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

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СКАЧАТЬ went back to the shop.

      I felt so wretched I could hardly carry the boxes from the rear of the printing shop out to the cart and hand them over to Daniel. My father did nothing. He stood with his forehead leaning against the wall of the house.

      ‘The press,’ he said quietly.

      ‘I will see that it is taken down, sheeted and stored safely,’ I promised. ‘Along with everything else. And when you decide to come back, it will be here for you and we can start again.’

      ‘We won’t come back,’ Daniel said. ‘This country is going to be a Spanish dominion. How can we be safe here? How can you be safe here? Do you think the Inquisition has no memory? Do you think your names are not on their records as heretics and runaways? They will be here in force, there will be courts in every city up and down the land. Do you think you and your father will escape? Newly arrived from Spain? Named Verde? Do you really think you will pass as an English girl called Hannah Green? With your speech, and your looks?’

      I put my hands to my face, I nearly put them over my ears.

      ‘Daughter,’ my father said.

      It was unbearable.

      ‘All right,’ I said furiously, in anger and despair. ‘Enough! All right! I’ll come.’

      Daniel said nothing in his triumph, he did not even smile. My father muttered, ‘Praise God,’ and picked up a box as if he were a twenty-year-old porter and loaded it on the back of the wagon. Within minutes everything was done and I was locking the front door of the shop with the key.

      ‘We’ll pay the rent for the next year,’ Daniel decided. ‘Then we can fetch the rest of the stuff.’

      ‘You’ll carry a printing press across England, France and Italy?’ I asked nastily.

      ‘If I have to,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

      My father climbed in the back of the wagon and held out his hand for me. I hesitated. The three white faces of Daniel’s sisters turned to me, blank with hostility. ‘Is she coming now?’ one of them asked.

      ‘You can help me with the horses,’ Daniel said quickly and I left the tailgate of the wagon and went to the head of the nearest horse.

      We led them, slipping a little clumsily on the cobbles of the side street, until we came out to the solid track of Fleet Street and headed towards the city.

      ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

      ‘To the docks,’ he said. ‘There is a ship waiting on the tide, I have booked our passage to France.’

      ‘I have money for my own passage,’ I said.

      He threw me a dark smile. ‘I already paid for you. I knew you would come.’

      I gritted my teeth at his arrogance and tugged on the reins of the big horse and said, ‘Come on then!’ as if the horse were to blame, and as it felt the even ground of the street under its hooves it started a steady walk and I swung up on to the driving box of the wagon. A few moments later and Daniel joined me.

      ‘I did not mean to taunt you,’ he said stiffly. ‘I only meant that I knew you would do the right thing. You could not leave your father and your People, and choose to live among strangers forever.’

      I shook my head. In the cold morning light with the fog curling off the Thames I could see the great palaces that faced out over the river, their pleasure gardens running down to the water’s edge. All of them were places I had enjoyed, a favoured guest in the queen’s train. We entered the city, just stirring to start the day, and I saw the smoke from the ovens uncurling from the bakers’ chimneys, past the church of St Paul’s scented once more with incense, and then we headed along the familiar route towards the Tower.

      Daniel knew I was thinking of Robert Dudley as the shadow of the curtain wall fell over our little wagon. I looked up, past the wall to where the great white tower pointed like a raised fist shaken at the sky as if to say that whoever held the Tower, held London; and justice and mercy had nothing to do with it.

      ‘Perhaps he’ll slither free,’ Daniel said.

      I turned my head away. ‘I’m leaving, aren’t I?’ I said inconsequentially. ‘That should be enough for you.’

      There was a light at one of the windows, a little candle flame. I thought of Robert Dudley’s table drawn up to the window and his chair before it. I thought of him sleepless in the night, trying to prepare for his own death, mourning those he had brought to theirs, fearful for those who still waited, like the Princess Elizabeth, watching for the morning when they would be told that this was their last day. I wondered if he had any sense of me, out here in the darkness, driving away from him, longing to be with him, betraying him with every step of the big horses’ hooves.

      ‘Stay,’ Daniel said quietly, as if I had shifted in my seat. ‘There is nothing you can do.’

      I subsided and looked dully at the thickness of the walls and the forbidding gated entrances as we skirted all around the breadth of the Tower and came back to the riverside at the last.

      One of Daniel’s sisters poked her head up from the back of the wagon. ‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked, her voice sharp with fear.

      ‘Nearly,’ Daniel said gently. ‘Greet your new sister, Hannah. This is Mary.’

      ‘Hello, Mary,’ I said.

      She nodded at me and stared as if I were some freak show at Bartholomew’s fair. She took in the richness of my cloak and the fine quality of my linen and then her eyes went down to the shine on my boots and my embroidered hose and breeches. Then without another word she turned and dropped down to the body of the wagon and whispered to her sisters and I heard their muffled laughter.

      ‘She’s shy,’ Daniel said. ‘She doesn’t mean to be rude.’

      I was absolutely certain that she was determined to be rude but there was no point in telling him. Instead I wrapped the cloak a little closer around myself and watched the dark flow of the water as we plodded down the road to the dockside.

      I glanced back upriver and then I saw a sight that made me put my hand out to Daniel. ‘Stop!’

      He did not tighten the rein. ‘Why? What is it?’

      ‘Stop, I say!’ I said abruptly. ‘I have seen something on the river.’

      He paused then, the horses turned a little as they were pulled up, and I could see the royal barge, but with no standard flying. Queen Mary’s own barge, but not with the queen on board, the drumbeat keeping the rowers in time, a dark figure at the front of the boat, two hooded men, one at the rear, one at the prow, scanning the banks in case of trouble.

      ‘They must have Elizabeth,’ I guessed.

      ‘You can’t possibly tell,’ Daniel said. He shot a glance at me. ‘And if they do have her? It’s nothing to do with us. They’d be bound to arrest her now that Wyatt …’

      ‘If they turn into the Tower then they have her on board and they are taking her to her death,’ I said flatly. ‘And Lord Robert will die too.’

      He СКАЧАТЬ