by Robert Nye
Anjou the Frog Prince applauding. His hands like pale gloves filled with wet sand. His face pitted with pock-marks. Especially his nose, like a great blunt strawberry.
Elizabeth watching her Frog Prince, smiling pleasantly with her mouth, her eyes not smiling. Long fingers playing with the little green-jewelled frog she wore in her bosom.
A new Esquire of the Body watching his Queen.
Due north, Mr Burwick. For Polaris, Stella Maris, best and brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Minor. Due north while I sleep. If I sleep.
16
26 March
Describe her now as she appeared to me.
I had seen her before, of course. But never close up.
I had seen Gloriana. Now I saw Elizabeth. There was not so much difference. The difference came later.
Elizabeth looked tall, but she was not. Her habit of holding herself erect and straight-backed accounted for that. Her neck was long, and smooth as ivory. She was pale, she was haughty. Well-favoured but high-nosed. The iron beak of her thin Plantagenet blood. Her eyes, which changed rapidly from gold to grey if you displeased her, had lost little of their original sceptical sharpness. For all that, she was shortsighted, and would blink, bewildered, lost, if emerging too fast into light from darkness or vice versa. The whole compass of her countenance somewhat long. Small sucking lips, often parched, visited now and again by that flickering ironic inward-referring smile I first noticed by the Holbein Gate. At 48 not the rouged waxen doll in a wirework ruff which she would become, but the ghost of a girl with red hair like wisps of fire, her hands (which she took care not to hide) of special beauty, her glance quick and sidelong, with always an air of complicity and radiant busyness about her.
She was divine.
She was devilish.
I do not speak lightly. There was an angel at work in the Queen, and there was a devil. She was very woman. The angel and the devil were at war. Not just for her soul. For her body. She was never at peace with herself save when she was dancing. Dancing she loved. To see her dance was to see her whole spirit at work.
An English Cleopatra.
Our Lady of Albion.
Something about her also of Diana. The moon goddess. Hecate. Hag and maid. Mistress and virgin.
A knowledge pure it was - her worth to know.
With Circe let them dwell that think not so.
I wrote that once, in a poem in praise of the Queen. My verdict on the purity or impurity of knowing her was to place me in Circe’s company in the end.
*
I slept in the Presence Chamber every night. I observed the Queen’s comings and her goings. I saw her flirt perversely with Anjou, then laugh behind his back that the stupid Frog could be so taken in. I watched her listening to her Councillors and yawning into her hand. I watched in particular the game she played with Sir Christopher Hatton, her Vice Chamberlain and the Captain of her Guard. She called him her ‘Sheep’, her ‘Mutton’, and her ‘Ram’. I watched the teasing and teased looks which passed between them.
Hatton, dark, handsome, in his early forties, was her favourite dancing partner. Their dances were like no others that I had ever seen. Lutes and virginals playing in a candlelit room full of mirrors, with much leaping and turning and touching of hands, then standing and slapping and clapping. The Queen would dance always a little out of Hatton’s reach, like a child twisting this way and that in a game of tag. But by the end of the dance she would be looking back over her shoulder at him, her pale face flushed, her gold eyes hot and bright, her parched lips slightly gasping and apart, in a fashion not like any child’s in any child’s game.
They would go dancing out of the Presence Chamber and into the Privy Chamber, Elizabeth leading, Hatton following, while the rest of us Gentlemen of the Body were required to stand and stamp to the long pounding music. Then the door of the Privy Chamber slammed shut behind them and that was that. The music stopped, the musicians put away their instruments, and we were left staring stupidly at one another, aroused, disappointed, but never saying a word about the arousal or its disappointment.
As for the closed door - who could think ill of it? The Privy Chamber was not empty. That was the perpetual province of the Queen’s Maids of Honour. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of her in there in the midst of her white-clad female attendants.
If Elizabeth chose to lead Hatton out of the Presence Chamber and into the Privy Chamber then that was her privilege. What happened next was anyone’s guess. Not that anyone dared to speculate about it aloud. Not that anyone would have guessed, if my experience is anything to go by, and what happened to Hatton is what happened to me, as seems more than likely, though I never cared to ask her nor she to tell me. Not that anyone could give free rein to galloping licentious imagination about it, in any event, for wasn’t the Queen protected from such slanderous and possibly treasonable fantasies by the fact that there were always those Maids of Honour in the Privy Chamber?
Very well. Very true. But this leaves two vital matters out of the account.
First, the arousal caused by the dance. And here I should say that these dances - while they could be demanded or called for only by the Queen, as the whim took her, at any time of the day or more usually the night - were attended only by men, only by the select band of the Esquires of the Body, arranged and aligned in good order around the mirrored walls of the Presence Chamber.
Second, not every dance would end with the door closed behind the two dancers. I should say that rather more than half the dances which Elizabeth danced with Hatton ended with the door closed behind Elizabeth alone. She would kick it with her foot, encased in a tiny gold shoe, as she went dancing through into the Privy Chamber. On these occasions, it was Hatton who was left in the palpable but indescribable state of arousal and disappointment. He never said a word. He would turn on his heel and stalk from the chamber, head down, fists clenched, breathing heavily, often with a foolish grin on his face as if it was no matter.
As to what determined his fate on each occasion - whether the capricious Queen would let him dance into the Privy Chamber at her heels, or whether he would find the connecting door slammed in his face - there seemed no telling.
Yet I felt that I was on the edge of some momentous secret, in the first avenues of a maze of great mystery, and that along with the other dozen or so Esquires of the Body I was being permitted, however ignorantly, however imperfectly, to participate in something that was essential to our mistress Elizabeth.
*
Perhaps I need hardly add that these strange and secret dances were never discussed at the Court, nor were they ever reported or referred to by anyone. The silence was so complete that one could have been forgiven for supposing the whole thing a dream. There seemed to be an unwritten rule on the subject. And an unstated knowledge besides that if that rule was broken then the breaker could expect the Queen’s displeasure to amount to a demand for his death.
I said nothing.
I never even so much as wrote down a sketch of the matter until this present and private writing.
True, I did hint at it in certain verses - but that was later, and the poems were for the Queen’s eyes only, and they are now no doubt destroyed.
I hinted also in those same verses at what happened (as it were) in the dance that followed the dance.
None ever spoke of that, nor even threatened to speak of that, and kept his head. (Witness the fate of my Lord Essex.)
But this was later also, when I was learning by experience, when I had taken Sir Christopher Hatton’s place.
I’ll come to it, if I dare, if I can, soon enough, when it is time in the story, although I am not yet clear in my mind how much of it I ought to tell at all, if anything.
Meanwhile, that first Christmas, that glittering New Year, that beginning spring, I watched.
I watched Queen Elizabeth and she watched me watching her.
And the music hammered and the dancers danced and the blood coursed hot and furious in my v
eins.
*
The winds have swung round to the south and west by south. Today we sailed another 90 miles, taking care to avoid the Spanish island of Porto Rico, which Columbus christened San Juan, and the Indians call Borinquen. Our position is 18° 50’ north, in 66° west. I saw at evening a rainbow in a waterspout. Terrible beauty. The rainbow faded. The waterspout remained. It was huge, about a mile and a half ahead of the ship when I first saw it. Then it moved round rapidly to port until it was a bare half a mile from our side. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. If we ran foul of something like that then I fear we would stand little chance of getting through. The Encounter managed to keep directly astern of us. For nearly fifteen minutes the whirling column of water twisted up to a low black cloud before I lost sight of it in the swiftly fading light.
17
30 March
Main sail, fore sail, main top-sail, fore top-sail, top-gallant sails, royal sails, studding sails - we are riding the sea under every bolt of canvas that will haul and hold wind.
Exhilaration of taking the wheel as we do!
I imagine I can feel all the timbers singing through my hands, from keel to cross-trees, and from stem to stern
Steady, old fool that you are. Be quiet, my heart.
What a parcel of confusions and contradictions the flesh is, to be sure. Here I am, half-drunk with delight at taking a turn at the wheel of a ship which flies through the foam to speed me home to disaster and (probably) death. As soon see beauty in the way the vultures turn against the sun to spread their wings downwind in search of carrion to eat? Yes, and I do that too.
*
Details from the log.
27 March: From 6 in the morning till 12 at night we ran 140 miles. Wind strong from the south. Our course being north by north-west. Grossed latitude 20° north.
28 March: The wind failed in the night but continued well from 9 in the morning until 11 this evening. We steered away north-west by north, running 120 miles.
29 March: From midnight to midnight our best day yet. Winds fair to strong, and constant from the south. 170 miles run. Course: north by north-west.
*
Now it is noon, 30 March, with the wind still following, making a generous shoulder of seas on which we sail. In the past twelve hours we have come another 90 miles. Since quitting St Kitts we have completed a total of 715 miles in five and a quarter days. This is the best time we have made on the whole voyage since leaving Plymouth last year. It amounts, by Mr Burwick’s calculation, to an average rate of 136 miles a day, and he calculates also that during some of that time we have been sailing at speeds of twelve knots.
This is, of course, excellent. If it could be maintained we should reach Newfoundland in about 13 days, making an overall time for the voyage of little more than 18 days. It would be foolish to hope for that, perhaps. But it does begin to look as though my original allowance of one whole month for this stretch of the journey home might err on the side of pessimism. It is, all things considered, quite possible that we shall see the harbour of St John in Newfoundland three weeks after quitting St Kitts instead of four.
We are presently, whatever happens, and whether the future holds a bag of fair winds or ill for us, within about one day’s sail of San Salvador, that little island where Columbus fell ashore in October 1492, believing that he had found his way to the Orient. The Indians call that island Guana-hani.
At the same time, I must report that our ship’s master, Robert Burwick, a most experienced mariner, has commented daily for the past three days on the fact that these strong southerly winds are uncommon in these latitudes at this time of the year. He refers me to the almanacs: about one half of the winds to be expected, on an annual basis, are from the east or north-east; in March and April this percentage rises to three quarters. Some of the crew are conversant with this figure. I have overheard idle talk of our progress being ‘unnatural’ and ‘ill-omened’. Last night a meteor fell into the sea at four or five miles distance to the north. That will provide further fuel for their superstitious grumblings, no doubt.
We glide along and they have little enough to do. Our course determined, we square in the yards and keep the vessel before the breeze. The ship and the wind do the rest between them.
The sky presents an unbroken expanse of most delicate blue, except along the skirts of the horizon. There I can see a mass of milky-looking clouds in curious formation. In appearance it might be a forest of trees set on the silver shore of Valhalla. So mysterious and exquisite it seems.
As for the sea, its swell is long and measured, its surface broken only by shoals of flying fish, like showers of bright metal.
I note also how my mood has improved since we left the islands. Just to be moving is sufficiënt, just to be sailing along. My problems remain as they were. My life is in ruins. Yet not for the first time I observe how merely to take action provides me with relief from the tensions which tortured my mind. Past tense? Not quite. The rack travels with me, within me, but I am eased an inch or two by pursuing a definite course.
I eat better too. My appetite for everything is made keener. At dawn this morning I made my breakfast of yams as big as a man’s arm.
*
As I told you, the Indian has been withdrawn and elusive ever since we weighed anchor from St. Kitts.
At first, I ascribed his temper to the uncertainty which he must surely feel on account of being for the first time so far out of sight of land. But all the several attempts which I have made to reassure him on this subject have met with a blank response.
He stands for much of each day leaning up against the bulwarks, the skin of his face and arms and legs as dark as the timbers behind him, gazing out in a kind of trance of concentration across the sea. At night he employs Wat’s cabin.
Notice that I avoid the term sleeps in.
I don’t know if the Indian sleeps at night. I’m not at all sure that the Indian really wakes by day. Most of the time he seems to be suspended in some limbo between waking and sleeping.
This afternoon, during the first dog watch, I sought to rouse him from his torpor by referring to the death of Palomeque.
‘What would you say,’ I demanded, ‘if I told you that I did not believe your story of having murdered your Spanish master?’
His eyes met mine. They did not flicker. His huge jaws worked methodically all the while. He was chewing one of his khoka leaves.
After a silence he shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘What Guattaral believes is not important.’
This answer angered me.
I said: ‘What is important then, in your estimation?’ ‘What I know,’ he replied.
I thought of his life passed in obscurity in the dark hinterland of the southern American continent, comparing it with my own life, and I laughed.
‘Your philosophy is arrogant,’ I said.
‘I think not.’
‘What do you mean then?’ I demanded.
‘I say only that knowledge is the important thing,’ he replied. ‘What I know. What Guattaral knows. What men know is what is important. Not what they think they believe.’
‘But there must be many things which belong to belief rather than to knowledge,’ I complained.
‘For instance?’ he said.
‘For instance, God,’ I said.
The Indian said nothing.
He chewed. He stared at the horizon.
‘Do you believe in God?’ I said. He spat. He shook his head.
‘No?’ I said.
The Indian shifted the bulge of the leaf from one cheek to the other. ‘I do not believe in gods,’ he said. ‘I know.’
‘Know?’
“Know.”
‘Know what?’ I said.
‘Know gods,’ the Indian replied.
His continual shift of emphasis is disconcerting. In this particular case it also served to make me feel ashamed. No more than Queen Elizabeth have I ever been possessed by a desire to make windows into men’s souls, a
nd to demand to see what secrets lie in them. The Indian’s conception of the Deity is no doubt both strange and simple. His insistence that nevertheless he knows what he knows, rather than merely believing something which he has been told, impresses my conscience with its moral force.
Theology and science are one to him. His world and my world have different shapes.
‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Let us leave that. But concerning things like the death of Palomeque. That is different. I can only believe or disbelieve what you tell me.’
‘Not so,’ he said. ‘You know.’
‘Know what?’
‘You know the truth about that,’ he said. ‘I killed Palomeque. I also killed your son. And you have forgiven me. You gave me his cabin.’
I looked at him for a long time. I said nothing. He did not look at me.
It may seem mad to say so, but I must say it: What he says is true. I do know. He did kill Palomeque. He did (in some sense) kill Wat.
I do not ‘believe’ it. I do not know how to believe such things.
But I know.
And I have forgiven him.
Myself, however, I have not forgiven. Which is perhaps another way of saying that while I know that what the Indian says is true, I do not understand how I know it, or why I know it, or what I should do with the knowledge. Nor do I know what it means.
*
Elizabeth got rid of her Frog Prince.
She went with him down the river to Gravesend. In Canterbury, at their parting, she contrived to cry. I suspect she used an onion in her handkercHicf. Anjou set off on some fool’s errand to the Netherlands, accompanied by Leicester and a hundred English gentlemen lent for the brief occasion by the Queen. I was one of the hundred.
In Antwerp, William the Silent lived up to his name. He saw through Anjou. Anjou drifted off to Paris in a huff. The Queen wrote to Leicester demanding our immediate return. We were spending too much money, so she said.
