The Other Queen (41 page)

Cecil has forced a bill through Parliament which says that no Roman Catholic can inherit the English throne. This is obviously directed at me, designed to disinherit me, even before the birth of the Protestant heir. It is an act of such double-dealing falsehood that it leaves me breathless. My friends write to me that he has even worse to come: plans to disinherit all Papists from their fathers’ lands. This is an open attack on all of my faith. He plans to make us all paupers on our own lands. It cannot be borne. We have to move now. Every day my enemies become more determined against me; every day Cecil becomes more vindictive to us Papists.

This is our time, it must be our time. We dare not delay. The Great Enterprise of England must be launched this month. I dare not delay. Cecil has disinherited me in law and Elizabeth will divide me from my family. I am promised a journey to Scotland and yet I am in Tutbury again. We have to launch the enterprise now. We are ready, our allies are sworn to our service, the time is set.

Besides, I long to act. Even if this was going to fail, I would relish the joy of trying. Sometimes I think that even if I knew it would fail for a certainty I would still do it. I write to Bothwell of this sense of wild desperation and he writes back:

Only a fool rides out to fail. Only a fool volunteers for a forlorn hope. You have seen me take desperate risks but never for something I thought was doomed. Don’t be a fool, Marie. Only ride out if you can win. Riding out for death or glory benefits only your enemy. Don’t be a fool, Marie, you have only once been a fool before.

B

I laugh as I read his letter. Bothwell counseling caution is a new Bothwell. Besides, it is not going to fail.

At last we have the allies we need.

A message from the French ambassador tells me that he has delivered to my beloved Norfolk three thousand crowns in gold coin—enough to finance my army. Norfolk will send it on to me by a secret courier in his own service. Ridolfi reports that he has seen the Spanish commander in the Netherlands, the Duke of Alva, who has promised to lead an assault by the Spanish troops from the Low Countries on the English channel ports; he has been blessed by the Pope, who has even promised his financial backing too. As soon as Spanish troops set foot on English soil, the power and wealth of the Vatican will be behind them. Now Ridolfi is on his way to Madrid to confirm that Spain will back the scheme with all its power. With the Pope’s support and with the Duke of Alva’s advice, Philip of Spain is certain to give the order to go ahead.

I write to John Lesley, the Bishop of Ross, for his latest news and to my old servant now in his service, Charles Bailly. Neither has replied yet, and this is troubling. Bailly could well be on a secret mission for the bishop and away from his lodgings, but my ambassador should have answered me at once. I know he is in London awaiting news of the “Great Enterprise.” When I hear nothing from him I write to Norfolk to ask him for news.

Norfolk replies in code, and his letter comes to me hidden in a pair of hollow heels to a pair of new shoes. He says that he has sent a letter to Lesley and also sent a trusted servant to his house, but the house was closed and he was not at home. His servants say that he is visiting a friend but they don’t know where he is, nor did he take any clothes with him, nor his personal servant.

Norfolk says that this sounds less like a visit, more like capture, and he fears the bishop has been arrested by Cecil’s spy ring. Thank God at least they cannot torture him: he is a bishop and an accredited ambassador; they dare not threaten him or hurt him, but they can keep him from writing to me or to Norfolk; they can keep him from the network of information that we need. At this most important moment we are without him, and—worse than that—if Cecil has arrested him it must be that he suspects that something is being planned, even if he does not know what it is.

Cecil never does anything without good reason. If he has picked up Bishop Lesley now, when he could have arrested him at any time, then he must know we are planning something of importance. But then I comfort myself by thinking that we have driven him from the shadows where he works. Bothwell always used to say, Get your enemies out in the open where you can see their numbers. Cecil must be afraid of us now, to act so openly.

As if this were not trouble enough, Norfolk writes to me that he has sent out the three thousand crowns of French gold by means of a draper from Shrewsbury who has served one of his servants by running errands in the past. They have not told the man what he is carrying. Norfolk decided it was safer to tell him it was only some sealed papers and a little money, and to ask him to deliver them on his way, at his own convenience. This is a risk, it is a terrible risk. The messenger, not knowing the value of what he is carrying, might well not take enough care. If he is curious, he can simply open the bag. I suppose my lord’s thinking is that if he did know the value of the package, he might simply steal the gold—and there would be no way we could complain of him or arrest him for theft. We are in danger whichever way we turn but I have to wish that Norfolk could have chosen someone—anyone—from all his thousands of servants who could have been trusted with this great, this crucial secret. These are the wages to pay my army for the uprising and Norfolk has sent them out by a Shrewsbury draper!

I have to bite my tongue on my impatience. For the love of God! Bothwell would have given it to a bondsman, or someone sworn to lifetime fealty. Norfolk must have such men; why does he not use them?

He acts as if he has no sense of his own danger when we are about to make war against a sovereign queen. He behaves as if he were safe. But we are not safe. We are about to take on the greatest power in England; we are about to challenge her on her own land. We are about to take on Cecil and his spy ring and he is already alert and suspicious. God knows, we are not safe. We are none of us safe.

It is the dusty hot weather at the end of the English summer, the leaves of the trees like crumpled gowns at the end of a masque. We have been sent back to Sheffield Castle. Whatever crisis they feared seems to be over and the summer is sunny once more. The court is on progress and Lady Wendover, writing to me from Audley End, tells me that Elizabeth has turned gracious to her cousins the Howards, is staying in their house, is speaking sweetly of her love for her cousin Thomas, and they are going to ask her to forgive him and restore him to his place at court and his house at Norfolk. The poor Howard children, who left their home in the hands of the royal assessors, are now asking Elizabeth for her favor and are getting a kindly hearing. The court is hopeful that this will end happily. We all want to see a reconciliation.

Elizabeth has no family but the Howards; she and her cousin have been brought up together. They may quarrel as cousins do, but no one can doubt their affection. She will be seeking to find a way to forgive him, and this progress and this hospitality by his young son, in his father’s house, is her way to allow him back into her presence.

I let myself hope that the danger and the unhappiness of these last two miserable summers are finished.

Elizabeth has ordered us back to Sheffield Castle; the fears that drove us to Tutbury are passed.

Elizabeth will forgive her cousin Norfolk; perhaps she will marry Anjou and we can hope that she will have a son. The Scots queen will be sent back to Scotland, to manage as well or as ill as she can. I will have my husband restored to me and slowly, little by little, we will regain and recoup our fortune. What has been sold is lost and gone and we can never have it back. But the loans can be repaid, the mortgages settled, and the tenants will get used to paying higher rents in time. Already, I have made plans for mortgaging a coal mine and selling some packages of land that should take my lord out of the hands of the moneylenders within five years. And if the Scots queen honors her promises, or if Elizabeth pays some share, even half her debt to us, we should survive this terrible experience without the loss of a house.

I am going to settle my lord and the queen here in Sheffield Castle and then I will go on a visit to Chatsworth. I pine like a lover to be there; I have missed most of this summer; I want to catch the leaves turning sere. We cannot afford to rebuild or improve this year, nor the next, perhaps not for a decade, but at least I can plan what I would like to do; at least I can enjoy the work I have done. At least I can ride around my own land and see my friends and be with my children as if I were a countess and a woman of substance and not a cipher at a young woman’s court.

This autumn, my husband the earl and I will escort the queen to Scotland, and if she rewards him as richly as she should, we shall have Scottish lands and perhaps a Scottish dukedom. If she gives him the rights to the harbor dues of a port, or the taxes on the import of some restricted goods, or even the tolls of the border roads, we might make our fortune again from this painful vigil. If she plays us false and gives us nothing, then at the very least, we are rid of her, and that alone is worth a barony to me. And when we are rid of her there is no doubt in my mind that he will return to me in his heart. We did not marry for passion but for a mutual respect and affection, and our interests run together now, as they did then. I put my lands into his keeping, as I had to; he put his children and his honorable name into mine. Surely, when she is gone, and he has recovered from his foolish adoration of her, he will come back to me and we can be once more as we were before.

So I comfort myself, hoping for a better future, as I walk from the rose garden to the garden door. Then I pause, as I hear the worst sound in the world: the sound of galloping hooves, rapid like an anxious heartbeat, and I know at once, without a moment’s doubt, that something terrible has happened.

Something truly terrible is happening again. Some terror is coming into my life carried by a galloping horse. She has brought some horror to our door and it is coming as fast as it can ride.

Iam in the mews, tending to my favorite hawk, when I hear Bess screaming my name at the same time as I hear the tolling of the castle bell.

The hawk bates off my wrist and tries to fly in terror at the noise, and there is a moment of flapping wings and confusion and me hollering for the falconer, as if the world is ending. He comes at the run and hoods the frightened bird, scoops her into his steady hands, and takes her from me as I unwind the leash and hand her over to him, and all the time the terrible bell is tolling and tolling, loud enough to wake the dead, too loud for the living.

“God save us, what is it?” he demands of me. “Have the Spanish landed? Is it the North up again?”

“I don’t know. Get the bird safe. I have to go,” I say, and I set off at a run for the front of the house.

I am not strong enough for these alarms. I cannot run, even though my heart is pounding in terror. I drop to a walk, cursing my lungs and my legs, and when I get to the front of the house I see Bess there, white as a sheet, and a man collapsed on the ground before her, with his head between his knees, having fainted from exhaustion.

She hands me the letter he has brought, without a word. It is Cecil’s handwriting, but scrawled as if he has lost his mind. My heart sinks as I see it is addressed to me, but on the outside he has written, “5th of September, 1571, at 9 of the night. Haste, post haste. Haste, haste, for life, life, life, life.”

“Open it! Open it! Where have you been?” Bess screams at me.

I break the seal. The man on the ground whoops for his breath and begs for water. No one attends to him.

“What is it?” Bess demands. “Is it the queen? Never say she is dead!”

“The Spanish are coming,” I say. I can hear my own voice tight and cold with fear. “Cecil writes that the Spanish are to land an army of six thousand men. Six thousand. Six thousand. They are coming here to free her.”

“What are we to do? Are we to go to Tutbury?”

The man raises his head. “No use,” he croaks.

Bess looks blankly at me. “Are we to ride south?”

“Are you in Cecil’s confidence?” I ask him.

He gives me a wry smile as if to say that no one is in that position. “It’s too late to get her away. I have my orders,” he says. “I am to discover all that she knows and get back to my lord. You are to stay here and wait for the invasion. You can’t outrun them.”

“Dear God,” Bess says. “What are we to do when they come?”

He says nothing, but I know the answer is “Kill her.”

“Is the queen safe?” I demand. “Our queen, Elizabeth?”

“When I left she was safe,” he says. “But my lord was sending guards to Audley End to bring her back to London.”

“They plan to capture Queen Elizabeth,” I say briefly to Bess. “It says here. They have a great plan.

Kidnap the Queen of England, free the Queen of Scots, raise the people. The Spanish will march through us.” I turn to the man. “Was London ours when you left?”

He nods. “Please God, we are ahead of them by a matter of days. The Queen of Scots’ spy, a man called Ridolfi, blabbed the whole plan to an English merchant in Madrid. Thank the lord he knew what he was hearing and sent word to Cecil, as fast as his messenger could travel. Cecil sent me to you. We think the Spanish will be upon us in days. Their armada is launched, the Spanish Netherlands is armed, and the Pope is sending his wealth to arm traitors and calling out all the English Papists.”

I glance down the letter. “Cecil says that I am to interrogate the queen and prevail upon her to tell me all she knows.”

“I am to be with you,” he says. He staggers to his feet and brushes the dirt from his breeches.

I bristle at the suggestion that I cannot be trusted. He falls back against the portals of the front door from sheer exhaustion.

“This is a matter beyond pride,” he says, seeing that I want to refuse him admission to the queen. “I have to see her and search her room for papers. The Scots queen may know where the Spanish are landing.