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With a flash of rings, my father knocked aside the edge of a woven battle and stepped out of the alcove behind it. ‘Anatomise her, man! Ye’re too nice!’ The king staggered in his excitement, his restless body made clumsy by the urgencies of his mind.
Cecil stared at the floor.
The king stopped in front of me, blocking my view of Cecil. ‘Aye, Bessie! Y’ know very well it’s an examination! And you’d best thank God to be here in Coventry and not locked in the Tower with your friends!’
‘“Friends”?’ I repeated faintly.
‘You’d be examined there, right enough! And not so gently, neither!’ The king turned on Cecil. ‘Why didn’t you ask the questions I prepared? What have y’done with them?’
‘I meant to come to them by degrees, your majesty.’
‘There’s no degree in being dead! And no degree in treason!’ The king held out his hand. ‘Give me my questions and act as my clerk. I will play Solomon. I’ll examine this treacherous whelp of mine, who seems to have terrified you into degrees!’ His over-large tongue dammed and slowed the flow of words pouring from his brain. His bright, hungry magpie eye probed at me.
From the table beneath a window Cecil took a densely written paper and gave it to the king. He returned to the table and sat on the stool behind it. Now I saw the waiting pen and ink.
‘That devil Digby’s in the Tower,’ said my father. ‘We know by his own confession that he and his fellow fiends meant to make you queen of England! After I…your king and father…had been blown sky-high, murdered, along with your precious brother.’
‘Never, my lord father!’ I whispered.
‘What do ye have to say to that?’
‘What sort of queen would I have been…?’
He jabbed a finger at me. ‘A compliant one. Controlled by Papists, ruling at the will of Rome.’
‘I had rather been murdered in Parliament with you than wear the Crown on such condition!’ I spoke that truth with all my heart.
The small eyes skewered me. ‘Fine words!’ He pulled at his lower lip with finger and thumb. ‘What are you?’
‘I don’t understand.’ I glanced at Cecil but he was head-down at the table, recording our words.
‘What…are…you?’ the king repeated slowly and loudly, as if I were simple. ‘Do I know you?’
‘I’m your loyal daughter, sir.’ I felt my own temper begin to rise.
‘D’ye think me a fool?’
‘I think you many things, sir, but never a fool!’
We both drew breath and stared at each other. Cecil’s pen stopped scratching.
The king shook his list of questions in my face. I blinked but did not move. ‘I ask you, just as your friends in the Tower were asked,’ he said. ‘Are you a Papist?’
Refusing to step back, I fixed my eyes on my father’s thick padded jerkin, diamond hatched with stitching that held the thick lining in place to turn aside attacking knives. ‘Never!’
‘I know that you are a Papist!’
Like my mother? I wanted to ask but had just enough good sense not to say.
‘Do you mean to accuse my guardian too?’ I asked instead. ‘Lord Harington hears me pray at his side five times a day.’
The close-set eyes studied me. The king scratched under his doublet. He tugged at his cuffs. He twitched his neck in his collar and seemed to chew on his tongue.
I had seen people ape those mannerisms, and then laugh. I did not find my father laughable. He terrified me.
I can make you obey where you ache to scorn, his behaviour seemed to say to those who aped him. That’s real power!
The king bit at a fingernail. I felt the swift current of his thought tugging at me. ‘Why should I let you keep your head?’ he asked.
‘Because I’ve done nothing!’
We both pretended to listen to the scratching of Cecil’s quill.
‘Don’t think, madam—you and your brother—that public acclaim is the same as power! From the common people it’s worth nothing! It’s a river that drowns all virtue.’
‘I don’t want acclaim!’ I cried. ‘I don’t want power! What would I do with power?’
‘Don’t think I wasn’t told how the people cried out in the streets,’ he said, now just as agitated as I was. ‘Singing out as you and your brother went by. “The golden pair!” “The golden boy, the golden girl!” “England’s best hope!” Don’t think you’ll bury me, either one of you! Don’t imagine you’ll ever warm your arse on the English throne!’
‘I don’t want the English throne!’
‘…because I shall marry you as far away from here as I can arrange. I’d marry you to the Great Cham, if I could, and send you to his queen in Tartary. I’d marry you to the Devil himself, if only he wanted a wife!’
He shoved his face close to mine. ‘Listen to me, Bessie. If I choose to let you live, I mean to marry you off as soon as I can. Do y’hear me? Catholic, Protestant, doddering fool or dribbling babe—I’d give you this moment if your husband would take you and your ambitions away from England, out of my sight for ever!’
He folded the list of questions. ‘We’re not done with these yet. You don’t deceive me. But first, I’ll hear more of what your friends in the Tower have to tell us. Then I’ll decide what’s to be done with you.’
There’s no point in lying further, I thought with despair. My father would make those prisoners say whatever he liked.
I opened my mouth to defend myself with the truth. Yes, I had met Digby, but not by my own will. I had refused to go with him, no matter what he might claim in his confession. I had threatened to kill myself rather than agree to do as the plotters intended.
Behind the king, Cecil gave a minute shake of his head.
I closed my mouth and stared past my father’s shoulder in astonishment. Again, a tiny warning shake, no mistake. Then Cecil looked back down at his notes.
Then I saw how close I had been to disaster. My guilt or innocence in the treason plot did not matter. It had never mattered, once I had reported Digby’s kidnap attempt to Henry alone. Not to the king or Cecil. That failure alone made me a traitor in the king’s eyes. And if I had confessed, I would have dragged my brother down with me.
‘My mother had friends like yours.’ My father handed the folded questions back to Cecil. ‘You should choose better acquaintance, lassie. With less taste for regicide. First your old governess Lady Kildare and her husband, now these Papist gallants. To be twice touched by treason is no accident.’
The king turned to Cecil. ‘Come, Wee Bobby! Let’s leave the “golden” lassie to her thoughts, while she still has a head to think them.’ He struck the door with his fist. It opened. He left without looking back.
Cecil wiped his pen and inserted it into a leather roll. He gathered up his papers and tapped them to align the edges. ‘Don’t fear,’ he said, so quietly that I might almost have imagined it.
‘And lest her thoughts remain confused,’ shouted my father from the corridor, ‘I’ll arrange a sight to clear them.’
‘My lord…’ I began.
Cecil held up his hand to silence me. ‘As Lord Treasurer, among all else,’ he continued, to the tabletop, ‘I must advise the king that he can’t afford to throw away even one of his two most valuable assets.’
When the door closed behind the two men and their footsteps had faded, I finally let my knees dump me back into my chair.
Cecil would have warned me to keep silent only if he knew what I was about to confess. But if he knew, why was he protecting me?
8 (#ulink_5e0959a2-a5c5-5824-b3d1-868a193cd48e)
Bonfires were lit across England to celebrate my father’s deliverance from his brush with the fires of hell. From my window in Coventry, I saw arcs of glowing orange spring up against the night sky. No one invited me to attend any of the fires, nor the dancing, feasting and drinking that accompanied them. But even in the guarded household of Mr Hopkins, I felt a feverish exhilaration.
Something terrible had been averted, even if the details were blurred. The consuming darkness had been defeated. Demons had been slain. Those captured alive would soon be executed. The king declared that the anniversary of his deliverance would become a yearly holiday. Each year, on the fifth of November, the fires would burn. The threat to Henry and the Members of Parliament dropped from mention.
Once it was believed that all of the Gunpowder Plotters, as they became known, were either dead or in the Tower, I was returned to Combe. Lady Anne, left behind to avoid advertising my flight, was still agog with scraps of news. She lacked the discretion of Mr Hopkins, or perhaps his wariness, and eagerly poured her snippets into my ear.
The leader of the plot, Robert Catesby, had been killed at Holbeche House, not far beyond Coventry, with several others, including Thomas Percy, a cousin of the Duke of Northumberland.
Robert Catesby, I thought. ‘Robin…’
‘He was a known Papist trouble-maker,’ said Anne. ‘Even though he was a gentleman. A single bullet struck down both him and Thomas Percy, whose cousin the Duke of Northumberland lives at Syon and has been himself examined by Lord Salisbury and the king, your father.’ I felt in her the same feverish excitement I had found in Coventry.
‘My uncle had such a wondrous fire lit here,’ she went on happily. ‘He even permitted me to watch the dancing, though of course, I was not allowed to romp in a field with the tenant farmers.’ She leaned closer. ‘I did manage to snatch a mug of eau de vie distilled by our estate manager, but don’t tell Uncle.’ She looked at me for approval. She so seldom had daring to offer me.
‘What of the other plotters?’ I didn’t want to mention Digby by name.
‘You must ask Uncle. I know only what I hear on the estate.’
I went to ground, and waited. I wondered what my father had meant by ‘a sight to clear her thoughts’.
Christmas passed with the social restraint and well-fed decorum you would expect in a household where the Papish word ‘mass’ caused unease. In a house that had once been a Catholic abbey, we marked the holiday merely by praying more often, to a Protestant God, in the chapel built for monks.
But although my Protestant guardian spoke only of ‘Christ Tide’, the old, forbidden word ‘mass’ lived on in the kitchen, gardens and stable yard. Other, even older spirits had their gifts too. Protecting holly springs hung in the horses’ stalls. Mistletoe sprouted in the dairy. I left an appeasing plate of sweet, twisted anise-flavoured Jumbles in a corner of my bedchamber for the ghostly abbot, and found them half-eaten the next morning.
I used the more-frequent prayers to beg Henry to respond to my letter, if he had ever received it. Seven weeks had passed. Neither Abel nor Clapper had yet returned from London.
I sometimes caught Lord Harington studying me with a frown. Whether I imagined pity or coldness in his eyes, I felt the same quiver of terror. I tried to distract myself by playing with my monkey and my dogs. I rode whenever the bleak damp January weather allowed. I was never left alone again.
Like an animal, I felt a storm coming. I fell asleep at night with the fragment of granite from the Edinburgh crags in one hand, and Belle’s furry warmth hugged close with my other, whenever I managed to smuggle her past Lady Harington and her fear that the little dog might soil the bed linen.
At the end of January, the king sent men-at-arms to take me to London.
9 (#ulink_5250f80d-0764-5569-90a7-e20b6e431378)
LONDON, THURSDAY, 30 JANUARY 1606
From my chamber in the Bishop’s house at Paul’s, beside the Cathedral, I listened all day to the distant sound of the scaffold being built in the Churchyard. I had arrived in London by night, as furtively as I had fled to Coventry. Lord Harington sent me off from Combe professing ignorance of why the king had sent for me in secret. Besides the men-at-arms and the necessary grooms, only my old nurse, Alison Hay, had ridden beside me. Not even Anne was allowed to attend me.
As I rode away, I looked over my shoulder at my guardian. After more than two years, I still did not know whether I was merely a costly burden to him or whether true affection lurked in all his well-meaning severity.
Hammering, sawing. Faint and distant, but I knew what they meant. In the next two days, the Gunpowder Plotters were to die, some here at Paul’s and some at the Tower. Listening to the sound of hammers, I tried to decide whether I had seen more than concern on Harington’s face when I left Combe.
The hammering paused. In the brief silence, I understood why I had been brought to London. I was to be seized without warning and beheaded, along with the Plotters! That was why I had travelled in such secrecy, lest my fate raise a wake of protest among the common people who had cheered so loudly for Henry and me. Their cheers had meant nothing, just as my father said.
I saw now why not even my mother knew I was in London—for she had neither visited nor sent a greeting. I saw whyI hadn’t been allowed to go to Whitehall or to send a message to anyone. And why Anne had been kept behind, so she would not be tainted with my crimes. The king feared me, his oldest daughter, enough to kill me as his own mother had been killed, for the safety of the English crown.
I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions. But however much I fought it, the conviction that I was right twisted its roots deeper and deeper into my head.
Mrs Hay woke me in what felt like the middle of the night. ‘You are sent for.’
The windows were still dark, with no hint yet of winter sunrise. The air was cold.
I gripped her hands. ‘Do you know why? Tell me! I won’t cry out, I swear.’ My heart pounded. If I were to die, I needed time to ready myself. This wasn’t fair! Not possible…‘Where must I go?’ I could not imagine dying.
‘To the Bishop’s little study.’
‘Not to the Churchyard?’
‘I was told the study, here in the Bishop’s house.’
‘Only the Bishop’s study?’ I burst into tears.
‘Oh…!’ Mrs Hay stared, uncertain what to do. She hadn’t held me for more than six years. Then she reached out and clutched my head to her breast. ‘No. No! You mustn’t think such things!’ She smoothed my wild hair. ‘How can you think it?’
I heard a pause while she did indeed think how the thought might have occurred. A new spasm of terror quivered through me.
‘What does the king want with me?’
Mrs Hay sounded less confident than before. ‘His majesty’s at Whitehall, not here. And means to go hunting, or so I’m told.’ She stroked my head again. ‘Four of those Papist fiends are to die today. Grant, Digby, Wintour and Bates. No one else.’
Digby. I was here because of him. Digby must be the reason. I could not think straight.
She fingered a russet tangle at the back of my head, then began to unpick it, hair by hair. ‘I’ll attend you in the Bishop’s study, if they let me.’ As she lifted my heavy hair in both hands to shake it out, I felt a cold draft on my nape.
‘I’ll wear my hair loose today,’ I said. I smelled fear in my armpits. I put my hands on my neck as if to hold my head in place.
A gentleman wearing the Bishop of London’s livery led us to the study, a small room overlooking Paul’s Churchyard on the far side of the Bishop’s house from the chamber where I had slept. Apart from the bishop’s man, Mrs Hay and myself, the room was empty. I had half-expected Cecil to be there. I felt him twined into my fate but did not yet know how.
The bishop’s man gestured towards the window. With Mrs Hay beside me, I looked down through the diamonds of watery glass at the blurred bulk of the scaffold I had heard being built.
Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten. Lanterns and torches still burned. A crowd already packed the space. I could hear it through the closed window, like the sea shuffling pebbles. The Bishop’s man opened the window so that I could see more clearly.
The blades of halberds pricked the chilly air above the crowd, where men-at-arms stood stationed in every doorway, enough of them to stop a possible rescue attempt, which such a great crowd might allow. Or to put down a civil uprising, like those the plotters had believed would take place across England in support of the Catholic cause—and which the government still feared, to judge by that army in the courtyard.
Dignitaries stood crowded onto the scaffold close below me, talking amongst themselves as if in a waiting room in Whitehall. I was so close I could hear them coughing and clearing their throats. Cecil’s small figure was first hidden, then discovered again, as the others shifted around him.
‘Who is that man standing behind Lord Salisbury?’ I asked Mrs Hay. ‘There, the one with the thin face, who keeps smiling and nodding at the others.’
‘That’s his lordship’s cousin,’ said Mrs Hay. ‘Sir Francis Bacon. Their mothers are sisters.’ She tried to think what else to tell me. ‘He writes a great deal.’
Though much taller and better formed, Bacon lacked his little cousin’s authority. I watched him for a moment. He reminded me of an anxious dog, sniffing and wagging his tail at the other men on the scaffold. Then I forgot him.
The hangman was quietly and methodically testing his ropes and knots. It would begin soon. Soon they would be making me ready, pinning up my hair, removing my collar.
