The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

‘But all the same, Jan, there does tend to come a time when people have to decide where their loyalties lie.’ At the time I took it as a truism, and simply bowed my head respectfully. I should have remembered how wide was his network of information, and wondered if he was warning me.

  PART IV

  Change thy mind since she doth change,

  Let not fancy still abuse thee;

  Thy untruth cannot seem strange,

  When her falsehood doth excuse thee.

  Love is dead, and thou art free.

  She doth live, but dead to thee.

  Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex

  When I was fair and young, and favour graced me,

  Of many was I sought unto, their mistress for to be.

  But I did scorn them all, and said to them therefore,

  ‘Go, go, go seek some otherwhere, importune me no more.’

  But there fair Venus’ son, that brave, victorious boy,

  Said, ‘What, thou scornful dame, sith that thou art so coy,

  I will so wound thy heart, that thou shalt learn therefore:

  Go, go, go seek some otherwhere; importune me no more.’

  But then I felt straightaway a change within my breast;

  The day unquiet was; the night I could not rest,

  For I did sore repent that I had said before,

  ‘Go, go, go seek some otherwhere; importune me no more.’

  Elizabeth I

  Jeanne

  September/October 1600

  I suppose things went on as usual, those next weeks. I did my work, and ate my meals, and listened to the clerks’ table stories. The cooks had begun to make the autumnal dishes – whole cabbages stuffed and boiled in broth, peaches steeped in wine, and plums dried and conserved as suckets. But I was not as hungry for them as I used to be. I went into the garden, as I’d always done for comfort, though when I got close to the rose garden, I tended to shy away. It felt as if I were a ghost, dragging myself around the place with the chains of the quarrel with Martin rattling behind me. Haunting the fringes of my own life.

  It seemed as if all London was in waiting that autumn – even people who’d never heard Lord Essex’s voice, or felt his touch on their body. He seemed further away from me, free, than ever he had done in imprisonment. Cut off from the world, I could imagine that he’d remember our meetings, few though they might be. Now he was surrounded by his admirers. And now, I had other things to worry about. The thought of Lord Essex was no longer so much with me.

  More followers flocked to Essex House every day, and London was ringing with talk of it, and of the kind of men prepared to join that company. Anyone out of tune with the authorities. Discharged soldiers home from Ireland, veterans of the Azores and of Cadiz. Papists, so they said; and I couldn’t help but ask how that was likely to go down with Henry Cuffe, or with the Puritan chaplain of whom people were beginning to speak, an austere Mr Abdy? Rutland and Southampton and the rest of the fantasticals were with him again, of course, each as desperately short of money as he, each hoping to be carried on his coat-tails back to the seat of power or else face bankruptcy.

  When men spoke of Essex House they spoke also of a new name, and one familiar to me. At first, it was with a sense of incredulity that I heard Cuffe’s name on others’ lips – like meeting a creature from your own nightmares alive and walking the streets. But suddenly Master Cuffe was being named as one of Essex’s party, almost as if he were a grandee. Suddenly, when the wiser heads tutted over my lord of Essex’s folly, they said to be sure it was a pity he was advised so badly, and what about that devil of a secretary? I felt like shouting that that picture was half a lie, an image as distorted as you could see in the mirrors of the queen’s conjurer, Dr Dee. But the lie was spreading more quickly than leaves on the wind, and knowing what I knew, knowing the strings pulled behind the scenes, increased my sense of unreality. I never saw Cuffe on the streets any more, and small wonder, maybe. I didn’t go near the booksellers’ row, for fear of who else I might see.

  It was at the end of October that the blow fell; 30 October, to be precise, and since I was the one who carried the message, I do know it precisely.

  Lord Essex had never abated his letters to the queen, and we saw them all at Burghley House. They came more often, as the day of the queen’s decision grew closer, and more fulsome now that Master Bacon leant over the shoulder of the one who held the pen – ‘“shaming, languishing, despairing SX”, indeed,’ the secret clerk snorted, as he read the signature on one. I’d come to know him as a bitter man, with the scars on his face of foreign injuries.

  ‘“Till I may appear in your gracious presence, and kiss your majesty’s fair correcting hand, time itself is a perpetual night and the whole world but a sepulchre …” Very pretty.’

  He couldn’t let it alone. ‘Look at this bit. He says if his creditors would only take his blood in payment, her majesty would never hear of his suit – oh, very likely. Still, at least he’s getting a bit more open about what he really wants, none of this stuff about how he only writes in pure love of her majesty.

  ‘Not that it matters. The queen will have seen through all that, don’t worry.’ The man sounded as though Lord Essex were his own personal enemy. But everyone in the house was beginning to sound that way, bristling with hostility. I thought that was the only reason that when, for form’s sake, someone with clean fingernails and a decent cloak had to carry the letter to Essex House, the choice fell on me.

  I could hear the noise from outside the gates. Not revelry, precisely. Just the hard clatter of a host of men who see no reason to hide their presence. Through the porter’s lodge, I checked a second, in dismay. The courtyard seemed to be full of men and horses – men with tough scarred faces and stained leathers. Men with swords on their hip.

  A couple of them broke off their talk to glare suspiciously at me and I ducked my head, hunching my shoulder to try and hide the badge of the Secretary’s livery. One started towards me, and the porter hastily called a boy to take me directly to his lord-ship’s study.

  My heart was pounding, and not just because of the soldiery. The last time I’d seen him close to had been St George’s Day. The day that we so nearly … I didn’t know whether he still felt any trace of warmth, I didn’t know whether he’d forgiven me. The boy ushered me into the room and Lord Essex started up from his chair impatiently.

  ‘Well? Come on, give it to me.’ There was anger there all right, but not for me, myself. With the sensation of falling from a great height, I understood he hadn’t recognised me. Hadn’t even seen me.

  He ripped the letter open and his face, already flushed, grew even more suffused. As he strode past me to the doorway, I could see that he was sweating heavily.

  ‘Get their lordships! Southampton and Rutland. Tell them to come quickly.’ He still hadn’t so much as glanced my way, and I shrank back against the wall. The turbulent entry of the two lords sent me staggering into the tapestry. They must have been waiting close at hand to have arrived so quickly.

  ‘What is it?’ snapped Southampton. ‘God’s Breath, is it – ? What does she say?’

  ‘Not she. He.’ Essex was calmer now, his face growing pale and clammy. ‘The queen’s decision is relayed to me by Master Secretary. “For the time being, her majesty has decided to keep the tax on sweet wines in her own hands.” Master Secretary says he is very sorry. You know, I really do find it very interesting that the letter comes from Master Secretary.’ Southampton swore something under his breath, and kicked viciously at the pile of logs in the fireplace.

  ‘She’s keeping it to herself ? For the moment?’ Rutland asked. He seemed to me less angry than desperate, reluctant to relinquish hope completely. ‘If she’s not giving it to anyone else, then maybe there’s still a chance that later … If you promise to abide by her conditions, absolutely?’

  ‘Her conditions! The queen’s conditions are as crooked as her carcase!’ Essex’s anger was none the less for having turned icy, I real
ised with dismay. His bitterness rose up in the room like a miasma. ‘And believe me, my lords, I know what I’m talking about there. She –’ It was Lord Rutland again who stopped him, with a nervous gesture of his hand towards me.

  ‘Go. Get out.’ Lord Essex did not look up. He had never once looked directly at me. This time I hardly noticed the soldiers in the courtyard. Their looks and their catcalls couldn’t even touch me. It was as if I had gone into some other place, cold and lonely. As I turned into the street I looked up at the blank face of the house and I fancied that from behind a window a familiar brown head was watching me. But no doubt it was just my fancy, and in any case, instantly, I turned away.

  I went back to Burghley House. It was my duty. And I didn’t really have anywhere else to go, except the barren little room I’d long since ceased to think of as home, to dodge the landlady’s eye and nurse my misery. In the courtyard there, Sir Robert’s page was hanging around. He seemed to be waiting for me.

  ‘I’m to take you to them, soon as you’re back. What’s going on, anyway?’ I didn’t answer, and he scampered before me along the gallery, to Sir Robert’s study.

  The old secretary was there, and the secret secretary, with a couple of sharp-faced men who were strangers to me, and not the sort of men I usually saw with the master, or not in public.

  ‘Well?’ Sir Robert asked quietly.

  ‘I gave the letter to Lord Essex, sir.’ I paused. I didn’t quite understand what it was they wanted of me.

  ‘What else? Come on, how did he take it?’ It was the sharp-faced man.

  ‘He seemed very grieved and sorry.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I told them the gist of it as best I could.

  ‘Did he say anything about her majesty?’

  I paused, but only for a moment. It was already too late for a denial, and I couldn’t think of a good lie that fast. And, this was where I owed my loyalty. But afterwards I knew, it was partly the soreness of my heart speaking for me.

  ‘He said her conditions were as crooked as her carcase.’

  ‘Yes!’ The sharp man said it with his fist punching the air, as though his side had just won a victory. The others murmured approval more restrainedly. I felt sick. I knew now why I’d been told to take the letter, rather than someone Lord Essex might view with more suspicion. The queen would hear those words as soon as they could find a way to tell her safely.

  I’d understood my role in this great game by now, and it was one without dignity. I’d been used in the campaign against Lord Essex, but there’d never been any fine-wrought labyrinthine plot to involve me. Quite simply I was the old dog, expendable, sent into the boar’s lair, to flush it out to where the younger, more valuable beasts waited to pull it down; I was the hawk sent up into an empty sky, just to see. Probably I wouldn’t bring back any prey, but what did that matter? What had been lost, beyond a little of my time and someone else’s ingenuity? A little of my time, and a little of my heartbreak, and what did that matter, really?

  I leant my head against the cold window, as if I could see through the glum fading light to the autumn wreckage of the plants below. I had begun to feel sick, as the events of the last couple of hours sank into me. Lord Essex had sent me away without even noticing who he sent, and I couldn’t pretend any longer that there’d ever been anything there for me. That any closeness I had dreamed had been nothing more than a silly girl’s fantasy. Oddly enough, I felt more visible, more exposed, for the fact he hadn’t even seen me.

  I’d understood for some time, really. Since meeting Martin again, maybe. But although I’d learnt a lot in the Cecil house, I hadn’t learnt to see myself clearly. Now I saw my figure as if reflected in a mirror – me, and not me – and the sickness grew as I understood what I could see. I’d played their game as surely as … as surely as Martin Slaughter, I realised, and yet I’d told him that he … Perhaps he had played his part more wittingly than I had done, but then he was an actor, used to the world of smoke and mirrors, to seeing himself so as to choose what others would see.

  Sir Robert looked towards me. I felt his gaze on me, but I took it kindly that he didn’t insist on catching my eye. ‘That will do. You may go,’ he said quietly. ‘Go into the garden, Jan.’ He pronounced my name so softly, I could almost believe he was speaking it the French way.

  Katherine, Countess of Nottingham

  30 October 1600

  It is Cecil who brings her the report, put together by some spy of his finding. They’d put it into writing, needless to say. No man alive would want to stand there and repeat to her majesty’s face the words ‘as crooked as her carcase’, even to incriminate an enemy. Her face under the mask of paint is still as she reads, and I feel my face, too, stiffen and freeze into something like wood as I stand there and read over her shoulder. It’s as though the guts have been kicked out of me.

  Cecil doesn’t enjoy it either, not personally. He doesn’t have the absolute reverence for her crown his father did, but he is not a cruel man; perhaps that’s what sometimes provokes her to flashes of cruelty. That, and the fact he was right about Essex all along, and for that alone she’ll feel he owes her some apology. That, and for daring to have a vision of the future; a vision that, of necessity, will not include her majesty.

  She keeps her eyes calm, and raises her brows slowly. I am proud of her, with the fierce pride I thought only my children could raise in me. ‘Well, masters,’ she says, ‘it seems we have a while to wait before our treatment cools his lordship’s temper. But we’ve cut off his supplies, and I’m confident that will ultimately bring him to our heels. A fractious horse must be bated of its provender before it will go more docilely.’

  The spy begins to mutter something, and she snaps that if he’s going to speak out of that ill-favoured face, the least he can do is to speak clearly. Cecil shushes him with a gesture; by this time he knows how best to break bad news to her majesty.

  ‘We have all been concerned, your grace, by the number and the style of men Lord Essex seems to be gathering around him. His lordship, for all his abilities, is young enough to be influenced by evil counsellors, and these are not men with any motive to persuade him’ – he gives a slight smile in acknowledgement of her metaphor – ‘to take to the bridle lightly.’

  The spy makes as if to speak again, but she jerks her hand to brush him away. Cecil is her man here: he believes as strongly as she does that peace in the land is the absolute necessity. Every time she looks at him she has to remember he is not Burghley, but he is his father’s son in that much.

  ‘We wait,’ she says. ‘We see. Either the boil comes to a head, or else it ebbs away. We’ll know all that happens in the house, of course?’ He gives the tiny bow of assent that means ‘Trust me’.

  She waves me away with the rest and I leave the bedchamber as quickly as may be. I’m almost running out through the Privy Chamber and the Presence Chamber, signing my own servants not to follow me. When I reach my own room at last, I lean my forehead against the cool window and find I’m breathing heavily. ‘The queen’s conditions are as crooked as her carcase’ – to have to read that, in front of everybody! I find there’s a tear trickling down my face. I want to go out there and tell them how she used to be, with her long red hair and the smile in her dark eyes and the way of moving – in the dance, on a horse – that made everyone else look clumsy. That when I first went to live in her house, I thought she was something from a story. I want to tell them that those other men loved her, Leicester and the rest, they did, they really did, and if they didn’t distinguish the queen from the woman, well, that was all right. Neither did she.

  I want to tell them all that even the quarrels were different, then. Standing behind her while she sat with Leicester or Hatton before her on their knees, I’d feel as if I were sharing her triumph, feel the delicious sense of power course through me like wine. Other women stood behind their husbands, but she … I’d feel their eagerness to please like the scent on the mist curling round the horses�
�� flanks as we rode out early to the hunt, and I’d know the reconciliations would be sunshine after rain, as sweet a luxury of affection as though they’d lain together in ecstasy.

  And Essex – yes, I’d tell them, even he! In another, warmer summer I saw them once, when we were still basking in the Armada victory, on one of those summer progresses through the ripening country. I stood on the terrace and I watched them on the lawns below, Essex half walking, half gambolling in front of her as he expounded some scheme – oh, he was young, then, he always had a scheme, but he didn’t take himself so seriously. He seized her wrist, in defiance of all etiquette, and laughed as he tugged her towards the mound that looked out over the surrounding country. Perhaps they looked like a child and his nurse, but they looked like lovers too, surely?

  I just heard his voice on the breeze. ‘Come on,’ he’d said. ‘King of the Castle!’ There’s a sting in remembering that one now, for who was to be king, precisely? But at the time she laughed too, and moved as fast as her skirts would allow. And at the top, as he stood behind and turned her this way and that way to see the sky and field, all blue and gold, she leant backwards onto his chest, like any girl with her lover, tumbling in the soft shining piles of hay. They say she’s a woman of head not of heart – like her mother Anne, not her aunt Mary. I say, you can’t just split people, sheep and goats, that easily.

  That’s all gone now – there’s a sting even in the memory. But don’t tell me Essex himself didn’t feel her spell, once. Oh, he can exercise a magic, but I tell you this: it went both ways. Armed with that knowledge I compose my face, and set out to rejoin her majesty. She’s seated in front of the mirror – an act of defiance, that – as a maid rearranges her wig to her gesture, carefully. She does not move to catch my eye and I wonder exactly what she sees.

  Cecil

  November 1600

  In autumn, as the fruits hang from the pomegranate tree, brought in a pot in the hopes of coaxing it through the English winter, the tough skin splits so that from the underneath you see the dark red flesh and glistening seeds, like a woman’s secret place. This is the time of year when the garden, like an ageing beauty, displays its few remaining charms with a shamefaced air, waiting for the visitor to spy out their paucity. There are a few late mulberries not yet moulding on the branch, with their musky taste and purple dye. In the kitchen garden a few yellow gourds cling to the withered vine, and the cabbages show green-grey. More colour here than in the pleasure gardens, come to that: my father sometimes grumbled I had low tastes, as a boy. Nothing out of its right order, was his creed, in nature or in society: sometimes I think he only purchased the new, late-blooming plants to please the queen, so that no one else would get ahead of him that way.