I had to tempt him to rewrite this story. I felt certain that he wanted to. ‘It doesn’t have to be too late,’ I said. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you truly intend. If you go now, I won’t raise an alarm.’
He shook his head.
‘You don’t believe me? Don’t you see why I can’t raise an alarm? Why I must not even admit that you exist?’
I might be just a slip of a girl, but even I could see why no one must ever connect me to him and his friends. I knew suddenly that, though he was a grown man armed with a sword, my wits were quicker than his.
He kept shaking his head.
‘You’re a fool! But not wicked enough.’ I eased back another step. ‘They sent the wrong man. I swear I won’t betray you. Save yourself, if you can.’
I watched his eyes as I watch those of a new hound to seewhether it means to lick my hand or bite. ‘Whatever you and your friends are plotting, you must stop it, so I can try to save myself.’ I saw struggle in his blue eyes. ‘Neither of us wants to be here.’
‘No,’ he whispered.
‘Then we must simply agree that we’re not here and never were. If I don’t betray you, what crime will you have committed?’ I held my breath.
‘You’re scarce more than a child and don’t understand men’s affairs.’ Then he went still, in that moment-of-just-before. Just before a dog is unleashed. Just before a bow-man releases his bolt or the dangling pig’s throat is cut. I had seen men gather themselves up like that before, when they had to do something unpleasant.
‘You must come with me,’ he said. ‘Please don’t make me hurt you.’
I had lost him.
But I wouldn’t die on the scaffold like my grandmother! Because that was how I would end, if I let him take me to these ‘friends'. Better to die now, with only a short time for fear. Struggling, perhaps not even noticing the fatal blow. Better that than to wait blindfolded for the first blow of the axe, and the second and the third. Better that my Belle not creep whimpering out from under my skirts, like my grandmother’s little dog, covered with my blood, to sniff at my severed head.
‘I won’t come!’
He shook his head, avoiding my eyes.
I tightened my grip on my dirk.
‘I can’t be queen if I’m dead.’
‘I swear that I won’t kill you.’
‘But I will.’
He stepped towards me.
I placed the tip of the dirk in the hollow at the base of my throat. I felt the point prick my skin. I took another step back.
Don’t think! Don’t think! Be ready to push… twist… Just do it!
‘It’s harder than you imagine,’ he said. But I had made him uncertain again.
I hopped back another step. He started to follow.
‘Don’t misjudge my age or sex! I’m not a child, whatever you may think.’ The young she-wolf looked him in the eyes. ‘And I’m not one of your delicate English ladies, neither. I’m a Scottish barbarian. I cut the shoulder of a stag when I was seven.’ I hobbled another step. The she-wolf still knew that I would use the dirk. My eyes told him so.
And another step.
He wavered, sword half-raised.
‘God speed you!’ I turned my back with the knife still at my throat.
Breathe in. Hop. Breathe in. Hop.
The courage-wolf inside me gobbled up the pain.
Breathe in. Hop.
I listened for his footsteps over the sound of my own breathing.
Around a bend in the track, then past a hazel clump. I began to hope. Unreasonably, that fragile physical barrier between us made me feel safer.
Breathe in. Hop. And again. And again.
Suddenly, the pain returned. I stopped, dizzy with pain. I looked back. Through the screen of brown hazel leaves, I could see him only in parts. He sat on his heels in the middle of the track, rocking, with his head in his hands.
Get out of England! I urged him silently. As far away from me as possible!
‘Robin,’ he had said, ‘a band of armed men.’
There were others, but how many? And what were they doing at this very moment? What did they intend? Oh, God! I begged. Please let Henry be unharmed!
The snake word ‘treason’ coiled around my throat and tightened. I must warn Henry. But how, without entangling myself in treason?
A fine deep tremor began in the bones of my legs. I leaned my hand on a beech trunk. My heart felt smothered, as if it didn’t have room to beat. I tugged at my stomacher and bodice again. Distractedly, I picked broken twigs and leaves from my skirt and sleeves. The smell of fear rose from under my arms. I felt small and empty. My wolf had left me. I was on my own again.
I hobbled on. Now I had to return to my attendants and try to lie.
Trey raced up covered with mud and bits of dead leaf from rolling on the ground. Then he galloped ahead and back again, reproaching me for my slowness.
I had been such a fool!
If only our thoughts could leap across distances.
Take care, beloved brother. Take care! I don’t know where you are. I don’t even know what I must warn you about.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ my would-be kidnapper had said. Please, God, let someone tell me what is happening.
Henry and I had been kept apart from birth, he at Stirling Castle under the rod of Lord Mar, I at Dunfermline and Linlithgow with Lady Kildare. But when we met at Holyrood before coming south to England, we had recognised each other as true kin in our first shy glance. Henry, who would one day be king, would know what I should do next.
Are you still alive?
It did not seem possible that Combe would still be standing when we got back.
On the riverbank, the grooms were asleep on the grass. Lady Anne Dudley Sutton, a niece chosen by my guardian to be my chief companion, was making a necklace of plaited grass.
‘What has happened to you?’ cried one of the two older ladies with the beginning of alarm.
‘Twisted my ankle,’ I said. ‘Slipped from a fallen log.’ Only half a lie.
The ladies clicked their tongues over my ankle and promised a poultice. They exchanged amused glances while they re-pinned my sleeves and skirt without further questions. This time, at least, past misbehaviour worked in my favour.
To my relief both my guardian and his wife were away when we returned to Combe and would not return that night. But I had to let Mrs Hay resume her former role as my nurse, and order my fire built higher and fuss over my ankle with cool cloths and ointments. I agreed to eat my supper propped up on pillows in my big canopied bed. I stroked the four upright carved oak lions that held up the canopy and protected me from bad dreams. But tonight they stared past me with blank, denying eyes.
There was no help for it, I decided as I tried to force down some pigeon pie. I must risk implicating myself with guilty knowledge and warn Henry. If any harm came to him that might have been avoided, I would have to kill myself after all. I would not let myself think that the harm might already be done. I pushed aside the chicken broth. I asked Anne to fetch my pen and ink.
‘You don’t understand men’s affairs,’ the man in the forest had said. He was right. My life was being shaped by events I might know nothing about until it was too late. But I knew enough to know that my father’s demons had followed us here to his Promised Land and threatened both Henry and me.
When I was younger, Mrs Hay had often put me to bed with tales that kept me wide awake in the dark for hours, tales even more terrifying than the servants’ whispers of a ghostly abbot who sometimes stalked through my bed-chamber, which had once been his.
Vivid against the shadowy canopy overhead, I saw the sword tip held to my grandmother’s pregnant belly while my father still lay curled inside. My grandfather’s sword tip, threatening his own wife and unborn son. My father almost killed by his own father, Lord Darnley, while he was still in the womb. Then I saw Darnley murdered, his twisted body blown out of his bed by a mysterious explosion, lying dead under an apple tree. I saw my grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scotland, beheaded because Protestant Queen Elizabeth believed her guilty of plotting with Catholics to usurp the English crown.
‘Papists,’ whispered Mrs Hay. ‘The devilish spawn of Rome.’ She kept her voice down because my Danish mother was a Catholic and one never knew who might be listening. But she did not hesitate to call my Grandmother Mary by her Scottish nickname – ‘The Strumpet of Rome'.
I learned that there had been two Catholic plots againstmy father here in England, before his backside had even touched the English throne. The Bye and The Main, I repeated silently to myself.
When very young, I did not understand. Then, shortly after we came south, I had lost my own sweet governess, Lady Kildare. Her husband had plotted to kill my father in one of the Catholic plots. Though he was executed, she had survived. But my lovely, lively guardian, whom I loved dearly and who held my young heart in her care as tenderly as a mother, was wrenched from my life for fear that I might catch treason from her like the plague. I learned then about the bloody struggle between Papists, who were still loyal to the Catholic Pope in Rome, and the newer Protestants, a struggle set off in England by the old queen’s father, Henry VIII, my brother’s namesake.
‘Holy Mother, protect me!’ my forest spirit had cried.
It was happening again.
If anyone learned of our meeting – or even of his intent – I was tainted by treason for a second time. And I knew enough from Mrs Hay to be afraid of more than Papists.
My father’s demon enemies were here in England, like the supernatural
fanes
and
trowies
who are invisible until they show themselves. In the dreams I had after my nurse’s stories, I saw devils riding on skeleton horses, the faces of dead men taking shape in the dust of the road. The sons of executed men clung to my father’s back whispering vengeance in his ear. No River Jordan cut off his English Paradise to leave all his Scottish ghosts behind, shouting impotently and shaking their fists on the far bank. They rode south with him.
I knew from Mrs Hay that my father still searched his closet himself, every night before going to bed, for hidden assassins and still wore a doublet cross-quilted with thick padding to stop a knife. The fine embroidery over his chest and belly was laid with enough metal wire to dull any blade.
I don’t know if Mrs Hay ever saw what else she wasteaching me along with respect for my father’s youthful courage. I couldn’t think what wires or quilted padding could armour him against knowing that he had accepted the English throne from the woman who signed his own mother’s death warrant. My father had acquiesced to the death of my grandmother… his own mother. How could his children feel safe?
I tossed in the darkness. In spite of the poultice, my ankle throbbed. Having written the letter to Henry, I didn’t know where to send it. At different times, I had heard that the king had lodged him at Oatlands, Windsor, Richmond and Whitehall.
When the sky began to lighten the next morning but before the sun rose, I struggled into a loose gown and cloak and limped out of the house to the Combe stables. They were still dark, although a few horses had begun to stamp and bump in their stalls. I tiptoed unevenly through the dusty air and smells of horse and hay to find my groom, Abel White, who had ridden with me from Scotland and with whom I had once played in the Dunfermline stables.
He was asleep in a cocoon of blankets in the box stall of one of my mares. I shook him awake.
He groaned, then peered. ‘My lady!’
‘I need you to serve me on a secret mission,’ I whispered. My breath made a pale cloud in the chilly air.
His sleepy eyes widened. He scrambled to his feet. ‘Gladly! Yes, your grace. Always!’
My mare, Wainscot, stamped her feet, whuffled and nuzzled hopefully at the side of my neck.
‘It’s too early for your breakfast,’ I pushed her away and gave Abel my letter to Henry. ‘No one but Prince Henry must see this. I’m trusting you with my life.’
He nodded seriously. ‘I will protect it with my own.’ He put the letter into his purse, then hooked his jacket tightly over the purse.
As if I were one of the sparrows perched on the beams above our heads, I saw the two of us, there in the shadows of the horse barn, barely grown, now echoing in deadly earnest the adventure games we had once played together as children.
‘Take Clapper,’ I said. ‘He’s strongest.’ I gave him a purse holding most of my precious half-yearly allowance from Lord Harington. ‘Use this to hire another horse if he grows too tired and to stable him well.’
I watched while he saddled up Clapper, a solid, roan Ardennais gelding strong enough to carry an armoured man. Then he led the horse out into the stable yard.
The sky had now committed itself to the day. I held the reins and leaned against Clapper’s strong, warm neck to stop my shivering while Abel went to make his excuse to a fellow groom for missing the morning chores.
‘There you are!’ Wearing a cloak over her night-dress, my companion, Anne Dudley, picked her way towards me across the brick paving, looking both rumpled and alarmed. ‘I woke up and saw that you were gone! Vanished! Nowhere in the room! I couldn’t think where you had gone… my heart is still thumping! I thought perhaps your injuries had suddenly worsened and you had died in the night. Or else been kidnapped from the bed.’
I looked at her sharply but saw only worry in her blue eyes. ‘Would you like to come with me for an early morning ride?’ I asked. ‘To watch the sun rise?’
Accustomed by now to my sudden fancies, she shivered. ‘I’d rather go back to bed, your grace.’
Abel came out of the horse barn.
‘I’ve said I’m going for an early ride,’ I told him in Scots, with a glance over my shoulder at Anne retreating across the yard.
Abel looked worried and jerked his head back at the barn. ‘I’ve told them I’m riding on an errand for you but not where or why.’ He continued in Scots to confuse any curious Warwickshire ears inside the barn.
I nodded. I’d untangle our stories later. I stroked Clapper’s muzzle until Anne had disappeared again through the stable yard gate.