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Chapter 3

LUCY – MOOR PARK, 1620

I lie in my cold bed, breathing out warm clouds, my feet close to the iron brazier filled with coals at the end of the mattress. My maid Annie snores gently from her pallet on the floor. A nodding house groom tends the fire.

I think about the news Edward has given me. The daughter of the King of England – my Elizabeth – is in flight, pursued by the armies of a Catholic empire that rules most of northern Europe from Russia to Flanders, only a short sail away across the North Sea. The long rumbling of war on the Continent between Catholic and Protestant powers has suddenly turned to the thunder of guns that can be heard in England.

She will be frightened and confused, though, as always, she will seem to command. She will fear for the children. They are all in danger.

I know I should not feel happy. How dare I rejoice?

I duck down under the covers to warm my hands on the brazier, curling like a cat in the small warm cave.

I am being given another chance. If I can think how to take it.

The next morning I rise as if the world were not changing. I dress, eat my frugal breakfast of bread and small beer. Wearing old fur-lined gloves with the fingers cut off, I sign orders to buy sugar and salt that we can’t afford. I approve the slaughter of eight precious hens. I count linens as they come back from the washhouse, and the remaining silver returned from being washed and polished in the scullery. While Lady Agnes frowns at a peony she is working in tiny knots to hide a patch on a sleeve, I try to do my own needlework. But I prick myself so often that I throw the torn pillow cover across the room.

Agnes tightens her mouth and ignores me. After a time, I pick up the pillow cover myself.

After the midday meal, I write to my old friend from court, Sir Henry Goodyear, begging for news. I would have written to Elizabeth, but do not know where to send a letter. I take out her many letters to me and re-read her joy at her babies, her excitement at moving to Prague, her confession how she had offended her new subjects by misunderstanding their early gifts.

. . . So I made certain to display the gift of a cradle for the coming babe on the dais in the great hall, as if it were a holy icon. I believe that the people were puzzled by this strange English custom, but pleased . . .

She had always trusted me with her indiscretions as well as her joys. I press the letter to my forehead.

If she were dead or captive, Edward would have told me. Therefore, she must still be alive and free.

As the early winter darkness closes in, to get through the time, I try to write verse as I had once done so easily at court.

Remembering the good-natured, bibulous, literary competitions, I attempt to write an ode in the style of Horace – a challenge we had often set ourselves after dinner, made arrogant by wine and youth. But my metres now trudge heavy-footed where the Roman poet’s had danced and skimmed like swallows.

No thoughts or words seem important enough to distract me. All my being waits trembling on the surface of life. It should be anguish, but I confess that, even while tearing up my attempt at Latin verse, I feel alive once again.

Above all, I need more news. Even without the distortion of malice, accounts of past or distant events are always slippery. The truth often proves to be, insofar as one can determine it, a little less vibrant than the tale as told. The tale is almost always simpler. The true narrative most often proceeds by bumps and hiccoughs, not in great sweeps.

I need a letter from Elizabeth. She has clung to England by writing letters, first from her husband’s German Palatine, more recently from Bohemia. I know she will write to me as soon as she can.

Goodyear writes back by return of messenger. He has heard that Elizabeth and her children struggled down the mountain to spend the first night in Prague, in the house of a Czech merchant near the Old Town Square across the Vltava river from the palace. There, she waited while Frederick and his generals argued whether to try to defend Prague. With Hapsburg soldiers already looting the Hradcany Palace, the cavalcade of carriages and carts left the city by the West Gate just after nine o’clock the following morning.

There seems to have been wide-spread panic, he writes. The royal family were deserting Prague! Frederick was forced to make a speech to reassure the terrified mob that the Bohemian officials, who were in truth escaping with them, would escort the royal family only a short distance then return to defend the city. The heaviest snow caught them on the Silesian border.

The world has changed. And I see a part for myself in this new world. Not at Moor Park.

Her first letter reaches me at last, from Nimberge.

My Dear Bedford (Elizabeth writes), I have no doubt that you have heard of the misfortune that has come upon us and that you will have been very sorry. But I console myself with one thing. The war is not yet over. Frederick has gone into Moravia in search of reinforcements. I will await him in Nimberge. I have also written to my father, the King, begging that he send immediate assistance to the embattled King, my husband . . .

By the time I receive this letter, she has almost certainly moved on. I must track her flight. Find her. Go to her. Elizabeth’s need and mine will meet. Her need will rescue me, just as her mother’s need had rescued me once before.

I can do it again.

But the first ti me I changed my life had been half my lifetime ago. I had been just twenty-two years old and known that I could do anything as well as any man, if I set my mind to it.