The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  That’s what he’d say about Lord Essex, were he here. Disnatured, is what he’d say. I came to the garden direct from the court, direct from telling her majesty.

  There was never any question but that I’d tell her what Essex said. The game has to be moved on to the next stage, by whatever means necessary. But that doesn’t mean I enjoy seeing that slight brace of the back with which she meets a blow, and knowing I have made it even harder for her to greet the next day like a queen, imperviously. God knows, no man has more reason than I to know her weaknesses, to know the squalls and the tantrums that ushered in each brilliant piece of diplomacy. You’d think I’d be like the mountebank at the fairground who knows how each trick is worked – and so I am, I’ve seen behind the curtain – and yet … I was born into the first flower of Elizabeth’s England, and in some way she will always be Gloriana to me.

  I have no appetite for this any more. There may once have been a moment when some tiny, surreptitious part of me would have expected to enjoy seeing Elizabeth humiliated – a moment when she was asking the whole court whatever she would do without her little pygmy. But I’ve supped too full of humiliation over the years to want to taste the dish again, even vicariously. I’ve watched the queen’s face grow leaner and her teeth blacker, and I’ve seen her technique falter. I’ve seen the cracks appear in her façade and I’ve exploited them or papered them over as necessary – mostly papered them over, I’m happy to say. I know how much it costs her to put on that face, just as Lizzie in the last months would order her maid to lace her stays tighter, as if she would hold herself upright that way.

  I could do nothing for Lizzie, I can do nothing for her majesty. Whatever the balm of flattery can do, she’ll take from others, not from me. But I think Jeanne has played her last part in this story: she’s been dragging around the house these last weeks as though she were sick. As though she were Lizzie. Gorges and the rest can do whatever is necessary. Gorges and Cuffe, my unwitting ally; no need to ask the countess what she’s done about Cuffe, and not just because Martin Slaughter would tell me anything necessary. We are all on the same side, or nearly. I only hope Jeanne hasn’t paid too high a price: I was told about the scene in the orchard at Theobalds, naturally. I would be little use if I could not know about a conversation like that, so close to me.

  Then I think: but who am I to say her part is ended? How can I say what her future will be? The story may not have finished with her; she may be telling herself another version of the story. I look the thought square in the face: I accept the possibility. I only hope she won’t prove like those caged birds we talked about, dying outside the safety of captivity.

  Jeanne

  December 1600/January 1601

  London had begun to feel like an armed camp, or it did if you had got yourself attached to either of the opposing parties. The steward said I had better move into the house – the servants could set a pallet again. The dark came so early now, and it was hardly safe to walk late along the Strand with the badge of Sir Robert’s livery. So at night I sat in the warmth of the hall, and found to my surprise that I was glad of the company.

  I heard Essex’s crew were growing ever more desperate, but what was it to me? I’d chosen, hadn’t I? He wrote to the queen again before Accession Day, no doubt hoping to jog her memories of his glamour at the tilt, but I doubt if she was in any mood to receive his flattery. When the day came, some of the younger servants went to the festivities, but more of the household did not. It made no comment when I stayed away.

  They had a play at court almost every day, that holiday, and when Twelfth Night came, the steward said a few of us could go along to see the show. ‘Not that you’ll see much except the back of courtiers’ shoulders if you keep to your place and don’t bother anybody, as I’m sure I trust you will do.’ In truth, going to Whitehall always reminded me more of making one’s way through a winding maze than it did going to a palace. So many alleys and passageways, courtyards and cubbyholes, half of them crammed with the traders and citizens who did business here every day, and all of them draughty. It took a lot of asking, and some arguing, before at last we made our way to the great hall, and shoved our way into the back of what was already a seething mass of humanity.

  All I could see in front of me was a pair of blue broadcloth shoulders and the kind of ruff no one in town had been wearing these two years. A squire up from the country. I suppose the queen and Sir Robert were there, secure on a dais away from the mêlée. They had some kind of funny man to warm up the crowd, but I could hardly hear the words. If it weren’t for one thing, I’d rather have been at home – the Lord knows, no one would notice if I slipped away.

  The thought of that one thing was making butterflies in my belly. I’d known what the play would be, of course; I’d thought of who might be playing. But when I saw him it still felt like a surprise to me. Or, something had surprised my heart, because it seemed to be beating strangely. I caught a pageboy as he passed, and gave him a coin to tell Martin Slaughter I’d be waiting in the anteroom when he had finished his part. I couldn’t for the life of me have stayed to watch. It would have finished me.

  When he stepped through the door, his face was grave. None of the slight, sweet smile with which he used to greet me. Well, there wouldn’t be, after the way we’d parted. After the things I’d said. For once, he seemed to be waiting for me to speak, and I wasn’t sure what to say.

  ‘I thought of you.’ I paused. ‘I missed you.’

  His whole face seemed to concentrate, as if he were listening intently. Still he didn’t speak.

  ‘Martin, I’m sorry.’

  Sorry for the things I’d said, sorry for my folly. For being so stupid as not to see where and what we all were. Pawns in the game but players too, with choices to make: and in the end we’d made the same choice, hadn’t we? I opened my mouth, I almost began to pour out the silly story, but a tiny movement from him stopped me. There was just a trace of his smile now, though less assured than it used to be, and he was breathing strongly.

  He half stepped towards me.

  ‘But not yet – I’m not ready –’

  He sobered instantly.

  ‘No – I know,’ he said with a fervency that surprised me. ‘The Lord knows there is too much of this game still to play.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I meant: Don’t tell me you’re still there; for all I hear, Cuffe now needs no urging. I meant: When I saw you playing here at court, I hoped at least that you were out of it.

  He answered the thought more than just the words: I remembered how he’d always understood the things I didn’t say.

  ‘I am, I’m out of the Essex House set, anyway,’ he said swiftly. ‘I’m back to my trade, acting on the boards instead of off them. Just your straightforward freelance rogue and vagabond, no more mixing above my station with the nobility. Or their secretaries.’ He flashed me the smile, but sobered instantly.

  He cocked an ear to the great hall again. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll be on in a minute. Will you – will you meet me tomorrow? We can’t talk properly here.’ I made myself nod, though my heart was beating uncomfortably. But then Martin himself sounded younger, less certain in his dealings than he used to be with me.

  ‘Meet me at the eastern gate,’ he said. ‘No, not by St Paul’s. We’ll go for a walk – get right out of town.’

  ‘But, Martin’ – despite myself I was laughing – ‘it’s January. We’ll freeze.’

  He grinned. ‘You little city girl. It’ll be beautiful. You’ll see.’

  He’d told me, sometimes, about his long slow journeys through the English country, and how an actor in a strolling company got to know the banks and hedges of his land as intimately as a farmer, or nearly. How some make a kind of hobby out of getting to know every inn along the way – ‘And Master Henslowe, he did nothing but fret about what was going on at home – bored us all to shreds with how the spinach in his garden should be coming up, and whether his wife would have got his stockings dye
d!’ But others chose instead to turn their eyes on the green book that lay around them – the plants you could crush and wedge into your boot to ease the pain of a blister, the tiny changes that told you to seek cover, since a storm was on the way. He’d said once, joking, that he would show me, but it was an altered country he showed me today. Snow had fallen in the night – I wasn’t sure he’d be at the gate, but I went all the same. His face cracked into a smile of relief when he saw me, and he led me into a world where the very sunlight fell differently.

  It was a world where every sense seemed heightened. Where the green of lichen on the tree trunks glowed emerald against the whiteness and a puff of wind blew fine snow dust out from the bushes so that it was like walking through a cloud. In the dykes the water had frozen into blue-green swirls, bubbled like the glass on a windowpane, except one pool where a long tendril of bramble blew in the wind to stir the surface, as a man might stir his spiced wine with his finger. It was so silent that when we stepped from path to snowdrift, we could hear that the crunch under our feet came differently. I didn’t want to speak, but there were things we had to say. I waited for him to take the lead, but he seemed reluctant, today, and in the end it was I who broke the silence, nervously.

  ‘You’re right – it’s good to be out of the town. Good to be out of all of it, I mean, really.’ He was still silent, and I turned to him, anxious – prepared almost to be angry. ‘Martin, you are out of it, aren’t you? You’re not still – I mean, Cuffe, everything I’m hearing –’

  He flung out one hand to halt me, reassuring. ‘I’m out. Well, out of that business anyhow. You know actors mix it by trade, we’re never out of trouble entirely.’ His grin faded quickly.

  ‘But Jeanne, I’m not sure anyone in London is going to be able to stay out of it, the way that things are going.’

  ‘Is it so bad? Really?’ Bad, I meant, as nobles’ quarrels were bad. Bad for the people like us, who could die without even knowing why.

  ‘Oh Lord, yes. As bad as it can be. It’ll come to blows. I can’t see it ending any other way.’

  ‘Real rebellion?’ I almost whispered the word. ‘He wouldn’t, surely?’

  ‘You know he would. He almost did, in Ireland. Take care of yourself if it comes, Jeanne. I don’t suppose you could …?’His voice faded out.

  ‘Could get away?’ I shook my head. The house in the Strand, the lodging house at Blackfriars – the thought flashed through my mind of the Pointers in Twickenham. But I had nowhere to go, not really. He knew it. His hand brushed mine, just briefly. But there was something else – I was thinking aloud, in the way he seemed to make me. ‘I don’t want to go, anyway.’

  He nodded, but the few feet between us seemed wider, suddenly. It had begun to snow again. The fat soft flakes came only lazily, but the white hill slope before us stood out, now, against a dark grey sky.

  ‘We’d best get back. But, Jeanne …’ He paused again, as if he were trying to decide what to say. ‘You know, you’re going to have to take risks again some day.’

  I didn’t want to understand him. ‘You’ve just told me to take care! To get away.’

  He made an actor’s gesture of dismissal. ‘You know what I mean. Though I’ll admit right now it sounds odd, when we’re standing in the eye of a storm that’s going to break over us any day. But you do know what I mean.’

  He paused, and when I didn’t reply: ‘What is it you’re waiting for? For all the fears to go away? For a talisman to keep you safe for ever and a day?’

  I managed half a smile as I shook my head. The dirty little bags of magic herbs, the lucky stones, were not for me. ‘I don’t have talismans.’

  ‘Everyone has a talisman of some kind, even if it’s a place or a tree. Here –’ He reached out to catch a snowflake and made as if to press it in my palm. I looked down. It was melted already. ‘Well, that’s the way with talismans. There is no guarantee of safety. You just have to learn to trust along the way.’ He seemed to have no more to say, but instead looked up at the darkening sky. ‘We’d better hurry.’ We stepped out faster and in silence, through a ghost landscape where the hoar frost coated each branch with menace, and the violet shadows were the only colour in a landscape turning to grey. We’d turned in the gate before he spoke again, and then it was with a casual air of normality.

  ‘You’re not the only one who loves a garden, you know. When I’m in London, I go to the garden by St Helen’s, before dinner, whenever I’m free. Maybe I’ll see you there, one of these days.’ He didn’t wait for me to answer, but instead just made me an actor’s bow, and I stood there dumbly to watch him walk away.

  February 1601

  Once or twice, as January sobbed and blustered its way in and out, I had found myself by Bishopsgate, near St Helen’s, and I looked in. But Martin Slaughter was never there, and in truth, for most of those weeks, the weather was enough to keep even the hardiest away.

  It occurred to me too that an actor knows when to exit the stage, and Heaven knew these were tense times on the London streets, full of tales of clashes between Essex men and Essex’s enemies. It did not occur to me, then, that this might be a private performance, for an audience of one, directed at me.

  I spent a lot of time alone in the garden on the Strand, and in one way I was glad of the solitude. Something strange seemed to be happening to me. No doubt to the household I was much as I had been, but inside I felt like a young child. Naked, like a performer in an Italian comedy when he pulls the painted mask away. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or sorry. It was like the pins and needles when a dead limb comes back to life. Once, I looked at the ground where the first green shoots were beginning to show: I wondered if the garden, too, was reborn each year only in pain and difficulty.

  The first days of February brought a drier sort of chill, and the gardeners wagged their heads with a pleasurable melancholy. ‘If Candlemas be fair and bright, come winter have another flight …’ But even the new light in the sky brought no release from the dull ache of tension that was gripping me. Gripping all of us, maybe. Even the old clerk exploded one day.

  ‘Jesu! It’s like waiting by a deathbed. In the end you just want it to be over, since it can only end one way. If nothing else, you want the surgeon to give you some idea – next week, tomorrow, don’t leave the room – and all they do is look wise, and bill for another fee.’

  I stared at him in surprise. Somehow I’d never thought of his having a life outside these walls, where people close to him lived and died. But wait – hadn’t someone told me he’d been married, once? I’d not been used to eyeing the people around me too closely. It had always seemed safer that way. But now I felt … guilty?

  It was the first Friday in February when the message came. I was on my way back into Burghley House, just before dusk, when the porter stopped me.

  ‘There was someone asking for you,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘Well-dressed, well-spoken sort of fellow – thought he was a gentleman at first, but he turned out to be one of them players.’ My heart gave a lurch within me. ‘Wanted you to know he’d be playing tomorrow, down at the Globe.’ I nodded thanks and hurried in with my face down, in case it should betray me.

  The performance wouldn’t begin till two next day. I didn’t pass the morning easily. It was barely dinner time when I was headed towards the bridge, with the Globe’s pennant snapping in the breeze in front of me.

  I hadn’t been to a performance there in the eighteen months since they built the place, and the rougher entertainments of the Paris Gardens held no charms for me. But I knew the area – every immigrant did. This was where you went to buy cuts of meat that made the English butchers roll their eyes, or find hose knitted in the continental way. This was the area of the stinking trades, the slaughterhouses and the tannery.

  Close to, the theatre was enormous. I squeezed my way through the crowds, looking for a back way in. Martin Slaughter must have told the boy who kept the door that I’d be coming, for it was only a moment before he
was standing before me.

  I laughed a little to hide the effect the sight of him had on me. ‘Goodness, Martin, you look very grand. Who are you playing – the king?’ His velvet suit was a little worn, but it must once have been some nobleman’s favourite finery.

  ‘Which one of them?’ he said, as lightly. I must have looked blank, because he added, ‘You do know the play?’ I shook my head.

  ‘We’re playing Richard II – and you had no idea? Well, maybe they didn’t want to advertise this one too widely.’ The truth was that there may well have been playbills handed out – I’d simply been too nervous to see. And some of my confusion must have shown in my face, because he went on to explain more slowly.

  ‘My lord Southampton, and several of the Earl of Essex’s friends, came to the performance yesterday. Oh, not this play – some comedy, it was, and I wasn’t here, just the regular company. They told them, the lords, that they wanted a special performance of Richard, today.

  ‘Well, the bosses protested, of course. That’s so fast it’s ludicrous, even if it weren’t for the question of the play.’ It must have been my fate, that day, to gape at him like the village idiot, but he’d obviously decided to forgive me.