Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (405 page)

She turned away and roughly rubbed her eyes. Ishraq put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Don’t blame yourself,” she said. “There was nothing we could do when we first came here. And now that the whole abbey is falling apart around us, we can still do nothing until we understand what is going on. But everything is changing even while we wait, powerless. Even if we do nothing, something is going to happen. This is our chance. Perhaps this is the moment when the door swings open. We’re going to be ready for our chance.”

Isolde took the hand from her shoulder and held it against her cheek. “At least I have you.”

“Always.”

Luca slept heavily; not even the church bell tolling the hour in the tower above his head could wake him. But just when the night was darkest, before three in the morning, a sharp scream cut through his sleep, and then he heard the sound of running feet.

Luca was up and out of his bed in a moment, his hand snatching for the dagger under his pillow, peering out of his window at the dark yard. A glint of moonlight shining on the cobblestones showed him a woman in white racing across the yard to scrabble at the beams barring the heavy wooden gate. Three women pursued her, and the old porteress came running out of the gatehouse and grabbed the woman’s hands as she clawed like a cat at the timbers.

The other women were quick to catch the girl from behind, and Luca heard her sharp wail of despair as they grabbed hold of her, and saw her knees buckle as she went down under their weight. He pulled on his breeches and boots, threw a cape over his naked shoulders, then sprinted from his room, out into the yard, tucking the dagger out of sight in the scabbard in his boot. He stepped back into the shadow of the building, certain they had not noticed him, determined to see their faces in the shadowy light of the moon, so that he would know them when he saw them again.

The porteress held up her torch as they lifted the girl, two women holding her shoulders, the third supporting her legs. As they carried her past him, Luca shrank back into the concealing darkness of the doorway. They were so close that he could hear their panting breaths; one of them was sobbing quietly.

It was the strangest sight. The girl’s hand had swung down as they lifted her; now she was quite unconscious. It seemed that she had fainted when they had pulled her from the barred gate. Her head was rolled back, the little laces from her nightcap brushing the ground as they carried her, her long nightgown trailing in the dust. But it was no normal fainting fit. She was as limp as a corpse, her eyes closed, her young face serene. Then Luca gave a little hiss of horror. The girl’s swinging hand was pierced in the palm, the wound oozing blood. They had folded her other hand across her slight body and Luca could see a smudge of blood on her nightgown. She had the hands of a girl crucified. Luca froze where he stood, forcing himself to stay hidden in the shadows, unable to look away from the strange, terrible wounds. And then he saw something that seemed even worse.

All three women carrying the sleeping girl wore her expression of rapt serenity. As they shuffled along, carrying their limp, bleeding burden, all three were slightly smiling, all three were radiant as if with an inner secret joy.

And their eyes were closed like hers.

Luca waited till they had sleepwalked past him, steady as pallbearers, then he went back into the guesthouse room and knelt at the side of his bed, praying fervently for guidance to somehow find the wisdom, despite his self-doubt, to discover what was so very wrong in this holy place and put it right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Mary, Queen of Scots, is one of the great iconic characters of English history, and the research for this book has been a revelation to me, as I hope it will be to the reader. Recent work on the queen suggests a very different picture of her from the romantic and foolish woman of the traditional version. I believe she was a woman of courage and determination who could have been an effective queen even of a country as unruly as Scotland. The principal difference between her and her successful cousin Elizabeth was good advisors and good luck, not—as the traditional history suggests—one woman who ruled with her head and the other who was dominated by her heart.

Of course, a character who lives as long and in such dramatically contrasting circumstances as Queen Mary experienced will be interpreted in different ways by different writers. As in my version she suggests: “A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore.”

My version of Queen Mary’s story focuses on her years in captivity, when she was held by one of the most fascinating women of the Elizabethan era: Bess of Hardwick. Interestingly, Bess is another woman whom popular history has defined in terms of her husbands. The new biography by Mary S. Lovell shows Bess laying the foundation of her fortune less as a gold digger and more as a businesswoman and developer
with an eye for good investment and management. Her last husband, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury, is not a man who features much in the history books, but there is strong evidence to suggest that he was in love with Mary, with whom he lived as her host and jailer for sixteen years and whose death he did indeed oversee with tears pouring down his cheeks.

The story of these three is a tragedy at the very heart of dramatic times. Their hopes and disappointments in one another is set against the great rising of the North that aimed to free Mary, restore her to her throne in Scotland, guarantee her inheritance of the throne of England, and provide freedom of religion for Roman Catholics. If they had triumphed—as they looked certain to do—then Elizabethan England would have been a very different place.