The Girl in the Mirror (11 page)

Jeanne
Summer 1598

No one at Burghley House saw anything out of the ordinary, but as spring rains soaked the hawthorn blossom, day after day, I hadn’t been able to forget Wanstead, though I had tried. Told myself, as I dipped brush in paint, to colour in a drawing to be presented to some visiting dignitary, that at best, Lord Essex had just been amusing himself for an hour. At worst, he had been trying to gain an advantage over a rival’s emissary. Jumping out from behind a hedge, like an overgrown schoolboy.

By day, in the damp green pause between spring and summer, I managed well enough. At night, my dreams betrayed me. I had no real fear his lordship would pass on my secret. My very unimportance protected me. But as June came in, I sensed the roses, and the strawberries, a little more keenly.

When I heard Lord Essex’s name on the gangling clerk’s lips, I started guiltily, absurd though it might be. Of course the story had nothing to do with me. Indeed, as I heard with mounting dismay, this was something to be taken seriously. A meeting of the Council, to discuss the running sore that was our governance of Ireland, and the appointment of a new Lord Deputy. The queen had announced her choice, Lord Essex had dared to argue, and grew angry that his views, he felt, were not being taken seriously.

‘And then he turned his back on her! On her majesty!’ The gangling clerk was a magnet for gossip, which he broadcast indiscriminately. This time he had all of our attention.

‘What did the queen do?’ It was one of the page boys.

‘She boxed his ears. Yes, really. She shouted at him to go to the devil.’ It was hard to know whether the murmur of disapproval was aimed more at the earl or the queen. A little of both, maybe. But the gangling clerk hadn’t finished. ‘No, wait, there’s more’ – as the old clerk began gathering his things to move away.

‘Give over, lad. That’s enough, surely?’

‘He said he’d never put up with such an insult, and not from a woman, especially.’ The young clerk was gabbling slightly. ‘He said he would never have swallowed that, even from old King Henry. And as he said it’ – he looked round importantly – ‘he had his hand on his sword hilt. They say he even drew his sword – well, part drew anyway. The Lord Admiral, I mean Lord Nottingham, had to grab his arm, or maybe –’ He faltered slightly and his stream of words ran dry. Even to say what had happened here required a kind of temerity.

‘Where is he now?’ We expected to hear ‘in the Tower’, surely.

‘He’s gone back to Wanstead.’ Doubtless with Rutland and Southampton, his cronies. I tried to think of that smiling house and garden as the seat of rebellion, but found I couldn’t do it easily. But neither could I still think of it as only a place of high shady hedges, and of strawberries.

Soon we had other things to think about at the great house along the Strand. When the fresh peas came, the cooks boiled them into broth; it was only the simple soups and pottages of his youth that could tempt the old lord as he aged. I still went down to the kitchens and ate the dishes they had promised me – the asparagus cooked with beaten egg, the apricots not yet crystal-lised – but I was one of the few in that house who were still greedy. And that, perhaps, was only because I’d learnt to keep grief, like love, at one remove: perhaps it made me less than human, but it was a lesson I’d learnt early.

Lord Burghley’s health had been failing for so many years that it conspired to make him seem indestructible as one of those old hollow oak trees. But when the change came, it came quickly. As summer passed the height of its sweetness and stumbled towards the sparse dog days, the only whisper at the clerks’ table was, ‘How is he today?’

The physicians came, but he’d have none of them. He’d take only the odd garden remedy – a decoction of strawberry leaves and roots for his kidneys. The queen sent messages ordering him to rally. When they failed of their effect, she even came herself, and I was there with the rest as she swept in, bowing in the hallway. I lingered to see her come out again. I had a kind of hunger to see her closely. But as I dawdled there, I heard a kind of snuffle from across the room. It was the old clerk, crying quietly. I tiptoed silently away. There was no comfort I could give, but I could spare him, and the queen, my curiosity.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
Summer 1598

It’s me she wants with her when she goes to visit Burghley. Well, of course, it would be. We’re getting precious now, like any other rarity, those of us who remember the old days. And at the moment we’re riding high, my husband and I. I should thank Lord Essex, really. Of course it was pure instinct made Charles grab Essex’s arm, that day in the Council room, and he made nothing of it when he told me. Well, I don’t suppose Essex would have gone further in any case. But Charles’ action proves to have done us a lot of good, though it was sheer instinct, as I say.

Actually, maybe that is the point – that Charles’ instincts were to keep the peace and protect the queen, before any calculation got in the way. Maybe the queen saw that more quickly than I. So I’m with her now at the house on the Strand – not as much to my taste as my house in Chelsea, but solid enough in its way. She even wants me with her in the bedchamber, though I stay in the background, beside the door. The man has the right to die in some privacy. When with her own royal hand she fed him his broth, I had to catch myself from jumping forwards. She was too unaccustomed to do it handily. Half a spoonful fell down onto Burghley’s white beard, but I know she saw the tenderness with which Robert wiped it away. They have strong affections, one for the other, in the Cecil family. And perhaps it was something she needed to do, however untidily.

Afterwards, her face was damp with tears, and she called Robert to walk with her in the garden. She wouldn’t want to go out in the street, and have the people see her that way. That garden is flattened by yesterday’s downpour, and if the thought of another bad harvest, another hungry winter, fills me with a sick fury, I can only guess what it must be doing to her majesty. Nothing she can do, save declare more fast days, but the blame and the guilt will still stick. That is what it is to be a ruler, to have some power, and all responsibility. Like being a woman, maybe. Last autumn we all cheered that God was on our side, when he sent the winds against the Spaniards, but sometimes it seems that from us, too, he turns his face away.

There’s a boy at an easel in front of a flower bed, so intent he had not noticed us until we were quite close. As he hears us at last, he starts up, bows, and backs away, Robert starts speaking about his garden, about the catalogue of plants he caused to be made, and is having translated for growers abroad, to our greater glory. The queen allows him half an ear, and I hope she appreciates the attempt at diversion, but she’s listening only distractedly. Robert may be about to lose a father, but she is about to lose her past, the man above all others with whom she shared the years, and the only one left, or nearly.

I’ve thought, as I have to, of what this means for us, because Charles does not see these things clearly. Perhaps there is no harm in that: I like to think I have long made my deal, heart as well as head, with everything about the man to whom they married me, and a good marriage it’s been, too – well, when you think I might have been given over to something like Philadelphia’s brutish booby, Scrope. If Charles does not think of his advantage at this time, that’s the very simplicity of temperament that allows him to work with Robert Cecil the more easily. Cecil’s will be the planning brain, but as the queen’s – now – oldest councillor, the one with the most years of service, my husband will have a certain new status, naturally. For a single second I allow myself the thought of how it might be to be married to a man who made the plan himself, or how it might be if I … No point for a woman to think that way. Behind the queen, her arm on Robert Cecil’s, I climb the little garden mound, and stare out over the damp prospect. I doubt that, this time, the queen has been able to walk her cares away.

Burghley dying here, and in Spain the spies tell us Philip is going, too, of a slow putrefaction, with his coffin placed beside the bed to set his mind on immortality. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer; though the loss of Philip will be England’s gain, I could almost swear we’re mourning for him as well as for Burghley. I was too young to know much about the alarums when he first married Queen Mary, when our queen was still a princess, but as a child in her household I swear I remember her going to the court to make her curtsey to the new King Philip, and the red velvet gown she wore that day. Everyone else from those days is gone: Mistress Ashley and the rest of the ladies, the old Queen Mary herself, of course, Robert Dudley. The thought sends a breath of chill even through me, though I’m a younger woman than she.

When there is no one left to whom you seem young, then you are old indeed, they say. And, unless all the doctors are wrong, then in a few days’ time, that’s what will happen to her majesty. So don’t think – don’t think, I urge her in my thoughts, silently – that I don’t understand why you can hanker after an Essex, in his youthful vitality.

Don’t think I don’t understand why to talk of the succession, as a childless monarch should, drives you into a nervous frenzy, like a dog that’s been whipped so often for barking at strangers it only has to hear the gate now to run away.

If she were just my cousin, instead of the queen, I’d put my arms around her in the carriage home, and say something silly. Instead, I sit there reminding myself to make sure her ruffs go to the Dutch laundry since none of the English cleaners starch them properly; and thinking about whether I’ll be able to slip away to Chelsea some time – I don’t trust that new confectioner – to see they’re preserving the summer fruits properly. I sit there with my eyes cast down, while she turns a still, hard profile away.

Jeanne
November 1598, Accession Day

Lord Essex had to come back to town, of course. He had to, to take his place as one of the black-cowled mourners at Lord Burghley’s funeral. I’d been there too – we all were – though he didn’t see me. The old lord would really be laid to rest in his own church at Stamford, up to the north, but her majesty had decreed that there would be a great mourning ceremony in Westminster Abbey. They had as many of the household there as possible, to do him honour – or ‘to make a show’, as the most malicious of the clerks put it bluntly.

No one had looked more sorrowful than Lord Essex, but the clerks weren’t the only ones to whisper he was sorrier for himself than for the loss of Lord Burghley. Down in the kitchens they were shouting it, over the sound of the cleavers and the kitchen boys, that the trouble continued between him and the queen. He actually dared say he wanted an apology. And the real question wasn’t just how they’d make up, or when – it was how we were all to go on as before, when a subject set his rights and the queen’s on terms of equality.

They had to find some way. The news from Ireland was worse every day, and while Lord Essex was wanting to take an army, swearing he’d hang the rebel Tyrone from the country’s highest tree, the queen was holding back.

‘Well, you can’t blame her,’ the malicious clerk had said. ‘She’s never liked sending a man off to lead a war – shows who’s got the balls, besides the question of money. But this time, if she gives Essex an army she must ask herself what he’s going to wind up doing with it.’

I’d kept my head down while the talk was going on, but at night I realised that I didn’t know, either, just what Lord Essex would do with his army.

This was no golden harvest year; the corn had been snapped up for the tables of the rich, and by October the poor were already baking bread of beans and barley. The weather had worsened sharply as autumn wore on, and when the odd day did come of chilly sunshine, we’d snatched at it like greedy children who’d known the gift of light would soon be seized away. As Accession Day approached, I’d told myself I might not go, for all we knew Lord Essex would be a challenger. But when it came to it, of course, I shrugged my shoulders and allowed the other young clerks to persuade me.

The crowds and the vendors were the same, and the awnings flapping in the wind overhead, and the sand underfoot. But I fancied I felt a special anticipation in the air. Everyone there knew of Lord Essex’s quarrels, and I felt a prick of irritation at him for making himself a motley. Maybe it wasn’t irritation so much as jealousy. I’d kept it close to my heart, that he’d been so open with me in the garden that day. But I’d come to realise that, like a beggar with his sores, he showed his moods to everybody.

I felt a tug at my elbow, and it was the gangling clerk. ‘Come on – they say there’s going to be something to see.’ The grandees were beginning to arrive – my lord of Nottingham the Lord Admiral, a youthful earl or two, Sir Walter Ralegh the Captain of the Guard, with his men bravely decked out in plumes of orange and tawny.

But they’d hardly taken their places when a titter arose, from those nearest the gateway. They were carrying Lord Essex’s scutcheon, with rows of men marching behind, decked out in … orange and tawny. Ralegh’s colours. More men, taller plumes, and the crowd were enjoying it hugely.

I turned away, with a tinge of sadness. I knew, of course, that his lordship and Sir Walter were no friends, but this seemed so – petty?

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. ‘She won’t like that. He won’t do himself any good that way.’ I started – I hadn’t even noticed that the old clerk had joined the party. I craned round to peer to the royal gallery near at hand – this was a better place than I’d managed for myself when I’d come to the tilt as a lone boy, and I could see that the waiting gentlewomen were paving the way for her majesty. But of the champions themselves there was no sign. They were still hidden behind the bleachers, and on a sudden impulse I sprang up and raced back down the stairs, drawn as surely as if I’d been a fish on a line in the garden pond, and he playing with me.