“With the exception of the king, who loves you and detests me — who am, of course, detestable — I don’t think that between us we count a single friend in the royal family. It would not trouble me but for the thought that this young Puritan will be king some day, and then we may have to shift our lodgings from Whitehall. But that’s in the future — and the future is less real than the past, which is itself unreal when compared with the present. The present is yours. Enjoy it, Robin. And here’s the means.”
He thrust the momentarily neglected verses under my lord’s attention.
My lord read, and as he read his eyes kindled, his cheeks flushed delicately with delight.
“Man, ye’ve a gift!” he cried at last.
“Several gifts, Robin, several, as is known to all the world, and to none better than myself. Will they serve?”
“Serve! Good lack! It is the very key of heaven. There’s magic in them.”
“Of course. I wrote them.”
“And the fee? Name it yourself. Ask what you will.”
“Nay, I might ask too much, which would lower your admiration of the work, or too little, which would cheapen it. It shall be a gift to you, Robin. ‘Sh! Not another word. And now to get this chaplet of sweet conceits into my lady’s lap. There is the masque at Somerset House to-night. There will be dancing. That should be your occasion.”
“None better, Tom. I had thought of it myself.”
“You flatter my poor wit.”
“Derider! Come, now, make a copy in your fairest hand.”
“And so prove you an impostor. Oh, Robin, Robin, what would you be without me? Man, don’t you see that your own pothooks must serve for this, to match the signature you’ll append to it?”
“Then give me pen and ink, and lend me what aid you can.”
My lord drew up a chair and sat down. Overbury, the scoffer, proffered a pen.
“Here it is — from the pinions neither of Pegasus not turtle-dove, either of which would have been apposite enough, but of a goose, which is more apposite still. To it, Robin.”
And my lord grew busy upon that key of heaven, as he called it.
It was to prove, ere all was done, the very key of hell for him — the very passport to ruin and dishonour. But that was not yet. At first it won him admittance to that garden of delight which he deemed paradise. For it did its work swiftly upon the lady to whom it was addressed, and in whose little hand his lordship left it that same night. It evoked from her a swift response — due less, perhaps, to the shrewd magic of its appeal than to the passionate longing with which the lady had desired some such token from my lord.
A week or so thereafter the saturnine Sir Thomas Overbury was himself to witness a pregnant sign of the mischief he had so sweetly wrought. That old fox, Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, and Lord Privy Seal, brother to that Duke of Norfolk who had lost his head out of love for the Queen of Scots — King James’s mother — gave an entertainment at Northumberland House, which was graced by the presence of the king, Prince Henry, and Prince Charles, the Duke of York.
Sir Thomas found himself at one moment in conversation with the earl. There was inevitably between the Lord Privy Seal and the secretary of a man so powerful in the State as my Lord of Rochester a certain political intimacy, grown from the almost daily intercourse that passed between them relating to affairs. Outwardly their relations were perforce friendly; yet neither had any illusions about the other, whence it naturally followed that in reality there was no love between them — for, as Overbury would have said, there can be no love where there is no illusion.
Sir Thomas knew my Lord of Northampton for a recusant, a secret Papist, and suspected him of aiming at the re-establishment of the Catholic faith in England. This, indeed, was the main reason why Northampton urged upon the king the marriage of Prince Henry and the Infanta of Spain, a matter which was splitting the Court into two great parties; the Spanish party, of which my Lord of Northampton, closely supported by all the powerful tribe of Howards, was the acknowledged head, and the anti-Spanish party, led by Prince Henry and the austere Earl of Pembroke, the queen’s friend and the Howards’ enemy. So far Sir Thomas had contrived to keep Rochester aloof from either party. The time, in his opinion, was not yet ripe to make a choice of sides, although he saw that it could not now be very long delayed. The Howards — and Northampton in particular — were assiduously wooing the king’s favourite, with the aim of obtaining his weighty influence on their side. If they won him, they might account that they had won the king himself, since the king’s will was now in Rochester’s keeping, even as Rochester’s was in Overbury’s. And knowing this, Northampton wooed Overbury, whilst mistrusting him and disliking him for his shrewdness. It was a shrewdness which — as Northampton uncomfortably suspected — saw to the very roots of the earl’s schemes, whilst at the same time veiling his own — which is to say, Rochester’s — intentions.
Already Overbury perceived that ultimate alliance with the Howards was becoming inevitable, that it was being rendered so by the arrogant stupidity of the other party. Stiff-necked Pembroke and the austere Prince of Wales — whose austerity was, however, somewhat damaged since he had been caught in the toils of Lady Essex — would not stoop to woo the all-powerful favourite to their side, preferring the luxury of indulging their hatred and contempt.
Overbury, cursing their inflexible stupidity, gave them back hate for hate — particularly Pembroke, whose arrogance provoked Sir Thomas’s own arrogance, which was inferior to no man’s. He had thought to delay the inevitable decision, frustrate it altogether perhaps, by helping to precipitate a scandal involving Rochester and Lady Essex. That might provoke the Howards, whose daughter she was, and convert them from wooers of the favourite into his enemies. But shrewd and cynical as he was, Sir Thomas had reckoned — as he was to learn to-night — without certain factors of human baseness.
Standing there, on the edge of that glittering Court throng, in conversation with my Lord of Northampton, Overbury’s eyes were suddenly caught by the handsome figure of Rochester sweeping past with Lady Essex on his arm. She was, says one of her contemporaries, “a lady of transcendent beauty and full of fire,” whilst another describes her as “of a sweet and bewitching countenance.” It was barest justice that they did her. Slight and small and exquisitely graceful was she. Above the broad, starched ruff Sir Thomas beheld a delicately featured, almost childish face, with great blue eyes and a mass of red-gold hair, in which a jewel glowed as if gathering light and fire from its setting. Below the ruff the bodice of her gown was cut very low and square, revealing a breast which, as in his rhymed epistle he had so justly said, would for whiteness shame the very snows.
But what caught his glance, and the glance of the swart-faced little earl beside him, was the unwonted flush upon her cheeks, the light that sparkled in her eyes as they glanced upwards with betraying shyness at her tall companion.
The radiant pair flashed past and were gone, eclipsed to the eyes of those two by the little throng that followed. But, in passing, the lady had dropped a glove, and a courtier stooped now to pick it up. Rising with that slender, perfumed simulacrum of a lovely hand, this courtier came face to face with a slim, shapely, sensitive-faced lad upon whose breast hung a George suspended from a broad riband.
The courtier was either a fool or malicious. He bowed low, and proffered the glove to the young man.
“May it please your highness,” he lisped, “the glove of my Lady Essex.”
The prince, who had been pale already, turned now a deathly white; the frown that had marred his brow grew deeper, and his eyes blazed on a sudden, whilst he stiffened and recoiled as if shrinking from the touch of something unclean and vile. Deeply resentful, deeply affronted as he was, not merely to see himself outbidden in the affections of this lady to whom he now accounted that he had stooped, to whose witchery he had fallen a prey, so that his will was weakened, and he was false to all his high ideals, and outbidden by one whom he had despised
and accounted utterly detestable, he seized this chance to give expression to a contempt that was in itself but the expression of mortification.
“And what have I to do with it?” he asked in a tone that withered the smirking courtier before him. Then his lips curled terribly, and in a voice that carried far and rang in a score of eager ears: “It has been stretched by another,” he added, and swept on.
In the momentary hush that followed this deliberate and deadly insult, Sir Thomas looked aslant at my Lord Northampton. He was baffled by the expression on the earl’s aquiline face, so different was it from all that he could have expected. His lordship’s long, slender fingers were combing his beard, his eyes were narrowed, and he almost seemed to smile.
Was it that, looking beneath the insult, he saw the lacerated feelings that had provoked it, and maliciously rejoiced in that hurt to a young man he did not love? Or could it be that Northampton would take satisfaction in the prostitution of his niece for the sake of the greater hold which through her he might obtain upon the all-powerful favourite?
Sir Thomas, who could be bold to insolence on occasion, would have sought of Northampton then and there a solution of this riddle had Northampton tarried to afford him the opportunity. But whilst he was considering words with which to approach the subject, the earl slipped from his side and was lost in the crowd. Sir Thomas did not attempt to follow. He turned about, and moved in the opposite direction, proceeded slowly, and using his ears the while to catch stray comments upon the behaviour of the prince. Suddenly he came face to face with the austere and stately Pembroke. The great nobleman nodded coldly.
“Your master, sir, grows daily of an increasing boldness,” said he sourly.
“Nay, my lord — not grows. He was born so.”
“Ha! I have known men better born who walked more circumspectly.”
“Why, so have I,” says Overbury, staring straight at the earl. “They are common hereabouts. That is why my Lord of Rochester achieves distinction.”
“I wish him joy of such distinction as he has achieved to-night.”
“He will be flattered by your lordship’s interest when I convey it to him.”
Pembroke snarled.
“Does my Lord Northampton walk these ways with you?” he asked, with supercilious scorn.
“Ah! Now you probe too deep in emptiness, my lord. For what should I know of my Lord Northampton’s designs? I who occupy so small a place, a very rutae folium, as Martial picturesquely puts it.”
The Welsh earl smiled disdainfully.
“In that respect, sir, perhaps I can mend your lack of knowledge.” The venom bubbled out of him. “My Lord of Northampton may at times have lapsed from wisdom, but never yet to the extent of leaning on a rotten staff.”
“’Tis picturesque,” said glib Sir Thomas, “almost as picturesque as Martial. But it lacks his accuracy.” He was looking over Pembroke’s shoulder, and beyond him, and his smile — the smile that the Welshman found so maddening — broadened. “For the staff — to keep to your lordship’s well-chosen image — is far from rotten, and as for leaning on it, why — where the king’s majesty leans so heavily, there may my Lord of Northampton also lean with confidence. Look for yourself. Look behind you, my lord.”
Down the middle of the room, through the parting crowd of courtiers, came the king, his right arm about the shoulders of my Lord Rochester — as much to express his fondness as to support himself and relieve his weakly legs of the weight of his ungainly, rather obese body. The jewelled fingers of his none too clean left hand were twirling some strands of the thin, fading beard that adorned his chin. His pale, rather watery eyes looked up with almost fawning devotion into his minion’s face. He pinched the young man’s cheek, smiled and smirked, mumbled and slobbered in his full-mouthed way.
My Lord Pembroke looked on, and his long face lengthened with loathing and chagrin. He realised the meaning of this ostentatious display of royal fondness. It was an amend offered by the king to his favourite for the affront which the prince had indirectly put upon him. There was by this time so little love between the king and his eldest son that to belong to the party of the one was almost to be opposed to the party of the other, and James may have intended now to warn such men as Pembroke to beware how far they presumed to take their tone from that which the prince’s rank gave him immunity to adopt.
Looking beyond, Pembroke had a glimpse of the full face of the queen, and the fine, sensitive countenance of the prince, and on both he saw reflected something of his own disgust and anger.
A laugh, soft but infinitely mocking, rippled behind him. He set his teeth in rage, and span round to face that saturnine derider. But he was no more than in time to see Overbury retreating through the courtly press.
Though the last laugh in that encounter may have been with Overbury that night, yet he took little satisfaction from it, troubled as his mind was with that riddle concerning my Lord Northampton, and troubled the more because he had seen that the matter was exercising Pembroke, too.
Doubt, however, was not to plague him very long. Two days thereafter Rochester came once more to claim the services of his scholarly pen. He brought a letter from Lady Essex, which he frankly, almost ostentatiously, laid before his secretary. In this, brief as it was, her ladyship extolled the grace and beauty of his lordship’s composition. Thereafter:
“My uncle,” she wrote, “bids me chide you for that you do not come oftener to a house in which all are devoted to you. He desires that you honour him at dinner to-morrow. There will be none other, unless you so desire it, and then you shall find for company whomsoever you be pleased to name. So I pray you send me word, my lord, that I may comfort my uncle.”
“You see, Tom — I am to find for company whomsoever I be pleased to name. What make you of that?”
“That the lady asks you to woo her,” said Sir Thomas bluntly.
“You are brutal, Tom.”
“Merely in words. In thought no more brutal than her ladyship. Her expression is less blunt than mine, but what she means is: Bid me to be of the company, and you may have your desire, being assured that unless you also name another there will be none other there. Faith, never was invitation plainer. It is yours to say yea or nay.”
“Ay, ay,” says his lordship, between satisfaction at the matter of his letter and vexation at the manner of his secretary. “Ay, ay. It will be as ye say, no doubt. And now to answer it.”
“To be sure you must.”
“Nay, nay, but it asks subtlety. ’Tis a task for you, Tom. The answer must be full worthy o’ what has gone before. You see what she says: ‘The silver-dropping stream of your lordship’s pen—’ You must continue what you have begun, Tom. Bear with me.”
Sir Thomas fetched a sigh from lips that smiled sardonically, and sat down to indite an answer. And thus my lord, being further committed to this imposture of employing the choice elegancies of his secretary’s pen, was thereafter forced to continue in it. Sir Thomas, being endowed with a very fertile literary gift, and a full sense of subtleties of thought and melody of words, found in the task some measure of that self-expression which is the craving of every man of letters. Where Rochester would merely have made love, Overbury made literature as well. He wrote, in fact, precisely as he would have written had he been himself the suitor, which at times he almost imagined that he was. Into the growing amorousness of these letters he wove exquisite patterns of tender philosophy and graceful poesy, revealing coruscating beauties of mind that could not fail to dazzle and enchant.
Rochester, in high delight, proclaimed him a wizard, and with good reason, for he observed the daily growing effect of that wizardry upon my lady. In their frequent meetings now at Northumberland House her theme would often be the subject of those prized letters that he wrote, a theme in which it was not easy for him to do justice to the pen that passed with her for being his own. At first it had been the splendid beauty of the man that had attracted her, appealing irresistibly to her senses,
and so provoked from her those languishing, inviting glances which had set afoot this mischief. But to that erstwhile physical admiration came to be added this intellectual, spiritual delight in him, so that what in its beginnings was no more than wanton fancy was grown by now into a very ardent worship on my lady’s part, believing as she did that such beauties of body and mind had never yet been combined in any single man.
And worshipping him so, it is not strange at all that she should become impatient of the brevity and restraint of such meetings as took place between them at Northumberland House. For, be her scheming uncle never so accommodatingly disposed, there were limits sharply defined by rank and custom upon the extent to which he could countenance and abet the growing intimacy between his niece, who had a husband of her own, and my Lord of Rochester.
One day at last she gave free and frank expression to her impatience.
“My love,” she murmured — for it had come to that by now between them— “are we to suffer for ever this parching thirst for each other’s company? Are we never to do more than quicken it by these furtive, fleeting glimpses and stolen words?”
Tenderly, wistfully he looked down into the upturned face of that lovely child-woman.
“Sweet,” he said, “how choicely you express it! Tantalus, in his damnation, suffered no such torture as I am suffering. But there are ever a hundred curious, peering eyes upon us. We are watched and spied upon on every hand, and could I suffer it that you should afford these crows of the Court reason to pluck and tear at your fair name, to befoul it with their scandal? I am bound like Prometheus to his rock, and my heart is being devoured by longing. Could I devise a way—”
“Do you desire it?” she flashed in quickly.
And he saw at once that she had considered and resolved the difficulty that would not yield to his own wits.
“Desire it? Do I desire Heaven?”
“Then listen, Robin. I know a place — a sweet garden by the river, within an hour’s ride of Whitehall — where we can freely meet, and spend whole hours together in secret from the world. Will you come to-morrow, as soon after noon as you can contrive? I shall be waiting for you.”
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 502
