Well! Now at last the country has seen what my husband can do, I’m happy to say. Three days after that first secret warning, we all heard that a hundred Spanish ships were on the way, and as August broke the town was in a panic, chains down across the roads and closing the gates to the City. And who did they look to to defend them? Charles. Yes, even her majesty. Appointed lieutenant and captain general over all forces south of the Trent, with powers to defeat invasion and rebellion by whatever means he saw fit. Declare martial law, punish disorder at his own discretion, even make statutes, as long as they were necessary to govern the army. That’s what the queen does when she really has confidence in somebody, I tell Lord Essex, silently. When she is certain of their loyalty. And the army Charles pulled together at Tilbury! Fifty thousand men and forty ships, all from nowhere in less than three weeks. That’s what the people of this country can do when they actually trust somebody, for all Lord Essex is the one with the easy popularity.
Of course there were naysayers. At one point there were rumours the queen was dying; there were even rumours that Charles, if you please, had whipped up the panic, to show Lord Essex, the absent hero, ‘that others could be followed as well as he’. My sister Philadelphia, always standing up for Essex, sniffed that Charles was always one to make a mountain out of a molehill – but that was after we’d heard that the Spanish fleet had sailed on by, to deal with the Dutch in another country. It’s the fourth invasion scare in hardly more years, and I suppose it’s got to feel like the boy who cried wolf. But of course my husband is right when he says that one fair day should not breed opinion it will never be foul weather again.
I told Philadelphia, what a pity her husband can’t be here to help us – but then again, when you think of the turmoil Lord Scrope has managed to create in his governance of the Border countries … She blushed – we’ve both got the scarlet blush of the red-haired woman – and then I looked at her as if something had just caught my eye, and said what a pity that red hair like ours shows the grey so easily. Petty, in the context, maybe.
You’d have thought Essex might have been quiet, at least, while all this was going on. Maybe given us a little Irish victory. Instead, it was hardly a week later that the news came. He stood opposite Tyrone’s army at last, and what was the outcome? A truce treaty! He should have brought us Tyrone’s head on a spike, not splashed across a ford to shake hands with the enemy, in view of both their watching armies. And we’re to believe that, in some mysterious way, it’s for the good of the country? Tell that to someone who hasn’t been watching court quarrels so long. My enemy’s friend is my enemy. That’s a maxim I learned from her majesty.
I didn’t see the letter with that news. That one was brought not by a Carey but by Essex’s man, one Cuffe. Still, the queen’s anger knew no concealment, and I am left to wonder that his lordship shows his hand so clearly – or, whether the hand there now before him was quite the one he had meant to play? I’m not surprised that his friend Bacon warned him against Ireland, and has now abandoned Essex’s cause entirely. And maybe, maybe, I’m not surprised that, when his lordship clamoured for the Irish job, Sir Robert Cecil helped to make it a possibility.
There was some satisfaction in knowing he didn’t want to go, not really. But he’d bragged of being the right man for the job so often, he could hardly complain when they took him at his word. It was a winning situation, you might say. If Essex pacifies Ireland, well then England has her victory. If he fails miserably – well, scales and balances, it may take him down a peg or two. Every day, I find myself growing in admiration for Master Secretary.
It’s barely a month later and I don’t know what shocked me more – what happened this morning, or what I heard just now, as I came up through the pantry. We’d hardly got the queen out of bed when we heard the uproar, outside her very door. I remember we all froze there – her in her shift, with her hair, what there is of it, every which way, her wig on the stand, and the whalebone bodies laid out on the bed. There was one girl kneeling on the floor ready to roll the silk stocking on, another standing with the sleeves ready, and we all stuck as we were, like parts of the same clockwork toy run down.
As he stood there, the violence of the door slamming behind him made the dried cowslip blossoms dance in the bowl of white wine – nothing like it to drive wrinkles away – and I saw his eye light on a pile of stained brown bandages, like something off a mummified corpse. Soak them in solution of lady’s mantle and it keeps the breasts firm, but I’ll admit they don’t look pretty.
Even Philadelphia looked thoroughly startled. I suppose, as much as anything else, it was the sheer incredulity. Almost half a century on the throne and now it comes, the sound we were always waiting for in the early days; the sound of men outside the door – shouting, angry.
He stank – that was the first thing I noticed. He must have been in the saddle since he landed from Ireland, and stewing himself into a muck sweat every inch of the way. But he went down onto his knees, babbling some nonsense about making her understand, and I hardly heard the words but the gesture would do, he was on his knees, no sword in his hand. I suppose it was then we all began to breathe again, just barely.
She’s at her best in an emergency, of course – always was, from a girl. She held out her hand and she spoke to him kindly, and seemed not even to know what she looked like, she who manages these things so carefully. I think I admired her then as much as I ever have – to sit there as bare of grace as a plucked chicken and make believe she didn’t feel diminished in any way. When she told him she would see him later he went away quite quietly, leaving her to face the day, and us to shut the doors on the whole court outside, gawping, as well they may. Oh, of course the insult to her hurts. I think we all felt it, even the young girls. To have her caught out like this, it lowers us all. In this world, a woman needs her mystery. They say the queen has two bodies: as a mortal, and as a monarch, one step from a divinity. What I say is, when your mortal body has just been exposed like this, it’s hard to take comfort in a theory.
But, all of that, that’s not what most shocks me.
As we stood for that moment at the open chamber doors, as they led Lord Essex away, I saw a man in Howard livery, and made sure he caught my eye. He slid out after Essex’s party – we don’t keep fools in our employ. I snapped at the girls to put the queen’s combing cloth about her shoulders, and to use the box comb carefully, and that this time they might get a quill and clean the brushes properly. I was making more bustle than I had to, I suppose, but it relieved me. I waited long enough to see that Philadelphia wasn’t supervising the choice of ribbons as she should. My sister has not the brains of a coney. ‘Lady Scrope!’ I said sharply, in public reproof, and she started, and signed to a maid where the ribbon knots should be pinned on the gown, for when the queen was ready. Then I said her majesty might wish to dress her head with the other pearl border, and made excuse to slip away. By now I reckoned the servitor and his news might be ready.
For the most part his words were reassuring. Essex himself, or so he claimed, had only ever planned to speak with the queen, though some in his party had talked more wildly. They’d met with Lord Grey on the way, so the man said, quite casually, and they’d tried to hold him back, to keep the advantage of surprise, but Lord Grey had got away from them and galloped ahead to the palace to warn Master Secretary.
The words seemed to burn into my brain. He’d galloped ahead to warn the Secretary, and what did the Secretary do with the warning? Nothing. How far ahead of the Essex crew had Lord Grey been? Only a few minutes, maybe. Yes, but how many minutes does it take, to run from the Secretary’s chamber towards her majesty’s, to call the guards – to shout a warning from one man to the other. It’s not even as though we were in Whitehall – Nonsuch is a small palace, for all that it’s so pretty.
Oh, I’m sure Cecil knew or guessed there was no real danger. I can’t believe he’d have risked her majesty. But for all that I’ve said myself it would be best if the queen saw soon wh
at Essex could do, for all that, this still shocks me. I’d thought myself so shrewd, so awake on every suit. Now I feel like a child, groping my way through a maze, while above my head others, more grown up than I, see their way clearly.
October 1599
There was a knot of serving men blocking the gravel path through the garden as I came in to work at Burghley House on Monday. Usually they kept their distance from the clerks, but today any hearer was better than none, and one of the more impertinent boys spun away from the group long enough to speak to me.
‘Did you hear? They’ve got him at York House, just up the road, in the Lord Keeper’s custody. Lord Essex, silly!’ he added. He must have thought I hadn’t understood, but behind the blankness of my face I felt as if all the barrels of the lock inside my head were suddenly clicking open. I hadn’t thought much of Lord Essex these last weeks. Well, months, maybe. When men – when Martin Slaughter – spoke of him, even, it was almost as if they were speaking of a public stranger, as if there was a safe wall between the me I had become and the day at Wanstead, the moment at the tourney.
But I hadn’t heard Martin Slaughter speak of anything, of course, since that August day, that evening in the alley. I hadn’t seen or heard of him, and it felt almost as though those few weeks of companionship we’d shared had been swept away. If I were hiding myself, then events had helped me. No one could expect you to stroll around booksellers while London was preparing for a siege, and in the Secretary’s house we were all too busy to go gallivanting, anyhow. On the heels of that reflection, I seemed to see Martin Slaughter’s face, a faint look of hurt in his brown eyes. As I flinched away, my mind’s eye fell greedily on Lord Essex’s image, with the blind determination of a baby grasping at the breast. Only a few hundred yards away!
I knew I had to see him. It had been six months, almost to the day, since he’d gone away and now, as if to make up for the summer’s disloyalty, my very gut seemed to have kept the tally. I might not get into his presence. But I had to try, even if all I got to do in the end was to sit in the courtyard with the soldiers and their stories. If he’d returned in triumph, I might have been content to stand at the back of the crowds as they cheered, but he’d returned a captive, under the queen’s displeasure, and that seemed to open a space for me.
A few drops of rain started to spit down as I turned towards the gate and I blessed them. They gave me the excuse to pull my cap low enough to hide my eyes. I’d have staked a guinea that panic stared from them as surely as from a doe’s when the hunts-men hold her down and bare her throat for the knife, or a horse’s, when they fit the headpiece on before the tourney.
The luck was with me. As I turned in to York House the porter’s lodge was crowded with men and reeking with beer, and a bubble of frantic laughter rose up in my throat. Of course – they’d want, just like everybody else, to talk over the events of the last few days. The porter jerked a piece of sacking over the barrel as he turned towards me, caught out and ready to be surly. I just held up my satchel, bulging with papers, and let the badge on my cloak speak for me.
‘It’s all right – you can let him through. It’s Master Secretary’s boy.’ It was a clerk of the house who called out from the back, and he added something under his breath that made the rest of the men laugh drunkenly.
The courtyard was still quiet – I thought that when my lord’s baggage and his servants really started arriving, that porter had better put his head under the pump and get ready for the fray. I didn’t know the house, but they’d have put him upstairs and at the back: honourable quarters – just in case he was back on top of the dung heap tomorrow – and far enough from the street that any supporters couldn’t get to him too easily. A lad with a bucket pointed me to the right staircase, and the badge and the papers were enough to make the guard open the door. I stopped dead inside. I didn’t even know why I was here, never mind what I was going to say.
He was alone, thank God. He showed no surprise at seeing me. I suppose the appearance of one of the Secretary’s servants really didn’t rank high in the surprises of these days. He just held out his hand, for the papers he supposed I’d brought. It was a minute before he even recognised me.
‘Why – Jeanne.’ He said it like a man waking slowly from a dream. ‘Janny …’ I gazed at him dumbly. So much had happened in Ireland, yet on the surface he didn’t look much different and that’s what I blurted out, indignantly.
‘Oh, Janny,’ his eyes creasing up with laughter, ‘ten months, and battles, and high politics and the queen’s displeasure, and what a thing to say. I’ve had the Council on at me for three days now about Tyrone. Surely there’s something other than my looks you’re supposed to ask me?’
‘Is it true, that you came back from Ireland without permission? And that you shoved into her majesty’s chamber early and found her …’
‘Yes! Every bit of it! They hadn’t even cleared away the pot she used to piss in. I felt like the fox who’d got shut in the hen house. Mistress Russell shrieked as though I’d violated the Vestal Virgins’ shrine, and I thought my Lady of Nottingham was going to make the sign of the cross at me.’
‘How did she look?’ I seemed to have got stuck on a loop of trivialities, but it was what everyone wanted to know. When you’ve spent a lifetime gazing at an image of jewels and face paint, and being told it’s an icon of beauty, the idea of pulling down the conjurer’s screen and showing how the trick is worked brings out the wicked schoolboy in everybody.
‘The queen? Old.’ He’d sobered suddenly. ‘If you want the truth, I wouldn’t have recognised her at once – not from behind. They hadn’t got her wig on, and there was just this short, grey stubble. In her nightgown, without the dress and the jewellery, it could have been an old man sitting there.’ His eyes flicked up at me.
‘You know she’ll never forgive you.’
‘What, for the treaty? No, I tell you –’ He’d explained it all to the lords. He seemed to have forgotten he had no need to justify himself to me.
‘Not the treaty – for having seen her like that.’ He gazed at me uncomprehendingly. ‘No woman would.’ I could see him registering slowly that this was one area where I could speak with authority. But he shrugged it away.
‘She always forgives me.’ He jumped up and began striding around the room. An inkwell on the desk crashed to the floor: the very force of his convictions must make him clumsy. The guard stuck his head around the door in alarm, but Essex waved him off, ignoring the spreading stain on the floorboards. The servants would curse, when they tried to scrub that one away.
‘She’s got to forgive me.’ He was off now, talking wildly, half to himself, about the queen’s enemies, how everyone was against him but they’d all see, how he was the only one who gave a toss for the country. The words hardly registered, everybody knew the theme, and truth to tell it was hard to take it more seriously than when old Nan down the street used to start yelling about how the end of the world was nigh. It was the kind of thing they came on and roared in a play. But not for Lord Essex. His face was red, and he was sweating slightly. I smelt a strange acrid tang on his breath as he grabbed my shoulders and rounded on me.
‘Whose sake brought you here? Is it for Cecil – or for me?’ When I didn’t answer, he shook me. I saw my master’s face in my mind’s eye, knowing eyes under those arched brows. It seemed to make no demands, to leave the judgement to me.
‘Me. I mean, my own sake. I’m here for myself.’ It seemed to satisfy Lord Essex – or at least, to make him lose interest in me.
It was time to get out. I didn’t know what I’d come for, but I’d been wrong: this was a different Essex from the man at Wanstead, or at the tourney. And at any moment, someone was going to come along who wouldn’t fall back in awe at the mere sight of a handful of papers. Someone who would query my presence later, in silken tones, to the Secretary. At the door, I turned.
‘My lord – if there’s ever anything I can do.’ I didn’t even know what I meant,
but he seemed hardly to hear me, and just as well, maybe. Later, down the road in an empty wine shop, with a beaker of mulled ale to still the tremble in my legs, I remembered that promises of loyalty to Lord Essex had a way of coming home to roost. They should not be given lightly.
Back at work, Sir Robert set me to translating a new volume on herbs that he’d been sent from France, though the litany of vervain and tansy, mallow and chamomile didn’t soothe me as it usually would. I was relieved that he didn’t say anything about Lord Essex – but then why should he? It was only much later I realised the guard on the door probably took extra pay to keep his ears open, and the Secretary knew everything already.
As the days passed and autumn edged towards winter, and the chill began to stick out under the late sun like the ribs under an alley cat’s fur, the tavern talk was still all of Lord Essex, and of how he was growing sicker in captivity, and whether he’d be out of custody for the tilt this Accession Day.
There came a Saturday when I couldn’t resist the booksellers any longer. And in any case, I knew I was being silly. Had been silly, in the alley that day. And there were some references in that new herbal I didn’t understand, and maybe I’d find something else that could help me … At any rate, that’s what I told myself.
My heart gave a queer leap when I saw his back in that brown doublet. Only a turned shoulder and a cap, but I had no doubt that it was he. I had time to notice the cloth was getting shabby before I reached him and, tentatively, put a hand on his arm. He spun around and for a second I saw warm gladness in his eyes before something more complicated took its place.
‘Jan!’ This time, he pronounced it harder than he usually did, so the boy’s name came out quite clearly. The name everyone else called me. ‘How nice to see you again. Master Cuffe, might I present Master de Musset?’ I hadn’t even noticed the man standing beside him – why should I? But now I found myself making a hasty bow to a lanky man in black, who barely acknowledged me. I had time to eye him while Martin was explaining that he and I had met here before, that I was a fellow book lover though our tastes differed occasionally. He was speaking as if I were the most ordinary acquaintance, but I couldn’t blame him for that, after last time, I thought miserably. And how did I expect him to introduce me, anyway, me with my cropped hair and clerk’s outfit? It might have been different if this Cuffe had been another actor, but somehow I knew he had nothing to do with that all-forgiving company. A pale face and somehow puffy under the tall-brimmed black hat, an air of self-consequence. Until his eyes fell on my livery button, he hardly looked at me.
The Girl in the Mirror Page 12
