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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 (#ulink_3965fc76-c0bf-56f0-a952-fc2bde8855d4)
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 (#ulink_879707c7-ca46-518f-8be0-410540e8846a)
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.
