on a beech trunk. My heart felt smothered, as if it didn’t have room to beat. I tugged at my stomacher and bodice again. Distractedly, I picked broken twigs and leaves from my skirt and sleeves. The smell of fear rose from under my arms. I felt small and empty. My wolf had left me. I was on my own again.
I hobbled on. Now I had to return to my attendants and try to lie.
Trey raced up covered with mud and bits of dead leaf from rolling on the ground. Then he galloped ahead and back again, reproaching me for my slowness.
I had been such a fool!
If only our thoughts could leap across distances.
Take care, beloved brother. Take care! I don’t know where you are. I don’t even know what I must warn you about.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ my would-be kidnapper had said. Please, God, let someone tell me what is happening.
Henry and I had been kept apart from birth, he at Stirling Castle under the rod of Lord Mar, I at Dunfermline and Linlithgow with Lady Kildare. But when we met at Holyrood before coming south to England, we had recognised each other as true kin in our first shy glance. Henry, who would one day be king, would know what I should do next.
Are you still alive?
It did not seem possible that Combe would still be standing when we got back.
On the riverbank, the grooms were asleep on the grass. Lady Anne Dudley Sutton, a niece chosen by my guardian to be my chief companion, was making a necklace of plaited grass.
‘What has happened to you?’ cried one of the two older ladies with the beginning of alarm.
‘Twisted my ankle,’ I said. ‘Slipped from a fallen log.’ Only half a lie.
The ladies clicked their tongues over my ankle and promised a poultice. They exchanged amused glances while they re-pinned my sleeves and skirt without further questions. This time, at least, past misbehaviour worked in my favour.
To my relief both my guardian and his wife were away when we returned to Combe and would not return that night. But I had to let Mrs Hay resume her former role as my nurse, and order my fire built higher and fuss over my ankle with cool cloths and ointments. I agreed to eat my supper propped up on pillows in my big canopied bed. I stroked the four upright carved oak lions that held up the canopy and protected me from bad dreams. But tonight they stared past me with blank, denying eyes.
There was no help for it, I decided as I tried to force down some pigeon pie. I must risk implicating myself with guilty knowledge and warn Henry. If any harm came to him that might have been avoided, I would have to kill myself after all. I would not let myself think that the harm might already be done. I pushed aside the chicken broth. I asked Anne to fetch my pen and ink.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ the man in the forest had said. He was right. My life was being shaped by events I might know nothing about until it was too late. But I knew enough to know that my father’s demons had followed us here to his Promised Land and threatened both Henry and me.
When I was younger, Mrs Hay had often put me to bed with tales that kept me wide awake in the dark for hours, tales even more terrifying than the servants’ whispers of a ghostly abbot who sometimes stalked through my bed-chamber, which had once been his.
Vivid against the shadowy canopy overhead, I saw the sword tip held to my grandmother’s pregnant belly while my father still lay curled inside. My grandfather’s sword tip, threatening his own wife and unborn son. My father almost killed by his own father, Lord Darnley, while he was still in the womb. Then I saw Darnley murdered, his twisted body blown out of his bed by a mysterious explosion, lying dead under an apple tree. I saw my grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scotland, beheaded because Protestant Queen Elizabeth believed her guilty of plotting with Catholics to usurp the English crown.
‘Papists,’ whispered Mrs Hay. ‘The devilish spawn of Rome.’ She kept her voice down because my Danish mother was a Catholic and one never knew who might be listening. But she did not hesitate to call my Grandmother Mary by her Scottish nickname—‘The Strumpet of Rome’.
I learned that there had been two Catholic plots against my father here in England, before his backside had even touched the English throne. The Bye and The Main, I repeated silently to myself.
When very young, I did not understand. Then, shortly after we came south, I had lost my own sweet governess, Lady Kildare. Her husband had plotted to kill my father in one of the Catholic plots. Though he was executed, she had survived. But my lovely, lively guardian, whom I loved dearly and who held my young heart in her care as tenderly as a mother, was wrenched from my life for fear that I might catch treason from her like the plague. I learned then about the bloody struggle between Papists, who were still loyal to the Catholic Pope in Rome, and the newer Protestants, a struggle set off in England by the old queen’s father, Henry VIII, my brother’s namesake.
‘Holy Mother, protect me!’ my forest spirit had cried.
It was happening again.
If anyone learned of our meeting—or even of his intent—I was tainted by treason for a second time. And I knewenough from Mrs Hay to be afraid of more than Papists.
My father’s demon enemies were here in England, like the supernatural fanes and trowies who are invisible until they show themselves. In the dreams I had after my nurse’s stories, I saw devils riding on skeleton horses, the faces of dead men taking shape in the dust of the road. The sons of executed men clung to my father’s back whispering vengeance in his ear. No River Jordan cut off his English Paradise to leave all his Scottish ghosts behind, shouting impotently and shaking their fists on the far bank. They rode south with him.
I knew from Mrs Hay that my father still searched his closet himself, every night before going to bed, for hidden assassins and still wore a doublet cross-quilted with thick padding to stop a knife. The fine embroidery over his chest and belly was laid with enough metal wire to dull any blade.
I don’t know if Mrs Hay ever saw what else she was teaching me along with respect for my father’s youthful courage. I couldn’t think what wires or quilted padding could armour him against knowing that he had accepted the English throne from the woman who signed his own mother’s death warrant. My father had acquiesced to the death of my grandmother…his own mother. How could his children feel safe?
I tossed in the darkness. In spite of the poultice, my ankle throbbed. Having written the letter to Henry, I didn’t know where to send it. At different times, I had heard that the king had lodged him at Oatlands, Windsor, Richmond and Whitehall.
When the sky began to lighten the next morning but before the sun rose, I struggled into a loose gown and cloak and limped out of the house to the Combe stables. They were still dark, although a few horses had begun to stamp and bump in their stalls. I tiptoed unevenly through the dusty air and smells of horse and hay to find my groom, Abel White, who had ridden with me from Scotland and with whom I had once played in the Dunfermline stables.
He was asleep in a cocoon of blankets in the box stall of one of my mares. I shook him awake.
He groaned, then peered. ‘My lady!’
‘I need you to serve me on a secret mission,’ I whispered. My breath made a pale cloud in the chilly air.
His sleepy eyes widened. He scrambled to his feet. ‘Gladly! Yes, your grace. Always!’
My mare, Wainscot, stamped her feet, whuffled and nuzzled hopefully at the side of my neck.
‘It’s too early