She paused in the story to put another log on the fire and smile at the two small boys, who smiled back, Watt disclosing the gap where he had lately lost a milk-tooth.
A little later, she heard Ralegh’s step outside, and broke off between word and word, as the door opened, and he appeared on the threshold. He was still clad in the orange-tawny taffetas of the Queen’s Guard, just as he had come from Westminster Hall, and the grey February light touched on his silvered breastplate. Bess’s eyes flew to his face, trying to read the verdict in it, but it told her nothing. For an instant he paused in the doorway, then advanced into the room; and she turned to the two small boys. ‘There, that must be all for today.’
‘But you’ve not finished the story,’ Watt protested in righteous indignation.
‘I will finish it another day — tomorrow. Run to Joan, sweet-heart, and take Will with you, and tell her I said that you might each have three ginger suckets.’
The two scrambled to their feet and set off, ducking their heads to Ralegh, who returned a friendly nod to Will, but set a hand for an instant on Watt’s shoulder as the small boy passed him. Little Watt checked and looked up, wagging his narrow stern in adoration. ‘One day I shall be the Queen’s Captain,’ he said.
‘Will you so, my valiant Imp? And what of myself? Am I to turn my helmet into a hive for bees?’
‘The Queen must needs have two Captains,’ said Watt, after a moment’s consideration. ‘She would be a deal safer with two of us.’
Ralegh laughed, and sped him on his way with a friendly slap on his behind. ‘Shut the door after you.’ Then he turned to Bess, who had risen and stood waiting for him before the fire.
She looked up at him, her eyes questioning and very dark, her hands gripped together. ‘What news, Walter?’
‘Death,’ Ralegh said.
*
The Earl of Essex had been Leicester over again to Elizabeth; lover and son in one; but she signed the death warrant with a steady hand, and five days later he went to the block on Tower Green.
But though Essex’s body lay headless in its narrow grave, the life of the Court must go on. If anything it was gayer than usual that spring. The long table was laid every evening in the Presence Chamber, and the Court supped as it was used to do, though the Queen in her Privy Chamber, with none but her nearest Ladies to see, could eat nothing but succory pottage and a little manchet bread. And after dark the lights shone from every window of the Palace, and there would be dancing in the Long Gallery, though the gayest dancer of all was no longer there to call the tune.
On an evening in late spring the light shone as usual from the windows of Whitehall Palace, and music lilted from the Long Gallery, stealing down the terraces to the misty river, and the Court made merry in honour of a Polish Envoy.
Bess, who was of the company that night, had a headache; a small, nagging thunder headache that grew worse as the hour latened. Presently, when the Queen had withdrawn, she began to feel as though a bright worm of pain was boring into her brain through her right eyebrow. There seemed no air in the Long Gallery, and the lights dazzled her and made her feel sick. Sir Lewis Stucley appeared, hovering in her neighbourhood as though he might be going to ask her to dance — he had never quite given up his fainthearted attempts at friendliness, though Ralegh had never appeared aware of them. He was moving towards her, and all at once she was desperate for escape. She could not dance again; above all, she could not dance with Sir Lewis whose nearness always made her vaguely uneasy.
In a near panic, she turned to a door close by, and slipped out thankfully into an ante-room. It was cooler here, but almost as bright as in the Gallery, and there were people standing about or passing through. She turned unobtrusively to another door, then checked, drawing back her wide skirts to give passage to Lord Henry Howard, who appeared suddenly in her path. The old man passed her with a gesture of cold courtesy, and going on her way with a suddenly quickened heart-beat, Bess carried with her the vision of eyes like dark jewels in an ivory mask, a beautiful wicked hand, ivory too, against dark velvet. Lord Henry Howard, a fanatical Romanist, and an ancient enemy of Ralegh’s. Not for the first time she wondered how the man, long since exiled from Court for intriguing with the Queen of Scots, and closely bound to the Essex faction, had shaken free and climbed back into the Court circle just as Essex went down into the dark. The nearness of him in his passing made her afraid, but then so many things made her afraid these days, things and the shadows of things, even the sight of Sir Lewis Stucley. And oh! her head did ache!
She turned a corner, and another, mounted a shallow flight of steps into a little used gallery, and found the quiet she longed for. Only a few tapers shed a soft light on the painted escutcheons on the walls, and the hangings at an oriel window stirred in the breath of air from an open casement. She crossed to it, and sank down on the cushioned sill, leaning her aching temple against the cool stone of the mullion.
Far off, like the echo of the sea in a shell, she heard the music in the Long Gallery, and once or twice, distant voices or footsteps; but no one disturbed her. It was quiet here, quiet, and cool ...
Gradually she began to feel better; and she was on the point of rising to go back to the dancers, when a light prowling step sounded behind her, and she looked round to see the Secretary of State.
‘Robin!’ she exclaimed. ‘What brings you this way?’
‘Much the same as I imagine brings you, Elizabeth; the search for a little air to breathe. I have been with the Queen and the Polish Envoy. His Excellency is greatly averse to fresh air.’
He moved forward into the deep embrasure beside her, and something in the way he stood there, leaning with one hand on the stonework, made Bess say, ‘You are tired.’
‘I am always tired, these days.’ There was no self-pity in his tone. He was merely stating a fact.
‘You work too hard,’ Bess said, impulsively.
‘There is so much work to be done. Beside, what else is there for me to do? I cannot be for ever collecting jewels or watching my new house built, or even playing cards.’
There was nothing one could say to that, nothing to be said. Into the silence that hung between them stole the sound of someone singing below in the darkness. The tune was Greensleeves, ever a favourite on which to graft words of the moment; and as the singer drew nearer, the words became plain.
All you who cry O hone! O hone!
Come now and sing O Lord! With me:
For why? Our Jewel is from us gone,
The valiant knight of Chivalry.
‘Even under the Palace windows, they sing that song,’ Bess whispered, as the singer passed on about his business, and first words and then tune faded.
‘Three whole months and more, they have kept faith,’ Cecil said sardonically. ‘Never have I known the Mob true for so long to a dead man.’
‘He was what the song says — their Jewel to them. He was beautiful and full of fire, and they never understood nor believed the rest.’ She turned to Cecil in the dim light which, shining through the wine-coloured hangings, made a red glow behind his head. ‘You know they say that Walter lured him to his ruin, and stood by, puffing at his pipe and — gloating over his handiwork, to see the axe fall?’
‘They say as much of me, for the first part.’ Cecil sounded faintly amused. ‘The second charge, they cannot level at my head, since I do not smoke.’
‘They can say that your kindness to him in the Tower was but to throw dust in the Queen’s eyes!’
‘But then,’ Cecil said gently, ‘that which were another man’s paternoster were ever accounted in me a charm.’
Bess rounded on him in sudden exasperation born of fear. ‘You are as bad as Walter! You seem, both of you, positively to pleasure in the hatred and mistrust of stupid people!’
‘Your husband must answer that charge for himself. For myself — I do not pleasure in it. I have merely learned indifference. When I was young and extremely foolish, it even gave me hurt.’ He l
aughed, very softly. ‘By what right are you so scornful of the Mob’s stupidity? Do you not also mistrust me in your heart of hearts?’
‘No!’ Bess protested. She drew a quick breath. ‘Not for a moment, if you will tell me that you had no hand in his downfall.’
‘You see? — Does it matter to you?’
‘Yes! Oh, not for his sake; for yours.’
‘Thank you, Elizabeth. Shall we say merely, as your husband once wrote to me, that the Earl of Essex was a canker to the Queen’s safety and estate? — a constant menace to the realm, while he lived?’
Bess’s throat felt suddenly dry. ‘So you took measures to ensure that he should not live?’
‘With so rash and headstrong a plotter, there could be no need to take anything so positive or so clumsy as “measures”,’ he said deliberately.
Bess shrank from him a little. It seemed to her that the red glow behind his head was an unholy oriel. ‘Sometimes I think you really are a devil!’ she whispered.
They had been speaking at half breath ever since he joined her in the window, and now his voice, low pitched as the purring of a cat, barely reached her. ‘So you have heard my new name? Personally I find it an improvement on the old one. It never amused me to hear myself called Robert the Hunchback. Robert the Devil is infinitely better.’
‘Infinitely better! You even took Communion with him, the night before he died!’
‘Why not? Are you not confusing political expediency with personal animus? We were political foes — all the world knoweth it — not personal enemies. I had already saved most of his confederates; there was small harm in them without his flame to kindle them; and he was grateful. There was no blasphemy in that we took Communion side by side.’
The sudden horror had ebbed away from Bess, leaving her chilled and shaking; and utterly baffled by the complexities of men which she would never understand as long as she lived. ‘How do you dare to speak of these things in the very Palace?’ she asked at last.
‘There is no arras to hide an eavesdropping page.’
‘There is — myself.’
‘You, Elizabeth? What have I told you, other than the whole world and the Council knows already?’
She found herself thinking back over the past few minutes, as though trying to lay hold of the dissolving end of a dream. ‘Nothing, almost nothing — in words. Nevertheless, you have — allowed me to know. Why did you do that?’
‘Because you asked me.’
‘Would you put your neck in the hands of anyone who asked you?’
He sounded amused, and a little surprised at her lack of wit. ‘My neck could never be unsafe in your hands, Elizabeth, while I hold a certain letter of your husband’s.’
It was not a threat, Bess knew that. She had asked him a question, and he had answered it scrupulously: he who had so few scruples in his dealings with the world. All at once her heart ached for him. She asked another question, with a woman’s quick change of position. ‘Do you never trust anyone?’
‘Not of late years.’ He sighed, and turned half away, as a group of strayed revellers entered the gallery. ‘It was a fine jewel, but with a hidden flaw. God den to you, Lady Ralegh.’
Chapter 12 - Faith in Israel
‘IT appeareth now, by one’s example, more bound than all or any others, how little faith there was in Israel,’ the Queen said to Lord Willoughby when Essex’s death was still a raw wound, speaking not only of her Robin, but of all those others who had turned from her to follow him — so many of them, so little faith in Israel.
She had aged ten years in the weeks following the execution, all that was young slipped away from her unawares, so that she was, as Ralegh said of her with a pity that was rare in him, ‘A Lady whom time had surprised.’
But by the autumn of 1602 she seemed to have mastered her own sick heart. She rode and hunted as of old; early in December she was carried in her gleaming litter through the first snow of the winter, to dine at Sir Robert Cecil’s great new house in the Strand, and that Christmas was the gayest that the Court had known for years. There was a sudden craze for country dancing, which the Queen had always loved; pavanes and galliards were laid aside, and the long galleries lilted to such tunes as Dargazon and Jenny-pluck-pears.
At the end of January, the Court moved to Richmond; a bitter journey only just accomplished in time, for the wind had gone round to the north-east, bringing in black winter weather that made travelling all but impossible. Frozen mire clogged the ways, and icy sleet blotted out the world for days at a time, and draughts that cut like a whetted knife cried up and down the galleries of Richmond Palace. The Queen refused to dress more warmly; she had never worn furs save for show, and did not intend to begin now. She rustled to and fro in silks and taffetas as she had always done, and laughed at her shivering ladies. It seemed as though the cold could not touch her through the armour of her indomitable will.
And then in mid-February the old Countess of Nottingham died.
The loss of one of her Ladies was not so great a matter, it would seem, as many of the losses she had suffered, the stresses and the agonies she had known, the dangers she had outfaced in the years that were behind her. But Lady Nottingham was an old and very dear friend, almost the last of those who had shared her youth, the very last, seemingly, of those who linked her to the living world. Quite suddenly she became frail, shrivelling before the eyes of her Court like a dead poplar leaf in the icy wind; until a night came, towards the end of March, when they knew that her long reign was within a few hours of its end.
No one retired to their quarters that night. They hung about the Presence Chambers and ante-rooms, speaking to each other in hushed voices. The galleries were full of silent comings and goings, quietly passing feet, uneasy shadows on candle-lit walls. The whole Palace was awake and waiting; waiting for the Queen to die.
Less than a week since, her legs failing her, she had taken to a pile of cushions on the floor of her bed-chamber. There she had sat, refusing with all the indomitable strength that was still in her, to go to bed. Her physician, her Chaplain, her Ladies, the Members of her Council, she had defied them all. Finally the Earl of Nottingham, the Lord High Admiral, who had withdrawn from Court following his wife’s death, had come stalking into her chamber, and neither pleaded not persuaded, but ordered the Queen to bed. And to bed she had gone at last, like a docile child. That had been three days ago; and this morning, said the whisperers, she had sent for her Council, and signified to them by signs — she was beyond speech — that James VI of Scotland was to take her throne after her.
So the long-debated, long-intrigued question of the Successor was settled. It was the last thing she had to do in this world.
And now the Queen lay dying, with the Ladies of her bedchamber about her, and the Captain of her Guard standing before the door. Bess could catch a glimpse of the Queen’s Captain, from the place where she stood with Mary Herbert, far down the shadowed privy gallery — a mere streak of silver and orange-tawny, through the open ante-room doorway — but she glanced that way repeatedly, as one touching a talisman in a dark place.
In another part of the gallery, the Maids of Honour had drifted into a cluster, looking in their gowns of white and green like a huddle of startled birds gathered close for company. Most of them were crying in a subdued way, for the Queen had been kind to her Maids after her fashion; and they were frightened by something infinitely more final than her death.
All along the gallery, people were waiting; the Queen’s Ladies, the Queen’s Courtiers, standing and sitting in little groups. They could do no good by it. The Queen had no further need of them; and only the Ladies of her bedchamber were held in the privy apartments by duty; but they lingered about her none the less, unable to bring themselves to go to their own lodgings, though the hour grew late, and later yet. Doors opened and closed softly; the physician’s low voice sounded, and was still; gentlemen of the household congregated near doors that were kept open. The black and gold lacquer
ed clock on the wall ticked more loudly, Bess thought, than she had ever heard it before, ticking away the last hours of the Queen’s life, telling them off with a whirr and a cascade of bell notes that were sparks of clear sound in the murmurous hush of the waiting Palace.
There had been a breath of spring in the world for the first time, that day, a softer feel in the air, a sense of quickening. Bess remembered suddenly a clump of golden crocuses, like candle flames, like a fanfare of trumpets, rising from the sleet-puddled earth in an angle of the lower terrace. ‘The Resurrection and the Life,’ she thought. ‘The Resurrection and the Life.’ The thought superimposed itself on the image of the golden crocuses and becoming one with it. But tonight the winter had swooped back, and sleet spattered against the windows, and a little moaning wind ran to and fro along the galleries, swaying the arras and worrying the candle flames.
Two men came out through the ante-room; Archbishop Whitgift, the Queen’s ‘Black Husband’, and following him the stocky figure of Matthew Sutcliffe, the Dean of Exeter and her Chaplain. They had been with her many hours, but now her need of them was over, too. Faces were turned to them, low-pitched questions asked. They shook their heads. Her Majesty was asleep, very peacefully asleep. It was unlikely that she would wake again in this world.
The black and gold clock chimed one o’clock, two o’clock. Once a shadow that might be the physician’s passed across the fretted screen-work that shielded the Queen’s door. The Queen’s Captain shifted to ease the ache of an old wound.
Still the shadowy people came and went, quietly, very quietly: Lord Cobham appeared in a doorway, and when Bess looked again, had become Nottingham; and when she looked a third time, the doorway was empty. So might figures drift through the dark mazes of a dream. And as a black shadow thrown up out of nowhere by a dream, having for Bess the quality of incipient nightmare, suddenly Lord Henry Howard was there.
Lady in Waiting Page 14
