Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen. Philippa Gregory
Читать онлайн книгу.
can tell me, I can keep a secret,’ she said. ‘I have kept many many secrets.’
‘Since you ask it, I will tell you: I am certain that he is dying,’ I admitted quietly. ‘But the duke denies it.’
She nodded. ‘And this wedding?’
I hesitated. ‘What wedding?’
She tutted in brief irritation. ‘Of Lady Jane Grey to the duke’s son, of course. What do they say about it at court?’
‘That she was unwilling, and he not much better.’
‘And why did the duke insist?’ she asked.
‘It was time that Guilford was married?’ I hazarded.
She looked at me, as bright as a knife blade. ‘They say no more than that?’
I shrugged. ‘Not in my hearing, my lady.’
‘And what of you?’ she asked, apparently abandoning interest in Lady Jane. ‘Did you ask to come to this exile? From the royal court at Greenwich? And away from your father?’ Her wry smile indicated to me that she did not think it likely.
‘Lord Robert told me to come,’ I confessed. ‘And his father, the duke.’
‘Did they tell you why?’
I wanted to bite my lips to hold in the secret. ‘No, my lady. Just to keep you company.’
She gave me a look that I had never seen from a woman before. Women in Spain tended to glance sideways, a modest woman always looked away. Women in England kept their eyes on the ground before their feet. One of the many reasons why I was glad of my pageboy clothes was that masquerading as a boy I could hold my head up, and look around. But Lady Mary had the bold look of her father’s portrait, the swaggering portrait, fists on hips, the look of someone who has been bred to think that he might rule the world. She had his gaze: a straight look that a man might have, scanning my face, reading my eyes, showing me her own open face and her own clear eyes.
‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked bluntly.
For a moment I was so taken aback I could have told her. I was afraid of arrest, of the Inquisition, afraid of suspicion, afraid of the torture chamber and the heretic’s death with kindling heaped around my bare feet and no way to escape. I was afraid of betraying others to their deaths, afraid of the very air of conspiracy itself. I rubbed my cheek with the back of my hand. ‘I am just a little nervous,’ I said quietly. ‘I am new to this country, and to court life.’
She let the silence run and then she looked at me more kindly. ‘Poor child, you are very young to be adrift, all alone in these deep waters.’
‘I am Lord Robert’s vassal,’ I said. ‘I am not alone.’
She smiled. ‘Perhaps you will be very good company,’ she said finally. ‘There have been days and months and even years when I would have been very glad of a merry face and an uplifted voice.’
‘I am not a witty fool,’ I said cautiously. ‘I am not supposed to be especially merry.’
Lady Mary laughed aloud at that. ‘And I am not supposed to be given especially to laughter,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you will suit me very well. And now, you must meet my companions.’
She called her ladies over to us and named them to me. One or two were the daughters of determined heretics, holding on to the old faith and serving a Roman Catholic princess for pride, two others had the dismal faces of younger daughters with scanty dowries whose chance of service to an out-of-favour princess was only slightly better than the marriage they would have been forced to undertake if they had been left at home. It was a little court with the smell of desperation, on the edge of the kingdom, on the edge of heresy, on the edge of legitimacy.
After dinner the Lady Mary went to Mass. She was supposed to go alone, it was a crime for anyone else to observe the service; but in practice, she went openly and knelt at the very front of the chapel and the rest of her household crept in at the back.
I followed her ladies to the chapel door and then I hovered in a frenzy of worry as to what I should do. I had assured the king and Lord Robert that my father and I were of the reformed faith, but both the king and Lord Robert knew that Lady Mary’s household was an island of illegal Papist practices in a Protestant kingdom. I could feel myself sweating with fear as the meanest housemaid slipped past me to say her prayers, and I did not know the safest thing for me to do. I was in a terror of being reported to the court for being a Roman Catholic, and yet how could I serve in this household as a steadfast Protestant?
In the end, I compromised, by sitting outside where I could hear the mutter of the priest and the whispered responses, but no-one could actually accuse me of attending the service. All the time that I perched on the draughty window-seat I felt ready to leap up and run away. Constantly my hand was at my face, wiping my cheek as if I could feel the smuts from the fires of the Inquisition sticking to my skin. It made me sick in my belly not to know the safest place to be.
After Mass I was summoned to Lady Mary’s room to hear her read from the Bible in Latin. I tried to keep my face blank as if I did not understand the words, and when she handed it to me to put it on its stand at the end of the reading, I had to remind myself not to check the front pages for the printer. I thought it was not such a good edition as my father printed.
She went to bed early, walking with her candle flickering before her, down the long shadowed corridor, past the dark draughty windows of the house, looking out over the darkness of the empty land beyond the tumbling-down castle walls. Everyone else went to bed too, there was nothing to wait up for, nothing was going to happen. There would be no visitors coming to see the popular princess, there would be no mummers or dancers or pedlars drawn by the wealth of the court. I thought that it was no wonder that she was not a merry princess. If the duke had wanted to keep Lady Mary in a place where she would be rarely visited, where her heart and spirits were sure to sink, where she would experience coldness and loneliness every day, he could not have chosen a place more certain to make her unhappy.
The household at Hunsdon turned out to be as I had thought: a melancholy place of outsiders, ruled by an invalid. Lady Mary was plagued with headaches, which often came in the evening, darkening her face as the light drained from the sky. Her ladies would notice her frown; but she never mentioned the pain and never drooped in her wooden chair nor leaned against the carved back, nor rested against the arms. She sat as her mother had taught her, upright like a queen, and she kept her head up, even when her eyes were squinting against dim candles. I remarked on her physical frailty to Jane Dormer, the Lady Mary’s closest friend and lady in waiting, and she said briefly that the pains I saw now were nothing. When it was the Lady’s time of the month, she would be gripped with cramps as severe as those of childbirth, which nothing could ease.
‘What ails her?’ I asked.
Jane shrugged. ‘She was never a strong child,’ she said. ‘Always slight and delicate. But when her mother was put aside and her father denied her, it was as if he had poisoned her. She could not stop vomiting and voiding her food, she could not get out of bed but she had to crawl across the floor. There were some who said she had been poisoned indeed, by the witch Boleyn. The princess was near to death and they would not let her see her mother. The queen could not come to her for fear of never being allowed back to her own court. The Boleyn woman and the king destroyed the two of them: mother and daughter. Queen Katherine hung on for as long as she could but illness and heartbreak killed her. Lady Mary should have died too – she suffered so much; but she survived. They made her deny her faith, they made her deny her mother’s marriage. Ever since then she has been tormented by these pains.’
‘Can’t the doctors …?’
‘They wouldn’t even let her see a doctor for many years,’ Jane said irritably. ‘She could have died for want of care, not once but several times. The witch Boleyn wanted her dead and more than once I swear she sent poison. She has had a bitter life: