The King's Daughter (4 page)

‘Go first to Windsor. If Prince Henry isn’t there, go on to Richmond then on to Oatlands and last London and Whitehall. Don’t rest till you find my brother and give him my letter.’

He mounted. I looked up at him. ‘Let no one but my brother see that letter,’ I repeated. With one hand on Clapper’s neck, I walked beside them out of the stable yard.

Clapper’s hoofs rang like gunshots in the cold morning air. I looked up at the house. No curious faces appeared at the windows. It made no difference now, in any case. The absence of man and horse could not be kept secret for long on this small estate.

From the gate of the main courtyard, I watched Abel trot away up the long tree-lined avenue burdened with treason, my life tucked inside his jacket. Even on Clapper, he seemed a frail vessel to carry so much weight.

I could not bear to go back into the dense vaulted shadows of Combe Manor, once an abbey, now turned private house. I felt that God had never quite loosed His chilly grip on the place, even though He had been turned out more than sixty years before. I limped around the brick-paved courtyard along the walls of the three wings of the house. Still not ready to fall back under God’s stern eye, I turned right into the gardens lying in the elbow of the river Smite, where I soaked myshoes leaving a dark ragged trail through the dew on the grass. I was not good at waiting.

The Haringtons returned before sundown. They brought no news of disturbance abroad nor death in London. Lady Harington, short, wiry and as sharp-eyed as a sparrow hawk, at once spotted my wet shoes and sent me to change them. I waited for Lord Harington to ask me about Abel White and Clapper. But he said nothing about the absence of either horse or groom. We prayed as we always did before every meal. I would have begged to eat in my bed again but Lord Harington always fussed so much over my health that it seemed easier to brave the table than his concern.

Supper passed as quietly and tediously as always. The Haringtons, never talkative, chewed and sipped quietly as if a demon might not, at this very moment, be crashing about doing damage I could not bear to imagine.

I half-raised my spoon of onion and parsnip stew then set it back down on my plate. A pent-up force seemed to distend my chest. Any moment, it would burst upwards and escape like lightning flashing along my hair.

‘What news?’ I wanted to shout. ‘What is happening in the world outside Combe?’

At Dunfermline and Linlithgow palaces, when I was merely the girl-child of a Scottish king who already had two surviving sons, I had stolen time for games in the stables with the grooms, including Abel, and with the waiting footmen, maids and messengers. I had known all the kitchen family and listened while they thought I played. I heard all their gossip, suitable for my ears, and otherwise. Now that I was at last old enough to understand what I heard, I had been elevated into an English princess, third in line to the joint crowns of England and Scotland. Who must be kept safely buried in this damp green place where everyone treated me with tedious and uninformative respect.

I knocked over my watered ale.

Lord Harington gazed at me in concern with his constantly anxious eyes. ‘Are you certain that your injuries yesterday weren’t more serious than you say, your grace?’

‘Perhaps a little more shaken,’ I muttered. Though I sometimes thought him a tiresome old man, Lord Harington was kind. I did not like lying to him. I didn’t know what I would tell him when he at last asked why Clapper was gone.

Then it occurred to me that he might be pretending that all was well. He might have been instructed to lull me into false security until men-at-arms could arrive from London to arrest me. I caught my glass as it almost toppled a second time.

When we were preparing for bed, Anne gave a little cry. ‘What did you do to your arm?’

I looked down at the line of fingertip bruises along the bone. I brushed at them as if they were smudges of ash. ‘I must have done it yesterday while riding.’

I wondered suddenly if Anne had been set by her uncle to spy on me.

5

For a second sleepless night, I lay in my bed in the darkness, waiting, not knowing what I was waiting for. I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the ghostly abbot if he should decide to visit. Tonight, however, I didn’t fear him. My head was too crowded to deal with one thing more. I lay thinking how past events, which seemed to have nothing at all to do with you, could shape your life.

I could hear again Mrs Hay’s whispers of treason and danger as she readied me for bed.

Ruthven. Gowrie. Morton. The names thumped in my pulse.

Treachery and knives. Ruthven and Gowrie, kidnappers and possible murderers. The child king, my father, no older than I was, standing courageously against his attackers. Morton, the regent who betrayed him and died on the scaffold. My father signing execution warrants when only a child.

‘Never listen to the gossip that calls him a coward,’ Mrs Hay had warned me. ‘His majesty had a terrible life for a wee bairn, royal or not. Being made king so young did him no favours. That Scotland you pine for is a fierce and wild place, ruled by unruly chiefs who call themselves “nobles”… I don’t know what you do to make knots in your hair like this!’

I always wanted to tell her that if I were a boy, I would have liked to be one of those unruly chiefs.

But I was her golden girl, her royal pet, her child, her life. I was her Responsibility, she said, which was a fearful weighty thing, which she carried nevertheless with a whole heart. She had to prepare me for my future without making false promises of joy in this life, though she was generous on behalf of the Hereafter.

So I stopped telling her what I felt. When very young, I had tried to tell her what I truly thought about a good many things but soon learned that she would only look stricken, as if someone had accused her of failure, and tell me to remember who I was. And to be grateful that my father wanted me kept safe as he himself had never been.

Tediously safe, I had thought. Until today, when the demons had arrived at Combe.

Henry? Can you hear me? We are both in danger.

I pressed my thoughts out into the night. I often spoke to my brother as one spoke to God. Even though I loved Henry more than I loved God, I told myself that God could never be jealous. Jealousy was a mortal weakness. God knew that Henry deserved to be loved. He was God’s perfect, shining knight.

I had seldom seen the king, my father. But, so far as I remembered him before he set off on his separate journey to London, he cut a poor figure beside his eldest son. Our father was thick-bodied and short-legged where Henry, though not over-tall, was slim, fair and well-formed. Our father was awkward and given to coarse wit, where Henry had a soldier’s bearing and the seriousness of a full-grown man.

I knew that I was not alone in my high opinion of my brother. At all the great houses where we had stopped onour progress south, we were entertained by poetry and songs praising us both, but chiefly Henry, who would one day be king. At Althorpe one poet, Mr Jonson, wrote in his entertainment that Henry was:

The richest gem, without a paragon…

Bright and fixed as the Arctic Star…

The poets did no more than speak for the people. Everywhere we went on our journey south, the cheers swelled when Henry appeared, the noble, handsome heir to the throne of England. Every boy in England wanted to be like Henry. Surely, no girl ever had a finer brother.

Look over the strict ocean and think where

You may but lead us forth.

I needed my brother’s level-headed advice. I needed him to lead me forth. I whispered the poet’s words to myself now.
‘You must not be extinguished.’

Though some people were said to find him stand-offish, or even cold, I had seen at once, when we met at Holyrood, that Henry’s supposed chilliness grew from a modest reserve that took little delight in trumpeting his virtues. He was far more modest than I (who made the most of little) even though he had many more virtues to be modest about.

I had seen him smile and wave for mile after mile at the cheering crowds that lined our route to London, even when his throat was dry and his eyelashes caked with the dust stirred up by so many feet. Once, as we prepared with our mother to meet yet another matched set of mayor and aldermen, he said to me over the basin of water and towels offered so that we could clean our hands and faces, ‘I don’t know why they cheer. I’ve done nothing to prove myself to them yet.’

‘You’ve missed a streak of dirt, just there.’ I pointed, testing our wonderful intimacy.

‘I promise to reward their hopes,’ his voice said through the towel. His face reappeared, shiny and damp. ‘I must not disappoint them. Their hopes put me in their debt.’

‘You could never disappoint.’ I did not quite dare to push back a lock of hair, darkened with water, which had fallen over his brow.

He shook his head, but smiled with pleasure all the same at my vehemence. ‘Oh, my Elizabella, our father disappoints them already, and he hasn’t yet reached London.’

I shrugged. I still felt too shy to try to tell him how superior he was to our father in every way. Except perhaps in his reported indifference to his books. But then, that was a weakness I shared. I was also thinking how much Henry knew that I did not, and how he lived in a larger world than mine. A little startled by his disrespect towards our father, I was also thinking how much he must trust me to say such things to me. He was looking at me with his serious eyes, warming me, sharing his knowledge and candour with me, his younger sister, as an equal.

Henry?

In my bed, I turned and turned his ring on my finger, remembering how he had given it to me in Scotland, up on the crags above Edinburgh. We were breathless from riding. Henry had brought a young eagle he was training to hunt. He handed the bird to his falconer, then we perched on rocks on the Cat Nick. It was a rare moment of sunshine. The dark dragon island crouching in the Firth of Forth behind us had been brushed with light. The backs of a pair of gulls wheeling and screaming below our feet, flashed white in the sun.

‘We don’t know what waits for us, Elizabella,’ he had said.

‘In England?’

He nodded. Together we watched the neatly folded ears of my favourite greyhound bounce up into view from the long grass of the slope to our right, then disappear again.

‘The king has been quick to send me instruction on how to conduct myself as a prince, but is less generous withinformation about our new country.’ Henry tossed a pebble over the edge of the cliff. ‘The English Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, has written to me offering – if I understand him right through his careful words – to help me learn what I need to know. But he’s preoccupied at this moment with smoothing the accession of our father.’

‘England will be an adventure,’ I said. ‘Won’t you be grateful to escape from Stirling to see more of the world?’

‘Of course.’ He tossed another stone. ‘But I feel the weight of it as well.’

I nodded, but in truth, I felt a pang. Of course, Henry would feel the weight of our new life. He would one day become king of England and Scotland, after our father. I, on the other hand, was merely a daughter, fit only for marrying off to some foreign prince or other. Mrs Hay had not put it so bluntly but that was what she meant about ‘preparing me for my future'.

‘We cannot know the future,’ said Henry. ‘We may hope, but we can’t ever be certain.’

He shifted sideways and reached into the pocket hung inside his breeches. ‘I had these made.’ He showed me two rings, identical except in size, of twisted gold wires, each topped by a small, square gold seal engraved with a ship in full sail.

He put one of the rings on my finger. ‘If ever you are truly afraid, send me this ring.’

He put the second ring on his own hand. ‘And, if I am in need, I will send mine to you. “I am in danger,” the ring will say. “Come at once! I need your help."’

‘I will come!’ I said.

Looking down at our two hands wearing identical rings, I felt myself grow until I was as vast and solid as one of the mountains marching into the distance beyond the city. I became a crouching dragon. I was as strong as the wind that blew at our backs and scoured the clouds from the blue sky. My brother Henry had not only promised me his help if I ever needed it, he believed that I might be able to help him.

We kissed each other gravely to seal our pact.

I am trying, Henry, though you never sent your ring. You may not even know that you need my help.

In the shadows of my bed, I saw him dying under the knives of the friends of my man in the forest. I saw myself clawing at a locked prison door. Then turned into a headless chicken like the one I had seen in the farmyard at Combe, the broken-off head tossed onto the midden, the yellow eye still staring out sideways, the wings flapping as if flight were still possible. Chicken and head, too far apart. Nothing in its proper place. The outlines of the world had wavered like reflections on a pond struck by a stone. A curious dog wandered up to sniff at the head. I had imagined it crunching the head in its teeth and screamed at it to go away.

My golden brother, help me! Be warned, save yourself, but don’t let anyone harm me neither. Lead me forth.

The next morning, breakfast followed prayers, as always. All day, from my high window, I listened to the usual daily sounds of the estate. No men-at-arms came marching down the avenue. No messenger arrived from London on a foam-flecked horse.

If I had imagined that my man in the forest was a spirit, perhaps I had imagined the man as well. Perhaps I was mad.

After supper, I looked into my glass. Pale, yes. A little red around the eyes from lack of sleep. But otherwise as usual.

‘Do you think that mad people know that they are mad?’ I asked Anne.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Well, perhaps… There’s an old mad woman in the village. You could go ask her whethershe knows if she’s mad… or else my aunt would surely know. She knows everything.’