The other queen

1572, JANUARY, SHEFFIELD CASTLE: BESS

Ihave no great love for the Scots queen, God knows, but it would take a woman with a harder heart than mine not to defend her against our new house guest and temporary jailer, Ralph Sadler. He is a hard-hearted bad-tempered old man, utterly immune to any form of beauty, whether it be the white hoarfrost on the trees here at Sheffield Castle or the pale, strained beauty of the Scots queen.

“I have my orders,” he says hoarsely to me after she has withdrawn from the dinner table, unable to bear his slurping his pottage for another moment. She whispers of a headache and takes herself from the room. I could wish I could escape so easily, but I am the mistress of a great house and I must do my duty by a guest.

“Orders?” I ask politely, and watch him spoon up another great swallow in the general direction of his big mouth.

“Aye,” he says. “Defend her, protect her, prevent her escape, and if all else fails…” He makes a horrible gesture with his flat hand, a long cutting movement across his own throat.

“You would kill her?”

He nods. “She cannot be allowed to get free,” he says. “She is the greatest danger this country has ever faced.”

I think for a moment of the Spanish armada that they say Philip is building right now in his fearsome shipyards. I think of the Pope demanding that all of the old faith disobey Queen Elizabeth, authorizing them to kill her. I think of the French and the Scots. “How can she be?” I ask. “One woman alone? When you think of all that we face?”

“Because she is a figurehead,” he says harshly. “Because she is French, because she is Scots, because she is Catholic. Because none of us will ever sleep sound in our beds while she is free.”

“Seems a bit hard that a woman should die because you can’t sleep,” I say waspishly.

It earns me a hard look from this hard old man, who is obviously unaccustomed to a woman with opinions. “I heard that she had won you over, and your lord,” he says nastily. “I heard that he, in particular, was very taken.”

“We are both of us good servants to the queen,” I say staunchly. “As Her Grace knows, as my good friend Lord Burghley knows. No man has ever doubted my lord’s honor. And I can be a good servant to Her Grace and yet not want to see the Scots queen murdered.”

“You might be able to,” he says gloomily, “but I cannot. And in time, I expect there will be more who think like me than think like you.”

“She might die in battle,” I say. “If, God forbid, there was a battle. Or she might be killed by an assassin, I suppose. But she cannot be executed: she is of blood royal. She cannot be charged with treason: she is a consecrated queen. No court can judge her.”

“Oh, who says?” he asks suddenly, dropping his spoon and turning his big face on me.

“The law of the land,” I stammer. He is almost frightening in his bulk and with his temper. “The law of the land which defends both great and small.”

“The law is what we say it is,” he boasts. “As she may yet discover, as you may one day see. The law will be what we say it should be. We shall make the laws and those who threaten us or frighten us will find that they are outside the protection of the law.”

“Then it is no law at all,” I maintain. After all I am the wife of the Lord High Steward of England. “The law must defend the high and the low, the innocent, and even the guilty until they are shown to be criminal.”

Sadler laughs, a rough loud laugh. “That may have been so in Camelot,” he says crudely. “But it is a different world now. We will use the laws against our enemies, we will find evidence against our enemies, and if there is neither law nor evidence, then we will make it fresh, specially for them.”

“Then you are no better than they,” I say quietly, but aloud I turn to my server of the ewery and say, “More wine for Sir Ralph.”