The Other Queen (11 page)

The relief for me is tremendous. Even though I know that our inquiry cleared her, and the queen herself is defending her cousin’s name, I was anxious for her. She is so young, and without advisors. She has neither father nor husband to defend her, and she has such enemies ranged against her! And the more time I spend with her the more I hope for her safety, even for her success. She has a way—I have never known such a woman before—she has a way of making everyone feel that they would like to serve her.

Half of my household is openly in love with her. If I were a bachelor, or a younger man, or a fool outright, I would say that she is enchanting.

The same messenger from London brings me a packet from Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and I open it slowly. He has such a passionate opposition to the growing power of Cecil, to the fearful England that Cecil is making, that I think this may be the invitation to be part of some plot against the secretary of state. If he is inviting me to join against Cecil, I will be hard put to refuse him. Indeed, in honor, I think I cannot refuse him. The man has to be curbed if not stopped outright and we lords are the ones who will have to do it. For a moment I consider going to find Bess so that we can read his letter together. But then curiosity is too much for me and I open it. A sealed package falls from the inside, into my hands with this note:

Shrewsbury, Please convey this letter to the Queen of Scots. It is a proposal of marriage from me and has the blessing of all the other lords. I trust to your discretion. I have not yet told Her Grace the Queen of my intention, but Leicester, Arundel, and Pembroke all think this a good solution to the current difficulty, returning her to her throne with an English connection and preventing a foreign husband. It was suggested by the Scots lords themselves, as a way to guarantee her safe return with a reliable Protestant Englishman at her side. I hope she will marry me. I believe it to be her safest route, indeed her only route, Norfolk

I think I had better take this to Bess.

Our days have fallen into a rhythm dictated by the queen, who rules this castle as her own palace, as I suppose she should. In the morning she prays and hears Mass in her own way with her secretary who, I imagine, is an ordained priest. I am supposed not to know, and so I do not ask, though I am required to give him four square meals a day and fish on Friday.

I have made sure that my household know that they are not to join nor even to listen to the heresies that take place behind the closed doors of her lodgings, and so I hope to confine to her rooms the confusion and distress that always follows the rule of Rome. But once she has done with heretical mutterings, and taken her breakfast in her rooms, she likes to ride out accompanied by my husband the earl. She has ten horses that are taking up ten loose boxes in our stables and are feeding well on our oats. She rides with my lord and his guard in the morning while I go to the small parlor that I have set aside for my business and I meet with the stewards of all my houses and ventures who report to me either by letter or, when there is trouble, in person.

This is a system of my own devising, based on my first lessons from my dear Cavendish with the housekeeping books. Each manor, each house has its own book; each has to meet its own costs. By treating each parcel of land as a separate kingdom I make sure that they each make money. It may seem obvious—but this is unique. I know no other landlord who does it. Unlike me, my lord’s stewards who work in the old ways bundle all their accounts together, use land as security against loans for cash, endow it, buy it, sell it, mortgage it, and entail it away on heirs. At best they can always keep my lord’s treasure room rich with cash, but at worst they never know what is earned and what is borrowed and what is owed. Badly handled, a whole fortune can slip through the fingers of a landlord and go out of the family altogether. They can never know if they are in profit or loss; there is a continual exchange of land into debt, into cash, and back to land again. The value of the land changes, even the value of the currency changes, and this is beyond their control—they can never know for sure what is happening. This is the way that the nobility run their business, grandly but vaguely, whereas I run mine like a poor woman’s household and know to a penny what I am worth at the end of every week. Of course, they start with an enormous fortune. All they have to do is not to squander their wealth, whereas I started from nothing and nothing is easily counted. But a landlord like me—a newcomer—has to watch every penny and every acre, has to be alert to every change. It is a different view of the land, and my view is a novelty. Never before was there a landlord in England like me. Never in the world, for all I know, was there a woman in business like me.

Only a trader at his stall, only a cobbler at his last, would understand the pleasure I have at knowing the cost of things, and the profit from things, and the balancing of the books. Only a woman who has been poor would know the heartfelt sense of relief that comes from looking at the household accounts books and seeing a profit. There is nothing that warms my heart more than knowing that I am safe in my house, with cash in my treasure room, with land at my doorstep, and my children endowed or well married.

Nothing in the world is better for me than the sense that I have money in my purse and that no one can rob me.

This should be a strength of course, but it means that any loss strikes me hard. For within the first week of having the Scots queen as our guest, I have a letter from the Lord Treasurer’s office telling me that we will be paid fifty-two pounds a week for hosting the Queen of Scots. Fifty-two pounds! A week!

After my initial dismay I cannot say that I am surprised. Anyone who has served at court knows that Queen Elizabeth is as mean with her money as when she was a bankrupt princess. She was brought up as a girl who was sometimes heir, sometimes pauper, and it has left her with a terrible habit of penny-pinching. She is as bad as I am for keeping watch over a groat. She is worse than me, for it is her trade as queen to be generous, whereas it is my trade as a subject to turn a profit.

I look at the letter again. I calculate that she is offering us about a quarter of what we are paying out at present for the pleasure of housing and entertaining our guest. They, in London, have calculated that this queen will be served with thirty people and have a stable of six horses. In truth she has a household of double that number as well as a good hundred of troublemakers and admirers and followers who have settled in Tutbury and nearby but visit us constantly, especially at mealtimes. We are not housing a guest with a retinue, we are housing a full royal court. Clearly, the treasury will have to pay us more. Clearly, this Scots queen’s companions will have to be sent back to their homes. Clearly, I shall have to persuade my husband to make these unwanted announcements, since no one else can tell the two queens that their arrangements are un-workable. My difficulty is that George will not like to do this, being a lord who has never had to deal with money and never in his life drawn up an accounts sheet. I doubt I can even make him understand that we can barely afford this, not now, not for this month, certainly not till midsummer.

In the meantime I will have to send to my steward at Chatsworth and tell him to take some of the smaller pieces of silver down to London and sell them for cash. I cannot wait for the rents at quarter day; I have to buy things in Tutbury and pay extra servants, and for this I need more coin than I earn. I could laugh at my own sense of loss when I write to him to sell half a dozen silver plates. I have never used them but they are mine, hoarded away in my own treasure room. To sell them for their value as scrap is as painful to me as a personal loss.

At midday the hunting party comes home. If they have killed on the hunt then the meat goes straight to the kitchens and is an essential addition to the provisioning of this great household. We dine all together in my lodgings, on this sunny side of the courtyard, and in the afternoon the queen often sits with me in my presence chamber, for the light is better for sewing, and the room brighter, and her women can sit with mine and we can all talk.

We talk as women always do: inconsequentially but with enthusiasm. She is the greatest needlewoman I have ever met; she is the only woman I have ever known whose ability and love of sewing matches mine.

She has wonderful pattern books that arrive, travel-stained but intact, from Edinburgh Castle, and she falls on them like a child and shows me the pictures and explains them to me. She has patterns for Latin inscriptions and classical designs that all mean different things. They are beautiful and all carry hidden meanings, some of them secret codes, and she says that I can copy them out.

Her designer joins our household after a few days—he had been left behind at Bolton Castle. He sets to work for us both, drawing up designs, and I watch him as he sketches freehand on canvas the wonderful symbolic flowers and heraldic beasts as she commands him. She can say to him, “And put an eagle over it all,” and his chalk arcs like a child scribbling in the sand, and suddenly, there is an eagle! With a leaf in its beak!

It is a great thing, I think, to have an artist such as this man in your train. She takes him quite for granted, as if it were natural that a man of great talent, a truly fine artist, should do nothing but sketch designs for her to sew. I think of King Henry using Hans Holbein to draw designs for his masques, which would be broken up the day after the dance was done, and employing great musicians to write songs for his chamber or the way that the poets spend their talents writing plays for Queen Elizabeth. Truly, these are the luxuries of kings. Of all the riches that have surrounded this spoiled young woman from childhood, this employment of such a gifted man gives me the best sense of what her life has been like until now.

Everything she has had around her has been supreme, the best of the very best; everyone who works for her, or follows in her train, is the most talented or charming or skilled. Even the design for her embroidery must be a work of art before she will touch it.

Together we work on a new cloth of estate for her. It will hang over her chair to proclaim her royalty.

Hertapissier has already started stitching the dark red background. In gold curly script the letters will say.

“En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

She is seated on the best chair, between the window and the fire. I am on a lower chair, though this is my own room in my own house, and our ladies-in-waiting are on stools and benches near the windows for the light.

“It was my mother’s motto,” she says. “It means, ‘In my end is my beginning.’ I have been thinking of it in these troubled days and decided to take it as my own. When I lost my husband and was no longer Queen of France, then I began my life as Queen of Scotland. When I fled from Scotland, my new life in England begins. Soon another phase of my life will start. I will return to my throne; perhaps I shall remarry. In every end is a new beginning. I am like a queen of the sea, I am a queen of tides. I ebb, but I also flow. One day I shall cease to be queen on earth of any kingdom and be a queen in heaven over all kingdoms.”

I scowl at my women, whose heads bob up like rabbits at this un-seemly and Papistical assurance.

“Should you like to do the gold lettering?” she offers. “The silk is such a pleasure to work with.”

Despite myself, my hands go out to touch it. The silk is very fine, I have never worked with anything so beautiful, and I have loved needlework with a passion for all my life. “How is it so smooth?”

“It is spun gold,” she says. “Real gold thread. That is why it glitters so. Do you want to sew with it?”

“If you wish,” I say, as if I don’t much mind.

“Good!” she says, and she beams as if she is genuinely delighted that we will work together. “You will start at that end and I shall start at this and bit by bit we shall come closer and closer together.”

I smile in reply; it is impossible not to warm to her.

“And at the end we shall meet in the middle, head to head and the greatest of friends,” she predicts.

I draw up my chair and the fine fabric loops from her lap to mine. “Now,” she says quietly, when we are settled with our gold thread. “Do tell me all about my cousin the queen. Have you been much to her court?”

Indeed, I have. I don’t boast but I let her know that I have been a senior lady-in-waiting at the queen’s court, at her side from the earliest days of her reign, her friend when she was nothing more than a princess, friends with her friends, loyal informant to her advisor.

“Oh, so you must know all her secrets,” she says. “Tell me all about her. And tell me about Robert Dudley. Was she really so desperately in love with him as they all said?”

I hesitate at that. But she leans forward to engage me. “Is he still so very handsome?” she whispers.

“She offered him to me, you know, in marriage, when I first came to Scotland. But I knew she would never part with him. She is lucky to have such a loyal lover. It is a rare man who can love a queen. He has devoted his life to her, has he not?”

“Forever,” I say. “From the moment she came to the throne and formed her court. He came to her then and he has never left. They have been hand in glove for so long that they finish each other’s sentences, and they have a hundred secret jokes, and sometimes you see her just glance towards him, and he knows exactly what she is thinking.”

“Then why does she not marry him, since he is free?” she asks. “She made him an earl so that she could propose him for me. If he was good enough for me he must be more than good enough to marry her.”

I shrug. “The scandal…,” I say very quietly. “After his wife’s death. The scandal has never gone away.”

“Can she not defy the scandal? A queen of courage can live down a scandal.”

“Not in England,” I say, thinking. And probably not in Scotland either. “A queen’s reputation is her crown; if she loses one she loses the other. And Cecil is against him,” I add.