The other queen

1570, JANUARY, TUTBURY CASTLE: BESS

You would not take us for a castle of victors. Hastings is surly and anxious to be home. He speaks of riding out and overseeing the hangings himself, as if the lives of our tenants were a matter of sport: another sort of kill when the weather is too snowy for hunting. The queen is pale and sickly; she complains of a pain in her side, in her leg; she has headaches and sits in the darkness of her rooms with the shutters closed against the cold wintry light. She is taking this hard, as well she might.

And my lord is as quiet and grave as if there was a death in the house; he goes quietly about his business almost on tiptoe. We hardly speak to one another except about the work of the house and family matters. I have not heard him laugh, not once, not since we were at Wingfield, when it was summer and we thought the queen would go back to her throne in Scotland within days.

Elizabeth’s justice is clamping down on our lands like a hard winter. The news of the planned executions has leaked out and men are disappearing from the villages overnight, leaving nothing but their footsteps in the snow, leaving wives like widows with no one to break the ice on the water of the well. It will not be the same here, not for a generation. We will be ruined if the strong young men run away and their sons are taken to the gallows in their place.

I don’t pretend to know how to run a country: I am a woman of no education, and I care for nothing but keeping my lands in good heart and building my houses, keeping my books, and raising my children to the best estate I can find for them. But I do know how to run a farm, and I do know when a land is ruined, and I have never seen anything more sad and sorry than the estates of the North in this bitter, bitter year of 1570.