by Jeane Westin
Her Majesty stood near the large fireplace, her features now as distorted with anger as they had been gently arranged earlier in the linen closet.
Lady Fitton fell to her knees. “Forgive me, Majesty, for I am not at fault. He promised to marry me, or I would never—”
The queen began to stomp about, clearly in an escalating rage. “Strumpet! Whore! Slut! A man’s cock always crows loudest when aroused. We treated you as a daughter, and by Christ’s blessed nails and wounds, you have disgraced us and our court. Be gone from our sight and at once.” The queen advanced on Lady Fitton with a raised fist.
The girl covered her face, but the regal blow fell harder on her hands than Mary could have imagined the old queen’s strength to be, even with righteous wrath so great.
Lady Fitton cried out pitiably as the blows found their target. She scrambled away from Elizabeth on her hands and knees like a whipped cur, one finger already swelling and twisted, obviously broken.
Short of death, Her Majesty had every right to chastise an un-dutiful servant or, as a mother, an unfaithful and willful daughter. Mercy was a royal prerogative, Mary saw clearly, but not forgiveness. Queens could not afford to forgive, lest it give encouragement to defiance.
Mary guided the stumbling girl to her bed in the ladies’ anteroom, where they were alone. From the gusts of excited chatter in the hall, the other ladies of the bedchamber wanted to be nowhere near a disgraced lady, or the queen’s temper. There would be no comfort for Lady Fitton from that quarter. She had not made herself popular with women.
Hearing the sound of smashing pottery as the queen’s rage continued, Mary quickly tied a tight bandage around Lady Fitton’s hand to hold the broken finger straight and grabbed up her cloak, placing it about the lady’s shoulders. “Leave at once, to save yourself from worse . . . perhaps even the Tower, where Pembroke will fare better than you. I promise your belongings will be sent after you.”
“Mary Rogers, I know you have no cause to help me, but I beg you . . . The earl, my father, will beat me and send me off to some country village. No man of honor will ever want me. Wherever I go, whispers will follow. I am not yet nineteen years and I am ruined.”
Mary was truly sorry for the distraught girl, but there was little that she could say or do, for all the young fool spoke was truth. She had trusted in promises spoken in hot, dark haste and now she must pay, as women did who gave themselves to the wrong man.
For the first time, Mary knew herself fortunate that John was not at court. She doubted she would have the strength to continue to deny him what they both wanted. The memory of being in his arms told her of her own woman’s weakness, as had night upon night of struggle to ease the restless, hot ache that filled her.
April and May came that year, days alternating the warmth and chill of early spring. Sudden showers of rain and fruit tree blossoms fell as the queen walked swiftly, seemingly tirelessly, through her privy gardens, Mary at her side.
Everyone marveled that a woman now nearing her sixty-seventh birthday could maintain such a pace, and Elizabeth laughed to read and quote to Mary the intercepted and decoded messages from foreign ambassadors writing to their monarchs about the amazing English queen’s endless energy. Elizabeth liked this report even more than the French ambassador De Baise’s message to Henri IV praising her white skin and her grasp of world affairs, which could put any man to shame. And certainly more than the French noble who wrote that the queen was still beautiful “from a distance.” That phrase had banished the foreign lord to a distance from the queen forever.
Though Mary did not disagree with De Baise, only she knew that on occasion, when the queen seemed to stop and admire a bed of spring violets, a leafing eglantine or a pot of clove-scented carnations, Her Majesty leaned heavily on Mary’s arm, and for a few minutes her face would grow even whiter under the cherry-tinted cheeks.
One morning, while walking with the queen in the gardens near good shelter, should the clouds sweeping in decide to empty their wet burden, Mary was given the news that Lady Howard miraculously lived on. “It is God’s will, Majesty,” she answered appropriately, not mentioning that she’d had something to do with it, praying for that lady’s recovery every night at chapel. She dreaded the minute Lady Howard breathed her last, for it would send her grieving husband galloping to the queen and the warrant that would grant him Mary Rogers. And the salt tax, which would mean a thousand pounds a year, doubling that lord’s annual income.
When she sent John this news, he vowed to work day and night and return quickly after finishing the Greenwich Palace royal water closet, frustrated that his workmen were so slow and the money he needed as grudgingly supplied by the queen. He wrote: Although my invention may soon be installed in the least tradesman’s house and sweeten the whole air of England beyond any flower or fruit, I wish I had never conceived the scheme, for it keeps me from you. I come soon to appeal to my godmother to change her mind for our happiness.
Mary answered: Dearest Knight of my Heart, if Lady Howard dies, the queen will hold me to my vow to serve her until her end time comes, not allowing me to leave her as long as she lives and, Praise God, looks to live on.
In May, the queen quietly released Essex, now well and hearty, from Lord Keeper Edgerton’s custody, but the earl was allowed only the freedom of his own Essex House. The queen was further gracious. She now allowed him any visitor he wished. At court the wagering on Essex’s restoration to favor began again. Her Majesty was certain to return him to her presence soon. Everyone saw the queen’s periods of melancholy and her frolics and reckless riding in the hunt as substitutes for the handsome company she denied herself.
In early June, John Harington, having finished his work at Windsor, made his way to Oatlands, where the court was staying until the inevitable summer plague in London subsided. He stopped, reluctantly accepting Essex’s urgent invitation to wait upon him at Essex House before continuing his journey.
John found the earl writing his woes to King James of Scotland, even asking him to send troops to restore him to his rightful place and bring down Cecil and Raleigh, offering to support James’s right to the throne in return. The earl was proud enough of the letter to show it to John.
“My lord earl, you tread on exceeding dangerous ground here,” John said, alarmed at what he read. Here was Essex assuming James was heir to the English throne before the queen had named him heir, seeking his patronage while the queen lived. Such a communication in Cecil’s hands could be seen as treasonous, and that wily councilor would wait for just the right time to put it before Elizabeth, when she had swung from melancholy to anger as she surely would.
Essex scowled. “What more could she do to me? I am beggared, kept from her council and the court . . . even my own rightful place as a peer of this realm.”
“You could lose your head.”
“She wouldn’t dare arrest me. The people of London would rise up.”
“And what, my lord? Make you king?”
Even Essex knew he had gone too far, and in an instant his mind swiveled. “Do you go to court, John?” he said in a pleading tone, gripping John’s arm. “Tell her that I have loved her more than any man ever living. Tell her that until I may see her, the sun is dead and the world all night to me.”
“My lord, have you written this to her?”
“Yes. Yes, a dozen times and in a dozen ways, though I do not know if she reads my letters or, indeed, is in right enough emotion to understand them. Perhaps Cecil keeps them from her. He poisons her mind against me.” He began to walk up and down frantically, changing direction without thought, a dripping pen clasped in his hand, heedless of the black ink blotting the clinging hose on those celebrated legs. His face first showed sorrow, then anger and back to sadness again, until finally his long, loping stride nearly ran him into a wall. “Cursed woman! Poor copy of a king!”
“My lord, as a loyal subject, I cannot suffer such talk in my hearing.” John hastily sought an exit without leave. It w
as clear to him who was not in his right mind. Elizabeth’s Wild Horse had now gone completely feral.
Essex put out a placating hand. “Stay, John, yet awhile. We have been comrades for years. I have great need of you to bring the queen to right thinking of who serves her best.”
John feared to confirm any such friendship with this heedless lord, a friendship that was now long gone and had, in truth, not existed since Essex had tried to take Mary by force. “My lord, according to my communications, Her Majesty’s mind is very active, and the court is full of frolic.”
The earl clenched his fists, and fury shook him. “She laughs and dances while I am denied all aid and my debts mount. Everyone speaks against me. Cecil and Raleigh work for my disgrace; indeed, I think them the true traitors, for they love Spain and are plotting with the Spaniards.”
“Surely, my lord, you are mistaken. You accuse the queen’s ministers of loving our enemies.”
Essex opened his mouth to say more, but gained control, since at some level of rationale he must know that what he said was false delusion. “I take it that these communications you speak of are from a lady close to the queen.” He looked at John, controlling the smirk obviously longing to twist his mouth.
“Yes, my lord.” John put his hand on his sword and reached the door.
“Give my fondest greetings to Mistress Mary.” He did smirk at that, and John left the room before he knocked His Lordship to the floor and trod on his face. Such an act would bring shame to him, since it was obvious that Essex had lost what little sense he ever had, blaming everyone but himself, unable to hide his most destructive, even treasonous feelings. He wore them on his face without even the knowledge that he did so.
John rode on through an afternoon shower, his mind a jumble of Mary, the queen and Essex, his heart dark with a sense of ominous events in motion that he could not know or protect against. He pushed on into the dusk along the Thames a few miles upstream from Hampton Court toward Oatlands, the smallest of the queen’s residences, forcing many courtiers to abide in nearby inns and country houses. He heard the noisy rooks in the elm trees before he saw the jutting towers and redbrick chimneys of the queen’s hunting lodge. He rode at last through the tower gate with the Tudor arms carved above and the queen’s flag flying to show she was in residence, threw his reins to a sleepy stable groom and made his way to one of the cottages around the central quadrangle, which the chamberlain had said was his.
He liked this place. It was more a village than the impersonal stone heaps he had been attempting to sweeten with his water closets. As he threw himself full-clothed on the straw pallet laid atop a bed of crossed ropes, he wrapped his arms about his chest and slept, imagining that Mary was pressing against him.
“Walk with me, godson.”
“With delight, Majesty,” John replied the next morn, shaved, trimmed and brushed, wearing a clean ruff newly starched and pleated. He was very aware that Mary, even under the cosmetic mask demanded of court ladies, looked so fresh and beautiful that it took all his will not to stare at her. She followed a few paces behind the queen with several ladies of the presence chamber. He had not spoken with her privately, but her eyes told him that she would soon find a way.
John pretended to be fully exercised by Elizabeth’s vigorous stride, knowing she delighted in besting young men with her vitality and learned old men with her knowledge. Before they reached the middle fountain of her privy garden, John told her the humorous tale of the guard’s captain at Windsor Castle, who would not go near Her Majesty’s new water closet for fear of falling in. He did not turn to Mary to see if she’d noticed he had promoted the groom who had actually feared the invention. Any jest could be made more humorous by a little embellishment, as Will Shakespeare proved most afternoons at the Globe Theatre on the Bankside. And what was this if not the theater of the court, and he, Mary and the queen all players? They said their lines, acted their roles, danced and postured through days and nights. Not for the first time, he knew that it was a life he did not want to live forever. And he did not want Mary to live it, though she had grown up longing for court life.
Elizabeth, her cheeks more sunken than he remembered, made a face at his story. “It seems we must show our brave yeoman captain the way of a water closet.”
John bowed, appreciating without laughing. Sometimes the queen was given to scandalous jest, but until he was sure . . .
Her jeweled gown flashing in the morning light, her high white ruff waving behind her bright red wig, the queen bent a little to smell a rose newly opened, dew gathered on its open petals.
John stepped forward, snapped it off and, drawing his dirk, removed all the thorns. No royal blood would water this soil.
He knelt and presented the flower to her, his eyes shining with humor. “A first rose of summer for England’s great Tudor rose, Majesty, from your humble subject John Harington.”
The queen held it to her nose and looked into the distance. He did not know how far she saw until she spoke.
“My father called my cousin Catherine Howard his ‘rose without a thorn.’ You honor her memory, sir.”
John bowed his head and made no reply. No one dared speak of Henry VIII except Elizabeth herself. Sixteen years old, Catherine Howard had been the king’s fifth wife, whom he’d beheaded because she did have a thorn . . . in the form of several lovers. Though Henry was probably impotent at the time, he thought this behavior in his young, beauteous wife deserving an ax on the Tower block. How Elizabeth must have feared him, beheading her mother and her cousin, divorcing or otherwise ridding himself of women who displeased him. She had inherited his steel and his temper without his cruelty . . . John hoped, though she guarded her kingdom as fiercely as a bear her cub. He took a deep breath and determined on a course, the only one open to him.
The queen suddenly returned from her reverie to the present and gave him her hand to rise. “We release you from your duties to give attention to your properties in Somersetshire, which you have long neglected for our sake.”
“Your Grace, I confess, having been so long from court in your service, I long to stay with you for a time.”
The queen surged ahead down the path toward a far brick wall espaliered with Spanish orange trees in flower, and John rushed to stay at her side. “We will not change our mind about Mary Rogers, Sir John,” she said, matter-of-fact. She paused. “Why would you stay at court if it gains you nothing?”
He decided that boldness was always his best foot forward.
“Love, Majesty.”
“Don’t speak to us of love.” Her voice was gruff and flat, almost a growl.
He had no caution left. “Love is all I speak, Majesty. It has become my first language.”
“Better you work on your Latin, sir. Love fails, is false and all too soon is consumed in its own fire.” She stared at the rose she twirled in her hand. “Or it dies.”
“Forgive my disagreement, godmother.”
“We do not forgive disagreement.”
He fell again to his knees, her bitterness surrounding him, and bowed his head.
The queen of England hit her godson a good stroke over the head with the rose he’d given her. Was it a symbolic beheading? As the petals fell about his face and doublet, he looked up to see her striding from the privy garden, Mary following, her face turned back to John in alarm.
That night, the Danish ambassador was honored by a masque. John attended but did not approach the queen’s throne, though Mary stood to one side, until Elizabeth beckoned to him. He walked forward, knelt and on her signal rose, sweeping his hat to the floor.
The flutes, tambours, guitars and drums were playing the Spanish panic, and the queen’s foot tapped furiously.
“Majesty, I have need of your instruction in these measures.”
“You should take yourself to the dancing master for improvement.”
John bowed. He was not forgiven his forward behavior in the privy garden, at least not completely, though there migh
t be a dim sparkle in his godmother’s stern eye. As he began to back away, the queen stood and gave him her hand.
“Do not look so whipped, John. It ill becomes a man of your height and closeness to us.”
“I cannot smile when you send me from you.”
“You need be in no hurry to leave us.”
He smiled at her ability to scold and forgive in almost the same breath. With a grand gesture he drew off his cloak and threw it to the floor as if to prepare for strenuous exercise.
“Rascal!” she scolded, but threw back her head and laughed.
She could turn from stern monarch to young coquette on the instant.
Elizabeth danced as she always had, her body very straight, her feet fast enough to show her ankles, and her gestures exaggerated, but no less elegant. He looked toward Mary when he could without discovery and he saw the queen glance at the Danish ambassador several times as they spun with the other dancers, none of the ladies over forty years daring to lift their feet from the floor. He knew that Her Majesty was showing the Danes that the English were ruled by a queen forever young, though he felt the shrunken body under his hands as he raised her through the leaps and gently put her down. She had never had much flesh. Now she was all bone.
“We have invited Lord Howard to court for the hunting,” she said as he led her to her throne.
No response was required from him, but he felt his arm muscles tense under her hand.
“Godson,” the queen whispered, “look you for another love. We would not have you so unhappy. But when Lord Howard is free—and we are done of this world—he will have her. This lord is one of a very loyal few in the north who does not seek James of Scotland’s patronage before we are in our grave. We must keep him close if James grows impatient and comes over the border before it is his time. There are those we once loved who urge that course.” She meant, of course, Essex. She removed her fan from its ribbon and tapped it against John’s chest for emphasis.
