brow and red hair could doubt this girl’s paternity. The men riding closest to her as her guards had been picked, without doubt, for their looks. There was not one man beside her who was not remarkably handsome. The dull-looking ones were all scattered, further back in her train. Her ladies were the reverse; there was not one who outshone her, a clever choice, but one which only a coquette would make. She rode a white gelding, a big animal, almost as grand as a man’s warhorse, and she sat on it as if she had been born to ride, as if she took joy in mastering the power of the beast. She gleamed with health and youth and vitality, she shone with the glamour of success. Against her radiance, the Lady Mary, drained by the strain of the last two months, faded into second place.
Lady Elizabeth’s entourage halted before us and Lady Mary started to dismount as Lady Elizabeth flung herself down from her horse as if she had been waiting all her life for this moment, as if she had never skulked in bed, biting her nails and wondering what would happen next. At the sight of her, the Lady Mary’s face lit up, as a mother will smile on seeing her child. Clearly, Elizabeth riding in her pride was a sight that gave her sister a pure unselfish joy. Lady Mary held out her arms, Elizabeth plunged into her embrace and Lady Mary kissed her warmly. They held each other for a moment, scrutinising each other’s faces and I knew, as Elizabeth’s bright gaze met Mary’s honest eyes, that my mistress would not have the skill to see through the fabled Tudor charm to the fabled Tudor duplicity which lay beneath.
Lady Mary turned to Elizabeth’s companions, gave them her hand and kissed each of them on the cheek to thank them for bearing Elizabeth company and giving us such a grand welcome into London. Lady Mary folded Elizabeth’s hand under her arm, and scanned her face again. She could not have doubted that Elizabeth was well, the girl was radiant with health and energy, but still I heard a few whispered confidences of Elizabeth’s faintness, and swelling of her belly, and headache, and the mysterious illness that had confined her to bed, unable to move, while the Lady Mary had stared down her own fear alone, and armed the country and prepared to fight for their father’s will.
Elizabeth welcomed her sister to the city and congratulated her on her great victory. ‘A victory of hearts,’ she said. ‘You are queen of the hearts of your people, the only way to rule this country.’
‘Our victory,’ Mary said generously at once. ‘Northumberland would have put us both to death, you as well as me. I have won the right for us both to take our inheritance. You will be an acknowledged princess again, my sister and my heir, and you will ride beside me when I enter London.’
‘Your Grace honours me too much,’ Elizabeth said sweetly.
‘She does indeed,’ Jane Dormer said in a hiss of a whisper to me. ‘Sly bastard.’
The Lady Mary gave the signal to mount and Elizabeth turned to her horse as her groom helped her into her saddle. She smiled around at us; saw me, riding astride in my pageboy livery, and her gaze went past me, utterly uninterested. She did not recognise me as the child who had seen her with Tom Seymour in the garden, so long ago.
But I was interested in her. From the first glimpse I had of her, up against a tree like a common whore, she had haunted my memory. There was something about her that absolutely fascinated me. The first sight I had of her was that of a foolish girl, a flirt, a disloyal daughter, but there was always more to her than that. She had survived the execution of her lover, she had avoided the danger of a dozen plots. She had controlled her desire, she had played the game of a courtier like an expert, not like a girl. She had become her brother’s favourite sister, the Protestant princess. She had stood outside the conspiracies of the court and yet known to a penny the price of every man. Her smile was utterly carefree, her laugh as light as birdsong; but her eyes were as sharp as a black-eyed cat that misses nothing.
I wanted to know every single thing about her, to discover everything she did, and said, and thought. I wanted to know if she hemmed her own linen, I wanted to know who starched her ruff. I wanted to know how often she washed her great mane of red hair. As soon as I saw her, in her green gown at the head of such a troop of men and women on that huge white horse, I saw a woman that I could one day wish to be. A woman who was proud of her beauty and beautiful in her pride; and I longed to grow into a woman like that. The Lady Elizabeth seemed to me to be something that Hannah the Fool might become. I had been an unhappy girl for so long, and then a boy for so long, and a fool for so long that I had no idea how to be a woman – the very idea baffled me. But when I saw the Lady Elizabeth, high on her horse, blazing with beauty and confidence, I thought that this was the sort of woman that I might be. I had never seen such a thing in my life before. This was a woman who gave no quarter to a disabling maidenly modesty, this was a woman who looked as if she could claim the ground she walked on.
But she was not bold in a brazen way, for all of her red hair, and her smiling face, and the energy of her every movement. She deployed all the modesty of a young woman, with a sideways sliding smile at the man who lifted her back into the saddle, and a flirtatious turn of the head as she gathered up the reins. She looked like someone who knew all the pleasures of being a young woman and was not prepared to take the pains. She looked like a young woman who knew her mind.
I looked from her to the Lady Mary, the mistress that I had come to love, and I thought that it would be better for her if she made plans to marry off Lady Elizabeth at once, and send her far away. No household could be at peace with this firebrand in its midst, and no kingdom could settle with such an heir burning so brightly beside an ageing queen.
As Lady Mary became established in her new life as the next Queen of England I realised that I must speak to her about my own future. September came and I was paid my wage from the queen’s household accounts, just as if I were a musician or a pageboy in very truth, or one of her other servants. Clearly, I had exchanged one master for another, the king to whom I had been begged as a fool was dead, the lord who had sworn me as his vassal was in the Tower, and the Lady Mary on whom I had been battened all this summer was now my mistress. In a move contrary to the spirit of the times – since everyone else in the country seemed to be coming to court with their palm outstretched to assure her that their village would never have declared for her had it not been for their own heroic isolated efforts – I thought that perhaps the moment had come for me to excuse myself from royal service and go back to my father.
I chose my time carefully, just after Mass when the Lady Mary walked back from her chapel at Richmond in a mood of quiet exaltation. The raising of the Host was not an empty piece of theatre to her, it was the presence of the risen God, you could see it in her eyes and in the serenity of her smile. She was uplifted by it in a way I had only ever seen before in those who held to a religious life for conviction. She was more abbess than queen when she walked back from Mass, and it was then that I fell into step beside her.
‘Your Grace?’
‘Yes, Hannah?’ she smiled at me. ‘Do you have any words of wisdom for me?’
‘I am a most irregular fool,’ I said. ‘I see that I pronounce very rarely.’
‘You told me I would be queen, and I held that to my heart in the days when I was afraid,’ she said. ‘I can wait for the gift of the Holy Spirit to move you.’
‘It was that I wanted to speak to you about,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I have just been paid by the keeper of your household …’
She waited. ‘Has he underpaid you?’ she asked politely.
‘No! Not at all! That is not what I meant!’ I exclaimed desperately. ‘No, Your Grace. This is the first time that you have paid me. I was paid by the king before. But I came into his service when I was begged as a fool to him by the Duke of Northumberland, who then sent me as a companion to you. I was merely going to say that you, er, you don’t have to have me.’
As I spoke,