The Tournament (4 page)

Elsie and I lingered outside the palace under the watchful gaze of our two chaperones, our six guardsmen and seven recently beheaded traitors mounted on spikes above the gates.

The angry roars of a bear being baited rose from a nearby alley, followed by the cheers of a crowd. I peered into the alley and saw the poor animal: it was a mighty beast chained by the neck to a stake lodged in the ground and it bellowed with impotent rage as two mastiffs attacked it, drawing chunks from its hide. The bear managed to hit one of the dogs with a lusty swipe, and the dog went flying with a yelp into a wall, where it collapsed in a heap, mortally wounded. As it lay dying, another mastiff was released to take its place. The crowd cheered even more loudly.

Mrs Ponsonby was predictably appalled. ‘I thought Englishmen were made of better stuff than this. Come, girls. Avert your eyes.’

On this rare occasion, I found myself agreeing with her.

After our short stop at Whitehall, we proceeded apace to Dover and thence across the Channel to Calais.

From there, at Mr Ascham’s suggestion, we all changed into garments that were decidedly less colourful than the attire we had worn across southern England. Elsie and I wore plain cassocks and skirts without farthingales (which I must say made movement considerably easier). With her graceful neck, blonde hair and nubile body, Elsie still managed to look angelic even in that crude smock.

Mrs Ponsonby puckered her lips in outrage when Mr Ascham made her don a plain brown travelling cloak. Her blue one, he said, was not appropriate for an overland journey across the Continent—dressing so would almost certainly attract the attention of bandits. Elsie could barely contain her delight at this exchange.

Mr Ascham dressed for our journey in a fashion that I feel warrants further description.

In Hertfordshire he always wore the stiff formal attire of a gentleman: ruff, gown, bulging breeches and stockinged feet. But now he donned an outfit that was decidedly different: full-length brown trousers of a sturdy weave, knee-high brown riding boots and a brown jerkin made of tough Spanish leather. Over this he draped a longcoat of oiled black canvas that reached all the way to his ankles. On his head he placed a broad-brimmed brown hat that seemed impervious to rain.

All this gave my beloved schoolmaster a far more rugged appearance than that to which I was accustomed. He looked more like an explorer or an adventurer than a little girl’s teacher from Hertfordshire.

He looked harder, rougher, and perhaps even a little dashing.

We made good progress through France.

Although nominally my father was the King of France, such an appellation seemed a sore point to the local inhabitants, so we travelled through the lands of the Franks incognito, disguising our status to the extent that we did not even stay overnight in the homes of royal relatives.

Instead we lodged at taverns and public houses which were usually foul-smelling and rancid places not suitable for dogs let alone human beings. On a handful of occasions—yes, it’s true!—we even slept in our wagons by the side of the road while our guards stood watch in the firelight.

While I’d been somewhat saddened at Whitehall by the entertainments of my fellow Englishmen, I was shocked by the ways of the French countryfolk: at their wanton drinking and revelling, and their appalling personal hygiene. A man would piss into the gutter and then immediately use his unwashed hands to grasp a chicken leg and eat it.

I mentioned this to my teacher, asking what such sights could possibly add to my royal education.

‘Bess,’ he said. ‘The majority at court may not think that you will ever sit on the throne of England, but in matters of succession one should never discount even the most remote heir. Should Edward catch smallpox and Mary, with her zealous faith, put the court offside, then you will find yourself Queen of England, Ireland and France. And if you do, then the education you receive from me will be decisive in whether or not you are a
good
queen of England. This journey will be the easiest lesson I shall ever give you, for all you have to do is watch. Watch and observe the customs, activities and proclivities of real people, for it is real people over whom a king or queen rules.’

Although not entirely convinced, I said that I would do so.

Each evening, wherever we happened to be staying, Mr Ascham and Mr Giles would play chess. Usually Mr Giles won, but not before the game had lasted some time and only a few pawns and the kings remained on the board. I would often retire before they finished.

One day I asked my teacher why, if Mr Giles was such a highly regarded chess player, he needed to play every evening.

Mr Ascham said, ‘It is especially important that Mr Giles keep his mind fresh and alert. Playing chess is no different from any other sport. As with jousting or archery, one must keep one’s muscles practised and prepared.’

‘Sport? You call chess a sport?’

‘Why, of course!’ Mr Ascham seemed shocked. ‘It is the greatest of all sports, for it pits the player against his foe on an absolutely equal footing. Size is no advantage in chess. Nor is age or even—young miss—gender. Both players have the same pieces, which all move in accordance with the same rules. Chess is the sport of sports.’

‘But a sport is a physical activity. Must not the definition of a sport be that a player is made weary from the exertions involved in its play or at least perspires while engaging in it? Chess is but a parlour game which fails on both counts.’

‘A parlour game! A
parlour
game!’ Mr Ascham exclaimed indignantly. But instead of arguing the matter further with me, he simply nodded in acquiescence. ‘All right. Let us accept your definition for now, and from our observations of the upcoming tournament, let us see if chess qualifies as a sport in accordance with it.’

While they played their nightly matches, Mr Ascham and Mr Giles would converse casually—discussing that day’s journey or the rise of Martin Luther or any other matter that took their interest.

I admired the easy way they chatted. They were, quite simply, good friends: so comfortable with each other that they could talk about anything, from honest advice to criticism. One day, as I rode on Mr Ascham’s horse with him, I asked him how and when he and Mr Giles had become friends.

My teacher laughed softly. ‘We were both hopelessly in love with the same girl.’

‘You were rivals and now you are the best of friends? I don’t understand.’

‘She was a local debutante and the most beautiful girl in all of Cambridge.’ Mr Ascham shook his head. ‘Beautiful but also wilful. Giles and I were students, brash and young. We competed shamelessly for her affections—I with awful love poems, he with flowers and wit—and she happily accepted
both
of our advances before she ran off and married the heir to a vast estate who turned out to be a drunk and a fool and who eventually lost all his lands to a moneylender. I don’t know what became of her but out of our combined failure Giles and I became firm friends.’

‘And now he teaches at Cambridge?’

‘Yes. Secular philosophy. William of Occam, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, that sort of thing.’

‘And he is a bachelor like you, is he not?’ I asked, trying my best to sound innocent. Elsie was particularly curious about this. She thought Mr Giles quite fetching, ‘in an intellectual kind of way’.

‘Indeed he is,’ Mr Ascham said, ‘but unlike me, not by choice. Giles was married once—to the daughter of his philosophy professor, a brilliant and delightful girl named Charlotte Page. Charlotte’s father allowed her to sit in on his lectures, hiding at the back of the room, and thus she learned everything the boys did. She was a match for any of them and Giles simply adored her. They married, but a year after they were wed, she took ill with the plague and died at the age of twenty-one. Giles has shown no interest in courting since.’

I looked over at Mr Giles riding on his horse nearby, staring idly at the landscape, lost in thought, and I wondered if he was thinking about her. ‘Poor Mr Giles.’

Mr Ascham smiled grimly. ‘Yes. But then, is it better to love deeply and truly for a short while than to never love at all?’

I didn’t know. At that stage in my life, boys were an oddity. Whereas only a year before I had found them annoying, now I found them intriguing. The idea of actually loving one, however, was a vague notion at best.

‘Is this why you are a bachelor?’ I asked. ‘Are you waiting for a similar all-abiding love?’

‘I may well be,’ my teacher said. ‘But the real reason is that I have certain projects I wish to complete before I settle down.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, for one thing, you.’

AT LENGTH WE VENTURED ACROSS BURGUNDY
, through the Rhine Valley, and into the lands of the Habsburgs.

Moving in a wide arc around the mountains that guard the Swiss Confederation, we passed through thick forests and spectacular valleys and beheld the soaring castles of the Germanic nobility.

I imagine that I travelled with a permanent expression of wonder on my face—every day of our journey brought new sights, new peoples, new cultures.

In the Habsburg lands, our lodgings improved. Through a labyrinthine network of intermarriage that not even the Astronomer Royal could calculate, my father’s family had many distant relatives in these parts and it was their hospitality that we enjoyed. (It did not escape my notice that in France, where my father was supposedly king, we had moved with stealth and caution, while in the Germanic regions, where he held no such title, we travelled openly and freely.)

We stayed in grand country houses and sometimes in castles perched on hilltops, and we ate according to our station once again: roasted venison, manchet, red deer pasties and some of the most delightful gingerbreads. To the evident disapproval of our chaperones, on one occasion Mr Ascham and Mr Giles partook of Rhenish, a strong German wine (and I know that Elsie managed to quickly quaff a glass of the stuff, too). All three of them complained of stinging headaches the next morning. The pious Ponsonbys drank only pear cider and suffered no such ills.

The further eastward we travelled, however, the more we stayed at the taverns and
Bierhallen
found in the mining towns of Bavaria. Here Mr Giles would play chess against talented locals while we observed or ate.

I watched these games keenly, utterly enthralled, while Mrs Ponsonby knitted calmly by my side, outwardly uninterested but in truth, ever watchful.

Elsie, on the other hand—and it must be said, she was quite easily bored—would sometimes watch, but more often she would disappear to our rooms or to some other place I knew not where. And just as Elsie didn’t care for Mrs Ponsonby, Mrs Ponsonby didn’t care about Elsie: ‘My job is to watch over you and you alone, Elizabeth,’ she said to me once. ‘I leave it to our good Lord to save the soul of that little slut.’

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Mr Giles play. He was a most inventive and clever player.

Some evenings, he would give me lessons in chess. Like many inexperienced players, I was always using my queen to carve great swathes through his pieces, but then he would invariably take my rampaging lady with a knight I had not seen coming. Many times he would take her after checking my king with that same knight, a move he called a
fork
.

‘The knight is the queen’s greatest enemy,’ he told me at one tavern, ‘for while the queen can replicate every other piece’s moves, she cannot mimic the knight’s leaps. Thus, whenever you move your queen, always keep an eye out for a knight’s fork. Never let her land on a square that will allow an enemy knight to take her and your king at once. It is the amateur player’s greatest mistake.’

After watching him play many games, I began to notice that Mr Giles used two kinds of openings, rarely deviating from them. When I asked my teacher why this was so, he explained that Mr Giles was ‘controlling the centre of the board’ and ‘providing a foundation for later attacks’. I just liked taking pieces.

When he played with me, Mr Giles would often say, ‘Now, Bess, in chess, never play the pieces, play your opponent. Watch his eyes, watch for the moments when he blinks excessively, or when he holds his breath: for those are the times when your foe is planning something. Likewise, control your own expressions, because in life as in chess, your face can betray your intentions.’ As he said this, he gave me a meaningful look: ‘This is especially important for queens and princesses.’

He smiled. I smiled back. I liked Mr Giles.

Mr Giles also laid fiendish traps for his opponents and, again, after watching him play many times, I began to see when he laid them. On those occasions, I would wait tensely for him to spring his trap (and true to his own dictum, he never let his facial expression give away his intentions).

His chief trap occurred when his opponent castled. On seeing this, Mr Giles would casually position his queen in front of one of his bishops and wait for his moment.

Then just when his opponent thought the game was moving on to a new phase, Mr Giles would strike like a cobra. His queen would rush diagonally across the length of the board until she stood nose to nose with her rival king and, protected by her trusty bishop far behind her, Mr Giles would quietly say, ‘Checkmate.’