One of the rebels admitted it, about Charles. He said if he and Cecil were killed it would have been just ‘a fillip matter’, that nothing would be made of it. I told that to Philadelphia; oh yes, I went to see her – a little red about the eyes, a little worn about the cheeks, but not nearly as worried, or as guilty, as she should be.
‘I owe God a death,’ Essex said as they took him away, and asked if he could have his own chaplain, some Master Abdy Ashton, with him for his last days. I wish I could have been there and could say: Everyone owes God a death. And anything special that you owe, right down to the silks on your back, you owe to her majesty. She gave them to you, didn’t she? The silks and velvets, the sleek horses, the chef in your kitchen and the malmsey in your cellar, and the offices that made men bow down before you. I tell them over, like an angry litany. ‘Only merchants count the cost,’ you said once, when she tried to teach you the price of your wars, and we all knew people remembered there’d been merchants in her mother’s – my grandmother’s – family.
Of all the things you have, your earldom is the only one that wasn’t a gift from the queen. No, her father gave that to yours, and now you pride yourself on your old nobility? Aye, there’s a few drops of old royal blood in your veins, but what you’ve never understood is, it takes more than that to make a monarchy. If it didn’t – well, they used to whisper my father was born at a time my grandmother was very close to old King Henry. It used to be a joke that my hair was as red as the queen’s, but of course she got hers from her red-gold father, whereas for me … People didn’t finish that thought, prudently.
And who is this Ashton, anyway, that you want him so particularly? Some black-winged crow of a Puritan preacher, I suppose, who’ll help you fling yourself into the fantasies of guilt and repentance as eagerly as you once flung yourself into the games of power and glory. Folly! But I suppose you’ll find a kind of escape that way. I don’t think any the better of you for it. I’m old enough, just, to remember the bigots and the bloodshed before you were born, with the smell of burning flesh from the faggots and the stakes in Queen Mary’s day.
You want this Ashton, this Abdy, do you – and why should you have what you want now, pray? You wanted Henry Cuffe once, and much good his advice did you. The wheel comes round; another day, another dear friend to advise you, and you too blind, too in love with your own magic, to understand that the dear friends have their own lives and their loyalties, and that other hands may be spinning the wheel, hands you cannot see. But it’s possible this Ashton, too, is someone for whom Robert Cecil will find a use, and that is as it should be.
Jeanne
Saturday, 21 February 1601
I’d been having the dreams again, of being young, and small, and unable to move, and the screams, and the knife in the belly. But what came next was almost worse. The night-time dreams I’d learnt to cope with. I could shut them down into a dark hidden place and walk calm-faced through the day. But what happened now – as my landlady banged on the door to ask if she should send for a physician, or if I was going out to work, as I got shakily up and went out into the streets – left me no safe place by night or day.
The private horrors started slowly, like something just seen out of the corner of your eye. It was as if I were seeing two worlds at once. As if the ordinary world were a thin membrane, fragile as the skin on warm milk as it cools, and under it the flames like the hell in a rood painting, and we were all about to tumble down into the nightmare below, but somehow only I could see it. I don’t think I could have told anybody else – not just for fear they should think I was mad, but for very pity.
I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand him, I don’t understand me. Or Cuffe, or – anybody. The trial was on the Thursday; the next day I went to Burghley House, but I may as well not have bothered, for all the useful work I did. It’s as if my real being is somewhere else, crouched and waiting. Waiting for what, I do not know, but the words that come to me are ‘to be set free’.
He’s the one who’s supposed to lack freedom, of course, but he seems to be finding his way. Perhaps that’s the root of my misery. On the Friday we heard they’d sent Dr Dove to him – an honourable cleric but a man with a fine eye for the political side of the story.
Be sure he’d been briefed by the Council – they needed more than the peers’ verdict of Essex’s guilt: they needed confession, they needed repentance, if they were to carry the feelings of the people with them and win through to safety. And, of course, they needed the names of any sympathisers who might still be at liberty. Torture was out of the question – they didn’t ever rack peers – so they had to try another way.
Dr Dove got nowhere; my lord still held to it that he’d meant nothing wrong, that he had in no way offended God Almighty.
I saw the note Cecil sent back, when they’d sent him word. ‘Try Ashton,’ it said briefly. I knew of this reverend, this Abdy Ashton – he was probably there when I went to Essex House, I’d heard him asked for at the trial – but I hadn’t understood him as the enemy.
They’d have taken him aside before he went to Lord Essex, shown him both the carrot and the stick. And Ashton knew his man; he went in thundering that Essex had dishonoured God and pulled down upon himself the notes of infamy. That his lordship’s refusal to reveal the details of his plot just protected his associates – atheists or Papists, and discontented riff-raff – and left them a danger to the queen’s majesty. That he was guilty of ambition and of self-deception, and of hypocrisy, since whether he’d admitted it or not, his real end must have been to seek the crown for himself. It would have been that accusation that touched Essex most nearly.
Be sure we heard exactly what Ashton said: the man wrote it all down, so the Council could see how well he’d done their work. I expect he touched it up a little in the retelling, but perhaps not much. These zealous preachers, after all, pour out their phrases every Sunday.
‘If by a true confession and unfeigned repentance you do not unburden yourself of these sins, you shall carry out of the world a guilty soul before God, and leave upon your memorial an infamous name to posterity.’ Ugh! Perhaps it’s easy to see why Essex fell into the trap. But – he fell so completely.
He didn’t just tell Ashton what his own plans had been; he went on to try and prove that his confederates had been worthier men than Ashton implied. He proved it by naming them precisely. He didn’t just fall, he flung himself down the ladder into the trap, as if impaling himself on the spikes at the bottom would be some bid for liberty.
By Saturday morning he’d convinced himself it was his duty to see all those who’d sympathised with him restrained; the only way to protect her majesty. He sent for Sir Robert and my lord of Nottingham to hear his confession for themselves. You can be sure they went eagerly. They didn’t even need to take a clerk. He wrote down his confession himself, quite readily. He said that he was the greatest, the vilest, the most unthankful traitor ever born; but he was none the less ready to blame all his friends, for all that he blamed himself so freely. He had them bring Cuffe before him, so he could blame him to his face – told Cuffe he’d been one of the chiefest instigators of all his, Lord Essex’s, disloyal course, and I couldn’t help but think, what, wasn’t he a grown-up, then? Nothing more than a leaf in the wind? I’d blamed Cuffe myself for his evil counsel, but this … You know Cuffe wasn’t even out there, on rebellion day? They said he stayed in his room, sunk in melancholy. They made that sound the worst of all, that he hadn’t even the courage of his convictions, that he was just a scurvy ‘book traitor’, but surely Sir Robert couldn’t think that way? Maybe he could: the prosecutor’s papers, that called him the seducer of the earl, went through stamped, without query. The old clerk showed me a letter in Sir Robert’s own hand, that Cuffe was a subtle sophister and showed his baseness in that he wasn’t even confessing his treason freely. The old man must have seen my horror.
‘Well, they have to blame somebody,’ he said. ‘They c
an’t lay it all on the earl himself – after all, he’s a grandee, and it would reflect badly on the queen’s majesty. And after all, it’s not as if Lord Essex were rushing to take it all on himself.’
It was true. When they went to the Tower to take his confession, his lordship even warned them of the danger in his own sister Penelope.
I do not understand it. Before the trial I’d suffered for the violence all around, and for the knowledge he must die, and for the division in my own loyalties. This was different. Like a dog with a bone I worried at the difference, walking the streets all the day Sunday.
Out of Bishopsgate and up, past Bedlam and the butts, past the Curtain playhouse to the north; south again over the bridge towards St George’s Fields, and turned again. From the country itself I shied away. I needed the bustle of people around me. As I paced, I argued it out with Lord Essex, as if he paced beside me. His zeal for his religion struck no chord in me. He was a sure Protestant; well and good, so was I. (So, unfortunately, was the Reverend Ashton – but so was Sir Robert, and so was her majesty. And so, I supposed, was Martin Slaughter: it wasn’t a subject on which we’d spoken much, but it was one on which we seemed to agree.) It was why my parents had died, but the fury of a faith was for me an absence, not a presence. I cherished the empty space; the massacres had bred in me no desire to kill Papists as some Papists had killed, but a shudder for all religious frenzy.
Thus far I was as Jacob had raised me. As England had raised me. But I knew, even without understanding it, that for others it was different. That wasn’t the problem, surely.
Before, I’d seen it as a contest. Strife against stability, energy against order. Heart against head, maybe. Never really that cut and dried – I was not that unsophisticated – but in the end, to be decided, as definitely as the prize was decided at the tilt, on Accession Day. Once I had chosen – and in the end the choice could only go one way, I was Cecil’s servant, wasn’t I? – the other had to be excised, however painfully. Perhaps not as cleanly as a surgeon cuts out a tumour, more like a schoolboy gouging out a knot from a piece of wood. But excised at last, leaving me scarred perhaps, but still me.
I’d thought I was past this. I’d made my choice, I’d understood my dreams of Lord Essex had been built on a fantasy. And Martin and I were … friends again, weren’t we? So why now did I feel I had a whole new hill to climb if ever I were to be able to name that friendship honestly? Why did Essex’s betrayal of his allies leave me so sick and angry? No, more than that – so guilty? I’d thought Martin was betraying Lord Essex by encouraging Cuffe’s dangerous folly, but then hadn’t I betrayed Martin by blaming him so harshly? And where was the greater treason: anything Martin might do against a great lord who hardly even knew his name, or my hurting someone who – I pushed the thought away. We were … friends again, weren’t we? All I knew for sure was that I felt sickened by the spinning of wheels I couldn’t even see. I passed by St Paul’s – I was circling by now – and though the booksellers’ stalls were closed I thought of that pallid-faced figure in his foolish black finery and I thought of him – yes, even of Cuffe – with a kind of pity.
As I went through the streets, it was as if the citizens around me, the merchants and the housewives, were just children, dancing on the edge of a well, and I couldn’t tell them the truth any more than I’d wake a sleepwalker suddenly. By the afternoon I’d started moving slowly, as if the weight of my thoughts were bowing me down, and I knew people were beginning to stare at me.
I found my steps had led me back to the garden where I used to go with Jacob – what, only four years ago? It seemed an eternity away. The gate was locked but I could peer through. Whoever had it now had replanted the periwinkle seat with chamomile, so that at this season it stood brown and bare. The rosemary bird had been let grow into a great ragged bush – and of course, I’d now seen better topiary. The vines were bare over the arbour, and there were cabbages where some of Jacob’s rarer herbs had grown. But all the same I rattled the gate, as if I could shrink back down and have the world again bounded by those low hedges. As if somewhere between the pond and the pea sticks, I’d find security waiting for me.
My eyes were full of tears, and I could feel my face beginning to go awry.
My walk was turning into a stumble, and when I passed the end of the street with the slaughterhouses, the smell made me turn away. I was remembering – what? Yes, years ago, and Dr Lopez, who had been so kind to me. I didn’t know if I were grieving for Lord Essex, or for my own folly, or with the sheer fatigue of the discoveries I had made and those I sensed still ahead of me, but everything I saw said pain, and every pain was inside me. I bit my hand so as not to cry out when a stray dog in the streets cringed away from me. Even the eyes of the landlady’s pampered spaniel, when I got back to my lodgings, seemed so full of grief I had to set my lips, though I daresay he was just lamenting he’d get no more tidbits that day. I’d bought a pasty, though I’d not be able to eat. But I scooped the dog up, and carried him up to my room with me. He snorted with pleasure as I fed him, and I buried my face in his warm fur.
As I sat on the bed, too tired to get inside it, I was footsore and worse than chilly. But something had been gained. I knew myself a little better now – knew I couldn’t just choose a side, like in a game of chess, knew that surely as the fallow ground in winter, I had different impulses working inside of me. Knew I had to follow where they led, and knew too, with a fresh shock of shame, that if it was true for me it was true for others, that I’d judged too easily, up till now, in blindness and vanity. Knew maybe somewhere underneath this knowledge, there was something that would set me free.
Tuesday, 24 February 1601
I was back at work on Monday, and packing my inks up at the end of the day when the old clerk came in with a face of misery.
‘She’s signed the death warrant,’ he said. Neither of us spoke. There was nothing more to say. But I found comfort in knowing here was another Cecil man whom Essex’s charm had touched, and as he left the room he dropped a hand on my shoulder, uncharacteristically.
As I passed out through the lodge, the porter called me.
‘That actor fellow was here again.’ His tone spoke a mixture of grudging respect, the result, no doubt, of a large tip, to soften a player’s lack of good solid respectability. He handed me a folded note, and I shoved it still sealed into my pocket, unheedingly.
I knew I had to see Essex, knew it with a certainty beyond reason. It wasn’t about him, or not precisely. It was about me. I’d felt what I felt for him, however foolish the roots of the fantasy, and for once in my life I had to face my feelings squarely. Lay them honourably to rest and go on the freer to the next stage of my journey. I never asked whether, with only a day or two left on this earth, Lord Essex would even want to see an unimportant secretary, a boy–girl with whom once or twice, in a dull moment, he had flirted idly. Instead I set myself to the how of it, as if this were no more than an exercise in practicality.
To get into the Tower was not so hard. The place wasn’t built as just a prison, it was an armoury, a mint, and a warehouse. A royal palace, when necessary. Guards watched the gatehouses, but what use was a guard when he had to nod through a small army of workers, and a score of delivery wagons each day? I could go in with a load of firewood, or ale, or hay, I could probably walk in waving a handful of papers, or a school book for one of the officers’ children, or a paper of pills for one of the beasts in the menagerie. To get into Lord Essex’s rooms themselves would be a different story, but I could hide until dark fell and surely there’d be some opportunity.
It was absurd, it was childish, and a part of me knew it. But as I lay in my bed that night, all I understood was that I had to be there, with a hunger more acute than any pang I’d ever felt in my body.
I decided to go in soon after dinner time. Too early, and I’d have to try and loiter there all day, without anybody noticing me. Too late – too close to curfew and the closing of the gates – and some
one might ask themselves why I was going in when everyone else was headed the other way.
The stallholders outside were busy. There were surely more people around than usual, drawn by the sweet sickly smell of catastrophe. There’d be even more the next day. I found an old man selling pastries which didn’t look too poisonous – an old man with a face that looked sharper than most – and loitered as I forced myself to chew it down appreciatively. These people know everything that’s going on.
‘What’s the latest?’ No need to specify. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand me.
‘They’re building the scaffold now. They took the timber in at daybreak. You can hear hammering when the wind is right. But’ – he shot a sly sideways glance at the badge on my cloak – ‘you’ll know more than I do, I daresay.’
‘We don’t know everything, grandfather! Not the way you lot do, on the ground here. Which rooms have they got him in, anyway?’
‘Right over there – that tall bit, see?’ He pointed across the grey waters of the moat, and I stared at the great fortress eagerly. Beyond the low, solid outer wall an inner, higher, wall reared up, set at intervals with turrets and it was one of these – on the northeastern corner, the citywards side – that he was indicating.
‘They call it the Devlin Tower – the devil’s tower – after some old Robert the Devil who was held there once. Got another Robert the Devil in there now, that’s what I say.’ As he cackled, I pressed a coin into his waiting palm and turned away before the conflict on my face could be seen too clearly.
The Girl in the Mirror Page 23
