The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  ‘Couldn’t she just have said so?’

  ‘Not likely. If anyone tries to suggest it, she brags that the old and infirm should stay behind, that the young and active are for her company. If she as much as called for a litter instead of a horse the whole court would have understood, and every ambassador in the country would have sent home the news she was beginning to fail. They watch her the way the carrion crows do an old animal in the fields that’s waiting to die.’

  He had said the forbidden word. He had said, die. Of course everyone knew the queen’s life couldn’t go on forever; of course by now, most thought, if they didn’t say, it was a miracle it hadn’t ended already. Of course everyone asked who the next on the throne would be – the King of Scotland, my lord of Hertford’s son? – and some felt the choke of a nightmare coming close when they thought of England seized by some great Catholic country. Some – like me. All the same, there was an air of unreality about the thought. For all except the very oldest nodding in the corner, Queen Elizabeth had been there forever, sure as the sun in the sky, and even if you grumbled about the weather, you never considered any other possibility.

  Now, for a minute, gazing down on the chequerboard landscape below, I allowed myself to look at the future, like a soldier looking at a map of enemy country, a land full of dangers and opportunities. The way the gossipmongers in their cups did when drink had made them reckless, and men like Sir Robert did in all sobriety.

  The way Lord Essex did, or so men said. They were saying ever more openly – I tried not to hear their talk – that the queen had good reason to fear sending him to Ireland at the head of an army.

  It was as if Martin had picked up my thought. ‘You know he didn’t want to go? Not really. But he’d criticised every other candidate, he’d jeered at everyone else’s policy, so he could hardly complain when they took him at his word. And now they’re in a winning situation, you might say. If Essex pacifies Ireland, well then England has her victory. If he fails miserably – well, at the least it will take a little lustre off the people’s golden boy.’

  He paused for a second, as if wondering whether or not to speak.

  ‘Of course, there are some – just a very few, the ones who don’t usually do much talking, who say there’s a deeper game afoot. They say it’s one that the old fox used to play.’ The jerk of his head around us said – as if I couldn’t have guessed – that he meant Lord Burghley. ‘“Give them enough rope, madam, and they’ll hang themselves sure as sanctity,”’ he quoted, with his actor’s mimicry.

  ‘The old man even did it with the Queen of Scots – set the temptation in her way, then cut off her head when she fell for it. Like father, like son, they say. Maybe there’s a reason for it, every time Sir Robert plays the peacemaker, helps Lord Essex’s favour with the queen to go grinding on one more day.’ He stopped. I must have made a movement, enough to let him see the thought distressed me. Yes, I had learned a lot those last two years, but the thought of such hidden wheels still frightened me. Perhaps one of the things I’d learnt was to believe Sir Robert acted for the best. Perhaps I shouldn’t have trusted so easily.

  ‘Ah well, I daresay that part isn’t true,’ Martin added more lightly. ‘Maybe it’s all just coming from her majesty. This queen’s father said once that if he believed his nightcap knew his counsel, he would throw it in the fire, and no doubt she agrees.’

  A ripple of applause came from the hall, and he turned his head quickly to listen. We were both a little relieved, maybe.

  ‘The play! You should go –’

  ‘No, that’s all right, this is just the first act. I’m not needed until nearly halfway. But, listen, Jeanne –’ He stopped again. His arm on the balustrade was very close to mine. For the first time since I’d known him, he seemed uncertain what to say. Then he seemed to shrug on confidence and gaiety, as he might don his costume for the play.

  ‘We’ll meet tomorrow. You can show me the marvels of Theobalds, and we’ll find a few more together, maybe. Come now, you’re not going to say no, surely?’

  ‘No – I mean, yes, after breakfast, in the hall. Unless Sir Robert needs me.’

  I found now my arm was brushing his. For a long moment we both gazed at the moon, silently.

  When I found him next day, there was mischief in his face.

  ‘Come on – I know what I want to show you. One of the gardeners told me.’ I hesitated, but I’d already checked that I couldn’t be called on for another hour or two – or probably at all – and there was really no reason not to agree. He led me down through the orchards, where a few petals still clung around the swelling fruit, and towards the great lake I had seen yesterday. Behind it, screened by a line of trees, there was a smaller pool, with fountains shaped like serpents and white with water lilies.

  ‘They don’t use it much now but they used to bathe here.’ He flicked a smiling glance at me. ‘I don’t suppose we dare – dare we?’ I felt sure enough of him now to smile as I shook my head. ‘But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Come – I got them to lend me the key.’

  A little banqueting house stood at one end of the pool and he held the door open for me, ceremoniously. I stepped in past him, as a lady might sweep past a gentleman, and gave an un-ladylike snort of laughter. I was in something straight out of a fantasy. I’d read about things like this – the gardens the emperors had had in Rome – but now the story had become reality. Above me, naked figures rioted across the ceiling. At my feet huge carp rose lazily to the surface from great shallow tanks and Martin – eager as a boy, proud as the proprietor – ran around to show me the underwater gates that would release them, when the house was closed, into the outdoor pond to swim free. A tiny bridge, fit for a child, or for a queen’s feet, led over the water to a minute man-made island, where a stone table stood ready for a feast.

  ‘Now, that I didn’t think to organise. I’m sorry.’ But we sat down anyway, one across from the other. He spread both hands flat on the surface, like a man about to come to a point, and I remembered how every movement of his seemed to mean something – how he made me feel as graceless as a landed plaice, flop-ping in a fishmonger’s tray.

  ‘You know, I’d thought the Cecils were –’ I made a damping down gesture with my hands, less expressive than any of his. Were order and safety, were the garden on the Strand with its ordered patterns, was what I was trying to say – not, too, the wonders, and the tricks, I had seen these last two days.

  ‘They are. But that’s not all they are. There’s a lot of things about the Cecils you don’t know.’ I looked at him sharply. ‘But – that’s not what I wanted to say.

  ‘Jeanne, do you think of the future? No – for yourself, I mean, not Essex or the country.’

  I shook my head mutely. I tried not to think of it. I knew it was easier for a girl to be a boy than for a woman to be a man of full-bearded maturity. I knew I should be grateful for his concern, but I felt shy in his presence suddenly.

  ‘If I can help in any way –’ He broke off, uncertainly. ‘You could always join an actors’ company! Not much botanising to be done, except the hedgerow plants along the road, but a talent with a pen might come in handy.’ I laughed with him, relieved that the moment had passed. As we walked back to the house we talked idly, of the past more than the present. I asked after Ben, and he said the old actor had died, on the road, two years before. From the way he spoke, Martin had been with him on that last journey, and I was glad.

  He said there’d been more than one time he’d seen me, in the old days – that once or twice he’d seen me with Jacob at the booksellers behind St Paul’s. ‘Do you ever go there now? I do, when I get the chance, of a Saturday.’ He let the information hang in the air, as we turned back towards the house. We passed the maze, and he drew me inside it. You reached the centre easily: the path led just one way, and you had only to follow it.

  ‘Lord Burghley’s taste,’ Martin said, inconsequentially. ‘Did you know, now they’re planting mazes where h
alf the paths are dead ends? The whole point is to make you lose your way.’

  The moment was over. He began to tell me of his travels as an actor, and of other great houses around the country.

  When we got back to town, nothing there seemed to have changed, and if things had changed for me, no one knew it. We, Sir Robert’s household, stayed some days at Theobalds, though the royal party, with the actors’ company behind them, went back almost immediately. Sir Robert had things to order here: since his father died, Theobalds was now his property. The great house on the Strand had gone to his brother, and Sir Robert was preparing himself another across the street, hard by the Savoy, though in this close family the change of ownership hadn’t altered the household, or Sir Robert’s presence, to any real degree.

  As we rode back to town the dog roses were opening in the hedgerows, though a sharp wind made silver waves on the seas of barley like the ripple of fur on a noble’s cloak. London seemed stuffy on my return, and in that close stillness the thought of Martin Slaughter kept coming back to me.

  PART III

  … who seeketh two strings to one bow, they may shoot

  strong but never straight. And if you suppose that

  princes’ causes be veiled so covertly that no intelligence

  may bewray them, deceive not yourself: we old foxes can

  find shifts to save ourselves by others’ malice, and come

  by knowledge of greatest secret, specially if it touch our

  freehold.

  Letter from Elizabeth I to James VI of Scotland

  Weeds are always growing, the great Mother of all living

  Creatures, the Earth, is full of feed in her Bowels, and

  any stirring gives them heat of the Sun, and being laid

  near day, they grow.

  A New Orchard and Garden, William Lawson

  Jeanne

  July 1599

  I was happy in those next few weeks, and yet I was unsettled. I wasn’t at ease. I’d always thought of happiness as something calm and reassuring, like a warm coat on a winter’s day – the absence, for a while, of fear; a little pleasure, a new plant or a pasty; something interesting to chew on in my work. This was different. This was more like finding that a layer of my skin had been stripped away, so that everything I felt, I felt more sharply.

  I went to the booksellers’ row round St Paul’s churchyard the Saturday after we got back, and it was thin of company. The poor scholars were still there, in their shabby black, and the foreign visitors too, but the young lawyers from the Inns of Court had gone home for the harvest holidays, and the gallants snickering over the latest Italian translations – the ones with the special illustrations, that the shopmen brought out from under counters, quietly – were likewise in the country. I spotted Martin Slaughter quite easily. Spotted him, and then stopped dead for a moment feeling oddly shy. Seeing him as a stranger might do, slight and inconspicuous with his brown hair and brown doublet – until, I thought, you noticed something quick and definite in his movements. A kind of gallantry … Or was that just to my eye?

  I might almost have gone away that moment, but he turned and saw me – and beckoned, as if to an old friend, easily. He was leafing through a pile of new editions of some of the London plays, and expostulating on the cuts and errors in a way that made the bookseller eye him angrily. It was only later that I realised, looking back, he had been talking too much, too fluently – as if he were as nervous as I. He asked which stall I liked best, and I led him to the one with the great illustrated herbals, where a new barrel of the latest books came in regularly from the Low Countries. Afterwards, it seemed only natural that he should suggest we go to a nearby tavern, to sit outside in the summer warmth, and only natural for me to agree. It was the kind of thing I hadn’t often done, keeping myself one step away from those around as I had had to, and it came to me, with quite a different kind of warmth, that with a friend, someone who knew my past, there might be new pleasures open to me.

  We came to meet almost regularly on the booksellers’ row, though always without acknowledging that there was any more than chance, without anything so close to commitment as an appointment. Books can be a path to anywhere and so they were for Martin and me. Showing him the illustration of a herb, or a way of growing, I told him about Sundays in the garden with Jacob. To talk of the publisher Christopher Plantin, Jacob’s friend, who had died in Antwerp but whose illustrations lived on, was to talk of the Low Countries and of what had happened to the Protestant refugees who had remained there. Even now, I said little. But what I did say, I think he understood. Maybe it was his actor’s craft, to feel dead or invented tragedies as if they lived anew. Maybe it was something of his own experience; though England had looked peaceful to Jacob and to me, it had known its troubles just as we had in the countries across the sea. These last few years, it seemed, one could remember that more easily.

  Sometimes we walked; sometimes we sat, to watch the other people walking by. It was something I might once have dismissed as a waste of time, but for him it was a business to be taken seriously. He told me an actor must learn how to read the signs, so he can give an audience more about a character than mere words alone can ever say. He taught me to open my eyes – how this man walked bold, but had a thief’s brand on his hand, how the sailors in from foreign ports looked about them with as much bravado as curiosity. I learned, I suppose, that everyone has a story.

  Showing me the play texts, Martin told me of parts he’d taken, and a little of his own early years in the smooth fertile Hertfordshire country, a placid land that yet remembered dramas from when Catholic and Protestant princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, had squabbled over the territory. He told me tales, too, of life on the road – tales to make me laugh, mostly. I came to be aware of reticences – that there were things he was not telling me. But that was all right; I’d grown up with silences and with secrecies. Martin had shown me I was not alone in that, but open-mouthed frankness might still have disconcerted me.

  And yet behind the pleasure of those Saturdays, I had a growing unease. Sometimes his question, about the future, came back to me. It was one of those things of which I had managed not to think, and done it successfully. He never mentioned it again – I came to realise he was handling me warily, as one might a half-tamed animal lest it suddenly run away. But there was still a kind of challenge, not in anything he said but somehow in what he was. In what he was to me. I greeted that challenge almost resentfully.

  Sometimes we talked of the news on the streets – it was hard not to, in those weeks. As July wore on the reports from Ireland grew worse every day. They were raising more trained bands in the City. The tavern drinkers still cheered Lord Essex’s eventual victory, but the more sober heads – Martin said – were setting their faces against further demands, and lamenting the monies already spent.

  ‘You should hear his excuses,’ Martin said once, with a flash of what looked like real anger. It was the kind of feeling he showed only rarely. ‘In the spring his force wasn’t ready to campaign, or so he said. In the summer he was too busy on other matters to march to where he’s supposed to be. Now autumn’s almost on us, and I suppose he’ll be declaring we’re past the fighting season, see you next year, and anyone could tell you how well that will go down with her majesty. Anyone but his lordship, anyway.’

  He seemed well informed – I said as much, but he didn’t answer me directly. I suppose every ale-drinker was a bar-room general, though I wouldn’t have put Martin in that company. Some doubt must have showed on my face because ‘Actors hear things,’ he reminded me. ‘And when you think how many times I’ve waved a sword on stage, I swear they could give me charge of a company!’ I laughed, as I was supposed to, but it was a retreat, or so it seemed to me. And perhaps Martin’s nerves were a little on edge. As we left the tavern late, and set out through the darkening streets – only a few weeks past midsummer, but the evenings were drawing in already – he stopped, and grasped my arm suddenly. I d
idn’t know what he was going to say. For a single minute I thought he was going to kiss me – me, standing there in my doublet and hose. I wrenched my arm from his hand and almost ran down the street, calling an incoherent farewell behind me. I did not go to the booksellers the next Saturday.

  Katherine, Countess of Nottingham

  August 1599

  I’d thought the rows were bad enough before he even went to Ireland. That’ll teach me. He hadn’t reached his ship before the complaining letters started, all about how he’d gone armed before but not behind, meaning that we’d be stabbing him in the back. As if we haven’t had other things to think about while he’s been away! It was the last of July or near when the report came secretly to my husband that the Spanish were on the move again, and he sent it on to Master Secretary. It was the very next day when another of Essex’s complaints turned up: I suppose, to be fair, he could hardly have known it in advance, but it’s hard not to feel that young man has always been his own worst enemy.

  I knew the contents of that letter before the queen did; one learns how to arrange these things when you’ve lived in a palace as long as I have, but this time it was easy. The messenger was my own kinsman on my father’s side, a promising young Carey.

  Three months’ campaigning and what had he to show for it? Nothing, not a single real victory. Oh, he complains the rebels fight in woods and bogs, skirmish and run away. They’re armed by Spain, and more numerous than his troops, and he feels the lack of backing here at home. He’ll have heard that while he’s been away, Cecil has won mastership of the Court of Wards, and all that money Essex needs so badly.

  I think Charles almost sympathises with him, oddly – of course they have both campaigned for her majesty. I can’t say I do: a woman has different loyalties.