The Queen's Fool

Autumn 1556

The first month in our little shop, I absolutely rejoiced in my escape from the Carpenter household. A couple of times I saw Daniel’s mother or two of his sisters in the market, or at the fish quay, and his mother looked away as if she could not see me, and his sisters pointed and nudged each other and stared as if I were a visiting leper and freedom was a disease that they might catch if they came too close. Every night in bed I spread myself out like a starfish, hands and feet pointing to each corner, rejoicing in the space, and thanked God that I might call myself a single woman once more with all the bed to myself. Every morning I awoke with an utter exultation that I need not fit myself to someone else’s pattern. I could put on my sound walking boots underneath the concealing hem of my gown, I could set print, I could go to the bakehouse for our breakfast, I could go with my father to the tavern for our dinner, I could do what I pleased; and not what a young married woman, trying to please a critical mother-in-law, had to do.

I did not see Daniel until midway through the second month and then I literally ran into him as I was coming out of church. I had to sit at the back now; as a deserting wife I was in a state of sin which nothing would remove but full penitence and a return to my husband if he would be kind enough to have me. The priest himself had told me that I was as bad as an adulteress, worse, since I was in a state of sin of my own making and not even at another’s urging. He set me a list of penances that would take me until Christmas next year to complete. I was as determined as ever to appear devout and so I spent many evenings on my knees in the church and always attended Mass, head shrouded in a black shawl, seated at the back. So it was from the darkness of the meanest pew that I stepped into the light of the church door and, half dazzled, bumped into Daniel Carpenter.

“Hannah!” he said, and put out a hand to steady me.

“Oh, Daniel.”

For a moment we stood, very close, our eyes meeting. In that second I felt a jolt of absolute desire and knew that I wanted him and that he wanted me, and then I stepped to one side and looked down and muttered: “Excuse me.”

“No, stop,” he said urgently. “Are you well? Is your father well?”

I looked up at that with an irrepressible giggle. Of course he knew the answers to both questions. With spies like his mother and sisters he probably knew, to the last letter, what pages I had on the press, what dinner we had in the cupboard.

“Yes,” I replied. “Both of us. Thank you.”

“I have missed you sorely,” he said, quickly trying to detain me. “I have been wanting to speak with you.”

“I am sorry,” I said coldly. “But I have nothing to say, Daniel, excuse me, please.”

I wanted to get away from him before he led me into talking, before he made me feel angry, or grieved, or jealous all over again. I did not want to feel anything for him, not desire, not resentment. I wanted to be cold to him, so I turned on my heel and started to walk away.

In two strides he was beside me, his hand on my arm. “Hannah, we cannot live apart like this. It is wrong.”

“Daniel, we should never have married. It is that which was wrong; not our separation. Now let me go.”

His hand dropped to his side but he still held my gaze. “I shall come to your shop this afternoon at two,” he said firmly. “And I shall talk with you in private. If you go out I shall wait for your return. I will not leave things like this, Hannah. I have the right to talk with you.”

There were people coming out of the church porch, and others waiting to enter. I did not want to attract any more attention than I had already earned by being the deserting bride of Calais.

“At two o’clock, then,” I said, and dipped him a tiny curtsey and went down the path. His mother and his sisters, coming into church behind him, drew their skirts back from the very paving slabs of the path where I was walking, as if they were afraid they would get the hems dirty by being brushed by me. I smiled at them, brazening it out. “Good morning, Miss Carpenters,” I said cheerily. “Good morning, Mrs. Carpenter.” And when I was out of earshot I said: “And God rot the lot of you.”

Daniel came at two o’clock and I drew him out of the house and up the stone stairs beside our house that went up to the roof of the gateway of the city walls that overlooked the English Pale and then south toward France. In the lee of the city walls, just outside, were new houses, built to accommodate the growing English population. If the French were ever to come against us these new householders would have to abandon their hearths and skip inside the gates. But before the French could come close, there were the canals which would be flooded from the sea gates, the eight great forts, the earth ramparts, and a stubborn defense plan. If they could get through that, they would have to face the fortified town of Calais itself and everyone knew that it was impregnable. The English themselves had only won it, two centuries ago, after a siege lasting eleven months and then the Calais burghers had surrendered, starved out. The walls of this city had never been breached. They never would be breached, it was a citadel that was famous for being impossible to take either by land or sea.

I leaned against the wall and looked south to France, and waited.

“I have made an agreement with her and I will not see her again,” Daniel said steadily, his voice low. “I have paid her a sum of money and when I set up in practice on my own I will pay her another. Then I will never see her or her child again.”

I nodded but I said nothing.

“She has released me from any obligation to her, and the master of her house and his wife have said they will adopt her child and bring him up as if he were their grandson. She will see no more of me and he will not want for anything. He will grow up without a father. He will not even remember me.”

He waited for me to respond. Still I said nothing.

“She is young and…” He hesitated, searching for a word which would not offend me. “Personable. She is almost certain to marry another man and then she will forget me as completely as I have forgotten her.” He paused. “So there is no reason why you and I should live apart,” he said persuasively. “I have no pre-contract, I have no obligation, I am yours and yours alone.”

I turned to him. “No,” I said. “I set you free, Daniel. I do not want a husband, I do not want any man. I will not return to you, whatever agreement you and she have made. That part of my life is over.”

“You are my wedded wife,” he said. “Married by the laws of the land and in the sight of God.”

“Oh! God!” I said dismissively. “Not our God, so what does that mean to us?”

“Your father himself said the Jewish prayers.”

“Daniel!” I exclaimed. “He could not remember them all, not even he and your mother racking their brains together could remember all the words of the blessings. We had no rabbi, we had no synagogue, we did not even have two witnesses. All that bound us was such faith that we could bring to it – there was nothing else. I came to it with my faith and trust in you, and you came to it with a lie in your mouth, a woman hidden behind you and your child in her cradle. Whatever God we invoked – it was meaningless.”

He was ashen. “You speak like an alchemist,” he said. “We swore binding oaths.”

“You were not free to make them,” I snapped.

“You are following reason to its end and coming to madness,” he said desperately. “Whatever the rights or wrongs of the wedding, I am asking you to make a marriage now. I am asking you to forgive me and love me, like a woman, not anatomize me like a scholar. Love me from your heart, not from your head.”

“I am sorry,” I said. “I will not. My head and my heart are indivisible. I will not cut myself up into parts so that my heart can have its way and my head think it wrong. Whatever this decision costs me I take it entire, as a whole woman. I shall pay the price but I will not return to you and to that house.”

“If it is my mother and my sisters…” he started.

I raised my hand. “Peace, Daniel,” I said gently. “They are what they are and I don’t like them; but if you had kept faith with me I would have found some way to live with them. Without our love, it all means nothing.”

“So what will you do?” he asked, and I could hear the despair in his voice.

“I shall stay here with my father, and when the time serves, we shall return to England.”

“You mean when the false princess comes to the throne and the traitor that you love comes out of the Tower,” he accused me.

I turned my head away from him. “Whatever happens, it will be no concern of yours what I do,” I said quietly. “Now, I want to go.”

Daniel put his hand on my arm, I could feel the heat of his palm through the thin linen of my sleeve. He was hot with torment. “Hannah, I love you,” he said. “It is death to me, if you will not see me.”

I turned back to him and met his gaze straight, like a lad, not like a woman meeting her husband’s eyes. “Daniel, you have no one but yourself to blame,” I said flatly. “I am not a woman to be played with. You were false to me and I have cut my love for you out of my heart and out of my mind and nothing, nothing will restore it. You are a stranger to me now and for always. It is over. Go your way and I will go mine. It is finished.”

He gave a hoarse raw-throated sob and turned on his heel and plunged away. I went as quietly and as quickly as I could back to the shop, I went up the stairs to the little empty bedroom in which I had celebrated being free, and I put myself facedown on the little bed, pulled a pillow over my head and cried silently for the love I had lost.

That was not the last I saw of him, but we did not speak intimately again. Most Sundays at church I would glimpse him, meticulously opening his missal and saying his prayers, observant to every movement of the Mass, never taking his eyes from the Host and the priest, as all of us always did. In their pew his mother and his sisters stole little glances at me, and once I saw them with a pretty vapid-looking fair-haired young woman with a baby on her hip and I guessed that she was the mother of Daniel’s child and that Daniel’s mother had taken it upon herself to bring her grandson to church.

I turned my head away from their curious glances but I felt an odd swimmy feeling that I had not known for years. I leaned forward and gripped the smooth time-worn wood of the pew and waited for the sensation to pass but it grew stronger. The Sight was coming to me.

I would have given anything for it to pass me by. The last thing I wanted was to make a spectacle of myself in church, especially when the woman was there with her child; but the waves of darkness seemed to wash down from the rood screen, from the priest behind it, from the candles in the stone arched windows, wash down and engulf me so that I could not even see my knuckles whiten as I gripped the pew. Then I could only see the skirt of my gown as I dropped to my knees and then I could see nothing but darkness.

I could hear the sound of a battle and someone screaming: “Not my baby! Take him! Take him!” and I felt myself say: “I can’t take him.” And the insistent voice cried again: “Take him! Take him!” and at that moment there was a dreadful crash like a forest falling, and a rush of horses and men and danger, and I wanted to run but there was nowhere to run, and I cried out with fear.

“You’re all right now,” came a voice and it was Daniel’s beloved voice and I was in his arms, and the sun was shining warmly on my face, and there was no darkness, nor terror, nor that terrible crash of falling wood and the clatter of hooves on stones.

“I fainted,” I said. “Did I say anything?”

“Only ‘I can’t take him,’” he said. “Was it the Sight, Hannah?”

I nodded. I should have sat up and pulled away from him but I rested against his shoulder and felt the seductive sense of safety that he always gave me.

“A warning?” he asked.

“Something awful,” I said. “My God, an awful vision. But I don’t know what. That’s what it’s like, I see enough to feel terror but not enough to know.”

“I had thought you would lose the Sight,” he said quietly.

“It seems not. It’s not a vision I would want.”

“Hush then,” he soothed. He turned his face to one side and said, “I will take her home. You can leave us. She needs nothing.”

At once I realized that behind him was a small circle of people who had gathered for curiosity to see the woman who had cried out and fainted in church.

“She’s a seer,” someone said. “She was the queen’s holy fool.”

“She didn’t foresee much then…” someone said with a snicker and made a joke about me coming from England to marry a man and then leave him within three months.

I saw Daniel flush with anger and I struggled to sit up. At once his arm tightened around me. “Be still,” he said. “I am going to help you home and then I am going to bleed you. You are hot and feverish.”

“I am not,” I contradicted him at once. “And it is nothing.”

My father appeared beside Daniel. “Could you walk if we both helped you?” he asked. “Or shall I fetch a litter?”

“I can walk,” I said. “I am not ill.”

The two of them helped me to my feet and we went down the narrow path to the lane that led to the city gate and our shop. At the corner I saw a knot of women waiting, Daniel’s mother, his three sisters, and the woman with a baby on her hip. She was staring at me just as I stared at her, each of us measuring the other, examining, judging, comparing. She was a broad-hipped pink milk-fed young woman, ripe as a peach, with pink smiling lips and fair hair, a broad face which denied deception, blue slightly protruding eyes. She gave me a smile, a shy smile, half apologetic, half hopeful. The baby she held against her was a true Jewish boy, dark-haired, dark-eyed, solemn-faced, with sweet olive skin. I would have known him for Daniel’s child the moment I had seen him, even if Mrs. Carpenter had not betrayed the secret.

As I looked at her I saw a shadow behind her, a shadow that was gone as quickly as I turned my gaze to it. I had seen something like a horseman, riding behind her, bending low toward her. I blinked, there was nothing there but this young woman, her baby held close, and Daniel’s womenfolk looking at me, looking at them.

“Come on, Father,” I said, very weary. “Get me home.”