Elizabeth I (75 page)

Earlier this morning a messenger had brought him a dispatch of some sort. He had slipped it under the door and departed. Now this.

The laughter was hideous, demented. I must see what was happening. If the door was locked, I would summon someone to break it down.

But the door pushed open with no resistance. The laughter was so loud now it hurt my ears. The midday sun was blasting full into the room, making a curtain of light it was difficult to see through.

Was he in the bed? I fumbled my way to it and yanked the curtains open. But there was nothing there. The laughter stopped as abruptly as it had started, as if a ghoul or hell creature had come into the room and then fled. I turned, letting my eyes grow accustomed to the harsh difference between the sunlight and the dark recesses. Then I saw his feet, long white things like roots ripped untimely from the earth, stretched out, his toes in the sunlight. The rest of him was in darkness.

“Why, Mother, you come to pay a visit?” His tone was light, detached, faint, perhaps, from the raucous laughter torn from his throat.

“I was alarmed,” I said, squinting to see him. His nightshirt was open, soiled, its drawstrings hanging down. He was sprawled, sloping, in the chair, as if he had no spine. I bent over him. I did not smell any beer or wine on his breath.

“I'm quite sober,” he said. “No need to sniff.”

I felt relief flooding through me at the assurance that he was neither drunk, hysterical, nor deathly ill. “What were you laughing at?” I asked, as if this were a normal encounter, as if he had not been hiding away for days, prostrate with anger and frustration over the Queen.

“Huh, huh ...” He started guffawing. I was afraid it would change back into that hyena howl. He said, “He's dead. He's dead. The old boy is dead.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Who is dead?”

“Ph—Ph—Philip!” He burst out with a spray of spittle as he tried to stifle his hoot. “You know, the king of Spain. Or—what did Raleigh call him?—the king of figs and oranges?” He waved airily toward the letter on the floor. “After all these years of tormenting us, of being the dark shadow directing our actions, poof! He's gone.” He lurched forward to pick up a goblet perched on the windowsill, gulping down whatever was in it. “Not quickly, no, it took him fifty days. He had a coffin in his room, ready. It was made of timber from one of the Armada ships!” He hiccupped. “Fifty days—that's even before I was in disgrace with the Queen. A long time ago, that was.”

“What did he die of?” I stooped to pick up the dispatch. I read it quickly, but it did not say.

“Whatever it was, it was horrible,” he said. “He was in agony, they say. Something in his jaw was eating him up. Oh, that is a reversal—being eaten by a jaw.”

“He was seventy-one,” I said. “One by one they leave us, those oaks that served to hold up the ceiling of our world.” Elizabeth was only six years younger. Her turn was coming. “I remember when he came to England to marry Mary Tudor. I saw his entourage passing; little boys pelted his carriage with garbage. He was unpopular even then among us, as a Spaniard and a Catholic. But he was in his twenties, an attractive man who flattered the older spinster princess. She was wild with love for him. Made a fool of herself.” Had watching her sister warned Elizabeth never to do such a thing? She had certainly taken it to heart. And learned a lesson in the perfidy of men, when her devout brother-in-law had flirted with her, with an eye to marrying her and keeping his hand in England after his sickly wife died.

“Well, Elizabeth is making a fool of herself now,” snorted Robert, showing more liveliness.

“In what way?”

“Dressing up like a virgin and wearing those low-cut gowns that show her wrinkled old bosom.”

“I thought she was a virgin.”

“Yes, yes, she is ... but just because a code of dress is prescribed for a certain station, if we have grown far beyond it, we should take heed. It's assumed most virgins are young and therefore flattered by loose hair and open bosoms. An old woman who dresses that way looks like a witch.”

“Robert!” Such words were dangerous. “Have a care.”

“I have no care. I have no station. I am nobody. I can say what I like.”

“You are a fool,” I said. “Shut your mouth. Get dressed. Act according to
your
station. The most famous noble in the land, sitting in the dark, wallowing in his nightshirt, is more ridiculous than anything the aging Queen has ever done. She is always a queen. At this minute, you are less an earl than anything I have ever yet seen.”

Chastened, he emerged from his darkened chamber within the hour, dressed appropriately, seemingly alert and engaged. I sent him off to eat while I sat, shaken, at his reckless words. He had already almost taken an irretrievable step, a step too far. The dreadful folly of having tried to draw his sword on her, his hotheaded words comparing her to her father—and saying she was lesser than he and commanded less respect—and then his refusal to apologize, put his career, if not his life, in jeopardy. As she had reminded him, had she been her father, he would not have gone free from that room. And now she looked for some gesture on his part to show contrition. But he refused to take even the smallest step toward her, shooting out angry letters to others (which undoubtedly had been shown to her) and then staying away from the council, even for emergency sessions in the wake of the disaster in Ireland. The greatest military defeat the English had ever suffered there, and when the hour had come to make decisions, he had absented himself.

The Queen. I was still smarting from her insulting rejection of me and my gift, when she had invited me to court. It was a mean-spirited little drama, meant to humiliate me. It was unworthy even of her. Well. I would never see her again, except at a distance. But my son still must make his fortune by pleasing her. Perhaps he was so hostile to her on account of me. But it was too dangerous. She could be spiteful, but we could not afford it. Robert must make his peace with her.

The next few days passed uneventfully enough, as Robert regained his bearings and his health. After one of these bouts he always needed a recovery period. He never did explain why he laughed so much at Philip's death—perhaps now he did not remember. But Anthony Bacon brought information about Philip's last days, and they were no laughing matter.

It was sad to see a man in declining health describing another's similar situation. Anthony had grown even more frail and nervous and had attacks of shaking and heart pounding that came upon him suddenly. When that happened, he would jerk and sweat and have to cling to the arms of his chair. His brother Francis seldom visited us now; Robert had made his disdain for his advice so blatant that his erstwhile friend stayed away.

“Philip had been suffering for some time,” said Anthony. “He had a cancer of some sort, and his body was covered with sores. He lay in bed for at least fifty days, and brooded and brooded upon the loss of his last Armada. He feared it meant the end of his Enterprise of England, the one thing that had mattered to him. He felt a special responsibility for the English Catholics; after all, that is one reason he had married Mary Tudor. Now he had failed them.”

“He must have felt that God deserted him,” I said.

“So it seems,” said Anthony. “He kept gazing at that waiting coffin. Did you know, he had over seven thousand saints' relics? They failed him, too.”

“Pitiful.” I thought of the bedridden old man, his body a putrefying mass of sores, with the coffin staring him in the face. He did not even have any teeth and had to exist on mush.

“Before you feel too sorry for him, let me tell you what the bastard did.” Anthony's voice rose as he gathered his strength. “His last official business was to dictate a letter to The O'Neill congratulating him on his great victory at Yellow Ford and offering him support. Cheering on the Queen's enemy, he was passing his sword on to the next generation.”

“Let him rot in hell!” No matter my own personal feelings for or against Elizabeth as a woman and a cousin, she was the Queen of my country and to insult her was to insult England.

“With all his saints' elbows and tongues and knucklebones,” said Anthony. “I heard he had a square inch from the skinned St. Bartholomew and one of St. Lucia's eyeballs.”

“Popish rubbish, and let him fester in it. They probably buried him chin deep in such stolen body parts.”

“His heir, Philip III, is only twenty and does not seem as devout. He will probably auction off the relics to raise money.”

“Well, don't buy any!” I said. There would be scant market for them in England in any case.

“I don't know; I've always wanted one of those pieces of the true cross. Although I'd settle for a vial of the Virgin's milk.” He gave a great snorting laugh that soon turned into a painful cough.

“Call upon St. Blaise,” I said. “That's the cure for sore throats.”

Robert strode into the room, looking puzzled. “Whatever are you laughing at?”

“Philip again,” I said. “Anthony was just talking about his collection of saints—parts of them, anyway.”

Robert shivered. “Such a gruesome hobby,” he said. His own piety, which came upon him in fits and starts, was of the Protestant variety—inherited from my father, most likely.

“I brought intelligence about Philip's last hours,” said Anthony.

“Doubtless they were impeccably Catholic and involved a vision of some sort,” said Robert.

“Yes, indeed, a vision. It wore an Irish cloak and had long hair and a bloodthirsty yell. Philip commissioned it—against us.”

“A ghost? He called upon a ghost?”

“Would that it were. This one is alive enough—The O'Neill. Philip gave him his dying blessing, as it were. Said Yellow Ford was a great thing, and for him to go forth and do more, at Spain's expense.”

Now Robert's face went pale, pale as it had been in his sequestered room where he had hidden from the sun. “He did that?” he murmured.

“If we doubted the battle lines were drawn, we now have our proof,” said Anthony. “Ireland is Spain's surrogate, and it has won a mighty victory against us.”

Robert let out a mournful sigh, as if all the deaths there, including his father's, entered into him. For once, he had no words ready.

Early the next morning a summons came from Greenwich. Her Majesty commanded the presence of the Earl of Essex at court, immediately, upon pain of severe punishment if disobeyed.

T
he candles flickered in unison. When one leaped up, the other mirrored it, as if they were competing to illuminate Philip's face. He would have liked that, I thought. He would have felt it an angelic tribute. He was comely and youthful in this miniature portrait, the one he had given my sister upon their betrothal. I had seen her look hungrily upon it before she had beheld him in person. He had a restrained smile in this picture, a teasing promise of high spirits—a promise he never fulfilled. After she died I had kept it; it served to remind me that the willful enemy plotting my demise had once been my friend in England and that no one is entirely a monster.