The Queen's Fool.

By Philippa Gregory.

For Anthony.

Summer 1548.

The girl, giggling and overexcited, was running in the sunlit garden, running away from her stepfather, but not so fast that he could not catch her. Her stepmother, seated in an arbor with Rosamund roses in bud all around her, caught sight of the fourteen-year-old girl and the handsome man chasing around the broad tree trunks on the smooth turf and smiled, determined to see only the best in both of them: the girl she was bringing up and the man she had adored for years.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed at the hem of the girl's swinging gown and caught her up to him for a moment. "A forfeit!" he said, his dark face close to her flushed cheeks.

They both knew what the forfeit would be. Like quicksilver she slid from his grasp and dodged away, to the far side of an ornamental fountain with a broad circular bowl. Fat carp were swimming slowly in the water; Elizabeth's excited face was reflected in the surface as she leaned forward to taunt him.

"Can't catch me!"

"'Course I can."

She leaned low so that he could see her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s at the top of the square-cut green gown. She felt his eyes on her and the color in her cheeks deepened. He watched, amused and aroused, as her neck flushed rosy pink.

"I can catch you any time I want to," he said, thinking of the chase of s.e.x that ends in bed.

"Come on then!" she said, not knowing exactly what she was inviting, but knowing that she wanted to hear his feet pounding the gra.s.s behind her, sense his hands outstretched to grab at her; and, more than anything else, to feel his arms around her, pulling her against the fascinating contours of his body, the scratchy embroidery of his doublet against her cheek, the press of his thigh against her legs.

She gave a little scream and dashed away again down an allee of yew trees, where the Chelsea garden ran down to the river. The queen, smiling, looked up from her sewing and saw her beloved stepdaughter racing between the trees, her handsome husband a few easy strides behind. She looked down again at her sewing and did not see him catch Elizabeth, whirl her around, put her back to the red papery bark of the yew tree and clamp his hand over her half-open mouth.

Elizabeth's eyes blazed black with excitement, but she did not struggle. When he realized that she would not scream, he took his hand away and bent his dark head.

Elizabeth felt the smooth sweep of his moustache against her lips, smelled the heady scent of his hair, his skin. She closed her eyes and tipped back her head to offer her lips, her neck, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to his mouth. When she felt his sharp teeth graze her skin, she was no longer a giggling child, she was a young woman in the heat of first desire.

Gently he loosened his grip on her waist, and his hand stole up the firmly boned stomacher to the neck of her gown, where he could slide a finger down inside her linen to touch her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her nipple was hard and aroused; when he rubbed it she gave a little mew of pleasure that made him laugh at the predictability of female desire, a deep chuckle in the back of his throat.

Elizabeth pressed herself against the length of his body, feeling his thigh push forward between her legs in reply. She had a sensation like an overwhelming curiosity. She longed to know what might happen next.

When he made a movement away from her, as if to release her, she wound her arms around his back and pulled him into her again. She felt rather than saw Tom Seymour's smile of pleasure at her culpability, as his mouth came down on hers again and his tongue licked, as delicate as a cat, against the side of her mouth. Torn between disgust and desire at the extraordinary sensation, she slid her own tongue to meet his and felt the terrible intimacy of a grown man's intrusive kiss.

All at once it was too much for her, and she shrank back from him, but he knew the rhythm of this dance which she had so lightheartedly invoked, and which would now beat through her very veins. He caught at the hem of her brocade skirt and pulled it up and up until he could get at her, sliding his practiced hand up her thighs, underneath her linen shift. Instinctively she clamped her legs together against his touch until he brushed, with calculated gentleness, the back of his hand on her hidden s.e.x. At the teasing touch of his knuckles, she melted; he could feel her almost dissolve beneath him. She would have fallen if he had not had a firm arm around her waist, and he knew at that moment that he could have the king's own daughter, Princess Elizabeth, against a tree in the queen's garden. The girl was a virgin in name alone. In reality, she was little more than a wh.o.r.e.

A light step on the path made him quickly turn, dropping Elizabeth's gown and putting her behind him, out of sight. Anyone could read the tranced willingness on the girl's face; she was lost in her desire. He was afraid it was the queen, his wife, whose love for him was insulted every day that he seduced her ward under her very nose: the queen, who had been entrusted with the care of her stepdaughter the princess, Queen Katherine who had sat at Henry VIII's deathbed but dreamed of this man.

But it was not the queen who stood before him on the path. It was only a girl, a little girl of about nine years old, with big solemn dark eyes and a white Spanish cap tied under her chin. She carried two books strapped with bookseller's tape in her hand, and she regarded him with a cool objective interest, as if she had seen and understood everything.

"How now, sweetheart!" he exclaimed, falsely cheerful. "You gave me a start. I might have thought you a fairy, appearing so suddenly."

She frowned at his rapid, overloud speech, and then she replied, very slowly with a strong Spanish accent, "Forgive me, sir. My father told me to bring these books to Sir Thomas Seymour and they said you were in the garden."

She proffered the package of books, and Tom Seymour was forced to step forward and take them from her hands. "You're the bookseller's daughter," he said cheerfully. "The bookseller from Spain."

She bowed her head in a.s.sent, not taking her dark scrutiny from his face.

"What are you staring at, child?" he asked, conscious of Elizabeth, hastily rearranging her gown behind him.

"I was looking at you, sir, but I saw something most dreadful."

"What?" he demanded. For a moment he was afraid she would say that she had seen him with the Princess of England backed up against a tree like a common doxy, her skirt pulled up out of the way and his fingers dabbling at her purse.

"I saw a scaffold behind you," said the surprising child, and then turned and walked away as if she had completed her errand and there was nothing more for her to do in the sunlit garden.

Tom Seymour whirled back to Elizabeth, who was trying to comb her disordered hair with fingers that were still shaking with desire. At once she stretched out her arms to him, wanting more.

"Did you hear that?"

Elizabeth's eyes were slits of black. "No," she said silkily. "Did she say something?"

"She only said that she saw the scaffold behind me!" He was more shaken than he wanted to reveal. He tried for a bluff laugh, but it came out with a quaver of fear.

At the mention of the scaffold Elizabeth was suddenly alert. "Why?" she snapped. "Why should she say such a thing?"

"G.o.d knows," he said. "Stupid little witch. Probably mistook the word, she's foreign. Probably meant throne! Probably saw the throne behind me!"

But this joke was no more successful than his bl.u.s.ter, since in Elizabeth's imagination the throne and the scaffold were always close neighbors. The color drained from her face, leaving her sallow with fear.

"Who is she?" Her voice was sharp with nervousness. "Who is she working for?"

He turned to look for the child but the allee was empty. At the distant end of it he could see his wife walking slowly toward them, her back arched to carry the pregnant curve of her belly.

"Not a word," he said quickly to the girl at his side. "Not a word of this, sweetheart. You don't want to upset your stepmother."

He hardly needed to warn her. At the first hint of danger the girl was wary, smoothing her dress, conscious always that she must play a part, that she must survive. He could always rely on Elizabeth's duplicity. She might be only fourteen but she had been trained in deceit every day since the death of her mother, she had been an apprentice cheat for twelve long years. And she was the daughter of a liar - two liars, he thought spitefully. She might feel desire; but she was always more alert to danger or ambition than to l.u.s.t. He took her cold hand and led her up the allee toward his wife Katherine. He tried for a merry smile. "I caught her at last!" he called out.

He glanced around, he could not see the child anywhere. "We had such a race!" he cried.

I was that child, and that was the first sight I ever had of the Princess Elizabeth: damp with desire, panting with l.u.s.t, rubbing herself like a cat against another woman's husband. But it was the first and last time I saw Tom Seymour. Within a year, he was dead on the scaffold charged with treason, and Elizabeth had denied three times having anything more than the most common acquaintance with him.

Winter 1552a1553.

"I remember this!" I said excitedly to my father, turning from the rail of the Thames barge as we tacked our way upstream. "Father! I remember this! I remember these gardens running down to the water, and the great houses, and the day you sent me to deliver some books to the lord, the English lord, and I came upon him in the garden with the princess."

He found a smile for me, though his face was weary from our long journey. "Do you, child?" he asked quietly. "That was a happy summer for us. She said..." He broke off. We never mentioned my mother's name, even when we were alone. At first it had been a precaution to keep us safe from those who had killed her and would come after us, but now we were hiding from grief as well as from the Inquisition; and grief was an inveterate stalker.

"Will we live here?" I asked hopefully, looking at the beautiful riverside palaces and the level lawns. I was eager for a new home after years of traveling.

"Nowhere as grand as this," he said gently. "We will have to start small, Hannah, in just a little shop. We have to make our lives again. And when we are settled then you will come out of boy's clothes, and dress as a girl again, and marry young Daniel Carpenter."

"And can we stop running?" I asked, very low.

My father hesitated. We had been running from the Inquisition for so long that it was almost impossible to hope that we had reached a safe haven. We ran away the very night that my mother was found guilty of being a Jew - a false Christian, a "Marrano" - by the church court, and we were long gone when they released her to the civil court to be burned alive at the stake. We ran from her like a pair of Judas Iscariots, desperate to save our own skins, though my father would tell me later, over and over again, with tears in his eyes, that we could never have saved her. If we had stayed in Aragon, they would have come for us too, and then all three of us would have died, instead of two being saved. When I swore that I would rather have died than live without her, he said very slowly and sadly that I would learn that life was the most precious thing of all. One day I would understand that she would have gladly given her life to save mine.

First over the border to Portugal, smuggled out by bandits who took every coin from my father's purse and left him with his ma.n.u.scripts and books, only because they could find no use for them. By boat to Bordeaux, a stormy crossing when we lived on deck without shelter from the scudding rain and the flying spray, and I thought we would die of the cold or drowning. We hugged the most precious books to our bellies as if they were infants that we should keep warm and dry. Overland to Paris, all the way pretending to be something that we were not: a merchant and his young apprentice-lad, pilgrims on the way to Chartres, itinerant traders, a minor lord and his pageboy traveling for pleasure, a scholar and his tutor going to the great university of Paris; anything rather than admit that we were new Christians, a suspicious couple with the smell of the smoke from the auto-da-fe still clinging to our clothes, and night terrors still clinging to our sleep.

We met my mother's cousins in Paris, and they sent us on to their kin in Amsterdam, where they directed us to London. We were to hide our race under English skies, we were to become Londoners. We were to become Protestant Christians. We would learn to like it. I must learn to like it.

The kin - the People whose name cannot be spoken, whose faith is hidden, the People who are condemned to wander, banned from every country in Christendom - were thriving in secret in London as in Paris, as in Amsterdam. We all lived as Christians and observed the laws of the church, the feast days and fast days and rituals. Many of us, like my mother, believed sincerely in both faiths, kept the Sabbath in secret, a hidden candle burning, the food prepared, the housework done, so that the day could be holy with the sc.r.a.ps of half-remembered Jewish prayers, and then, the very next day, went to Ma.s.s with a clean conscience. My mother taught me the Bible and all of the Torah that she could remember together, as one sacred lesson. She cautioned me that our family connections and our faith were secret, a deep and dangerous secret. We must be discreet and trust in G.o.d, in the churches we had so richly endowed, in our friends: the nuns and priests and teachers that we knew so well. When the Inquisition came, we were caught like innocent chickens whose necks should be wrung and not slashed.

Others ran, as we had done; and emerged, as we had done, in the other great cities of Christendom to find their kin, to find refuge and help from distant cousins or loyal friends. Our family helped us to London with letters of introduction to the d'Israeli family, who here went by the name of Carpenter, organized my betrothal to the Carpenter boy, financed my father's purchase of the printing press and found us the rooms over the shop off Fleet Street.

In the months after our arrival I set myself to learn my way around yet another city, as my father set up his print shop with an absolute determination to survive and to provide for me. At once, his stock of texts was much in demand, especially his copies of the gospels that he had brought inside the waistband of his breeches and now translated into English. He bought the books and ma.n.u.scripts which once belonged to the libraries of religious houses - destroyed by Henry, the king before the young king, Edward. The scholarship of centuries was thrown to the winds by the old king, Henry, and every shop on each corner had a pile of papers that could be bought by the bushel. It was a bibliographer's heaven. My father went out daily and came back with something rare and precious and when he had tidied it, and indexed it, everyone wanted to buy. They were mad for the Holy Word in London. At night, even when he was weary, he set print and ran off short copies of the gospels and simple texts for the faithful to study, all in English, all clear and simple. This was a country determined to read for itself and to live without priests, so at least I could be glad of that.

We sold the texts cheaply, at little more than cost price, to spread the word of G.o.d. We let it be known that we believed in giving the Word to the people, because we were convinced Protestants now. We could not have been better Protestants if our lives had depended on it.

Of course, our lives did depend on it.

I ran errands, read proofs, helped with translations, set print, st.i.tched like a saddler with the sharp needle of the binder, read the backward-writing on the stone of the printing press. On days when I was not busy in the print shop I stood outside to summon pa.s.sersby. I still dressed in the boy's clothes I had used for our escape and anyone would have mistaken me for an idle lad, breeches flapping against my bare calves, bare feet crammed into old shoes, cap askew. I lounged against the wall of our shop like a vagrant lad whenever the sun came out, drinking in the weak English sunshine and idly surveying the street. To my right was another bookseller's shop, smaller than ours and with cheaper wares. To the left was a publisher of chap books, poems and tracts for itinerant peddlers and ballad sellers, beyond him a painter of miniatures and maker of dainty toys, and beyond him a portrait painter and limner. We were all workers with paper and ink in this street, and Father told me that I should be grateful for a life which kept my hands soft. I should have been; but I was not.

It was a narrow street, meaner even than our temporary lodgings in Paris. Each house was clamped on to another house, all of them tottering like squat drunkards down to the river, the gable windows overhanging the cobbles below and blocking out the sky, so the pale sunshine striped the earth-plastered walls, like the slashing on a sleeve. The smell of the street was as strong as a farmyard's. Every morning the women threw the contents of the chamber pots and the washing bowls from the overhanging windows and tipped the night-soil buckets into the stream in the middle of the street where it gurgled slowly away, draining sluggishly into the dirty ditch of the River Thames.

I wanted to live somewhere better than this, somewhere like the Princess Elizabeth's garden with trees and flowers and a view down to the river. I wanted to be someone better than this: not a bookseller's ragged apprentice, a hidden girl, a woman heading for betrothal to a stranger.

As I stood there, warming myself like a sulky Spanish cat in the sunshine, I heard the ring of a spur against a cobblestone and I snapped my eyes open and leaped to attention. Before me, casting a long shadow, was a young man. He was richly dressed, a tall hat on his head, a cape swinging from his shoulders, a thin silver sword at his side. He was the most breathtakingly handsome man I had ever seen.

All of this was startling enough, I could feel myself staring at him as if he were a descended angel. But behind him was a second man.

This was an older man, near thirty years of age, with the pale skin of a scholar, and dark deep-set eyes. I had seen his sort before. He was one of those who visited my father's bookshop in Aragon, who came to us in Paris and who would be one of my father's customers and friends here in London. He was a scholar, I could see it in the stoop of his neck and the rounded shoulders. He was a writer, I saw the permanent stain of ink on the third finger of his right hand; and he was something greater even than these: a thinker, a man prepared to seek out what was hidden. He was a dangerous man: a man not afraid of heresies, not afraid of questions, always wanting to know more; a man who would seek the truth behind the truth.

I had known a Jesuit priest like this man. He had come to my father's shop in Spain, and begged him to get ma.n.u.scripts, old ma.n.u.scripts, older than the Bible, older even than the Word of G.o.d. I had known a Jewish scholar like this man, he too had come to my father's bookstore and asked for the forbidden books, remnants of the Torah, the Law. Jesuit and scholar had come often to buy their books; and one day they had come no more. Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world, half of them are forbidden, the other half would lead a man to question the very place of the earth itself, safe at the center of the universe.

I had been so interested in these two, the young man like a G.o.d, the older man like a priest, that I had not looked at the third. This third man was all dressed in white, gleaming like enameled silver, I could hardly see him for the brightness of the sun on his sparkling cloak. I looked for his face and could see only a blaze of silver, I blinked and still I could not see him. Then I came to my senses and realized that whoever they might be, they were all three looking in the doorway of the bookshop next door.

One swift glance at our own dark doorway showed me that my father was in the inside room mixing fresh ink, and had not seen my failure to summon customers. Cursing myself for an idle fool, I jumped forward into their path and said clearly, in my newly acquired English accent, "Good day to you, sirs. Can we help you? We have the finest collection of pleasing and moral books you will find in London, the most interesting ma.n.u.scripts at the fairest of prices and drawings wrought with the most artistry and the greatest charm that..."

"I am looking for the shop of Oliver Green, the printer," the young man said.

At the moment his dark eyes flicked to mine, I felt myself freeze, as if all the clocks in London had suddenly stopped still and their pendulums were caught silent. I wanted to hold him: there, in his red slashed doublet in the winter sunshine, forever. I wanted him to look at me and see me, me, as I truly was; not an urchin lad with a dirty face, but a girl, almost a young woman. But his glance flicked indifferently past me to our shop, and I came to my senses and held open the door for the three of them.

"This is the shop of the scholar and bookmaker Oliver Green. Step inside, my lords," I invited them and I shouted, into the inner dark room: "Father! Here are three great lords to see you!"

I heard the clatter as he pushed back his high printer's stool and came out, wiping his hands on his ap.r.o.n, the smell of ink and hot pressed paper following him. "Welcome," he said. "Welcome to you both." He was wearing his usual black suit and his linen at the cuffs was stained with ink. I saw him through their eyes for a moment and saw a man of fifty, his thick hair bleached white from shock, his face deep-furrowed, his height concealed in the scholar's stoop.

He prompted me with a nod, and I pulled forward three stools from under the counter, but the lords did not sit, they stood looking around.

"And how may I serve you?" he asked. Only I could have seen that he was afraid of them, afraid of all three: the handsome younger man who swept off his hat and pushed his dark curled hair back from his face, the quietly dressed older man and, behind them, the silent lord in shining white.

"We are seeking Oliver Green, the bookseller," the young lord said.

My father nodded his head. "I am Oliver Green," he said quietly, his Spanish accent very thick. "And I will serve you in any way that I can do. Any way that is pleasing to the laws of the land, and the customs..."

"Yes, yes," the young man said sharply. "We hear that you are just come from Spain, Oliver Green."

My father nodded again. "I am just come to England indeed, but we left Spain three years ago, sir."

"An Englishman?"

"An Englishman now, if you please," my father said cautiously.

"Your name? It is a very English name?"

"It was Verde," he said with a wry smile. "It is easier for Englishmen if we call ourselves Green."

"And you are a Christian? And a publisher of Christian theology and philosophy?"

I could see the small gulp in my father's throat at the dangerous question, but his voice was steady and strong when he answered. "Most certainly, sir."

"And are you of the reformed or the old tradition?" the young man asked, his voice very quiet.

My father did not know what answer they wanted to this, nor could he know what might hang on it. Actually we might hang on it, or burn for it, or go to the block for it, however it was that they chose this day to deal with heretics in this country under the young King Edward.

"The reformed," he said tentatively. "Though christened into the old faith in Spain, I follow the English church now." There was a pause. "Praise be to G.o.d," he offered. "I am a good servant of King Edward, and I want nothing more than to work my trade and live according to his laws, and worship in his church."

I could smell the sweat of his terror as acrid as smoke, and it frightened me. I brushed the back of my hand under my cheek, as if to wipe away the s.m.u.ts from a fire. "It's all right. I am sure they want our books, not us," I said in a quick undertone in Spanish.

My father nodded to show he had heard me. But the young lord was on to my whisper at once. "What did the lad say?"

"I said that you are scholars," I lied in English.

"Go inside, querida," my father said quickly to me. "You must forgive the child, my lords. My wife died just three years ago and the child is a fool, only kept to mind the door."

"The child speaks only the truth," the older man remarked pleasantly. "For we have not come to disturb you, there is no need to be afraid. We have only come to see your books. I am a scholar; not an inquisitor. I only wanted to see your library."

I hovered at the doorway and the older man turned to me. "But why did you say three lords?" he asked.

My father snapped his fingers to order me to go, but the young lord said: "Wait. Let the boy answer. What harm is it? There are only two of us, lad. How many can you see?"

I looked from the older man to the handsome young man and saw that there were, indeed, only two of them. The third, the man in white as bright as burnished pewter, had gone as if he had never been there at all.

"I saw a third man behind you, sir," I said to the older one. "Out in the street. I am sorry. He is not there now."

"She is a fool but a good girl," my father said, waving me away.

"No, wait," the young man said. "Wait a minute. I thought this was a lad. A girl? Why d'you have her dressed as a boy?"

"And who was the third man?" his companion asked me.

My father became more and more anxious under the barrage of questions. "Let her go, my lords," he said pitifully. "She is nothing more than a girl, a little maid with a weak mind, still shocked by her mother's death. I can show you my books, and I have some fine ma.n.u.scripts you may like to see as well. I can show you..."