The Girl in the Mirror (29 page)

Cecil
Thursday, 19 February, night

Of course it’s long dark when I get home, and the torch boy dares make a grimace of incredulity when nonetheless I turn towards the garden. But I employ no stupid children in my house: he looks again, and realises this is not the day to flout me. Just as well – out of the savagery in my breast tonight I could tell the steward to order him whipped, and I could do it gladly. But I am a civilised man – all I do, when once the door is unlocked and we’re out in the faint moon, is to take the torch from the boy’s hand and order him away. At least if I stumble in the darkness there will be no one to see.

The crunch of the gravel under my feet sounds loudly on the still air. I pick a path less with my eyes than with my memory. But the very forms of the plants are different in the darkness – a flowerbed bled away into shadows, a bush grown into a bogey – and the strangeness, as much as the quiet, begins to soothe my ragged nerves. Forgive me, would he? Every soul under God has need of forgiveness in the end, but for what I have done against Essex, let no soul here on earth judge me.

My eyes are growing accustomed now, and I can make out the harsh straight line of the clipped hedges of rosemary. I crouch down, settle the stem of the torch into the earth, like a child making a sandcastle, and brush the flat of my hands over the crisp spikes, though the air is too cold to set the scent free, and I have to crush the needles between my fingers to carry it away with me.

The flame of the torch flickers on a clump of snowdrops, just beginning to drop their heads: there’ll be daffodils here later. I press further, delicately, with the palms of my hands and the sharp spears of their first folded buds press back at me. After the daffodils, the fritillaries, still under the earth: a garden in winter is like a coded message that only a gardener can read clearly. I press down on the earth again, and well tilled though it is – my labourers know their work – a mixture of clod and pebble meets me. Essex and his ilk were always fond of picturing the Cecils, the pen gents, as new men, themselves as the ancient and honourable aristocracy, but this is older than either of us. A garden is about the future and the past too: always has been, always will be.

The chill of the earth is seeping into my bones: they’ll be surprised when I go back into the house with my knees all muddy, like a schoolboy. We are finding new ways to label and define our plants: will we ever be able to see humans differently? To look at Essex, and see not just a catalogue of virtues corrupted into vices, but a different compact of possibilities? To say that, just as a garden has its exotics and its native wildflowers both, its clipped neat hedges and its flowery meads, so people can be one way or be another and to be other does not have to mean to be at enmity? In the garden a fountain spurts water from a hidden jet, and we aren’t up in arms at the deception – instead we exclaim at the novelty.

If my father were here, he’d say that the moonlight had got into my brain. Now he is dead I’m having a new house built for myself across the Strand, and I wonder if, when I move there, his voice will be with me as frequently. My father would say that the only change is decline and the only future is eternity. That God has ordained the order of things, and the fantasy of improving it is as impious as the attempt to destroy. God and the queen love unity. So do the people, the godly. It is only those with malicious and private purpose who seek to corrupt and destroy what is manifest so clearly. Better to hold my mind to the now and the necessary. I have won a victory today, and if I feel I bared my heart to the whole court, I did no more than what was planned and necessary. I brush the earth from my hands as I move back to the house, turning my thought to Mr Abdy Ashton.

It is true, tares have to be torn up, or they would choke the garden. My father would have said it, and my gardeners would agree. But the battle between thistles and garden flowers is not personal. Was it personal, with Essex and me?

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
Friday, 20 February 1601

They’d have killed Charles as well as Cecil if they’d reached the court, and they were all set to storm the court until Gorges turned the idea away. Gorges – I
wonder
, now. Ralegh’s cousin, isn’t he? But too many cooks haven’t spoiled this broth so far: it takes warp and weft to weave a cloth, anyone can tell you that much, or anyone who’s worked with fabrics. We will not need to speak of this: if Cecil still has any games afoot with Gorges he can certainly play them out without any help from me.

One of the rebels admitted it, about Charles. He said if he and Cecil were killed it would have been just ‘a fillip matter’, that nothing would be made of it. I told that to Philadelphia; oh yes, I went to see her – a little red about the eyes, a little worn about the cheeks, but not nearly as worried, or as guilty, as she should be.

‘I owe God a death,’ Essex said as they took him away, and asked if he could have his own chaplain, some Master Abdy Ashton, with him for his last days. I wish I could have been there and could say: Everyone owes God a death. And anything special that you owe, right down to the silks on your back, you owe to her majesty. She gave them to you, didn’t she? The silks and velvets, the sleek horses, the chef in your kitchen and the malmsey in your cellar, and the offices that made men bow down before you. I tell them over, like an angry litany. ‘Only merchants count the cost,’ you said once, when she tried to teach you the price of your wars, and we all knew people remembered there’d been merchants in her mother’s – my grandmother’s – family.

Of all the things you have, your earldom is the only one that wasn’t a gift from the queen. No, her father gave that to yours, and now you pride yourself on your old nobility? Aye, there’s a few drops of old royal blood in your veins, but what you’ve never understood is, it takes more than that to make a monarchy. If it didn’t – well, they used to whisper my father was born at a time my grandmother was very close to old King Henry. It used to be a joke that my hair was as red as the queen’s, but of course she got hers from her red-gold father, whereas for me … People didn’t finish that thought, prudently.

And who is this Ashton, anyway, that you want him so particularly? Some black-winged crow of a Puritan preacher, I suppose, who’ll help you fling yourself into the fantasies of guilt and repentance as eagerly as you once flung yourself into the games of power and glory. Folly! But I suppose you’ll find a kind of escape that way. I don’t think any the better of you for it. I’m old enough, just, to remember the bigots and the bloodshed before you were born, with the smell of burning flesh from the faggots and the stakes in Queen Mary’s day.

You want this Ashton, this Abdy, do you – and why should you have what you want now, pray? You wanted Henry Cuffe once, and much good his advice did you. The wheel comes round; another day, another dear friend to advise you, and you too blind, too in love with your own magic, to understand that the dear friends have their own lives and their loyalties, and that other hands may be spinning the wheel, hands you cannot see. But it’s possible this Ashton, too, is someone for whom Robert Cecil will find a use, and that is as it should be.

Jeanne
Saturday, 21 February 1601

I’d been having the dreams again, of being young, and small, and unable to move, and the screams, and the knife in the belly. But what came next was almost worse. The night-time dreams I’d learnt to cope with. I could shut them down into a dark hidden place and walk calm-faced through the day. But what happened now – as my landlady banged on the door to ask if she should send for a physician, or if I was going out to work, as I got shakily up and went out into the streets – left me no safe place by night or day.

The private horrors started slowly, like something just seen out of the corner of your eye. It was as if I were seeing two worlds at once. As if the ordinary world were a thin membrane, fragile as the skin on warm milk as it cools, and under it the flames like the hell in a rood painting, and we were all about to tumble down into the nightmare below, but somehow only I could see it. I don’t think I could have told anybody else – not just for fear they should think I was mad, but for very pity.

I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand him, I don’t understand me. Or Cuffe, or – anybody. The trial was on the Thursday; the next day I went to Burghley House, but I may as well not have bothered, for all the useful work I did. It’s as if my real being is somewhere else, crouched and waiting. Waiting for what, I do not know, but the words that come to me are ‘to be set free’.

He’s the one who’s supposed to lack freedom, of course, but he seems to be finding his way. Perhaps that’s the root of my misery. On the Friday we heard they’d sent Dr Dove to him – an honourable cleric but a man with a fine eye for the political side of the story.

Be sure he’d been briefed by the Council – they needed more than the peers’ verdict of Essex’s guilt: they needed confession, they needed repentance, if they were to carry the feelings of the people with them and win through to safety. And, of course, they needed the names of any sympathisers who might still be at liberty. Torture was out of the question – they didn’t ever rack peers – so they had to try another way.

Dr Dove got nowhere; my lord still held to it that he’d meant nothing wrong, that he had in no way offended God Almighty.

I saw the note Cecil sent back, when they’d sent him word. ‘Try Ashton,’ it said briefly. I knew of this reverend, this Abdy Ashton – he was probably there when I went to Essex House, I’d heard him asked for at the trial – but I hadn’t understood him as the enemy.

They’d have taken him aside before he went to Lord Essex, shown him both the carrot and the stick. And Ashton knew his man; he went in thundering that Essex had dishonoured God and pulled down upon himself the notes of infamy. That his lordship’s refusal to reveal the details of his plot just protected his associates – atheists or Papists, and discontented riff-raff – and left them a danger to the queen’s majesty. That he was guilty of ambition and of self-deception, and of hypocrisy, since whether he’d admitted it or not, his real end must have been to seek the crown for himself. It would have been that accusation that touched Essex most nearly.

Be sure we heard exactly what Ashton said: the man wrote it all down, so the Council could see how well he’d done their work. I expect he touched it up a little in the retelling, but perhaps not much. These zealous preachers, after all, pour out their phrases every Sunday.

‘If by a true confession and unfeigned repentance you do not unburden yourself of these sins, you shall carry out of the world a guilty soul before God, and leave upon your memorial an infamous name to posterity.’ Ugh! Perhaps it’s easy to see why Essex fell into the trap. But – he fell so completely.

He didn’t just tell Ashton what his own plans had been; he went on to try and prove that his confederates had been worthier men than Ashton implied. He proved it by naming them precisely. He didn’t just fall, he flung himself down the ladder into the trap, as if impaling himself on the spikes at the bottom would be some bid for liberty.

By Saturday morning he’d convinced himself it was his duty to see all those who’d sympathised with him restrained; the only way to protect her majesty. He sent for Sir Robert and my lord of Nottingham to hear his confession for themselves. You can be sure they went eagerly. They didn’t even need to take a clerk. He wrote down his confession himself, quite readily. He said that he was the greatest, the vilest, the most unthankful traitor ever born; but he was none the less ready to blame all his friends, for all that he blamed himself so freely. He had them bring Cuffe before him, so he could blame him to his face – told Cuffe he’d been one of the chiefest instigators of all his, Lord Essex’s, disloyal course, and I couldn’t help but think, what, wasn’t he a grown-up, then? Nothing more than a leaf in the wind? I’d blamed Cuffe myself for his evil counsel, but this … You know Cuffe wasn’t even out there, on rebellion day? They said he stayed in his room, sunk in melancholy. They made that sound the worst of all, that he hadn’t even the courage of his convictions, that he was just a scurvy ‘book traitor’, but surely Sir Robert couldn’t think that way? Maybe he could: the prosecutor’s papers, that called him the seducer of the earl, went through stamped, without query. The old clerk showed me a letter in Sir Robert’s own hand, that Cuffe was a subtle sophister and showed his baseness in that he wasn’t even confessing his treason freely. The old man must have seen my horror.

‘Well, they have to blame somebody,’ he said. ‘They can’t lay it all on the earl himself – after all, he’s a grandee, and it would reflect badly on the queen’s majesty. And after all, it’s not as if Lord Essex were rushing to take it all on himself.’

It was true. When they went to the Tower to take his confession, his lordship even warned them of the danger in his own sister Penelope.

I do not understand it. Before the trial I’d suffered for the violence all around, and for the knowledge he must die, and for the division in my own loyalties. This was different. Like a dog with a bone I worried at the difference, walking the streets all the day Sunday.

Out of Bishopsgate and up, past Bedlam and the butts, past the Curtain playhouse to the north; south again over the bridge towards St George’s Fields, and turned again. From the country itself I shied away. I needed the bustle of people around me. As I paced, I argued it out with Lord Essex, as if he paced beside me. His zeal for his religion struck no chord in me. He was a sure Protestant; well and good, so was I. (So, unfortunately, was the Reverend Ashton – but so was Sir Robert, and so was her majesty. And so, I supposed, was Martin Slaughter: it wasn’t a subject on which we’d spoken much, but it was one on which we seemed to agree.) It was why my parents had died, but the fury of a faith was for me an absence, not a presence. I cherished the empty space; the massacres had bred in me no desire to kill Papists as some Papists had killed, but a shudder for all religious frenzy.