The Girl in the Mirror (12 page)

I turned my back on the lists themselves, and dodged round behind the back of the stands, to where the squires and the grooms would be making the knights ready. Down at this level, the noise was overwhelming, with the shouting of the boys and the stamping and whickering of the restless horses, but Lord Essex was already mounted, a little apart from the crowd, sitting loose in the saddle as he waited, idly.

I slowed as I approached him, unsure what I could say. Unsure whether he’d even remember me.

‘Why, hello, Jan. Have you come to wish me luck?’ His squire started up, with a warning face, from where he’d been checking the point of the great lance, but Lord Essex waved him away. I was drinking in every detail of him. He looked tired – I’d heard that he’d been ill in truth, besides the diplomatic illnesses he’d used to get round her majesty.

‘You’re not wearing a favour this year,’ I said idiotically. ‘You haven’t got her majesty’s glove.’

‘I haven’t, have I?’ It was stupid of me to have reminded him, at this of all moments, how everyone knew he’d lost the queen’s favour, but that didn’t seem to worry him. Quite the reverse. He’d seemed to be drooping a little when I’d come up, detached from the scene; more like a crusader knight on a tomb than someone who was going to spur his horse into those lists and win a crashing, snorting victory. But now he was rousing, opening up like a plant in the sun under the flattery of my memory.

‘You’ve seen me joust before? Then you’ll know the rules. And you’re right – I should have a token. A knight should tilt for the favour of some lady.’ His voice lingered on the last word and my breath caught, half in anticipation and half in fear. His dark eyes were dancing as he beckoned me closer. The smell of the sweating horse was in my nostrils as I came to stand by his armoured knee.

‘Who do you suppose I should ask to give me one, my Jeanne Janny?’ His voice was quiet, but alive with mischief as he gave me my girl’s name, the French way.

I’d been out in the gardens that morning, and found a bush of early blooming rosemary. I’d tucked a sprig into my doublet, telling myself it was best to have some clean scent by, in case the smells of the crowd grew unhealthy. I couldn’t have moved my fingers towards it, even had I dared. I was as paralysed as a rabbit in front of a snake. It felt as if I hardly breathed as slowly he stripped the metal gauntlet from his hand, and slowly reached out his long white hand towards me.

My eyes were still fixed on his face as dimly I heard the herald’s trumpet sound. With a shout of alarm his boy sprang towards him, helmet at the ready, and I stumbled out of the way. As the great roan clattered past me I looked down at my doublet, at where the sprig of rosemary used to be.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
November 1598, Accession Day

I do not actually watch as the queen raises her arm and unclenches her fingers, letting the glove fall solidly to the sand, heavy with its embroidery. I merely make a mental note to see that, this time, they clean it carefully. How many Accession Days is it now? It can’t be far off forty, though in the beginning we didn’t celebrate them this way. Once, long ago, we gave her such a wisp of a thing to throw that the wind all but whipped it away, but after this many years we’ve learned how to do these things properly.

I can see the queen’s hands clench on the railing as the hoof-beats take up their rhythm, and, reluctantly, I turn my attention to the joust. Long past the time when my husband might take part, and I thank God neither of my sons are competing today. It takes skill to get a horse straight into a canter from a standing start, but Essex knows his business – in horsemanship, at any rate. Bad luck, I know – the curse, on the curser – but I can’t help half wishing him a fall. Not a serious one, naturally. Just enough to slow him down, to give a check to his career, and one for which no one could blame her majesty. Or say she was an old lady now, blind to genius and opportunity. One to make him walk cautiously for a few weeks. The way the queen walks today. The way I am beginning to walk myself – I can give a good decade to her majesty, but I swear I’m beginning to grow as old, in sympathy.

Then again, after all those births – five large Howard babies living – you’d be lucky if you were left walking as easily as you used to as a girl; it’s the kind of thing the queen used to ask me about, once upon a time, when she’d keep me in her bedroom talking late into the night, and what was I supposed to say? They were all desperate for her to marry and produce an heir, and if it cost her life, well, so long as the baby was a boy … I told her the truth, the bad and the good, the so very good, but I don’t suppose it made any difference to her, really. I don’t suppose it made any difference, full stop. She may still have the figure of a girl, even without the whalebone stays. But no one could say she hadn’t suffered in other ways.

When I glance around the younger ladies, the chits are all gazing at the tourney, with eyes like my lapdog if I hold a bone up, slowly. It’s Essex, languishing his way around the ring again, needless to say. The queen has seen it too. Her thin lips are clenched under the paint, and the pale winter sun shows the lines on her face too cruelly. So many years of these chits of maids, with their follies and their fancies, it makes me weary. Thank God I’ll be home for a few days soon, at my own house in Chelsea.

Cecil
Winter 1598–99

‘Wish the king no evil in thy thought, nor speak no hurt of him in thy privy chamber; for the bird of the air shall betray thy voice, and with her feathers shall bewray thy words.’ It says so in Ecclesiastes, and our best theorists agree. But the birds of the air may as well have help: especially since we can’t yet be sure whether evil is wished to the queen, precisely. Indeed, when Lord Essex declares he needs an army to take to Ireland, I’m not sure he himself formulates his thoughts too clearly.

My father said that there were three sorts of traitors: since he died, I’ve found myself mouthing his sayings more frequently. Those ‘discontented for lack of preferments’, those who couldn’t afford to live quiet at home, and the bankrupt merchants. By merchants, he meant those buying and selling more than goods. By merchants, he meant anybody. Perhaps he was too sweeping, putting it all down to money. But in some ways, Essex is all three.

A conspiracy must be laid out and tended like a garden. A plot for a plot, but only schoolboys congratulate themselves on their word play. Nor, of course, would I use the word plot for the simple precautions I am taking: and I doubt Lord Essex tends anything carefully.

I listen to the rumours Essex has been in touch with Tyrone, just as I will later listen to the drone of the bees, which tells the keepers to get their skeps ready. I observe the wilting patch where the queen’s affection for him has faded, and I consider whether anything else could be planted there more usefully. I see the weeds sown by his lordship’s determination that his officers in Ireland shall be his men only – but these tares I shan’t pluck up too quickly. I think of the snares the gardeners set, before the rabbits can get the young seedlings. And I think of how Lord Essex set himself up so none other could be given the Irish captaincy. I think of how he may be regretting it already.

Jeanne
Spring 1599

He wouldn’t set out until after dinner, bound for Ireland with his army. One of the secret clerks broke his silence for once, to say that it would be a miracle if his lordship set out at all – but truth to tell, there wasn’t much of a secret about that. Every ale-drinker in every tavern had been talking for weeks about how Lord Essex was having second thoughts. It wasn’t just the impossibility of the job, though no Lord Deputy had ever managed to tame those wild Irish kerns. But they were talking, too, about how he’d told the Council he was armed before but not behind – ‘Saying while he was gone, our master would stab him in the back! Quite openly!’ It had been one of the pages reporting the tale, wide-eyed, in the kitchens, and the cook slammed his pot lid down with unusual vehemency. The old clerk said something damping, when he heard, about getting the tutor to thrash some grammar into the boy – but the fact was, everyone had heard of his lordship’s accusations. And I don’t think I was the only one, even in our house, to have divided loyalties.

The day he was going dawned fine and clear – the kind of day you dream of as Easter approaches. The people would have a choice of blossoms, if the crowds wanted to throw flowers in his path as he left. The country women in the streets were already selling great balls of cowslips smelling like honey, and any children who ran out early to the woods could bring back the wreckage of frail wilting windflowers and the last of the daffodowndillies.

No one actually said that we were all free to go out and watch that day, as Lord Essex and his troops rode out. Perhaps, in a Cecil household, it was the kind of thing you didn’t really say. But as I looked around the hall at dinner, there were a lot of trenchers being mopped up briskly, and more of the fish than usual went back into the kitchens. It might still be Lent, but the scullions would have a feast day – if they themselves hadn’t already tumbled out onto the streets.

Outside, in the Strand, as I made my way to Essex House, the crowds were behaving as though it were indeed a festival. The vendors were out in force, and from the queues and the nudges around the pasty vendors, I’d say the rules about needing doctor’s order to eat meat were being broken pretty freely.

Indeed, there was a curious feel of lawlessness, as if this were a crowd that could turn nasty – as all crowds can, maybe. The army was drawn up in the fields beyond the Tower, and after he’d joined them, Lord Essex’s path lay towards Chester, where the boats waited to take him to Ireland. He’d set out towards the village of Islington, not due west past the palace at Westminster, and the shadow of her majesty’s authority.

They were coming. I could hear the shouts of ‘Hurray!’ and faintly, under them, the click of the horses’ hooves and the chink of armoury. Whatever privations lay ahead – and I knew enough now to be sure this expedition wasn’t flush with money – he’d make sure his personal guard made a fine show in their orange livery. And whatever sulks and furies lay behind, he’d greet the crowd smilingly. He went past in one long moment, the cool spring sunlight shining on his breastplate, decked out for battle already, as though he were going to have to fight his way through London. Maybe that was what he was trying to say.

‘God speed your lordship,’ people were shouting. And yes, they were throwing flowers in his way. But – perhaps it was only my imagination, but I fancied there was a faint undercurrent of mockery in the calls. A London crowd was a strange beast, savage, shrewd, and fickle – as strange as anything you might find in the Tower menagerie. We’d seen a noble young lord, tall and shining as a god, ride out on a venture of chivalry. But was it – did we think it – any more real than the feints and masques at the tournament on Accession Day?

Yes, the air was chilling. I looked north, the way the army would go, and black clouds were massing in the sky. ‘That’s a bad omen, sure enough,’ said a workman beside me, cheerfully. ‘They’ll be soaked and sorry before they stop tonight.’ Sure enough, a few spiteful drops of rain began to fall as I turned and made my way back to Burghley House.

Passing through the courtyard, I made my way into the garden, despite the moisture on the air. I’d be alone there. Except that I wasn’t – a small, dark figure stood by the aviary. From this angle his twisted shoulder showed clearly. I hesitated for just too long to be able to go back, then slowly moved towards him. I had a feeling he might welcome company. He turned at the sound of my steps, and I think his face lightened slightly.

‘Ah, Jan. We’ll miss him, won’t we?’

I didn’t know what to say. I was taken aback twice over. Once, that Sir Robert had seen my feelings so clearly. Once that he, whom everyone thought was Lord Essex’s sworn enemy …

As he turned, and began to pace the gravel, I was used enough to his ways by now to fall in automatically. ‘We were boys together – you knew that, surely?’

I nodded. It was one of the old clerk’s favourite stories, about how Lord Essex had been made Lord Burghley’s ward, after his own father died in Ireland (in Ireland!), and how they should have seen this coming, even in the old days.

‘There’s good as well as bad in that, and they neither of them ever quite go away.’ He slipped a hand under my elbow. I’d seen gallants do it all the time, but from him, to me, the gesture was striking. ‘His father was dead then, and he was determined to see his work finished. And now my father is dead too, and I …’

All I could do was bow my head attentively, while a tiny voice in my head whispered that this was a man who did nothing without a purpose, and why was he talking this way to me? But another, firmer voice spoke, telling me that sometimes conviction and convenience marched hand in hand. That whatever Sir Robert did to put stones in Lord Essex’s path – I was no longer as naive as I used to be – yet all the same, this was still a kind of verity.

‘We’ve both lost people, you and I. Oh, they’ve gone into God’s care, of course, and we’re still in the sinful world. Perhaps that’s why, sometimes, I swear, it can make you feel almost guilty.’ He wasn’t looking for an answer, and I couldn’t have made one easily. But as the rain began to fall in earnest, and he turned to precede me into the house, I thought that, for all its hidden secrets, that was the most intimate exchange I’d ever had with anybody.

Summer 1599

As the summer approached, with its odours and its whispers of plague – and its puffs of rose scent borne on warm wind too – I was told we were all going out from town, to Sir Robert’s family home at Theobalds, and that the queen was coming to stay.

‘Yes, I said “we”. You’re coming too,’ the steward told me irritably. ‘Her majesty loves a garden, and she’ll want to see all the work that’s been going on, whether it’s in the flowerbeds or the library. What do you expect Sir Robert to do, if the queen asks him about a plant you’ve drawn – say we’ll get back to her in a week or two?