Elizabeth, Captive Princess

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘Is that all? Why, I thought you were ill! You’ll get used to it,’ he told her comfortably. ‘Here are all of us, my brothers and I, under sentence of death ever since last autumn, but only poor Guildford has suffered it, and even he would not have, nor his wife Jane, if there had not been this new rising. The rest of us may still have to pay for it, but every day that drags by raises our chances that we’ll cheat the hangman yet.’

  How strange it was to talk and listen without measuring every word lest it should touch danger! To look up at a face that was young and handsome, that looked at her with delight instead of narrowly watching her above a grey beard or under bushy brows for some sign of guilt.

  She had even found it amusing that she could make some of those old men fall in love with her, could watch them from beneath her demurely lowered eyelashes as they pondered their chances in wooing her hand now when it seemed not worth a rush, and thus possibly winning a rich prize in the future.

  Old men dressing up their self-interest in a gallant’s swaggering cloak – and in the past a tutor or two eyeing her across his books with desperate but fearful hunger, letting his hand rest on hers for a supposedly forgetful minute, speaking Latin or Greek into her eyes, in passionate accents but a dead language – these had been her only lovers since the man who had declared his love for her, and died of it.

  All since then had been haunted by his memory, and scared away from her. But here at last one stood boldly, who looked at her without calculation or fear.

  He had taken her hands in his, and so warm and strong was their grasp that for a moment she noticed nothing else, and did not hear his words. Then their sense fell on her, hot and fierce as the thrust of a sword.

  ‘Will you sup with me tonight?’ he said. ‘Oh yes, it can be done – you do not know the Tower yet as I do. But – sup with me tonight. I will have good wine and my cook is a clever fellow, you would never guess what he can do with £2, 3s. 4d. a week! And I have my lute and we will sing again as we did when your little brother used to plague us for “the Puddy in the Well” – do you remember, my “Merry Mouse in the Mill”? But you were never a mouse – say, rather, a flashing kingfisher by the mill-stream – and you are not so merry now and you are so thin you stand like a spear in the sunlight – but you will be merry again, if only once, if you sup with me tonight.’

  A forgotten magic was at work again. She heard his laugh ring back through the years on this keen high wind of April. She felt herself once more a child on a gusty spring day in a high red brick-walled garden by the river, when crocuses were blowing this way and that in translucent flames of purple and gold, and standing in front of her was the tall arrogant figure of the man who had pulled her forward so gladly, recklessly into womanhood.

  She had forgotten she had ever felt like that for the Lord Admiral – or for any man. She had not believed she could ever feel like that again – for any man. She did not believe she felt it now – but then Robin Dudley bent his head and kissed her.

  The April wind was blowing, the sun was shining, a young man had kissed her. Life might end tomorrow, but while it lasted it was sweet again. He had asked her to sup with him tonight. There was something to look forward to, something else to hope for, rather than a French executioner’s sword.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Farra diddle dino,

  This is idle fino!’

  Robin Dudley had whistled the refrain so often that he had to sing it for a change, till the meaningless words palled and he swung into a verse of the latest song to become the rage at Court before the young King died and Robin saw the Court no more.

  ‘Therefore my heart is surely pight

  Of her alone to have a sight

  Which is my joy and heart’s delight.

  In youth is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.’

  He sang it all the time he supervised the setting of the supper-table and the arrangement of the room with the new tapestried hangings his wife Amy had brought him from Norfolk (showing Diana bathing and Acteon turned into a stag for looking at her) and bowls of small spring flowers making flecks of colour and sweetness in the dark mouldy-smelling corners. He brushed his hair so hard that his head tingled, looked out his finest jewels, put a dab of scent on his spruce upturned feather of a moustache, pulled up his head and pulled down his doublet and, while his face was still passionately in earnest from the importance of these occupations, his feet suddenly flicked out in the pattering steps of a jig.

  Here he was plunging into new life after months of agonizing boredom. Oh these endless dark evenings this past winter when he had read all his books and taken to carving his name, ornamented with roses and oak leaves, on the stone walls! Amy had been allowed to visit him two or three times but was awkward and miserable, not knowing the right thing to say, sobbing as she clung to him instead of cheering and amusing him – a stupid little thing, as he had began to discover even before he had gone to the Tower. He had been glad to slip away on long visits to the French and English Courts, to take up his appointment at the latter as Master of the Royal Buckhounds, to become a practised courtier and famous sportsman before he was out of his teens, while Amy stayed at his Manor of Hemsley near Yarmouth – for she was terrified of public life, but no good at country life either, hated housekeeping and was extravagant without anything to show for it, buying quantities of showy clothes she proved too timid to wear, and devoted to him without any sense of how to arouse a like devotion in him. Yes, poor Amy was a ‘hoofer’, he had decided, clumsy of foot, inevitably putting it in the wrong place. He had thought he was deep in love with the shy delicate nervous girl who adored him, and was also, conveniently, her wealthy father’s heiress; but they had married when they were both only seventeen, mere children he now considered, and he had grown up since, but she had not.

  He had grown to long for an equal mate in courage, wits and knowledge of the world, a woman of complicated and baffling charm, yet as young as he or younger – and he not yet one-and-twenty. An impossible combination, he knew; but then on a dreary March Sunday, when the stone walls of his room were reeking with damp, and his legs chill from lack of exercise, and the grey skies were pouring down in floods of rain on the gaunt fortress and the sullen rushing river, and it was Palm Sunday but with no hope of spring, and he in prison with no hope of freedom, no hope anywhere, then by pure chance he looked out through the bars of his narrow window and saw a slight girl whose hair flared like a torch in the dripping gloom, saw her step out of a heavily guarded boat on to the flooded stairs of Traitors’ Gate, and with a fierce gesture strike from her the cloak that one of her attendant nobles offered her; then sink down in collapse on the wet stones and sit there in the heavy downpour, apparently refusing to move.

  Armed men surrounded her, the Lieutenant of the Tower came out towards her. At last she rose and lifted a white stricken face up to the towering walls above her; and swept her draggled skirts on through the prison gates with the haughty bearing of a great prince, or rather, thought the young man watching her, of a wild creature of the woods surrounded by its captors, desperate but untamed, defiant to the end.

  His dulled heart leaped and he told himself, ‘This is she!’

  He had been long enough in the Tower to have grown clever in knowing whom and how to bribe; he could get money from his estates through Amy, and one could do almost anything with money in the Tower, short of escape from it. So he laid his plans with his friend and fellow-prisoner Jack Harington, who had long been in love with one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Isabella Markham, and through her got in touch with Mrs Coldeburn the guardian of the Princess’s walks, and even made good use of the friendship he had already struck up with little Henry Martin.

  He now awaited the fruit of his labours. What would it be?

  An amusing interlude? A lifelong love-affair? A king’s crown? Or death?

  ‘Damn the fruit!’ he muttered as he lit the tall candles before the polished silver mirror. ‘Why look ahead to it
when the moment is in flower?’

  The flames flickered in the draught, then raised themselves in pale yellow pointed shapes that lit up unexpected threads of crimson and blue in the tapestry. Diana’s hair now gleamed more gold, her naked body more white; a rabbit that sat up on his haunches to look at her suddenly shot into prominence so that his sharp pink-lined ears seemed to quiver into life. A perfume of musk and rosemary stole from the scented wax as it melted; Robin was using his most expensive candles. He stepped back from the mirror, which was convex, so that at a little distance he could see his whole figure, and stood gazing at his reflection, adjusting it by a lift of the eyebrows, a careless posture of the hand upon his belt, until he was satisfied.

  The room was now still, after all its bustle of preparation, and only the husky ticking of the clock made any sound in it, a strangely slow one in the ears of the young man before the mirror, who could hear his heart beating fast as if it would race ahead of time and hasten the moment for which he waited.

  Time brought it at last in a flurry of footsteps and swishing skirts, of whispered voices – that must be Jack Harington greeting his Isabella. There came a low excited laugh that made his blood tingle. So she had come! And now they were in the next room. The door between clicked open and then the air was hushed again.

  A shadow stood there, a figure wrapped in a dark cloak that she held before her face and let trail upon the ground. In silence he approached and knelt beside her and slowly raised the cloak to reveal a pair of jewelled shoes, and remained for an instant thus kneeling before the shrouded figure with bright feet. Then he rose and led her before the mirror and unwrapped the cloak from her so that her satin dress was first glimpsed here and there between the darkness of the cloak, and then flowed all over her like a waterfall, and the candlelight gleamed on her bare neck. Last of all, and looking, not at her but her reflection, he lifted back the hood from her head, and her mirrored face swam out of its obscurity as the crescent moon out of a cloud.

  And still in silence he watched, as he would watch the working of a spell, how the green eyes in the silver pool raised themselves to the reflection, first of her own face, and then of the young man who stood behind her and still held the cloak.

  A spell there was, binding him who had worked it with such instinctive cunning as well as her, for in that first moment alone together they both seemed to be looking, not at the image of their present selves, but into a magic mirror that reflected something far away – was it in times past or in the years to come?

  ‘They are passionately met in this grey moment of their lives,’ Sir John Harington told himself, and wondered what lasting fire might not strike from it. He watched them with a ghostly interest as he talked and laughed with Isabella Markham. He was by far the eldest of the little company, and love no longer seemed to him a race with time and death.

  The years he had spent in the Tower gave his mind the leisured space to follow more than one thread at a time, even when the upper web was his own love for the pretty girl beside him. But the woof, spun by the loves of her young mistress the Princess, was as deeply personal to him, for it gave the reason that he had been here in prison ever since he had entered the Tower with his friend and master the Lord High Admiral, beheaded five years ago almost to this day, for his love for the white red-haired girl now singing a catch with young Robin Dudley.

  ‘Sing we and chant it

  While love doth grant it,

  Fa la la!’

  He was well paired with her, as dark as she was fair, as obviously handsome as she was fine-drawn and variable, visited by sudden gleams of beauty, as wary as a cat, yet unquestionably royal; while he wore like a splendid cloak his careless air of arrogant ambition, as of one born in the purple, yet knowing it to have been achieved only by reckless adventure.

  Did she not feel she was sitting with a ghost? Especially when Robin laughed with her and sometimes even at her – as Tom Seymour had done – and looked into her strange light-coloured eyes, looking to her not only for his delight in this present moment, but for his advancement in the future – no doubt Tom had also done. Had she forgotten him now he was cold?

  No, Tom’s friend conceded, she had not forgotten the man who had first shown her how to love; she would never forget. For she would only love one who would remind her of the man that Harington’s own verse had praised for his ‘person rare, strong limbs and manly shape,’ and ‘in war-skill great bold hand.’

  Whom did one ever love but the image of the lover for whom one dreamed? Once that had taken the ‘manly shape’ of the bearded Admiral twice her age; and now another ‘person rare,’ rivalling him in stature, but of her own age this time, laid his bold hand on hers.

  The lover was dead, but ‘Long live love!’ said Jack Harington, lifting his glass and looking into Isabella’s soft brown eyes as she shyly raised them from a sonnet he had shown her. He had written it remembering ‘When I first thought her fair, as she stood by the Princess’s window.’ Isabella had then been a young girl in a new dress, and he had been married to a bastard daughter of King Henry’s and had not much liked it, for Ethelreda (what a name!) had something of her father’s temper and nothing of his charm. But she had two virtues: she had brought him the royal gift of a fine house at Batheaston and had died early. It was odd to think she had made him a sort of half-brother-in-law – or out of law – to the Princess, who knew nothing of the relationship, for Sir John’s discretion, with remarkable lack of snobbery in a snobbish age, had never admitted that his wife was any other than the illegitimate daughter of King Henry’s tailor.

  His discretion showed itself now in his humorously tender wooing of the timid Isabella, noting with amusement how she responded to his lines—

  ‘Why thus, my love, so kind bespeak,

  Sweet lip, sweet eye, sweet blushing cheek,

  Yet not a heart to save my pain?’

  Poetic licence had to maintain the lady’s coldness, but it was perfectly plain that Isabella had a heart, and that it was delightfully fluttered at meeting her old friend. But there was no need for such licence over the ‘blushing cheek’ for Isabella could still show it, whereas her mistress, the younger by five years, had learnt to blush, and leave off blushing, five years ago.

  Shocked at the scandal then about the Princess, Sir John Markham had hastily recalled his daughter, who had but newly come to Court, to her home at Cotham, where she had grown tired of wearing a big bunch of keys and being called her mother’s home-bird, tired of the still-room and the stables, of simples and samplers, of large bucolic suitors in whom she took in interest only because she longed to mimic them to the Princess and see her laugh. ‘Markham!’ Elizabeth might exclaim in unflattering astonishment, ‘You are a wit!’

  Nobody at Cotham seemed alive in comparison with the Princess, and she made everyone about her alive too. Isabella felt she had been asleep ever since she had left the younger girl, whom she had feared and adored and found a mass of contradictions, straightforward and secret, bold and cautious, her self-mastery as tight as whip-cord when need be, but a spitfire in her sudden rages.

  Then, as if to show she could do everything, she became a model of propriety, everybody heard about it, and so Isabella at last won permission to return to her service, but unfortunately just in time to land herself in the Tower.

  But at least, so her parents consoled each other, there was no danger now to morals, for their daughter’s letters home were full of the ‘sweet words and sweeter deeds’ of her Mistress, who was setting her such a heroic example of constancy to the true religion.

  At this moment, however, the Princess’s example was in another field.

  ‘Not long youth lasteth

  And old age hasteth,

  Fa la la!’

  she sang with her new lover, knowing they had less reason than most to fear old age.

  ‘If I lived till then, should I have a paunch?’ asked Robin.

  ‘And would my teeth go black from eating so many swe
ets, or my hair fall out so that I’d have to wear a wig?’

  They rocked with laughter at such impossibilities, but Robin suddenly grew grave in that arresting way he had. His gay mood dropped from him as he looked at her as if for the first time.

  ‘Age will forget you,’ he said; ‘though no one else will.’

  She wanted to cry. But she laughed and said, ‘I have forgotten how to answer pretty speeches.’

  ‘I could make other kinds to you.’

  ‘That sounds like a threat.’

  ‘It might even be that! I never know what I might say to you, or—’ he paused, drank his wine at a gulp, and whispered, ‘or what I might do.’

  He dared no more than a glance after that. There was a diamond brightness in her smile that told him nothing. He must speak on quickly. ‘There’s never any knowing what you will be or do next. You swear like a sailor, sing like a siren, smile like a sphinx. God made a thousand women and threw them all away before He found the mould for making you. I can say what I please, for you can’t punish me – you and I are only fellow-prisoners now!’

  The term pleased them both, it showed them equal, more free together in prison than ever they could be outside it. They shared the danger as well as the pleasure of this secret supper party, so informal and regardless of rank, served for safety by only one trusted servant.

  They shared their lot in the Tower, its stolen April hours snatched out of the proper order of their lives, its intrigues and messages entwined in knots of flowers, its knowledge that each meeting might be their last.

  And they shared its humdrum commonplaces, its comic and tiresome money problems.