The Noble Assassin. Christie Dickason

could not imagine that shadowed, unsmiling mouth open in song, nor that clenched fist raising a wine glass in a tipsy toast. This new queen was not the lively, deep-drinking, dance-loving, frivolous creature of my friends’ letters. Not for the first time, rumour had been wrong. She might as well have been holding a prayer book and wearing black.

      From under my lashes, I tried to read her. My mother had taught me that, to survive, you must learn to read the people who hold power over your life. What you learn will give you power. They think they hide themselves, but the set of shoulder, or twitch of a hand, an uneasy sideways look or overloud voice always gives them away, if you know how to look and listen. Learn what they truly want and give it to them, my mother had said. Then you will not only survive, you will succeed.

      More sconces bloomed around the walls. I saw the new queen clearly now.

      Another sour queen like the old one, I thought unhappily. To advance in her court, I did not have to like her, but she had to like me.

      I had to make her like me. If not, it was back to Chenies with my tail between my legs. Back to Edward and silence. To my lute without strings. To living with my husband’s infinite reasons for saying ‘no’.

      I glanced at the three Scots ladies attending her, all soberly dressed, their hair covered. They eyed me coldly. The story of my undignified arrival had quickly spread.

      If they were what pleased her, I was finished.

      I had nothing to offer this woman except the usual obsequious court flattery that drove me mad with impatience and fuelled a dangerous urge to blurt out the truth. While many of my friends at court before our exile had celebrated my reckless candour as wit, this dour queen would not. Experience had taught me that sour women tended not to like me, however modestly I tried to behave myself. For the first time, it occurred to me that I might fail.

      I knew that I made a sorry picture. Both my thighs now trembled violently. I could see the fabric of my gown shake. Though I had paid a castle woman to dress my hair and lace my bodies, my gown was still wrinkled from the saddlebag in spite of all her shaking and brushing. I had managed to cram my injured foot into a shoe, but only after cutting away my riding boot.

      My bad ankle trembled on the brink of giving way. My good leg wobbled from having to support my entire weight. Pain brought tears to my eyes.

      The Queen turned suddenly, as if she had just noticed me. An unexpected brightness of diamonds and amethysts flashed when she waved a bony hand for me to rise.

      ‘I thank you, Your Majesty.’ I straightened with care. It was still possible that I might fall at her feet. Then I looked at her face. Our eyes met in shared assessment.

      I tried not to stare.

      Unlike Old Gloriana, Anne wore no rouge or other artifice. Her naked face looked drained by weariness and older than her twenty-nine years. In the candlelight, her skin was grey against the creamy pearls hanging from her ears. On the jewelled hand she had waved, the nails were bitten short and the skin around the nails nibbled raw.

      Forgive me, I thought. I read you wrong.

      We studied each other with equal intensity.

      Do you not yet understand the need for masks? I ached to ask. Old Gloriana understood that need, most of all for queens.

      The weary pain in her eyes tightened my throat. The last emotion I had expected to feel with the new queen was kinship.

      I had prepared an amusing, pretty speech of welcome, but could not begin it. Those words were meant to charm a different woman.

      I saw now that she had not been ignoring me from spite, nor to assert her position. I recognised the heaviness that had held her unmoving at the window. I knew that long stare into nothing. She had been searching for strength to begin conversation with yet another stranger, who, like all the others, undoubtedly wanted something from her and would require her to make a decision.

      I dropped my eyes to her childlike bitten nails again.

      Not sour, after all, I thought. Queen or not, she was melancholy and past hiding it. Her youth was being worn away by misery. Like me, she was spoiling from the core.

      I felt a rush of gentle ferocity, like the tenderness when I cupped a new chick or saw a fragile green shoot pushed up through clods of dirt and stones.

      The Whitehall wolves would tear this poor woman apart. I had felt their teeth and knew how sharp they could be. She must be protected. She must be told. Somehow, without giving offence. But to tell her would give offence, no matter how carefully worded. One does not pity royalty.

      ‘You made good speed here, Lady Bedford,’ she said. ‘Though perhaps at a dear cost.’ She gestured at my bad hand. So, she had heard the tale too. But between her native Danish accent and her acquired Scottish one, I could not tell what she thought of my journey.

      Trying to decide whether to risk speaking my true thoughts or to hazard a jest in return, I stepped onto my bad ankle. A flash of searing pain together with exhaustion betrayed my training.

      ‘Oww! God’s Balls!’

      I staggered, hopped sideways, caught myself and clapped my good hand over my mouth. I heard outraged gasps from the attending ladies, then unbreathing silence. Even the six men-at-arms standing behind the Queen had frozen.

      Raw arse and dead horse were for nothing, after all. The touch between my shoulder blades had been a Divine warning. I had ignored it. I would have to slink back to Chenies, confess to Edward . . . for rumour would soon tell him if I did not . . . that I had managed to marry obscenity to blasphemy in two short words. And been thrown out of Berwick for offending the new queen.

      The silence grew.

      I began to rehearse my long, painful, slow hobbling retreat to the door . . . desperately slow, stretching out my torment . . . the averted eyes of the men-at-arms, the suppressed smiles of the ladies-in-waiting . . . their hungry gossip when out of the Queen’s hearing. I imagined their tutting and lip-smacking disapproval and raising of eyes to Heaven.

      I waited to be dismissed.

      The Queen was studying me with . . . I tried to resist hope . . . what looked like the first real interest. ‘Lady Bedford,’ she said at last. ‘I think that I must engage you to improve my English. I’m certain my other ladies don’t know so many useful words.’

      I imagined a glint of mischief in the swift look she gave her three tight-lipped Scots.

      I wagered my future.

      I became an angel balanced on a pinhead, precarious yet suddenly sure of my footing at the same time. I must abandon protocol, I was certain. She had had too much protocol. Her carelessness with her person told me that she had put herself beyond the reach of a courtier’s empty flattery. I wagered my future on what I felt she needed most from me.

      The words sprang raw and unexamined from my mouth. ‘It will be my greatest pleasure to give you pleasure, madam,’ I said. ‘Pleasure.’ I repeated the word. I let it hang in the air. ‘. . . in English lessons and all else.’

      Play, I thought.

      ‘I will shake my sack of words,’ I said, ‘until every last “zounds” and “zwagger” has tumbled out for your instruction – and enjoyment, if you so choose.’

      She gave a minute nod at my return of her serve.

      I advanced carefully towards my leap. ‘If my honesty ever oversteps, or I play the fool too far, I beg your forgiveness in advance.’

      Her intent stillness gave me courage to go on.

      ‘Because even my errors will have only one purpose – to give you joy.’ I heard another intake of breath behind me at this presumption.

      Joy. The word flew out of my mouth and circled in the air above our heads. A dove. A butterfly. A scarlet autumn leaf.

      Joy. My offering to her. Not service, not loyalty, not reverence, nor adoration, nor awe,