Читать книгу The King’s Daughter - Christie Dickason - Страница 13

A small lop-sided shape waited for me below in Mr Hopkins’s great parlour. There was no mistaking him for anyone else. This was a far greater man than my temporary host.

‘My Lady Elizabeth.’ He sketched an off-kilter bow.

He should have been in London questioning traitors in the Tower.

Robert Cecil, now Lord Salisbury and the English Secretary of State. My father’s chief advisor. Here in Mr Hopkins’s large parlour, his sharp, intelligent eyes on my face. He cleared his throat.

If we were to stand side-by-side, he would reach no higher than the top of my ear. The fur collar of his loose gown did not quite disguise the uneven slope of his shoulders. Why then, did he cause such fear in me?

I struggled to hold his gaze.

Neither of us spoke. It was my part to speak. Unlike my conscience, my mind was blank.

‘Has something more happened?’ I asked at last.

‘More than…?’

‘About…?’ I tried to wipe my thoughts clean, leaving only what Lord Harington had told me. But I could not remember clearly. ‘About the fearful plot?’ I was certain at least that Lord Harington had told me about a plot.

‘And did your guardian tell you about the quick wit of the king, your father, in perceiving the threat?’

I could not remember.

‘My father?’ I echoed.

I had seen no attendants waiting in the hall. No secretary waited behind the little table below the window. Cecil was alone. I could think of no good reason why he had come here in apparent secrecy.

After another pause, Cecil pointed to a high-backed, unpadded chair-of-grace.

Flushed and angry with myself for needing his prompt, I sat. I noticed that he had slender, long-fingered hands, like a woman. Then I remembered to nod for him to sit as well.

‘Thank you, your grace.’ He perched at the front of a second chair-of-grace and smoothed the skirts of his robe over his knees. He cleared his throat again and spoke a little too loudly, as if I might be deaf. ‘The king, your father was the agent of his own salvation. Praise God.’

‘Praise God,’ I echoed.

‘A loyal subject had brought me an anonymous letter.’ He looked away.

‘A loyal subject?’ I echoed again. Thank God, Harington had prepared me for the letter. I laid my hands on the arms of the chair and closed my fingers carefully around the oak grape leaves carved on the ends.

He nodded. ‘A warning from a loyal Catholic lord.’ He met my eye with a half-smile. His words rolled on smoothly. ‘Which I showed to the king. His majesty saw at once what had escaped me—that it concerned the hidden intent to blow up the opening of Parliament.’ He paused. ‘The terrible plot was uncovered. Thanks be to God!’

I murmured an incoherent piety.

Not my letter after all! I felt my hands fly into the air like startled doves and quickly clasped them together in my lap.

His small lumpy bulk leaned forward. He braced his elbows on the chair arms, so that his long feminine fingers dangled from awkwardly suspended hands.

I looked away. I wished those eyes would stop looking at me and at my clasped hands. I wished the room were not so strange and close, nor hung with tapestries of bloody battle scenes. I ached to be back at tedious, familiar Combe. I had misplaced all my rehearsed lies. I was sick with waiting.

‘Why are you here, my lord?’

He hesitated. My throat tightened. I tried to swallow but had forgotten how. I saw his eyes go to my throat. He watched me struggle. I managed to swallow on the third try.

‘His majesty has instructed me to speak with you.’ He looked back at my eyes. ‘About these recent dreadful events.’

I stared back, afraid now to trust any sound that might come out of my throat. With effort, I unclenched my fists.

‘Were you ever acquainted with Sir Everard Digby?’

I shook my head, cautiously truthful. To my knowledge, this was no lie.

‘A traitor whom I have recently examined in the Tower, along with several of his companion devils.’

‘Is he one of those who would have blown up Parliament?’ The frog in my throat was quite natural, I told myself. In the circumstances.

Cecil smiled slightly, inviting me into complicity. ‘This young knight, Digby, had a very different task—to take you prisoner.’

I met his invitation as blankly as I could. All I could see in my head was Digby—for that must be his name—standing with the coins of sunlight dancing on his shoulders and head.

Go away! I begged him. Get out of my thoughts! A treacherous heat began to bloom in my chest.

‘A plausible young knight,’ said Cecil. ‘Well-formed and fair-haired. His family’s estate is not far from Combe. Until he married, I’m told that many ladies had their eye on him.’

All at once, I saw the truth, Digby had confessed. He had confessed to our meeting in the forest. Cecil knew!

I shook my head, helpless to stop the red fire that stained my chest and flooded up my neck. Cecil knows everything, I thought.

‘I never met a man who gave that name.’ I frowned slightly, as if trying to recall. I understood very well. Digby had taken me down with him just as I feared. Had not taken my advice to flee, not in time. Good man or bad, he had turned out to be a trowie after all.

Cecil watched the telltale blush reach my cheeks and rise upwards until the roots of my hair felt ablaze. ‘You might perhaps have smiled on him once?’ he prompted gently. ‘Perhaps not knowing who he was? He’s held to be handsome and is only a few years older than your grace. Any young woman might smile on him.’

The Chief Secretary was toying with me. I could bear it no longer.

‘Is this an examination, my lord?’ I demanded.

‘Should it be?’ he asked mildly. He looked around the room. ‘Do you see a clerk? Or witnesses to an examination? Should you be examined?’

‘No,’ I whispered.

On the far wall, one of the tapestries heaved. ‘By God, it is an examination!’

I leapt to my feet and turned. I had heard that Scottish bellow before. In the corner of my eye, I saw Cecil wriggle off his chair.

With a flash of rings, my father knocked aside the edge of a woven battle and stepped out of the alcove behind it. ‘Anatomise her, man! Ye’re too nice!’ The king staggered in his excitement, his restless body made clumsy by the urgencies of his mind.

Cecil stared at the floor.

The king stopped in front of me, blocking my view of Cecil. ‘Aye, Bessie! Y’ know very well it’s an examination! And you’d best thank God to be here in Coventry and not locked in the Tower with your friends!’

‘“Friends”?’ I repeated faintly.

‘You’d be examined there, right enough! And not so gently, neither!’ The king turned on Cecil. ‘Why didn’t you ask the questions I prepared? What have y’done with them?’

‘I meant to come to them by degrees, your majesty.’

‘There’s no degree in being dead! And no degree in treason!’ The king held out his hand. ‘Give me my questions and act as my clerk. I will play Solomon. I’ll examine this treacherous whelp of mine, who seems to have terrified you into degrees!’ His over-large tongue dammed and slowed the flow of words pouring from his brain. His bright, hungry magpie eye probed at me.

From the table beneath a window Cecil took a densely written paper and gave it to the king. He returned to the table and sat on the stool behind it. Now I saw the waiting pen and ink.

‘That devil Digby’s in the Tower,’ said my father. ‘We know by his own confession that he and his fellow fiends meant to make you queen of England! After I…your king and father…had been blown sky-high, murdered, along with your precious brother.’

‘Never, my lord father!’ I whispered.

‘What do ye have to say to that?’

‘What sort of queen would I have been…?’

He jabbed a finger at me. ‘A compliant one. Controlled by Papists, ruling at the will of Rome.’

‘I had rather been murdered in Parliament with you than wear the Crown on such condition!’ I spoke that truth with all my heart.

The small eyes skewered me. ‘Fine words!’ He pulled at his lower lip with finger and thumb. ‘What are you?’

‘I don’t understand.’ I glanced at Cecil but he was head-down at the table, recording our words.

‘What…are…you?’ the king repeated slowly and loudly, as if I were simple. ‘Do I know you?’

‘I’m your loyal daughter, sir.’ I felt my own temper begin to rise.

‘D’ye think me a fool?’

‘I think you many things, sir, but never a fool!’

We both drew breath and stared at each other. Cecil’s pen stopped scratching.

The king shook his list of questions in my face. I blinked but did not move. ‘I ask you, just as your friends in the Tower were asked,’ he said. ‘Are you a Papist?’

Refusing to step back, I fixed my eyes on my father’s thick padded jerkin, diamond hatched with stitching that held the thick lining in place to turn aside attacking knives. ‘Never!’

‘I know that you are a Papist!’

Like my mother? I wanted to ask but had just enough good sense not to say.

‘Do you mean to accuse my guardian too?’ I asked instead. ‘Lord Harington hears me pray at his side five times a day.’

The close-set eyes studied me. The king scratched under his doublet. He tugged at his cuffs. He twitched his neck in his collar and seemed to chew on his tongue.

I had seen people ape those mannerisms, and then laugh. I did not find my father laughable. He terrified me.

I can make you obey where you ache to scorn, his behaviour seemed to say to those who aped him. That’s real power!

The king bit at a fingernail. I felt the swift current of his thought tugging at me. ‘Why should I let you keep your head?’ he asked.

‘Because I’ve done nothing!’

We both pretended to listen to the scratching of Cecil’s quill.

‘Don’t think, madam—you and your brother—that public acclaim is the same as power! From the common people it’s worth nothing! It’s a river that drowns all virtue.’

‘I don’t want acclaim!’ I cried. ‘I don’t want power! What would I do with power?’

‘Don’t think I wasn’t told how the people cried out in the streets,’ he said, now just as agitated as I was. ‘Singing out as you and your brother went by. “The golden pair!” “The golden boy, the golden girl!” “England’s best hope!” Don’t think you’ll bury me, either one of you! Don’t imagine you’ll ever warm your arse on the English throne!’

‘I don’t want the English throne!’

‘…because I shall marry you as far away from here as I can arrange. I’d marry you to the Great Cham, if I could, and send you to his queen in Tartary. I’d marry you to the Devil himself, if only he wanted a wife!’

He shoved his face close to mine. ‘Listen to me, Bessie. If I choose to let you live, I mean to marry you off as soon as I can. Do y’hear me? Catholic, Protestant, doddering fool or dribbling babe—I’d give you this moment if your husband would take you and your ambitions away from England, out of my sight for ever!’

He folded the list of questions. ‘We’re not done with these yet. You don’t deceive me. But first, I’ll hear more of what your friends in the Tower have to tell us. Then I’ll decide what’s to be done with you.’

There’s no point in lying further, I thought with despair. My father would make those prisoners say whatever he liked.

I opened my mouth to defend myself with the truth. Yes, I had met Digby, but not by my own will. I had refused to go with him, no matter what he might claim in his confession. I had threatened to kill myself rather than agree to do as the plotters intended.

Behind the king, Cecil gave a minute shake of his head.

I closed my mouth and stared past my father’s shoulder in astonishment. Again, a tiny warning shake, no mistake. Then Cecil looked back down at his notes.

Then I saw how close I had been to disaster. My guilt or innocence in the treason plot did not matter. It had never mattered, once I had reported Digby’s kidnap attempt to Henry alone. Not to the king or Cecil. That failure alone made me a traitor in the king’s eyes. And if I had confessed, I would have dragged my brother down with me.

‘My mother had friends like yours.’ My father handed the folded questions back to Cecil. ‘You should choose better acquaintance, lassie. With less taste for regicide. First your old governess Lady Kildare and her husband, now these Papist gallants. To be twice touched by treason is no accident.’

The king turned to Cecil. ‘Come, Wee Bobby! Let’s leave the “golden” lassie to her thoughts, while she still has a head to think them.’ He struck the door with his fist. It opened. He left without looking back.

Cecil wiped his pen and inserted it into a leather roll. He gathered up his papers and tapped them to align the edges. ‘Don’t fear,’ he said, so quietly that I might almost have imagined it.

‘And lest her thoughts remain confused,’ shouted my father from the corridor, ‘I’ll arrange a sight to clear them.’

‘My lord…’ I began.

Cecil held up his hand to silence me. ‘As Lord Treasurer, among all else,’ he continued, to the tabletop, ‘I must advise the king that he can’t afford to throw away even one of his two most valuable assets.’

When the door closed behind the two men and their footsteps had faded, I finally let my knees dump me back into my chair.

Cecil would have warned me to keep silent only if he knew what I was about to confess. But if he knew, why was he protecting me?