The other queen

1569, OCTOBER, TUTBURY CASTLE: BESS

They can have her. They can take her and damn well have her. She has brought us nothing but trouble. Even if they take her now, the queen will never pay us what she owes. To Wingfield and back, with a court of sixty people, perhaps forty more coming in for their meals. Her horses, her pet birds, her carpets and furniture, her gowns, her new lute player, hertapissier ; I have kept her household better than I have kept my own. Dinner every night with thirty-two courses served, her own cooks, her own kitchens, her own cellar. White wine, of the best vintage, just to wash her face. She has to have her own taster in case someone wants to poison her. God knows, I would do it myself. Two hundred pounds a week she costs us against an allowance of fifty-two, but even that is never paid. Now it will never be paid. We will be thousands of pounds the poorer when this is finished and they will take her away but not pay for her.

Well, they can have her, and I shall manage the debt. I shall write it at the bottom of the page as if it were the lost account of a dead debtor. Better that we are rid of her and us half-bankrupt, than she stays here and ruins me and mine. Better that I account of her as dead and there is no reckoning.

“Bess.” George is in the doorway of my accounting room; he is leaning against the door, his hand to his heart. He is white-faced and shaking.

“What is it?” I rise at once from the table, put down my pen, and take his hands. His fingers are icy. “What is it, my love? Tell me. Are you ill?” Three husbands I have lost to sudden death. This, my greatest husband, the earl, is white as a corpse. At once I forget I have ever thought badly of him, at once dread of losing him clutches me like a pain of my own. “Are you ill? Do you have a pain? My love, what is it? What’s the matter?”

“The queen has sent Hastings and Devereux to take her away,” he says. “Bess, I cannot let her go with them. I cannot send her. It is to send her to her death.”

“Hastings would not—” I start.

“You know he would,” he interrupts me. “You know that is why the queen has chosen him. Hastings is the Protestant heir. He will put her in the Tower, or in his own house, and she will never come out. They will announce that she is in frail health, and then that she is worse, and then that she is dead.”

The bleakness in his voice is terrible to me.

“Or they will kill her on the journey and say she fell from her horse,” he predicts. His face is wet with sweat, his mouth twisted with pain.

“But if the queen commands it?”

“I cannot let her go out to her death.”

“If it is the queen’s order—”

“I cannot let her go.”

I take a breath. “Why not?” I ask. I dare him to tell me. “Why can you not let her go?”

He turns away from me. “She is my guest,” he mutters. “A matter of honor…”

I turn a hard face to him. “You learn to let her go,” I say harshly. “Honor has nothing to do with it. You command yourself to let her go, even to her death. Bring yourself to it. We cannot stop their taking her, and if we protest we only look worse. They think you are disloyal already; if you try to save her from Hastings, they will be certain that she has turned you to her side. They will know you for a traitor.”

“This is to send her to her death!” he repeats, his voice breaking. “Bess! You have been her friend, you have spent day after day with her. You cannot be so heartless as to hand her over to her murderer!”

I glance back to my desk, to the figures in my book. I know to a penny what she has cost us so far. If we defend her against the queen we will lose everything. If the queen thinks we are overly fond of this other queen she will destroy us. If she charges us with treason we will lose our lands and every single thing we own. If we are found guilty of treason it is a hanging offense; we will both die for my husband’s tender heart. I cannot risk it. “Who cares?”

“What?”

“I said, Who cares? Who cares if they take her and behead her in a field and leave her body in a ditch? Who cares about her?”

There is a terrible silence in the room. My husband looks at me as if I am a monster. The Fool and the Monster face each other and I wonder at what we have become. Twenty-one months ago we were a newly married man and wife, well pleased with the contract we had made, enjoying each other, the joint heads of one of the greatest families in the kingdom. Now we are ruined in our hearts and our fortunes. We have ruined ourselves.

“I’ll go and tell her to pack,” I say harshly. “We can do nothing else.”

Still he won’t leave it. He catches my hand. “You cannot let her go with Hastings,” he says. “Bess, she is our guest; she has sewed with you and eaten with us and hunted with me. She is innocent of any wrongdoing, you know that. She is our friend. We cannot betray her. If she rides out with him, I am certain that she will never get to his house alive.”

I think of my Chatsworth, and my fortune, and that steadies me. “God’s will be done,” I say. “And the queen has to be obeyed.”

“Bess! Have pity on her as a young woman! Have pity on her as a beautiful, friendless young woman.”

“God’s will be done,” I repeat, holding tight to the thought of my new front door and the portico with the plasterwork flowers, and the marble entrance hall, thinking of the new stable block that I want to live to build. I think of my children, well married, and well placed at court in good positions already, of the dynasties I will found, of the grandchildren I will have and the marriages I will make for them. I think of how far I have come and how far I hope to go. I would go to hell itself rather than lose my house. “Long live the queen.”