his face close to mine. ‘Listen to me, Bessie. If I choose to let you live, I mean to marry you off as soon as I can. Do y’hear me? Catholic, Protestant, doddering fool or dribbling babe—I’d give you this moment if your husband would take you and your ambitions away from England, out of my sight for ever!’
He folded the list of questions. ‘We’re not done with these yet. You don’t deceive me. But first, I’ll hear more of what your friends in the Tower have to tell us. Then I’ll decide what’s to be done with you.’
There’s no point in lying further, I thought with despair. My father would make those prisoners say whatever he liked.
I opened my mouth to defend myself with the truth. Yes, I had met Digby, but not by my own will. I had refused to go with him, no matter what he might claim in his confession. I had threatened to kill myself rather than agree to do as the plotters intended.
Behind the king, Cecil gave a minute shake of his head.
I closed my mouth and stared past my father’s shoulder in astonishment. Again, a tiny warning shake, no mistake. Then Cecil looked back down at his notes.
Then I saw how close I had been to disaster. My guilt or innocence in the treason plot did not matter. It had never mattered, once I had reported Digby’s kidnap attempt to Henry alone. Not to the king or Cecil. That failure alone made me a traitor in the king’s eyes. And if I had confessed, I would have dragged my brother down with me.
‘My mother had friends like yours.’ My father handed the folded questions back to Cecil. ‘You should choose better acquaintance, lassie. With less taste for regicide. First your old governess Lady Kildare and her husband, now these Papist gallants. To be twice touched by treason is no accident.’
The king turned to Cecil. ‘Come, Wee Bobby! Let’s leave the “golden” lassie to her thoughts, while she still has a head to think them.’ He struck the door with his fist. It opened. He left without looking back.
Cecil wiped his pen and inserted it into a leather roll. He gathered up his papers and tapped them to align the edges. ‘Don’t fear,’ he said, so quietly that I might almost have imagined it.
‘And lest her thoughts remain confused,’ shouted my father from the corridor, ‘I’ll arrange a sight to clear them.’
‘My lord…’ I began.
Cecil held up his hand to silence me. ‘As Lord Treasurer, among all else,’ he continued, to the tabletop, ‘I must advise the king that he can’t afford to throw away even one of his two most valuable assets.’
When the door closed behind the two men and their footsteps had faded, I finally let my knees dump me back into my chair.
Cecil would have warned me to keep silent only if he knew what I was about to confess. But if he knew, why was he protecting me?
Bonfires were lit across England to celebrate my father’s deliverance from his brush with the fires of hell. From my window in Coventry, I saw arcs of glowing orange spring up against the night sky. No one invited me to attend any of the fires, nor the dancing, feasting and drinking that accompanied them. But even in the guarded household of Mr Hopkins, I felt a feverish exhilaration.
Something terrible had been averted, even if the details were blurred. The consuming darkness had been defeated. Demons had been slain. Those captured alive would soon be executed. The king declared that the anniversary of his deliverance would become a yearly holiday. Each year, on the fifth of November, the fires would burn. The threat to Henry and the Members of Parliament dropped from mention.
Once it was believed that all of the Gunpowder Plotters, as they became known, were either dead or in the Tower, I was returned to Combe. Lady Anne, left behind to avoid advertising my flight, was still agog with scraps of news. She lacked the discretion of Mr Hopkins, or perhaps his wariness, and eagerly poured her snippets into my ear.
The leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, had been killed at Holbeche House, not far beyond Coventry, with several others, including Thomas Percy, a cousin of the Duke of Northumberland.
Robert Catesby, I thought. ‘Robin…’
‘He was a known Papist trouble-maker,’ said Anne. ‘Even though he was a gentleman. A single bullet struck down both him and Thomas Percy, whose cousin the Duke of Northumberland lives at Syon and has been himself examined by Lord Salisbury and the king, your father.’ I felt in her the same feverish excitement I had found in Coventry.
‘My uncle had such a wondrous fire lit here,’ she went on happily. ‘He even permitted me to watch the dancing, though of course, I was not allowed to romp in a field with the tenant farmers.’ She leaned closer. ‘I did manage to snatch a mug of eau de vie distilled by our estate manager, but don’t tell Uncle.’ She looked at me for approval. She so seldom had daring to offer me.
‘What of the other plotters?’ I didn’t want to mention Digby by name.
‘You must ask Uncle. I know only what I hear on the estate.’
I went to ground, and waited. I wondered what my father had meant by ‘a sight to clear her thoughts’.
Christmas passed with the social restraint and well-fed decorum you would expect in a household where the Papish word ‘mass’ caused unease. In a house that had once been a Catholic abbey, we marked the holiday merely by praying more often, to a Protestant God, in the chapel built for monks.
But although my Protestant guardian spoke only of ‘Christ Tide’, the old, forbidden word ‘mass’ lived on in the kitchen, gardens and stable yard. Other, even older spirits had their gifts too. Protecting holly springs hung in the horses’ stalls. Mistletoe sprouted in the dairy. I left an appeasing plate of sweet, twisted anise-flavoured Jumbles in a corner of my bedchamber for the ghostly abbot, and found them half-eaten the next morning.
I used the more-frequent prayers to beg Henry to respond to my letter, if he had ever received it. Seven weeks had passed. Neither Abel nor Clapper had yet returned from London.
I sometimes caught Lord Harington studying me with a frown. Whether I imagined pity or coldness in his eyes, I felt the same quiver of terror. I tried to distract myself by playing with my monkey and my dogs. I rode whenever the bleak damp January weather allowed. I was never left alone again.
Like an animal, I felt a storm coming. I fell asleep at night with the fragment of granite from the Edinburgh crags in one hand, and Belle’s furry warmth hugged close with my other, whenever I managed to smuggle her past Lady Harington and her fear that the little dog might soil the bed linen.
At the end of January, the king sent men-at-arms to take me to London.
LONDON, THURSDAY, 30 JANUARY 1606
From my chamber in the Bishop’s house at Paul’s, beside the Cathedral, I listened all day to the distant sound of the scaffold being built in the Churchyard. I had arrived in London by night, as furtively as I had fled to Coventry. Lord Harington sent me off from Combe professing ignorance of why the king had sent for me in secret. Besides the men-at-arms and the necessary grooms, only my old nurse, Alison Hay, had ridden beside me. Not even Anne was allowed to attend me.
As I rode away, I looked over my shoulder at my guardian. After more than two years, I still did not know whether I was merely a costly burden to him or whether true affection lurked in all his well-meaning severity.
Hammering, sawing. Faint and distant, but I knew what they meant. In the next two days, the Gunpowder Plotters were to die, some here at Paul’s and some at the Tower. Listening to the sound of hammers, I tried to decide whether I had seen more than concern on