Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  Silence fell between them again, but this time it was not one that required filling; and they stood together in quiet companionship, looking out at the world. The window at this end of the gallery looked down slantwise to the Strand and the crowds who came and went along it. There were many gay companies passing, this New Year’s Day, most of the people known to the watchers in the high window. Presently one of the passing throng hesitated in his walk, looking up at the house, and moved a step or two towards the gatehouse as though minded to ask admittance, a tallish, thinnish man with a rapier of exaggerated length at his hip and a hat of exaggerated height on his head.

  ‘There is Sir Lewis Stucley,’ Bess said. ‘I do believe he is coming in.’ Then with relief, as he turned away to continue his walk, ‘No, he has changed his mind.’

  As the man disappeared from view, though not without one uncertain backward glance, she looked at Cecil with puzzled eyes. ‘Now that is a strange thing.’

  ‘That your husband’s kinsman should turn away from the door?’

  She shook her head. ‘That he should come and hover before it, clearly half minded to enter ... In all the while that I have been Walter’s wife, though I have seen the man maybe half a score of times, I have never known any word to pass between them because of some stupid grudge he has borne against Walter these twelve years and more. Yet three nights since, at Mary Herbert’s revel, he was one of the company, and showed himself — not friendly, but as though he would lief be on better terms, and yet was nervous for some reason — ready to shy like a startled colt. Now he comes to the gate on New Year’s Day, and hovers — and passes on. Why, Robin?’

  Cecil’s face was sardonic. ‘Do you need me to read the riddle for you? Before your husband fell under the cloud of the Queen’s displeasure, the grudge was still sweet. Thereafter, your husband was under the Queen’s displeasure. Now he thinks it possible that the cloud may be going to lift: and what, after all, when one has had twelve years to think it over, is a threadbare grudge, compared with a friend in the Queen’s favour? So he comes to your gate. He is nervous, and he hovers, and he goes away because he fears lest, after all, he is mistaken.’

  Bess’s eyes had never left his face while he was speaking. They were startled and questioning. ‘Is the cloud going to lift?’ she asked after a moment, ‘or is Sir Lewis mistaken, as he fears?’

  ‘You could be happy if the recall never came, could you not, Elizabeth?’ he said shrewdly.

  She considered, then shook her head. ‘If it were but myself, yes; but Walter could not — and that breaks the circle of contentment for me.’

  ‘I think that it will come, and before so very long,’ Cecil said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Signs and portents. Maybe the same ones that brought our friend here this morning. My Lord of Essex is no longer quite so secure in favour as of yore. He grows over sure on his dunghill; and the Queen — for all that she gave him the Ordnance when he begged her — was not pleased with his Cadiz knighthoods ... Also, my influence increases a little with the Queen.’

  A shadow crossed Bess’s face. ‘I know that it does: I know that you do your best for Walter. But it is hateful, this jostling for places — playing off one against the other in the Queen’s favour.’

  ‘Here we go up — up — up. Here we go down — down — down,’ Cecil quoted softly, mockingly, the chant of children on a seesaw. ‘A good game — played with one standing in the centre of the plank to control the balance.’

  Bess, still looking at him, had no need to ask who that one was, and was conscious of a little trickling fear. She had always been sure of Robin Cecil’s friendship; she was sure of it still. And yet she wondered ... He had not been quite a friend over her marriage; and now — his Bess was dead. Part of Robin Cecil had died with his wife, she thought, and it was the happiest part, and the best.

  *

  A few days later they were once more at Sherborne, and though Ralegh was back and forth all the rest of that winter and the following spring, Bess remained for the most part quietly in her home. But she was with him again in lodgings at Deptford, where he was busy on some matter of the Fleet, when the long-hoped-for recall finally came.

  The Court was at Greenwich, and acting on a sudden impulse the Queen came down unheralded among her ships in the Royal Dockyard, as her father had so often used to do. Ralegh was in one of the Mould-lofts when she arrived, so hotly engaged in arguing a point of construction with one of the senior shipwrights, that he was completely unaware of the buzz of excitement running through the yard, until, limping out through the huge entrance without looking where he was going, he all but ran into her.

  He had tried so often to bring about a meeting, written her sonnets, humbly implored her forgiveness, and never seen her once, save as a distant glittering figure riding by in some state procession. Now, here she stood, so near that he could have touched her, could have knelt at her feet. He had already started forward with bended knee, but her strange eyes that could be pale as shallow water or black as midnight looked him full in the face, and she moved on without pause. Only as she passed, she spoke to him, casting the words carelessly over her shoulder. And the words, whether of sudden impulse or long deliberation, were: ‘Come to me before Evensong, Sir Walter. The Chamberlain shall have orders concerning you.’

  Then she had passed on, jewelled like a quetzel bird in the sunlight, with Petit, the Master shipwright at her side, and the gentlemen of her train around her.

  The Presence Chamber in Greenwich Palace was a long and lovely room, lit by many windows through which the late afternoon sun streamed in upon the shifting throng who waited to see the Queen. Feet moved quietly over the strewing herbs on the floor bruising and bringing out the scent of mint and marjoram and yellow iris leaves, and the buzz of talk sounded sleepy in the hot air as the drone of bees above a bed of sun-warmed snapdragons. They were a fantastically assorted company, almost exclusively male; merchants in flat caps and long gowns, an old scholar with a book for Her Majesty and hope of her acceptance writ large upon his face; young men up from the country and hopeful of making their way at Court; an alderman with a rich chain round his neck; a soldier with a rose in his cable hatband; a lawyer; a shipmaster, a bishop, a lute player; and moving here and there among them, the quiet Court officials.

  Ralegh had drawn aside with Bess into one of the window embrasures, aloof from the main throng; and standing there in the full flood of the sunlight, he caught and focused the whole attention of the room. He had elected to wait upon the Queen in a magpie symphony of frost white doublet and hose under an excessively short and wide pearl-embroidered black velvet cloak; the great pearl in his ear was translucent in the sunlight, and the Queen’s diamond burned on the hand which rested on his jewelled sword hilt. But even in sackcloth, he would have stood out in any company, Bess thought, his eyes and the carriage of his head would see to that.

  He was holding himself with the coldly perfect arrogance — insolence might be a better word — that had won him the hatred of his peers and the common folk alike. Not so much disdaining the throng in the great room as unaware of their very existence; he seemed as indifferent to their veiled glances as though they had been so many apes behind bars. Not by the twitch of a muscle did he betray the fact that he knew himself pilloried there; knew that the Queen, by ordering him to wait among all these others, had pilloried him and his wife for their curiosity, their whispers and covert glances. Not by the twitch of a muscle did he betray his sickening anxiety as to the meaning of her action. A last flick of the whip before forgiveness? — or no forgiveness after all? But Bess, knowing almost all that anybody could know about him, saw the fears and the hopes and the raw, scarified pride.

  ‘It will come to a happy issue,’ she murmured, her head half averted from him towards the window. ‘She is a woman, and she acts in a woman’s way, that is all.’

  ‘A woman should know a woman,’ Ralegh returned in the same undertone. ‘Bu
t can even another woman know the Queen?’

  He swung round as one of the Queen’s Gentlemen, slipping through the crowd, touched him on the arm. ‘Sir Walter, Her Majesty commands your presence.’

  So he was not, after all, to be received with the herd. With superb confidence in the very swirl of his cloak, he turned to follow the other man, gathering Bess after him. But for one instant Bess remained as though rooted to the ground. ‘Walter, the summons is for you — I will wait here.’

  ‘No,’ Ralegh said. ‘We will go to the Queen together, Bess.’ She cast one agonised, questioning glance at the young man who had brought the summons. She had danced with him last Christmas at Baynard’s Castle, but his face told her nothing. She was shaking from head to foot as, with her head braced high, she moved beside her husband through the shifting, curious crowd towards those folding doors.

  Two of the Guards moved aside to let them pass; two more, at another door hung with gold and crimson; and they were in the familiar chamber where Bess had watched the Earl of Essex teasing his merlin and bargaining for Ralegh’s downfall, nine long years ago.

  Several of the Queen’s Ladies, gathered at the lower end of the chamber, rose and fluttered away, through an inner door, as they entered, and, save for the Guards at the door behind them, they were alone with the Queen. She was fresh from the hands of her tirewomen, and in a few minutes she would pass out into the crowded Presence Chamber on her way to Evensong. She was sitting by the window, the light falling full and mercilessly upon her, faintly gilding the stiff creamy folds of her gown, blazing in the jewels with which she was hung, kindling her auburn wig to a harsh metallic red. A very splendid, very lonely figure. She had been reading; the book lay open on the pedestal table beside her, but she was not reading now. She sat upright, motionless, her hands folded in her lap, her jewelled head turned a little on the long, jewelled neck, to watch them.

  ‘Come here,’ she said; and that was all.

  Bess was not conscious of crossing the rush-strewn floor, but she found that she was kneeling at the Queen’s feet, her head bent in a passion of wordless supplication; and Ralegh was kneeling beside her.

  There was a long silence; a silence drawn out thin and brittle like spun glass, and then the Queen’s voice above them, forceful, clear, yet a little dry, as though the sap no longer rose as it used to do. ‘So you have brought her with you, Sir Walter.’

  Ralegh raised his head, his bright blue eyes looking levelly into her bright dark ones. ‘My wife always companies with me, Madam, wherever it is possible for a woman to go.’ And a thrill of mingled pride and fear shot through Bess, as she realised that he was calmly stating his terms to the Queen.

  The Queen knew it also, but she said only, with a note of regret: ‘So. You are a more stubborn creature than my Robin,’ and the regret seemed to be for Essex’s lack of stubbornness, rather than for Ralegh’s abundance of it.

  ‘I am your Majesty’s most faithful servant,’ Ralegh said, simply.

  She leaned down towards him a little. ‘A proud, stiff-necked servant,’ she said, but there was no censure in her tone.

  ‘But a faithful one,’ Ralegh insisted.

  In the silence that followed, Bess raised her head a little, and the Queen’s hands came into her sight. They were loosely folded, but Bess knew instinctively that they were only held from convulsive tightening by the will of their owner. They were still beautiful, those hands, but suddenly it dawned on Bess that they were the hands of an old woman, the skin puckered into soft wrinkles, the blue veins prominent, the joints of the slender fingers a little enlarged under the sparkling load of rings. Slowly her gaze crept higher, higher yet, until it reached the Queen’s face, down-bent towards Ralegh’s; a shrinking gaze that yet sought to pierce through the pink and white enamel, the powder and the eye cosmetic, to the woman beneath. It was five years since she had looked into that face, and it came to her with a sense of shock and pity — yes, and fear — that the Queen, like her hands, was growing old.

  People older than Bess had been born into the reign of this Queen; it had been a great reign, a flowering-time for England, the like of which had not been seen before. It was the only reign that Bess’s generation knew, and somehow it had seemed that because one had not known a beginning to it, one would not know an end. It was the established order; and now it seemed that the sands were beginning to run low, not only for Elizabeth, but for a whole way of life.

  But Ralegh and the Queen were unaware of the cold wind out of the unknown that had touched Bess. Their whole attention was turned on each other; the Queen, perhaps, making her decision, Ralegh certainly waiting for it, and meanwhile, making small bold love to her with his eyes. They were all a little in love with her, Bess thought, young and old, because they were in love with England. That was her power over them.

  ‘Faithful, yes, I believe so,’ the Queen said at last. ‘Else I had not sent for you again. Indeed you have proved your faith. You are still lame; does the wound irk you yet?’

  ‘It irks me the less that it was gained in your service, Madam,’ Ralegh said; and his complete sincerity was in his face.

  ‘From some men, I might take that for a mere pretty speech — one such as men make to their Queen,’ Elizabeth said, ‘but from you, though you are nothing lacking in the courtier’s art, I am inclined to accept it for very truth.’ She sat upright, with a quick change of tone. ‘Well, if my service means so much to you, my Bodyguard lacks its Captain yet. Your old place is empty for you; go and try if it still fits.’

  With a quick gesture she held out her hand to him. And Ralegh’s face, as he took it and bent to kiss the jewelled fingers, was the eager face of a very young man.

  ‘Now you must get up or you will strain the wound. And as for your wife —’ the Queen’s bright gaze flicked from Ralegh to Bess for the first time as she withdrew her hand, and there was a glint of snapping laughter in it. ‘Since you are graciously pleased to deem my Court a fit place for her, let her come and take her place as your wife in it ... What a-devil are you crying for, woman?’

  Bess had not known until that moment that she was crying — crying for regret, for relief, for pity; crying for the sands of familiar things that were running low. ‘I hardly know, Madam.’ She raised her head, blinking. ‘But indeed and indeed I am not greatly prone to tears.’

  ‘No, I remember that you are not, which is just as well, for I detest weeping women about me.’ The Queen reached for the little silver bell beside her, but paused without touching it. She was looking up at Bess who had risen to her feet, and the glint of sharp laughter spurted up again. ‘Five years,’ she said, speaking as one woman to another and ignoring Ralegh now, as completely as she had ignored Bess before. ‘Five years since you ran away to him. Tell me, Bess, was it a good bargain?’

  Bess returned the laughter, warmed by a sudden sense of fellowship with the other woman. ‘It was a good bargain, Madam.’

  Chapter 10 - The Gazing-Crystal

  THE Queen’s Captain was back, but with a difference; older than he had been, in more than years, lame, and grey at the temples. His relationship with the Queen was altered, too. Gloriana still carried on the old, delicately artificial play of lovemaking with her Courtiers, but from Ralegh she no longer desired the extravagant gestures of a lover, and from Ralegh she no longer got them. He was not now a favourite in the old romantic sense, but a trusted councillor and a friend. But the world saw what it had always seen, the Queen’s Captain carrying his head like the Prince of the Morning.

  The Earl of Essex, returning from his ships at Chatham to find his fallen rival risen again, seemed, rather surprisingly, not to care. And for the moment all rivalry was laid aside, as they set to work on the fitting out of yet another English fleet for action against yet another Spanish one — an Armada which Philip, mad to avenge Cadiz, was selling even his gold candelabrum to raise.

  A few weeks after Ralegh’s reinstatement, the fleet sailed under Essex’s command, with Rale
gh seconding him. But when, after struggling through the most appalling series of summer gales, they reached the coast of Spain, the new Armada, in an impregnable position, refused them battle, and there was nothing for the English to do but return home, looking slightly foolish.

  Nothing daunted, the queer triumvirate set to work again, got rid of many of the soldiers and patched up the storm damage, and by early autumn, Ralegh and Essex were off once more on a grand and glorious Spaniard-hunt, officially supposed to be an attack on Ferrol, where a large part of the Armada was assembling; while Cecil, who had watched over them throughout with something of the pleasure in his own skill of a man driving a superb but unruly team, turned himself once again to the myriad other matters that beset the Secretary of State.

  Left to herself, Bess would have dearly liked to go home to Sherborne, but when she had spoken of it to Ralegh, he had protested. ‘Bess, you cannot do that. All that we have won might so easily be lost again! Stay about the Court, sweetheart, and keep me in the Queen’s mind, if you love me.’ And Bess did love him. So she sent for Little Watt and his nurse, and settled down in Durham House as best she might. The familiar life of the Court drew her back into herself. She was in occasional attendance on the Queen, rode with the Court party, danced now and then at Whitehall, sat embroidering in a vine arbour with Mary Herbert, while the Queen walked to and fro upon the terrace with her Councillors; and in between whiles, contrived to live her own life as Mistress of Durham House and mother of Little Watt.

  Meanwhile the Spaniard-hunt had collapsed into farce, with Essex off and away on one wild goose chase after another, and Ralegh, grimly obedient to his contradictory orders, following in his wake. The climax came when, acting on an urgent summons, Ralegh arrived with his squadron at Fayal, to find that instead of keeping the rendezvous, Essex was off on the trail of yet another wild goose. Ralegh waited for him three days, and then determined to act on his own initiative and take Horta, the chief town, without further delay.