Elizabeth, Captive Princess E-Book

Margaret Irwin

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Elizabeth I Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 437

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

July, 1553. Sibling rivalry has never been more tumultuous and perilous than between the daughters of King Henry VIII. Queen Mary Tudor has just won possession of the throne, but her younger half-sister - the beautiful and vivacious Princess Elizabeth - holds the hearts of the people. Knowing this, Mary banishes her sibling to a country retreat, determined to keep her as far away from court life and any powerful supporters she has there as possible. But Mary's health is fading fast and her power beginning to crumble. The people of England are crying out for a new monarch and it seems, at last, they may have their wish and crown their beloved Bess as queen .

Leseprobe

Praise for Margaret Irwin1

‘One of Britain’s most accomplished historical novelists.

Her love and respect for the past shines through every page’

Sarah Dunant, author of Sacred Hearts

‘Accomplished, fluent, graceful, picturesque and very readable’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Kind, courageous and fertile; it mingles history and romance with such spirit’

The Observer

‘Beautifully and evocatively written, this is historical writing at its best’

Historical Novels Review

‘Splendidly retold … the strange drama in this writer’s skilful hands has a strong romantic appeal’

Daily Telegraph

‘An evocative historical writer … her writing style brings the period to life’

My Weekly Magazine

Elizabeth, Captive Princess

MARGARET IRWIN

Contents

Title Page

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

About the Author

By Margaret Irwin

Copyright

Elizabeth, Captive Princess

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The fields were deep and ruddy with uncut corn, the orchards heavy with ripening fruit. Set in their coloured ring, the courtyard of the great house at Hatfield lay quivering in the dancing light reflected off stone and brick and smooth cobbles. The waiting horses stamped and champed their bits, clanked their harness, tossed their heads, shook off the clustering flies that rose in angry clouds only to sink and settle again, sent their shrill whinnyings spinning up into the sunlight, complaining to each other that yet again their young lady was late.

The subdued voices of the men standing at their heads grumbled in concert with them and the buzz of the disturbed flies; the men had scurried and sweated to get themselves and their mounts ready on the instant they had been ordered, and here they had been banging about in this courtyard for the past half-hour at least. What could the girl be doing to keep them all dangling like this? Surely she didn’t need to titivate all this time in order to ride and see her brother before he died? For most of them there knew or guessed by now what message had been brought by the rider in Duke Dudley’s livery who had urged his spent horse into this courtyard an hour or so ago, slid from the saddle rubbing his sleeve across a face dripping with sweat, and demanded to see the Lady Elizabeth.

She had seen him, she had given order that an escort was to make ready on the instant to ride with her to London; she herself, but just returned from riding in the great park, would not wait even to change her dress. Had she changed her mind instead? since she did that almost as often. But would a girl of nineteen be so heartless, and one so fond of her young half-brother, and he the King? No one had said openly that King Edward lay seriously ill in his palace at Greenwich, but that was the noise in London, and noises from London travelled fast.

The noises in the courtyard hummed and heaved; they killed off King Edward easily enough, a sickly boy who was always having colds and had been worked too hard at his books, though some murmured sympathetically that it was a pity, for the lad had shown a great keenness for sport since Duke Dudley had taken charge of him. Some of them put his much elder half-sister, the Lady Mary, on the throne, and supposed she’d down the Duke and bring back the old religion. Some thought the Duke would make a bid to keep his place by setting up her cousin, the little Lady Jane Grey, instead as Queen, in the name of the new Protestant faith; he’d just married her off to his younger son, Guildford, which looked as though he had been planning some such move. Others again said if England must keep a Protestant sovereign, why not their Lady Elizabeth, own half-sister to the King instead of mere cousin? and a likely lass with a fine taste in horseflesh, for all she had kept them stewing and sweating in this leaden cup of a courtyard where the sun poured down like molten brass.

The murmurs and questions buzzed in the hot air, and then at last there was a stir within the silent house.

A door banged somewhere. A voice called. Steps were heard running up and down the stairs. The great doors were flung wide, opening a dark cool hollow in the glare of white heat. The Steward of the Household, Mr Thomas Parry, came out puffily, blinked like an owl at the sunlight, turned his back on it and bowed low.

The men in the courtyard could just see a slight figure moving towards them like a shadow through the dim recesses of the hall; a girl in a grey dress came out to the top of the steps and there stood still, the sun beating down on her sparkling red hair and the winking jewels and buttons of her cap and riding-dress. There she stood and stared, her eyes narrowing in a face grown suddenly thin and white; stared, not at the brilliant coloured scene before her, but at a hidden danger just come to light in the sun. Her eyes closed against it, her face shut into a mask.

Suddenly it flashed open. ‘Take away the horses,’ she called out in a clear and ringing voice where the note of command could not quite disguise an undertone of terror. ‘Take them all away. I’m not going.’

There was a rustle of amazement, of alarm. Mr Thomas Parry asked with obsequious anxiety if anything were wrong.

‘I – think – so,’ was the baffling reply.

‘Is Your Grace not feeling well?’

She turned her eyes towards him with a look that might mean gratitude. She paused, then nodded, then swayed, then put out a groping hand, and the long fingers clutched his arm so sharply that he winced.

‘Yes, that is it. I feel giddy. Take me back to my room, Parry. Tell them I am ill. I cannot ride to London. I am going to bed.’

She turned and went back, leaning helplessly upon his arm, and their retreating figures disappeared within the dim cool cave of the hall. The great doors were shut to.

The men in the courtyard looked at each other, nodded, swore softly. Their young lady had changed her mind again. What did it mean? Was she ill? Was it a sham? She could always be ill if she’d a mind to, they fancied. But why should she have a mind to, now, when her brother who loved her best in the world lay at the point of death?

‘A hard-hearted young bitch,’ the Duke’s messenger muttered as he took horse again to ride back with the news – and no doubt the Duke would give him small thanks for it. ‘The boy longed to see his sweet sister once again’ – that was the moving message he had brought. But it had only moved her for a moment – and then she had gone to bed.

He cursed and rode out of the courtyard. The men left it to lead their horses back to the stables. Soon it was emptied of all life and noise, even of the flies, and became a barrenly blazing cup of silence, and sunlight reflected on the stones, until the shadows lengthened over it and the dusk deepened into dark and the moon rose.

And next day, and the day after, the sun rose hot and bright again, and there was the noise of men and horses again outside the house. But the Lady Elizabeth stayed in bed.

CHAPTER TWO

The room was filled with silence and the July sunshine. No birds sang in the midday heat outside the many windows. All those made to open were pushed wide; the small leaded panes of the others threw a chess-board of shadow on the gleaming floor. One was clouded by a tall fir, blue as thunder; not a leaf fluttered its carved shadow.

Suddenly the bright hush was shattered into fragments; an uproar crashed in through the windows, pealing, clashing, ringing, echoing, carillon after carillon of rejoicing bells.

With that, came a furious movement from between the white and scarlet bed-curtains, drawn back like the furled sails of a ship. The creature who had lain there motionless and wary, breathing an eager life into the stillness, sprang forward, tossing a cloud of fiery hair, fine as blown silk, round her white face and thin shoulders. Rage compressed her lips; the pupils of her pale eyes narrowed like a frightened cat’s, but rage conquered fear, she lunged sideways across the looped curtain, snatched up a little silver bell and shook it. In case its tinkle should not have the required effect, she yelled.

There came the clattering uneven sound of tight shoes running in a monstrous hurry. In came a tall angular woman of about forty. Her long nose was inquisitive, her mouth anxious, but her eye irrepressibly lively.

‘Hell-Cat!’ said a voice from the bed, vibrant as the twang of a lute, ‘what the devil is the meaning of that din?’

‘The Hatfield church bells are all ringing too,’ stammered the Hell-Cat; ‘we thought – we didn’t dare not to ring them in the house-chapel—’

‘We? Who are “we”, you Ash-Cat?

The Ash-Cat did not answer.

‘Stop them at once.’

‘Your Grace – is it safe? Duke Dudley is sure to hear of it. And by the same token, was it wise to yell – I mean, to call so loud? I have told everyone that the Lady Elizabeth is practically at death’s door.’

The Lady Elizabeth ducked abruptly over the side of the bed, snatched up a book that had slid to the floor of the dais and flung it against a closed door. Cat Ashley knew when to go.

‘Ding dong, ding dong,’ rang the bells.

‘Ding dong, ding dong,’ sang the girl in a spasm of desperate merriment, and she chanted in time to them,

‘Long live Queen Jane,

Will Jane long reign?

Long live Queen Jane,

How long—?’

The bells stopped in the middle of a peal. The abrupt silence quivered over the sunlit room with an effect disruptive and shocking, like sudden death.

Mrs Ashley had carried out her orders, and the bells in the house-chapel had ceased to ring for Queen Jane. That made no odds; they were still ringing for her all through the countryside, proclaiming her Queen as soon as King Edward was proclaimed dead.

But had he really only just died, today, as announced? Had he really sent that sweet, compelling message to her two days ago, using his old childish nickname for her? Why had she suddenly felt certain, as she faced the blaze of sunlight in the courtyard, that her brother was already dead, that the message was a trap, baited by his guardian Duke Dudley, to get the King’s sisters into his power before he had to announce the King’s death?

Had Mary swallowed the bait and obeyed her summons to her dying brother? It would be just like her! Poor Mary was always gullible. Elizabeth with smug thankfulness snuggled beneath the sheet. But it could not protect her long. And everything depended on what had happened to Mary. Was she, the rightful Queen, now clapped in the Tower? If so, how long would it be before her rightful heir, the Lady Elizabeth, would be made to join her? All these questions tossed to and fro, ding dong, ding dong, as though the bells were still echoing through the silence.

The silence grew; it weighed on the aromatic air like a thundercloud.

Elizabeth flung herself back on the pillows, plucking nervously at the gold threads embroidered on her linen night-shift, saw that she had unpicked half a butterfly and jerked forward again, pulled out a gold box from the back of the bed and began to eat sweets voraciously. Crisply sugared rose-leaves, primroses and violets, fruit suckets, sticky cloying marchpane, she crammed them all into her mouth indiscriminately; then when they got too much even for her sweet tooth, she helped herself from a dish of wild strawberries by the bed, her long pointed fingers pouncing on several at a time and dropping one on the linen sheet so that it made a small stain like blood, at which she chuckled. How Cat would grumble under her breath!

The footsteps were coming back again, tiptoeing almost as noisily as they had pattered before. They were being followed by a heavy shambling tread. ‘Is there a bear in the house?’ Elizabeth demanded of herself, and thrust the box back well behind the pillows. ‘Come in,’ she breathed in an all but extinct voice. The door opened softly.

‘The doctor!’ was sounded on a solemn note.

Mrs Ashley stepped warily into the room, followed by Dr. William Turner. He began in a blurring north-country voice on what he had evidently prepared: ‘I grieve that my Lady Elizabeth’s Grace should find herself indisposed. Youth, health and summer should travel hand in hand.’

It was too much for the Lady Elizabeth’s logic. ‘On the contrary,’ she whispered, ‘the plague is rife in summer.’

‘Plague?’ Dr. Turner stopped dead in the middle of the room, petrifying into a black pear-shaped block. From over his head Mrs Ashley opened aghast eyes.

‘Have you any swelling under the armpit?’ asked Dr. Turner presently, quite forgetting the ‘Grace.’

‘Swellings all over me,’ Elizabeth replied promptly.

One of Mrs Ashley’s eyes shut quickly, in time to a slight shake of the head.

The invalid tossed feverishly, and turned her head away. ‘Sometimes it’s in my throat, sometimes under my jaw. My whole face has blown up like a swine-bladder for a football – it’s gone down now,’ she added hastily as she felt Dr. Turner’s protuberant eyes revolving over her pointed profile, thin as the slip of the new moon. She varied the symptoms. ‘I am hot as fire – it is the fever.’

‘It is the sun,’ grunted Dr. Turner, now advancing, but still rather cautiously; ‘this room is transparent to it. More glass than brick!’ He looked round disapprovingly on the new-fashioned shining room. ‘No tapestries, bare walls, bare floor! These pale oak panels and straw matting reflect all the light. What’s wrong with strewn rushes?’

‘Lousy,’ said the Lady Elizabeth.

‘Then you pay for your skin with your eyes. All these new fantods will make the rising generation go blind before they are forty, blinded by the perpetual glare of the sun they are brought up in.’

She pointed at his horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘Never tell me you are over forty,’ she said archly. ‘In what glare were you brought up?’

‘In the murk of my father’s tanning-shed at Newcastle in the ancient Kingdom of Northumberland,’ he replied simply. ‘But,’ he added, ‘he owned twenty-two roods of land.’

He leaned over the bed and felt her armpits and drew a sigh of relief; her pulse, which was certainly throbbing, and her head, which was certainly hot.

‘No rich nor roasted meats,’ he commanded Mrs Ashley; ‘let Her Grace touch nothing but a sow pig boiled with cinnamon, celery, dates and raisins; a hedgehog stewed in red wine and rosewater; and jelly, coloured purple by Scorpion’s Tail as the vulgar call Turnsole, that flower that turns toward the sun – but you, most learned Princess, would take the Greeks’ word for it, Heliotrope. And take two calves’ feet and a shoulder of veal for the jelly, boiled in a gallon of claret.’

‘I vomit at the sight of any food,’ said the invalid. ‘My head is too hot.’

‘All that hair had better be cut off,’ he replied. ‘Will Your Grace put out your tongue?’

Her Grace put it out with vehemence.

‘Ah, I see Your Grace has been eating sweets. You should not take so many, or your teeth will go black and fall out in old age.’

‘Who cares? – as long as I live to old age. Though it’s a poor prospect you offer for it – blind, toothless.’ Suddenly she flashed a smile that made him blink. A young wild animal snapping at his hands had turned into a charming princess.

‘You must grow tired of sick people talking of their ailments. Tell me, have you been writing anything lately? Your Herbal and Dictionaryof Plants has soothed my sickness.’

She turned to lay her hands on the book. It was not there. Mrs Ashley smiled maliciously as Dr. Turner went heavily back to the door and picked up a book that lay on the floor near it.

‘It does not seem to have soothed you much,’ he mumbled. ‘Did Your Grace find a fault in the Latin?’

Elizabeth searched for an explanation and gave it up. She decided to burst out laughing.

‘You were the Duke of Somerset’s physician as well as mine,’ she said. ‘We must have taught you that patients have none. It is the doctor who should be called patient.’

‘And the herberist and writer,’ he burst out, ‘and preacher and father of a family, all of which I am. I have fed full on patience and my children on hope, so long that they are very lean. I would they were fatter – and further off. For we are all penned up together for lack of a house. Dean Goodmin, the craftiest fox,’ he eyed the girl on the bed, ‘yes, or vixen either, that ever went on two feet, won’t give up the Deanery to me and my poor childer. ’Tis that that brought me to London to complain to King Edward through Mr Secretary Cecil – but only to find your royal brother dead, poor lad, and Mr Cecil so busy signing letters patent with “Jana Regina” that he can attend to nothing of importance.’

No doubt now that it was a vixen in the bed. A low snarl came from the bared white teeth. ‘So – o – that’s what Mr Secretary Cecil is doing!’

But the murmurous voice rumbled on imperturbably, ‘Yes, Queen Jane’s new seal leaves him no time for sealing old friendships. I wish I had trained my little dog to leap at lower game than a bishop’s square cap – he’ll snatch one off at sight. But it should have been deans. That Dean of the Devil, Goodman, nay rather, Badman, is the cause that I cannot go to my book for the crying of childer in my chamber. Never bear childer, gracious Princess. They cry to you to provide their sustenance – and prevent your doing it.’

He shuffled over to the silver mugs of flowers. ‘You have a fine tussie-mussic here, what is the newfangled name for it – a “posy”? a word of naught, a chambermaid of a word – no reason, nor rhyme neither in misnaming flowers as poesie. Aha, here are outlandish rarities – Damask roses, my old colleague Dr. Liniker brought you from Syria. But what’s this gypsy gang doing from the heath outside?’

‘The village children brought me wild flowers and wood strawberries when they heard of my sickness,’ said Elizabeth with something of a smirk. ‘They know my love for harebells. Beautiful even when they fade and their blue turns white, like the eyes of the children murdered by Gilles de Rais, that foul sorcerer. Yet once he rode with de Gaulle to fight for Joan of Arc, and did not betray her as did others, her own countrymen. Civil war is the curse of France.’ She slid him a sharp glance from under her tawny eyelashes but he was impervious. Obtuse? Or merely cautious? She tried once more, sighing piously. ‘Pray heaven it will not be that of England yet again!’

But he was touching the thin flower stems, tossing their whispering bells. ‘Yes, they are Your Grace’s flowers – fine-drawn as hairs but wiry, upspringing when trodden. Your eyes at times have their blue. Here is one faded white indeed but with a line of blue rimming its edge, carrying beauty into death – as you will do, Princess, at whatever age you die, for your bones are delicate, yes, their shape will shine with noble understanding in a death-mask, even in a skull.’

‘You pay a grisly compliment. You may soon prove it.’

‘No, Lady, your sickness is not so grave.’ (The old rascal must know her mortal danger was not from sickness!) And there was an odd glimmer behind his thick spectacles as he humbled on among the wild flowers, now twirling a dog-rose from the hedges. ‘Impostor, you won your name falsely! I have proved you no cure for a mad dog’s bite.’

‘The mad dog has not yet bitten me. I have snatched my hand back from his jaws,’ she added boldly.

But now he was looking at a small pansy. ‘Here’s a wanton, Love-in-Idleness, though some call it Johnny Jump-Up, which suits these upstart days of the new gentry.’

And he must know that Johnny Jump-Up was the nickname that the common people gave to John Dudley the lawyer’s son who had jumped to Sir John, then Viscount Lisle, then Earl of Warwick, and now Duke of Northumberland, Duke Dudley as he was always called. But his globed eyes did not turn in her direction. ‘Aha, my gay fellow, Ragged Robin! Many a Johnny Jump-Up’s son may become that, and so may you, my bold Cock Robin, if you ride too fast on your father’s errands.’

An oath snapped out from the bed. ‘Stop your teasing, you ancient villainy. Tell me what young Robin Dudley has done.’

‘Ridden out from London at the head of three hundred horses, as fine a troop as you could see on a summer morning clattering over Tower Bridge, with my bold Cock Robin at their head, and the sun just coming up over the house-tops to glint on his scarlet waistcoat. Aye, I saw ’em all go past with these old eyes at four o’clock yesterday morning, and, thinks I, there’s a gallant company of young men, all for one old maid! – For my bonny sweet Robin was riding to fetch back my Lady Mary a prisoner.’

‘And has he?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Where is Mary?’

‘Nobody knows.’

Had Mary been as astute as herself? Impossible, she decided, somewhat piqued. Mary must have had secret warning that their brother was already dead. It flashed on her that it must have been Mary’s refusal to come to London that had forced Duke Dudley’s hand; that he had had to come out in the open before he had intended; declare the King dead, and Jane as Queen.

‘And with Jane as Queen,’ she said, ‘your bold Cock Robin will be no ragamuffin but an elder brother to King Guildford, God save the mark!’

‘Not so,’ said the doctor placidly. ‘They had a to-do persuading little Lady Jane to be Queen,’ (‘Mighty modest of her!’ came with a snort from the bed) – ‘but when it came to her young bridegroom as King, she refused as flat as my foot. Who was Guildford Dudley to be King, says she, and he with not a drop of the blood-royal in him? She’d consent to his being made a Duke so as not to demean herself through her husband – but never King! Phew, what a family squabble! Both the old cats yowling their heads off, his mother and her mother, and the boy bursting with rage at being downed by a girl. Off he goes in his tantrums, he and his mother, to sulk in their own house, and if they think that will bring the bride to her senses, they’re clean out, for she can’t abide him. ’Tis said she’s not yet gone to bed with him, for all her mother’s thumps. Little Miss ‘Seventeen come Sunday’ – nay, she’ll not be that for some months yet – has a good dollop of the Tudor blood in her!’

‘’Tis no news to me. Give me fresher.’

‘Fresh as hot bread. For she was proclaimed Queen Jane – a newfangled name, but Joan is now held to be coarse and homely – yesterday at five in the afternoon, and walked in the procession to the Tower, clattering on cork-soled wedge shoes a foot high under her long robes, for she’s so small no one could see her else – and the heralds cried “Queen Jane” to the crowds as I rode down Cheapside – I saw all their heads waving this way and that with the sun slanting on ’em like a field of waving corn, but, lord! they stayed as mum as that field – not a cheer raised among ’em, only the archers of the guard to shout “Long live Queen Jane!” Eh, lass, but her proud mother had to bear her train – think of that now!’

‘Eh, lad, I’ll swear it did more than all else to make Jane consent to be Queened!’

Dr. Turner stood abashed at his familiarity. ‘I forget, I forget,’ he murmured. ‘I grow an old man now, and you be a sharp young thing, sharp as a needle. Don’t be so sharp as you’ll cut yourself. Your Grace has a hard row to hoe, whichever way it goes now, Queen Jane or Queen Mary.’

Jane the gentle, studious schoolgirl, Mary the modest, simple, kindly old maid, far more akin to each other than to herself; both so conscientious, so anxious to do right, so rigidly certain they were right, both were of the stuff to be martyrs – and to make them! A duel between those two quiet women would be to the death – and of many.

Aloud she said coolly, ‘Do you put their chances as equal? But Johnny Jump-Up holds the Tower, manned and gunned; he still has an army from putting down the last rebellion; he has ships—’

‘Aye, a score of ’em riding at anchor in the Thames, been there three weeks past now, all ready, they say, to sail for Barbary and the Spice Islands.’

‘Spice Islands my nose! It smells gunpowder, not spices.’

‘Sharp as a needle, I say. But Your Grace has left out one thing, the hearts of the people.’

‘Are they for Mary and her Mass?’

‘They are for fair dealing. They’ll not have an innocent woman done out of her rights, and after all the long years she’s been bullied and put upon. It’s a shame, they say. As I rode here this morning there were copies of the Proclamation all new-printed, still wet and smelling of printers’ ink, being stuck up at every cross-road and market square, saying the King’s sisters were both bastards – if you’ll excuse my saying so! – and that it was King Edward’s will and testament that Jane should be Queen.’

‘Edward’s testament – but Dudley’s will!’

‘Not the people’s. Now I must jog on my way back to Wells, and do you stay still. Do not go to London, it would not be healthy for you. I will write out some prescriptions for your worthy governess to make up in the still-room.’

There was a sharp rustle from the window-curtain as Mrs Ashley’s alert and wary back swung round from her pretended scrutiny of the garden.

‘Some draughts of rhubarb and water-lily roots to cool the blood, and of acanthus leaves whose subtle parts dry up the moisture of a cold brain and cut ill humours, dispersing them to their appointed places. And let Your Grace,’ his voice dropped an octave, ‘take the advice of the Latins, A fabis abstineto.’

‘Abstain from beans – why beans?’

‘“Bean-belly Leicestershire” they say, and your cousin Jane is a Leicestershire lass, the more’s the pity, for her. You have only to hold up a Leicestershire man by the collar to hear the beans rattle in his belly.’

‘Have you tried it with my Lady Jane?’

‘Tut, child – and Your Grace a scholar! Have you forgot that the ancients gave their vote by casting in a bean? So that to tell us to abstain from beans is not merely to say they are windy and discompose the tranquillity of men’s minds by their flatuous evaporation. Nay, it gives a graver warning: “Do not meddle with affairs of state”.’

‘That’s special pleading. Pythagoras said he might have had calmer sleeps had he totally abstained from beans.’

‘That is to say, from affairs of state. So do you sleep as calmly as you can, fair Princess?’

The fear came back into her eyes. ‘With Dudley coiled like a snake about to strike?’

‘Then take the sour herb of grace, the strong and bitter rue—’

‘Rue? Ugh!’

‘—for when,’ said he, impressively, looking down on the slender tawny head and pointed face, ‘that swift creature of enchantment, the weasel or Dandy Dog, is to fight the serpent, she arms herself by eating rue against his might.’

‘Have you proved that too?’

‘No, Lady – but you may do so.’

He took his leave, ducking his way backwards to the door in a succession of clumsy bows, the last of them towards the window.

‘See to it, good Mrs Ashley, that Her Grace takes full doses of all I prescribe, for I know well her habit of obedience to you.’

Then finally out he flumped and ‘good Mrs Ashley’ swung forward in a passionate crackle of skirts. ‘What a clown, what a clod! “Bean-bellies” – is it possible! And he as good as called Your Grace a weasel!’

Elizabeth flung herself back on the pillows, laughing uncontrollably as a schoolgirl and mimicking the bell-like whimper of young weasels in chase. ‘How do I know they sound like that? How do you know I am not one? Watch me at night and you’ll see me slip out to hunt the hare in the dark with a Chime of Dandy Dogs!’

Ashley crossed herself inadvertently. They said Nan Bullen had been a witch – was her child one too? She recovered herself with an uneasy giggle and a reminder of the other parent. ‘Fie on your royal father’s daughter! You should scorn to belong to less than a Pride of Lions.’

‘Oh, the cub can roar too.’

‘That she can!’ muttered Ashley, adding hastily, ‘Is that old man to be trusted?’

‘Is any man? There’s my very good friend Mr Cecil busy writing “Jana Regina”!’ She laughed again with, to Ashley, a maddening insouciance. ‘I liked his training his dog to fly at bishops’ caps.’

‘Yet he gets ordained so as to get a Deanery, the old hypocrite!’

‘I think I have seldom met an honester man.’

Mrs Ashley pursed up her lips as if to prevent herself bursting with exasperation.

‘At the least it shows what King Edward’s tutor, Sir John Cheke, has always said, that the fellow’s no gentleman.’

‘Cheke should know. His mother kept a small wine-shop in a back street in Cambridge.’

Cat Ashley exploded out of the room, to inform the steward, Mr Parry, that when it came to a man, however elderly, ill-favoured or ill-bred, the Lady Elizabeth—

CHAPTER THREE

‘There’s a man coming to the Lady Elizabeth now,’ said Mr Parry, wheeling a heavy eye towards the little turret window. ‘I think it’s her former tutor, Mr Ascham.’

‘He back again! I thought he was in Germany. How these ambassadors’ secretaries do gad about!’

‘His master probably had an early secret wind of the crisis here and came hurrying home. Ambassadors, even abroad, know most of the game.’

‘And what’s Mr Ascham’s? He’d cooled off the Lady Elizabeth, left in a hurry – and a huff-and was all for the Lady Jane. So what’s he doing here unless to crow over the success of his precious little bookworm in snatching the Crown from her?’

‘From her elder sister, the Lady Mary,’ he corrected, patting his belly.

‘A Papist! The people will never have that now. And she was bastardised after her mother’s divorce.’

‘So was the Lady Elizabeth after her mother’s beheading.’

‘Be hanged to your logic. The bastardy is only the thinnest excuse for Duke Dudley to seize the Crown for himself, in the person of that undersized brat with the freckled nose. There go the church bells now again for her in the distance. Pray heaven Her Grace does not hear them on t’other side of the house or I shall get another wigging.’

‘Mr Ascham is dismounting in the courtyard,’ said Mr Pray over his shoulder. ‘A pretty nag!’

‘I’ll never let him in on her. It’s not safe.’

‘Best find out what Her Grace wishes first. “When it comes to a man,” however faithless in transferring his devotion to another, the Lady Elizabeth—’

‘Oh, to hell with you!’ said Mrs Ashley.

She ran out of the room to the top of the great staircase and stood listening to voices in the hall below. Dr. Turner, going out, was speaking with Mr Aschim coming in.

‘It’s too late,’ she hissed to Mr Parry, who had followed softly at his discretion; ‘that old busybody has told him she may receive a visitor. Look, for the love of heaven, at Master Schoolmaster’s short cloak in the Spanish fashion! He’s put your new sleeveless coat clean out of date. And one of those little Austrian caps like an oyster patty at the side of his pate, glued to it, I’ll swear, or it would never stay on. How fast they climb, these rising young men!’

Through all her gibes she was busy adjusting her own dress and hair in a wall mirror of polished steel, the size of a sixpence she complained, as she smacked her cheeks and sucked in her lips to redden them, then shot them out again in a succession of sharp comments like peas from a pea-shooter. ‘What’s he think of the whole queer business I’d like to know, and I will know, too, in the shake of a posset cup. Send for some of that cooled Tokay, Parry, from the lower cellar that the Lord Admiral laid down, God rest his soul! That will loosen his tongue as to which of the three young women – one not so young, and one so young she’s scarce a woman – is most likely to sit on the throne of England. And after all King Harry’s efforts to get a male heir, and no one can say he didn’t do his best, with six wives, two divorced and two beheaded! Yet after all there’s got to be a woman on the throne, is it possible!’

‘It is not possible,’ pronounced Mr Parry as though from the seat of judgment; ‘all the best legal authorities are agreed that it will be declared against the laws of England to have a woman sovereign.’

But Mrs Ashley had not waited to hear the opinion of the best legal authorities. With a pleasant excitement flushing her already smarting cheeks she was pacing in impressively stately fashion down the great staircase into the hall to play the gracious hostess on Her Grace’s behalf and the welcoming old friend on her own.

The bells had swung through the lime-scented air as Roger Ascham rode up the long avenue.

‘Long live Queen Jane,

Long may she reign.’

That was what they sang to him as he thought of her and of the Lady Elizabeth, but, like nearly everybody else at the moment, not of the Lady Mary.

Two crowded years he had spent in Germany, in Spain, in Italy, learning to be a courtier and a diplomat and a statesman, and here he was embarking on the most important test of his new career; he must cross swords in diplomacy with the Lady Elizabeth, with whom as her tutor he had crossed swords so often, and then once too often.

What had happened? He had never been sure. You never could be sure with Elizabeth. Which Elizabeth?

A lively precocious child had stood beside him at the archery butts and shown off the gay colours of her long shooting-gloves while she bent her supple body as he had taught her to the bow; had laughed, yes, and flirted with him across the schoolroom table. Would he find her now at Hatfield? – or the ghostly stranger who had taken her place after the Admiral’s execution and her long illness – a stranger who sat white and tense in a nunlike gown, her eyes only for her book?

Yet even then there had still been a hint of something fiery and provocative, dangerous and baffling, of the wild charm that her mother had swayed over men, to her own destruction. Elizabeth had surely inherited that, together with the vein of poetry from her mother’s brother, George Lord Rochford, who had been beheaded for his supposed incest with Nan Bullen. Ascham remembered the lines of broken verse like a torn-off cry of pain that he had found among a mass of papers Elizabeth had destroyed in some frantic fit of nerves or temper:

‘I am and am not, freeze and yet I burn,

Since from myself my other self I turn;.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,

Follows me flying – flies when I pursue it;

Stands and lives by me, does what I have done.’

Yes, she had become her own shadow. But she would not stay so; the fire still burned beneath the frozen face, within her ash-grey shroud.

As he had found to his cost when it blazed out against him for no apparent reason.

The Lady Jane would never have so treated her tutor, Mr Aylmer. ‘Oh happy Aylmer to have such a scholar – so divine a maid – best adorned virgin!’ So he had written to Aylmer, the very words he had once used for his own happiness in teaching Elizabeth – ‘but to you I can repeat them with more truth.’

All through this long hot ride from London, when he ought to have been rehearsing his approaching interview with Elizabeth, he had found himself remembering instead that letter he had written to Aylmer about Jane. He had written it in the midst of the hotbed of international politics at the Council of Trent, the air seething with the tumult in Africa; with the attempts to organise all Europe into a concerted front against the invading onrush of the heathen Turk, already far advanced into the Christian States; with the expected march of the German Emperor into Austria, which Ascham himself was to attend. Yet in the thick of it all, and the welter of his secretarial duties, and his eager efforts to make himself as good a statesman and courtier as he was a scholar and sportsman, he had sat down late one night and written till two in the morning all about the last visit he had paid to little Lady Jane just before leaving England.

He had ridden to her father’s new mansion at Bradgate, the finest house in Leicestershire, and in the great park he had met her parents, and a chattering laughing crowd of young guests, and all the huntsmen glittering in their harness and green livery, out hunting in the early autumn sunshine.

But not the daughter of the house. He had found her quite alone in her study, a girl who looked like a small child, curled up in her chair with her head bent over a volume of Plato in Greek, ‘with as much delight,’ he wrote to Aylmer, ‘as gentlemen read the merry tales of Boccaccio.’

He asked Jane why she was not out amusing herself with all the rest of the household at their sport. She replied, ‘Alas, good folks, they have never felt what true pleasure means. All their sport is but a shadow to that pleasure I find in Plato.’

And her great grey eyes shone as she raised them to his. It was too much for Roger Ascham. ‘You are so young, so lovely,’ he blurted out, ‘how can you prefer to sit all alone and read the Phaedon – even when your tutor is absent?’

The grey eyes clouded over, but they looked at him with the same clear candour of spirit that prevented her first answer from sounding pretentious, or her second harsh. ‘I will tell you,’ came after a pause in low, measured tones; ‘the reason is that my parents are so sharp and severe to me that whether I speak, keep silent, sit, stand, go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing or anything else, I must do it as perfectly as God made the earth – or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, yes, persecuted with pinches, nips and bobs that I think myself in hell while with them.’

His furious exclamation cut her short. It looked as though he, not she, would burst into tears. But without any alteration in her deliberate tone she presented the reverse side. ‘One of the greatest benefits God ever gave me is that He sent me, with such parents, so gentle a schoolmaster as Mr Aylmer, who teaches me so pleasantly that I think all the time of nothing while I am with him. And when I am called from him I weep, because, whatever else I do than learning is full of great trouble and fear to me.’

The sad little monotone ceased on that note of prophecy – as it now struck him, now when the Crown that was being forced on her might well prove ‘full of great trouble and fear’ to this child who had become a scholar before she had learned to be a woman.

The contrast with her cousin Elizabeth struck him as strongly. He admired Elizabeth’s brilliant wits, but he worshipped Jane’s disinterested love of scholarship for its own sake. It had once been his own ideal and when with her he felt guilty at having forsaken it in his pursuit of the full and complete life.

But Elizabeth could never hold it even as an ideal. She had worked as a schoolgirl with the fiery untiring concentration of a grown man, but always, he was certain, for an ulterior motive: to fit herself for the chance she might one day get to be Queen of England.

Jane, now Queen, had never wanted it. Her love for learning was as pure as he, sometimes, wished his own could be.

Elizabeth teased, intrigued, defied, fascinated him.

But Jane was his guiding star, an image that he did not even think of connecting with the grave beauty of her oval face and steadfast eyes.

He envied Aylmer, but he was not jealous of him.

And so he wrote to Aylmer what was really a love-letter to Jane, describing that last delicious meeting with her in the cool shadowed study where the green light came filtered through the great trees outside, and the silence was very still after the blare of horns and shouts of the huntsmen in the park; he had proffered to him his ‘entreaty that the Lady Jane may write to me, in Greek, which she has already promised to do’; his prayer that she and Aylmer and himself should ‘keep this mode of life among us. How freely, how sweetly, how philosophically then should we live, enjoying all these things which Cicero at the conclusion of the Third book, De Finibus, describes as the only rational mode of life.’

‘You and I and Amyas,

Amyas and you and I,’

the bells were now chiming in his head to that old song by William Cornish of the perfect trio,

‘You, and I and Amyas,

Amyas and you and I,

To the greenwood must we go, alas,

You and I, my life, and Amyas.’

(Why ‘alas’? Why, to rhyme with Amyas!)

But the only rational mode of life could not be the only mode for him. If only he could live six lives at the same moment! He had them all in his capacity; but he had not the time. One life was not enough. It had not been enough to make himself the finest Greek scholar in England, to set all the Cambridge students acting the new glories of Greek drama, and with brilliant modern stage effects, instead of gabbling their tedious old-fashioned Latin plays; not enough to shape the new beauties of English prose into an instrument as fine for scholarship as it was vigorous and flexible for common life, for his books on sport, hunting, archery, even the cockpit. Not enough even to mould the mind of the young Princess Elizabeth, that cynically practical, strangely poetic mind, incarnating in itself the daring spirit of the New Learning that had flamed up all through Europe, springing phoenix-like from the ashes of the new-found ancient classic lore; not enough to invent new methods of education that should make learning a delight to her.

No; one life was not enough. He had wanted, not the study, but the world for his province.

Now, thinking of Jane in the deep shadow of this avenue where he rode so far below the still green branches that he seemed to be riding at the bottom of the sea, he had dropped out of the world, out of time. He forgot his feverish demands on it. He wished instead that he were single-minded, bent only on one pursuit noble enough to fill a man’s whole life.

What then was he doing here, riding towards the advancement he had hoped to win?

CHAPTER FOUR

He stood in the hall and Mrs Ashley swept down the stairs towards him, hands outstretched, a welcoming smile pinned on her face, her inquisitive nose all ready to probe his secrets, a host of flattering exclamations and inquiries fluttering from her.

Once he had flattered her and given her presents, pulling strings to help him become the Princess Elizabeth’s tutor. Now he must give her another present. He gave it. He staved off her questions. He would not drink the heavy sweet Tokay.

There was nothing for it but for her to lead him off with many protestations of Her Grace being too ill to see any ordinary visitor, but that she knew she would never forgo the pleasure of meeting her former tutor, if she were awake. Only let him tread softly as he approached her room, for Her Grace was very drowsy, had had no rest at all these last few nights, and had signified her intention of going to sleep the instant the doctor left.

Roger Ascham followed her out of the sunlight from the open doorway of the great hall. The sound of bells in the outer air became muffled, then drowned.

In the cool corridor, secluded from the sultry afternoon outside, he heard music dropping in small faint notes like the drops of water from a fountain splashing into the basin below. The instrument was modern, either the virginals or clavichord such as he played himself and had taught his pupils to play. But the tune was ancient, barbarically wild and simple, in a mode long since neglected by the musicians. He thought he had heard it before, he tried to think where and when, and stood still to listen while Mrs Ashley harried on, her steps now clacking noisily with, he fancied, a deliberately warning note, and as she advanced the music swung abruptly into another tune, the popular air of ‘My Lady Greensleeves.’ It stopped as Mrs Ashley opened a door and went through, shutting it behind her. Presently she returned and admitted him to the Lady Elizabeth’s bedroom. A lady-in-waiting was sitting at the end of the room and went out through a door at the end as he entered. Mrs Ashley took her place.

The Lady Elizabeth was leaning back on the pillows with a green brocade bedgown thrown somewhat carelessly, he thought, across her shoulders. True, the day was very hot. But if the glimpse he got of the young rounded breasts under her thin shift was inviting, the glance she gave him was cold as steel.

He flicked some invisible dust off his fine new cloak, hoping she would notice its impeccable cut; she had always liked him to be well dressed and not like a musty pedagogue, she used to say, wrinkling her nose. He flattered himself he was now a long way from the pedagogue as he flung back his head after his courtly bow and squared his broad shoulders that even his frequent practice in archery could not entirely cure of the literary stoop he had acquired from years of study. He felt uneasily that she was summing it all up; he did not guess her answer to the sum – that his mild brown eyes were just the same as she had known them, eager, ingenuous, the eyes of a man who had dreamed of life through books, and wanted to wake up.

He apologised for intruding on her illness, made polite enquiries and, a trifle breathlessly, as though to gain time, he congratulated her on having kept up her music – he hoped she still composed her own songs, words and tunes, as every performer should – he was glad, anyway, she was not too ill to play.

‘That was my woman playing,’ she said curtly.

Was it? He had remembered by now the tune he had first heard as he came down the corridor, a lament for some savage mountain chieftain killed centuries ago, which King Henry’s old Welsh harper had sometimes played at Court; and he remembered, too, the Princess Elizabeth as a little girl listening to it, her small face pale and fierce in its intentness. He did not believe it was her woman who had played that tune.

‘Cat,’ said she, ‘you can follow Mag into the next room.’

Mrs Ashley stared. It was nothing for a man to visit a princess in bed; balls and receptions had been held before now in state bedrooms with the hostess in bed; but for him to be left alone with her there, that was quite another matter!

‘Cat!’ repeated her mistress.

She went.

‘Why have you come?’

The question was shot at him so suddenly that he found all the careful answers he had thought out for it evading him.

‘I come from Court—’ he began.

‘Whose Court? My sister’s or my cousin’s?’

So there it was. He had got to declare himself at the first instant, on whose side he stood. He struggled for a moment’s respite.

‘I went straight to London, naturally, with my master on his return to this country. I have seen the little Queen.’ The sheet jerked from a kick. ‘Believe me, Madam, she has no love for the title. She has sobbed and prayed them not to force the Crown on her – she is but a child of sixteen. She could not withstand her parents.’

‘She could when she chose. They could force her to wear the Crown, but not to share it with her bridegroom. Queen Jane, oh yes! But King Guildford, oh no!

‘When I am queen, diddle diddle,

You shan’t be king!’

So she sang on a high note, and ended in a peal of wild laughter.

There it was again, that sudden levity, that pale flash of the eyes, that baffling mockery that had disconcerted him when she was his pupil. Girlish hysteria he had thought it, and that she would grow out of it, but there it was again after two years’ absence from her, and he badly disconcerted in his uncertainty as to what the laughter might hide, or bode. She was what the song sang, ‘a lady bright,’ but ‘strangeness that lady hight.’