“Then sorry I am, to so disappoint you,” I said, as cold as Princess Elizabeth in one of her haughty moods.
In a sudden movement she snatched my wrist, and twisted it round so that I was forced to turn and face her, her grip biting into the skin. “You’re not taking something?” she hissed. “You’ve not got some draught to take to stop a child coming? From your clever friends at court? Some slut’s trick?”
“Of course not!” I said, roused to anger. “Why would I?”
“God knows what you would or would not do!” she exclaimed in genuine distress, flinging me from her. “Why would you go to court? Why would you not come with us to Calais? Why be so unnatural, so unwomanly, more like a boy than a girl? Why come now, too late, when Daniel could have had his pick of any girl in Calais? Why come at all if you’re not going to breed?”
I was stunned by her anger, it knocked the words out of me. For a moment I said nothing. Then slowly I found the words. “I was begged for a fool, it was not my choice,” I said. “You should reproach my father if you dare with that, not me. I wore boy’s clothes to protect me, as you well know. And I did not come with you because I had sworn to the Princess Elizabeth that I would be with her at her time of trial. Most women would think that showed a true heart, not a false one. And I came now because Daniel wanted me, and I wanted him. And I don’t believe a word you say. He could not have the pick of the girls of Calais.”
“He could indeed!” she said, bridling. “Pretty girls and fertile girls too. Girls who would come with a dowry and not in breeches, a girl who has a baby in the cradle this summer and knows her place, and would be glad enough to be in my house, and proud to call me mother.”
I felt very cold, like fear, like a dreadful uncertainty. “I thought you were talking in general,” I said. “D’you mean that there is a particular girl who likes Daniel?”
Mrs. Carpenter would never tell the whole truth about anything. She turned away from me and went to the breakfast pot hanging beside the fireplace and took it off the hook as if she would go out with it and scour it again. “D’you call this clean?” she demanded crossly.
“Daniel has a woman he likes, here in Calais?” I asked.
“He never offered her marriage,” she said grudgingly. “He always said that you and he were betrothed and that he was promised.”
“Is she Jew, or Gentile?” I whispered.
“Gentile,” she said. “But she would take our religion if Daniel married her.”
“Married her?” I exclaimed. “But you just said he always said he was betrothed to me!”
She brought the pot to the kitchen table. “It was nothing,” she said, trying to slide away from her own indiscretion. “Only something she once said to me.”
“You spoke to her about Daniel marrying her?”
“I had to!” she flared up. “She came to the house when he was in Padua, her belly before her, wanting to know what would be done for her.”
“Her belly?” I repeated numbly. “She is with child?”
“She has his son,” Daniel’s mother said. “And a fine healthy boy, the very picture of him as a baby. Nobody could doubt whose child he is, not for a moment, even if she were not a lovely girl, a good girl, which she is.”
I sank to the stool at the table and looked up at her in bewilderment. “Why did he not tell me?”
She shrugged. “Why would he tell you? Did you tell him everything in all these long years when you made him wait for you?”
I thought of Lord Robert’s dark eyes on me, and the touch of his mouth on my neck. “I did not lie with another and conceive a child,” I said quietly.
“Daniel is a handsome young man,” she said. “Did you think he would wait like a nun for you? Or did you not think of him at all, while you played the fool and dressed like a whore and ran after who knows who?”
I said nothing, listening to the resentment in her tone, observing the rage in her flushed cheeks and the spittle on her lips from her hissing speech.
“Does he see his child?”
“Every Sunday at church,” she said. I caught her quickly hidden smile of triumph. “And twice a week, when he tells you he is working late, he goes to her house to dine with her and to see his child.”
I rose up from the table.
“Where are you going?” she asked, suddenly alarmed.
“I am going to meet him as he walks home,” I said. “I want to talk with him.”
“Don’t upset him,” she said eagerly. “Don’t tell him that you know of this woman. It will do you no good if you quarrel. He married you, remember. You should be a good wife and wink at this other. Better women than you have turned away and seen nothing.”
I thought of the look of blank pain on Queen Mary’s face when she heard Elizabeth’s lilting laugh at the king’s whisper in her ear.
“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t care about being a good wife any longer. I don’t know what to think or what to care for.”
I suddenly noticed the pot with the smear of gruel along the side and I snatched it up and threw it at the back door. It hit the wood with a resounding clang and bounced to the floor. “And you can scour your own damned pot!” I shouted at her shocked face. “And you can wait forever for a grandson from me.”
I stormed from the house and across the marketplace, not seeing the stalls and the usual traders. I made my way across the fish quay, not even hearing the catcalls of the fishermen at my rapid pace and my uncovered head. I came to the door of the physician’s house in a rush and then realized that I could not hammer on it and demand to see Daniel. I would have to wait. I hitched myself up on to a low stone wall of the opposite house and settled down to wait for him. When passersby smiled or winked at me I glared at them, brazen, as if I were in my lad’s clothes again and had forgotten how to smooth down my skirts and cast down my eyes.
I did not consider what I would say to him, nor did I plan what I might do. I just waited like a dog waits for his master. I just waited in pain, as a dog will do with its paw caught in a trap and there is nothing to do but to wait; not understanding what the pain is, not knowing what can be done. Just enduring. Just waiting.
I heard the clock strike four and then half past before the side door opened and Daniel came out, calling a farewell and closing the door behind him. He had a flask of some green liquid in one hand, and when he came to the gate he started in the wrong direction, away from home. I was in a sudden terror that he was going to visit his lover, and that I, like some suspicious wife, would be caught spying on him. At once I crossed the road and ran up to him.
“Daniel!”
“Hannah!” His pleasure in seeing me was unfeigned. But after one glance at my white face he said: “Is there something wrong? Are you ill?”
“No,” I said, my lip trembling. “I just wanted to see you.”
“And now you do,” he said easily. He drew my hand through his arm. “I have to take this to Widow Jerrin’s house, will you come with me?”
I nodded, and fell into step beside him. I could not keep up. The fullness of my petticoats under my gown prevented me from striding out as I had done when I was a pageboy. I lifted my skirts out to one side but they still hobbled me as if I was a mare, hog-tied in the horse-breaking ring. Daniel slowed down and we walked in silence. He stole a glance at me and guessed from my grim expression that all was not well, but he decided to deal first with the delivery of the medicine.
The widow’s house was one of the older buildings inside the crisscrossing streets of the old town. The houses were packed in under the sheltering bulk of the castle, all the little alleyways overshadowed by the jutting first storeys of the houses that lined them, running north and south and intersected by the next road going east-west.
“When we first came here, I thought I would never find my way round,” he said, making conversation. “And then I learned the names of the taverns. This has been an English town for two hundred years, remember. Every street corner has a ‘Bus
h’ or a ‘Pig and Whistle’ or a ‘Travelers Rest.’ This street has a tavern called ‘The Hollybush.’ There it is.” He pointed to the building with a battered sign swinging outside it.
“I’ll only be a moment.” He turned to a narrow doorway and tapped on the door.
“Ah, Dr. Daniel!” came a woman’s croaking voice from within. “Come in, come in!”
“Ma’am, I cannot,” he said with his easy smile. “My wife is waiting for me and I will walk home with her.”
There was a laugh from inside the house and a remark that she was a lucky girl to have him, and then Daniel emerged, pocketing a coin.
“Now,” he said. “Shall I walk you home around the city walls, m’lady? Get a breath of sea air?”
I tried to smile at him but I was too heartsore. I let him lead me to the end of the street and then along a lane. At the very end of the lane was the towering wall of the town, shallow stone steps running up the inside. We climbed them, up and up, until we got to the ramparts and could look northward toward the horizon where England lay. England, the queen, the princess, my lord: they all seemed a long way away. It seemed to me in that moment that I had known a better life as a fool to a queen than I had being a fool to Daniel and to his stone-hearted mother and his poisonous sisters.
“Now,” he said, matching his steps to mine as we walked along the wall, seagulls crying over our heads and the waves slapping at the stones. “What is the matter, Hannah?”
I did not turn the conversation round and round like a woman would do. I went straight to the heart of it, as if I were still a troubled pageboy and not a betrayed wife. “Your mother tells me that you have got a Calais woman with child,” I said bluntly. “And that you see her and her child three times a week.”
I could feel his stride falter, and when I looked up at him he had lost the color from his cheeks. “Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”
“You should have told me.”
He nodded, marshaling his thoughts. “I suppose I should have done. But if I had told you, would you have married me and come to live with me here?”
“I don’t know. No, probably not.”
“Then you see why I did not tell you.”
“You cozened me and married me on a lie.”
“I told you that you were the one great love of my life, and you are. I told you that I thought we should marry to provide for my mother and for your father, and I still think that we did the right thing. I told you that we should marry so that we might live together, as the Children of Israel, and I could keep you safe.”
“Safe in a hovel!” I burst out.
Daniel recoiled at that: the first time that I had told him directly that I despised his little house. “I am sorry that is what you think of your home. I told you that I hope to provide better for us later.”
“You lied to me,” I said again.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I had to.”
“Do you love her?” I asked. I could hear the pitiful note in my own voice and I pulled my hand from his arm, filled with resentment that love should have brought me so low that I was whimpering at betrayal. I took a step away from him so he could not wrap me close and console me. I did not want to be a girl in love any more.
“No,” he said bluntly. “But when we first came to Calais, I was lonely and she was pretty and warm and good company. If I had any sense I would not have gone with her, but I did.”
“More than once?” I asked, wounding myself.
“More than once.”
“And I suppose you didn’t make love to her with a hand over her mouth so your mother and sisters couldn’t hear?”
“No,” he said shortly.
“And her son?”
His face warmed at once. “He is a baby of about five months old,” he said. “Strong, and lusty.”
“Does she take your name?”
“No. She keeps her own.”
“Does she live with her family?”
“She is in service.”
“They allow her to keep her child?”
“They have a kindness for her, and they are old. They like to have a child around the house.”
“They know that you are the father?”
He nodded his head.
I rocked with shock. “Everyone knows? Your sisters, the priest? Your neighbors? The people who came to our wedding feast and wished me well? Everyone?”
Daniel hesitated. “It’s a small town, Hannah. Yes, I should think everyone knows of it.” He tried to smile. “And now I should think everyone knows that you are rightly angry with me, and that I am begging your pardon. You have to get used to being part of a family, part of a town, part of the People. You are not Hannah on her own any more. You are a daughter and a wife, and one day, I hope you will be a mother.”
“Never!” I said, the word wrung out of me by my anger and my disappointment in him. “Never.”
He caught me to him and held me close. “Don’t say that,” he said. “Not even in rage with me when you would say anything to hurt me back. Not even when I deserve punishment. You know I waited for you and loved you and trusted you even when I thought you were in love with another man and might never come to me. Now you are here and we are married, and I thank God for it. And now you are here we shall make a life, however difficult it has been for us to be together. I shall be your husband and your lover and you will forgive me.”
I wrenched myself from his grip and faced him. I swear if I had had a sword I would have run him through. “No,” I said. “I will never lie with you again. You are false, Daniel, and you called on me to trust you with lies in your mouth. You are no better than any man and I thought you were. You told me that you were.”
He would have interrupted me but the words were pouring out of my mouth like a shower of stones. “And I am Hannah on my own. I don’t belong in this town, I don’t belong with the People, I don’t belong with your mother or your family and you have showed me that I don’t belong with you. I deny you, Daniel. I deny your family, and I deny your people. I will belong to no one and I will be alone.”
I turned on my heel and marched away from him, the tears running hot down my cold cheeks. I was expecting to hear him hurrying after me but he did not come. He let me go and I strode away as if I would walk home across the foam-crested gray waves to England, all the way to Robert Dudley, and tell him that I would be his mistress this very night if he desired it, since I had nothing left to lose. I had tried an honorable love and it had been nothing but lies and dishonesty: a hard road and paid with a false coin at the end.
I strode furiously along the walls until I had done a whole circuit of the town and found myself back overlooking the sea once more at the spot where we had quarreled. Daniel had gone, I had not expected to find him where I had left him. He would have gone home to his supper, and appeared to his family as composed and in control of his feelings as always. Or perhaps he would have gone to dine with his other woman, the mother of his child, as his mother had told me he did, twice a week, in the evenings, when I had stood at the window to watch for him coming and felt sorry for him, working late.
My feet, in the stupid high-heeled girls’ shoes that I now had to wear, were aching from my forced march around the town walls and I limped down the narrow stone stairs to the sally port, through the little gate to the quayside. A handful of fishing boats was making ready to set sail on the evening tide, one of the many small traders who regularly crossed the sea between France and England was loading up with goods: a cart filled with household goods for a family returning to England, barrels of wine for London vintners, baskets of late peaches, early plums, currants, great parcels of finished cloth. A woman at the quayside was parting with her mother, the woman embraced her daughter, pulling her hood up over the girl’s head, as if to keep her warm until they could be together again. The girl had to tear herself away and run up the gangplank and then she leaned over the side of the ship to kiss her hand and wave. The girl might be going into ser
vice in England, she might be leaving home to marry. I thought self-pityingly that I had not been sent out into the world with a mother’s blessing. No one had planned my wedding thinking of my preferences. My husband had been chosen by the matchmaker to make a safe home for my father and for me, and to give Daniel’s mother a grandson. But no home could be safe for us, and she already had a grandson of five months old.
I had a moment’s impulse to run to the ship’s master and ask him what he would take for my passage. If he would let me owe him the fare I could pay when I reached London. I had a desire, like a knife in the belly, to run to Robert Dudley, to return to the queen, to get back to the court where I was valued by many, and desired by my lord, and where nobody could ever betray me and shame me, where I could be the mistress of myself. I had been a fool: a servant, lower than a lady in waiting, less than a musician, on a par perhaps with a favored lap dog; but even as that I had been freer and prouder than I was, standing on the quayside with no money in my pocket, with nowhere to go but Daniel’s home, knowing that he had been unfaithful to me in the past and could be again.
It was dusk by the time I opened the door and stepped over the threshold of our house. Daniel was in the act of swinging on his cape as I came into the shop, my father waiting for him.
“Hannah!” my father exclaimed, and Daniel crossed the room in two strides and took me into his arms. I let him hold me but I looked past him to my father.
“We were coming out to look for you. You’re so late!” my father exclaimed.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think you would be worried about me.”
“Of course we were worried.” Daniel’s mother came halfway down the stairs and leaned over the rail to scold me. “A young lady can’t go running around town at dusk. You should have come home at once.”
I shot her a thoughtful look, but I said nothing.
“I am sorry,” Daniel said, his mouth close to my ear. “Let me talk with you. Don’t be distressed, Hannah.”