The King’s Daughter

I could read only one conclusion. Abel had failed in his mission for me.

After supper that night, I sat beside my fire holding the sprig of rue between my palms willing it to tell me more.

The reappearance of Clapper cracked open the door holding back the future. It told me that, like the warmth of a morning bed, this life was going to end. Just as someone elsewhere had chosen to send back my horse, my true life elsewhere would begin whenever my father willed it. I could not let Combe and its people take root in my heart. I had merely borrowed this world and would soon have to give it back. I had no colours, or tastes, or smells for what awaited me.

I begged my tutors to tell me about Italy, France, Spain and the German states, in any of which I might, or might not, find myself living for the rest of my life.

I coaxed Mrs Hay to visit me at bedtime as she had once done. While Anne lay goggle-eyed beside me, my old nurse told me yet again the tales of my family’s past, carrying the seeds of my future.

I watched the Haringtons together. I listened to the tone of their voices, watched what distances they kept between them, noted their exchange of glances, trying to sniff out the dark truth about this mysterious thing, marriage that made my father threaten me with it as the alternative to execution.

A perverse impatience began to press like a belch in my gullet. I hated my own helplessness and the false safety of Combe. Knowing the worst would be better than knowing nothing. At least then, I could try to think what to do.

I would fall asleep each night holding the fragment of stone from the crags in one hand, cradling the smuggled Belle with my other arm. I was a creature of marsh and granite, temporarily asleep, buried in a green, green forest. But I could hear hoof beats in the distance, drawing closer.

12

‘We might have been given more warning!’ Lady Harington sawed at her roast meat so fiercely that her ear-drops flashed and her lace collar quivered. She gave up and slammed down her knife. Her small hands made fists on the table.

‘One would think a shell had exploded in the forecourt,’ said her husband mildly. ‘It’s only a summons to London for a short time.’ He tugged unhappily at his moustaches, so hard that the end of his long bony nose was moved from side to side.

Lady Harington snorted. ‘Do you imagine that duration makes any difference to her grace’s needs? If she’s to be presented to a king, it matters not one whit whether she stands there for an hour or for five days.’

‘It might matter to her,’ my guardian murmured

My Uncle Christian, who was my mother’s brother and King of Denmark, was coming to England. I must join the English court in London to be presented to my visiting uncle.

‘His majesty could land in England at any time,’ said Lady Harington. ‘We must all pray for contrary winds. Not tempests,’ she added hastily. ‘Merely winds from the wrong direction, and strong enough to delay his arrival until I can arrange what is needed.’

Her husband sighed and nodded.

Suddenly, I needed new gowns, embroidered smocks, standing collars, falling collars, and stomachers. To go on show before a foreign king, the First Daughter of England must have embroidered slippers, jewelled sleeves, silk stockings, gloves, purses, handkerchiefs. I overheard orders for pearls by the pound and silver lace by the bale and hoped that my guardian’s cousin had managed to arrange extra money to repay Lord Harington for these expenses.

All at once, there was no time for riding, no escape to stables or garden. I had to stand still for measuring and fittings, while tailors and dress-makers from Coventry shook out stiff rustling taffetas and satins and cooed and knelt with their lips clamped tight on pins and turned me a half inch this way or that.

‘She must take gifts to give to her new people,’ I overheard Lord Harington say to his wife in despair. ‘Surely, she will now be given a full household. Wherever shall I find the money to buy all those necessary scent bottles and pieces of gold and silver plate?’

‘She must have them, all the same,’ replied Lady Harington. ‘We, and our care for her, will be under scrutiny at Whitehall just as much as she.’

As urgently as new gowns, I needed final instruction from Lady H, which she crammed into me like last-minute stockings into a travelling chest.

‘You will become a magnet for the ambitious,’ she warned. ‘All wanting something from you. We’ve protected you from such people here at Combe. But in Whitehall…’ She rolled her eyes just enough to make clear her doubts about the protection I would find in London. ‘These climbers will try to turn your head with flattery, to win your favour. I hope you’ve learned here to be sensible enough to disbelieve them all.’

‘Oh, yes, madam.’

‘Distrust all compliments as flattery.’

‘Yes, madam,’ I said with less fervour. Was it not possible that an occasional compliment might be deserved?

‘Take special care with your new ladies, for I’m certain you will have some, even for a short visit.’ Her eyes narrowed as if assessing these distant figures. ‘Every one of them will be someone’s creature. They will report everything you do. Never forget. Beware, in particular of the rival noble families. The Howards will no doubt insert one of their bitches into the hunting pack. They can’t bear not always to be at the centre. And Northumberland will also buy a place for one of his nieces…Serving you will be a sure step to a good marriage.’

She frowned at a rabbit embroidered in fine red wool on one of my new smocks. ‘I may be only a countrywoman, but I know a thing or two about how things run there in London. And there’s Lord Salisbury to fear, of course, Robert Cecil…the twisted little son of Burleigh. The Chief Secretary has an intelligencer placed in every noble house in England…and in France too, I’ve no doubt. One of your women or grooms will most certainly be reporting to him.’

Anne had been listening with open dismay. ‘Will you not keep me as one of your ladies?’

‘Anne!’ said her aunt. ‘Don’t subject poor Lady Elizabeth to petitions already!’

I tried to imagine being without that placid, agreeable and slightly dull presence beside me, night and day. Warm, breathing, often less amusing than my monkey or dogs, but able to converse, to ask my opinion and able to understand my instructions.

‘But I must have Anne with me!’ I cried. I forgot how tedious I sometimes found her chattering.

Faced with Howards and all those other treacherous creatures described by Lady Harington, I could not imagine doing without Anne. ‘You must be my Lady of Honour!’

‘Yes!’ cried Anne. ‘Thank you, my lady!’ She turned to her aunt. ‘Now I must have some new gowns too! May I have one with satin bows at the waist? I am so fond of bows!’

Lady Harington nodded. Though she had reproved Anne for asking, my lady guardian could not hide her gratification at my choice of her niece. ‘You must keep each other steady,’ she said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t either of you make an enemy of Lady Elizabeth’s steward. You have no idea what petty tyranny that person can exercise over your daily life.’

At that moment, I wanted Lady Harington to come with me too, to guide me in a world that clearly would not be like Combe.

‘I will dine with my mother again, as I did when I visited her at Holyrood Palace,’ I told Anne that night. ‘The two of us together, in her little closet, which had a beautiful red, blue and gold painted ceiling, and a fire, and with only one or two of her ladies.’ Anne would fall asleep while I listed the delicacies we had eaten and the games we had played together after eating.

I did not tell Anne about the other scenes I imagined. In London my mother would take me in her arms again as she had at Holyrood. She would kiss my forehead, and look closely at me to see what sort of creature I had become, and say how much I had grown since she saw me last. I imagined how I might even, in time, tell her what had happened to me in the forest, so that she could tell me how brave I had been.

But in darker moments, I feared this London visit. I had not seen my mother for so long that I half-distrusted my memories of her. And I scarcely knew my younger brother, poor sickly Baby Charles, whom the queen had kept closer by her on the journey south than either Henry or me. I did not know where Charles was now, nor in whose care. I feared that Henry might no longer love me after being so long apart. The thought of my father stabbed my belly like a knife. Someone, somewhere, had my treasonous letter. In London, I might learn who had it. At such moments, I did not want ever to leave Combe.

In the end, God did not dare to deny Lady Harington’s prayers. Bad weather delayed my uncle for almost six weeks, even though it was already May. I arrived in London, panting for breath so to speak, just before the Danish ships arrived at Gravesend.

13

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, 1606

At Holyrood, Henry had told me that our new people were good soldiers and successful merchants. He led me to believe that they were measured in temperament, being either wily or cheerful, and, when necessary, severe. The crowds I saw on the journey south had been clean, dressed in their finest clothes, and cheerful, made well-behaved by hope for their new monarch. At Combe, Lord Harington’s example led me to believe that the English prayed even more than Scottish Kirk men. But in the bishop’s little study overlooking the scaffold in Paul’s Churchyard, my view of the English darkened.

Tonight, I could not tear my eyes from the alarming but educating spectacle around the royal dais in the Great Presence Chamber. Though Lord Harington had done his best to shield me, I had learned within a few days of coming to Whitehall that the English were not just cruel. They were wild men. They cursed, fought and drank too much, just for the sheer joy of it, not to a purpose like the Scottish lairds. They sweated over dancing as earnestly as they practised with their weapons, then claimed that neither activity made them turn a hair. I had seen them tilt without horses, attacking each other on foot, and half-murder each other over a game of bowls. They came in all heights and colour of hair and skin. They believed that the rest of the world was theirs for the taking and, at full shout in any company, they resented the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch as if these nations were other suitors daring to chase their women.

For the invading Scots, whom they openly called savages, they reserved their iciness. And their malice—drunk or sober.

And I had had other surprises, none of them good. My mother was not at Whitehall to greet me, but down river in her palace at Greenwich. To my consternation, I learned that she had recently been delivered of another baby, a girl, my sister Sophia, who died the day after she was born and whom I would never see. I had not known that my mother was pregnant again.

Because my Whitehall lodgings were still being carved out of the Small Closed Tennis Court, I had been bundled, with only Lady Anne, my chamberer, my single French maid, my sempstress, and two house grooms, into three rooms full of plaster dust in the old queen’s lodgings overlooking the Thames, which were themselves still being finished to house my mother and her household. My two horse grooms were found sleeping corners in the stables. The rest of my small retinue, including Lady Harington who in the end had insisted on coming with me, were sent back to Combe.

The king’s Lord Chamberlain, Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, himself explained the difficulties to me. It seemed that the Lord Chamberlain, The King’s Master of Works and other officials still scrambled to squeeze the new king and his family—all with their separate households—into the former palaceof the unmarried, childless Queen Elizabeth.

Henry was at either Hampton Court or Windsor, but I had no time to seek him out before being told that he was gone again to Gravesend with the king, to welcome my uncle. I was left behind with Baby Charles, to be loaded down with our finest clothes, and allowed to greet our uncle, the Danish king, on the Whitehall water steps.

Now six years old, Baby Charles had all the failings of the runt in a litter of dogs. While we waited on the steps, he allowed me to take his hand but avoided my eye. His weaknesses deserved my sisterly protection, I told myself. I wanted to love him and vowed to be both tender and patient with him. By surviving for even this long, he had confounded a general expectation of his early death. Still in the care of his nurse, he was small for his age and walked unsteadily on legs bowed by a softening of the bones. Pale patches of scalp showed through his fine, thin hair. When he dared to speak, he stammered and formed his words with difficulty. When silent, he wore a sulky expression. He showed no interest in riding or even playing. But he was my own, my brother.

His hand tightened in mine when sudden thunder began to shake the air. A loose roof tile smashed on the ground. The water of the Thames quivered.

‘It’s only the guns at the Tower,’ I said. ‘Saluting the royal barges. Listen! You can hear the people shouting. They’re almost here!’

Distant cheers rolled slowly up the river towards us from crowds lining the banks.

The first boats appeared around the Lambeth bend, tiny spots of red and gold.

‘Henry’s c-coming!’ Baby Charles exclaimed excitedly. I glanced down. He was smiling for the first time since I had arrived in London.

‘Yes, Henry!’ I smiled back and squeezed his hand. He and I were bound by our love for Henry, at the very least. ‘Just listen to those cheers for two kings and a king-to-be.’

For a moment, I felt the glory of it all. I saw everything sharply and cleanly. The gilded boats catching the sunlight. Red and gold pennants sagging, then snapping back into life as if trying to jump from their poles. The hungry oars biting into the water and rising up to pounce again, trailing bright arcs of water through the air. The air itself pressed into my ears, thick with joyful shouting.

My skin prickled. I am a part of all of this, I thought. For the first time, I felt it. My life. I saw myself standing on the water stairs, all copper and gold, my hair tamed under a net of pearls, my high fine collar fluttering in the breeze, ripples breaking at my feet and spreading back out into the river. Who was also cheered. Who was even now being watched and had her own part to play. Who, like her older brother, had a duty not to disappoint. No longer a child. The First Daughter of England, who carried a secret she-wolf in her bones, waiting now to welcome a foreign king. Ready to face her father in their shared world.

I smiled and waved back at some young fishermen in a dinghy who had dared to row close enough to the steps to throw a posy of flowers at me. Their bouquet fell short and lay bobbing near the lowest step. While a boat of men-at-arms rushed to drive away the invaders, I sent a groom down into the water to retrieve the flowers. I held aloft the dripping bundle of iris and early roses and was rewarded by a chorus of delighted cheers from the retreating fishermen.

Baby Charles pulled his hand from mine, stepped away and frowned in disapproval. He wiped a water drop from his cheek.

The golden barges pulled in to the stairs. There was a flurry of securing, steadying, disembarking, bowing. There were more cheers from the steps, from the windows of the palace and from the turmoil of smaller boats following the royal progress up the Thames. My uncle, the king of Denmark, leapt up the water steps in three huge strides.

‘What charming children!’ he boomed. Hardly pausing, he pinched my cheek. Then the burly, ugly man was gone, one arm thrown across my father’s somewhat lower shoulders. My father had not seemed even to see me. With a wild look over his shoulder, Henry followed them.

Baby Charles was removed by his nurse. Dismissed as a ‘charming child’, the First Daughter of England skulked back to her dusty temporary lodgings and waited crossly in the smell of damp plaster and rotting water weed from the river under her window.

I would be summoned soon, I told myself. I had not come all this way nor had all those new clothes made just to have my cheek pinched in passing.

I ate dinner alone with Anne in my lodgings, trying not to drop crumbs or make grease spots on the copper-coloured silk of my taffeta gown. It had taken me more than an hour to be dressed. I dared not change in case I was suddenly called. If I were to be called.

After eating, I leaned on the windowsill and counted wherries on the river. I watched the sun set over the marshes. Then I had to ask my maid to brush the pink plaster dust from my gown. Briefly, I played my lute, then put it back in its case again.

‘I don’t know why we troubled to come to London!’ I said.

‘But I would never have had this gown otherwise.’ Anne smoothed a blue silk flounce.

I need not have feared this visit, after all. The king had forgotten me.

Or he was slighting me. Teaching me yet again how little he valued me, and how easily I could be thrown aside. I listened to the faint sounds of music. Somewhere, other people were dancing. I had never seen courtiers dancing all together. I had never danced with anyone but Anne. I wanted to dance, here at court. I wondered what would happen if I were to present myself uninvited.

I rehearsed what I would say. Imagined the general amazement. My own dignity, as I walked fearlessly towards the king, head held high…

When my window began to grow opaque with darkness, I was at last summoned to the Great Presence Chamber. I gathered around me what was left of the first Daughter of England and set off.

I stopped just inside the door to stare like a gawk. I inhaled sharply and almost choked on the brew of civet, cinnamon, sandalwood, rose water and sweat. There were too many people jammed together even for such a vast space, all of them giving off a shimmering heat of urgency and importance. The air was thick with their voices and the rustling of silks and fine wools, the faint rasping of crusted gold and silver embroidery against jewelled buttons. Somewhere in the crowd, a lute and drum fought to be heard.

‘Wait here, your grace,’ whispered the page, who had accompanied me.

I looked about me.

In Scotland, even in the palaces, our ceilings were often built low to conserve the heat in the long, fierce, damp winters. We did not try to emulate God’s own space between mountains, above the sea. Here at Whitehall, the roof was so high that it vanished into the shadows above the torches, making me feel as small as an ant. At the far end of this hall, my father sat raised above his courtiers as if on an altar, with my uncle beside him holding a glass of wine.

Even while he spoke to my uncle, the king’s bright jackdaw eyes leapt and darted, searching for something of interest, pretending not to see me waiting at the door. His fingers explored the arm of his chair, his sleeves, his buttons. Dark and heavy against the surrounding finery, he wore one of his plain quilted velvet doublets, as if scorning the extravagant efforts of the courtiers to deck themselves for him.

The jackdaw eyes chose to see me. Though his doublet was plain, I saw the flash of unfamiliar gems on his fingers when he lifted his hand to summon me. When he angled his head, a white sun flared just above the brim of his hat.

I moved towards him, half-terrified, half-enraged. I kept my eyes down, not from modesty but from fear of having my thoughts and senses overwhelmed.

Life in Scotland had been all polished wood and leather, and the comfortable smells of wood smoke, dogs, damp, mice and horses. Even at Holyrood, everyone had lived bundled together, separated only by invisible lines of the respect owed to my parents. I had not altogether lied to Anne. My mother ate with her ladies, and then with Henry and me when we were there, in a cosy closet off her bed chamber. My father’s nobles leaned their elbows on the same table as he did. The king of Scotland was the chief among the other clan chiefs. He did not sit apart on an altar like an image of God.

I advanced through a parting sea of courtiers, feeling the stares hammer at me. Voices grew sibilant with ‘she’ and ‘princess’ and my name, ‘Elizabeth’. I heard a murmur, ‘…one of the Scottish brats.’

A lock of twisting red-gold hair had escaped from its pins. I would have blown it out of my eyes but refused to give that mocking English voice further reason to laugh at my uncouth Scottish behaviour.

Musk and candle smoke caught at the back of my throat. A miasma of sweat and oil of roses swirled around my head.

‘She…’ ‘She…’ hissed the sea.

The curve of my skirt met the line of my father’s altar plinth. The air was sickly sweet with wine vapours. I looked up. A young man sat on the dais at my father’s feet, with his arm draped over the king’s right knee.

Tonight, unlike the fearsome man who had brushed aside the wall-hanging in Coventry, my father overflowed with satisfaction and drunken arrogance. He seemed to tremble on the edge of bad behaviour, like a child overwrought by too many fine gifts.

‘Here’s my little Bessie!’ he shouted. ‘My country mouse has ventured out of her hole at last!’

A red flush began to climb my chest. I curtsied faultlessly.

‘Would she not make any father proud?’ he demanded at large. The rings on his fingers flashed. A knife blade of light from the diamond on his hat sliced across my vision. Another gust of wine fumes reached me on his breath.

Burning with humiliation, I put on my chilliest face and let the crudely exacted compliments rain down on me.

‘Is she not a pearl beyond price, monsewer?’ My father leaned forward and aimed this question past Wee Bobby Cecil, squarely between the eyes of a French-dressed envoy standing in the front rank of attending courtiers and foreign visitors.

The sight of the Secretary of State made my heart thump with guilty memories of Coventry.

‘No longer a child, after all!’ said my uncle, looking me up and down. ‘Not in the least.’

‘Come up here and sit by me, Bessie!’ The king waved a flashing hand. ‘Fetch the lassie a stool!’ he shouted. ‘Come on, Bessie! Don’t be shy. Come up and give your father a kiss!’ His voice hardened. ‘It may be your only chance to look down from up here! Come make the most of it!’

I climbed the steps and kissed him without recoiling from the wine fumes. I sat and held the glass of wine he forced into my hands, over the head of the young man lounging between us.

Straight-backed, I pretended to ignore the stares, so many eyes on me at the same time. A quick sideways glance met the considering hazel gaze of a dark-haired, narrow-jawed man with a thin mouth pulled down by discontent—Sir Francis Bacon, last seen nodding and smiling among the dignitaries on the scaffold in Paul’s Churchyard. I looked away and met the eyes of the young man at my father’s feet. Enemies everywhere.

Henry, the next king of England, should have been sitting with his father and uncle, in place of that smirking stranger. Henry who was not there at all.

I snatched a look at the ‘monsewer’ who had been challenged by my father. He was now studying me, his head tilted to the man beside him. Then he leaned to the other side and murmured to Cecil.

My father was watching him. ‘But can France afford her?’ he called. ‘No one else can!’

My humiliation was complete. I was not here to meet my uncle. My father had called me here to be inspected like a market heifer. A gangling, red-haired, freckled heifer, I thought savagely. ‘A Scots brat’. Exposed to the ridicule of the English court as crudely as if he had set me in the stocks.

The faces below me began to bob in a dance. My head felt like a net full of jumping fish. I no longer wanted to dance. I needed to escape from all those eyes and sort my thoughts. Trapped up there on my stool I looked again for Henry but could not find him. I imagined standing up and walking out. But in my imagination, the sea refused to part to let me escape. I would be trapped in a cage of bodies.