‘I have everything I need for my happiness,’ I say, by way of an explanation. ‘I have my wife, my life, my infant, the means to live, and I have not entirely lost the King’s love. There is nothing more I could wish for.’ Hearing myself say those things out loud, I am struck by the change in me. I think of the extent to which my younger self so desperately sought favour and status but now I see only emptiness there.
‘Your wife is in the gardens.’ More is looking out of the window.
‘Can I join her?’
‘Of course. There is no need to ask.’
I grab my Garter jewel, fling it round my neck and run from the room, taking the steps two at a time, bursting out of the door at the bottom into the bright heat of a July evening. All the torture of the past months slips away to nothing. I am galloping over the lawn, arms spread, calling her name. She turns, astonishment on her face, poppies in her hands. ‘You,’ she says, seeming lost for words.
‘I am free,’ I cry, as I reach her and draw her to me.
She fingers my Garter jewel. ‘A full pardon, your offices reinstated?’
‘Not exactly, but –’
‘Then you are not free.’ She pulls away.
‘Don’t be sad, my darling. We have all we need. I have the freedom of the Tower. We can live as man and wife.’ I take her hand. ‘Come and walk with me.’ I guide her towards some steps that lead to a walkway overlooking the river.
Once up there we stand, completely alone and hidden from view, in our own private world. I lean over to look into the water below. I can feel her pearl in my pocket.
‘Isn’t the light beautiful where it catches the ripples? Imagine swimming in it.’ I have a sudden image of Prince Henry vaulting on to the Greenwich pier and shaking his hair, droplets skimming the air like a crown of diamonds. I remember how I loathed him for his love of Frances, when I had secretly claimed her for myself.
‘I can’t swim,’ she says, ‘and I’m told the currents here are dangerous.’ She looks at the already wilting bunch of poppies. ‘I’m afraid of water.’
I had never thought her afraid of anything but knowing this small weakness makes my tenderness swell. ‘You never need be afraid with me. I’ll always protect you.’
We are silent for a while. I can’t stop thinking of Northampton and all the harm he visited on his great-niece. How can someone wilfully break a person, a child, like that? It is incomprehensible. Were he still alive I would willingly choke the air from him with my bare hands. ‘That man has much to answer for.’ I don’t really mean to say it aloud.
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Northampton. That man was a devil. The story you told me of your parrot – how he made you break its neck to teach you to overcome love.’ I can feel the throbbing pulse, the frantic beat of feathers, the snap, as if the memory is my own. I remember the night she told me with acute clarity: the way the moonlight threw itself over her, the thrilling whisper of her voice, my deep shock at her revelation and how my love took form in the knowledge of her brokenness.
‘Is that what I told you?’ She turns to me and seems inexplicably on the brink of laughter. ‘That’s not how it went. It wasn’t Uncle, it was me. I wanted to feel what it would be like to kill something I loved. Uncle had nothing to do with it.’
I don’t know what to say. I don’t recognize this woman wearing my wife’s skin. The poppies watch me with their black eyes, just like hers. Who are you? I ask silently. Who are you?
‘You didn’t believe it, did you? That Uncle would be so evil. Uncle wasn’t like that. How gullible you have been. I suppose you believed you had my virginity too.’
She is talking, telling me of her conquests: Essex, Prince Henry, others, a guard at the Tower even. I can’t listen. Her words are a volley of shots to the heart. I am the broken one now. My thoughts whirr and clunk through the past, remembering all her advice to me: the general pardon, the burned letters, the warrant, the altered dates. What else? I wonder. Even if they offer you a pardon for saying you are guilty, you must not under any circumstances accept it. Whirr, clunk. It is the sound of everything falling into place.
The blunt truth confronts me: my wife designed my downfall.
‘Did you imagine I’d be happy with an ordinary life? If we’re going to be stuck with each other you may as well know the facts.’ Her Howard smirk is torture.
Whirr, clunk.
I have that image of Thomas dead seared into my mind and I can hear him warning me about her: For pity’s sake, when are you going to wake up and see she’s a base whore and her family are pimps? I can feel the sting on my palm where I slapped him.
‘Not you?’
She is still smiling at me, the indecipherable smile that hooked me in all that time ago in the prince’s chambers. A new fear wells in my gut: a different fear, a fear born of finally grasping the truth. But the thing that frightens me most is that, despite everything, I can still feel her hook hauling me in.
‘Why?’ Thomas is in my head and my shame is fighting for sovereignty.
She cups her hand over my ear and whispers, ‘Because I could. Because I wanted you.’
I wait for the old euphoria. ‘And now ... what do you want now?’ Why do I still want her to want me? But Thomas is telling me something: You are nothing but an object to her, something to collect, like one of the prince’s bronze figures. His voice is indistinct.
He is leaving me.
He is leaving me with her.
‘Oh, Robert,’ she lets out a brittle laugh, ‘when I use the term “want” it’s not the same as what you mean when you say it.’
Those black-eyed poppies are mocking me.
Whirr, clunk.
I need to tell Thomas he was right. My anger swells. Thomas is gone and she is here.
A gentle shove would do it.
I look down at the water, black now, and take her pearl from my pocket. I let it drop. It vanishes instantly.
I will watch as the current pulls her slowly under, her waterlogged dress heavier and heavier, until all that is visible is a wisp of that remarkable hair, like a frond of vegetation drifting on the surface.
In a moment that too will disappear.
A cluster of bubbles.
Gone.
As if she never was.
Author’s Note
The Poison Bed is, first and foremost, a work of fiction. It is, however, rooted in fact. Frances Howard confessed to the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury and was subsequently convicted for the crime along with her husband, the King’s favourite. It was a scandal that rocked the Jacobean court and was one of the initial cracks that would eventually lead to the devastation of the Stuart monarchy. It also made of Frances Howard a living example of the wicked women so prevalent in the drama of the day.
Whether or not Robert Carr was James I’s lover is disputed by historians because hard evidence is lacking. However, given that ‘sodomy’ was a capital offence, this is no surprise. James was famed for his close association with a string of beautiful men and there is no doubt that his relationship with Carr was intimate and that they loved one another – there are letters to support this. So it is not an audacious leap to suppose their closeness was consummated. James worked hard to convince Carr to make a plea bargain at his trial, which suggests he might have been anxious about something coming to light.
There has long been speculation about what really happened when an insignificant man died at the tail end of summer, 1613, in a gloomy cell in the Tower of London. It remains an enigma but there were many for whom Overbury’s death was convenient and some, too, who wanted to see Robert Carr and his Howard wife fall. It is generally agreed that Frances’s supremely powerful great-uncle had some part to play.
I make no pretence of uncovering any new or definitive truths about the case, there are none to be had, and neither do I claim any veracity in my characters’ intentions. My novel has instead been a way to explore the depths of an intriguing event, blurred by time and made murky
by corruption, through the prism of an era in which the truth has become equally elusive.
Though often alluded to, few historians have tackled this episode of history head on, but for those interested in further reading Anne Somerset’s Unnatural Murder: Poison in the Court of James. I is a comprehensive and absorbing rendition.
Acknowledgements
Some novels slip easily into the world, while others arrive kicking and screaming. The Poison Bed is of the latter kind and, were it not for the skilled midwifery of three exceptional women, it might not have survived: Jane Gregory, hand-holder extraordinaire and titan among agents; Maxine Hitchcock, whose rare vision and commitment has kept me going even in the hopeless moments; and the indefatigable Jillian Taylor, who has worked ceaselessly to guide me through labyrinthine rewrites and whose razor-sharp editorial instinct has shaped this novel. I am indebted to you all for keeping my dream alive. I am hugely appreciative, too, of the teams at Michael Joseph, Penguin and Gregory and Company, who have done so much vital work on my behalf. Heartfelt thanks also to Mary Sandys and Katie Green for invaluable early input, Hazel Orme, for her seamless and sensitive fine-tuning, and Gill Heeley for an exquisite cover design – if this book is judged by its cover I will be very happy indeed.
THE POISON BED
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Fremantle
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition April 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN: 978-1-64313-024-8
ISBN: 978-1-64313-123-8 (ebk.)
Distributed by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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