I’d never forgotten the little dark statesman who, at the joust, had taken insult so quietly. I found thoughts of that day were coming more frequently. Since I’d moved to Blackfriars, I saw the court crowds in the streets every day: young men whose clothes were stiff with embroidery, once the queen’s fool and once one of her ladies, in a misty blue gown trimmed with silver lace. They gave me the sense I’d had sometimes when I went down to the river and looked at the sky – a sense the world was larger than it seemed to be, and with more varied possibilities.
I could no more have approached one of those swans than I could fly. But the ugly duckling with the damaged wing, the sober man of work who did the queen’s business night and day – well, given Master Pointer’s connections, a move towards him might just be a possibility.
It was a September day and in the orchard the apples were ripening, while the heavy pear-shaped quinces perfumed the air around them. The emblem of happiness, I thought – I was young enough for superstition – and after all, what was I going to do that was so extraordinary? Only go with Master Pointer’s men when they took the pots of lavender held back from blooming early, and report to him how the vines he’d sold to the Cecils were fruiting, and see whether the new hazels were thriving in the nuttery.
It would be the purest chance if Sir Robert actually spoke to me, even if he did happen to be walking in the garden, as he did frequently. And if I did take my sheaf of sketches with me – well, nothing in that, surely?
Burghley House was a rambling comfortable building on the north side of the Strand, poised between the palace at Whitehall and the City, opposite the old Savoy. Kings had lived there once, but today its grandeurs were in ruins, while a poorhouse camped in the wreckage. The rich, odorous stew that was a London crowd grew even thicker and more exotic as one drew near, for all that the Strand held the palaces of the nobility. Deep-water sailors from distant countries eyeing liveried men at arms, cutpurses skirting the ordinary citizens just trying to get through the working day. No wonder Burghley House showed the street a long line of thick brick walls, with only three small windows to break their solidity. The Cecils were still near the people – of them, in a way – and this was a bustling place of business as much as a gentleman’s private residence, but that didn’t mean they took stupid risks.
A porter’s lodge stood in the middle of the wall, but Master Pointer’s men turned into another gateway. To the west of the house, the palace side, lay the service quarters and the vegetable beds, and the back way up to another arched gate which led out to the north and the open spaces of Convent Garden, where the monks or their servants used to tend their own beds and orchards in the old days. I walked and I wondered, along clipped hedges and gravelled pathways. I was on Master Pointer’s business, wasn’t I? And in any case, the afternoon would have encouraged an anchorite to linger.
The grass had its brightness back, after the summer drought, and the soft warm light brought out the reds and greens, making a little miracle out of the trees. In its plan perhaps the garden wasn’t as modern as it might be. I could feel the taste of old Lord Burghley. But it had still its element of fantasy. A mound rose up from a sunken garden, a man-made hollow and a man-made hill, and the winding path up to the summit guided your feet clearly. The plants themselves were extraordinary. One great flower had been left to form a seed head more than the spread of my hand across, and I was drawing it for Master Pointer when I sensed a presence beside me.
He was alone, but he must have moved lightly – his feet on the gravel made no sound as he approached. He was dressed in black – we’d heard that his wife had died recently, for I remember eager talk about whether it would be appropriate for the Pointers to send a gift in sympathy.
Perhaps that accounted for the lines that already showed on his face, but I suspect they came there naturally. It was the eyes that struck me, cool and grey under high arched brows.
He held out his hand. ‘May I see?’
Dumbly, I passed over my sheaf of drawings, barely remembering to jerk down into a bow, and he leafed through the pages, those brows raising slightly.
‘Impressive. Do you work for Master Pointer? In what capacity?’ He gestured me to fall in with him as he walked on. ‘My constitutional. If I’m taking you from your art, you must forgive me.’ He knew I’d come in his way on purpose, of course, but he was a polite man – polite in his soul – and he didn’t let the knowledge intrude.
As he walked he questioned me – my skills, my situation – and I answered him with a sense of inevitability, so completely had it fallen out as I had dreamed it. Though it was my penman-ship first caught his eye, it was my languages that seemed to interest him most. He’d ask me for the names of plants in French and Flemish, as well as Latin, as we passed by. He spoke to me of the great plant hunters from earlier in the century, of Turner and Gesner and of Mattioli before them, and of who was like to take up the mantle of Plantin in Antwerp, now that his great printing centre under the sign of the golden compasses had passed away. He spoke of his own commission to John Gerard, the surgeon and collector who’d had the ordering of the Cecil gardens, to produce the first great English Herbal in almost half a century. I was devoutly thankful to Jacob, and to all the evenings, since his death, I’d spent in solitary study.
‘I may be able to find a use for you, Master – de Musset?’ Of course he pronounced it correctly. ‘If Master Pointer can spare you, naturally. Come and see my steward tomorrow.’
When I went back next day, I didn’t see the steward, I saw Sir Robert himself. But I was then too new to the game to realise that was extraordinary.
Cecil
Summer 1597
I walk in the garden more and more these days – even when it’s wet, even when it’s too hot for comfort. It’s the only thing that makes the pain go away. Well, not go away, but step back a single pace, still snarling, like a dog when you pick up a stick and wave it menacingly. Round the beds, like a soldier on a route march, ticking off the success or failure of each plant in my head, like nature’s own litany. Rosemary for remembrance, the last seed heads of the heartsease pansy … Lizzie would give my bad arm that little shake that seemed to loosen more than it hurt me and tell me I was a secret sentimentalist, for all the rest of them thought I was so canny.
Lizzie.
I’m not alone in the garden this time, though usually the gardeners absent themselves now. I suppose one of the secretaries has tipped them off, tactfully. There’s a boy – at least, he looks no more than a stripling, brown-haired and neat, without being finicky. He’s standing in front of the Marvel of Peru, and he has a paper and a stick of charcoal in his hand, but from a certain self-conscious stiffness in his stance, I know he’s waiting for me.
I would have gone over anyway. Always know everything that’s happening in your household – and for your household, read the whole country, or as much of it as you can manage. That’s another thing my father taught me. And, never ignore any thing that comes to you. You never know where you’ll find an opportunity.
I hold out my hand for the paper he is working on. ‘May I see?’
He hands over his sheaf of drawings, silently.
‘Impressive. Do you work for Master Pointer? In what capacity?’ I gesture him to fall in with me. As we walk I question him, and I believe he answers me honestly. There is something held back, of course, there always is. If there weren’t, he would be too simple to be of much use to me, and I can use him – on the garden records, certainly. New plants are arriving every day. Gerard’s indisposition is likely to be lengthy, so the physicians say, and it would be a crying shame if our records were to remain incomplete, and his book left with only English eyes to admire it. I ask the boy for the names of plants in French and Italian as we pass by. He speaks Flemish too, which is less ordinary. It only takes two sentences for him to tell me why.
It carries me back ten years to that first journey, my first taste of a diplomatic mission, and me barely past twenty.
I’d gone to the Netherlands in an older man’s train, to see if Parma could be bought off, with the great Armada on the way. It hadn’t worked – no one ever thought it was likely to – but the time bought was something. What I remember most wasn’t the negotiations, nor even the hard riding that made my shoulder ache, but the inns where they served up half a herring as a feast, and then stood around to watch as we ate it, and the miserable state of the country. That was when I truly understood that peace in a land matters more than anything. That it is worth dying for – or arranging others’ deaths, if necessary.
I should like to help this boy, apart even from the question of his use to me. Never dismiss your kindly impulses – they can be as useful as any other, so my father used to say. My father used to do a lot of saying, before age made him as twisted as me, as twisted as Lizzie just before she –
‘Come see my steward tomorrow,’ I tell the boy. Pointer won’t make any trouble – he’ll understand the value of a friend at court, to make sure all the Cecil business doesn’t go any other firm’s way.
There’s a discreet bustle by the house. I’ve dallied too long, and someone needs me. I set my shoulders as I turn back – as set as my shoulders are able to be. I will take our business off my father’s hands where necessary, and when business fails me, I will keep my mind firmly fixed on the trivialities. The gardeners should be getting the seeds in now, if we’re to eat green vegetables again before May: folly to say you can’t plant before spring, just because that’s how it was done in their grandfather’s day.
But sometimes I think that the two weights, my work and my grief, will be enough to crush me. Now, though, there’s the faintest breath of relief – a tickle, at the corner of my mind’s eye. I’m not sure what it was but there was something – something about that boy.
PART II
I am melancholy, merry, sometimes happy and often
unfortunate. The court is of as many humours as the
rainbow hath colours, the time wherein we live more
inconstant than women’s thoughts, more miserable than
old age itself and breeding both people and occasions
that is violent, desperate and fantastical.
Letter from Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex,
to his sister Penelope
We princes are set on highest stage, where looks of all
beholders verdict our works; neither can we easily dance
in nets so thick as may dim their sight.
Letter from Elizabeth I to James VI of Scotland
Jeanne
Autumn 1597
‘You won’t be needing livery – the secretaries don’t. Just wear something neat, dark and discreet. No ruffs,’ the steward added, sharply. I nodded, as if curbing an inclination to finery, though the truth was I was only too glad to be let off an accessory that would have to go to an expensive laundress every few days.
‘Here – you might want to take this, though. You’ll find it’s something of a passport.’ It was a metal cloak badge with the Cecil crest, and as I pinned it on I felt at the same time a small tug of vexed pride, and a tiny glow of warmth. It seemed I had not just accepted a post, I had joined a community.
That had been six weeks ago, and I was finding I liked this new sense of family. I’d kept my own room in Blackfriars for the nights, of course. It wasn’t as if sharing with three other young male clerks was really a possibility. But I found that more and more often I was getting up early in the morning to walk along Fleet Street and break my fast in the hall at Burghley House, not just for the fine white manchet bread the steward occasionally let slip to our table, but for the company.
I suppose I’d always assumed that I’d stick out like a sore thumb in any group I tried to join, but on the clerk’s table everyone was an oddity. There was one old man, with his delicate small paws and twitching mouse’s face, kept on for the beauty of his calligraphy. There was one gangling youngster with a lantern jaw and spluttering speech, who read seven languages fluently. There were two silent watchful men who rarely spoke of the day’s business, though one had a passion for part singing and the other for archery, and they carried an air of warning about them. The music lover was one of the best breakers of cipher in the country, I was told quietly.
Not all the business in the Burghley household was open for all to see. But there was nothing secret about the job laid down for me, in between the routine tasks I’d be given, translating and transcribing whatever was necessary. All the world knew that Master Gerard was about to publish his great Herbal, and dedicate it to Lord Burghley. This was my first chance to read it, in the original copy, and of course I did so avidly. Some of its information seemed strange to me – I’d heard Jacob and the other herbalists speak of Gerard’s work before, and not always kindly – but Master Pointer had said that such a book, and written not in Latin but in the vernacular tongue, would be a great help to the industry. And Gerard’s vivid descriptions of the yellow loosestrife in the meadows towards Battersea, of the kidney vetch growing on Hampstead Heath, brought plant-hunting expeditions with Jacob back to me.
But Master Gerard’s health was poor at the moment and, as new plants arrived every month from abroad to be added to the records of the Cecil gardens, he couldn’t get out to sketch them easily, or to quiz the gardeners about their care. What’s more, Sir Robert had no intention of letting this new light of knowledge shine only in his own country. The Herbal was to be translated and finely bound up, with coloured illustrations and new additions wherever necessary, and then sent out to foreign dignitaries; a minor tool of diplomacy. It was a specialised task, which set me a little apart from the rest of the under-secretaries, just as surely as the small closet, with its window over the garden for a clear light, where I was allowed to spread my paints and papers. I felt so spoiled I was almost scared of it – half drunk with the freedom to borrow any book from the great library. For the first time in my life, in fabulous hand-tinted editions, I saw the plants from foreign countries spring to life in shades of saffron, cinnabar and verdigris. Maybe it was because Sir Robert’s rule over the household was so complete that I suffered no open signs of envy. Or maybe mine was a private pleasure, and the others didn’t envy me.
Sometimes I thought of Jacob, and wished that he could see me. Sometimes I thought what Jacob would say, if he could see the Herbal: I knew Master de l’Obel had begun to correct Master Gerard’s work, before its author took it back, indignantly; and truth to tell I wondered, I did wonder, when I read his description of how the barnacle geese that flock here each year spring from the shells shed by a Scottish tree. But in our age of marvels it might be foolish to query – it would certainly be foolhardy. I bent my head to the translation, industriously.
I was sent to make my bow to Master Gerard, of course – in this house they did things courteously. His brief glance made it clear he wouldn’t expect to be seeing too much of me, but if he felt any resentment, he didn’t show it. The only person in the house who seemed openly to disapprove of me was the nominal master himself, old Lord Burghley. He wasn’t there all the time – everyone knew that for years he’d been begging her majesty to let him retire, and that his greatest pleasure now was to ride around Theobalds, his country estate, on a mule, or to sit and watch his gardeners from the shade of a tree. But sometimes I would hear the clunk of his stick, and turn to see his small eyes fixed on me. Like a lot of old people, he had the habit of talking to himself aloud and once, ‘I suppose Robert knows what he’s doing,’ I heard, as he glared at me.
I ventured to mention it to the old clerk. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, twisting his hands below his pointed face, so that I almost expected to see whiskers twitching above a grain of corn, ‘he’s like that with everybody.’ And even for Lord Burghley, it seemed, in the end it was enough that Sir Robert had a purpose for me – just how good or useful a one would become clear eventually.
Katherine, Lady Howard, Countess of Nottingham
October 1597
There are patches of time when too much seems to happen, so that in the end you feel punch-drunk, like a cheap fighter in the ring at the end of fair day. It was only yesterday, the twenty-third, that the queen paused on her way back from chapel, and handed to my husband the patent that made him Earl of Nottingham – and me the countess, naturally.
Of course we knew that it was coming – the queen herself had been in a little ripple of amusement when she beckoned me to walk to chapel with her that day. But even so there is something about the moment: I couldn’t step from my place in the queen’s train to be beside my husband, but after so many years of marriage, I could still feel his joy. The ceremony was all it should have been – I wished my father were alive to see. He once said these things were the nearest a gentleman could get to the drama, and of course he loved a play, and players – Lord Hunsdon and his Lord Chamberlain’s Company.
The earls of Shrewsbury and Worcester presented Charles, Sussex bore the cup and the shiny new coronet, Pembroke lent his robes and Robert Cecil read aloud the patent he had drafted, with a convincing gravity. Time was, no doubt, when any Howard would have been glad to see a Cecil done down, when we’d have stared at the idea of any friendship between these jumped-up pen gents and the old nobility. But one must try to move with the times, and new enemies make new allies. And of course these days, it’s hard to tell who is the old nobility. Look at my family – which means her majesty’s. And Robert Cecil, unlike others I could name, has always behaved with respect towards my husband and I.
So the next morning should have been good, and ordinary, surely? Maybe I would have had a chance to enjoy my new honours, maybe I would have gone around the court a little, to savour the greater depth of the bows that greeted me. Maybe – for one has, after all, experience in this world – I would, underneath, have felt a little flat, as often one can do after the event, but I’d sent for my sister Philadelphia and surely, at the very least, I could have enjoyed having her see me in my day of glory – she may have been grabbing everyone’s attention ever since she was in the nursery, and her husband may be the tenth Lord Scrope, but he isn’t an earl, and entitled to wear the purple, is he?
The Girl in the Mirror Page 6
