The Girl in the Mirror (30 page)

Thus far I was as Jacob had raised me. As England had raised me. But I knew, even without understanding it, that for others it was different. That wasn’t the problem, surely.

Before, I’d seen it as a contest. Strife against stability, energy against order. Heart against head, maybe. Never really that cut and dried – I was not that unsophisticated – but in the end, to be decided, as definitely as the prize was decided at the tilt, on Accession Day. Once I had chosen – and in the end the choice could only go one way, I was Cecil’s servant, wasn’t I? – the other had to be excised, however painfully. Perhaps not as cleanly as a surgeon cuts out a tumour, more like a schoolboy gouging out a knot from a piece of wood. But excised at last, leaving me scarred perhaps, but still me.

I’d thought I was past this. I’d made my choice, I’d understood my dreams of Lord Essex had been built on a fantasy. And Martin and I were … friends again, weren’t we? So why now did I feel I had a whole new hill to climb if ever I were to be able to name that
friendship
honestly? Why did Essex’s betrayal of his allies leave me so sick and angry? No, more than that – so guilty? I’d thought Martin was betraying Lord Essex by encouraging Cuffe’s dangerous folly, but then hadn’t I betrayed Martin by blaming him so harshly? And where was the greater treason: anything Martin might do against a great lord who hardly even knew his name, or my hurting someone who – I pushed the thought away. We were … friends again, weren’t we? All I knew for sure was that I felt sickened by the spinning of wheels I couldn’t even see. I passed by St Paul’s – I was circling by now – and though the booksellers’ stalls were closed I thought of that pallid-faced figure in his foolish black finery and I thought of him – yes, even of Cuffe – with a kind of pity.

As I went through the streets, it was as if the citizens around me, the merchants and the housewives, were just children, dancing on the edge of a well, and I couldn’t tell them the truth any more than I’d wake a sleepwalker suddenly. By the afternoon I’d started moving slowly, as if the weight of my thoughts were bowing me down, and I knew people were beginning to stare at me.

I found my steps had led me back to the garden where I used to go with Jacob – what, only four years ago? It seemed an eternity away. The gate was locked but I could peer through. Whoever had it now had replanted the periwinkle seat with chamomile, so that at this season it stood brown and bare. The rosemary bird had been let grow into a great ragged bush – and of course, I’d now seen better topiary. The vines were bare over the arbour, and there were cabbages where some of Jacob’s rarer herbs had grown. But all the same I rattled the gate, as if I could shrink back down and have the world again bounded by those low hedges. As if somewhere between the pond and the pea sticks, I’d find security waiting for me.

My eyes were full of tears, and I could feel my face beginning to go awry.

My walk was turning into a stumble, and when I passed the end of the street with the slaughterhouses, the smell made me turn away. I was remembering – what? Yes, years ago, and Dr Lopez, who had been so kind to me. I didn’t know if I were grieving for Lord Essex, or for my own folly, or with the sheer fatigue of the discoveries I had made and those I sensed still ahead of me, but everything I saw said pain, and every pain was inside me. I bit my hand so as not to cry out when a stray dog in the streets cringed away from me. Even the eyes of the landlady’s pampered spaniel, when I got back to my lodgings, seemed so full of grief I had to set my lips, though I daresay he was just lamenting he’d get no more tidbits that day. I’d bought a pasty, though I’d not be able to eat. But I scooped the dog up, and carried him up to my room with me. He snorted with pleasure as I fed him, and I buried my face in his warm fur.

As I sat on the bed, too tired to get inside it, I was footsore and worse than chilly. But something had been gained. I knew myself a little better now – knew I couldn’t just choose a side, like in a game of chess, knew that surely as the fallow ground in winter, I had different impulses working inside of me. Knew I had to follow where they led, and knew too, with a fresh shock of shame, that if it was true for me it was true for others, that I’d judged too easily, up till now, in blindness and vanity. Knew maybe somewhere underneath this knowledge, there was something that would set me free.

Tuesday, 24 February 1601

I was back at work on Monday, and packing my inks up at the end of the day when the old clerk came in with a face of misery.

‘She’s signed the death warrant,’ he said. Neither of us spoke. There was nothing more to say. But I found comfort in knowing here was another Cecil man whom Essex’s charm had touched, and as he left the room he dropped a hand on my shoulder, uncharacteristically.

As I passed out through the lodge, the porter called me.

‘That actor fellow was here again.’ His tone spoke a mixture of grudging respect, the result, no doubt, of a large tip, to soften a player’s lack of good solid respectability. He handed me a folded note, and I shoved it still sealed into my pocket, unheedingly.

I knew I had to see Essex, knew it with a certainty beyond reason. It wasn’t about him, or not precisely. It was about me. I’d felt what I felt for him, however foolish the roots of the fantasy, and for once in my life I had to face my feelings squarely. Lay them honourably to rest and go on the freer to the next stage of my journey. I never asked whether, with only a day or two left on this earth, Lord Essex would even want to see an unimportant secretary, a boy–girl with whom once or twice, in a dull moment, he had flirted idly. Instead I set myself to the how of it, as if this were no more than an exercise in practicality.

To get into the Tower was not so hard. The place wasn’t built as just a prison, it was an armoury, a mint, and a warehouse. A royal palace, when necessary. Guards watched the gatehouses, but what use was a guard when he had to nod through a small army of workers, and a score of delivery wagons each day? I could go in with a load of firewood, or ale, or hay, I could probably walk in waving a handful of papers, or a school book for one of the officers’ children, or a paper of pills for one of the beasts in the menagerie. To get into Lord Essex’s rooms themselves would be a different story, but I could hide until dark fell and surely there’d be some opportunity.

It was absurd, it was childish, and a part of me knew it. But as I lay in my bed that night, all I understood was that I had to be there, with a hunger more acute than any pang I’d ever felt in my body.

I decided to go in soon after dinner time. Too early, and I’d have to try and loiter there all day, without anybody noticing me. Too late – too close to curfew and the closing of the gates – and someone might ask themselves why I was going in when everyone else was headed the other way.

The stallholders outside were busy. There were surely more people around than usual, drawn by the sweet sickly smell of catastrophe. There’d be even more the next day. I found an old man selling pastries which didn’t look too poisonous – an old man with a face that looked sharper than most – and loitered as I forced myself to chew it down appreciatively. These people know everything that’s going on.

‘What’s the latest?’ No need to specify. He didn’t pretend to misunderstand me.

‘They’re building the scaffold now. They took the timber in at daybreak. You can hear hammering when the wind is right. But’ – he shot a sly sideways glance at the badge on my cloak – ‘you’ll know more than I do, I daresay.’

‘We don’t know everything, grandfather! Not the way you lot do, on the ground here. Which rooms have they got him in, anyway?’

‘Right over there – that tall bit, see?’ He pointed across the grey waters of the moat, and I stared at the great fortress eagerly. Beyond the low, solid outer wall an inner, higher, wall reared up, set at intervals with turrets and it was one of these – on the northeastern corner, the citywards side – that he was indicating.

‘They call it the Devlin Tower – the devil’s tower – after some old Robert the Devil who was held there once. Got another Robert the Devil in there now, that’s what I say.’ As he cackled, I pressed a coin into his waiting palm and turned away before the conflict on my face could be seen too clearly.

I told the soldier at the gatehouse I had a message for the Lieutenant’s deputy, and he nodded me through. I didn’t even have to say it was from Sir Robert – it was that easy. Across the bridge, and I could hear the sounds of feeding time from the menagerie below. In through the first gateway. To my left a cobbled road led between the two walls, lined with tidy offices, and I turned up it, walking purposefully. My heart was thumping as I could see his tower just ahead of me.

But at the corner I received a check. The two storeys of the tower were set with small arched windows, but there was no sign of an entrance. Of course – I should have expected as much. Access only on the inmost side, for greater security.

To turn right around might look suspicious, if from any of those windows someone was watching me. I ducked into a doorway. I could hear a burst of laugher from above – clerks, no doubt, while their supervisor was away – but none of the inner doors opened and after waiting a moment, trying not to think just how close he must be, I braced my shoulders and stepped out again – task done, message delivered – and walked with all the confidence I could muster back the way I’d come.

This time, I took the path that lay straight ahead from the gatehouse, and the number of carts and people around told me this was the right way. A short distance on, there was an arch-way cut into the inner wall, and the heart of the Tower lay before me. But to the northeast, I saw with dismay, a solid mass of buildings lay around the foot of the Devlin Tower – what, did I have to find my way through them, and then maybe realise I was mistaken again, under the eyes of all the people working there? No – that can’t be right. Think, Jeanne. They’re not going to drag him in and out through wardrooms and kitchens and stables, are they? It wouldn’t be safe and it wouldn’t be proper – not with all those official visitors coming to see him, especially.

I strained my eyes upwards – yes! A walkway ran around the inner wall. Now all I had to do was find the stairs up. But as I rounded a corner I stopped in dismay.

In front of me was a platform, about breast high, made of crude new planks. I’d have guessed what it was for, even without the big baskets of sawdust that stood nearby. I’d never been one of those who flock to executions, but everybody knew that much. They’d scatter the sawdust thickly enough to soak up his blood, next day. The thought drove me on, as I raced up the staircase. The Devlin Tower lay right before me, only yards ahead, but two guards barred the door.

For the first time I froze. In the two years since I’d first met Lord Essex I’d sailed through many barriers, but instinct and experience told me this one would be different. These would be intelligent men, hand picked and hard briefed that it was as much as their life was worth to let anyone in without the proper authority. And for the first time, too, it really came home to me that it might be all my life was worth, here, to be caught out in a lie.

I stood there, paralysed, like a rabbit in a snake’s eye. Was one of the guards already beginning to stare at me? It was almost with relief that I caught a bustle of footsteps behind me and went down into a bow as a party of expensive cloaks swept by.

‘Jan! What in the world?’ said a voice I knew well. ‘Are you looking for me?’ It was Sir Robert, and he was holding out his hand, assuming I’d brought some message, urgently. But as his gaze hardened on my face his hand dropped, and he glanced over my shoulder with a flash of comprehension.

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Either he understood, or he didn’t, and if not then I had no words to explain. Silent as I, he regarded me gravely, gesturing his companions to pass on. A finger and thumb massaged his forehead and briefly, the gesture jolted me back into the outside world, it was so familiar to me.

The moment stretched on. His eyes found mine and, for the first time since I had known him, I looked straight back at him. Stared, really. If I’d learnt some things in the past weeks – learnt I was the stalking horse, the decoy – then somewhere I’d learnt, too, that the only way was to play the hand of cards they’d dealt you. To accept you would be used in the great lords’ plans, and use that knowledge to forward your own goals. To forge your own autonomy.

He said something, half under his breath. It might have been, ‘I suppose I owe you that much.’ And then: ‘And after all, who knows?’ – as much to himself as to me.

A quick crook of his finger brought one of the guards forward, but for a second I hardly understood what Sir Robert was telling him.

‘Ten minutes, nothing given and nothing taken away. Ten minutes and one of you – you’re the senior? then you – to stay.’

Without another word to me, he turned down the stairway. I will never know whether he acted from compassion or calculation. Both, maybe. He was a man who’d learnt to use even his most private impulses in the service of his country. They’d got so much information out of Essex already, but this man of all others knew his lordship capable of surprise and there was always the chance he was a lemon they had not yet squeezed dry.

It had been only a few days since I’d seen him in the courtroom, but the first thing I thought was that he’d changed. Perhaps it was just that I expected the nearness of death to have put some mark upon him – but it wasn’t that, precisely. It was something else, something I mistrusted, and I stared it in the face, his face, even as he was saying ‘Janny!’ He sounded surprised, but not too surprised; I think he sounded pleased, but I don’t know. I was too busy staring at the invisible enemy.

I’d never realised how much I hated that saintly look. That glow, of the fool who dreams of martyrdom as a goal, not an outrage against their humanity. I’d never used the word hatred to myself, when I saw it on a preacher’s face of a Sunday. But I hated it when I saw it now. No wonder he hardly thought to ask what I was doing there. It seemed natural to him the whole world should come to admire his sanctity.