Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (228 page)

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When we reached Kenninghall at midday, I saw why we had ridden till the horses foundered to get here. The sun was high in the sky and it made the fortified manor house look squat and indomitable in the flat uncompromising landscape. It was a solid moated house, and as we drew closer I saw that it was no pretty play castle; this had a drawbridge that could be raised, and a portcullis above it that could be dropped down to seal the only entrance. It was built in warm red brick, a deceptively beautiful house that could nonetheless be held in a siege.

Lady Mary was not expected, and the few servants who lived at the house to keep it in order came tumbling out of the doors in a flurry of surprise and greeting. After a nod from Lady Mary I quickly told them of the astounding news from London as they took our horses into the stable yard. A ragged cheer went up at the news of her accession to the throne and they pulled me down from the saddle and clapped me on the back like the lad I appeared to be. I let out a yelp of pain. The inner part of my legs from my ankles to my thighs had been skinned raw from three days in the saddle, and my back and shoulders and wrists were locked tight from the jolting ride from Hunsdon to Hoddesdon, to Sawston to Thetford to here.

Lady Mary must have been near-dead with exhaustion, sitting pillion for all that long time, a woman of nearly forty years and in poor health, but only I saw the grimace of pain as they lifted her down to the ground; everyone else saw the tilt of her chin as she heard them shout for her, and the charm of the Tudor smile as she welcomed them all into the great hall and bid them good cheer. She took a moment to pray for the soul of her dead brother and then she raised her head and promised them that just as she had been a fair landlord and mistress to them, she would be a good queen.

That earned her another cheer and the hall started to fill with people, workers from the fields and woods and villagers from their homes, and the servants ran about with flagons of ale and cups of wine and loaves of bread and meat. The Lady Mary took her seat at the head of the hall and smiled on everyone as if she had never been ill in her life, then after an hour of good company, she laughed out loud and said she must get out of this cloak and this poor gown, and went to her rooms.

The few house servants had flung themselves into getting her rooms ready and her bed was made with linen. It was only the second-best bedding, but if she was as weary as I then she would have slept on homespun. They brought in a bathtub, lined it with sheets to protect her from splinters, and filled it with hot water. And they found some old gowns, which she had left behind when she was last at this house, and laid them out on the bed for her to choose.

“You can go,” she said to me, as she threw the servant girl’s cloak from her shoulders to the floor, and turned her back to the maid to be unlaced. “Find something to eat and go straight to bed. You must be tired out.”

“Thank you,” I said, hobbling for the door with my painful bowlegged stride.

“And, Hannah?”

“Yes, lady…Yes, Your Grace?”

“Whoever it is who has paid your wages while you have been in my household, and whatever they hoped to gain from that—you have been a good friend to me this day. I will not forget it.”

I paused, thinking of the two letters I had written to Lord Robert that would bring him hard on our heels, thinking what would happen to this determined, ambitious woman when he caught us, thinking that he was certain to catch us here, since I had told him exactly where to come; and then it would be the Tower for her, and probably her death for treason. I had been a spy in her household and the falsest of friends. I had been a byword for dishonor and she had known some of it; but she could not have dreamed of the falseness that had become second nature to me.

If I could have confessed to her then, I would have done. The words were on my tongue, I wanted to tell her that I had been put into her household to work against her; but that now that I knew her, and loved her, I would do anything to serve her. I wanted to tell her that Robert Dudley was my lord and I would always be bound to do anything he asked me. I wanted to tell her that everything I did seemed to be always full of contradictions: black and white, love and fear, all at once.

But I could say nothing, and I had been brought up to hold secrets under my lying tongue, so I just dropped to one knee before her and bowed my head.

She did not give me her hand to kiss, like a queen would have done. She put her hand on my head like my own mother used to do and she said, “God bless you, Hannah, and keep you safe from sin.”

At that moment, at that particular tenderness, at the very touch of my mother’s hand, I felt the tears well up in my eyes; and I got myself out of the room and into my own small attic bedchamber and into my bed without bath or dinner, before anybody should see me cry like the little girl I still was.

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We were at Kenninghall for three days on siege alert, but still Lord Robert and his company of cavalry did not come. The gentlemen from the country all around the manor came pouring in with their servants and their kinsmen, some of them armed, some of them bringing blacksmiths to hammer out spears and lances from the pruning hooks, spades and scythes that they brought with them. The Lady Mary proclaimed herself as queen in the great hall, despite the advice of more cautious men, and flying in the face of a pleading letter from the Spanish ambassador. He had written to tell her that her brother was dead, that Northumberland was unbeatable, and that she should set about negotiating with him while her uncle in Spain would do his best to save her from the trumped-up charge of treason and sentence of death which was certain to come. That part of his letter made her look grim, but there was worse.

He warned her that Northumberland had sent warships into the French seas off Norfolk, specially to prevent the Spanish ships from rescuing her and taking her to safety. There could be no escape for her, the emperor could not even attempt to save her. She must surrender to the duke and give up her claim to the crown, and throw herself on his mercy.

“What can you see, Hannah?” she asked me. It was early morning, and she had just come from Mass, her rosary beads still in her fingers, her forehead still damp with holy water. It was a bad morning for her, her face, sometimes so illuminated and merry with hope, was gray and tired. She looked sick of fear itself.

I shook my head. “I have only seen for you once, Your Grace, and I was certain then that you would be queen. And now you are. I have seen nothing since.”

“I am queen indeed now,” she said wryly. “I am proclaimed queen by myself at least. I wish you had told me how long it would last, and if anyone else would agree with me.”

“I wish I could,” I said sincerely. “What are we going to do?”

“They tell me to surrender,” she said simply. “The advisors I have trusted all my life, my Spanish kinsmen, my mother’s only friends. They all tell me that I will be executed if I continue with this course, that it’s a battle I can’t win. The duke has the Tower, he has London, he has the country, he has the warships at sea and an army of followers and the royal guard. He has all the coin of the realm at the Mint, he has all the weapons of the nation at the Tower. I have this one castle, this one village, these few loyal men and their pitchforks. And somewhere out there is Lord Robert and his troop coming toward us.”

“Can’t we get away?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Not fast enough, not far enough. If I could have got on a Spanish warship then, perhaps…but the duke has the sea between here and France held down by English warships, he was ready for this, and I was unprepared. I am trapped.”

I remembered John Dee’s map spread out in the duke’s study and the little counters which signified soldiers and sailors on ships all around Norfolk, and Lady Mary trapped in the middle of them.

“Will you have to surrender?” I whispered.

I had thought she was frightened; but at my question the color rushed into her cheeks, and she smiled as if I had suggested a challenge, a great gamble. “You know, I’m damned if I will!” she swore. She laughed aloud as if it was a bet for a joust rather than her life on the table. “I have spent my life running and lying and hiding. Just once, just once I should be glad to ride out under my own standard and defy the men who have denied me, and denied my right and denied the authority of the church and God himself.”

I felt my own spirits leap up at her enthusiasm. “My la…Your Grace!” I stumbled.

She turned a brilliant smile on me. “Why not?” she said. “Why should I not, just once, fight like a man and defy them?”

“But can you win?” I asked blankly.

She shrugged, an absolutely Spanish gesture. “Oh! It’s not likely!” She smiled at me as if she were truly merry at the desperate choice before her. “Ah, but Hannah, I have been humbled to dust by these men who would now put a commoner such as Lady Jane before me. They once put Elizabeth before me. They made me wait on her as if I were her maid in her nursery. And now I have my chance. I can fight them instead of bowing to them. I can die fighting them instead of crawling to them, begging for my life. When I see it like this, I have no choice. And I thank God, there is no better choice for me than to raise my standard and to fight for my father’s throne and my mother’s honor, my inheritance. And I have Elizabeth to think of, too. I have her safety to secure. I have her inheritance to pass on to her. She is my sister, she is my responsibility. I have written to her to bid her come here, so that she can be safe. I have promised her a refuge, and I will fight for our inheritance.”

Lady Mary gathered her rosary beads in her short workmanlike fingers, tucked them into the pocket of her gown and strode toward the door of the great hall where her armies of gentlemen and soldiers were breaking their fast. She entered the head of the hall and mounted the dais. “Today we move out,” she announced, loud and clear enough for the least man at the back of the hall to hear her. “We go to Framlingham, a day’s ride, no more than that. I shall raise my standard there. If we can get there before Lord Robert we can hold him off in a siege. We can hold him off for months. I can fight a battle from there. I can collect troops.”

There was a murmur of surprise and then approbation.

“Trust me!” she commanded them. “I will not fail you. I am your proclaimed queen and you will see me on the throne, and then I will remember who was here today. I will remember and you will be repaid many times over for doing your duty to the true Queen of England.”

There was a deep low roar, easily given from men who have just eaten well. I found my knees were shaking at the sight of her courage. She swept to the door at the back of the hall and I jumped unsteadily ahead of her and opened it for her.

“And where is he?” I asked. She did not have to be told who I was asking for.

“Oh, not far,” Lady Mary said grimly. “South of King’s Lynn, I am told. Something must have delayed him, he could have taken us here if he had come at once. But I cannot get news of him. I don’t know where he is for sure.”

“Will he guess that we are going to Framlingham?” I asked, thinking of the note that had gone to him, naming her destination here, its spiral on the paper like a curled snake.

She paused at the doorway and looked back at me. “There is bound to be one person in such a gathering who will slip away and tell him. There is always a spy in the camp. Don’t you think, Hannah?”

For a moment I thought she had trapped me. I looked up at her, my lies very dry in my throat, my girl’s face growing pale.

“A spy?” I quavered. I put my hand to my cheek and rubbed it hard.

She nodded. “I never trust anyone. I always know that there are spies about me. And if you had been the girl I was, you would have learned the same. After my father sent my mother away from me there was no one near me who did not try to persuade me that Anne Boleyn was true queen and her bastard child the true heir. The Duke of Norfolk shouted into my face that if he were my father he would bang my head against the wall until my brains fell out. They made me deny my mother, they made me deny my faith, they threatened me with death on the scaffold like Thomas More and Bishop Fisher—men I knew and loved. I was a girl of twenty and they made me proclaim myself a bastard and my faith a heresy.

“Then, all in a summer’s day, Anne was dead and all they spoke of was Queen Jane and her child, Edward, and little Elizabeth was no longer my enemy but a motherless child, a forgotten daughter, just like me. Then the other queens…” She almost smiled. “One after another, three other women came to me and I was ordered to curtsey to them as queen and call them Mother, and none of them came close to my heart. In that long time I learned never to trust a word that any man says and never even to listen to a woman. The last woman I loved was my mother. The last man I trusted was my father. And he destroyed her, and she died of heartbreak, so what was I to think? Will I ever be a woman who can trust now?”

She broke off and looked at me. “My heart broke when I was a little more than twenty years old,” she said wonderingly. “And d’you know, only now do I begin to think that there might be a life for me.”

She smiled. “Oh, Hannah!” she sighed and patted me on the cheek. “Don’t look so grave. It was all a long time ago and if we can triumph in this adventure then my story is ended happily. I shall have my mother’s throne restored, I shall wear her jewels. I shall see her memory honored and she will look down from heaven and see her daughter on the throne that she bore me to inherit. I shall think myself a happy woman. Don’t you see?”