The King's Daughter (48 page)
The silence grew until it seemed to fill my head.
‘Let him see you,’ Tallie’s voice repeated. His eyes were now on my breasts, naked beneath the sheer silk.
I pushed my shift down to my waist.
‘Oh, Lizzie!’ Frederick stared at me, his face bright red. ‘You are entirely the most beautiful thing I have ever seen!’ He fumbled at the hook of his gown. ‘Wait,’ he said urgently, as if I could do anything else. He shed his heavy gown onto the floor like a pelt. His night shirt followed. Naked, he was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I couldn’t breathe.
Naked, he was no longer a boy. Men’s clothing hid more than it revealed, and I’d never quite believed the paintings and statues of warriors and satyrs that littered my world. Now I saw that the clean lines of those rendered muscles were true representations of exquisite fleshly curves and planes.
We walked to meet each other. I felt the extraordinary sensations of a bare male chest touching my nipples. We stood for a moment with our arms around each other, forehead to forehead. Holding on carefully, as if the other might be fragile. I was no longer frightened.
Tallie had been right. There was no difficulty whatsoever. His cock seemed all of a piece with the rest of him, not redor pink but lightly browned like his hands, face and smooth flat belly. Already stiff. He desired me after all. I touched it in wonder, as if it were a new sort of pet I had never stroked before. I would have stroked it again but Frederick groaned and caught my hand.
It seemed that I was wonderful too. Perfect. Beyond belief, beautiful.
He ran wondering fingers down my belly and touched my navel and red-gold bush. ‘I never thought a woman’s tits could be so soft!’ he whispered, cupping them with his warm palms.
His excellent manners and careful watchfulness in a strange world had disguised this woodland creature I now found exploring me with such an open joyful appetite. He was a faun, set free by my permission and by my own eager hunger. A young satyr, still downy with innocence, but a satyr nonetheless. I grew recklessly drunk on his delight, awash with exquisite sensations that even our exploring fingers and snatched kisses had not led me to expect.
There was just one moment of peril, when we looked at each other, like the instant before a leap. Then I opened to him and he found me, as if we had both known exactly what to do, all along.
It hurt far less than I had expected. And the small pain was nothing against the joy of his weight and warmth, there, with me, against my skin, pressing me down. It was nothing when set against our relish in each other. It was nothing compared to my sense that all was suddenly right with the world. Although I was a little sore, he soon entered me again.
Then, feeling pleased with ourselves, we curled damply together. Inhaling our mixed new odours, we suddenly fell asleep, felled by the weight of our day. Thames and Rhine had long ago slunk out the door to await our public daylight selves.
I stretched, deliciously, only half-awake. Every fold in the bed linens stroked me like a caress. During the night, the dogs had found their way back into the room and crept up onto the bed, where they lay in comfortable heaps around our feet.
My leg brushed against Frederick’s warm calf. We pressed the sides of our feet together, my right against his left. His hand fell sleepily onto my bare thigh. His fingertips stroked. His nails scratched lightly.
‘Do that again!’ I begged.
‘This?’ His nails moved over my skin again. He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.
Under the covers, I offered my arm. ‘Oh, yes,’ I murmured.
He swept his nails up my arm, then along the inside of my forearm to the elbow. I shifted position so that he could continue on to my upper arm. In the morning light that seeped between the bed hangings, I saw his beautiful lips curve into a smile.
‘I swear this pleases you more than the other.’ He scratched delicately with his forefinger between my fingers. My forearm again… palm…
‘Perhaps,’ I teased, watching his fingers move on me. ‘Och, Lord! No wonder my dogs love it so!’
‘Roll over.’ He gave me a little push. I turned onto my side with my back to him. He pulled the coverlet close around us to close out the sudden leak of icy air and ran his nails lightly back and forth over my bare shoulders.
I quivered with delight. ‘Again!’ I begged. My skin was the surface of a lake, shivering under a breeze. The sensation spread in tiny rivulets of quicksilver into places I had not known were connected to each other – the muscles under my ears, across the back of my tongue, down my inner arms, into my toes. Time stopped running away with me and shoving me onwards roughly into the next moment. It sat back down on its haunches like a great dog, planting itself exactly where it meant to be.
‘Again,’ I murmured. Every inch of my skin grew urgent, and clamoured, me, too! Me, too! ‘Oh, yes. And a little higher…’ I begged. It was almost too much to bear. I felt him gathering intensity like a river nearing the top of a waterfall.
‘I’ve married a hound,’ he said.
‘Please, don’t stop!’ The sensations were all the more delightful because I could feel his cock pressing against the backs of my thighs, impatient but biding its time.
‘Don’t fear,’ he said.
We heard the latch rattle. The chamber door creaked open, without a warning knock.
‘How are my little turtledoves?’ My father threw the bed hangings open.
Behind him, Anne, in a loose gown and hair awry, held up her hands helplessly. His attending gentlemen had stopped outside the door and pretended to look elsewhere. The dogs scattered off the bed.
We turned and scrambled into a sitting position, clutching the covers up to our chins to hide our nakedness.
‘Well, sir,’ demanded my father. ‘Is it done? Did ye enjoy my daughter?’
We gaped at him.
Anne went out and closed the door behind her.
The king sat heavily on the side of the bed. Frederick pulled back his legs to make room. The king still wore his night gown, with a loose gown over it, and slippers.
‘Are you now my true son-in-law?’
It was the first time, in all his sad history of discomfort in England that I had seen Frederick truly lost for words. His hand reached for mine under the covers. It was as icy as my own.
This was unbearable.
The king leaned closer, speaking slowly and kindly, as if Frederick might otherwise be too simple to understand. ‘Did ye ride her or did ye not?’ He sniffed at the air.
We stared at him, appalled.
He peered closely at us both. ‘Not dumb from disappointment, I hope! Let me see the sheet!’
He yanked the coverlet from our hands. With a yelp, I dived away into the cold sheets on the far side of the bed. Poor Frederick had nowhere to go, and lay exposed to the king’s eyes. He drew up his knees.
My father pushed Frederick’s feet aside and touched the rusty smudge on the linen under-sheet.
‘We could have done with a wee bit more,’ he said. ‘Even your mother produced more blood than that. All that running after your brother like a boy must have shrivelled your maidenhead. But it’s clear enough. The young man performed. Well done, sir.’ He shook Frederick by the hand.
Rage began to rise in me. This is mine! I wanted to scream at him. What I have now is mine! Not yours any longer! I’ve done my part for England.
‘Let’s hope you planted an heir.’ My father pushed down on Frederick’s knee to straighten the leg and dropped his sharp gaze to my poor husband’s cock, now shrivelled with cold. However, my father seemed satisfied.
‘Now, don’t forget that I must agree to the marriage ofthe
bairn.
It will be a Stuart babe, with a grip on the English throne. No matter what backwater you take my daughter off to, remember that the babe is grandchild to the king of England and Scotland, and stands in this royal line after Baby Charles.’
Frederick’s face had darkened to the colour of old leather. His bare chest rose and fell with quick, shallow breaths. His knuckles showed white as ivory through his skin.
I had gone so hot that I thought the coverlets would burst into flame. Danger, danger! I warned myself. You’re so close to escape. Don’t undo it now!
But if my father had troubled himself to look at me then, my eyes would have dropped him stone dead.
‘I will send our royal midwife with you,’ he was telling Frederick. ‘And a nurse, to see that the child is properly reared.’
‘I’m sure they have midwives in Heidelberg!’ I croaked.
My father glanced at me and, surviving my eyes, turned back to Frederick. ‘You’ll need assistance in ruling her, Palsgrave. You’re not built with the stature for the task. Don’t fear. You’ll have my support in the matter.’
Frederick darkened another degree.
I drew breath to speak. Frederick put out his hand to stop me. ‘I thank you, your highness… father… for your kind offer, but we have very fine midwives in Heidelberg. But if Elizab…’ His dark eyes turned to me as if to reassure himself that I was still there.
I gasped. Frederick’s eyes were hot and opaque with anger. I had seen him uneasy, confused, aroused and alarmed, but never angry. This new anger felt as fierce as his desire.
But his voice remained steady. ‘If… my wife… wishes a woman she knows, she shall have her. But only then.’
‘Insolent Protestant pup!’ My father stared back into those suddenly dangerous eyes, his jaw moving as if he were chewing on his tongue. He scratched his jaw, chewed twomore times, then guffawed and clapped Frederick on the shoulder. ‘You’ll need every ounce of that spirit if you hope to ride my Bessie to a standstill.’
He raised himself from the side of the bed. ‘Door!’ he shouted.
When my father had gone, Frederick flung himself back against the pillows and stared straight ahead in silence. I lay watching him, uncertain what to do. Our joy lay shattered around us in knife-edged splinters. I did not know how to pick it up again. I tried to think what to say. I imagined words and rejected them. The moment felt too fragile to test in any way.
The silence grew. Only one thought became clear in my mind.
We spoke the same words at the same time. ‘We must leave England as soon as possible!’
We looked at each other and laughed with renewed delight at this proof that our unity had survived. Then, watching each other as we had done across crowded rooms or dining tables, we raised our hands in our game of mirrors. In unison like a pair of wheeling swifts, we clenched our fists and knocked them against our temples in mock rage and despair, not knowing which of us followed and which of us led.
Weak with relief, I smiled back into Frederick’s eyes, which were no longer opaque. Again they liked what they saw. I was also aware of a new feeling.
Though I already thought him perfect in every way, and had never minded that I was leading and protecting him through the complexities of the English court, Frederick had just surprised me. I felt respect.
Then he leaned over and kissed my nipple. ‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘But we must barricade the door.’
APRIL, 1613 – MARGATE
We had to wait for favourable winds. Lord Admiral Northampton again insisted that I not be allowed to sail on an ill-fated vessel that never wished to be put to sea. But I had vowed to make my escape on the
Prince Royal,
even if not to the Americas. My determination was as great as Henry’s had been to get his ship afloat. Charges of corruption in the Navy and delayed launchings never sank a ship that I knew of.
It was ten years since I left Scotland.
I could not eat for fear that something would still stop us. I had listened in the night for the hoof beats of those skeleton horses. I did not look down into the river as we rowed away from Westminster, imagining that bony hands reached up for me, to twine in my skirts and pull me down to stay with them forever, buried in muddy silt.
The weeks of celebration following our marriage were marred by the financial reckoning. My father had failed to raise enough money from his subjects, as custom allowed, to pay the costs of my marriage. To save money, he dismissed the household he had arranged for my husband so that mostof Frederick’s gentlemen had to leave for Heidelberg at once, without us. Lord Harington found himself out of pocket for the costs of my trousseau. I ran out of the gold rings and other trinkets I was giving as gifts to the followers I would leave behind. I had found one of Carr’s men measuring up my apartments. The Golden Weasel could not wait until I had left England before claiming what had been mine.
‘Please tell your master that I’m amazed he’s willing to wait until I’ve gone!’ I said. ‘Why does he not wheedle and pout and work on the king to have me thrown out at once?’
On the other hand, Bacon’s masque had ended in disaster. Fireworks failed to ignite. Boats were delayed, performers injured. The king left in impatience before the end, ordering Bacon to try again the next day. Then the king refused to attend. Gleeful rumour said that, beforehand, Bacon had refused all offers to help allay the costs, because he wanted full credit with the king and refused to share the glory. The champion of Reason had been undone by unreasoning chance, with no one else to share the blame.
Without the firm guiding hand of Cecil, the affairs of England still limped and changed direction. Bacon was the most able of the king’s advisers but also widely disliked. Frederick and I wanted only to be gone but had to wait on the festivities and the vacillations of the king,
The royal family had travelled together by barge from Whitehall to Greenwich and from there to Rochester.
I said farewell first to my mother, who was setting out on a progress to Bath.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Here we are. As I said – you, going. To Heidelberg.’
I nodded. I laid my hand over the fragment of granite from the Edinburgh crags, tucked into my pocket under my skirts. This time, I had armoured myself.
She kissed me formally and stepped back at once as if my touch burned. She started to leave, then turned back to meagain. She gave me a sly glance. ‘Sometimes, it is possible to exact a small revenge,’ she said with the air of bestowing a parting gift. ‘His majesty does not yet know it, but I have shot Brutus, his favourite dog.’