The Queen’s Fool. Philippa Gregory

coming to court?’ Will asked, pulling on his jerkin against the cold draught of air whistling in through the open door.

      ‘Said to be,’ the Master said. ‘She’ll get better rooms and a better cut of the meat this time, don’t you think, Will?’

      He shut the door before Will could reply, and so I turned and asked, ‘What does he mean?’

      Will’s face was grave. ‘He means that those of the court who move towards the heir and away from the king will be making their move now.’

      ‘Because?’

      ‘Because flies swarm to the hottest dung heap. Plop, plop, buzz.’

      ‘Will? What d’you mean?’

      ‘Ah, child. Lady Mary is the heir. She will be queen if we lose the king, God bless him, poor lad.’

      ‘But she’s a heret –’

      ‘Of the Catholic faith,’ he corrected me smoothly.

      ‘And King Edward …’

      ‘His heart will break to leave the kingdom to a Catholic heir but he can do nothing about it. It’s how King Henry left it. God bless him, he must be rolling in his shroud to see it come to this. He thought that King Edward would grow to be a strong and merry man and have half a dozen little princes in the nursery. It makes you think, doesn’t it? Is England ever to get any peace? Two young lusty kings: Henry’s father, Henry himself, handsome as the sun, each of them, lecherous as sparrows, and they leave us with nothing but a lad as weak as a girl, and an old maid to come after him?’

      He looked at me and I saw him rub his face, as if to brush off some wetness round his eyes. ‘Means nothing to you,’ he said gruffly. ‘Newly come from Spain, damned black-eyed girl. But if you were English, you’d be a worried man now; if you were a man, and if you were a sensible man instead of being a girl and a fool at that.’

      He swung open the door and set off into the great hall on his long legs, nodding at the soldiers who shouted a good-natured greeting to him.

      ‘And what will happen to us?’ I demanded in a hissed whisper, trotting after him. ‘If the young king dies and his sister takes the throne?’

      Will threw me a sideways grin. ‘Then we shall be Queen Mary’s fools,’ he said simply. ‘And if I can make her laugh it will be a novelty indeed.’

      My father came to the side gate that night and he brought someone with him, a young man dressed in a cape of dark worsted, dark ringlets of hair falling almost to his collar, dark eyes, and a shy boyish smile. It took me a moment to recognise him; he was Daniel Carpenter, my betrothed. It was only the second time I had ever seen him, and I was embarrassed that I failed to recognise him and then utterly shamed to be seen by him in my pageboy livery in golden yellow, the colour of the holy fool. I pulled my cape around me, to hide my breeches, and made him an awkward little bow.

      He was a young man of twenty years old, training to be a physician like his father, who had died only last year. His kin had come to England from Portugal eighty years ago as the d’Israeli family. They changed their name to the most English one they could find, hiding their education and their foreign parentage behind the name of a working man. It was typical of their satirical wit to choose the occupation of the most famous Jew of all – Jesus. I had spoken to Daniel only once before, when he and his mother welcomed us to England with a gift of bread and some wine, and I knew next to nothing about him.

      He had no more choice in this marriage than I, and I did not know if he resented it as much, or even more. They had chosen him for me because we were sixth cousins, twice removed, and within ten years of each other’s age. That was all that was required and it was better than it might have been. There were not enough cousins and uncles and nephews in England for anyone to be very particular as to whom they might marry. There were no more than twenty families of Jewish descent in London, and half as many again scattered around the towns of England. Since we were bound to marry among ourselves we had very little choice. Daniel could have been fifty years of age, half-blind, half-dead even, and I would still have been wedded to him and bedded by my sixteenth birthday. More important than anything else in the world, more important than wealth or fitness for each other, was that we would be bound to each other in secrecy. He knew that my mother had been burned to death as a heretic accused of secret Jewish practices. I knew that beneath his smart English breeches he was circumcised. Whether he had turned to the risen Jesus in his heart and believed the words of the sermons that were preached at his local church every day and twice on Sundays would be something I might discover about him later, as in time he must learn about me. What we knew for certain of each other was that our Christian faith was new, but our race was very old, and that we had been the hated ones of Europe for more than three hundred years and that Jews were still forbidden to set foot in most of the countries of Christendom, including this one, this England, which we would call our home.

      ‘Daniel asked to see you alone,’ my father said awkwardly, and he stepped back a little, out of earshot.

      ‘I heard that you had been begged for a fool,’ Daniel said. I looked at him and watched his face slowly colour red till even his ears were glowing. He had a young man’s face, skin as soft as a girl’s, a down of a dark moustache on his upper lip, which matched his silky dark eyebrows over deep-set dark eyes. At first glance he looked more Portuguese than Jewish, but the heavy-lidded eyes would have betrayed him to one who was looking.

      I slid my gaze from his face and took in a slight frame with broad shoulders, narrow waist, long legs: a handsome young man.

      ‘Yes,’ I said shortly. ‘I have a place at court.’

      ‘When you are sixteen you will have to leave court and come home again,’ he said.

      I raised my eyebrows at this young stranger. ‘Who gives this order?’

      ‘I do.’

      I allowed a frosty little silence to fall. ‘I don’t believe you have any command over me.’

      ‘When I am your husband …’

      ‘Then, yes.’

      ‘I am your betrothed. You are promised to me. I have some rights.’

      I showed him a sulky face. ‘I am commanded by the king, I am commanded by the Duke of Northumberland, I am commanded by his son Lord Robert Dudley, I am commanded by my father; you might as well join in. Every other man in London seems to think he can order me.’

      He gave a little gulp of involuntary laughter and at once his face was lighter, like a boy’s. He clipped me gently on my shoulder as if I were his comrade in a gang. I found I was smiling back at him. ‘Oh, poor maid,’ he said. ‘Poor set-upon maid.’

      I shook my head. ‘Fool indeed.’

      ‘Don’t you want to come away from all these commanding men?’

      I shrugged. ‘I am better living here, than being a burden on my father.’

      ‘You could come home with me.’

      ‘Then I would be a burden on you.’

      ‘When I have served my apprenticeship and I am a physician I will make a home for us.’

      ‘And when will that be?’ I asked him with the sharp cruelty of a young girl. Again I watched the slow painful rise of his blush.

      ‘Within two years,’ he said stiffly. ‘I shall be able to keep a wife by the time you are ready for marriage.’

      ‘Come for me then,’ I said unhelpfully. ‘Come with your orders then, if I am still here.’

      ‘In the meantime, we are still betrothed,’ he insisted.

      I tried to read his face. ‘As much as we ever have been. The old women seem to have arranged it to their satisfaction if not to ours. Did you want