The Queen's Fool

Spring 1554

In the days that followed I went between the queen’s apartments and Lady Elizabeth’s, but in neither place could I be comfortable. The queen was tight-lipped and determined. She knew that Elizabeth must die for treason, and yet she could not bear to send the girl to the Tower. The council examined the princess and were certain that she had known everything of the plot, that she had masterminded one half of it, that she would have held Ashridge to the north for the rebels while they took London from the south, and that – and this was the worst – that she had summoned help from France for the rebellion. It was thanks to the loyalty of London that the queen was on the throne and the princess under arrest and not the other way around.

Though everyone urged it on her, the queen was reluctant to try Elizabeth with a charge of treason, because of the uproar it would create in the country. She had been dismayed by the numbers who had come out for Elizabeth’s rebellion, no one could predict how many might come out to save her life. A further thirty men were marched home to Kent to be hanged in their own towns and villages but there could be no doubt that there would be hundreds ready to take their place if they thought that the Protestant princess was to be sent to the scaffold.

And worse than that: Queen Mary could not force her own determination. She had hoped that Elizabeth would come to court a penitent, and they could have reconciled. She had hoped that Elizabeth would have learned that Mary was stronger than her, that she could command the city even if Elizabeth could summon half of Kent. But Elizabeth would not confess, would not beg her sister for mercy. Prideful and unyielding, she continued to swear that she was innocent of anything, and Mary could not bear to see her with the lies on her lips. Hour after hour the queen knelt before her prie-dieu, her chin on her hands, her eyes fixed on the crucifix, praying for guidance as to what she should do with her treacherous sister.

“She would have beheaded you in minutes,” Jane Dormer said bluntly when the queen rose from her knees and walked to the fireside, leaning her head against the stone chimney breast and looking into the flames. “She would have had your head off your shoulders the moment she put the crown on her own. She would not have cared if you were guilty of envy or rebellion. She would have killed you for simply being the heir.”

“She is my sister,” Mary replied. “I taught her to walk. I held her hands while she stumbled. Am I now to send her to hell?”

Jane Dormer shrugged her disagreement, and picked up her sewing.

“I shall pray for guidance,” the queen said quietly. “I must find a way to live with Elizabeth.”

The cold days turned warmer in March and the skies grew pale earlier in the mornings and later at night. The court stayed on tiptoe, watching to see what would happen to the princess. She was examined almost daily by the councillors but the queen would not see her face to face. “I cannot,” she said shortly, and I knew then that she was nerving herself to send Elizabeth to trial, and from there it would be a short walk to the scaffold.

They had enough evidence to hang her three times over but still the queen waited. Just before Easter I was glad to get a letter from my father asking me if I could absent myself from court for a week and come to the shop. He said he was unwell and needed someone to open and close the shutters for him, but I was not to worry, it was just a passing fever and Daniel came every day.

I was a little irritated at the thought of Daniel in constant attendance, but I took the letter to the queen and when she gave me leave, packed a spare pair of breeches and a new clean linen shirt, and made my way to the princess’s apartment.

“I have been given leave to go to my home, to my father,” I said as I knelt before her.

There was a clatter from the room above. The royal cousin Lady Margaret Douglas’s kitchen had been moved over Elizabeth’s bedroom, and they had not been asked to work quietly. Judging from the noise, they had been given extra pans just to bang together. Lady Margaret, a sourfaced Tudor, would have a strong claim to the throne if Elizabeth were to die and she had every reason to drive the princess into irritable exhaustion.

Elizabeth flinched at the crash. “Going? When will you return?” she asked.

“Within the week, your ladyship.”

She nodded and to my surprise I saw that her mouth was working, as if she were about to cry. “Do you have to go, Hannah?” she asked in a small voice.

“I do,” I said. “He is ill, he has a fever. I have to go to him.”

She turned away and brushed her eyes with the back of her hand. “Good God, I am weak as a child losing a nursemaid!”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. I had never seen her so low. I had seen her swollen and sick on her bed and yet even then I had seen her eyes gleam with bright cunning. “What is it?”

“I am frozen to my very bones with fear,” Elizabeth said. “I tell you, Hannah, if fear is cold and darkness I am living in the wastes of the Russias. No one sees me but to interrogate me, no one touches me but to position me for questioning. No one smiles at me, they stare as if they would see my heart. My only friends in the whole world have been exiled, imprisoned or beheaded. I am only twenty years old and I am utterly alone. I am only a young woman and yet I have no one’s love and care. No one comes near me but Kat and you, and now you tell me you are leaving.”

“I have to see my father,” I said. “But I’ll come back as soon as he is well.”

The face she turned to me was not that of the defiant princess, the hated Protestant enemy at this passionately Catholic court. The face she turned to me was that of a young woman, alone with no mother or father, and no friends. A young woman trying to find the courage to face a death that must come soon. “You will come back to me, Hannah? I have become accustomed to you. And I have no one about me but you and Kat. I ask it of you as a friend, not a princess. You will come back?”

“Yes,” I promised. I took her hand. She had not exaggerated about feeling cold, she was as icy as if she were dead already. “I swear I will come back.”

Her clammy fingers returned my grip. “You will think me a coward, perhaps,” she said. “But I swear to you, Hannah, that I cannot keep up my courage without a friendly face by me. And I think soon I shall need all the courage I can summon. Come back to me, please. Come back quick.”

My father’s shop had the shutters up though it was only early in the afternoon. I quickened my step as I turned down the street and I felt for the first time a fear clutch at my heart at the thought that he was a mortal man, just like Robert Dudley, and that none of us could say how long we would live.

Daniel was putting the bolt on the last shutter and he turned around at the rapid sound of my footsteps.

“Good,” he said shortly. “Come inside.”

I put my hand on his arm. “Daniel, is he very ill?”

He covered my hand briefly with his own. “Come inside.”

I went into the shop. The counter was bare of books, the printing room quiet. I went up the rickety stairs at the rear of the shop and looked toward the little truckle bed in the corner of the room, fearing that I would see him there, too ill to stand.

The bed was heaped with papers and a small pile of clothes. My father was standing before it. I recognized at once the signs of packing for a long journey.

“Oh, no,” I said.

My father turned to me. “It’s time for us to go,” he said. “Did they give you permission to come away for a week?”

“Yes,” I said. “But they expect me back. I came running down here in terror that you were ill.”

“That gives us a week,” he said, disregarding my complaint. “More than enough time to get to France.”

“Not again,” I said flatly. “You said we were to stay in England.”

“It’s not safe,” Daniel insisted, coming into the room behind me. “The queen’s marriage is to go ahead, and Prince Philip of Spain will bring in the Inquisition. Already the gallows are up on the street corners, and there is an informer in every village. We cannot stay here.”

“You said we would be English.” I appealed past him to my father. “And the gallows are for traitors, not for heretics.”

“She will hang traitors today and heretics tomorrow,” Daniel said firmly. “She has discovered that the only way to make herself safe on the throne is through blood. She executed her own cousin, she will execute her own sister. Can you doubt that she would hesitate for a moment to hang you?”

I shook my head. “She is not executing Elizabeth, she is struggling to show her mercy. It is not about Elizabeth’s religion, it is about her obedience. And we are obedient subjects. And she is fond of me.”

Daniel took my hand and led me to the bed, which was covered with rolls of manuscript. “See these? Every one is now a forbidden book,” he said. “These are your father’s fortune, they are your dowry. When your father came to England these were his library, his great collection, now they would serve only as evidence against him. What are we to do with them? Burn them before they burn us?”

“Keep them safe for better times,” I said, incurably the daughter of a librarian.

He shook his head. “There is nowhere safe for them, and there is nowhere safe for their owner in a country ruled by Spain. We have to go away and take them with us.”

“But where do we have to go now?” I cried. It was the wail of a child who has been too long traveling.

“Venice,” he said shortly. “France, then Italy, and then Venice. I shall study at Padua, your father will be able to open a print shop in Venice, and we will be safe there. The Italians have a love of learning, the city is filled with scholars. Your father can buy and sell texts again.”

I waited, I knew what was coming next. “And we will marry,” he said. “We will marry as soon as we arrive in France.”

“And your mother and your sisters?” I asked. It was living with them that I dreaded as much as marriage.

“They are packing now,” he said.

“When do we leave?”

“In two days’ time, at dawn. Palm Sunday.”

“Why so soon?” I gasped.

“Because they have come asking questions already.”

I stared at Daniel, unable to take in the words, but already filled with horror as my worst fears started to take shape. “They came for my father?”

“They came to my shop looking for John Dee,” my father said quietly. “They knew that he sent books to Lord Robert. They knew that he had seen the princess. They knew that he had foretold the young king’s death, and that is treason. They wanted to see the books that he asked me to store here.”

I was twisting my hands together. “Books? What books? Are they hidden?”

“I have them safe in the cellar,” he said. “But they will find them if they take up the floorboards.”

“Why are you storing forbidden books?” I cried out in frustrated anger. “Why store John Dee’s books for him?”

His face was gentle. “Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together. John Dee and Lord Robert and even Daniel here and I, even you, my child, are all scholars steeped in knowledge that has suddenly become against the law. To stop us reading forbidden books they will have to burn every manuscript. But to stop us thinking forbidden thoughts they will have to cut off our heads.”

“We are not guilty of treason,” I said stubbornly. “Lord Robert is still alive, John Dee too. And the charges are treason, not heretical thinking. The queen is merciful…”

“And what happens when Elizabeth confesses?” Daniel snapped at me. “When she names her fellow traitors, not just Thomas Wyatt but Robert Dudley, John Dee, perhaps even you. Have you never taken a message or run an errand for her? Could you swear to it?”

I hesitated. “She would never confess. She knows the price of confession.”

“She is a woman.” He dismissed her. “They will frighten her and then promise her forgiveness, and she will confess to anything.”

“You know nothing about her, you know nothing about this!” I flared up. “I know her. This is not a young woman who is easily frightened, and more than that, her fear does not lead her to tears. If she is afraid she will fight like a bated cat. She is not a girl who gives up and weeps.”

“She is a woman,” he said again. “And she is enmeshed with Dudley and Dee and Wyatt and the rest of them. I warned you of this. I told you that if you played a double game at court you would bring danger on yourself and danger to us all, and now you have led danger to our door.”

I was breathless with rage. “What door?” I demanded. “We have no door. We have the open road, we have the sea between us and France and then we have to cross France like a family of beggars because you, like a coward, are afraid of your own shadow.”

For a moment I thought Daniel would strike me. His hand flew up and then he froze. “I am sorry you call me a coward before your father’s face.” He spat out the words. “I am sorry you think so lowly of me, your husband-to-be, and the man trying to save you and your father from a traitor’s death. But whatever you think of me, I am commanding you to help your father pack and be ready.”

I took a breath, my heart still hammering with rage. “I am not coming,” I said flatly.

“Daughter!” my father started.

I turned to him. “You go, Father, if you wish. But I am not running away from a danger that I don’t see. I am a favorite at the palace with the queen and I am in no danger from her, and too small a person to attract the attention of the council. I don’t believe you are in any danger either. Please don’t throw away what we have started here. Please don’t make us run away again.”

My father took me into his arms and held my head against his shoulder. I felt myself rest against him and for a moment I longed to be the little girl who went to him for help, who had known that his judgment was always right. “You said we would stay here,” I whispered. “You told me this was to be my home.”

“Querida, we have to go,” he said quietly. “I truly believe they will come: first for the rebels, and then for the Protestants, and then for us.”

I lifted my head and I stepped back from him. “Father, I cannot spend my life running away. I want a home.”

“My daughter, we are the people who have no home.”

There was a silence. “I don’t want to be one of the people without a home,” I said. “I have a home at court, and friends at court, and my place there. I don’t want to go to France and then Italy.”

He paused. “I was afraid you would say that. I don’t want to force you. You are free to take your own decision, my daughter. But it is my wish that you come with me.”

Daniel walked the few paces to the attic window, then he turned and looked at me. “Hannah Verde, you are my betrothed wife and I order you to come with me.”

I drew myself up and faced him. “I will not come.”

“Then our betrothal will be ended.”

My father raised a hand in dissent, but he said nothing.

“So be it,” I said. I felt cold.

“It is your wish that our betrothal is ended?” he asked again, as if he could not believe that I would reject him. That hint of arrogance helped me to my decision.

“It is my wish that our betrothal is ended,” I said, my voice as steady as his own. “I release you from your promise to me, and I ask you to release me.”

“That’s easily done,” he flared. “I release you, Hannah, and I hope that you never have cause to regret this decision.” He turned on his heel and went to the stair. He paused. “But nonetheless, you will help your father,” he said, still commanding me, I noticed. “And if you change your mind you may come with us. I would not be vengeful. You can come as his daughter and as a stranger to me.”

“I shan’t change my mind,” I said fiercely. “And I don’t need you to tell me to help my father. I am a good daughter to him and I would be a good wife to the right man.”

“And who would the right man be?” Daniel sneered. “A married man and a convicted traitor?”

“Now, now,” my father said gently. “You have agreed to part.”

“I am sorry you think so badly of me,” I said icily. “I shall care for my father and I will help him leave when you bring the wagon.”

Daniel clattered down the stairs and then we heard the shop door bang, and he was gone.

Over the next two days we worked in an almost unbroken silence. I helped my father tie his books together, the manuscripts we rolled into scrolls and packed in barrels, and pushed them behind the press in the printing room. He could take only the core of his library; the rest of the books would have to follow later.

“I wish you would come too,” he said earnestly. “You’re too young to be left here on your own.”

“I’m under the protection of the queen,” I said. “And hundreds of people at court are the same age as me.”

“You are one of the chosen to bear witness,” he said in a fierce whisper. “You should be with your people.”

“Chosen to witness?” I demanded bitterly. “More like chosen never to have a home. Chosen to be always packing our most precious things and leaving the rest behind? Chosen to be always one skip ahead of the fire or the hangman’s noose?”

“Better one skip ahead,” my father said wryly.

We worked all through the last night, and when he would not stop to eat, I knew that he was mourning for me as a daughter that he had lost. At dawn I heard the creaking of wheels in the street and I looked out of the downstairs window, and there was the dark shape of the wagon lumbering toward us with Daniel leading a stocky pair of horses.

“Here they are,” I said quietly to my father, and started to heave the boxes of books through the door. The wagon halted beside me and Daniel gently put me aside. “I’ll do that,” he said. He lifted the boxes into the back of the cart, where I saw the glimpse of four pale faces: his mother and his three sisters. “Hello,” I said awkwardly, and then went back to the shop.

I felt so wretched I could hardly carry the boxes from the rear of the printing shop out to the cart and hand them over to Daniel. My father did nothing. He stood with his forehead leaning against the wall of the house.

“The press,” he said quietly.

“I will see that it is taken down, sheeted and stored safely,” I promised. “Along with everything else. And when you decide to come back, it will be here for you and we can start again.”

“We won’t come back,” Daniel said. “This country is going to be a Spanish dominion. How can we be safe here? How can you be safe here? Do you think the Inquisition has no memory? Do you think your names are not on their records as heretics and runaways? They will be here in force, there will be courts in every city up and down the land. Do you think you and your father will escape? Newly arrived from Spain? Named Verde? Do you really think you will pass as an English girl called Hannah Green? With your speech, and your looks?”

I put my hands to my face, I nearly put them over my ears.

“Daughter,” my father said.

It was unbearable.

“All right,” I said furiously, in anger and despair. “Enough! All right! I’ll come.”

Daniel said nothing in his triumph, he did not even smile. My father muttered, “Praise God,” and picked up a box as if he were a twenty-year-old porter and loaded it on the back of the wagon. Within minutes everything was done and I was locking the front door of the shop with the key.

“We’ll pay the rent for the next year,” Daniel decided. “Then we can fetch the rest of the stuff.”

“You’ll carry a printing press across England, France and Italy?” I asked nastily.

“If I have to,” he said. “Yes.”

My father climbed in the back of the wagon and held out his hand for me. I hesitated. The three white faces of Daniel’s sisters turned to me, blank with hostility. “Is she coming now?” one of them asked.

“You can help me with the horses,” Daniel said quickly and I left the tailgate of the wagon and went to the head of the nearest horse.

We led them, slipping a little clumsily on the cobbles of the side street, until we came out to the solid track of Fleet Street and headed toward the city.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To the docks,” he said. “There is a ship waiting on the tide, I have booked our passage to France.”

“I have money for my own passage,” I said.

He threw me a dark smile. “I already paid for you. I knew you would come.”

I gritted my teeth at his arrogance and tugged on the reins of the big horse and said, “Come on then!” as if the horse were to blame, and as it felt the even ground of the street under its hooves it started a steady walk and I swung up on to the driving box of the wagon. A few moments later and Daniel joined me.

“I did not mean to taunt you,” he said stiffly. “I only meant that I knew you would do the right thing. You could not leave your father and your People, and choose to live among strangers forever.”

I shook my head. In the cold morning light with the fog curling off the Thames I could see the great palaces that faced out over the river, their pleasure gardens running down to the water’s edge. All of them were places I had enjoyed, a favored guest in the queen’s train. We entered the city, just stirring to start the day, and I saw the smoke from the ovens uncurling from the bakers’ chimneys, past the church of St. Paul’s scented once more with incense, and then we headed along the familiar route toward the Tower.

Daniel knew I was thinking of Robert Dudley as the shadow of the curtain wall fell over our little wagon. I looked up, past the wall to where the great white tower pointed like a raised fist shaken at the sky as if to say that whoever held the Tower, held London; and justice and mercy had nothing to do with it.

“Perhaps he’ll slither free,” Daniel said.

I turned my head away. “I’m leaving, aren’t I?” I said inconsequentially. “That should be enough for you.”

There was a light at one of the windows, a little candle flame. I thought of Robert Dudley’s table drawn up to the window and his chair before it. I thought of him sleepless in the night, trying to prepare for his own death, mourning those he had brought to theirs, fearful for those who still waited, like the Princess Elizabeth, watching for the morning when they would be told that this was their last day. I wondered if he had any sense of me, out here in the darkness, driving away from him, longing to be with him, betraying him with every step of the big horses’ hooves.

“Stay,” Daniel said quietly, as if I had shifted in my seat. “There is nothing you can do.”

I subsided and looked dully at the thickness of the walls and the forbidding gated entrances as we skirted all around the breadth of the Tower and came back to the riverside at the last.

One of Daniel’s sisters poked her head up from the back of the wagon. “Are we nearly there?” she asked, her voice sharp with fear.

“Nearly,” Daniel said gently. “Greet your new sister, Hannah. This is Mary.”

“Hello, Mary,” I said.

She nodded at me and stared as if I were some freak show at Bartholomew’s fair. She took in the richness of my cloak and the fine quality of my linen and then her eyes went down to the shine on my boots and my embroidered hose and breeches. Then without another word she turned and dropped down to the body of the wagon and whispered to her sisters and I heard their muffled laughter.

“She’s shy,” Daniel said. “She doesn’t mean to be rude.”

I was absolutely certain that she was determined to be rude but there was no point in telling him. Instead I wrapped the cloak a little closer around myself and watched the dark flow of the water as we plodded down the road to the dockside.

I glanced back upriver and then I saw a sight that made me put my hand out to Daniel. “Stop!”

He did not tighten the rein. “Why? What is it?”

“Stop, I say!” I said abruptly. “I have seen something on the river.”

He paused then, the horses turned a little as they were pulled up, and I could see the royal barge, but with no standard flying. Queen Mary’s own barge, but not with the queen on board, the drumbeat keeping the rowers in time, a dark figure at the front of the boat, two hooded men, one at the rear, one at the prow, scanning the banks in case of trouble.

“They must have Elizabeth,” I guessed.

“You can’t possibly tell,” Daniel said. He shot a glance at me. “And if they do have her? It’s nothing to do with us. They’d be bound to arrest her now that Wyatt…”

“If they turn into the Tower then they have her on board and they are taking her to her death,” I said flatly. “And Lord Robert will die too.”

He went to flick the reins to make the horse move on, but I clamped my hand on his wrist. “Let me see, damn you,” I spat at him.

He waited for a moment. As we watched the barge turned, struggled against the onrush of the tide and then headed toward the Tower. The dark watergate – a heavy portcullis, which protected the Tower from the river – rolled up; this visit was prearranged to be secret and silent. The barge went in, the watergate came down, there was utter silence except the plash of the dark water running by us. It was as if the hushed barge and the two dark watching men at prow and stern had never been.

I slipped down from the wagon and I leaned back against the forewheel, closing my eyes. I could imagine the scene as brightly as if it were noon, Elizabeth arguing and delaying and struggling for every extra minute, all the way from the watergate to the room they would have prepared for her in the Tower. I could see her fighting for every grain of sand in the hourglass, as she always did, as she always would do. I could see her bartering words for every moment. And finally, I could see her in her room, looking down on the green where her mother had her head swept from her body with the sharpest French sword they could find, and I could see her watching them build the scaffold that would be her own death place.

Daniel was by my side. “I have to go to her,” I said. I opened my eyes as if I had wakened from a dream. “I have to go. I promised I would go back to her, and now she is near death. I cannot betray a promise to a dying woman.”

“You will be identified with her and with him,” he whispered passionately. “When they come to hang the servants you will be among them.”

I did not even answer him, something nagged in my mind. “What was that you said about Wyatt?”

He flushed, I saw that I had caught him out. “Nothing.”

“You did. When I saw the barge. You said something about Wyatt. What about him?”

“He has been tried and found guilty and sentenced to death,” Daniel said abruptly. “They have his confession to convict Elizabeth.”

“You knew this? And kept it from me?”

“Yes.”

I drew my cloak around my dark breeches, and went around to the back of the wagon.

“Where are you going?” He put his hand out and grabbed me at the elbow.

“I am getting my bag, I am going to the Tower, I am going to Elizabeth,” I said simply. “I will stay with her till her death and then I will come to find you.”

“You can’t travel to Italy on your own,” he said in sudden rage. “You cannot defy me like this. You are my betrothed, I have told you what we are doing. See, my sisters, my mother, all obey me. You have to do the same.”

I gritted my teeth and squared up to him as if I were in truth a young man and not a girl in breeches. “See, I do not obey you,” I said bluntly. “See, I am not a girl like your sisters. See, even if I were your wife you would not find me biddable. Now take your hand off my arm. I am not a girl to be bullied. I am a royal servant, it is treason to touch me. Let me go!”

My father climbed out of the wagon and Daniel’s sister Mary tumbled out after him, her face bright with excitement.

“What is happening?” my father asked.

“The Lady Elizabeth has just been taken to the Tower,” I explained. “We saw the royal barge go in by the watergate. I am certain she was on board. I promised I would go back to her. I was going to break that promise to come with you. But now she is in the Tower and under sentence of death. I cannot leave her. I am honor bound to go to her and I will go.”

My father turned to Daniel, waiting for his decision.

“It is nothing to do with Daniel,” I went on, trying to keep the rage from my voice. “There is no need to look to him. This is my decision.”

“We will go to France as we planned,” Daniel said steadily. “But we will wait at Calais for you. We will wait for Elizabeth’s execution, and then you will come to us.”

I hesitated. Calais was an English town, part of the English settlement which was all that remained of the great English kingdom in France. “Don’t you fear the Inquisition in Calais?” I asked. “If they come here, their writ will run there too.”

“If it comes we can get away to France,” he said. “And we should have warning. Do you promise you will join us?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling my rage and my fear roll away from me. “Yes, I can promise I will come when it is over, when Elizabeth is safe or dead I will come to you.”

“I shall come back for you when I hear that she is dead,” he said. “And then we can fetch the printing press and the rest of the papers at the same time.”

My father took my hands in his. “You will come, querida?” he asked gently. “You won’t fail?”

“I love you, Father,” I whispered. “Of course I will come to you. But I love Lady Elizabeth too, and she is afraid, and I promised to stay near her.”

“You love her?” he asked, surprised. “A Protestant princess?”

“She is the bravest cleverest woman I have ever known, she is like a quick-witted lion,” I said. “I love the queen, no one could help loving the queen, but the princess is like a flame of fire, no one could help wanting to be near her. And now she will be afraid, and facing death, and I must be with her.”

“What is she doing now?” one of Daniel’s sisters demanded in a delighted hiss from the rear of the wagon. Mary stepped up to the side, and I heard their scandalized whispers.

“Give me my bag and let me go,” I said shortly to Daniel. I stepped up to the rear of the wagon and said “Good-bye” to the lot of them.

Daniel dropped my bag on the cobbles. “I will come for you,” he reminded me.

“Yes, I know,” I said, with as little warmth in my voice as his.

My father kissed my forehead, and put his hand on my head to bless me, then he turned without another word and got back into the wagon. Daniel waited till he was seated inside, and then he reached for me. I would have pulled away, but he pulled me close and he kissed me fiercely on the mouth, a kiss so full of desire and anger that I flinched away from him and only realized, when he abruptly let me go and swung on to the driver’s box, that I wanted that kiss from him, and that I wanted more. But it was too late to say anything, too late to do anything. Daniel flicked the reins and the wagon rolled past me, and I was left in the cold London morning with nothing but a small bag at my feet, a hot bruised mouth, and a promised duty to a traitor.

Those days and then weeks in the Tower with the princess were the worst ones of my life in England, the worst days for Elizabeth too. She went into a sort of trance of unhappiness and fear which nothing could lift. She knew that she was going to die, and in the very same spot where they had beheaded her mother Anne Boleyn, her aunt Jane Rochford, her cousin Catherine Howard, and her cousin Jane Grey. There was a lot of family blood already soaked into that earth, and soon hers would join it. That spot, unmarked by any stone on the green inside the walls of the Tower, overshadowed by the White Tower, was the dying ground for the women of her family. She felt doomed the moment she came close to it, she was certain that her red-rimmed eyes were looking on the place of her death.

The warder of the Tower, first frightened by the drama of her arrival – which Elizabeth had milked to its utmost, seating herself on the watergate steps and refusing to go in out of the rain – became yet more alarmed when she sank into a fear-filled despair, which was even more convincing than her theatrics. They allowed her to walk in the warder’s garden, inside the safety of the great walls, but then a little lad peeped through the gate with a posy of flowers and the second day he was there again. By the third day the queen’s councillors in their fear and their malice decided that it was not safe to allow her even the relief of that exercise, and she was returned to her rooms. She prowled up and down like the lion that I had named her for, and then she lay on her bed and looked up at the tester for long dull hours, saying nothing.

I thought she was preparing herself for death and I asked if she would want to see a priest. She gave me a look that had no life in it at all, she looked as if she was dying from her eyes downward. All her sparkle was drained from her, all that was left was dread.

“Did they tell you to ask me?” she whispered. “Is he to give me extreme unction? Is it to be tomorrow?”

“No!” I said hastily, cursing myself for making matters worse. “No! I just thought you might want to pray for your safe deliverance from here.”

She turned her head to the arrow-slit window, which showed her a glimpse of grey sky and allowed a breath of cold air. “No,” she said shortly. “Not with the priest that she would send me. She tortured Jane with the prospect of forgiveness, didn’t she?”

“She hoped she would convert,” I said, trying to be fair.

“She offered her life in return for her faith.” Her mouth twisted in contempt. “What a bargain to make with a young girl. Serve her right that Jane had the courage to refuse.” Her eyes darkened again and she turned her face to the counterpane on the bed. “I don’t have that courage. I don’t think like that. I have to live.”

Twice in the time that she was awaiting her trial I went to court, to collect my clothes and to gather news. The first time I briefly saw the queen, who asked me coldly how the prisoner was faring.

“See if you can bring her to a sense of penitence. Only that can save her. Tell her if she confesses I will pardon her and she will escape the block.”

“I will,” I promised. “But can you forgive her, Your Grace?”

She raised her eyes to me and they were filled with tears. “Not in my heart,” she said softly. “But if I can save her from a traitor’s death I will. I would not see my father’s daughter die as a criminal. But she has to confess.”

On my second visit to court the queen was engaged with the council, but I found Will petting a dog on a bench in the great hall.

“Are you not asleep?” I asked.

“Are you not beheaded?” he replied.

“I had to go with her,” I said shortly. “She asked for me.”

“Let’s hope you’re not her last request,” he said dryly. “Happen she’ll eat you for her last meal.”

“Is she to die?” I whispered.

“Certainly,” he said. “Wyatt denied her guilt from his scaffold, but all the evidence convicts her.”

“But he cleared her?” I asked hopefully.

Will laughed. “He cleared all of them. Turns out it was a rebellion of one and we must all have imagined the army. He even cleared Courtenay, who had already confessed! I don’t think Wyatt’s voice will make much odds. And we won’t hear it again. He won’t be repeating himself.”

“Has the queen decided against her?”

“The evidence has decided against her,” he said. “She can’t hang a hundred men and spare their leader. Elizabeth breeds treason like old meat breeds maggots. Not much point swatting flies and leaving the meat rotting in the open.”

“Soon?” I asked, aghast.

“Ask her yourself-” He broke off and nodded to the door to the presence chamber. It swung open and the queen came out. She gave a genuine smile of pleasure to see me and I went forward and dropped to my knee before her.

“Hannah!”

“Your Grace,” I said. “I am glad to see you again.”

A shadow crossed her face. “You have come from the Tower?”

“As you commanded,” I said quickly.

She nodded. “I do not want to know how she does.”

At the cold look in her face I kept my lips together and bowed my head.

She nodded at my obedience. “You can come with me. We are going riding.”

I fell in among her train. There were two or three new faces, ladies and gentlemen, but for a queen’s court they were very soberly dressed, and for young people out on a ride for pleasure, they were very quiet. This had become an uneasy court.

I waited till we were all mounted and riding out of the city to the north, past the beautiful Southampton House and on to the open country, before I brought my horse up alongside the queen.

“Your Grace, may I stay with Elizabeth until…” I broke off. “Until the end?” I concluded.

“Do you love her so much?” she asked bitterly. “Are you hers now?”

“No,” I said. “I pity her, as you would if you would only see her.”

“I won’t see her,” she said firmly. “And I dare not pity her. But yes, you can keep her company. You are a good girl, Hannah, and I don’t forget that we rode into London together on that first day.” She glanced back. The streets of London were very different now, a gibbet on every corner, with a traitor hanging by the neck, and the carrion crows on every rooftop growing fat on good pickings. The stink in the city was like a plague wind, the smell of English treason. “I had great hopes then,” she said shortly. “They will return, I know it.”

“I am sure of it,” I said: empty words.

“When Philip of Spain comes we shall make many changes,” she assured me. “You will see then, things will be better.”

“He is to come soon?”

“This month.”

I nodded. It was the date of Elizabeth’s death sentence. He had sworn he would not come to England while the Protestant princess was alive. She had no more than two dozen days left to live.

“Your Grace,” I said tentatively. “My old master, Robert Dudley, is still in the Tower.”

“I know it,” Queen Mary said quietly. “Along with other traitors. I wish to hear of none of them. Those who have been found guilty must die to keep the country safe.”

“I know you will be just, and I know you will be merciful,” I prompted her.

“I certainly will be just,” she repeated. “But some, Elizabeth among them, have outworn mercy from me. She had better pray that she can receive it from God.”

And she touched her horse’s flank with her whip and the court broke into a canter and there was nothing more to be said.