The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

      The small boy again cried out to his father. ‘Ta ta!’ Digby turned his head to the sound and smiled at his son’s voice. His straight back and erect head reminded me of Henry. He opened his mouth to speak.

      The crowd grew more silent than a playhouse.

      Don’t look up! I begged. I could not bear it, if he saw that I was there but dared not acknowledge him. The shame…Given what he had done and tried to do, I didn’t understand why I should care, but I did.

      In a strong clear voice, Digby admitted that he had broken the law. He apologised to the king. He asked forgiveness of God, the king, and of all the kingdom.

      Heads nodded. There were murmurs of approval in the crowd.

      But these were fatal admissions for me, if I had been mired in the plot by their confessions.

      ‘…but Father Garnet knew nothing of our plot,’ he was saying. ‘The Jesuit priests knew nothing.’ No one else knew what they had intended.

      He lifted his head to my window. His eyes locked onto mine for an instant but moved on before I had time to respond.

      In a clear voice he insisted that only the plotters themselves had known what they meant to do. No one else. No one!

      He kept turning his face to include the whole crowd and all the people watching from all the windows, but I knew that he spoke to me and to any others who feared betrayal. He could not have known for certain that I was there, nor at which window. But he had guessed that perhaps I might be there, or had sent someone to report to me.

      Relief unstrung my joints. I leaned harder on the sill.

      Digby had not betrayed me in his confession, after all, whatever Cecil had implied. I was certain of it now. We shared a strange intimacy after our encounter in the forest. He was a good man, as I had told him. The wrong one for the task. As an abductor, he had tried not to alarm me. Even when about to die, he tried to console and reassure. I was certain of it. My relief was as intense as my earlier conviction that I was about to die.

      Don’t cry! Don’t cry, with those eyes watching you, waiting to report every blink of eyelid and twitch of your lips. I felt myself growing older in a rush, like music played too fast or the riffled pages of a book.

      Cecil had been testing me with his hints of confession, just as my father had been testing me, but with more subtlety. They didn’t know what had happened in the forest at Combe after all. They had nothing more than suspicion to hold against me.

      I pushed away the memory of Cecil’s warning nod when I had been about to blab to the king. And the sharp-cornered question of my letter to Henry.

      I watched Digby take his leave of the courtiers gathered on the scaffold. He took their hands with such friendly good will that he might have been setting out on a hopeful sea voyage to the Americas. A strong young man in his prime, sailing off on his next adventure.

      Then he was climbing the ladder. He bent his head to accept the noose. Was pushed off the ladder, jerked, kicked, swung only briefly before being cut down, choking but still alive, and delivered to the butchers’ knives.

      I closed my eyes, not caring who saw me. I wanted to stop my ears. The greatest courage in the world could not suppress his scream at disembowelment. Cries from the crowd beat at my ears, of fury mixed with grief. Women screeched and wailed. I imagined I still heard his reassuring voice above the crowd, but it wasn’t possible, because, when I opened my eyes, a man was holding aloft his heart, shouting, ‘Here is the heart of a traitor!’

      I felt a heavy downward pull. All my weight was sinking into my feet. My eyes blurred and my head swam.

      Don’t fall! I was the First Daughter of England.

      I leaned my elbows on the sill, as if to see better. Three more to go. God have mercy on them!

      The First Daughter would not close her eyes again. Let that weasel-spy report that I watched without flinching. Though it was wicked for me even to imagine that I suffered. I locked my knees.

      I tried to call up my wolf. Tried with her help to look through the scene under the Bishop’s window into the vast scoured space below the crags, at the combs of rain scraping the distant mountains. The mist blowing in to cover the dragon crouching in the Firth.

      A second prisoner was pushed up the steps of the scaffold.

      Perched on the Cat Nick, I narrowed my eyes and tried to peer down into the chasm between Edinburgh and the crags, at Holyrood Palace at the bottom of the valley, like treasure sunk at the bottom of a lake. Where I had spent my last days of happy childhood, that short wonderful time with my mother and Henry. All three together for the first and last time, before I was hauled away from my true home and slammed down here in this damp green country where they tore out the hearts of golden young men.

      ‘…Robert Wintour, will you renounce…?’ a voice intoned below me.

      The hearts of the best and most chivalrous men, I thought. The golden heroes. The near-perfect knights, Catholic or not. Henry’s perfection was already turning the love of the people towards him and terrifying our father.

      Wintour was climbing the ladder to the noose.

      I tried to conjure up a wind off the northern sea to fill my ears. My eyes followed the long ascending spine of the Holy Mile up, up, clambering over hard, sharp grey rock to Edinburgh Castle itself, like a jagged outcrop of cliffs at the very top.

      I heard another scream, then the thud of blades on a butcher’s block. The next severed head was offered to the sight of the crowd. The next heart.

      Wintour gone.

      Strident voices from below me drowned out the rush of wind from the Firth. Though invisible through the cloud, the rising sun was warming the blanket of grey that pressed down on London. I must stand through two more deaths to show my father that I could not be broken. My forest sprite had died, but he had protected me. The reflection of a torch flared as a window swung closed. I could smell smoke and blood.

      Another man forced up onto the scaffold.

      The Loch. I tried to see the loch to the north just below the castle. A dark, brooding eye that seldom caught the light, where the trowies emerged at night from their underwater kingdom to steal babies or play eerie fiddles that drew you into fatal dances…

      The third man shouted, ‘It was no sin against God!’

      I could not help looking down at this defiance. Not a demon, a blind man, his face terribly burnt.

      I groped for the memory of the glint of the Firth…

      Solicitously, the hangman helped the blind man onto the ladder. At the top, the prisoner crossed himself defiantly; was pushed off.

      The noose may have killed him, in spite of the haste with which the hangman cut him down to suffer the rest of his punishment. I heard no scream this time, although I was braced for it. I clutched the sleeves of my crossed arms, hanging on. I forgot the man behind me and that he might, even now, be adding my white knuckles to his notes. I tried to remember my hand and Henry’s side by side, two rings…

      Scotland slipped away from me. The carnage below me was stronger than my imagination. My eyes saw with horrible clarity, a butcher’s slab, dark blotches on the butchers’ aprons. Severed joints. Another heart held aloft in bloody hands.

      I’ve hunted, I told myself. I’ve seen blood before.

      But these were men. And the cruellest huntsman did not quarter his prey while it was still alive.

      My hands tightened until my knuckles almost split my skin. As I stared down at the scaffold, the faces of the witnesses changed until they grew so terrible that I could no longer look at them or else my soul would have run away and left my body a hollow shell for ever. I would never find my way out of this dark forest where I was suddenly lost. Would never see sunlight again, never smile, or feel joy. What I saw below me was too terrible. It would darken my mind forever.

      Those