The King's Daughter (32 page)
‘And Lady Arbella is English.’
He nodded. ‘Our father is terrified of her, and even more terrified that she might bear a royal English child.’
We emerged from King Henry’s Tower and followed a narrow passage towards the mews and stables. We stepped out into a brick-paved courtyard and sunshine. A pair of dog grooms bowed to us and moved on with their pails of meat scraps from the kitchens. Above our heads, a maid shook a pillow out of a window.
Henry led me into his pheasant yard, where birds of different ages waited in pens to be released for hunting. On the far side of the yard stood a low wall of stacked willow basket cages.
‘My American treasures,’ said Henry excitedly. ‘A new breed of chicken…’ He opened a cage, reached into a furore of cackling and fished out an indignant brick-red rooster with a black tail. He tucked it under his arm and soothed it with his finger. ‘Said to be very hardy and the hens are generous with their eggs, laying through the winter.’ He returned the chicken to its cage and showed me another cage of American doves. Then led on to a third cage. ‘And here is a turkey. The settlers hunt them for meat.’
I stooped down to peer at the strange creature in the cage, with the body of a bird, head of a beaked lizard, and strange long strand of grey-pink flesh dangling beside its beak.
‘I’m building an enlarged aviary to house them all,’ he said. ‘Together with my West Indian parrots and the ostrich which the Venetian ambassador has promised to send me.’
Then he opened the slatted front of a solid wooden box cage. ‘Come,’ he said to the cage’s occupant. ‘I won’t hurt you. Good girl.’ Carefully, he lifted out what might have been a fluffy grey fox kit, except for its black-banded tail. ‘Would you like to hold it? I don’t think she’ll bite, but take care.’
The little creature wrapped itself around my hand, clinging on. I cradled it and looked down. It had pricked ears and a pointed snout like a fox but wore a comical black mask of fur across bright eyes that looked up at me warily. It clung to me with paws almost like hands, which emerged from its soft, warm fur like wrists from a bulky jacket.
‘A raccoon kit. I have a pair of them,’ said Henry. ‘They will grow to the size of small spaniels.’
Still clinging on with one paw, the raccoon began to pull at my buttons with the other. I felt a rush of the same warmth I felt when cradling Belle, a moment of peace when I forgot all other concerns. Then the little raccoon began to squirm and twist to escape. Reluctantly, I handed it back to Henry, who returned it to the cage.
I remembered why I had come looking for him. ‘Are you afraid of Arbella, too?’ I asked.
Henry squatted down and gazed intently at the turkey. ‘Not afraid. She claims to want only a husband, not the English throne. She’s only a woman, without an army. And Cecil says that the English have had enough of petticoat rule. But I can see the threat this marriage poses. Our father is not entirely wrong. She was a fool to provoke him in that way. What was Seymour thinking of?’
‘Was she never to marry at all?’ I asked. ‘She’s almost thirty and a husband has never been found.’
‘And Cecil says that our father never meant to find her one. Unlike you, she’s safe only when unmarried.’
‘One marriage is safe but another is unsafe?’ I asked.
‘It was a close and crowded race for the throne after the old queen died. You may have been too young to understandhow close it was. Without the help of Lord Salisbury, our father might still be in Scotland.’
Henry led me to the centre of the pheasant yard, away from all windows, doors and gates.
‘That’s why Wee Bobby is already preparing me for kingship,’ he said quietly. ‘Not to set my father in his winding sheet before time, as the king would have it, if he knew. Cecil merely wants me to be ready to move decisively when the time comes. To forge my own Protestant alliances on the Continent in advance of the need and make my political intentions known. To be a step ahead of any rivals for the throne.’
His words made good sense as he said them, but a shimmer of fear spread under my ribs. ‘Be careful, dearest brother.’
‘For what reason? I do not threaten the king. I’m a loyal, dutiful son. I wait my turn in patience. Our father chastises me for idleness and being too fond of the arts of war. He should approve of my earnest labour, not fear it.’
Then why do you hide it from him? I wanted to ask. Instead, I nodded, but my fear did not go away.
‘… Arbella,’ I prompted after a moment.
‘The king hates this marriage for the same reason he refused the Seymours for you.’ He flicked me a glance to judge the effect of the name, Seymour. Apparently satisfied that my heart was unbroken, he continued. ‘The union of royal cousins, both carrying the blood of Henry VII.’
A sudden burst of cackling from the cage of American chickens set off the pheasants in echoing alarm.
Henry rotated his shoulders, then cracked his knuckles. ‘If Cousin Arbella ever had a child by a Seymour, the babe could claim the throne through both its bloodlines. Unlike any of us, it would be English-born. It could threaten to dislodge us.’
He gave me one of those uncertain glances that tore at my heart. ‘That’s why I must work hard now to show my ownfitness to rule when the time comes. Most of all, I must prove it to Cecil.’
I wanted to shake him and weep at the same time. How could he not see how much he was already loved? How could he not see that Cecil had already embraced him as the future king?
‘Tennis?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Of course.’
We left the pheasant yard and went to his small closed tennis court, where he turned his back while I put off my farthingale and heavy outer petticoat. As I chose my racket, I ventured another warning.
Henry’s handsome face set stubbornly. ‘Do you fear that our father might have me locked in the Tower, like Arbella’s husband? He wouldn’t dare! If I were to challenge him for the throne today – if it were between the two of us – I dare to believe that the people would support me.’
‘Don’t say that!’
‘But is it not true, Elizabella? If it came to it?’
I imagined ears pressed to the flimsy wooden walls, behind doors. I shook my head in silent protest. Suddenly, I found myself up to my neck in treason. With Henry, of all people. The buried subject was suddenly in the open. His words gave hard reality to the unspoken currents that surrounded his troupe of young knights. To the dark thoughts I saw passing through our father’s eyes as he pulled at his lower lip and watched my brother. His words gave reality to the murmurs of factions. To the fulsome dedications, like those written by Sir Francis Bacon and his pleas for my brother’s patronage.
‘But I would never allow a rebellion,’ he said. ‘You know it. The king must know it. Cecil knows. Apart from all else, he knows that I’m not ready. If his tutorials are ever discovered, he can reassure the king of my dutiful patience and industry in the unending battle to overcome my many faults.’
He flung his racket into the air. I caught it and we climbed fist over fist to the end of the handle. My serve.
I lost every point of our first game and handed over to the Seigneur de St Antoine, who had heard the thumps of the hard, hair-filled ball against wood and wandered in to watch us play. As I smiled at him and asked after his favourite horse which had gone lame from a bad stop in the last tilt, I wondered how much he had heard of my conversation with Henry.
The king ordered Arbella moved from London to more secure and distant imprisonment in Durham. Court gossip avidly tracked every detail of the lady’s resistance to this move north. First, she swore that she was ill and could not be moved from Lambeth. Then she failed to recover. The king again ordered her to be moved, regardless of her health. He sent doctors who declared her fit to travel. Her doctors vowed that travel might kill her. In the end, it was said, she clung to the sheets and had to be carried out of the house still in her bed.
They got her no farther than Barnet before her claims of ill-health forced them to stop again. It was still a long way to Durham.
With suppressed delight, I waited for the next chapter of her story. In the next months, I watched my father’s anger at his defiant Stuart cousin grow, the more she mounted in the people’s love.
Oh, how they loved her! She was no longer an uneasy political loose end but a star-crossed lover, denied her true love by a cruel king. There was even a play about it, the most popular play in London. I never dared to attend a performance, but I sent Tallie in my place.
‘It does indeed treat a pair of lovers imprisoned by a Tyrant,’ she reported. ‘Just as rumoured. The crowd cheered the lovers and booed the Tyrant. Feelings ran so high at the end that he was hit hard in the eye by a well-aimed hazelnut fromthe gallery and forced to play his death scene with one eye squinnied shut, like this.’ She grimaced and pretended to fall off her stool.
I carried on with the routines of my life but Arbella’s situation left me both thoughtful and uneasy, as if it might throw light on my own future, if only I could only read with the right eyes.
Then one morning, I received an unexpected petitioner. Waiting for the future – Arbella’s and mine – I had forgotten the dangers of the past.
He was a pleasant-looking young man, a year or two my senior, with a fair, neatly-trimmed beard and eyebrows bleached white by the sun. He had presented himself as an ordinary petitioner and stood with a letter in his hand. He seemed to be waiting for me to speak.
‘Your grace.’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘You don’t know me, I see.’
‘I won’t pretend,’ I said. Then I saw the front tooth chipped in a riding fall. ‘Abel!’ To my horror, I felt a lump come into my throat. I blinked. I wanted to grab his hand but saw Anne and the others looking at us curiously. Anne seemed not to know him yet. My other ladies were watching us intently.
I reached for the letter that he held forgotten in his hand. I opened the letter and held it out as if to read. ‘Will you walk with me, sir?’ I strolled slowly, as if reading whilst I walked. Abel followed at a respectful distance. When we reached a window alcove and I judged that we were out of earshot of the eager Herd, I asked under my breath, ‘Where the devil have you been?’
‘Did Clapper come home safe?’
‘With an evergreen message. For which, I thank you… It was from you, was it not?’
He nodded.
‘I was certain I had sent you to your death.’
‘And I feared I might have been the cause of yours.’ He turned to look down into the orchard below the window. ‘I failed in my mission for you.’
He has darkened, I thought. From the cheerful youth who leapt up offering to risk death in my service.
‘The bitter rue,’ I said. I wondered suddenly if he had been in the crowd at Paul’s when the traitors had died. ‘Failed, how?’
He smiled and gestured at the orderly grid of trees below us. ‘You’ll have a fine apple crop this year.’ With a glance towards the Herd, he moved away from the window and placed himself between me and their avid eyes, with his back to them. ‘My purse was taken from me at Hampton Court.’
‘Did you ever learn what was in it?’
The new, darker Abel lifted one side of his mouth. ‘I’m as curious as any man, your grace, but not such a fool as to risk knowledge. Not any more than I must.’
Now I turned away to the window. Tallie could read lips. Other ladies might have the same skill. ‘Do you know who took your purse?’ I realised that I had caught his care in speaking.
He shook his head. ‘A pair of thugs jumped me, thumped me and left me sitting on the cobbles beside Clapper with a bloody nose and a much reduced opinion of myself. I never heard of the purse again.’ He smiled. ‘At the time, I was chiefly relieved that they hadn’t stolen your horse.’
I gripped the sill. Still on tenterhooks as to who had my letter. It had not been lost and destroyed by accident, in a river crossing or accidental fire, after all. I now knew for certain that someone had taken it, knowingly, and kept it for a purpose.
‘On the other hand,’ Abel said, ‘one of Lord Salisbury’s men dug me out of the stables and took me to his master. Cecil offered me the post of messenger. Because, he said, I already had experience.’
‘Ah.’ We looked at each other.
‘I have taken several packets to France for him. And some books to the English ambassador in Venice, where I stayed long enough to learn Italian. He advised me to stay away from Combe.’
‘Why come today? After all this time?’
‘I’m back in England for a short time. And asked Lord Salisbury if I might visit, to tell you that I was still alive. He trusts my discretion.’
‘I’m grateful to see you. You’ve been on my conscience these past years.’
He gave me a quick look. ‘I’m very pleased to see you well, too, your grace.’
‘It’s a miracle,’ I said lightly. ‘We’re both alive in a uncertain world.’ I re-folded his letter before it could start to rattle in my hand. At last, light illuminated one dark corner. Abel White had survived to become one of Cecil’s agents. Cecil had intercepted my letter to Henry. The Chief Secretary and Lord Treasurer held proof of my treason. He wanted me to know that he did.
SEPTEMBER 1610
Gustavus Adolphus, Crown Prince of Sweden. Protestant.
Tallie smuggled me the portrait of the Swedish crown prince, under a heavy satin loose gown she had worn for the purpose.
‘Have a quick gawp,’ she said. She handed me a small oval painting framed in ebony and pearls. ‘I must return it straightaway. A firm proposal came with it, yesterday. The Swedes are in earnest.’
I stared at the tiny image, no larger than the palm of my hand. With his martial stance and serious air, the long-faced, fair-haired youth reminded me pleasantly of Henry.
I could see how they were alike. The Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was sixteen years old, only a little younger than Henry. The painter had liked his subject, unlike the man who had painted the Melancholy Trout. His liking was there in the open, friendly smile, like Henry’s, and the candid blue eyes. If the artist were to be trusted, the prince’s legs were as fine as any in Henry’s train. I felt a lightening under my heart.