Elizabeth, Captive Princess Read online

  Praise for Margaret Irwin1

  ‘One of Britain’s most accomplished historical novelists.

  Her love and respect for the past shines through every page’

  Sarah Dunant, author of Sacred Hearts

  ‘Accomplished, fluent, graceful, picturesque and very readable’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Kind, courageous and fertile; it mingles history and romance with such spirit’

  The Observer

  ‘Beautifully and evocatively written, this is historical writing at its best’

  Historical Novels Review

  ‘Splendidly retold … the strange drama in this writer’s skilful hands has a strong romantic appeal’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘An evocative historical writer … her writing style brings the period to life’

  My Weekly Magazine

  Elizabeth, Captive Princess

  MARGARET IRWIN

  Contents

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  About the Author

  By Margaret Irwin

  Copyright

  Elizabeth, Captive Princess

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The fields were deep and ruddy with uncut corn, the orchards heavy with ripening fruit. Set in their coloured ring, the courtyard of the great house at Hatfield lay quivering in the dancing light reflected off stone and brick and smooth cobbles. The waiting horses stamped and champed their bits, clanked their harness, tossed their heads, shook off the clustering flies that rose in angry clouds only to sink and settle again, sent their shrill whinnyings spinning up into the sunlight, complaining to each other that yet again their young lady was late.

  The subdued voices of the men standing at their heads grumbled in concert with them and the buzz of the disturbed flies; the men had scurried and sweated to get themselves and their mounts ready on the instant they had been ordered, and here they had been banging about in this courtyard for the past half-hour at least. What could the girl be doing to keep them all dangling like this? Surely she didn’t need to titivate all this time in order to ride and see her brother before he died? For most of them there knew or guessed by now what message had been brought by the rider in Duke Dudley’s livery who had urged his spent horse into this courtyard an hour or so ago, slid from the saddle rubbing his sleeve across a face dripping with sweat, and demanded to see the Lady Elizabeth.

  She had seen him, she had given order that an escort was to make ready on the instant to ride with her to London; she herself, but just returned from riding in the great park, would not wait even to change her dress. Had she changed her mind instead? since she did that almost as often. But would a girl of nineteen be so heartless, and one so fond of her young half-brother, and he the King? No one had said openly that King Edward lay seriously ill in his palace at Greenwich, but that was the noise in London, and noises from London travelled fast.

  The noises in the courtyard hummed and heaved; they killed off King Edward easily enough, a sickly boy who was always having colds and had been worked too hard at his books, though some murmured sympathetically that it was a pity, for the lad had shown a great keenness for sport since Duke Dudley had taken charge of him. Some of them put his much elder half-sister, the Lady Mary, on the throne, and supposed she’d down the Duke and bring back the old religion. Some thought the Duke would make a bid to keep his place by setting up her cousin, the little Lady Jane Grey, instead as Queen, in the name of the new Protestant faith; he’d just married her off to his younger son, Guildford, which looked as though he had been planning some such move. Others again said if England must keep a Protestant sovereign, why not their Lady Elizabeth, own half-sister to the King instead of mere cousin? and a likely lass with a fine taste in horseflesh, for all she had kept them stewing and sweating in this leaden cup of a courtyard where the sun poured down like molten brass.

  The murmurs and questions buzzed in the hot air, and then at last there was a stir within the silent house.

  A door banged somewhere. A voice called. Steps were heard running up and down the stairs. The great doors were flung wide, opening a dark cool hollow in the glare of white heat. The Steward of the Household, Mr Thomas Parry, came out puffily, blinked like an owl at the sunlight, turned his back on it and bowed low.

  The men in the courtyard could just see a slight figure moving towards them like a shadow through the dim recesses of the hall; a girl in a grey dress came out to the top of the steps and there stood still, the sun beating down on her sparkling red hair and the winking jewels and buttons of her cap and riding-dress. There she stood and stared, her eyes narrowing in a face grown suddenly thin and white; stared, not at the brilliant coloured scene before her, but at a hidden danger just come to light in the sun. Her eyes closed against it, her face shut into a mask.

  Suddenly it flashed open. ‘Take away the horses,’ she called out in a clear and ringing voice where the note of command could not quite disguise an undertone of terror. ‘Take them all away. I’m not going.’

  There was a rustle of amazement, of alarm. Mr Thomas Parry asked with obsequious anxiety if anything were wrong.

  ‘I – think – so,’ was the baffling reply.

  ‘Is Your Grace not feeling well?’

  She turned her eyes towards him with a look that might mean gratitude. She paused, then nodded, then swayed, then put out a groping hand, and the long fingers clutched his arm so sharply that he winced.

  ‘Yes, that is it. I feel giddy. Take me back to my room, Parry. Tell them I am ill. I cannot ride to London. I am going to bed.’

  She turned and went back, leaning helplessly upon his arm, and their retreating figures disappeared within the dim cool cave of the hall. The great doors were shut to.

  The men in the courtyard looked at each other, nodded, swore softly. Their young lady had changed her mind again. What did it mean? Was she ill? Was it a sham? She could always be ill if she’d a mind to, they fancied. But why should she have a mind to, now, when her brother who loved her best in the world lay at the point of death?

  ‘A hard-hearted young bitch,’ the Duke’s messenger muttered as he took horse again to ride back with the news – and no doubt the Duke would give him small thanks for it. ‘The boy longed to see his sweet sister once again’ – that was the moving message he had brought. But it had only moved her for a moment – and then she had gone to bed.

  He cursed and rode out of the courtyard. The men left it to lead their horses back to the stables. Soon it was emptied of all life and noise, even of the flies, and became a barrenly blazing cup of silence, and sunlight reflected on the stones, until the shadows lengthened over it and the dusk deepened into dark and the moon rose.
r />   And next day, and the day after, the sun rose hot and bright again, and there was the noise of men and horses again outside the house. But the Lady Elizabeth stayed in bed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The room was filled with silence and the July sunshine. No birds sang in the midday heat outside the many windows. All those made to open were pushed wide; the small leaded panes of the others threw a chess-board of shadow on the gleaming floor. One was clouded by a tall fir, blue as thunder; not a leaf fluttered its carved shadow.

  Suddenly the bright hush was shattered into fragments; an uproar crashed in through the windows, pealing, clashing, ringing, echoing, carillon after carillon of rejoicing bells.

  With that, came a furious movement from between the white and scarlet bed-curtains, drawn back like the furled sails of a ship. The creature who had lain there motionless and wary, breathing an eager life into the stillness, sprang forward, tossing a cloud of fiery hair, fine as blown silk, round her white face and thin shoulders. Rage compressed her lips; the pupils of her pale eyes narrowed like a frightened cat’s, but rage conquered fear, she lunged sideways across the looped curtain, snatched up a little silver bell and shook it. In case its tinkle should not have the required effect, she yelled.

  There came the clattering uneven sound of tight shoes running in a monstrous hurry. In came a tall angular woman of about forty. Her long nose was inquisitive, her mouth anxious, but her eye irrepressibly lively.

  ‘Hell-Cat!’ said a voice from the bed, vibrant as the twang of a lute, ‘what the devil is the meaning of that din?’

  ‘The Hatfield church bells are all ringing too,’ stammered the Hell-Cat; ‘we thought – we didn’t dare not to ring them in the house-chapel—’

  ‘We? Who are “we”, you Ash-Cat?

  The Ash-Cat did not answer.

  ‘Stop them at once.’

  ‘Your Grace – is it safe? Duke Dudley is sure to hear of it. And by the same token, was it wise to yell – I mean, to call so loud? I have told everyone that the Lady Elizabeth is practically at death’s door.’

  The Lady Elizabeth ducked abruptly over the side of the bed, snatched up a book that had slid to the floor of the dais and flung it against a closed door. Cat Ashley knew when to go.

  ‘Ding dong, ding dong,’ rang the bells.

  ‘Ding dong, ding dong,’ sang the girl in a spasm of desperate merriment, and she chanted in time to them,

  ‘Long live Queen Jane,

  Will Jane long reign?

  Long live Queen Jane,

  How long—?’

  The bells stopped in the middle of a peal. The abrupt silence quivered over the sunlit room with an effect disruptive and shocking, like sudden death.

  Mrs Ashley had carried out her orders, and the bells in the house-chapel had ceased to ring for Queen Jane. That made no odds; they were still ringing for her all through the countryside, proclaiming her Queen as soon as King Edward was proclaimed dead.

  But had he really only just died, today, as announced? Had he really sent that sweet, compelling message to her two days ago, using his old childish nickname for her? Why had she suddenly felt certain, as she faced the blaze of sunlight in the courtyard, that her brother was already dead, that the message was a trap, baited by his guardian Duke Dudley, to get the King’s sisters into his power before he had to announce the King’s death?

  Had Mary swallowed the bait and obeyed her summons to her dying brother? It would be just like her! Poor Mary was always gullible. Elizabeth with smug thankfulness snuggled beneath the sheet. But it could not protect her long. And everything depended on what had happened to Mary. Was she, the rightful Queen, now clapped in the Tower? If so, how long would it be before her rightful heir, the Lady Elizabeth, would be made to join her? All these questions tossed to and fro, ding dong, ding dong, as though the bells were still echoing through the silence.

  The silence grew; it weighed on the aromatic air like a thundercloud.

  Elizabeth flung herself back on the pillows, plucking nervously at the gold threads embroidered on her linen night-shift, saw that she had unpicked half a butterfly and jerked forward again, pulled out a gold box from the back of the bed and began to eat sweets voraciously. Crisply sugared rose-leaves, primroses and violets, fruit suckets, sticky cloying marchpane, she crammed them all into her mouth indiscriminately; then when they got too much even for her sweet tooth, she helped herself from a dish of wild strawberries by the bed, her long pointed fingers pouncing on several at a time and dropping one on the linen sheet so that it made a small stain like blood, at which she chuckled. How Cat would grumble under her breath!

  The footsteps were coming back again, tiptoeing almost as noisily as they had pattered before. They were being followed by a heavy shambling tread. ‘Is there a bear in the house?’ Elizabeth demanded of herself, and thrust the box back well behind the pillows. ‘Come in,’ she breathed in an all but extinct voice. The door opened softly.

  ‘The doctor!’ was sounded on a solemn note.

  Mrs Ashley stepped warily into the room, followed by Dr. William Turner. He began in a blurring north-country voice on what he had evidently prepared: ‘I grieve that my Lady Elizabeth’s Grace should find herself indisposed. Youth, health and summer should travel hand in hand.’

  It was too much for the Lady Elizabeth’s logic. ‘On the contrary,’ she whispered, ‘the plague is rife in summer.’

  ‘Plague?’ Dr. Turner stopped dead in the middle of the room, petrifying into a black pear-shaped block. From over his head Mrs Ashley opened aghast eyes.

  ‘Have you any swelling under the armpit?’ asked Dr. Turner presently, quite forgetting the ‘Grace.’

  ‘Swellings all over me,’ Elizabeth replied promptly.

  One of Mrs Ashley’s eyes shut quickly, in time to a slight shake of the head.

  The invalid tossed feverishly, and turned her head away. ‘Sometimes it’s in my throat, sometimes under my jaw. My whole face has blown up like a swine-bladder for a football – it’s gone down now,’ she added hastily as she felt Dr. Turner’s protuberant eyes revolving over her pointed profile, thin as the slip of the new moon. She varied the symptoms. ‘I am hot as fire – it is the fever.’

  ‘It is the sun,’ grunted Dr. Turner, now advancing, but still rather cautiously; ‘this room is transparent to it. More glass than brick!’ He looked round disapprovingly on the new-fashioned shining room. ‘No tapestries, bare walls, bare floor! These pale oak panels and straw matting reflect all the light. What’s wrong with strewn rushes?’

  ‘Lousy,’ said the Lady Elizabeth.

  ‘Then you pay for your skin with your eyes. All these new fantods will make the rising generation go blind before they are forty, blinded by the perpetual glare of the sun they are brought up in.’

  She pointed at his horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘Never tell me you are over forty,’ she said archly. ‘In what glare were you brought up?’

  ‘In the murk of my father’s tanning-shed at Newcastle in the ancient Kingdom of Northumberland,’ he replied simply. ‘But,’ he added, ‘he owned twenty-two roods of land.’

  He leaned over the bed and felt her armpits and drew a sigh of relief; her pulse, which was certainly throbbing, and her head, which was certainly hot.

  ‘No rich nor roasted meats,’ he commanded Mrs Ashley; ‘let Her Grace touch nothing but a sow pig boiled with cinnamon, celery, dates and raisins; a hedgehog stewed in red wine and rosewater; and jelly, coloured purple by Scorpion’s Tail as the vulgar call Turnsole, that flower that turns toward the sun – but you, most learned Princess, would take the Greeks’ word for it, Heliotrope. And take two calves’ feet and a shoulder of veal for the jelly, boiled in a gallon of claret.’

  ‘I vomit at the sight of any food,’ said the invalid. ‘My head is too hot.’

  ‘All that hair had better be cut off,’ he replied. ‘Will Your Grace put out your tongue?’

  Her Grace put it out with vehemence.

  ‘Ah, I
see Your Grace has been eating sweets. You should not take so many, or your teeth will go black and fall out in old age.’

  ‘Who cares? – as long as I live to old age. Though it’s a poor prospect you offer for it – blind, toothless.’ Suddenly she flashed a smile that made him blink. A young wild animal snapping at his hands had turned into a charming princess.

  ‘You must grow tired of sick people talking of their ailments. Tell me, have you been writing anything lately? Your Herbal and Dictionary of Plants has soothed my sickness.’

  She turned to lay her hands on the book. It was not there. Mrs Ashley smiled maliciously as Dr. Turner went heavily back to the door and picked up a book that lay on the floor near it.

  ‘It does not seem to have soothed you much,’ he mumbled. ‘Did Your Grace find a fault in the Latin?’

  Elizabeth searched for an explanation and gave it up. She decided to burst out laughing.

  ‘You were the Duke of Somerset’s physician as well as mine,’ she said. ‘We must have taught you that patients have none. It is the doctor who should be called patient.’

  ‘And the herberist and writer,’ he burst out, ‘and preacher and father of a family, all of which I am. I have fed full on patience and my children on hope, so long that they are very lean. I would they were fatter – and further off. For we are all penned up together for lack of a house. Dean Goodmin, the craftiest fox,’ he eyed the girl on the bed, ‘yes, or vixen either, that ever went on two feet, won’t give up the Deanery to me and my poor childer. ’Tis that that brought me to London to complain to King Edward through Mr Secretary Cecil – but only to find your royal brother dead, poor lad, and Mr Cecil so busy signing letters patent with “Jana Regina” that he can attend to nothing of importance.’

  No doubt now that it was a vixen in the bed. A low snarl came from the bared white teeth. ‘So – o – that’s what Mr Secretary Cecil is doing!’