The Queen's Fool

  “I was running away from court,” I said. “I didn’t dare wait for you to come. I was coming to you.”

  “Why?” Daniel asked. “What has happened?”

  “They are arresting men for plotting to overthrow the queen,” I said. “Cardinal Pole is making the inquiry and I am afraid of him. I thought he would discover where I had come from, or…” I broke off.

  Daniel’s glance at me was acute. “Were you involved in the plot?” he asked abruptly.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  At his hard skeptical look I flushed red.

  “I was involved enough,” I admitted.

  “Thank God we are here then,” he said. “Have you dined?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “I can help to pack.”

  “Good, for we have a ship that leaves on the one o’clock tide.”

  I slipped off the printer’s stool and set to work with Daniel, my father, and our next-door neighbor, carrying the boxes and barrels and pieces of the press to the wagon. The horses stood still and quiet. One woman threw up her window and asked us what we were doing and our neighbor went and told her that at last the shop was to be let and the old bookseller’s rubbish was being cleared away.

  It was near ten o’clock at night by the time we had finished and a late spring moon, all warm and yellow, had risen and was lighting the street. My father swung himself into the back of the wagon, Daniel and I rode on the box. Our neighbor shook hands all round and bade us farewell. Daniel signaled for the horses to start and they leaned against the traces and the wagon eased forward.

  “This is like last time,” Daniel remarked. “I hope you don’t jump ship again.”

  I shook my head. “I won’t.”

  “No outstanding promises?” he smiled.

  “No,” I said sadly. “The queen does not need my company, she does not want anyone but the king and I think he will never come home to her. And though the Princess Elizabeth’s household is charged with treason, she has the favor of the king. She might be imprisoned but she won’t be killed now. She is determined to survive and wait.”

  “She does not fear that the queen might pass her over and give the crown to another — Margaret Douglas or Mary Stuart, perhaps?”

  “She had her future foretold,” I said to him in a tiny whisper. “And she was assured that she will be the heir. She does not know how long she will have to wait but she is confident.”

  “And who foretold her future?” he asked acutely.

  At my guilty silence he nodded. “I should think you do indeed need to come with me this time,” he said levelly.

  “I was accused of heresy,” I said. “But released. I have done nothing wrong.”

  “You have done enough to be hanged for treason, strangled for a witch, and burned as a heretic three times over,” he said without a glimmer of a smile. “By rights you should be on your knees to me, begging me to take you away.”

  I was half a moment from outraged exclamation when I saw that he was teasing me and I broke into an unwilling laugh. At once he gleamed and took my hand and brought it to his lips. The touch of his mouth on my fingers was warm, I could feel his breath on my skin, and for a moment I could see nothing and hear nothing and think of nothing but his touch.

  “You need not beg,” he said softly. “I would have come for you anyway. I cannot go on living without you.”

  Our road took us past the Tower. I felt, rather than saw, Daniel stiffen as the lowering shadow of Robert Dudley’s prison fell on us.

  “You know, I could not help loving him,” I said in a small voice. “When I first saw him I was a child, and he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my life and the son of the greatest man in England.”

  “Well, now you are a woman and he is a traitor,” Daniel said flatly. “And you are mine.”

  I shot a sideways smile at him. “As you say, husband,” I said meekly. “Whatever you say.”

  The ship was waiting as Daniel had arranged and we had a few hours of hard work loading the pieces of the dismantled press and the barrels and boxes of books and papers before finally we were all aboard and the sailors cast off, the barges took us in tow, and the ship went slowly downriver, helped by the ebbing tide. My father had brought a hamper of food and we sat on the deck, sometimes shrinking from a passing sailor running to obey an order, and ate cold chicken and a strange strong-tasting cheese and a hard crunchy bread.

  “You’ll have to get used to this fare,” Daniel laughed at me. “This is Calais food.”

  “Shall we stay in Calais?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “It’s not safe for us forever,” he said. “Soon Queen Mary will turn her attention there too. The place is riddled with runaway Protestants and Lutherans and Erastians and all sorts of heretics, anxious to have a quick exit to France, or Flanders or Germany. Plotters too. And the kingdom of France has its own battle with the Huguenots or anyone who is not an orthodox son of the church. Between the two powers I think that people like us will be squeezed out.”

  I felt the familiar sense of injustice. “Squeezed out to where now?” I asked.

  Daniel smiled at me and put his hand over my own. “Peace, sweetheart,” he said. “I have found a home for us. We are going to go to Genoa.”

  “Genoa?”

  “They are making a community of Jews there,” he said, his voice very low. “They are allowing the People to settle there. They want the trade contacts and the gold and trustworthy credit that the People bring with them. We’ll go there. A doctor can always find work, and a bookseller can always sell books to the Jews.”

  “And your mother and sisters?” I asked. I was hoping he would tell me that they would stay in Calais, that they had found husbands and homes in the town and we could visit them once every two years.

  “Mary and my mother will come with us,” he said. “The other two have good posts and want to stay in Calais, whatever the risks to them. Sarah is courting with a Gentile and may marry him.”

  “Don’t you mind?”

  Daniel shook his head. “When I was in Venice and Padua I learned much more than the new sciences,” he said. “I changed my mind about our people. I think now that we are the yeast of Christendom. It is our task to go among the Christians and bring them our learning and our skills, our ability with trade and our honor. Perhaps someday we shall have a country of our own once more, Israel. Then we shall have to rule it kindly, we know what it is to be ruled with cruelty. But we were not born to be hidden and to be ashamed. We were born to be ourselves, and to be proud of being the chosen to lead. If my sister marries a Christian then she will bring her learning and her wisdom to her family and they will be the better Christians for it, even if they never know that she is a Jew.”

  “And shall we live as Jews or Gentiles?” I asked.

  His smile at me was infinitely warm. “We shall live as suits us,” he said. “I won’t have the Christian rules that forbid my learning, I won’t have Jewish rules that forbid my life. I shall read books that ask if the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun, and I shall eat pork when it is well reared and properly killed and well cooked. I shall accept no prohibitions on my thoughts or my actions except those that make sense to me.”

  “And shall I?” I asked, wondering where this independence would take us.

  “Yes,” he said simply. “Your letters and everything you have ever said makes sense to me only if I see you as my partner in this venture. Yes. You shall find your own way and I hope we will agree. We shall find a new way to live and it will be one that honors our parents and their beliefs, but which gives us a chance to be ourselves, and not just their children.”

  My father, seated a little away from us and carefully not listening to our conversation, enacted an unconvincing yawn. “I’m for sleep,” he said. He put his hand on my head. “Bless you, child, it is good to have you with me once more.” He wrapped his cape around himself and laid down on the cold deck.

>   Daniel stretched out his arm to me. “Come here and I will keep you warm,” he said.

  I was not in the least cold but I did not tell him that as I went into the circle of his arm and let myself stretch out against the mystery of his male body. I felt him gently kissing my cropped hair and then I felt and heard his breath against my ear.

  “Oh, Hannah,” he whispered. “I have dreamed of having you for so long I could cry like a girl for desire.”

  I giggled. “Daniel,” I said, trying the unfamiliar name on my lips. I turned my face up toward him and felt the warmth of his mouth on mine, a kiss which melted the very marrow of my bones so that I felt we were dissolving into one another like some alchemical mixture, an elixir of pleasure. Under his cape his hands caressed my back and then fumbled under my jerkin and linen and stroked my breasts, my throat, my belly, and I felt myself stretch out like a petted cat and whisper “Daniel” once more and this time it was an invitation. Gently, his hands explored the contours of my body like a stranger in a new land. Shyly, but with gathering curiosity I let my fingers explore the soft fine hair of his chest, the warmth of his skin beneath his breeches, and then the extraordinary shape of his cock which rose and pulsed at my touch as Daniel groaned with desire.

  The night was too long and the skies too dark for shamefulness. Under Daniel’s cloak we slid our breeches down and coupled with an easy confident delight that started breathless and became ecstasy. I had not known that it could feel like that. Watching other women and men court, even trembling beneath Lord Robert’s touch, I had not known that such pleasure was possible. We parted only to doze and within an hour we woke and moved together again. Only when we saw the sky lighten through the ropes to our left did I drift from arching desire and satisfaction into exhausted sleep.

  I woke to a cold morning, and had to scramble into my clothes before the sailors could see what we had been about. At first I could see nothing but the dark outline of the land, and then slowly it became clearer to me. A stolid strong fort guarded the entrance to the harbor. “Fort Risban,” Daniel said, standing behind me so that I could lean back against his warm chest. “Do you see the port beyond?”

  I raised myself up a little and giggled like a girl as I felt his body respond to my movement. “Where?” I asked, innocently enough.

  He shifted me away from him with a little grunt of discomfort. “You are a coquette,” he said bluntly. “There. Ahead of you. That is the main port and the canals flow from it all around the city, so it is a moated city as well as a walled one.”

  As the ship came into port I stayed at the side, watching the features of this town with the sense — familiar to so many of my people — that I would have to start my life over again, and make my home here all over again. These red-tiled rooftops just showing over the strong thickness of the city walls would become familiar to me, the cobbled streets between the high houses would be my routes to and from the baker, from the market, to my house. This strange aroma, the smell of a working port: old fish, the tarry odor of drying nets, the fresh hint of newly sawn wood, the clean tang of salt wind, all this would become the familiar taste on my lips and the perfume of my woolen cape. Soon all this would mean home to me, and in a little while I would cease to wonder how the queen was this morning, whether better or worse, how Elizabeth was faring, waiting patiently as she must surely do, and how my lord was, watching the sun rise from the arrow-slit window of his prison. All of those thoughts and loves and loyalties I must put behind me and greet my new life. I had left the court, I had deserted the queen, I had abandoned Elizabeth and I had taken my leave of the man I adored: my lord. Now I would live for my husband and my father and I would learn to belong to this new family: a husband, three sisters and my mother-in-law.

  “My mother is waiting for us.” Daniel’s breath was warm against my hair as he leaned against me at the rail of the ship. I leaned back again and felt his cock stir inside his breeches at my touch and I pressed back, wanton and desiring him once more. I looked to where he was looking and saw her, formidable, arms folded across a broad chest, scrutinizing the deck of the ship as if to see whether her reluctant daughter-in-law had done her duty and arrived this time.

  When she saw Daniel she raised a hand in greeting, and I waved back. I was too far away to see her face, but I imagined her carefully schooling her expression.

  “Welcome to Calais,” she said to me as we came down the gangplank. Daniel she wordlessly enfolded into an adoring embrace.

  He struggled to be free. “I have to see to them unloading the press,” he told her, and went back on board and swung down into the hold. Mrs. Carpenter and I were left alone on the quayside, an island of awkward silence among the men and women bustling around us.

  “He found you then,” she said, with no great pleasure.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And are you ready to marry him now?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll have to get out of those clothes,” she said. “They’re respectable people in Calais, they won’t like the sight of you in breeches.”

  “I know,” I said. “I left in a hurry or I would have changed before I came.”

  “That would have been better.”

  We were silent again.

  “Did you bring your wages?”

  “Yes.” I was nettled by her tone. “All of my wages for the last two quarters.”

  “It will cost you all of that to buy stockings and gowns and shifts and caps, you will be surprised at the price.”

  “It can’t be more expensive than London.”

  “Much more,” she said flatly. “So much has to be shipped in from England.”

  “Why do we not buy French?” I asked.

  She made a little face. “Hardly,” she said, but did not trouble to explain.

  Daniel appeared and looked pleased that we were talking. “I think I have everything unloaded,” he said. “Your father is going to stay here with the things while I fetch a wagon.”

  “I’ll wait with him,” I said hastily.

  “No,” he said. “Go home with Mother, she can show you our house and you can get warm.”

  He wanted to ensure that I was comfortable. He did not know that the last thing I wanted to do was to go home with his mother and sit with his sisters and wait for the men to finish their work and come home. “I’ll get the wagon with you then,” I said. “I’m not cold.”

  At a glance from his mother he hesitated. “You can’t go to the carter’s yard dressed like that,” she said firmly. “You will shame us all. Wrap your cloak around you and come home with me.”

  Home was a pretty enough little house in London Street squashed in beside others in a row near the south gate of the town. The top floor was divided into three bedrooms; Daniel’s three sisters shared the big bed in the room which faced the back of the house, his mother had a tiny room all to herself, and my father had the third. Daniel mostly lived with his tutor, but would sleep on a truckle bed in my father’s room when he stayed overnight. The next floor served as a dining room and sitting room for the family, and the ground floor was my father’s shop facing the street, and at the back a little kitchen and scullery. In the yard behind, Daniel and my father had built and thatched a roof, and the printing press would be reassembled and set up in there.

  All three of Daniel’s sisters were waiting to greet us in the living room at the top of the stairs. I was acutely conscious of my travel-stained clothes and dirty face and hands, as I saw them look me up and down and then glance in silence at each other.

  “Here are my girls,” their mother said. “Mary, Sarah and Anne.”

  The three of them rose like a row of moppets and dipped a curtsey as one, and sat down again. In my pageboy livery I could not curtsey, I made a little bow to them and saw their eyes widen.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” Mrs. Carpenter said.

  “I’ll help,” Anne said and dived out of the room. The other two and I regarded each other with silent disli
ke.

  “Did you have a good crossing?” Mary asked.

  “Yes, thank you.” The tranced night on the deck and Daniel’s insistent touch seemed to be a long way away now.

  “And are you going to marry Daniel now?”

  “Mary! Really!” her sister protested.

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t ask. It’s been a long enough betrothal. And if she is to be our sister-in-law we have a right to know.”

  “It’s between her and Daniel.”

  “It’s a matter for all of us.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said, to bring their wrangling to an end.

  They turned their bright inquisitive faces toward me. “Indeed,” said Mary. “You’ve left court then?”

  “Yes.”

  “And will you not go back?” the other one, Sarah, asked.

  “No,” I said, keeping the regret from my voice.

  “Won’t you find it awfully dull here, after living at court? Daniel said that you were the queen’s companion and spent all the day with her.”

  “I shall help my father in the shop, I expect,” I said.

  They both looked aghast as if the thought of working with books and the printing press was more daunting than marrying Daniel and living with them.

  “Where are you and Daniel going to sleep?” Mary asked.

  “Mary! Really!”

  “Well, they can hardly bed down on the truckle bed,” she pointed out reasonably. “And Mother can’t be asked to move. And we have always had the best back bedroom.”

  “Daniel and I will decide,” I said with an edge to my voice. “And if there is not enough room for us here we will set up our own house.”

  Mary gave a little scream of shock as her mother came up the stairs.

  “What is it, child?” she demanded.

  “Hannah has not been in the house five minutes and already she says she and Daniel will live elsewhere!” Mary exclaimed, halfway to tears. “Already she is taking Daniel away from us! Just as I knew she would! Just as I said — she will spoil everything!” She leaped to her feet, tore open the door and ran up the stairs leading to her room, leaving the wooden door to bang behind her. We heard the creak of the rope bed as she flung herself on to it.