The Girl in the Mirror (27 page)

‘Wait!’ The queen’s call halts the boy as he’s being pushed out of the pages’ door. ‘What was Lord Essex doing inside this alderman’s house? Could you see?’

The child looks almost ashamed, for some reason. As if it were his own folly. ‘They said – they said he was having dinner, Majesty. And he’d asked for one of the alderman’s fresh shirts, because his own had got so sweaty.’

Several of the gentlemen around give a derisive snort, and I feel in myself the strangest mixture, of triumph, vindication and of … pity? The image of Philadelphia passes over my mind’s eye.

‘Well, gentlemen, if Lord Essex has leisure to dine, I think I shall do the same,’ her majesty says smilingly.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
8 February, afternoon

The afternoon is the hardest. We no longer believe the people will rise up, but the time passes so slowly. I wish I could have some word from Chelsea, or that I’d thought to leave instructions they should hide away my tapestries. Strange how, when a danger is surely passing over, that’s the time you seem to feel it most acutely.

When the messenger boys come back to say Essex is still inside, still drinking, I begin to feel almost indignant that he’s not making a better showing, that ours is all the activity. Cecil’s brother is out now in the City streets, proclaiming Essex’s treachery; and by the time Essex finally runs out, with his napkin round his neck, to understand at last that no support is coming, we here must have known it for hours. Our musters have raised three companies of foot and sixty horse, and the queen swears out loud she thinks of going with them, as they set out towards the City. They take it for bravado, which they call bravery, but I suspect that, like the rest of us, she’d be grateful for any activity.

Official messengers are arriving all the time now, from our forces in the City. They’ve set up barricades at Temple Bar. The Lord Mayor and the Bishop of London have done their duty. Charles, my husband, has ridden out at the head of a troupe, but I disdain to ask leave to see him off from the courtyard: what are Essex’s few fools on London’s own streets to a man who has often faced the Spanish? He’ll be glad, I think, though he’d never admit it, that at last he can face Essex openly.

The February light is already beginning to weaken when we hear that Essex’s followers have been stopped at the City gates on Ludgate Hill, but that he and the other lords got away to a boat and – ‘To sea!’ cried one gentleman, impetuously. I swear the discipline of the court has gone to pieces, but I suppose it must be forgiven for today. The messenger shakes his head.

‘No, your grace. They were rowing upriver.’ Every huntsman in the room knew what that meant. The quarry was going to ground, in Essex House, and it was there that he would be smoked out.

Jeanne
8 February, evening

‘Smoke!’ One of the boys was pointing eastwards, his nose snuffing the air like a hungry dog’s.

‘What’s so extraordinary about that? London’s keeping warm and having its supper, where’s the story?’ But the old clerk spoke without conviction. Through the dusk, the smell on the damp night sky was different, somehow, and we tumbled out into the street to see. There hadn’t been a single moment, that afternoon, when anyone rang a bell and declared we could now go out in safety, but no one could hear the word from the City and still think it was a crime to go out in Cecil livery.

‘They’ve not fired his house. It isn’t bad enough for that – and besides, we’d see the flames,’ someone said uncertainly. Without conscious volition, I found I’d broken away from the group and was running across the Strand, my breath coming sobbingly.

Outside Essex House the crowd was thick, but I squeezed and shoved my way through without remorse, until my path was stopped by a solid line of soldiery. I edged sideways until I caught sight of a sergeant, and then pulled the cloak forward to show him my badge.

‘Let the young gent through. That’s it, no further.’ But at least now I could see. ‘We think it’s papers he’s burning in there,’ he went on, informatively. ‘Southampton’s been out, shouting down from the roof, doing a parley with our commander, and they’re letting the ladies come out safely.’ So it was ‘Southampton’ now, without his title – but only the surface of my mind took wry note of the liberty.

In my mind’s eye I could see Essex in his shirtsleeves, staring-eyed and sweaty as the devils in a rood-painting, burning whatever might incriminate his friends and family. It must be of them he was thinking. For himself, he was damned to hell already.

It was something I’d always known about him – that he held to life but lightly. It was what he’d recognised in me, maybe. I knew, with a sick sense in my gut too strong to brook denial, that his urge now would be to fight – to die, as he’d see it, gloriously. But maybe – fiercely, I sent the thought winging to them – maybe the others wouldn’t feel the same way.

They were telling people to move along, that the show was over, but I couldn’t go away. My breath was clouding on the cold air, my eyes were stinging as I stared through the dark towards the house, but I could no more have left than I could have walked out yesterday in the middle of the play.

Vainly, I gazed around the crowd, somehow hoping that Martin Slaughter might be there. He wasn’t, of course not. There was no reason he should be. And no reason for me suddenly to feel even more chilled than the night air had made me.

There was a low murmur from the crowd – almost a breathing, as if the mass of people had become one entity. A flickering light was moving along the ledge of the roof, a man holding a torch. I knew it was Essex. It had to be. The government commanders stepped forward to parley. Among them I could make out my lord Admiral, with his white beard, but the wind carried their words away from me.

The light on the roof retreated and vanished. The beast that was the crowd breathed in unison, quietly. We waited. No one told us what was happening. Why should they? My imagination traced a handful of figures down through the floors of the house and everyone present must have done the same, even those who’d never trodden that staircase in reality.

A door was flung open and there they were. A handful of men, dishevelled, falling to their knees. I could see Essex’s face, glistening and ghastly, as he held out his sword, hilt first. Two soldiers stepped forward and took his arms – not roughly – but the Lord Admiral gestured them away, and the little group just stood there, for all the world as if they were debating where to dine after the play.

‘They won’t want to take him through the streets – too risky.’ It was the friendly sergeant. ‘And if it’s the Tower they’re after, they’ll not get there tonight by water, not with this lot brewing up.’ I followed his gaze and he was right. Black clouds were blotting out all trace of the stars, and a vicious rain had started to sting against my face. But some decision had been reached; the group was moving, with a kind of slovenly dignity. They were heading through the gardens, towards the river gate, and my eyes burned Lord Essex’s back as they took him away.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
8 February, night

It’s the small of the night when she wakes, shaking with chills. I hadn’t returned to sleep in my own room but I’d had them set up a pallet for me, next to her majesty. I knew this would happen: she’s always been cool in the face of crisis, even when she was a white-faced girl ordered to the Tower by her own sister and not sure if she’d leave it with her head still on her body. It’s afterwards that there’s the price to pay.

Now it’s all over and it’s clear who’s won, this shadow of danger is looming larger every time the tale is told, by women who’ve never known what it’s like to be really afraid for your life. So afraid you’re sick with it, savage and lonely. As I set the girls to bring posset and furs I cast a cold eye on one who was thoroughly enjoying a flutter of panic half the afternoon; until I told her that she of all of us had nothing to fear if Lord Essex should seize control of the court. Not if the stories I’d heard of her goings on with him were true … That silenced her, the pretty pert hussy.

I move over to the window while the girls are busy and I real-ise what awakened her majesty – and me. You don’t live by the river all these years, in the palaces or at Chelsea, without developing a sense of its moods, and it must now be – ‘Almost three,’ one of the maids agrees. The turn of the tide. The time when those souls close to death go out with the waters, so they say. The time when they’ll be moving Essex downriver to the Tower. For the few hours they held him at Lambeth, waiting for the water to quiet, he’ll have been half hoping there was still some way out. Now he’ll understand that, tonight, there truly isn’t any.

That other time, as a girl, half a century ago, it was another early springtime day. I heard the stories from the ladies who’d been with her: how she scribbled and scribbled at a plea to Queen Mary so that the waters had risen and they couldn’t take her to the Tower that day. The water slopping under the boat as they shot the choppy waves under London Bridge, feet numbing under the sodden hems of their gowns, and her saying at least if we drowned now it would be easy. I wonder whether – if Essex had won, if we’d played that scene now – any of us would find the energy to fight for our lives quite so frantically.

If she’d been as rash, as credulous as Essex, she’d have been dead before she was twenty. All yesterday, as the news of idiocy after idiocy came in, she must, God knows, have been taken aback by his folly. But maybe, of all the people who’ll hear the story of his foolish rebellion, she’s the one who can best understand that panic, that slump of the spirit that makes decision impossible. But understanding is not always forgiveness, and this time it must not be.

Once she’d have called for Leicester and Burghley to sit with her through the long nerve-wracked night, but who is there to call for now? To comfort her, but also to help her hold her nerve, in those chilly pre-dawn hours that drain resolution away. It’s not as if she had family – family closer than Charles and I. Please God Philadelphia and her husband weren’t fools enough actually to have known anything about this conspiracy, but my Charles set the example there, when he arrested the men at Essex House but set the ladies free.

So that’s why I’m still here, in the queen’s outer chamber, though the fire is burning low in the grate and I haven’t seen Charles since he returned in safety. Dreaming of the high-banked fires in my house, with apple wood to scent them sweet, and telling over the linen like a litany. I’m here so that, if she wants someone, she won’t have to wait while they come to fetch me.

Cecil
8 February, night

There comes a moment, dancing the coranto, when you hold your partner high. When just for that moment, the woman held aloft seems of the air, weightless, and the tension of the man’s muscles freezes both into immobility. I swear that for that second time itself seems to stop – as if, like the ancients dancing for their gods, we have danced time itself into a lapse of drugged security.

Well, when I say ‘we’, I’ve never been able to take part in the coranto, naturally. But just now, a feeling of that moment comes over me.

This is it, there is no turning back. As they take Essex down-river to the Tower he will understand that this time there can be no forgiveness. That he, who is fond of boasting his lineage, is the last in another long line of inheritance that stretches back through our history. They’ve gone in ambition, or they’ve gone in stupidity. They’ve gone for blind obstinate misguided faith, or sometimes they have gone in innocence, with nothing but their bloodline to make their continued existence an impossibility. But this they have in common: they go into the Tower with the knowledge that getting out again will not be easy. Oh, people are released from the Tower, of course they are. Sometimes after just a comfortable token captivity, sometimes with the peril of the axe so close they feel its cold breath on their neck the rest of their lives, however long that may be. Like her majesty. But not Essex. If ever I have understood the queen, I can say this with certainty.

There was just a moment when I thought she knew. Oh, not knew the details, not knew about Gorges, though even that is a possibility. When a man has turned coat once he’ll find it easier to do so again, especially when both his new employers are on the same side, or nearly. And I have to remember that anything I can offer an ambitious man can be offered more directly by her majesty. A double agent’s loyalties must be suspect to both sides: indeed, for a time I thought Gorges might have gone over to the rebels wholeheartedly. An agent buried deep in enemy territory is never sure where his cover ends and his life begins. The wear of the pretence is such it’s almost easier to make yourself over into what you are pretending to be. Still, Gorges did well. He even managed to get back to Essex House before the earl, and release those lords the queen had sent who Essex had been holding hostage all day.

I do not know what brought the sudden suspicion of the queen to me. She was doing something quite ordinary – ordering the boy to bring more sweetmeats: now she is older she does let the release from tension push her into her own favourite glut-tony. But she turned her head and I thought: She knew – knew, with a certainty beyond her politician’s instinct, knew Essex would rebel, knew what the outcome would be. Knew, like one who had been planning long and carefully. As long and as carefully as me.

My mind reeled at the thought of it. If she knew, then all these months past … If she knew, then even when she refused him the sweet wines tax … God’s Death, she’s been baiting him like a staked bear. I know my father taught her the advantage of a long rope, that that way you can see if the puppy has really taken its training or just learned to obey when obedience comes easy. But to gamble so high, to do it so boldly … It needs thinking about, closely. If I’m not wrong, if it’s not my imagination playing tricks on me. The greatest mystery in all high policy is her majesty’s mind, my father used to say.