The Queen's Fool

Summer 1556

It was a long hot summer, that first summer in Calais. I greeted the sunshine as if I were a pagan ready to worship it, and when Daniel told me he was persuaded by the new theory that the earth revolved around the sun in the great vastness of space, and not the other way around, I had to acknowledge that it made perfect sense to me too, as I felt myself unfold into the heat.

I loitered in the squares, and dawdled at the fish quay to see the dazzle of sunlight on the ripples of the harbor. They called it le Bassin du Paradis, and in the bright sunlight I thought it was paradise indeed. Whenever I could, I made an excuse to leave the town and slip out through the gates where the casual sentries watched the townspeople coming and going and the country people arriving. I strolled in the little vegetable plots outside the city walls to sniff at the freshness of the growth in the warm earth, and I pined to go further, down to the beach to see the waves breaking on the shore, across the marshlands where the herons stood eyeing their own tall reflections, out to the country where I could see the darkness of the woods against the light green meadows.

It felt like a long summer and it was a breathtakingly tedious season for me. Daniel and I were under the same roof but we had to live as maid and suitor, we were hardly ever left alone together. I longed for his touch, for his kiss, and for the pleasure that he had given me on the night that we sailed to France. But he could hardly bear to come near me, knowing that he must always step back, knowing that he must never do more than kiss my lips or my hand. Even the scent of me, as I passed him on the stairs or in the narrow rooms, would make him tremble, and when he touched my fingers as he passed me a plate or a glass I would long for his caress. Neither of us would show our desire to the bright curiosity of his sisters, but we could not wholly hide it, and I hated the way their gaze flicked from one of us to the other.

I was out of my breeches and into a gown in the first week and soon experiencing a constant tuition in how a young lady should behave. It seemed there was a tacit agreement between my father and Daniel’s mother that she should coach me in the skills that a young woman should possess. Everything my mother had taught me of domestic skills I appeared to have left behind when we fled from Spain. And since then, no one had taught me how to brew and bake, how to churn butter, how to squeeze the whey from cheese. No one had taught me how to lay down linen in henbane and lavender in a linen chest, how to set a table, how to skim for cream. My father and I had lived, agreeably enough, as a working man and his apprentice. At court I had learned sword fighting, tumbling and wit from Will Somers, political caution and desire from Robert Dudley, mathematics from John Dee, espionage from Princess Elizabeth. Clearly, I had no useful skills for a young doctor’s home. I was not much of a young woman and not much of a wife. Daniel’s mother had awarded herself the task of “taking me in hand.”

She found a sulky and unwilling pupil. I was not naturally gifted at housekeeping. I did not want to know how to scour a brass pan with sand so that it glittered. I did not want to take a scrubbing brush to the front step. I did not want to peel potatoes so that there was no waste at all, and feed the peelings to the hens that we kept in a little garden outside the city walls. I wanted to know none of these things, and I did not see why I should learn them.

“As my wife you will need to know how to do such things,” Daniel said reasonably enough. I had slipped out to waylay him where his road home from work crossed the marketplace before the great Staple Hall, so that I could speak with him before he entered the house and we both fell under his mother’s rule.

“Why should I know? You don’t do them.”

“Because I will be out at work and you will be caring for our children and preparing their food,” he said.

“I thought I would keep a printing shop, like my father.”

“And who would cook and clean for us?”

“Couldn’t we have a maid?”

He choked on a laugh. “Perhaps, later on. But I couldn’t afford to pay wages for a maid at first, you know, Hannah. I am not a wealthy man. When I set up in practice on my own we will have only my fees to live on.”

“And will we have a house of our own then?”

He drew my hand through his elbow as if he were afraid that I might pull away at his answer.

“No,” he said simply. “We will find a bigger house, perhaps in Genoa. But I will always offer a house to my sisters and to my mother; to your father too. Surely, you would want nothing less?”

I said nothing. To tell the truth, I did want to live with my father, and with Daniel. It was his mother and his sisters I found hard to bear. But I could hardly say to him that I would choose to live with my father but not with his mother.

“I thought we would be alone together,” I said mendaciously.

“I have to care for my mother and sisters,” he said. “It is a sacred trust. You know that.”

I nodded. I did know it.

“Have they been unkind to you?”

I shook my head. I could not complain of their treatment of me. I slept every night in a truckle bed in the girls’ room and every night as I fell asleep I heard them whispering in the big bed at my side, and I imagined they were talking about me. In the morning they drew the curtains of the bed so that I should not see them as they dressed. They emerged to comb and plait each other’s hair before the little mirror and cast sideways glances at my growing mop of hair only half covered by my cap. My dresses and linen were all new and were the focus of much silent envy, and occasional secret borrowing. They were, in short, as spiteful and as unkind as girls working in concert can be, and many nights I turned my face into my hay mattress and cried in silence for sheer frustrated anger.

Daniel’s mother never said a word to me that could be cited against her to her son. She never said a thing that I could quote in a complaint. Insidiously, almost silently, she made me feel that I was not good enough for Daniel, not good enough for her family, an inadequate young woman in every domestic task, an awkward young woman in appearance, a faulty young woman in religious observation, and an undutiful daughter and potentially a disobedient wife. If she had ever spoken the truth she would have said that she did not like me; but it seemed to me that she was absolutely opposed to speaking the truth about anything.

“Then we surely can live happily together,” Daniel said. “Safe at last. Together at last. You are happy, aren’t you, my love?”

I hesitated. “I don’t get on very well with your sisters, and your mother does not approve of me,” I said quietly.

He nodded, I was telling him nothing he did not know. “They’ll come round,” he said warmly. “They’ll come round. We have to stay together. For our own safety and survival we have to stay together, and we will all learn to change our ways a little and to be happy.”

I nodded, hiding my many, very many, reservations. “I hope so,” I said and watched him smile.

We were married in late June, as soon as all my gowns were made and my hair long enough for me to be – as Daniel’s mother said – passable, at l’Eglise de Notre Dame, the great church of Calais, where the vaulting columns looked like those of a French cathedral but they ran up to a great English church tower set square on the top. It was a Christian wedding with a Mass afterward and every one of us was meticulous in our observation of the rituals in church. Afterward, in the privacy of the little house in London Street, Daniel’s sisters held a shawl as a chuppah over our heads as my father repeated the seven blessings for a wedding, as far as he could remember them, and Daniel’s mother put a wrapped glass at Daniel’s feet for him to stamp on. Then we drew back the shutters, opened the doors and held a wedding feast for the neighbors with gifts and dancing.

The vexed question of where we would sleep as a married couple had been resolved by my father moving to a bunk alongside the printing press in the little room created by thatching the backyard. Daniel and I slept in Father’s old room on the top floor, a thin plaster wall between us and his sleepless mother on one side, and his curious sisters, awake and listening, on the other side.

On our wedding night we fell upon each other as a pair of wanton lovers, longing for an experience too long denied. They put us to bed with much laughter and jokes and pretended embarrassment, and as soon as they were gone Daniel bolted the door, closed the shutters and drew me into the bed. Desperate for privacy we put the covers completely over our heads and kissed and caressed in the hot darkness, hoping that the blankets would muffle our whispers. But the pleasure of his touch overwhelmed me and I gave a breathy little cry. At once, I stopped short and clapped a hand over my mouth.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, prising my fingers from my lips to kiss them again.

“It does,” I said, speaking nothing but the truth.

“Kiss me,” he begged me.

“Well, very quietly…”

I kissed him and felt his mouth melt under mine. He rolled underneath me and guided me to mount him. At the first touch of his hardness between my legs I moaned with pleasure and bit the back of my hand, trying to teach myself to stay silent.

He turned me so that I was underneath him. “Put your hand over my mouth,” I urged him.

He hesitated. “It feels as if I am forcing you,” he said uncomfortably.

I gave a little breathy laugh. “If you were forcing me I would be quieter,” I joked, but he could not laugh. He pulled away from me and dropped on to his back, and he pulled me to lie beside him, my head on his shoulder.

“We’ll wait till they are all asleep,” he said. “They cannot wake all night.”

We waited and waited but his mother’s heavy tread did not come up the stairs until late, and then we heard, with embarrassing clarity, her sigh as she sat on the side of her bed, the “clip, clop” as she dropped one wooden clog then another on the floor. Then we heard with a sharpness which showed us how thin the walls must be, the muted rustle of her undressing and then the creak of the ropes of the bed as she got under the covers.

After that it was impossible. If I even turned the bed creaked so loud that I knew she would hear it. I pressed my mouth to his ear and breathed, “Let us make love tomorrow when they are all out,” and I felt the nod of his silent assent. Then we lay, burning up with desire, sleepless with lust, not touching, not even looking at each other, on our bridal night.

They came for the sheets in the morning, and would have flown them like a bloodstained flag from the window to prove the consummation of the marriage but Daniel stopped them. “There’s no need,” he said. “And I don’t like the old ways.”

The girls said nothing but they raised their eyebrows at me as if they well knew that we had not bedded together at all, and suspected that he could not feel desire for me. His mother, on the other hand, looked at me as if it proved to her that I was not a virgin and that her son had brought a whore into her home.

It was a bad wedding night and a sour wedding morning and, as it happened, they did not go out all day but stayed at home, and we could not make love that day, nor the next night, nor the next night either.

Within a few days I had learned to lie like a stone beneath my husband, and he had learned to take his pleasure as quickly as he could in silence. Within a few weeks we made love as seldom as possible. The early promise of our night of lovemaking on the boat that had left me dizzy with satisfied desire could not be explored or fulfilled in a bedroom with four nosy women listening.

I came to hate myself for the rise of my desire and then my embarrassment that they would hear us. I could not bear to know that every word I said, every snatched breath, even the sound of my kiss was audible to a critical and intent audience. I shrank from his sisters’ knowledge that I loved him, I flinched from their intimacy with something that should be exclusive, just to us. On the first morning after we had finally made love, when Daniel came downstairs, I caught the glance his mother flickered over him. It was a look of utter possession, as a farmer might look at a healthy bull at stud. She had heard my cry of pleasure half silenced the night before and she was delighted at his prowess. To her I was nothing more than a cow who should soon be in calf, the credit for it all was to her son, the prestige of founding a family would come to her.

After that I would not come downstairs at the same time as Daniel. I felt scorched by the bright glances of his sisters which flicked from his face to mine and back again, as if to read how we had been transformed into man and wife by the muffled exchanges of the night. I would either get up before the others, and be downstairs with the kindling laid on last night’s embers, boiling the breakfast gruel before anyone else was up, or I would wait until he had eaten his breakfast and gone.

When I came down late, his sisters would nudge each other and whisper.

“I see you keep court hours still,” Mary said spitefully.

Her mother made a gesture with her hand to silence her. “Leave her alone, she will need to rest,” she said.

I shot a quick glance at her, it was the first time she had defended me against Mary’s acid tongue, and then I saw it was not me, Hannah, that she was defending. It was not even Daniel’s wife – as though anything that belonged to Daniel was illuminated by the glow he cast in this household – it was because she hoped I was breeding. She wanted another boy, another boy for the House of Israel, another little d’Israeli to continue the line. And if I could produce him soon, while she was still young and active, she could bring him up as her own, in her own house, under her supervision and then it would be: “my son’s little boy, my son the doctor, you know.”

If I had not served for three years at court I would have fought like a cat with my mother-in-law and my three dear sisters-in-law; but I had seen worse and heard worse and endured worse than they could ever have dreamed. I knew that the moment I complained to Daniel about them I would bring down on my own head all his worry and all his love for them, for me, and for the family he was trying to make.

He was too young a man to take the responsibility of keeping a family safe in such difficult and dangerous times. He was studying his skill as a physician, every day he had to advise men and women who were staring death in the face. He did not want to come home at night to a coven of women torn apart by malice and envy.

So I held my tongue and when his sisters were witty at my expense, or even openly critical of the bread I had bought at market, of my wasteful kitchen practices, of the printers’ ink on my hands, of my books on the kitchen table, I said nothing. I had been at court and seen the ladies in waiting vying for the attention of the queen. I knew all about female malice, I had just never thought that I would have to live with it at home.

My father saw some of it and tried to protect me. He found me translation work to do, and I would sit at the bookshop counter and work from Latin to English or from English to French while the smell of the ink from the press drifted in reassuringly from the yard outside. Sometimes I helped him to print, but the complaints from Mrs. Carpenter if I got ink on my apron or, worse, on my gown, were so extreme that both my father and I tried to avoid arousing her indignation.

As the summer wore on and Daniel’s mother gave me the pick of the food, the breast of the scrawny French chickens, the fattest sweetest peaches, I realized that she was waiting for me to speak to her. In the last days of August she could not bear to wait any longer.

“Have you got something to tell me, daughter?” she asked.

I felt myself stiffen. I always flinched when she called me “daughter.” I never wanted another mother but the one who bore me. In truth, I thought it an impertinence of this unlovable woman to try to claim me for her own. I was my mother’s child and not hers, and if I had wanted any other mother then I would have chosen the queen who had laid my head in her lap, and stroked my curls and told me that she trusted me.

Besides, I knew Daniel’s mother now. I had not observed her for the whole of the summer without learning her particular route to things. If she called me “daughter” or praised how I had combed my hair under my cap she was after something: information, a promise, some kind of intimacy. I looked at her without a glimmer of a smile, and waited.

“Something to tell me?” she prompted. “A little news that would make an old woman very, very happy?”

I realized what she was after. “No,” I said shortly.

“Not yet sure?”

“Sure I am not with child, if that is what you mean,” I said flatly. “I had my course two weeks ago. Did you want to know anything more?”

She was so intent on what I was saying that she ignored my rudeness. “Well, what is the matter with you?” she demanded. “Daniel has had you at least twice a week ever since your wedding day. No one can doubt him. Are you ill?”

“No,” I said through cold lips. She would, of course, know exactly how often we made love. She had listened without any sense of shame, she would go on listening. It would not even occur to her that I could take no pleasure in his touch or his kiss knowing that she was just the other side of the thinnest of walls, ears pricked. She would not have dreamed that I had hoped for pleasure. As far as she was concerned the matter was for Daniel’s pleasure and for the making of a grandson for her.

“Then what is the matter?” she repeated. “I have been waiting for you to tell me that you are with child any day these last two months.”

“Then sorry I am, to so disappoint you,” I said, as cold as Princess Elizabeth in one of her haughty moods.

In a sudden movement she snatched my wrist, and twisted it round so that I was forced to turn and face her, her grip biting into the skin. “You’re not taking something?” she hissed. “You’ve not got some draught to take to stop a child coming? From your clever friends at court? Some slut’s trick?”

“Of course not!” I said, roused to anger. “Why would I?”

“God knows what you would or would not do!” she exclaimed in genuine distress, flinging me from her. “Why would you go to court? Why would you not come with us to Calais? Why be so unnatural, so unwomanly, more like a boy than a girl? Why come now, too late, when Daniel could have had his pick of any girl in Calais? Why come at all if you’re not going to breed?”

I was stunned by her anger, it knocked the words out of me. For a moment I said nothing. Then slowly I found the words. “I was begged for a fool, it was not my choice,” I said. “You should reproach my father if you dare with that, not me. I wore boy’s clothes to protect me, as you well know. And I did not come with you because I had sworn to the Princess Elizabeth that I would be with her at her time of trial. Most women would think that showed a true heart, not a false one. And I came now because Daniel wanted me, and I wanted him. And I don’t believe a word you say. He could not have the pick of the girls of Calais.”

“He could indeed!” she said, bridling. “Pretty girls and fertile girls too. Girls who would come with a dowry and not in breeches, a girl who has a baby in the cradle this summer and knows her place, and would be glad enough to be in my house, and proud to call me mother.”

I felt very cold, like fear, like a dreadful uncertainty. “I thought you were talking in general,” I said. “D’you mean that there is a particular girl who likes Daniel?”

Mrs. Carpenter would never tell the whole truth about anything. She turned away from me and went to the breakfast pot hanging beside the fireplace and took it off the hook as if she would go out with it and scour it again. “D’you call this clean?” she demanded crossly.

“Daniel has a woman he likes, here in Calais?” I asked.

“He never offered her marriage,” she said grudgingly. “He always said that you and he were betrothed and that he was promised.”

“Is she Jew, or Gentile?” I whispered.

“Gentile,” she said. “But she would take our religion if Daniel married her.”

“Married her?” I exclaimed. “But you just said he always said he was betrothed to me!”

She brought the pot to the kitchen table. “It was nothing,” she said, trying to slide away from her own indiscretion. “Only something she once said to me.”

“You spoke to her about Daniel marrying her?”

“I had to!” she flared up. “She came to the house when he was in Padua, her belly before her, wanting to know what would be done for her.”

“Her belly?” I repeated numbly. “She is with child?”

“She has his son,” Daniel’s mother said. “And a fine healthy boy, the very picture of him as a baby. Nobody could doubt whose child he is, not for a moment, even if she were not a lovely girl, a good girl, which she is.”

I sank to the stool at the table and looked up at her in bewilderment. “Why did he not tell me?”

She shrugged. “Why would he tell you? Did you tell him everything in all these long years when you made him wait for you?”

I thought of Lord Robert’s dark eyes on me, and the touch of his mouth on my neck. “I did not lie with another and conceive a child,” I said quietly.

“Daniel is a handsome young man,” she said. “Did you think he would wait like a nun for you? Or did you not think of him at all, while you played the fool and dressed like a whore and ran after who knows who?”

I said nothing, listening to the resentment in her tone, observing the rage in her flushed cheeks and the spittle on her lips from her hissing speech.

“Does he see his child?”

“Every Sunday at church,” she said. I caught her quickly hidden smile of triumph. “And twice a week, when he tells you he is working late, he goes to her house to dine with her and to see his child.”

I rose up from the table.

“Where are you going?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.

“I am going to meet him as he walks home,” I said. “I want to talk with him.”

“Don’t upset him,” she said eagerly. “Don’t tell him that you know of this woman. It will do you no good if you quarrel. He married you, remember. You should be a good wife and wink at this other. Better women than you have turned away and seen nothing.”

I thought of the look of blank pain on Queen Mary’s face when she heard Elizabeth’s lilting laugh at the king’s whisper in her ear.

“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t care about being a good wife any longer. I don’t know what to think or what to care for.”

I suddenly noticed the pot with the smear of gruel along the side and I snatched it up and threw it at the back door. It hit the wood with a resounding clang and bounced to the floor. “And you can scour your own damned pot!” I shouted at her shocked face. “And you can wait forever for a grandson from me.”

I stormed from the house and across the marketplace, not seeing the stalls and the usual traders. I made my way across the fish quay, not even hearing the catcalls of the fishermen at my rapid pace and my uncovered head. I came to the door of the physician’s house in a rush and then realized that I could not hammer on it and demand to see Daniel. I would have to wait. I hitched myself up on to a low stone wall of the opposite house and settled down to wait for him. When passersby smiled or winked at me I glared at them, brazen, as if I were in my lad’s clothes again and had forgotten how to smooth down my skirts and cast down my eyes.

I did not consider what I would say to him, nor did I plan what I might do. I just waited like a dog waits for his master. I just waited in pain, as a dog will do with its paw caught in a trap and there is nothing to do but to wait; not understanding what the pain is, not knowing what can be done. Just enduring. Just waiting.

I heard the clock strike four and then half past before the side door opened and Daniel came out, calling a farewell and closing the door behind him. He had a flask of some green liquid in one hand, and when he came to the gate he started in the wrong direction, away from home. I was in a sudden terror that he was going to visit his lover, and that I, like some suspicious wife, would be caught spying on him. At once I crossed the road and ran up to him.

“Daniel!”

“Hannah!” His pleasure in seeing me was unfeigned. But after one glance at my white face he said: “Is there something wrong? Are you ill?”

“No,” I said, my lip trembling. “I just wanted to see you.”

“And now you do,” he said easily. He drew my hand through his arm. “I have to take this to Widow Jerrin’s house, will you come with me?”

I nodded, and fell into step beside him. I could not keep up. The fullness of my petticoats under my gown prevented me from striding out as I had done when I was a pageboy. I lifted my skirts out to one side but they still hobbled me as if I was a mare, hog-tied in the horse-breaking ring. Daniel slowed down and we walked in silence. He stole a glance at me and guessed from my grim expression that all was not well, but he decided to deal first with the delivery of the medicine.

The widow’s house was one of the older buildings inside the crisscrossing streets of the old town. The houses were packed in under the sheltering bulk of the castle, all the little alleyways overshadowed by the jutting first storeys of the houses that lined them, running north and south and intersected by the next road going east-west.

“When we first came here, I thought I would never find my way round,” he said, making conversation. “And then I learned the names of the taverns. This has been an English town for two hundred years, remember. Every street corner has a ‘Bush’ or a ‘Pig and Whistle’ or a ‘Travelers Rest.’ This street has a tavern called ‘The Hollybush.’ There it is.” He pointed to the building with a battered sign swinging outside it.

“I’ll only be a moment.” He turned to a narrow doorway and tapped on the door.

“Ah, Dr. Daniel!” came a woman’s croaking voice from within. “Come in, come in!”

“Ma’am, I cannot,” he said with his easy smile. “My wife is waiting for me and I will walk home with her.”

There was a laugh from inside the house and a remark that she was a lucky girl to have him, and then Daniel emerged, pocketing a coin.

“Now,” he said. “Shall I walk you home around the city walls, m’lady? Get a breath of sea air?”

I tried to smile at him but I was too heartsore. I let him lead me to the end of the street and then along a lane. At the very end of the lane was the towering wall of the town, shallow stone steps running up the inside. We climbed them, up and up, until we got to the ramparts and could look northward toward the horizon where England lay. England, the queen, the princess, my lord: they all seemed a long way away. It seemed to me in that moment that I had known a better life as a fool to a queen than I had being a fool to Daniel and to his stone-hearted mother and his poisonous sisters.

“Now,” he said, matching his steps to mine as we walked along the wall, seagulls crying over our heads and the waves slapping at the stones. “What is the matter, Hannah?”

I did not turn the conversation round and round like a woman would do. I went straight to the heart of it, as if I were still a troubled pageboy and not a betrayed wife. “Your mother tells me that you have got a Calais woman with child,” I said bluntly. “And that you see her and her child three times a week.”

I could feel his stride falter, and when I looked up at him he had lost the color from his cheeks. “Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”

“You should have told me.”

He nodded, marshaling his thoughts. “I suppose I should have done. But if I had told you, would you have married me and come to live with me here?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not.”

“Then you see why I did not tell you.”

“You cozened me and married me on a lie.”

“I told you that you were the one great love of my life, and you are. I told you that I thought we should marry to provide for my mother and for your father, and I still think that we did the right thing. I told you that we should marry so that we might live together, as the Children of Israel, and I could keep you safe.”

“Safe in a hovel!” I burst out.

Daniel recoiled at that: the first time that I had told him directly that I despised his little house. “I am sorry that is what you think of your home. I told you that I hope to provide better for us later.”

“You lied to me,” I said again.

“Yes,” he said simply. “I had to.”

“Do you love her?” I asked. I could hear the pitiful note in my own voice and I pulled my hand from his arm, filled with resentment that love should have brought me so low that I was whimpering at betrayal. I took a step away from him so he could not wrap me close and console me. I did not want to be a girl in love any more.

“No,” he said bluntly. “But when we first came to Calais, I was lonely and she was pretty and warm and good company. If I had any sense I would not have gone with her, but I did.”

“More than once?” I asked, wounding myself.

“More than once.”

“And I suppose you didn’t make love to her with a hand over her mouth so your mother and sisters couldn’t hear?”

“No,” he said shortly.

“And her son?”

His face warmed at once. “He is a baby of about five months old,” he said. “Strong, and lusty.”

“Does she take your name?”

“No. She keeps her own.”

“Does she live with her family?”

“She is in service.”

“They allow her to keep her child?”

“They have a kindness for her, and they are old. They like to have a child around the house.”

“They know that you are the father?”

He nodded his head.

I rocked with shock. “Everyone knows? Your sisters, the priest? Your neighbors? The people who came to our wedding feast and wished me well? Everyone?”

Daniel hesitated. “It’s a small town, Hannah. Yes, I should think everyone knows of it.” He tried to smile. “And now I should think everyone knows that you are rightly angry with me, and that I am begging your pardon. You have to get used to being part of a family, part of a town, part of the People. You are not Hannah on her own any more. You are a daughter and a wife, and one day, I hope you will be a mother.”

“Never!” I said, the word wrung out of me by my anger and my disappointment in him. “Never.”

He caught me to him and held me close. “Don’t say that,” he said. “Not even in rage with me when you would say anything to hurt me back. Not even when I deserve punishment. You know I waited for you and loved you and trusted you even when I thought you were in love with another man and might never come to me. Now you are here and we are married, and I thank God for it. And now you are here we shall make a life, however difficult it has been for us to be together. I shall be your husband and your lover and you will forgive me.”

I wrenched myself from his grip and faced him. I swear if I had had a sword I would have run him through. “No,” I said. “I will never lie with you again. You are false, Daniel, and you called on me to trust you with lies in your mouth. You are no better than any man and I thought you were. You told me that you were.”

He would have interrupted me but the words were pouring out of my mouth like a shower of stones. “And I am Hannah on my own. I don’t belong in this town, I don’t belong with the People, I don’t belong with your mother or your family and you have showed me that I don’t belong with you. I deny you, Daniel. I deny your family, and I deny your people. I will belong to no one and I will be alone.”

I turned on my heel and marched away from him, the tears running hot down my cold cheeks. I was expecting to hear him hurrying after me but he did not come. He let me go and I strode away as if I would walk home across the foam-crested gray waves to England, all the way to Robert Dudley, and tell him that I would be his mistress this very night if he desired it, since I had nothing left to lose. I had tried an honorable love and it had been nothing but lies and dishonesty: a hard road and paid with a false coin at the end.

I strode furiously along the walls until I had done a whole circuit of the town and found myself back overlooking the sea once more at the spot where we had quarreled. Daniel had gone, I had not expected to find him where I had left him. He would have gone home to his supper, and appeared to his family as composed and in control of his feelings as always. Or perhaps he would have gone to dine with his other woman, the mother of his child, as his mother had told me he did, twice a week, in the evenings, when I had stood at the window to watch for him coming and felt sorry for him, working late.

My feet, in the stupid high-heeled girls’ shoes that I now had to wear, were aching from my forced march around the town walls and I limped down the narrow stone stairs to the sally port, through the little gate to the quayside. A handful of fishing boats was making ready to set sail on the evening tide, one of the many small traders who regularly crossed the sea between France and England was loading up with goods: a cart filled with household goods for a family returning to England, barrels of wine for London vintners, baskets of late peaches, early plums, currants, great parcels of finished cloth. A woman at the quayside was parting with her mother, the woman embraced her daughter, pulling her hood up over the girl’s head, as if to keep her warm until they could be together again. The girl had to tear herself away and run up the gangplank and then she leaned over the side of the ship to kiss her hand and wave. The girl might be going into service in England, she might be leaving home to marry. I thought self-pityingly that I had not been sent out into the world with a mother’s blessing. No one had planned my wedding thinking of my preferences. My husband had been chosen by the matchmaker to make a safe home for my father and for me, and to give Daniel’s mother a grandson. But no home could be safe for us, and she already had a grandson of five months old.

I had a moment’s impulse to run to the ship’s master and ask him what he would take for my passage. If he would let me owe him the fare I could pay when I reached London. I had a desire, like a knife in the belly, to run to Robert Dudley, to return to the queen, to get back to the court where I was valued by many, and desired by my lord, and where nobody could ever betray me and shame me, where I could be the mistress of myself. I had been a fool: a servant, lower than a lady in waiting, less than a musician, on a par perhaps with a favored lap dog; but even as that I had been freer and prouder than I was, standing on the quayside with no money in my pocket, with nowhere to go but Daniel’s home, knowing that he had been unfaithful to me in the past and could be again.

It was dusk by the time I opened the door and stepped over the threshold of our house. Daniel was in the act of swinging on his cape as I came into the shop, my father waiting for him.

“Hannah!” my father exclaimed, and Daniel crossed the room in two strides and took me into his arms. I let him hold me but I looked past him to my father.

“We were coming out to look for you. You’re so late!” my father exclaimed.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think you would be worried about me.”

“Of course we were worried.” Daniel’s mother came halfway down the stairs and leaned over the rail to scold me. “A young lady can’t go running around town at dusk. You should have come home at once.”

I shot her a thoughtful look, but I said nothing.

“I am sorry,” Daniel said, his mouth close to my ear. “Let me talk with you. Don’t be distressed, Hannah.”

I glanced up at him, his dark face was scowling with anxiety.

“Are you all right?” my father asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course I am.”

Daniel took his cape from his shoulders. “You say, ‘of course,’” he complained. “But the town is full of the roughest of soldiers, and you are dressed as a woman now, you don’t have the protection of the queen and you don’t even know your way around.”

I disengaged myself from Daniel’s arms and pulled out a stool from the shop counter. “I survived crossing half of Christendom,” I said mildly. “I should think I could manage for two hours in Calais.”

“You’re a young lady now,” my father reminded me. “Not a child passing as a boy. You shouldn’t even be out on your own in the evening.”

“Shouldn’t be out at all except to go to market or church,” Daniel’s mother supplemented robustly from her perch on the stairs.

“Hush,” Daniel said gently to her. “Hannah is safe, that’s the main thing. And hungry, I’m sure. What do we have left for her, Mother?”

“It’s all gone,” she said unhelpfully. “You had the last of the potage yourself, Daniel.”

“I didn’t know that was all there was!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t we save some for Hannah?”

“Well, who knew when she would come home?” his mother asked limpidly. “Or whether she was dining out somewhere?”

“Come on,” Daniel said impatiently to me, pulling at my hand.

“Where to?” I asked, slipping from the stool.

“I am taking you to the tavern to get dinner.”

“I can find her some bread and a slice of beef,” his mother offered at once at the prospect of the two of us going out alone together to dine.

“No,” Daniel said. “She’s to have a proper hot dinner and I’ll take a mug of ale. Don’t wait up for us, Mother, nor you, sir.” He slung his cloak around my shoulders and swept me out of the door before his mother could suggest that she came too, and we were out in the street before his sisters had time to remark that I was not properly dressed for an evening out.

We walked in silence to the tavern at the end of the road. There was a tap room at the front of the building but a good parlor for travelers at the back. Daniel ordered some broth and some bread, a plate of meats and two mugs of small ale, and we sat down in one of the high-backed settles, and for the first time since I had come to Calais I felt that we might talk alone and uninterrupted for more than a snatched moment.

“Hannah, I am so sorry,” he said as soon as the maid had put our drinks before us, and gone. “I am deeply, deeply sorry for what I have done.”

“Does she know you are married?”

“Yes, she knew I was betrothed when we first met, and I told her I was going to England to fetch you and we would be married when we returned.”

“Does she not mind?”

“Not now,” he said. “She has become accustomed.”

I said nothing. I thought it most unlikely that a woman who had fallen in love with a man and borne his child would become accustomed within a year to him marrying someone else.

“Did you not want to marry her when you knew she was carrying your child?”

He hesitated. The landlord came with the broth and bread and meat and fussed around the table, which gave us a chance for silence. Then he left and I took a spoonful of broth and a mouthful of bread. It was thick in my mouth but I was not going to look as if I had lost my appetite through heartache.

“She is not one of the People,” Daniel said simply. “And, in any case, I wanted to marry you. When I knew she was with child I was ashamed of what I had done; but she knew I did not love her, and that I was promised to you. She did not expect me to marry her. So I gave her a sum of money for a dowry and I pay her every month for the boy’s keep.”

“You wanted to marry me, but not enough to stay away from other women,” I remarked bitterly.

“Yes,” he admitted. He did not flinch from the truth even when it was told baldly out of the mouth of an angry woman. “I wanted to marry you, but I did not stay away from another woman. But what about you? Is your conscience utterly clear, Hannah?”

I let it go, though it was a fair accusation. “What’s the child named?”

He took a breath. “Daniel,” he said and saw me flinch.

I took a mouthful of broth and crammed the bread down on top of it and chewed, though I wanted to spit it at him.

“Hannah,” he said very gently.

I bit into a piece of meat.

“I am sorry,” he said again. “But we can overcome this. She makes no claims against me. I will support the child but I need not go and see her. I shall miss the boy, I hoped to see him grow up, but I will understand if you cannot tolerate me seeing her. I will give him up. You and I are young. You will forgive me, we will have a child of our own, we will find a better house. We will be happy.”

I finished my mouthful and washed it down with a swig of ale. “No,” I said shortly.

“What?”

“I said, ‘No.’ Tomorrow I shall buy a boy’s suit and my father and I will find new premises for the bookshop. I shall work as his apprentice again. I shall never wear high-heeled shoes again, as long as I live. They pinch my feet. I shall never trust a man again, as long as I live. You have hurt me, Daniel, and lied to me and betrayed me and I will never forgive you.”

He went very white. “You cannot leave me,” he said. “We are married in the sight of God, our God. You cannot break an oath to God. You cannot break your pledge to me.”

I rose to it as if it were a challenge. “I care nothing for your God, nor for you. I shall leave you tomorrow.”

We spent a sleepless night. There was nowhere to go but home and we had to lie side by side, stiff as bodkins in the darkness of the bedroom with his mother alert behind one wall, and his sisters agog on the other side. In the morning I took my father out of the house and told him that my mind was made up and that I would not live with Daniel as his wife.

He responded to me as if I had grown a head from beneath my shoulders, become a monstrous strange being from a faraway island. “Hannah, what will you do with your life?” he said anxiously. “I cannot be always with you, who will protect you when I am gone?”

“I shall go back to royal service, I shall go to the princess or to my lord,” I said.

“Your lord is a known traitor and the princess will be married to one of the Spanish princes within the month.”

“Not her! She’s not a fool. She would not marry a man and trust him! She knows better than to put her heart into a man’s keeping.”

“She cannot live alone any more than you can live alone.”

“Father, my husband has betrayed me and shamed me. I cannot take him back as if nothing had happened. I cannot live with his sisters and his mother all whispering behind their hands every time he comes home late. I cannot live as if I belonged here.”

“My child, where do you belong if not here? If not with me? If not with your husband?”

I had my answer: “I belong nowhere.”

My father shook his head. A young woman always had to be placed somewhere, she could not live unless she was bolted down in one service or another.

“Father, please let us set up a little business on our own, as we did in London. Let me help you in the printing shop. Let me live with you and we can be at peace and make our living here.”

He hesitated for a long moment, and suddenly I saw him as a stranger might see him. He was an old man and I was taking him from a home where he had become comfortable.

“What will you wear?” he asked finally.

I could have laughed out loud, it mattered so little to me. But I realized that it signified to him whether he had a daughter who could appear to fit into this world or whether I would be, eternally, out of step with it.

“I will wear a gown if you wish,” I said to please him. “But I will wear boots underneath it. I will wear a jerkin and a jacket on top.”

“And your wedding ring,” he stipulated. “You will not deny your marriage.”

“Father, he has denied it every day.”

“Daughter, he is your husband.”

I sighed. “Very well. But we can go, can we? And at once?”

He rested his hand on my face. “Child, I thought that you had a good husband who loved you and you would be happy.”

I gritted my teeth so the tears did not come to my eyes and make him think that I might soften, that I might still be a young woman with a chance of love. “No,” I said simply.

It was not an easy matter, stripping down the press again and moving it from the yard. I had only my new gowns and linen to take with me, Father had a small box of his clothes, but we had to move the entire stock of books and manuscripts and all the printing equipment: the clean paper, the barrels of ink, the baskets of bookbinding thread. It took a week before the porters had finished carrying everything from the Carpenters’ house to the new shop, and for every day of that week my father and I had to eat our dinner at a table in silence while Daniel’s sisters glared at me with aghast horror, and Daniel’s mother slammed down the plates with utter contempt as if she were feeding a pair of stray dogs.

Daniel stayed away, sleeping at his tutor’s house, coming home only for a change of clothes. At those times I made sure that I was busy with my father out the back, or packing up books under the shop counter. He did not try to argue with me or plead with me and, willfully, I felt it proved that I was right to leave him. I felt that if he had loved me he would have come after me, asked me again, begged me to stay. I willed myself to forget his stubbornness and his pride, and I made very sure to keep my thoughts from the life we had promised ourselves when we had said we would become the people we wanted to be and not be tied by the rules of Jew, or Gentile, or the world.

I had found a little shop at the south city gate: an excellent site for travelers about to leave Calais and travel through the English Pale to venture into France. It was the last chance they would have to buy books in their own language, and for those who wanted maps or advice about traveling in France or in the Spanish Netherlands we carried a good selection of travelers’ tales, mostly fabulous, it must be said, but good reading for the credulous. My father already had a reputation inside the city and his established customers soon found their way to the new premises. Most days he would sit in the sun outside the shop on one of the stools and I would work inside, bending over the press and setting type, now that there was no one to scold me for getting ink on my apron.

My father was tired, his move to Calais and then the disappointment of my failed marriage had wearied him. I was glad that he should sit and rest while I worked for the two of us. I relearned the skill of reading backward, I relearned the skill of the sweep of the ink ball, the flick of the clean sheet and the smooth heave on the handle of the press so that the typeface just kissed the whiteness of the paper and it came away clean.

My father worried desperately about me, about my ill-starred marriage, and about my future life, but when he saw that I had inherited all of his skill, and all of his love of books, he began to believe that even if he were to die tomorrow, I might yet survive on the business. “But we must save money, querida,” he would say. “You must be provided for.”