The other queen

1570, JUNE, CHATSWORTH: GEORGE

Iam about to mount up to ride out with the queen when I hear the clatter of a small guard of horses and a man with a small group of companions rides up the drive under the big arching trees. He comes to the stable entrance, without hesitation, as if he has studied a map of my house and knows where everything is.

Warily, I hand over the reins of my horse to the stable lad and go to meet him. “Yes?”

He dismounts and pulls his hat from his head and bows low to me. Not very low, I notice. “My lord Shrewsbury?”

I nod. I recognize him as one of the men that I sometimes see at court, standing behind Francis Walsingham, when he, in turn, is standing behind William Cecil. So he is a spy, yet another spy. So he is an enemy to the freedom of the people of England, however plausible and charming he will try to be.

“I am Herbert Gracie. I serve Master Cecil.”

“You are welcome,” I say politely. I see by his clothes that he is a gentleman, this is one of the hidden men of Cecil’s affinity. God knows what he wants here with me. “Will you come into the house?”

“I won’t delay you,” he says, nodding to my horse. “Are you about to ride out with the queen?”

I smile and say nothing. I do not need to tell Cecil’s servants what I do in my own house.

“Forgive me,” he says. “I will not delay you. I wanted to speak with you for only a moment.”

“You have come a long way for only a moment,” I observe.

He has a rueful, merry smile. “When you serve my lord you soon get accustomed to long rides and scant results,” he says.

“Do you indeed?” The last thing I want to hear is the hardship of Cecil’s service and the rigors of life as a dirty spy.

“A word only,” he says. I go to the corner of the stable yard with him and wait.

“A servant of your wife has met with three conspirators and plotted to release the queen,” he says flatly.

“What?”

“He reported back to her, and she gave him two guineas and told him to go on with the conspiracy.”

“This isn’t possible.” I shake my head. “Truly. Bess would never free the queen.I am more likely to free her than Bess.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“Bess dislikes her,” I say unguardedly. “Women’s jealousy…They are like the sea and the shore; they cannot help but beat against each other. Two strong women under the same roof, you cannot imagine…”

“Only too well! Does she dislike her so much she would try to get rid of her by helping her run away?”

I shake my head. “She would never plot against Queen Elizabeth, she would never go against Cecil…” As I protest, a truly horrible thought strikes me as to what Bess might be capable of. Would she, overactive, businesslike, spiteful as she is, try to entrap Queen Mary in an unsuccessful escape attempt? So that she would be taken from us? “I had better speak to her.”

“I’ll have to come too,” he says carefully.

I bristle at once. “You can trust me, I should hope.”

“We can trust no one,” he says simply. “Your wife has taken some part in a plot with Sir Thomas Gerard to free the queen. It is my task to find out how far the plot has gone. I shall have to question her. It is a courtesy to you, my lord, and to Master Secretary Cecil’s friendship with you and with your wife, that I come to you first. That I speak to you privately and that there are no immediate arrests.”

I try to hide my shock. “There can be no need for arrests…,” I protest weakly.

“I have the warrants in my pocket.”

I take a breath. “Well, I shall see Bess with you,” I stipulate. “She is not to be put to question.” Whatever she has done, I think to myself, they shall not see her without my protection. She is a determined woman, and when she thinks that something is the right course she will do it, and damn the consequences. Damn her, actually.

“She’ll be in the muniments room,” I say, and we are turning towards the house just as the queen comes through the garden door into the yard and calls gaily, “Chowsbewwy!”

Before Cecil’s man can say or do anything, I stride to her side. “This is a spy from London,” I say rapidly in a whisper. “Tell me quickly. Have you been plotting? Is there a plot for you to run away? Has a man called Gerard spoken to you? My life depends on this.”

She is so quick-witted, she sees at once the danger, the waiting man, my urgent tone. She replies at once, without prevarication, in a quick whisper. “No. I swear. I have never even heard of him.”

“Bess did not speak to you of a plot to free you?”

“Bess? On my life, no.”

I bow. “I shall have to delay our ride, if you will forgive me,” I say loudly.

“I shall walk him round the grounds until you are ready,” she says formally, and turns for her horse.

I wait till her horse is held steady before her and I can lift her into the saddle. Even with Cecil’s man waiting to question my wife, I cannot bear to let anyone else lift Queen Mary and hold her for that brief, spellbinding moment. She smiles down at me.

“Soyez brave,”she whispers. “I am innocent of this. Elizabeth has no evidence against me, and she dare do nothing against me. We just have to be brave and wait.”

I nod, and she turns her horse and rides out of the yard. As she passes Cecil’s spy she flicks him the most mischievous little smile and nods her head to his low bow. When he comes up she is gone, but his face is a picture.

“I didn’t know…,” he stammers. “Good God, she is beautiful. My God, her smile…”

“Exactly,” I say grimly. “And that is one of the reasons I pay for double guards, why I never cease watching, and why I can promise you that there are no plots in my household.”

We find Bess, as I knew we would, in the room which should be the muniments room, the room to store the records of the family, pedigrees, peerages, records of the joust and standards, and the like. Under Bess’s command all this history of honor has been discarded and the shelves and drawers are filled instead with records of the income and expenditure from Chatsworth, yields from the flocks of sheep, timber from the woods, lead from the mines, stone from the quarries, coal production, ship-building reports, and the traveling chest which she takes with her everywhere is filled with all the records of her other lands and estates. These are all mine now, they came to me on marriage. They are all in my name and ownership as her husband. But Bess was so perturbed at the thought that my stewards would manage the estates—though they would do it perfectly well—that she has gone on keeping the records of her old properties, while I merely collect the income. It makes no difference to me. I am not a tradesman whose pleasure is weighing his gold. But Bess likes to know how her lands are doing; she likes to be involved in the tedious business of shepherding, quarrying, mining, and shipping. She likes to see all the business letters and reply to them herself. She likes to add everything up and see her profit. She cannot help herself. It is her great pleasure, and I allow it to her. Though I cannot help but find it far beneath the behavior one would expect of a countess of England.

I can see that Herbert Gracie is a little taken aback to find Bess in her lair, surrounded with books written up in copperplate and with two clerks heads down and scribbling to her dictation. So I take the moment of his discomfort to step towards her, take her hand, and kiss her, and so whisper in her ear, “Beware.”

She has not the quick understanding of the Scots queen. “Why, what’s the matter?” she asks, out loud like a fool.

“This is Herbert Gracie; he comes from Cecil.”

At once, she is all smiles. “You are welcome,” she says. “And how is the Master Secretary?”

“He is well,” he says. “But he asked me to speak with you in private.”

She nods to the clerks, who pick up their pens, ready to go. “Here?” she asks, as if a countess should do business at a clerk’s office.

“We’ll go to the gallery,” I interrupt, and so I get a chance to lead the way with Bess and try to warn her again: “He is inquiring after a plot to free the queen. He says you are in it. With a man called Thomas Gerard.” Her little gasp tells me everything. “Wife,” I almost groan, “what have you done?”

She doesn’t answer me; she ignores me, though I am risking my own neck by whispering to her. She spins around to young Mr. Gracie, standing on the stair below her, and puts out her hand to him, with her frank, honest smile.

“My husband tells me that Cecil knows of the Gerard plot,” she says quickly. “Is this why you are here?”

I stifle my horror at this plain dealing. If only she would take advice from me; if only she would not act as she does, always so independently.

He takes her hand as if she were sealing a bargain with him, and nods, watching her intently. “Yes, it is about the Gerard plot.”

“You must think me very foolish,” she says. “I was trying to do the right thing.”

“Indeed?”

“I was going to tell my husband today; he knows nothing of this.”

A quick glance from Mr. Gracie’s brown eyes to my horror-struck face confirms this well enough, and then he is back to Bess.

“My servant, John Hall, came to tell me that someone had tried to bribe him to lead the Scots queen riding onto the moor, where she would be met by her friends and taken away.”

Cecil’s man nods again. It strikes me that all this is old news to him, he knows all about it already; what he is listening for is to hear Bess lie. This is not an inquiry; this is an entrapment.

“Tell the truth, wife,” I warn her. “Don’t try to protect your servants. This is important.”

She turns her pale face to me. “I know,” she says. “I will tell Mr. Gracie the whole truth, and he will tell my good friend Mr. Cecil that I am honest and loyal as I ever was.”

“What did you do, when your servant John Hall came to you?” Mr. Gracie asks her.

“I asked him who else was in the plot, and he named a Mr. Rolleston and Sir Thomas Gerard and said that there might be another, greater man behind it all.”

“And what did you do?”

Bess looks at him with her frank smile. “Now, I daresay that you will think me a scheming woman, but I thought that if I sent John Hall back to the men with word that the plot could go ahead, he could discover the names of the plotters and if there was a greater man behind them. And then I could tell Master Cecil the whole plot, and not a small worthless strand of it.”

“And has he reported back to you?”

“I have not seen him today,” she says, and then she looks at him in sudden understanding. “Oh, have you taken him up?”

Gracie nods. “And his confederates.”

“He came straight to me though they had bribed him,” she says. “He is loyal. I would vouch for him.”

“He will be questioned but not tortured,” Gracie says. He is matter-of-fact; I note that torture is now a routine part of Cecil’s questioning, and it can be mentioned in front of a lady in an earl’s own house without remark. We have come to this: that a man can be taken without warrant, without a word from a justice of the peace, without the permission of his master, and he can be tortured on the say-so of Cecil. This is not how it was. This is not English justice. This is not how it should be.

“And your intention was only to discover the full plot before you alerted your husband or Secretary Cecil?” he confirms.

Bess widens her eyes. “Of course,” she says. “What else? And John Hall will tell you, those were my exact instructions to him. To lead them on and report to me.”

Herbert Gracie is satisfied, and Bess is plausible. “Then I must ask you to forgive my intrusion and I shall leave.” He smiles at me. “I promised it would only be a moment.”

“But you must eat!” Bess presses him.

“No, I must go. My lord expects me back at once. I was only to ascertain what you have kindly told me, take the relevant men into custody, and bring them back to London. I do thank you for your hospitality.” He bows to Bess, he bows to me, he turns on his heel, and he has gone. We hear his riding boots clatter away down the stone steps before we realize that we are safe. We never even got as far as the gallery; this interrogation all took place on the stairs. It started and was completed in a moment.

Bess and I look at each other as if a storm has blown through our garden destroying every blossom, and we don’t know what to say.

“Well,” she says with pretended ease, “that’s all right then.”

She turns to leave me, to go back to her business, as if nothing has happened, as if she was not meeting with plotters in my house, conspiring with my own servants, and surviving an interrogation from Cecil’s agents.

“Bess!” I call her. It comes out too loudly and too harshly.

She stops and turns to me at once. “My lord?”

“Bess, tell me. Tell me the truth.”

Her face is as yielding as stone.

“Is it how you said, or did you think that the plot might go ahead? Did you think that the queen might be tempted to consent to the escape, and you would have sent her out with these men into certain danger and perhaps death? Though you knew she has only to wait here to be restored to her throne and to happiness? Bess, did you think to entrap her and destroy her in these last days while she is in your power?”

She looks at me as if she does not love me at all, as if she never has done. “Now why would I seek her ruin?” she asks coldly. “Why would I seek her death? What harm has she ever done me? How has she ever robbed me?”

“Nothing. I swear, she has not harmed you; she has taken nothing from you.”

Bess gives a disbelieving laugh.

“I am faithful to you!” I exclaim.

Her eyes are like arrow slits in the stone wall of her face. “You and she, together, have ruined me,” she says bitterly. “She has stolen my reputation as a good wife; everyone knows that you prefer her to me. Everyone thinks the less of me for not keeping your love. I am shamed by your folly. And you have stolen my money to spend on her. The two of you will be my ruin. She has taken your heart from me and she has made me see you with new, less loving eyes. When she came to us, I was a happy, wealthy wife. Now I am a heartbroken pauper.”

“You shall not blame her! I cannot let the blame fall on her. She is innocent of everything you say. She shall not be falsely accused by you. You shall not lay it at her door. It is not her doing—”

“No,” she says. “It is yours. It is all yours.”