The King’s Daughter

Even the loyal Mrs Hay was willing to whisper how the Scottish king had been happy to take the English crown from the same hand that had signed the warrant for his own mother’s death.

The young man picked up his sword, dropped in our struggle. ‘I can’t let you go.’

He must know as I did that he was almost certainly a dead man now, sooner or later, no matter what happened to me.

And I could no longer scream for help, even if I could be heard. Not now that I knew what he intended.

I shifted my weight onto my hurt ankle as slowly as a cat stalking a bird. The ankle felt cold and watery with pain but held, just. I tried to read him as I would a new dog or horse. ‘I also see that you don’t want to do this. I think you’d rather let me go.’

Startled eyes met mine. I hopped my good foot back beside the other. ‘I think you’re a good man and something has gone wrong.’

‘If you knew…!’ he agreed fervently. ‘But I have no choice now.’

Our panting seemed to fill the low vault of arching trees. In his face, I could still see a last gleam of my enchanted prince. ‘I thought at first you were under a curse,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t entirely wrong, after all.’

And in a different story, we might have been friends. I hopped another step.

‘I’m damned,’ he whispered.

I begged my courage rise up to fill that cold hollow space inside me. ‘I trusted you when I first saw you,’ I said.

‘That’s why Robin…’ He caught himself. ‘…why I was sent alone. For fear that you would take fright at a group of armed men.’

I straightened my back to give my courage room to rise. Please, I begged. At first it felt as fluid as water, flowing into my limbs, rising through my belly and chest. Slowly, another stronger creature, that was both me and something else far greater than I was forced its way up through the tight column of my throat until it reached my eyes.

I burned my attacker with a wolf’s fierce gaze. ‘Is my father already dead?’ Even stiffened by courage, I didn’t dare ask about Henry.

‘I don’t know. But it makes no difference now. It’s too late to turn back!’ He looked at me, his mouth slightly open. ‘I beg you, forgive me, your grace, I never meant…’

‘I think you should run,’ said the young she-wolf steadily. ‘As fast as you can.’

He closed his eyes. ‘Holy Mother, protect me…!’ His sword shook in his hand.

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 see whether 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.

3

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 against my 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 knewenough 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 was teaching 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?

4

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.

‘Go first to Windsor. If Prince Henry isn’t there, go on to Richmond then on to Oatlands and last London and Whitehall. Don’t rest till you find my brother and give him my letter.’

He mounted. I looked up at him. ‘Let no one but my brother see that letter,’ I repeated. With one hand on Clapper’s neck, I walked beside them out of the stable yard.

Clapper’s hoofs rang like gunshots in the cold morning air. I looked up at the house. No curious faces appeared at the windows. It made no difference now, in any case. The absence of man and horse could not be kept secret for long on this small estate.

From the gate of the main courtyard, I watched Abel trot away up the long tree-lined avenue burdened with treason, my life tucked inside his jacket. Even on Clapper, he seemed a frail vessel to carry so much weight.

I could not bear to go back into the dense vaulted shadows of Combe Manor, once an abbey, now turned private house. I felt that God had never quite loosed His chilly grip on the place, even though He had been turned out more than sixty years before. I limped around the brick-paved courtyard along the walls of the three wings of the house. Still not ready to fall back under God’s stern eye, I turned right into the gardens lying in the elbow of the river Smite, where I soaked my shoes leaving a dark ragged trail through the dew on the grass. I was not good at waiting.

The Haringtons returned before sundown. They brought no news of disturbance abroad nor death in London. Lady Harington, short, wiry and as sharp-eyed as a sparrow hawk, at once spotted my wet shoes and sent me to change them. I waited for Lord Harington to ask me about Abel White and Clapper. But he said nothing about the absence of either horse or groom. We prayed as we always did before every meal. I would have begged to eat in my bed again but Lord Harington always fussed so much over my health that it seemed easier to brave the table than his concern.

Supper passed as quietly and tediously as always. The Haringtons, never talkative, chewed and sipped quietly as if a demon might not, at this very moment, be crashing about doing damage I could not bear to imagine.

I half-raised my spoon of onion and parsnip stew then set it back down on my plate. A pent-up force seemed to distend my chest. Any moment, it would burst upwards and escape like lightning flashing along my hair.

‘What news?’ I wanted to shout. ‘What is happening in the world outside Combe?’

At Dunfermline and Linlithgow palaces, when I was merely the girl-child of a Scottish king who already had two surviving sons, I had stolen time for games in the stables with the grooms, including Abel, and with the waiting footmen, maids and messengers. I had known all the kitchen family and listened while they thought I played. I heard all their gossip, suitable for my ears, and otherwise. Now that I was at last old enough to understand what I heard, I had been elevated into an English princess, third in line to the joint crowns of England and Scotland. Who must be kept safely buried in this damp green place where everyone treated me with tedious and uninformative respect.

I knocked over my watered ale.

Lord Harington gazed at me in concern with his constantly anxious eyes. ‘Are you certain that your injuries yesterday weren’t more serious than you say, your grace?’

‘Perhaps a little more shaken,’ I muttered. Though I sometimes thought him a tiresome old man, Lord Harington was kind. I did not like lying to him. I didn’t know what I would tell him when he at last asked why Clapper was gone.

Then it occurred to me that he might be pretending that all was well. He might have been instructed to lull me into false security until men-at-arms could arrive from London to arrest me. I caught my glass as it almost toppled a second time.

When we were preparing for bed, Anne gave a little cry. ‘What did you do to your arm?’

I looked down at the line of fingertip bruises along the bone. I brushed at them as if they were smudges of ash. ‘I must have done it yesterday while riding.’

I wondered suddenly if Anne had been set by her uncle to spy on me.

5

For a second sleepless night, I lay in my bed in the darkness, waiting, not knowing what I was waiting for. I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the ghostly abbot if he should decide to visit. Tonight, however, I didn’t fear him. My head was too crowded to deal with one thing more. I lay thinking how past events, which seemed to have nothing at all to do with you, could shape your life.

I could hear again Mrs Hay’s whispers of treason and danger as she readied me for bed.

Ruthven. Gowrie. Morton. The names thumped in my pulse.

Treachery and knives. Ruthven and Gowrie, kidnappers and possible murderers. The child king, my father, no older than I was, standing courageously against his attackers. Morton, the regent who betrayed him and died on the scaffold. My father signing execution warrants when only a child.

‘Never listen to the gossip that calls him a coward,’ Mrs Hay had warned me. ‘His majesty had a terrible life for a wee bairn, royal or not. Being made king so young did him no favours. That Scotland you pine for is a fierce and wild place, ruled by unruly chiefs who call themselves “nobles”…I don’t know what you do to make knots in your hair like this!’

I always wanted to tell her that if I were a boy, I would have liked to be one of those unruly chiefs.

But I was her golden girl, her royal pet, her child, her life. I was her Responsibility, she said, which was a fearful weighty thing, which she carried nevertheless with a whole heart. She had to prepare me for my future without making false promises of joy in this life, though she was generous on behalf of the Hereafter.

So I stopped telling her what I felt. When very young, I had tried to tell her what I truly thought about a good many things but soon learned that she would only look stricken, as if someone had accused her of failure, and tell me to remember who I was. And to be grateful that my father wanted me kept safe as he himself had never been.

Tediously safe, I had thought. Until today, when the demons had arrived at Combe.

Henry? Can you hear me? We are both in danger.

I pressed my thoughts out into the night. I often spoke to my brother as one spoke to God. Even though I loved Henry more than I loved God, I told myself that God could never be jealous. Jealousy was a mortal weakness. God knew that Henry deserved to be loved. He was God’s perfect, shining knight.

I had seldom seen the king, my father. But, so far as I remembered him before he set off on his separate journey to London, he cut a poor figure beside his eldest son. Our father was thick-bodied and short-legged where Henry, though not over-tall, was slim, fair and well-formed. Our father was awkward and given to coarse wit, where Henry had a soldier’s bearing and the seriousness of a full-grown man.

I knew that I was not alone in my high opinion of my brother. At all the great houses where we had stopped on our progress south, we were entertained by poetry and songs praising us both, but chiefly Henry, who would one day be king. At Althorpe one poet, Mr Jonson, wrote in his entertainment that Henry was: