The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  Now, not only did every tavern conversation half heard seem to contain an illicit whisper, but I truly understood for the first time how anxious, how ambitious, how afraid all the nobles were – the ones too highly placed to hide their heads in a crowd, the ones with most to lose. Yes, even – especially – the Secretary.

  A new king, or queen, might seek new advisers. The race would be to those who had offered their support early. Yet who was more firmly barred from offering support than he who was tied to the old regime most closely? It must be like one of those baitings, where they tie the bear so tight he can’t even fight against the dogs. Or one of those dreams, where you can see the danger coming, but it’s as if you’re mired in quicksand, and can’t run away.

  I said as much to Martin Slaughter, sitting inside the tavern, this time, driven in by the threat of rain. This was the first Saturday I’d seen him without Master Cuffe at his side (yes, I had been keeping watch) and I was determined to make the most of the opportunity. But it seemed to me, sadly, that we were glad, now, of a subject of conversation outside ourselves. As I spoke, he looked at me – what? I almost thought, contemptuously. That, or as if he felt sorry for me. I suppose I had been slow on the uptake. I suppose I didn’t grasp as much as I should of the world around me. In my confusion, I almost said that his friend Master Cuffe must know all about that problem, but I bit the words back as they rose to my lips. Just as well I did – almost as I began speaking, a dark shadow materialised behind me.

  ‘Martin – are you ready?’ I don’t think Master Cuffe even glanced at me. A tiny spark of anger rose in me. I didn’t have much sense of my own importance, but it was too much to be ignored this way.

  ‘You have an appointment, Martin? You should have told me.’ Now Cuffe did flick his eyes down to me.

  ‘Master Slaughter is taking a role in a very special new play,’ he informed me, and my tiny bubble of pride was pricked, like the pigs’ bladders boys blow up and explode on fairground day. He hadn’t told me.

  ‘Oh, you should have said. I must come to see it.’ Now Martin looked embarrassed, quite definitely, and it was Master Cuffe who answered, shortly.

  ‘It’s a private theatre – near Blackfriars. You’ll have heard of them, no doubt, but they’re only for the gentry.’

  Martin had leapt to his feet when Cuffe arrived. Now, silent, he allowed himself to be ushered away.

  The news from York House was always worse. Lord Essex could only be lifted from his bed long enough for the servants to change the sheets soaked with black voided matter. Lord Essex was so sick his doctors despaired; and the preachers in the London pulpits offered prayers for his recovery. The queen didn’t like that, so they said. She’d never been a woman who wanted to share her place in the sun, and now, when so much in life had left her, she clung onto the love of her people, jealously. But she sent her own doctors to him: teams of them – a sign she still cared, surely?

  ‘A sign she prefers a man when he’s beneath her, not on top,’ said the gangling clerk, grinning bawdily.

  Katherine, Countess of Nottingham

  29 November 1599

  I swear, now I see the queen in the cold winter sunlight, that black satin sleeve looks positively faded, and as I stand behind her chair, my face, I may trust, as expressionless as ever, there is an angry litany running through my head of what I’ll say when I have the maids alone.

  Must I go down into the park myself, I’ll say, and pull the ivy off the trees? And then mash the leaves until the rinsing water runs dark – or is it just possible that one of you could see the laundresses do their work properly? I can see in my mind’s eye the pout there’ll be on each young face, but they won’t voice their thoughts, not in front of me. Mind you, her majesty won’t be wearing much more black this season, or not if I have anything to say about it. We’ve got enough crows at court already.

  If Lady Essex wants to wear mourning while her husband is in prison, well, I suppose I’ve nothing to say. He is her husband, after all, and the poor girl with a baby on the way. But Philadelphia! What cause has she to go into mourning, pray? – and then to go round telling everybody Lord Essex’s troubles have taken her joy in living away. I suppose I may be thankful she didn’t take it upon herself to spell out to the queen precisely why she feels – I trust I have her words right – that while virtue and valour lie smitten to the heart, it is time to mourn for the country. I told her, if she wasn’t careful people would be saying she was just another old woman fallen for a handsome young face, and she pretended to look shocked and to hush my mouth, as if I need lessons in discretion from the likes of her, as if I’d be meaning her majesty. And then she said, with that little dazzle of conscious daring on her face, the one she had as a child when she knew she was being naughty, that that’s what the men do so why shouldn’t we, and she hadn’t seen Emilia around court so much recently. And I had to hold my hands hard not to slap her, for we all know my father had Emilia Lanier in keeping the years before he died but to mock like that at his memory … And then she said, how is Charles, by the way? I told her, with forty far behind it was time to put off these young girl’s tricks, and she said I’d never been young, anyway. My sister is a flighty woman. I was never able to be flighty. Those six years in age I have over her feel more like something she has over me. Six years, just the length of the reign of old Queen Mary, so that I grew up in the dark days, the burning days, when anyone with Boleyn blood in their veins walked fearfully, while she stepped straight out from the schoolroom into our own queen’s first heyday. Any disturbance in the court sees her darting above it, zestful as a gadfly. It’s enough to make me wish that husband of hers would come down from his precious northern castle occasionally and give her something else to think about: all these years of marriage she’s had and just the one baby.

  These last few weeks, the queen has been calling for Philadelphia to sit up late with her as often as for me.

  I couldn’t believe it when Lady Warwick told me where they’d been yesterday. I thought everything was as it should be. Tomorrow the queen will have her complaints against Lord Essex read out, and it will be Charles’ chance to have his say. He’ll be able to tell the world that if he’d had the army Lord Essex was given, he could have marched it clear to Spain, as he has so often said to me. I could have sworn the queen was as annoyed by Philadelphia’s folly as I am myself: she’s certainly been speaking of it despitefully. But then to go out on the river with just Lady Warwick, and to have herself rowed down to York House privately. Lady Warwick swears they didn’t even get to Essex’s sickroom, in the end, just walked in the garden with the Lord Keeper, and came away quite quietly, but that’s almost worse in a way. Well, no, not worse, but it makes the queen look like a lovesick laundry maid, or one of those laughable suitors in the old songs who just wanted to be near their beloved and probably wouldn’t have known what to do about it if they were wedded and bedded decently.

  She’d said that if Lord Essex had been her own son she’d have had him shut up in the highest tower in England for his wicked folly. When the wife of one of Lord Essex’s crew – Lady Harington, it was – tried to excuse her husband’s part in it all, she said that no doubt Lady Harington was doing her wifely duty, but that she was the queen and she had her duty to her husband the country. Now this. It makes her look foolish. It makes me feel foolish, as if there are things about the queen I’ve failed to understand. As if there are things that are closed to me. And the worst of it is, I see Philadelphia’s hand, even though she may not have been in the boat with her majesty.

  What, my sister intercedes for Essex, and Essex has become the proposer of James, and next thing we know we have a king who owes his crown to Philadelphia’s meddling? All my life I’ve been careful to stand a little apart, to ask few favours of her majesty. It is one reason why she trusts me. But this – I’ve tried never to have much truck with fear, or no more than any woman with children must do. No truck with the foolish fears, at least. We who grew up
in the middle of this century knew there were enough real dangers to endure, without going out to meet ideas halfway. But now I find myself fearful, and I do not quite know why. I do not know which thought rattles me more: that the queen may still have a foolish heart for Essex, or that there may be sense in Philadelphia’s folly.

  Cecil

  30 November 1599

  I look on it as one of my advantages that I never make the mistake of underestimating her majesty – unlike so many others, unlike even my father, maybe. He spoke to her always as an elder, however respectfully – I must frame my words more carefully. But care comes naturally to me. And I am aware that I have never known for certain how much she is really – was really? – under Essex’s spell, or whether she dices with danger as one leans over the side of a ship, half dreaming the next big crash of the waves might carry you away. Or, as one stakes one’s last card at the tables, maybe.

  When I said that to Lizzie once, she looked at me as if I were missing something important – almost pityingly. I am reluctant to take onto my back the burden of doubt such a thought would load on me, but better that than really to have failed to understand. The queen has two bodies, and one is frail and mortal, all too surely. If it is sense enchantment we are talking here, the sheer power of his long body, then I can make reckoning, whether or not I understand. And there are other things I do understand: I understand that the queen, that any woman, has fears that may be hidden from me.

  I have never been a man who has much truck with fear; not like Essex with his suspicious mind, and his imagination’s tyranny. Dangers are real and present and all around us, and I see them clearly, as my father trained me to do. But by the grace of God, rewarding our own uttermost efforts, we can prevail against them and the world work out the ordained way.

  Oh, I understand fear, as any effective statesman must do: I have doled it out in judicious measure, as a doctor might a pill – spread whispers about our enemies, had a witness shown the rack – but its conquest, in myself, has been my victory. Still the thought of the queen and Essex makes me uneasy, makes me wonder what wheels have been turning where even I cannot see. Makes me wonder – just faintly, in moments of fatigue, in the night – whether I and my like have got things wrong, and that thought does frighten me.

  Jeanne

  December 1599

  The more word spread of my lord Essex’s illness, the more the people in the streets grumbled he’d been treated harshly.

  ‘Held in close confinement without even a trial, shows they know they’ve got nothing against him. Why, you wouldn’t treat a dog that way.’

  That must be why the queen had her complaints against him read out, and every member of the Council, from the Secretary to the Lord Admiral, had their bit to say. That he had mismanaged the Irish campaign, that he had wasted a fortune in public money, and made a shameful treaty with the Irish leader. But in the clerks’ room I had to listen to even darker stories. I’d taken to dropping in there at the end of the day, with a flagon of warm ale from the inn on the corner. The old clerk cracked a scribe’s joke about Greeks and gifts, but he let the spicy heat melt his discretion away.

  There were letters – he said – decoded in the utmost secrecy, from agents in Ireland who suggested Lord Essex had been something more than clumsy. That it wasn’t just Tyrone had been one too many for him, and that he’d let himself be manoeuvred into that foolish treaty – that the friendship between them was of older date, that when Lord Essex was sent to Ireland he already had an alliance with the man he was supposed to defeat, and maybe even ideas what he could do if he struck a deal for that man’s army. I’d always seen him as a mouse of a man, with eyes grown rheumy and little wizened paws to hold his papers, and I’d come to grow fond of him over the months, but now I must have gazed at him as if he’d bared a rat’s fangs.

  ‘What, made a fool of you too, boy, has he?’ He said it almost jeeringly, though his face was turned away. I answered something so pompous I could have learned it from a prayer book, about being horrified at such perfidy, and he bared yellow teeth and snuffled into his mug disbelievingly.

  * * *

  There came a day after the middle of the month when, having been out at Twickenham viewing a new consignment of plants Master Gerard had ordered, I was making my way back to the horse ferry near Whitehall through the clammy yellow light at the fading of the day. As I rode east it seemed to me that there were more crowds gathered than was usual for a week day and, now I thought of it, surely as I’d come up from the village to the south I’d heard the ghost of bells tolling on the wind. I kicked the horse to go faster, and leant forward anxiously. At the great house there was no more bustle than usual – or no more than I could be sure wasn’t just my fancy, but I hurried to the clerks’ room just the same. The gangling boy was there, with his loose wide mouth and the shiny-faced pleasure he always seemed to show in others’ misery. He raised a mug in a mocking toast.

  ‘What, you come back to join the mourning party?’

  I froze. It seemed to me my face must have ceased to function the way it normally did, but luckily he went on, oblivious.

  ‘You’ve missed a fine day of it, trekking all that way out after a few new daisies. Some fool spread the story his lordship had finally shat himself to death, and they’ve been ringing the bells all over London.

  ‘Oh, it’s not true,’ he added, regretfully. ‘But the rumours, and the counter rumours, and the wailing in the streets – you can guess how well that went down with her majesty. Sir Robert’s been off to the palace, and I doubt he’ll be back today.’ He giggled, and drank again. It had become a funny story. I raised a hand, as if to gesture ‘I give up’ or ‘Tell me another one’, and turned away. I think I managed the ghost of a grin but it didn’t matter, he wasn’t really looking at me.

  As I walked back to my lodging I was worrying, like a dog with a bone, at two distinct feelings inside of me. One was a shudder for what might have been. I’d had the tale with the truth, the fever with the medicine, but there was still a shiver there for what might have been. I was glad I had gone to Twickenham that day. But there was maybe, too, just a faint cold surprise, like a powdering of frost, that the thought of a world without Lord Essex didn’t touch me more deeply.

  The next day I found out what did touch me: nothing here I could even pretend to find funny. I was walking in to work in the morning when I recognised the voice behind me. Sure enough it was Master Cuffe, with Martin Slaughter a pace behind him, like a lackey. We all came to a halt, of course, and this time even Master Cuffe deigned to acknowledge me with a nod, though he went on with what he’d been saying to Martin.

  ‘… and now everyone can see. Why, there were women sobbing in the streets as though it were the queen herself had passed away.’

  Martin and I both blenched. No one who wanted to keep their ears spoke openly, in the streets, about death and her majesty in the same breath, but there was an air of barely contained excitement about Master Cuffe, and he swept on regardless.

  ‘I told his lordship it just showed how the people feel about him, and as you yourself said, Martin’ – he nodded, condescendingly – ‘every actor knows there’s one moment when he has to step out on stage and make his presence felt, and if you don’t seize it you’ll be stuck forever on the sidelines of the play.’

  I looked at Martin in quick horror, but he wouldn’t catch my eye. He was nodding at Cuffe, almost sycophantically. What had he been saying, what was this role Lord Essex was supposed to play? We’d talked about this, we both understood deep in our gut that what mattered in real life wasn’t drama and glory, not if blood in the streets was the price you had to pay. We both agreed. Didn’t we? Cuffe must have mistaken his meaning – sure enough, Martin was holding out a restraining hand and I breathed again. He’d explain that he’d only been talking for talk’s sake, God forbid anyone should take it seriously. But no –

  ‘Henry’ – Henry? – ‘not here. You never know who might be listeni
ng.’ This was worse. This meant for sure they weren’t just talking generalities. And then Martin put his hand on Cuffe’s arm, to turn him away from me. From me. I went on to Burghley House deeply uneasy – yes, and more than uneasy. I was angry.

  We shared a camaraderie these days, we Secretary’s men. One or two of the brighter sparks even took to sporting a quill pen through the lacing of their cloak. Pen gents, were we, and despised by those who liked their lords all hot for death or glory? Well, we’d see who laughed loudest in the end, wouldn’t we? I laughed along with that, too, and it wasn’t altogether a lie. My thoughts of Lord Essex didn’t permeate, quite, the rest of my life. They were like some dangerous animal I kept in another room, and had to feed occasionally.

  The animal could live as well off curses as kindness; grew fat on disapproval and jealousy. As Christmas drew near, we heard Lady Essex had been allowed to see her husband – had hung around the court, dressed in mourning weeds, until the queen took pity. We heard his sister visited too; and if ever I’d fantasised making one in the group around his bedside, that news killed the foolish daydream in me. I’d seen her at court, swishing by in a fanfare of pearls and lace, and lawn so fine her beauty shone through it. She hadn’t noticed me – another dun clerkly mouse – but it made me uneasy to be around that triumphant femininity.

  There was no such sting in the thought of the old queen. That Christmas, as she feasted at Richmond there was talk of her taking a new favourite, Pembroke’s heir; a new suitor in preparation for a new century. She danced three or four galliards at the Twelfth Night celebrations, and I am sure I wished her happy. I wondered if Martin Slaughter would be celebrating with Master Cuffe, and in a mood of sheer self-pity, I wondered if I were the only one lonely.