The Girl in the Mirror (20 page)

I hadn’t seen Lord Essex either, though I did once succumb to folly. Just once, the impulse was too strong for me, and I tied up another tiny nosegay, sweeter and softer than the November blooms. I slipped into the courtyard of York House, and handed them to a young serving boy. ‘For his lordship,’ I said firmly, and the child eyed the badge on my cloak and nodded eagerly. I saw no sign of Cuffe, or of Martin, and I left no message, naturally, but for two days after, my stomach churned. It was dangerous, of course it was; what if anyone thought it worth their while reporting to the Secretary? In the event, no one asked me, but I knew I should never again indulge myself so stupidly.

It was only later that I realised, fearful though I had been then, that taking a token to a state prisoner had actually seemed less dangerous than thinking of Martin Slaughter too freely.

Sometimes the promise of the seasons is not fulfilled. Sometimes even the events of the year come out of order, and in the fierce grip of a backwinter the early shoots are covered by new snow. A few balmy days of sunshine were followed by weeks of rain, and a freezing wind that seemed to blow the buds back into the trees. No pleasure to be enjoyed in the garden but to kick the clods of heavy soil and watch the stunting of leaves that had unfurled too early. It was as if the paralysis that held us all had infected the land, so that not even the movement from the earth could progress properly.

We heard that Lord Essex had grown religious in captivity. Down on his knees, praying for forgiveness, sending for his old tutor from Oxford to talk of his immorality. Sending letters to his friends, urging them to repent in misery. Some of his supporters in the taverns said wisely that his lordship knew what he was doing; if straight appeal wouldn’t move the queen, then maybe it would work this way. The woman who served the drinkers their ale, whose cheeks had grown rougher and her voice huskier over the last year, said in truth he had plenty to repent of. But her man had gone to Ireland in Essex’s train, and had never come home again. For me, I had seen how fast his moods could change. He had no nerves to play this waiting game the queen imposed on him; he could easily have fallen into true despair, I told myself – it must be better that he should take this way.

We’d heard he was to be allowed home, to Essex House, though still in the conditions of captivity. Hard to know how he’d live there, though. He’d been told to dismiss his household, those two hundred men in their bright orange livery, and as April came in I often thought about what he might be doing now, racketing around all those empty corridors. It was enough to drive any man to misery. The old clerk told me it even worried our master.

‘It’s not natural to Master Robert, all this shilly-shallying. He can be slow and devious when he has to be, none better, but the trouble is, his mind is tidy.’ He’d known Sir Robert since he was a boy, and when he talked of him, it was most often to me.

As Easter came and a few first stunted bluebells with it, and sharp gusts still blew the apple blossom from the trees, the old man told me there was a fresh source of worry – the coming of St George’s Day. Lord Essex was a Garter Knight, of course – one of that select band who (so the theory ran) the sovereign had deemed most worthy. Now he’d written to Sir Robert that the rules of the Order decreed he should wear his robes on Garter Day.

‘He’s quite right, too. We checked,’ the secretary who took care of these things interjected, fussily. So did this mean he should wear them in the Garter Procession? (‘which would mean his being allowed back into public, to a degree’). Should he do honour to the order by dining in state in Essex House? (‘All very well, but if we’re not careful, that one could turn into some kind of private rival ceremony.’) Or was he to wear them only in the privacy of his bedroom? I gaped at the absurdity. ‘Oh, you may laugh, young man, but I’d wager you that’s what it will come to, when Sir Robert asks her majesty.’

They knew a thing or two, those old men. Three days later we in the scribes’ room heard that Lord Essex had been refused permission to join the court, or to break in any way the conditions of his captivity. Which meant … ‘A feast in all his splendour, and no one there to see!’ It was one of the younger boys, this time, making a chant of it; a chunky, cheeky lad, on whom the ink stains under his fingernails looked like an anomaly. He didn’t see any pathos in the situation, that’s for sure, but I don’t think I was the only one in the room to feel the diminution of the earl.

Even Master Secretary felt it, I found. Everything his father had taught him schooled him to cut down the too-tall poppy, for fear of spoiling the bed. Everything in him told him to shun the ‘man of blood’. But still –

‘Go to Lord Essex today, at dinner time. Take him a dish of those candied violets, with my compliments.’ Sir Robert glanced up from his letter. ‘He’ll be pleased to see you,’ he said. I stared at him disbelievingly. Of course he meant that Lord Essex would be glad to see anybody, anyone to break his boredom, since no visitor would be allowed save one who came direct from the queen or the Secretary. But to my greedy heart, it sounded almost as if Sir Robert were acknowledging a bond – I’d blush even to suggest it aloud – between the earl and me.

The present was in the kitchen, waiting and ready, and of course the sweetmeats weren’t really the point, even though they’d bulked the violets up with squares of milk jelly, and confit of quinces, and a few candied roses the confectioner must have been hoarding: England’s flower for England’s saint’s day. The silver dish on which they rested was worth a king’s ransom – or an earl’s, maybe. I wondered whether Sir Robert would have mentioned his present to her majesty. I wondered if, when he looked to the future, he ever thought of the possibility their positions would be reversed, and Essex would once again be riding high.

‘We’d best send a guard with you, if you’re carrying that,’ said the steward, signing two burly men-at-arms to fall in behind me. He was wise: on the short journey over the Strand I saw that the street was packed, with everything from apprentices in crudely painted dragon masks to vendors with their pickled fish and their mutton pies.

Only Essex House stood quiet, its courtyard empty. The very façade seemed to stare at me reproachfully, and even the porter sounded almost grateful to see me. As my two guards turned gladly back into the throng, he bowed low at Sir Robert’s name – word had got round, it was the Secretary saved the earl from the indignity of a public trial – and whistled up a boy to show me the way to his lordship’s chamber.

They had taken most of the dishes away. Perhaps there hadn’t been that many – he had never eaten with any great interest; his appetites did not lie that way – but he had obviously been drinking heavily. I could see a red flush where the white ostrich feather and the black heron’s plume swept down over his cheek, and there was a splash on his velvet sleeve. He was indeed in all his finery.

‘Why, Janny. How very good of you to visit me. I dare not hope it’s for the pleasure of my company. As you can see’ – he waved an arm vaguely around the empty room – ‘that’s a pleasure the rest of the world seems able to resist quite easily.’ I stammered something graceless, about Sir Robert’s wishing to send him a gift and the compliments of the day.

‘Sir Robert, Sir Robert. Is there no end to the kindnesses I’m fated to receive from Master Secretary? Sometimes I think they may yet be the death of me. But come’ – he seemed to pull himself together – ‘I am being a poor host. Sit down and have a drink with me.’ He pulled up a chair next to his own, and I subsided into it, uncomfortably. It was hardly proper, for a clerk to be seated by England’s premier earl, but at this tiny table, at the end of his bedstead, there was no above and below the salt.

‘That right. Now, have a drink, if there’s any left – Aha, what have you got there? Another present for me?’

I blushed. It was true – before I left, I’d begged from the housekeeper a bottle of the new cowslip wine. Its sweet honey taste spelt the spring to me, the spring we’d shared only in my fantasy. But on the way I’d had time to realise how ridiculous I was – taking a country bottle to one of the greatest men in the land, for all the world as though I’d been visiting my old granny.

‘A present from yourself, perhaps. If so, I’ll drink it the more gladly.’ He spoke more soberly, and with some gentleness. ‘Here, let us strike a bargain. For the next hour or two, I’ll forget that I’m the earl, or that Master Secretary hates me.’ I looked up sharply to protest, that my master’s overtures weren’t feigned, that they weren’t really enemies –

‘Hush, no …’ He laid a finger on my lips. ‘Let’s forget, I said. And you – what do you have to forget, my Jeanne Janny? Or should it be, who?’ I gazed at him dumbly. I was back in the maze, more than eighteen months before, that summer’s day.

He was looking at me intently. ‘There’s something different about you. There’s been somebody.’ But now he took pity on me, or so I thought, and began showing off the Garter insignia. ‘I suppose you know this story?’ He gestured to the blue ribbon round his thigh, and I shook my head.

‘It was old King Edward – Edward III, two centuries ago – at a court dance with his daughter-in-law, Joan of Kent. A beauty, so they say. In the pace of the dance step the garter holding her stocking fell down, and the courtiers sniggered to see her lingerie. King Edward picked it up, and said to them all “
Honi soit qui mal y pense
”. I’ve always rather admired him for being so ready to spare embarrassment to a lady.’

He held out his leg towards me. ‘I don’t need to translate for you, surely? Not for Master, or Mistress, French Secretary.’ I shook my head as he gestured me to look closer. ‘Shame be on him who thinks evil.’

His finger traced the golden words embroidered on the ribbon, and as I bent forward his other hand smoothed down my short hair and closed around the nape of my neck, caressingly. ‘Do you know how they make a brood mare ready for the stallion? If you’re Master of Horse, you know all about making good foals. They bring in another horse, just to get her juices flowing, and then they take the poor beast away unsatisfied so that the real stallion, the bloodstock male, finds her receptive and easy. They call the other beast the teaser. Has someone been the teaser for me?’

His words hardly reached me, I felt only his body. I could no more have resisted than a fly in a spider’s web as his lips came forward to meet me. I felt my mouth open under his. His breath tasted of wine, but his hand moved with deliberation across the front of my doublet, and through the rushing in my head I heard him give a half laugh as he realised just how firmly it concealed what lay beneath.

‘A good disguise, by the Life. But I think the time for that is over.’ He fumbled only briefly with the fastening before his hand slipped below. As I felt it close around my breast, my bowels seemed to be turned to water. ‘Not a full rose here, just a little bud.’ His other arm was around me, urging me up as he pressed me back towards the bed. I was leaning backwards against the pillows and he was kneeling over me, his hands tugging at his own clothing, when –

‘No!’ I hardly knew where the voice came from, but from the frenzy with which I was pushing at his arm, it had to have been from me. He gaped at me, too surprised to insist. It was only later I thought, too, that perhaps sex was another of the things for which he was not truly greedy.

‘I can’t! I mustn’t … Please – my lord – I’m sorry …’ I could see him rallying his forces, the wine beginning to leave his head. Recollecting the servant who could come in any moment, recollecting who had sent me.

‘As you wish.’ He said it thickly, with something of a grudge in his voice, but after a second he said it again, more clearly. ‘As you wish.’

I was yanking my doublet closed with such speed I almost broke the laces. I stammered again, ‘I’m sorry.’

He had himself under control now. It would, after all, be beneath him to show even if he cared, that he’d been discommoded in any way. ‘Don’t even think of it, my dear. It’s of no consequence.’ I must still have been looking stricken, because he added, wryly. ‘I’m used to it, after all.

‘Thank Master Secretary for his gift,’ he called after me.

Back in the street, making my way home towards Blackfriars, without the guards this time, I wondered what he meant – used to the brush-off, or used to the preliminaries of love, cut off too early? Uncomfortably, I realised that, either way, he was probably thinking of her majesty. He’d said something else, too, about other men, and horses, but I couldn’t think about that properly. As I cleared the corner of the house I saw a brown figure going in where I’d just come out and faltered a moment, shrunken into stillness like a woodland creature. I’d recognised Martin Slaughter but I hoped, I did hope, he hadn’t seen me.

May/June 1600

I told myself I’d just been prudent. I told myself that I was lucky. If heartbreak had been the worst of it I’d have got off lightly; no one can walk the London streets without seeing the women and their babies. But in the days and weeks ahead I knew it hadn’t been just prudence talking, when I pushed him away. It had been something deeper. If before
that
I was Jan, then who would I be after? And I did not ask myself whether, if Martin had been the man, I would still have reacted in the same way.

For a second my mind even hovered over the question of what the queen might have felt, why she had sent suitor after suitor away. Pushed away Leicester, and Hatton, and Essex; and only at the very last minute, some say.

I didn’t see Lord Essex, and we heard no more, as the hawthorn blossom whitened and then grew brown and powdery on the branches, smelling like the kitchen on washing day. The real spring had come at last, as it always does, and in the gardens they had wild purple geranium, and fleur de luce and the yellow poppy. In the country the bluebells came properly, in lakes so blue it burned the eye, and then began to fade; in the lanes when I walked of a Sunday the greens – the dark green of reed, the pale green of barley, the sullen grey green of the nettles – made a tapestry. I registered each one with a kind of determination, because the truth was, the lanes these days did not mean so much to me. Just occasionally, I caught myself wondering whether they would matter again, if I were walking there with somebody. But I stopped, before ever there was a face on the figure beside me.