The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

Чтение книги онлайн.

       9

      LONDON, THURSDAY, 30 JANUARY 1606

      From my chamber in the Bishop’s house at Paul’s, beside the Cathedral, I listened all day to the distant sound of the scaffold being built in the Churchyard. I had arrived in London by night, as furtively as I had fled to Coventry. Lord Harington sent me off from Combe professing ignorance of why the king had sent for me in secret. Besides the men-at-arms and the necessary grooms, only my old nurse, Alison Hay, had ridden beside me. Not even Anne was allowed to attend me.

      As I rode away, I looked over my shoulder at my guardian. After more than two years, I still did not know whether I was merely a costly burden to him or whether true affection lurked in all his well-meaning severity.

      Hammering, sawing. Faint and distant, but I knew what they meant. In the next two days, the Gunpowder Plotters were to die, some here at Paul’s and some at the Tower. Listening to the sound of hammers, I tried to decide whether I had seen more than concern on Harington’s face when I left Combe.

      The hammering paused. In the brief silence, I understood why I had been brought to London. I was to be seized without warning and beheaded, along with the Plotters! That was why I had travelled in such secrecy, lest my fate raise a wake of protest among the common people who had cheered so loudly for Henry and me. Their cheers had meant nothing, just as my father said.

      I saw now why not even my mother knew I was in London—for she had neither visited nor sent a greeting. I saw whyI hadn’t been allowed to go to Whitehall or to send a message to anyone. And why Anne had been kept behind, so she would not be tainted with my crimes. The king feared me, his oldest daughter, enough to kill me as his own mother had been killed, for the safety of the English crown.

      I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions. But however much I fought it, the conviction that I was right twisted its roots deeper and deeper into my head.

      Mrs Hay woke me in what felt like the middle of the night. ‘You are sent for.’

      The windows were still dark, with no hint yet of winter sunrise. The air was cold.

      I gripped her hands. ‘Do you know why? Tell me! I won’t cry out, I swear.’ My heart pounded. If I were to die, I needed time to ready myself. This wasn’t fair! Not possible…‘Where must I go?’ I could not imagine dying.

      ‘To the Bishop’s little study.’

      ‘Not to the Churchyard?’

      ‘I was told the study, here in the Bishop’s house.’

      ‘Only the Bishop’s study?’ I burst into tears.

      ‘Oh…!’ Mrs Hay stared, uncertain what to do. She hadn’t held me for more than six years. Then she reached out and clutched my head to her breast. ‘No. No! You mustn’t think such things!’ She smoothed my wild hair. ‘How can you think it?’

      I heard a pause while she did indeed think how the thought might have occurred. A new spasm of terror quivered through me.

      ‘What does the king want with me?’

      Mrs Hay sounded less confident than before. ‘His majesty’s at Whitehall, not here. And means to go hunting, or so I’m told.’ She stroked my head again. ‘Four of those Papist fiends are to die today. Grant, Digby, Wintour and Bates. No one else.’

      Digby. I was here because of him. Digby must be the reason. I could not think straight.

      She fingered a russet tangle at the back of my head, then began to unpick it, hair by hair. ‘I’ll attend you in the Bishop’s study, if they let me.’ As she lifted my heavy hair in both hands to shake it out, I felt a cold draft on my nape.

      ‘I’ll wear my hair loose today,’ I said. I smelled fear in my armpits. I put my hands on my neck as if to hold my head in place.

      A gentleman wearing the Bishop of London’s livery led us to the study, a small room overlooking Paul’s Churchyard on the far side of the Bishop’s house from the chamber where I had slept. Apart from the bishop’s man, Mrs Hay and myself, the room was empty. I had half-expected Cecil to be there. I felt him twined into my fate but did not yet know how.

      The bishop’s man gestured towards the window. With Mrs Hay beside me, I looked down through the diamonds of watery glass at the blurred bulk of the scaffold I had heard being built.

      Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten. Lanterns and torches still burned. A crowd already packed the space. I could hear it through the closed window, like the sea shuffling pebbles. The Bishop’s man opened the window so that I could see more clearly.

      The blades of halberds pricked the chilly air above the crowd, where men-at-arms stood stationed in every doorway, enough of them to stop a possible rescue attempt, which such a great crowd might allow. Or to put down a civil uprising, like those the plotters had believed would take place across England in support of the Catholic cause—and which the government still feared, to judge by that army in the courtyard.

      Dignitaries stood crowded onto the scaffold close below me, talking amongst themselves as if in a waiting room in Whitehall. I was so close I could hear them coughing and clearing their throats. Cecil’s small figure was first hidden, then discovered again, as the others shifted around him.

      ‘Who is that man standing behind Lord Salisbury?’ I asked Mrs Hay. ‘There, the one with the thin face, who keeps smiling and nodding at the others.’

      ‘That’s his lordship’s cousin,’ said Mrs Hay. ‘Sir Francis Bacon. Their mothers are sisters.’ She tried to think what else to tell me. ‘He writes a great deal.’

      Though much taller and better formed, Bacon lacked his little cousin’s authority. I watched him for a moment. He reminded me of an anxious dog, sniffing and wagging his tail at the other men on the scaffold. Then I forgot him.

      The СКАЧАТЬ