The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  ‘A pleasure, Master de Musset. Martin, shall we? That new place you promised to show me …’ And Martin was off behind him, with a stranger’s hasty bow to me, and another hard look I couldn’t understand. I was left standing there, more disturbed than I’d thought I could possibly be.

  I walked for a while. I didn’t know where I was going, but eventually I found I was circling the gardens outside the City. That wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I needed to eat. There was a tavern where I’d been with Martin several times – after all, they knew me there, and I knew the food. And why shouldn’t I dine there as well as anybody?

  I’d have had no chance to turn and run, he was watching out, and he sprang up as soon as he saw me.

  ‘Jeanne – thank God, I was afraid you wouldn’t come. Look, I’m sorry –’ But he broke off. Sorry for what, exactly? He seemed to realise that explanations would only get us into worse difficul-ties. With an air of lightness that was only slightly forced – he was an actor, after all – he began to talk of other things. The book he’d found, the unseasonable weather, and the news. Heaven knows, news wasn’t hard to come by.

  Everyone knew Lord Essex had fallen sick of the Irish flux; just as they knew Tyrone had taken up arms again in Ireland, at the end of the month’s treaty. One of the secret clerks had said Lord Essex’s illnesses came as easily as a whore’s kisses, and for just the same reason – adding that, this time, if he were hoping to move the queen, it wasn’t going to work. I opened my mouth to force myself to tell Martin Slaughter that – I couldn’t go on just nodding about the harvest, and I had a dim sense that if we spoke of his lordship, Martin might somehow help me to make sense of the mixture of feelings that were in me. But he forestalled me.

  ‘Master Cuffe, whom you met earlier – he’s one of Lord Essex’s men. In fact, he’s one of his foremost secretaries. Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, he used to be. It was who brought Lord Essex’s last letter back from Ireland.’ He was speaking not without effort, or so it seemed to me. And I was struggling to frame my reply.

  ‘A responsible position – especially in these times.’ I had to bite back other words. For God’s sake, why? When I’ve heard the disapproval with which you spoke of Essex before, why are you cosying up to his man, and why now are you sitting here speaking of him in this guarded way? I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’d had no training for this kind of thing in my life without society.

  ‘I must go. I’m glad to have seen you, Martin.’ He made no move to detain me. But he looked at me again, and this time I’d have sworn I could interpret it, as a plea. Or an apology.

  * * *

  One morning in early November, with the news from York House that Lord Essex was sicker, Sir Robert sent for me. I was to take a letter to York House, and give it into Lord Essex’s own hand. I was … He paused, as if uncertain what to say.

  The study window gave out onto the garden. He stood there, gazing towards the river, though the day was too thick to see clearly. ‘Tell me how he really is,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got a doctor’s report for every time he takes physic, but they’re the stew without the meat. I don’t doubt he’s fretted himself into high fever by now, but is there any more to it? He always was one who could die of a cold for thinking it was a catalepsy, as our old nurse used to say.’ I had almost forgotten that they had been boys together. But for Sir Robert the memories, good and bad, can’t ever have been far away.

  ‘Take him some fruit, as a token of my good will. Nothing raw if he’s got the flux. Pears in wine? Or some of that quince jelly? Tell them to give you whatever you want. See if you can find anything in the garden, maybe.’ He met my eyes briefly, and I might almost have thought he knew the pleasure the giving would be to me. Knew that the wide-eyed gabble in the streets, that Lord Essex was failing and the doctors despaired, had felt like something gnawing a hole in me. Hastily, Sir Robert gestured me to go, as if half ashamed of sounding so solicitous over the man who was supposed to be his enemy.

  I ordered the pears, and the jelly, and a bottle of the cordial of red rose hips, and a dish of crab apples baked in honey too. The beds in the garden were dug over by now, but I found a few sprigs of a bramble blooming late, and grey lavender spikes where the scent still lingered, and the first blue flowers of next year’s rosemary. Rosemary for remembrance. With fingers that trembled slightly in their haste, I bound them into a nosegay.

  At York House, things were more in order than they had been. Lord Essex had never been allowed to have his own servants join him, but now he was attended – guarded – properly. I could never have bluffed my way in, as I did that first day. Even with Sir Robert’s authority, I was stopped at the door by my lord Essex’s doctor, who lifted the cloth from the basket I carried and sniffed at the content suspiciously.

  ‘What do you want to do, boy – poison him?’ The word hung in the air between us like an accusation, and the doctor retreated hastily. ‘I meant, such indigestible foods, for a man in his lord-ship’s condition …’ He signed for a man to carry the delicacies away, no doubt to be enjoyed at his own dinner, but I clung obstinately to my little nosegay.

  ‘A token of Sir Robert’s goodwill.’ The doctor nodded, grudgingly.

  Inside the chamber, the air was foul. The servants had done what they could, but when the patient has voided, and voided again, the very hangings take up the smell of sickness, change the linen and the rushes as often as you may. The voice from the great bed was no more than a thread. ‘Janny?’

  I would hardly have known him, his cheeks were so fallen in. There were sores around his mouth, and his long hair hung limply. Under the watchful eyes of his attendants, he held out a hand for the letter, but his grasp was too uncertain to break the seal and he gestured me closer. His breath was hot and sour. ‘Read it to me.’

  The words themselves were nothing much. Sir Robert was grieved to hear of Lord Essex’s illness – wished to assure Lord Essex of his prayers and his friendship – hoped Lord Essex would soon be restored to health, as to her majesty’s most princely favour. He seemed to take them as routine – with disappointment, I thought, as a piece of mere court flummery. With a finger he brushed the flowers. ‘For me? From Sir Robert? Really?’ I shook my head dumbly. The ghost of his sweetest smile flickered over his face, and the bridle of pleasure seemed almost to lend him flush of strength. Absurd to think he could care that way for a mere nobody’s affection, but he’d always responded like a shy girl to flattery.

  ‘I give humble thanks to all my well wishers. Say as much to Master Secretary.’ He turned his face on the pillow, and the doctor hurried forward officiously. I made my way out into the street with my head in a whirl. In the pride of his strength and his ambition, Lord Essex had been able to turn my mind upside down. Now for the first time I had a presentiment that his weakness might give him an even stronger hold over me.

  When I went back to the house to make my report, they told me Sir Robert was at Whitehall with the court, and had left word I should make my report to him there. The corridors and the courtiers no longer held quite the terrors they once would have for me – I’d been here before, stepping soft behind some more experienced secretary. But I stuck close to the page as he led me through the maze. It was a rambling, old-fashioned rabbit warren of a place, courtyards sprouting literally hundreds of doorways giving onto poky rooms, the kind of rooms made for secrets – and for disappointment, it seemed to me. But as we thrust onwards into its heart, further than I had ever been before, the richness of the decorations made me gasp. It was like stepping into the pages of a missal.

  I checked when the page passed before me through the great hall, and the guards’ room, and to the doors of the very Presence Chamber. The boy, an impertinent scrap, contemptuously jerked his head for me to go on in. A throng of ladies and gentlemen were there, but among them to my relief I could see Sir Robert, talking to a middle-aged lady all in black, whose curls showed reddish under the back of her cap. Over her turned shoulder, he saw
me. I knew him well enough to read his moods by now, and he was not sorry to come over and speak to me. I told him what I’d seen and he nodded as if to say, yes, after all, just what he’d known already, when there came a rustle of skirts and the click of heels on the floor and a sharpening of the atmosphere, as if the very air itself had sprung to attention, to tell me that this heralded her majesty.

  I stood just inside the door, and lowered my eyes submissively. I tried to pretend I was part of the furniture, but of course she had no eyes for me.

  ‘Ah, Lady Scrope, as festive as ever, I see,’ she said in clear, cold tones as she swept past me, and the black-clad lady ducked her rusty head submissively. As her ladies followed hastily I heard an exasperated murmur – ‘Philadelphia …’ – spoken exasperatedly.

  I could see the flowery hems of the younger maids’ skirts, and hear the hiss and bubble of their whispered chatter, but the queen and Sir Robert spoke together in low tones at the far end of the room. After a few minutes I grew bolder and peeped up under my lashes, only to find that the queen was looking directly at me. Drop my gaze as fast as I might, I was still hooked, like a fish on a line, by the power of that hard black eye.

  Old she might be, and indeed, as she passed there had been the faintest whiff of decay. The image Lord Essex had conjured up for me had destroyed the illusion she was anything but an old woman, soon to die, and for the first time I truly understood the urgent squabbling, the need to secure a future, of those nearer at hand who lived with this knowledge every day. But nothing could take her force away.

  I rode back to Burghley House behind the Secretary, behind the guards who went everywhere with him these days. These were hard times to be Sir Robert Cecil on the London streets, or even to wear any trace of his livery. Rumours of Lord Essex’s sickness, of his close imprisonment, were on every corner and the people knew who they blamed. Mostly it appeared only in their sullen eyes, but occasionally some urchin, bolder than the rest, would catcall, or yell out something about ‘pen gents’ from the safety of the crowd. As we drew near the house, men were scrubbing at the wall and I cocked an eyebrow at a groom, enquiringly.

  ‘Yes, another one, this morning,’ he confirmed in an under-tone. ‘“Here lies the toad”, it said.’ We were beginning to get used to the graffiti.

  As we dismounted and the grooms came to the horses’ heads, I would have melted away, but a motion from Sir Robert stopped me. ‘Walk with me a little, in the garden,’ he said. ‘I need the fresh air to clear my head.’ To most people there would have been little to see except the bare shape of the borders, but he looked at the clipped hedges and fine raised earth of the neatly turned beds with a true gardener’s eye.

  His servants knew his habits; even in winter, the sand on the paths was freshly raked, and there hadn’t yet been a frost hard enough to make them bring the birds indoors from the aviary. A small bag of grain hung ready to hand and he flung a pinch to the twittering occupants, absent-mindedly.

  ‘He’s been writing to Scotland, you know.’ No need to ask who ‘he’ might be. I suppose in a way it should have been no surprise. Everyone knew that, of all the contenders, the Scots king had to be the best bet to succeed her majesty. I daresay there wasn’t a courtier or an officer of state whose mind’s eye didn’t turn that way. But even to say so aloud was treason, and for a private citizen to approach the head of a foreign power, in a matter of such magnitude, was worse than that – it was treachery.

  ‘Are you certain?’ I said it baldly, almost as if I spoke to an equal, but he didn’t reprove me. Although he didn’t answer, either, just passed me the grain and gestured at the aviary. A dozen sentences hung around my lips – Do you have proof ? and Surely he wouldn’t? and Now’s your chance to crush him, if you want to – but there seemed nothing I could safely say.

  After a minute he moved on, by the wall where in summer the peach tree bloomed, and where, on a warm evening, you could hear the laughing couples on the other side make their way up to the fields. Abruptly he paused, and though his grave face gave no sign, I felt his dismay.

  A robin lay at his feet, its feathers bright as on the aviary birds, but a stick had been driven through its red breast, heavy enough to carry it over the wall, if flung with sufficient force. The man whose name was often made into Robin gazed at it a second, summoning his calm, then stepped back towards the house without a word. It was I, left behind, whose eyes pricked with a sudden burn of sympathy.

  I grabbed the stick and would have thrown it back – but the more people who saw it, the more the insult would be a tavern story. Instead I seized a spade that a gardener had left and began digging a shallow grave, clumsily. I was too angry to think of the question I should have been asking. The news about Lord Essex and the Scots king – no doubt it was true. He’d never neglect such an opportunity. And Scotland was far enough away that maybe James would believe Lord Essex when he said he alone could rule the queen. Or maybe not. Everyone said the Scots king was canny. But – and it only came to me that night, when the call of the Watch had woken me – true or not true, prudence or treachery, why was Sir Robert telling me?

  Cecil

  October 1599

  He’s been writing to Scotland: well, of course he has. Cuffe must be putting something together every week, or nearly. Erratic in his behaviour Essex may be, but he’s not such a fool as to ignore what any ploughboy in the field could see, that her majesty cannot grace the throne forever, that change must come sure as night follows day. And I’m sure he’s loving it – a clandestine correspondence, with all its perfume of rebellion and of secrecy; a chance to preen himself again as England’s saviour, and for a new audience which hasn’t already seen through his games. James may take Essex at his own valuation – or nearly, everyone agrees that the Scots king is canny. But they also say good-looking young men can hope he’ll look on them indulgently.

  That could never have been my way to appeal to him. I would not want it to be. But any question of approach is for the future: for now, the faintest question of it is impossible. Ruination if it came to the queen’s ears – though just occasionally the dizzying thought takes me, what if the queen is one step before me? What if she knows we are all calculating the future, and it’s from the safety of that knowledge that she allows herself to indulge her folly? For it is folly, for an old and childless monarch to scream that to speak of her successor is to set her winding sheet before her eyes; and yet her majesty is the furthest thing from a fool; and so logically … I push the thought away, for there is no profit in it. Even if I could safely send letters north I wouldn’t do it; not to appear as second-best claimant to the king’s attentions at a moment when he is dazzled by Essex, when Essex will have told him I am the enemy.

  My father could never understand that I am a gambling man. I told him it gives me good access to the gallants at court to play, and to play high. He nodded, grudgingly. But one thing gambling has taught me: I know when the player who sits out a round may rise the winner at the end of the evening, and I know other things too. I know the value of a wild card, and that’s what I have been offering Essex, ever since I sent Jeanne to Wanstead that day.

  Oh, the chances of its paying dividend could never be rated high, but in this game you scatter your bread upon the waters and if one crumb in a thousand comes back to you as a loaf, you’re happy. There are spies informing upon spies in the Essex household, but knowledge can never be too dearly bought, as Walsingham used to say. Not that the gathering of information is all of it, of course: information, disinformation; lies to draw truths, sprats to catch mackerel; and the faint fishy reek of scandal to be spread, maybe. We can use Jeanne’s innocence as well as her isolation, and perhaps even the uncertainty over her sex. I could have had no excuse to send a girl to Lord Essex, openly; but he would never have treated a real boy so, at the tourney. We can use Essex’s charm as well as his vanity: use your opponent’s own strengths to overthrow him, the sergeant used to tell the boys – the other boys – whe
n they practised in the armoury.

  You can always use charm, and in more ways than one. You can always use vanity. My father could count on Walsingham’s spies: now Walsingham’s daughter is married to Lord Essex, and I have to do things differently.

  So: James. I do not move, I wait. I wait and see. It’s what my father would expect of me. On his deathbed he laid it on me as a charge, to ensure a smooth transition for our country. But it was not rash action he had in mind: nothing ill-considered, nothing hasty. Rather an onward-looking gardener’s eye, to see that the beds which hold the future’s crop are dug and seeded carefully. Only – I do wonder sometimes, how it would be, to live in the present, unquestioningly. To know that the future is out of your hands, as surely as a gambler when he turns over the cards, or a milkmaid who’s been with a boy, and can’t do anything else but wait for the missed courses and the tender breasts that mean an unwanted pregnancy.

  Jeanne

  November 1599

  Queen Elizabeth had sat on the throne of England since before I was born and I suppose we had all come half to believe the legend of her immortality. But sometimes, it’s as if your eyes have been opened to a particular subject and suddenly, that’s all you can see. Of course I’d thought about the future – the future after Queen Elizabeth – who hadn’t? The ploughboy in the field maybe. But somehow, underneath the speculation, there must have lain a vague sense that these things were sorted out somewhere. That someone knew what the answer would be. The king of Scots, the Earl of Hertford’s son, or my lord of Shrewsbury’s niece. Even, God forbid, the Infanta of Catholic Spain, and that thought had seemed to bring it closer to me. Seemed almost to make me think that everyone had a part to play.