LITMIR.BIZ

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on a London goldsmith. I can pay my bills and face the shopkeepers of Ware again.’

      ‘I am glad of it,’ I said awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You would have thought that King Henry’s only legitimate daughter would have had her fortune in her own hands by now, but they have delayed and withheld until I thought they wanted me to starve to death here. But now I come into favour.’

      She paused, thoughtful. ‘The question which remains, is, why I am suddenly to be so well treated.’ She looked speculatively at me. ‘Is Lady Elizabeth given her inheritance too? Are you to visit her with such a letter?’

      I shook my head. ‘My lady, how would I know? I am only a messenger.’

      ‘No word of it? She’s not at court visiting my brother now?’

      ‘She wasn’t there when I left,’ I said cautiously.

      She nodded. ‘And he? My brother? Is he better at all?’

      I thought of the quiet disappearance of the physicians who came so full of promises and then left after they had done nothing more than torture him with some new cure. On the morning that I had left Greenwich, the duke had brought in an old woman to nurse the king: an old crone of a midwife, skilled only in the birthing of children and the laying out of the dead. Clearly, he was not going to get any better.

      ‘I don’t think so, my lady,’ I said. ‘They were hoping that the summer would ease his chest but he seems to be as bad as ever.’

      She leaned towards me. ‘Tell me, child, tell me the truth. Is my little brother dying?’

      I hesitated, unsure of whether it was treason to tell of the death of the king.

      She took my hand and I looked into her square determined face. Her eyes, dark and honest, met mine. She looked like a woman you could trust, a mistress you could love. ‘You can tell me, I can keep a secret,’ she said. ‘I have kept many many secrets.’

      ‘Since you ask it, I will tell you: I am certain that he is dying,’ I admitted quietly. ‘But the duke denies it.’

      She nodded. ‘And this wedding?’

      I hesitated. ‘What wedding?’

      She tutted in brief irritation. ‘Of Lady Jane Grey to the duke’s son, of course. What do they say about it at court?’

      ‘That she was unwilling, and he not much better.’

      ‘And why did the duke insist?’ she asked.

      ‘It was time that Guilford was married?’ I hazarded.

      She looked at me, as bright as a knife blade. ‘They say no more than that?’

      I shrugged. ‘Not in my hearing, my lady.’

      ‘And what of you?’ she asked, apparently abandoning interest in Lady Jane. ‘Did you ask to come to this exile? From the royal court at Greenwich? And away from your father?’ Her wry smile indicated to me that she did not think it likely.

      ‘Lord Robert told me to come,’ I confessed. ‘And his father, the duke.’

      ‘Did they tell you why?’

      I wanted to bite my lips to hold in the secret. ‘No, my lady. Just to keep you company.’

      She gave me a look that I had never seen from a woman before. Women in Spain tended to glance sideways, a modest woman always looked away. Women in England kept their eyes on the ground before their feet. One of the many reasons why I was glad of my pageboy clothes was that masquerading as a boy I could hold my head up, and look around. But Lady Mary had the bold look of her father’s portrait, the swaggering portrait, fists on hips, the look of someone who has been bred to think that he might rule the world. She had his gaze: a straight look that a man might have, scanning my face, reading my eyes, showing me her own open face and her own clear eyes.

      ‘What are you afraid of?’ she asked bluntly.

      For a moment I was so taken aback I could have told her. I was afraid of arrest, of the Inquisition, afraid of suspicion, afraid of the torture chamber and the heretic’s death with kindling heaped around my bare feet and no way to escape. I was afraid of betraying others to their deaths, afraid of the very air of conspiracy itself. I rubbed my cheek with the back of my hand. ‘I am just a little nervous,’ I said quietly. ‘I am new to this country, and to court life.’

      She let the silence run and then she looked at me more kindly. ‘Poor child, you are very young to be adrift, all alone in these deep waters.’

      ‘I am Lord Robert’s vassal,’ I said. ‘I am not alone.’

      She smiled. ‘Perhaps you will be very good company,’ she said finally. ‘There have been days and months and even years when I would have been very glad of a merry face and an uplifted voice.’

      ‘I am not a witty fool,’ I said cautiously. ‘I am not supposed to be especially merry.’

      Lady Mary laughed aloud at that. ‘And I am not supposed to be given especially to laughter,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you will suit me very well. And now, you must meet my companions.’

      She called her ladies over to us and named them to me. One or two were the daughters of determined heretics, holding on to the old faith and serving a Roman Catholic princess for pride, two others had the dismal faces of younger daughters with scanty dowries whose chance of service to an out-of-favour princess was only slightly better than the marriage they would have been forced to undertake if they had been left at home. It was a little court with the smell of desperation, on the edge of the kingdom, on the edge of heresy, on the edge of legitimacy.

      After dinner the Lady Mary went to Mass. She was supposed to go alone, it was a crime for anyone else to observe the service; but in practice, she went openly and knelt at the very front of the chapel and the rest of her household crept in at the back.

      I followed her ladies to the chapel door and then I hovered in a frenzy of worry as to what I should do. I had assured the king and Lord Robert that my father and I were of the reformed faith, but both the king and Lord Robert knew that Lady Mary’s household was an island of illegal Papist practices in a Protestant kingdom. I could feel myself sweating with fear as the meanest housemaid slipped past me to say her prayers, and I did not know the safest thing for me to do. I was in a terror of being reported to the court for being a Roman Catholic, and yet how could I serve in this household as a steadfast Protestant?

      In the end, I compromised, by sitting outside where I could hear the mutter of the priest and the whispered responses, but no-one could actually accuse me of attending the service. All the time that I perched on the draughty window-seat I felt ready to leap up and run away. Constantly my hand was at my face, wiping my cheek as if I could feel the smuts from the fires of the Inquisition sticking to my skin. It made me sick in my belly not to know the safest place to be.

      After Mass I was summoned to Lady Mary’s room to hear her read from the Bible in Latin. I tried to keep my face blank as if I did not understand the words, and when she handed it to me to put it on its stand at the end of the reading, I had to remind myself not to check the front pages for the printer. I thought it was not such a good edition as my father printed.

      She went to bed early, walking with her candle flickering before her, down the long shadowed corridor, past the dark draughty windows of the house, looking out over the darkness of the empty land beyond the tumbling-down castle walls. Everyone else went to bed too, there was nothing to wait up for, nothing was going to happen. There would be no visitors coming to see the popular princess, there would be no mummers or dancers or pedlars drawn by the wealth of the court. I thought that it was no wonder that she was not a merry princess. If the duke had wanted to keep Lady Mary in a place where she would be rarely visited, where her heart and spirits were sure to sink, where she would experience coldness and loneliness every day, he could not have chosen a place more certain to make her unhappy.

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