Lady Elizabeth came riding out from the city to greet us, at the head of a thousand men, all in the Tudor colors of green and white, riding in her pride as if she had never been sick with terror and hiding in her bed. She came out as if she were Lord Mayor of London, coming to give us the keys to the city, with the cheers of the Londoners ringing like a peal of bells all around her, crying “God bless!” to the two princesses.
I reined in my horse and fell back a little so that I could see her. I had been longing to see her again ever since Lady Mary had spoken of her with such affection, ever since Will Somers had called her a goat: up one moment and down the next. I remembered the flash of a green skirt, the invitingly tilted red head against the dark bark of the tree, the girl in the garden that I had seen running from her stepfather, and making sure that he caught her. I was desperately curious to see how that girl had changed.
The girl on horseback was far beyond the child of shining innocence that Lady Mary had described, beyond the victim of circumstance that Will had imagined, and yet not the calculating siren that Jane Dormer hated. I saw instead a woman riding toward her destiny with absolute confidence. She was young, only nineteen years old, yet she was imposing. I saw at once that she had arranged this cavalcade — she knew the power of appearances and she had the skill to design them. The green of her livery had been chosen by her to suit the flaming brazen red of her hair which she wore loose beneath her green hood as if to flaunt her youth and maidenhood beside her older spinster sister. Green and white were the Tudor colors of her father, and no one looking at her high brow and red hair could doubt this girl’s paternity. The men riding closest to her as her guards had been picked, without doubt, for their looks. There was not one man beside her who was not remarkably handsome. The dull-looking ones were all scattered, further back in her train. Her ladies were the reverse; there was not one who outshone her, a clever choice, but one which only a coquette would make. She rode a white gelding, a big animal, almost as grand as a man’s warhorse, and she sat on it as if she had been born to ride, as if she took joy in mastering the power of the beast. She gleamed with health and youth and vitality, she shone with the glamour of success. Against her radiance, the Lady Mary, drained by the strain of the last two months, faded into second place.
Lady Elizabeth’s entourage halted before us and Lady Mary started to dismount as Lady Elizabeth flung herself down from her horse as if she had been waiting all her life for this moment, as if she had never skulked in bed, biting her nails and wondering what would happen next. At the sight of her, the Lady Mary’s face lit up, as a mother will smile on seeing her child. Clearly, Elizabeth riding in her pride was a sight that gave her sister a pure unselfish joy. Lady Mary held out her arms, Elizabeth plunged into her embrace and Lady Mary kissed her warmly. They held each other for a moment, scrutinizing each other’s faces and I knew, as Elizabeth’s bright gaze met Mary’s honest eyes, that my mistress would not have the skill to see through the fabled Tudor charm to the fabled Tudor duplicity which lay beneath.
Lady Mary turned to Elizabeth’s companions, gave them her hand and kissed each of them on the cheek to thank them for bearing Elizabeth company and giving us such a grand welcome into London. Lady Mary folded Elizabeth’s hand under her arm, and scanned her face again. She could not have doubted that Elizabeth was well, the girl was radiant with health and energy, but still I heard a few whispered confidences of Elizabeth’s faintness, and swelling of her belly, and headache, and the mysterious illness that had confined her to bed, unable to move, while the Lady Mary had stared down her own fear alone, and armed the country and prepared to fight for their father’s will.
Elizabeth welcomed her sister to the city and congratulated her on her great victory. “A victory of hearts,” she said. “You are queen of the hearts of your people, the only way to rule this country.”
“Our victory,” Mary said generously at once. “Northumberland would have put us both to death, you as well as me. I have won the right for us both to take our inheritance. You will be an acknowledged princess again, my sister and my heir, and you will ride beside me when I enter London.”
“Your Grace honors me too much,” Elizabeth said sweetly.
“She does indeed,” Jane Dormer said in a hiss of a whisper to me. “Sly bastard.”
The Lady Mary gave the signal to mount and Elizabeth turned to her horse as her groom helped her into her saddle. She smiled around at us; saw me, riding astride in my pageboy livery, and her gaze went past me, utterly uninterested. She did not recognize me as the child who had seen her with Tom Seymour in the garden, so long ago.
But I was interested in her. From the first glimpse I had of her, up against a tree like a common whore, she had haunted my memory. There was something about her that absolutely fascinated me. The first sight I had of her was that of a foolish girl, a flirt, a disloyal daughter, but there was always more to her than that. She had survived the execution of her lover, she had avoided the danger of a dozen plots. She had controlled her desire, she had played the game of a courtier like an expert, not like a girl. She had become her brother’s favorite sister, the Protestant princess. She had stood outside the conspiracies of the court and yet known to a penny the price of every man. Her smile was utterly carefree, her laugh as light as birdsong; but her eyes were as sharp as a black-eyed cat that misses nothing.
I wanted to know every single thing about her, to discover everything she did, and said, and thought. I wanted to know if she hemmed her own linen, I wanted to know who starched her ruff. I wanted to know how often she washed her great mane of red hair. As soon as I saw her, in her green gown at the head of such a troop of men and women on that huge white horse, I saw a woman that I could one day wish to be. A woman who was proud of her beauty and beautiful in her pride; and I longed to grow into a woman like that. The Lady Elizabeth seemed to me to be something that Hannah the Fool might become. I had been an unhappy girl for so long, and then a boy for so long, and a fool for so long that I had no idea how to be a woman — the very idea baffled me. But when I saw the Lady Elizabeth, high on her horse, blazing with beauty and confidence, I thought that this was the sort of woman that I might be. I had never seen such a thing in my life before. This was a woman who gave no quarter to a disabling maidenly modesty, this was a woman who looked as if she could claim the ground she walked on.
But she was not bold in a brazen way, for all of her red hair, and her smiling face, and the energy of her every movement. She deployed all the modesty of a young woman, with a sideways sliding smile at the man who lifted her back into the saddle, and a flirtatious turn of the head as she gathered up the reins. She looked like someone who knew all the pleasures of being a young woman and was not prepared to take the pains. She looked like a young woman who knew her mind.
I looked from her to the Lady Mary, the mistress that I had come to love, and I thought that it would be better for her if she made plans to marry off Lady Elizabeth at once, and send her far away. No household could be at peace with this firebrand in its midst, and no kingdom could settle with such an heir burning so brightly beside an aging queen.
Autumn 1553
As Lady Mary became established in her new life as the next Queen of England I realized that I must speak to her about my own future. September came and I was paid my wage from the queen’s household accounts, just as if I were a musician or a pageboy in very truth, or one of her other servants. Clearly, I had exchanged one master for another, the king to whom I had been begged as a fool was dead, the lord who had sworn me as his vassal was in the Tower, and the Lady Mary on whom I had been battened all this summer was now my mistress. In a move contrary to the spirit of the times — since everyone else in the country seemed to be coming to court with their palm outstretched to assure her that their village would never have declared for her had it not been for their own heroic isolated efforts — I thought that perhaps the moment had come for me to excuse myself from royal service and go back to my fa
ther.
I chose my time carefully, just after Mass when the Lady Mary walked back from her chapel at Richmond in a mood of quiet exaltation. The raising of the Host was not an empty piece of theater to her, it was the presence of the risen God, you could see it in her eyes and in the serenity of her smile. She was uplifted by it in a way I had only ever seen before in those who held to a religious life for conviction. She was more abbess than queen when she walked back from Mass, and it was then that I fell into step beside her.
“Your Grace?”
“Yes, Hannah?” she smiled at me. “Do you have any words of wisdom for me?”
“I am a most irregular fool,” I said. “I see that I pronounce very rarely.”
“You told me I would be queen, and I held that to my heart in the days when I was afraid,” she said. “I can wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit to move you.”
“It was that I wanted to speak to you about,” I said awkwardly. “I have just been paid by the keeper of your household…”
She waited. “Has he underpaid you?” she asked politely.
“No! Not at all! That is not what I meant!” I exclaimed desperately. “No, Your Grace. This is the first time that you have paid me. I was paid by the king before. But I came into his service when I was begged as a fool to him by the Duke of Northumberland, who then sent me as a companion to you. I was merely going to say that you, er, you don’t have to have me.”
As I spoke, we turned into her private apartments and it was as well, for she gave a most unqueenly gurgle of laughter. “You are not, as it were, compulsory?”
I found I was smiling too. “Please, Your Grace. I was taken from my father on the whim of the duke and then begged as a fool to the king. Since then I have been in your household without you ever asking for my company. I just wanted to say that you can release me, I know you never asked for me.”
She sobered at once. “Do you want to go home, Hannah?”
“Not especially, Your Grace,” I said tentatively. “I love my father very well but at home I am his clerk and printer. It is more enjoyable and more interesting at court, of course.” I did not add the proviso — if I can be safe here — but that question always dominated me.
“You have a betrothed, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, disposing of him promptly. “But we are not to marry for years yet.”
She smiled at the childishness of my reply. “Hannah, would you like to stay with me?” she asked sweetly.
I knelt at her feet, and spoke from my heart. “I would,” I said. I trusted her, I thought I might be safe with her. “But I cannot promise to have the Sight.”
“I know that,” she said gently. “It is the gift of the Holy Spirit, which blows where it lists, I don’t expect you to be my astrologer. I want you to be my little maid, my little friend. Will you be that?”
“Yes, Your Grace, I should like that,” I said, and felt the touch of her hand on my head.
She was silent for a moment, her hand resting gently as I knelt before her. “It is very rare to find one that I can trust,” she said quietly. “I know that you came into my household paid by my enemies; but I think your gift comes from God, and I believe that you came to me from God. And you love me now, don’t you, Hannah?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” I said simply. “I don’t think anyone could serve you and not come to love you.”
She smiled a little sadly. “Oh, it is possible,” she said, and I knew she was thinking of the women who had been employed in the royal nursery and paid to love the Princess Elizabeth and to humiliate the older child. She took her hand from my head and I felt her step away, and I looked up to see her going toward the window to look out at the garden. “You can come with me now, and bear me company,” she said quietly. “I have to talk with my sister.”
I followed her as she walked through her private rooms to the gallery which ran looking out over the river. The fields were all shaven bare and yellow. But it had not been a good harvest. It had rained at harvesttime, and if they could not dry the wheat then the grains would rot and there would not be enough to last through the winter, and there would be hunger in the land. And after hunger came illness. To be a good queen in England under these wet skies you had to command the weather itself; and not even Lady Mary, on her knees to her God for hours every day, could manage that.
There was a rustle of a silk underskirt and I peeped around and saw the Lady Elizabeth had entered the gallery from the other end. The young woman took in my presence and she gave me her mischievous smile, as if we were somehow allies. I felt like one of a pair of schoolmates summoned before a severe teacher and I found that I was smiling back at her. Elizabeth could always do that; she could enlist your friendship with a turn of her head. Then she directed her attention to her sister.
“Your Grace is well?”
Lady Mary nodded and then spoke coolly. “You asked to see me.”
At once the beautiful pale face became sober and grave. Lady Elizabeth dropped to her knees, her mane of copper hair tumbled around her shoulders as she dropped her head forward. “Sister, I am afraid you are displeased with me.”
The Lady Mary was silent for a moment. I saw her check a rapid movement forward to raise up her half sister. Instead she kept her distance and the cool tone of her voice. “And so?” she asked.
“I can think of no means where I have displeased you, unless it is that you suspect my religion,” Lady Elizabeth said, her head still penitently bowed.
“You don’t come to Mass,” the Lady Mary observed stiffly.
The copper head nodded. “I know. Is it that which offends you?”
“Of course!” Lady Mary replied. “How can I love you as my sister if you refuse the church?”
“Oh!” Elizabeth gave a little gasp. “I feared it was that. But sister, you don’t understand me. I want to come to Mass. But I have been afraid. I didn’t want to show my ignorance. It’s so foolish… but you see… I don’t know how to do it.” Elizabeth raised a tearstained face to her sister. “Nobody ever taught me what I should do. I was not brought up in the way of the Faith as you were. No one ever taught me. You remember, I was brought up at Hatfield and then I lived with Katherine Parr and she was a most determined Protestant. How could I ever be taught the things you learned at your mother’s knee? Please, sister, please don’t blame me for an ignorance which I could not help. When I was a little girl and we lived together, you did not teach me your faith then.”
“I was forbidden to practice it myself!” the Lady Mary exclaimed.
“So you know what it was like for me,” Elizabeth said persuasively. “Don’t blame me for the faults of my upbringing, sister.”
“You can choose now,” the Lady Mary said firmly. “You live in a free court now. You can choose.”
Elizabeth hesitated. “Can I have instruction?” she asked. “Can you recommend things that I should read, perhaps I could talk with your confessor? I am conscious of so many things that I don’t understand. Your Grace will help me? Your Grace will guide me in the right ways?”
It was impossible not to believe her. The tears on her cheeks were real enough, the color had flushed into her face. Gently Lady Mary went forward, gently she outstretched her hand and put it on Elizabeth’s bowed head. The young woman trembled under her touch. “Please don’t be angry with me, sister,” I heard her breathe. “I am all alone in the world now; but for you.”
Mary put her hands on her sister’s shoulders and raised her up. Elizabeth was normally half a head higher than the Lady Mary but she drooped in her sadness so that she had to look up at her older sister.
“Oh, Elizabeth,” Mary whispered. “If you would confess your sins and turn to the true church I would be so very happy. All I want, all I have ever wanted, is to see this country in the true faith. And if I never marry, and if you come after me as another virgin queen, as another Catholic princess, what a kingdom we could build here together. I shall bring the country back to the true faith and
you shall come after me and keep it under the rule of God.”
“Amen to that, Amen,” Elizabeth whispered, and at the joyful sincerity in her voice I thought of how often I had stood in church or at Mass and whispered “Amen,” and that, however sweet the sound was, it could always mean nothing.
These were not easy days for the Lady Mary. She was preparing for her coronation but the Tower, where the Kings of England usually spent their coronation night, was filled with traitors who had armed against her only a few months before.
Her advisors, especially the Spanish ambassador, told her that she should execute at once everyone who had been involved in the rebellion. Left alive, they would only become a focus of discontent; dead they would be soon forgotten.
“I will not have the blood of that foolish girl on my hands,” the Lady Mary said.
Lady Jane had written to her cousin and confessed that she had been wrong to take the throne but that she had acted under duress.
“I know Cousin Jane,” the Lady Mary said quietly to Jane Dormer one evening, while the musicians plucked away at their strings and the court yawned and waited for their beds. “I have known her since she was a girl, I know her almost as well as I know Elizabeth. She is a most determined Protestant, and she has spent her life at her studies. She is more scholar than girl, awkward as a colt and rude as a Franciscan in her conviction. She and I cannot agree about matters of religion; but she has no worldly ambition at all. She would never have put herself before one of my father’s named heirs. She knew I was to be queen, she would never have denied me. The sin was done by the Duke of Northumberland and by Jane’s father between them.”
“You can’t pardon everyone,” Jane Dormer said bluntly. “And she was proclaimed queen and sat beneath the canopy of state. You can’t pretend it did not happen.”
Lady Mary nodded. “The duke had to die,” she agreed. “But there it can end. I shall release Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, and Jane and her husband Guilford can stay in the Tower until after my coronation.”