The King's Daughter (6 page)

‘Why are you here, my lord?’

He hesitated. My throat tightened. I tried to swallow but had forgotten how. I saw his eyes go to my throat. He watched me struggle. I managed to swallow on the third try.

‘His majesty has instructed me to speak with you.’ He looked back at my eyes. ‘About these recent dreadful events.’

I stared back, afraid now to trust any sound that might come out of my throat. With effort, I unclenched my fists.

‘Were you ever acquainted with Sir Everard Digby?’

I shook my head, cautiously truthful. To my knowledge, this was no lie.

‘A traitor whom I have recently examined in the Tower, along with several of his companion devils.’

‘Is he one of those who would have blown up Parliament?’ The frog in my throat was quite natural, I told myself. In the circumstances.

Cecil smiled slightly, inviting me into complicity. ‘This young knight, Digby, had a very different task – to take you prisoner.’

I met his invitation as blankly as I could. All I could see in my head was Digby – for that must be his name – standing with the coins of sunlight dancing on his shoulders and head.

Go away! I begged him. Get out of my thoughts! A treacherous heat began to bloom in my chest.

‘A plausible young knight,’ said Cecil. ‘Well-formed and fair-haired. His family’s estate is not far from Combe. Until he married, I’m told that many ladies had their eye on him.’

All at once, I saw the truth, Digby had confessed. He had confessed to our meeting in the forest. Cecil knew!

I shook my head, helpless to stop the red fire that stained my chest and flooded up my neck. Cecil knows everything, I thought.

‘I never met a man who gave that name.’ I frowned slightly, as if trying to recall. I understood very well. Digby had taken me down with him just as I feared. Had not taken my advice to flee, not in time. Good man or bad, he had turned out to be a
trowie
after all.

Cecil watched the telltale blush reach my cheeks and rise upwards until the roots of my hair felt ablaze. ‘You might perhaps have smiled on him once?’ he prompted gently. ‘Perhaps not knowing who he was? He’s held to be handsome and is only a few years older than your grace. Any young woman might smile on him.’

The Chief Secretary was toying with me. I could bear it no longer.

‘Is this an examination, my lord?’ I demanded.

‘Should it be?’ he asked mildly. He looked around the room. ‘Do you see a clerk? Or witnesses to an examination? Should you be examined?’

‘No,’ I whispered.

On the far wall, one of the tapestries heaved. ‘By God, it is an examination!’

I leapt to my feet and turned. I had heard that Scottish bellow before. In the corner of my eye, I saw Cecil wriggle off his chair.

With a flash of rings, my father knocked aside the edgeof a woven battle and stepped out of the alcove behind it. ‘Anatomise her, man! Ye’re too nice!’ The king staggered in his excitement, his restless body made clumsy by the urgencies of his mind.

Cecil stared at the floor.

The king stopped in front of me, blocking my view of Cecil. ‘Aye, Bessie! Y’ know very well it’s an examination! And you’d best thank God to be here in Coventry and not locked in the Tower with your friends!’

‘"Friends"?’ I repeated faintly.

‘You’d be examined there, right enough! And not so gently, neither!’ The king turned on Cecil. ‘Why didn’t you ask the questions I prepared? What have y’done with them?’

‘I meant to come to them by degrees, your majesty.’

‘There’s no degree in being dead! And no degree in treason!’ The king held out his hand. ‘Give me my questions and act as my clerk. I will play Solomon. I’ll examine this treacherous whelp of mine, who seems to have terrified you into degrees!’ His over-large tongue dammed and slowed the flow of words pouring from his brain. His bright, hungry magpie eye probed at me.

From the table beneath a window Cecil took a densely written paper and gave it to the king. He returned to the table and sat on the stool behind it. Now I saw the waiting pen and ink.

‘That devil Digby’s in the Tower,’ said my father. ‘We know by his own confession that he and his fellow fiends meant to make you queen of England! After I… your king and father… had been blown sky-high, murdered, along with your precious brother.’

‘Never, my lord father!’ I whispered.

‘What do ye have to say to that?’

‘What sort of queen would I have been…?’

He jabbed a finger at me. ‘A compliant one. Controlled by Papists, ruling at the will of Rome.’

‘I had rather been murdered in Parliament with you than wear the Crown on such condition!’ I spoke that truth with all my heart.

The small eyes skewered me. ‘Fine words!’ He pulled at his lower lip with finger and thumb. ‘What are you?’

‘I don’t understand.’ I glanced at Cecil but he was head-down at the table, recording our words.

‘What… are… you?’ the king repeated slowly and loudly, as if I were simple. ‘Do I know you?’

‘I’m your loyal daughter, sir.’ I felt my own temper begin to rise.

‘D’ye think me a fool?’

‘I think you many things, sir, but never a fool!’

We both drew breath and stared at each other. Cecil’s pen stopped scratching.

The king shook his list of questions in my face. I blinked but did not move. ‘I ask you, just as your friends in the Tower were asked,’ he said. ‘Are you a Papist?’

Refusing to step back, I fixed my eyes on my father’s thick padded jerkin, diamond hatched with stitching that held the thick lining in place to turn aside attacking knives. ‘Never!’

‘I know that you are a Papist!’

Like my mother? I wanted to ask but had just enough good sense not to say.

‘Do you mean to accuse my guardian too?’ I asked instead. ‘Lord Harington hears me pray at his side five times a day.’

The close-set eyes studied me. The king scratched under his doublet. He tugged at his cuffs. He twitched his neck in his collar and seemed to chew on his tongue.

I had seen people ape those mannerisms, and then laugh. I did not find my father laughable. He terrified me.

I can make you obey where you ache to scorn, his behaviour seemed to say to those who aped him. That’s real power!

The king bit at a fingernail. I felt the swift current of histhought tugging at me. ‘Why should I let you keep your head?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ve done nothing!’

We both pretended to listen to the scratching of Cecil’s quill.

‘Don’t think, madam – you and your brother – that public acclaim is the same as power! From the common people it’s worth nothing! It’s a river that drowns all virtue.’

‘I don’t want acclaim!’ I cried. ‘I don’t want power! What would I do with power?’

‘Don’t think I wasn’t told how the people cried out in the streets,’ he said, now just as agitated as I was. ‘Singing out as you and your brother went by. “The golden pair!” “The golden boy, the golden girl!” “England’s best hope!” Don’t think you’ll bury me, either one of you! Don’t imagine you’ll ever warm your arse on the English throne!’

‘I don’t want the English throne!’

‘… because I shall marry you as far away from here as I can arrange. I’d marry you to the Great Cham, if I could, and send you to his queen in Tartary. I’d marry you to the Devil himself, if only he wanted a wife!’

He shoved his face close to mine. ‘Listen to me, Bessie. If I choose to let you live, I mean to marry you off as soon as I can. Do y’hear me? Catholic, Protestant, doddering fool or dribbling babe – I’d give you this moment if your husband would take you and your ambitions away from England, out of my sight for ever!’

He folded the list of questions. ‘We’re not done with these yet. You don’t deceive me. But first, I’ll hear more of what your friends in the Tower have to tell us. Then I’ll decide what’s to be done with you.’

There’s no point in lying further, I thought with despair. My father would make those prisoners say whatever he liked.

I opened my mouth to defend myself with the truth. Yes, I had met Digby, but not by my own will. I had refused togo with him, no matter what he might claim in his confession. I had threatened to kill myself rather than agree to do as the plotters intended.

Behind the king, Cecil gave a minute shake of his head.

I closed my mouth and stared past my father’s shoulder in astonishment. Again, a tiny warning shake, no mistake. Then Cecil looked back down at his notes.

Then I saw how close I had been to disaster. My guilt or innocence in the treason plot did not matter. It had never mattered, once I had reported Digby’s kidnap attempt to Henry alone. Not to the king or Cecil. That failure alone made me a traitor in the king’s eyes. And if I had confessed, I would have dragged my brother down with me.

‘My mother had friends like yours.’ My father handed the folded questions back to Cecil. ‘You should choose better acquaintance, lassie. With less taste for regicide. First your old governess Lady Kildare and her husband, now these Papist gallants. To be twice touched by treason is no accident.’

The king turned to Cecil. ‘Come, Wee Bobby! Let’s leave the “golden” lassie to her thoughts, while she still has a head to think them.’ He struck the door with his fist. It opened. He left without looking back.

Cecil wiped his pen and inserted it into a leather roll. He gathered up his papers and tapped them to align the edges. ‘Don’t fear,’ he said, so quietly that I might almost have imagined it.

‘And lest her thoughts remain confused,’ shouted my father from the corridor, ‘I’ll arrange a sight to clear them.’

‘My lord…’ I began.

Cecil held up his hand to silence me. ‘As Lord Treasurer, among all else,’ he continued, to the tabletop, ‘I must advise the king that he can’t afford to throw away even one of his two most valuable assets.’

When the door closed behind the two men and theirfootsteps had faded, I finally let my knees dump me back into my chair.

Cecil would have warned me to keep silent only if he knew what I was about to confess. But if he knew, why was he protecting me?

8

Bonfires were lit across England to celebrate my father’s deliverance from his brush with the fires of hell. From my window in Coventry, I saw arcs of glowing orange spring up against the night sky. No one invited me to attend any of the fires, nor the dancing, feasting and drinking that accompanied them. But even in the guarded household of Mr Hopkins, I felt a feverish exhilaration.

Something terrible had been averted, even if the details were blurred. The consuming darkness had been defeated. Demons had been slain. Those captured alive would soon be executed. The king declared that the anniversary of his deliverance would become a yearly holiday. Each year, on the fifth of November, the fires would burn. The threat to Henry and the Members of Parliament dropped from mention.

Once it was believed that all of the Gunpowder Plotters, as they became known, were either dead or in the Tower, I was returned to Combe. Lady Anne, left behind to avoid advertising my flight, was still agog with scraps of news. She lacked the discretion of Mr Hopkins, or perhaps his wariness, and eagerly poured her snippets into my ear.

The leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, had been killed at Holbeche House, not far beyond Coventry, with severalothers, including Thomas Percy, a cousin of the Duke of Northumberland.

Robert Catesby, I thought. ‘Robin…’

‘He was a known Papist trouble-maker,’ said Anne. ‘Even though he was a gentleman. A single bullet struck down both him and Thomas Percy, whose cousin the Duke of Northumberland lives at Syon and has been himself examined by Lord Salisbury and the king, your father.’ I felt in her the same feverish excitement I had found in Coventry.

‘My uncle had such a wondrous fire lit here,’ she went on happily. ‘He even permitted me to watch the dancing, though of course, I was not allowed to romp in a field with the tenant farmers.’ She leaned closer. ‘I did manage to snatch a mug of
eau de vie
distilled by our estate manager, but don’t tell Uncle.’ She looked at me for approval. She so seldom had daring to offer me.

‘What of the other plotters?’ I didn’t want to mention Digby by name.

‘You must ask Uncle. I know only what I hear on the estate.’

I went to ground, and waited. I wondered what my father had meant by ‘a sight to clear her thoughts'.

Christmas passed with the social restraint and well-fed decorum you would expect in a household where the Papish word ‘mass’ caused unease. In a house that had once been a Catholic abbey, we marked the holiday merely by praying more often, to a Protestant God, in the chapel built for monks.

But although my Protestant guardian spoke only of ‘Christ Tide', the old, forbidden word ‘mass’ lived on in the kitchen, gardens and stable yard. Other, even older spirits had their gifts too. Protecting holly springs hung in the horses’ stalls. Mistletoe sprouted in the dairy. I left an appeasing plate of sweet, twisted anise-flavoured Jumbles in a corner of my bedchamber for the ghostly abbot, and found them half-eaten the next morning.

I used the more-frequent prayers to beg Henry to respond to my letter, if he had ever received it. Seven weeks had passed. Neither Abel nor Clapper had yet returned from London.

I sometimes caught Lord Harington studying me with a frown. Whether I imagined pity or coldness in his eyes, I felt the same quiver of terror. I tried to distract myself by playing with my monkey and my dogs. I rode whenever the bleak damp January weather allowed. I was never left alone again.

Like an animal, I felt a storm coming. I fell asleep at night with the fragment of granite from the Edinburgh crags in one hand, and Belle’s furry warmth hugged close with my other, whenever I managed to smuggle her past Lady Harington and her fear that the little dog might soil the bed linen.

At the end of January, the king sent men-at-arms to take me to London.

9

LONDON, THURSDAY, 30 JANUARY 1606

From my chamber in the Bishop’s house at Paul’s, beside the Cathedral, I listened all day to the distant sound of the scaffold being built in the Churchyard. I had arrived in London by night, as furtively as I had fled to Coventry. Lord Harington sent me off from Combe professing ignorance of why the king had sent for me in secret. Besides the men-at-arms and the necessary grooms, only my old nurse, Alison Hay, had ridden beside me. Not even Anne was allowed to attend me.