The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

my life.’

      He nodded seriously. ‘I will protect it with my own.’ He put the letter into his purse, then hooked his jacket tightly over the purse.

      As if I were one of the sparrows perched on the beams above our heads, I saw the two of us, there in the shadows of the horse barn, barely grown, now echoing in deadly earnest the adventure games we had once played together as children.

      ‘Take Clapper,’ I said. ‘He’s strongest.’ I gave him a purse holding most of my precious half-yearly allowance from Lord Harington. ‘Use this to hire another horse if he grows too tired and to stable him well.’

      I watched while he saddled up Clapper, a solid, roan Ardennais gelding strong enough to carry an armoured man. Then he led the horse out into the stable yard.

      The sky had now committed itself to the day. I held the reins and leaned against Clapper’s strong, warm neck to stop my shivering while Abel went to make his excuse to a fellow groom for missing the morning chores.

      ‘There you are!’ Wearing a cloak over her night-dress, my companion, Anne Dudley, picked her way towards me across the brick paving, looking both rumpled and alarmed. ‘I woke up and saw that you were gone! Vanished! Nowhere in the room! I couldn’t think where you had gone…my heart is still thumping! I thought perhaps your injuries had suddenly worsened and you had died in the night. Or else been kidnapped from the bed.’

      I looked at her sharply but saw only worry in her blue eyes. ‘Would you like to come with me for an early morning ride?’ I asked. ‘To watch the sun rise?’

      Accustomed by now to my sudden fancies, she shivered. ‘I’d rather go back to bed, your grace.’

      Abel came out of the horse barn.

      ‘I’ve said I’m going for an early ride,’ I told him in Scots, with a glance over my shoulder at Anne retreating across the yard.

      Abel looked worried and jerked his head back at the barn. ‘I’ve told them I’m riding on an errand for you but not where or why.’ He continued in Scots to confuse any curious Warwickshire ears inside the barn.

      I nodded. I’d untangle our stories later. I stroked Clapper’s muzzle until Anne had disappeared again through the stable yard gate.

      ‘Go first to Windsor. If Prince Henry isn’t there, go on to Richmond then on to Oatlands and last London and Whitehall. Don’t rest till you find my brother and give him my letter.’

      He mounted. I looked up at him. ‘Let no one but my brother see that letter,’ I repeated. With one hand on Clapper’s neck, I walked beside them out of the stable yard.

      Clapper’s hoofs rang like gunshots in the cold morning air. I looked up at the house. No curious faces appeared at the windows. It made no difference now, in any case. The absence of man and horse could not be kept secret for long on this small estate.

      From the gate of the main courtyard, I watched Abel trot away up the long tree-lined avenue burdened with treason, my life tucked inside his jacket. Even on Clapper, he seemed a frail vessel to carry so much weight.

      I could not bear to go back into the dense vaulted shadows of Combe Manor, once an abbey, now turned private house. I felt that God had never quite loosed His chilly grip on the place, even though He had been turned out more than sixty years before. I limped around the brick-paved courtyard along the walls of the three wings of the house. Still not ready to fall back under God’s stern eye, I turned right into the gardens lying in the elbow of the river Smite, where I soaked my shoes leaving a dark ragged trail through the dew on the grass. I was not good at waiting.

      The Haringtons returned before sundown. They brought no news of disturbance abroad nor death in London. Lady Harington, short, wiry and as sharp-eyed as a sparrow hawk, at once spotted my wet shoes and sent me to change them. I waited for Lord Harington to ask me about Abel White and Clapper. But he said nothing about the absence of either horse or groom. We prayed as we always did before every meal. I would have begged to eat in my bed again but Lord Harington always fussed so much over my health that it seemed easier to brave the table than his concern.

      Supper passed as quietly and tediously as always. The Haringtons, never talkative, chewed and sipped quietly as if a demon might not, at this very moment, be crashing about doing damage I could not bear to imagine.

      I half-raised my spoon of onion and parsnip stew then set it back down on my plate. A pent-up force seemed to distend my chest. Any moment, it would burst upwards and escape like lightning flashing along my hair.

      ‘What news?’ I wanted to shout. ‘What is happening in the world outside Combe?’

      At Dunfermline and Linlithgow palaces, when I was merely the girl-child of a Scottish king who already had two surviving sons, I had stolen time for games in the stables with the grooms, including Abel, and with the waiting footmen, maids and messengers. I had known all the kitchen family and listened while they thought I played. I heard all their gossip, suitable for my ears, and otherwise. Now that I was at last old enough to understand what I heard, I had been elevated into an English princess, third in line to the joint crowns of England and Scotland. Who must be kept safely buried in this damp green place where everyone treated me with tedious and uninformative respect.

      I knocked over my watered ale.

      Lord Harington gazed at me in concern with his constantly anxious eyes. ‘Are you certain that your injuries yesterday weren’t more serious than you say, your grace?’

      ‘Perhaps a little more shaken,’ I muttered. Though I sometimes thought him a tiresome old man, Lord Harington was kind. I did not like lying to him. I didn’t know what I would tell him when he at last asked why Clapper was gone.

      Then it occurred to me that he might be pretending that all was well. He might have been instructed to lull me into false security until men-at-arms could arrive from London to arrest me. I caught my glass as it almost toppled a second time.

      When we were preparing for bed, Anne gave a little cry. ‘What did you do to your arm?’

      I looked down at the line of fingertip bruises along the bone. I brushed at them as if they were smudges of ash. ‘I must have done it yesterday while riding.’

      I wondered suddenly if Anne had been set by her uncle to spy on me.

       5

      For a second sleepless night, I lay in my bed in the darkness, waiting, not knowing what I was waiting for. I closed my eyes so that I wouldn’t see the ghostly abbot if he should decide to visit. Tonight, however, I didn’t fear him. My head was too crowded to deal with one thing more. I lay thinking how past events, which seemed to have nothing at all to do with you, could shape your life.

      I could hear again Mrs Hay’s whispers of treason and danger as she readied me for bed.

      Ruthven. Gowrie. Morton. The names thumped in my pulse.

      Treachery and knives. Ruthven and Gowrie, kidnappers and possible murderers. The child king, my father, no older than I was, standing courageously against his attackers. Morton, the regent who betrayed him and died on the scaffold. My father signing execution warrants when only a child.

      ‘Never listen to the gossip that calls him a coward,’ Mrs Hay had warned me. ‘His majesty had a terrible life for a wee bairn, royal or not. Being made king so young did him no favours. That Scotland you pine for is a fierce and wild place, ruled by unruly chiefs who call themselves “nobles”…I don’t know what you do to make knots in your hair like this!’

      I always wanted to tell her that if I were a boy, I would have liked to be one of those unruly chiefs.

      But I was her golden girl, her royal pet, her child, her life. I was her Responsibility, she said, which was a fearful weighty thing, which she carried nevertheless with a whole heart. She had to prepare me for my future without