Читать книгу The King’s Daughter - Christie Dickason - Страница 19

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.

In a gap between dancers, I spied my guardian sitting with folded arms against one wall, now joined by Wee Bobby Cecil. From their gestures and Lord Harington’s frown, they appeared to be arguing about me. Bacon leaned on a pillar watching them while dancers jogged around him. I caught my guardian’s eye, then a gaggle of dancers hopped between us.

What use was a guardian, I thought, if he didn’t guard you?

The racket of voices and music grew louder until I heard only a blur of sound. The young man at my father’s feet tilted his head back while the royal hand toyed with his curls. My father leaned forward and whispered in his ear.

I stared down into my wineglass. I knew that I had just learned something else momentous but did not yet know what to make of it.

The king of Denmark hauled a woman onto his lap and began to play the clown with the hoops of her farthingale, threatening to put them over his head. Neither of them seemed to notice that her legs were exposed to the knee.

Lord Harington appeared at the foot of the dais, pinched and resolute. ‘Your majesty, with your permission…’ When he saw that my father still whispered into the young man’s ear, Lord H held out his hand to me.

‘Who is that man who was earlier standing beside Lord Salisbury?’ I murmured as he steadied me down the steps.

‘The French envoy.’

‘And the other, who didn’t speak? The one who still keeps staring at me?’

‘The Duc de Bouillon, envoy from the German Palatine, chief state of the Protestant Union in Europe.’

I didn’t ask about the young man leaning on my father’s knees.

I curtsied to my oblivious father.

Lord Harington mouthed words about my recent journey and the dangers of too much excitement. As we turned to leave, three of my father’s Scottish gentlemen began to lay loud wagers on how much more of the woman on my uncle’s lap would be seen before the night was done.

‘Depends on how oiled she is,’ said one.

‘Nae! Nae! S’nowt to do w’drink!’ another shouted back, as Lord Harington hustled me away. ‘A good bush need no wine!’ My father and uncle laughed loudly.

Lord Harington forgot himself far enough to give me a little push towards the door.

‘Where is Prince Henry?’ I asked, when we reached the corridor. ‘Why is he not here?’

Lord Harington pinched his lips. ‘Best if you had not been here neither.’

‘Can we go back to Combe now?’

Harington hesitated. ‘I will ask permission, but I fear that his majesty has not done with you yet.’

I walked a few feet in silence. ‘Are you still my guardian?’

I heard him breathe in sharply. ‘Yes, your grace. I will be your guardian until you marry. But I cannot remove you without the king’s permission.’

I nodded, but could not stop the unworthy, childish feeling that he was abandoning me in the monster’s lair.