Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘No. He is mine,’ she said.

  ‘Of course he is yours, the blessed lamb,’ said the midwife in motherly tones, ‘but you must let me take him down to his Daddy. You want his Daddy to see him, now don’t you?’

  ‘His Daddy must come and see him here. He must come now,’ Bess said.

  ‘Presently, presently, my duck. Do you take another sup of your cordial and have a little sleep first.’

  ‘You’d a deal better, My Lady. Come along now.’ Joan added her voice to that of the midwife, with less of cajolery and more of command.

  Lying blessedly flat in the great bed, Bess defied them. She would not take another sup of her cordial, she would certainly not go to sleep, until they let her husband in to her. Utterly spent as she was, she still possessed reserves of quiet obstinacy against which stronger wills than Joan and the midwife had broken before now.

  Finally an expressive glance passed between the two older women, and Joan, with a parting shot of ‘Stubborn as a mule you always were, My Lady, for all your pretty soft way with you, and stubborn as a mule you’ll be to your dying day!’ rustled out of the room. Bess lay with her eyes fixed on the door. Voices sounded beyond it, and it opened again so quickly that she knew her husband had been waiting just outside, and he appeared on the threshold. The midwife sidled past him into the gallery, admonishing him wheezily as she did so, ‘’Tis but for a minute, mind; and don’t you go for to tire the poor blessed dear. You men, you don’t know —’

  But Ralegh had shut the door on her, and come striding across to the bed. ‘Bess,’ he said, ‘Oh, my Bess.’

  Bess put back the soft fold of the shawl from the little head in the curve of her arm. The baby was asleep now, its rage at being born all spent. It was red and rumpled, but rather less so than most new-born babies, with a head of black down, and a mouth like a three-cornered poppy. It was altogether enchanting.

  ‘Here’s a little son to go adventuring with you, one day,’ she said.

  Ralegh slipped to his knees beside the bed, one arm across her body so that both she and the babe were within the curve of it. His hand stole up to caress with light finger tips, her bare shoulder where the shift had fallen back. ‘Dear Bess,’ he said. And she saw in the fading candle-light that his face, bent over the two of them, was almost devout.

  A wild gust of wind swooped against the house out of the greying sky, driving smoke and sparks from the fire, hurling the hissing rain against the windows, making the candles gutter to that all the room was filled with a dancing turmoil. Ralegh’s arm bent more closely round his wife and son as if to hold them safe; and Bess turned a little on her goose-down pillow, to smile at him. ‘He has chosen a wild night for his coming,’ she said.

  ‘He is come in a happy time!’ Ralegh raised his head to return her smile, his eyes suddenly blazing blue. ‘I received my letters patent from the Queen, a few hours ago!’

  Chapter 8 - ‘Fortune My Foe’

  RALEGH got his Captains together and set about gathering his crews; and in February of the following year, the little fleet of five vessels set sail from Dartmouth, and Bess was left to rear her small son and wait through the lonely months until they came back again — if they ever did.

  They returned at last, beating up channel in a full gale, to drop anchor in Dartmouth Harbour, and by mid-November, after a brief and tempestuous descent on Sherborne, Ralegh was in London.

  Two or three days later, in the high turret room at Durham House where he had made his study, he stood facing the Secretary of State across a shining litter of ore and spar-fragments on the writing table. ‘Madre del Oro, the Spaniards call it,’ Ralegh was saying. ‘Mother of Gold. Westwoods of Wood Street have found it to contain gold at the rate of 1.200 lb. a ton. So much for that damned half-wit at the Mint who has been bruiting it abroad that Sir Walter Ralegh has brought back nought but Fool’s Gold from the New World! — Yellow dross that I learned to know at a glance in my own West Country when I was scarce breeched.’

  Cecil, seated beside the table, one hand playing with the shining quartz, raised his eyes to the other’s face. ‘Yet an officer of the Mint is not much given to the making of groundless statements. Was this one completely without foundation?’

  ‘No,’ Ralegh said. ‘That’s the damnable part of it.’ From the litter on the table he picked out two or three fragments, thrust them under Cecil’s nose, and cast them back with a little clatter among the rest. ‘There is his foundation ... While we lay at Trinidad, certain natives told us of a ruined mine that they believed to be gold. I sent men to bring in stones from it for trial; but it was Marcasite after all. I told them that it was so, but some of them mistrusted my judgment, and kept their shining stuff and showed it to the assayers in Dartmouth on our return. Hence the mischief.’

  ‘So.’ The slender hand had taken up one of the pieces of Marcasite, and was turning it over and over. ‘How much does it mean to you, this mischief?’

  ‘To me, merely that a few thousand fools will count me of their number; but to England — to the future of England in the New World, it may be deadly.’

  He was pacing up and down, flinging his words now over this shoulder, now over that, to the quiet man who sat toying with a scrap of Marcasite. ‘If the gold that we brought from Guiana be but Fool’s Gold, how shall it seem to others that our report is to be trusted in anything beside? How shall it seem to them worth while to follow our lead? And I tell you, Cecil, that whatsoever prince possesses the Empire of Guiana will be the greatest in the world; and if Spain enjoy it, she will become irresistible thereby.’

  ‘Tell the Queen that.’

  Ralegh made a small helpless gesture. ‘The Queen will not receive me, nor pay any heed to my letters.’

  ‘If you could but have come to her Presence Chamber dangling the golden keys of El Dorado ...’ Cecil murmured. Their eyes met. They had few illusions about the Queen.

  Ralegh said defiantly: ‘I did not find El Dorado. The season was over late; it lies six hundred miles further from the coast than Whiddon supposed, and there are pitfalls on the way, of which he know nothing. But it is there! I have seen gold that came from it, soft red gold with the power of the sun in its substance! Soon the Dons will find the way — God knows they seek it hard enough — and then there will be no more gold in El Dorado. But if we can but find it first —’

  Cecil’s voice slid silkily into the harangue. ‘Then there will be no more gold in El Dorado.’

  Ralegh checked an instant, and surveyed the Secretary of State with brows twitched to meeting point above his nose, then returned to his pacing. ‘I was not thinking in terms of piracy. Guiana is rich in more than gold, even throughout those parts that I have seen with my own eyes. For colonising, the open land has no equal. Therefore I have held my hand from easy riches, and the hands of my men also, which was something harder. There is neither tomb nor temple rifled nor woman raped because of us, in all Guiana, though the tombs and temples are as rich in gold and the women full as comely as any in Peru or Darien. I could have had wealth beyond even my wants today, but I took them not, for I would not do that which might jeopardise the Queen’s Empire in the New World. So from this venture, for the Queen’s sake, I have brought back debts to hang round my neck for years to come, and a palm full of quaintly coloured stones ... You are a collector of precious stones, are you not — it might interest you to see them.’ He thrust a hand into the breast of his doublet, brought out a small wash-leather bag, and spilled half a dozen uncut gems among the quartz. ‘This, I am told, is a sapphire; but this, I like better — this one, hot hearted like a ruby, I shall have made into an eardrop for my Bess. Well cut, and set around with pearls it will become her as the red spot becomes the cowslip.’ His manner had gentled for the moment, but as he cast the jewel back on to the table it exploded once more into blazing vehemence. ‘But how in God’s sweet name shall anything be brought to birth if no man follow my lead, and the Queen refuse even to see me?’

  Ceci
l did not answer at once. He had left the gold ore and was fingering the gems. ‘This is undoubtedly a sapphire, though not of the first water. Why trouble to bring back this piece of rose quartz among gems of so much greater value?’

  Ralegh made an impatient gesture. ‘For the merest whim, because I had already a piece the brother to it but curiously worked.’ He fished again in his doublet, and brought out a piece of rose quartz not much larger than a bean. ‘This was given to me when I was a lad, and I have carried it ever since.’

  Cecil took it from him and turned it over, and so came upon the carved mask on the other side. For a long moment he looked at the thing in silence. ‘It is not often that one holds in one’s hands the seed of a dream,’ he said at last; and handed it back. ‘For me, my cut gems are enough. Dreams are uncomfortable travelling companions.’

  ‘Cecil,’ Ralegh said abruptly. ‘Four years since, when men were blowing upon my kinsman Richard’s name, I made and published him a defence, and I think that it served its purpose none so ill. If now I were to make and publish a report of Guiana, think you that it might serve some purpose also?’

  The other hesitated. ‘I — am not sure,’ he said slowly, after a moment; then he sat forward as though making up his mind. ‘But I believe that it is worth the trial ... Aye, write your report of Guiana, but do not be too long in the writing of it, for there may be other work for you in the spring.’

  Ralegh’s head whipped up. ‘What work?’

  ‘Another Armada to be dealt with,’ Cecil said.

  *

  As it turned out, that work was upon him long before spring. There was a plan afoot to strike Spain at her main port of Cadiz and so prevent the sailing of the new Armada, and by the turn of the year, Ralegh was in it up to his arrogant eyebrows; for though he might be in disgrace at Court, his powers as a leader were too well proved for him to be left out of such a venture. He sat at Council tables with the Earl of Essex, keeping a kind of working truce with the reigning favourite. He delved into armament and store lists, put his own vessels in fighting trim, and gathered others; listened to reports brought in by spies, and rode wildly between London and the West Country all that winter. And whenever he had an hour to himself, he returned to his Discovery of Guiana. ‘The deer crossing in every path,’ he wrote, ‘the birds towards evening singing in every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and herons of white and crimson and carnation perching on the river’s side, the air fresh with a gentle easterly wind, and every stone that we stooped to pick up promised either gold or silver by its complexion.’

  He finished it, sitting up into the grey hours of a March morning to do so; and almost before the ink was dry on the last words was with his ships at Mile End.

  The squadron was gathering in London River. All down the Limehurst Reach, Bess, who had come to join him, could see them from the window of the waterside inn where she was lodged; great ships riding at anchor, their masts and spars and spiderweb of rigging rising against the spring-flushed woods of the Surrey shore; small craft, water-beetling hither and yon among them; and the never ceasing shift and flow and hurry of London River running to the sea.

  Sometimes Ralegh took her with him, out to the Warspite, his flagship; and then she saw an aspect of her husband that she had not seen before, being tied to Sherborne and Little Watt when the Guiana venture was forming: Ralegh complete and in his own element, among ships and seamen, with a deck beneath his feet.

  He showed her his ship with the pride of a boy. He presented to her his officers; it seemed strange to miss from among them Lawrence Kemys, who had been sent off on the old quest earlier in the year, and find in his place as Ralegh’s Captain a piratical individual by the name of William King. He sent for the Master Gunner to demonstrate for her the use of the culverin in the waist. Presently he took her to the State Cabin, and bade her wait for him, and then went flying off in a cock-boat about the crowding business of the squadron. And Bess sat quietly, listening to all the strange sounds about her, waiting to be claimed. Once he sent her brother Arthur in his stead. Nicholas was fully occupied just then in getting himself wed to a flirtatious chit of fifteen, but Arthur, whom she had scarcely seen since her marriage, had most unexpectedly come south to put his sword at Ralegh’s service. Once, he forgot about her altogether, and Sir Allen Apsley, a young gentleman of the venture, found her long afterwards, still waiting, and ordered away the jolly-boat since the Admiral’s barge was gone, and sent her ashore. And climbing the stairs to her chamber, she heard Ralegh’s voice from the big room where the Fleet Councils were held. And later, when he came to bed, he did not even remember that he had forgotten her.

  *

  On the evening of June 1st the citizens of Plymouth gathered to see the greatest fleet that England had ever known lying at anchor in the Sound, and pointed out to each other the Repulse, ablaze with lights from stem to stern, where the Earl of Essex was entertaining to dinner the Admirals and Captains of the Fleet. And before dawn they had weighed anchor and slipped out on the morning tide. At the head of the first squadron, the Earl of Essex in Repulse, leading his fleet to sea: Effingham, in Ark Royal, Tom Howard in Merhonour; Ralegh in Warspite, leading the fourth squadron; and the shore lights of Plymouth fading into the mists astern, and the lilt of a ship’s fiddle stealing back down the long line of the Fleet.

  And then only silence, where the Cadiz Fleet had been; silence, and the long waiting.

  Three weeks went by, and a morning came like any other fine summer morning. And at Sherborne, Bess sat under the lime trees in the early sunshine, and watched Little Watt scuttling among the pinks of the border with a setter pup for company, and wondered where his father was and what he was doing.

  His father was standing with Captain King on the poop deck of the Warspite; and the Warspite, with fifes and drums playing Fortune my Foe, with red sendal battle-pennant at her masthead and the cross of St. George fluttering bravely at her stern, with nets rigged and men at action stations, was sailing straight into Cadiz Harbour, leading Mary Rose, Lion, Rainbow, Swiftsure, Dreadnaught and Nonpareil into the massed fire of the galleys drawn up below the town.

  Putting an end to the argument that had broken out at last night’s Council of War, as to who should lead the naval attack (for which he himself had made the plans), he had weighed anchor just an hour before the agreed time.

  To his Master Gunner, waiting the order to return the galleys’ fire, he said, ‘Nay man, they are but wasps compared to what comes after. We will not waste good powder and shot on them; they shall be answered in another kind.’ And the Warspite swept on, replying to the cannonade with a derisive burst of trumpets.

  The day passed, and the evening came. The sun that sank so peacefully behind the rim of the Blackmore Vale, gilding the quiet trees of Sherborne, went down red and swollen behind the rolling murk that was the smoke of half Cadiz burning. The naval battle was over, Essex had led the land assault, and while English troops and seamen were storming through the blazing streets, and while Bess sat in the twilight at the window of her painted bower, putting off the moment for having the candles lit, Ralegh was lying in torment in the cockpit of the Warspite, while a rough and ready surgeon probed the wound in his thigh — a jagged wound, laced with splinters from the Warspite’s bulwarks, where almost the last round-shot of the action had landed.

  The light wind brought out to the ships in the harbour the acid smitch of the burning town; brought also the shouts of the looters who were ransacking the place for jewels and plate, rich hangings and fine weapons, and maybe a dark-eyed woman here and there, and Ralegh, his wound finally dressed, lay in his bunk and raged, cursing outrageous fortune that had laid him there (not for him the fierce joys of the assault, the burning streets and a bishop’s golden chalice or the jewelled sword of a hidalgo), while the rest of the Fleet went looting.

  *

  Seven weeks later, Bess was jolting along the Dorset lanes in the family coach, to meet Ralegh at Weymouth. The family coac
h was a square box-like vehicle, upholstered in straw-coloured damask, so heavy that only farm horses could pull it, lacking springs of any kind, and quite phenomenally uncomfortable. But to Bess, trundling and jolting southward that day, it might have been carved from a hazel shell, and the feathery-heeled wain horses that drew it a team out of fairyland.

  Ralegh was wounded, and still sick of his wound; his letter from Plymouth had told her that, but she had taken the coach instead of her own horse litter, which would have been infinitely more comfortable for a wounded man on the homeward journey, because she knew that nothing under Heaven would induce Ralegh to ride in a litter, whereas the coach was the pride of his heart because so few people possessed one. She was desperately anxious about his wound, agonising over the fact that he had been ill and in pain, and she not there to comfort him; but so soon now, she would be with him again, and she was as happy and excited in the prospect as a young girl. She was happy too, in the hope — of which she was ashamed, though she could not quite cast it out — that now he was hurt, he would have to stay at home with her, at least for a while.

  Three times during that long day they changed horses, and each team seemed to Bess slower than the one before; but at last, towards evening, they came over the final lift of the Downs before the sea, and slithered down by the chalky road into the little town of Weymouth.

  As they rumbled and clattered to a stand in the yard of the only inn, a familiar figure stepped forward to open the coach door and help her down. ‘God den to you, My Lady Sister.’

  ‘Arthur!’ Bess rose in her place, and put a hand on the arm he held up to her; she was stiff and aching in every inch of her body, as she stepped thankfully down to the cobbles. ‘Arthur my dear, I did not think to see you here. Is Walter —’ She hesitated, and changed the form of her question. ‘How is Walter?’