Circle of Pearls

by Rosalind Laker

  ‘That’s good.’ Katherine set both hands on the arms of her chair and levered herself up to take her cane, which Julia handed her before turning on a skip of anticipation to take her free hand. Anne, watching them go from the room, noted as she had done many times before the similarity in the proud way they both held their heads. Then there was the colour of the hair. When Anne had come as a bride to Sotherleigh Katherine’s hair had still shown traces of a wild chestnut colour. A portrait of her in the Long Gallery proved that once it had been as luxuriant and rich in hue as Julia’s seemed destined to be.

  In the hall the child matched her pace to her grandmother’s as they crossed the marble floor to the Grand Staircase. On the first landing Katherine called a halt in front of the portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

  ‘Tell me what you know about this royal lady.’

  Julia realized immediately that this was to be some kind of test for her. She tilted her head back to gaze up at the chalk-white face with the high intelligent forehead and the long, pointed nose, the thinly plucked brows and those clear, direct eyes. The frizzed red hair was topped by a demi-crown of diamonds and four drop-pearls, more pearls studding the full sleeves and the bodice of the russet satin gown with its huge standing ruff that made a frame within a frame for those arresting features.

  ‘She gave Grandfather Ned the gold to build Sotherleigh and the land on which it stands.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Julia thought carefully, wanting to be sure of getting her facts right from her history lessons. ‘Our new King, Charles II, is the grandson of James, the Scottish king who came to the throne after her.’

  ‘That’s right. What else?’

  ‘When England was threatened by invasion by the Spanish Armada, she made a great speech to her soldiers to show them she would be with them in spirit. She said that although she had the body of a weak woman she had the heart of a king of England.’

  ‘Correct. That is how you must be, Julia. Keep a stout heart at all times and nothing will ever prevail against you.’

  ‘The Queen must have been a kind lady. Was Sotherleigh given to Grandfather Ned at Yuletide or on a natal day?’ These were the only times she received presents herself.

  Katherine smiled to herself somewhat wryly. Elizabeth had liked to be generous to good-looking men at all times, having an eye for a handsome face, however much she kept them at arm’s length, jealously guarding her royal power. Ned, the fourth son of a noble but impecunious family with his own way to make in life, had been extremely personable, with the dashing air of a privateer, which in some ways he was, for he had plundered ruthlessly many foreign ships to bring home the spoils to lay at the royal feet. Katherine, raw with love, had seen that he was enthralled by Elizabeth, although she was old then in a red wig, her face painted white and her lips scarlet over bad teeth. Yet still she had enchanted him. He had spoken of her with a glow in his eyes and something close to awe in his voice. Katherine recalled how difficult it had been for her to share even a small part of his heart with another woman, in spite of knowing that his devotion to the Queen was no threat to his love for her. There had been many times during her years at Court when she had witnessed the effect of Elizabeth’s intense personal charm on her nobles and ordinary people alike. It was no wonder that many men had fallen in love with that strong and vibrant woman.

  Then she had seen that same charm dawning in this firework of a granddaughter almost before the first toddling steps were taken. It lurked in the eyes, the smile and the tilt of the head, exactly as she had seen it before. When it became obvious that Anne was innocently set on spoiling the child, Katherine was determined that such a mistake should not be made or else the gift of charm could be used to the wrong ends, greed and selfishness prevailing. Having been well tutored herself, she had done everything in her power from that time forward to mould the child’s character into reason and good sense, to instill a desire for learning and a respect for heritage in all its forms, a pattern set by Elizabeth. On a gentler aspect there had been plenty of help from Anne, who in herself set an example to her daughter of consideration for other people and their feelings, something Katherine knew was not one of her own strong points.

  ‘Sotherleigh was neither a Christmas nor a natal gift,’ she said in answer to the child’s question, ‘but a reward for loyal services courageously rendered from the days of the Spanish Armada when your grandfather fought in an armed merchantman attached to Vice Admiral Sir Francis Drake’s command.’

  ‘Would it have been very bad if the Armada hadn’t been defeated?’

  ‘Oh, yes. England would have been governed by the Spaniards and they would have brought their terrible inquisition with them.’

  Julia shivered. She did not know what it meant, but it sounded frightening. Katherine’s thoughts were still with her husband. ‘The Queen’s real gratitude stemmed from later years when Ned was commanding his own ship, sailing, trading and exploring in the Far East. The Portuguese were already established in those parts, but he saw that there were great opportunities for the English to form settlements and trade in many countries from India to the little-known lands beyond. It was due to his persuasion and his rousing of the Queen’s interest that she was moved to give support to her subjects endeavouring to increase England’s wealth and power in those far distant places.’

  ‘Did you like serving the Queen, Grandmother?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She could be stern and quickly angry, but she was just and had a wonderful sense of humour. I was her ward and became one of her ladies when I was fifteen. It was at Court that I met your grandfather.’

  That had been at the Palace of Whitehall during an evening of music and dancing, the Queen leading the measures. Katherine recalled the impact across the room of Ned’s blue eyes and a clear-cut face tanned dark by sea air and hair bleached to a pale gold. She had felt her heart and her bones melt. When he had come to partner her she had trembled like an aspen leaf as he took her hand. In the bussing of the lips, which always ended that particular dance, his kiss had been bolder than was customary, but it had been the heralding of their union.

  ‘Did you leave Court when you married?’

  Katherine shook her head. ‘No, I continued to serve the Queen after Ned and I were wed, because it would have been very lonely for me when he was on long voyages of two years or more. He received the Royal Grant towards the end of the old century and I recall how we came down from London to view the acres of land known as Southerly meadows. On the documents the scribe had spelt it more imaginatively, so we kept it to Sotherleigh in future. The master builder met us on site to discuss the plans drawn up to our specifications.’ As she talked she could see the day clearly in her mind’s eye. It was high summer and there was nothing but flower meadows and waving grass and larks singing. ‘The master builder became difficult and stubborn when I said I wanted the house to face south.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘He thought it should look northwards to the nearby Downs, which gave the better view, but even more important in his opinion was the danger of infection drifting across the Channel from the Continent. Most people building within range of the Sussex coast at that time would have thought the same as he. I pointed out that evil vapours could enter even if the house had its back to the sea, but he insisted that the danger was less. He expected Ned to over-ride me and follow his advice, but he had put the wrong argument to a sea-captain. Your grandfather declared that salt air was always pure and only good could come from facing the sea, no matter that it was some miles distant. Sotherleigh was to be exactly how I wanted it.’

  She had never loved Ned more than at that moment. He had turned to her with dancing eyes and she had flung her arms about his neck, laughing in her triumph at the victory he had handed her, careless of the defeated master-builder looking on. After the man had ridden away, they had gone still farther from their coach waiting in the narrow lane that was to become the drive. Together they had lain to make love in the warm gra
ss under the flutter of butterflies, stripping each other half-naked and kissing all that was uncovered. He had smothered her ecstatic cry with his mouth or else the sound would have carried in the sweet air like notes from a flute to the lane where their coach waited.

  A month later the clearing of the site for Sotherleigh was done and the digging of the foundations begun, but after this initial flurry of activity there were various delays. Mostly these hold-ups were due to the winter weather and the master-builder’s refusal to deal with anyone but Ned, who was away at sea.

  ‘Master Pallister must decide,’ he would say every time she wanted to settle a matter, his hatred of her thinly disguised. She was certain he was neglecting the building of Sotherleigh through taking on work he considered more urgent. The walls had scarcely begun to rise when Ned came home the following autumn. Progress had been made by the time he left again, but the house was still no more than a shell when his ship was wrecked in a storm at sea, going down with all hands. She had been left a broken-hearted widow and pregnant with Robert.

  Although Ned had bequeathed her all his wealth, it was generally expected that she would sell Sotherleigh as it stood, for there were many would-be buyers, but it was a link with him that she would not let go. She gained permission from the Queen to absent herself from Court and with her newly born son she moved into a small house in the village. From there, leaving a nursemaid in charge, she sallied forth every morning to the site and fought many verbal battles with the master-builder, who had thought to pass off shoddy workmanship now that Ned was gone. She caught him out in trickery and various deceits, realized he had been swindling all along, and to his fury dismissed him and his workforce together.

  As the men left, their carts and wagons trundling off down the lane in the wake of their irate master, she had entered the doorless entrance hall and shouted aloud to the house, throwing out her arms as if to embrace it. ‘Nothing is over! This is just the beginning.’

  She hired in London a youngish man named Henry Colchester, who was a master-builder calling himself by the new term of architect. He employed good craftsmen, had the position of the rafters changed, saw that walls were taken down and rebuilt, and returned panelling and frames and anything else ordered by his predecessor that did not come up to his standards. Had she been less frozen by grief she could have taken him as a lover, or even as a husband, for he was soon in love with her, but she wanted no man other than the one she had lost. Sotherleigh was all she craved as a balm in her bereavement. She watched its graceful chimneys rise to touch the sky, and its windows were so tall and fine that when they caught the sun they made Sotherleigh appear to be a house of dazzling glass.

  When it was finished the Queen was her first visitor. There was talk between them of her returning to her duties as lady-in-waiting at Court, but at that time she was reluctant to be parted from her young son, who she felt should remain in the country for his health’s sake. The option was left open, but was never to be taken up, for in March the following year of 1603 she was suddenly sent for and rode in an escorted coach to the Palace of Richmond where the Queen was dying.

  It was hoped that Katherine could persuade Elizabeth to take to her bed, for with the courage that Henry VIII’s daughter had always shown she was attempting to meet death on her feet. Without a wig, wisps of white hair hanging from her pate and her face devoid of paint, she still presented a majestic figure. Katherine had curtsied and spoken to her. Elizabeth had shown recognition, a corner of her mouth twitching as if in a smile that her loyal lady of Sotherleigh had come back to be with her to the end. Yet she would not move from where she stood. None dared touch her, not even her doctors, and she was beyond food and drink, closing her eyes in refusal when once Katherine would have put a crystal goblet to her lips. As the hours went by some of the ladies fainted from exhaustion, for none could sit while the Queen stood, and Katherine was thankful for the stamina that enabled her to keep vigil during the last hours of a woman who had always been gracious and kind to her. Finally the Queen had collapsed, slipping down to the floor without a sound. At last she could be lifted on to the bed and Katherine herself had bathed the white brow with a clout soaked in cool rose-water.

  ‘Thank you again for Sotherleigh, madam,’ she had whispered for the Queen’s ears alone. Whether the whisper was heard there was no telling, for she was thrust aside by Lord Cecil, who was fearful the Queen would die without naming her successor. But all had gone well. She had accepted the name of James of Scotland and her death was peaceful.

  London had never seen such public grief as when the Queen was carried to her last resting place in Westminster Abbey. Katherine had stayed in London until that day and had watched from one of the windows lining the funeral route. Then she returned to Sotherleigh and had never since spent a night anywhere but under its roof.

  There had been plenty of social life in Chichester and the surrounding countryside and at that time Katherine was never short of proposals from men, honourable and otherwise; it had been obvious to her since first losing Ned that men considered widows to be fair game. With the passing of time she might have considered marrying again if it had not been the case that upon marriage any woman, whether spinster or widow, forfeited everything she owned to her husband. She did not intend to lose control of Sotherleigh, especially as Robert, having been born after Ned’s death, had not been mentioned as the eventual heir in his father’s will.

  The one man she had loved just as much as her dear Ned was married already and had children. He was Sir Harry Warrender of Warrender Hall, father of the objectionable colonel who had slighted her granddaughter in Chichester. She recalled how strongly she had been attracted to Harry with his mature good looks and flashing dark eyes. They had begun to meet secretly, possessed by passion and love, but when she realized that whispers about them might soon increase to outright scandal, she became alarmed. Nothing must taint the future of her son and his good Pallister name. After much painful heart-searching she had forced herself to end the affair. She had seen Harry age overnight as if some kind of physical sickness had afflicted him. But it had been a malaise of the spirit, for he had continued to live an active life to the age of ninety, riding to hounds every week in season until his heart failed him. His longevity had been galling to his ill-tempered son, who had been long waiting to step into his father’s shoes as Master of Warrender Hall. It had been Harry’s misfortune that his heir had proved to be a throwback to some distant ancestor, for in temperament, John Warrender was totally unlike either of his parents.

  After that period of violent attraction to Harry, Katherine had followed the example of the late Queen by continuing to endure a lonely bed. As a result she understood Elizabeth better than anyone else. They had both suffered sexual deprivation by their own choice: the Queen to maintain her mighty rule free of male domination and she herself to retain control of her own heart and property. Yet in her son she had a blessing that had been denied the Queen.

  Although Sotherleigh was Robert’s now and Anne its mistress, Katherine secretly felt herself to be still as much the head of it as she had always been in the past. Why else had Sotherleigh not been sequestrated by Parliament when the majority of the neighbouring Royalist estates had suffered the fate of confiscation?

  She believed the exemption to be the late Harry Warrender’s bequest to her, an intercession by him with powerful Parliamentary friends to ensure that she should end her days in the house she loved and that her family would continue to live there after her. She and Harry, by reason of their opposing loyalties, had never met face to face once the war had begun, but when fortune had turned against the Royalists at the Battle of Naseby, he must have been convinced then that Parliament would prevail and one of his last acts on this earth had been for her welfare. Most surely he would have known that she would guess what he had done for her, and that her gratitude would be boundless. She had never disclosed this supposition to Robert or anyone else, fearing explanations would have to be given and
the past was a closed book.

  Julia tugged at Katherine’s sleeve, ‘Is there anything else you wanted to ask me about the Queen’s portrait, Grandmother?’

  Katherine collected her thoughts again. One of the weaknesses of old age was in letting one’s mind run away at a tangent. She smiled down at her granddaughter. ‘No, you did well. We’ll go up to my apartment now.’

  As she moved to take the next section of the stairs, Julia went to her side, one small foot in a white shoe put down on successive treads at the same moment as black silk ones, stretched over painful bunions, until they reached the first floor. They had to pass the screen before turning into the west wing and at their slow pace Julia had time to play her game of identifying some of the carved flowers, giving them the country names her mother had taught her.

  ‘There’s Shepherd’s Purse and Heart’s Ease. Up there is Lady’s Smock, Jack-by-the-Hedge and Cat’s Ear.’ She chatted on about every one of the plants, giving the reason through shape, colour or location for being so called. Did her grandmother know that pretty little Self-Heal had been known for its curative powers since time began? Together they paused to look up to where it was entwined with some Black Medick. ‘That’s yellow in bloom and black in seed. By it is a spray of Traveller’s Joy. That would lift anyone’s spirits on a wearisome journey.’

  ‘I’m sure it would,’ Katherine agreed and, not having minded the short rest, went plodding on again. It had been her idea to have such a screen, preserving in wood that special day that she and Ned had shared among the flowers of Sotherleigh. He had secured the royal wood-carvers for the task, for they were the best in all Europe. He had seen a section of the screen finished, and been highly pleased with it, before the sea took him from her.

  When they drew near the door of the apartment, Julia sprang ahead to open it into the parlour through which she had run on the morning the Roundheads came. It was here that her grandmother was content to be alone sometimes. A comfortable domain, its walls were lined with bookfold panelling, which had the appearance of the backs of volumes, and her marriage chair, its legs far more bulbous than those on Anne’s chair downstairs, stood by the hearth, its velvet cushions in tulip colours. As Katherine entered the room in her granddaughter’s wake, she glanced as was her habit at the portrait of Ned above the fireplace. It showed him in the short ruff and padded doublet of the era, the drapery behind him drawn back to reveal the largest and most renowned of the ships he had commanded, painted against a background of a palm-fringed coastline, a tribute to his part in the founding of the East India Company. She had made and embroidered the ruff he was wearing, tracing the design in black on white in double running stitches with speckling like minuscule stars. The so-called black work gave the snowy ruffles the look of being overlaid with delicate lace.