The Queen’s Fool. Philippa Gregory
heard her run up stairs, her feet pattering on the bare wooden treads like those of a young girl, and then her voice, light and excited, as she called back down to Jane Dormer to take especial care to pack her finest jewels for if the king was indeed well then there would be dancing and feasting at court.
Next day we were on the road, Lady Mary’s pennant before us, her soldiers around us, and the country people tumbling out of their houses in the small villages to call out blessings on her name, and holding up their children for them to see her: a real princess, and a pretty smiling princess at that.
Lady Mary on horseback was a different woman from the white-faced half-prisoner that I had first met at Hunsdon. Riding towards London with the people of England cheering her on, she looked like a true princess. She wore a deep red gown and jacket, which made her dark eyes shine. She rode well, one hand in a worn red glove on the bridle, the other waving to everyone who called out to her, the colour blazing in her cheeks, a stray lock of rich brown hair escaping from her hat, her head up, her courage high, her weariness all gone. She sat well in the saddle, proud as a queen, swaying with the pace of the horse as we made our way to the great road to London.
I rode beside her for much of the way, the little bay pony that the duke had given me stepping out to keep pace with Lady Mary’s bigger horse. She commanded me to sing the songs of my Spanish childhood, and sometimes she recognised the words or the tune as something her mother had once sung to her, and she would sing with me, a little quaver in her voice at the memory of the mother who had loved her.
We rode hard along the London road, splashing through the fords at their summertime low, cantering where the tracks were soft enough. She was desperate to get to court to discover what was happening. I remembered John Dee’s mirror and how I had guessed at the date of the king’s death, the sixth of July, but I did not dare to say anything. I had spoken the name of the next Queen of England, and it had not been Queen Mary. The sixth of July had been a guess to please my lord, and the name Jane had come to me from nowhere – both might mean nothing. But as Lady Mary rode to London, hoping that her fears would prove to be unfounded, I rode at her side hoping that my Sight was all the chicanery and nonsense that I thought it must be.
Of all of the nervous train who rode with her I was the most anxious. For if I had seen true, she was riding not to a reconciliation with her brother the king, but to attend the coronation of Lady Jane. She was riding fast towards her own abdication, and we would all share her bad luck.
We rode all the morning and came just after midday into the town of Hoddesdon, weary of the saddle and hoping for a good dinner and a rest before we continued the journey. Without warning, a man stepped out from a doorway and put his hand up to signal to her. Clearly, she recognised him. At once she waved him forward so he could speak to her privately. He stood close to her horse’s neck and took her rein familiarly in his arm and she leaned down towards him. He was very brief, and though I strained to hear, he kept his voice low. Then he stepped back and melted away into the mean streets of the little town and Lady Mary snapped an order to halt, and tumbled down from her saddle so fast that her Master of Horse could scarcely catch her. She went into the nearest inn at a run, shouting for paper and pen, and ordering everyone to drink, eat, see to their horses and be ready to leave again within the hour.
‘Mother of God, I really can’t,’ Lady Margaret said pitifully as her royal mistress strode past. ‘I’m too tired to go another step.’
‘Then stay behind,’ snapped Lady Mary, who never snapped. That sharpness of tone warned us that the hopeful ride to London, to visit the young, recovering king, had suddenly gone terribly wrong.
I did not dare to write a note for Lord Robert. There was no easy way to get it to him and the whole mood of the journey had changed. Whatever the man had told her it was not that her brother was well and summoning her to dance at his court. When she came out of the parlour she was pale and her eyes were red, but she was not softened by grief. She was sharp with decision, and she was angry.
She sent one messenger flying south down the road to London to find the Spanish ambassador, to beg for his advice and to alert the Spanish emperor that she would need his help to claim her throne. She took another messenger aside for a verbal message for Lady Elizabeth, she did not dare to write it down, she did not dare to give the impression that the sisters were plotting against their dying brother. ‘Speak only to her when you are alone,’ she emphasised. ‘Tell her not to go to London, it is a trap. Tell her to come at once to me for her own safety.’
She sent a further message to the duke himself, swearing that she was too ill to ride to London, but that she would rest quietly at home at Hunsdon. Then she ordered the main group to stay behind. ‘I’ll take you, Lady Margaret, and you, Hannah,’ she said. She smiled at her favourite, Jane Dormer. ‘Follow us,’ she said, and she leaned forward to whisper our destination in her ear. ‘You must bring this company on behind us. We are going to travel too fast for everyone to keep pace.’
She picked six men to escort us, gave her followers a brief leave-taking and snapped her fingers for her Master of Horse to help her into the saddle. She wheeled her horse round and led us out of Hoddesdon, back the way we had come out of the town. But this time we took the great road north, racing away from London, as the sun slowly wheeled overhead and then set on our left, as the sky lost its colour, and a small silvery moon rose over the dark silhouettes of trees.
‘Where are we going, Lady Mary? It’s getting dark,’ Lady Margaret asked plaintively. ‘We can’t ride in the dark.’
‘Kenninghall,’ Lady Mary crisply replied.
‘Where’s Kenninghall?’ I asked, seeing Lady Margaret’s aghast face.
‘Norfolk,’ she said as if it were the end of the world. ‘God help us, she’s running away.’
‘Running away?’ I felt my throat tense at the scent of danger.
‘It’s towards the sea. She’ll get a ship out of Lowestoft and run to Spain. Whatever that man told her must mean that she’s in such danger that she has to get out of the country altogether.’
‘What danger?’ I asked urgently.
Lady Margaret shrugged. ‘Who knows? A charge of treason? But what about us? If she goes to Spain I’m riding for home. I’m not going to be stuck with a traitor for a mistress. It’s been bad enough in England, I’ll not be exiled to Spain.’
I said nothing, I was feverishly racking my brains to think of where I might be safest: at home with my father, with Lady Mary, or taking a horse and trying to get back to Lord Robert.
‘What about you?’ she pressed me.
I shook my head, my voice quite lost in fear, my hand feverishly rubbing at my cheek. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I should go home, I suppose. But I don’t know the way on my own. I don’t know what my father would want me to do. I don’t understand the rights and the wrongs of it.’
She laughed, a bitter laugh for a young woman. ‘There are no rights and wrongs,’ she said. ‘There are only those who are likely to win and those who are likely to lose. And Lady Mary with six men, me and a fool, up against the Duke of Northumberland with his army and the Tower of London and every castle in the kingdom, is going to lose.’
It was a punishing ride. We did not check until it was fully night, when we paused at the home of a gentleman, John Huddlestone, at Sawston Hall. I begged a piece of paper and a pen from the housekeeper and wrote a letter, not to Lord Robert, whose address I did not dare to give, but to John Dee. ‘My dear tutor,’ I wrote, hoping this would mislead anyone who opened my letter, ‘this little riddle may amuse you.’ Then underneath I wrote the coded letters in the form of a serpentine circle, hoping to make it look like a game that a girl of my age might send to a kind scholar. It simply read, ‘She is going to Kenninghall.’ And then I wrote: ‘What am I to do?’
The housekeeper promised to send it to Greenwich by the carter who would pass by tomorrow, and I had to hope that