The Queen's Fool

by Philippa Gregory

  “Daniel!” I exclaimed. “He could not remember them all, not even he and your mother racking their brains together could remember all the words of the blessings. We had no rabbi, we had no synagogue, we did not even have two witnesses. All that bound us was such faith that we could bring to it — there was nothing else. I came to it with my faith and trust in you, and you came to it with a lie in your mouth, a woman hidden behind you and your child in her cradle. Whatever God we invoked — it was meaningless.”

  He was ashen. “You speak like an alchemist,” he said. “We swore binding oaths.”

  “You were not free to make them,” I snapped.

  “You are following reason to its end and coming to madness,” he said desperately. “Whatever the rights or wrongs of the wedding, I am asking you to make a marriage now. I am asking you to forgive me and love me, like a woman, not anatomize me like a scholar. Love me from your heart, not from your head.”

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I will not. My head and my heart are indivisible. I will not cut myself up into parts so that my heart can have its way and my head think it wrong. Whatever this decision costs me I take it entire, as a whole woman. I shall pay the price but I will not return to you and to that house.”

  “If it is my mother and my sisters…” he started.

  I raised my hand. “Peace, Daniel,” I said gently. “They are what they are and I don’t like them; but if you had kept faith with me I would have found some way to live with them. Without our love, it all means nothing.”

  “So what will you do?” he asked, and I could hear the despair in his voice.

  “I shall stay here with my father, and when the time serves, we shall return to England.”

  “You mean when the false princess comes to the throne and the traitor that you love comes out of the Tower,” he accused me.

  I turned my head away from him. “Whatever happens, it will be no concern of yours what I do,” I said quietly. “Now, I want to go.”

  Daniel put his hand on my arm, I could feel the heat of his palm through the thin linen of my sleeve. He was hot with torment. “Hannah, I love you,” he said. “It is death to me, if you will not see me.”

  I turned back to him and met his gaze straight, like a lad, not like a woman meeting her husband’s eyes. “Daniel, you have no one but yourself to blame,” I said flatly. “I am not a woman to be played with. You were false to me and I have cut my love for you out of my heart and out of my mind and nothing, nothing will restore it. You are a stranger to me now and for always. It is over. Go your way and I will go mine. It is finished.”

  He gave a hoarse raw-throated sob and turned on his heel and plunged away. I went as quietly and as quickly as I could back to the shop, I went up the stairs to the little empty bedroom in which I had celebrated being free, and I put myself facedown on the little bed, pulled a pillow over my head and cried silently for the love I had lost.

  That was not the last I saw of him, but we did not speak intimately again. Most Sundays at church I would glimpse him, meticulously opening his missal and saying his prayers, observant to every movement of the Mass, never taking his eyes from the Host and the priest, as all of us always did. In their pew his mother and his sisters stole little glances at me, and once I saw them with a pretty vapid-looking fair-haired young woman with a baby on her hip and I guessed that she was the mother of Daniel’s child and that Daniel’s mother had taken it upon herself to bring her grandson to church.

  I turned my head away from their curious glances but I felt an odd swimmy feeling that I had not known for years. I leaned forward and gripped the smooth time-worn wood of the pew and waited for the sensation to pass but it grew stronger. The Sight was coming to me.

  I would have given anything for it to pass me by. The last thing I wanted was to make a spectacle of myself in church, especially when the woman was there with her child; but the waves of darkness seemed to wash down from the rood screen, from the priest behind it, from the candles in the stone arched windows, wash down and engulf me so that I could not even see my knuckles whiten as I gripped the pew. Then I could only see the skirt of my gown as I dropped to my knees and then I could see nothing but darkness.

  I could hear the sound of a battle and someone screaming: “Not my baby! Take him! Take him!” and I felt myself say: “I can’t take him.” And the insistent voice cried again: “Take him! Take him!” and at that moment there was a dreadful crash like a forest falling, and a rush of horses and men and danger, and I wanted to run but there was nowhere to run, and I cried out with fear.

  “You’re all right now,” came a voice and it was Daniel’s beloved voice and I was in his arms, and the sun was shining warmly on my face, and there was no darkness, nor terror, nor that terrible crash of falling wood and the clatter of hooves on stones.

  “I fainted,” I said. “Did I say anything?”

  “Only ‘I can’t take him,’” he said. “Was it the Sight, Hannah?”

  I nodded. I should have sat up and pulled away from him but I rested against his shoulder and felt the seductive sense of safety that he always gave me.

  “A warning?” he asked.

  “Something awful,” I said. “My God, an awful vision. But I don’t know what. That’s what it’s like, I see enough to feel terror but not enough to know.”

  “I had thought you would lose the Sight,” he said quietly.

  “It seems not. It’s not a vision I would want.”

  “Hush then,” he soothed. He turned his face to one side and said, “I will take her home. You can leave us. She needs nothing.”

  At once I realized that behind him was a small circle of people who had gathered for curiosity to see the woman who had cried out and fainted in church.

  “She’s a seer,” someone said. “She was the queen’s holy fool.”

  “She didn’t foresee much then…” someone said with a snicker and made a joke about me coming from England to marry a man and then leave him within three months.

  I saw Daniel flush with anger and I struggled to sit up. At once his arm tightened around me. “Be still,” he said. “I am going to help you home and then I am going to bleed you. You are hot and feverish.”

  “I am not,” I contradicted him at once. “And it is nothing.”

  My father appeared beside Daniel. “Could you walk if we both helped you?” he asked. “Or shall I fetch a litter?”

  “I can walk,” I said. “I am not ill.”

  The two of them helped me to my feet and we went down the narrow path to the lane that led to the city gate and our shop. At the corner I saw a knot of women waiting, Daniel’s mother, his three sisters, and the woman with a baby on her hip. She was staring at me just as I stared at her, each of us measuring the other, examining, judging, comparing. She was a broad-hipped pink milk-fed young woman, ripe as a peach, with pink smiling lips and fair hair, a broad face which denied deception, blue slightly protruding eyes. She gave me a smile, a shy smile, half apologetic, half hopeful. The baby she held against her was a true Jewish boy, dark-haired, dark-eyed, solemn-faced, with sweet olive skin. I would have known him for Daniel’s child the moment I had seen him, even if Mrs. Carpenter had not betrayed the secret.

  As I looked at her I saw a shadow behind her, a shadow that was gone as quickly as I turned my gaze to it. I had seen something like a horseman, riding behind her, bending low toward her. I blinked, there was nothing there but this young woman, her baby held close, and Daniel’s womenfolk looking at me, looking at them.

  “Come on, Father,” I said, very weary. “Get me home.”

  Winter 1556–1557

  Of course within days the word was out that I had fainted in church because I was pregnant, and for the next weeks I had women coming into the printing shop and asking for volumes which were stored on high shelves so that I would have to come out from behind the counter and stretch up, so that they could see my belly.

  By winter they had to acknowledge that they were wrong a
nd that the bookseller’s daughter, the odd changeling woman, had not yet received her comeuppance. By Christmas it was all but forgotten and by the long cold spring I was almost accepted as yet another eccentric in this town of runaways, vagabonds, ex-pirates, camp followers and chancers.

  Besides, there were greater interests for the most inveterate gossips that year. King Philip’s long desire to drag his wife’s country into war against France had finally triumphed over her better sense, and England and France were declared enemies. Even sheltered as we were behind the stout walls of Calais it was terrifying to think that the French army could ride up to the bastions which encircled the Pale. The opinion of our customers was divided between those who thought the queen a fool ruled by her husband and mad to take on the might of France, and those who thought that this was a great chance for England and Spain to defeat the French as they had done once before, and this time to divide the spoils.

  Spring 1557

  The spring storms kept ships in port and made news from England late and unreliable. I was not the only person who waited every day on the quayside and called to incoming ships: “What’s the news? What’s the news in England?” The spring gales threw rain and saltwater against the tiles and windows of the house and chilled my father to his very bones. Some days he was too cold and weary to get out of bed at all and I would kindle a little fire in the grate in his bedroom and sit by his bed and read to him from the precious scraps of our Bible. On our own, and quietly, lit only by candlelight, I would read to him in the rolling sonorous language of our race. I read to him in Hebrew and he lay back on his pillows and smiled to hear the old words that promised the land to the People, and safety at last. I hid from him as best as I could the news that the country we had chosen for our refuge was now at war with one of the strongest kingdoms in Christendom, and when he asked I emphasized that at least we were inside the town walls and that whatever might happen elsewhere to the English in France, or to the Spanish just down the road at Gravelines, at least we knew that Calais would never fall.

  In March, as the town went mad for King Philip who traveled through the port on his way to Gravesend, I paid little attention to the rumors of his plans for war and his intentions toward the Princess Elizabeth. I was growing very anxious for my father, who did not seem to be getting any stronger. After two weeks of worry, I swallowed my pride and sent for the newly licensed Dr. Daniel Carpenter, who had set up an independent practice at a little shop on the far side of the quay. He came the moment that the street urchin delivered my message, and he came very quietly and gently as if he did not want to disturb me.

  “How long has he been ill?” he asked me, shaking the sea fret off his thick dark cape.

  “He is not really ill. He seems tired more than anything else,” I said, taking the cape from him and spreading it before the little fire to dry. “He doesn’t eat much, he will take soup and dried fruit but nothing else. He sleeps by day and night.”

  “His urine?” Daniel asked.

  I fetched the flask that I had kept for his diagnosis and he took it to the window and looked at the color in the daylight.

  “Is he upstairs?”

  “In the back bedroom,” I said and followed on my lost husband’s heels up the stairs.

  I waited outside while Daniel took my father’s pulses and laid his cool hands on my father’s forehead, and asked him gently how he did. I heard their low-voiced exchange, the rumble of male communion, saying everything by speaking words which said nothing, a code which women can never understand.

  Then Daniel came out, his face grave and tender. He ushered me downstairs and did not speak until we were in the shop once more, with the wooden door to the staircase closed behind us.

  “Hannah, I could cup him, and physic him, and torment him a dozen different ways but I don’t think I, or any other doctor, could cure him.”

  “Cure him?” I repeated stupidly. “He’s just tired.”

  “He is dying,” my husband said gently.

  For a moment I could not take it in. “But Daniel, that’s not possible! There’s nothing wrong with him!”

  “He has a growth in his belly which is pressing against his lungs and his heart,” Daniel said quietly. “He can feel it himself, he knows it.”

  “He is just tired,” I protested.

  “And if he feels any worse than tired, if he feels pain, then we will give him physic to take the pain away,” Daniel assured me. “Thank God he feels nothing but tired now.”

  I went to the shop door and opened it, as if I wanted a customer. What I wanted was to run away from these awful words, to run from this grief which was unfolding steadily before me. The rain, dripping from the eaves of all the houses down the streets, was running through the cobbles to the gutter in little rivulets of mud. “I thought he was just tired,” I said again, stupidly.

  “I know,” Daniel said.

  I closed the door and came back into the shop. “How long d’you think?”

  I thought he would say months, perhaps a year.

  “Days,” he said quietly. “Perhaps weeks. But no more, I don’t think.”

  “Days?” I said uncomprehendingly. “How can it be days?”

  He shook his head, his eyes compassionate. “I am sorry, Hannah. It will not be long.”

  “Should I ask someone else to look at him?” I demanded. “Perhaps your tutor?”

  He took no offense. “If you wish. But anyone would say the same thing. You can feel the lump in his belly, Hannah, this is no mystery. It is pressing against his belly, his heart and his lungs. It is squeezing the life out of him.”

  I threw up my hands. “Stop,” I said unhappily. “Stop.”

  He checked at once. “I am sorry,” he said. “But he is in no pain. And he is not afraid. He is prepared for his death. He knows it is coming. He is only anxious about you.”

  “Me!” I exclaimed.

  “Yes,” he said steadily. “You should assure him that you are provided for, that you are safe.”

  I hesitated.

  “I myself have sworn to him that if you are in any difficulty or in any danger that I will care for you before any other. I will protect you as my wife for as long as you live.”

  I held on to the handle of the door so that I did not pitch myself into his arms and wail like a bereaved child. “That was kind of you,” I managed to say. “I don’t need your protection, but it was kind of you to reassure him.”

  “You have my protection whether you need it or not,” Daniel said. “I am your husband, and I do not forget it.”

  He took up his cape from the stool before the fire and swung it around his shoulders. “I shall come tomorrow, and every day at noon,” he said. “And I shall find a good woman to sit with him so that you can rest.”

  “I will care for him,” I fired up. “I don’t need any help.”

  He paused in the doorway. “You do need help,” he said gently. “This is not something you can do well on your own. And you shall have help. I shall help you, whether you like it or not. And you will be glad of it when this is all over, even if you resist it now. I shall be kind to you, Hannah, whether you want me or not.”

  I nodded; I could not trust myself to speak. Then he went out of the door into the rain and I went upstairs to my father and took up the Bible in Hebrew and read to him some more.

  As Daniel had predicted, my father slipped away very quickly. True to his word, Daniel brought a night nurse so that my father was never alone, never without a candle burning in his room and the quiet murmur of the words he loved to hear. The woman, Marie, was a stocky French peasant girl from devout parents and she could recite all the psalms, one after another. At night my father would sleep, lulled by the rolling cadences of the Île-de-France. In the day I found a lad to mind the shop while I sat with him and read to him in Hebrew. Only in April did I find a new volume which had a small surviving snippet of the prayers for the dead. I saw his smile of acknowledgment. He raised his hand, I fell silent
.

  “Yes, it is time,” was all he said. His voice was a thread. “You will be well, my child?”

  I put the book on the seat of my chair and knelt at his bedside. Effort-fully he put his hand on my head for a blessing. “Don’t worry about me,” I whispered. “I will be all right. I have the shop and the press, I can earn a living, and Daniel will always look after me.”

  He nodded. Already he was drifting away, too far to give advice, too far to remonstrate. “I bless you, querida,” he said gently.

  “Father!” My eyes were filled with tears. I dropped my head to his bed.

  “Bless you,” he said again and lay quietly.

  I levered myself back to my chair and blinked my eyes. Through the blur of tears I could hardly see the words. Then I started to read. “Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all of the house of Israel, speedily, yea soon; and say ye, Amen.”

  In the night when the nurse knocked on my door I was dressed, seated on my bed, and waiting for her to call me. I went to his bedside and saw his face, smiling, illuminated and without fear. I knew he was thinking of my mother and if there was any truth in his faith, or even in the faith of the Christians, then he would be greeting her soon in heaven. I said quietly to the nurse, “You can go and fetch the doctor Daniel Carpenter,” and heard her patter down the stairs.

  I sat beside his bed and took his hand in mine and felt the slow pulse flutter like the heart of a small bird under my fingers. Downstairs, the door quietly opened and shut and I heard two pairs of footsteps come in.

  Daniel’s mother stood in the bedroom doorway. “I don’t intrude,” she said quietly. “But you won’t know how things should be done.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I have read the prayers.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “You’ve done it right, and I can do the rest. You can watch, and learn, so you know how it is done. So that you can do it for me, or for another, when my time comes.”