* * *
Winter is the waiting season. Sometimes in London you can forget that, but it only took a few moments in the garden to remind me. The brown frozen beds preached patience. Wait – for the warmth, for the new shoots, for the turn of the year. It was as if the earth itself were holding its breath.
When the change does come, it comes quickly – in the earth, anyway. It was only a week after the melt of the snow before the first snowdrops showed their heads. I picked a few, when the gardeners weren’t looking, and sniffed their faint powdery fragrance. Soon there would be a gleam of yellow in the stiff buds of the wild daffodils, the Lent lilies, and a touch of green – the buds schoolboys nibble for the first fresh taste of the season – on a sheltered hawthorn tree. It was still February when I found the very first of the fat sweet violets, their leaves almost as perfumed as the velvet flowers, were dropping purple heads. Soon they would make a pool under the mulberry tree.
‘Amazing flowers, I always think. Something so lush should really come out in May.’ I pulled myself together and bowed, hastily. Sir Robert had come up behind me. ‘Have you ever noticed that these big scented violets actually come out before the little woodland sort? I’m sure there’s food there for an allegory.’ He went on with hardly a break: ‘I shall be going to York House this afternoon.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I think perhaps you should come with me.’ He sounded almost regretful – or perhaps it was just that he had phrased it oddly. But I wasn’t thinking about Sir Robert, I wasn’t even questioning why me, out of all the clerks who could take any notes more appropriately. As I dropped my flushed face in acknowledgement, my heart was beating too rapidly.
Sir Robert ordered a carriage, unusually, for such a short journey, and summoned me to sit with him, but he hardly spoke. When I ventured to peep sideways, he looked like a man with a lot on his mind. Just what, was known to everybody.
The queen had ordered that Lord Essex should face trial in Star Chamber, so that his faults, she said, should be plain to see. Those who the beer had made pot-valiant said, instead, that this was his chance to prove his own case. Perhaps that was what was making Sir Robert look like a soldier in the cold light of dawn, when he knows the battle is on the way. I heard him sigh, as if he had reached a decision about something, but one he did not enjoy.
Lord Essex was no longer in his bedchamber. He was seated in the study that by rights belonged to the master of York House; and when Sir Robert was announced he paused before he rose, just long enough to make it clear that this was no more than a voluntary courtesy, to a commoner from a member of the nobility.
‘Master Secretary – how kind of you to visit me. I am all the more grateful since the pleasure has been so long delayed.’ It was the flourishing salute before a duel of words, but Sir Robert, I saw, was not going to play. He stood silent a moment, head slightly bowed, and suddenly I saw them as the boys they must have been – Sir Robert four years the elder, to be sure, but, with his slight frame and stooping back, outstripped by the other every day.
‘My lord – I am happy to see you so much recovered. The more so since I have come to make your lordship a plea.’ I stood three steps behind, lost in admiration, as the web of words wove round me.
He said he had no desire for the trial to go ahead. I could see Essex quickly casting around in his mind to judge whether this was a bluff, and deciding it was not. His nature, and his life, had made him see bogeys wherever he looked, but he was not a fool. Perhaps, too, that shared boyhood had given each some understanding of the other. Or perhaps it just made it easy for Lord Essex to underestimate the Secretary.
The master was sketching a picture of the chaos that might follow the conflict of a trial. The rioting in the streets, the rumours in the night. And this was the beauty of it: no one could doubt the truth of Sir Robert’s hatred of chaos, his conviction that the order of England must be maintained. It was not quite clear whether he was suggesting the rioters would be protesting or celebrating the queen’s or the earl’s victory … It was not quite clear whether he was urging (begging!) the earl to put an end to the situation for his own safety, or for her majesty’s. Both at once – the pill, and the pastille too, maybe.
He managed to suggest to the earl that – again – his country needed him: needed him first, of course, to set himself at liberty by putting an end to this comedy, but needed him, too, more fundamentally, needed the kind of man of action he had proved himself to be. The kind he, Robert Cecil, Robert Crookback, Master Secretary could never be.
I was ashamed, when I thought about it afterwards, but at the time, I fell for it completely. Ashamed, most of all, that I let my master, the cleverest man in England, convince me that he was a creature of no moment, just because his limbs were not long, and he didn’t have the kind of charisma a street corner comedian might envy. But when the earl, wholly dazzled but still slightly doubting, glanced around the room for reassurance until his eyes lit on me, I know mine glowed back at him with an urgent plea.
I almost spoiled the point of the quill in my eagerness, when Sir Robert signed me to take down the earl’s letter of apology to her majesty.
‘The tears in my heart have quenched all the sparkles of pride that were in me,’ he dictated, with moisture, indeed, brightening his eyes. The words were abject, but we were wrought up to a pitch, all three of us, where subjection seemed like glory. Yes, I still think, all three. The best tellers of tales believe their own story, at least for as long as their performance lasts.
It was enough. There would be no trial, no riots. For Lord Essex, no sentence publicly proclaimed – but also no public victory. As we walked back to the carriage, the letter safe in my satchel, I noticed my master was limping slightly, the slight cast to his shoulders more noticeable than usual. His lips were stretched into a smile that held as much of pain as pleasure. It was the smile of someone who has won, but who resents the means they have used to win the victory.
Any fool, in the wrestling ring, can down an opponent smaller than they, but the skilful can use their opponent’s very weight against them. Can make a weapon of their own vulnerability. I realised afresh just how formidable Sir Robert Cecil was as an adversary.
Cecil
February 1600
There are things I do, and will continue to do, because I see that they are necessary. You use whatever weapons you have: that is what my father taught me, although I do not think, looking back, that he was ever forced to practise what he preached quite so completely. I do not think he was ever forced to display, like a leper’s sore, the most shameful, the tenderest, place, in his whole mind or body. But I did it: it served its purpose, and I am sure I am only imagining that my shoulder is paining me.
But somehow, when we get back to the house, I find I do not want to have Jeanne near me. It is not her fault: she saw only what I arranged for her to see. But she seems to feel it too – she bows without a word and leaves, silently. A woman’s tact, maybe.
I am positively glad to feel a hovering presence, and see one of the secret secretaries. A visitor, cloaked and come by the back way. In my present mood I am glad of what I might otherwise find dirty. At any rate, it’s a matter of business and brains. Nothing messy.
He is unhappy at having come here. In a man less clever, I would call it sulky, but Francis Bacon’s fast mind analyses even his own moods, and dismisses what is unnecessary. A shame that leaves him so ill placed to deal with the rest of humanity.
‘I don’t like it. It’s dangerous,’ he says.
‘Oh, tush. We’re cousins, we’re both in her majesty’s service, there could be a thousand reasons for a visit. And nobody saw you, anyway.’ That’s the other thing about Francis; he takes everything so seriously that he is the only man in whose presence I feel myself frivolous, or nearly.
‘So you’ve done it.’ He sounds grudging, and I allow myself to bow my head in acknowledgement of victory.
‘He’s made a good apology. There should be no trial, no pot boys shou
ting his praises in the streets, no public declaration of his guilt – or of the contrary. At least’ – I check myself – ‘not if her majesty takes it as I hope.’ And from his sharp sound of alarm it’s obvious he agrees with me. Her majesty’s mind, and its incalculability. But I’ve long understood that Francis and I don’t feel the same here, though he probably assumes we must agree. He sees only the weakness of the queen’s way. He doesn’t see the skill which uses her very defects so peerlessly. He sees only the flaws in her mind; he doesn’t see its beauty, and I smile at him, now, a little sadly.
‘All well and good, so far, but what comes next? Reinstatement? You know he’s writing to James, secretly?’ I shrug my shoulders and raise the corners of my mouth in a way I know will annoy him. What will be, will be.
‘Robert, for heaven’s sake! You must have a plan.’ He eyes me, baffled, not sure if my silence is discretion or inadequacy. He can see there must be hidden layers of intention here, but that is as far as he can see. He does not know everything Gorges has told me. He does not know about the countess and the actor, and about Cuffe’s malleable vanity. He does not understand the value of timing, the delicacy and the subtlety of it; that tomorrow, Lord Essex’s plight may not seize the townsman in the tavern in the way it does today. He has infinite subtlety, my cousin, but his mind always circles a maze of its own making, and there are possibilities he cannot see.
My cousin Bacon does not know I am aware that his are still divided loyalties: that when he advises my lord of Essex, he does so only partly so that he can then advise me. Gratitude for Essex’s past kindnesses does not weigh with him, naturally. But he is drawn, like an alchemist to gold, to the idea of being the brain behind Essex’s party, and if that party brings the Scots king to the kingdom, he would love not to play second fiddle there to me.
That sharp mind registers that I am not telling him everything, that there is a door that is closed. He will worry at the problem, unwearyingly. He will make himself useful to my lord of Essex, and he will be useful to me. I pass on to talk with him of our gardens. It is one of the subjects of which I enjoy his mastery. It is the one on which we will always agree.
Jeanne
March/April 1600
Spring is the itching season. Nothing wants to wait for its right order: the days draw out before the warmth begins. And everywhere in the streets I seemed to hear a mutter, the same sullen rhythm that was beating in my veins. Soon after Christmas we’d heard Lord Essex was mending, by the end of January he had quit his bed. Now surely the time had come for the queen to forgive him. What was he supposed to do – stay shut up alone in York House until his beard went grey and the boredom turned his head? But down in the kitchens where speech was free they were saying, too, it was easier to get milk from a bull than forgiveness out of the queen’s majesty.
There was a pale profusion of primroses, now, where the snowdrops had held place only days before. I saw them when I’d walk out into the fields – not anywhere near where the booksellers had stalls – on a Sunday. I saw the blackthorn trees turn white with blossom, and the first green fronds of cow parsley.
Around my feet there was a sprinkling of colour, though when I looked up into the high trees the branches were bare. The spring had not got into the bones of the land. It was too early: they’d still be feeling winter in the country. I noticed everything more sharply than I did usually, because every step I took, down lanes where new shades of green appeared every week, I was aware I was seeing what Lord Essex could not. Even this first faint fore-taste of the year made me feel his captivity. Or maybe it was that this time – this year – we all felt captive within the moody city.
But at least the queen had given permission – the doctors urged it – that Lord Essex should now be allowed to walk in the garden every day. And when I saw our gardeners plant new slips to fill holes in the lavender hedge – when I saw them take up the spent hellebores, and put in seedling of granny’s bonnet, aquilegia, and young oxslip plants brought in baskets from the country – I imagined that he was seeing them too, just along the river bank, hardly a mile away.
Talking to imaginary companions is a game for a lovesick girl – or boy – not a secretary to a Master Secretary. But I had never allowed myself to dream when I was young, never known who I should dream of, and now, like the plague that hides away in the winter, only to return more strongly with the first heat, perhaps the infection came all the stronger for the fact that it came unseasonably.
I didn’t see Martin Slaughter, and I told myself I didn’t want to, not unless I could see him without his shadow Cuffe, the way it used to be. I was growing angrier with him in his absence, and had we met I might have told him so, but he made no attempt to see me. That made me angry too, and I’d never had the conversations with girls – or boys – that might have told me how there were some things not meant to go easily.
I hadn’t seen Lord Essex either, though I did once succumb to folly. Just once, the impulse was too strong for me, and I tied up another tiny nosegay, sweeter and softer than the November blooms. I slipped into the courtyard of York House, and handed them to a young serving boy. ‘For his lordship,’ I said firmly, and the child eyed the badge on my cloak and nodded eagerly. I saw no sign of Cuffe, or of Martin, and I left no message, naturally, but for two days after, my stomach churned. It was dangerous, of course it was; what if anyone thought it worth their while reporting to the Secretary? In the event, no one asked me, but I knew I should never again indulge myself so stupidly.
It was only later that I realised, fearful though I had been then, that taking a token to a state prisoner had actually seemed less dangerous than thinking of Martin Slaughter too freely.
Sometimes the promise of the seasons is not fulfilled. Sometimes even the events of the year come out of order, and in the fierce grip of a backwinter the early shoots are covered by new snow. A few balmy days of sunshine were followed by weeks of rain, and a freezing wind that seemed to blow the buds back into the trees. No pleasure to be enjoyed in the garden but to kick the clods of heavy soil and watch the stunting of leaves that had unfurled too early. It was as if the paralysis that held us all had infected the land, so that not even the movement from the earth could progress properly.
We heard that Lord Essex had grown religious in captivity. Down on his knees, praying for forgiveness, sending for his old tutor from Oxford to talk of his immorality. Sending letters to his friends, urging them to repent in misery. Some of his supporters in the taverns said wisely that his lordship knew what he was doing; if straight appeal wouldn’t move the queen, then maybe it would work this way. The woman who served the drinkers their ale, whose cheeks had grown rougher and her voice huskier over the last year, said in truth he had plenty to repent of. But her man had gone to Ireland in Essex’s train, and had never come home again. For me, I had seen how fast his moods could change. He had no nerves to play this waiting game the queen imposed on him; he could easily have fallen into true despair, I told myself – it must be better that he should take this way.
We’d heard he was to be allowed home, to Essex House, though still in the conditions of captivity. Hard to know how he’d live there, though. He’d been told to dismiss his household, those two hundred men in their bright orange livery, and as April came in I often thought about what he might be doing now, racketing around all those empty corridors. It was enough to drive any man to misery. The old clerk told me it even worried our master.
‘It’s not natural to Master Robert, all this shilly-shallying. He can be slow and devious when he has to be, none better, but the trouble is, his mind is tidy.’ He’d known Sir Robert since he was a boy, and when he talked of him, it was most often to me.
As Easter came and a few first stunted bluebells with it, and sharp gusts still blew the apple blossom from the trees, the old man told me there was a fresh source of worry – the coming of St George’s Day. Lord Essex was a Garter Knight, of course – one of that select band who (so the theory ran) th
e sovereign had deemed most worthy. Now he’d written to Sir Robert that the rules of the Order decreed he should wear his robes on Garter Day.
‘He’s quite right, too. We checked,’ the secretary who took care of these things interjected, fussily. So did this mean he should wear them in the Garter Procession? (‘which would mean his being allowed back into public, to a degree’). Should he do honour to the order by dining in state in Essex House? (‘All very well, but if we’re not careful, that one could turn into some kind of private rival ceremony.’) Or was he to wear them only in the privacy of his bedroom? I gaped at the absurdity. ‘Oh, you may laugh, young man, but I’d wager you that’s what it will come to, when Sir Robert asks her majesty.’
They knew a thing or two, those old men. Three days later we in the scribes’ room heard that Lord Essex had been refused permission to join the court, or to break in any way the conditions of his captivity. Which meant … ‘A feast in all his splendour, and no one there to see!’ It was one of the younger boys, this time, making a chant of it; a chunky, cheeky lad, on whom the ink stains under his fingernails looked like an anomaly. He didn’t see any pathos in the situation, that’s for sure, but I don’t think I was the only one in the room to feel the diminution of the earl.
Even Master Secretary felt it, I found. Everything his father had taught him schooled him to cut down the too-tall poppy, for fear of spoiling the bed. Everything in him told him to shun the ‘man of blood’. But still –
‘Go to Lord Essex today, at dinner time. Take him a dish of those candied violets, with my compliments.’ Sir Robert glanced up from his letter. ‘He’ll be pleased to see you,’ he said. I stared at him disbelievingly. Of course he meant that Lord Essex would be glad to see anybody, anyone to break his boredom, since no visitor would be allowed save one who came direct from the queen or the Secretary. But to my greedy heart, it sounded almost as if Sir Robert were acknowledging a bond – I’d blush even to suggest it aloud – between the earl and me.
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