‘He is mending. It would take more than a leg full of splinters to keep that one down!’ Bess’s brother turned to Mine Host, who was hovering near. ‘I will take Lady Ralegh up.
Mine Host bowed. ‘Very good, Sir Arthur.’
And Bess catching his words, turned to her brother quickly. ‘Sir Arthur?’
‘Yes,’ he said, noncommittally.
‘Oh my dear, I am so —’
He checked her with an eyebrow cocked in rueful amusement. ‘There is no call for your congratulations, sweet sister; His Grace of Essex dubbed sixty and six knights the morning after Cadiz; and a Cadiz knighthood is become a jest for the gods in consequence.’
‘Oh,’ said Bess, damped. Then in swift championship. ‘But I am very sure that yours was earned, however it was with the other five and sixty!’
He laughed, and swept her indoors and up a winding stairway; and at the head of it, halted before a door carved with roses and dolphins. Bess, who had donned a jonquil damask that morning although it was most unsuitable for travelling in, because it was Ralegh’s favourite, and who had been trying to shake out the creases all the way upstairs, gave a final despairing shake to her skirts. Arthur flung open the door. ‘Here she is,’ he announced, and thrusting her through with a brotherly hand, shut it again behind her.
Ralegh was standing by the window. He turned quickly but awkwardly as she entered, and took one pace towards her, leaning heavily on a stick. ‘So you have come to collect the pieces, Bess,’ he said.
She was across the room before the words were well spoken, and his free arm was round her, holding her close. She put up her hands and drew his head down and kissed him. ‘My dear, my most dear, how is it with you?’
‘I am still damnably lame,’ he said ruefully. ‘How is it with you?’
‘What need to ask, now that I have you back? But you must sit down or you will tire the wound.’
He laughed, half angrily. ‘I am tired of sitting down.’ But he obeyed her, all the same, lowering himself into a cushioned chair by the window, and stretching out his right leg with a sigh of relief.
Bess slipped to her knees beside him, among a swirl of out-flung skirts like a huge yellow flower, and looked up into his face, studying it gravely. He was woefully thin, and his eyes, sunk deep into his head by fever, seemed a deeper blue than was their wont, less of the sapphire about them, more of the muted colour that distant hills wear before rain. Very gently she touched his right knee, where the fashionable Venetian breeches were ungartered. ‘Is it here? Under my hand?’
‘Further up — here.’ He took her hand and moved it midway up his thigh.
‘Does it ache?’
‘Not with your hand over it.’
She smiled at him fondly. ‘Have you wanted my hand over it?’
‘I have wanted all of you,’ Ralegh said. ‘I have longed for you as a sick child longs for his mother.’
‘Oh my dear,’ she said, in a small, shaken whisper.
He bent down to her. ‘Will you take me home and look after me, and make me well again, Bess?’
The humility of him, so unlike his normal self, tore at her heartstrings. She perfectly understood its cause; Ralegh had never in his life been really ill, and now he had been very ill indeed; he had wanted her, and had to do without her, which was a new experience. He was very weak, and that too, was a new thing. So came humility. She understood all that, and understood also, with an inner gleam of amusement, that it would not last. But while it did last, it was very real; and she put her arms round him as she might have put them round Little Watt if he had hurt himself, and pressed her cheek against his. ‘Darling, we will go home tomorrow,’ she said.
She began to tell him the odds and ends of home news that she knew would please him. Little Watt had lately added a new word to his vocabulary — unfortunately it was a profane word, but that could not be helped. The lime saplings in the lower meadow were doing well. Cherry, the old sorrel mare had dropped a fine foal ...
Presently Mine Host and his henchman appeared, the man to spread linen on the table and lay supper, the master to stand watchful in the doorway and ask if everything was to My Lady’s taste, and the wine sufficiently cool.
Arthur joined them at supper, and with his coming, Ralegh’s mood returned to normal. They made a merry meal, pledging each other in the canary wine; and the two men proceeded to re-fight Cadiz for Bess’s entertainment, while she sat looking from one to the other, perfectly content to be entertained by them in whatever way they thought fit.
‘And Bess —’ Ralegh remembered something, and bent eagerly towards her. ‘What do you think was the first sight that met my eyes when we dropped anchor in Plymouth Sound, last week?’
‘Nay, you must tell me. I was never any good at guessing.’
‘Why, the Darling, riding at anchor in the mouth of the Hamoaze, as peacefully as though she had not been to Guiana at all!’
‘So soon? How did the voyage prosper?’
‘None too well, it seems. The Spaniards have grown busy again in the Orinoco basin. God knows England has only herself to blame that Spain is before her! — Kemys told me he could not reach the mines where we found the gold ore last year, for there is a Spanish trading post with six pieces of ordnance astride the way.’
‘Could he not have landed lower down, and worked round behind them?’ Throckmorton put in.
‘With Trinidad a hornet’s nest of Spaniards, and Don Berrio’s ships between them and the sea, to cut them off at any time? Use your wits, man!’
The other poured himself a glass of wine. ‘You had neglected to mention those facts,’ he said. ‘Are there any further depressing details?’
‘When I know that, I will tell you.’ Ralegh flashed a smile at him. ‘There was but small time for talking in Plymouth, and I have bidden Kemys come up to me at Sherborne as soon as he is through with paying off. Do you stay and make one of our Council of War!’
‘Marry-come-up! I am no adventurer! I am away back to my wife and my acres.’
‘Council of War!’ Bess thought. ‘Council of War. Oh God, not yet, not again just yet!’ Aloud, she said, ‘How bad is it, that the Spaniards are up the Orinoco? What will it mean?’
‘It will mean no more letters patent to explore, with a caution against trespass on the territory of other Christian princes,’ Ralegh said. ‘Christian princes; God save the Mark! It will mean that the next attempt must be made, not in peace, but with guns. It will mean sacking this strong-post that they call San Thome, and sweeping Guiana clean of Dons and burning out the stink of the Inquisition that they leave behind them!’ He caught up his glass, holding it aloft, and the light caught and kindled in the heart of it with a ragged scarlet flame. ‘I drink to our next attempt on El Dorado! Arthur — drink, Bess!’
Bess raised her glass to his, smiling, and drank. She had not noticed until now, how sour the wine was; sour and salty, as though there were tears mingled in it.
Chapter 9 - ‘Here We Go Up — Up — Up’
RALEGH was an impossible patient. The melting mood of his reunion with Bess wore off even more rapidly than she had expected, and left behind it a restless and furious rebellion. He was a man whose body had never meant very much to him — even his love of luxury was because it ministered to his pride, not because it ministered to his comfort — but always it had been his instrument; the sword to the soldier, the lute to the minstrel, and he had kept it and used it accordingly. Now the wretched thing was out of order; it creaked and ached and was unduly heavy to carry about. The great purplish rent in it which was so slow to heal offended his fastidiousness, and his weakness outraged his pride, and he glowered at poor Bess when she wished to change the dressing, as though the whole thing were her fault.
Bess bore with him patiently, tended his wound and brewed him strengthening draughts, provided such of his favourite meals as she deemed good for a man in his condition, and loved him. He had need of all her love and forbearance, in the months that
followed.
Kemys’ report, when given in detail, was not good hearing, making it abundantly clear that if nothing was done soon, England’s chance in South America would be gone for ever. Essex and Effingham and Tom Howard were at Court. Effingham had been created Earl of Nottingham for his part in the Cadiz victory; Essex had been made Master of the Ordnance — albeit a little grudgingly; but Ralegh was not returned to his old place as Captain of the Guard. He was here at Sherborne, tied by the leg, unable to take his part with the others in their Councils, unable to bring himself to the Queen’s notice and lay Kemys’ report before her and make her send her ships westward before it was too late.
But the obverse side of that difficult autumn was Little Watt. When his son was born, Ralegh had been astonished and delighted as though such a thing had never happened before; but in the preparations for his Guiana venture, he had soon lost interest. One baby was, after all, very much like another. Now, all that was changed. Little Watt was two years old, and no longer a baby, but a person, and a person after Ralegh’s own heart. Outwardly, he resembled Bess, but inwardly, he was, in embryo, all Ralegh’s, to understand the same things and dream the same dreams; and already there was growing between them the bond that was to link them so closely all their lives. Little Watt repaid his father’s new interest with a swift and complete devotion, and was seldom willingly apart from him. He sat under the table with his father’s legs through the interminable conferences with Lawrence Kemys and others, that went on all that autumn, and when Ralegh hobbled about the demesne, Little Watt invariably trotted behind, thrusting among the dogs for pride of place next to the heels of his private god. They began to do things together. ‘Come along, Imp,’ Ralegh would say, and they would set forth, generally deep in conversation, to visit the stables or the mews or see how the lime saplings were doing. And Bess, watching their absorbed backs disappearing round some corner, would experience an amused and slightly wistful sense of looking in on something from the outside.
By degrees, Ralegh grew strong again, despite all his rebellious fretting, though he still walked with a stick. Autumn turned to winter, and on a day early in December he came looking for Bess, and found her in her herb garden, gathering sprigs of rosemary for her next boiling of candles. He had an open letter in his hand, and his eyes were at their brightest and bluest. ‘Word from Effingham, Bess!’ he called, the instant he saw her. ‘I crave his pardon — Nottingham, rather. If I am sufficiently well of my wound, he bids me come up to Westminster. Some question of the Cadiz prizes, seemingly.’
Bess added an aromatic sprig to those already in her basket, and went to meet him. ‘And you are sufficiently well?’ she asked, a little anxiously.
‘Of course I am! Plague take it! I cannot roost here like a pelican on the housetops far the rest of my days! How soon can we be away, Bess?’
She heaved a little sigh of regret for her quiet home and the boiling of candles, that she would not now have time to attend to. ‘Tomorrow, I suppose,’ she said, and then, catching sight of a second packet held between two casual fingers under his letter, ‘Walter, was there anything for me in the bag?’
He glanced at his hand. ‘Eh? — Ah yes — here you are.’
Bess took the little packet, half laughing, half exasperated. ‘Walter, you are too bad! You know I am waiting news of Elizabeth Cecil’s new baby —and it should be here by now.’ She was breaking the seal as she spoke; she opened the sheet, her eyes skimming along the lines. Suddenly she gave a little cry, and looked up. ‘Oh Walter, she is dead!’
‘Who is?’ Ralegh, who had returned to his own letter, raised his eyes again.
‘Elizabeth. This is from Mary Herbert, to tell me so. The baby is well enough, she says; another little daughter — but Elizabeth —’ She let the page flutter to the chill winter ground, and lie unheeded. ‘Oh poor, poor Robin.’
Ralegh said, ‘Aye, poor Robin,’ and stooped stiffly for the fallen letter.
And that was all.
But throughout the rest of that day, whenever he had a moment to spare, he came to find Bess, wherever she was busy about her preparations for the journey, just to look at her, and go away again, and presently come back to look once more, as though to make sure that she was still there.
Christmas found them still at Durham House. The Court was at Westminster, and though they had no part in the Court festivities, there was a good deal of coming and going between Durham House and the houses of old friends. But one familiar face was absent from all the festivities, Court or otherwise. Robert Cecil appeared in public whenever his duties as Secretary of State or Minister in Attendance demanded; otherwise nobody saw him that winter, save the men who worked with him. He and Essex and Ralegh were much together, a queer triumvirate that had no official existence, but about which men were already beginning to whisper, looking to the future.
But Bess did not see him at all, until the morning of New Year’s Day, when she had gone down the garden to gather some Christmas roses, and hearing a light step on the water stair, turned to find him standing behind her.
Something about him was unfamiliar; something more concrete than the changed look in his eyes. And then as he doffed his cap, and stood uncovered before her, she realised what it was. His hair was grey. He was not quite thirty-five.
‘Robin!’ she exclaimed.
‘I am sorry; I have startled you,’ he said. ‘I came to wish you happiness in the New Year.’
‘And you —’ she began, and checked, holding out her hands to him, forgetful of the Christmas roses. He cupped his hands under hers, saving the flowers, and greeting her with a touch. A smile that it was not good to see twisted his long, sensitive lips. ‘No, you cannot return it, can you?’ he said. ‘Poor Elizabeth, it is difficult for you.’
‘I — was not expecting you,’ Bess said.
‘Because I have been so long in coming? I would have come before, but I was busy. You will have heard that I have gotten me the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, for a Christmas fairing?’
‘Yes, I heard,’ Bess said. ‘Oh Robin, I am so sorry. So — very sorry.’
‘Thank you, Elizabeth.’ His voice was completely unemotional, almost dry, but a muscle twitched in his sallow cheek. ‘I came to see your husband, as well as to bring you my New Year wishes; is it a propitious time?’
‘Walter is from home. He is gone to the Mermaid with Ben Jonson, to talk with a seaman who is newly returned from the South Seas,’ Bess said, turning towards the fantastic turreted mass of the house. ‘Do you come in and drink a cup of wine and wait for him. He cannot be long, at least I hope not, for he has been gone since early morning already, and his wound still tires so quickly. But Master Jonson will take good care of him, for he is really most reliable when he is sober, and he was as sober as a judge — almost — when they set out this morning. Though what state he may be in by now is quite another matter, of course —’ She was talking completely at random, unable to stop, and acutely aware of his light, prowling step behind her as she led the way indoors and up to the long gallery.
She sent a servant for wine and a bowl for the Christmas roses, and slipped off her heavy mantle of olive velvet lined with squirrel fur, and let it fall across a chair. The wine came swiftly, and a silver bowl; and she poured for Robin Cecil, quite unable, now that her breathless chatter on the stairs was silent, to speak at all, though there was so much that she longed to say. And having poured for him, and put the cup into his hand, she turned her attention to the Christmas roses. They were chill with melted frost under her fingers, for the sun had not reached them under the wall; flawless, coldly pure as the frost itself, yet with a flush of warmth on the outer sides of the petals.
Behind her, Cecil had moved over to the virginal that stood open before a window. Still standing, his wine cup in one hand, he ran the other over the narrow keys, and began to play, idly and caressingly, with a touch that brought out the nostalgia of the slight song-tune with unbearable poignancy. The last
time that Bess had seen his wife, she had sung that song; it was a favourite of hers.
Sweet Adon, dare’st not glance thine eye,
N’oserez vous, mon bel ami?
Upon thy Venus that must die?
Je vous en prie, pity me:
N’oserez vous, mon bel, mon bel,
N’oserez vous, mon bel ami?
The sappy stem of a Christmas rose broke in Bess’s finger, and she swung round. ‘Robin, don’t!’
He drove a hand along the keyboard with a crashing, deliberate discord, and turned away from the virginal. ‘Crave your pardon, Elizabeth. There was a somewhat oppressive silence that seemed to require filling.’
‘But why with that tune?’ Bess thought, knowing, even as the question sprang into her mind, that the answer lay in the man’s warped instinct for self-flagellation. Aloud, she said: ‘I am sorry; there are so many things that I would say, but I do not know how to say them.’
His old, sweet smile flickered for an instant into his eyes. ‘Then let us take them as said, since we both know what they are.’
‘Robin,’ she said after a moment. ‘What will you do now?’
‘Do? Much as I have always done. My father grows old and tired; soon there will be more work for me to do.’
She had joined him at the window. ‘And the children?’
‘I have given Frances and the babe to my sister, at least for the present time.’
‘But Will?’
‘I shall keep the boy with me. He is six — old enough to do with a tutor.’
‘Poor little boy,’ Bess said, and she put out a hand to touch his sleeve. ‘Robin, if you should find at any time that he is not — that he needs mothering — or even another little boy to play with, send him to me. I loved your Bess.’
‘I know you did,’ Cecil said. ‘You make a most kind offer, Elizabeth; I shall not forget it.’
It occurred to Bess for the first time, that he had called her Elizabeth throughout their conversation. It seemed as though, with his own Bess dead, he could not use her name for another woman.
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