by G Lawrence
Dee was to be sent to France and the Low Countries to seek out advice on my condition. Mixtures of honey and sage were poured into my mouth three times a day, but did no good. My doctors were at a loss, and since I declared I would rather die than have my teeth pulled, they knew not what to do.
That November, there came a flaming star, with a train of fire, in the skies. People said it was a portent of trouble to come, and Dee, already at court, spending his days tasting my piss and examining my stools, was called to comment on it.
“As I have said many times, they may be auguries of ill, and sometimes, simply of change.”
Which star should have warned me about Robin? I wondered.
Taking a flask of my urine with him, Dee left. He made his way to Frankfurt, where he wanted to consult with the noted physician and alchemist Leonhard Thurneysser. This doctor had invented a method to test illnesses using urine, said to be more reliable than simply staring at it, as other doctors did.
As I continued to suffer, one close to me fell to sickness too. After weeks of nursing me day and night, Blanche fell ill.
So ill, it seemed she would die.
Chapter Eighty
Richmond Palace and Greenwich Palace
Winter 1578 - 1579
I was made frantic by Blanche’s illness. I had lost too many people to misread the signs of death upon her. She was exhausted and a fever had taken hold. Memories of Kat, of Katherine, of Parry, Parr, and everyone else I had lost haunted me. My doctors were commanded away from my side and to hers.
“You should not be here, Majesty,” she croaked upon waking late one night, or perhaps early the next day, to find me there. I had lost all sense of time. “You will fall ill.”
“Actually, old friend,” I said, attempting and failing to smile. “In my fear about you, I find my bodily pains have departed. You have done me good service, but I would take my pains back if it meant yours would depart.”
“It is good to hear I have aided you, cariad. But all the same, you should not put yourself at risk.”
She slept a great deal, and because of her age, the doctors were concerned. Blanche was seventy-one, an age many did not reach in this life of frail mortality. I sat with her day and night, ignoring business of state. There was nothing more important than Blanche.
One night, as I went to my bed, almost falling down with weariness, a thought came. Richmond Palace had been where Kat had died. Was it written in the shifting sands of fate that this palace, seat of my ancestors, would be where I lost all those most important to me?
Hold Death back, Kat, my mind said to her. Only you could do it.
The next morning I was aghast to hear Blanche had started to make preparations for death. She had asked that Kate Carey ensure her debts were paid and a discharge certificate for her heirs obtained. When Kate came to ask this, I felt all blood drain from my body. Only the rapid thump of my heart told me I was still alive.
A fit of panic came, so sudden I had no time to prepare. I was breathless, my heart raced, and I thought I might suffer an attack in that organ and die. Kate all but dragged me to an open window so I could stick my head from it. After, I fell in a heap at the base of the window, my head between my knees as I tried to envision a world without Blanche. If that happened, I did not want to live.
“I cannot lose another that I love,” I whispered. “I cannot, Kate. I have not the strength.”
I recovered, but suffered another fit when I was told Blanche had sent orders for the tomb in her family’s mausoleum to be prepared for her. That night I went to her. She was asleep and I did not wake her. I sat on the bed and soon found myself curled up at her side. As a child I lay, thinking of all she had done for me. When Kat had died, I had been broken. Blanche stitched me back together. There would always be tears in my seams, wounds I would bear, but she had made the unbearable bearable. If she was lost to me, I would become lost.
I dreamt strange dreams that night. I was a babe in a cradle. A face, beautiful and kind, watched over me, her hand on the wooden edge, rocking it back and forth. A lullaby was sung, and although I knew not the words, they reached into me, taking hold of the deepest part of my heart, holding it safe.
When I woke, there was a hand on my hair. “Cariad,” said Blanche. “You have been here all night?”
“I will stay here for the rest of my life,” I said.
“You have a task to do, Elizabeth. A country to watch over.”
“You are more important than anything.”
I looked up and almost fell from the bed when I saw a hint of colour in her cheeks. “Blanche!” I exclaimed. “You look better!”
“I feel better.” She smiled. “In the night, I dreamed I was a young girl again, rocking your cradle. When I woke, I felt youth within me.”
“I had the same dream,” I said, my tone high with wonder. “But I was in the cradle.”
“Then we are linked, Majesty.”
“We always were,” I said.
To my unbounded relief, Blanche rallied. Within days she was receiving guests, and eating so much broth my kitchen maids started to swear she had been granted the stomach of a horse by the Good Folk. As Christmas approached, I woke one day to find her at my side, holding out my nightgown.
“Blanche!” I cried, leaping from my bed in delight. Unfortunately, my legs were caught, and I tumbled from the bed in a manner most unbecoming of a queen. I half-fell out, my legs in and torso without, and hit my head on the wooden bedpost.
Rushing to my side, but quickly ascertaining there was no harm done, Blanche chuckled. “Careless fop,” she said, kissing my head.
“Irresponsible crone,” I retorted, taking her in my arms as I wept, holding her so close that I thought I might break her ribs and mine.
As Blanche recovered, I became worse. Christmas came and the court moved to Greenwich, but I did not take part in the ceremonies. My teeth were agony and the thought of feasting or dancing impossible. I was also disturbed by a smell that had started to emerge from my mouth. Although I did not want to admit it, one tooth was rotten, causing noxious vapour to emerge. Always in horror of ill smells, I had taken to putting a perfumed handkerchief in my mouth as my ladies performed my morning ablutions. The taste of the perfume was vile and dried my tongue, but it was better than the smell of my rotten tooth.
“The offending tooth must be pulled, Majesty,” chided my doctor. “It will only get worse.”
“Worse?” I could not imagine such a thing. The constant pain was blinding, consuming my whole body.
“Worse,” he affirmed.
Finding me unwilling, afraid not only of the operation but of becoming a toothless hag, the doctor went to Cecil, who went to Hatton.
“Majesty,” he said. “I have a solution.”
“A cure for my teeth?”
“A way to demonstrate the operation is not what you think,” he said. “Bishop Aylmer of London has agreed to take part in the demonstration. He has a black tooth that needs to come out. It will be done before Your Majesty so you can see there is little pain, and only great relief.”
I made a face. The Bishop was an aged man, with few teeth left, so losing another was not likely to pain him. He wore false teeth, made from the leavings of the dead, but when he came to me they had been taken out, giving him that curious look the toothless possess, where it seems their whole face has collapsed like a pile of laundry.
I watched as the doctor pulled out the troublesome tooth with pliers. Since the good Bishop did not even whimper, and looked pleased afterwards, although there was a certain amount of blood, I agreed to the procedure.
In practise, it was hideous. I was held down by four men, Hatton, Robin, Cecil and Walsingham, as the doctor knelt on my chest. He wrestled with the tooth as I drooled, and when he pulled it out, it hurt a great deal and my mouth erupted with blood. Clamping a cloth infused with sage and thyme to my bleeding gum, he held the tooth aloft and smiled. “So die all traitors,” he said, making the oth
ers chuckle.
The operation worked, and the pain and swelling subsided rapidly. The wound was sore, but nothing to what I had endured for almost nine months. I felt lighter and happier, but was determined not to have more teeth taken out. This one had been near the back, and no one would see there was a gap there. I did not need my men glancing at me and seeing an old woman. Unless the pain was unbearable, I would keep my remaining teeth.
*
“Robert is to enter Grey’s Inn this year?” I asked Cecil, selecting a piece of marchpane. Made by my favourite confectioner, Master Smythesone, the sugary knots were works of art as well as being exceedingly tasty.
“Next year,” Cecil said, shaking his head as I offered him a bit of marchpane.
My appetite had returned. Some doctors warned they were starting to link tooth problems with an excess of sugar, but there was no conclusive proof. If one looked into the mouths of commoners, who had no money for sweet treats, one would find hardly any teeth after the age of twenty-five, so clearly sugar was not the only culprit in the ongoing war of teeth.
It was the day after New Year’s, and I had been presented not only with marchpane, but quince pies, comfits of orange peel and walnut, boxes of gingerbread spiced with nutmeg, and cakes, custards and tarts all sent by courtiers who knew my addition to sugar and its wily ways.
To my chagrin, I had also been forced to accept a present from Lettice. If the farce that I knew nothing of Robin’s marriage was to be upheld, I had no cause to keep her from court. She had presented me with a chain of amber beads garnished with pearls and gold, but I swore to myself that would be the last present I took from her hands. The chain was pretty, but knowing it had been bought with Robin’s wealth made it ugly to my eyes.
“I find it hard to keep up with the ages of those who will form the next generation,” I said. “One moment they are but babes and the next are grown.”
“Think how baffling it is for a parent, Majesty. Sometimes I expect to return home to a house of babies, as I used to, and instead find it full of young men, with many of the girls fled to make homes and babes of their own.”
“Will young Cecil be ready for his new school?”
“Mildred has offered him a rare education in the classics. He is far ahead of many other young men.”
“And the second Robert in your charge? He is doing well at Cambridge?”
Young Essex had been sent to Cambridge at the age of just eleven and a half. Favourable reports had come swiftly.
“He does well, Majesty,” Cecil said. “The Cambridge scholars are delighted with him. They say he has a fine mind, and think he may achieve his Master of the Arts within two years.”
“Ambitious.” To gain a degree at the tender age of sixteen was no mean feat.
“He would like to come to court again, on breaks from university,” Cecil said. Robert had been at court that Christmas. I had not seen him at all, since I had been in my rooms with toothache, or in Blanche’s with terror.
“He may come,” I agreed.
“I will inform the young man.”
*
“Witches of Windsor?” I asked. “It sounds like a play.”
Cecil offered a swift smile, but he was concerned. Another report of people using the dark arts had come, this time of women conjuring spirits against me at Windsor.
“They were found with more waxen images of you,” said Cecil. “And have confessed to being Catholics.”
“But their images failed to kill me. Laws on witchcraft state that death is only granted to the accused if death were to fall upon their intended victim.”
“Majesty, to show mercy would encourage more people to wield harmful magic. And this event was worryingly close to court.”
“I would think magic rather useless if it required the witch to be right next to me when enacting a harmful spell,” I pointed out. “Then, people may as well take up a dagger, or use a gun.”
“We must make an example of them, Majesty.”
“Arrest them. I will think on their sentences.”
“Majesty…”
“I think most of these people foolish, Cecil, that is all. If all who claim to have such powers truly did, would I not be dead by now? Although I believe there are unexplained mysteries in life, I think most so-called witches are people who feel powerless and seek out magic because they think it offers them some form of control. I pity, rather than hate them.”
“You are too clement, my lady.”
“I am simply not in haste to punish the foolish.”
*
The Treaty of the Union of Utrecht was signed in the states of Holland that January, joining the north to Orange, and we had word soon after that the Catholic Walloon provinces of the Netherlands had signed their own defensive treaty, the Union of Arras, with Spain. The Netherlands were split, south to north, and war raged on, whilst famine, pestilence and death stalked the lands.
As war struggled on, aided by ambition, revenge and sorrow, a French embassy arrived in London to talk of peace and marriage.
“We are delighted to receive you, lord ambassador,” I said. “I am anxious for news of the Duc.”
Jean de Simier, Baron de Saint-Marc, one of Anjou’s most trusted men, was the man I addressed.
“His Highness wishes me to impress upon you, Majesty, that he is in the same condition,” said Simier. “He sleeps but little, and food has become tasteless to his tongue. The only food that may now touch him is the sustenance of Your Majesty’s love, and the only dreams he will dream, ones of you.”
I smiled. Simier was charming and although I had heard rumours that he was just as dangerous as his charm, I was flattered and pleased.
Simier was a highly objectionable man in many ways. There were rumours he had murdered his brother after finding him in bed with his wife, and the lady herself had been poisoned not long after, probably also by Simier. Although I found this distasteful, I had just experienced what it was to be betrayed. The darkness within me whispered that Simier and I were similar souls.
He came bearing gifts; hoards of jewels for me and my courtiers, silks for me, and intimate presents sent by Anjou. I took each present in my hands and admired it publicly. I wanted Robin to feel desperate, as desperate as he had made me. If he thought I would truly marry Anjou, he would regret marrying Lettice.
Petty, yes, and it brought me little joy, but sometimes even a scrap is enough. In being hurt, I wanted to hurt. In being humiliated, I wanted Robin shamed. I would make him regret. I would make him pay.
But as I played the game, I wondered. Should I marry? Certainly, it would teach Robin a fine lesson… but would it also heal my heart to have someone of my own? Anjou and I seemed to have much in common. Could I find solace with him?
There were political advantages. Spain would be rendered fearful, I would be able to control Anjou in his ambitions, and France would become a friend. Calais might be restored, and I would be in a position to aid Huguenots in France. Political worth there was, but in truth I was seeking consolation.
I wanted to be loved.
Some will see this and think it pathetic, would chide me for valuing such a common goal over those of power, liberty and glory, but we all need to feel loved, do we not? To know that someone, somewhere, cares for you? That they would nurse you when sick, comfort you when you were low. And more than this… that they want to.
That is important. Merely showing up for duty is not enough. I wanted to be loved for the woman I was, not the crown I wore. I wanted to be adored, never set aside. I wanted to feel as I had before all this pain and hurt.
Simier presented letters from Anjou, and, eager to know there was a heart out there that might beat for me, I read them over and over. Gifts followed, and when I found many pearls amongst the gems offered to me, I remarked on it to Simier.
“Did someone tell the Duc that I adore pearls?”
Simier smiled. “The Duc instructed our ambassadors to watch your clothes, Majesty. Over the pas
t year, they have been counting gems, the number and frequency with which you wear them, and this has been reported to the Duc. He thought, using this method, he might discover your favourites.”
I blinked, astonished. Although it was normal for a queen to be spied upon, I was not only surprised Simier had admitted to it, but also by the work that this mission must have taken. “Are there not more important matters for your ambassadors to attend to at court?”
“To the Duc, nothing is more important than you, Majesty.” Simier’s grin grew. “And he has sent, too, gifts to delight your senses.” He indicated to a table of perfumes and expensive sugary treats. “He knows you love good smells, and abhors ill ones, and he is of the same mind. And my master heard of Your Majesty’s predilection for the sweetness in life, although he worried you might not like the comfits he sent, because of the pain you lately endured.”
