The Girl in the Glass Tower (30 page)

I had never taken such pleasure in cake, never quite understood the extreme gratification that can be derived from the assault of delicate flavours, almond, vanilla, frangipane. What had once seemed sickeningly cloying had become a glorious indulgence.

‘Would you like mine?’ asked Jane Drummond. ‘It’s too sweet for me.’

I snatched the confection from her, barely noticing the look she exchanged with Lucy Bedford.

‘You seem different,’ Queen Anna said.

‘Are you in love?’ asked Lucy Bedford.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I replied, but it was clear that some fundamental transformation had occurred in me that had aroused their curiosity. I suspected that love might be the affliction that held me in its thrall. I had so little experience; even in my middle thirties I was barely more sophisticated when it came to the heart than I had been on encountering Essex as a thirteen-year-old and finding myself infatuated.

I turned to the poets in an attempt to gain a greater understanding, discovering, in the verses of Sidney and Petrarch, that love was a longing for that which is unavailable. This seemed a realistic characterization of the emotion that was ploughing up my heart. It was complicated only by the fact that the usual pattern of such things, taking poetry as the standard, dictated that it was the man who longed and the woman who was longed for. This appeared reversed in the case of myself and Will Seymour. At the very least our longing was mutual, or so I inferred from his frequent letters.

I licked my lips to gather the stray granules of sugar and asked Jane if she might help me undo my lacing a little at the back, where it was too tight. I had become aware of a subtle filling out of my flesh, a new softness in my body, and found, rather than being alarmed by it, I welcomed it.

‘There, is that better?’ she asked as she loosened my ties.

‘Much, thank you.’ She was looking at me strangely.

I’d struggled to comprehend how it could be that such apparently profound emotions could be conjured from nothing. I supposed I’d thought myself incapable of love, and perhaps those women had been of the same mind. But I was beginning to understand that it was a species of recognition; I realized that Will Seymour had echoes of dear Starkey and concluded that this was the genesis of the feelings that had taken hold in me. For if I had ever loved anyone, it had been Starkey, though only the distance of near on a decade would allow me to understand such a thing.

‘All those letters toing and froing,’ said Lucy.

It had not gone unnoticed that I was receiving a greater volume of correspondence than usual. I licked my finger to harvest the remaining cake crumbs from the platter.

‘I heard it mentioned that the Prince of Moldavia has been making inquiries about you,’ said the Queen.

‘I know nothing of that, Your Highness,’ I replied airily. ‘I’ve never heard of the Prince of Moldavia; indeed, I’ve never heard of Moldavia. Where is it?’

‘It’s next to Poland and very small,’ said Lucy Bedford, who somehow always seemed to know such things.

‘That’s certainly a step down from the King of Poland,’ I remarked, causing a burst of laughter, ‘though I doubt anything will come of it. Besides, it is nothing but rumour.’ As long as they had the Prince of Moldavia in mind, they would never guess the truth.

It was not until high summer that the opportunity arose for another encounter between Will Seymour and myself. Circumstances and duty had kept us apart but in late July the court convened at Greenwich and it was there that we managed, through complicated choreography, to find a moment alone together.

Though the idea of marriage had not actually been articulated in any of Will’s letters, it seemed clear to me that the intention of our meeting was that we might promise ourselves to each other.
There is something I must tell you in person
, he had written. So as I made my way to our rendezvous, a small boathouse set back from the river, tucked out of the way in the cover of a few trees, I found myself pondering on what it would mean to give this man my hand.

Despite his royal blood, as a younger son Will Seymour was dynastically insignificant, or so I had convinced myself, and was thus a perfect choice for me. I would not be wedding beneath my station but neither would our union constitute a threat to the throne. Besides, with Prince Henry Frederick and little Charles – feeble in body but male nevertheless – the royal dynasty was rooted. I imagined us setting up a home away from court, living in easy tranquillity like the marchioness, enabled by my father’s bequest, which would come to me on my marriage. Freedom seemed, at last, within reach.

He was already there, waiting in the dark, greeting me with, ‘My love!’ Inside it smelled dank, like wet clothes, and I was suddenly daunted. It seemed such an unsuitable location to mark a betrothal. I could sense Starkey drifting somewhere in the air and feared perhaps he wouldn’t approve. My eyes accustomed themselves slowly to the gloom. We stood opposite one another in silence, neither of us knowing quite what to do next. A tender feeling welled up in me. It felt like a betrayal; I silently asked Starkey’s forgiveness.

‘Shall we sit?’ he said.

There was a form to one side, reduced almost to lace by woodworm. We lowered ourselves on to it. The silence billowed. I followed the patterns in the wood with my finger. Without warning, he moved to take my hand and I flinched, sliding away along the bench, that old habit raising its head when I least expected it.

‘That was a liberty, I’m sorry,’ he said. His voice was a little hoarse and I remembered him mentioning bronchitis in a recent letter.

‘No. It is that I am unused to such …’ I didn’t know what to call it – an assignation, a tryst? I had to resist the urge to run from that place. I heard Starkey whisper:
Carpe diem
, so faint it was no more than a riffle of air.

Girding myself, I seized his hand, holding it tight.

He expelled a small gasp.

I didn’t dare look at him. His hand was warm and alive, like an animal. The past came cascading back to me; that embrace, Starkey’s body pressed against mine. I pulled him to his feet and grabbed him tight round the torso, feeling his firm arms encircle me too. He was tall and I was surprised by his strength, his muscularity, not like that other embrace at all. Burrowing in his neck, bloodhound-like, I captured his scent.

‘My love, my dearest love,’ he breathed.

All at once I was engulfed by a delinquent appetite far beyond my control and pushed my body hard up to him, pressing my mouth over his, as if I were a man, wishing I could rip away my cumbersome dress the better to get at him. I didn’t know the foreign creature inhabiting me, driving me closer and closer still to that other being. I wanted to ingest him, like the snakes – curiosities Uncle Henry once told me of – that swallow their prey whole and take on the shape of their victim. I was no longer cold and unyielding, I was soft, expansive, fleshy. I would subsume Will Seymour
into my body and become him; we would be indivisible one from the other, unrecognizable as separate entities, a single great monster of desire.

Grandmother’s voice surprised me:
Desire is a demon
.

He broke the embrace, peeling himself away. ‘There is something I must say.’

‘No! Let me say it.’ I wanted to be the one to ask, to be the one to take charge of this exchange.

‘A confession.’

‘A confession?’ I was bewildered. What was it? He was already promised? ‘So confess.’ Unclasped for mere seconds, I already felt a boundless craving, as if a vital part of me had been extracted.

He sat with a sigh, clutched his hands on his lap and looked at them like a small boy in disgrace. ‘It was my father who wanted me to approach you.’

‘What do you mean?’ I stepped back, shaking off his embrace.

‘He put me up to it … to seduce you … to make you love me.’

‘So when we met on the river …’ I became rigid and began to shatter slowly, sharp shards of me breaking away.

‘It was contrived.’

Smithereens scattered the dirt floor.

‘Even the Plato?’

‘Yes, even that. I was told you had a fondness for Plato.’

‘So who are you, then?’ My voice creaked with suppressed rage, as bits of me continued to break away.

‘I am the man who loves you, in spite of –’

‘In spite of the fact that you plotted to seduce me? Then what? Wed me so your family could have a shot at the throne they’ve always coveted?’ I couldn’t stop once I had started. ‘You Seymours are all the same. Your grandfather wed Katherine Grey for her Tudor blood, to make an heir for England,
and look what became of her.
She
was the one who paid the price.’ I was slamming my fists into my thighs. ‘It would have been a long shot with you, a younger son,’ I spat, ‘a
nobody
. What did you think would be done with the three Stuart heirs, one of whom you serve? You are the Prince’s gentleman. The Prince is a dear cousin of mine. You thought what? That I would birth you a boy and your father would do what? Wait ten years and raise an army to overthrow my cousins? A long shot indeed –’

‘Please stop,’ he said, his voice trembling. His beauty, those sad grey eyes, made me ache. ‘I beg of you, stop.’

I was silent. I had used up all my words.

‘I hadn’t expected to fall in love.’ He sounded clogged with distress.

‘Love!’ I snapped. ‘So much store is set in love when it better belongs in the imagination of rattle-brained girls.’ It was Grandmother speaking. ‘Love is no motive for anything.’

He looked as if I’d hit him. ‘You must believe me when I say I love you. I think of nothing but you. You have become my entire world. I am riven with guilt. Oh God, I regret …’

‘
You
regret! It is
I
who have the monopoly on regret.’

I ran from the shed, pieces of me crunching underfoot.

‘Please!’ he cried. ‘Let me show you I am true.’

‘What a fool you have been,’ I muttered as I fled through the Greenwich gardens, ‘a little idiot, a stupid, stupid, stupid little fool.’

The sun was brilliant, the sky clear blue, roses giving out their fragrance, birdsong in the air; the day was mocking me with its loveliness. I stopped, collapsing to the ground, my skirts ballooning out around me. I couldn’t return to the palace. Everyone would see the stain on me; they would see I had taken a bite of that apple, that a monster had been raised from my depths. I sank my face into my hands to blot out the day.

‘Lady Arbella, what is it?’ I recognized Jane Drummond’s doeskin slippers. She was not alone but the advance guard of a troupe of Queen Anna’s women taking the air. A small dog jumped into my lap, licking my hands, wriggling. I thought of Ruff in my chamber, longing for his uncomplicated affection. I would have crawled back to that sanctuary had it not been for Jane standing over me, and the others who had stopped a few yards away and were whispering behind their hands. ‘Has the sun caused a fever? Are you ailing?’

‘I don’t know what came over me.’ My voice was feeble, a deathbed croak, barely audible.

‘We must get you to your rooms and summon a physician.’ Jane rattled out orders to the girls: ‘Fetch a couple of pages to help; don’t just stand there looking thick-headed; one of you bring her something to drink; someone send for the doctor.’

She sat on the grass beside me, placed a cool palm on my forehead then began to waft her fan over my face. ‘Don’t fret, help is on its way.’ She spoke to me as if I were an infant, and part of me wished I were, that I could wind my life back and live it differently, in a world where my father and mother hadn’t died. I wanted to weep and moan and shriek and rock with grief, like the mourners in the Bible, but I was dry-eyed and silent and imagined turning to dust and being taken by the breeze, disappearing into the air, becoming nothing.

It was Queen Anna who suggested I take a respite from court. ‘A month or two away will do you the world of good.’

Permission was sought and given and I found myself riding north once more with my household. It was a freedom of sorts, and travelling in August was a good deal more pleasant than in February the previous year, when I had last made that journey.

Dorcas, no longer so sprightly, lolloped along, flicking her
tail against the flies, and I had tied a muslin cloth over my face, protection from the dust but also to mask the inner devastation which I feared was etched into my features. With several mounted guards, we were quite a band. Dodderidge rode at my side on his beloved mare, who had recovered well from her injury; Margaret, Crompton, my doctor, Moundford, and a number of others joined us on horseback, while Bridget and my aging laundress travelled in the cart that lumbered in our wake, piled high with our various possessions. I wished for the company of Mistress Lanyer, for my writing had dried up to nothing and she might have inspired me. The
Tragedy of Philomel
was little more than a few scribbled pages. But she was obliged to keep house for her husband.

As we passed through the towns and villages – St Albans, Dunstable, Northampton – people came out of their houses to watch us pass as if we were a royal progress. I suppose to them we were – the King’s first cousin and her entourage – and we must have seemed a splendid sight. No one could have told that I was penniless and that the journey was funded by debt.

I had left a letter with Cecil outlining my financial needs, pleading with him to persuade the King to increase my allowance and appease my creditors. If I could raise even a small amount, I might have the means to set up house somewhere and retire quietly. But I knew it was a dream, I wouldn’t be allowed to leave court as an unmarried woman – prey for pretenders – and besides, I could never have raised the funds to support even a modest household.

We had an itinerary of visits, people and places from my past and some I hardly knew who were friends of the family, or friends of friends: Lady Cheney at Toddington; Sir William Skipwith at Prestwood; Lady Bowes at Walton Hall; Uncle Henry at Chatsworth and on to Buxton for the waters; Aunt Mary and Uncle Gilbert at Sheffield; Cousin Bessie at
Wrest Park on the way home. I don’t know who had arranged it all (Aunt Mary, I supposed), but I simply went where I was bid and behaved as I should; I smiled and made conversation and complimented my hosts as if there was nothing wrong at all, as if I had not turned to dust.