The Noble Assassin

CHRISTIE DICKASON

Dedication

For John

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Chapter 1

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

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part Two

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

Epilogue

The People In THE NOBLE ASSASSIN

Author’s Notes

By the same author

Some Helpful Books

The Noble Assassin – TIME LINE

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Thank you to:

John Faulkner, my personal Google

Stephen Wyatt, my creative SOS, as always

Olena Kostovska

Lindsay Smith

Stephen Siddall

Tom French for IT support and rescue

Emma Faulkner, for the title

Orly, for listening, among much else

Leonardo, Giuseppe and Rosa Giannini for

my office away from home

Sarah Ritherdon and Victoria Hughes-Williams at

HarperCollins

My agents, Robert Kirby and Charlotte Knee

Jon M. Moore, Chief Executive, Moor Park Golf Club

The Museum of Richmond, Richmond Surrey

The Richmond Reference Library

Jeremy Preston and the staff of East Sheen Library

for invaluable support in research, readings, and

readership involvement

(And, welcome to Matilda, who arrived in this world

just before I hit ‘SEND’.)

Part One

Chapter 1

LUCY – MOOR PARK, HERTFORDSHIRE, NOVEMBER 1620

The air is so cold that I fear my eyelashes will snap off like the frozen grass. Only my two youngest, most eager hounds have left the fireside to bound at my side.

I do not want to die. But I cannot go on as I am, neither. I ride my horse closer to the edge of the snow cliff. I imagine turning his head out to the void and kicking him on. I imagine the screams behind me.

We would fly, my horse and I, falling in a great arc towards the icy River Chess far below. My hair would loosen and tumble free. His tail and my darned red gown would flutter like flags.

Then we would begin to tumble, slowly, end over end, like a boy’s toy soldier on horseback, my bent knee clamped around the saddle horn, his legs frozen in mid-gallop. The winter sun reflecting off his black polished hoofs. My last unsold jewels scattering through the air like bright rain. For those frozen dreamlike moments, my life would again be glorious.

I feel the alarmed looks being exchanged behind me on the high, snowy ridge, among the moth-eaten furs and puffs of frozen breath. I quiver like a leashed dog, braced for the first voice to cry, ‘Take care!’

I walk my horse still closer to the edge.

It would be so easy.

I look down again at the river. Why not? What is left to lose now?

The in-drawn breath of that vast space pulls at me. The serrated edges of the snow cliff glisten, sharp enough to slice off Time.

Welcome, the space whispers. Below me, I see the smiling faces of my two dead babes. Welcome. I see the face of my poet, my only love, now dead to me.

One kick, then no more fighting. No more debts. No more loss. No more of the scorn and silence already denying that I am alive.

Even my Princess is gone from England.

I listen to the uneasy stirring behind me. Who would break first and call me back?

You can die from lack of a purpose to live.

‘Your Grace . . .’ The waiting gentleman speaks quietly lest he startle me, or my horse, and send us over the edge. Speaking carefully, as if I were poor, maimed, self-indulgent Edward, who suffers so nobly before witnesses then beats his fist against his chair when he thinks himself alone.

The cold air is a knife in my chest. The sun on the snow blinds me. I am made of ice.

I let my small band of attendants hold their breaths by the edge of the snow cliff. They should be grateful to me for this small gift of fear, I think. Salting the bland soup of their day.

I look down at the river again. Edward is wrong to say that I lie to myself. I face the reality in front of me. Listen to its melody. Then I rewrite it, sometimes on paper, sometimes only in my head. I give it more beauty, or terror or meaning. I tell the story better. But I never deceive myself as to which is which.

For instance, I can see that the scene I am now writing in my head is impossible. The fall would be messy, not glorious. Almost certainly, the horse would have to be shot. I would land at the bottom broken but still breathing. And then I would become a captive with my husband in his fretful rage.

I see the pair of us, invalids side-by-side in our fur rugs, dropping malice as the stars drop the dew until we die.

I still brim with unwritten words, unsung music, unplanted gardens. I still keep most of the looks and all of the wit that had made me the darling of the Whitehall poets. I feel like a piece of verse begun but not finished. There is one poet who could have written me but never will.

In the void below me, I see him striding up and down the gravel path of my lost garden in Twickenham, stirring the air, reciting a poem born from the passionate union of our thoughts. I hear words I had offered him, whole lines, even. An easy rhythm where my ear had pointed out a stumbling line for him to revise. All now made his own. He recites the completed poem for the first time, to me alone, too intent to notice that spray from the fountain spangles his dark hair and coat with sparkling diamond chips.

He glares up at the sky and down at the gravel path. I watch his clenched hands spring open to mark each stress of his metre. Watch his long fingers and feel them on my skin. His words sail out of his body on the fierce current of his breath into the wide air of the universe. I imagine them sailing on past the moon, past the sun, until they reach the farthest heavens to lodge as new stars. He comes to the end of the poem, listens for a moment to its last echo in his head, then turns to look at me, almost with fear. Was it good?

I have lost him along with all the rest.

When I had been the Queen’s favourite, she bathed me in her generosity. Passing it on with an open hand, I became that bountiful goddess known as a patron, a source of prizes, favours and preferment.

But my fortunes had declined with the Queen’s health and the vigour of her court. My husband and I never recovered from his fine for treason. I often spent what I did not have. Our growing debts had forced me to sell the lease of my Twickenham garden to that reptile Lord Bacon. When the Queen died, almost two years past, I was finished. Her court was dissolved. I lost my place and the wealth that went with it. I could no longer afford to be patron, to my poet or anyone else. Now I am branded a ‘court cormorant’, a beggar, wife of a debtor, a woman of no use to anyone, burying her shame in the country. Like the pox, my fall from grace threatens to infect others.

What remains for me? Why not open my wings and fly? If not here, somewhere higher and more certain.

My gelding suddenly shies away from the shining ice edge.

I lean forward and pat his neck. ‘Don’t fear,’ I murmur. ‘When I jump, I won’t take you with me. I swear it. Nor anyone else.’

Not today.

But I have never yet given up on anything I set my mind to.

I will do it, I promise myself. Soon.

My poor hounds have begun to shiver, up to their shoulders in the drifts.

I turn my horse’s head to let him begin to pick his way back down along the icy track towards Moor Park, with the dogs racing ahead and my attendants behind, no doubt relieved. I press my old beaver muff to my cold face then bite savagely into the fur like a hound on a hare’s nape.

I have little patience with wilful misery, least of all my own, but I see no way out for me now. I clench my teeth on the side of my hand, deep inside the muff. I want to throw back my head and howl. To crack open the steady deadly progress of time and set loose demons and angels with flaming swords. I would welcome the novelty of a second Great Flood, cheer on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Anything to change what my life has become.

When I drag my frozen skirts back to the fire in the hall at Moor Park, I learn that those demons and angels have already escaped. As my skirts steam and drip and my shivering grey hounds curl close to the flames beside their fellows, I listen with horror to Edward’s urgent report.

The dark, gaunt Horseman of War had heard my desperate plea.

‘There is war in Bohemia.’ My husband can scarcely conceal the pleasure he takes in telling me.

I didn’t mean it! I think. Not like this! Not Elizabeth!

‘They lasted scarcely a year on the Bohemian throne, your English princess and her little Palatine husband.’ He shakes his head and waits for me to ask if she is dead.

Queen Anne’s daughter Elizabeth. My father’s former charge, raised in our home at Combe Abbey. Elizabeth Stuart, the only woman I love who is still left alive. In spite of her younger years, she could always match me thought for thought. At times, she had left me, the older girl, laughing in her wake.

When I remain silent, he can’t contain himself any longer. ‘All reports say the Hapsburg armies have invaded Prague, routed the new young King’s Protestant forces and arrested the rebel leaders.’

‘How certain is this news?’

‘A courier arrived from my cousin today.’

‘What of the King and Queen?’ I ask when my voice is again under control. My Elizabeth and her Frederick, who had been pressed into accepting the crown of Bohemia.

‘Fled, I’m told . . . and still in flight. Declared outlaws by the Hapsburgs, under Ban of the Empire.’

I want to hit him for the pleasure in his voice. ‘Will England go to war to save her?’

‘That’s for her father to decide.’ I have asked a foolish question. Then he smiles and shrugs. ‘King James is England’s self-styled “rex pacificus”. Draw your own conclusions.’

‘There’d be no honour in his “peace” now.’ I wish I could say that my feelings at that moment are pure, generous and patriotic, but honesty insists otherwise. A sudden jolt of excitement runs through my horror.

‘The Bohemians might prefer to call their leaders “heroes” not “rebels”,’ I say mildly while my racing thoughts drown both Edward’s voice and his quiet malice.

I survived my first seven years of marriage chiefly by pretending to ignore my husband. He had soon proved to be a master of the puzzled tone, the helpless shrug, the meaningful glances over my head. He let my words fall to the floor as if they had no meaning. Or he would seize on one and examine it with puzzled incomprehension before tossing it away. Or he shook his head sadly and told me what I had meant to say. In the company of other men, he ignored me altogether. When he managed to provoke me past endurance, he would smile with satisfaction. Look at her! See what a harridan I have married!

Having once again failed to goad me into an unseemly outburst, my husband now purses his lips. I scarcely notice.

If what Edward tells me is true, I know that the future of England has just changed. My future could change with it. I see escape from Edward and from Moor Park. I see the return of warmth and true companionship. I see purpose for my life again. I confess that I begin to listen to his news of unfolding disaster in Bohemia with a heart turned suddenly light with renewed possibility.

Chapter 2

ELIZABETH STUART – PRAGUE, BOHEMIA, NOVEMBER 1620

In the royal palace in Prague, the King, Queen and guests pretended to eat. The young, Scottish-born Queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth Stuart, jumped at a sudden boom and spilled the sauce from her silver spoon. She set the spoon down on her plate and picked up her French fork. She looked at the fork, unable to remember what she should do with it. With its two long sharp tines, it resembled a weapon. She found herself gripping the gold mermaid of its handle in her fist.

They no longer pretended to converse, in any of the several languages spoken around the table. All words had now deserted them. Up and down the long polished table, people stared at their food as if puzzled by it or chewed on morsels that they forgot to swallow. All their senses seemed to have deserted them except that of hearing. Sir Edward Conway, one of the two ambassadors sent by James from England to parlay for peace with the Hapsburg enemy, sat with one hand at his hip, resting on an absent sword hilt. Even the servers standing behind each chair forgot to offer the food they held, frozen in listening.

Cannons had begun to boom far too close, from the west.

The child in her womb jumped.

Elizabeth could almost have persuaded herself that the guns were summer thunder bouncing off the mountains.

‘It’s noisy for a Sunday that was meant to be a day of truce,’ said the other English ambassador, Sir Richard Weston.

‘We’re high here,’ said Elizabeth. Her unspoken meaning – the Hradcany Palace, home to the King and Queen of Bohemia, sat on a rocky summit high above the Vltava river. Sounds from far away reached them with unnatural clarity. Therefore, the fighting was not as close as it sounded. She was reassuring her white-faced husband as much as the rest of them.

Her husband shook his head. Frederick, elected King of Bohemia for a little more than a year, had been weighed down beyond his strength from the age of sixteen by his leadership of the German Union of Protestant Princes. ‘They’re fighting on the White Mountain. I should be there, not at table.’ He stood abruptly. Fabric rustled and stool feet squeaked on the stone floor as everyone else rose with him. Then he paused uncertainly, head lifted, listening to the sounds of the battle.

The forces of the mighty Catholic Hapsburg Empire had engaged Frederick’s twenty-five thousand German mercenaries and Protestant Bohemians less than half an hour’s ride from the city.

‘But we have them outnumbered,’ said Frederick. ‘They’re only seventeen and a half thousand men.’

‘Go tell the stables to prepare His Majesty’s horse,’ Elizabeth ordered a serving groom.

The fear and relief on the boy’s face as he ran from the hall made her question whether he would take her order to the stables or flee from the castle entirely.

‘You must go arm yourself, my love,’ she told her husband quietly.

‘Oh, Lizzie!’ He looked at her with terror in his large dark eyes. ‘I fear that we can’t . . .’

‘I shall come serve as your armourer, myself.’ Elizabeth, First Daughter of England and child of its King, married to Frederick at fifteen, now the twenty-four-year-old Serene and Puissant Queen of Bohemia, took her King firmly by the arm and led him towards the door of the great hall.

‘You must leave Prague at once,’ said Frederick. ‘Go early to Bresslau.’ She was to spend her confinement in Bresslau. He had already ordered some of her furniture sent there.

She shook her head. ‘I stay here in Prague as long as you do.’

The doors had no sooner closed behind him than they opened again on bad news. The arriving messenger smelled of gunpowder, blood and horse. Elizabeth could scarcely hear his words through the thunder of cannons inside her head.

The messenger finished speaking.

Behind her, Elizabeth heard screams and the crash of falling stools. Courtiers ran past her out of the hall, pushing and jostling in the door.

‘Where are the other German princes?’ she demanded. ‘Our allies? Where’s Thyssen? Bethlem Gabor and his Hungarians? Are they on their way to relieve us?’

‘I don’t know, Your Majesty. But our army is on the run with the Imperial army on their heels.’ The messenger looked back at the door.

‘Go run with the rest of them, then!’ she said with contempt.

She stood in a small still centre of the maelstrom unleashed by his message. She saw a man run by her carrying two jewelled goblets from the royal table.

‘Your Highness, do you wish me to take your knives and forks?’ A voice at her elbow, her chief lady-in-waiting, balanced on her toes, wanting to run, but still at her English mistress’s side.

She looked back and saw a waiting woman rolling up one of the Russian carpets on the royal dais.

Reality hit her. A hostile army was about to invade this very space in which she was standing.

Feeling unnaturally calm, she nodded at her lady-in-waiting. ‘And all my jewels.’ She turned to the two English ambassadors, still present, heads together. ‘You must return to England and tell my father to send soldiers and money at once!’

Weston nodded, but looked away.

Into the maelstrom, a white-faced, trembling Frederick returned. ‘It’s too late, Lizzie. My army has deserted. Even Anhalt and Hohenlohe were clamouring at the city gate in the midst of their own soldiers, begging to be let back inside the walls. We must all leave Prague now!’

‘Then you can ride with me and the children,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We will need you and the castle militia to protect us.’

Scarcely a year after she had arrived in Prague as the new queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth packed to leave again.

First, the children. The boys must not become Imperial captives! Thank God the Crown Prince had already been sent to safety in Berlin! Get the others away from here! Look to their needs. Clouts for the coming babe, petticoats, toy soldiers, cups and spoons, coverlets, shoes and boots, bread and wine. Gloves.

Oh God! She could not think with that thunder in her head.

Cradle . . . a welcoming gift from her new people less than a year ago, for Rupert her first Bohemian child . . . Too heavy to carry?

She looked out of a high window as if expecting to see Hapsburg soldiers climbing towards the castle.

Snow, falling. Great pillows of snow fell onto the thick coverlet that already hid steps and cart tracks. The staircase down to the river looked like a smooth white slope. They would have to take the wagons and carriages the long way round, to the north where the land rose more gradually, towards the advancing enemy, before curving south again.

Money chest, she thought. Petticoats, riding boots. Fill brass warming pans with charcoal. Likewise the iron heaters for the carriages. Feather mattresses . . . Leave all farthingales behind to save room in the carriages.

All the time, her ears listened to the gunfire, growing closer.

‘Madam . . .! Madam!’ cried frightened voices. ‘Do you want me to take . . .?’

No time. They must leave now!

The First Daughter of England, child of the would-be Peacemaker English King, could not become a prisoner-of-war.

Apart from all else, she thought, my father would never forgive me for forcing him to take a stand. Not after he had advised Frederick to stay at home in Heidelberg and refuse the Bohemian crown.

‘Into the second and third carriages,’ she ordered the children’s nurses with their bundles. Where was the castle steward who should be overseeing this rout?

Food! she thought. And ale. Who was supervising the packing of food and drink for them all?

How many were they?

She sat on a packed chest, pulled up her skirts and hauled on her riding boot unassisted. Her ladies were all running with loaded arms. Or had vanished.

And who can blame them? she thought. She hauled on her other boot.

How far away was her intended refuge in Bresslau? Too far. The mountains would be impassable in this weather.

Our departure from Prague is merely a series of problems to be solved, she told herself. But they all needed solving at once. There was no time . . .

Think!

Food, she thought again. Don’t let yourself become distracted from the most important things.

She found the steward in the kitchen courtyard, making a tally of flitches of bacon and smoked hams as they were thrown into carts.

‘Where are your clerks?’ she asked.

He gestured at the mêlée around them and shrugged. ‘I want to be certain, myself . . . Bread already in that cart, madam.’ He pointed, then ran across the courtyard to chivvy along two men who were loading barrels of ale onto another cart. She saw a guardsman carrying a pike.

The armoury! She ran back to the steward. ‘Weapons,’ she said. ‘We must not leave weapons for the enemy to take.’ He nodded and pointed at bundled pikes and stacked shields waiting to be loaded.

We must go to Berlin, she decided. A long ride in this weather. But once there, they would find warmth and food and safety, for a time at least. Time to think about their suddenly unthinkable situation. She didn’t entirely believe it, even now.

Snow was already blanketing the contents of the carts. Churned-up slush washed past the ankles of her boots as she ran back into the castle to oversee her own chests, which were being loaded onto carts in the main courtyard. And her money chest and jewel case, stowed in her carriage at the front of the forming line. And the chest holding state papers.

Letters!

She turned to go back to her apartments, but a militiaman blocked her way.

‘No time, madam,’ he said. ‘You must leave now!’ The militiaman disappeared again.

She lifted her head. The cannons had stopped. For a moment, she felt an intense silence, as if the world had stopped turning. Then shouts and gunfire, and the screaming of wounded horses arrived on the wind, far too close.

Children already in their carriage. Shadowy heads and the heads of their nurses . . .

Cloak. Gloves. Money pouch tied under her soft riding skirts, over her seven-month bulge of belly. Dagger.

She clambered up into her carriage. Two women in it already. Her chief lady-in-waiting sat huddled under a bearskin rug with Elizabeth’s jewel case in her arms.

She helped to wrap Elizabeth in another rug. ‘Put your feet here, my lady.’ Elizabeth lifted her soaked boots onto the iron warming pan of burning charcoal. Melted snow was already making a puddle on the floor of the coach. She lifted back the curtain over the window to watch their departure. In both directions along the line, indistinct figures took shape in the snow then disappeared again, both mounted and on foot. Though the light felt unnaturally bright, she could scarcely see the walls of her adopted home.

Frederick appeared on his horse, armed for war. ‘I’m giving the order to go forward.’

She nodded at him through the open square of the window. ‘To Berlin.’

He leaned close and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry, Lizzie.’ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ she said. ‘We’re having another adventure.’

‘Do you think we’ll survive?’

‘I shall. And I don’t like the prospect of widowhood, however you imagine you might arrange it.’

He nodded, then swallowed. ‘If I could face your father to win you, why should I fear the army of the Hapsburg emperor?’

She smiled more brightly than his sally warranted, to reward him for attempting it at all. They clasped gloved hands through the carriage window. The ends of his dark curly hair were tipped with snow. Flakes were already settling on her skirts.

‘I’ll see you safely to Berlin,’ he said. ‘Then I must ride north to try to raise more men. I’ve learned that it was only the mercenaries who deserted, not our local troops. The people of Bohemia will defend us yet.’

‘And I will give you all my jewels to pawn to pay them.’ She held up the curtain and watched him dematerialise again as he rode away to the head of the long line.

Her carriage jolted forward, throwing her back against the seat. Behind her the shouts of the drivers travelled like a wave back along the line of carts and carriages. The carriage dropped suddenly as its wheels slid into buried ruts in the frozen mud. The seat banged the ends of their spines.

‘Dear Lord!’ exclaimed her lady-in-waiting. Elizabeth heard the horses groaning and blowing. Behind them, oxen protested. The carriage swayed and creaked like a ship in a storm. She dropped the curtain across the window. She needed both hands to clutch the front of the seat. The interior of the coach was now dark and no warmer, but the curtain at least kept out the snow.

‘Stop!’ A scream rose behind her. She leaned from the window again, into the icy needles of snow. A voice fought its way to her against the wind, through the shouts of the carters and coachmen and the protests of the horses. ‘Wait, Your Majesty . . .!’

Then the wind blew the voice into ragged tatters.

‘Stop!’ she cried. Cold air filled her open mouth. Her teeth ached from the cold. ‘Who is that?’

It’s too late, she thought. We’ve been overtaken.

‘Your Majesty!’ The voice shouted again.

Then she saw the man staggering and sliding through the snow alongside the track. Not a Hapsburg soldier: one of Frederick’s gentlemen. Clutching a bundle of cloth in his arms, he fought his way forward towards her carriage.

‘Your Majesty,’ he shouted again. He overtook the carriage behind hers. ‘Dohna, the King’s Chamberlain went back . . .’ He slipped and almost fell into a drift. ‘. . . into the castle to check that everyone was gone . . . That nothing valuable had been left . . . Look!’ He stumbled alongside, panting, beneath the carriage window, holding up the bundle of cloth. ‘I was in the last carriage. Dohna threw him in . . . left behind in the nursery!’

The bundle gave an angry wail.

The carriage slid sideways. Elizabeth nearly fell from the window as she reached out. The man shoved the bundle up into her hands just before he fell. Elizabeth fumbled, re-gripped and fell back into her seat. It was her youngest son.

‘Rupert!’

One of her ladies whimpered.

Alive. Very much alive. She could now hear his steady screams and feel the pumping of his breath. The scrap of his face that showed amongst the wrappings was brick red. His body arched with rage.

Frightened faces stared back at her across the carriage.

‘Where’s the prince’s nurse?’

But she already knew. She remembered now. She had not seen Rupert’s nurse waiting with the others. The woman had fled.

Behind her she heard the coachmen and carters cursing and shouting as their beasts piled into the ones in front of them, trying not to run into her carriage.

‘Onwards,’ she shouted through the window and heard the order reverse itself back down the line. As the carriage lurched forward again, she braced herself against the motion, with her son pressed against her guilty heart. For the first time, she truly felt the enormity of what had happened to them all, of what was happening, and would go on happening. However calm she had pretended to be, what had happened was so terrible that it had almost made her leave behind her youngest child.

Chapter 3

LUCY – MOOR PARK, 1620

I lie in my cold bed, breathing out warm clouds, my feet close to the iron brazier filled with coals at the end of the mattress. My maid Annie snores gently from her pallet on the floor. A nodding house groom tends the fire.

I think about the news Edward has given me. The daughter of the King of England – my Elizabeth – is in flight, pursued by the armies of a Catholic empire that rules most of northern Europe from Russia to Flanders, only a short sail away across the North Sea. The long rumbling of war on the Continent between Catholic and Protestant powers has suddenly turned to the thunder of guns that can be heard in England.

She will be frightened and confused, though, as always, she will seem to command. She will fear for the children. They are all in danger.

I know I should not feel happy. How dare I rejoice?

I duck down under the covers to warm my hands on the brazier, curling like a cat in the small warm cave.

I am being given another chance. If I can think how to take it.

The next morning I rise as if the world were not changing. I dress, eat my frugal breakfast of bread and small beer. Wearing old fur-lined gloves with the fingers cut off, I sign orders to buy sugar and salt that we can’t afford. I approve the slaughter of eight precious hens. I count linens as they come back from the washhouse, and the remaining silver returned from being washed and polished in the scullery. While Lady Agnes frowns at a peony she is working in tiny knots to hide a patch on a sleeve, I try to do my own needlework. But I prick myself so often that I throw the torn pillow cover across the room.

Agnes tightens her mouth and ignores me. After a time, I pick up the pillow cover myself.

After the midday meal, I write to my old friend from court, Sir Henry Goodyear, begging for news. I would have written to Elizabeth, but do not know where to send a letter. I take out her many letters to me and re-read her joy at her babies, her excitement at moving to Prague, her confession how she had offended her new subjects by misunderstanding their early gifts.

. . . So I made certain to display the gift of a cradle for the coming babe on the dais in the great hall, as if it were a holy icon. I believe that the people were puzzled by this strange English custom, but pleased . . .

She had always trusted me with her indiscretions as well as her joys. I press the letter to my forehead.

If she were dead or captive, Edward would have told me. Therefore, she must still be alive and free.

As the early winter darkness closes in, to get through the time, I try to write verse as I had once done so easily at court.

Remembering the good-natured, bibulous, literary competitions, I attempt to write an ode in the style of Horace – a challenge we had often set ourselves after dinner, made arrogant by wine and youth. But my metres now trudge heavy-footed where the Roman poet’s had danced and skimmed like swallows.

No thoughts or words seem important enough to distract me. All my being waits trembling on the surface of life. It should be anguish, but I confess that, even while tearing up my attempt at Latin verse, I feel alive once again.

Above all, I need more news. Even without the distortion of malice, accounts of past or distant events are always slippery. The truth often proves to be, insofar as one can determine it, a little less vibrant than the tale as told. The tale is almost always simpler. The true narrative most often proceeds by bumps and hiccoughs, not in great sweeps.

I need a letter from Elizabeth. She has clung to England by writing letters, first from her husband’s German Palatine, more recently from Bohemia. I know she will write to me as soon as she can.

Goodyear writes back by return of messenger. He has heard that Elizabeth and her children struggled down the mountain to spend the first night in Prague, in the house of a Czech merchant near the Old Town Square across the Vltava river from the palace. There, she waited while Frederick and his generals argued whether to try to defend Prague. With Hapsburg soldiers already looting the Hradcany Palace, the cavalcade of carriages and carts left the city by the West Gate just after nine o’clock the following morning.

There seems to have been wide-spread panic, he writes. The royal family were deserting Prague! Frederick was forced to make a speech to reassure the terrified mob that the Bohemian officials, who were in truth escaping with them, would escort the royal family only a short distance then return to defend the city. The heaviest snow caught them on the Silesian border.

The world has changed. And I see a part for myself in this new world. Not at Moor Park.

Her first letter reaches me at last, from Nimberge.

My Dear Bedford (Elizabeth writes), I have no doubt that you have heard of the misfortune that has come upon us and that you will have been very sorry. But I console myself with one thing. The war is not yet over. Frederick has gone into Moravia in search of reinforcements. I will await him in Nimberge. I have also written to my father, the King, begging that he send immediate assistance to the embattled King, my husband . . .

By the time I receive this letter, she has almost certainly moved on. I must track her flight. Find her. Go to her. Elizabeth’s need and mine will meet. Her need will rescue me, just as her mother’s need had rescued me once before.

I can do it again.

But the first ti me I changed my life had been half my lifetime ago. I had been just twenty-two years old and known that I could do anything as well as any man, if I set my mind to it.

Chapter 4

LUCY – EAST ENGLISH COAST, JUNE 1603

My right knee had cramped around the saddle horn. My thoughts jolted with the thud of the horse’s hoofs. The pain in my arse and right thigh was unbearable.

For tuppence, I’d have broken the law, worn a man’s breeches and ridden astride. Then I could at least have stood in the stirrups from time to time to ease the endless pounding on my raw skin.

But I could not break the law. I was the Countess of Bedford. Even if I had not been riding at this mad, mudflinging pace, strewing gold hairpins and silver coins behind me, my progress would have been noted and reported. Therefore, I had to ride side-saddle like a lady and wear a woman’s stiffened, laced bodies and heavy, bulky skirts.

. . . worth the pain . . . worth the pain . . . worth the pain . . . Two days in the saddle so far, one more to go. A man rode ahead of me to confirm food, lodging and the next hired horse. I had never before ridden so far, so fast, nor for so long. Our speed and the effort of keeping my seat at this constant killing pace prevented coherent thought. A woman’s side-saddle is designed for stately progresses and the occasional hunting dash, not for this hard riding.

But a gentlewoman riding full tilt, scantly accompanied, leaping from one post horse to the next, was not invisible. I dared not risk man’s dress lest word of my crime reach the wrong ears and ruin my chance for advancement forever. Meanwhile, my body screamed that I was murdering it.

. . . worth the pain . . . worth the pain . . .

I pointed my thoughts ahead along the green tunnel of the forest track, to Berwick, on the eastern coast just south of the Scottish border, where the new queen of England would arrive the next day on her progress from Edinburgh to London.

Elizabeth, the sour Virgin Queen, was dead. Good riddance to Gloriana! England now had a new king, James Stuart, who was already King of Scotland. This new king brought with him a new queen, Anne of Denmark.

Berwick on Tweed . . . upon Tweed . . . upon Tweed . . . The hired post horse wheezed and panted, throwing his head up and down in effort as his hoofs drummed out the rhythm of my destination.

Sun flashed through the trees. We splashed through pools of white light on the wide dirt track, where I rode at the side to avoid the ruts ploughed by wagon wheels.

. . . a new queen . . . a new queen . . .

Days and miles behind me, other would-be ladies-in-waiting advanced on the royal prey at a more sedate and comfortable pace. Even my mother, as ambitious as I but with an ageing woman’s need for bodily comfort, had fallen behind me. I would be the first to greet our new queen. My best pair of steel-boned bodies, finest green tuft taffeta gown and ropes of pearls jolted behind me in my saddlebags, with my collapsed-drum farthingale lashed across the top like a child’s hoop.

When the new Danish-born Queen Anne had been married to the King of Scotland, Scotland became her country. Now she was moving again willy-nilly with her husband-King to yet another of his strange kingdoms and another strange tongue. Queen or not, she was a mortal woman with mortal fears and must surely be wondering what, and whom, this new foreign country would bring her.

If I had my way, it would bring me. Before any other English woman, I would be the first to make her feel welcome in her new country. I would be the first in her thoughts and in her royal gratitude. The first to receive her favour.

My thoughts drummed in my head with the beat of the horse’s hoofs.

Edward pretended not to know what I did. If he had seen me at this moment, he would have paled like a slab of dead fish and railed yet again against the day he let his aunt Warwick persuade him to marry me, my modest bloodline redeemed only by the size of my dowry. But now that he had spent my money, the Third Earl needed me to succeed in this venture as much as I did myself.

When I had been married at thirteen and become Countess of Bedford, I was not fool enough to hope to love a man so much older, with a noble title, no self-control and an empty purse. But secure in my innocence, youthful confidence and the protecting glow of my dowry, I had never imagined that our chief bond would grow to be rage, at circumstances and each other.

Though I had fought him at the beginning of our marriage, when we still lived at Bedford House in London and were still received at court, my husband’s scorn had burrowed into my head and replaced my childhood nimbleness of mind with a sluggish anger. In the pit of my stomach, I soon began to carry a heavy worm of resentment and guilt.

I could write verse well enough to be admitted, as an equal, to the company of poets, wits and literary men at court, known as the ‘wits, lords and sermoneers’. Among our other games, we competed to write ‘news’ in set rhythms and poetic forms. But my paper and ink were too costly, Edward said, even before his own stupidity had cost us everything. Why did I imagine that I could write like a man?

From the first days of our short time at court, he ridiculed my early gestures of patronage. ‘Why waste money that we don’t have on playing patron to cormorant poets and playwrights?’ he asked. Surely, I must know that they wrote their flattering lies only to earn a free meal at my expense!

And of what use were my languages? We couldn’t afford to entertain anyone, English or otherwise. My closest friend at that time, and fellow poet, Cecilia Bulstrode was no better than a whore. Our former acquaintances of good repute would sneer at our growing poverty. I should concern myself with beds and linens, not the houses that contained them. What other wife created uproar and muddy disorder by building pools and fountains, or wasted money on infant trees when she had not yet produced an infant heir?

Then his actions put a stop to our life at court, to my literary life and to all my hopes of becoming a patron. After his folly, we could no longer afford even to buy my books, nor strings for my lute and my virginal, nor trees for my gardens. No matter how distant and faint, my singing gave him megrims.

Because of his treason against the Old Queen, which might have cost him his stupid head, I was trapped with him in exile from court and all that I loved best. Exiled from the place where I was valued, where my skills and education had purpose and employ. The worm of resentment gnawed. The rich life in my head was going quiet. I was losing myself, spoiling from the core like a pear.

I was already twenty-two years old. The new queen just arrived in Berwick was my chance for escape.

‘Why would she favour you when she has all the nobility of England to choose from?’ my husband had asked when I told him what I meant to do.

I dared not tell him. The avid rumours circulating in London, which had reached me in letters, even in exile from court at our country seat at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, where we then lived. I had heard the same from my dear, faithful friend Henry Goodyear, from the incorrigible gossip Master Chamberlain, and from my friend Cecilia Bulstrode, who collected a terrifying amount of pillow-talk. All three wrote the same vital news. The new queen was said above all else to love drinking, music and dance.

I kissed their letters in a passion of intent. Tenderly, I refolded them, to trap in the folds their promise of escape from Chenies. All my skills that my husband disregarded would serve me at last.

My father had educated me like a boy in the Ancient philosophies and languages, including Greek, Latin and a little Hebrew. I spoke French and could write passable verse in both Latin and English. But I also had been taught the female skills. I sang, danced, played the lute and plucked out not-bad original tunes. I could stitch well enough. Like either sex, I could tipple with the best, having learned young (and to the outrage of my mother) how to drink from court poets, musicians, artists and playwrights.

Even my lowly birth, so disparaged by my husband, would soon be put right. My father, a mere knight, a sweet, gentle man, had just been appointed guardian to the King’s young daughter, the Princess Elizabeth Stuart. A baronetcy was sure to follow soon.

In short, I would make the perfect companion for a lively young foreign queen who loved to drink, dance and sing – if I could get to her before she chose another.

In truth, my husband could not lose in permitting me to ride for Berwick. If I succeeded in my aim, I might restore both our fortunes. If I broke my neck in the attempt, I would set him free to seek a wealthier wife. And if I failed, I would give him the pleasure of punishing me with his disappointment for the rest of my life.

. . . worth the pain . . . worth the pain . . .

A new time had begun for England with the death of the sour Old Queen and the naming of King James VI of Scotland as her heir. A new time had begun for me, Lucy Russell, the young Countess of Bedford. The new king would not hate my husband, like the Old Queen, for having been fool enough to entangle himself in the Essex rebellion against her. If I succeeded, I would entreat the Queen to ask the new king to end our exile from court. He might even forgive my husband the Old Queen’s punishing fine.

But I knew that good fortune is not a reliable gift for the deserving. You have to see where it lies and ride towards it. The future will find you, no matter what you do. Why not take a hand in shaping it?

. . . upon Tweed, upon Tweed . . .

We crested a hill, broke briefly out of the tunnel of trees, plunged down again, taking the downward slope at a reckless speed.

Two sets of hoofs drummed and flung up divots of mud. A single armed groom, Kit Hawkins, rode with me. Like me, he was still young enough to delight in the brutal challenge of our shared journey north.

My knee had set solidly around the saddle horn in a constant blaze of pain. I would scream if I could not straighten it.

Just a little longer . . .

You promised the same an hour ago! shrieked my muscles and bones.

Just another mile, I coaxed, as I had been coaxing myself for most of the day. Then you and the horse can rest . . . for a short time. Less than half a mile now to the next inn . . . a quarter of a mile . . . then a little water for the horse – but not too much. A short rest, no eating for either of us yet or the galloping pace would cramp our bellies as hard as rocks. Then just one more hour of riding, to our arranged stop for the night and the next day’s change of horse.

And then . . . My thoughts escaped from my grip . . . I would dismount, straighten my leg if it would obey . . . lie down . . . sleep for the night on a soft, soft bed. Sleep . . . lying still, flat on my back . . . on tender down pillows . . . quite, quite still. Not moving a single sinew. Heaven could never offer such pure bliss as that.

I felt a jolt, something amiss, too quick for me to grasp. The horse buckled under me. Still flying forward, I detached from the saddle and felt the horse’s neck under my cheek and breast. Sliding.

His poor ears! I thought wildly. I somersaulted over his head.

Don’t step on me!

The world rushed past me, upside down.

Stones!

A crashing thud.

As I emerged from darkness, I found that I could not breathe. I sucked at air that would not come. Searing pain burned under my ribs. Dark mist in my head blurred my sight. My several different parts felt disconnected from each other, like the limbs of a traitor butchered on the scaffold. An ankle somewhere in the dark mist began to throb. Then an arm.

‘Madam!’ said a tiny, distant voice.

The mist cleared a little more. I blinked and moved my eyeballs in their sockets, still trying to breathe in.

A wild accusing eye met mine, only a few inches away. It did not blink.

With a painful whoop, I breathed in at last.

My groom, Kit, stooped beside me. ‘Madam! Are you badly hurt?’

Whoop! I gulped at the air. Then took another wonderful breath. I swivelled my head. My neck, though jarred, was intact. I tested the throbbing leg. Also not broken, so far as I could judge. My left hand felt like a bag of cold water, but my fingers moved. ‘Not fatally . . .’ I sucked at the air again. ‘. . . it seems.’

‘Thanks be to God!’ He offered his hand to help me rise.

In truth, he had to haul me up. I stood unsteadily. My left ankle refused to take my weight. ‘Did you see what happened?’

‘No . . .’ He inhaled. ‘. . . madam.’ He was having as much trouble breathing as I. ‘No hole in the road . . . just stumbled and fell without reason . . . that I saw.’

‘How does he?’ Carefully, I turned my head.

We blew out long shaky breaths.

The hired gelding lay with forelegs crumpled awkwardly under him. Flecks of foam marked the sweaty, walnut-coloured neck. Wind stirred his near-black mane. White bone showed through the skin on his knees. The wild, staring eye still did not blink. The arch of ribs hung motionless. The stirring mane was only the illusion of life. He had not stepped on me, not fallen on me, had saved me but not himself.

We stared down at the long, yellow, chisel teeth in the gaping mouth.

The absolute stillness, where a few moments before had been heat and pounding motion, pricked the back of my neck with incomprehension. I had seen the sudden death of a vital creature before in hunting, more than once. But I could never grasp the sudden nothingness – one moment alive, the next moment a carcass that could never change back.

One of the horse’s ears had been turned inside out in the fall. I pulled off my right riding glove with my teeth, knelt painfully with Kit’s help and straightened the ear with my good hand, as if this act might somehow help undo what had happened. I brushed away a fly already crawling on the horse’s eyelash and looked again at the long, yellow teeth. An old horse. Too old for our pounding pace. I had killed him with my ambitious urgency.

I felt the skin between my shoulder blades quiver, touched by a Divine reproving finger. I laid my hand on the smooth, hard neck, still warm, still damp with sweat. This death was surely a sign. A warning of failure. The skin of my back quivered again.

‘He was too old to keep up such a pace,’ Kit said. ‘Forgive me, I should have seen . . .’

‘Merely old,’ I said to the sky. ‘An old horse, dead from wicked carelessness perhaps, but by natural cause.’

God sent no sign of rage that I was ignoring His sign. Lightning did not split a nearby oak. A hail of toads did not fall.

‘Help me up.’ I stood and tested my ankle again. Still watery, as if the bones had dissolved.

‘I should have . . .’ Kit’s voice shook.

I felt his hand trembling. My thoughts had now cleared enough for me to remember that he would have been blamed had I been killed in the fall. I looked at his white face.

‘Not your fault,’ I said. ‘Mine. And the ostler who hired the horse to me . . . knew that we meant to ride hard. I should have paid more mind to . . .’ I meant to touch his arm in reassurance, but found myself clutching it in a wave of giddiness.

After a moment I patted the arm and let go. I was on my feet. Alive. A clergyman would no doubt call me innocent of wrongdoing, in the case of the horse, at least. But, insofar as I could define a sin, failing a creature in my care was one of them.

However, sin was not the same as a warning. To my knowledge, sin seldom seemed to prevent worldly success.

‘Please take my saddle and bags from the body,’ I said. ‘I’ll ride behind you until we can find me another horse.’

His eyes widened but he obeyed. He also had the grace to pretend not to notice my gasps of pain when he lifted me up behind his saddle.

We made a curious sight, when we rode just before sundown into a modest farmyard, scattering pigs and hens. Faces appeared in windows and doors to stare at a liveried groom with a dirty, dishevelled lady behind him, their horse’s hindquarters lumpy with too many saddlebags, a spare side-saddle and a flattened farthingale.

I paid the farmer far too much to sell me an ancient mare that fitted my saddle. He could not believe his luck. I was overjoyed to find any mount at all.

I did not try to gallop her. I was grateful that she managed to move me forward. In truth, I could not have survived a gallop, even though I had bound my ankle to steady it.

By the time we stopped at our scheduled inn to sup and sleep, much later than intended and long after dark, my left wrist had swollen so that I could not hold the reins in that hand. My head thumped. Preparing for sleep, I found blood smeared on the back of my linen shift, from my raw thighs. Because I could not remove it, I had to sleep in my boot.

The next morning, I could not move. Slowly, cursing, I forced each limb into action. Inch by inch, I pushed myself upright. I had to call for a kitchen maid from the inn to help me dress.

I blinked water from my eyes as Kit carried me into the stable yard and lifted me up into my saddle, now buckled onto the new hired mount. As we set off again at a gallop towards Scotland, when he was behind me and could no longer hear me nor see my face, I wept openly with pain and cursed my rebelling sinews.

The reward had best be worth what it was costing.

I arrived in Berwick at midday the following day.

Chapter 5

BERWICK CASTLE, NORTHUMBERLAND, 1603

Queen Anne, my intended prey, stood by a window in the little presence chamber in Berwick Castle, gazing out towards the foggy, darkening sea. I fastened my will onto her like a hound setting at a partridge.

She ignored me and continued to look out into the dusk.

I tottered towards her, past curious courtiers, inhaling sharply with each step and hobbling like a one-legged sailor. At a respectful distance I sank into the deepest curtsy that I could manage.

‘The Countess of Bedford, Your Highness,’ said the gentleman usher, in French.

Let me rise! I begged her silently. This was no time to faint from pain.

She gazed out of the window, still ignoring me.

If she ever let me speak, I could show her that I spoke French. But then, I must have seemed an unlikely companion, with my limp, misshapen hand and pain curdling my wits.

There’s nothing to see out there but fog! Please, let me rise!

Five grooms began to light candles against the sudden fall of darkness. A sconce on the wall threw a sudden wash of unsteady yellow light across the Queen’s face.

I did not like what I saw.

Her tall, lean figure stood half turned away from me, dressed in grey satin, one hand clenched on the pleated lip of her farthingale. The nearest corner of her tight lips was turned down under a long, large nose made larger by the shadow it cast across her mouth.

I could not imagine that shadowed, unsmiling mouth open in song, nor that clenched fist raising a wine glass in a tipsy toast. This new queen was not the lively, deep-drinking, dance-loving, frivolous creature of my friends’ letters. Not for the first time, rumour had been wrong. She might as well have been holding a prayer book and wearing black.

From under my lashes, I tried to read her. My mother had taught me that, to survive, you must learn to read the people who hold power over your life. What you learn will give you power. They think they hide themselves, but the set of shoulder, or twitch of a hand, an uneasy sideways look or overloud voice always gives them away, if you know how to look and listen. Learn what they truly want and give it to them, my mother had said. Then you will not only survive, you will succeed.

More sconces bloomed around the walls. I saw the new queen clearly now.

Another sour queen like the old one, I thought unhappily. To advance in her court, I did not have to like her, but she had to like me.

I had to make her like me. If not, it was back to Chenies with my tail between my legs. Back to Edward and silence. To my lute without strings. To living with my husband’s infinite reasons for saying ‘no’.

I glanced at the three Scots ladies attending her, all soberly dressed, their hair covered. They eyed me coldly. The story of my undignified arrival had quickly spread.

If they were what pleased her, I was finished.

I had nothing to offer this woman except the usual obsequious court flattery that drove me mad with impatience and fuelled a dangerous urge to blurt out the truth. While many of my friends at court before our exile had celebrated my reckless candour as wit, this dour queen would not. Experience had taught me that sour women tended not to like me, however modestly I tried to behave myself. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might fail.

I knew that I made a sorry picture. Both my thighs now trembled violently. I could see the fabric of my gown shake. Though I had paid a castle woman to dress my hair and lace my bodies, my gown was still wrinkled from the saddlebag in spite of all her shaking and brushing. I had managed to cram my injured foot into a shoe, but only after cutting away my riding boot.

My bad ankle trembled on the brink of giving way. My good leg wobbled from having to support my entire weight. Pain brought tears to my eyes.

The Queen turned suddenly, as if she had just noticed me. An unexpected brightness of diamonds and amethysts flashed when she waved a bony hand for me to rise.

‘I thank you, Your Majesty.’ I straightened with care. It was still possible that I might fall at her feet. Then I looked at her face. Our eyes met in shared assessment.

I tried not to stare.

Unlike Old Gloriana, Anne wore no rouge or other artifice. Her naked face looked drained by weariness and older than her twenty-nine years. In the candlelight, her skin was grey against the creamy pearls hanging from her ears. On the jewelled hand she had waved, the nails were bitten short and the skin around the nails nibbled raw.

Forgive me, I thought. I read you wrong.

We studied each other with equal intensity.

Do you not yet understand the need for masks? I ached to ask. Old Gloriana understood that need, most of all for queens.

The weary pain in her eyes tightened my throat. The last emotion I had expected to feel with the new queen was kinship.

I had prepared an amusing, pretty speech of welcome, but could not begin it. Those words were meant to charm a different woman.

I saw now that she had not been ignoring me from spite, nor to assert her position. I recognised the heaviness that had held her unmoving at the window. I knew that long stare into nothing. She had been searching for strength to begin conversation with yet another stranger, who, like all the others, undoubtedly wanted something from her and would require her to make a decision.

I dropped my eyes to her childlike bitten nails again.

Not sour, after all, I thought. Queen or not, she was melancholy and past hiding it. Her youth was being worn away by misery. Like me, she was spoiling from the core.

I felt a rush of gentle ferocity, like the tenderness when I cupped a new chick or saw a fragile green shoot pushed up through clods of dirt and stones.

The Whitehall wolves would tear this poor woman apart. I had felt their teeth and knew how sharp they could be. She must be protected. She must be told. Somehow, without giving offence. But to tell her would give offence, no matter how carefully worded. One does not pity royalty.

‘You made good speed here, Lady Bedford,’ she said. ‘Though perhaps at a dear cost.’ She gestured at my bad hand. So, she had heard the tale too. But between her native Danish accent and her acquired Scottish one, I could not tell what she thought of my journey.

Trying to decide whether to risk speaking my true thoughts or to hazard a jest in return, I stepped onto my bad ankle. A flash of searing pain together with exhaustion betrayed my training.

‘Oww! God’s Balls!’

I staggered, hopped sideways, caught myself and clapped my good hand over my mouth. I heard outraged gasps from the attending ladies, then unbreathing silence. Even the six men-at-arms standing behind the Queen had frozen.

Raw arse and dead horse were for nothing, after all. The touch between my shoulder blades had been a Divine warning. I had ignored it. I would have to slink back to Chenies, confess to Edward . . . for rumour would soon tell him if I did not . . . that I had managed to marry obscenity to blasphemy in two short words. And been thrown out of Berwick for offending the new queen.

The silence grew.

I began to rehearse my long, painful, slow hobbling retreat to the door . . . desperately slow, stretching out my torment . . . the averted eyes of the men-at-arms, the suppressed smiles of the ladies-in-waiting . . . their hungry gossip when out of the Queen’s hearing. I imagined their tutting and lip-smacking disapproval and raising of eyes to Heaven.

I waited to be dismissed.

The Queen was studying me with . . . I tried to resist hope . . . what looked like the first real interest. ‘Lady Bedford,’ she said at last. ‘I think that I must engage you to improve my English. I’m certain my other ladies don’t know so many useful words.’

I imagined a glint of mischief in the swift look she gave her three tight-lipped Scots.

I wagered my future.

I became an angel balanced on a pinhead, precarious yet suddenly sure of my footing at the same time. I must abandon protocol, I was certain. She had had too much protocol. Her carelessness with her person told me that she had put herself beyond the reach of a courtier’s empty flattery. I wagered my future on what I felt she needed most from me.

The words sprang raw and unexamined from my mouth. ‘It will be my greatest pleasure to give you pleasure, madam,’ I said. ‘Pleasure.’ I repeated the word. I let it hang in the air. ‘. . . in English lessons and all else.’

Play, I thought.

‘I will shake my sack of words,’ I said, ‘until every last “zounds” and “zwagger” has tumbled out for your instruction – and enjoyment, if you so choose.’

She gave a minute nod at my return of her serve.

I advanced carefully towards my leap. ‘If my honesty ever oversteps, or I play the fool too far, I beg your forgiveness in advance.’

Her intent stillness gave me courage to go on.

‘Because even my errors will have only one purpose – to give you joy.’ I heard another intake of breath behind me at this presumption.

Joy. The word flew out of my mouth and circled in the air above our heads. A dove. A butterfly. A scarlet autumn leaf.

Joy. My offering to her. Not service, not loyalty, not reverence, nor adoration, nor awe, nor blind obedience, which royalty can always command. Joy. A precious commodity that cannot be commanded of another person, nor bought, nor wrestled into being. It was delicate and fleeting, as I knew very well. You must stalk it, surprise it. It’s a seed that may or may not grow. You can’t force it, but you can dig out the stones, till the ground and stand by with expectant heart and watering cans. Among other things, I was also a gardener. I knew how to make the desert bloom.

The Queen had tilted her head, not looking at me now, listening.

‘Madam, at my birth I was christened Lucy . . . lux, lucis . . . light. In your service, I swear I will earn the right to my name.’ I held her now in my thoughts as gently but firmly as I would trap a moth. ‘If the light and laughter ever fail, you may banish me.’

I heard her draw a deep breath.

Quickly, to lighten my earnest words, I threw open my arms, imitating a player-warrior accepting the fatal sword thrust. ‘And I must beg your forgiveness already, madam. I dare not risk another curtsy or I will sprawl at your feet.’

To my horror, she did not smile at this extravagance. Instead, tears welled in her eyes. I had misjudged and cut too near the quick.

I had made the new queen cry in front of everyone. Now she would hate me. I had dared to pity her and let her know it. Shamed her in public, before those tight-lipped, but almost certainly loose-tongued, women. I had made a second fatal error. Back to Chenies after all.

Then she swallowed. ‘Thank you, Lady Bedford.’

The gowns of the waiting women rustled. There was a tiny pause.

I tried to think what to say, unable to hope that I might somehow, perhaps, survive my own mistakes for a second time.

Then she pointed at my swollen hand. ‘You must have that hand bandaged. I shall ask my doctor to see to it.’ She waved away my renewed attempt to curtsy. She was mistress of herself again.

And she had offered me her own royal doctor.

‘Thank you, madam.’ I dropped my arms. ‘I am honoured . . .’ I caught her eye and noted the slightly raised royal brows and the waiting chilly half-smile. I bit down on the formulaic gratitude.

Lightly, Lucy, lightly now.

She saw me catch myself. Her brows stayed up. But she knew that I had understood her.

I glanced at the row of cold eyes and tight mouths behind her.

She needed a playmate in the pursuit of joy.

‘I will limp gratefully from the field for treatment,’ I said. ‘But before this herald retires injured, she must first deliver urgent news. Two thousand richly jewelled royal gowns await Your Highness in the royal Wardrobe in London.’

‘That’s good news for any woman, royal or not!’

Her Scottish women laughed politely.

Now the Queen was reading me as closely as I had read her. ‘And tell me, Lady Bedford, who brings such good tidings, can you give me more good news? Does it truly rain less in London than in Edinburgh, as I have been told?’ Even through her double-layered accent, I heard a testing playfulness.

‘I could never speak ill of Scotland, Your Highness. Even when the truth demands it.’

She smiled at last. The air around us loosened. We exchanged another assessing look. Together, we had averted danger. We exchanged the most minute of nods. Miraculously, we seemed to stand at the first fragile beginning of friendship. The way ahead felt as tentative as a garden path marked out in sand, but it held the same implied promise that it might be laid, rod by rod, in brick and stone.

In the next days before setting off for London, I tested what gave our new queen pleasure. I soon learned that she did not share my taste for debate and philosophy but did like music and dancing, just as rumour had said. Above all, she needed to laugh.

Therefore, I brought these pleasures together. I taught her – and several of her women – to sing two English songs whilst I played the fool with a borrowed lute and one good hand and made her press her fingers in place of mine onto the strings so that together she and I made a single musician and all of us almost fell off our stools with laughing.

She liked to gossip and would be living among strangers.

Therefore, I improvised scurrilous rhyming couplets to help her, and her Scots ladies, to remember the different English courtiers waiting in London.

‘“Her flattering portrait is like Lady C . . . Only in this – that they both painted be”,’ I recited.

‘Does she still whiten her face with lead?’ Her Majesty clapped a hand to her mouth in mock horror. Her women clucked ‘tut-tut’ and shook their heads. One or two touched their own hair or mouths thoughtfully.

She fancied herself a poet. Therefore, we began together to devise her first masque to celebrate her arrival at the court of Whitehall.

When she grew weary, I made herbal tisanes to help her sleep. I quickly learned not to mention children or the King.

I watched her shoulders loosen. Her eyes began to sparkle. Once, at some trivial jest of mine, she laughed so immoderately that I feared she would veer into uncontrolled tears. Then she patted her breastbone, wiped her eyes and stood up to foot-fumble her way into a half-remembered Danish country-dance, which she promised to teach me when I had two good feet again.

I had ridden north driven by cold ambition and need, in search of advancement. I had won royal favour just as I had intended. I did not expect to have my ambition disarmed by my heart. The more I saw that I was able to please Queen Anne, the more she captured my love. She needed me when no one else did. She needed Lucy in all her brightness. I loved her for her need and shone ever more brightly in the effort to give her joy. It was more than I deserved.

I had ridden into my rightful life where I was needed and where my skills had value. Chenies did not need me as the new queen did. My husband’s other estates at Woburn and Moor Park did not need me. He too would profit from my renewed royal favour. I was saving us both.

I heard the mutters among the disappointed English women who arrived three days after I did. No lady would have done what I did, they said.

But the truth proved them wrong. Three evenings after I had ridden into Berwick, hatless, hair flying, limping and with a wrist like a ham, I was made first lady of the bedchamber to Queen Anne, wife of the new Scottish King, James VI of Scotland who was now also James the First of England. I was elevated to be chief among all the court ladies-in-waiting. If that was not lady enough for anyone, I cannot say what would be.

My new position even silenced my mother when she arrived in Berwick with the other women. This was a woman who, when she later died, was widely said to have gone to see that God remembered to wash behind His ears.

I was twenty-two years old when I rode to Berwick. Power and privilege were in my grasp again. I was happy. I thought I had tamed the future.

This time I don’t know where to point myself. Time is now the enemy. Elizabeth is on the run and may be taken prisoner at any time. She is expecting another babe.

She has not written to me since that first letter.

I must go where powerful men gather intelligence, where news and rumour are born. Someone will know where Elizabeth is. I will ask until I learn. Then I will go to her, on the run or not, however it can be done, and persuade her to come home so that I can help her find joy again as I once helped her mother. She will keep me by her, and I will have a purpose again.

Chapter 6

ELIZABETH STUART – BERLIN, DECEMBER 1620

Elizabeth understands the message she holds in her gloved hand. The letter’s language is formal. It twists and turns, slithering around the brutal meaning without ever quite arriving. But the message is clear.

No.

She is being turned away yet again with flattering words that fail to hide the writer’s fear.

No friends here, neither. No room at the inn for the queen and children of a defeated king. They are enemies of the imperial House of Austria who are not known to forgive an affront. The rebellion of the Bohemian Protestants has been an affront. Daring to elect their own Protestant king in place of the Hapsburg Ferdinand has been an affront. Helping the fugitive king and queen will be an affront. The Hapsburgs would not forgive.

With the back of her fur-lined glove, she wipes a clump of falling snow from her left eyelash. Snow is already blotting out the words on the paper she holds.

. . . Madame, in spite of the great . . . in which I hold your esteemed husband . . . and your . . . circumstances alas . . . regret . . . unfit to entertain you in a way suitable to your elevated . . .

Not possible, she thinks. I am the wife of a king, and daughter of the King of England. If these cowards don’t fear my poor Frederick, they must feel some respect for my father and for England! Surely, England would not tolerate such treatment of its First Daughter, even if she were not also Queen of Bohemia.

The letter is from Frederick’s brother-in-law, who regrets his unavoidable absence. Even family lacks the courage to help them.

She should have been prepared for refusal. The Imperial armies are close and marching closer. England is very far away. And, so far, resolutely refusing to take sides.

The messenger stands respectfully, head bowed, awaiting her response. Behind him, at the far end of the snow-covered causeway, stand the closed gates of the city. Behind the gates lie the castle and lighted fires, heated wine, warmed beds. Roasted meats that have not frozen solid. Dry shoes.

Her fingers, even gloved, are almost too cold to hold the Elector of Brandenburg’s message.

With disdain, Elizabeth drops the letter into the snow. She tightens her grip on the belt of the man riding in front of her and re-balances her shivering, pregnant bulk on the back of the saddle. ‘Ride on.’

Captain Ralph Hopton understands the spirit of her order as well as the words. He kicks their horse, turning it so that he forces the messenger to leap back out of their way. One large rear hoof drives the letter deep into the snow.

They have lost carts and carriages to the drifts and to desertion. Looters had not waited until she was out of sight of Prague before beginning to strip the contents of the caravan.

A wave of disbelief rolls back along the line behind her when the remaining drivers and horsemen see that they are turning away from the city. She hears shouts as men heave carts onwards out of ruts in the frozen mud. One by one, the straggling remains of the procession lurches into movement again.

She looks back to see that the light carriages now holding the children and their nurses still follow Hopton’s horse. The first carriage slips on a frozen rut and lurches violently like a ship hit broadside by a wave. Then it rights itself and tilts to the other side. Behind it, straining horses and oxen are lashed by violent English, German and Bohemian curses aimed at the circumstances.

She straightens her aching back and cradles her belly with her free hand. If their eight-month-pregnant queen can carry on, so could the rest of them. Those who remain.

The child in her belly gives a violent kick. Her womb is riding very low, a sign that the birth is not far off.

Not yet, she begs. Please, not until I find refuge! Or else, I may give birth to an icicle. You know you don’t want to be an ice baby.

From here at the front of the line, she cannot see the end of the caravan, but she knows that farther back men and women are still slipping away into a familiar countryside. Back to their mountains, back to their villages. Like Rupert’s nurse.

She imagines the nurse’s husband or lover, perhaps a soldier, pulling her by the arm away from her charge. Saying, ‘This fight is nothing to do with us. Leave the royal brat. Come home!’

The army would not fight for us, she thought. If soldiers desert, why expect more of maids and grooms and ladies of the bedchamber?

She ducks her head under her hood against sudden needles of sleet. If all her new subjects left her, she would manage perfectly well without them.

Without a palace, what need did she have for so many people?

Once past the approach to the city gates, the road divides. Before word of the onward advance has had time to reach the rearmost carts, Hopton asks, ‘Where do we ride, madam?’

‘Custrin,’ she says at once, with authority. Another of Brandenburg’s castles, just as unsuitable, he said. But she is running out of choices. ‘A few days more. Perhaps only two. At Custrin, we’ll have fires and real beds. Tonight we will find a sheltered place to stop and sleep in the carriages.’ Her ears catch the sound of a child crying behind her. ‘We shall curl up together as warmly as a litter of pups.’ She lays a calming hand on the agitation in her belly.

There is still enough charcoal left to keep their braziers alight for another night. The two remaining cooks might even manage hot soup. They will lose a few more animals to exhaustion and the cold, but that can’t be helped. A few more men will slip away to warmer beds.

‘We won’t be able to wash,’ she says cheerfully. ‘But there are worse things than beginning to smell like a dog as well as sleeping like one.’

Chapter 7

LUCY – MOOR PARK, DECEMBER 1620

‘I must go to London,’ I say. We are at dinner in the damp, draughty hall at Moor Park, eating vegetable soup from pewter bowls, the silver plate having long been sold. The long table is half-empty. Though we still keep our personal retinues, they have shrunk. Only three servers stand behind our chairs, where once there would have been one for every diner. Once, musicians would have played while we ate. Once, when we had finished eating, we would have pushed back the table to dance.

The Third Earl sets down his spoon, hugs his injured arm to his chest and looks at me over his barricade. ‘Why?’

At the bottom of the table, our steward holds up a finger to signal the coming point of his story to the four heads leaning towards him, including that of my chief lady, Lady Agnes Hooper, the widow of a local knight. I have no patience with the strict Protestant protocol in which I had been raised, and keep an informal house.

‘To mend our fortunes,’ I say quietly.

The steward’s listeners laugh, settle back on their stools and resume eating.

I am tempted to add, ‘as I did before’. But my husband’s agreement would make my project easier and a great deal more pleasant.

I chase a cube of turnip around my bowl, braced for the frown and pursed lips that always precede refusal.

Even before his accident, Edward had preferred to say ‘no’. ‘Yes’ pained him. It suggested action, feeling, thought.

‘I believe that the muscles of your cheeks and lips will creak if you say “yes”,’ I had once observed.

‘No’ lets him purse his lips. ‘Yes’ hints at a smile. Whenever he is forced into agreement, his mouth stiffens with reluctance, as if it hurts him to stretch it wide enough to let ‘yes’ escape.

The dislike I see in his eyes still startles me. Eyes that are too close together, huddled near his nose.

‘London?’ he echoes, puzzled and querulous like the old man he is rushing to become.

I would have preferred him to shout.

My tongue speaks of its own will. ‘You remember London, do you not? A city to the south of us, on the Thames? Less than a day’s ride . . .’

He flinches. I have used a wrong word again. ‘Ride.’ He had been thrown from his horse, against a tree, while hunting. He could no longer tolerate the word ‘ride’. Even ‘horse’ makes him uneasy.

Why could I play the courtier with everyone but my husband? Close your ears. Keep your eye on your destination, I tell myself.

‘I forbid you to go,’ he says. ‘This is another of your fancies. And certain to cost us dear, like all the rest.’ He bends to his bowl again.

Eyes around the table suddenly grow intent on soup and the roasted duck from our ponds.

That was not a request, I think. I was telling you what I mean to do.

I have had many such silent conversations with him. The smell of the soup sickens me. I set down my spoon. I fold my napkin exactly on its creases and lay it on the table – once we could have afforded a waiting groom to take it from me. I stand up. ‘I pray you all, excuse me.’

Stool and bench legs scrape on the stone floor as the others rise with me. Everyone but my husband.

‘Sit down!’ He speaks as if to one of his dogs. Even whores are granted the courtesy of ‘mistress’, and I am a countess.

‘Sir, I need air.’

‘Sit!’ he snaps again.

I hear breaths drawn around the table and see glances exchanged. My thoughts cloud as if I had drunk too much wine, though we were making do with over-watered ale. My heart grows white hot and swells against the inside of my ribs, pounding as if I were at court, in costume, waiting to fling myself onto the table of a thousand eyes. I have the sensation that my bones shift subtly inside my skin.

I catch the eye of my lady and the steward. I widen my own eyes.

‘If you will treat me as one of your dogs, sir, you must allow me out for a run.’

Someone snorts. Agnes Hooper hides a smile. Followed by my husband’s astonished gaze, I leave the room. Calmly. I walk through the cold passages to a side door. Unhurried. I open the door and step outside.

I run. My heeled shoes slip on patches of mud in the vegetable gardens. The long icy orchard grass turns to glass under my feet.

I look back. No one follows me. I plunge deeper into the orchard, colliding with trees like a drunken dancer, cursing and wiping my nose on my lace cuff.

A sow nosing for frozen windfall apples squeals and flees from my path, baggy teats swaying, followed by panicked, flap-eared scraps of piglet.

No farther, or else my heart will explode. I fling myself back against a tree. My throat opens. A scream rises from my feet, swells, pours out and quivers the leaves above my head, a dark animal scream like the demon shriek of copulating foxes.

I am drowning in ‘No!’

I scream again, pounding my fists into the tree behind me.

Everything gone! Fallen from chief lady-in-waiting at court to this! Tied down by my husband’s constant ‘No’. By poverty. The Queen, dead, and her court dispersed. My dear friend, Prince Henry, dead. My Elizabeth, married, gone, and now a fugitive . . . another exile.

Stop! The voice in my head is firm, the necessary voice that had always before pulled me back from folly, just in time.

I scream again.

Stop! the reasonable voice repeats. Someone will hear you and come.

The thought of anyone coming to force me back to the dining table is even more intolerable than the sudden storm inside me.

My thick brocade skirt and winter petticoat, together with the padded sausage of my bum-roll tied around my waist, have rucked up in a lump behind my waist and hips. The rough grey, lichen-covered apple bark snags at my hair.

I clamp down on the next scream and press my hands to my face to close out the world.

Into the darkness float the faces of loss. My parents. My queen. Elizabeth. And my infant daughter, who had lived inside me, kicking at the inside of my belly, dancing at music, stirring when I laughed. At the sight of her, complete and perfect, a miraculous new person who met my eyes with puzzled astonishment, the milk had leapt into my breasts and flowed from my nipples.

I had never suckled her. Even the sow could suckle her young. My daughter stayed with me for only two hours. I lost her. Like my son, my first babe, Edward’s precious heir who had lived one whole month. Long enough to be christened, at least. Losing my babes had cut out one of my vital organs and left me diminished, like a fatal illness from which I would never recover.

I drop my hands and try to narrow my thoughts to the fan of brown grass near my left foot. But another lost face arrives there.

John would have seen a metaphor in that dead grass, would have resurrected it with the miracle of his words, given it new, eternal life in verse and human comprehension. He would have made its little patch of mud here under an old apple tree as huge as the world of the soul.

The rough grey tree bark tugs at my hair when I shake my head. Don’t think of him.

Though still in this world, he is now dead to me, but his words are still alive and insinuating in my head. I have them trapped in ink shaped by the movement of his hand, locked into my chest of papers like hostages.

I stare down, puzzled, at the blood on the sides of my fists.

I am meant to be the wild, merry Countess of Bedford, who can be relied on to lead each new diversion, who lightens the heavy spirits of others. Who soars in witty debate. Her spirits are never seen to weigh her down. In my thirty-nine years of conscious life, I had met Melancholy more than once, but always in secret. I had refused to entertain it.

Now, I feel too heavy to move. I could not even have kicked my horse over the edge of the snow bank. I bow my head, pulling my hair free. I lick the blood and flecks of bark from the side of my right hand, absently noting the tiny points of roughened skin that scrape against my tongue.

From the age of thirteen, I have tried to be a dutiful wife. I knew what was required of me.

After Edward had spent the modest fortune for which he had married me, losing his own money along with mine through his folly and bad judgement, I made over to him my own portion, which should have been mine alone, my protection, my safeguard. He had insisted. I was still, then, a dutiful wife. My portion was long gone.

There is nothing he could do to me now to make me any unhappier than I am already. Except to lock me away like a madwoman or chain me to my bed.

I imagine rising from the table again, but this time, I walk to the stables. I mount my horse, standing already saddled with a gold-embroidered, red velvet saddle-cloth. I turn his head south to London and kick him gently. It is spring. I wear a fine silk satin gown, deep blue, not frayed and not mended. The African ostrich plume on my hat curves down to tickle the lobe of my ear. I again wear my wedding diamonds, and the pearl eardrops I had worn when I first danced for the Queen.

I hear the sow grunt in the distance. A woman’s shadow moves among the trees. I slide around the tree to buy a few more moments of freedom.

‘Madam?’ calls a tentative voice. Agnes Hooper, my chief lady.

At least, my husband has not sent the watchman, or a man-at-arms to restrain me like a madwoman.

Take care, warns the voice in my head. You’ve just behaved like a madwoman. Don’t risk being thought possessed. Don’t hand a naked blade to your enemy. Even Edward might be tempted to use it.

I sigh and step from behind the tree.

Back in the big house, I smile at my husband, nod pleasantly to the others at the table and sit down again as if nothing at all had happened. Reassured by my smiles, the diners unfreeze and begin to murmur and chew again. The surface of the afternoon closes over us though it remains a little uneasy. Only Agnes glances at me from time to time with a small frown of concern. With grim satisfaction, I note that I still have the power to bend the spirits of others and to shape the mood.

Except that of my husband.

Edward Russell, Third Earl of Bedford, is watching me over his dinner with an air of puzzled reproach. In public, as always, he endures with heroic patience the harridan that his wife has become.

Look at her! his eyes beg the other diners. What man has ever been so tormented by his spouse?

Let it pass! I warn him with my eyes. Can’t you see the danger you’re in? Can’t you feel how your dutiful wife has just changed?

Chapter 8

My husband continues to eat slowly and calmly, to show everyone who rules in this house. But he eats without appetite. He still watches me, with the progress of his thoughts clear in his eyes.

He had seen. He had noticed. He feels the change in me and doesn’t know what to do. I almost pity him in his confusion.

Everyone waits for his response while they pretend to eat. By rights, he should assert his male authority. Perhaps even try to beat me later.

But he does not know what to do and hates himself for not knowing. He hates me for making him not know.

His eyes shift away. I have long suspected and am now certain. He is afraid of me. Just as he had once feared his formidable father.

Poor, poor Edward, I think.

Whatever manhood he ever had seems to have leaked away through his cracked arm bone, along with his youth and any vitality, as if the crack had let in a sense of death. The tree trunk that met his head had not cracked his skull, but it seemed, nevertheless, to have shaken his wits.

After the horse threw him, he had surrendered himself to becoming clumsy and lop-sided. He seemed to aim at the world askew, anticipating dislocation and, therefore, finding it.

At first, I had tried to coax him into healing. ‘It’s only an arm,’ I said. ‘Not your neck, or back. It will soon mend.’

‘What do you know of twisted sinews and constant aches that gnaw at your spirits?’

I had bitten back my impatient reply and offered him the cup of pain-killing draught.

Now he gives up on eating, shoves away his plate and stands up from the dinner table. Everyone else stands. He lifts a foot, then hesitates.

I recognise that hesitation. He lurches forward. Looks around. Everyone pretends not to see.

His secretary, his steward, his three attending gentlemen, and all the rest, stand politely, waiting to see what he will do, or wish them to do.

A show of respect for his position, I think. Not for the man.

Every year since his accident, the Earl shrinks a little more. Everything grows less. His movement, his appetites, his will. His fortune. His dignity. The space he occupies in this world.

He looks at me accusingly, as if I had caused the floor to shift beneath his feet.

I have to look away. I cannot bear his wilful determination to suffer.

On the last time that we truly spoke to each other, he had pointed at me with his good hand. ‘I stumble towards the grave,’ he had said. ‘I’m dying, and no one on this earth cares that I am afraid of death yet wish for it at the same time – least of all you, who should care most of all. My wife.’

‘You’re not dying,’ I said. ‘You can walk. And you could ride again, if only you would.’

‘What do you know of suffering?’

I could only look at him, wordless.

‘Get out of my sight,’ he had said. ‘Stop taunting me with your lithe moves and your sudden little dance steps.’ His gaze had fallen on the ridged mud plot outside the window, a frozen maze of ditches and string, which would one day become my new garden. ‘Go look for joy out there in the mud you love so much.’

Unless I shared in his misery, I insulted him with any pleasure I took in life.

‘And in case you hope to make a life without me here in this godforsaken place,’ he said, ‘I will tell you that no one of any consequence will ever come see your blasted garden!’ He steadied himself against the tabletop, waving away my offered hand. ‘What good do you imagine that making a garden has ever done anyone?’

He turned his face away from the window, squinting his eyes as if hurt by the light.

‘I know that you hide from me out there, amongst all those costly infant trees we can’t afford. I’ve seen you wrapping them tenderly against the cold. And when it’s too cold to coo over trees or seedlings in some gardener’s hands, you bury yourself away from me making sketches and diagrams. You make your garden only to torment me, to punish me for what I have become, even though it was not my fault.’

I had stood wordless, unlike my usual self, my breath taken away by this mistaking of the truth, and from fear of what I felt coming.

‘How dare you imply reproach, as if I were a useless husband?’ His knuckles whitened on the edge of the tabletop. ‘I lifted you from country into court. And to no purpose! You have killed my family’s line. You can’t even produce me a living heir!’

I keep my eyes averted now until I hear him move away from the table. I watch him leave the hall. He walks uncertainly, as if unsure where to go. His two gentlemen of the bedchamber, the sons of neighbouring knights, exchange glances then follow him. I see his old nurse hobble to meet him in the passage outside the hall, take his good hand and lead him away to the safety of her care.

Chapter 9

Falling asleep that night, the heaviness of the orchard ambushes me again. To fight it, I repeat to myself all the reasons that life has changed and will continue to change.

Elizabeth, in flight and without a home, needs me. The newly married princess, in love with her young husband, headed for his beloved Palatine, had not needed me. Then she had lost her one close English friend, Lady Anne Dudley Sutton, gone with her to Germany after her marriage. She will need to see a well-known face. She will need a trustworthy friend. She needs me now as much as her mother ever did.

I turn over in my bed and yank at a wrinkle in the sheet that feels like a mountain ridge under my shoulder. I listen to Annie’s gentle snores from her pallet on the floor.

If she is to come home, Elizabeth must believe that the English still love her. I must reassure her. And that I too still love her. That I will protect, inform and amuse her. Then, when she returns, she will make me her first lady of the bedchamber as her mother did. I will again be the older almost-sister, trusted once more with private access to both her person and her secret thoughts. I will be back where I belong and have purpose again.

My restless foot meets the solid weight of one of my small hounds, which has managed to slip into my chamber and jump onto the bed. I feel the animal go very still, pretending to sleep, waiting for the command to get down. But I welcome the heavy warmth. After a moment, the dog sighs and softens in sleep.

I cannot sleep. She might already be a captive. Or even dead, executed by the Hapsburgs, or from loss of blood in childbirth. Her confinement must be soon.

I close my eyes and feel for her in the darkness of my bed. Surely, I would feel an emptiness if she had died?

Elizabella, please write to tell me that you are well!

I am still awake to hear the first birds warming up after the night.

I do not tell my husband that I mean to defy him. I make an inventory of my remaining jewels not yet sold to try to pay our debts or to buy winter feed for the horses, or salt and sugar for our table. Or Edward’s claret. I rifle through my secret, shrinking store of plate, silver pomander cases, embroidered gloves, silver-gilt boxes and other baubles for the gifts and bribes needed to navigate Whitehall.

At Whitehall, appearances matter. The surface is held to reveal the inner man. Or woman.

And I am going back to Whitehall.

With my lady Agnes Hooper and my maid Annie, I lay out my old court gowns, pairs of bodies, embroidered petticoats, cloaks, gloves, hats and shoes to choose what to take with me. I examine worn cuffs and finger torn lace ruffs. One pair of heeled shoes, in which I had once danced before the whole court, had been mended twice and the leather of the toes rubbed nearly through.

I imagine the aghast astonishment of my former protégés, the poets, artists and musicians who had once received my generous patronage.

Or worse: no longer being of use to them, I might have turned invisible.

The thought of being pitied makes me hot. My skin burns as if I have a rising ague.

‘Poor thing!’ I could hear a woman whisper it, the Rutland girl, or one of the acid-tongued Howards. ‘She may have risen to become a countess, but look where it got her.’

‘An invalid husband, mended shoes . . .’ says another voice.

And the constant search for someone to loan us more money.

My skin has grown thinner, I think as I stitch a loose strip of gold sequins back onto the front panel of a petticoat.

‘If I brush this carefully, it will serve, don’t you think?’ says Agnes, holding up a hat of Muscovite beaver fur.

I nod as I bite off the thread.

Once, I would not have cared. But now, unprotected by the love of my queen or my poet, I feel an urgent need for at least one new gown to face both my enemies and my friends who remain at Whitehall.

‘You too must have a new gown,’ I tell Agnes. ‘Madam.’ She curtsies and tries not to look too pleased, but the severe planes of her face rearrange themselves into something like a smile. Though her husband had been a knight, his estate was sold to pay old debts and she now depends on me for survival.

I glance at the patched soles of her shoes where she kneels by a chest. I need a pair of new shoes, I think. We both need new shoes.

So much for my ‘learned and masculine soul’, once praised by Master Jonson. But, as I have said, we are impure creatures. Only saints and demons can be entirely consistent.

Then Agnes shakes her head. She knows most of my secrets, good and bad. ‘Where will you find the money, madam?’

‘Watch me,’ I say.

I fetch one of Edward’s old doublets that I had filched from his chambers. He has not worn it since his exile from court by the Old Queen for his entanglement in the Essex rebellion, seven years after our marriage – when he was old enough to know better. He would never miss it now.

I pull my little knife from where it hangs on a ribbon under my skirt.

I begin to cut off the jewelled buttons on the front of the doublet.

At least, this is not your foolish head, I think as I slice off the first button with my knife. You had a lucky escape from the scaffold. Though the fine of five thousand pounds imposed by the Queen had begun our ruin. And his exile had made it impossible for him to acquire all the money he’d borrowed to pay back the fine.

I give the button to Agnes, who sets it carefully on the table.

I saved us once before . . . with my ride to Berwick . . . I slice off another button.

I shall have to do it again . . .

Another button off.

Whether you want me to, or not.

This one jumps from my fingers and rolls away under my bed. Without losing a fraction of her lean, straight-backed dignity, Agnes sinks to the floor in a pool of skirts, presses her head to the side of the bed and extends her arm into the dark space beneath.

I cut off another button. ‘I have it!’ cries Agnes in triumph. She unfolds upwards, puts the escaped button beside the others on the table, shakes her skirts and begins to pick dust kittens from her sleeve.

‘Thirteen,’ I count. We look down at the glittering line of small golden baskets, woven from gold wire, each set with a diamond.

‘Lucky thirteen,’ she says. ‘If you believe such things.’

One button buys me rich golden taffeta a little darker than my hair and the making of it into a court gown in the latest style, with a soft farthingale and embroidered sleeves. Two more buttons buy a gown for Agnes, and new saddlebags for me, along with a new side-saddle to replace the old one that is stained with sweat, patched, and has a girth as crumpled and limp as an old stocking. The other ten, I put into a purse against the expenses of London.

Losing your position at court . . . I tighten the cord around the neck of the purse . . . means losing all the means by which money can be made. You no longer receive fees for granting licences, patents, monopolies. You might lose all the rights formerly granted to you – the income from harbour fees and taxes on imported goods. You lose the gifts of gratitude given in exchange for favours, like access to the Queen, or a kind word spoken into a powerful ear, or finding a position for a young female cousin as a lady-in-waiting, or placing a young son as a groom in a noble house. You can no longer grant favours for favours in return.

I tie the purse around my waist and tilt my Italian glass to be certain that my petticoats hide the bulge.

Voilà! No purse.

A week later, while my maid Annie, assisted by my chamberer, makes piles of clean linens and matches stockings, I start to pack a few books into my travelling chest. To Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, begins one of them. To the Countess of Bedford, begins another. And, To My Golden Mistress . . .

The only verses I truly value have been written but not yet published.

To the Most Esteemed . . . I snap the book closed and return it to the cupboard.

A poor woman cannot serve as patron to poets and playwrights. A poor woman is not called ‘the Morning Star’ or ‘Brightest star in the Firmament’ in exchange for putting food on a poet’s table.

But poverty means more than merely losing the flattery of your protégés. Or even scrimping to buy feed for your horses or the lack of fashionable gowns. It means hopelessness. It blocks the means by which you can hope to prosper and progress. Poverty closes doors. It stitches up your pockets so that no money can enter them. It dulls your senses and your wits with constant grinding need.

I know that I should be grateful. Compared to a beggar, I am rich.

I know that the soul should rise above such worldly concerns. It should console you for lack of material goods by a richness of the mind and hope for the Next Life. But in truth, I have never met an artist or poet who did not tell me that poverty crowds out the imagination and dulls the action of the wits with its endless round of the petty problems of daily survival. I share their conclusion.

On the other hand, I think as I brush the feathers on my beaver hat, if you’re poor, no one marries you for your money. I try on the hat and assess my reflection in my glass.

Plausible, though not impressive. If I squint, I can ignore the tracks of Time on my face. Praise God, my hair still keeps its original bright red-gold.

I set the hat on top of my folded winter cloak.

My route is not yet clearly mapped, but I know where I am headed. I can take the first step.

To London.

I will let the whispers and raised eyebrows in Whitehall roll off me like water off wax.

And then . . . when I have found Elizabeth and brought her back, and we are close again . . . The excuses and closed doors that drove me away from court will be retracted and opened again. And I will forgive, or not, as I decide. Lucy Russell, born a Harington, is not finished yet.

When I am ready, I go to Edward’s chambers. He looks up from his brooding examination of his fire, startled to see me there. His old nurse pauses in her folding and smoothing of a shirt to glare at me.

‘I leave for London tomorrow,’ I say. ‘All is arranged. I will send back word how the house and gardens have been tended in our absence.’

He does not pretend surprise. If he has failed to notice the dressmaker and the loss of his doublet, he must have seen the cart that is to follow me with my belongings as it stood being repaired in the stable yard. Or the chests standing open in the hall. Or the ale kegs and small stack of hams in the screens passage. He must have heard the noisy chase after a dozen laying hens and their indignant squawks at being crammed into their travelling crate.

‘Back to your poets and lovers?’

‘You know that I can’t afford poets any longer.’ I weaken, foolish enough still to hope for a word of approval. ‘I have a purpose that will benefit us both.’

‘Another of your schemes?’ He hugs his shattered arm to his chest, swaddled in its fur muff. ‘What will this one cost us?’

‘Less than my ride to Berwick.’

He rolls his eyes to Heaven. God spare me her impudence!

But he waves his good hand to dismiss me. ‘Do as you will, madam. I’m too weary to fight you. I don’t care where you go or whom you see. You’re of no use to me.’

I take that as his formal permission. I have already sent word to our London house that I am coming.

Chapter 10

ELIZABETH STUART – CUSTRIN, GERMANY, DECEMBER 1620

‘Are you ordered to turn us away?’ Elizabeth demands.

The castle steward shifts uneasily on his horse. ‘The Elector of course welcomes you, if you truly wish to stay. In the circumstances.’ He had intercepted them at the bridge before they could enter the town.

From behind him on his horse, Elizabeth stares over Hopton’s shoulder. Custrin Castle looks very much like the grim fortress described in the Elector of Brandenburg’s letter.

. . . the walls are without tapestries, the cellars empty of wine, the granaries bare of corn. From my own sense of honour . . .

Elizabeth had snorted when she read that word ‘honour’ in Berlin. Now all impulse to laugh has left her. She could have recited the vile letter word by word.

. . . I cannot allow Your Majesty and your attendants to suffer the inconvenience of lodging in a place devoid of food and fuel, without fodder for your horses.

‘I wish to stay,’ she says. ‘Just for one night. No civilised man would make a pregnant woman sleep in a snowdrift, even if she were not a queen.’ The child in her womb heaves and kicks as if infected by her fury and despair. A belt of muscle tightens around the base of her gut.

The steward shrugs and turns his horse back to the castle. Hopton kicks his mount to follow. Elizabeth grabs clumsily at his belt with numb hands to keep from being jolted off when the horse slips on the ice on the bridge.

We are turned enemy, she thinks, still disbelieving the speed and distance of their fall. One moment at dinner together in Hradcany Palace, monarch and ally. The next moment in wild flight, the guest no one dares to entertain.

The great fireplace in the hall of Custrin Castle stands cold and cave-like. The huge iron firedogs are empty of logs. No waiting fire has been laid. The bare stone walls ooze damp. Although the absence of icy wind makes the interior of the castle warmer than the back of a horse, her teeth still rattle. Her feet are numb, untrustworthy blocks. The tight belt of muscle around the base of her belly has slackened, but she knows it will tighten again at any moment.

‘There must be firewood in the village, if you have none here,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We badly need fires. And food.’

Someone in the village must have food, even if the castle larders do not.

‘Your Highness.’ The steward looks past her, wild-eyed, at the shivering crowd of attendants and royal children.

The Elector must have believed that the English princess would understand the true message of his letter. He had given no orders what to do if Her Highness ignored it.

‘I’m certain we can find enough for one night,’ the steward says. He would have to see that the captain of the castle garrison doubled the night watch.

The child shifts in her belly. Elizabeth pulls off her gloves and flexes her icy fingers.

The Elector did not lie in his letter. The place does not suit a queen. Cold air flows down from the small, high windows. Icy currents seep under the door and wash around their ankles. Everywhere she looks, she sees only more grey dampness.

But she is in.

‘I assume that you have a suitable chamber for me, with clean sheets on the bed,’ she says. ‘And chambers for the Prince, the Princess and my ladies. The rest can be laid out on pallets so long as there are fires. The carters and drovers, too.’ She gazes around the grey, grim hall. ‘I’m quite sure that your master has a few bottles left in his cellars for just such emergencies as this one.’

‘Madam.’ The man bows and begins to back away. ‘I must just . . .’

As he is about to leave the hall, she adds, ‘And bring me pen and ink. Tomorrow morning, I will give you a list of my needs for the next month, including a midwife. As soon as we have fires, I will also write to the Elector to tell him that I have decided to stay here at Custrin until my child is born.’

If he dares to throw me out, she writes to friends in England, . . . let him try to explain to the English people – and to their King – why an heir to the English throne was born – and very likely frozen to death – in a German snowdrift.

LUCY, DECEMBER 1620

Her letter reaches me just before I leave Moor Park for London. She is not only alive but sounds like her former undaunted self. The tale is almost comical as she relates it, but her anger glints through her words.

She must learn to be more guarded in what she writes, I think. Or at least use a cipher. I put this letter with her other ones in my writing chest that will travel under my eye on my horse’s hindquarters.

Chapter 11

LONDON, JANUARY 1621

I turn my horse left out of St Martin’s Lane. The house stands ahead of me on the north side of the Strand, as lanky and narrow-shouldered as I remembered it. I have never liked Bedford House, built in London for my husband by his father in the days of the Old Queen. It strikes me as unfriendly, with its long roof, seven steep sharp gables and the empty posturing of a mock-military turret tower. It looks south across the Strand, past York House, home of the Lord Keeper Francis Bacon, to the Thames. Only being near to the river is in its favour.

I can hear the distant shouts of boatmen from the different water stairs as I let my horse pick his way through the frozen rubbish in the street. After passing under the arch of the gatehouse at the far end of the house front, my small party clops into a large, irregular, open courtyard.

A tall, fair-haired man bursts out of the higgledypiggledy wing on my left. ‘I hear that a new horse has arrived for the stables! And it’s not half-dead, neither.’

‘Sir Kit!’ I cry.

He runs to take my horse as if he were still a groom, but I’d had Christopher Hawkins made up to knight as soon as he was old enough – one of the first favours I asked after arriving in London with the new queen. The young groom who had ridden with me to Berwick is now my London Master of Horse. When he married the year after his advancement, I persuaded Edward to give him the lease of a small house in the tangle of streets that abut the west wall of Bedford House, along with a small annual income. So far as I know, he survives the paltry stipend granted to him by Edward by teaching the aspiring sons of successful London merchants how to ride.

Now I look down at the delight in his face and watch him stroke my horse’s nose with a broad callused hand. Here is one of the few men I know I can trust.

In the big entrance hall, steward, clerk, secretary, cook, house grooms, chamber grooms and maids wait to greet me. It is a smaller company than it had once been, even allowing for absent scullery grooms and gardeners. But a London house can supply itself from the city bakers, fishmongers, butchers, brewers, vintners, poulterers and pigmen, and does not need its own. It need not pretend to be a self-feeding country estate.

The steward looks ill, I note. I will ask later if he needs to give up his position.

I hand my fur-lined gloves to my maid. Agnes Hooper unhooks my travel cloak and takes it away to dry. I look about me.

I’m pleasantly surprised. Bedford House feels drier than either Chenies or Moor Park, and far more welcoming than when I had first seen it as a new young wife. When we married, my husband was lodged there with his aunt, the Countess of Warwick, for whom I had been third choice.

Raised from slumber by my arrival, the house smells of the lavender and rosemary used against moths and of hastily applied beeswax polish. But there is not the odour I remember from other visits of mustiness and mice. The entrance hall and chief receiving room, like much of the house, are half-empty, their paintings and furniture having been sold to help pay Edward’s fine. But the smoke rises straight in the fireplaces. The wooden floors are warmer underfoot than the stone floors of Chenies and Moor Park, the low-ceilinged rooms easier to heat.

The steward, who bears the unfortunate name of Mudd, escorts me to the chief sleeping chamber. Looking through open doors as we pass, I see that some of the upholstered chairs and stools still wear their protective linen covers. But then, I had given very little warning of my arrival.

At the threshold of the great bedchamber, I stop. For a moment, I think I will not be able to enter. The ornately carved bed, with its newly brushed silk hangings and velvet coverlet embroidered with harsh, slightly tarnished gold threads, wrenches open the door of memory.

My wedding night at Bedford House: duty on both our parts. Impatience on his. Pain. Sticky slime.

I had counted off the month. I bled. I had failed to conceive.

Tried again. Again, not with child.

I felt sick in the mornings, but not in the right way. Again. Still not with child.

My husband’s eyes were cold and resolute when he bedded me.

I must not want to conceive, he said. I wasted my vital force in court frivolities. I unwomaned myself with my pen, by aspiring to have a manly soul. I loved the Queen and played the man with her so that I was no longer a true woman. I murdered my babes with my mind before they could grow.

Again I bled.

I conceived but lost the babe soon after.

My guilt grew plainer in his eyes.

Again we mated.

Again, I failed. I disappointed and disgusted him in every way.

And my money was going fast.

It was because I could not give him an heir that I had signed over to him my own marriage portion, my own money, my protection. Because I was still young and hoped to be valued, even if not loved.

In spite of many offers, I was not tempted to repeat the carnal experience with another man. I hid my distaste with flirtation and outrageous talk. For the next several years, I was that rare case, a woman who was as virtuous in life as she was painted in verse.

‘I will sleep in my old parlour,’ I say now. ‘A smaller bed will do.’

Mudd disappears to arrange it.

I summon Sir Kit to the little parlour and call to a groom to bring us warmed wine and tobacco pipes.

Kit brings with him a faint odour of horse and cold fresh air. His new leather jacket creaks as he shifts in his chair, smiling at me. I feel that he would rather be in motion, but will sit for the moment to please me.

‘Now, tell me all the gossip,’ I order. ‘How has London entertained itself in my long absence?’

‘Very ill, without you.’

‘Kit! Please don’t turn courtier on me or I’ll have your knighthood revoked. Tell me the worst.’

‘Lord Bacon is on trial for corruption. His old enemy Coke leads the prosecution.’ He grins with glee. His firm chin wears a stubble that it had lacked on our ride to Warwick, but otherwise, he looks no older. ‘With Killer Coke sniffing after him, he’s done for.’ Coke had also prosecuted the Gunpowder Plotters. All of them were executed.

I pass Kit a long-stemmed clay pipe and light my own with a coal from the fire.

‘Rumour . . .’ He draws on his pipe. ‘. . . whispers that Buckingham already has his eye on Bacon’s house, York Place.’

‘My neighbours do not improve,’ I murmur.

‘Buckingham still climbs in the King’s favour.’ ‘That may not be entirely bad.’ I had plans for Buckingham.

We finish our pipes with the special relish of wickedness. Smoking defies authority. The King loathes the ‘stinking weed’ tobacco. My friend Henry Goodyear had written that courtiers at Whitehall are forced to huddle in furtive groups in the open air if they want to share the fashion for smoking pipes.

Sir Kit drops his voice. ‘Buckingham now controls all access to the King . . . and I know this from more than gossip during riding lessons.’ He takes my mug and warms my wine again with the poker. ‘He drives others from the court.’

‘My friends?’

‘Southampton.’ The poker hisses in his mug. ‘Cranborne and Suffolk . . .’

‘So many?’ All these men were old friends. Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton. Lord Cranborne, the son of my old protector and friend, Robert Cecil.

‘And what of my dear old letter-writing friend, Sir Henry Goodyear?’

‘He’s with the King, in all things. Sings the praises of a Spanish marriage for the Prince.’

Perhaps to be trusted, perhaps not.

The number of safe allies at court has dwindled. ‘And Arundel?’ I ask. ‘Does he still chase after antiquities with his old hunger?’

From a prominent Catholic family, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel had survived the taint of Catholic treason after the Gunpowder Treason against the King in 1605. Who could blame him if he found art safer than politics?

Kit sets the poker carefully on a trivet. ‘He now woos Buckingham.’

‘And so must we all, from what you say.’ I upturn my mug and drain it with an unladylike gusto that would have made my husband purse his lips and look up to Heaven.

Neither of us asks after the other’s family. Kit’s wife, like me, has failed to breed, and like me grows near the end of her child-bearing years.

‘Now I will inspect the gardens, before it grows too dark.’ I call the steward.

His face bleaches when I say what I wish to do. ‘Tonight?’ He swallows.

‘Is there some difficulty?’

‘None, madam.’

The house groom kneeling by the fireplace grows intent on placing a new log. I glance at Kit but he is engrossed in buttoning his coat.

The Bedford House gardens run in a long narrow belt along the wall, beyond the outbuildings at the far end of the big courtyard and the stable yard to its right. Beyond them and our wall lies the open space of Covent Garden – forty acres of rough land and patches of wilderness. Standing below the garden wall, I can hear the voices of people using the diagonal track that cuts across the Long Acre between Drury Lane at Holborn and St Martin’s Lane near the Royal Mews.

At first, I see no cause for the steward’s ill-concealed distress. The box hedges in the small knot garden just behind the house have been neatly trimmed. No weeds or other disorder explain his unease. I head for the arched gate to my right that leads to our kitchen gardens, orchard and the small wilderness that provides coppiced garden stakes and firewood.

‘There’s little to see there at this time,’ the steward warns. ‘And the paths will be muddy.’

‘Frozen mud.’ I go through the arch and stop. Edward would have called it ‘theft’, a crime punishable by hanging.

Before me lie row upon row of neatly tended cabbages, late turnips, and the remains of vast onion beds. A long line of old diamond-paned windows leans against the wall, protecting dung-heap hot beds, recently dug over. I see a vast bean patch with dried haulms hanging on some of the tripod supports. A mountain of frosted carrot tops rises from the corner of another cleared and newly manured plot. Far more vegetables are being grown here than could ever be needed by the skeleton-house family left in residence when the owners of Bedford House are elsewhere.

I know that we lease some of the garden to local people who lack growing space in the crowded city. But those gardens lie beyond a farther, locked gate. This is private land, for the use of Bedford House only. The knuckles of Mudd’s clenched hands gleam white under his skin.

‘Your labour, our land,’ I say mildly. ‘I see no difficulty with your enterprise, so long as you pay fair rent.’

‘Of course, Your Grace! It’s just that I . . .’ He makes the wise choice and swallows his excuse.

‘How long have you been growing vegetables to sell?’

He clasps his hand over his mouth, then mumbles, ‘Two years.’

I weaken in the face of his distress. And the thought of how little Edward pays him. ‘We shall calculate what you owe . . . and start from now.’

He drops to his knees on the frozen earth. ‘Madam, I thank you! God bless you!’

‘But when you next undertake commerce using someone else’s land, ask permission first. Or you might find yourself hanged after all.’ Before he can begin to weep and protest his gratitude any further, I tell him to get up or else he will freeze his knees.

The truth is that I need all the allies I can muster.

‘Before the light goes,’ says Kit, when we are returned to the warmth of the house, ‘you must come with me to admire a wonder.’

Chapter 12

Ice crunches under our boots. The silence is eerie. No slapping of water against the stone steps. No would-be passengers shouting, ‘Oars here! Oars here!’ No thump of colliding boats, no rattling of rowlocks. Standing on the Strand water stairs, I look out over the Thames. Knives of icy air stab my lungs. I hold my silky beaver-fur muff to my face, inhaling the musty animal smell, warming my nose with my exhaled breath.

Kit points at the sinuous black ribbon at the centre of the river. ‘The water grows narrower every day.’

It is the coldest winter in living memory. The Thames is freezing outward from its banks.

A flock of gulls arrives suddenly out of a grey sky and swoops to land on the river. They slither and slide on the ice in a comical flapping of wings. Dignity recovered, they sit, perplexed, on the new, hard lid over the water, waiting to reconnect with what they knew.

I watch two small boys testing the ice, too far out.

The air is luminous and thick in the growing dusk. On the opposite bank of the Thames, Southwark, where I had visited only four years past as the favourite of the Queen, is dissolving into a faint hint of buildings in the beginning of snow. Soon it will disappear altogether and leave me looking across the river at nothing. As insubstantial as the past.

Time behind us might as well never have been. It’s gone. Today is what there is.

Suspended there above the freezing river, I feel a cold clarity enter my thoughts.

I was right to have come. Too many women in my position lay meekly down in the narrow coffin of duty. The Lord would have to forgive me. Whilst I am alive, I mean to live. Until Death steps into my path and raises a beckoning finger, I will not accept impossibility.

I’d had a close call on that ice cliff between Moor Park and Chenies. I’d almost given up.

The first icy needles of new snow prick my face as we watch the two boys arguing. Their bodies tell the story as clearly as words. One of them slides a foot a little farther out towards the black ribbon of water, which looks as lithe and alive as the back of a moving snake. The other boy steps back, ready to sprint for the shore.

A dark crack opens in the glinting white surface. With shrill cries, they fall onto their bellies and push furiously with their arms, sliding like young seals towards the bank.

Kit runs down the icy steps towards them. Then they are safe on the thick ice near the shore, brushing snow and ice from the front of their coats, their excited voices as sharp as the cries of the gull. Kit returns to my side. A dog barks from the far side of a nearby wall. The rhythm of horses in the street behind me is jagged as they struggle on the ice. Church bells begin to crack the cold air with metallic hammer blows.

Two weeks ago, I was prepared to kill myself, even at the risk of damnation. I had not imagined how soon I would be here in London again, half fearful, half filled with exhilaration, examining my weapons like an old warrior coming out of retirement to fight once more for his life.

We turn away from the river to return to Bedford House. A passer-by would see only a handsome woman of middle years, in fine but mended clothes, crunching across the ice-filled street attended by a single waiting gentleman, and a maidservant and groom who can scarcely contain their eagerness to get back to the warmth of a fire. He would not have seen a fallen countess who meant to raise ghosts and make them dance again.

Later I lie in my narrow bed on down pillows and feather bed over the base of wool and straw. Agnes has been given a cot in the next room, with her maid on a pallet on her floor while Annie snores on mine. Unable to sleep, I listen to the old familiar night noises of the city. Moor Park already feels distant and a little unreal. The creak of its damp leaning walls and the screams of foxes have been replaced by church bells, dogs, shouts of the night watch, and fainter, more distant voices and music from the tightly packed houses and inns around our walls.

I hear an explosion of shouts in the street. Then abrupt silence.

Perhaps from the Savoy. The derelict hospital stands nearby, across the Strand from Bedford House, its rooms now occupied by vagabonds, criminals, indigent students, and the occasional poet.

I shift my head on the pillows. I will not think about poets tonight.

Tonight, I will not think about loss, only what I hope to regain. I pull the coverlet up to just below my nose, close my eyes and breathe in the resinous smell of pine from the fire that still burns brightly to warm the room. I would make it all happen again.

With the scent of burning pine branches in my nostrils, I again pulled on red silk stockings. Fastened a white heron feather in my hair. Draped a veil. Little by little, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, transformed herself into a magical creature.

It was the masque, Hymenaei, celebrating the marriage of the new young Earl of Essex to the daughter of the Duke of Suffolk, Frances Howard.

I pinned a jewel at the front of my hair. I turned my head. My third eye, my Cyclops eye, flashed and winked. My jewelled shoes turned my steps to bursts of spangled light. Behind me revolved a huge golden globe. ‘Behold the world, how it is whirled round,’ a court poet had written.

We all floated together on the music. The space beneath my ribs grew as large as the sky. We inhaled starlight.

I smiled as I spun past the silent mouthing and hungry, anxious eyes of Ben Jonson, the poet and playwright whose words we sang. Then I spied the straggling locks and thoughtful frown of the court painter Master Jones, the God who had created the revolving world that would soon open like a flower bud. Together we three had made these ‘lies’, as my husband called them. I had defined the terrain, helped to devise the songs. Together, we had waved the wand that transformed the plumpest lady-in-waiting into a goddess for the evening. Following our queen, we floated and spun in a better world than our own until the candles blurred.

At the end of each performance, in the silence after the music died, I would drop heavily back onto my feet, attacked by a vague sadness. But even before my Cyclops eye could be counted back into the Jewel House and the smoky threads of extinguished candles could fade from the air, I was in conference with the Queen about the next masque, display of fireworks or other prodigy of illusion.

I understood the code of royal flattery that must underlie every word and action. I knew that we all worked for the glorification of England. Even the new king, who preferred the hunt to dance, and was an awkward gnome crawled from under a Scottish stone – even he understood how the extravagant glories of our masques made him shine brighter in the eyes of visiting envoys and ambassadors.

But we also made a deeper magic than mere politics. Once I caught even the King watching a forest transform into the undersea kingdom of Neptune, with an open mouth and the eyes of an enchanted child.

When not devising masques or other entertainments, my everyday self had chased after other urgent purpose. The Queen gave me the right to sell positions in her household. I could also sell licences to ship wool, cut wood, or drive your beasts to market in London. I sold monopolies on certain trades. I could collect customs duties and was granted the right to mint coins.

Much of my profit went to repay the Russell debts. But I also made my gardens. I bought paintings and antiquities. I wrote. I debated, sometimes even at the King’s table of wits. I entertained poets and playwrights and threw gold at their metaphors.

Alone in my own chamber in Twickenham or in the apartments the Queen had given me to keep me near her in her own residence at Denmark House, I filled the silence with the sound of my lute or the scratching of my pen. I left no cracks for sadness to take root.

The fire in my chamber at Bedford House is almost dead. The dream music fades but the smell of burning pine remains and is real. I wrap myself in a coverlet and go to put another log on the greying coals of the fire. A piece of rough bark catches and sends up tongues of blue and orange. I will the log to catch.

Then the little tongues of flame stretch out and embrace the log. My entrails unclench. It feels like a good omen. I warm my ankles for a time. A ragged chorus of church bells announces one o’clock.

‘All is well,’ cries the watch.

Amen.

I am on my way back to the good times.

I return to my bed.

I get up again, light a candle from the fire, and search until I find where Agnes has put my little writing chest. Then I put on my old fur-lined robe. I sit on the floor in front of the fire, cooking my face while my back chills, and open the chest.

Now I will test your gratitude, I think as I lay out my paper. Remember who lifted you onto the ladder that led you up to your present power and position.

To the Most Esteemed Lord Buckingham, I write.

To reach the most powerful man in England, I must go through the second most powerful, the King’s favourite, George Villiers, Marquess of Buckingham.

I do not expect trouble. I helped to put George where he is.

Lord Buckingham. My George. How he has risen!

To hold power at court, you must first observe and read those above you to discern their deep desires. Then you fill those desires without seeming to see either weakness or need. And then, you must see off your rivals. When the royal family arrived at last in London, late in the summer of 1603 – King, Queen, and children, with their Scottish courtiers and eager new English ones – the chief enemy of the English courtiers was Robert Carr.

I rise from beside the fire to get my knife. As I sharpen my quill I remember how urgently many of us had wanted to see off this adored favourite of the King, the worst of the loud, greedy, land- and title-grabbing Scots who had trailed down from Scotland behind the new monarch.

Carr was a tall, fair, self-satisfied Scottish lunk, with moustaches like tufted squirrel’s ears. He was far less able than he believed himself to be, a handicap that, nevertheless, did not prevent him from beginning almost at once to believe that he ruled England through the King.

The English soon learned to despise and fear him in equal measure. His word to the King could ruin a man. A wistful sigh could win him another man’s house and lands. Before he died, Cecil, the Chief Secretary of England, had hated the man as much as the rest of us. But it was I who read the King’s desires and found the weapon to bring Carr down – a beautiful, witty, ambitious young Englishman named George Villiers.

Georgie Villiers, a graceful, charming youth whose fragile beauty and well-formed thighs had made more than one lady-in-waiting weep with desire.

Together, I and one of the most powerful lords, with the willing connivance of many others in the English faction at court, had used Villiers as one nail to drive out another.

Anything to see off the wretched, overweening favourite, Carr, we had thought. Dark beauty for fair. Englishman in place of Scot. An amusing wit to leaven the required adoration. Villiers to replace Carr.

I test my newly sharpened nib. There must be no blots or torn places in this letter.

It would give me great pleasure to see you once again . . .

We had sung in the flickering light of candles, the jewelled seawater on our costumes sparking. Cool air caressed my bare ankles. The tall young sea god beside me stroked the bare skin of my arm. I had chosen him from all the other men to be my partner.

I balanced the silk seaweed and gilded shells twined into my hair as we made a reverence to the queen of the Sea, my queen. Joy poured out through my throat. I was safe in a magical place where the whine of growing debt could not be heard. Where men and women could live briefly as creatures better and more marvellous than themselves. Disappointed petitioners, unhappy wives, heart-broken suitors, secret cheats who feared discovery. The bored and the tedious, the ambitious and the hopeless. For a short time, in this shared place out of time, they could all forget their true lives and live in earthly Paradise.

And the ambitious could rise.

I let George Villiers lead me into a dance, with the rhythm of beating waves in our heads and in our blood. George Villiers was rising in the King’s favour and owed it to me. At my side, beside the chief lady of the court, he had become chief lord. He stood at James’s side and I at the Queen’s. The two separate courts, insofar as they mingled, had mingled in us.

He had sworn his undying gratitude. I had seen his beauty and his ambition and drawn him into the court circles. I had trusted him to make the most of the preferment to which I helped him. He knew how I ensured that he always appeared to advantage, as he did that night in a pale glittering costume that gave his eyes a dangerous gleam and showed off his legs.

My baron father was the guardian of the King’s daughter. Poets praised me. I was the Queen’s favourite lady and ruled the revelry of the court. No wonder he thought that he loved me. No wonder I had loved him with the pure heat of a creator. I was the begetter and breeder of his new being as favourite of the King. He was my creation, and my investment in favours owed.

Once, no one could enter the King’s presence without Carr’s consent. Now, George holds the keys. Where he was once my supplicant, I am now his. This reversal of roles follows the natural ebb and flow of favours done and returned, and does not trouble me. My request now, small as it is, should flatter him in his new elevation. In my experience, great beauty dooms a man to vanity, a weakness that can make him malleable. And, besides, he owes me a great deal.

Clever, ambitious Georgie, I think as I sign the letter, Your most grateful and admiring Lucy . . . I hesitate, then add, . . . Russell. Cs. of Bedford.

We would soon see if his sense of gratitude is as finely developed as his thighs.

‘If you wish to achieve power here at court . . .’ I had once stood on tiptoe to breathe into his ear during a pause in the dance, ‘. . . learn to read those above you and divine their deep desires . . . give them what they want without seeming to know that you do so. You won’t be forgiven for seeing weakness or need.’

‘I already know,’ he had said, looking at the King.

I should have been warned then.

Chapter 13

LUCY – THE PALACE OF WHITEHALL, LONDON, 1621

Like a country mouse, I peer into the Great Hall where I once ruled on behalf of my queen. My jewels, which felt so overdone in Hertfordshire, shame me here in Whitehall. I advance from the door, past dense clusters of men, some of them friends, some not.

I nod to the tall, thin, soberly dressed figure of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, said by Kit to be wooing Buckingham. He smiles back. Though he ranks far above me, being old nobility amongst all the bindweed knights and barons created by King James (of which my father had been one), Arundel and I share a passion for beautiful things that we cannot afford. He is talking now to the King’s Surveyor, Master Inigo Jones, progressed from designing masques to designing buildings, in what will no doubt prove to be a costly conversation.

Many people think Arundel cold and aloof, but I found him a steady friend when poverty had turned many people against my husband and me. His own experience of childhood poverty may have left him softened by understanding.

I exchange chilly nods with two of the bindweed knights and move on through the packed bodies.

The hall smells worse than a barnyard. I had forgotten the nasal assault of the court. Civet, musk, and herbal waters applied to freshly shaved chins. The reek of anger and aggression seeping out from armpits. Damp wool, leather, foul breath, horse and farting dogs. Woodsmoke overlays the dark heaviness of old ashes and damp stone. Through the open arches and passageways, smells of sewage, rotting weed and fish seep in from the river. The herbs burning on the fire fail to sweeten the air.

On the low dais at the far end of the hall, the King’s empty chair confirms his absence hunting at Royston. George Villiers is standing as close as is possible to the royal chair without actually occupying it. Even if he were not at the centre of a gaggle of courtiers, I would have spied him at once by the bright flashing of diamond buttons and the wide, stiff white-lace collar that sets off his handsome face.

Nearest to him in the crowd stands Cranfield, the Lord Treasurer, looking wary, and the Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, nodding and smiling at Buckingham’s words. Buckingham’s brain-sick brother John, now made Viscount Purbeck by the doting King, sits on the edge of the dais, picking at the cuticles of his left hand.

Buckingham’s other brother, Kit, amiable enough if little more than that, stands smiling when other men smile, laughing when they laugh. Though still only a groom of the royal bedchamber he has been promised an earldom by the King. Just behind Buckingham hover two secretaries, ready to note down any licences or patents or letters of favour that his lordship might grant.

The beautiful youth has become a striking man. He is still lean, in spite of the indulgences of James’s court. Since I last saw him, he has grown a neat, elegant stiletto beard and a moustache that flicks up at the ends. These frame his full, sensuous mouth, which – I would have sworn – he has reddened with carmine. His eyes, edged with long thick lashes any woman would envy, shift thoughtfully from face to face as if choosing from a flock of chickens which neck to break for the pot.

He seems more sharply drawn than the men around him, larger than his true size. A five-strand yoke of pearls, like the diamond buttons and red and white fires sparking on his fingers, make him seem a source of light. Even in a daytime doublet of yellow silk, and leather shoes instead of evening silk, he looks as rare and glamorous as a player in a candlelit masque.

My eye had been as good for a man as for a painting when I chose him.

I watch him speak to an eagerly nodding courtier, whose face I do not know. As he does so, he places a casual hand on the back of the King’s chair.

I see no sign of his poor credulous, wealthy new wife, little Katherine Manners, the only daughter and now, on the death of her brother, the sole heir to the Duke of Rutland. However, I spy his monster mother holding court in the far corner of the hall, at the same time she sees me.

I nod coolly to the three-times married Lady Villiers. We loathe each other. She always saw me as an enemy. I despise her for the coarse hunger of her ambition for her entire family as well as her son.

Then Buckingham sees me. He breaks through the circle of courtiers and holds out his hand. ‘Madam! My dearest Lucy! Such a long time!’

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