The Queen's Captive (5 page)

And here, Princess Elizabeth, by order of her sister, Queen Mary, had been kept under house arrest for eight months. The palace had been in sorry disrepair for decades and was now a palace in name only. Its dilapidated medieval buildings rose from the marshy riverbed, a managerial headache of crumbling stone, leaky roofs, and cracked window casements. The place, never meant as a jail, had few doors with locks, so for security reasons the man appointed as the Princess’s custodian, Sir Henry Bedingfield, had lodged her in the gatehouse.

All this, Honor had learned from Thomas Parry, the Princess’s steward, as they conferred at Woodstock’s inn, the Bull. Each had been alerted about the other by Sir William Cecil, and now they were discussing how they might find a way for Honor to get in to see the Princess. They stood at the upstairs hall window overlooking the main street. The Bull’s customers were downstairs at dinner, and the clack of cutlery and whiffs of braised rabbit with leeks drifted up the stairs. Still, Honor and Parry kept their voices low, for they could not risk anyone, guest or servant, wandering by and overhearing. Parry had said he suspected that the village held at least one of the imperial ambassador’s spies keeping a vigilant, hostile eye on the Princess.

“Is she allowed out to walk?” Honor asked.

“Once a day, but only in the garden and always accompanied by guards. Usually by Bedingfield as well.”

Honor looked out at the muddy street where strips of browned snow lay shredded by the ruts. Across the street the parish church of St. Mary Magdalene with its squat, Norman tower stared sternly back at her. Wind keened through its battlements.

“Do they take her to church? The Queen must insist on that, on her sister attending mass.”

“Indeed, but there is a chapel beside her bedchamber. She does not leave the grounds.”

“How many rooms in the gatehouse?”

“Four, counting the chapel. The guardsmen occupy one. Elizabeth is left with just two for herself and the women of her chamber.”

“Any hope there, among her women? Friends to help us from the inside?”

He shook his head. “Both were strictly chosen for their religion. They are the Queen’s women.”

“Jailers themselves,” Honor said grimly. “And no one’s allowed to visit her?”

“No one. Excepting, of course, the Queen’s councilors who come regularly to press her to confess her guilt in the rebellion. Or did until this week. I expect we’ll see them back again after Twelfth Night.”

“May she receive letters?”

“None, unless read and approved by Bedingfield.”

“Books?”

“Only approved religious texts, and only after Bedingfield has leafed through every page for contraband.”

The challenge seemed insurmountable. How was she to advise the Princess when she could neither see her nor communicate with her? The wind hurled gusts of grainy snow against the window like a tempestuous child hurling handfuls of sand, and Honor hugged herself against the chilly draft. A farmer plodded up the street behind his ox, the beast strapped with a load of firewood on each of its bony sides. Christmas was approaching. Honor had hoped to spend it at home in Colchester. In her absence Richard’s sister was overseeing the holiday preparations, and Honor could imagine Joan busily ordering the baking of plum and currant puddings with brandy, while the servants bedecked the great hall with fragrant cedar boughs. But it seemed that she would be stuck in seclusion at the Bull Inn for some time. She felt like a prisoner herself.

At least there was Parry. They had met only this afternoon but already she liked and trusted him. A stout, fleshy, plain-speaking man about her own age, early forties, he had a no-nonsense view of his job and the people around him. He had been Elizabeth’s factotum for years, carefully husbanding her estates, for she owned several homes and was the second largest landholder in the realm. Parry had made the Bull his headquarters and from it he continued to manage her tenants, collect her rents, and protect her deer parks, sending his reports to her through Sir Henry Bedingfield and hoping to one day get in to see her. His devotion to the Princess reminded Honor of Sir William Cecil. So did his pity for her. “My poor young Lady Elizabeth is so lonely, brought so low,” Parry had said with a catch in his voice. Honor observed it with some wonder. How this girl could move men.

“Tell me more about her keeper,” she asked. She knew that Bedingfield was of an ancient Norfolk family, a stoutly Catholic knight, but little else about him.

Parry rolled his eyes. “A pusillanimous donkey. He fears the Queen’s displeasure, fears the council’s disapproval, fears even offending Elizabeth herself. Fears his own fart, I shouldn’t wonder. His solution is to make not the slightest decision without first asking permission of his betters and getting it in writing. Though the oaf can barely read. But he is blindly loyal to the Queen, conspicuously so during the rebellion, for which she rewarded him with Wyatt’s confiscated lands. He’ll go far.”

They talked for some time about the routines of the household, about who came and went, why and how, Honor trying to spot a gap through which she might slip past Bedingfield’s notice. She wondered aloud if she might hide in some delivery cart. “How about deliveries of food?”

“His staff buys here at the village market.”

“
No one
goes in?” she asked, adding in exasperation, “Not the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker?”

He smiled wanly at her jest. “They do, but the guards check every item brought in. Bedingfield’s orders. As far as I can tell, the only thing to enter or leave the gatehouse that is not viewed and searched is the Princess’s smalls.”

Her underclothes? “How so?”

“Bedingfield’s orders, again.” His voice took on the tone of a pronouncement. “All linen brought to Her Grace clean by the laundress is to be delivered to the Queen’s women, and they are to see all fouled linen delivered to the said laundress.”

Honor liked this. A plan, at last.

She had slung the burlap bundle over her shoulder. Wrapped in homespun shawls against the cold, her head lowered under a shawl kerchief, she trudged up the road to the palace, the ruts iron hard with frost this morning. Her borrowed dress was brown as a burr and shapeless as a sack, but it was clean, as befitted her pretended occupation. After her years of soft living, the bristly wool grated her skin like sandpaper, and the borrowed leather shoes, coarse as bacon rinds, were already raising blisters on her heels. She was afraid her wincing would give her away. Could she really hope to deceive these people?

No one stopped and stared at her on the road, at least. A drayman rumbled past in his cart piled with ox hides that stank in the strengthening sun. A grimy little girl and boy with sticks prodded a couple of geese that honked their distress, waddling fast as though to escape the death that no doubt awaited them. A priest trudged past Honor munching a chicken leg. She had to stop for a young shepherd driving sheep out of a muddy lane and then across the road to a half-frozen field. He whistled to his dog and it came tearing past her, splashing muck onto her hem. She tried not to flinch like a lady. Dirt was as routine in these people’s lives as the gnaw of hunger.

She walked up the gentle slope and reached the palace walls. Four guards were stationed at the gate, all decked in Bedingfield’s livery of blue and tawny, complete with his badge of stars over a field of grain. Her heart beat fast as she approached the forward guard.

“Halt there. What’s your business?”

“Laundress, sir. Delivering Her Grace’s smalls.”

He frowned. “The laundress is Meg.” He spread his arms to indicate a woman of more than ample girth.

“My sister. Down with a flux, she is. Poor soul can’t leave her bed. I’m doing the job till she’s better.”

He grunted. Was this a negative or affirmative? Unsure, Honor didn’t move.

“Let’s have a look,” he said, beckoning her to set down the bundle.

She did so, very careful to display its sewn-on Bedingfield badge. The guard poked through the clean, folded underclothes—linen smocks and shifts, detachable linings of bodices, stockings both silk and worsted. Honor hoped there wasn’t some password the laundress had forgotten to tell her. Parry had paid the woman well, but she had been hesitant in instructing Honor, eager for the coins but nervous about the risk. What if there was something she had missed?

“A bloody flux, it is, something awful,” Honor prattled on, hoping to disgust the guard or bore him, anything to nudge him to be done with her. “Bloody mucous running out one end of her, mixed with far worse. And our pease pudding supper chucked up out the other end of her. I can tell you, cleaning up that mess is—”

“Enough of that,” he said, making a face. He retied the bundle roughly, apparently satisfied. But then said, “The chamberlain said nothing about Meg.”

“It came on her in the night, sir. You can tell his lordship yourself. Unless you’d rather have me go away and leave Her Grace without her underclothes.”

“Don’t be daft.” He waved to his fellow guard to open the gate.

In for a penny, in for a pound,
Honor thought as the gate creaked open. “As I don’t know the way, sir, could you tell me where I’m to take these to Her Grace?”

He gave her directions, and she walked through, careful not to hurry, to plod on like a working woman who was far from eager to get to her chores.

She had made it in.

The courtyard, surrounded by its jumble of decaying buildings and neglected gardens, was in a sorry state. The palace had been built over springs that left a spongy marsh of melted ice and a stench of swamp grass. Pigs snorted from a pen notched into the crumbling wall. Honor could smell them, along with pungent cow dung. Some soldiers lounged under an archway, talking quietly, a couple of them playing cards at a table while another tweedled a tune on a pipe. Two servant women ambled past Honor, gossiping, carrying baskets of kitchen refuse toward the pig pen. In the center of the courtyard a scullery boy hauled a bucket up from the well, jumping back as he sloshed water on his foot. On the far side, a blacksmith’s fire sparked beside a farrier who held a steaming horseshoe in his tongs and bent over the raised hoof of a dappled gelding. Somewhere, a dog was barking.

Honor wasn’t interested in the courtyard society. Her focus was the gatehouse. She found the archway the guard had described in a two-story tower, and then the stairs, a rickety affair. She hadn’t gone halfway up the stairs when she heard a woman’s angry shout in the rooms above her.

“Go! Get out!”

Following the voice, Honor carried on to the top and through a door, and reached a vacant room that was musty smelling but had a stately aspect with an ornate carved ceiling painted blue and gold. A council chamber in the time of King Henry VII, Parry had told her. Her mind flicked back to the gorgeous gilded ceiling of the great banqueting hall at Hampton Court during her days as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine. She was seventeen when she had arrived at Henry VIII’s court, wide-eyed at its splendors. It seemed a lifetime ago.

The room was empty but she heard the voice beyond it shout again: “Leave my sight!”

She went on through to the next room, a bedchamber, and saw a middle-aged man on his knees, cringing, and a young woman with a furious red face. She hurled a book at him, yelling,
“Out!”
He ducked the book and clambered to his feet and scurried past Honor, escaping. A servant, she saw from his livery. The young woman wore fine green velvet.

So this was Princess Elizabeth. A red-faced shrew.

Honor kneeled in her presence.

“The man’s a toad,” Elizabeth snapped, her angry gaze sweeping over Honor as though she were a sack of apples. “I ask for Cicero and get the Epistles of Saint Paul!”

Honor saw they were not alone. The room held two more women, one dark haired and plump, the other sallow and frizzy haired, both well dressed. Ladies. The sallow one bent to pick up the offending book, saying with weary forbearance, “You already have Cicero, my lady.”

“I have
De Natura Deorum,
” was Elizabeth’s withering reply. “It’s the
De Officiis
I want.”

The dark-haired lady was looking directly at Honor. “Who’s this? What’s your business, woman?”

Honor repeated her story, still kneeling. They barely listened; none of them seemed to care. The lady who had spoken to her motioned impatiently for her to rise, then took Honor’s laundry bundle and dumped it on the bed. The other joined her to see to the linen. Their ages fell somewhere between that of Honor and that of the Princess. Both were smooth of voice and movement, gentlewomen of the court.

Elizabeth flopped down in a chair and stretched out her long legs. “When’s dinner?” she groaned, closing her eyes tightly as though to mitigate a headache.

The ladies, sorting the clean underclothes, did not answer. They were serving in duty to their families, friends of the Queen, not the Princess. Their courtesy barely stretched as far as civility.

Honor knew she didn’t have long. Time to make her move. Her fist tightened around the folded slip of paper she had brought. She got to her feet and walked directly toward Elizabeth.

“Here! What are you doing?” the sallow lady said.

“The foul linen, if you please, your ladyship.” Honor pointed to a wicker basket full of jumbled clothes. Her foot was inches away from Elizabeth’s. “Am I not to take it away?”

“Those are rags for the poor, fool. Come here. I’ll give you your load.”