The Queen's Fool

Spring 1553

I was allowed to go home to my father in April and I took him my wages for the quarter. I went in my old boy’s clothes that he had bought me when we first came to England and found that my wrists poked out at the sleeves and I could not get my growing feet into the shoes. I had to cut out the heels and go slipshod through the city.

“They will have to put you in gowns soon,” my father remarked. “You are half a woman already. What news of the court?”

“None,” I said. “Everyone says that the king is growing stronger with the warmer weather.” I did not add that everyone was speaking a lie.

“God bless him and keep him,” my father said piously. He looked at me, as if he would know more. “And Lord Robert. Do you see him?”

I felt myself color. “Now and then.” I could have told him to the very hour and the minute when I had last seen Lord Robert. He had not spoken to me, perhaps he had not even seen me. He had been mounted on his horse, about to go hawking for herons along the mudflats of the river shore. He was wearing a black cape and a black hat with a dark feather pinned to the ribbon with a jet brooch. He had a beautiful hooded falcon on his wrist and he rode with one hand outstretched to keep the bird steady and his other hand holding the curvetting horse, which was pawing the ground in its eagerness. He looked like a prince in a storybook, he was laughing. I had watched him as I might have watched a seagull riding the wind blowing up the Thames: as a thing so beautiful that it illuminated my day. I watched him, not a woman desiring a man; but a girl worshipping an icon, something far beyond reach but perfection in every way.

“There is to be a great wedding,” I said to fill the pause. “Lord Robert’s father has arranged it.”

“Who is to marry?” my father asked with a gossip’s curiosity.

I ticked off the three couples on my fingers. “Lady Katherine Dudley is to marry Lord Henry Hastings, and the two Grey sisters are to marry Lord Guilford Dudley and Lord Henry Herbert.”

“And you know them all!” my father boasted, proud as any parent.

I shook my head. “Only the Dudleys,” I said. “And not one of them would know me out of livery. I am a very lowly servant at court, Father.”

He cut a slice of bread for me and one for himself. It was stale bread, yesterday’s loaf. He had a small piece of cheese on one plate. On the other side of the room was a piece of meat, which we would eat later, in defiance of the English way of doing things which was to set all of the dinner – meats, breads, puddings as well – on the table at the same time. I thought however much we might pretend, anyone who strolled into the room now would see that we were trying to eat the right way: dairy and meat separate. Anyone looking at my father’s vellum skin and my dark eyes would know us for Jews. We might say that we were converted, we might attend church as enthusiastically as Lady Elizabeth herself was loudly praised for doing, but anyone would know us for Jews, and if they wanted an excuse to rob or denounce us, they would have it to their hand.

“Do you not know the Grey sisters?”

“Hardly at all,” I said. “They are the king’s cousins. They say that Lady Jane does not want to marry, she lives only to study her books. But her mother and her father have beaten her till she agreed.”

My father nodded, the forcible ordering of a daughter was no surprise. “And what else?” he asked. “What of Lord Robert’s father, the Duke of Northumberland?”

“He’s very much disliked.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “But he is like a king himself. He goes in and out of the king’s bedroom and says that this or that is the king’s own wish. What can anyone do against him?”

“They took up our neighbor the portrait painter only last week,” my father remarked. “Mr. Tuller. They said he was a Catholic and a heretic. Took him off for questioning, and he has not come back. He had copied a picture of Our Lady some years ago, and someone searched a house and found it hidden, with his name signed at the foot.” My father shook his head. “It makes no sense in law,” he complained. “Whatever their conviction, it makes no sense. When he painted the picture it was allowed. Now it is heresy. When he painted the picture it was a work of art. Now it is a crime. The picture has not changed, it is the law which has changed and they apply the law to the years when it did not exist, before it was written. These people are barbarians. They lack all reason.”

We both glanced toward the door. The street was quiet, the door locked.

“D’you think we should leave?” I asked, very low. I realized for the first time that now I wanted to stay.

He chewed his bread, thinking. “Not yet,” he said cautiously. “Besides, where could we go that was safe? I’d rather be in Protestant England than Catholic France. We are good reformed Christians now. You go to church, don’t you?”

“Twice, sometimes three times a day,” I assured him. “It’s a very observant court.”

“I make sure I am seen to go. And I give to charity, and I pay my parish dues. We can do nothing more. We’ve both been baptized. What can any man say against us?”

I said nothing. We both knew that anyone could say anything against anyone. In the countries that had turned the ritual of the church into a burning matter no one could be sure that they would not offend by the way they prayed, even by which direction they faced when they prayed.

“If the king falls ill and dies,” my father whispered, “then Lady Mary takes the throne, and she is a Roman Catholic. Will she make the whole country become Roman Catholic again?”

“Who knows what will happen?” I asked, thinking of my naming the next heir as “Jane” and Robert Dudley’s lack of surprise. “I wouldn’t put a groat wager on Lady Mary coming to the throne. There are bigger players in this game than you and I, Father. And I don’t know what they are planning.”

“If Lady Mary inherits and the country becomes Roman Catholic again then there are some books I shall have to be rid of,” my father said anxiously. “And we are known as good Lutheran booksellers.”

I put my hand up and rubbed my cheek, as if I would brush smuts away. At once he touched my hand. “Don’t do that, querida. Don’t worry. Everyone in the country will have to change, not just us. Everyone will be the same.”

I glanced over to where the Sabbath candle burned under the upended pitcher, its light hidden but its flame burning for our God. “But we’re not the same,” I said simply.

John Dee and I read together every morning like devoted scholars. Mostly he commanded me to read the Bible in Greek and then the same passage in Latin so that he might compare the translations. He was working on the oldest parts of the Bible, trying to unravel the secrets of the real making of the world from the flowery speech. He sat with his head resting in his hand, jotting notes as I wrote, sometimes raising his hand to ask me to pause as a thought struck him. It was easy work for me, I could read without comprehension, and when I did not know how to pronounce a word (and there were many such words) I just spelled it out, and Mr. Dee would recognize it. I could not help but like him, he was such a kind and gentle man; and I had a growing admiration for his immense ability. He seemed to me to be a man of almost inspired understanding. When he was alone he read mathematics, he played games with codes and numbers, he created acrostics and riddles of intense complexity. He exchanged letters and theories with the greatest thinkers of Christendom, forever staying just ahead of the Papal Inquisitions, which forbade the very questions that everyone’s work suggested.

He had invented a game of his own that only Lord Robert and he could play, called Chess on Many Floors, for which Mr. Dee had invented a chessboard on three levels made of thick beveled glass, where the players could go up and down as well as along. It made a game of such difficulty that he and Lord Robert would play the same round for weeks at a time. Other times he would retreat into his inner study and be silent for all the afternoon or all the morning and I knew that he was gazing in the scrying mirror and trying to see what might exist in the world just beyond our own, the world of the spirits which he knew must be there, but which he glimpsed only occasionally.

In his inner chamber he had a small stone bench, with a little fireplace hollowed out of the stone. He would light a charcoal fire, and suspend above it great glass vessels filled with herbs in water. A complicated network of glass tubes would drain liquor from one bottle to the other and then would stand and cool. Sometimes he would be in there for hours and all I would hear, as I copied page after page of numbers for him, was the quiet clink of one flask against another as he poured liquid into a vessel, or the hiss of the bellows as he heated the little fire.

In the afternoons Will Somers and I practiced our sword fighting, leaving aside the comical tricks and concentrating on proper fighting, until he told me that I was a commendable swordsman for a fool, and that if I ever found myself in trouble I might use a sword to fight my way out: “Like a proud hidalgo,” he said.

Although I was glad to learn a useful skill, we thought that the lessons would have been for nothing since the king continued to be so sick; until in May we were commanded to the great wedding feasts at Durham House in the Strand. The duke wanted a memorable wedding for his family and Will and I were part of an elaborate dinner entertainment.

“You would think it a royal wedding,” Will said slyly to me.

“How, royal?” I asked.

He put his finger to his lips. “Jane’s mother, Frances Brandon, is King Henry’s niece, the daughter of his sister. Jane and Katherine are royal cousins.”

“Yes,” I said. “And so?”

“And Jane is to marry a Dudley.”

“Yes,” I said, following this not at all.

“Who more royal than the Dudleys?” he demanded.

“The king’s sisters,” I pointed out. “Jane’s own mother. And others too.”

“Not if you measure in terms of desire,” Will explained sweetly. “In terms of desire there is no one more royal than the duke. He loves the throne so much he practically tastes it. He almost gobbles it up.”

Will had gone too far for me. I got to my feet. “I don’t understand,” I said flatly.

“You are a wise child to be so dense,” he said and patted my head.

Our sword fight was preceded by dancers and a masque and followed by jugglers, and we acquitted ourselves well. The guests roared with laughter at Will’s tumbles and my triumphant skill, and the contrast between our looks: Will so tall and gangling, thrusting his sword wildly this way and that; and me, neat and determined, dancing around him and stabbing with my little sword, and parrying his blows.

The chief bride was as white as the pearls embroidered on her gold gown. Her bridegroom sat closer to his mother than to his new bride and neither bride nor groom spoke so much as one word to each other. Jane’s sister had been married to her betrothed in the same ceremony and she and he toasted each other and drank amorously from the same loving cup. But when the shout went up for a toast for Jane and Guilford, I could see that it cost Lady Jane an effort to raise her golden goblet to her new husband. Her eyes were red and raw, and the shadows under her eyes were dark with fatigue; there were marks on either side of her neck that looked like thumbprints. It looked very much as if someone had shaken the bride by the neck till she agreed to take her vows. She barely touched the bridal ale with her lips, I did not see her swallow.

“What d’you think, Hannah the Fool?” the Duke of Northumberland shouted down the hall to me. “Shall she be a lucky bride?”

My neighbors turned to me, and I felt the old swimming sensation that was a sign of the Sight coming. I tried to fight it off, this court would be the worst place in the world to tell the truth. I could not stop the words coming. “Never more lucky than today,” I said.

Lord Robert flashed a cautionary look at me but I could not take back the words. I had spoken as I felt, not with the skill of a courtier. My sense was that Jane’s luck, at a low ebb when she married with a bruise on her throat, would now run ever more swiftly downhill. But the duke took it as a compliment to his son and laughed at me, and raised his goblet. Guilford, little more than a dolt, beamed at his mother, while Lord Robert shook his head, and half closed his eyes, as if he wished he was elsewhere.

There was dancing, and a bride had to dance at her own wedding, though Lady Jane sat in her chair, as stubborn as a white mule. Lord Robert led her gently to the dance floor. I saw him whisper to her and she found a wan little smile and put her hand in his. I wondered what he was saying to cheer her. In the moments when the dancers paused and awaited their turn in the circle his mouth was so close to her ear that I thought she must feel the warmth of his breath on her bare neck. I watched without envy. I did not long to be her, with his long fingers holding my hand, or his dark eyes on my face. I gazed on them as I might look on a pair of beautiful portraits, his face turned to her as sharp as a hawk’s beak in profile, her pallor warming under his kindness.

The court danced until late, as if there were great joy from such weddings, and then the three couples were taken to their bedrooms and put to bed with much throwing of rose petals and sprinkling of rosewater. But it was all show, no more real than Will and I fighting with wooden swords. None of the marriages was to be consummated yet, and the next day Lady Jane went home with her parents to Suffolk Place, Guilford Dudley went home with his mother, complaining of stomach ache and bloating, and Lord Robert and the duke were up early to return to the king at Greenwich.

“Why does your brother not make a house with his wife?” I asked Lord Robert. I met him at the gateway of the stable yard, and he waited beside me while they brought out his great horse.

“Well, it is not unusual. I do not live with mine,” he remarked.

I saw the roofs of Durham House tilt against the sky, as I staggered back and held on to the wall till the world steadied again. “You have a wife?”

“Oho, did you not know that, my little seer? I thought you knew everything?”

“I did not know…” I began.

“Oh yes, I have been married since I was a lad. And I thank God for it.”

“Because you like her so much?” I stammered, feeling an odd pain like sickness under my ribs.

“Because if I had not been married already, it would have been me married to Jane Grey and dancing to my father’s bidding.”

“Does your wife never come to court?”

“Almost never. She will only live in the country, she has no liking for London, we cannot agree… and it is easier for me…” He broke off and glanced toward his father, who was mounting a big black hunter and giving his grooms orders about the rest of the horses. I knew at once that it was easier for Lord Robert to move this way and that, his father’s spy, his father’s agent, if he was not accompanied by a wife whose face might betray them.

“What’s her name?”

“Amy,” he said casually. “Why?”

I had no answer. Numbly, I shook my head. I could feel an intense discomfort in my belly. For a moment I thought I had taken Guilford Dudley’s bloat. It burned me like bile. “Do you have children?”

If he had said that he had children, if he had said that he had a girl, a beloved daughter, I think I would have doubled up and vomited on the cobbles at his feet.

But he shook his head. “No,” he said shortly. “You must tell me one day when I shall get a son and an heir. Can you do that?”

I looked up and tried to smile despite the burning in my throat. “I don’t think I can.”

“Are you afraid of the mirror?”

I shook my head. “I’m not afraid, if you are there.”

He smiled at that. “You have all the cunning of a woman, never mind the skills of a holy fool. You seek me out, don’t you, Mistress Boy?”

I shook my head. “No, sir.”

“You didn’t like the thought of me married.”

“I was surprised, only.”

Lord Robert put his gloved hand under my chin and turned my face up to him so that I was forced to meet his dark eyes. “Don’t be a woman, a lying woman. Tell me the truth. Are you troubled with the desires of a maid, my little Mistress Boy?”

I was too young to hide it. I felt the tears come into my eyes and I stayed still, letting him hold me.

He saw the tears and knew what they meant. “Desire? And for me?”

Still I said nothing, looking at him dumbly through my blurred vision.

“I promised your father that I would not let any harm come to you,” he said gently.

“It has come already,” I said, speaking the inescapable truth.

He shook his head, his dark eyes warm. “Oh, this is nothing. This is young love, green-sickness. The mistake I made in my youth was to marry for such a slim cause. But you, you will survive this and go on to marry your betrothed and have a houseful of black-eyed children.”

I shook my head but my throat was too tight to speak.

“It is not love that matters, Mistress Boy, it is what you choose to do with it. What d’you choose to do with yours?”

“I could serve you.”

He took one of my cold hands and took it up to his lips. Entranced, I felt his mouth touch the tips of my fingers, a touch as intimate as any kiss on the lips. My own mouth softened, in a little pursed shape of longing, as if I would have him kiss me, there, in the courtyard before them all.

“Yes,” he said gently, not raising his head but whispering against my fingers. “You could serve me. A loving servant is a great gift for any man. Will you be mine, Mistress Boy? Heart and soul? And do whatever I ask of you?”

His moustache brushed against my hand, as soft as the breast feathers of his hawk.

“Yes,” I said, hardly grasping the enormity of my promise.

“Whatever I ask of you?”

“Yes.”

At once he straightened up, suddenly decisive. “Good. Then I have a new post for you, new work.”

“Not at court?” I asked.

“No.”

“You begged me to the king,” I reminded him. “I am his fool.”

His mouth twisted in a moment’s pity. “The poor lad won’t miss you,” he said. “I shall tell you all of it. Come to Greenwich tomorrow, with the rest of them, and I’ll tell you then.”

He laughed at himself as if the future was an adventure that he wanted to start at once. “Come to Greenwich tomorrow,” he threw over his shoulder as he strode toward his horse. His groom cupped his hands for his master’s boot and Lord Robert vaulted up into the high saddle of his hunter. I watched him turn his horse and clatter out of the stable-yard, into the Strand and then toward the cold English morning sun. His father followed behind at a more sober pace, and I saw that as they passed, although all the men pulled off their hats and bent their heads to show the respect that the duke commanded, their faces were sour.

I clattered into the courtyard of the palace at Greenwich riding astride one of the carthorses pulling the wagon with supplies. It was a beautiful spring day, the fields running down to the river were a sea of gold and silver daffodils, and they reminded me of Mr. Dee’s desire to turn base metal to gold. As I paused, feeling the warmer breeze against my face, one of the Dudley servants shouted toward me: “Hannah the Fool?”

“Yes?”

“To go to Lord Robert and his father in their privy rooms at once. At once, lad!”

I nodded and went into the palace at a run, past the royal chambers to the ones that were no less grand, guarded by soldiers in the Dudley livery. They swung open the double doors for me and I was in the presence room where the duke would hear the petitions of common people. I went through another set of doors, and another, the rooms getting smaller and more intimate, until the last double doors opened, and there was Lord Robert leaning over a desk with a manuscript scroll spread out before him, his father looking over his shoulder. I recognized at once that it was Mr. Dee’s writing, and that it was a map that he had made partly from ancient maps of Britain borrowed from my father, and partly from calculations of his own based on the sailors’ charts of the coastline. Mr. Dee had prepared the map because he believed that England’s greatest fortune were the seas around the coast; but the duke was using it for a different purpose.

He had placed little counters in a crowd at London, and more in the painted blue sea. A set of counters of a different color was in the north of the country, Scots, I thought, and another little group like Lord Robert’s chess pawns in the east of the country. I made a deep bow to Lord Robert and to his father.

“It has to be done at speed,” the duke remarked, scowling. “If it is done at once, before anyone has a chance to protest, then we can deal with the north, with the Spanish, and with those of her tenants who stay loyal, in our own time.”

“And she?” Lord Robert asked quietly.

“She can do nothing,” the duke said. “And if she tries to run, your little spy will warn us.” He looked up at me on those words. “Hannah Green, I am sending you to wait upon the Lady Mary. You are to be her fool until I summon you back to court. My son assures me that you can keep your counsel. Is he right?”

The skin on the back of my neck went cold. “I can keep a secret,” I said unhelpfully. “But I don’t like to.”

“And you will not go into a trance and speak of foretellings and smoke and crystals and betray everything?”

“You hired me for my trances and foretellings,” I reminded him. “I can’t order the Sight.”

“Does she do it often?” he demanded of his son.

Lord Robert shook his head. “Rarely, and never out of turn. Her fear is greater than her gift. She is witty enough to turn anything. Besides, who would listen to a fool?”

The duke gave his quick bark of a laugh. “Another fool,” he suggested.

Robert smiled. “Hannah will keep our secrets,” he said gently. “She is mine, heart and soul.”

The duke nodded. “Well, then. Tell her the rest.”

I shook my head, wanting to block my ears; but Lord Robert came around the table and took my hand. He stood close to me and when I looked up from my study of the floor I met his dark gaze. “Mistress Boy, I need you to go to the Lady Mary and write to me and tell me what she thinks, and where she goes, and who she meets.”

I blinked. “Spy on her?”

He hesitated. “Befriend her.”

“Spy on her. Exactly,” his father said brusquely.

“Will you do this for me?” Lord Robert asked. “It would be a very great service to me. It is the service I ask of your love.”

“Will I be in danger?” I asked. In my head I could hear the knock of the Inquisition on the heavy wooden door and the trample of their feet over our threshold.

“No,” he promised me. “I have guaranteed your safety while you are mine. You will be my fool, under my protection. No one can hurt you if you are a Dudley.”

“What must I do?”

“Watch the Lady Mary and report to me.”

“You want me to write to you? Will I never see you?”

He smiled. “You shall come to me when I send for you,” he said. “And if anything happens…”

“What?”

He shrugged. “These are exciting times, Mistress Boy. Who knows what might happen? That’s why I need you to tell me what Lady Mary does. Will you do this for me? For love of me, Mistress Boy? To keep me safe?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

He put his hand into his jacket and brought out a letter. It was from my father to the duke, promising him the delivery of some manuscripts. “Here is a mystery for you,” Lord Robert said gently. “See the first twenty-six letters of the first sentence?”

I scanned them. “Yes.”

“They are to be your alphabet. When you write to me I want you to use these. Where it says ‘My Lord,’ that is your ABC. The M for ‘my’ is your A. The Y is your B. And so on, do you understand? When you have a letter which occurs twice you only use it once. You use the first set for your first letter to me and your second set for your second letter, and so on. I have a copy of the letter and when your message comes to me I can translate it.”

He saw my eyes run down the page. There was only one thing I was looking for and it was how long this system would last. There were enough sentences to translate as many as a dozen letters; he was sending me away for weeks.

“I have to write in code?” I asked nervously.

His warm hand covered my cold fingers. “Only to prevent gossip,” he said reassuringly. “So that we can write privately to one another.”

“How long do I have to stay away?” I whispered.

“Oh, not for so very long.”

“Will you reply to me?”

He shook his head. “Only if I need to ask you something, and if I do, I will use this almanac also. My first letter will be the first twenty-six characters, my second the next set. Don’t keep my letters to you, burn them as soon as you have read them. And don’t make copies of yours to me.”

I nodded.

“If anyone finds this letter it is just something you brought from your father to me and forgot.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you promise to do this exactly as I ask?”

“Yes,” I said miserably. “When do I have to go?”

“Within three days,” the duke said from his place behind the table. “There’s a cart going to the Lady Mary with some goods for her. You can ride alongside that. You shall have one of my ponies, girl, and you can keep her at Lady Mary’s house for your return. And if something should happen that you think threatens me or Lord Robert, something very grave indeed, you can ride to warn us at once. Will you do that?”

“Why, what should threaten you?” I asked the man who ruled England.

“I shall be the one that wonders what might threaten me. You shall be the one to warn me if it does. You are to be Robert’s eyes and ears at the house of the Lady Mary. He tells me that he can trust you; make sure that he can.”

“Yes, sir,” I said obediently.

Lord Robert said that I might send for my father to say good-bye to him and he came downriver to Greenwich Palace in a fishing smack on the ebbing tide, with Daniel seated beside him.

“You!” I said without any enthusiasm, when I saw him help my father from the bobbing boat.

“Me,” he replied with the glimmer of a smile. “Constant, aren’t I?”

I went to my father and felt his arms come around me. “Oh, Papa,” I whispered in Spanish. “I wish we had never come to England at all.”

“Querida, has someone hurt you?”

“I have to go to the Lady Mary and I am afraid of the journey, and afraid of living at her house, I am afraid of…” I broke off, tasting the many lies on my tongue and realizing that I would never be able to tell anyone the truth about myself ever again. “I am just being foolish, I suppose.”

“Daughter, come home to me. I will ask Lord Robert to release you, we can close the shop, we can leave England. You are not trapped here…”

“Lord Robert himself asked me to go,” I said simply. “And I already said I would.”

His gentle hand caressed my cropped hair. “Querida, you are unhappy?”

“I am not unhappy,” I said, finding a smile for him. “I am being foolish. For look, I am being sent to live with the heir to the throne, and Lord Robert himself has asked me to go.”

He was only partly reassured. “I shall be here, and if you send for me I shall come to you. Or Daniel will come and fetch you away. Won’t you, Daniel?”

I turned in my father’s arms to look at my betrothed. He was leaning against the wooden railing that ran around the jetty. He was waiting patiently, but he was pale and he was scowling with anxiety.

“I would rather fetch you away now.”

My father released me and I took a step toward Daniel. Behind him, bobbing at the jetty, their boat was waiting for them. I saw the swirl of water and saw the tide was ready to turn; we could go upstream almost at once. He had timed this moment very carefully.

“I have agreed to go to serve Lady Mary,” I said quietly to him.

“She is a Papist in a Protestant country,” he said. “You could not have chosen a place where your faith and practices will be more scrutinized. It is me who is named for Daniel, not you. Why should you go into the very den of lions? And what are you to do for Lady Mary?”

He stepped closer to me so we could whisper.

“I am to be her companion, be her fool.” I paused and decided to tell him the truth. “I am to spy for Lord Robert and his father.”

His head was so close to mine that I could feel the warmth of his cheek against my forehead as he leaned closer to speak into my ear.

“Spy on Lady Mary?”

“Yes.”

“And you have agreed?”

I hesitated. “They know that Father and I are Jews,” I said.

He was silent for a moment. I felt the solidity of his chest against my shoulder. His arm came around my waist to hold me closer to him and I felt the warmth of his grip. A rare sense of safety came over me as he held me, and for a moment I stood still.

“They are going to act against us?”

“No.”

“But you are a hostage.”

“In a way. It feels more as if Lord Robert knows my secret and trusts me with his. I feel bound to him.”

He nodded for a moment, I craned my neck to look up into his scowling face. For a moment I thought he was angry then I realized that he was thinking hard. “Does he know my name?” he demanded. “Of my mother, of my sisters? Are we all at risk?”

“He knows I am betrothed, but not of you by name. And he knows nothing of your family,” I said, with quick pride. “I have not brought danger to your door.”

“No, you keep it all to yourself,” he said with a brief unhappy smile. “And if you were questioned you could not keep it secret for long.”

“I would not betray you,” I said quickly.

His face was troubled. “No one can remain silent on the rack, Hannah. A pile of stones will crush the truth out of most people.” He looked down the river over my head. “Hannah, I should forbid you to go.”

He felt my instantaneous move of disagreement. “Don’t quarrel with me for nothing, for clumsy words,” he said quickly. “I did not mean forbid like a master. I meant I should beg you not to go – is that better? This road leads straight into danger.”

“I am in danger whatever I do,” I said. “And this way, Lord Robert will protect me.”

“But only while you do his bidding.”

I nodded. I could not tell him that I had volunteered to walk into this danger, and I would have risked worse for love of Lord Robert.

Gently he released me. “I am sorry you are here, and unprotected,” he said. “If you had sent for me I would have come sooner. This is a burden that you shouldn’t have to bear alone.”

I thought of the terror of my childhood, of my wild apprenticeship in fear on our flight through Europe. “It is my burden.”

“But you have kin now, you have me,” he said with the pride of a young man made head of his family too young. “I shall bear your burdens for you.”

“I bear my own,” I said stubbornly.

“Oh yes, you are your own woman. But if you would condescend to send for me if you are in danger, I would come and perhaps be allowed to help you escape.”

I giggled at that. “I promise that I will.” I held out my hand to him in a gesture which suited my boy’s clothing. But he took my hand and drew me close to him again and bent his head. Very gently he kissed me, full on the lips, and I felt the warmth of his mouth on mine.

He released me and stepped back to the boat. I found I was slightly dizzy, as if I had gulped down strong wine. “Oh, Daniel!” I breathed, but he was climbing into the boat and did not hear me. I turned to my father and caught him hiding his smile.

“God bless you, daughter, and bring you home safe to us,” he said quietly. I knelt on the wooden pier for my father’s blessing and felt his hand come down on my head in the familiar, beloved caress. He took my hands and raised me up. “He is an attractive young man, isn’t he?” he demanded, a chuckle behind his voice. Then he wrapped his cape around himself and went down the steps to the fishing smack.

They cast off and the little boat traveled swiftly across the darkening water, leaving me alone on the wooden pier. The mist hanging on the river and the gathering dark hid their silhouette, and all I could hear was the splash of the oars and the creak of the rowlocks. Then that sound was gone too and all that was left was the smack and suck of the rising tide and the quiet whistle of the wind.