by Jeane Westin
He knew one thing: All the world’s women, and he expected there would be many in his future, would never remove her from his heart. Robert acknowledged that he would search for one more woman to love and accepted that he would not find her.
He had ridden hard to return to Whitehall to keep his promise. The wintry roads from Plymouth were like Irish bogs, but with each labored, sucking hoofbeat, he had leaned forward, urging himself and his horse on past exhaustion toward the spire of St. Paul’s rising above London in the distance. Toward Frances Sidney.
“My lady, I must report to your father,” he said, standing and stepping back from her when he found his will weakening. “I will see you at the masque.”
She nodded, her eyes following him to the door of her outer chamber. Yes, the masque!
Mere hours later, the great hall was full of revelers. As Frances and her changing maid entered the door to the tiring room behind the raised dais, she could hear the musicians playing a lively galliard and dancers stomping, already full of ale and wine.
The music stopped, and with a scramble of feet the dancers returned to their benches.
Behind the scenes, Frances donned her flowing white gown of clinging silk, waited for her cue, then stepped onto the stage. Her eyes searched for the reassuring sight of Robert, but she could not find him.
Queen Elizabeth, magnificent in a jeweled gown under her royal canopy, turned toward Frances and lifted her hand in the royal signal to begin. Frances curtsied low, took a deep breath, and spoke the play’s prologue.
Majesty, lords and gentles all, we present Pandosto,
wherein is discovered that by means of sinister fortune,
truth may be concealed
yet by time is most manifestly revealed.
Frances turned toward the queen seated alone at her high table, almost surrounded by servers from her kitchens. She took watered wine and waved them away.
Majesty, our play is pleasant for age to annoy drowsy
thoughts, profitable for youth to eschew wanton
pastimes, and bringing to both at last a desired content.
She curtsied, and when the queen nodded, Frances exited stage right.
Immediately, Lady Rich, costumed as Pandosto’s queen, Bellaria, in a flowing white gossamer gown covering only one shoulder, entered stage left followed by her dancing handmaidens. Everyone in the tiring room heard the audience gasp as one. Essex had chosen well for the chaste queen of Bohemia. Lady Rich could have been a golden, wingless angel come down to the Twelfth Night masque to teach the court the beauties of chastity. No one laughed, though Frances heard a traveling whisper of “Stella!”
How they must have anticipated watching the public performance of wife and mistress.
Frances ignored the whisper, controlling her face and body, outwardly tranquil.
The queen imagined her court virtuous, and her stern demeanor stopped the crowd’s most outrageous comments.
The playwright, playing Pandosto, king of Bohemia, entered with Bellaria and announced all that must be done to make his dear friend Egistus, king of Sicilia, welcome to his court.
Endless servers and carvers from the flesh kitchens walked upon the stage bearing huge platters of turkeys, a boar, and the queen’s swan still adorned in its feathers before they exited and delivered all to the Twelfth Night revelers’ tables.
Egistus entered with his retinue. Pandosto embraced his dear friend and Bellaria did as well, smiling angelically over the handsome Egistus’s shoulder, though the smile was made sly on her lips by an uplifted eyebrow. The audience erupted in laughter, expecting what was to come.
Soon, Pandosto, with many fearsome frowns, grew jealous of his friend and suspicious of his wife’s easy friendship. His suspicions quickly turned to anger, then to hate with many evil looks. Both his wife and friend sought to determine what had angered the king so, but he refused to say, to their dismay.
Pandosto called Helen, his cup bearer, to him. “‘My wife has proved unchaste, and my false friend, the king of Sicilia, would put a cuckold’s horns on me.’”
Frances was able to act credibly distressed, since she knew how he felt, although she had never confronted Philip in like manner.
“‘My king, Queen Bellaria is most honorable and chaste,’” Helen insisted. Frances was able to put honesty into the words, although she thought it was probably the best acting of her life.
There was a thin trickle of laughter from the audience.
The king marched around the stage, his face bloated with anger. “‘They must both pay for dishonoring me.’” He handed his cup bearer a flask. “‘Administer this poison to them so that their lives be forfeit for their crimes.’”
Helen fell to her knees. “‘Please, sire, by heavenly Apollo, ask anything of me but murder.’”
But Pandosto, gripped by jealousy, threatened Helen with painful death unless she obeyed.
All unknowing, Queen Bellaria was sitting with Egistus by a pond, watching her favorite swan, when Helen came upon them, white as death, thanks to an ample application of cerise from one of the queen’s ladies behind the curtain.
“‘Here comes your husband’s faithful cup bearer,’” the Sicilian king announced, turning to Frances. “‘What distresses you, Helen? My great friend the king of Bohemia has not been taken ill, has he?’”
With many moans and wringing of hands, as if unable to bear the burden of the crime she was to commit, Helen fell to her knees and confessed.
Egistus leaped to his feet.
Bellaria fell to the ground, then struggled to her feet and, with an anguished cry of innocence—a too-anguished cry that rang through the great hall—she leaped into the pool that was inches deep. The king of Sicilia pulled her out, searching for some dialogue, since Bellaria’s attempt to drown herself was not in the script. The playwright as Pandosto, standing forward of this action, looked lost, turning first one way and then another.
The great hall was quiet, everyone leaning forward, not wanting to miss what Lady Rich would do next. But Frances was angry now. Not about to allow the woman to take over the play, Frances as Helen threw herself to her knees again, sobbing loudly over Bellaria’s soggy body.
Lady Rich moved a shoulder slightly and deliberately exposed an ample breast, wet with a dripping, red nipple. She opened one eye. “No man is watching you now, Frances. They are watching me,” she murmured out the side of her mouth.
“Aye, my lady, there is much of you to see.”
“‘I do not want to live if my dearest husband thinks me a wanton,’” shouted Bellaria, back on script, snatching up the goblet of poison from Helen’s hand and downing it with a smack of her lips, about which she circled her pink tongue slowly.
The audience laughed until Queen Elizabeth held up a hand and stilled them.
Bellaria collapsed slowly and elegantly into a heap, one breast still peeping from her Grecian gown.
Egistus, obviously angered at the way he had been upstaged and forgetting most of his speech, declared Pandosto, king of Bohemia, his enemy and fled with his retinue back to Sicilia, vowing his innocence. He took Helen with him. Frances cast a triumphant glance back at Bellaria, now fortunately without dialogue, though her heaving breasts belied her pose as corpse.
When Pandosto heard that his wife, Bellaria, had knowingly drunk from the poison goblet, he rushed to her body and wailed out his woe with a few whispered complaints for Lady Rich’s ear. Stella was making this tragedy of jealousy into a farce.
A large grave monument was wheeled onto the stage, its giant gilt letters pronounced by the grieving husband, sobbing on his knees:
Here lies entombed Bellaria fair,
Falsely accused to be unchaste,
Who ere thou be that passes by,
Curse him that caused this queen to die.
Frances entered and stopped by the king’s grieving body, pointing with one hand:
Oh miserable Pandosto, what surer witness than
consci
ence? What plague worse than jealousy?
You have committed such a bloody thing, as repent
you may, but recall you cannot.
The players came upon the stage, including Lady Rich in a dry gown, her breasts enclosed on orders of Her Majesty. Many shouts of “Stella!” greeted her, as did thunderous applause when she curtsied to the audience. Frances also was appreciated, if not quite as enthusiastically. She cared less about the loudness of her applause than she loved the sight of Robert standing to do her honor.
The playwright was escorted to the queen’s table and given a thin purse of coins, and the queen called for her musicians to strike a merry tune as the writer began to tell her about the second part of his play, where Pandosto and Egistus were reunited as friends.
Relieved to have her part performed and done, Frances was escorted to her father’s table, where she took a seat next to him.
“Although I never see women players in the theaters, you did well, daughter. Was the queen pleased?”
“I think not, but I thank you for thinking well of me, Father. The Earl of Essex chose the play and players.”
The spymaster seemed moved by this information. “The earl’s attention honors you.”
Frances’s gaze swept the benches until she found Robert Pauley well below the giant silver salt shaped like a ship on wheels. That he was at her father’s table indicated Mr. Secretary’s high regard for the intelligencer.
The servers began bringing in the feast, which was no longer steaming hot. A boar’s head covered in herbs and yew, a souse of pickled pig’s feet and ears, and finally a huge turkey stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a partridge, and served in a bread coffin half the width of the table.
Frances had little appetite, and even the giant sugar plates and elaborate baskets filled with apricot comfits from the subtleties kitchen did not much tempt her.
“You have little appetite for a feast night, Frances,” her father said. “Are you missing Philip this Twelfth Night?”
“Yes,” she said, though she had not thought of him except for Stella’s tomfoolery. Then she could not stop the truth from her lips. “But it is Jennet who concerns me most.”
Her father’s face became set in hard lines. “She is no longer your concern, daughter.”
“But, Father, she—”
“—is now lodged in the Tower, after we raided that Catholic den of traitors. I will do—”
At this terrible news, Frances knew a sudden blackness sweep her eyes and she felt her body slipping away from the bench.
She knew nothing more until she awoke in her own bed, her arm in a bowl with the queen’s doctor preparing to bleed her.
CHAPTER TEN
“Absence will sure help, if I can learn how myself
To sunder, from what in my heart doth lie.”
—Astrophel and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney
Candlemas, February 2
GREENWICH PALACE
Frances lay in her bed with newly warmed bricks heating her feet. Though she yet shivered, her heart was cold with doubt concerning Robert and worry for Jennet. Was her father sending Robert away? Was her aunt suffering tortures Frances dared not imagine? Could she hear agonized shrieks?
Though her father swore Jennet was yet untouched, Frances knew that the Tower touched every prisoner, driving some mad before they reached the hands of the torturers. Frances had heard enough about royal prisoners to imagine too well what agony it must be for Jennet, waiting in a dungeon cell for the guards to come and drag her to hell.
Would Jennet swallow her poison pill as she had planned, or lose the desperate courage she would need to follow her plan and give up any knowledge she had of other Catholics?
And, as too often for Frances, one trouble followed close on another. Robert’s image near swamped her thoughts, leaving her every day without an essential support.
Yet a certain presence could hurt almost as much as a bitter absence. Essex had returned to England from the Low Countries with dispatches for Burghley and private letters for the queen from his stepfather, the Earl of Leicester. He was full of soldierly bravado, though he had not yet seen battle. From his swagger and the behavior of the swooning ladies in the court, including the queen’s own ladies of the bedchamber, he might have returned thrice wounded and ten times decorated.
Frances did not think him a coward, but he was certainly a man who would snatch any benefit where he could, especially if it brought one of Elizabeth’s pretty young ladies sliding into his bed at night. He complained loudly to his admirers that he got no sleep.
Frances opened the curtains and left the warmth of her bed for the hearth settle, where her slippers, shift, bodice, and gown were hanging to remove the chill. Noting that the time was near for her to join the queen’s procession to the presence chamber, she hastily dressed and rushed to the royal apartments.
“My lady Sidney, I bring you good news from your husband, Sir Philip,” Essex said, bowing to her in the presence chamber after the queen’s audience and under her always watchful eye. He had put muscle on his long-limbed form and was beginning a beard, which did not please the queen. Frances thought Her Majesty preferred he remain a young boy…her boy.
And to Frances’s mind, the beard was scraggly compared to Sir Walter Raleigh’s very short curly beard with turned-down mustache to frame his sensuous lips. He had quickly taken Essex’s place in the hearts of some ladies and was always near the throne, which did not please the earl at all. It contented the queen to have handsome young men vying for her attention.
Essex handed Frances a packet of letters, bowed, remarked on her apparent good health and on the first signs of spring, and walked away. He made no entreaties to visit her apartment or walk with her. Perhaps he was over his immature desire to swive every new court lady, or at least this one. He was affecting a reserve that Frances had no doubt he thought quite mature…and intriguing.
With relief, she took her letters and would return to her chamber to read them after seeing her father once more.
She had pleaded with him to show mercy to Jennet several times, without success. She must try again, now that he was almost recovered from his latest attack of the flux, the same that had troubled him for years.
Mr. Secretary was resting in his chambers, letters and documents spread before him on the counterpane, alone except for a doctor preparing an enema. He lectured as he mixed. “If a man have a flux then obviously his black bile humor is at fault and must be completely cleared from his body, even if it weakens him further.”
Frances had heard this opinion many times, but still wondered at its sense, since purging always weakened and never strengthened. “Father, may we be alone?”
The doctor scowled. “Mr. Secretary, I have here a heavy decoction of privet, which is sovereign for all fluxes.”
“Give it.” Impatient, Mr. Secretary took the flask and, with his other hand, waved the doctor into an outer chamber. He turned to Frances, nodding at her packet of letters. “What news of Philip, daughter?”
“I have not read my letters as yet.” She spread her shawl and covered the packet in her lap. His eyes narrowed into the black look that she had seen before and knew as a warning sign. “Father, I will give you all the news of Philip’s comings and goings as soon as I read them, but I must—”
Censure was plain on his rigid mouth. “You should be reading your husband’s letters now, as any good and loving wife would. If you have come to plead for your aunt, do not trouble me again with that unhappy matter.”
Frances tried not to wring her hands, but she could project no calm. “Jennet was very wrong, Father, I agree most heartily, but she did no more than half the court and half of England.”
His face became set into even harder lines. “Then we must build more and larger jails and hire new and better torturers, daughter. Rome shall never rule England or assassinate her queen while I live.”
Frances thought, not for the first time, that h
er father might be a little at a loss for wits. Yet he was not finished and stared at her.
“The recusants are traitors all, many wishing to enthrone the Scots queen and give England up to Spain and the Inquisition. Frances, would you see an auto-da-fé in St. Paul’s churchyard?” His face was set in a way that was meant to cease all her womanly chatter and concern. She knew she should leave off pleading, but she could not.
“Why, Father? Could you not send her to Barn—”
“Never again to my manor!” He closed his eyes and drank the privet draft, which soured his face further. “I am the queen’s high servant and spymaster, and I cannot be seen to harbor a traitor…even if I desired to, which I do not. Jennet has forfeited my goodwill and her place in my household. If I am not seen to stand fast for the true Protestant faith and the saving of this realm, even in my own family, how can I do my work for God and queen?”
“But, Father—”
“Leave me at once, Frances, and speak no more on this matter. Jennet must be dead to you, as she is to me. Put her from your thoughts and trouble me no more. My work is pressing and such needless distraction—and from you, daughter, while I am ailing—I would not have believed….” His head fell back on the bolster and he closed his eyes. The doctor approached with his tubing, stopping any further censure.
Yet another question preyed upon Frances’s mind. She leaned in to kiss her father’s cheek. “Pauley, Father. Why is he gone from court more than he is here?” She had not meant to ask about Robert, but the words were out before she could stop them.
Mr. Secretary’s chest heaved, expelling the last of his patience. “He asks for every difficult task and quite suddenly wants to be away from court.”
