Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2: The Queen’s Fool, The Virgin’s Lover, The Other Queen. Philippa Gregory

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ knew they would kill me if I did not renounce my faith. But all I have done to Elizabeth is to beg her to save her own soul and be my little sister once more!’

      ‘Your Grace …’ I whispered. ‘She’s only young, she will learn.’

      ‘She’s not that young.’

      ‘She will learn …’

      ‘If she is going to learn then she chooses the wrong tutors. She conspires with the kingdom of France against me, she has a band of men who would stop at nothing to see her inherit. Every day someone tells me of another foul plot, and always, the tendrils come back to her. Every time I look at her now, I see a woman steeped in sin, just like her mother, the poisoner. I can almost see her flesh going black from the sin from her heart. I see her turning her back on the Holy Church, I see her turning her back on my love, I see her rushing towards treason and sin.’

      ‘You said she was your little sister,’ I reminded her. ‘You said you loved her as if she was your own child.’

      ‘I did love her,’ the queen said bitterly. ‘More than she remembers. More than I should have done, knowing what her mother did to mine. I did love her. But she is not the child that I loved any more. She is not the little girl that I taught to write and read. She has gone wrong. She has been corrupted. She is steeped in sin. I cannot save her; she is a witch and the daughter of a witch.’

      ‘She’s a young woman,’ I protested quietly. ‘Not a witch.’

      ‘Worse than a witch,’ she accused. ‘A heretic. A hypocrite. A whore. I know her for all these. A heretic because she takes the Mass; but I know her to be a Protestant, and she is forsworn with her eyes on the Host. A hypocrite because she does not even own to her faith. There are brave men and women in this land who would go to the stake for their error; but she is not one of them. When my brother Edward was on the throne she was then a shining light of the reformed religion. She was the Protestant princess in her dark gowns and her white ruffs and her eyes turned down and no gold or jewels in her ears or on her fingers. Now he is dead she kneels beside me to see the raising of the Host, and crosses herself, and curtsies to the altar, but I know it is all false. It is an insult to me, which is nothing; but it is an insult to my mother who was pushed aside for her mother, and it is an insult to the Holy Church, which is a sin against God himself.

      ‘And, God forgive her, she is a whore because of what she did with Thomas Seymour. The whole world would know it; but that other great Protestant whore hid the two of them, and died in hiding it.’

      ‘Who?’ I asked. I was appalled and fascinated, all at once, remembering the girl in the sunlit garden and the man who held her against a tree and put his hand up her skirt.

      ‘Katherine Parr,’ Queen Mary said through her teeth. ‘She knew that her husband Thomas Seymour had been seduced by Elizabeth. She caught them at it in Elizabeth’s chamber, Elizabeth in her shift, Lord Thomas all over her. Katherine Parr bundled Elizabeth off to the country, out of the way. She faced down the gossip, she denied everything. She protected the girl – well, she had to, the child was in her house. She protected her husband, and then she died giving birth to his child. Fool. Foolish woman.’

      She shook her head. ‘Poor woman. She loved him so much that she married him before my father was cold in the ground. She scandalised the court, and she risked her place in the world. And he rewarded her by tickling a fourteen-year-old girl in her house, under her supervision. And that girl, my Elizabeth, my little sister, wriggled under his caresses and protested that she would die if he touched her again, but never locked her bedroom door, never complained to her stepmother and never found a better lodging.

      ‘I knew of it. Good God, there was such gossip even I, hidden away in the country, heard of it. I wrote to her and said she should come to me, I had a home, I could provide for us both. She wrote me very sweetly, very fair. She wrote to me that nothing was happening to her and that she did not need to move house. And all the time she was letting him into her chamber in the morning, and letting him lift the hem of her gown to see her shift, and one time, God help her, letting him cut her gown off her, so that she was all but naked before him.

      ‘She never sent to me for help, though she knew I would have taken her away within the day. A little whore then, and a whore now, and I knew it, God forgive me, and hoped that she might be bettered. I thought if I gave her a place at my side, and the honour which would be hers, then she would grow into being a princess. I thought that a young whore in the making could be unmade, could be made anew, could be taught to be a princess. But she cannot. She will not. You will see how she behaves in the future when she has the chance of a tickling once again.’

      ‘Your Grace …’ I was overwhelmed by the spilling out of her spite.

      She took a breath and turned to the window. She rested her forehead against the thick pane of glass and I saw how the heat from her hair misted the glass. It was cold outside, the unbearable English winter, and the Thames was iron-grey beyond the stone-coloured garden beneath the pewter sky. I could see the queen’s reflected face in the thick glass like a cameo drowned in water, I could see the feverish energy pulsing through her body.

      ‘I must be free of this hatred,’ she said quietly. ‘I must be free of the pain that her mother brought me. I must disown her.’

      ‘Your Grace …’ I said again, more gently.

      She turned back to me.

      ‘She will come after me if I die without heir,’ she said flatly. ‘That lying whore. Anything I achieve will be overturned by her, will be spoiled by her. Everything in my life has always been despoiled by her. I was England’s only princess and the great joy of my mother’s heart. A moment, an eyelid blink, and I was serving in Elizabeth’s nursery as her maid, and my mother was deserted and then dead. Elizabeth, the whore’s daughter, is corruption itself. I have to have a child to put between her and the throne. It is the greatest duty I owe to this country, to my mother and to myself.’

      ‘You will have to marry Philip of Spain?’

      She nodded. ‘He, as well as any other,’ she said. ‘I can make a treaty with him that will hold. He knows, his father knows, what this country is like. I can be queen and wife with a man like him. He has his own land, his own fortune, he does not need little England. And then I can be queen of my own country and wife to him, and a mother.’

      There was something in the way she said ‘mother’ that alerted me. I had felt her touch on my head, I had seen her with the children that tumbled out from dirty cottages.

      ‘Why, you long for a child for yourself,’ I exclaimed.

      I saw the need in her eyes and then she turned away from me to the window and the view of the cold river again. ‘Oh yes,’ she said quietly to the cold garden outside. ‘I have longed for a child of my own for twenty years. That was why I loved my poor brother so much. In the hunger of my heart I even loved Elizabeth when she was a baby. Perhaps God in his goodness will give me a son of my own now.’ She looked at me. ‘You have the Sight. Will I have a child, Hannah? Will I have a child of my own, to hold in my arms and to love? A child who will grow and inherit my throne and make England a great country?’

      I waited for a moment, in case anything came to me. All I had was a sense of great despair and hopelessness, nothing more. I dropped my gaze to the floor and I knelt before her. ‘I am sorry, Your Grace,’ I said. ‘The Sight cannot be commanded. I can’t tell you the answer to that question, nor any other. My vision comes and goes as it wishes. I cannot say if you will have a child.’

      ‘Then СКАЧАТЬ