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Henry! I could never become queen while my father and older brother Henry were alive! This young man spoke treason and meant to harm my brother, Henry.
Treason. A word with a huge sharp beak that bit off people’s heads. It had bitten off my grandmother’s head. It could bite off my head.
I might die, I suddenly thought. For the very first time, I understood that my life could end. I would die. Now…one day…or very soon.
My wits scattered. My eyes blurred. I had never before in my life felt such fear. A dark, cold hollowness at my centre grew larger and larger until the thin shell of my being seemed about to crack. I wanted to sit down on the track. To imagine this scene away and make it back into a story.
But he stood there waiting, reaching out to take me. And there was no one to help me but myself.
‘I won’t come,’ I said.
‘You must.’
I slid my hand down to my dirk, hanging at my belt. But, though sharp enough, it was only a short-bladed, jewelled woman’s toy.
‘Don’t make me call the others,’ he begged. ‘I swear I won’t harm you.’
He drew his sword and stepped closer.
I wanted to scream at him. ‘You may have killed me already.’ I kept my voice steady. ‘…killed me without touching me!’ Did he think I didn’t know my own family’s history?
I knew I could not outrun him but my body would no longer stand still. I turned and ran.
My skirts jounced up and down, swayed out of control, knocked into my legs. Though dressed for riding in a soft-hooped farthingale, I was still too wide, too heavy, too ornamented, too stiffened and pinned together.
I snagged on bushes, tore free. I heard his breathing close behind. A weight hauled at my skirt. I yanked free of his grasp. Felt a fumble at my sleeve. Then his hand clamped tightly around my upper arm.
His face was distorted, no longer handsome nor amiable. No going back for him now, not after laying hands on me. Not after those words. No going back for me, neither. With my free hand, I tried to hit him, to claw at his face, lost my balance. We fell together into a tangle of scrub.
Treason! I thought, now as desperate as he. As I fell, I clutched at leaves that tore away in my hands. I landed on the side of my ankle, lay wedged, half-toppled, my skirts caught in the thicket, my bodice twisted tightly around my ribs so that I could not breathe.
Our fall broke his grip on my arm. I snatched a tiny breath with the top of my chest, pushed myself out of the scrub and hit him hard in the face. He stepped back.
‘My grandmother had friends…’ I yanked at my bodice, tried to breathe and run again. ‘…like you! She died on the block because of…friends…like you!’ I could already feel the axe falling towards my bared neck.
Even the loyal Mrs Hay was willing to whisper how the Scottish king had been happy to take the English crown from the same hand that had signed the warrant for his own mother’s death.
The young man picked up his sword, dropped in our struggle. ‘I can’t let you go.’
He must know as I did that he was almost certainly a dead man now, sooner or later, no matter what happened to me.
And I could no longer scream for help, even if I could be heard. Not now that I knew what he intended.
I shifted my weight onto my hurt ankle as slowly as a cat stalking a bird. The ankle felt cold and watery with pain but held, just. I tried to read him as I would a new dog or horse. ‘I also see that you don’t want to do this. I think you’d rather let me go.’
Startled eyes met mine. I hopped my good foot back beside the other. ‘I think you’re a good man and something has gone wrong.’
‘If you knew…!’ he agreed fervently. ‘But I have no choice now.’
Our panting seemed to fill the low vault of arching trees. In his face, I could still see a last gleam of my enchanted prince. ‘I thought at first you were under a curse,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t entirely wrong, after all.’
And in a different story, we might have been friends. I hopped another step.
‘I’m damned,’ he whispered.
I begged my courage rise up to fill that cold hollow space inside me. ‘I trusted you when I first saw you,’ I said.
‘That’s why Robin…’ He caught himself. ‘…why I was sent alone. For fear that you would take fright at a group of armed men.’
I straightened my back to give my courage room to rise. Please, I begged. At first it felt as fluid as water, flowing into my limbs, rising through my belly and chest. Slowly, another stronger creature, that was both me and something else far greater than I was forced its way up through the tight column of my throat until it reached my eyes.
I burned my attacker with a wolf’s fierce gaze. ‘Is my father already dead?’ Even stiffened by courage, I didn’t dare ask about Henry.
‘I don’t know. But it makes no difference now. It’s too late to turn back!’ He looked at me, his mouth slightly open. ‘I beg you, forgive me, your grace, I never meant…’
‘I think you should run,’ said the young she-wolf steadily. ‘As fast as you can.’
He closed his eyes. ‘Holy Mother, protect me…!’ His sword shook in his hand.
I had to tempt him to rewrite this story. I felt certain that he wanted to. ‘It doesn’t have to be too late,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you truly intend. If you go now, I won’t raise an alarm.’
He shook his head.
‘You don’t believe me? Don’t you see why I can’t raise an alarm? Why I must not even admit that you exist?’
I might be just a slip of a girl, but even I could see why no one must ever connect me to him and his friends. I knew suddenly that, though he was a grown man armed with a sword, my wits were quicker than his.
He kept shaking his head.
‘You’re a fool! But not wicked enough.’ I eased back another step. ‘They sent the wrong man. I swear I won’t betray you. Save yourself, if you can.’
I watched his eyes as I watch those of a new hound to see whether it means to lick my hand or bite. ‘Whatever you and your friends are plotting, you must stop it, so I can try to save myself.’ I saw struggle in his blue eyes. ‘Neither of us wants to be here.’
‘No,’ he whispered.
‘Then we must simply agree that we’re not here and never were. If I don’t betray you, what crime will you have committed?’ I held my breath.
‘You’re scarce more than a child and don’t understand men’s affairs.’ Then he went still, in that moment-of-just-before. Just before a dog is unleashed. Just before a bow-man releases his bolt or the dangling pig’s throat is cut. I had seen men gather themselves up like that before, when they had to do something unpleasant.
‘You must come with me,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make me hurt you.’
I had lost him.
But I wouldn’t die on the scaffold like my grandmother! Because that was how I would end, if I let him take me to these ‘friends’. Better to die now, with only a short time for fear. Struggling, perhaps not even noticing the fatal blow. Better that than to wait blindfolded for the first blow of the axe, and the second and the third. Better that my Belle not creep whimpering out from under my skirts, like my grandmother’s little dog, covered with my blood, to sniff at my severed head.
‘I won’t come!’
He shook his head, avoiding my eyes.
I tightened my grip on my dirk.
‘I can’t be queen if I’m dead.’
‘I swear that I won’t kill you.’
‘But I will.’
He stepped towards me.
I placed the tip of the dirk in the hollow at the base of my throat. I felt the point prick my skin. I took another step back.
Don’t think! Don’t think! Be ready to push…twist…Just do it!
‘It’s harder than you imagine,’ he said. But I had made him uncertain again.
I hopped back another step. He started to follow.
‘Don’t misjudge my age or sex! I’m not a child, whatever you may think.’ The young she-wolf looked him in the eyes. ‘And I’m not one of your delicate English ladies, neither. I’m a Scottish barbarian. I cut the shoulder of a stag when I was seven.’ I hobbled another step. The she-wolf still knew that I would use the dirk. My eyes told him so.
And another step.
He wavered, sword half-raised.
‘God speed you!’ I turned my back with the knife still at my throat.
Breathe in. Hop. Breathe in. Hop.
The courage-wolf inside me gobbled up the pain.
Breathe in. Hop.
I listened for his footsteps over the sound of my own breathing.
Around a bend in the track, then past a hazel clump. I began to hope. Unreasonably, that fragile physical barrier between us made me feel safer.
Breathe in. Hop. And again. And again.
Suddenly, the pain returned. I stopped, dizzy with pain. I looked back. Through the screen of brown hazel leaves, I could see him only in parts. He sat on his heels in the middle of the track, rocking, with his head in his hands.
Get out of England! I urged him silently. As far away from me as possible!
‘Robin,’ he had said, ‘a band of armed men.’
There were others, but how many? And what were they doing at this very moment? What did they intend? Oh, God! I begged. Please let Henry be unharmed!
The snake word ‘treason’ coiled around my throat and tightened. I must warn Henry. But how, without entangling myself in treason?
A fine deep tremor began in the bones of my legs. I leaned my hand on a beech trunk. My heart felt smothered, as if it didn’t have room to beat. I tugged at my stomacher and bodice again. Distractedly, I picked broken twigs and leaves from my skirt and sleeves. The smell of fear rose from under my arms. I felt small and empty. My wolf had left me. I was on my own again.
I hobbled on. Now I had to return to my attendants and try to lie.
Trey raced up covered with mud and bits of dead leaf from rolling on the ground. Then he galloped ahead and back again, reproaching me for my slowness.
I had been such a fool!
If only our thoughts could leap across distances.
Take care, beloved brother. Take care! I don’t know where you are. I don’t even know what I must warn you about.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ my would-be kidnapper had said. Please, God, let someone tell me what is happening.
Henry and I had been kept apart from birth, he at Stirling Castle under the rod of Lord Mar, I at Dunfermline and Linlithgow with Lady Kildare. But when we met at Holyrood before coming south to England, we had recognised each other as true kin in our first shy glance. Henry, who would one day be king, would know what I should do next.
Are you still alive?
It did not seem possible that Combe would still be standing when we got back.
On the riverbank, the grooms were asleep on the grass. Lady Anne Dudley Sutton, a niece chosen by my guardian to be my chief companion, was making a necklace of plaited grass.
‘What has happened to you?’ cried one of the two older ladies with the beginning of alarm.
‘Twisted my ankle,’ I said. ‘Slipped from a fallen log.’ Only half a lie.
The ladies clicked their tongues over my ankle and promised a poultice. They exchanged amused glances while they re-pinned my sleeves and skirt without further questions. This time, at least, past misbehaviour worked in my favour.
To my relief both my guardian and his wife were away when we returned to Combe and would not return that night. But I had to let Mrs Hay resume her former role as my nurse, and order my fire built higher and fuss over my ankle with cool cloths and ointments. I agreed to eat my supper propped up on pillows in my big canopied bed. I stroked the four upright carved oak lions that held up the canopy and protected me from bad dreams. But tonight they stared past me with blank, denying eyes.
There was no help for it, I decided as I tried to force down some pigeon pie. I must risk implicating myself with guilty knowledge and warn Henry. If any harm came to him that might have been avoided, I would have to kill myself after all. I would not let myself think that the harm might already be done. I pushed aside the chicken broth. I asked Anne to fetch my pen and ink.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ the man in the forest had said. He was right. My life was being shaped by events I might know nothing about until it was too late. But I knew enough to know that my father’s demons had followed us here to his Promised Land and threatened both Henry and me.
3 (#ulink_9741187f-5806-5dd8-b676-2ac0187fba5e)
When I was younger, Mrs Hay had often put me to bed with tales that kept me wide awake in the dark for hours, tales even more terrifying than the servants’ whispers of a ghostly abbot who sometimes stalked through my bed-chamber, which had once been his.
Vivid against the shadowy canopy overhead, I saw the sword tip held to my grandmother’s pregnant belly while my father still lay curled inside. My grandfather’s sword tip, threatening his own wife and unborn son. My father almost killed by his own father, Lord Darnley, while he was still in the womb. Then I saw Darnley murdered, his twisted body blown out of his bed by a mysterious explosion, lying dead under an apple tree. I saw my grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scotland, beheaded because Protestant Queen Elizabeth believed her guilty of plotting with Catholics to usurp the English crown.
‘Papists,’ whispered Mrs Hay. ‘The devilish spawn of Rome.’ She kept her voice down because my Danish mother was a Catholic and one never knew who might be listening. But she did not hesitate to call my Grandmother Mary by her Scottish nickname—‘The Strumpet of Rome’.
I learned that there had been two Catholic plots against my father here in England, before his backside had even touched the English throne. The Bye and The Main, I repeated silently to myself.
When very young, I did not understand. Then, shortly after we came south, I had lost my own sweet governess, Lady Kildare. Her husband had plotted to kill my father in one of the Catholic plots. Though he was executed, she had survived. But my lovely, lively guardian, whom I loved dearly and who held my young heart in her care as tenderly as a mother, was wrenched from my life for fear that I might catch treason from her like the plague. I learned then about the bloody struggle between Papists, who were still loyal to the Catholic Pope in Rome, and the newer Protestants, a struggle set off in England by the old queen’s father, Henry VIII, my brother’s namesake.
‘Holy Mother, protect me!’ my forest spirit had cried.
It was happening again.
If anyone learned of our meeting—or even of his intent—I was tainted by treason for a second time. And I knewenough from Mrs Hay to be afraid of more than Papists.
