child named?”

  He took a breath. “Daniel,” he said and saw me flinch.

  I took a mouthful of broth and crammed the bread down on top of it and chewed, though I wanted to spit it at him.

  “Hannah,” he said very gently.

  I bit into a piece of meat.

  “I am sorry,” he said again. “But we can overcome this. She makes no claims against me. I will support the child but I need not go and see her. I shall miss the boy, I hoped to see him grow up, but I will understand if you cannot tolerate me seeing her. I will give him up. You and I are young. You will forgive me, we will have a child of our own, we will find a better house. We will be happy.”

  I finished my mouthful and washed it down with a swig of ale. “No,” I said shortly.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘No.’ Tomorrow I shall buy a boy’s suit and my father and I will find new premises for the bookshop. I shall work as his apprentice again. I shall never wear high-heeled shoes again, as long as I live. They pinch my feet. I shall never trust a man again, as long as I live. You have hurt me, Daniel, and lied to me and betrayed me and I will never forgive you.”

  He went very white. “You cannot leave me,” he said. “We are married in the sight of God, our God. You cannot break an oath to God. You cannot break your pledge to me.”

  I rose to it as if it were a challenge. “I care nothing for your God, nor for you. I shall leave you tomorrow.”

  We spent a sleepless night. There was nowhere to go but home and we had to lie side by side, stiff as bodkins in the darkness of the bedroom with his mother alert behind one wall, and his sisters agog on the other side. In the morning I took my father out of the house and told him that my mind was made up and that I would not live with Daniel as his wife.

  He responded to me as if I had grown a head from beneath my shoulders, become a monstrous strange being from a faraway island. “Hannah, what will you do with your life?” he said anxiously. “I cannot be always with you, who will protect you when I am gone?”

  “I shall go back to royal service, I shall go to the princess or to my lord,” I said.

  “Your lord is a known traitor and the princess will be married to one of the Spanish princes within the month.”

  “Not her! She’s not a fool. She would not marry a man and trust him! She knows better than to put her heart into a man’s keeping.”

  “She cannot live alone any more than you can live alone.”

  “Father, my husband has betrayed me and shamed me. I cannot take him back as if nothing had happened. I cannot live with his sisters and his mother all whispering behind their hands every time he comes home late. I cannot live as if I belonged here.”

  “My child, where do you belong if not here? If not with me? If not with your husband?”

  I had my answer: “I belong nowhere.”

  My father shook his head. A young woman always had to be placed somewhere, she could not live unless she was bolted down in one service or another.

  “Father, please let us set up a little business on our own, as we did in London. Let me help you in the printing shop. Let me live with you and we can be at peace and make our living here.”

  He hesitated for a long moment, and suddenly I saw him as a stranger might see him. He was an old man and I was taking him from a home where he had become comfortable.

  “What will you wear?” he asked finally.

  I could have laughed out loud, it mattered so little to me. But I realized that it signified to him whether he had a daughter who could appear to fit into this world or whether I would be, eternally, out of step with it.

  “I will wear a gown if you wish,” I said to please him. “But I will wear boots underneath i
t. I will wear a jerkin and a jacket on top.”

  “And your wedding ring,” he stipulated. “You will not deny your marriage.”

  “Father, he has denied it every day.”

  “Daughter, he is your husband.”

  I sighed. “Very well. But we can go, can we? And at once?”

  He rested his hand on my face. “Child, I thought that you had a good husband who loved you and you would be happy.”

  I gritted my teeth so the tears did not come to my eyes and make him think that I might soften, that I might still be a young woman with a chance of love. “No,” I said simply.

  It was not an easy matter, stripping down the press again and moving it from the yard. I had only my new gowns and linen to take with me, Father had a small box of his clothes, but we had to move the entire stock of books and manuscripts and all the printing equipment: the clean paper, the barrels of ink, the baskets of bookbinding thread. It took a week before the porters had finished carrying everything from the Carpenters’ house to the new shop, and for every day of that week my father and I had to eat our dinner at a table in silence while Daniel’s sisters glared at me with aghast horror, and Daniel’s mother slammed down the plates with utter contempt as if she were feeding a pair of stray dogs.

  Daniel stayed away, sleeping at his tutor’s house, coming home only for a change of clothes. At those times I made sure that I was busy with my father out the back, or packing up books under the shop counter. He did not try to argue with me or plead with me and, willfully, I felt it proved that I was right to leave him. I felt that if he had loved me he would have come after me, asked me again, begged me to stay. I willed myself to forget his stubbornness and his pride, and I made very sure to keep my thoughts from the life we had promised ourselves when we had said we would become the people we wanted to be and not be tied by the rules of Jew, or Gentile, or the world.

  I had found a little shop at the south city gate: an excellent site for travelers about to leave Calais and travel through the English Pale to venture into France. It was the last chance they would have to buy books in their own language, and for those who wanted maps or advice about traveling in France or in the Spanish Netherlands we carried a good selection of travelers’ tales, mostly fabulous, it must be said, but good reading for the credulous. My father already had a reputation inside the city and his established customers soon found their way to the new premises. Most days he would sit in the sun outside the shop on one of the stools and I would work inside, bending over the press and setting type, now that there was no one to scold me for getting ink on my apron.

  My father was tired, his move to Calais and then the disappointment of my failed marriage had wearied him. I was glad that he should sit and rest while I worked for the two of us. I relearned the skill of reading backward, I relearned the skill of the sweep of the ink ball, the flick of the clean sheet and the smooth heave on the handle of the press so that the typeface just kissed the whiteness of the paper and it came away clean.

  My father worried desperately about me, about my ill-starred marriage, and about my future life, but when he saw that I had inherited all of his skill, and all of his love of books, he began to believe that even if he were to die tomorrow, I might yet survive on the business. “But we must save money, querida,” he would say. “You must be provided for.”

  Autumn 1556

  The first month in our little shop, I absolutely rejoiced in my escape from the Carpenter household. A couple of times I saw Daniel’s mother or two of his sisters in the market, or at the fish quay, and his mother looked away as if she could not see me, and his sisters pointed and nudged each other and stared as if I were a visiting leper and freedom was a disease that they might catch if they came too close. Every night in bed I spread myself out like a starfish, hands and feet pointing to each corner, rejoicing in the space, and thanked God that I might call myself a single woman once more with all the bed to myself. Every morning I awoke with an utter exultation that I need not fit myself to someone else’s pattern. I could put on my sound walking boots underneath the concealing hem of my gown, I could set print, I could go to the bakehouse for our breakfast, I could go with my father to the tavern for our dinner, I could do what I pleased; and not what a young married woman, trying to please a critical mother-in-law, had to do.

  I did not see Daniel until midway through the second month and then I literally ran into him as I was coming out of church. I had to sit at the back now; as a deserting wife I was in a state of sin which nothing would remove but full penitence and a return to my husband if he would be kind enough to have me. The priest himself had told me that I was as bad as an adulteress, worse, since I was in a state of sin of my own making and not even at another’s urging. He set me a list of penances that would take me until Christmas next year to complete. I was as determined as ever to appear devout and so I spent many evenings on my knees in the church and always attended Mass, head shrouded in a black shawl, seated at the back. So it was from the darkness of the meanest pew that I stepped into the light of the church door and, half dazzled, bumped into Daniel Carpenter.

  “Hannah!” he said, and put out a hand to steady me.

  “Oh, Daniel.”

  For a moment we stood, very close, our eyes meeting. In that second I felt a jolt of absolute desire and knew that I wanted him and that he wanted me, and then I stepped to one side and looked down and muttered: “Excuse me.”

  “No, stop,” he said urgently. “Are you well? Is your father well?”

  I looked up at that with an irrepressible giggle. Of course he knew the answers to both questions. With spies like his mother and sisters he probably knew, to the last letter, what pages I had on the press, what dinner we had in the cupboard.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Both of us. Thank you.”

  “I have missed you sorely,” he said, quickly trying to detain me. “I have been wanting to speak with you.”

  “I am sorry,” I said coldly. “But I have nothing to say, Daniel, excuse me, please.”

  I wanted to get away from him before he led me into talking, before he made me feel angry, or grieved, or jealous all over again. I did not want to feel anything for him, not desire, not resentment. I wanted to be cold to him, so I turned on my heel and started to walk away.

  In two strides he was beside me, his hand on my arm. “Hannah, we cannot live apart like this. It is wrong.”

  “Daniel, we should never have married. It is that which was wrong; not our separation. Now let me go.”

  His hand dropped to his side but he still held my gaze. “I shall come to your shop this afternoon at two,” he said firmly. “And I shall talk with you in private. If you go out I shall wait for your return. I will not leave things like this, Hannah. I have the right to talk with you.”

  There were people coming out of the church porch, and others waiting to enter. I did not want to attract any more attention than I had already earned by being the deserting bride of Calais.

  “At two o’clock, then,” I said, and dipped him a tiny curtsey and went down the path. His mother and his sisters, coming into church behind him, drew their skirts back from the very paving slabs of the path where I was walking, as if they were afraid they would get the hems dirty by being brushed by me. I smiled at them, brazening it out. “Good morning, Miss Carpenters,” I said cheerily. “Good morning, Mrs. Carpenter.” And when I was out of earshot I said: “And God rot the lot of you.”

  Daniel came at two o’clock and I drew him out of the house and up the stone stairs beside our house that went up to the roof of the gateway of the city walls that overlooked the English Pale and then south toward France. In the lee of the city walls, just outside, were new houses, built to accommodate the growing English population. If the French were ever to come against us these new householders would have to abandon their hearths and skip inside the gates. But before the French could come close, there were the canals which would be flooded from the sea gates, the eight great forts
, the earth ramparts, and a stubborn defense plan. If they could get through that, they would have to face the fortified town of Calais itself and everyone knew that it was impregnable. The English themselves had only won it, two centuries ago, after a siege lasting eleven months and then the Calais burghers had surrendered, starved out. The walls of this city had never been breached. They never would be breached, it was a citadel that was famous for being impossible to take either by land or sea.

  I leaned against the wall and looked south to France, and waited.

  “I have made an agreement with her and I will not see her again,” Daniel said steadily, his voice low. “I have paid her a sum of money and when I set up in practice on my own I will pay her another. Then I will never see her or her child again.”

  I nodded but I said nothing.

  “She has released me from any obligation to her, and the master of her house and his wife have said they will adopt her child and bring him up as if he were their grandson. She will see no more of me and he will not want for anything. He will grow up without a father. He will not even remember me.”

  He waited for me to respond. Still I said nothing.

  “She is young and…” He hesitated, searching for a word which would not offend me. “Personable. She is almost certain to marry another man and then she will forget me as completely as I have forgotten her.” He paused. “So there is no reason why you and I should live apart,” he said persuasively. “I have no pre-contract, I have no obligation, I am yours and yours alone.”

  I turned to him. “No,” I said. “I set you free, Daniel. I do not want a husband, I do not want any man. I will not return to you, whatever agreement you and she have made. That part of my life is over.”

  “You are my wedded wife,” he said. “Married by the laws of the land and in the sight of God.”

  “Oh! God!” I said dismissively. “Not our God, so what does that mean to us?”

  “Your father himself said the Jewish prayers.”