Elizabeth I (116 page)

Then she did the oddest thing she has ever done. No, I cannot say that. But it was the oddest thing she has ever done in regard to our family. When Robert had returned without permission from Ireland, Frances had gathered up letters and papers she thought the government might confiscate to incriminate him. After his death, the people to whom she had entrusted the papers blackmailed her. At first she paid the fee, but they kept demanding more. Somehow the Queen got wind of it and had the blackmailer arrested, tried, and fined. She gave the fine to Frances, as well as the papers, saying, “I would have my winding-sheet unspotted.” Elizabeth never loses the power to amaze and surprise us.

Frances, who cried to Elizabeth that she would not draw breath one hour after Robert had been executed, still lived and breathed. She, too, wore black, and busied herself with her children, especially the youngest, who had just begun walking. But I had the feeling that, at thirty-four, she would lay it aside before long and consider a third husband. She was the sort who should be married.

But for myself, no. I was well past that now.

I had withdrawn to Wanstead, six miles outside of London. I would grow old here. It was a house free of all the dark associations that Essex House had for me. Here there had been laughter and lovemaking, music, summer’s pleasures, and happy liaisons. After the opprobrium died down, I would be welcome enough for charitable work. Since I had become an outcast myself, I saw unfortunates in a new light. Looking down upon them from my heights of wealth and safety, I had shrugged them off. The poor you have with you always, Jesus had said. If they were poor, they must be lazy. Or happy. Odd how to assuage our own consciences we assume they must be happy, and spin tales to ourselves about their dancing and singing and laughing. We even envy them! Drowning in our obligations and worries, we ride past them and imagine their lives free of striving and competition, and sigh with longing.

But I knew now they were not to be envied for the weight of poverty that left them unrecognized. It was the children I most wanted to rescue; it was too late for their parents. I would make them my mission.

I was visited occasionally by my respectable daughters. Dorothy seemed far removed from both court and family, still married to the “Wizard” Earl of Northumberland and spending most of her time at Syon House, on the other side of London, upstream on the Thames. Penelope was the acclaimed woman of the hour, the consort, if not the wife, of the hero of Ireland.

Yes, Charles Blount had done the seemingly impossible, had achieved what Robert had so signally failed to do. His hard-fought campaign in Ireland had brought victory. The great turning point came in December. Charles and his forces had been in the north, chasing The O’Neill, when the Spanish landed at Kinsale with their reinforcing units. Suddenly his mission was not to smash the rebels in Ulster, but to prevent their joining forces with the Spanish in the south. He executed this brilliantly. But as always, fate played a part. O’Neill suffered a lapse in judgment and chose to meet the English in the field, in a traditional battle, handing them the victory. He was ill suited for it and was soundly routed. The Irish fled north once again, and the Spanish set sail, never to return. Now all that remained was to capture O’Neill and extract his surrender. He was a beaten man, and the Irish rebellion was smashed.

Elizabeth would be able to add the subjugation of Ireland to her victory over the Armada in the annals of her reign. A worthy achievement for a woman warrior, no matter how reluctant a one she was.

To be honest, for all his blustering, his engraved armor, and his golden tents, her father achieved nothing militarily. His excursions into France were costly and pointless, yielding nothing permanent. She, on the other hand, has saved her realm from invasion and has slammed the back door of Ireland shut to foreign meddling. And she knew what she wanted. In order to press ahead in Ireland, she was willing to overlook Charles Blount’s transgressions to get the important job done. Her father would have focused on the “treason” of Blount. Elizabeth wanted to use him, treason or no. Who, then, was the better monarch? Elizabeth would demur even at hinting at a competition between herself and her father, but that might be because in her heart she knew she had surpassed him.

I was shocked to receive a letter from Will, two months after the anniversary of Christopher’s death. It was very short, saying merely that he wished to offer his condolences and that, on his way back to Stratford, he would like to pay a call. Would that be acceptable?

I had received few condolence visits, and even fewer guests had come to Wanstead, although in the heady days twenty years past they had begged for invitations. Part of me wished to say no, to keep myself away from anything that smacked of the old life. The other part of me wanted to say yes, still to be connected to the world beyond Wanstead.

I said yes.

He arrived on a May day, one of those so fine that we would not want to be anywhere else. Let Rome and Sicily have their wildflowers and warm, sweet evenings; we had May in England.

“Will,” I said, taking his hat. “I appreciate your coming.”

He stepped in. “I have wanted to ever since ... You understand.”

“Yes. You had to be careful.” I looked at him. He had aged little, and he had a contentment about him that I noticed. “Shall we go out in the garden?” Let me add another pleasant memory to it.

I guided him outside, and he exclaimed over the profusion of gillyflowers, hollyhocks, and climbing roses and the neatly trimmed maze. It was odd, but I did not feel awkward around him. It was as if he were from another life, another version of myself. The Lettice who now stood before him owed nothing, had nothing to apologize for. The stroke of the ax on Tower Green had severed my past from my future.

“Will you sit?” I indicated a bench, wreathed all around with climbing vines twining overhead in a protective canopy. He nodded and did so. I sat beside him.

“I was sorrowed by what happened,” he said.

“Thank you,” I replied. “I still have difficulty believing it. I wake up expecting Robert or Christopher to be there. Then I remember.” I smiled. “But there is less and less time between the expectation and the remembrance.”

“The gap will always be there,” he said.

“Will the realization always be painful?” I asked him.

“As long as you live,” he said.

“You give no balm,” I said. “Should not a friend do so?”

“A friend must not lie,” he said.

“Ah, Will. You were always difficult.”

“I was always honest.”

“Always?”

“As far as I could be.”

I did not desire him any longer, yet I loved him. This confused me. Far from losing him forever, as I had once thought, I knew now he would be a part of me forever.

“Tell me of your life. Mine you know already. I am sorry you were caught up in the rebellion.”

“All that was an accident. I wish I had never written that play! But as for my life now, I have been buying property in Stratford. I find my thoughts turning more and more to my old home.”

As I had retreated to Wanstead. The past pulled us back with urgent hands.

“My father recently died,” he said. “Only a few months after your son.”

“His life was not cut short.”

“No, he was almost seventy.”

“The same age as the Queen.”

“Yes. But ...”

It must go unsaid. “Is your mother still living?”

“Yes. And they had been married forty-four years.”

“And you?”

He looked uneasy, embarrassed. “I’ve been married since I was eighteen,” he said. “I am now almost forty.”

And I almost sixty. I had forgotten how much younger than I he was. When we were together, he had seemed the elder.

“And how is your wife?” I asked primly.

“The same.” He suppressed a smile.

“Shall we not speak of her?”

“That is agreeable to me.”

“Why do you return to Stratford, if not to see her?”

“My mother, my children ... It is odd. When I was a child, I wished nothing more than to escape it. Now I find that if I wish to leave any sort of legacy, it will exist only in Stratford. London swallows me up. I will not survive there. In a generation, I will vanish. The country has longer memories.”

“But your plays ...”

“For the moment only,” he said. “They amuse the crowds. But plays are not the stuff that endures. My company owns the scripts. And we dare not publish them, else others would enact them and rob us of our rightful earnings.”

I looked hard at him, trying to memorize his features, his fine nose and penetrating eyes. I wondered what women had loved him, and where they were now.

“My younger brother is here now,” he suddenly said. “Edmund. He, like me, was afire for the theater. He has played bit parts, but nothing that would make his name. I should write something for him. But I cannot construct a play around such a need. I can only write a character that calls me. Edmund cannot play the ones that are clamoring for me to give them birth. They are too old for him. A Scottish noble who is drawn to murder to fulfill a prophecy, an old king who realizes too late that he cannot give away his office and retain its privileges, a Moor who is undone with jealousy—no, a young man from Stratford cannot play any of these.” He broke off suddenly. “But all this is talk. Laetitia, how are you? My heart wants to know.” He grasped my hands so I could not pull away.

How could I answer? I was empty; I was a changed creature. “I survive,” I said, aware of his hands, their warmth, their hold.

“Can you forgive me?” he said.

“For what? For warning me what to expect from you, and then following through?”

He smiled, a slight smile. “I was a coward.”

“It was better for us that you were. You were wiser than I. You could see what must ultimately come of it. And you did not want it.”

“I could not endure it. I can write about it, but I cannot live it.”

“Better, then, for others. You can leave them something.”

“I told you, Laetitia. I leave nothing behind for anyone. My works will not survive me. They are played to crowds at the Globe, then forgotten. I can behold tumultuous emotions, record them—but not fall victim to them. My weakness.”

“Never mind, Will. You are here now. Few have come. You have given me a precious gift. Now kiss me. In friendship.” I leaned over to him, closed my eyes.

90

ELIZABETH

July 1602

I
looked up at the threatening sky; black and blue clouds were racing past, and the wind had picked up. I steadied my hat to keep it from blowing off and turned in the saddle.

“Ladies, we are like to have a wet welcome!” I called to my companions.

“How far are we from Harefield?” asked Catherine.

“Five or six miles, at least,” said my horse master. “Perhaps it will hold off that long.”