The Noble Assassin

I felt the skin between my shoulder blades quiver, touched by a Divine reproving finger. I laid my hand on the smooth, hard neck, still warm, still damp with sweat. This death was surely a sign. A warning of failure. The skin of my back quivered again.

‘He was too old to keep up such a pace,’ Kit said. ‘Forgive me, I should have seen . . .’

‘Merely old,’ I said to the sky. ‘An old horse, dead from wicked carelessness perhaps, but by natural cause.’

God sent no sign of rage that I was ignoring His sign. Lightning did not split a nearby oak. A hail of toads did not fall.

‘Help me up.’ I stood and tested my ankle again. Still watery, as if the bones had dissolved.

‘I should have . . .’ Kit’s voice shook.

I felt his hand trembling. My thoughts had now cleared enough for me to remember that he would have been blamed had I been killed in the fall. I looked at his white face.

‘Not your fault,’ I said. ‘Mine. And the ostler who hired the horse to me . . . knew that we meant to ride hard. I should have paid more mind to . . .’ I meant to touch his arm in reassurance, but found myself clutching it in a wave of giddiness.

After a moment I patted the arm and let go. I was on my feet. Alive. A clergyman would no doubt call me innocent of wrongdoing, in the case of the horse, at least. But, insofar as I could define a sin, failing a creature in my care was one of them.

However, sin was not the same as a warning. To my knowledge, sin seldom seemed to prevent worldly success.

‘Please take my saddle and bags from the body,’ I said. ‘I’ll ride behind you until we can find me another horse.’

His eyes widened but he obeyed. He also had the grace to pretend not to notice my gasps of pain when he lifted me up behind his saddle.

We made a curious sight, when we rode just before sundown into a modest farmyard, scattering pigs and hens. Faces appeared in windows and doors to stare at a liveried groom with a dirty, dishevelled lady behind him, their horse’s hindquarters lumpy with too many saddlebags, a spare side-saddle and a flattened farthingale.

I paid the farmer far too much to sell me an ancient mare that fitted my saddle. He could not believe his luck. I was overjoyed to find any mount at all.

I did not try to gallop her. I was grateful that she managed to move me forward. In truth, I could not have survived a gallop, even though I had bound my ankle to steady it.

By the time we stopped at our scheduled inn to sup and sleep, much later than intended and long after dark, my left wrist had swollen so that I could not hold the reins in that hand. My head thumped. Preparing for sleep, I found blood smeared on the back of my linen shift, from my raw thighs. Because I could not remove it, I had to sleep in my boot.

The next morning, I could not move. Slowly, cursing, I forced each limb into action. Inch by inch, I pushed myself upright. I had to call for a kitchen maid from the inn to help me dress.

I blinked water from my eyes as Kit carried me into the stable yard and lifted me up into my saddle, now buckled onto the new hired mount. As we set off again at a gallop towards Scotland, when he was behind me and could no longer hear me nor see my face, I wept openly with pain and cursed my rebelling sinews.

The reward had best be worth what it was costing.

I arrived in Berwick at midday the following day.

Chapter 5

BERWICK CASTLE, NORTHUMBERLAND, 1603

Queen Anne, my intended prey, stood by a window in the little presence chamber in Berwick Castle, gazing out towards the foggy, darkening sea. I fastened my will onto her like a hound setting at a partridge.

She ignored me and continued to look out into the dusk.

I tottered towards her, past curious courtiers, inhaling sharply with each step and hobbling like a one-legged sailor. At a respectful distance I sank into the deepest curtsy that I could manage.

‘The Countess of Bedford, Your Highness,’ said the gentleman usher, in French.

Let me rise! I begged her silently. This was no time to faint from pain.

She gazed out of the window, still ignoring me.

If she ever let me speak, I could show her that I spoke French. But then, I must have seemed an unlikely companion, with my limp, misshapen hand and pain curdling my wits.

There’s nothing to see out there but fog! Please, let me rise!

Five grooms began to light candles against the sudden fall of darkness. A sconce on the wall threw a sudden wash of unsteady yellow light across the Queen’s face.

I did not like what I saw.

Her tall, lean figure stood half turned away from me, dressed in grey satin, one hand clenched on the pleated lip of her farthingale. The nearest corner of her tight lips was turned down under a long, large nose made larger by the shadow it cast across her mouth.

I could not imagine that shadowed, unsmiling mouth open in song, nor that clenched fist raising a wine glass in a tipsy toast. This new queen was not the lively, deep-drinking, dance-loving, frivolous creature of my friends’ letters. Not for the first time, rumour had been wrong. She might as well have been holding a prayer book and wearing black.

From under my lashes, I tried to read her. My mother had taught me that, to survive, you must learn to read the people who hold power over your life. What you learn will give you power. They think they hide themselves, but the set of shoulder, or twitch of a hand, an uneasy sideways look or overloud voice always gives them away, if you know how to look and listen. Learn what they truly want and give it to them, my mother had said. Then you will not only survive, you will succeed.

More sconces bloomed around the walls. I saw the new queen clearly now.

Another sour queen like the old one, I thought unhappily. To advance in her court, I did not have to like her, but she had to like me.

I had to make her like me. If not, it was back to Chenies with my tail between my legs. Back to Edward and silence. To my lute without strings. To living with my husband’s infinite reasons for saying ‘no’.

I glanced at the three Scots ladies attending her, all soberly dressed, their hair covered. They eyed me coldly. The story of my undignified arrival had quickly spread.

If they were what pleased her, I was finished.

I had nothing to offer this woman except the usual obsequious court flattery that drove me mad with impatience and fuelled a dangerous urge to blurt out the truth. While many of my friends at court before our exile had celebrated my reckless candour as wit, this dour queen would not. Experience had taught me that sour women tended not to like me, however modestly I tried to behave myself. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might fail.

I knew that I made a sorry picture. Both my thighs now trembled violently. I could see the fabric of my gown shake. Though I had paid a castle woman to dress my hair and lace my bodies, my gown was still wrinkled from the saddlebag in spite of all her shaking and brushing. I had managed to cram my injured foot into a shoe, but only after cutting away my riding boot.

My bad ankle trembled on the brink of giving way. My good leg wobbled from having to support my entire weight. Pain brought tears to my eyes.

The Queen turned suddenly, as if she had just noticed me. An unexpected brightness of diamonds and amethysts flashed when she waved a bony hand for me to rise.

‘I thank you, Your Majesty.’ I straightened with care. It was still possible that I might fall at her feet. Then I looked at her face. Our eyes met in shared assessment.

I tried not to stare.

Unlike Old Gloriana, Anne wore no rouge or other artifice. Her naked face looked drained by weariness and older than her twenty-nine years. In the candlelight, her skin was grey against the creamy pearls hanging from her ears. On the jewelled hand she had waved, the nails were bitten short and the skin around the nails nibbled raw.

Forgive me, I thought. I read you wrong.

We studied each other with equal intensity.

Do you not yet understand the need for masks? I ached to ask. Old Gloriana understood that need, most of all for queens.

The weary pain in her eyes tightened my throat. The last emotion I had expected to feel with the new queen was kinship.

I had prepared an amusing, pretty speech of welcome, but could not begin it. Those words were meant to charm a different woman.

I saw now that she had not been ignoring me from spite, nor to assert her position. I recognised the heaviness that had held her unmoving at the window. I knew that long stare into nothing. She had been searching for strength to begin conversation with yet another stranger, who, like all the others, undoubtedly wanted something from her and would require her to make a decision.

I dropped my eyes to her childlike bitten nails again.

Not sour, after all, I thought. Queen or not, she was melancholy and past hiding it. Her youth was being worn away by misery. Like me, she was spoiling from the core.

I felt a rush of gentle ferocity, like the tenderness when I cupped a new chick or saw a fragile green shoot pushed up through clods of dirt and stones.

The Whitehall wolves would tear this poor woman apart. I had felt their teeth and knew how sharp they could be. She must be protected. She must be told. Somehow, without giving offence. But to tell her would give offence, no matter how carefully worded. One does not pity royalty.

‘You made good speed here, Lady Bedford,’ she said. ‘Though perhaps at a dear cost.’ She gestured at my bad hand. So, she had heard the tale too. But between her native Danish accent and her acquired Scottish one, I could not tell what she thought of my journey.

Trying to decide whether to risk speaking my true thoughts or to hazard a jest in return, I stepped onto my bad ankle. A flash of searing pain together with exhaustion betrayed my training.

‘Oww! God’s Balls!’

I staggered, hopped sideways, caught myself and clapped my good hand over my mouth. I heard outraged gasps from the attending ladies, then unbreathing silence. Even the six men-at-arms standing behind the Queen had frozen.

Raw arse and dead horse were for nothing, after all. The touch between my shoulder blades had been a Divine warning. I had ignored it. I would have to slink back to Chenies, confess to Edward . . . for rumour would soon tell him if I did not . . . that I had managed to marry obscenity to blasphemy in two short words. And been thrown out of Berwick for offending the new queen.

The silence grew.

I began to rehearse my long, painful, slow hobbling retreat to the door . . . desperately slow, stretching out my torment . . . the averted eyes of the men-at-arms, the suppressed smiles of the ladies-in-waiting . . . their hungry gossip when out of the Queen’s hearing. I imagined their tutting and lip-smacking disapproval and raising of eyes to Heaven.

I waited to be dismissed.

The Queen was studying me with . . . I tried to resist hope . . . what looked like the first real interest. ‘Lady Bedford,’ she said at last. ‘I think that I must engage you to improve my English. I’m certain my other ladies don’t know so many useful words.’

I imagined a glint of mischief in the swift look she gave her three tight-lipped Scots.

I wagered my future.

I became an angel balanced on a pinhead, precarious yet suddenly sure of my footing at the same time. I must abandon protocol, I was certain. She had had too much protocol. Her carelessness with her person told me that she had put herself beyond the reach of a courtier’s empty flattery. I wagered my future on what I felt she needed most from me.

The words sprang raw and unexamined from my mouth. ‘It will be my greatest pleasure to give you pleasure, madam,’ I said. ‘Pleasure.’ I repeated the word. I let it hang in the air. ‘. . . in English lessons and all else.’

Play, I thought.

‘I will shake my sack of words,’ I said, ‘until every last “zounds” and “zwagger” has tumbled out for your instruction – and enjoyment, if you so choose.’

She gave a minute nod at my return of her serve.

I advanced carefully towards my leap. ‘If my honesty ever oversteps, or I play the fool too far, I beg your forgiveness in advance.’

Her intent stillness gave me courage to go on.

‘Because even my errors will have only one purpose – to give you joy.’ I heard another intake of breath behind me at this presumption.

Joy. The word flew out of my mouth and circled in the air above our heads. A dove. A butterfly. A scarlet autumn leaf.

Joy. My offering to her. Not service, not loyalty, not reverence, nor adoration, nor awe, nor blind obedience, which royalty can always command. Joy. A precious commodity that cannot be commanded of another person, nor bought, nor wrestled into being. It was delicate and fleeting, as I knew very well. You must stalk it, surprise it. It’s a seed that may or may not grow. You can’t force it, but you can dig out the stones, till the ground and stand by with expectant heart and watering cans. Among other things, I was also a gardener. I knew how to make the desert bloom.

The Queen had tilted her head, not looking at me now, listening.

‘Madam, at my birth I was christened Lucy . . . lux, lucis . . . light. In your service, I swear I will earn the right to my name.’ I held her now in my thoughts as gently but firmly as I would trap a moth. ‘If the light and laughter ever fail, you may banish me.’

I heard her draw a deep breath.

Quickly, to lighten my earnest words, I threw open my arms, imitating a player-warrior accepting the fatal sword thrust. ‘And I must beg your forgiveness already, madam. I dare not risk another curtsy or I will sprawl at your feet.’

To my horror, she did not smile at this extravagance. Instead, tears welled in her eyes. I had misjudged and cut too near the quick.

I had made the new queen cry in front of everyone. Now she would hate me. I had dared to pity her and let her know it. Shamed her in public, before those tight-lipped, but almost certainly loose-tongued, women. I had made a second fatal error. Back to Chenies after all.

Then she swallowed. ‘Thank you, Lady Bedford.’

The gowns of the waiting women rustled. There was a tiny pause.

I tried to think what to say, unable to hope that I might somehow, perhaps, survive my own mistakes for a second time.

Then she pointed at my swollen hand. ‘You must have that hand bandaged. I shall ask my doctor to see to it.’ She waved away my renewed attempt to curtsy. She was mistress of herself again.

And she had offered me her own royal doctor.

‘Thank you, madam.’ I dropped my arms. ‘I am honoured . . .’ I caught her eye and noted the slightly raised royal brows and the waiting chilly half-smile. I bit down on the formulaic gratitude.

Lightly, Lucy, lightly now.

She saw me catch myself. Her brows stayed up. But she knew that I had understood her.

I glanced at the row of cold eyes and tight mouths behind her.

She needed a playmate in the pursuit of joy.

‘I will limp gratefully from the field for treatment,’ I said. ‘But before this herald retires injured, she must first deliver urgent news. Two thousand richly jewelled royal gowns await Your Highness in the royal Wardrobe in London.’

‘That’s good news for any woman, royal or not!’

Her Scottish women laughed politely.

Now the Queen was reading me as closely as I had read her. ‘And tell me, Lady Bedford, who brings such good tidings, can you give me more good news? Does it truly rain less in London than in Edinburgh, as I have been told?’ Even through her double-layered accent, I heard a testing playfulness.

‘I could never speak ill of Scotland, Your Highness. Even when the truth demands it.’

She smiled at last. The air around us loosened. We exchanged another assessing look. Together, we had averted danger. We exchanged the most minute of nods. Miraculously, we seemed to stand at the first fragile beginning of friendship. The way ahead felt as tentative as a garden path marked out in sand, but it held the same implied promise that it might be laid, rod by rod, in brick and stone.

In the next days before setting off for London, I tested what gave our new queen pleasure. I soon learned that she did not share my taste for debate and philosophy but did like music and dancing, just as rumour had said. Above all, she needed to laugh.

Therefore, I brought these pleasures together. I taught her – and several of her women – to sing two English songs whilst I played the fool with a borrowed lute and one good hand and made her press her fingers in place of mine onto the strings so that together she and I made a single musician and all of us almost fell off our stools with laughing.

She liked to gossip and would be living among strangers.

Therefore, I improvised scurrilous rhyming couplets to help her, and her Scots ladies, to remember the different English courtiers waiting in London.

‘“Her flattering portrait is like Lady C . . . Only in this – that they both painted be”,’ I recited.

‘Does she still whiten her face with lead?’ Her Majesty clapped a hand to her mouth in mock horror. Her women clucked ‘tut-tut’ and shook their heads. One or two touched their own hair or mouths thoughtfully.

She fancied herself a poet. Therefore, we began together to devise her first masque to celebrate her arrival at the court of Whitehall.

When she grew weary, I made herbal tisanes to help her sleep. I quickly learned not to mention children or the King.

I watched her shoulders loosen. Her eyes began to sparkle. Once, at some trivial jest of mine, she laughed so immoderately that I feared she would veer into uncontrolled tears. Then she patted her breastbone, wiped her eyes and stood up to foot-fumble her way into a half-remembered Danish country-dance, which she promised to teach me when I had two good feet again.

I had ridden north driven by cold ambition and need, in search of advancement. I had won royal favour just as I had intended. I did not expect to have my ambition disarmed by my heart. The more I saw that I was able to please Queen Anne, the more she captured my love. She needed me when no one else did. She needed Lucy in all her brightness. I loved her for her need and shone ever more brightly in the effort to give her joy. It was more than I deserved.

I had ridden into my rightful life where I was needed and where my skills had value. Chenies did not need me as the new queen did. My husband’s other estates at Woburn and Moor Park did not need me. He too would profit from my renewed royal favour. I was saving us both.

I heard the mutters among the disappointed English women who arrived three days after I did. No lady would have done what I did, they said.

But the truth proved them wrong. Three evenings after I had ridden into Berwick, hatless, hair flying, limping and with a wrist like a ham, I was made first lady of the bedchamber to Queen Anne, wife of the new Scottish King, James VI of Scotland who was now also James the First of England. I was elevated to be chief among all the court ladies-in-waiting. If that was not lady enough for anyone, I cannot say what would be.

My new position even silenced my mother when she arrived in Berwick with the other women. This was a woman who, when she later died, was widely said to have gone to see that God remembered to wash behind His ears.

I was twenty-two years old when I rode to Berwick. Power and privilege were in my grasp again. I was happy. I thought I had tamed the future.

This time I don’t know where to point myself. Time is now the enemy. Elizabeth is on the run and may be taken prisoner at any time. She is expecting another babe.

She has not written to me since that first letter.

I must go where powerful men gather intelligence, where news and rumour are born. Someone will know where Elizabeth is. I will ask until I learn. Then I will go to her, on the run or not, however it can be done, and persuade her to come home so that I can help her find joy again as I once helped her mother. She will keep me by her, and I will have a purpose again.

Chapter 6

ELIZABETH STUART – BERLIN, DECEMBER 1620

Elizabeth understands the message she holds in her gloved hand. The letter’s language is formal. It twists and turns, slithering around the brutal meaning without ever quite arriving. But the message is clear.

No.

She is being turned away yet again with flattering words that fail to hide the writer’s fear.

No friends here, neither. No room at the inn for the queen and children of a defeated king. They are enemies of the imperial House of Austria who are not known to forgive an affront. The rebellion of the Bohemian Protestants has been an affront. Daring to elect their own Protestant king in place of the Hapsburg Ferdinand has been an affront. Helping the fugitive king and queen will be an affront. The Hapsburgs would not forgive.

With the back of her fur-lined glove, she wipes a clump of falling snow from her left eyelash. Snow is already blotting out the words on the paper she holds.

. . . Madame, in spite of the great . . . in which I hold your esteemed husband . . . and your . . . circumstances alas . . . regret . . . unfit to entertain you in a way suitable to your elevated . . .

Not possible, she thinks. I am the wife of a king, and daughter of the King of England. If these cowards don’t fear my poor Frederick, they must feel some respect for my father and for England! Surely, England would not tolerate such treatment of its First Daughter, even if she were not also Queen of Bohemia.

The letter is from Frederick’s brother-in-law, who regrets his unavoidable absence. Even family lacks the courage to help them.

She should have been prepared for refusal. The Imperial armies are close and marching closer. England is very far away. And, so far, resolutely refusing to take sides.

The messenger stands respectfully, head bowed, awaiting her response. Behind him, at the far end of the snow-covered causeway, stand the closed gates of the city. Behind the gates lie the castle and lighted fires, heated wine, warmed beds. Roasted meats that have not frozen solid. Dry shoes.

Her fingers, even gloved, are almost too cold to hold the Elector of Brandenburg’s message.

With disdain, Elizabeth drops the letter into the snow. She tightens her grip on the belt of the man riding in front of her and re-balances her shivering, pregnant bulk on the back of the saddle. ‘Ride on.’

Captain Ralph Hopton understands the spirit of her order as well as the words. He kicks their horse, turning it so that he forces the messenger to leap back out of their way. One large rear hoof drives the letter deep into the snow.

They have lost carts and carriages to the drifts and to desertion. Looters had not waited until she was out of sight of Prague before beginning to strip the contents of the caravan.

A wave of disbelief rolls back along the line behind her when the remaining drivers and horsemen see that they are turning away from the city. She hears shouts as men heave carts onwards out of ruts in the frozen mud. One by one, the straggling remains of the procession lurches into movement again.

She looks back to see that the light carriages now holding the children and their nurses still follow Hopton’s horse. The first carriage slips on a frozen rut and lurches violently like a ship hit broadside by a wave. Then it rights itself and tilts to the other side. Behind it, straining horses and oxen are lashed by violent English, German and Bohemian curses aimed at the circumstances.

She straightens her aching back and cradles her belly with her free hand. If their eight-month-pregnant queen can carry on, so could the rest of them. Those who remain.