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‘Wait here, your grace,’ whispered the page, who had accompanied me.
I looked about me.
In Scotland, even in the palaces, our ceilings were often built low to conserve the heat in the long, fierce, damp winters. We did not try to emulate God’s own space between mountains, above the sea. Here at Whitehall, the roof was so high that it vanished into the shadows above the torches, making me feel as small as an ant. At the far end of this hall, my father sat raised above his courtiers as if on an altar, with my uncle beside him holding a glass of wine.
Even while he spoke to my uncle, the king’s bright jackdaw eyes leapt and darted, searching for something of interest, pretending not to see me waiting at the door. His fingers explored the arm of his chair, his sleeves, his buttons. Dark and heavy against the surrounding finery, he wore one of his plain quilted velvet doublets, as if scorning the extravagant efforts of the courtiers to deck themselves for him.
The jackdaw eyes chose to see me. Though his doublet was plain, I saw the flash of unfamiliar gems on his fingers when he lifted his hand to summon me. When he angled his head, a white sun flared just above the brim of his hat.
I moved towards him, half-terrified, half-enraged. I kept my eyes down, not from modesty but from fear of having my thoughts and senses overwhelmed.
Life in Scotland had been all polished wood and leather, and the comfortable smells of wood smoke, dogs, damp, mice and horses. Even at Holyrood, everyone had lived bundled together, separated only by invisible lines of the respect owed to my parents. I had not altogether lied to Anne. My mother ate with her ladies, and then with Henry and me when we were there, in a cosy closet off her bed chamber. My father’s nobles leaned their elbows on the same table as he did. The king of Scotland was the chief among the other clan chiefs. He did not sit apart on an altar like an image of God.
I advanced through a parting sea of courtiers, feeling the stares hammer at me. Voices grew sibilant with ‘she’ and ‘princess’ and my name, ‘Elizabeth’. I heard a murmur, ‘…one of the Scottish brats.’
A lock of twisting red-gold hair had escaped from its pins. I would have blown it out of my eyes but refused to give that mocking English voice further reason to laugh at my uncouth Scottish behaviour.
Musk and candle smoke caught at the back of my throat. A miasma of sweat and oil of roses swirled around my head.
‘She…’ ‘She…’ hissed the sea.
The curve of my skirt met the line of my father’s altar plinth. The air was sickly sweet with wine vapours. I looked up. A young man sat on the dais at my father’s feet, with his arm draped over the king’s right knee.
Tonight, unlike the fearsome man who had brushed aside the wall-hanging in Coventry, my father overflowed with satisfaction and drunken arrogance. He seemed to tremble on the edge of bad behaviour, like a child overwrought by too many fine gifts.
‘Here’s my little Bessie!’ he shouted. ‘My country mouse has ventured out of her hole at last!’
A red flush began to climb my chest. I curtsied faultlessly.
‘Would she not make any father proud?’ he demanded at large. The rings on his fingers flashed. A knife blade of light from the diamond on his hat sliced across my vision. Another gust of wine fumes reached me on his breath.
Burning with humiliation, I put on my chilliest face and let the crudely exacted compliments rain down on me.
‘Is she not a pearl beyond price, monsewer?’ My father leaned forward and aimed this question past Wee Bobby Cecil, squarely between the eyes of a French-dressed envoy standing in the front rank of attending courtiers and foreign visitors.
The sight of the Secretary of State made my heart thump with guilty memories of Coventry.
‘No longer a child, after all!’ said my uncle, looking me up and down. ‘Not in the least.’
‘Come up here and sit by me, Bessie!’ The king waved a flashing hand. ‘Fetch the lassie a stool!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, Bessie! Don’t be shy. Come up and give your father a kiss!’ His voice hardened. ‘It may be your only chance to look down from up here! Come make the most of it!’
I climbed the steps and kissed him without recoiling from the wine fumes. I sat and held the glass of wine he forced into my hands, over the head of the young man lounging between us.
Straight-backed, I pretended to ignore the stares, so many eyes on me at the same time. A quick sideways glance met the considering hazel gaze of a dark-haired, narrow-jawed man with a thin mouth pulled down by discontent—Sir Francis Bacon, last seen nodding and smiling among the dignitaries on the scaffold in Paul’s Churchyard. I looked away and met the eyes of the young man at my father’s feet. Enemies everywhere.
Henry, the next king of England, should have been sitting with his father and uncle, in place of that smirking stranger. Henry who was not there at all.
I snatched a look at the ‘monsewer’ who had been challenged by my father. He was now studying me, his head tilted to the man beside him. Then he leaned to the other side and murmured to Cecil.
My father was watching him. ‘But can France afford her?’ he called. ‘No one else can!’
My humiliation was complete. I was not here to meet my uncle. My father had called me here to be inspected like a market heifer. A gangling, red-haired, freckled heifer, I thought savagely. ‘A Scots brat’. Exposed to the ridicule of the English court as crudely as if he had set me in the stocks.
The faces below me began to bob in a dance. My head felt like a net full of jumping fish. I no longer wanted to dance. I needed to escape from all those eyes and sort my thoughts. Trapped up there on my stool I looked again for Henry but could not find him. I imagined standing up and walking out. But in my imagination, the sea refused to part to let me escape. I would be trapped in a cage of bodies.
In a gap between dancers, I spied my guardian sitting with folded arms against one wall, now joined by Wee Bobby Cecil. From their gestures and Lord Harington’s frown, they appeared to be arguing about me. Bacon leaned on a pillar watching them while dancers jogged around him. I caught my guardian’s eye, then a gaggle of dancers hopped between us.
What use was a guardian, I thought, if he didn’t guard you?
The racket of voices and music grew louder until I heard only a blur of sound. The young man at my father’s feet tilted his head back while the royal hand toyed with his curls. My father leaned forward and whispered in his ear.
I stared down into my wineglass. I knew that I had just learned something else momentous but did not yet know what to make of it.
The king of Denmark hauled a woman onto his lap and began to play the clown with the hoops of her farthingale, threatening to put them over his head. Neither of them seemed to notice that her legs were exposed to the knee.
Lord Harington appeared at the foot of the dais, pinched and resolute. ‘Your majesty, with your permission…’ When he saw that my father still whispered into the young man’s ear, Lord H held out his hand to me.
‘Who is that man who was earlier standing beside Lord Salisbury?’ I murmured as he steadied me down the steps.
‘The French envoy.’
‘And the other, who didn’t speak? The one who still keeps staring at me?’
‘The Duc de Bouillon, envoy from the German Palatine, chief state of the Protestant Union in Europe.’
I didn’t ask about the young man leaning on my father’s knees.
I curtsied to my oblivious father.
Lord Harington mouthed words about my recent journey and the dangers of too much excitement. As we turned to leave, three of my father’s Scottish gentlemen began to lay loud wagers on how much more of the woman on my uncle’s lap would be seen before the night was done.
‘Depends on how oiled she is,’ said one.
‘Nae! Nae! S’nowt to do w’drink!’ another shouted back, as Lord Harington hustled me away. ‘A good bush need no wine!’ My father and uncle laughed loudly.
Lord Harington forgot himself far enough to give me a little push towards the door.
‘Where is Prince Henry?’ I asked, when we reached the corridor. ‘Why is he not here?’
Lord Harington pinched his lips. ‘Best if you had not been here neither.’
‘Can we go back to Combe now?’
Harington hesitated. ‘I will ask permission, but I fear that his majesty has not done with you yet.’
I walked a few feet in silence. ‘Are you still my guardian?’
I heard him breathe in sharply. ‘Yes, your grace. I will be your guardian until you marry. But I cannot remove you without the king’s permission.’
I nodded, but could not stop the unworthy, childish feeling that he was abandoning me in the monster’s lair.
14 (#ulink_18313011-2406-5cc8-970c-44bdbbdba9f9)
Henry and I found each other at last, the following day, in the gardens. My brother was just as handsome as I remembered, but taller, and beginning to fill out into a man. He had been on his way to the tiltyard and carried a sword. It was our first time together in private since I had arrived from Combe.
‘I knew that you would be here,’ he said with delight.
‘I knew that you would be.’
We kissed each other gravely and stood looking into each other’s eyes, both of us a little shy after so long apart but buoyed up by the miracle of a shared impulse that had brought us both to the same place at the same time.
Henry in the flesh seemed very like the Henry in my head, apart from a faint new, darker smell that came off him when he kissed me. In Edinburgh, he had smelled of fresh cut grass.
‘What do you read in my face?’ asked Henry. ‘After studying it so earnestly?’
‘I wonder if you still love me,’ I blurted. ‘And I see that you have a red-gold fuzz on your upper lip and chin, just the same colour as my hair.’
‘You’re taller but are still my Elizabella,’ he said. ‘Quick as a squirrel, always darting and leaping, looking for a new nut.’
We ordered our attendants to stay by the fountain. Since most of them had sore heads, they were happy to comply. Over my shoulder, I saw Anne settle on a stone bench with one of Henry’s gentlemen. We set off together without them down the long central gravel path that divided the pattern of box-edged formal beds.
‘Where were you last night?’ I asked, instead of all the other questions I wanted to ask him.
‘I had to sit with them through dinner.’ My brother flushed and looked down at his feet crunching on the gravel path. ‘When I couldn’t tolerate their coarseness and drinking any longer, I excused myself.’
‘I lacked your courage,’ I said. ‘I stayed.’
‘It needed more courage to stay than to flee.’ He swung his sword in a fierce downward arc. ‘I never dreamed that our father meant to summon you last night. I would have stayed. I should have been there to protect you.’
‘Do you still wear your oath ring?’ I asked. ‘Like the one you gave me on Cat Nick?’ I held out my hand wearing his golden ship.
‘See for yourself.’ Henry held out his left hand with the matching golden ship on the middle finger. ‘Our hands are the same shape,’ he observed. ‘Even if mine are a little larger. In Scotland, we were so innocent of the true dangers. We should swear again.’
We stopped walking. A robin landed on the wooden obelisk in the centre of the nearest bed and trilled encouragement. Solemnly, with the robin as witness, looking into each other’s eyes, we again pledged ourselves to rescue if the other sent for help.
Even against our father? I wondered if that was what Henry meant by ‘true dangers’. Having now had a little time to observe him, I felt a new weight pressing down on him. Like Atlas, he seemed to have shouldered the world.
The robin gave a final trill and jumped away into the air.
We smiled at each other. His presence still created that familiar circle of warmth that I wanted to step inside.
As we began to walk again, I thought how there was something bright and pure in him, of which he seemed unaware, that made crowds shout out his name and press forward to touch him. Today in the gardens, I saw how the women pushed out their bosoms at him. His grooms and gentlemen followed him with their eyes. Unlike our father, he was patient with attention and wore his golden manacles of duty as if they delighted him.
‘You might have needed protecting last night, too,’ I ventured.
‘From the king, you mean?’ He pinched his lips and turned his head away. ‘He would have been happy enough if I had stayed away altogether. But the people expect my presence.’
Even at my most hopeful, I had not thought this meeting would be so easy. Very soon, I would confess how I had once talked to him at night. And why.
‘We must both be strong,’ he said. ‘There will be more nights like last night while our uncle is here. The Danes are notorious for their drinking and carousing.’
‘That’s what Lord Harington said.’
There was a moment of silence, in which I felt our thoughts pulling back from the same uneasy terrain.
Henry balanced his sword at the end of an outstretched arm. ‘This sword was a gift from Spain.’
‘It’s very fine,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Not as fine as the suit of golden armour given to me by my spiritual father, who is the model for all kings.’
‘And who is that?’ I asked obediently.
‘Henri IV of France. A true warrior king. Unlike our father.’
I said nothing. Ever since I was six years old, Mrs Hay had whispered that the king wanted me to marry Henri’s son, the infant Dauphin of France. That was the future for which she had to prepare me, she had said. The closest I had come to imagining this future was the image of living with someone like my younger brother, Baby Charles, who lay somewhere between a nuisance and a pet.
‘Our father hopes I might marry the Spanish Infanta,’ Henry said. ‘He seems to believe that if I accept a sword, I might accept a bride.’
He stretched his arm over the low box hedge and began to tickle a daisy with tiny circles of the sword tip. I watched the tendons working in his wrist.
‘I cannot marry a Papist.’ He glanced up at me. ‘I don’t want you to marry a Papist, neither.’
‘I don’t much want to marry at all,’ I said. ‘But I must. Just as you must one day be king.’
Henry lunged with the sword. Silently, I admired the line of his leg and the steadiness of his blade. ‘We could run away together to the Americas.’ He straightened again and lowered his voice. ‘This is not idle dreaming, Elizabella. You won’t have heard of my interest in the London Company and its enterprise in the new Virginia colony, because I must hide it to avoid stirring up the commercial rivalry among the different English joint stock companies—the East Indies Company, the West Indies Company, and the Virginia Company. And it’s also better that Spain and France, who already have an eager foothold in the Caribbean, don’t know that the future king of England has a keen interest in the Americas.’
He lowered his voice even though we could not possibly have been overheard, except by the robin, which seemed to be following us. ‘I have invested money in the new Virginia colony, Elizabella. Even the king doesn’t know how much. His interests lie all in Europe. I am helping to shape a new British kingdom, which I will one day rule. The first expedition named their first landfall at Chesapeake Bay after me—Cape Henry. We could rule together there as brother and sister, as I believe happened in ancient times.’
‘I could marry a handsome savage prince,’ I said. ‘And you would marry his long-haired golden sister.’
‘Queen Elizabella,’ he said.
‘King Henry the Ninth of England, Scotland and the Americas!’ I made a deep reverence. ‘But how could you leave England?’
‘England would forgive my absence because I would send back so many riches from this other kingdom. Gold and silver. Coral. Beaver pelts, tabacco…’
‘…live bears and beavers for the royal menagerie…’
We stared at each other with excited surmise, even knowing that we spoke nonsense. The Americas might be real. Henry’s eventual rule there might be real. But Queen Elizabella of the Americas was idle dreaming.
Henry whacked the head off a daisy. ‘Meanwhile, we both must go wherever we’re summoned.’
‘But if you’re there, too, I won’t mind. We can suffer together.’
‘They wallow in beastly delights. It’s not right for a young girl to see and hear such things.’
‘But surely, I must learn the ways of the world before I’m sent out into it.’ I rolled my eyes and pretended to stagger.
