A Net for Small Fishes

by Lucy Jago

She was angry with him, perhaps with everyone. With a combative lift to her chin she weighed up what was safe to tell. I tried to feel indifferent to her judgement but something of her defiant spirit had already captured me. ‘Better a sheep than a shrew,’ the saying goes, but not to my mind. My courage would appeal to her, and my greater age and lower rank would save us from rivalry, but my taste would be too outlandish.

  ‘I can trust no one,’ she said, ‘not even my family and servants.’

  I shrugged slightly, making clear it made no difference whether she confided in me or not. She lifted her chin higher, yet never took her eyes from mine. Suddenly her face softened. She took a great breath and a step closer, as if spies listened at the door.

  ‘My husband beats me because he has been home from his travels for two months and I am still a virgin.’

  That net of words and meanings, cast with little self-pity and great faith in my discretion, ensnared me. I was fascinated that the most appealing young wife at Court remained a virgin; nosiness is another of my failings. Frances kicked at the clothes forming soft piles on the floor, like molehills. She was a most dishevelled creature, but not defeated.

  ‘Has he not suffered from the pox since his return?’ George had told me this.

  ‘He is not too ill to whip me. I am of the new way of thinking about marriage, in which man and wife are friends, the wife is not slave to the husband,’ said Frances.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘but husbands rarely are.’ I looked at the clock on the mantel, an elaborate confection of golden mermaids who rode their dolphins valiantly but could not steer back time. There was less than an hour ’til midday.

  ‘I advise you to dress. It seems you will be unhappier if you refuse.’

  ‘I will kill myself,’ she said, pausing for a response, but I felt only embarrassment at her irreligion. I busied myself with picking up clothes and laying them on the bed. Her mother dressed her in fungal hues, perhaps to dampen her allure.

  ‘If you take your life you will go to hell, which is worse than marriage,’ I said.

  ‘It will be hot, otherwise the differences will be few.’

  ‘A woman should not decide her future.’

  ‘I am deciding against a future.’

  ‘That is the same. If you obey your husband, he might be kinder,’ I said, knowing that she would already have been told that a hundred times. Indeed, she snorted.

  ‘He only cares for horses and dogs. Even those he thrashes. He says women are parasites, like ticks.’ She sat abruptly on the edge of the bed, head bowed. ‘I am very unhappy,’ she whispered, and slipped her hand into mine.

  A powerful memory rose to the surface. I had taken my older children to see a baby elephant in the Tower. The dejected creature was so thin its skin hung off its bones and it kept its eyes to the ground as though ashamed. Yet, even in dejection, the animal placed its trunk in the hand of its keeper, as if its trust was not broken. The keeper, long hardened to the prolonged deaths of his charges, had no clue what to do with it. We left that place quickly, our hearts very sore. The fantastical nature of the beast had not brought us the pleasure we had anticipated. I felt the same that moment with Frances Howard. The wealth and distance in rank of this young woman were not sufficient to shield me from her anguish, and I could not remain unmoved by the soft weight of her hand in mine.

  In that moment, I recognised Frances Howard to be the dream I had long held and suffered from, because it had appeared unattainable. She was a young thoroughbred, stamping about in her dark stall. If she allowed me, if I dared, we could take off her halter and together race the course in our own fashion. With Frankie, I could have the life I had always wanted and regain the honour I sought for myself and my family, and with me she could forge something more satisfying from her own.

  She looked at me over the bottle as she took another drink. Had she an inkling of what I imagined for us both? I had no plan, no scheme, just a basket of desires. I sensed that deep-lying in us both was a longing for something to happen; we scanned the horizon daily, expectant. She lowered the bottle to the floor and stood, she in bare feet and I in heels, so that our faces were level. Her eyes flickered minutely as she tried to see both of mine. She held out her hand, like a man. It was a strange gesture but exactly what was required. I shook it.

  That was it.

  My entry to her world.

  From this stemmed everything that followed.

  ‘You have a weapon,’ I said, picking at her clothes for items not offensive to my tastes. ‘Your beauty. You must harness it to better serve you.’

  ‘It is a curse. Essex chose me over my younger sister because of it. You would think she would be nicer to me. My husband is already blind to it.’

  ‘I doubt it, and others won’t be; they might protect you.’

  On Frances’s palm sat the white oval, like a large, fluffy pearl. It quivered unnervingly, as if some manner of insect lived within, but it was only the trembling of her hand.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Nothing of value if my mother gave it to me,’ she said, tossing it to her little dog. I unpinned her hair and brushed until it was bright from crown to knee.

  ‘Will your husband give me something more potent than wine to numb my misery?’ she asked.

  ‘I myself brew a hypericum tincture that lifts the spirits. Have you silk?’ Frances pointed to a chest and I pulled out a fine piece from which I cut a strip, coated it with a balsam to cover and heal the seeping welts, and pressed it to her back. I asked about her black armband as I untied it. It was a few moments before she answered, in a voice that had lost all its bravado.

  ‘My little sister Margaret fell ill this autumn and gave me her pearls to look after until she got better,’ she said, rubbing her thumb over them. ‘I was nearly ten when she was born and was allowed to care for her like she was my own. God took her three weeks ago. She was nine.’ I was pained by that news. It explained perhaps her mother’s hard face and the depth of Frances’s despair. My keeping angel had spared me that grief but, like all mothers, I lived in fear of any hurt to my children and I made the sign of the cross.

  ‘You think that will protect you?’ she asked.

  ‘It costs nothing.’ In truth, I had stopped attending mass four years previously after Catholic fanaticks attempted to blow up the royal family and their ministers in the Powder Plot. I could not align myself with such people. Its discovery made the lives of all Catholics in these isles harder, with renewed fines and greater abuse. Even George stopped attending confession. I did not know if Frankie went and had not the familiarity to ask her, yet I knew she and her family were Catholic and that made me feel safer than I would have done in the great Protestant houses.

  ‘All my love and prayers did not save Margaret. Her loss has turned earth to water beneath my feet. I feel her in my arms, her weight on my lap. Her death is as if I saw it on a stage and nothing convinces me that she will not skip into the room at any moment and demand kisses as she always did.’

  I worked gently and in silence, hoping that she could feel my care. Words cannot dam sorrow, nor should they. They can make a soul feel less alone, but I did that with my work better than my talk.

  ‘Everyone is angry with me,’ she said, after a long moment of companionable quiet. ‘My mother thinks it my fault that my husband hates me and my eldest sister believes that I have made a much smaller sacrifice than her own.’

  ‘You and your sisters have married well,’ I said, cutting the ruined undershirt from her perfect body and dropping a clean one over her head.

  ‘We have married high,’ she corrected, ‘Elizabeth to a man older than our grandfather would have been had he not been executed. None of us has produced an heir.’

  ‘Why did you deserve a whipping?’

  ‘For a sigh when again he could not penetrate me. He says I must not talk unless it is in answer to a question. Nor laugh.’

  ‘Perhaps he is ashamed,’ I said, fitting a stiff bodic
e like armour, flattening and broadening her chest. She eyed it, the horse resentful of its tight girth, but said nothing. ‘Shame can make a person cruel. He has returned from Europe to find his bride a woman while he is still a boy.’

  ‘He is aggrieved that my brothers and cousins are given positions at Court while he is ignored. His father’s treason taints him still.’

  I caged her hips in a farthingale wide as a cart. Over it I tied a carmine skirt, pinning up the hem to reveal her ankles. My hands darted like a bird pecking seed, working needles and pins, laces and points, circling Frances like a whole flock of maids though I was but one woman. My deftness pleased me, as if the pins and laces grew from my own body as silk comes from the spider. I enjoyed the feel of the sharp metal broaching cloth made on looms in foreign lands, by hands as quick and sure as my own. It pleased me to sculpt fine materials into the shapes in my mind’s eye. To the bodice I tied sleeves, pulling them into sharp peaks above her shoulders. From the shambles of this whipped child rose a castle, every swag and buttress testament to her worth.

  ‘He has been restored to his titles and lands, he should be content with that or try harder to be liked by my family, who might help him,’ said Frankie. It was not for me to discuss the savagery of her husband’s whipping, so I concentrated instead on what I was there to do. I rolled her hair over fat pads and stuck them with jewelled pins. The parrot attempted to steal the jewels but we batted it away and it came to rest amongst the rose-dyed ostrich feathers atop Frances’s bed, as if amongst the foliage of its homeland. I took three of the longest feathers and pinned them to her hair, to give her another foot or more of height.

  ‘My great-uncle Northampton sent me that popinjay this morning as a New Year’s present. With it was a note that green is the colour of hope and physical love. He has a nose for trouble like no other,’ said Frances.

  The Lord Northampton was so high a person that to talk casually of him would be like gossiping about God. That her father and great-uncle were, alongside Lord Salisbury, the King’s three closest advisers, his ‘Trinity of Knaves’ as he called them, made me feel again the distance between us.

  ‘He claims it can say “Hail Mary”, but for me it only shrieks and whistles. Comfit?’ she asked.

  I declined but watched in admiration as she tossed the sweetmeat high in the air and caught it in her mouth. ‘My brother Harry taught me,’ she said with a laugh. ‘His eyes will pop when he sees me tricked out like this.’

  ‘Your husband’s too. And all the women in your acquaintance. Now I will paint you.’

  ‘My husband says that the woman who paints puts up a sign, like a tavern, that she is open to visitors. “Jezebel-finery for strumpets and followers of false prophets”,’ she said, mimicking her husband’s glum tone.

  ‘Indeed? It will excite him all the more then. No smiling until you wash it off tonight.’

  ‘I am not allowed to smile.’

  I painted egg white on to her naked skin and into it drew blue veins. As it dried to a perfectly smooth sheen, I darkened her eyelashes and brows and reddened her lips, cheeks and nails. Finally, from the linen sack I had brought with me, I took out a ruff dyed with my own patent starch recipe. You would have thought it was a severed head, so repulsed was her expression. I wondered if she had been in the crowd when her father-in-law was executed. Many of her relatives had gone to the block. It made my fingers fly to think that I was in the presence of people talked about in taverns.

  ‘Yellow? That is too bold. Only drabs wear yellow,’ Frances said.

  ‘Drabs and Irish peasants,’ I agreed, tying the ruff round her neck. ‘They use urine but, if you can afford it, saffron gives a deeper colour without the stink. It is somewhat outrageous but that can prove arousing.’ She looked unconvinced but allowed me to pin it in place.

  I pushed up her skirt to roll on stockings. She had the slim, taut legs of a girl. Her feet, young enough that the bones did not show, were as pretty as ducklings. I felt, for an uncomfortable moment, as if I was arming a child. Still, her husband had no qualms in attacking her, so I must have none in fortifying her.

  The bells of Westminster chimed midday. I rolled on the stockings, elaborately embroidered at the ankle, and tied the laces of green silk shoes with high heels. From strong boxes came bracelets, rings, necklaces and earrings with which I finished her armature, tying the most valuable to her body with black thread to keep them safe. I helped her to stand by pulling on her lower arms so as not to smudge her painted hands. She towered a good two feet above me.

  As she stared at herself in the long glass, I was suddenly nervous. The dreary little mushroom was magicked into a goddess, barely human although wrought of human artifice, a statue brought to life by enchantment, highly sexual yet not approachable. Could she carry so brave a façade?

  She turned to me. Although her face was stiff under the ceruse, her eyes shone with delight.

  ‘You may call me Frankie, but not in public,’ she said, swaying to the door. ‘Ready?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To join me.’

  ‘I am not dressed!’

  ‘No matter. We are only going to see the King’s worms.’

  2

  Frankie and I shuddered in her carriage along the frozen road inside the wall of St James’s Park. She sat still and upright to keep her hair from harm, asking every few moments if her skirt was not too short, her cuffs too yellow, her lips too red? I kept up a patter of encouragement as I looked through the window at that to which only the Court was allowed entry. Part-hidden by the frozen fog, workmen were digging the canal of Prince Henry’s design, about which I had read in the broadsheets. Beyond it, like a jumble of jewel cases, was the King’s menagerie. Men in red coats strolled around.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘The keepers,’ said Frances. ‘They are treated like princes.’

  The cages were empty, their exotic prisoners sheltering inside small huts except for a dark-skinned man wrapped in a blanket. His eyes followed the progress of our coach.

  ‘That’s an Indian, and there are pelicans from Muscovy, antelopes from the Great Mogul, Virginia squirrels that can fly and Cassuare birds that cannot, although they swallow hot coals without harm, and the courtiers’ favourite, two crocodiles.’ Frankie loved to laugh. I checked her face for cracks.

  At the western end of the park we came to an orchard of saplings wrapped in straw to protect them from frost. At the centre squatted three long sheds, little taller than a man, steaming in the pale January light. To one side were coaches, horses and servants, all emblazoned with the crests of noble families.

  ‘So many,’ I said. Frankie barely glanced at what impressed me.

  ‘You will get used to it. The King is never unattended.’

  ‘The King?’

  She looked at me curiously, as if I were a foreigner with different understanding. ‘This is the King’s new silk factory. We are here to admire it.’

  I had known Frances but a few hours and already, in her company, I was to be admitted to the King’s presence. Frankie noticed my agitation and took my hand.

  ‘I will keep you safe from the monsters,’ she said as the footman helped her down; he helped me too, but with less deference. I was ashamed of my sweating palms.

  Inside it was so dark that at first I thought we were alone. The place was hot and wet and reeked like a turgid pond. Frankie held her perfumed gloves to her nose to mask the stench. There was a strange noise, like rain drumming on canvas, so loud that I looked about for its source but could find none in the gloom. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the low building was crammed with courtiers, fantastically silhouetted against the slatted shutters, many of whom were members of Frankie’s family. They all gazed towards a short, rather scruffy man. The moment Frankie spotted him she lowered her gloves.

  There could be no other reason for her sudden movement than that this was the King. He held a shiny leaf on which feasted a caterpillar, as fat as a carpenter�
��s thumb, heedless of its monarch. Awe possessed me like a devil, jumping on my organs, pulling the strings of my eyes, making me stare when I should have looked down. Although his clothes were a poor fit, his cap was magnificently jewelled and adorned with feathers tall enough to brush the ceiling. His countenance was unlovely, with drooping eyes and jowls, and his body encased in a doublet so thickly padded it resembled a turnip, but it mattered not for the King is appointed by God and stands as high as Him. His courtiers were more richly dressed, a host proclaiming the glory of their Lord, and I felt touched by divinity in my nearness to him; it is one of God’s mysterious workings that he should raise this small man above us even while all about are men of greater strength and beauty.

  ‘Have we entered hell, after all?’ Frankie whispered just as I was thinking myself in heaven.

  ‘The noise we hear is their eating,’ I whispered back, nodding towards trestles that stood between us and the King. These were piled with glossy leaves that the caterpillars were clamorously devouring. Frankie’s face was a picture of revulsion.

  ‘Lady Frances, this will interest ye!’ said the King, ensuring all became aware of our late arrival. He spoke in a Scotch accent so strong that at first I thought it was a different language. ‘The clothes on yer back are spun by these wurrums. They pissed on yer ruff too, p’raps?’

  At this, fifty pairs of eyes turned to Frankie. Women opened fans behind which they whispered; men grinned. The Countess of Suffolk stood very still, her rigid lips alone betraying distress at the great alteration in her daughter. We stood motionless in the semi-darkness as glittering eyes flicked between monarch and Frankie.

  The King examined Frankie as one would a horse before laying bets. I did not breathe. George had told me that our monarch loved to create mischief in his Court, to keep his nobles on their toes. The King raised his hands. To dismiss us? Ridicule is harder to survive than scandal. My jaw ached with fear. He began to clap. Slowly at first, then in a childish burst in which those around him were obliged to join. Frankie curtsied with such great dignity that the King nodded along with the applause.