The Virgin Queen's Daughter - Ella March Chase (5 page)

I blinked back tears, neither of us able to show the other our heartache. How different things might have been if we had. “I cannot bear to see him hurt.”

“You must bear it. You are the one person who can make him want to live.” Mother cupped my face, refusing to let me look away. “Since the day you could first name letters upon the hornbook your father bought you at a fair, he has had the raising of you. I have had to fight for scraps of your time to teach you even the barest essentials a woman must know to run a household for her husband someday.”

“I will learn it when I must.”

“You probably will just to spite me,” Mother said. “You’ve the quickest wit I have ever seen on a maid. But women do not have the luxury of retreating to their library when ugly things happen. We must change the bandages, fill empty bellies. Mend the tears in clothes and in lives. You may not have patience for your needlework, child, but you will be deft at the kind of mending your father needs most.” Mother surveyed the shelves packed with volumes precious as jewels. “You will fetch one of these books, Elinor de Lacey, and you will go to your father’s bedside and read to him.”

Did she long to ask more tenderly? I know she was as lost in her way as I was. Yet what choice did she have besides shoring up the broken places in our lives? “Mother, please do not make me.”

“You will show your father that his disfigurement changes none of your feelings for him. You will keep his mind so busy he will not miss his sight. Now go, Nell.”

It was the hardest thing I had ever done, entering the bedchamber where Father lay. I clutched a volume of Aristotle against my chest, trying not to let Father sense the horror I felt as I saw his eyes, now gray as marble and as lifeless.

He groped across the covers to find my hand. He raised my fingers to his lips. “I have missed you, Little Bird,” he said. And it was Father’s kiss. Father’s voice. I read and the books worked magic, just as Mother said they could. Angry red scars melted away with each turn of the page until he was Father. Just my father again.

Yet something in me had changed forever. The ice had broken beneath my feet; I waited for it to shatter again.

Chapter Four

March 1563

T
WO YEARS PASSED. I LEARNED THAT OUR NEIGHBOR
, Sir Charles, took Clarissa to London to be presented at court. To my Elizabeth, now four and a half years England’s queen. I burned with envy, torn between my duty to Father and my own yearning to break free of Calverley’s narrow world. I could recite by memory letters I had read to Father, his scholar friends telling of the great minds Elizabeth Tudor gathered around her, discussing advances in science it would take years to record in books that could be carried up the Great North Road to us. I imagined life beyond my cloistered existence, court where intellects were sharper than swords, the world my mother would not speak about, no matter how much I cajoled her.

“Father, what is it like at court?” I asked one day after reading a letter Ascham had sent him.

“That is hard to say. It changes, like the glass in the falcon window, sometimes sparkling so you are entranced by the sight. Other times light pierces your eyes, blinding you. There is much excitement there; the business of the whole world enters England through that gate. Ambassadors, adventurers, scientists, scholars. Rogues and scoundrels as well. The most beautiful, most powerful, wealthiest, and ruthless men England can provide.”

“But the queen is a woman. The rule of the country is entirely on her shoulders.”

“She has her ministers to guide her, and one day soon, God willing, she will have a husband to take much of that weight off of her shoulders.”

“Perhaps she does not wish a man to take the reins of the kingdom from her. Remember when I was learning to ride my pony? Crane hitched a rope to Marchpane’s bridle and led me about?”

Father smiled. “You gave him no peace until he freed the rope and let you ride about on your own.”

“Elizabeth has ridden on her own more than four years now. I cannot think she would like to be hitched to a lead rope again, no matter which man held on to its end.”

Father sobered. “No. It is a frustrating thing when one’s freedom is taken away.”

I winced, knowing that was exactly what had happened to him. Those rare times Crane could convince Father to come out into the fields, Father now rode the tamest of Calverley’s horses, which Crane led as he rode beside him. “Father,” I began. “I did not mean . . .”

“You merely raised a well-thought-out point in an argument. Be that as it may, a woman is not able to have such freedom once she has a husband.”

“Yet, the ladies at court have more freedom than most?”

“Yes. You would never lack someone to debate philosophy or matters of science with. There are more books in the queen’s library than there are in most of England. And the women who surround her have read many of them. Why do you ask?” A line appeared between Father’s brows. I could sense the worry in him—that I wanted to leave Calverley, leave him.

Guilt stung. “It is only that Clarissa Barton is in London. I would hate it if she understood things I did not.”

The tension in father’s scarred face eased. “I imagine you would know more than many women at court. You would like that, would you not? To be more than just the most intelligent girl in Lincolnshire? If you were a fine court lady you could leap all the intellectual fences you cared to—”

“How dare you speak to Nell thus!” My mother snapped, framed in the library door. She did not step into the chamber. It was as if some invisible wall had always held her outside.

Father went rigid. I retreated behind him, alarmed by the expression on my mother’s face. “Thomasin,” he said with great dignity, “perhaps you should announce yourself instead of lurking at doors. It is a courtesy, is it not, to a blind man?”

It was not enough to deflect her anger. “You are blind in more things than your eyes! Spinning pretty tales to Nell about court when you know I will not hear of her ever going there! Filling her head with thoughts that will only confuse her, make her question her lot as a woman. A wife. A daughter.”

“If you would forbid the child to think you are rather too late. She has a mind keen as yours is, keen as good Queen Katherine Parr’s.”

“And what good did it do either of us in the end? The queen handed her fate to a man not half the wit she was and he destroyed her. And me . . . nothing in my intellect could soften his betrayal. Better never to think at all than to be torn asunder between reason and duty. Nell’s life will be running a household, making certain the millers do not grind chalk into her flour, managing servants who may try to cheat her or let her babes wander off. The closest Nell will get to books is making certain the servants dust the volumes so that when her husband is locked up in his library he does not get a complaint of the lungs.”

“Is
that
what our life together has been to you?”

Fear rose in me, seeing my parents so angry with each other, so raw.

“Our marriage is exactly what it should be according to the Bible. And it will be the same for Nell. You cannot transform her into a boy who will have a man’s freedom. And I will be damned before I allow her to go to court! Talk of your science, your philosophies if you must. But the day she leaves Calverley such luxuries will be at an end. John, you will have to decide upon a husband for her one day. She is growing up and you cannot stop her.”

“That does not matter,” I shouted as if my defiance could drive back my parents’ fury, the way Eppie had once had me shout down the thunder in storms that frightened me as a child. “I will never leave Father,” I insisted. But my parents’ hard words thundered in the silence, and nothing I did could shout them down.

Yet, in spite of how shaken I was, my father’s picture of court entranced me, the letter concealed behind the brick in my wall whispering like Eve’s serpent. Forbidden fruit was mine for the taking. All I had to do was ask.

W
HEN
S
IR
C
HARLES
and his vapid daughter stopped overnight on their return to Barton Hall, Clarissa drove me nigh mad with tales of how she had suffered in London.

“Everyone is so accomplished!” Clarissa exclaimed once Mother took Sir Charles to speak to my father in his library, leaving us alone. “Her Majesty’s ladies argued fierce as the men about philosophy and science. I near fainted when one asked what
I
thought of some hypothesis.”

It sounded like heaven to me. I loved arguing with Father’s Cambridge friends, but as time passed fewer and fewer of them came to visit anymore. They still sent him books and wrote letters, but the travels that once brought them to Calverley no longer took them anywhere near Lincolnshire. It seemed Mother was right. Men could not bear to come face-to-face with Father’s pain.

“Before I was presented to the queen my father bought me this book.” Clarissa produced a small volume. “
The Three Virtues
. Reading it only made me more nervous. I know you are most fond of books, Mistress Nell. You might as well take it. I never intend to set foot in a palace again.”

I glanced through the pages, enough to know Mother would forbid me to read it. Thanking Clarissa, I tucked it beneath a stack of other volumes so Mother would not see. The presence of the book fortified me during the Bartons’ three-day visit. Even Mother was relieved when they left at last. She bustled about the estate on errands postponed while the Bartons were guests. Father had Jem settle him in the library and closed the door for some much-needed relief after Sir Charles’s brainless chatter.

The moment the Bartons left, I grabbed my contraband and fled to the nearest deserted chamber.

“Much good this will do me,” I grumbled, peering down at Clarissa’s volume. “My parents would not even let me go to London for the queen’s coronation. If I was denied that pleasure, nothing on earth would move them to present me at court.”

My mother had balked about attending the celebration, her dislike of Elizabeth still strong. But Father had insisted it was better to be wise. Queen Mary had died, a great tumor in her belly instead of the babe she yearned for. While Mary Tudor ruled, Elizabeth had endured much at her enemies’ hands, and royalty had notoriously long memories when it came to slights. Calverley could not afford to offend a Tudor queen. Every noble family had swarmed to the city for the magnificent ceremony, and I heard told that London was mad with joy that January day. Their Protestant queen: a shining sun to obliterate Spain’s dark hold over England. The hated King Philip banished, and with him the Catholicism he and his unhappy queen had tried to force upon their subjects. A proud day to remember in England’s history, Father had said. It still stung that I had missed it.

That old bitterness made defying my mother’s wishes taste sweet. I opened the book, ran my finger down to the author’s name. Christine de Pizan. The book was written by a woman? Katherine Parr had written two books about sin before she died. My mother kept copies beside her bed. But few English women dared to put words in print. Another of the Church’s dictums: Females should live to serve their lords and masters. Women should never speak in church. Women must bear children in pain without complaint because we deserved such dire punishment for being the instruments of Original Sin.

The door opened and I thrust my book behind my back, but it was only Moll bringing clean linen. When I let my hands fall back to my sides she eyed the volume wistfully. “A new book, Mistress Nell?” I knew she longed to unlock the secrets encoded in the black print. I sometimes read to her, longing to share with someone my age.

“Clarissa Barton gave it to me,” I said, skimming the page. “It is about court.”

“Her maid was at table next to me, Mistress.” Moll tucked the linens into a wooden chest. “The tales she told took my breath away!All the fine people. I wish that I could see it.” I must have looked sour. Moll stammered in her haste to make it right. “Not that I would get so above myself. I know I might as well wish I were queen. Still, I cannot help picturing it.”

“Neither can I,” I confessed. “Do you want to hear a paragraph about court?” I cleared my throat for dramatic effect. “
A young lady of quality must cultivate the ability to please your mistress at all times
.” I made a face. “
I
would be happy if I could please my mother once a year.” Moll pressed her fingers to her lips to suppress a laugh as I continued.

“A lady-in-waiting must exhibit most extreme loyalty at all times and defend her mistress if that mistress is discovered in adultery
—
even to claiming an infant of her illegitimate pregnancy as one’s own
. Exactly how is a woman supposed to manage that deception?” I scoffed aloud. “Stuff a bolster under her gown for nine months and waddle around?”

“Mistress Nell!” Moll exclaimed. “You are devilish wicked!”

“What I am is so restless I feel like I may go mad. I love Calverley and Father and Mother, but . . .” How could I explain longing for a world I had only imagined?

“I suppose that is one thing I can be grateful for,” Moll said. “No chance for me to get restless. I’ve a hundred more tasks to get done before sun sets.”

Off she went, leaving me alone. I crossed to the window, a little ashamed for complaining in front of Moll. But I could not help the truth. Once as a child I opened the cages in mother’s solar when no one was looking, letting the bright feathered birds fly free. One bird shrank back in his cage, afraid to fly. That was what I dreaded most of all. That kind of fear clipping my wings.

I laid the book facedown on an oak table to hold my place, needing to do something wicked at once. That was
sure
to make me feel better, a sad testimony to my character. My parents did not let me attend the coronation. Perhaps I should see what it would have been like if I had. Shutting the door to the privy chamber, I crossed to the oak chest where Mother kept her most precious things. I opened the lid of the ornate trunk. The double-tailed lions carved on the surface glared in disapproval. But Mother said everything in this chest would be mine on my wedding day. I was only borrowing the gown a little bit early.

I pressed the velvet against me, its soft ermine trim all the more special because it had warmed my mother as Elizabeth Tudor made her coronation journey from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey in her litter of cloth of gold. The sunshine-hued gown had not been worn since, so it shone, bright as it had on that grand occasion, the emeralds encrusting the bodice sparkling green. I could not resist humming a tune, my feet moving in the gavotte my dancing master had taught me. “Tell me, who do you favor for a bit of frivolous reading?” I asked my phantom partner. “Cicero or Socrates?”

Holding the gown in place with one hand, I approached my mother’s silver mirror. I stared, stunned by my transformation. The creature peering back at me was a stranger. I opened Mother’s jewel coffer, intent on fastening her emerald cross around my throat. But footsteps sounded in the next chamber. I knew mother’s purposeful stride even before I heard Eppie’s chatter. The door swung wide, mother entering in a swirl of rose petticoats. She slammed to a halt. “Elinor de Lacey,
what are you doing?
”