Kitabı oku: «The King’s Daughter», sayfa 2
I hobbled on. Now I had to return to my attendants and try to lie.
Trey raced up covered with mud and bits of dead leaf from rolling on the ground. Then he galloped ahead and back again, reproaching me for my slowness.
I had been such a fool!
If only our thoughts could leap across distances.
Take care, beloved brother. Take care! I don’t know where you are. I don’t even know what I must warn you about.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ my would-be kidnapper had said. Please, God, let someone tell me what is happening.
Henry and I had been kept apart from birth, he at Stirling Castle under the rod of Lord Mar, I at Dunfermline and Linlithgow with Lady Kildare. But when we met at Holyrood before coming south to England, we had recognised each other as true kin in our first shy glance. Henry, who would one day be king, would know what I should do next.
Are you still alive?
It did not seem possible that Combe would still be standing when we got back.
On the riverbank, the grooms were asleep on the grass. Lady Anne Dudley Sutton, a niece chosen by my guardian to be my chief companion, was making a necklace of plaited grass.
‘What has happened to you?’ cried one of the two older ladies with the beginning of alarm.
‘Twisted my ankle,’ I said. ‘Slipped from a fallen log.’ Only half a lie.
The ladies clicked their tongues over my ankle and promised a poultice. They exchanged amused glances while they re-pinned my sleeves and skirt without further questions. This time, at least, past misbehaviour worked in my favour.
To my relief both my guardian and his wife were away when we returned to Combe and would not return that night. But I had to let Mrs Hay resume her former role as my nurse, and order my fire built higher and fuss over my ankle with cool cloths and ointments. I agreed to eat my supper propped up on pillows in my big canopied bed. I stroked the four upright carved oak lions that held up the canopy and protected me from bad dreams. But tonight they stared past me with blank, denying eyes.
There was no help for it, I decided as I tried to force down some pigeon pie. I must risk implicating myself with guilty knowledge and warn Henry. If any harm came to him that might have been avoided, I would have to kill myself after all. I would not let myself think that the harm might already be done. I pushed aside the chicken broth. I asked Anne to fetch my pen and ink.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ the man in the forest had said. He was right. My life was being shaped by events I might know nothing about until it was too late. But I knew enough to know that my father’s demons had followed us here to his Promised Land and threatened both Henry and me.
3
When I was younger, Mrs Hay had often put me to bed with tales that kept me wide awake in the dark for hours, tales even more terrifying than the servants’ whispers of a ghostly abbot who sometimes stalked through my bed-chamber, which had once been his.
Vivid against the shadowy canopy overhead, I saw the sword tip held to my grandmother’s pregnant belly while my father still lay curled inside. My grandfather’s sword tip, threatening his own wife and unborn son. My father almost killed by his own father, Lord Darnley, while he was still in the womb. Then I saw Darnley murdered, his twisted body blown out of his bed by a mysterious explosion, lying dead under an apple tree. I saw my grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scotland, beheaded because Protestant Queen Elizabeth believed her guilty of plotting with Catholics to usurp the English crown.
‘Papists,’ whispered Mrs Hay. ‘The devilish spawn of Rome.’ She kept her voice down because my Danish mother was a Catholic and one never knew who might be listening. But she did not hesitate to call my Grandmother Mary by her Scottish nickname—‘The Strumpet of Rome’.
I learned that there had been two Catholic plots against my father here in England, before his backside had even touched the English throne. The Bye and The Main, I repeated silently to myself.
When very young, I did not understand. Then, shortly after we came south, I had lost my own sweet governess, Lady Kildare. Her husband had plotted to kill my father in one of the Catholic plots. Though he was executed, she had survived. But my lovely, lively guardian, whom I loved dearly and who held my young heart in her care as tenderly as a mother, was wrenched from my life for fear that I might catch treason from her like the plague. I learned then about the bloody struggle between Papists, who were still loyal to the Catholic Pope in Rome, and the newer Protestants, a struggle set off in England by the old queen’s father, Henry VIII, my brother’s namesake.
‘Holy Mother, protect me!’ my forest spirit had cried.
It was happening again.
If anyone learned of our meeting—or even of his intent—I was tainted by treason for a second time. And I knewenough from Mrs Hay to be afraid of more than Papists.
My father’s demon enemies were here in England, like the supernatural fanes and trowies who are invisible until they show themselves. In the dreams I had after my nurse’s stories, I saw devils riding on skeleton horses, the faces of dead men taking shape in the dust of the road. The sons of executed men clung to my father’s back whispering vengeance in his ear. No River Jordan cut off his English Paradise to leave all his Scottish ghosts behind, shouting impotently and shaking their fists on the far bank. They rode south with him.
I knew from Mrs Hay that my father still searched his closet himself, every night before going to bed, for hidden assassins and still wore a doublet cross-quilted with thick padding to stop a knife. The fine embroidery over his chest and belly was laid with enough metal wire to dull any blade.
I don’t know if Mrs Hay ever saw what else she was teaching me along with respect for my father’s youthful courage. I couldn’t think what wires or quilted padding could armour him against knowing that he had accepted the English throne from the woman who signed his own mother’s death warrant. My father had acquiesced to the death of my grandmother…his own mother. How could his children feel safe?
4
I tossed in the darkness. In spite of the poultice, my ankle throbbed. Having written the letter to Henry, I didn’t know where to send it. At different times, I had heard that the king had lodged him at Oatlands, Windsor, Richmond and Whitehall.
When the sky began to lighten the next morning but before the sun rose, I struggled into a loose gown and cloak and limped out of the house to the Combe stables. They were still dark, although a few horses had begun to stamp and bump in their stalls. I tiptoed unevenly through the dusty air and smells of horse and hay to find my groom, Abel White, who had ridden with me from Scotland and with whom I had once played in the Dunfermline stables.
He was asleep in a cocoon of blankets in the box stall of one of my mares. I shook him awake.
He groaned, then peered. ‘My lady!’
‘I need you to serve me on a secret mission,’ I whispered. My breath made a pale cloud in the chilly air.
His sleepy eyes widened. He scrambled to his feet. ‘Gladly! Yes, your grace. Always!’
My mare, Wainscot, stamped her feet, whuffled and nuzzled hopefully at the side of my neck.
‘It’s too early for your breakfast,’ I pushed her away and gave Abel my letter to Henry. ‘No one but Prince Henry must see this. I’m trusting you with my life.’
He nodded seriously. ‘I will protect it with my own.’ He put the letter into his purse, then hooked his jacket tightly over the purse.
As if I were one of the sparrows perched on the beams above our heads, I saw the two of us, there in the shadows of the horse barn, barely grown, now echoing in deadly earnest the adventure games we had once played together as children.
‘Take Clapper,’ I said. ‘He’s strongest.’ I gave him a purse holding most of my precious half-yearly allowance from Lord Harington. ‘Use this to hire another horse if he grows too tired and to stable him well.’
I watched while he saddled up Clapper, a solid, roan Ardennais gelding strong enough to carry an armoured man. Then he led the horse out into the stable yard.
The sky had now committed itself to the day. I held the reins and leaned against Clapper’s strong, warm neck to stop my shivering while Abel went to make his excuse to a fellow groom for missing the morning chores.
‘There you are!’ Wearing a cloak over her night-dress, my companion, Anne Dudley, picked her way towards me across the brick paving, looking both rumpled and alarmed. ‘I woke up and saw that you were gone! Vanished! Nowhere in the room! I couldn’t think where you had gone…my heart is still thumping! I thought perhaps your injuries had suddenly worsened and you had died in the night. Or else been kidnapped from the bed.’
I looked at her sharply but saw only worry in her blue eyes. ‘Would you like to come with me for an early morning ride?’ I asked. ‘To watch the sun rise?’
Accustomed by now to my sudden fancies, she shivered. ‘I’d rather go back to bed, your grace.’
Abel came out of the horse barn.
‘I’ve said I’m going for an early ride,’ I told him in Scots, with a glance over my shoulder at Anne retreating across the yard.
Abel looked worried and jerked his head back at the barn. ‘I’ve told them I’m riding on an errand for you but not where or why.’ He continued in Scots to confuse any curious Warwickshire ears inside the barn.
I nodded. I’d untangle our stories later. I stroked Clapper’s muzzle until Anne had disappeared again through the stable yard gate.
‘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 my shoes 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 on our 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 with information 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 whether she knows if she’s mad…or else my aunt would surely know. She knows everything.’
When the late, falling sun had shrunk to a small hot red coin just above the horizon, and I was pacing the muddy gardens with Anne trotting after me, I heard hoof beats on the avenue.
If they had come to arrest me, I would be ready. I was waiting in dry petticoat and clean shoes, still a little breathless, when Lord Harington sent for me a short time later, to come to his study.
I was not mad, after all.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
