The Poison Bed

by Elizabeth Fremantle

  ‘Franklin said your poor friend Overbury was served up so much poison it’s a miracle he lived as long as he did.’ He stops, leaving silence to well a moment. ‘He seemed quite sure you had a hand in it.’

  ‘Why would I have wanted Thomas dead? He was my dearest friend, my closest –’ I have grabbed Bacon’s arm and, realizing what I am doing, drop it as if burned. ‘I didn’t want him dead. I loved him.’

  The gold embroidery on Bacon’s sleeves catches the light. We are sitting in a flickering yellow pool with a sea of darkness around us.

  He looks at his arm, at the place where I had hold of him, then back at me. ‘Don’t be disingenuous.’

  ‘I know it looks that way.’ I am sweating.

  ‘Now, about these powders you sent in to Overbury.’

  ‘I explained all that to Coke. Thomas requested them. They were harmless.’ I try to remember exactly what I’d said to Coke on the matter, fearing some small inconsistency might cast doubt on the truth.

  ‘You must understand how it looks.’

  ‘I know how it looks.’ Bacon is scrutinizing me. ‘But it is not so.’ My voice is suddenly wet, as if I might burst into tears. I’m in confusion. The four who have already hanged are still swinging through my mind and I am trying not to think of my own fate or that of my wife. ‘Have you not yet seen the letters I received from Overbury at the time, saying how much better he felt? Cotton has them.’

  ‘Yes, Cotton handed them to us,’ Bacon says, steepling his fingers. ‘They prove nothing as their dates have been altered.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’ My insides shrink and I inwardly curse Cotton for not doing the job properly.

  Bacon regards me down his nose. He doesn’t believe a word I say. ‘Some have suggested Overbury knew things that might have caused trouble for the King.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I blurt. My heart is beating even faster now. I know I seem guilty as sin.

  ‘Coke believes in a wider conspiracy.’ Bacon’s calm is chiselling away at me.

  ‘What do you mean?’ He is watching my shaky hand.

  ‘He believes the prince’s death was suspicious too. Surely you heard that at the time. But Coke suspects you invented a plot to do away with all the Stuarts. I am inclined to believe him wrong. I don’t think you have the imagination for a great conspiracy, unless you were the pawn of Northampton.’ He pauses, receding into the darkness a moment.

  This sudden change in him has wrong-footed me. ‘What do you mean? I didn’t –’

  ‘I know. I know.’ He smiles but in the dim light it looks more like a scowl. The sweat is cold beneath my clothes, though the chamber is warm. ‘I think you did it for love. Such a trivial reason to kill a man – about your level.’

  I jump up and jab my finger at him. ‘I told you, I didn’t do it. Look to Northampton if you want the culprit.’

  Bacon doesn’t try to hide the fact that he thinks I am lying and remains in his seat, absolutely composed, while I continue to rave and prod, professing my innocence.

  ‘There is sworn testimony that you advised Overbury not to take the Moscow embassy.’

  Eventually I claw back some restraint and slump into my chair, saying, ‘I did want Overbury out of the way. I did want him detained but for his reformation, not his ruin. I didn’t want him dead. I loved him dearly.’

  ‘But not as much as you love your wife.’

  I have given in to my tears now, head in hands, sniffing and heaving, repeating, ‘I’m innocent,’ over and over again until the words seem senseless. All I want is the comfort of my beloved Frances – the only friend I have left. The clerk clears his throat. I had forgotten he was here at the edge of our small pool of grubby light, recording my shameful tears for posterity.

  I feel Bacon’s eyes boring through me, watching until I have calmed myself. Then he says, ‘Your wife confessed.’

  Her

  Frances waits alone. Her story is told, the story of that other Frances Howard. She imagines it out in the world, spreading from mouth to ear, working her revenge, planting the blame elsewhere and setting her free.

  She was glad when Nelly left but now she misses her company. Over and over she practises the card trick but, without a witness, has no idea if her sleight of hand is improving. She even vaguely misses the baby and thinks of it at Lizzie’s house in a proper mahogany cradle, tucked into crisp linens with its big round black eyes, like mirrors.

  She waits for something to happen. There is a new maid, timid as a field mouse. Her name is Lalage. She is plump and milky, and comes from a good family. Lalage is scared of Frances and does what she is charged to do with quivering befuddlement. Frances supposes she must believe all the stories of witchcraft. Perhaps she was at Anne Turner’s trial when the scaffold cracked as the evidence was produced.

  She waits in limbo for her trial, wants it to be over, but the single week plays its own sleight of hand, stretching itself out interminably. In her mind, she goes over what she said to Bacon and Coke when they questioned her, remembering how she’d thrown them with her confession. They had been back, of course, on the day after Nelly’s departure, for the details.

  They’d asked if her husband had also sent tarts and jellies to Overbury. Of course, she’d replied. We both did. But he never let me into his private dealings with my great-uncle – they were very close. That, funnily enough, was the truth. They asked whether Robert knew Franklin. I don’t know who you mean, Frances had replied. What did he look like? When Bacon described his features – the crook-back, the rotten nose – she’d clapped a hand over her mouth in false shock: I have seen this man. I saw him with my great-uncle and with Mistress Turner and – She’d stopped, only eventually stuttering out; With Robert once? What was he doing with such a man?

  Bacon had struggled to hide the upward flick of his lips when she’d said that. But Robert’s innocent, she’d added.

  I’m sure he is, Bacon had replied, his voice replete with sarcasm, and she wondered if they had already squeezed her story, like juice from a lemon, out of Nelly before they came. Strangely, they didn’t think to ask her about the final lethal enema, procured from Franklin, which had seen the job done.

  She shuffles the cards. Lalage comes in with a basket of clean linen and begins to make the bed. A fresh scent wafts through the thick, damp air.

  ‘Come here,’ she says to the girl. ‘I want to show you something.’

  Lalage’s eyes are wide set and long-lashed.

  ‘I won’t eat you.’

  The girl approaches diffidently.

  Frances lays out the three cards face up. ‘Follow the heart.’ She flips them over and begins to move them around, faster and faster. Lalage watches as if her life depends on it. ‘Which is the heart? The girl points to the left-hand card. Frances turns it up. It is the king of spades.

  Lalage gasps and murmurs, ‘The devil.’

  ‘It’s only a trick. Look.’ Frances demonstrates how to hold two cards together making them appear as one. ‘See?’

  ‘May I be excused?’ Her voice is small.

  ‘For pity’s sake, I’m no witch. Witchcraft is just something people invent to explain things they don’t understand or to make others do as they want.’ Frances can see that her words are not making any difference. ‘Go on, then. You may as well.’

  The girl slips away, and Frances is alone once more with her thoughts and the sound of the spring rain. She runs through the possible outcomes of her trial. There is a chance that Nelly has not been questioned, that the story of that other – spotless – Frances Howard will never be told. She will not allow herself to consider the possibility of her royal pardon being worthless, but the thought is there, like a small, hot flame in her head that will not be stamped out. The King’s dark little secret is all that prevents it flaring up and catching hold. Surely, she reasons, he wouldn’t take the risk that she might spill it. But she failed once to manipulate the King. She remembers his derision: I don’t need your soothsaying
game to tell me that.

  Desperate for a distraction, she goes to the door, tapping gently. It opens slightly and William’s eager cleft-chinned smile appears. ‘Come in,’ she mouths, sliding the tip of her tongue over her lips. She pulls him through the door, leaning against it to press it shut and pushes his head down on to her breasts, dragging her dress down so they are fully exposed. He is hard.

  But when he has gone the vortex of fear returns. The more she thinks of it, the more aware she is that there are many possible permutations of her future. There is nothing more she can do to influence the situation, and it remains to be seen whether she has done enough. It is out of her hands – perilously.

  She fans her cards, selecting one and saying to herself: If this is a heart I will be tried and pardoned, Robert will be executed and I will be free. She flips the card: it is the two of spades. Best of three.

  She is a Howard, after all, and the Howards always get what they want.

  Him

  In a month it will be five years since Frances Howard read my palm and saw love engraved there. In that time I have risen as high as it is possible to rise and plunged to the depths, dragging her with me. There is only one place lower in life: the gallows – and I cannot bear to consider what lies beyond. I beseech God to spare my wife but fear He no longer listens.

  A dog howls and scratches pitifully at a nearby door. I refuse to accept that Frances has confessed – not her. I’m no fool. Bacon lied to me in the hope that I would incriminate myself. But my mind plumbs the shadows, where thoughts of Northampton dwell. I can’t deny his influence over her, the way she was blind to his silk-clad malice and her unfailing faith in God’s forgiveness. I am accosted by the fate of her parrot, can feel the terrified jabber of its pulse in my fingertips. Perhaps she has been brought so low she would rather die than live. I know I would rather be dead than live without her.

  On my small rampart I can feel the warmth in the air and hear the birds singing to their mates. It makes me want to weep. Then it rains for three days without letting up. My neglected poetry books mock me from their shelf, the pining lovers imprisoned for eternity between their covers.

  I rack my mind for things that might help my case when it comes to trial. I try to see a pattern, an organizing principle of fate, but can see only that I have tripped haplessly through life from one experience to another. There is no map of the past, only a tangle of half-remembered events, and I have no pen or paper to make sense of them.

  Through my muddle of recollections, a single forgotten letter emerges. Overbury had sent it to me from the Tower. I can see now, with forensic clarity, Thomas’s precise hand asking for a stronger powder, saying the one I’d sent had had no effect. In the margin he had drawn a crude image of a heart in flames, which had touched me and made me want to keep it. I put it between the pages of Troilus and Criseyde. The verse it marked spills into my thoughts:

  What is this wondrous malady that fills me

  With fire of ice and ice of fire, and kills me?

  His image and that couplet belonged together.

  The remembering renews me. Thomas’s own words will help prove my innocence. But my optimism falters as I realize I have no way of laying my hands on that letter and I fall to questioning the point of proving my innocence anyway, if Frances is doomed.

  I listen to the incessant sad chorus of that howling dog as it rains on and on, with Thomas hovering, the stench of his putrefying flesh hanging in the air.

  On the day the rain stops, leaving the eaves dripping and gurgling, Harry Howard comes to visit. He has a letter of dispensation from the King to see me alone. More, who arrives with him, seems annoyed when Harry politely asks him to leave.

  Harry is so like Frances it pulls me up, makes me want to kiss him full on the mouth. My imagination escapes, running wild, and I’m shocked to feel myself stir.

  ‘You look frightful, Robert,’ is the first thing he says. ‘The sooner you’re out of here the better.’

  I allow myself to believe I am still one of the Howards and that they have the power to secure my release, but before I can ask him if this is the case he adds, ‘Your trial will be the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Two days?’ He nods. I make an inadvertent choking noise. ‘What about Frances?’

  ‘She confessed to the murder.’

  I struggle for breath. To hear it from two different sources surely makes it true. ‘My Frances. Such a heinous deed.’ But even knowing it, perversely, I have already forgiven her. She did it for me – for love of me. ‘My Frances.’ I’m confused, gibbering, staring despair in the face. I feel faint and can barely get my question out. ‘Will they execute her?’

  He doesn’t answer, just shrugs, saying, ‘Her trial’s tomorrow. With a guilty plea, it will be short.’

  ‘I’m telling you, she’s not a murderer.’ There are no other words in me.

  ‘Of course she’s not.’ He says it as if it is obvious and I am an ass for not realizing.

  ‘But why did she confess?’

  ‘How should I know?’ He is upset, almost shouting. ‘Coerced, perhaps. God knows.’

  The blood is rushing through my ears, making it hard to hear what he is saying. ‘She didn’t do it?’ Thomas, just a disembodied voice in my ear now, says: How can you be so sure?

  Harry’s face stiffens suddenly with rage. ‘What do you think she is, a monster? How could you ask such a thing? Or perhaps she’s sacrificing herself for you.’ His eyes are boring through me.

  ‘You know that’s not true.’ A great anguished roar comes out of me. I sound barely human.

  ‘You need to find some self-control.’ He is filled with disdain, as if my weakness is repulsive. ‘You can’t let yourself fall apart.’

  I see now that to be one of the Howards I would need to be hard and sharp as an executioner’s blade and I am not. That look they have is one of absolute resilience. They are born with it – it cannot be acquired, but I already know that.

  ‘The reason I’m here’ – I had altogether forgotten he was visiting me on the King’s business – ‘is that His Majesty wants you, too, to make a confession.’

  ‘A confession – me?’

  ‘He thinks it’s not enough that the servants have been executed. Says the public must be given more, or he will pay the price. He doesn’t want any further investigations and a solid confession provides an end to the matter. I suppose he has something to hide. You’d know better than me, what the King has to hide.’ He looks at me as if I am an idiot. ‘Put on a show of remorse in the dock and he promises your life will be spared. Then, once the fuss has all died down, he will give you a full pardon. Or so he says.’ Something seems to occur to him. He slaps the side of his head. ‘Why didn’t I think of it? Is it possible my sister made such an agreement with the King?’

  I have my wife’s words spinning about my head: Even if they offer you a pardon for saying you are guilty ... You must maintain your innocence or you will lose your head.

  ‘No. It’s impossible. She’d never have done that.’ It all comes clear. The Howards are casting us adrift – Frances and me. I begin to doubt once more whether my wife has truly made a confession, or if Harry Howard is deceiving me, like Bacon was. ‘I won’t.’ My voice is firm and I feel my resilience return.

  ‘For pity’s sake, if nothing else, do it for your daughter. Do you want her growing up in the shadow of a father executed for murder?’

  That poor dog starts up its howling once more.

  My focus sharpens and I can see that I had been wrong all along. The look, the Howard poise I wished my daughter to inherit, is the look of pure corruption. The Howards are rotten to the core, the lot of them. Only my Frances is free of it. I look at him and can see now that his resemblance to his sister is only superficial. Harry Howard is a sham. His eyes lack the warm intensity of hers and his smile has none of her beguiling sweetness. ‘Where are your parents?’ I ask. I am sure now that they are the source of this mission, rather than
the King.

  ‘At Audley End. They scuttled back there until this business is all over.’ He looks angry again, which confuses me.

  ‘They’d abandon their daughter.’ My poor Frances, even her own mother has left her to her fate. ‘Why would they do such a thing?’

  ‘To avoid becoming mired in her scandal. I tried to stop them going.’ He wipes a glaze of sweat from his forehead. ‘I beg you, come to your senses, Robert. Do as the King asks. Your confession could save my sister.’ He omits to say how this could be and I know better.

  I am certain Frances has not confessed and that her trial will be a mere formality to demonstrate her innocence.

  ‘In a year or two you may be living with your wife and daughter.’ He gesticulates expansively. He is convincing. He could earn his living at the playhouse. ‘You will probably have a new infant on the way. You will retain your lands, your respect. It will be a good life.’

  He thinks I can’t see through him. A thought rises to my surface, like a forgotten splinter–something that will save me.

  I tell him I will think about confessing. He looks pleased, triumphant even, perhaps. Harry Howard cannot see that I have no intention of falling into his trap, that far from making a confession I am determined to prove my innocence.

  ‘Would you do something for me, Harry? There’s a book I need from my Whitehall apartments.’ I explain what I want of him. ‘It must be possible to conceal a single book among my linens.’

  He tells me he will do his best. I don’t know if he can be trusted but I have no other choice.

  I am newly spurred with the thought that, rather than being cast adrift, I will find a way to save my wife from the poisoned claws of her flesh and blood.

  Her

  The barge pushes on up the Thames. It is a perfect day, clear blue sky and a gentle breeze. The river is crowded with craft and choppy for it. Frances holds on to the side so tightly her knuckles are white. She is more afraid of the water than the trial she is about to face.