“Can’t we get away?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not fast enough, not far enough. If I could have got on a Spanish warship then, perhaps… but the duke has the sea between here and France held down by English warships, he was ready for this, and I was unprepared. I am trapped.”
I remembered John Dee’s map spread out in the duke’s study and the little counters which signified soldiers and sailors on ships all around Norfolk, and Lady Mary trapped in the middle of them.
“Will you have to surrender?” I whispered.
I had thought she was frightened; but at my question the color rushed into her cheeks, and she smiled as if I had suggested a challenge, a great gamble. “You know, I’m damned if I will!” she swore. She laughed aloud as if it was a bet for a joust rather than her life on the table. “I have spent my life running and lying and hiding. Just once, just once I should be glad to ride out under my own standard and defy the men who have denied me, and denied my right and denied the authority of the church and God himself.”
I felt my own spirits leap up at her enthusiasm. “My la… Your Grace!” I stumbled.
She turned a brilliant smile on me. “Why not?” she said. “Why should I not, just once, fight like a man and defy them?”
“But can you win?” I asked blankly.
She shrugged, an absolutely Spanish gesture. “Oh! It’s not likely!” She smiled at me as if she were truly merry at the desperate choice before her. “Ah, but Hannah, I have been humbled to dust by these men who would now put a commoner such as Lady Jane before me. They once put Elizabeth before me. They made me wait on her as if I were her maid in her nursery. And now I have my chance. I can fight them instead of bowing to them. I can die fighting them instead of crawling to them, begging for my life. When I see it like this, I have no choice. And I thank God, there is no better choice for me than to raise my standard and to fight for my father’s throne and my mother’s honor, my inheritance. And I have Elizabeth to think of, too. I have her safety to secure. I have her inheritance to pass on to her. She is my sister, she is my responsibility. I have written to her to bid her come here, so that she can be safe. I have promised her a refuge, and I will fight for our inheritance.”
Lady Mary gathered her rosary beads in her short workmanlike fingers, tucked them into the pocket of her gown and strode toward the door of the great hall where her armies of gentlemen and soldiers were breaking their fast. She entered the head of the hall and mounted the dais. “Today we move out,” she announced, loud and clear enough for the least man at the back of the hall to hear her. “We go to Framlingham, a day’s ride, no more than that. I shall raise my standard there. If we can get there before Lord Robert we can hold him off in a siege. We can hold him off for months. I can fight a battle from there. I can collect troops.”
There was a murmur of surprise and then approbation.
“Trust me!” she commanded them. “I will not fail you. I am your proclaimed queen and you will see me on the throne, and then I will remember who was here today. I will remember and you will be repaid many times over for doing your duty to the true Queen of England.”
There was a deep low roar, easily given from men who have just eaten well. I found my knees were shaking at the sight of her courage. She swept to the door at the back of the hall and I jumped unsteadily ahead of her and opened it for her.
“And where is he?” I asked. She did not have to be told who I was asking for.
“Oh, not far,” Lady Mary said grimly. “South of King’s Lynn, I am told. Something must have delayed him, he could have taken us here if he had come at once. But I cannot get news of him. I don’t know where he is for sure.”
“Will he guess that we are going to Framlingham?” I asked, thinking of the note that had gone to him, naming her destination here, its spiral on the paper like a curled snake.
She paused at the doorway and looked back at me. “There is bound to be one person in such a gathering who will slip away and tell him. There is always a spy in the camp. Don’t you think, Hannah?”
For a moment I thought she had trapped me. I looked up at her, my lies very dry in my throat, my girl’s face growing pale.
“A spy?” I quavered. I put my hand to my cheek and rubbed it hard.
She nodded. “I never trust anyone. I always know that there are spies about me. And if you had been the girl I was, you would have learned the same. After my father sent my mother away from me there was no one near me who did not try to persuade me that Anne Boleyn was true queen and her bastard child the true heir. The Duke of Norfolk shouted into my face that if he were my father he would bang my head against the wall until my brains fell out. They made me deny my mother, they made me deny my faith, they threatened me with death on the scaffold like Thomas More and Bishop Fisher — men I knew and loved. I was a girl of twenty and they made me proclaim myself a bastard and my faith a heresy.
“Then, all in a summer’s day, Anne was dead and all they spoke of was Queen Jane and her child, Edward, and little Elizabeth was no longer my enemy but a motherless child, a forgotten daughter, just like me. Then the other queens…” She almost smiled. “One after another, three other women came to me and I was ordered to curtsey to them as queen and call them Mother, and none of them came close to my heart. In that long time I learned never to trust a word that any man says and never even to listen to a woman. The last woman I loved was my mother. The last man I trusted was my father. And he destroyed her, and she died of heartbreak, so what was I to think? Will I ever be a woman who can trust now?”
She broke off and looked at me. “My heart broke when I was a little more than twenty years old,” she said wonderingly. “And d’you know, only now do I begin to think that there might be a life for me.”
She smiled. “Oh, Hannah!” she sighed and patted me on the cheek. “Don’t look so grave. It was all a long time ago and if we can triumph in this adventure then my story is ended happily. I shall have my mother’s throne restored, I shall wear her jewels. I shall see her memory honored and she will look down from heaven and see her daughter on the throne that she bore me to inherit. I shall think myself a happy woman. Don’t you see?”
I smiled uncomfortably.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
I swallowed on my dry throat. “I am afraid,” I confessed. “I am sorry.”
She nodded. “We are all afraid,” she said frankly. “Me too. Go down and choose a horse from the stable and get a pair of riding boots. We are an army on the march today. God save us that we may make Framlingham without running into Lord Robert and his army.”
Mary raised her standard at Framlingham Castle, a fortress to match any in England, and unbelievably half the world turned up on horseback and on foot to swear allegiance to her and death to the rebels. I walked beside her as she went down the massed ranks of the men and thanked them for coming to her and swore to be a true and honest queen to them.
We had news from London at last. The announcement of King Edward’s death had been made shamefully late. After the poor boy had died, the duke had kept the corpse hidden in his room while the ink dried on his will, and the powerful men of the country considered where their best interests lay. Lady Jane Grey had to be dragged on to the throne by her father-in-law. They said she had cried very bitterly and said that she could not be queen, and that the Lady Mary was the rightful heir, as everyone knew. It did not save her from her fate. They unfurled the canopy of state over her bowed head, they served her on bended knee despite her tearful protests, and the Duke of Northumberland proclaimed her as queen and bent his sly head to her.
The country was launched into civil war, directed against us, the traitors. Lady Elizabeth had not replied to the Lady Mary’s warnings, nor come to join us at Framlingham. She had taken to her bed when she had heard the news of her brother’s death and was too sick even to read her letters. When Lady Mary learned of that, she turned away for a moment to hide the hurt in her face. She had count
ed on Elizabeth’s support, the two princesses together defending their father’s will, and she had promised herself that she would keep her young sister safe. To find that Elizabeth was hiding under the bedcovers rather than racing to be with her sister, was a blow to Mary’s heart as well as to her cause.
We learned that Windsor Castle had been fortified and provisioned for a siege, the guns of the Tower of London were battle-ready and turned to face inland, and Queen Jane had taken up residence in the royal apartments in the Tower and was said to lock the great gate every night to prevent any of her court slipping away: a coerced queen with a coerced court.
Northumberland himself, the battle-hardened veteran, had raised an army and was coming to root out our Lady Mary, who was now officially named as a traitor to Queen Jane. “Queen Jane indeed!” Jane Dormer exclaimed, irritably. The royal council had ordered Lady Mary’s arrest for treason, there was a price on her head as a traitor. She was alone in all of England. She was a rebel against a proclaimed queen, she was beyond the law. Not even her uncle, the Spanish emperor, would support her.
No one knew how many troops Northumberland had under his command, no one knew how long we could last at Framlingham. He would join with Lord Robert’s company of horse, and then the two men would come against Lady Mary: well-trained, well-paid men, experienced fighting men up against one woman and a chaotic camp of volunteers.
And yet, every day more men arrived from the surrounding countryside, swearing that they would fight for the rightful queen. The sailors from the warships anchored at Yarmouth who had been ordered to set sail to attack any Spanish ships which might be hanging offshore to rescue her, had mutinied against their commanders, and said that she must not leave the country: not because they had blocked her escape, but because she should be mounting the throne. They left their ships and marched inland to support us: a proper troop, accustomed to fighting. They marched into the castle in ranks, quite unlike our own draggle of farm laborers. At once they started teaching the men gathered at the castle how to fight and the rules of battle: the charge, the swerve, the retreat. I watched them arrive, and I watched them settle in, and for the first time I thought that Lady Mary might have a chance to escape capture.
She appointed an almoner to send out carts to bring in food for the makeshift army, which now camped all around the castle. She appointed building teams to repair the great curtain wall. She sent scouring parties out to beg and borrow weapons. She sent out scouts in every direction every dawn and dusk to see if they could find the duke and Lord Robert’s army in their stealthy approach.
Every day she reviewed the troops and promised them her thanks and a more solid reward if they would stand by her, hold the line; and every afternoon she walked on the battlements, along the mighty curtain wall which ran around the impenetrable castle, and looked to the London road for the plume of dust which would tell her that the most powerful man in England was riding at the head of his army against her.
There were very many advisors to tell the Lady Mary that she could not win a pitched battle against the duke. I used to listen to their confident predictions and wonder if it would be safer for me to slip away now, before the encounter which must end in defeat. The duke had seen a dozen actions, he had fought and held power on the battlefield and in the council chamber. He forged an alliance with France and he could bring French troops against us if he did not defeat us at once, and then the lives of Englishmen would be taken by Frenchmen, the French would fight on English soil and it would all be her fault. The horror of the Wars of the Roses, with brother against brother, would be relived once more if Lady Mary would not see reason and surrender.
But then, in the middle of July, it all fell apart for the duke. His alliances, his treaties, could not hold against the sense that every Englishman had that Mary, Henry’s daughter, was the rightful queen. Northumberland was hated by many and it was clear that he would rule through Jane as he had ruled through Edward. The people of England, from lords to commoners, muttered and then declared against him.
The accord he had stitched together to darn Queen Jane into the fabric of England all unraveled. More and more men declared in public for Lady Mary, more and more men secretly slipped away from the duke’s cause. Lord Robert himself was defeated by an army of outraged citizens, who just sprang up from the ploughed furrows, swearing that they would protect the rightful queen. Lord Robert declared for the Lady Mary and deserted his father but, despite turning his coat, was captured at Bury by citizens who declared him a traitor. The duke himself, trapped at Cambridge, his army disappearing like mist in the morning, announced suddenly that he too was for Lady Mary and sent her a message explaining that he had only ever tried to do his best for the realm.
“What does this mean?” I asked her, seeing the letter shaking so violently in her hand that she could hardly read it.
“It means I have won,” she said simply. “Won by right, accepted right and not by battle. I am queen and the people’s choice. Despite the duke himself, the people have spoken and I am the queen they want.”
“And what will happen to the duke?” I asked, thinking of his son, Lord Robert, somewhere a prisoner.
“He’s a traitor,” she said, her eyes cold. “What do you think would have happened to me if I had lost?”
I said nothing. I waited for a moment, a heartbeat, a girl’s heartbeat. “And what will happen to Lord Robert?” I asked, my voice very small.
Lady Mary turned. “He is a traitor and a traitor’s son. What do you think will happen to him?”
Lady Mary took her big horse and, riding side saddle, set off on the road to London, a thousand, two thousand men riding behind her, and their men, their tenants and retainers and followers coming on foot behind them. The Lady Mary was at the head of a mighty army with only her ladies and me, her fool, riding with her.
When I looked back I could see the dust from the horses’ hooves and the tramping feet drifting like a veil across the ripening fields. When we marched through villages, men came running out of their doors, their sickles or bill hooks in their hands, and fell in with the army and matched their step to the marching men’s. The women waved and cheered and some of them ran out with flowers for the Lady Mary or threw roses in the road before her horse. The Lady Mary, in her old red riding habit, with her head held high, rode her big horse like a knight going into battle, a queen going to claim her own. She rode like a princess out of a storybook to whom everything, at last, is given. She had won the greatest victory of her life by sheer determination and courage and her reward was the adoration of the people that she would rule.
Everyone thought that her coming to the throne would be the return of the good years, rich harvests, warm weather, and an end to the constant epidemics of plague and sweat and colds. Everyone thought that she would restore the wealth of the church, the beauty of the shrines and the certainty of faith. Everyone remembered the sweetness and beauty of her mother who had been Queen of England for longer than she had been a princess of Spain, who had been the wife that the king had loved the longest and the best, and who had died with a blessing for him, even though he had deserted her. Everyone was glad to see her daughter riding to her mother’s throne with her golden cap on her head and her army of men behind her, their bright glad faces showing the world that they were proud to serve such a princess and to bring her to her capital city, which even now declared for her and was ringing the bells in every church tower to make her welcome.
On the road to London I wrote a note for Lord Robert, and translated it into his code. It read: “You will be tried for treason and executed. Please, my lord, escape. Please, my lord, escape.” I put it into the fire in the hearth of an inn and watched it burn black, and then I took the poker and mashed it into black ash. There was no way that I could get the warning to him, and in truth, he would not need a warning.
He knew the risks he was running and he would have known them when he was defeated and gave himself up at Bury. He would know now, w
herever he was, whether in the prison of some small town being taunted by men who would have kissed his shoe a month ago, or already in the Tower, that he was a dead man, a condemned man. He had committed treason against the rightful heir to the throne and the punishment for treason was death, hanging until he lost consciousness, coming back into awareness with the shock of the agony of the executioner slicing his stomach open and pulling his guts out of his slit belly before his face so that his last sight would be his own pulsing entrails, and then they would quarter him: first slashing his head from his body and then hacking his body into four pieces, setting his handsome head up on a stake as a warning to others, and sending his butchered corpse to the four corners of the city. It was as bad a death as anyone could face, almost as bad as being burned alive and I, of all people, knew how bad that was.
I did not cry for him, as we rode to London. I was a young girl but I had seen enough death and known enough fear to have learned not to cry for grief. But I found I could not sleep at night, not any night, for wondering where Lord Robert was, and whether I would ever see him again, and whether he would ever forgive me for riding into the capital of England, with crowds cheering and crying out blessings, at the side of the woman who had so roundly defeated him, and who would see him and all his family destroyed.
Lady Elizabeth, too sick to rise from her bed during the days of danger, managed to get to London before us. “That girl is first, everywhere she goes,” Jane Dormer said sourly to me.