The King’s Daughter
CHRISTIE DICKASON

For My Beloved Tom

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Cast of Character

PROLOGUE

PART ONE The Dangerous Daughter

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

PART TWO The Bride Market

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

PART THREE The Bride

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

CHARACTERS IN THE KING’S DAUGHTER

Author’s Note

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Epigraphs

Other Books By

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE 1
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, JUNE 1610 ELIZABETH

Today, I learned what I am for. I think that the information has always been there, but I’ve chosen to ignore it. Then, this morning, when the Duc de Bouillon looked me up and down and allowed that I was indeed ‘handsome enough’, my grip on wilful ignorance began to slip.

I felt a tide of unbecoming red begin to rise from the top of my bodice. I tried to imagine that I had turned into a tortoise so that I could pull my head inside my shell and close the flap.

I was standing in the Great Presence Chamber on show as a prospective bride, weighed down by a pearl-crusted blue satin gown, with a chain of bright little enamelled gold flowers draped across my (still-improving) breasts. My hair had been savagely disciplined. My finest pearl and sapphire ear-drops knocked at my jawbones. Ten pairs of adult male eyes, including my father’s chilly gaze, stared at me as if I were a greyhound or horse for sale.

‘Good breeding,’ I imagined them saying. ‘Shame about the cow hocks.’ ‘Nice deep chest, not certain about the set of the ears…’

‘Handsome enough,’ the duke had said. I tried to think what had made me so uneasy.

Such guarded praise might have squashed my vanity, if I had any. I know how I look—tall and skinny with wild amber-red hair and fair Scottish skin. I may not be beautiful, like Frances Howard or fair, dainty Lucy, Countess of Bedford, but I’m not a trowie crept from under a stone, neither. But there was more to my sudden unease than hurt feelings.

Since I can remember, I’ve known that my father will marry me off, when and where he pleases. Marriage meant exile. I would be forced to leave my brother, to go, again, to a strange country to live among foreigners, with a man I didn’t know, to be his queen. Just as my poor mother had to leave her home in Denmark for Scotland to live with my father. And then had to follow him here to England.

I know that my brother Henry has no more choice in his fate than I, but at least he knows where he will be when he becomes king. He can let himself learn to love England. It’s his country now. My heart must not settle here.

That is the price of escaping from my father.

‘She’s tall for her tender years,’ said the Duc de Bouillon. The marriage broker for the German state of the Palatine slid his probing eyes over me again with a private adult male gleam that made me squirm and look away. My chest and face burned. My grip on wilful ignorance slipped a little further.

My father, a smallish man, moved his mouth as if chewing and scratched his neck. He didn’t trouble himself to reply. He knows that his wits are quicker than those of most men. And he’s the king, so he can play the fool if he wants to.

‘Of course, there’s no harm if the wife is taller than her husband,’ de Bouillon added quickly.

My mother is taller than my father.

My father still said nothing. He was behaving well, for him.

I rested my hands on the shelf of my farthingale and looked at the floor. The white ostrich plumes of my fan trembled in my fist. I felt a secret meaning in the duke’s words, which I did not yet grasp. I saw secret understanding gleam in other male eyes.

I know that I would be married even if I had tiny eyes like a badger and the stumpy legs of those German hounds they send down the badger’s hole—which I don’t. I am the First Daughter of England. Whoever marries me marries England. ‘Handsome’ has nothing to do with it.

The Dauphin of France, the most likely of my possible husbands according to my old nurse Mrs Hay, is a sulky, big-nosed boy not handsome enough for any purpose that I can think of. And yet his mother means to arrange a good marriage for him, in spite of his nose and absence of chin, like a trout—although I wrong the trout, which is a beautiful creature, all polished pewter-brown and speckled silver with the flush of dawn lining its gills. Also, its wits are sharper than his from what I hear. And its temper is less haughty, irritable and melancholy.

Handsome enough for what, then? I glanced up.

The duke’s eyes were now unlacing me, searching under the pearl-crusted silk for the swelling curves of my breasts. They lifted up my petticoats. They rested on my mouth. They dug through the layers of silk and linen looking for my most secret parts.

‘His highness will be pleased,’ he said.

He didn’t care that I could read his eyes. With a private smile, he nodded to himself. She will do, said his eyes. With her amber hair and blue eyes, which are much larger than those of a badger, and long legs under those petticoats. She will do very well.

For…

The cold edge of understanding slid into my heart. My thoughts scattered. I struggled for breath like a fish cast-up on the rocks. But I could no longer blind myself to what I hadn’t wanted to see.

I’m no looby. Of course I’ve known. I listen to gossip. I have observed dogs locked together and the noisy, terrifying breeding of horses. I can draw conclusions. But I never thought it might happen to me. To my flesh and skin and heart beat, to this thing that lives behind my eyes and breathes and fears and is me. Here is what I saw slithering through the duke’s eyes and let myself understand at last:

I am no more than a greyhound bitch or a mare to be bred. Marriage is not mere exile and strangeness. Marriage means that I must serve my country with my body. On my wedding night, Spain, or France or some German state—as our father chooses—like a dog or stallion, will push its designated cock into my private parts to plant an infant treaty.

Into that prim, closed mussel shell with its new amber fur, mysterious even to me. Closed like a book, even to me. Closed like a peach. Closed like a dark eye, still blind.

That is what I am for. How will I bear it?

PART ONE The Dangerous Daughter

To make women learned and foxes tame has the same effect—to make them more cunning.

James I & VI

2
5 NOVEMBER 1605—Combe Abbey, Warwickshire

It was my fault, but the sun had to share the blame. Because of the sun, I had escaped alone. It had been a wet November in England. To judge by the purple-edged clouds hanging just above the horizon, the rain would return before nightfall. But just then, bright sunlight spilled down through holes torn in a bruised cloudy sky.

Like contented hens, my three ladies had spread out their feathers on the river bank and settled in the patches of sun. Tipsy with unexpected sunlight and greedy for more, they agreed that I could come to no harm here on my guardian’s quiet estate.

‘I won’t go far,’ I promised. ‘Just a little way along the forest track across the ford.’

I was learning. When I was younger, perhaps six years old, I could never grasp why I should always seem to do as I was told. Then I learned. When people trust you, they watch you less.

My greyhound Trey splashed across the river Smite beside me as I balanced from stone to stone. Then he raced off after a squirrel and now barked furiously in the distance. My favourite toy spaniel, Belle, with her little short legs, had stayed behind on the riverbank.

Under cover of the forest canopy, I stopped to look back. No one had followed me.

Around me, the sun poked wavering holes through the wind-stirred trees and scattered spots of light across the ground like golden coins. I set off along a twisting leafy tunnel, through occasional pools of sunlight, to discover what adventure lay around the mysterious bend ahead of me. Under my leather riding boots the crumbly leaf mould of the forest track was sharp-smelling and black from rain in the night.

I stopped in a clearing, took off my hat and held up my face and hands to the rare, wonderful heat. A day like this tempted me against my better judgement to fall in love with England after all.

Something struck my hair lightly and slid down my chest—a yellow oak leaf, so bright and smooth that it seemedprecious and mysteriously purposeful. I picked it off my bodice and held it up to the sun. It was so perfect that it made me want to cry. I tucked it, smooth and cool, into my bodice to press later in a book.

The voices and laughter of my attendants arrived only faintly on the wind from the far side of the river. I picked up a piece of fallen branch and threw it as far as I could. I listened to the satisfying crash. I wanted to shout with joy.

Unwatched, unattended. A miracle of freedom.

I spread my legs wide. Happily, I emptied my bladder like a mare under the cone of my skirts, felt the steamy warmth and smelled the friendly barnyard odour from my own body.

Ever since my family came south, I had lived in a cage of eyes. Scotland had been far more free. In Edinburgh, while we waited to travel down to London, I rode almost every day with my older brother Henry, one of his hawks on his wrist. Accompanied only by a single groom and my greyhounds, Trey, Deuce, Quattro and Quince, we escaped together up onto the crags above the city under a sky of bright luminous grey. There, we stood side-by-side looking down on Edinburgh from the Cat Nick, a rocky point higher than the castle where our father had been born, higher even than the gulls. In the waters of the Firth beyond us, an island crouched low and dark in the water like a dragon waiting to spring on Fife. We would watch the mists blow in from the sea to cover it before we rode back. On the last day before we left Scotland, I took a small piece of sharp granite from the crags and hid it in my writing chest. I hold it in my hand now when I can’t fall asleep.

I paused again in a little glade pitted with rabbit holes. The only sound was a leafy whispering. Trey had stopped barking. I stood so still that five rabbits popped out from under the roots of an old oak and began to forage on the forest floor.

I imagined that I became a rabbit. My nose twitched. I hopped forward to nibble a fresh tuft of grass, then pulled my hindquarters up after me, as if I had almost forgotten and left them behind.

One of the rabbits lifted its head. In an explosion of movement, they all disappeared into the ground.

I turned.

A handsome young man stood on the track watching me. Coins of sunlight danced on his shoulders and fair hair, which was almost the colour of the oak leaf.

I felt a thump of startled interest and grew a little breathless. He had materialised silently in the forest glade as if by magic. I knew that I had just stepped out of my everyday life into something far more interesting.

As we stood regarding each other in silence, I grew more and more certain that he was one of the magical creatures from my nurse’s bedtime stories, who lived in forests and lochs and under stones. Always in our world but invisible unless they choose to show themselves.

I tried to think how to speak to him. He might have been anything, a tree-soul or a magic stag like those that roamed the Highlands, which had taken the shape of a man.

I wanted to reach out and pick the coins from his broad shoulders and put them into my purse, knowing that they would turn into real gold.

I was not afraid. His handsome face, though pale, was gentle and seemed made for cheerfulness. In any case, I was protected by the fairy shot, an ancient flint arrowhead, which my nurse, Mrs Hay, had sewn into my petticoat.

I smiled in greeting. When he did not smile back, I nodded encouragement.

He did not respond. We stood in silence.

‘Are you a spirit of the forest?’ I asked at last.

He opened his mouth as if he wished to speak but still remained silent.

I thought I understood then. I looked at his hands, clasped tightly in front of him. ‘You’re under a spell so that you can’t speak? Must I set you free?’

‘You must come with me.’ His voice cracked a little, as if I had indeed just lifted a spell and his words were still rusty.

‘Why?’ I told myself that this adventure was exactly what I had secretly hoped for when I set off down the mysterious, twisting path. All the same, I suddenly wished that Trey were there. ‘Where do you want me to go?’

He held out his hand to me.

I considered the urgency in his voice and gesture. But he was not threatening me. On the contrary, his words and reaching hand were a plea, not an order.

‘Are you an enchanted prince?’ I knew from Mrs Hay how the story went. He needed a kiss from me to set him free from a curse, but if he explained beforehand, he would stay cursed forever.

I looked at his mouth. I had never kissed a man, only my dogs and monkey and horses. Until this moment, I had not thought I would ever want to. To my surprise, I could imagine kissing him. My chest felt thick and full, making it hard to breathe.

I closed my eyes. It would be impossible to kiss a man while looking at him.

‘Please come, your grace!’

I opened my eyes. With his uncertain eyes and fierce words, he now reminded me of Baby Charles playing at being a soldier, though he was taller and far more handsome than my puny five-year-old brother.

I saw now that his hand shook. Now I detected the reek of ordinary human fear, stronger than the sharp tang of leaf mould and comfortable smells of dog and horse on my own clothes. Unease stirred.

He wasn’t doing it right. This no longer felt like the story I’d been imagining. With a thud, I dropped back into my everyday self. He was not an enchanted prince, and I was far too old to believe such things. A flush of shame began to creep up past the top of my bodice.

I smiled coolly, as I had learned from watching my present guardian’s wife, Lady Harington. He was most likely nothing more than an importuning courtier. Even at my age, when the tender pebbles on my chest were just beginning to swell into breasts, petitioners pursued me, imagining that I might at least put in a good word for them with my father or mother, or older brother, even when I was locked away here at Combe.

The young man did not smile back.

But then, people were often too overwhelmed to smile back at royalty, even young female royalty.

I eyed the silver buttons on his doublet and the fine Brussels lace edging his collar. In truth, he didn’t look like one of the usual awe-struck. More like one of those well-born Englishmen who sniggered behind their hands at my father and the ‘barbarian Scots’. A gentleman, in any case, importuning or not.

‘I beg you!’ he said.

‘Are you a footpad?’ I asked, to punish him because I had imagined foolish things, and thought of kissing him. ‘My purse is empty, but my amethyst buttons might be worth taking.’

He looked so startled and indignant that I almost smiled at him again.

The lace on his collar was vibrating against his coat.

But then, many people trembled before my father. Some even trembled before me, young as I was and only a girl. But such people were not often gentleman like this one.

Suddenly, I heard my father’s voice in my head, ‘Trust nae man.’ Then with that little flick of cruel disdain, ‘Nae woman neither.’

Beyond the beech saplings and arching bramble framing the young man, the forest track was deserted. Suddenly, I felt very young and alone. I had gone too far. My screams would not carry back against the wind to my attendants on the riverbank.

‘Where must I go with you?’ I asked.

‘Please trust me, your grace. I take you to some true friends.’

‘What do you and these friends want with me?’

He shook his head.

‘I won’t come unless you give me a good reason.’

We stared at each other again.

‘You must be queen,’ he said desperately.

I did not like that ‘must’. ‘Very likely, in time,’ I agreed cautiously. That had always been my eventual fate. ‘But of which country?’

He looked away. A branch creaked in the silence.

‘Where am I to be queen?’ I repeated. My voice sounded reedy and caught in my throat.

‘England.’ He spoke so quietly that I almost couldn’t hear.

‘Queen of England?’ My heart lurched into a gallop like a startled deer. A giant foot seemed to step on my ribcage. ‘England already has a king! And a queen!’ I took a step back. ‘My father is king! My brother Henry will be king after him!’

He set his hand on his sword.

I was alone in the forest…the king’s oldest daughter…alone in the forest with an armed, unknown man, who wanted to…I wasn’t yet sure what he intended, but it was not good…fool! Fool! Should have seen the danger at once…not magic deer or enchanted princes.

I took another step back. I could not believe how this scene had turned. Mrs Hay had also told me tales of politics and treason, and they were true. Those who laughed at my father’s fears were fools. Demons pursued our family everywhere. This young man, with his urgent voice and smell of fear was one of the demons.

I looked around, as if someone might come to my rescue. No ladies, no grooms, no guardian. No instructions what to do next. Not even Trey!

‘When am I to become queen? What do you mean to do?’

Henry! I could never become queen while my father and older brother Henry were alive! This young man spoke treason and meant to harm my brother, Henry.

Treason. A word with a huge sharp beak that bit off people’s heads. It had bitten off my grandmother’s head. It could bite off my head.

I might die, I suddenly thought. For the very first time, I understood that my life could end. I would die. Now…one day…or very soon.

My wits scattered. My eyes blurred. I had never before in my life felt such fear. A dark, cold hollowness at my centre grew larger and larger until the thin shell of my being seemed about to crack. I wanted to sit down on the track. To imagine this scene away and make it back into a story.

But he stood there waiting, reaching out to take me. And there was no one to help me but myself.

‘I won’t come,’ I said.

‘You must.’

I slid my hand down to my dirk, hanging at my belt. But, though sharp enough, it was only a short-bladed, jewelled woman’s toy.

‘Don’t make me call the others,’ he begged. ‘I swear I won’t harm you.’

He drew his sword and stepped closer.

I wanted to scream at him. ‘You may have killed me already.’ I kept my voice steady. ‘…killed me without touching me!’ Did he think I didn’t know my own family’s history?

I knew I could not outrun him but my body would no longer stand still. I turned and ran.

My skirts jounced up and down, swayed out of control, knocked into my legs. Though dressed for riding in a soft-hooped farthingale, I was still too wide, too heavy, too ornamented, too stiffened and pinned together.

I snagged on bushes, tore free. I heard his breathing close behind. A weight hauled at my skirt. I yanked free of his grasp. Felt a fumble at my sleeve. Then his hand clamped tightly around my upper arm.

His face was distorted, no longer handsome nor amiable. No going back for him now, not after laying hands on me. Not after those words. No going back for me, neither. With my free hand, I tried to hit him, to claw at his face, lost my balance. We fell together into a tangle of scrub.

Treason! I thought, now as desperate as he. As I fell, I clutched at leaves that tore away in my hands. I landed on the side of my ankle, lay wedged, half-toppled, my skirts caught in the thicket, my bodice twisted tightly around my ribs so that I could not breathe.

Our fall broke his grip on my arm. I snatched a tiny breath with the top of my chest, pushed myself out of the scrub and hit him hard in the face. He stepped back.

‘My grandmother had friends…’ I yanked at my bodice, tried to breathe and run again. ‘…like you! She died on the block because of…friends…like you!’ I could already feel the axe falling towards my bared neck.

Even the loyal Mrs Hay was willing to whisper how the Scottish king had been happy to take the English crown from the same hand that had signed the warrant for his own mother’s death.

The young man picked up his sword, dropped in our struggle. ‘I can’t let you go.’

He must know as I did that he was almost certainly a dead man now, sooner or later, no matter what happened to me.

And I could no longer scream for help, even if I could be heard. Not now that I knew what he intended.

I shifted my weight onto my hurt ankle as slowly as a cat stalking a bird. The ankle felt cold and watery with pain but held, just. I tried to read him as I would a new dog or horse. ‘I also see that you don’t want to do this. I think you’d rather let me go.’

Startled eyes met mine. I hopped my good foot back beside the other. ‘I think you’re a good man and something has gone wrong.’

‘If you knew…!’ he agreed fervently. ‘But I have no choice now.’

Our panting seemed to fill the low vault of arching trees. In his face, I could still see a last gleam of my enchanted prince. ‘I thought at first you were under a curse,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t entirely wrong, after all.’

And in a different story, we might have been friends. I hopped another step.

‘I’m damned,’ he whispered.

I begged my courage rise up to fill that cold hollow space inside me. ‘I trusted you when I first saw you,’ I said.

‘That’s why Robin…’ He caught himself. ‘…why I was sent alone. For fear that you would take fright at a group of armed men.’

I straightened my back to give my courage room to rise. Please, I begged. At first it felt as fluid as water, flowing into my limbs, rising through my belly and chest. Slowly, another stronger creature, that was both me and something else far greater than I was forced its way up through the tight column of my throat until it reached my eyes.

I burned my attacker with a wolf’s fierce gaze. ‘Is my father already dead?’ Even stiffened by courage, I didn’t dare ask about Henry.

‘I don’t know. But it makes no difference now. It’s too late to turn back!’ He looked at me, his mouth slightly open. ‘I beg you, forgive me, your grace, I never meant…’

‘I think you should run,’ said the young she-wolf steadily. ‘As fast as you can.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Holy Mother, protect me…!’ His sword shook in his hand.

I had to tempt him to rewrite this story. I felt certain that he wanted to. ‘It doesn’t have to be too late,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you truly intend. If you go now, I won’t raise an alarm.’

He shook his head.

‘You don’t believe me? Don’t you see why I can’t raise an alarm? Why I must not even admit that you exist?’

I might be just a slip of a girl, but even I could see why no one must ever connect me to him and his friends. I knew suddenly that, though he was a grown man armed with a sword, my wits were quicker than his.

He kept shaking his head.

‘You’re a fool! But not wicked enough.’ I eased back another step. ‘They sent the wrong man. I swear I won’t betray you. Save yourself, if you can.’

I watched his eyes as I watch those of a new hound to see whether it means to lick my hand or bite. ‘Whatever you and your friends are plotting, you must stop it, so I can try to save myself.’ I saw struggle in his blue eyes. ‘Neither of us wants to be here.’

‘No,’ he whispered.

‘Then we must simply agree that we’re not here and never were. If I don’t betray you, what crime will you have committed?’ I held my breath.

‘You’re scarce more than a child and don’t understand men’s affairs.’ Then he went still, in that moment-of-just-before. Just before a dog is unleashed. Just before a bow-man releases his bolt or the dangling pig’s throat is cut. I had seen men gather themselves up like that before, when they had to do something unpleasant.

‘You must come with me,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make me hurt you.’

I had lost him.

But I wouldn’t die on the scaffold like my grandmother! Because that was how I would end, if I let him take me to these ‘friends’. Better to die now, with only a short time for fear. Struggling, perhaps not even noticing the fatal blow. Better that than to wait blindfolded for the first blow of the axe, and the second and the third. Better that my Belle not creep whimpering out from under my skirts, like my grandmother’s little dog, covered with my blood, to sniff at my severed head.

‘I won’t come!’

He shook his head, avoiding my eyes.

I tightened my grip on my dirk.

‘I can’t be queen if I’m dead.’

‘I swear that I won’t kill you.’

‘But I will.’

He stepped towards me.

I placed the tip of the dirk in the hollow at the base of my throat. I felt the point prick my skin. I took another step back.

Don’t think! Don’t think! Be ready to push…twist…Just do it!

‘It’s harder than you imagine,’ he said. But I had made him uncertain again.

I hopped back another step. He started to follow.

‘Don’t misjudge my age or sex! I’m not a child, whatever you may think.’ The young she-wolf looked him in the eyes. ‘And I’m not one of your delicate English ladies, neither. I’m a Scottish barbarian. I cut the shoulder of a stag when I was seven.’ I hobbled another step. The she-wolf still knew that I would use the dirk. My eyes told him so.

And another step.

He wavered, sword half-raised.

‘God speed you!’ I turned my back with the knife still at my throat.

Breathe in. Hop. Breathe in. Hop.

The courage-wolf inside me gobbled up the pain.

Breathe in. Hop.

I listened for his footsteps over the sound of my own breathing.

Around a bend in the track, then past a hazel clump. I began to hope. Unreasonably, that fragile physical barrier between us made me feel safer.

Breathe in. Hop. And again. And again.

Suddenly, the pain returned. I stopped, dizzy with pain. I looked back. Through the screen of brown hazel leaves, I could see him only in parts. He sat on his heels in the middle of the track, rocking, with his head in his hands.

Get out of England! I urged him silently. As far away from me as possible!

‘Robin,’ he had said, ‘a band of armed men.’

There were others, but how many? And what were they doing at this very moment? What did they intend? Oh, God! I begged. Please let Henry be unharmed!

The snake word ‘treason’ coiled around my throat and tightened. I must warn Henry. But how, without entangling myself in treason?

A fine deep tremor began in the bones of my legs. I leaned my hand 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.

3

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?

4

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 for your breakfast,’ I pushed her away and gave Abel my letter to Henry. ‘No one but Prince Henry must see this. I’m trusting you with my life.’

He nodded seriously. ‘I will protect it with my own.’ He put the letter into his purse, then hooked his jacket tightly over the purse.

As if I were one of the sparrows perched on the beams above our heads, I saw the two of us, there in the shadows of the horse barn, barely grown, now echoing in deadly earnest the adventure games we had once played together as children.

‘Take Clapper,’ I said. ‘He’s strongest.’ I gave him a purse holding most of my precious half-yearly allowance from Lord Harington. ‘Use this to hire another horse if he grows too tired and to stable him well.’

I watched while he saddled up Clapper, a solid, roan Ardennais gelding strong enough to carry an armoured man. Then he led the horse out into the stable yard.

The sky had now committed itself to the day. I held the reins and leaned against Clapper’s strong, warm neck to stop my shivering while Abel went to make his excuse to a fellow groom for missing the morning chores.

‘There you are!’ Wearing a cloak over her night-dress, my companion, Anne Dudley, picked her way towards me across the brick paving, looking both rumpled and alarmed. ‘I woke up and saw that you were gone! Vanished! Nowhere in the room! I couldn’t think where you had gone…my heart is still thumping! I thought perhaps your injuries had suddenly worsened and you had died in the night. Or else been kidnapped from the bed.’

I looked at her sharply but saw only worry in her blue eyes. ‘Would you like to come with me for an early morning ride?’ I asked. ‘To watch the sun rise?’

Accustomed by now to my sudden fancies, she shivered. ‘I’d rather go back to bed, your grace.’

Abel came out of the horse barn.

‘I’ve said I’m going for an early ride,’ I told him in Scots, with a glance over my shoulder at Anne retreating across the yard.

Abel looked worried and jerked his head back at the barn. ‘I’ve told them I’m riding on an errand for you but not where or why.’ He continued in Scots to confuse any curious Warwickshire ears inside the barn.

I nodded. I’d untangle our stories later. I stroked Clapper’s muzzle until Anne had disappeared again through the stable yard gate.

‘Go first to Windsor. If Prince Henry isn’t there, go on to Richmond then on to Oatlands and last London and Whitehall. Don’t rest till you find my brother and give him my letter.’

He mounted. I looked up at him. ‘Let no one but my brother see that letter,’ I repeated. With one hand on Clapper’s neck, I walked beside them out of the stable yard.

Clapper’s hoofs rang like gunshots in the cold morning air. I looked up at the house. No curious faces appeared at the windows. It made no difference now, in any case. The absence of man and horse could not be kept secret for long on this small estate.

From the gate of the main courtyard, I watched Abel trot away up the long tree-lined avenue burdened with treason, my life tucked inside his jacket. Even on Clapper, he seemed a frail vessel to carry so much weight.

I could not bear to go back into the dense vaulted shadows of Combe Manor, once an abbey, now turned private house. I felt that God had never quite loosed His chilly grip on the place, even though He had been turned out more than sixty years before. I limped around the brick-paved courtyard along the walls of the three wings of the house. Still not ready to fall back under God’s stern eye, I turned right into the gardens lying in the elbow of the river Smite, where I soaked my shoes leaving a dark ragged trail through the dew on the grass. I was not good at waiting.

The Haringtons returned before sundown. They brought no news of disturbance abroad nor death in London. Lady Harington, short, wiry and as sharp-eyed as a sparrow hawk, at once spotted my wet shoes and sent me to change them. I waited for Lord Harington to ask me about Abel White and Clapper. But he said nothing about the absence of either horse or groom. We prayed as we always did before every meal. I would have begged to eat in my bed again but Lord Harington always fussed so much over my health that it seemed easier to brave the table than his concern.

Supper passed as quietly and tediously as always. The Haringtons, never talkative, chewed and sipped quietly as if a demon might not, at this very moment, be crashing about doing damage I could not bear to imagine.

I half-raised my spoon of onion and parsnip stew then set it back down on my plate. A pent-up force seemed to distend my chest. Any moment, it would burst upwards and escape like lightning flashing along my hair.

‘What news?’ I wanted to shout. ‘What is happening in the world outside Combe?’

At Dunfermline and Linlithgow palaces, when I was merely the girl-child of a Scottish king who already had two surviving sons, I had stolen time for games in the stables with the grooms, including Abel, and with the waiting footmen, maids and messengers. I had known all the kitchen family and listened while they thought I played. I heard all their gossip, suitable for my ears, and otherwise. Now that I was at last old enough to understand what I heard, I had been elevated into an English princess, third in line to the joint crowns of England and Scotland. Who must be kept safely buried in this damp green place where everyone treated me with tedious and uninformative respect.

I knocked over my watered ale.

Lord Harington gazed at me in concern with his constantly anxious eyes. ‘Are you certain that your injuries yesterday weren’t more serious than you say, your grace?’

‘Perhaps a little more shaken,’ I muttered. Though I sometimes thought him a tiresome old man, Lord Harington was kind. I did not like lying to him. I didn’t know what I would tell him when he at last asked why Clapper was gone.

Then it occurred to me that he might be pretending that all was well. He might have been instructed to lull me into false security until men-at-arms could arrive from London to arrest me. I caught my glass as it almost toppled a second time.

When we were preparing for bed, Anne gave a little cry. ‘What did you do to your arm?’

I looked down at the line of fingertip bruises along the bone. I brushed at them as if they were smudges of ash. ‘I must have done it yesterday while riding.’

I wondered suddenly if Anne had been set by her uncle to spy on me.

5

For a second sleepless night, I lay in my bed in the darkness, waiting, not knowing what I was waiting for. I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the ghostly abbot if he should decide to visit. Tonight, however, I didn’t fear him. My head was too crowded to deal with one thing more. I lay thinking how past events, which seemed to have nothing at all to do with you, could shape your life.

I could hear again Mrs Hay’s whispers of treason and danger as she readied me for bed.

Ruthven. Gowrie. Morton. The names thumped in my pulse.

Treachery and knives. Ruthven and Gowrie, kidnappers and possible murderers. The child king, my father, no older than I was, standing courageously against his attackers. Morton, the regent who betrayed him and died on the scaffold. My father signing execution warrants when only a child.

‘Never listen to the gossip that calls him a coward,’ Mrs Hay had warned me. ‘His majesty had a terrible life for a wee bairn, royal or not. Being made king so young did him no favours. That Scotland you pine for is a fierce and wild place, ruled by unruly chiefs who call themselves “nobles”…I don’t know what you do to make knots in your hair like this!’

I always wanted to tell her that if I were a boy, I would have liked to be one of those unruly chiefs.

But I was her golden girl, her royal pet, her child, her life. I was her Responsibility, she said, which was a fearful weighty thing, which she carried nevertheless with a whole heart. She had to prepare me for my future without making false promises of joy in this life, though she was generous on behalf of the Hereafter.

So I stopped telling her what I felt. When very young, I had tried to tell her what I truly thought about a good many things but soon learned that she would only look stricken, as if someone had accused her of failure, and tell me to remember who I was. And to be grateful that my father wanted me kept safe as he himself had never been.

Tediously safe, I had thought. Until today, when the demons had arrived at Combe.

Henry? Can you hear me? We are both in danger.

I pressed my thoughts out into the night. I often spoke to my brother as one spoke to God. Even though I loved Henry more than I loved God, I told myself that God could never be jealous. Jealousy was a mortal weakness. God knew that Henry deserved to be loved. He was God’s perfect, shining knight.

I had seldom seen the king, my father. But, so far as I remembered him before he set off on his separate journey to London, he cut a poor figure beside his eldest son. Our father was thick-bodied and short-legged where Henry, though not over-tall, was slim, fair and well-formed. Our father was awkward and given to coarse wit, where Henry had a soldier’s bearing and the seriousness of a full-grown man.

I knew that I was not alone in my high opinion of my brother. At all the great houses where we had stopped on our progress south, we were entertained by poetry and songs praising us both, but chiefly Henry, who would one day be king. At Althorpe one poet, Mr Jonson, wrote in his entertainment that Henry was:

The richest gem, without a paragon…

Bright and fixed as the Arctic Star…

The poets did no more than speak for the people. Everywhere we went on our journey south, the cheers swelled when Henry appeared, the noble, handsome heir to the throne of England. Every boy in England wanted to be like Henry. Surely, no girl ever had a finer brother.

Look over the strict ocean and think where

You may but lead us forth.

I needed my brother’s level-headed advice. I needed him to lead me forth. I whispered the poet’s words to myself now. ‘You must not be extinguished.’

Though some people were said to find him stand-offish, or even cold, I had seen at once, when we met at Holyrood, that Henry’s supposed chilliness grew from a modest reserve that took little delight in trumpeting his virtues. He was far more modest than I (who made the most of little) even though he had many more virtues to be modest about.

I had seen him smile and wave for mile after mile at the cheering crowds that lined our route to London, even when his throat was dry and his eyelashes caked with the dust stirred up by so many feet. Once, as we prepared with our mother to meet yet another matched set of mayor and aldermen, he said to me over the basin of water and towels offered so that we could clean our hands and faces, ‘I don’t know why they cheer. I’ve done nothing to prove myself to them yet.’

‘You’ve missed a streak of dirt, just there.’ I pointed, testing our wonderful intimacy.

‘I promise to reward their hopes,’ his voice said through the towel. His face reappeared, shiny and damp. ‘I must not disappoint them. Their hopes put me in their debt.’

‘You could never disappoint.’ I did not quite dare to push back a lock of hair, darkened with water, which had fallen over his brow.

He shook his head, but smiled with pleasure all the same at my vehemence. ‘Oh, my Elizabella, our father disappoints them already, and he hasn’t yet reached London.’

I shrugged. I still felt too shy to try to tell him how superior he was to our father in every way. Except perhaps in his reported indifference to his books. But then, that was a weakness I shared. I was also thinking how much Henry knew that I did not, and how he lived in a larger world than mine. A little startled by his disrespect towards our father, I was also thinking how much he must trust me to say such things to me. He was looking at me with his serious eyes, warming me, sharing his knowledge and candour with me, his younger sister, as an equal.

Henry?

In my bed, I turned and turned his ring on my finger, remembering how he had given it to me in Scotland, up on the crags above Edinburgh. We were breathless from riding. Henry had brought a young eagle he was training to hunt. He handed the bird to his falconer, then we perched on rocks on the Cat Nick. It was a rare moment of sunshine. The dark dragon island crouching in the Firth of Forth behind us had been brushed with light. The backs of a pair of gulls wheeling and screaming below our feet, flashed white in the sun.

‘We don’t know what waits for us, Elizabella,’ he had said.

‘In England?’

He nodded. Together we watched the neatly folded ears of my favourite greyhound bounce up into view from the long grass of the slope to our right, then disappear again.

‘The king has been quick to send me instruction on how to conduct myself as a prince, but is less generous with information about our new country.’ Henry tossed a pebble over the edge of the cliff. ‘The English Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, has written to me offering—if I understand him right through his careful words—to help me learn what I need to know. But he’s preoccupied at this moment with smoothing the accession of our father.’

‘England will be an adventure,’ I said. ‘Won’t you be grateful to escape from Stirling to see more of the world?’

‘Of course.’ He tossed another stone. ‘But I feel the weight of it as well.’

I nodded, but in truth, I felt a pang. Of course, Henry would feel the weight of our new life. He would one day become king of England and Scotland, after our father. I, on the other hand, was merely a daughter, fit only for marrying off to some foreign prince or other. Mrs Hay had not put it so bluntly but that was what she meant about ‘preparing me for my future’.

‘We cannot know the future,’ said Henry. ‘We may hope, but we can’t ever be certain.’

He shifted sideways and reached into the pocket hung inside his breeches. ‘I had these made.’ He showed me two rings, identical except in size, of twisted gold wires, each topped by a small, square gold seal engraved with a ship in full sail.

He put one of the rings on my finger. ‘If ever you are truly afraid, send me this ring.’

He put the second ring on his own hand. ‘And, if I am in need, I will send mine to you. “I am in danger,” the ring will say. “Come at once! I need your help.”’

‘I will come!’ I said.

Looking down at our two hands wearing identical rings, I felt myself grow until I was as vast and solid as one of the mountains marching into the distance beyond the city. I became a crouching dragon. I was as strong as the wind that blew at our backs and scoured the clouds from the blue sky. My brother Henry had not only promised me his help if I ever needed it, he believed that I might be able to help him.

We kissed each other gravely to seal our pact.

I am trying, Henry, though you never sent your ring. You may not even know that you need my help.

In the shadows of my bed, I saw him dying under the knives of the friends of my man in the forest. I saw myself clawing at a locked prison door. Then turned into a headless chicken like the one I had seen in the farmyard at Combe, the broken-off head tossed onto the midden, the yellow eye still staring out sideways, the wings flapping as if flight were still possible. Chicken and head, too far apart. Nothing in its proper place. The outlines of the world had wavered like reflections on a pond struck by a stone. A curious dog wandered up to sniff at the head. I had imagined it crunching the head in its teeth and screamed at it to go away.

My golden brother, help me! Be warned, save yourself, but don’t let anyone harm me neither. Lead me forth.

The next morning, breakfast followed prayers, as always. All day, from my high window, I listened to the usual daily sounds of the estate. No men-at-arms came marching down the avenue. No messenger arrived from London on a foam-flecked horse.

If I had imagined that my man in the forest was a spirit, perhaps I had imagined the man as well. Perhaps I was mad.

After supper, I looked into my glass. Pale, yes. A little red around the eyes from lack of sleep. But otherwise as usual.

‘Do you think that mad people know that they are mad?’ I asked Anne.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘Well, perhaps…There’s an old mad woman in the village. You could go ask her whether she knows if she’s mad…or else my aunt would surely know. She knows everything.’

When the late, falling sun had shrunk to a small hot red coin just above the horizon, and I was pacing the muddy gardens with Anne trotting after me, I heard hoof beats on the avenue.

If they had come to arrest me, I would be ready. I was waiting in dry petticoat and clean shoes, still a little breathless, when Lord Harington sent for me a short time later, to come to his study.

I was not mad, after all.

6

‘My neighbours had horses stolen from his stables last night.’ My guardian’s agitation was as great as my own. A moderate man of middling size, with a permanent air of mild anxiety, Lord Harington seemed swollen that evening with barely contained emotion. I watched his surprisingly luxuriant moustaches heaving as they framed his words. The peak of curling, greying hair that rose from his square forehead quivered like a torch flame. ‘It’s possible that one of our horses was taken also…one of yours, in fact. We fear some great rebellion.’

His brows collided ferociously above the fear in his eyes. ‘A groom is also missing,’ he said. ‘Perhaps dead, perhaps run off to join the rebels. No one can be trusted!’

Missing, I thought. Not yet caught. I felt guilt shouting from every muscle of my face.

I tried to listen to what my guardian was saying, but his words scrambled themselves into a confusion of devils and explosions, gunpowder, intended murder. Papists…

He paced as if running from his words, spilling them behind him in the air like a shower of live sparks.

Rebellion all around us. Murder and devastation in London. Thirty barrels of gunpowder…Opening of Parliament…another Papist plot to kill the king. Deaths beyond number…

My own agitation seized onto ‘Papist’. I was right. It was happening again.

He couldn’t know what had happened to me in the forest, I tried to tell myself.

‘…fires of hell to Westminster, and the death of all Members of Parliament,’ he was saying. The hem of his heavy long gown swung as he turned. ‘The king’s infinite wisdom…midnight arrests…questioning in the Tower. There was still a great fear of popular uprisings…’

‘Has my brother been harmed?’

Lord Harington looked startled by my interruption. ‘The prince is well, your grace,’ he assured me. ‘Though Prince Henry was to have accompanied His Majesty to the opening of Parliament yesterday, he is as safe as your father. Both of them have been spared.’ He looked relieved to have good news to give. ‘A warning letter was brought to Cecil,’ he went on. ‘Praise be to God!’

A warning letter?

‘Praise God,’ I echoed weakly.

My letter had been intercepted, I thought. Henry had never received it. Or…dear God…he had received it and betrayed me to Cecil. And Harington knew. Or Abel had been caught and had surrendered it.

‘Now, my dear…’ Harington stopped in front of me and looked down. ‘You must be brave, for the next news concerns you closely.’

Though my body seemed on fire, my fingertips made icy spots on the backs of my tightly folded hands. ‘Would you please tell me once more, just what happened? I don’t think I quite grasped…’

‘Forgive me, your grace. It is momentous news for anyone to take in, let alone someone so young and so close to the subject.’ He sat down opposite me and began again, more calmly.

‘There has been a Papist plot to set off an explosion of gunpowder under the hall where Parliament was to meet.’ His long square-edged face looked to see if I followed him.

I nodded, uncertain what to think. Surely, he would not be explaining with such mild patience if he believed me to be guilty of treasonable knowledge.

‘His majesty and the prince were to have been present. If the plot had succeeded, they would both have been killed along with most of the Members of Parliament. Happily, one of these devils was arrested on the spot, with his slow match ready in his pouch. He is being questioned even now at the Tower, along with several of his confederates who were also taken.’

‘But their plot has failed? No one was killed?’ I made myself unclasp my clenched hands. Why would he tell me all this if he thought I already knew? ‘But this is good news after all!’

‘Not entirely, your grace. I come now to the part that concerns you.’

I went very still.

‘These Papists traitors meant to kidnap you.’

I risked a small cry and widened my eyes in horrified surprise.

‘Don’t fear, your grace. Not to harm you, but, by means of civil uprisings, to make you queen of England.’ He paused. When I said nothing, he added, ‘After the deaths of your father and brother.’ He watched keenly, waiting for me to respond.

He has been asked to report how I took the news, I suddenly thought. I was suspected after all.

‘What sort of queen would I have been in those circumstances?’ I burst into absolutely genuine tears.

‘There, there. The devils haven’t succeeded there yet, either.’ My guardian stood up to lay an awkward hand on my shoulder. I imagined relief in his voice and absolution in that rare touch. But the mention of a warning letter still made a cold lump in my gullet. I could trust no one. Not even my kindly guardian and his seeming relief at my protested innocence.

He removed his hand. ‘At least eight rebels have been arrested with their servants and families. Four more were killed resisting arrest at Holbeche. But we don’t know how much wider the Papist rebellion has spread. Nor how many rebels remain at large. I hear that the arrests continue. England is in arms between London and Wales, and as far north as Leicester. There are fears about the loyalty of the Catholic lords, both in London and on their northern estates. I’m told that Northumberland is already in the Tower.’ He began to pace again. I had never seen him so filled with vigour.

He looked out of the window. ‘I sent this morning to the Chief Secretary for instructions on your safety and have been waiting for his reply. But I can’t wait any longer. There was further trouble just now, this afternoon, not far away. I won’t risk keeping you here at Combe.’

‘Surely I’m safe enough here.’ My voice rang false as I spoke. Fortunately, Harington was wiping his face with his handkerchief and seemed not to notice. I decided not to speak again.

‘Alas, Combe is not a fortified house,’ he said. ‘And we seem to be at the centre of the troubles here. Still more horses were stolen at Warwick and Holbeche is too close for comfort. Other rebels were followed fleeing this way. Some may even now be hiding among our neighbours. You must move to more secure lodgings in Coventry.’

I nodded.

Before the dusk had fully turned to night, I was mounted on Wainscot, my right leg hooked tightly around the saddle head. I had been allowed to take only a single maid.

‘All will be well, your grace.’ Harington leaned closer from his own horse. ‘I’m certain of that.’ He sounded unsure. ‘The Lord will protect you.’

He’d be even less certain if he knew what had already happened, I thought.

‘All will be well, I’m sure,’ he repeated. He wore his sword, which he seldom did at Combe. ‘They will pray for us.’ He nodded back at the house.

Our little cavalcade clattered off with a jingling of harness and squeak of leather on leather. Unfamiliar men-at-arms rode close around me on all sides. Their swords, saddle maces and faces told me what they were, but in place of identifying livery or badges, they wore plain leather jerkins and padded vests. No standard identified our party.

Skulking through the early dark of autumn with the hood of my plain wool cape pulled forward to hide my face, I felt like a fleeing criminal.

‘Whose men are you?’ I asked the rider on my right.

‘We all serve the king, madam.’ He turned his head away suddenly towards the shadows of the trees beside our muddy track.

‘What do we fear?’ I asked.

‘Ambush.’ No title, to hide my identity from any prying ears.

I fell silent inside my hood, which smelt of damp sheep.

The other horses closed more tightly around me as we passed through the village of Stoke and did not open out again until the lights of the last outlying farm were far behind. I wondered which they feared more—attack, or that I might tighten my leg around the horn of my side saddle and race away to join the rebels.

With less on my conscience, I might have enjoyed the ride. The carefree girl who had entered the forest yesterday might have pretended that she fled through the night like an escaping highwayman, triumphant at an audacious raid. But I felt a demon thrashing around us in the darkness, laying waste to my former life. In the dark gaps between trees, I saw the distorted face of the young man in the forest. His helpless rocking as I looked back. Twice I imagined that I heard hoof beats running beside us in the dark.

I had been to Coventry once before, the previous year. I remembered a bumpy carriage ride in the April sunlight, and the generosity of lengthening evenings. I had been accompanied by both Haringtons, and a troop of ladies from neighbouring estates. Lady Harington had sent one woman away for wearing her bodice cut too low. Then she had reshaped the wire of my standing collar and changed the order in which we were to travel.

On our tour of the streets, cheering crowds and ranks of waving livery men—cappers, mercers, tailors and drapers—stood to watch us pass. I remembered catching a thrown cap and placing it on my own head amid a burst of laughing cheers.

This time, we rode almost unseen through the dark streets. Two watchmen raised their lanterns curiously but quickly lowered them again at a sign from my escort. This time, in spite of the warm welcome given me by a Mr Hopkins of Earle Street, a close friend of Lord Harington, I felt like a prisoner. The two men-at-arms stationed outside my door seemed more like warders than guardians.

‘You can sleep at ease tonight, your grace,’ Mr Hopkins told me. The citizens of Coventry had posted an army of guards around the house in case the Papist army attacked. No one, he said, could get in, or out.

Seeing my person secured, Lord Harington assured me one last time that all would be well. Free for the time of his great charge, he rode off in visible high spirits to confront the Popish army now rumoured to have gathered on Dunsmore Heath.

Again, I waited. Three days passed. I received no official visitors or delegations. I heard no news from Combe, London or anywhere else. I dined alone in my chamber. I tried to eavesdrop through my half-open door but heard nothing. I smiled at an endless string of different grooms and maids who found an excuse to have a look at me, but none could be induced to gossip. I read, I stitched, I walked in the small walled garden. I began to write a heroic poem but tore it up. I practised scales on my new lute though I could not find it in me to sing. At noon on the fourth day, I heard a disturbance in the stable yard, then men’s voices on the floor below. Footsteps climbed the stairs. I left the door and sat on a chair by the fire.

My maid opened the door to a strange man-at-arms. Like my escort to Coventry, he wore no identifying livery badge.

‘What news?’ I demanded.

He stepped aside to escort me from the room.

7

A small lop-sided shape waited for me below in Mr Hopkins’s great parlour. There was no mistaking him for anyone else. This was a far greater man than my temporary host.

‘My Lady Elizabeth.’ He sketched an off-kilter bow.

He should have been in London questioning traitors in the Tower.

Robert Cecil, now Lord Salisbury and the English Secretary of State. My father’s chief advisor. Here in Mr Hopkins’s large parlour, his sharp, intelligent eyes on my face. He cleared his throat.

If we were to stand side-by-side, he would reach no higher than the top of my ear. The fur collar of his loose gown did not quite disguise the uneven slope of his shoulders. Why then, did he cause such fear in me?

I struggled to hold his gaze.

Neither of us spoke. It was my part to speak. Unlike my conscience, my mind was blank.

‘Has something more happened?’ I asked at last.

‘More than…?’

‘About…?’ I tried to wipe my thoughts clean, leaving only what Lord Harington had told me. But I could not remember clearly. ‘About the fearful plot?’ I was certain at least that Lord Harington had told me about a plot.

‘And did your guardian tell you about the quick wit of the king, your father, in perceiving the threat?’

I could not remember.

‘My father?’ I echoed.

I had seen no attendants waiting in the hall. No secretary waited behind the little table below the window. Cecil was alone. I could think of no good reason why he had come here in apparent secrecy.

After another pause, Cecil pointed to a high-backed, unpadded chair-of-grace.

Flushed and angry with myself for needing his prompt, I sat. I noticed that he had slender, long-fingered hands, like a woman. Then I remembered to nod for him to sit as well.

‘Thank you, your grace.’ He perched at the front of a second chair-of-grace and smoothed the skirts of his robe over his knees. He cleared his throat again and spoke a little too loudly, as if I might be deaf. ‘The king, your father was the agent of his own salvation. Praise God.’

‘Praise God,’ I echoed.

‘A loyal subject had brought me an anonymous letter.’ He looked away.

‘A loyal subject?’ I echoed again. Thank God, Harington had prepared me for the letter. I laid my hands on the arms of the chair and closed my fingers carefully around the oak grape leaves carved on the ends.

He nodded. ‘A warning from a loyal Catholic lord.’ He met my eye with a half-smile. His words rolled on smoothly. ‘Which I showed to the king. His majesty saw at once what had escaped me—that it concerned the hidden intent to blow up the opening of Parliament.’ He paused. ‘The terrible plot was uncovered. Thanks be to God!’

I murmured an incoherent piety.

Not my letter after all! I felt my hands fly into the air like startled doves and quickly clasped them together in my lap.

His small lumpy bulk leaned forward. He braced his elbows on the chair arms, so that his long feminine fingers dangled from awkwardly suspended hands.

I looked away. I wished those eyes would stop looking at me and at my clasped hands. I wished the room were not so strange and close, nor hung with tapestries of bloody battle scenes. I ached to be back at tedious, familiar Combe. I had misplaced all my rehearsed lies. I was sick with waiting.

‘Why are you here, my lord?’

He hesitated. My throat tightened. I tried to swallow but had forgotten how. I saw his eyes go to my throat. He watched me struggle. I managed to swallow on the third try.

‘His majesty has instructed me to speak with you.’ He looked back at my eyes. ‘About these recent dreadful events.’

I stared back, afraid now to trust any sound that might come out of my throat. With effort, I unclenched my fists.

‘Were you ever acquainted with Sir Everard Digby?’

I shook my head, cautiously truthful. To my knowledge, this was no lie.

‘A traitor whom I have recently examined in the Tower, along with several of his companion devils.’

‘Is he one of those who would have blown up Parliament?’ The frog in my throat was quite natural, I told myself. In the circumstances.

Cecil smiled slightly, inviting me into complicity. ‘This young knight, Digby, had a very different task—to take you prisoner.’

I met his invitation as blankly as I could. All I could see in my head was Digby—for that must be his name—standing with the coins of sunlight dancing on his shoulders and head.

Go away! I begged him. Get out of my thoughts! A treacherous heat began to bloom in my chest.

‘A plausible young knight,’ said Cecil. ‘Well-formed and fair-haired. His family’s estate is not far from Combe. Until he married, I’m told that many ladies had their eye on him.’

All at once, I saw the truth, Digby had confessed. He had confessed to our meeting in the forest. Cecil knew!

I shook my head, helpless to stop the red fire that stained my chest and flooded up my neck. Cecil knows everything, I thought.

‘I never met a man who gave that name.’ I frowned slightly, as if trying to recall. I understood very well. Digby had taken me down with him just as I feared. Had not taken my advice to flee, not in time. Good man or bad, he had turned out to be a trowie after all.

Cecil watched the telltale blush reach my cheeks and rise upwards until the roots of my hair felt ablaze. ‘You might perhaps have smiled on him once?’ he prompted gently. ‘Perhaps not knowing who he was? He’s held to be handsome and is only a few years older than your grace. Any young woman might smile on him.’

The Chief Secretary was toying with me. I could bear it no longer.

‘Is this an examination, my lord?’ I demanded.

‘Should it be?’ he asked mildly. He looked around the room. ‘Do you see a clerk? Or witnesses to an examination? Should you be examined?’

‘No,’ I whispered.

On the far wall, one of the tapestries heaved. ‘By God, it is an examination!’

I leapt to my feet and turned. I had heard that Scottish bellow before. In the corner of my eye, I saw Cecil wriggle off his chair.

With a flash of rings, my father knocked aside the edge of a woven battle and stepped out of the alcove behind it. ‘Anatomise her, man! Ye’re too nice!’ The king staggered in his excitement, his restless body made clumsy by the urgencies of his mind.

Cecil stared at the floor.

The king stopped in front of me, blocking my view of Cecil. ‘Aye, Bessie! Y’ know very well it’s an examination! And you’d best thank God to be here in Coventry and not locked in the Tower with your friends!’

‘“Friends”?’ I repeated faintly.

‘You’d be examined there, right enough! And not so gently, neither!’ The king turned on Cecil. ‘Why didn’t you ask the questions I prepared? What have y’done with them?’

‘I meant to come to them by degrees, your majesty.’

‘There’s no degree in being dead! And no degree in treason!’ The king held out his hand. ‘Give me my questions and act as my clerk. I will play Solomon. I’ll examine this treacherous whelp of mine, who seems to have terrified you into degrees!’ His over-large tongue dammed and slowed the flow of words pouring from his brain. His bright, hungry magpie eye probed at me.

From the table beneath a window Cecil took a densely written paper and gave it to the king. He returned to the table and sat on the stool behind it. Now I saw the waiting pen and ink.

‘That devil Digby’s in the Tower,’ said my father. ‘We know by his own confession that he and his fellow fiends meant to make you queen of England! After I…your king and father…had been blown sky-high, murdered, along with your precious brother.’

‘Never, my lord father!’ I whispered.

‘What do ye have to say to that?’

‘What sort of queen would I have been…?’

He jabbed a finger at me. ‘A compliant one. Controlled by Papists, ruling at the will of Rome.’

‘I had rather been murdered in Parliament with you than wear the Crown on such condition!’ I spoke that truth with all my heart.

The small eyes skewered me. ‘Fine words!’ He pulled at his lower lip with finger and thumb. ‘What are you?’

‘I don’t understand.’ I glanced at Cecil but he was head-down at the table, recording our words.

‘What…are…you?’ the king repeated slowly and loudly, as if I were simple. ‘Do I know you?’

‘I’m your loyal daughter, sir.’ I felt my own temper begin to rise.

‘D’ye think me a fool?’

‘I think you many things, sir, but never a fool!’

We both drew breath and stared at each other. Cecil’s pen stopped scratching.

The king shook his list of questions in my face. I blinked but did not move. ‘I ask you, just as your friends in the Tower were asked,’ he said. ‘Are you a Papist?’

Refusing to step back, I fixed my eyes on my father’s thick padded jerkin, diamond hatched with stitching that held the thick lining in place to turn aside attacking knives. ‘Never!’

‘I know that you are a Papist!’

Like my mother? I wanted to ask but had just enough good sense not to say.

‘Do you mean to accuse my guardian too?’ I asked instead. ‘Lord Harington hears me pray at his side five times a day.’

The close-set eyes studied me. The king scratched under his doublet. He tugged at his cuffs. He twitched his neck in his collar and seemed to chew on his tongue.

I had seen people ape those mannerisms, and then laugh. I did not find my father laughable. He terrified me.

I can make you obey where you ache to scorn, his behaviour seemed to say to those who aped him. That’s real power!

The king bit at a fingernail. I felt the swift current of his thought tugging at me. ‘Why should I let you keep your head?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ve done nothing!’

We both pretended to listen to the scratching of Cecil’s quill.

‘Don’t think, madam—you and your brother—that public acclaim is the same as power! From the common people it’s worth nothing! It’s a river that drowns all virtue.’

‘I don’t want acclaim!’ I cried. ‘I don’t want power! What would I do with power?’

‘Don’t think I wasn’t told how the people cried out in the streets,’ he said, now just as agitated as I was. ‘Singing out as you and your brother went by. “The golden pair!” “The golden boy, the golden girl!” “England’s best hope!” Don’t think you’ll bury me, either one of you! Don’t imagine you’ll ever warm your arse on the English throne!’

‘I don’t want the English throne!’

‘…because I shall marry you as far away from here as I can arrange. I’d marry you to the Great Cham, if I could, and send you to his queen in Tartary. I’d marry you to the Devil himself, if only he wanted a wife!’

He shoved 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?

8

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.

9
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 Harington’s face when I left Combe.

The hammering paused. In the brief silence, I understood why I had been brought to London. I was to be seized without warning and beheaded, along with the Plotters! That was why I had travelled in such secrecy, lest my fate raise a wake of protest among the common people who had cheered so loudly for Henry and me. Their cheers had meant nothing, just as my father said.

I saw now why not even my mother knew I was in London—for she had neither visited nor sent a greeting. I saw whyI hadn’t been allowed to go to Whitehall or to send a message to anyone. And why Anne had been kept behind, so she would not be tainted with my crimes. The king feared me, his oldest daughter, enough to kill me as his own mother had been killed, for the safety of the English crown.

I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions. But however much I fought it, the conviction that I was right twisted its roots deeper and deeper into my head.

Mrs Hay woke me in what felt like the middle of the night. ‘You are sent for.’

The windows were still dark, with no hint yet of winter sunrise. The air was cold.

I gripped her hands. ‘Do you know why? Tell me! I won’t cry out, I swear.’ My heart pounded. If I were to die, I needed time to ready myself. This wasn’t fair! Not possible…‘Where must I go?’ I could not imagine dying.

‘To the Bishop’s little study.’

‘Not to the Churchyard?’

‘I was told the study, here in the Bishop’s house.’

‘Only the Bishop’s study?’ I burst into tears.

‘Oh…!’ Mrs Hay stared, uncertain what to do. She hadn’t held me for more than six years. Then she reached out and clutched my head to her breast. ‘No. No! You mustn’t think such things!’ She smoothed my wild hair. ‘How can you think it?’

I heard a pause while she did indeed think how the thought might have occurred. A new spasm of terror quivered through me.

‘What does the king want with me?’

Mrs Hay sounded less confident than before. ‘His majesty’s at Whitehall, not here. And means to go hunting, or so I’m told.’ She stroked my head again. ‘Four of those Papist fiends are to die today. Grant, Digby, Wintour and Bates. No one else.’

Digby. I was here because of him. Digby must be the reason. I could not think straight.

She fingered a russet tangle at the back of my head, then began to unpick it, hair by hair. ‘I’ll attend you in the Bishop’s study, if they let me.’ As she lifted my heavy hair in both hands to shake it out, I felt a cold draft on my nape.

‘I’ll wear my hair loose today,’ I said. I smelled fear in my armpits. I put my hands on my neck as if to hold my head in place.

A gentleman wearing the Bishop of London’s livery led us to the study, a small room overlooking Paul’s Churchyard on the far side of the Bishop’s house from the chamber where I had slept. Apart from the bishop’s man, Mrs Hay and myself, the room was empty. I had half-expected Cecil to be there. I felt him twined into my fate but did not yet know how.

The bishop’s man gestured towards the window. With Mrs Hay beside me, I looked down through the diamonds of watery glass at the blurred bulk of the scaffold I had heard being built.

Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten. Lanterns and torches still burned. A crowd already packed the space. I could hear it through the closed window, like the sea shuffling pebbles. The Bishop’s man opened the window so that I could see more clearly.

The blades of halberds pricked the chilly air above the crowd, where men-at-arms stood stationed in every doorway, enough of them to stop a possible rescue attempt, which such a great crowd might allow. Or to put down a civil uprising, like those the plotters had believed would take place across England in support of the Catholic cause—and which the government still feared, to judge by that army in the courtyard.

Dignitaries stood crowded onto the scaffold close below me, talking amongst themselves as if in a waiting room in Whitehall. I was so close I could hear them coughing and clearing their throats. Cecil’s small figure was first hidden, then discovered again, as the others shifted around him.

‘Who is that man standing behind Lord Salisbury?’ I asked Mrs Hay. ‘There, the one with the thin face, who keeps smiling and nodding at the others.’

‘That’s his lordship’s cousin,’ said Mrs Hay. ‘Sir Francis Bacon. Their mothers are sisters.’ She tried to think what else to tell me. ‘He writes a great deal.’

Though much taller and better formed, Bacon lacked his little cousin’s authority. I watched him for a moment. He reminded me of an anxious dog, sniffing and wagging his tail at the other men on the scaffold. Then I forgot him.

The hangman was quietly and methodically testing his ropes and knots. It would begin soon. Soon they would be making me ready, pinning up my hair, removing my collar.

Then reason pulled me back from my leap to certainty. They were not preparing me, reason pointed out. I was here, looking down, buffered by staircases and corridors, not in a cell or a room more convenient to the Churchyard with a bishop praying over me and inviting me to repent.

I was not going to die today. Other traitors would die—real traitors, not an ugly troll of my father’s imagination that pretended to be me. I was not here to die but to watch.

I felt the solid thump of truth. This was the clarifying sight that my father promised me in Coventry.

I stepped back from the window.

The Bishop’s man gestured politely for me to return to my position.

With sudden clarity, I heard my father’s avid voice in my head, as he questioned the bishop’s man. ‘How did she bear it? Tell me, mon! Did she avert her eyes? At which death did she flinch the most? Did she seem to know any of them? Did she weep?’

I was still on trial.

I waved the man aside and noted that he took a position from which he could see my face.

Below me, the edgy crowd moved as one. Heads turned all in the same direction and craned to see over their neighbours. The dignitaries standing on the scaffold turned. Through the crowd, I saw the bobbing heads of three horses. Voices in the crowd shrieked curses at the prisoners. A fourth horse approached from the Gatehouse, where a woman was screaming. Then I heard a small boy’s voice cry, ‘Tata! Tata!’ before a hand muffled him. The shouting of the crowd grew louder. A tussle broke out. Men-at-arms broke from the doorways.

Mrs Hay turned away from the window. ‘I’m over here, if you need me, my lady.’ She sat on a stool in the corner. After a moment, she gave our watcher a look and pulled out a defiant handkerchief.

Four horse-drawn hurdles broke out of the crowd, carrying the condemned men. They stopped at the foot of the scaffold. A woman struggled out of the crowd, threw herself down onto one of the prisoners and clung to him, weeping. Men-at-arms hauled her off and lifted the men up from the hurdles.

The reek of sweaty animal excitement rose from the crowd. The horses stamped and tossed their heads. A torch juddered below the window, sending up gusts of pine and burning pitch.

There was a moment of consultation and confusion. Then the first man to die climbed the steps onto the scaffold. I gripped the windowsill. I could not breathe.

Though Digby was changed, I recognised him clearly. He still had golden hair, but no sunlight dappled his head and shoulders. He stood close enough to me that I could see beard stubble darkening his chin. In the strange dull light of early morning, he looked pale and heavy-eyed, as if he had not slept during his last night before eternal sleep. Even when about to die, he kept his air of amiability, lost only in our last desperate moments of struggle.

Then I realised that I could not hear the other man in the room breathing. His attention had fastened onto me so intently that his breathing echoed my own. Over my shoulder, I saw Mrs Hays’s eyes on me. Surely, she did not doubt me, as well! Had the air at Combe hummed with suspicions about me that I never heard?

The small boy again cried out to his father. ‘Ta ta!’ Digby turned his head to the sound and smiled at his son’s voice. His straight back and erect head reminded me of Henry. He opened his mouth to speak.

The crowd grew more silent than a playhouse.

Don’t look up! I begged. I could not bear it, if he saw that I was there but dared not acknowledge him. The shame…Given what he had done and tried to do, I didn’t understand why I should care, but I did.

In a strong clear voice, Digby admitted that he had broken the law. He apologised to the king. He asked forgiveness of God, the king, and of all the kingdom.

Heads nodded. There were murmurs of approval in the crowd.

But these were fatal admissions for me, if I had been mired in the plot by their confessions.

‘…but Father Garnet knew nothing of our plot,’ he was saying. ‘The Jesuit priests knew nothing.’ No one else knew what they had intended.

He lifted his head to my window. His eyes locked onto mine for an instant but moved on before I had time to respond.

In a clear voice he insisted that only the plotters themselves had known what they meant to do. No one else. No one!

He kept turning his face to include the whole crowd and all the people watching from all the windows, but I knew that he spoke to me and to any others who feared betrayal. He could not have known for certain that I was there, nor at which window. But he had guessed that perhaps I might be there, or had sent someone to report to me.

Relief unstrung my joints. I leaned harder on the sill.

Digby had not betrayed me in his confession, after all, whatever Cecil had implied. I was certain of it now. We shared a strange intimacy after our encounter in the forest. He was a good man, as I had told him. The wrong one for the task. As an abductor, he had tried not to alarm me. Even when about to die, he tried to console and reassure. I was certain of it. My relief was as intense as my earlier conviction that I was about to die.

Don’t cry! Don’t cry, with those eyes watching you, waiting to report every blink of eyelid and twitch of your lips. I felt myself growing older in a rush, like music played too fast or the riffled pages of a book.

Cecil had been testing me with his hints of confession, just as my father had been testing me, but with more subtlety. They didn’t know what had happened in the forest at Combe after all. They had nothing more than suspicion to hold against me.

I pushed away the memory of Cecil’s warning nod when I had been about to blab to the king. And the sharp-cornered question of my letter to Henry.

I watched Digby take his leave of the courtiers gathered on the scaffold. He took their hands with such friendly good will that he might have been setting out on a hopeful sea voyage to the Americas. A strong young man in his prime, sailing off on his next adventure.

Then he was climbing the ladder. He bent his head to accept the noose. Was pushed off the ladder, jerked, kicked, swung only briefly before being cut down, choking but still alive, and delivered to the butchers’ knives.

I closed my eyes, not caring who saw me. I wanted to stop my ears. The greatest courage in the world could not suppress his scream at disembowelment. Cries from the crowd beat at my ears, of fury mixed with grief. Women screeched and wailed. I imagined I still heard his reassuring voice above the crowd, but it wasn’t possible, because, when I opened my eyes, a man was holding aloft his heart, shouting, ‘Here is the heart of a traitor!’

I felt a heavy downward pull. All my weight was sinking into my feet. My eyes blurred and my head swam.

Don’t fall! I was the First Daughter of England.

I leaned my elbows on the sill, as if to see better. Three more to go. God have mercy on them!

The First Daughter would not close her eyes again. Let that weasel-spy report that I watched without flinching. Though it was wicked for me even to imagine that I suffered. I locked my knees.

I tried to call up my wolf. Tried with her help to look through the scene under the Bishop’s window into the vast scoured space below the crags, at the combs of rain scraping the distant mountains. The mist blowing in to cover the dragon crouching in the Firth.

A second prisoner was pushed up the steps of the scaffold.

Perched on the Cat Nick, I narrowed my eyes and tried to peer down into the chasm between Edinburgh and the crags, at Holyrood Palace at the bottom of the valley, like treasure sunk at the bottom of a lake. Where I had spent my last days of happy childhood, that short wonderful time with my mother and Henry. All three together for the first and last time, before I was hauled away from my true home and slammed down here in this damp green country where they tore out the hearts of golden young men.

‘…Robert Wintour, will you renounce…?’ a voice intoned below me.

The hearts of the best and most chivalrous men, I thought. The golden heroes. The near-perfect knights, Catholic or not. Henry’s perfection was already turning the love of the people towards him and terrifying our father.

Wintour was climbing the ladder to the noose.

I tried to conjure up a wind off the northern sea to fill my ears. My eyes followed the long ascending spine of the Holy Mile up, up, clambering over hard, sharp grey rock to Edinburgh Castle itself, like a jagged outcrop of cliffs at the very top.

I heard another scream, then the thud of blades on a butcher’s block. The next severed head was offered to the sight of the crowd. The next heart.

Wintour gone.

Strident voices from below me drowned out the rush of wind from the Firth. Though invisible through the cloud, the rising sun was warming the blanket of grey that pressed down on London. I must stand through two more deaths to show my father that I could not be broken. My forest sprite had died, but he had protected me. The reflection of a torch flared as a window swung closed. I could smell smoke and blood.

Another man forced up onto the scaffold.

The Loch. I tried to see the loch to the north just below the castle. A dark, brooding eye that seldom caught the light, where the trowies emerged at night from their underwater kingdom to steal babies or play eerie fiddles that drew you into fatal dances…

The third man shouted, ‘It was no sin against God!’

I could not help looking down at this defiance. Not a demon, a blind man, his face terribly burnt.

I groped for the memory of the glint of the Firth…

Solicitously, the hangman helped the blind man onto the ladder. At the top, the prisoner crossed himself defiantly; was pushed off.

The noose may have killed him, in spite of the haste with which the hangman cut him down to suffer the rest of his punishment. I heard no scream this time, although I was braced for it. I clutched the sleeves of my crossed arms, hanging on. I forgot the man behind me and that he might, even now, be adding my white knuckles to his notes. I tried to remember my hand and Henry’s side by side, two rings…

Scotland slipped away from me. The carnage below me was stronger than my imagination. My eyes saw with horrible clarity, a butcher’s slab, dark blotches on the butchers’ aprons. Severed joints. Another heart held aloft in bloody hands.

I’ve hunted, I told myself. I’ve seen blood before.

But these were men. And the cruellest huntsman did not quarter his prey while it was still alive.

My hands tightened until my knuckles almost split my skin. As I stared down at the scaffold, the faces of the witnesses changed until they grew so terrible that I could no longer look at them or else my soul would have run away and left my body a hollow shell for ever. I would never find my way out of this dark forest where I was suddenly lost. Would never see sunlight again, never smile, or feel joy. What I saw below me was too terrible. It would darken my mind forever.

Those men below me in their court robes served my father. With my father’s permission, they had imagined these practices, and conjured them into life. They were trowies, crept out from cold dark unknowable depths of black opaque water. Destroying the young and brave…If this could happen to men like Digby, then who was safe…? And I was captive in their world, trying to swim in their cold black water, where everything lovely had drowned. Cecil. My father…

I’d seen blood before!

I shook my head to try to clear my sight. But the faces below me would not change back into men.

The last prisoner died, after long repentance and many prayers for forgiveness. If my father wanted me to learn from this ‘clarifying sight’, I would. I watched now as if studying the actions of my enemy, in order to overcome him. Already older than my age, I now felt myself growing as ancient and cold as the waters of the loch.

It did not then occur to me, the First Daughter, the young she-wolf, that it might be safer to be seen as pliable and easy to rule than to challenge. It was not in my nature to understand the safety that lies in weakness. I was enough my father’s daughter to understand his speed of thought, the urge to pounce-and-devour. I was still young enough to believe that you triumphed by proving yourself the stronger.

In Coventry, I had stared at that padded jacket without grasping its true message. I had listened to Mrs Hay’s tales and learned courage from my father’s childhood but never seen the deeper truth. That the greatest threat grows, not from confident power, but from fear and uncertainty. My father was dangerous, not because he was a king, but because he had once been a frightened, vulnerable boy at the mercy of guardians and violent, unruly nobles. In my ignorance, looking down into Paul’s Churchyard, I determined to defy him.

10

I spoke to no one at Combe of what I had seen. Mrs Hay pretended that we had never left Combe. I would look at my lady guardian or at Anne as she chirped away about some small domestic adventure, and wonder if they saw no change in me, or if they merely feigned not to. Although Lord Harington must have known where I had been, he said nothing neither. The most that I could detect was the increased fuss Mrs Hay and the Haringtons now made about my health, asking unnecessarily often if I were chilled or overtired. Even Lord Harington’s habitual civilities, like, ‘How does your grace, this morning?’ seemed to carry weighty hidden meaning.

‘I am well,’ I would reply fiercely. I was the First Daughter. I had survived a kidnap attempt and learned that I could be a fool. I had not weakened at the terrible death of my forest spirit. I must believe that I had the strength to deal with whatever waited for me.

A noble posture is all very well in the intent, and when you are standing face-to-face with a clearly seen terror. But the unknown catches at your feet and steals your breath. I no longer slept but lay all night fretting and fearful in the dark, imagining first this way, and then that way, how things might be, and how they might unroll.

Henry did not write to say, however guardedly, that he had received my warning letter. Abel White did not return with Clapper, nor send word of how he had fared. After what I had seen in London, I now had little doubt that I had sent my old playmate to his death. A cold worm of guilty knowledge and fear lay coiled in my thoughts, a bump I could always feel even when the surface of my day seemed to be running smoothly.

With gritty eyelids and the ache of sleeplessness thumping at my brow bones, I tried to bury myself in the gentle patterns of life at Combe, as if they were the last, precious warmth of my bed on a freezing winter morning. I startled Lady Harington by my sudden meek application to needlework, and my prompt appearances for Scripture reading and the endless cycle of meals and prayers five times a day. Though the king had forbidden me the diet of history, classics and philosophy prescribed for Henry, I was allowed languages and womanly arts. To the amazement of my tutors, I tried to forget myself in my lessons.

Sometimes, I surprised even myself and managed to forget the worm of fear and guilt when French words brought my whole mouth alive, or Italian rolled off my tongue. When singing, playing my lute, and practising on my virginal, I forgot all else.

Also, because a princess must dance when introduced at court, I had to learn. Against the grain of their own stern morality, the Haringtons hired a dancing master. Under his knowing eye, with Mrs Hay watching us all, I practised how to curtsey. I advanced and returned. I glided, stamped and dipped. And sometimes, swooping across the floor or reversing in a turn, I experienced an instant of free flight. How could I not feel pure joy when every muscle was alive, riding the pulse of a drum?

Even better, Anne had to learn too, so that I could practise dancing with a partner. Inevitably, as she was short, dainty and neat, while I was tall, long-limbed and wild-haired, I most often ended up dancing the man’s part. When the dancing master at times insisted that Anne play the man so that I could practise my proper part, and she then tried to guide or to lift me, we would grow helpless with giggles.

I rode every day but Sunday, always under guard, chiefly on Wainscot, a little mare who was the lovely pale silvery brown of Russian oak, my favourite horse among the score stabled for me at Combe, now that Clapper was gone. Every day, I imagined Henry riding beside me, smiling at me across the space between us on the crags above Edinburgh, while the heads and haunches of our dogs bobbed up and down above the long silver-tasselled grass.

When Lady H was not watching, I helped the stable grooms with their combing and brushing and tried not to think about Clapper and Abel White. I never rode in the forest on the far side of the ford.

To fill any gaps in those quiet days, into which thoughts might otherwise rush, I wrote letters. I spent hours practising my signature in different sizes and coloured inks, including gold, to discover which self I should send out into the world.

Above a golden signature, I wrote in French to the Queen of France, whose son I might one day marry if my father had his way. With a chilly heart and in plain oak gall ink, I wrote formal, perfectly spelled and much re-copied letters of devotion to my father. In reply, I received stern admonitions drafted in a secretary’s neat, official hand.

I wrote often to Henry, now at either Windsor or Richmond. He sent back loving letters to me, full of tilts, swords and horses. I read and re-read them, searching for secret meaning but still found no hint of my warning. My own letters to him grew harder to write. The brother in my mind was fading. I was wearing him out with overuse, rubbing him thin and ragged at the edges.

One day, after feeling out of sorts and shouting at Anne, I discovered a pink stain on the back of my smock. A month later, the pink stain reappeared, a darker red this time, and my stomach ached dreadfully. I knew then that I must be dying. The worm of fear had gnawed away my vitals. The weight of guilty secrets had torn my innermost tissues. I was bleeding to death. My life would slowly seep away from that mysterious opening between my legs and no one but me would ever know why. I refused food for the rest of the day. It was best to get it over and done.

That night, one of my chamberers provided rags and explained that I would not die but had begun my monthly bleeding, which would continue forever, until I grew old. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or oppressed by her information. For reasons I did not understand, this messy, uncomfortable inconvenience also meant that I must now have Anne as my bed-fellow every night.

Though good-natured, Lady Anne Dudley was cursed by a sense of the obvious. ‘Look, there’s a butterfly,’ she would announce. Or she might observe, ‘It’s raining today.’ Or, ‘Aren’t those flowers red!’

I knew that she liked elderberries and disliked rhubarb, liked meat pies, disliked sauces made with ground almonds or wild garlic. I knew that she avoided melons for fear that they would make her belch. I also knew that she snored gently, just like Belle.

‘I shall sew with red silk today,’ she would say. ‘No! The blue is far better for this flower…the centre of it, in any case. What do you think, my lady? Perhaps yellow for the petals? Or would blue be prettier for the petals and yellow for the centre, do you think?’

On the other hand, she was almost always cheerful and willing. ‘Whatever you wish,’ she would say. ‘Shall I find Belle’s other collar, then?’ Or ‘I shall go at once and change into my riding skirts…’

Soon after she arrived at Combe, we had become the angel and the imp. I felt safe deciding that we should dig a secret cave in the hay barn where we might talk unheard. Or that we jump from an upper window to test whether our skirts would spread to slow our decent. Anne always agreed to whatever I proposed, but if she turned pale and silent when she trudged at my side, I would take pity and turn back—for her sake, I would tell myself, but with secret relief.

When we began to share a bed each night, I made the best of it, and entertained myself by whispering to her in the dark that the wind thrumming under the roof was the Death Drummer who always played before someone died. Or that trowies lived under the stones of the Smite ford and would reach up and pull her down if she tried to cross…I had seen one myself, I assured her.

Sometimes I frightened her with tales of a wild and unruly Scotland, where, I said, I was allowed to ride for miles by myself, seeing only the eagles and the seals on the rocks. ‘And at dinner,’ I would tell her, ‘the nobles put their elbows on the same table as the king. And had such fierce debates that they leapt up and hacked at each other with their knives until blood flew through the air, and you didn’t know whether you drank wine or blood from your glass.’

‘You must find England very tame and tedious,’ she said once.

Stricken by her look of misery, I continued to lie and assured her that she and I entertained ourselves so well that I hardly ever thought of Scotland at all, anymore.

My guardian, Lord Harington, continued to be kind enough to me and always respectful, never raising his voice in anger, and guiding me as if I had been his own daughter. In the absence of other parents, I might have loved him.

But one night, soon after I had first arrived at Combe, I had attempted to spy, to learn more about my new home. Hidden in the stairwell, I overheard him complaining to his cousin, who was also named John Harington, a godson of the old queen, and now, so I was told, one of my brother’s gentlemen.

‘Will you try to have a word when you’re next at court? The king has ignored my last letter.’ My guardian sighed. ‘She’s a heavy charge laid upon me by his majesty—and likely to prove a costly one.’

I flattened myself against the wall of the staircase, grateful to be wearing a soft gown. There was a long pause, during which I held my breath and felt my pulse begin to thump in my ears.

‘I know that his majesty is concerned with weightier matters than a daughter,’ Lord Harington went on. ‘But perhaps, coz, you might think how to prod his memory on the subject of the promised allowance for keeping her. Or have a word with Cecil.’

My heart, already half on offer, had slunk back to its kennel with its tail between its legs. Now, since our return from the execution of the Gunpowder Traitors, I felt that his heavy charge weighed him down almost unbearably.

Just once, shortly after my return from London, our eyes locked over the supper table. His glance held so much concern that I had to glare down at my plate to prevent tears. The people in my life would keep changing. There was nothing I could do about it. When I was married, I would leave not only Combe, and England, but also my guardian. That night over supper, for the first time, I thought that I might miss him.

His wife, Lady Harington, on the other hand, had terrified me from our first meeting. My lady guardian was a woman of absolute certainties. Unlike her easy-going husband, she had a fearsome frown and strong views on how a young girl should be schooled. After my return from Coventry, she carried on her detailed instruction as if never interrupted. Whether her steady purpose grew from ignorance of what had happened or defiance, I could never decide.

Both Anne and I had already learned how to wipe our fingers at the table, to take the precious salt on the tips of our knives, and to count our linens against pilfering by our women. Teaching by her own example as well as by words, Lady Harington now marched on through the long list of other bad habits that we must learn to prevent in our servants.

No serving man ever dared to piss in the corners of her fireplaces. No scullery maid at Combe ever polished a glass on her sleeve or blew her nose in her apron. By constant example, Lady H showed us how to measure respect or insolence in others, to the very finest degree. And how to bring down with an acid word anyone who stepped over any of the invisible lines of rank and place that she taught us to see. She adjusted the angle of my head when I curtsied. For three months, I nodded meekly and accepted her instruction. Any moment, I thought, she might teach me how to make order out of the rest of the tumbling chaos of life.

Sometimes I tried to play again as I had once done, when I still felt like a child. I would make Belle sit up in a miniature gilded carriage in her blue velvet collar whilst Cherami, my most obliging small greyhound, pulled her across the floor, his nails clacking like tiny hoofs. While Anne laughed and clapped, I looked on as if from a great distance.

When the late winter weather allowed, I sometimes sat very still in the gardens and tempted the robins to eat crumbs from my hand. Once, while Anne made a dumb show of being ill, I tasted a worm to try to understand its attractions. I whistled back at the wild birds, trying to speak their language, but caused agitation in the bushes and trees.

‘I think you’ve confused them,’ said Anne.

In truth, birds, with their sharp little eyes and edgy flutter, troubled me.

On the journey south from Scotland, well-wishers had given me six caged birds to join my animal family—two larks, a finch and three paraquettos from the West Indies. I felt that the little creatures wished to be friendly but could not trust me, who had the power to thrust them back into their cages. Their fragility terrified me—those tiny bones and trembling heartbeats, so fast that my own heart would crash to a halt at such a speed, or else burst into flame. I feared that I might accidentally crush one of them in my hand. This terrible power alarmed me so much that I avoided handling them. Unobserved, I released a lark and a paraquetto and said that they had escaped.

Then I found the remains of the paraquetto left under a bush by a cat. Staring down at the sodden little bundle of bloody blue and green feathers, I wondered if, after all, even unhappy, they were not safer in their cages. I knew that I was the true assassin.

The paraquetto. Abel White. Clapper. Lord Harington burdened. Digby dead. Because of me.

‘I am dangerous to know,’ I whispered one night to Anne. ‘Even for you.’

‘Why?’

Could she not see why? I thought. She had heard Mrs Hay’s tales.

‘I just am,’ I said.

‘Don’t be absurd!’ She rolled onto her side away from me. ‘Unless you mean the risk of tearing my best gown.’

11

Winter was clinging on into March, treading heavy-booted on the first green shoots of early spring. My large hunting greyhound, Trey, lifted his head and tested the damp grey air. Then Wainscot, too, lifted her head. Her ears swivelled towards the entrance avenue leading to the main house at Combe. Because Anne had chosen to stay inside by the fire, I was riding with only a groom and six of my hounds.

I held a small bunch of little wild daffodils to inhale their fresh odour while I rode, though I knew better than to curdle the milk by taking them into the house. Then I heard the hoof beats that my dog and horse had already heard. I shivered and threw down the daffodils. I pressed Wainscot forward through a haze of dark leaf buds, still as tight as fingertips while Trey and the other greyhounds sprinted ahead.

As we broke out into the avenue, a riderless horse was trotting down the track towards us. Riderless, like a horse in the tapestries of battlefield scenes, or at a king’s funeral.

Wainscot gave a joyful whinny of welcome.

Clapper. Without Abel White.

I swung my right knee over the saddle head and slid to the ground. When he saw us, Clapper broke into a canter and nearly knocked me over as I ran to meet him. Surrounded by a mêlée of wriggling dog haunches and sniffing noses, I hugged him, rubbed his neck and kissed his nose and breathed in his smell. It really was Clapper, not the ghost horse I had imagined for an instant when I first saw that he had no rider. He was sleek and well fed. He still wore his old tack. I quieted Trey, pushed past Wainscot who had arrived close behind me, and began to search the saddle for a message or some other sign of who had returned him.

No pouch. No saddle bag. No sheathe for a sword nor a lance-holder where a paper might be hidden. No letter tied to the bridle. I flipped up the saddlecloth. Nothing there. Nothing under the quilted leather pad of the seat. Nor fastened to the back of the cantle, nor under the saddle flaps.

‘Did you escape and find your own way back here alone?’ I asked him.

Then, under the small buckle guard at the top of the girth straps, I found something. Not a letter, a small blue-grey spring of rue, threaded through the steel buckles. I extracted the sprig carefully and held it to my nose.

Clapper nudged me hard. I put a calming hand on his neck. I needed to think.

A fresh-cut evergreen herb, not dried, still sharply musky with its odd animal smell. It had to be a message. It had not found its way into the buckle by itself. It had been put there by someone who knew that I would search.

Evergreen. I looked at the sprig in my hand. Surely that was the message—evergreen. Perhaps Abel was still alive after all

But rue? My first surge of joy turned sour. Even in this wintry weather, there were other plant choices. He…whoever it was…I wanted the messenger to be Abel White but tried not jump to conclusions…might instead have chosen the evergreen bay to signify victory, honour and success. Bay protected. But he had not sent a victor’s bay.

Or he could have sent protective rush. Or round-leafed box, or a mottled heart leaf of the little sowbread cyclamen, to ward off evil spells. Or even a feathery stem of grey mugwort that is tucked into a traveller’s shoes to give him strength for his journey. I could have read a happier story in any of those.

Rue spoke of repentance and sorrow. Rue spoke of regret. Rue could heal but also curse.

He dared not write but sent this vegetable messenger instead.

I could read only one conclusion. Abel had failed in his mission for me.

After supper that night, I sat beside my fire holding the sprig of rue between my palms willing it to tell me more.

The reappearance of Clapper cracked open the door holding back the future. It told me that, like the warmth of a morning bed, this life was going to end. Just as someone elsewhere had chosen to send back my horse, my true life elsewhere would begin whenever my father willed it. I could not let Combe and its people take root in my heart. I had merely borrowed this world and would soon have to give it back. I had no colours, or tastes, or smells for what awaited me.

I begged my tutors to tell me about Italy, France, Spain and the German states, in any of which I might, or might not, find myself living for the rest of my life.

I coaxed Mrs Hay to visit me at bedtime as she had once done. While Anne lay goggle-eyed beside me, my old nurse told me yet again the tales of my family’s past, carrying the seeds of my future.

I watched the Haringtons together. I listened to the tone of their voices, watched what distances they kept between them, noted their exchange of glances, trying to sniff out the dark truth about this mysterious thing, marriage that made my father threaten me with it as the alternative to execution.

A perverse impatience began to press like a belch in my gullet. I hated my own helplessness and the false safety of Combe. Knowing the worst would be better than knowing nothing. At least then, I could try to think what to do.

I would fall asleep each night holding the fragment of stone from the crags in one hand, cradling the smuggled Belle with my other arm. I was a creature of marsh and granite, temporarily asleep, buried in a green, green forest. But I could hear hoof beats in the distance, drawing closer.

12

‘We might have been given more warning!’ Lady Harington sawed at her roast meat so fiercely that her ear-drops flashed and her lace collar quivered. She gave up and slammed down her knife. Her small hands made fists on the table.

‘One would think a shell had exploded in the forecourt,’ said her husband mildly. ‘It’s only a summons to London for a short time.’ He tugged unhappily at his moustaches, so hard that the end of his long bony nose was moved from side to side.

Lady Harington snorted. ‘Do you imagine that duration makes any difference to her grace’s needs? If she’s to be presented to a king, it matters not one whit whether she stands there for an hour or for five days.’

‘It might matter to her,’ my guardian murmured

My Uncle Christian, who was my mother’s brother and King of Denmark, was coming to England. I must join the English court in London to be presented to my visiting uncle.

‘His majesty could land in England at any time,’ said Lady Harington. ‘We must all pray for contrary winds. Not tempests,’ she added hastily. ‘Merely winds from the wrong direction, and strong enough to delay his arrival until I can arrange what is needed.’

Her husband sighed and nodded.

Suddenly, I needed new gowns, embroidered smocks, standing collars, falling collars, and stomachers. To go on show before a foreign king, the First Daughter of England must have embroidered slippers, jewelled sleeves, silk stockings, gloves, purses, handkerchiefs. I overheard orders for pearls by the pound and silver lace by the bale and hoped that my guardian’s cousin had managed to arrange extra money to repay Lord Harington for these expenses.

All at once, there was no time for riding, no escape to stables or garden. I had to stand still for measuring and fittings, while tailors and dress-makers from Coventry shook out stiff rustling taffetas and satins and cooed and knelt with their lips clamped tight on pins and turned me a half inch this way or that.

‘She must take gifts to give to her new people,’ I overheard Lord Harington say to his wife in despair. ‘Surely, she will now be given a full household. Wherever shall I find the money to buy all those necessary scent bottles and pieces of gold and silver plate?’

‘She must have them, all the same,’ replied Lady Harington. ‘We, and our care for her, will be under scrutiny at Whitehall just as much as she.’

As urgently as new gowns, I needed final instruction from Lady H, which she crammed into me like last-minute stockings into a travelling chest.

‘You will become a magnet for the ambitious,’ she warned. ‘All wanting something from you. We’ve protected you from such people here at Combe. But in Whitehall…’ She rolled her eyes just enough to make clear her doubts about the protection I would find in London. ‘These climbers will try to turn your head with flattery, to win your favour. I hope you’ve learned here to be sensible enough to disbelieve them all.’

‘Oh, yes, madam.’

‘Distrust all compliments as flattery.’

‘Yes, madam,’ I said with less fervour. Was it not possible that an occasional compliment might be deserved?

‘Take special care with your new ladies, for I’m certain you will have some, even for a short visit.’ Her eyes narrowed as if assessing these distant figures. ‘Every one of them will be someone’s creature. They will report everything you do. Never forget. Beware, in particular of the rival noble families. The Howards will no doubt insert one of their bitches into the hunting pack. They can’t bear not always to be at the centre. And Northumberland will also buy a place for one of his nieces…Serving you will be a sure step to a good marriage.’

She frowned at a rabbit embroidered in fine red wool on one of my new smocks. ‘I may be only a countrywoman, but I know a thing or two about how things run there in London. And there’s Lord Salisbury to fear, of course, Robert Cecil…the twisted little son of Burleigh. The Chief Secretary has an intelligencer placed in every noble house in England…and in France too, I’ve no doubt. One of your women or grooms will most certainly be reporting to him.’

Anne had been listening with open dismay. ‘Will you not keep me as one of your ladies?’

‘Anne!’ said her aunt. ‘Don’t subject poor Lady Elizabeth to petitions already!’

I tried to imagine being without that placid, agreeable and slightly dull presence beside me, night and day. Warm, breathing, often less amusing than my monkey or dogs, but able to converse, to ask my opinion and able to understand my instructions.

‘But I must have Anne with me!’ I cried. I forgot how tedious I sometimes found her chattering.

Faced with Howards and all those other treacherous creatures described by Lady Harington, I could not imagine doing without Anne. ‘You must be my Lady of Honour!’

‘Yes!’ cried Anne. ‘Thank you, my lady!’ She turned to her aunt. ‘Now I must have some new gowns too! May I have one with satin bows at the waist? I am so fond of bows!’

Lady Harington nodded. Though she had reproved Anne for asking, my lady guardian could not hide her gratification at my choice of her niece. ‘You must keep each other steady,’ she said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t either of you make an enemy of Lady Elizabeth’s steward. You have no idea what petty tyranny that person can exercise over your daily life.’

At that moment, I wanted Lady Harington to come with me too, to guide me in a world that clearly would not be like Combe.

‘I will dine with my mother again, as I did when I visited her at Holyrood Palace,’ I told Anne that night. ‘The two of us together, in her little closet, which had a beautiful red, blue and gold painted ceiling, and a fire, and with only one or two of her ladies.’ Anne would fall asleep while I listed the delicacies we had eaten and the games we had played together after eating.

I did not tell Anne about the other scenes I imagined. In London my mother would take me in her arms again as she had at Holyrood. She would kiss my forehead, and look closely at me to see what sort of creature I had become, and say how much I had grown since she saw me last. I imagined how I might even, in time, tell her what had happened to me in the forest, so that she could tell me how brave I had been.

But in darker moments, I feared this London visit. I had not seen my mother for so long that I half-distrusted my memories of her. And I scarcely knew my younger brother, poor sickly Baby Charles, whom the queen had kept closer by her on the journey south than either Henry or me. I did not know where Charles was now, nor in whose care. I feared that Henry might no longer love me after being so long apart. The thought of my father stabbed my belly like a knife. Someone, somewhere, had my treasonous letter. In London, I might learn who had it. At such moments, I did not want ever to leave Combe.

In the end, God did not dare to deny Lady Harington’s prayers. Bad weather delayed my uncle for almost six weeks, even though it was already May. I arrived in London, panting for breath so to speak, just before the Danish ships arrived at Gravesend.

13
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, 1606

At Holyrood, Henry had told me that our new people were good soldiers and successful merchants. He led me to believe that they were measured in temperament, being either wily or cheerful, and, when necessary, severe. The crowds I saw on the journey south had been clean, dressed in their finest clothes, and cheerful, made well-behaved by hope for their new monarch. At Combe, Lord Harington’s example led me to believe that the English prayed even more than Scottish Kirk men. But in the bishop’s little study overlooking the scaffold in Paul’s Churchyard, my view of the English darkened.

Tonight, I could not tear my eyes from the alarming but educating spectacle around the royal dais in the Great Presence Chamber. Though Lord Harington had done his best to shield me, I had learned within a few days of coming to Whitehall that the English were not just cruel. They were wild men. They cursed, fought and drank too much, just for the sheer joy of it, not to a purpose like the Scottish lairds. They sweated over dancing as earnestly as they practised with their weapons, then claimed that neither activity made them turn a hair. I had seen them tilt without horses, attacking each other on foot, and half-murder each other over a game of bowls. They came in all heights and colour of hair and skin. They believed that the rest of the world was theirs for the taking and, at full shout in any company, they resented the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch as if these nations were other suitors daring to chase their women.

For the invading Scots, whom they openly called savages, they reserved their iciness. And their malice—drunk or sober.

And I had had other surprises, none of them good. My mother was not at Whitehall to greet me, but down river in her palace at Greenwich. To my consternation, I learned that she had recently been delivered of another baby, a girl, my sister Sophia, who died the day after she was born and whom I would never see. I had not known that my mother was pregnant again.

Because my Whitehall lodgings were still being carved out of the Small Closed Tennis Court, I had been bundled, with only Lady Anne, my chamberer, my single French maid, my sempstress, and two house grooms, into three rooms full of plaster dust in the old queen’s lodgings overlooking the Thames, which were themselves still being finished to house my mother and her household. My two horse grooms were found sleeping corners in the stables. The rest of my small retinue, including Lady Harington who in the end had insisted on coming with me, were sent back to Combe.

The king’s Lord Chamberlain, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, himself explained the difficulties to me. It seemed that the Lord Chamberlain, The King’s Master of Works and other officials still scrambled to squeeze the new king and his family—all with their separate households—into the former palaceof the unmarried, childless Queen Elizabeth.

Henry was at either Hampton Court or Windsor, but I had no time to seek him out before being told that he was gone again to Gravesend with the king, to welcome my uncle. I was left behind with Baby Charles, to be loaded down with our finest clothes, and allowed to greet our uncle, the Danish king, on the Whitehall water steps.

Now six years old, Baby Charles had all the failings of the runt in a litter of dogs. While we waited on the steps, he allowed me to take his hand but avoided my eye. His weaknesses deserved my sisterly protection, I told myself. I wanted to love him and vowed to be both tender and patient with him. By surviving for even this long, he had confounded a general expectation of his early death. Still in the care of his nurse, he was small for his age and walked unsteadily on legs bowed by a softening of the bones. Pale patches of scalp showed through his fine, thin hair. When he dared to speak, he stammered and formed his words with difficulty. When silent, he wore a sulky expression. He showed no interest in riding or even playing. But he was my own, my brother.

His hand tightened in mine when sudden thunder began to shake the air. A loose roof tile smashed on the ground. The water of the Thames quivered.

‘It’s only the guns at the Tower,’ I said. ‘Saluting the royal barges. Listen! You can hear the people shouting. They’re almost here!’

Distant cheers rolled slowly up the river towards us from crowds lining the banks.

The first boats appeared around the Lambeth bend, tiny spots of red and gold.

‘Henry’s c-coming!’ Baby Charles exclaimed excitedly. I glanced down. He was smiling for the first time since I had arrived in London.

‘Yes, Henry!’ I smiled back and squeezed his hand. He and I were bound by our love for Henry, at the very least. ‘Just listen to those cheers for two kings and a king-to-be.’

For a moment, I felt the glory of it all. I saw everything sharply and cleanly. The gilded boats catching the sunlight. Red and gold pennants sagging, then snapping back into life as if trying to jump from their poles. The hungry oars biting into the water and rising up to pounce again, trailing bright arcs of water through the air. The air itself pressed into my ears, thick with joyful shouting.

My skin prickled. I am a part of all of this, I thought. For the first time, I felt it. My life. I saw myself standing on the water stairs, all copper and gold, my hair tamed under a net of pearls, my high fine collar fluttering in the breeze, ripples breaking at my feet and spreading back out into the river. Who was also cheered. Who was even now being watched and had her own part to play. Who, like her older brother, had a duty not to disappoint. No longer a child. The First Daughter of England, who carried a secret she-wolf in her bones, waiting now to welcome a foreign king. Ready to face her father in their shared world.

I smiled and waved back at some young fishermen in a dinghy who had dared to row close enough to the steps to throw a posy of flowers at me. Their bouquet fell short and lay bobbing near the lowest step. While a boat of men-at-arms rushed to drive away the invaders, I sent a groom down into the water to retrieve the flowers. I held aloft the dripping bundle of iris and early roses and was rewarded by a chorus of delighted cheers from the retreating fishermen.

Baby Charles pulled his hand from mine, stepped away and frowned in disapproval. He wiped a water drop from his cheek.

The golden barges pulled in to the stairs. There was a flurry of securing, steadying, disembarking, bowing. There were more cheers from the steps, from the windows of the palace and from the turmoil of smaller boats following the royal progress up the Thames. My uncle, the king of Denmark, leapt up the water steps in three huge strides.

‘What charming children!’ he boomed. Hardly pausing, he pinched my cheek. Then the burly, ugly man was gone, one arm thrown across my father’s somewhat lower shoulders. My father had not seemed even to see me. With a wild look over his shoulder, Henry followed them.

Baby Charles was removed by his nurse. Dismissed as a ‘charming child’, the First Daughter of England skulked back to her dusty temporary lodgings and waited crossly in the smell of damp plaster and rotting water weed from the river under her window.

I would be summoned soon, I told myself. I had not come all this way nor had all those new clothes made just to have my cheek pinched in passing.

I ate dinner alone with Anne in my lodgings, trying not to drop crumbs or make grease spots on the copper-coloured silk of my taffeta gown. It had taken me more than an hour to be dressed. I dared not change in case I was suddenly called. If I were to be called.

After eating, I leaned on the windowsill and counted wherries on the river. I watched the sun set over the marshes. Then I had to ask my maid to brush the pink plaster dust from my gown. Briefly, I played my lute, then put it back in its case again.

‘I don’t know why we troubled to come to London!’ I said.

‘But I would never have had this gown otherwise.’ Anne smoothed a blue silk flounce.

I need not have feared this visit, after all. The king had forgotten me.

Or he was slighting me. Teaching me yet again how little he valued me, and how easily I could be thrown aside. I listened to the faint sounds of music. Somewhere, other people were dancing. I had never seen courtiers dancing all together. I had never danced with anyone but Anne. I wanted to dance, here at court. I wondered what would happen if I were to present myself uninvited.

I rehearsed what I would say. Imagined the general amazement. My own dignity, as I walked fearlessly towards the king, head held high…

When my window began to grow opaque with darkness, I was at last summoned to the Great Presence Chamber. I gathered around me what was left of the first Daughter of England and set off.

I stopped just inside the door to stare like a gawk. I inhaled sharply and almost choked on the brew of civet, cinnamon, sandalwood, rose water and sweat. There were too many people jammed together even for such a vast space, all of them giving off a shimmering heat of urgency and importance. The air was thick with their voices and the rustling of silks and fine wools, the faint rasping of crusted gold and silver embroidery against jewelled buttons. Somewhere in the crowd, a lute and drum fought to be heard.

‘Wait here, your grace,’ whispered the page, who had accompanied me.

I looked about me.

In Scotland, even in the palaces, our ceilings were often built low to conserve the heat in the long, fierce, damp winters. We did not try to emulate God’s own space between mountains, above the sea. Here at Whitehall, the roof was so high that it vanished into the shadows above the torches, making me feel as small as an ant. At the far end of this hall, my father sat raised above his courtiers as if on an altar, with my uncle beside him holding a glass of wine.

Even while he spoke to my uncle, the king’s bright jackdaw eyes leapt and darted, searching for something of interest, pretending not to see me waiting at the door. His fingers explored the arm of his chair, his sleeves, his buttons. Dark and heavy against the surrounding finery, he wore one of his plain quilted velvet doublets, as if scorning the extravagant efforts of the courtiers to deck themselves for him.

The jackdaw eyes chose to see me. Though his doublet was plain, I saw the flash of unfamiliar gems on his fingers when he lifted his hand to summon me. When he angled his head, a white sun flared just above the brim of his hat.

I moved towards him, half-terrified, half-enraged. I kept my eyes down, not from modesty but from fear of having my thoughts and senses overwhelmed.

Life in Scotland had been all polished wood and leather, and the comfortable smells of wood smoke, dogs, damp, mice and horses. Even at Holyrood, everyone had lived bundled together, separated only by invisible lines of the respect owed to my parents. I had not altogether lied to Anne. My mother ate with her ladies, and then with Henry and me when we were there, in a cosy closet off her bed chamber. My father’s nobles leaned their elbows on the same table as he did. The king of Scotland was the chief among the other clan chiefs. He did not sit apart on an altar like an image of God.

I advanced through a parting sea of courtiers, feeling the stares hammer at me. Voices grew sibilant with ‘she’ and ‘princess’ and my name, ‘Elizabeth’. I heard a murmur, ‘…one of the Scottish brats.’

A lock of twisting red-gold hair had escaped from its pins. I would have blown it out of my eyes but refused to give that mocking English voice further reason to laugh at my uncouth Scottish behaviour.

Musk and candle smoke caught at the back of my throat. A miasma of sweat and oil of roses swirled around my head.

‘She…’ ‘She…’ hissed the sea.

The curve of my skirt met the line of my father’s altar plinth. The air was sickly sweet with wine vapours. I looked up. A young man sat on the dais at my father’s feet, with his arm draped over the king’s right knee.

Tonight, unlike the fearsome man who had brushed aside the wall-hanging in Coventry, my father overflowed with satisfaction and drunken arrogance. He seemed to tremble on the edge of bad behaviour, like a child overwrought by too many fine gifts.

‘Here’s my little Bessie!’ he shouted. ‘My country mouse has ventured out of her hole at last!’

A red flush began to climb my chest. I curtsied faultlessly.

‘Would she not make any father proud?’ he demanded at large. The rings on his fingers flashed. A knife blade of light from the diamond on his hat sliced across my vision. Another gust of wine fumes reached me on his breath.

Burning with humiliation, I put on my chilliest face and let the crudely exacted compliments rain down on me.

‘Is she not a pearl beyond price, monsewer?’ My father leaned forward and aimed this question past Wee Bobby Cecil, squarely between the eyes of a French-dressed envoy standing in the front rank of attending courtiers and foreign visitors.

The sight of the Secretary of State made my heart thump with guilty memories of Coventry.

‘No longer a child, after all!’ said my uncle, looking me up and down. ‘Not in the least.’

‘Come up here and sit by me, Bessie!’ The king waved a flashing hand. ‘Fetch the lassie a stool!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, Bessie! Don’t be shy. Come up and give your father a kiss!’ His voice hardened. ‘It may be your only chance to look down from up here! Come make the most of it!’

I climbed the steps and kissed him without recoiling from the wine fumes. I sat and held the glass of wine he forced into my hands, over the head of the young man lounging between us.

Straight-backed, I pretended to ignore the stares, so many eyes on me at the same time. A quick sideways glance met the considering hazel gaze of a dark-haired, narrow-jawed man with a thin mouth pulled down by discontent—Sir Francis Bacon, last seen nodding and smiling among the dignitaries on the scaffold in Paul’s Churchyard. I looked away and met the eyes of the young man at my father’s feet. Enemies everywhere.

Henry, the next king of England, should have been sitting with his father and uncle, in place of that smirking stranger. Henry who was not there at all.

I snatched a look at the ‘monsewer’ who had been challenged by my father. He was now studying me, his head tilted to the man beside him. Then he leaned to the other side and murmured to Cecil.

My father was watching him. ‘But can France afford her?’ he called. ‘No one else can!’

My humiliation was complete. I was not here to meet my uncle. My father had called me here to be inspected like a market heifer. A gangling, red-haired, freckled heifer, I thought savagely. ‘A Scots brat’. Exposed to the ridicule of the English court as crudely as if he had set me in the stocks.

The faces below me began to bob in a dance. My head felt like a net full of jumping fish. I no longer wanted to dance. I needed to escape from all those eyes and sort my thoughts. Trapped up there on my stool I looked again for Henry but could not find him. I imagined standing up and walking out. But in my imagination, the sea refused to part to let me escape. I would be trapped in a cage of bodies.

In a gap between dancers, I spied my guardian sitting with folded arms against one wall, now joined by Wee Bobby Cecil. From their gestures and Lord Harington’s frown, they appeared to be arguing about me. Bacon leaned on a pillar watching them while dancers jogged around him. I caught my guardian’s eye, then a gaggle of dancers hopped between us.

What use was a guardian, I thought, if he didn’t guard you?

The racket of voices and music grew louder until I heard only a blur of sound. The young man at my father’s feet tilted his head back while the royal hand toyed with his curls. My father leaned forward and whispered in his ear.

I stared down into my wineglass. I knew that I had just learned something else momentous but did not yet know what to make of it.

The king of Denmark hauled a woman onto his lap and began to play the clown with the hoops of her farthingale, threatening to put them over his head. Neither of them seemed to notice that her legs were exposed to the knee.

Lord Harington appeared at the foot of the dais, pinched and resolute. ‘Your majesty, with your permission…’ When he saw that my father still whispered into the young man’s ear, Lord H held out his hand to me.

‘Who is that man who was earlier standing beside Lord Salisbury?’ I murmured as he steadied me down the steps.

‘The French envoy.’

‘And the other, who didn’t speak? The one who still keeps staring at me?’

‘The Duc de Bouillon, envoy from the German Palatine, chief state of the Protestant Union in Europe.’

I didn’t ask about the young man leaning on my father’s knees.

I curtsied to my oblivious father.

Lord Harington mouthed words about my recent journey and the dangers of too much excitement. As we turned to leave, three of my father’s Scottish gentlemen began to lay loud wagers on how much more of the woman on my uncle’s lap would be seen before the night was done.

‘Depends on how oiled she is,’ said one.

‘Nae! Nae! S’nowt to do w’drink!’ another shouted back, as Lord Harington hustled me away. ‘A good bush need no wine!’ My father and uncle laughed loudly.

Lord Harington forgot himself far enough to give me a little push towards the door.

‘Where is Prince Henry?’ I asked, when we reached the corridor. ‘Why is he not here?’

Lord Harington pinched his lips. ‘Best if you had not been here neither.’

‘Can we go back to Combe now?’

Harington hesitated. ‘I will ask permission, but I fear that his majesty has not done with you yet.’

I walked a few feet in silence. ‘Are you still my guardian?’

I heard him breathe in sharply. ‘Yes, your grace. I will be your guardian until you marry. But I cannot remove you without the king’s permission.’

I nodded, but could not stop the unworthy, childish feeling that he was abandoning me in the monster’s lair.

14

Henry and I found each other at last, the following day, in the gardens. My brother was just as handsome as I remembered, but taller, and beginning to fill out into a man. He had been on his way to the tiltyard and carried a sword. It was our first time together in private since I had arrived from Combe.

‘I knew that you would be here,’ he said with delight.

‘I knew that you would be.’

We kissed each other gravely and stood looking into each other’s eyes, both of us a little shy after so long apart but buoyed up by the miracle of a shared impulse that had brought us both to the same place at the same time.

Henry in the flesh seemed very like the Henry in my head, apart from a faint new, darker smell that came off him when he kissed me. In Edinburgh, he had smelled of fresh cut grass.

‘What do you read in my face?’ asked Henry. ‘After studying it so earnestly?’

‘I wonder if you still love me,’ I blurted. ‘And I see that you have a red-gold fuzz on your upper lip and chin, just the same colour as my hair.’

‘You’re taller but are still my Elizabella,’ he said. ‘Quick as a squirrel, always darting and leaping, looking for a new nut.’

We ordered our attendants to stay by the fountain. Since most of them had sore heads, they were happy to comply. Over my shoulder, I saw Anne settle on a stone bench with one of Henry’s gentlemen. We set off together without them down the long central gravel path that divided the pattern of box-edged formal beds.

‘Where were you last night?’ I asked, instead of all the other questions I wanted to ask him.

‘I had to sit with them through dinner.’ My brother flushed and looked down at his feet crunching on the gravel path. ‘When I couldn’t tolerate their coarseness and drinking any longer, I excused myself.’

‘I lacked your courage,’ I said. ‘I stayed.’

‘It needed more courage to stay than to flee.’ He swung his sword in a fierce downward arc. ‘I never dreamed that our father meant to summon you last night. I would have stayed. I should have been there to protect you.’

‘Do you still wear your oath ring?’ I asked. ‘Like the one you gave me on Cat Nick?’ I held out my hand wearing his golden ship.

‘See for yourself.’ Henry held out his left hand with the matching golden ship on the middle finger. ‘Our hands are the same shape,’ he observed. ‘Even if mine are a little larger. In Scotland, we were so innocent of the true dangers. We should swear again.’

We stopped walking. A robin landed on the wooden obelisk in the centre of the nearest bed and trilled encouragement. Solemnly, with the robin as witness, looking into each other’s eyes, we again pledged ourselves to rescue if the other sent for help.

Even against our father? I wondered if that was what Henry meant by ‘true dangers’. Having now had a little time to observe him, I felt a new weight pressing down on him. Like Atlas, he seemed to have shouldered the world.

The robin gave a final trill and jumped away into the air.

We smiled at each other. His presence still created that familiar circle of warmth that I wanted to step inside.

As we began to walk again, I thought how there was something bright and pure in him, of which he seemed unaware, that made crowds shout out his name and press forward to touch him. Today in the gardens, I saw how the women pushed out their bosoms at him. His grooms and gentlemen followed him with their eyes. Unlike our father, he was patient with attention and wore his golden manacles of duty as if they delighted him.

‘You might have needed protecting last night, too,’ I ventured.

‘From the king, you mean?’ He pinched his lips and turned his head away. ‘He would have been happy enough if I had stayed away altogether. But the people expect my presence.’

Even at my most hopeful, I had not thought this meeting would be so easy. Very soon, I would confess how I had once talked to him at night. And why.

‘We must both be strong,’ he said. ‘There will be more nights like last night while our uncle is here. The Danes are notorious for their drinking and carousing.’

‘That’s what Lord Harington said.’

There was a moment of silence, in which I felt our thoughts pulling back from the same uneasy terrain.

Henry balanced his sword at the end of an outstretched arm. ‘This sword was a gift from Spain.’

‘It’s very fine,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Not as fine as the suit of golden armour given to me by my spiritual father, who is the model for all kings.’

‘And who is that?’ I asked obediently.

‘Henri IV of France. A true warrior king. Unlike our father.’

I said nothing. Ever since I was six years old, Mrs Hay had whispered that the king wanted me to marry Henri’s son, the infant Dauphin of France. That was the future for which she had to prepare me, she had said. The closest I had come to imagining this future was the image of living with someone like my younger brother, Baby Charles, who lay somewhere between a nuisance and a pet.

‘Our father hopes I might marry the Spanish Infanta,’ Henry said. ‘He seems to believe that if I accept a sword, I might accept a bride.’

He stretched his arm over the low box hedge and began to tickle a daisy with tiny circles of the sword tip. I watched the tendons working in his wrist.

‘I cannot marry a Papist.’ He glanced up at me. ‘I don’t want you to marry a Papist, neither.’

‘I don’t much want to marry at all,’ I said. ‘But I must. Just as you must one day be king.’

Henry lunged with the sword. Silently, I admired the line of his leg and the steadiness of his blade. ‘We could run away together to the Americas.’ He straightened again and lowered his voice. ‘This is not idle dreaming, Elizabella. You won’t have heard of my interest in the London Company and its enterprise in the new Virginia colony, because I must hide it to avoid stirring up the commercial rivalry among the different English joint stock companies—the East Indies Company, the West Indies Company, and the Virginia Company. And it’s also better that Spain and France, who already have an eager foothold in the Caribbean, don’t know that the future king of England has a keen interest in the Americas.’

He lowered his voice even though we could not possibly have been overheard, except by the robin, which seemed to be following us. ‘I have invested money in the new Virginia colony, Elizabella. Even the king doesn’t know how much. His interests lie all in Europe. I am helping to shape a new British kingdom, which I will one day rule. The first expedition named their first landfall at Chesapeake Bay after me—Cape Henry. We could rule together there as brother and sister, as I believe happened in ancient times.’

‘I could marry a handsome savage prince,’ I said. ‘And you would marry his long-haired golden sister.’

‘Queen Elizabella,’ he said.

‘King Henry the Ninth of England, Scotland and the Americas!’ I made a deep reverence. ‘But how could you leave England?’

‘England would forgive my absence because I would send back so many riches from this other kingdom. Gold and silver. Coral. Beaver pelts, tabacco…’

‘…live bears and beavers for the royal menagerie…’

We stared at each other with excited surmise, even knowing that we spoke nonsense. The Americas might be real. Henry’s eventual rule there might be real. But Queen Elizabella of the Americas was idle dreaming.

Henry whacked the head off a daisy. ‘Meanwhile, we both must go wherever we’re summoned.’

‘But if you’re there, too, I won’t mind. We can suffer together.’

‘They wallow in beastly delights. It’s not right for a young girl to see and hear such things.’

‘But surely, I must learn the ways of the world before I’m sent out into it.’ I rolled my eyes and pretended to stagger.

Henry glanced back at our attendants. Then my earnest, well-behaved brother fixed me with a cold heavy-lidded stare. His eyes darted suspiciously around the garden then stared at me again. His fingers began to pick at his sleeve, then at his buttons. He tapped his foot. He chewed on his tongue. He took one graceless step then leaned an elbow on my shoulder

He had caught our father so exactly that I could not help giggling. Then I remembered the father I had seen in Coventry.

‘No more!’ I said. ‘Someone might see you!’

‘Our father dislikes me already. But like me or not, I’m his heir. He knows the value of both of us, you and me.’

He sounded so certain that he half-convinced me.

‘I must go practise swordplay now in the tiltyard with my friends,’ he said. ‘My trained band of gentlemen. Would you like to come watch us?’

‘Of course.’ I trotted to keep up with his quick stride, still bubbling with pleasure that he had shown me a hidden part of himself. ‘Perhaps one day, you’ll let me try.’

He looked amused. ‘If you wish, though I don’t know why you would.’

‘I wish,’ I said.

‘It will spoil your hands,’ he warned. He stopped and held out his own for me to see the roughened palm. I reached out across my skirt flounce and laid my hand palm down on his. We looked at our two hands in silence.

‘Wherever you are, I want to be,’ I said. ‘No matter how beastly.’

‘Would you truly tolerate being a witness to immorality like last night’s to be with me?’ asked Henry.

‘Yes,’

He nodded. ‘Then we will suffer together, as you say. And I will look after you.’

‘As far as my guardian permits.’ I wanted to hug him. Because my skirts made that impossible, I settled for a smile. Tomorrow I would ask if he had ever received my warning letter. Not today. Today was just right as it was.

15

But the right time to ask eluded me. Henry and I saw each other again several times after our meeting in the gardens and took pleasure from each other’s company. But we were always surrounded by a court racing in full cry after the pleasures of my uncle’s continued visit. Treason was not a subject for a snatched moment on the way to a banquet or tilt. Sooner or later, I would confront my fear of knowing the worst. But not yet.

Because I was not made for fear and gloom, I began to thread the bewildering events of my temporary new life together, to order them like a string of bright beads. Rashly, after the bad beginning of that first evening, I began to believe that I needed less protection than Henry and I had feared.

Though still an object of curiosity, I was only one of many entertainments on offer during my uncle’s visit. Courtiers vied to present the most lavish banquets and masques. Members of every noble family in England displayed their looks and skills as dancers and singers in these shows. So many spectators, supporters and enemies alike, crowded to see and discuss the performances that the women were forbidden to wear their wide-hooped farthingales in order to make more room.

Dressed in one or another of the new gowns that had put Lady H into a fever and emptied my guardian’s purse, I sat on the royal dais at as many of these masques as I could. There, I learned how much delight the stern-living Haringtons had denied me at Combe. I saw the true purpose of my lute lessons and my dancing master. Here was magic made real. A safe ecstasy. The perfect marriage of wonder and glue.

‘Did you ever see such things before?’ Anne would murmur close behind me. ‘Oh, just look at that!’

Transported out of my everyday self, I watched the sun rise behind wood and canvas mountains. I saw ladies of the court transformed into musical nymphs. Earthquakes destroyed temples. Monstrous lions roared out fire. Gods descended from the roof or sprang from cloven rock. A sky full of candles burned, and red, green and blue lanterns, and other mysterious lights that I could not name but which stirred unnamed memories and elusive wisps of lost dreams. The jewels that flashed in the folds of my gowns looked suddenly like fallen stars and my thoughts felt opened as wide as the night sky.

‘I didn’t know such things existed!’ I told Henry under my breath, when we met once at the door of the Royal Chapel before evening prayers. ‘Please tell me that you don’t think all the ways of the world are wicked!’

Sometimes the king was present with my uncle at these performances, though he would often fidget violently, then spring up in the middle of a song and leave before the final dance. Sometimes he stayed away altogether, reportedly locked in debate with his attendant wits or drinking in his lodgings, with or without my uncle. Sometimes, he vanished altogether to hunt at Newmarket or Royston, or at Theobald’s, Cecil’s great estate in Hertfordshire. I heard whispers that he disliked crowds and found excuse to avoid them, fearing a sudden assassin.

Whatever the reason for them, I rejoiced in his absences, which let me forget fear. With whole-hearted pleasure I could then attend tilts and applaud my brother fighting in the lists. I could marvel at fireworks where dragons spat flames at each other, Catherine Wheels blossomed on trees and rockets briefly imitated the stars. I could listen to music that made me want to weep with joy, as if the vibrating strings of the viols were the strings of my own heart. My body would lie singing under those bows.

‘Was that not fine music tonight?’ Anne would ask as we bedded down for sleep. ‘You could almost sing the tune along with the players. I do prefer the old songs, don’t you?’

One night, freed from my father’s heavy-lidded gaze, I danced for the first time with a man, in the general dancing that followed the masque. None of Lady H’s warning words had armoured me against his smiling gallantry nor against the disturbing yet exciting smell of a heated adult male body so close to mine. As we turned around each other, carried shoulder-to-shoulder on the music, face looking into face, I felt my future quiver with sudden, unexpected brightness.

We danced again. His blue eyes pressed into mine but shifted away just before I could grow awkward with self-consciousness. I glanced at his mouth, under his fair, curly moustache. He bowed over my hand and delivered me back to my chair. I danced with other men. Smiled at Anne as I passed her in a figure. Then I danced with my first partner again. And again. Whenever the drums began, I flew.

‘Elizabella.’ Henry arrived at my side when I sat down to catch my breath. He looked magnificent in cream-coloured silk embroidered with pearls. His russet hair gleamed. He studied the heaving mass of dancers below us. Nodding and smiling at acquaintances, he said under his breath, ‘It’s fitter exercise for women than for men.’

I scarcely heard him. I was watching the slim lean shape of my first partner as he danced with a fair-haired young woman. She had full breasts, I noted, trapped quivering behind her bodice top. And a knowing look in her eyes that I envied.

Henry followed my gaze. ‘A Seymour,’ he said, meaning the man. ‘William, has a brother, Thomas. Distant cousins who carry royal Tudor blood.’ He stared at the girl, but did not name her.

We watched William Seymour duck his neatly barbered head to lead his partner under the arched arms of another couple.

‘I’m told that he has hopes of marrying you,’ said Henry.

‘If marriage means nothing but dancing,’ I said, ‘he would suit me very well.’

Henry shook his head earnestly. ‘Our father will never let an ambitious English noble get so close to true power.’

‘Then I must be content to dance with him.’ But in truth, I was sobered by the cold purpose I now knew lay behind that smiling gallantry. I felt foolish, out of my depth. I could never lower my guard.

After that night, I lost much of my taste for masques and dancing and began to take refuge whenever I could in a more familiar haven, the royal stables in Scotland Yard. They held wonders never seen at Combe. Rows and rows of shining flanks. An entire barn full of saddles and tack. War saddles with sheaths for weapons. Ceremonial saddles set with gold. Ladies’ side-saddles with curved heads and X-shaped heads. Embroidered saddlecloths and jewelled cushions.

Wearing an old gown, with my farthingale left off, I persuaded the grooms to let me curry and brush my own horses several times a week. When finished in the stables, I wandered into the royal kennels where a greyhound bitch had just whelped, to watch the pups clamber over each other and nose for the teat. The King’s Master of the Hounds welcomed me and let me select a pup to have when it was weaned.

I chose one of the two dogs. I watched him wriggle to the top of the squirming pile, latch on to a teat and hang on undeterred even when another pup stepped on his face. ‘Mars,’ I said.

The Master of the Hounds also told me that the lioness in the menagerie at the Tower, named Elizabeth after me, had whelped. Poor Anne had to come with me from Whitehall and attend me for hours as I sat by the stacked-up cages, on a chair carried there for me, watching the infant lions suckling and learning to play.

‘I can’t think why you like it so much here,’ muttered Anne in a rare moment of rebellion. ‘It stinks.’

‘You just want to go back to Whitehall so you can flirt,’ I said. I had spoken lightly and was startled to see my old play-mate’s cheeks burn as red-hot as a sunset.

Then, I saw my first play, performed by the king’s own company of players in the temporary Banqueting Hall, built when the old one burned down. Not a mix of songs, dances and poetic declamations like the masques. Just bald, unadorned words, spoken as we speak ourselves, if a little more loudly. With the exception only of the murderous queen in the story, who struck me as strange until I finally saw that she was played by a boy, the players seemed to live as we did, progressing through time, breathing, loving, loathing, fighting, scheming, suffering, murdering.

But what braced me upright in my chair was the whiff of truth that drifted down from the trestle stage of the King’s Men. Not all men at court were flatterers after all, even when they wore flatterers’ clothes. This play had been written for my father, to be presented before him and my Danish uncle. It was tricked out in the usual flowery dedication. And yet it spoke terrible truths, more truth than any of the flattering poetry of the masques I had seen.

I looked around the Banqueting Hall. I could not believe that no one else noticed. An ambitious, Scottish would-be king. From a place described as ‘too cold for hell.’ A king who killed his rivals for the throne. A man with a vast and fearful imagination that showed him vividly what horrors might await him. A man of foreboding. Of changeable purpose.

‘Faith, here’s an equivocator,’ complained the player Porter. ‘…that could swear in both scales against either scale…’

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