Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

So when Harry decided that he would give a present of flowers to the imprisoned Princess, Susannah helped him to pick them, and when Harry enlisted his mother’s help to let him into the ‘secret garden’ as he called it, and she agreed (for no harm could come of it, and possibly good, if the old sister died and the young one came to power, and might well remember the pretty childish act of service to her in adversity), Susannah bore him company. They hid together behind a waving bush of green broom, studded all over with little tight buds not yet in flower, until suddenly Harry said, ‘Now!’ and stood up manfully, with his bunch of drooping primroses tightly grasped in one of his round pink fists, and Susannah holding firmly on to the other.

  In front of them stood a tall young lady in a dull coloured dress, which was disappointing for a fairy princess or even a real one. But at that moment the sun came out and glinted on her hair, and Harry saw that it was indeed like the gold threads in the waistcoat but softer and flying about, and he wanted to stroke it to feel the difference, but he knew he must not ask to do that, so he held out the primroses instead.

  And at that he saw a real enchantment, for her eyes opened wide and looked down into his, and they were flecked with green lights and smiling, and she said, ‘You have given me the first pleasure I have had in my prison, you have given me wild flowers which I like better than any, and when – if ever, I mean – I am Queen, I will always have them in my palace. Yes, I will have primroses in my palace and tall swaying harebells.’

  ‘What are harebells?’ asked Susannah.

  ‘She is not old enough to remember,’ said Harry in excuse. ‘She was only three last summer. But I remember harebells.’

  ‘So do I,’ said the Princess, ‘last summer, when my brother King Edward died, and Susannah was only three, and I was nineteen. I am twenty now.’

  It was a pity she was so old, as much too old for him as Susannah was too young. But she could still play Touch Wood with them, as there was no hall to play with, Susannah toddling about in the chase with some difficulty in her long skirts, which the Princess presently looped up for her through her belt, and then Susannah must needs stop the game to point out to her with pride all the toys that dangled from it, the coral on which she had cut her teeth, the rattle hung with silver bells, the gold pouncet box, the little ivory hand to scratch her back.

  At all this display Harry grew boastful too, and told the Princess that be had just been given a small young ger-falcon to tie to his wrist and keep till he could learn to fly it at game.

  Who had given him this treasure?

  No. That he would not tell, he said importantly, but it was a very fine gentleman.

  She looked down at the resolute underlip sucked like a red button into his mouth, at the eyes that confronted hers so squarely, and the high round ball of a forehead beneath the close-cropped hair.

  ‘As fine as you will be, Sir Harry Martin, my true knight?’

  ‘No. I will be the finest, truest knight to you of them all.’

  She kissed him for that. They laughed a great deal. The early April sun was warm and the grass newly green; a blackbird sang and they could hear the shouts of boatmen passing each other on the river.

  She was amazed to find she had not forgotten she was young.

  Mrs Coldeburn, a stout body with a shining bluish face like a glazed puff of pastry in the raw spring air, walked angrily up and down by the garden door and paid them as little attention as if she were the bored governess of all three.

  Next day Harry Martin was there again and his faithful Susannah, and yet another little girl who stood stiff and silent until Harry said, ‘She wants to set you free.’

  ‘And how will she do that?’ asked Elizabeth.

  The child held out a bunch of little keys, probably to writing-desks and store-boxes, which she had found in her mother’s kitchen.

  ‘I have brought you the keys now,’ she said, ‘so you need not always stay here, but may unlock the gates and go abroad.’

  Elizabeth stood looking down on the three small conspirators and the keys so confidently held out to her in promise of her freedom. She could not tell them that they were not the keys to her prison. She took them and thanked them – ‘You have made me free,’ she said, and then she handed them back again. ‘Put them back where you found them, and when I want to go abroad I will ask you for them!’

  ‘Don’t you want to go now?’ asked Harry.

  She looked at him, and for a moment he thought her face had been covered over as though a piece of fine gauze had dropped over it. Then it opened and her eyes flashed. ‘No,’ she said, laughing, ‘I would rather stay now and play with you,’ and she held out her hand for the bunch of white violets he had brought her.

  It was thicker than his bouquet of yesterday and securely tied, obviously not by him. She asked who had tied them for him, and once again he told her, a very fine gentleman.

  ‘A prisoner?’

  He answered yes, but he had promised not to say anything about him to anyone.

  ‘You can tell me this – was it he who gave you the ger-falcon?’

  Harry nodded with vehement importance.

  So that was it! The child was being used as a stalking-horse for her by some bold intriguer – Courtenay? – Wyatt? – Who? She would have thrown the flowers away but would not hurt Harry’s feelings, any more than those of the strange little girl who had presented her with those miniature keys to open the mighty gates of the Tower. Well, why not? A toy could set the fancy free, and these infant allies had brought back youth and hope to her. Excitement and curiosity were alight in her again though she did not know it, she took them only for alarm and anger as she hurried back to her room and, as soon as she was sure she was alone, untied the bunch of violets.

  It was just as she had suspected. A tightly rolled pellet of paper was twisted among the limp green stalks. Her hands trembled; to still them, she would not unroll the paper till she had filled a small silver jug with water and plunged the flowers into it up to their frail white heads, which they seemed to lift again towards her almost at once in thanks for their refreshment, breathing their delicate scent towards her.

  She stood very still a moment there alone in the shadowed room, a thin girl in a dull coloured dress with a silver jug of white flowers between her hands, her face still and pale, with her eyes downcast at the flowers, but the breath coming quickly from her high, finely cut nostrils. At last she laid down the jug and unrolled the small strip of paper.

  There were only a few words on it, asking her to arrange her walk an hour earlier the next morning. And it was signed, not ‘Edward Courtenay,’ not ‘Thomas Wyatt,’ but ‘Robert Dudley’.

  ‘So – Robin!’ she breathed.

  Robin Dudley clattering over Tower Bridge at the head of his horsemen on an early morning last July, when the sun rose glinting on his harness and his scarlet waistcoat, and he had been sent out by his father the magnificent Duke Dudley ‘to fetch in’ the Lady Mary – how was it she had that picture of him as clear in her mind as if she had seen it? Then she remembered the burring north-country voice that had told it to her, Dr. Turner who had come to see her when all England lay under the shadow of death and rebellion. and had talked to her of wild flowers. ‘Johnny Jump-Up’ he had called Duke Dudley, who had been laid low by the axe, and his son ‘Ragged Robin’ ever since a prisoner in the Tower.

  She had known Robin and liked him, played with him in childhood and done lessons with him. He was gay, handsome, and a friend. She had felt a prick of sharp interest, of hope and fear for him, when she had heard that hot July day of his part in his father’s rebellion.

  But now she did not think she dared, nor even cared to do as he asked; a day or two ago she would not even have considered it, and why should playing with three small brats in the open air have made any difference to her?

  Her life hung by a thread; she would attach no further weights to endanger snapping it asunder. If there were any plot afoot, even for her escape, she did not wan
t to get embroiled in it. ‘Heaven preserve me from my friends!’ she had sighed that so often lately. Those nearest to her had shown most power to hurt.

  ‘My mother has killed me,

  My father has eaten me.

  My brother and sister sit under the table

  Picking my bones,

  And they’ll bury them under the cold marble stones.’

  That queer riddle-me-ree that Mother Jack, her brother Edward’s old nurse, used to croon as she spun the flax on her humming wheel at Hampton Court, had come into her mind with the insistence, not of memory, but of prophecy. For mother, father, brother, sister had spun the web of her fate into this intricate and dangerous pattern, so that now her life hung by a single thread of it. She stood here in the prison where her mother had been killed to set her father free to beget his one male heir, her brother Edward, and now, of them all, only her sister still lived to wreak vengeance on Elizabeth for what they had done against Mary.

  Then let no other, no friend nor possible lover, add his coil to the tangle.

  She burned the note, and that night she went to bed resolved to pay no attention to it.

  But she woke to the sunlight on the river and the noise of cheering as a great ship sailed up it, returned from a voyage of discovery, and she altered the time of her walk.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Everything was the same in the little garden except that it was an hour earlier and a good deal colder, with the sun only just coming over the wall, and a sharp early April wind blowing up the river, rocking the newly returned ship, the Edward Bonaventure, that lay at anchor below them invisible behind the high walls, but she could hear the men on board singing chanties at their work.

  Harry Martin had brought his new ger-falcon to show her, tied by a thin silk cord to his wrist, but did not, after all, pay much attention to it, for he was too full of the tales he had heard this morning of the travellers in the ship below, and their voyage into the White Sea. They had discovered a strange land of endless snow where the people lived on horseflesh and mare’s milk and had taken them in sledges to their Emperor, who welcomed them in a robe of beaten gold with a crown on his head as high as the Pope’s; he was called Ivan the Terrible, but in spite of that he had been very kind and given them presents of furs and jewels to take back to their young King, for they never knew that King Edward had died just after the three ships had set sail last summer to explore the terrors of the Outland Ocean – they never knew till now, when one alone sailed back, to find Queen Mary on the throne. The two other ships had been lost in the frozen mists, caught between floating mountains of ice that were transparent as glass and green as emerald, and were there imprisoned till all on board had died of cold and starvation.

  ‘It was a pity they died,’ said Harry, ‘but I wish I could see the glass mountains. I shall go one day to this new land of Muscovy. It is at the topmost end of the earth, no one has ever gone so high up before. I shall take my sledge. Will you come with me?’

  ‘To the top of the world,’ said Elizabeth, and she chased him round the garden to keep warm for she was shivering and she supposed it must be from cold though she did not feel it.

  Mrs Coldeburn said she would get a cloak for her; Elizabeth said she did not want one, but Mrs Coldeburn then said she would get one for herself and hurried away, declaring she would be back on the instant. The children were now chasing each other, for Elizabeth had tired quickly and was walking up and down, watching the garden door, wondering why Mrs Coldeburn should be so long, wondering why she should feel so strange and excited, for whoever came through it when at last it opened could make no difference, no possible difference to her.

  It opened at last and a tall figure stood there an instant in the dark mouth of the doorway, looking out, and it was not Mrs Coldeburn. She tautened and flung back her head, bracing herself as if to meet an attack. A young man came quickly towards her, dropped on one knee and kissed her hand, then looked up at her for a long moment; his bold dark eyes grew grave and he said in a low tone, ‘I wonder, by God’s truth, what I have done till now!’

  She told him promptly, in a voice like the snapping of crystals against the deep bell of his voice. ‘You married little Amy Robsart because you fell in love with her, or she with you. And you helped your father in the rebellion to put Jane Grey on the throne instead of my sister, or myself. So never tell me, my bonny Cock Robin, that you’ve done nothing till now but wait to see me again!’

  She flicked him on the nose and he sprang to his feet with a crack of laughter. ‘You have not changed one jot! The very sight of you is a challenge, my prince of rapier play. Does your sword never rest in its scabbard? But never stab me for a family affair! With my father and brothers all raising rebellion, would you have had me such a snudge as to keep out?’

  ‘Snudge?’ She had not heard that new piece of slang. She had grown out of things, mewed up with plots and terrors, but now they were all winging out of her mind, a bat-winged flock of screeching shadows frightened by the coming day. Its light shone on her face and a young man was looking at her, for no other reason than that she was a young woman and good to look at.

  ‘I saw Your Highness land at Traitors’ Gate,’ he said, almost as though it were a joke. ‘Those elegant long feet must have got very wet. But one doesn’t worry about one’s feet here as long as one keeps one’s head.’

  ‘Was it you who waved from that window? I thought it was Courtenay.’

  ‘Are you betrothed to him? He says you are.’

  ‘He says a deal more than is good for him.’

  ‘Or for others. But he’s got a Gardiner who won’t prune him. Too busy cutting down his old Cambridge friends. How these fellow dons hate each other! He’ll get the Archbishop yet. Even Cranmer can’t recant all he wrote only last autumn against the “horrible abominations of the Mass”!’

  ‘Oh, but he can! He can cant and recant. He’ll prove himself for all time as the Archbishop of re-Canterbury!’ Her laugh was wild and cruel as the sudden wind; she hated Cranmer, who had helped pull down her mother to death and herself to bastardy – ‘he’d good reason to meddle with other men’s wives, with his career all but wrecked twice over by two of his own!’

  ‘Two? There’s his Gretchen that he brought over from Germany—’

  ‘In a box, the King my father always said, and a fine way to smuggle such contraband! But there was the landlady’s niece at the Dolphin in Cambridge long before that, who served him and Erasmus with small beer, Black Joan they called her, and a black day for Cranmer when he had perforce to marry her and so lost his Fellowship – but then lost her in childbed, and so won it back again. Did you never know our Archbishop’s scutcheon was blotted by a barmaid sinister?’

  ‘More, I beg you, tell me more. I’ve never heard you talk before.’

  ‘A lie! And you say it in rhyme to prove it! You’ve heard me talk since I was seven or eight – what you’d never heard before was the silence of these stone walls.’

  ‘But it’s true. I’m hearing you, seeing you for the first time.’

  And it was true also of her. They had known each other from childhood but they had not met for a couple of years or so, and at their age that makes a deal of difference. Now each took delight in the discovery of the other. A twinge of exasperated pity shot through him at the thought of Amy probably now crying her eyes out for him on their bleak windswept estates in Norfolk – but then she was in Norfolk, and here beside him was a Princess, subtle and sophisticated, who yet evidently admired him even while she mocked him; treated him with the outspoken camaraderie of a boy and the maddeningly teasing coquetry of – no, not a girl, but a woman of strange experience. What had been the truth about her and the Admiral? He had already lain awake at nights guessing, but in almost everything to do with Elizabeth he found himself still guessing.

  He was asking her questions now as venturesomely as he dared, as discreetly as he knew how, while the children in their stiff bunched-up clothes played
behind them with shouts of excitement on a plank of wood that they had turned into a see-saw.

  But she did not answer his questions; ‘I am not on examination now, so what reason have I to?’

  ‘No reason – and no rhyme neither? If I write you a sonnet—’

  ‘You will sing it first to your wife, who will praise it.’

  ‘That’s how wives are made. Dame Disdain was never wedded.’

  ‘Nor will I be, if I have my will.’

  ‘Then half mankind will lose theirs.’

  ‘Only if they lose their wits.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll lose wits and will and more for you. Why are you laughing?’

  ‘I don’t know. Am I laughing?’ But she found she was shaking with mirth and tears from it were trembling on her eyelashes, making a rainbow dazzle against the sun.

  ‘Here we go up, up, up,’ shouted Harry on the see-saw, and Susannah shouted back, ‘Here we go down, down, down!’

  ‘Sing up, heart, sing up, heart,

  Sing no more down!’

  sang Elizabeth in time to their shouts. ‘It is all mad,’ she cried, ‘here are you and I meeting like this, two prisoners under shadow of death, after all this time, and talking blather-skites just where we left off, where was it? – at Whitehall Palace or at Greenwich, where those ships sailed out to discover the Curdled Ocean where “there is no night at all, but a continual light and brightness of the sun shining clearly upon the huge and mighty sea.”’

  ‘What is it you are saying?’

  She had flushed so suddenly, her eyes shone with so strange a light that he laid his hand on her wrist, fearing to feel it throbbing with fever.

  ‘Why,’ she said, ‘did you never hear the Lord Admiral speak of the Merchant Venturers – or the pirates if you will – and their hopes to discover yet another world? We never spoke of them, did we, my bonny Cock Robin, nor do we now – we are talking nonsense just where we left off – at Greenwich Palace was it, or Whitehall? We were dancing, I know, or were we fencing in the long gallery, and the little black-bearded Spanish master calling ‘Riposte! Riposte!’ And here we are talking it in the Tower, and either or both of us may be dead tomorrow.’