As I rode away, I looked over my shoulder at my guardian. After more than two years, I still did not know whether I was merely a costly burden to him or whether true affection lurked in all his well-meaning severity.
Hammering, sawing. Faint and distant, but I knew what they meant. In the next two days, the Gunpowder Plotters were to die, some here at Paul’s and some at the Tower. Listening to the sound of hammers, I tried to decide whether I had seen more than concern on Harington’s face when I left Combe.
The hammering paused. In the brief silence, I understood why I had been brought to London. I was to be seized withoutwarning and beheaded, along with the Plotters! That was why I had travelled in such secrecy, lest my fate raise a wake of protest among the common people who had cheered so loudly for Henry and me. Their cheers had meant nothing, just as my father said.
I saw now why not even my mother knew I was in London – for she had neither visited nor sent a greeting. I saw why I hadn’t been allowed to go to Whitehall or to send a message to anyone. And why Anne had been kept behind, so she would not be tainted with my crimes. The king feared me, his oldest daughter, enough to kill me as his own mother had been killed, for the safety of the English crown.
I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions. But however much I fought it, the conviction that I was right twisted its roots deeper and deeper into my head.
Mrs Hay woke me in what felt like the middle of the night. ‘You are sent for.’
The windows were still dark, with no hint yet of winter sunrise. The air was cold.
I gripped her hands. ‘Do you know why? Tell me! I won’t cry out, I swear.’ My heart pounded. If I were to die, I needed time to ready myself. This wasn’t fair! Not possible… ‘Where must I go?’ I could not imagine dying.
‘To the Bishop’s little study.’
‘Not to the Churchyard?’
‘I was told the study, here in the Bishop’s house.’
‘Only the Bishop’s study?’ I burst into tears.
‘Oh…!’ Mrs Hay stared, uncertain what to do. She hadn’t held me for more than six years. Then she reached out and clutched my head to her breast. ‘No. No! You mustn’t think such things!’ She smoothed my wild hair. ‘How can you think it?’
I heard a pause while she did indeed think how the thought might have occurred. A new spasm of terror quivered through me.
‘What does the king want with me?’
Mrs Hay sounded less confident than before. ‘His majesty’s at Whitehall, not here. And means to go hunting, or so I’m told.’ She stroked my head again. ‘Four of those Papist fiends are to die today. Grant, Digby, Wintour and Bates. No one else.’
Digby. I was here because of him. Digby must be the reason. I could not think straight.
She fingered a russet tangle at the back of my head, then began to unpick it, hair by hair. ‘I’ll attend you in the Bishop’s study, if they let me.’ As she lifted my heavy hair in both hands to shake it out, I felt a cold draft on my nape.
‘I’ll wear my hair loose today,’ I said. I smelled fear in my armpits. I put my hands on my neck as if to hold my head in place.
A gentleman wearing the Bishop of London’s livery led us to the study, a small room overlooking Paul’s Churchyard on the far side of the Bishop’s house from the chamber where I had slept. Apart from the bishop’s man, Mrs Hay and myself, the room was empty. I had half-expected Cecil to be there. I felt him twined into my fate but did not yet know how.
The bishop’s man gestured towards the window. With Mrs Hay beside me, I looked down through the diamonds of watery glass at the blurred bulk of the scaffold I had heard being built.
Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten. Lanterns and torches still burned. A crowd already packed the space. I could hear it through the closed window, like the sea shuffling pebbles. The Bishop’s man opened the window so that I could see more clearly.
The blades of halberds pricked the chilly air above the crowd, where men-at-arms stood stationed in every doorway, enough of them to stop a possible rescue attempt, which such a great crowd might allow. Or to put down a civil uprising, like those the plotters had believed would takeplace across England in support of the Catholic cause – and which the government still feared, to judge by that army in the courtyard.
Dignitaries stood crowded onto the scaffold close below me, talking amongst themselves as if in a waiting room in Whitehall. I was so close I could hear them coughing and clearing their throats. Cecil’s small figure was first hidden, then discovered again, as the others shifted around him.
‘Who is that man standing behind Lord Salisbury?’ I asked Mrs Hay. ‘There, the one with the thin face, who keeps smiling and nodding at the others.’
‘That’s his lordship’s cousin,’ said Mrs Hay. ‘Sir Francis Bacon. Their mothers are sisters.’ She tried to think what else to tell me. ‘He writes a great deal.’
Though much taller and better formed, Bacon lacked his little cousin’s authority. I watched him for a moment. He reminded me of an anxious dog, sniffing and wagging his tail at the other men on the scaffold. Then I forgot him.
The hangman was quietly and methodically testing his ropes and knots. It would begin soon. Soon they would be making me ready, pinning up my hair, removing my collar.
Then reason pulled me back from my leap to certainty. They were not preparing me, reason pointed out. I was here, looking down, buffered by staircases and corridors, not in a cell or a room more convenient to the Churchyard with a bishop praying over me and inviting me to repent.
I was not going to die today. Other traitors would die – real traitors, not an ugly troll of my father’s imagination that pretended to be me. I was not here to die but to watch.
I felt the solid thump of truth. This was the clarifying sight that my father promised me in Coventry.
I stepped back from the window.
The Bishop’s man gestured politely for me to return to my position.
With sudden clarity, I heard my father’s avid voice in myhead, as he questioned the bishop’s man. ‘How did she bear it? Tell me,
mon!
Did she avert her eyes? At which death did she flinch the most? Did she seem to know any of them? Did she weep?’
I was still on trial.
I waved the man aside and noted that he took a position from which he could see my face.
Below me, the edgy crowd moved as one. Heads turned all in the same direction and craned to see over their neighbours. The dignitaries standing on the scaffold turned. Through the crowd, I saw the bobbing heads of three horses. Voices in the crowd shrieked curses at the prisoners. A fourth horse approached from the Gatehouse, where a woman was screaming. Then I heard a small boy’s voice cry, ‘Tata! Tata!’ before a hand muffled him. The shouting of the crowd grew louder. A tussle broke out. Men-at-arms broke from the doorways.
Mrs Hay turned away from the window. ‘I’m over here, if you need me, my lady.’ She sat on a stool in the corner. After a moment, she gave our watcher a look and pulled out a defiant handkerchief.
Four horse-drawn hurdles broke out of the crowd, carrying the condemned men. They stopped at the foot of the scaffold. A woman struggled out of the crowd, threw herself down onto one of the prisoners and clung to him, weeping. Men-at-arms hauled her off and lifted the men up from the hurdles.
The reek of sweaty animal excitement rose from the crowd. The horses stamped and tossed their heads. A torch juddered below the window, sending up gusts of pine and burning pitch.
There was a moment of consultation and confusion. Then the first man to die climbed the steps onto the scaffold. I gripped the windowsill. I could not breathe.
Though Digby was changed, I recognised him clearly. He still had golden hair, but no sunlight dappled his head and shoulders. He stood close enough to me that I could see beard stubble darkening his chin. In the strange dull light of early morning, he looked pale and heavy-eyed, as if he had not slept during his last night before eternal sleep. Even when about to die, he kept his air of amiability, lost only in our last desperate moments of struggle.
Then I realised that I could not hear the other man in the room breathing. His attention had fastened onto me so intently that his breathing echoed my own. Over my shoulder, I saw Mrs Hays’s eyes on me. Surely, she did not doubt me, as well! Had the air at Combe hummed with suspicions about me that I never heard?
The small boy again cried out to his father. ‘Ta ta!’ Digby turned his head to the sound and smiled at his son’s voice. His straight back and erect head reminded me of Henry. He opened his mouth to speak.
The crowd grew more silent than a playhouse.
Don’t look up! I begged. I could not bear it, if he saw that I was there but dared not acknowledge him. The shame… Given what he had done and tried to do, I didn’t understand why I should care, but I did.
In a strong clear voice, Digby admitted that he had broken the law. He apologised to the king. He asked forgiveness of God, the king, and of all the kingdom.
Heads nodded. There were murmurs of approval in the crowd.
But these were fatal admissions for me, if I had been mired in the plot by their confessions.
‘… but Father Garnet knew nothing of our plot,’ he was saying. ‘The Jesuit priests knew nothing.’ No one else knew what they had intended.
He lifted his head to my window. His eyes locked onto mine for an instant but moved on before I had time to respond.
In a clear voice he insisted that only the plotters themselves had known what they meant to do. No one else. No one!
He kept turning his face to include the whole crowd and all the people watching from all the windows, but I knew that he spoke to me and to any others who feared betrayal. He could not have known for certain that I was there, nor at which window. But he had guessed that perhaps I might be there, or had sent someone to report to me.
Relief unstrung my joints. I leaned harder on the sill.
Digby had not betrayed me in his confession, after all, whatever Cecil had implied. I was certain of it now. We shared a strange intimacy after our encounter in the forest. He was a good man, as I had told him. The wrong one for the task. As an abductor, he had tried not to alarm me. Even when about to die, he tried to console and reassure. I was certain of it. My relief was as intense as my earlier conviction that I was about to die.
Don’t cry! Don’t cry, with those eyes watching you, waiting to report every blink of eyelid and twitch of your lips. I felt myself growing older in a rush, like music played too fast or the riffled pages of a book.
Cecil had been testing me with his hints of confession, just as my father had been testing me, but with more subtlety. They didn’t know what had happened in the forest at Combe after all. They had nothing more than suspicion to hold against me.
I pushed away the memory of Cecil’s warning nod when I had been about to blab to the king. And the sharp-cornered question of my letter to Henry.
I watched Digby take his leave of the courtiers gathered on the scaffold. He took their hands with such friendly good will that he might have been setting out on a hopeful sea voyage to the Americas. A strong young man in his prime, sailing off on his next adventure.
Then he was climbing the ladder. He bent his head to acceptthe noose. Was pushed off the ladder, jerked, kicked, swung only briefly before being cut down, choking but still alive, and delivered to the butchers’ knives.
I closed my eyes, not caring who saw me. I wanted to stop my ears. The greatest courage in the world could not suppress his scream at disembowelment. Cries from the crowd beat at my ears, of fury mixed with grief. Women screeched and wailed. I imagined I still heard his reassuring voice above the crowd, but it wasn’t possible, because, when I opened my eyes, a man was holding aloft his heart, shouting, ‘Here is the heart of a traitor!’
I felt a heavy downward pull. All my weight was sinking into my feet. My eyes blurred and my head swam.
Don’t fall! I was the First Daughter of England.
I leaned my elbows on the sill, as if to see better. Three more to go. God have mercy on them!
The First Daughter would not close her eyes again. Let that weasel-spy report that I watched without flinching. Though it was wicked for me even to imagine that I suffered. I locked my knees.
I tried to call up my wolf. Tried with her help to look through the scene under the Bishop’s window into the vast scoured space below the crags, at the combs of rain scraping the distant mountains. The mist blowing in to cover the dragon crouching in the Firth.
A second prisoner was pushed up the steps of the scaffold.
Perched on the Cat Nick, I narrowed my eyes and tried to peer down into the chasm between Edinburgh and the crags, at Holyrood Palace at the bottom of the valley, like treasure sunk at the bottom of a lake. Where I had spent my last days of happy childhood, that short wonderful time with my mother and Henry. All three together for the first and last time, before I was hauled away from my true home and slammed down here in this damp green country where they tore out the hearts of golden young men.
‘… Robert Wintour, will you renounce…?’ a voice intoned below me.
The hearts of the best and most chivalrous men, I thought. The golden heroes. The near-perfect knights, Catholic or not. Henry’s perfection was already turning the love of the people towards him and terrifying our father.
Wintour was climbing the ladder to the noose.
I tried to conjure up a wind off the northern sea to fill my ears. My eyes followed the long ascending spine of the Holy Mile up, up, clambering over hard, sharp grey rock to Edinburgh Castle itself, like a jagged outcrop of cliffs at the very top.
I heard another scream, then the thud of blades on a butcher’s block. The next severed head was offered to the sight of the crowd. The next heart.
Wintour gone.
Strident voices from below me drowned out the rush of wind from the Firth. Though invisible through the cloud, the rising sun was warming the blanket of grey that pressed down on London. I must stand through two more deaths to show my father that I could not be broken. My forest sprite had died, but he had protected me. The reflection of a torch flared as a window swung closed. I could smell smoke and blood.