A Net for Small Fishes

by Lucy Jago

  ‘And the position?’ Weston asked, but it was not within my power to grant anything.

  ‘To have you in her household would be a daily reminder of what has occurred,’ I said gently. ‘She will look for something else that is suitable.’

  Very quietly, he placed his mug on the table. ‘So I am good enough to sin for her but not to be in the same building? And yet I hear that the loathsome Franklin is admitted to her bed chamber whenever he wants.’

  I pursed my lips, as much at Frankie’s behaviour as at Weston’s complaint. ‘Franklin is helping her conceive a child.’

  Weston’s eyebrows shot up.

  ‘Not that way,’ I said. ‘He brings medicines and says prayers to angels and, for reasons I will never understand, he amuses her. I tell her plain not to let that truckling cat’s paw visit at all, let alone be given the privilege of the bed chamber, for he is untrustworthy to his core.’ I hoped that our mutual abhorrence of Franklin would unite us, but Weston did not even nod as he drained his cup and got to his feet.

  ‘You might have thought that the scandal with Mary Woods was lesson enough to keep away from certain folk. What I did for the Lady Frances has led to great reward for her and nothing but idleness and poverty for me. If she doesn’t look to those who helped her when she was down, she won’t spend long on the up.’

  Weston escorted me out of the tavern but did not offer to accompany me to Whitehall; he knew without doubt now that I would never marry him. It pained me to see him walk away with shoulders hunched.

  ‘Richard!’ I ran after him and kissed his cheeks three times. ‘Thank you. Thank you for all you have done for us. I promise you will receive your full reward.’ He blushed and gave me a bow before leaving.

  As I passed Northampton House, an appalling sense of foreboding hit me, such that I hid in a doorway, struggling to breathe. Cold stone at my back, I saw the little things – a boy being painted, a debt unpaid, an old man dead – that would lead everything to slip away from me.

  23

  It was as green and fresh in Suffolk as London was filthy with coal smoke and effluent. When I returned to Frankie, I said nothing of Weston’s disgruntlement, nor of George Villiers. Her menses had ceased to flow and I was anxious not to alarm her. She had been married only since Christmas and her husband was already away on progress with the King.

  At the end of July she bled heavily and the child was lost. To ease her sadness, we decided to join Robin. Under the red August sun, veiled with dust from a burning mountain across the seas, I travelled with her. We met with the King’s party at Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire, Sir Anthony Mildmay’s house.

  Mildmay was a blustering, old-fashioned man, at least sixty years old or more, who hated foreigners, especially the Scots, French, and all Catholics. So he was no friend to Robert Carr or the Howards, and suffered the King’s visit purely out of duty to the Crown. He put on a hunt, inviting the local gentry and a young man of low degree but great beauty. The King’s eyes were out on stalks when this youth rode by and he was invited to dine that day, although his low birth should have barred him. Carr was occupied with state business and I was not invited, but Frankie could not stop talking about the unexpected guest while she undressed that night; how he danced with supreme elegance, how he made everyone laugh, how he was more beautiful than any woman she had ever seen.

  ‘“George!” they cried. “George!”’ she told me. ‘“Villain”, was it? Not a very English name.’

  ‘Villiers,’ I said. ‘George Villiers.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw him at Larkin’s studio.’

  ‘In London? But he is just a local boy. Whose page is he?’

  ‘He is not a page. His portrait was commissioned by the Earl of Essex.’

  Frankie stopped wiping the make-up from her face and stared at me.

  A few days later, the King’s delight in George Villiers became known to Robert Carr. The King suggested Carr meet with Villiers, befriend him, guide and rule over him, but Carr flew into a rage such as I had never seen in him. He refused to summon Villiers, no matter our efforts to persuade him of the benefits of this course. I was in the chamber with Frankie when Villiers, with impeccable manners and sensible of his lower rank, called on Carr instead.

  ‘My lord, I offer myself with utmost humility and love to be at your service in ’soever which ways you command of me.’ He bowed so low and gracefully that he looked more swan than human. The King’s retinue was awash with gossip about this young god; the rumour that he had learnt dancing and etiquette at the French Court was clearly true.

  Frankie and I smiled warmly at the young beauty and at each other, delighted that Carr should be honoured in this way. With George Villiers on the King’s arm, Carr would have more time for Frankie, for the burdens of state and for his own leisure.

  ‘I will have none of your service and you shall have none of my favour! If I can, I will break your neck. Of that, be confident!’ Carr shouted, so loudly that a hush fell over the ante-room. George Villiers was brave enough not to recoil, but Frankie and I did, afraid a fight would ensue. Carr began waving his arms as if shooing away a herd of inquisitive heifers. Utterly astounded, Villiers backed towards the door, offering Frankie and me a quick bow before fleeing.

  ‘My lord, what ails you?’ asked his wife. ‘Villiers offers you his loyalty.’

  ‘I do not want it,’ he spat, ‘nor any advice from you. Leave me.’

  *

  For the rest of that year and into the next, the Court was viler than ever Frankie or I had known it. One moment the King would favour Villiers, the next Carr. With Lord Salisbury and Lord Northampton dead, it seemed the King was trying to rebalance his Court, curbing the power of the Howard family by playing them off against the Essex crew. No business could be transacted; clients did not know whom to follow. Howards held every major post, yet the Essex camp looked confident that this was about to change. And with Overbury dead, Carr had only Frankie’s father, whose understanding of politics was deficient, to lean on. The Earl of Essex and his allies sought to topple the Howards completely, and truly they had discovered a magnificent weapon.

  For long hours Frankie and I worried over Robin’s surprising and undignified behaviour towards Villiers and increasingly towards the King himself. After the progress we returned to Suffolk, but by spring, Carr’s distress at the rapid rise of George Villiers truly alarmed us. Frankie decided to move to her elder sister’s house at Rotherfield Greys, near the busy Thames port of Henley, so that she could travel to Court more easily to shore up her husband. For me, the move had a more pleasing aspect, for Mr Palmer had family in Oxfordshire. He paid us visits when Carr was at Greys, ostensibly to discuss artworks, but always he and I walked together. The children begged to be allowed to join us on these walks, for Mr Palmer was a brilliant mimic, in particular of animals and birds and, sometimes, of myself, and we would laugh ourselves hoarse. I did not attempt to rush him into a proposal, I had learnt that lesson, but allowed our friendship to grow at a pace that was natural to it. He had asked that I sit for him, that he might take my likeness – surely the act of a man in love?

  Towards the end of April, after a week’s silence from Robin, we travelled by barge to Whitehall. The outer chamber in their apartment was crowded with people seeking his intercession with the King, but I noticed that they were less well-heeled than when Frankie and I were last there, lacking the connections to know that Carr had a rival who was winning the greater part of the King’s favour. The inner hall and receiving chamber were likewise busy, but Frankie acknowledged no one until we entered the privy chamber where her husband was seated at his table. Head resting in his hands, he was reading a letter, while behind him a group of advisers stood talking together.

  ‘If you please,’ said Frankie, standing at the door. The men rarely saw the Earl’s wife and it was with some reluctance that they left. I shut the door behind them and sat in the farthest window.

  ‘
My dearest,’ said Frankie, crouching beside her husband’s chair to look up into his face, taking his hands in hers.

  ‘You here?’ he said, not moving to embrace her or even to smile.

  ‘I could not leave you to face these trials alone,’ said Frankie. ‘But be reassured, my darling, that Villiers cannot rival the long and deep affection that exists between you and your King, by whom you have been favoured above all others for ten years and who has looked to your care since you were born; you are of the same nation, you speak his tongue. Go to him. Apologise for your anger and swear it was born of love. His feelings for you will increase tenfold.’

  Carr stood abruptly and glared down at his crouching wife.

  ‘You’d have me grovel?’ he said. ‘The King promised me his love until death.’

  I saw, as clearly as if Carr had cut open his chest, the furious child within, elevated, isolated and stunted by the King’s attention.

  He snatched up the letter he had been studying from the table’s littered surface, shoved it into Frankie’s hand and returned to his chair with his back towards her. She came over to where I sat. From the great red seal, I could see that the missive came from the King. The writing was in an educated hand but frequently blotted and sometimes crossed out – a message from the heart.

  A piece of ground cannot be so fertile that, either by nature or rank manure, it becomes fertile also for strong and noisome weeds. It then proves useless: those worthy and rare parts and merits of yours have been for a long time, but especially since this strange frenzy took you, so mixed with strange streams of unquietness, passion, fury and insolent pride, and (which is worst of all) with a settled kind of induced obstinacy, as it chokes and obscures all these excellent and good parts that God has bestowed upon you. The trust and privacy between us allows you a great liberty of speech with me, yet this new art of railing against me with the tongue of the Devil, this cannot be liberty or friendship.

  I have borne these passions of yours with grief, in the hope that time and experience would allay them. But you have woken me in my sleep to rail at me, it seems deliberately to vex and weary me; your outbursts were coupled with dogged and sullen behaviour towards me; your utter distrust of my honesty and friendship towards you; and fourthly, and worst of all, you have in many of your mad fits done what you could to persuade me that you hold me not by love but by fear, that I am so far in awe of you that I dare not offend you or resist your appetites. I leave out of this reckoning your creeping away from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary.

  This letter proceeds from the infinite grief of a heart deeply wounded, a grief such as I have not known since my birth. Neither can I bear it longer without committing an unpardonable sin against God. Be not the occasion of the hastening of my death, through grief, I who have prayed for you, which I never did for any other subject alive but you.

  What King would commit to paper such words of love and despair? How could he allow anyone, even his favourite, to know feelings so intimate? Looking at Frankie, it was clear that she was similarly appalled. I held her hand as we read on.

  Your furious assaults at unseasonable hours, my sadness and want of rest, have now made it known to many that we are in cross discourse. There must be amendment in your behaviour towards me. The best remedy for this I shall tell you with my tongue. But to ease my grief, tell me that you never think to hold me but by love. I told you two or three times that you may lead me by the heart, not the nose. Let me not apprehend that you disdain me or that any of your former affection is cooled. Hold me by the heart and you may build upon me as a rock. I shall constantly show you affection and allow no other to rise in degree to even a twentieth of the favour I show you. Your good and heartily humble behaviour will wash out of my heart all past grievances, yet never shall I pardon myself for raising a man so high as pierces my ears with such speeches as you have given me.

  Do not you and your father-in-law hedge in the whole Court such that it depends upon you? I have set down my position, make of me what you please, either the best master and truest friend, or, if you cause me to call you ingrate, no earthly plague shall be worse than my wrath.

  Frankie looked up and pointed out the last line, to be sure I had read it. Her face was flushed and I saw in it pain as well as fear. She left the letter on the window seat and walked over to her husband. Despite the anger he had shown, she curled her arms around him.

  ‘My love,’ she said, ‘you are part of my family now.’

  I could not see what comfort lay in having a mother-in-law who despised him and a guileless father-in-law, but Carr rested his head against Frankie’s and I understood that he did not love the King most as a man and bedfellow, but as the father who had protected him since birth, when his own father had died fighting for James’s mother. The King’s admiration for Villiers was to Carr the agony of being cast aside for another son judged worthier.

  I felt more afraid than ever, for I know that grief cannot be tamed or turned, but is a mighty rushing river that will engulf any bank built to contain it until it has run its course. Carr’s suffering was splitting him open. The father whose embrace he had never known, the best friend whom he had betrayed, the wise old counsellor from whom he had turned, all were dead; and now the King was replacing him with a younger, more beautiful man, and he was expected to make room without complaint. I wondered whether anybody’s love could rescue Carr from that torment, and I worried that Frankie’s passionate, forceful, provocative love would not provide the foundation he needed.

  ‘Soon, we will be our own little family.’ Robin looked up. He searched for confirmation of her meaning. ‘He is not yet quick but I am sure,’ said Frankie, putting a hand over her belly, not with the soft pride of most expectant mothers, but the severity of an avenging angel. ‘For our son, my love, you must be calm and play a clever game. Promise me, my darling, that you will not be the card that makes all the others tumble? Villiers is pretty, but we are powerful.’

  ‘I’m to be a father?’

  ‘You are, my love.’ This was a huge gamble; she had missed but one bleed. ‘You will be the best of fathers to our son, of that I have no doubt.’ I was watching Robin and saw that, far from knowing how to be a father, he was still in need of one himself. The gift Frankie hoped would bring him strength might prove the greatest challenge of all.

  ‘Frank, I’m pleased as a cat with its nose in butter, but I must go now,’ he said, rising and pulling her up with him. ‘The King’s to visit the Queen in her bed chamber today. That vile lad’ll be in attendance, so I must be too.’

  ‘The King did not invite you?’

  ‘He knows I’m like a shepherd at lambing with state business. I’ve to find a wife for Prince Charles who will please everyone, and money to fill empty coffers, and other miracles that would tax the Lord Jesu himself.’

  ‘Then look to them, my lord, for the King gives you charge of great matters. His confidence lies all in you. Let Villiers concern himself with the petty ones.’

  Robin looked at his wife for a good while, weighing up her words, then nodded and walked back to his table. ‘You talk a good deal of sense, wife,’ he said, with a smile that would have warmed the heart of the bitterest shrew.

  ‘God’s blessing in all your heavy work, my love. I will walk now and leave you in peace,’ said Frankie, blowing him a kiss.

  ‘Send my men back in,’ said Carr, looking down at his papers and missing the kiss.

  I followed her from the room and out of their apartments.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said, as we passed the guard, Frankie’s clacking heels betraying urgency.

  ‘To the Queen’s apartments.’

  ‘In truth? Are we invited?’

  ‘As the daughter of the Queen’s Keeper of the Jewels, I am always invited.’

  ‘You did not mention before that we were to go there.’

  ‘Because I did not know before that my husband was not invit
ed. If matters are so serious that he is excluded when Villiers is present, I must help him back into the King’s favour.’

  I had a hundred questions, but we were already entering the Queen’s gallery, where it was dark, hot and heavily perfumed. Frankie suddenly stopped.

  ‘I feel sick,’ she said.

  ‘The perfume, it’s heady,’ I said, delighted at this further indication of pregnancy. ‘Come back outside.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Frankie, straightening up.

  I turned to see the King swaying slowly along the gallery, arm in arm with his newly appointed cupbearer, George Villiers. Behind them came at least sixty members of the Court including Frankie’s father, who looked uncomfortable beside the Lords Southampton, Pembroke and his erstwhile son-in-law, Essex. Frankie kept her head lowered, perhaps to avoid Essex or because it was a shock to see George Villiers and not her husband on the King’s arm.

  The new favourite was two heads taller than his monarch and, I guessed, at least three decades younger. His perfectly turned legs were encased in white silk and contrasted most favourably with the bandy limbs and crumpled stockings of the King. His dark brown curls were lusciously frizzed and looked to be the work of the finest wig-maker but were, on closer inspection, native to the wearer. The King, his own appearance far less regal than that of Villiers, was patting and pinching the youth’s unbearded cheeks every few steps.

  Frankie pushed to the front of the crowd lining the gallery, pulling me with her.

  ‘It takes three thousand of these,’ the King was saying to Villiers, holding up a scruffy cocoon, ‘to make a pound of silk. There’s that much in your shoe roses,’ he said, popping the cocoon into Villiers’s hand. I thought back to how the King had also wooed Robin with talk of silk. ‘My courtiers would wear it even if it came from wee bairns boiled alive.’