The Noble Assassin. Christie Dickason

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СКАЧАТЬ The steward looks past her, wild-eyed, at the shivering crowd of attendants and royal children.

      The Elector must have believed that the English princess would understand the true message of his letter. He had given no orders what to do if Her Highness ignored it.

      ‘I’m certain we can find enough for one night,’ the steward says. He would have to see that the captain of the castle garrison doubled the night watch.

      The child shifts in her belly. Elizabeth pulls off her gloves and flexes her icy fingers.

      The Elector did not lie in his letter. The place does not suit a queen. Cold air flows down from the small, high windows. Icy currents seep under the door and wash around their ankles. Everywhere she looks, she sees only more grey dampness.

      But she is in.

      ‘I assume that you have a suitable chamber for me, with clean sheets on the bed,’ she says. ‘And chambers for the Prince, the Princess and my ladies. The rest can be laid out on pallets so long as there are fires. The carters and drovers, too.’ She gazes around the grey, grim hall. ‘I’m quite sure that your master has a few bottles left in his cellars for just such emergencies as this one.’

      ‘Madam.’ The man bows and begins to back away. ‘I must just . . .’

      As he is about to leave the hall, she adds, ‘And bring me pen and ink. Tomorrow morning, I will give you a list of my needs for the next month, including a midwife. As soon as we have fires, I will also write to the Elector to tell him that I have decided to stay here at Custrin until my child is born.’

      If he dares to throw me out, she writes to friends in England, . . . let him try to explain to the English people – and to their King – why an heir to the English throne was born – and very likely frozen to death – in a German snowdrift.

       LUCY, DECEMBER 1620

      Her letter reaches me just before I leave Moor Park for London. She is not only alive but sounds like her former undaunted self. The tale is almost comical as she relates it, but her anger glints through her words.

      She must learn to be more guarded in what she writes, I think. Or at least use a cipher. I put this letter with her other ones in my writing chest that will travel under my eye on my horse’s hindquarters.

       Chapter 11

      LONDON, JANUARY 1621

      I turn my horse left out of St Martin’s Lane. The house stands ahead of me on the north side of the Strand, as lanky and narrow-shouldered as I remembered it. I have never liked Bedford House, built in London for my husband by his father in the days of the Old Queen. It strikes me as unfriendly, with its long roof, seven steep sharp gables and the empty posturing of a mock-military turret tower. It looks south across the Strand, past York House, home of the Lord Keeper Francis Bacon, to the Thames. Only being near to the river is in its favour.

      I can hear the distant shouts of boatmen from the different water stairs as I let my horse pick his way through the frozen rubbish in the street. After passing under the arch of the gatehouse at the far end of the house front, my small party clops into a large, irregular, open courtyard.

      A tall, fair-haired man bursts out of the higgledypiggledy wing on my left. ‘I hear that a new horse has arrived for the stables! And it’s not half-dead, neither.’

      ‘Sir Kit!’ I cry.

      He runs to take my horse as if he were still a groom, but I’d had Christopher Hawkins made up to knight as soon as he was old enough – one of the first favours I asked after arriving in London with the new queen. The young groom who had ridden with me to Berwick is now my London Master of Horse. When he married the year after his advancement, I persuaded Edward to give him the lease of a small house in the tangle of streets that abut the west wall of Bedford House, along with a small annual income. So far as I know, he survives the paltry stipend granted to him by Edward by teaching the aspiring sons of successful London merchants how to ride.

      Now I look down at the delight in his face and watch him stroke my horse’s nose with a broad callused hand. Here is one of the few men I know I can trust.

      In the big entrance hall, steward, clerk, secretary, cook, house grooms, chamber grooms and maids wait to greet me. It is a smaller company than it had once been, even allowing for absent scullery grooms and gardeners. But a London house can supply itself from the city bakers, fishmongers, butchers, brewers, vintners, poulterers and pigmen, and does not need its own. It need not pretend to be a self-feeding country estate.

      The steward looks ill, I note. I will ask later if he needs to give up his position.

      I hand my fur-lined gloves to my maid. Agnes Hooper unhooks my travel cloak and takes it away to dry. I look about me.

      I’m pleasantly surprised. Bedford House feels drier than either Chenies or Moor Park, and far more welcoming than when I had first seen it as a new young wife. When we married, my husband was lodged there with his aunt, the Countess of Warwick, for whom I had been third choice.

      Raised from slumber by my arrival, the house smells of the lavender and rosemary used against moths and of hastily applied beeswax polish. But there is not the odour I remember from other visits of mustiness and mice. The entrance hall and chief receiving room, like much of the house, are half-empty, their paintings and furniture having been sold to help pay Edward’s fine. But the smoke rises straight in the fireplaces. The wooden floors are warmer underfoot than the stone floors of Chenies and Moor Park, the low-ceilinged rooms easier to heat.

      The steward, who bears the unfortunate name of Mudd, escorts me to the chief sleeping chamber. Looking through open doors as we pass, I see that some of the upholstered chairs and stools still wear their protective linen covers. But then, I had given very little warning of my arrival.

      At the threshold of the great bedchamber, I stop. For a moment, I think I will not be able to enter. The ornately carved bed, with its newly brushed silk hangings and velvet coverlet embroidered with harsh, slightly tarnished gold threads, wrenches open the door of memory.

      My wedding night at Bedford House: duty on both our parts. Impatience on his. Pain. Sticky slime.

      I had counted off the month. I bled. I had failed to conceive.

      Tried again. Again, not with child.

      I felt sick in the mornings, but not in the right way. Again. Still not with child.

      My husband’s eyes were cold and resolute when he bedded me.

      I must not want to conceive, he said. I wasted my vital force in court frivolities. I unwomaned myself with my pen, by aspiring to have a manly soul. I loved the Queen and played the man with her so that I was no longer a true woman. I murdered my babes with my mind before they could grow.

      Again I bled.

      I conceived but lost the babe soon after.

      My guilt grew plainer in his eyes.

      Again we mated.

      Again, I failed. I disappointed and disgusted him in every way.

      And my money was going fast.

      It СКАЧАТЬ