The Queen’s Fool. Philippa Gregory
place of outsiders, ruled by an invalid. Lady Mary was plagued with headaches, which often came in the evening, darkening her face as the light drained from the sky. Her ladies would notice her frown; but she never mentioned the pain and never drooped in her wooden chair nor leaned against the carved back, nor rested against the arms. She sat as her mother had taught her, upright like a queen, and she kept her head up, even when her eyes were squinting against dim candles. I remarked on her physical frailty to Jane Dormer, the Lady Mary’s closest friend and lady in waiting, and she said briefly that the pains I saw now were nothing. When it was the Lady’s time of the month, she would be gripped with cramps as severe as those of childbirth, which nothing could ease.
‘What ails her?’ I asked.
Jane shrugged. ‘She was never a strong child,’ she said. ‘Always slight and delicate. But when her mother was put aside and her father denied her, it was as if he had poisoned her. She could not stop vomiting and voiding her food, she could not get out of bed but she had to crawl across the floor. There were some who said she had been poisoned indeed, by the witch Boleyn. The princess was near to death and they would not let her see her mother. The queen could not come to her for fear of never being allowed back to her own court. The Boleyn woman and the king destroyed the two of them: mother and daughter. Queen Katherine hung on for as long as she could but illness and heartbreak killed her. Lady Mary should have died too – she suffered so much; but she survived. They made her deny her faith, they made her deny her mother’s marriage. Ever since then she has been tormented by these pains.’
‘Can’t the doctors …?’
‘They wouldn’t even let her see a doctor for many years,’ Jane said irritably. ‘She could have died for want of care, not once but several times. The witch Boleyn wanted her dead and more than once I swear she sent poison. She has had a bitter life: half-prisoner, half-saint, always swallowing down grief and anger.’
The mornings were the best times for Lady Mary. After she had been to Mass and broken her fast she liked to walk, and often she chose me to walk with her. One warm day in late June she commanded me to walk at her side and to name the flowers and describe the weather in Spanish. I had to keep my steps short so that I did not stride ahead of her, and she often stopped with her hand to her side, the colour draining from her face. ‘Are you not well this morning, my lady?’ I asked.
‘Just tired,’ she said. ‘I did not sleep last night.’
She smiled at the concern on my face. ‘Oh, it is nothing worse than it has always been. I should learn to have more serenity. But not to know … and to have to wait … and to know that he is in the hands of advisors who have set their hearts …’
‘Your brother?’ I asked when she fell silent.
‘I have thought of him every day from the day he was born!’ she burst out passionately. ‘Such a tiny boy and so much expected of him. So quick to learn and so – I don’t know – so cold in his heart where he should have been warm. Poor boy, poor motherless boy! All three of us, thrown together, and none of us with a mother living, and none of us knowing what would happen next.
‘I had more care of Elizabeth than I did of him, of course. And now she is far from me, and I cannot even see him. Of course I worry about him: about what they are doing to his soul, about what they are doing to his body … and about what they are doing to his will,’ she added very quietly.
‘His will?’
‘It is my inheritance,’ she said fiercely. ‘If you report, as I imagine you do, tell them I never forget that. Tell them that it is my inheritance and nothing can change that.’
‘I don’t report!’ I exclaimed, shocked. It was true, I had sent no report, there was nothing in our dull lives and quiet nights to report to Lord Robert or his father. This was a sick princess on a knife blade of watching and waiting, not a traitor spinning plots.
‘Whether or no,’ she dismissed my defence, ‘nothing and no-one can deny me my place. My father himself left it to me. It is me and then it is Elizabeth. I have never plotted against Edward, though there were some who came to me and asked me in my mother’s name to stand against him. I know that in her turn Elizabeth will never plot against me. We are three heirs, taking precedence one after another to honour our father. Elizabeth knows that I am the next heir after Edward, he came first as the boy, I come second as the princess, the first legitimate princess. We all three will obey our father and we stand to inherit one after the other as my father commanded. I trust Elizabeth, as Edward trusts me. And since you promise that you don’t report, you can make this reply if anyone asks you: tell them that I will keep my inheritance. And tell them that this is my country.’
Her weariness was gone, the colour had flamed into her cheeks. She looked around the small walled garden as if she could see the whole kingdom, the great prosperity which could be restored, and the changes she would make when she held the throne. The monasteries she would restore, the abbeys she would found, the life she could breathe back into it. ‘It is mine,’ she said. ‘And I am an English queen-to-be. No-one can put me aside.’
Her face was illuminated with her sense of destiny. ‘It is the purpose of my life,’ she said. ‘Nobody will pity me ever again. They will see that I have dedicated my life to being the bride of this country. I will be a virgin queen, I shall have no children but the people of this country, I shall be their mother. There shall be no-one to distract me, there shall be no-one to command me. I shall live for them. It is my holy calling. I shall give myself up for them.’
She turned from me and strode back to the house and I followed her at a distance. The morning sun burning off the mist made a lightness in the air all around her, and I had a moment’s dizziness as I realised that this woman would be a great queen for England, a queen who had a real vision for this country, who would bring back the richness and beauty and charity that her father had stripped out from the churches and from the daily life. The sun was so bright around her yellow silk hood that it was like a crown, and I stumbled on a tussock of grass and fell.
She turned and saw me on my knees. ‘Hannah?’
‘You will be queen,’ I said simply, the Sight speaking in my voice. ‘The king will die within a month. Long live the queen. Poor boy, the poor boy.’
In a second she was by my side, holding me up. ‘What did you say?’
‘You will be queen,’ I said. ‘He is sinking fast now.’
I lost my senses for a moment and then I opened my eyes again and she was looking down at me, still holding me closely.
‘Can you tell me any more?’ she asked me gently.
I shook my head. ‘I am sorry, Lady Mary, I barely know what I said. It was not said knowingly.’
She nodded. ‘It is the Holy Spirit which moves you to speak, especially to speak such news to me. Will you swear to keep it secret between us?’
For a moment I hesitated, thinking of the complicated webs of loyalties that were interwoven around me: my duty to Lord Robert, my honour for my father and mother and our kin, my promise to Daniel Carpenter, and now this troubled woman asking me to keep a secret for her. I nodded. It was no disloyalty not to tell Lord Robert something he must already know. ‘Yes, Lady Mary.’
I tried to rise but I dropped back to my knees with dizziness.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Don’t get up till your head is clear.’
She sat beside me on the grass and gently put my head in her lap. The morning sunshine was warm, the garden buzzed with the sleepy noise of bees and the distant haunting call of a cuckoo. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said.
I wanted to sleep as she held me. ‘I am not a spy,’ I said.
Her finger touched my lips. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘I know that you work for the Dudleys. And I know you are a good girl. Who better than I to understand a life of