The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

to London. I was to be seized without warning and beheaded, along with the Plotters! That was why I had travelled in such secrecy, lest my fate raise a wake of protest among the common people who had cheered so loudly for Henry and me. Their cheers had meant nothing, just as my father said.

      I saw now why not even my mother knew I was in London—for she had neither visited nor sent a greeting. I saw whyI hadn’t been allowed to go to Whitehall or to send a message to anyone. And why Anne had been kept behind, so she would not be tainted with my crimes. The king feared me, his oldest daughter, enough to kill me as his own mother had been killed, for the safety of the English crown.

      I tried to tell myself that I was jumping to conclusions. But however much I fought it, the conviction that I was right twisted its roots deeper and deeper into my head.

      Mrs Hay woke me in what felt like the middle of the night. ‘You are sent for.’

      The windows were still dark, with no hint yet of winter sunrise. The air was cold.

      I gripped her hands. ‘Do you know why? Tell me! I won’t cry out, I swear.’ My heart pounded. If I were to die, I needed time to ready myself. This wasn’t fair! Not possible…‘Where must I go?’ I could not imagine dying.

      ‘To the Bishop’s little study.’

      ‘Not to the Churchyard?’

      ‘I was told the study, here in the Bishop’s house.’

      ‘Only the Bishop’s study?’ I burst into tears.

      ‘Oh…!’ Mrs Hay stared, uncertain what to do. She hadn’t held me for more than six years. Then she reached out and clutched my head to her breast. ‘No. No! You mustn’t think such things!’ She smoothed my wild hair. ‘How can you think it?’

      I heard a pause while she did indeed think how the thought might have occurred. A new spasm of terror quivered through me.

      ‘What does the king want with me?’

      Mrs Hay sounded less confident than before. ‘His majesty’s at Whitehall, not here. And means to go hunting, or so I’m told.’ She stroked my head again. ‘Four of those Papist fiends are to die today. Grant, Digby, Wintour and Bates. No one else.’

      Digby. I was here because of him. Digby must be the reason. I could not think straight.

      She fingered a russet tangle at the back of my head, then began to unpick it, hair by hair. ‘I’ll attend you in the Bishop’s study, if they let me.’ As she lifted my heavy hair in both hands to shake it out, I felt a cold draft on my nape.

      ‘I’ll wear my hair loose today,’ I said. I smelled fear in my armpits. I put my hands on my neck as if to hold my head in place.

      A gentleman wearing the Bishop of London’s livery led us to the study, a small room overlooking Paul’s Churchyard on the far side of the Bishop’s house from the chamber where I had slept. Apart from the bishop’s man, Mrs Hay and myself, the room was empty. I had half-expected Cecil to be there. I felt him twined into my fate but did not yet know how.

      The bishop’s man gestured towards the window. With Mrs Hay beside me, I looked down through the diamonds of watery glass at the blurred bulk of the scaffold I had heard being built.

      Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten. Lanterns and torches still burned. A crowd already packed the space. I could hear it through the closed window, like the sea shuffling pebbles. The Bishop’s man opened the window so that I could see more clearly.

      The blades of halberds pricked the chilly air above the crowd, where men-at-arms stood stationed in every doorway, enough of them to stop a possible rescue attempt, which such a great crowd might allow. Or to put down a civil uprising, like those the plotters had believed would take place across England in support of the Catholic cause—and which the government still feared, to judge by that army in the courtyard.

      Dignitaries stood crowded onto the scaffold close below me, talking amongst themselves as if in a waiting room in Whitehall. I was so close I could hear them coughing and clearing their throats. Cecil’s small figure was first hidden, then discovered again, as the others shifted around him.

      ‘Who is that man standing behind Lord Salisbury?’ I asked Mrs Hay. ‘There, the one with the thin face, who keeps smiling and nodding at the others.’

      ‘That’s his lordship’s cousin,’ said Mrs Hay. ‘Sir Francis Bacon. Their mothers are sisters.’ She tried to think what else to tell me. ‘He writes a great deal.’

      Though much taller and better formed, Bacon lacked his little cousin’s authority. I watched him for a moment. He reminded me of an anxious dog, sniffing and wagging his tail at the other men on the scaffold. Then I forgot him.

      The hangman was quietly and methodically testing his ropes and knots. It would begin soon. Soon they would be making me ready, pinning up my hair, removing my collar.

      Then reason pulled me back from my leap to certainty. They were not preparing me, reason pointed out. I was here, looking down, buffered by staircases and corridors, not in a cell or a room more convenient to the Churchyard with a bishop praying over me and inviting me to repent.

      I was not going to die today. Other traitors would die—real traitors, not an ugly troll of my father’s imagination that pretended to be me. I was not here to die but to watch.

      I felt the solid thump of truth. This was the clarifying sight that my father promised me in Coventry.

      I stepped back from the window.

      The Bishop’s man gestured politely for me to return to my position.

      With sudden clarity, I heard my father’s avid voice in my head, as he questioned the bishop’s man. ‘How did she bear it? Tell me, mon! Did she avert her eyes? At which death did she flinch the most? Did she seem to know any of them? Did she weep?’

      I was still on trial.

      I waved the man aside and noted that he took a position from which he could see my face.

      Below me, the edgy crowd moved as one. Heads turned all in the same direction and craned to see over their neighbours. The dignitaries standing on the scaffold turned. Through the crowd, I saw the bobbing heads of three horses. Voices in the crowd shrieked curses at the prisoners. A fourth horse approached from the Gatehouse, where a woman was screaming. Then I heard a small boy’s voice cry, ‘Tata! Tata!’ before a hand muffled him. The shouting of the crowd grew louder. A tussle broke out. Men-at-arms broke from the doorways.

      Mrs Hay turned away from the window. ‘I’m over here, if you need me, my lady.’ She sat on a stool in the corner. After a moment, she gave our watcher a look and pulled out a defiant handkerchief.

      Four horse-drawn hurdles broke out of the crowd, carrying the condemned men. They stopped at the foot of the scaffold. A woman struggled out of the crowd, threw herself down onto one of the prisoners and clung to him, weeping. Men-at-arms hauled her off and lifted the men up from the hurdles.

      The reek of sweaty animal excitement rose from the crowd. The horses stamped and tossed their heads. A torch juddered below the window, sending up gusts of pine and burning pitch.

      There was a moment of consultation and confusion. Then the first man to die climbed the steps onto the scaffold. I gripped the windowsill. I could not breathe.

      Though Digby was changed, I recognised him clearly. He still had golden hair, but no sunlight dappled his head and shoulders. He stood close enough to me that I could see beard stubble darkening his chin. In the strange dull light of early morning, he looked pale and heavy-eyed, as if he had not slept during his last night before eternal sleep. Even when about to die, he kept his air of amiability, lost only in our last desperate moments of struggle.

      Then I realised that I could not hear the other man in the room breathing. His attention had fastened onto me so intently that his breathing echoed my own. Over my shoulder, I saw Mrs Hays’s eyes on me. Surely, she did not doubt me, as well! Had