The Virgin Queen's Daughter - Ella March Chase (6 page)

My cheeks burned and I fought the urge to stuff the gown behind my back. “I was reading a book and—”

I stopped. What was I thinking, pointing out Pizan’s book? I could not have found a better way to raise my mother’s ire. She picked up the volume I had left open at the part I had read to Moll.

Mother scanned the page. Her face went still. “Where did you get this?”

“Clarissa Barton gave it to me. I was just pretending—”

“You are far too old to be playing like a child!”

“I am not a child!” I protested. “Most girls my age have been to court! I can only imagine what wondrous things they have seen!”

“I thank God for it! Foolish chits like Clarissa Barton think only real diamonds glitter. They cannot know they are glass!”

“Please, my lady.” Eppie tried to intervene. “You cannot blame our Nell for wishing to see exciting places. It is hard to fight the pull of destiny. You can not cage her up like one of your birds! She will sicken and die.”

“Do not you dare speak so about my daughter! Nell is mine to protect!”

“She is mine to guard as well, and you know it!” Eppie’s chin thrust out of the folds of flesh it was usually lost in. “I have held my peace all these years, but no more. If it were not for me—”

“Be silent, Mistress Jones! Or I swear by the saints I will—”

“Please, both of you,” I shouted. Horror and confusion filled me, seeing what my mischief had wrought. “I am sorry!”

“Go to the withdrawing room, Nell. Do not come out until I fetch you.”

I obeyed her. What else could I do?

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Arabella helped me get dressed. But my mother’s usually loquacious maid barely spoke to me. When I demanded my own nurse, Arabella said I must speak to my parents about that. As soon as I was decently clothed, I raced down the stone stairs, searching all of Eppie’s favorite haunts: The garden where my pet deer, Grace, once doomed herself to exile by eating the herbs mother used to dose the household’s ills. The settle by the withdrawing room hearth, where Eppie would doze and toast her aching hands near the fire. The solar, with its sunny windows, where she most liked to stitch.

It was there I found Mother, going over the accounts. The white lawn wrist ruffs edging her sleeves were usually as pristine as mine were blotted whenever I came near an inkhorn. Today mother had dragged her wrist across a damp page. The fact that she had not noticed the stain unnerved me. “I cannot find Eppie,” I said.

Mother’s hand flexed with such force that it crushed the quill’s point against the ledger. Ink bloomed across her precise rows of numbers. “Eppie is not here.”

My uneasiness swelled to foreboding. “Did something go awry with Maude’s babe?” Eppie delivered all the children on the estate. The smith’s wife had borne her child too early, and I knew Eppie had left orders she was to be summoned if trouble arose.

“I do not know where Mistress Jones has gone,” Mother said. “But it is time she moved on to another household.” My heart sank.“Nell, your behavior of late has shown me that Mistress Jones indulged you far too much for your own good. The fantastical notions she might put in your head—”

“Is this about what happened yesterday? I took out one of your gowns, Mother.
I did
. Eppie had nothing to do with it.”

“Eppie is gone. You had best accept that and be done with it. I will find you a suitable maid of your own.”

“Suitable? I want Eppie!” I cried, feeling like a lost child.

“Well, you cannot have her. You are never to speak to her again, do you understand me? The woman is mad.” Mother laid her quill aside. “Elinor, I know you will not love me for what I have done, but I am your mother. It is my duty to protect you from evil, whether you want me to or no.”

“Eppie is not evil!” I cried. “She loves me. Far more than you have ever done! If you keep me from her I will never forgive you!” Mother looked at me steadily. “Hate me for it as you wish. It will avail you nothing. You will never see Hepzibah Jones again.”

I ran to my father, as I always did, sure he would right all the stars in my heavens. How pale he was when I found him in his library, where he always began his mornings alone. Bruised shadows snagged the hollows of his scarred face. His hands cradled a book, his fingers tracing over the binding, feeling its shape, its texture. In the years since his sight was stolen I had often caught Father lifting his precious books to his nose as if the familiar scent of printers’ ink and embossed leather could restore to him all he had lost. I poured out my woes. “Father, you will never believe what Mother has done! She says Eppie is evil! But she is not, Father! You know she is not!” Father laid his book aside. Copernicus, the book we had read together so many times since Dr. Dee sent it to Calverley eight years ago. The astronomer’s theory might have applied to me—I was fourteen and so sure I was the center of my very small world.

“Why does Mother hate me?” I cried, certain in my heartbreak that she must.

“Your mother’s sin is far different, Nell.” Father’s hand plucked at his fur-lined gown until it covered his thin white throat. “Perhaps she loves you far too much.”

“She would bar me in a tower if she could, keep me from the world.”

“Keep you safe.” Father groped for me, but I was too distraught to stay still. “You and Eppie love me and you do not try to keep me caged.”

“Do you know it is your mother who willed you into being?”

“What?”

“We wished for children. Like most people. Not sixteen like your poor grandmother gave birth to, but several to comfort us, delight us. Bind us together in a way that the kind of love minstrels sing of never would.”

My parents had not been a love match. That I had always known. It still bewildered my father that lovely Lady Thomasin Swift had chosen him for her husband when she had all the gallants court could offer vying for her hand. I thought Father the most wonderful man ever born. Yet he did often try Mother’s patience, the two of them different as two people could be.

“Three times your mother conceived and we hoped,” Father said. “But three times, the babe was born dead. In her heart, your mother grieved as much as I did. But after we tucked each babe in the crypt, she never spoke of them again. Off she would march to her court duties. Far too soon, we were past the age where we could hope for children. At least we thought so. Then came a miracle, Nell. You.”

“Aren’t miracles supposed to be angelic? I am far from it.”

“Remember what Father Richard used to say when you had one of your fits of anger? That even Jesus lost his temper with the moneylenders in the temple.” Father Richard and his family had returned to England when Elizabeth took the throne. He had died last Easter, and I still missed him. Father touched my hand. “From the time you were in your mother’s womb you had a talent for mischief, Nell. The month before you were born, you did as the other babes did before you, went still inside her. I gave up hope but your mother would not. She set out on pilgrimage to a holy well near the old Abbey of St. Michael. That is where you were born. I was lecturing at Cambridge. I preferred to be blind to her suffering, and to the crushing blow I feared would soon strike us both down. I was a coward.”

“No, Father! Never!”

“She returned to Calverley with the evidence of her great faith. You. Fed by your mother’s refusal to despair.” His voice softened. “If you could have seen her then, you would not question her love for you.”

“It is easy to love a babe so helpless it must do whatever you wish.” I sniffed back tears. “It is harder when that child knows her own mind! Mother sent Eppie away! Eppie, who I loved my whole life, better than anyone in the world, Father, except you.”

“Indeed, Nell. You have proved my point as I could not.” Father cocked his head toward me, guided by the direction of my voice. “Have you ever made any effort to hide how much you loved your nurse, daughter?”

“Should I?”

“Did you ever wonder how your mother felt? Knowing how much you loved Eppie? Loved me? Knowing that in your heart, she would forever be last among us?”

I squirmed as Father pressed on. “The child your mother wanted so badly . . . that little girl’s heart was fixed on another woman. It was Eppie’s arms you wept in when you were hurt. My lap you clambered onto when you wished to hear a story.”

“Mother never had time for such things! She has made Eppie go away because
I
took out the gown Mother wore when Elizabeth was crowned. It is not rational, punishing
Eppie
for that! What reason could Mother give you for what she has done?”

“None, Nell.” His reply stopped me cold. “She simply asked me to trust her in this decision. I do.”

Betrayal burned me, setting loose hard words. “Father, why must you always bend to her will, even when you disagree with her! Please. Do not allow her to banish Eppie just because you cannot bear to fight!”

I saw Father recoil, wished I could recall my angry words. I tried to say I was sorry, but he drew himself up, his voice so calm it startled me.

“Lady Calverley has been my wife far longer than you have been my daughter, and never, in all our years together, has she made a single frivolous decision. I do not know why she believes it is best for Eppie to leave us. But I do know she would never make such a decision lightly.”

“She is angry because I was reading a book about court. Mother traveled to court when she was younger than I am now. And you went to the university to learn wonderful things with the most brilliant minds of your age.” My voice broke. “Father—”

“You have been the delight of my life, Nell.” He sighed with regret. “If you were a son I could enroll you in university. You could master science and philosophy, mathematics and astronomy. Then off I could have sent you, to London to seek your fortune.”

Father had often claimed our world was changing so fast it was impossible to keep pace with the discoveries being made all across the globe. Men like Copernicus whose minds could plumb the heavens; the Italian Leonardo da Vinci, whose inventions surpassed even Dr. Dee’s wooden beetle: Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist with his revolutionary views on education; and the famous physician and seer Nostradamus, who peered into the future. These were only a sampling of great thinkers whose theories wended their way across the Channel week after week to be dissected by the queen.

England’s homegrown adventurers gathered at court as well, men who had sailed to new worlds, discovered creatures I would never see. God alone knew what I might have missed. I had been so isolated in the years of my father’s illness I might as well have stepped off of one of John Hawkin’s ships into a world as foreign as the Americas.

“Father, I want to stay here and be eyes for you, but sometimes I get so restless. It is not fair that you cannot see. And it is not fair that I am a girl and cannot learn all the things my mind hungers for.”

“No. It is not fair, child. But we will have to make the best of what God gives us. Still, things will not remain thus forever. You might write to Queen Elizabeth, a brief note to keep you in the queen’s mind. That way, when things change she will not have forgotten her letter to you.”

“I will not leave you, Father.”

He patted my hand. “But one day, I will leave you.”

I did not want to believe him, and yet he proved wiser than I would ever be. During the months that followed, my loss of Eppie faded in significance. For I sat at my father’s bedside watching life ebb away. I begged him to stay.

I sat sentry beside the great tester bed where he huddled beneath the heaps of fur-lined blankets that could no longer keep his shrunken body warm. My voice rasped, raw from reading aloud, hour after hour, the one thing that could make him rest. I paused to drink wine from the goblet on the table beside me. The liquid burned my throat not half so much as grief seared my heart.

“Poor Nell,” Father commiserated. “Soon you will have no voice at all.”

“No, Father. I am fine. I love to read to you.”

“And I am too selfish to stop you, even when it would be for your own good. I am storing up the sound of your voice, like squirrels store nuts.” Father smiled wearily. “I am saving you up for winter.”

I caught his hand. “We have a great many volumes to go. If you could see the stack of books your friends have sent you, you would laugh! There are volumes of medicine and astrology. Mathematics and philosophy.”

“You will have to finish them without me.”

“But the volume by Erasmus, Father. You must instruct me—”

“No, Nell. You do not need me anymore. I have taught you everything I know.”

“Do not say that, Father! I beg you!”

“You beg me often of late. To drink one more spoonful of broth. Swallow that dreadful medicine. Cajole me to sleep, when soon I will do nothing but.”

I fought back the lump in my throat. “How could I not? I do not care about anything but you getting well.”

“I am weary. Tired of a world without colors. In paradise, perhaps I will see.”

“If you do not, I will make God sorry for it when I get to heaven!” I clutched his hand against my face. “Do not go away from me, Father. If you would only
fight
I know you could grow strong again!”