Your Grace. I was taken from my father on the whim of the duke and then begged as a fool to the king. Since then I have been in your household without you ever asking for my company. I just wanted to say that you can release me, I know you never asked for me.’
She sobered at once. ‘Do you want to go home, Hannah?’
‘Not especially, Your Grace,’ I said tentatively. ‘I love my father very well but at home I am his clerk and printer. It is more enjoyable and more interesting at court, of course.’ I did not add the proviso – if I can be safe here – but that question always dominated me.
‘You have a betrothed, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, disposing of him promptly. ‘But we are not to marry for years yet.’
She smiled at the childishness of my reply. ‘Hannah, would you like to stay with me?’ she asked sweetly.
I knelt at her feet, and spoke from my heart. ‘I would,’ I said. I trusted her, I thought I might be safe with her. ‘But I cannot promise to have the Sight.’
‘I know that,’ she said gently. ‘It is the gift of the Holy Spirit, which blows where it lists, I don’t expect you to be my astrologer. I want you to be my little maid, my little friend. Will you be that?’
‘Yes, Your Grace, I should like that,’ I said, and felt the touch of her hand on my head.
She was silent for a moment, her hand resting gently as I knelt before her. ‘It is very rare to find one that I can trust,’ she said quietly. ‘I know that you came into my household paid by my enemies; but I think your gift comes from God, and I believe that you came to me from God. And you love me now, don’t you, Hannah?’
‘Yes, Your Grace,’ I said simply. ‘I don’t think anyone could serve you and not come to love you.’
She smiled a little sadly. ‘Oh, it is possible,’ she said, and I knew she was thinking of the women who had been employed in the royal nursery and paid to love the Princess Elizabeth and to humiliate the older child. She took her hand from my head and I felt her step away, and I looked up to see her going towards the window to look out at the garden. ‘You can come with me now, and bear me company,’ she said quietly. ‘I have to talk with my sister.’
I followed her as she walked through her private rooms to the gallery which ran looking out over the river. The fields were all shaven bare and yellow. But it had not been a good harvest. It had rained at harvest time, and if they could not dry the wheat then the grains would rot and there would not be enough to last through the winter, and there would be hunger in the land. And after hunger came illness. To be a good queen in England under these wet skies you had to command the weather itself; and not even Lady Mary, on her knees to her God for hours every day, could manage that.
There was a rustle of a silk underskirt and I peeped around and saw the Lady Elizabeth had entered the gallery from the other end. The young woman took in my presence and she gave me her mischievous smile, as if we were somehow allies. I felt like one of a pair of schoolmates summoned before a severe teacher and I found that I was smiling back at her. Elizabeth could always do that; she could enlist your friendship with a turn of her head. Then she directed her attention to her sister.
‘Your Grace is well?’
Lady Mary nodded and then spoke coolly. ‘You asked to see me.’
At once the beautiful pale face became sober and grave. Lady Elizabeth dropped to her knees, her mane of copper hair tumbled around her shoulders as she dropped her head forward. ‘Sister, I am afraid you are displeased with me.’
The Lady Mary was silent for a moment. I saw her check a rapid movement forward to raise up her half-sister. Instead she kept her distance and the cool tone of her voice. ‘And so?’ she asked.
‘I can think of no means where I have displeased you, unless it is that you suspect my religion,’ Lady Elizabeth said, her head still penitently bowed.
‘You don’t come to Mass,’ the Lady Mary observed stiffly.
The copper head nodded. ‘I know. Is it that which offends you?’
‘Of course!’ Lady Mary replied. ‘How can I love you as my sister if you refuse the church?’
‘Oh!’ Elizabeth gave a little gasp. ‘I feared it was that. But sister, you don’t understand me. I want to come to Mass. But I have been afraid. I didn’t want to show my ignorance. It’s so foolish … but you see … I don’t know how to do it.’ Elizabeth raised a tearstained face to her sister. ‘Nobody ever taught me what I should do. I was not brought up in the way of the Faith as you were. No-one ever taught me. You remember, I was brought up at Hatfield and then I lived with Katherine Parr and she was a most determined Protestant. How could I ever be taught the things you learned at your mother’s knee? Please, sister, please don’t blame me for an ignorance which I could not help. When I was a little girl and we lived together, you did not teach me your faith then.’
‘I was forbidden to practise it myself!’ the Lady Mary exclaimed.
‘So you know what it was like for me,’ Elizabeth said persuasively. ‘Don’t blame me for the faults of my upbringing, sister.’
‘You can choose now,’ the Lady Mary said firmly. ‘You live in a free court now. You can choose.’
Elizabeth hesitated. ‘Can I have instruction?’ she asked. ‘Can you recommend things that I should read, perhaps I could talk with your confessor? I am conscious of so many things that I don’t understand. Your Grace will help me? Your Grace will guide me in the right ways?’
It was impossible not to believe her. The tears on her cheeks were real enough, the colour had flushed into her face. Gently Lady Mary went forward, gently she outstretched her hand and put it on Elizabeth’s bowed head. The young woman trembled under her touch. ‘Please don’t be angry with me, sister,’ I heard her breathe. ‘I am all alone in the world now; but for you.’
Mary put her hands on her sister’s shoulders and raised her up. Elizabeth was normally half a head higher than the Lady Mary but she drooped in her sadness so that she had to look up at her older sister.
‘Oh, Elizabeth,’ Mary whispered. ‘If you would confess your sins and turn to the true church I would be so very happy. All I want, all I have ever wanted, is to see this country in the true faith. And if I never marry, and if you come after me as another virgin queen, as another Catholic princess, what a kingdom we could build here together. I shall bring the country back to the true faith and you shall come after me and keep it under the rule of God.’
‘Amen to that, Amen,’ Elizabeth whispered, and at the joyful sincerity in her voice I thought of how often I had stood in church or at Mass and whispered ‘Amen’, and that, however sweet the sound was, it could always mean nothing.
These were not easy days for the Lady Mary. She was preparing for her coronation but the Tower, where the Kings of England usually spent their coronation night, was filled with traitors who had armed against her only a few months before.
Her advisors, especially the Spanish ambassador, told her that she should execute at once everyone who had been involved in the rebellion. Left alive, they would only become a focus of discontent; dead they would be soon forgotten.
‘I will not have the blood of that foolish girl on my hands,’ the Lady Mary said.
Lady Jane had written to her cousin and confessed that she had been wrong to take the throne but that she had acted under duress.
‘I know Cousin Jane,’ the Lady Mary said quietly to Jane Dormer one evening, while the musicians plucked away at their strings and the court yawned and waited for their beds. ‘I have known her since she was a girl, I know her almost as well as I know Elizabeth. She is a most determined Protestant, and she has spent her life at her studies. She is more scholar