The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  ‘These letters breathe a proper spirit of regret,’ she says. ‘But perhaps, Master Bacon, you knew that already?’ He is a clever man, undoubtedly, but I’d hate for her to let him think he was cleverer than she. Cleverer than we – we of the Chamber, the queen’s closest, we bond together these days. ‘And behind all his talk of love and duty, I can’t but feel his real concern is for his income from the sweet wine levy.’

  Bacon bows apologetically. A complicated man, like his cousin Cecil, but writ in darker colours, and even after all my years at court, to see him here as Essex’s mouthpiece still astonishes me. It’s only, what, a few weeks since he stood up at the hearing as one of his lordship’s accusers and I’ll admit he made his case eloquently. I remember seeing the earl himself, who’d been still till then, hunch a shoulder defensively.

  Bacon had begun by reminding us that any existing bonds of loyalty to the earl should be put away. He’d certainly shed his own very easily. It was he who did most to expose the earl’s real vulnerability. Whereas the others had talked of his mistakes, Bacon had spoken of his motives. He’d quoted a letter Lord Essex had written almost two years before, after one of those quarrels with the queen some might still have thought loverly. ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects suffer wrong?’ Such a challenge, read out in such a place, had made a creeping unease come over me.

  Lord Essex must have felt the mood in the room, for he’d flung himself back down on his knees, and spoken out with what, like him or not, sounded like sincerity.

  ‘I will never excuse myself from any crimes of error, negligence, or inconsiderate rashness – not as long as they are those of youth, folly, or my own manifold infirmities. But I must ever profess a loyal, faithful and unspotted heart, and a desire to serve her majesty. I would tear that heart out of my breast with my own hands if ever a disloyal thought had entered it.’

  He might have left it there with his audience’s goodwill. Abject repentance was a set part of the script; so was the protestation of loyalty. But no, he’d had to start to argue every point of his conduct in Ireland, while his audience fidgeted. Still, I suppose I could hardly grudge him his chance to speak out. By then it seemed every man at court had already had their say.

  Every man at court. I see now, more clearly than ever I had before, that women must go about their business differently. And so today – later at night, when my chance comes – I am ready. I knew the queen would be restless: it has been a hard day. The business of giving audience, the endless suitors, the reports from the Treasury – this year, pray God, a better harvest, but so far it’s not looking that way. Summer used to be the time of pleasure, but it seems now, what with one thing and another, we can hardly ever get away.

  In the end she calls for a cup of Hippocras, though usually she drinks abstemiously. I linger while they serve it, arranging the ivory combs on the dressing table, putting the agate toothpick back in its holder, and sure enough she gestures the others to move further off, nods to me to stay.

  She signs me to sit, and on a stool not a cushion. So, it is to be a conversation between cousins, though the ghost of Essex and his letters hover in the air like a third party. I know what I have to do; to bring the other ghosts of the past alive so she can see, see, that things are different now, that Essex doesn’t have their love, their loyalty. I cast around for something, some memory, that will do it, and I see there’s no need, she’s ahead of me already.

  Do I leave it at that? No. The point is worth the hammering. I know a brief stab of compunction as I think of Leicester with his gout and his vanity, and his arrogance on top and underneath it his loyalty. He took two of my brothers to the Netherlands with him as volunteers, and he brought them back safely; and this is his boy, the stepson he loved and brought to her majesty. I harden my heart: if Leicester trusted Essex to continue his own work then he shouldn’t have, should he? It was as foolish as – well, as for the queen to think she can keep yesterday’s relationships alive with the men of today. Not that this queen would ever allow one to couple her and folly … That’s it, that’s the point that will touch her. In this, she is like me.

  ‘I’m glad your majesty showed Master Bacon you’re awake to his games,’ I say brightly. ‘Lord Essex seems to think he can play the rest of us like a child pushing the counters around a tiddlywinks tray. Well, that’s a young man for you, thinking the rest of us are as foolish as he.’

  Jeanne

  August 1600

  The mood in London was sullen that summer. We rush to embrace the warmth when it returns, bringing the light and the liveliness of the land, but in July and August come the dog days, with the pest and the sweat, as if the earth were already tired of its own fertility.

  This was a wet summer, too. The harvest would be bad again, the seventh year in a row, and there were those who said half openly it would not be good until a barren old woman no longer reigned over the country.

  I went about my work, and dropped into the clerks’ room when I could. Lord Essex continued in his confinement. In fact the custodian in charge of him had been withdrawn, we heard, but so long as he was ordered to keep within his house, it was still a kind of captivity.

  When midsummer had been and gone but the long twilight hours encouraged lingering at the end of the day, I called in on the old clerk. This time, several people were there already, bent over the desk, and they looked round at me, I thought, almost with hostility. Only the old man himself made room for me.

  ‘The lad’s all right,’ he said to the others. ‘He’s one of the confidential secretaries.’ The stranger seated at the clerk’s desk – a stranger with a sharp, swarthy face – nodded curtly, and bent to the letter he was copying. Inconspicuously as I could, I peered over his shoulder, and with a shock recognised Lord Essex’s hand.

  ‘What’s this bit? I can’t make it out,’ the copyist said to the company at large, and that gave me the excuse to look openly.

  ‘… you have believed I have been kind to you, and you may believe I cannot be other,’ I read. ‘I never flew with other wings than desire to merit, and confidence in, my sovereign’s favour, and when one of these wings failed me I would light nowhere but at her feet, though she suffered me to be bruised with my fall.’

  I looked a startled query at the old man, and silently he pushed another letter towards me. This one was written in a different hand. It was addressed to ‘My lord’ – Essex, I supposed – and it was signed … Francis Bacon? ‘But – at the inquiry –’ I stammered confusedly. The clerk just jerked his chin at the paper.

  ‘You’ll see.’ I read on, furiously.

  ‘… I humbly pray you to believe that I aspire to the conscience and commendation first of bonus civis, which with us is a good and true servant to the queen, and next of bonus vir, that is an honest man. I desire your lordship also to think that though I confess I love some things much better than I love your lordship, such as the queen’s service, her quiet and contentment, the honour, her favour, the good of my country, and the like, yet I love few persons better than yourself, both for gratitude’s sake and for your own virtues …’

  It was an effort not to crumple the paper in my hand. This, to the man who had attacked him at the hearing? I was surprised Essex had replied so mildly. I looked back down.

  ‘… I was ever sorry that your lordship should fly with waxen wings, doubting Icarus’ fortune … of the growing up of your own feathers, no man shall be more glad.’

  For one soaring moment I was captivated. What I resented most about Bacon’s letter was the aptness of the analogy. Icarus, who made wings of wax and feathers to fly with the gods, but flew too near the sun so they melted and sent him crashing to his death on earth. But then I realised it wasn’t the contents of the letter that had struck me so forcefully, nor even that Bacon seemed to be again aligned with Essex, though that alone might have made one dizzy.

  ‘These letters – how did they come into your hands? Our hands,’ I corrected hastily.

 
‘You’ll not have forgotten Bacon’s mother was our master’s aunt, before she married into the pig family?’ While the other men glanced at me with renewed suspicion, I thought the old clerk was watching me with something like pity.

  At the end of August, Sir Robert was one of those sent to tell Lord Essex he was to be set free. Only, that he must not come to court; he’d already been stripped of the Mastery of the Ordinances, and of the great office of Earl Marshal. The Mastership of the Horse was all that remained to him; the same that had been the start for Leicester, Robert Dudley. In my naivety, I thought that his liberty was the great good news, but the old clerk disillusioned me.

  ‘When he was shut away, at least no one could get at him, but now the creditors will all want their pound of flesh, won’t they? Yes of course he’s got debts, haven’t they all, but now how’s he going to make any money, to beg favours and sell them on again? How’s he going to keep his followers happy? He may say he’s going to live retired in the country, but with the bailiffs at the door he can’t do that very comfortably. And you’ve seen how they live now, the lords, you with your visit to Theobalds.’ He nodded at me, amiably.

  ‘It’s true Essex never splashed out on houses like that. They always said he was the poorest earl in the country. But all the same, he can’t just settle down in a cottage and tell his wife to do her own laundry.’

  That was the general opinion, I found. The earl was writing a string of increasingly desperate letters to the queen. I saw them all, now that I was on the strength of the secret clerks’ room, so to speak, and heard that Bacon had half dictated them, too, which made me feel strangely. It seemed Essex, like they all did, had lived off a tax – the right to take a levy off the people, if I looked at it honestly. A slice off the top of the duty paid on all the sweet wines to come into the country. Trouble was, his rights to it ended this year, and it would only be renewed by favour of her majesty. It was obvious by now that even he did not rate his chances highly.

  Summer is the strolling season, they say, though there hadn’t been much sense of freedom or pleasure this summer. But before the season was out came word we would all go up to Theobalds again: Sir Robert for his own reasons, and me, because of some plant that needed drawing, or so the chief clerk told me briefly. Packing my bags, I could have wept, remembering with what excitement I set out there last year. And of the hopes with which I returned. But in fact, the atmosphere in London was such that, even though the skies were still weeping as we left, I was – I think we all were – glad to get away.

  I saw the fountains and grottoes, the lakes and waterways. The gillyflowers and snapdragons in their pots were all but over, yet I could see they’d boasted as many double flowers as they used to. The citrus trees, free of the seasons, still showed flowers and fruit all at once, like something out of a picture of Paradise. But somehow, this time, they couldn’t touch me. Perhaps it wasn’t only me – all festivities, that summer, seemed to have desperation in their gaiety.

  I did not go back to the little pavilion where Martin had taken me. But the thought of it surely brought him to my mind because, as the rain drove me from the garden back into the house, I almost fancied I saw a familiar brown figure darting into another doorway. With the miserable wet outside I started to explore indoors – the galleries painted with the Knights of the Golden Fleece, with the arms of England’s nobles and the products of their counties, the great cities of the world with their customs and their features; it was as if Lord Burghley had turned schoolmaster to instruct me. At last I drew near to the private apartments of the family – or of Sir Robert, I should say. I was just outside the door when it opened quietly. It was with a sense of shock that I saw Martin Slaughter come out – and at the same time, with a sense that I’d known it already.

  For him, I think, it was much the same, but he gestured to me quickly. ‘Not here.’ I was reminded, horribly, of that scene with Cuffe, but Theobalds had other, Cuffe-free, memories. ‘Meet me in’ – for a brief second I thought he was going to say, the pavilion, but he would never be that clumsy – ‘in the orchard.’ A gleam of rueful humour. ‘We should have it to ourselves today.’

  In the orchard, the fruits were beginning to swell on the dripping trees. The rain had mercifully halted for the time, but I hurried under lowering skies. He was there waiting for me already – he clearly knew the paths better than I – and there was a look on his face I hadn’t seen before, at once stern and naked. With the long grass at our feet, between the grey framework of branches, we faced each other like adversaries.

  He stood there, silently. Perhaps he was more experienced at this than me. I spoke first.

  ‘What are you doing here? They haven’t announced a play.’

  ‘I’m not here as an actor.’ He paused. ‘I’m here doing other work,’ he said deliberately. We both remembered our other conversations, here, and elsewhere. He’d told me once that many actors do other work, travelling as they do all around the country. That they wind up as messengers, information gatherers, emissaries.

  ‘What work?’ I put it crudely but my brain was making calculations like an abacus. ‘That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? That’s why you’re hanging round Lord Essex’s house. You’re acting for Sir Robert.’

  He paused again, oddly. ‘Not entirely. Not him only. I have Sir Robert’s interests at heart, but also those of … somebody.’

  ‘Oh, why not? After all, that way you get two salaries!’ I was becoming angry. ‘I’m surprised you have any time left to devote to the drama. Or is it they aren’t hiring you for the plays?’

  He didn’t visibly wince. He rallied quickly. ‘I’ll be doing some of those too. Not in the theatres – at Lord Essex’s house. You know my lord of Southampton, his lordship’s friend, is a great patron of the drama.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, my dear.’ The endearment came almost insultingly. It wasn’t his normal style of speech, or it wasn’t with me. ‘You take work where you can get it, if you’re an actor – my kind of actor, anyway.’ He paused. ‘And besides, just at the moment, Essex House is an interesting place to be.’ I knew he wouldn’t shirk the confrontation. Not finally.

  What he did was take the initiative. ‘You can hardly expect me to give you script and scrippage – tell you exactly what I’m doing, and for who. You could work out the important part for yourself, if you looked at it clearly.

  ‘Just think, Jeanne. We’ve talked about this, haven’t we? Do you really believe Lord Essex’s way is the best way of running a country?’ He didn’t even wait for me to shake my head. ‘And who are you working for, yourself? Who is it pays your salary? Never mind what little extra-mural visits you might make.’ So he had seen me, on Garter Day.

  ‘You’re not wrong, and neither am I.’ His face softened slightly. ‘Look, don’t think that I don’t understand. This business isn’t easy for anybody. And for you –’ He stopped. I must have moved slightly. ‘But the fact is, a number of people agree that, whatever plans Lord Essex is brewing, it would be best if they came to a head, quickly. So that everyone can see the damage, from the market girl with the pickled herrings right up to her majesty. Do you think that’s wrong? Do you, really?’

  ‘So that’s why you and Cuffe –’

  His mouth twisted. ‘Master Cuffe is exactly what he appears to be. The more honourable of him, maybe. But Master Cuffe has Lord Essex’s ear, and I –’

  ‘Have Master Cuffe’s,’ I finished bitterly. ‘As long as you fawn round him like a dog all day.’ I didn’t know quite why I was so angry, but I felt as if everything I thought I knew was crumbling away from me. ‘And now Cuffe’s been telling Lord Essex the terms of his freedom are an insult, that he shouldn’t accept retirement quietly! Someone in the clerks’ room told me. What is it you want to happen?’

  ‘What do you want?’ he flung back instantly. Then he stepped towards me. ‘Jeanne, can’t we –’

  It all rose up, all of it, from further back than I could see. I screamed
at him. I’ve never screamed at anybody.

  ‘Stay away from me!’

  His face went awry, as if I had slapped it. He spun on his heel smartly. His figure moved for once without eloquence as he walked away.

  As we rode back towards London a few days later, I hardly had time to worry about the clumsy horse they had given me. Something in me accepted what Martin had said, but something fought it, too. You can’t choose that easily. Just pick Sir Robert, head not heart? You can’t split people like that, and I should know. Wasn’t it what I’d tried to do all my life? Tried and failed, and what had the trying done to me? At that moment my horse pecked and stumbled, and I put thought aside, gladly.

  * * *

  Back at Burghley House, I went into the garden often, now that the days would soon be drawing in. It was as if everything smelt the sweeter for the sharp knowledge of how soon autumn would come. One day I found Sir Robert there, sniffing the last late rose; the damask with the musky smell, the one they had brought in from Italy that flowered for a second spring. There was a minute when I looked at him with a kind of horror, the memory of Theobalds before me. But he was so much the same – so small, so neat, so reassuring – that it was more a kind of appeal I felt, though luckily he couldn’t see.

  He seemed disposed to chat – asked me how the work was going, waited for me to fall in step as he strolled along the pathways, chatting gently of roses, and grafting and cultivation, and of the new strains that were coming to join the old varieties.

  ‘You know my favourite story about the rose? It comes from the last century. That when the two great houses were squabbling for the throne, they met once in a garden. And everyone who followed Lancaster picked a red rose, and everyone who followed York a white.

  ‘I doubt very much it’s true. I suspect Warwick and the rest didn’t do their business so prettily. And of course – as her blessed majesty likes us to remember – the red rose and the white are united in the house of Tudor today.