The Virgin Queen's Daughter - Ella March Chase (18 page)

“Deserve it, some would say. Say it myself on the darkest days. I swear I would change things if I could, tell him the truth. But your mother knew. She insisted . . .” Eppie’s voice cracked. “I was so certain she would keep you safe.”

“Safe from what? You make no sense.” I could not shake the strangeness of that. Eppie had always made the best sense of anyone save my father. But I had been so young then and Mother . . . The back of my neck prickled.

“This place, Nell! You must get away from this place before it is too late.” Eppie glanced at the palace walls as if they were jaws waiting to snap shut on us both.

“But I have just begun to find my place. I am studying with Dr. Dee, and—”

“You must not let him look into your eyes! Him with his devil-skills as a seer. He is the queen’s creature now and he will betray you!”

“There is nothing to betray! Eppie, let me slip into the palace, bring you a posset to calm you. You are overwrought. Seeing menace when none is there.”

“It is everywhere! Lurking in shadows, watching me. Even at the Silver Swan.”

“Your brother-in-law’s alehouse? The one you meant to visit when we came to London?”

“How could I after what I saw at the Tower? Once I realized the danger, I dared not leave you.” Eppie plucked at the ties of her cloak, as if some specter was cinching it tight. “But once your mother drove me away from Calverley where else could I go?”

“Why did you never write me? I am sure one of the servants would have smuggled your letter to me.”

“She might have had me murdered if she knew where I was. A mother might do anything to see her child safe.”

“You cannot possibly mean you feared my mother might murder you?” I recoiled from Eppie, not wanting to see deeper signs of madness I now suspected might be there. “I know you and Mother parted badly. You were both angry—”

“I have no time to debate this! Not when they might have followed me.” Eppie shuddered, her busy eyes searching the shadows. “Last night the people I’ve dreaded finally came searching for me. Three fine gentlemen swaggered into the alehouse prying with strange questions, watching with eyes that could peel the very thoughts from the mind. My sister knew they were up to some evil. She put them off. Sent them back to the palace. God knows what powers their mistress might have invoked—a witch’s daughter. Familiar of sorcerers like John Dee.”

“You are speaking of the queen? But what would Her Majesty want with you?” Images flashed into my memory—the queen’s gaze black ice. Was my mention of Eppie the reason for the chill between Her Majesty and me? Did Elizabeth hold such a grudge over Katherine Parr’s death that she sought revenge? Dismay filled me. I pressed my fingers to my lips. “Oh, Eppie! I fear the visit from the queen’s men might be my fault! I told Her Majesty you were my nurse and she spoke of Katherine Parr.”

Eppie clasped my arms so tight they ached. “What else did you say, Nell? Lives depend on what you recall!”

My stomach coiled tight. “The queen blamed you for Katherine Parr’s death in childbed. I told her I would stake my life that you did all you could to see the dowager queen safely delivered. You were the finest midwife in the land. A miracle worker.”

“A miracle worker?”

“That is what Father claimed. I told the queen I was not expected to survive. My mother’s other babes had died in her womb. But you made certain I lived, even when all the rest of the world believed I was dead.”

Moonlight filtered through the trees, revealing Eppie’s eyes stark with terror. “What did Her Majesty say when you spoke thus? Did she ask any questions of you?”

“I cannot remember it all. I told the queen I was born in what used to be an abbey, near the well of St. Michael.”

“She cannot know! But she might suspect . . .” Eppie crossed herself with a shaking hand. “The danger is greater than I feared. But if a rabbit runs the fox will chase. The only armor I can give you is the truth before it is too late.”

“The truth about what?” I could almost feel her mind unhinge. Wind fingered a banner. The rustling sound made me jump. “Eppie, you are scaring me!”

“I will frighten you a good deal more. It is time you learned the truth about your birth.”

“Father told me.”

“Your father?” she scoffed. “And what did he know? Your mother and I, we kept secrets from Lord Calverley. We may burn in hell for it.”

“What kind of secrets?”

“About where you came from. How you came to be at the abbey.”

“It was run like an inn, Father said. Desperate people stayed there to pray for miracles.”

“Your mother had no hope of a miracle! All I prayed for was to keep her alive once the babe was delivered dead! But the waiting was so long, the hours tedious. Other women who lived near St. Michael’s heard of my skill, sought me out when they needed help. I never could have guessed what deviltry that would lead to.” She sucked in a deep breath.

I chafed at the old scar along the side of my hand, listening.

“The night before you were born, someone knocked on the door of your mother’s apartments. I opened the door. Masked strangers blindfolded me, then bundled me into a coach that took me to a house in the country. They did not remove the blindfold until I was in a richly appointed bedchamber where a very fair young lady lay suffering birth pangs.

“She was very young, this lady, dazed and frightened. It broke my heart, the way she stayed silent as birth pains tore at her. For two days she labored. Finally I had to wrench the babe from her womb or both mother and child would die. She should have screamed the lot of us deaf, the ordeal was so rough. The damage to her womb was such she would never deliver another babe. I went to console her, show her the healthy child she had borne. But before I could put the babe to her breast, one of her ladies made to suffocate the poor wee thing beneath a pillow.”

My stomach lurched at the image of that pitiful babe struggling for air. “How could anyone murder a babe? Did you not try to stop it?”

“They might have killed me, too. They were masked. The affair so furtive I knew I was in peril. They snatched me into the coach so quickly I barely had time to grab my bag of instruments. No one at the abbey knew where I had gone.” I pictured Eppie in that strange room, imagined how vulnerable she had been, how helpless.

“It is not the first time I had seen someone try to take a newborn’s life. It happens far too often. Mothers unable to face raising a bastard. In grand homes, murder done to save the pride of a noble name. In simpler cottages, a babe is sacrificed so there is enough food for other children to survive. I cannot imagine the guilt those who kill such innocents must carry. But on this night fortune smiled on the unwanted babe. Before the servant snuffed out the last spark of life, the fair lady started to wail like a wild thing. The servant rushed to her—to silence her, to comfort her—I know not which.But the instant all eyes were upon the mother, something drove me to peep beneath the pillow at the child. You peered up at me, so solemn, so . . . alive—”

“Me?”
I recoiled. “What are you saying?” Nay. Every part of me rejected it. “I am my father’s daughter. Everyone always said so! Even when we visited Cambridge and I recited my lessons!” I blinked back tears, remembering how proud I had been when Dr. John Dee had said farewell, the dragon book in my hands.
You are your father’s daughter, little Nell. You will not be satisfied until you have drained every drop of information on these fierce beasts there is to know
. Eppie moved toward me. I cringed away.

“You were like Lord Calverley in your love of learning, Nell. But when you looked into the mirror did you see Lord Calverley’s eyes? His nose? His chin?”

I looked no more like my swarthy, small father than a fox resembles a crow. “I was the babe the fair lady wished to kill?” I asked, knowing it was true.

Eppie nodded. “There you lay, your tiny mouth gasping for enough air to cry. Before you could do so, I slipped you the sugar teat I kept to teach reluctant babes to suckle, then I tucked you into my bundle, claiming I would give you a proper burial. By then, the mother who bore you was in hysterics. The servants blindfolded me and hastened me out of the house to the waiting carriage. I was terrified you would cry, betray us both. But you lay inside my bag, so silent, trusting me even then. By the time we reached the abbey my nerves were ragged with fear someone would check and make certain the babe was dead. Perhaps it was prayers that drove the thought from their minds. My prayers or a spate of even more desperate ones.

I found your mother alone, on her knees. Her water had broken, and it was murky with death like all the times before. I told her not to despair. God had answered her pleas for a child. Not the way she expected, but answered it, nonetheless. I opened my bag in the candlelight and told how they tried to suffocate you. She snatched you up into her arms and the look on her face! She loved you right then, so fiercely she barely felt the pain of delivering the child she had carried. ‘Show her to me, Eppie,’ she pleaded when agony gripped her. ‘Show me my perfect daughter.’ ”

My throat ached. So she had thought me perfect once. Her own babe lay dead in her womb, so in travail my mother had clung to me. She had needed me then, to drive back the pain, to grant her hope. My mother, vulnerable to pain and fate and God’s cruel whim. Needing
me.
Lying to her husband so she could keep a child who was not her own. I wondered how soon she had regretted the choice she made, realized I was anything but perfect.

“I did not know what danger I had put you and Lady Calverley in,” Eppie continued. “Not until five years later when you pulled me to the solar window of the Lieutenant’s house to see a real princess walking in the garden. The very same fair lady I had tended.”

I reeled, feeling sick, scarce believing my own ears. I could think of no catastrophe more devastating than what she had already told me—that I was not John de Lacey’s child. Yet this news flung me into a peril so vast I could scarce comprehend it. “You cannot mean that I am . . . Eppie, that is
impossible
!”

Eppie gripped both my hands in hers. “You are the Virgin Queen’s daughter.”

“Nay!” I pulled free, backed away. “You are mad! My mother was right to send you away!”

Pain crumpled Eppie’s features, pain and iron-hard resolve. “I would bear insanity gladly if it could keep you safe. But what I tell you is the truth. I swear it on my husband’s grave.” Eppie’s husband had died in King Henry’s French wars, and she had never loved again. “What is more, I have proof what I say is true.”

“Proof?”

“The most certain kind of proof, at least to the woman who bore you. But only she would recognize it as such. She is not likely to ever forget it.” Eppie drew something from inside her bodice, a scrap of cloth she pressed into my hand. I stared at dark velvet in the glow of a torch, the silvery embroidery glittering in the moonlight.

“What is this?” I asked, wary as if it were steeped in poison.

“A bit of cloth from the bed curtain in the chamber where you were born. I snipped it off when no one was looking.” Bed curtains. I thought of those in Elizabeth’s chamber here at Hampton Court, laboriously stitched by hand, each design unique as the patterns frost etched on wintry window panes. Such curtains were valuable as jewels, put in wills and passed on as legacies through generations.

The truth in what Eppie had said shook me. Weeks before an impending birth, a woman was shut away from the world. Anyone who spent her confinement in a bed luxurious as this scrap came from would never forget the pattern stitched on its curtains. “My mother knew whose daughter you say I am?”

“I told her everything at the Tower when you disappeared.”

“You could be lying. Mother is not here for me to ask.”

“Think, Nell. Why did we lock you in your room? Leave you there alone? For slipping away from me? You had done so before and been let off with a scolding.”

I remembered with burning clarity my mother’s stricken face when Elizabeth Tudor had swept me into her arms. I remembered the door to our Tower bedchamber slamming shut, mother and Eppie leaving me alone. To punish me, I had been so certain. Now my imagination ran wild, pictured two women who loved me, terrified at the secret they had discovered. Was it possible? Could that explain so many things?

Yet Eppie must have been mistaken. Nine years had passed between our visit to the Tower and the day that Mother banished her. Perhaps the imagination that had once conjured up Hobgoblin Puck had invented a far more menacing monster? Yet there could be no question my mother feared Eppie’s fantasy might be true, otherwise why had she reacted so violently when the messenger arrived from court? I recalled the frantic burning in Mother’s eyes as she crushed the missive in her hand, the queen’s seal like a gobbet of blood.

A rustling nearby startled us. Eppie and I sprang to our feet. Something tugged my petticoat. For an instant I feared it was a hand ready to drag me before the queen. I spun around. Heart hammering, I searched the shadows, met only Eppie’s eyes, so round with fear the whites glowed. “It was only the wind,” she said. “Or God himself warning I must leave before we are discovered.” Eppie clasped my face between her work-roughened palms. I flinched from her touch, but she held firm. “Nell, you understand what I have told you? You know the danger you are in?”

“Yet it does not make any sense,” I protested, desperate. “A woman with child would have a big belly. How could she have hidden it? You should see her at court—every moment of her life under scrutiny. She could not keep such a secret.”

“I do not know how she managed to do so, child. I only know that she did.”

“If Mother would have told me, I would have stayed at Calverley.”

“This secret means death to whoever knows it. That is why she did not tell you. That is why we must never meet again.”

She took the snipping of bed curtain from my numb fingers. Tucking the scrap in the cloth bag at my waist, she stretched on tiptoe to kiss me. “Be careful, my wandering princess,” she whispered. “May God shield us both.”