Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen. Philippa Gregory
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rewarded her by tickling a fourteen-year-old girl in her house, under her supervision. And that girl, my Elizabeth, my little sister, wriggled under his caresses and protested that she would die if he touched her again, but never locked her bedroom door, never complained to her stepmother and never found a better lodging.
‘I knew of it. Good God, there was such gossip even I, hidden away in the country, heard of it. I wrote to her and said she should come to me, I had a home, I could provide for us both. She wrote me very sweetly, very fair. She wrote to me that nothing was happening to her and that she did not need to move house. And all the time she was letting him into her chamber in the morning, and letting him lift the hem of her gown to see her shift, and one time, God help her, letting him cut her gown off her, so that she was all but naked before him.
‘She never sent to me for help, though she knew I would have taken her away within the day. A little whore then, and a whore now, and I knew it, God forgive me, and hoped that she might be bettered. I thought if I gave her a place at my side, and the honour which would be hers, then she would grow into being a princess. I thought that a young whore in the making could be unmade, could be made anew, could be taught to be a princess. But she cannot. She will not. You will see how she behaves in the future when she has the chance of a tickling once again.’
‘Your Grace …’ I was overwhelmed by the spilling out of her spite.
She took a breath and turned to the window. She rested her forehead against the thick pane of glass and I saw how the heat from her hair misted the glass. It was cold outside, the unbearable English winter, and the Thames was iron-grey beyond the stone-coloured garden beneath the pewter sky. I could see the queen’s reflected face in the thick glass like a cameo drowned in water, I could see the feverish energy pulsing through her body.
‘I must be free of this hatred,’ she said quietly. ‘I must be free of the pain that her mother brought me. I must disown her.’
‘Your Grace …’ I said again, more gently.
She turned back to me.
‘She will come after me if I die without heir,’ she said flatly. ‘That lying whore. Anything I achieve will be overturned by her, will be spoiled by her. Everything in my life has always been despoiled by her. I was England’s only princess and the great joy of my mother’s heart. A moment, an eyelid blink, and I was serving in Elizabeth’s nursery as her maid, and my mother was deserted and then dead. Elizabeth, the whore’s daughter, is corruption itself. I have to have a child to put between her and the throne. It is the greatest duty I owe to this country, to my mother and to myself.’
‘You will have to marry Philip of Spain?’
She nodded. ‘He, as well as any other,’ she said. ‘I can make a treaty with him that will hold. He knows, his father knows, what this country is like. I can be queen and wife with a man like him. He has his own land, his own fortune, he does not need little England. And then I can be queen of my own country and wife to him, and a mother.’
There was something in the way she said ‘mother’ that alerted me. I had felt her touch on my head, I had seen her with the children that tumbled out from dirty cottages.
‘Why, you long for a child for yourself,’ I exclaimed.
I saw the need in her eyes and then she turned away from me to the window and the view of the cold river again. ‘Oh yes,’ she said quietly to the cold garden outside. ‘I have longed for a child of my own for twenty years. That was why I loved my poor brother so much. In the hunger of my heart I even loved Elizabeth when she was a baby. Perhaps God in his goodness will give me a son of my own now.’ She looked at me. ‘You have the Sight. Will I have a child, Hannah? Will I have a child of my own, to hold in my arms and to love? A child who will grow and inherit my throne and make England a great country?’
I waited for a moment, in case anything came to me. All I had was a sense of great despair and hopelessness, nothing more. I dropped my gaze to the floor and I knelt before her. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace,’ I said. ‘The Sight cannot be commanded. I can’t tell you the answer to that question, nor any other. My vision comes and goes as it wishes. I cannot say if you will have a child.’
‘Then I will predict for you,’ she said grimly. ‘I will tell you this. I will marry this Philip of Spain without love, without desire, but with a very true sense that it is what this country needs. He will bring us the wealth and the power of Spain, he will make this country a part of the empire, which we need so much. He will help me restore this country to the discipline of the true church, and he will give me a child to be a godly Christian heir to keep this country in the right ways.’ She paused. ‘You should say Amen,’ she prompted me.
‘Amen.’ It was easily said. I was a Christian Jew, a girl dressed as a boy, a young woman in love with one man and betrothed to another. A girl grieving for her mother and never mentioning her name. I spent all my life in feigned agreement. ‘Amen,’ I said.
The door opened and Jane Dormer beckoned two porters into the room, carrying a frame between them, swathed in linen cloth. ‘Something for you, Your Grace!’ she said with a roguish smile. ‘Something you will like to see.’
The queen was slow to throw off her thoughtful mood. ‘What is it, Jane? I am weary now.’
In answer, Mistress Dormer waited till the men had leaned their burden against the wall, and then took the hem of the cloth and turned to her royal mistress. ‘Are you ready?’
The queen was persuaded into smiling. ‘Is this the portrait of Philip?’ she asked. ‘I won’t be cozened by it. You forget, I am old enough to remember when my father married a portrait but divorced the sitter. He said that it was the worst trick that had ever been played upon a man. A portrait is always handsome. I won’t be taken in by a portrait.’
In answer, Jane Dormer swept the cloth aside. I heard the queen’s indrawn breath, saw her colour come and go in her pale cheeks, and then heard her little girlish giggle. ‘My God, Jane, this is a man!’ she whispered.
Jane Dormer collapsed with laughter, dropped the cloth and dashed across the room to stand back to admire the portrait.
He was indeed a handsome man. He was young, he must have been in his mid-twenties to the queen’s forty years, brown-bearded with dark smiling eyes, a full sensual mouth, a good figure, broad shoulders and slim strong legs. He was wearing dark red with a dark red cap at a rakish angle on his curly brown hair. He looked like a man who would whisper lovemaking in a woman’s ear until she was weak at the knees. He looked like a handsome rogue, but there was a firmness about his mouth and a set to his shoulders which suggested that he might nonetheless be capable of honest dealing.
‘What d’you think, Your Grace?’ Jane demanded.
The queen said nothing. I looked from the portrait back to her face again. She was gazing at him. For a moment I could not think what she reminded me of, then I knew it. It was my own face in the looking glass when I thought of Robert Dudley. It was that same awakening, widening of the eyes, the same unaware dawning of a smile.
‘He’s very … pleasing,’ she said.
Jane Dormer met my eyes and smiled at me.
I wanted to smile back but my head was ringing with a strange noise, a tingling noise like little bells.
‘What dark eyes he has,’ Jane pointed out.
‘Yes,’ the queen breathed.
‘He wears his collar very high, that must be the fashion in Spain. He’ll bring the newest fashions to court.’
The noise in my head was getting louder. I put my hands over my ears but the sound echoed louder inside my head, it was a jangling noise now.
‘Yes,’ the queen said.
‘And see? A gold cross on a chain,’ Jane cooed. ‘Thank God, there will be a Catholic Christian prince for England once more.’
It was too much to bear now. It was like being in a bell tower at full