The Girl in the Mirror (6 page)

I owed him as great a debt as one human being can owe another, and never to try to grow too close was the only way I could pay. Children understand these things instinctively. Now, as an adult, or something near to it, I understood that the framework of my life had changed, but that I was not wounded in myself, or no worse wounded than I had been already.

He left me all that he had. Forty pounds – I was amazed, but we had always lived frugally. I’d have to quit the house, of course, but I’d be able to find rooms easily. The officials of the borough came to see me, since I’d not reached legal maturity, but were only too ready to accept there was no need to worry.

Mrs Allen came to help me move out, and I thought she was looking at me curiously. It was only later that I realised she’d half felt she should offer a home to me. It had never occurred to me, and the idea withered unspoken away. But on the last day, as we said goodbye, she seemed again to be struggling with what to say.

‘Remember, in this world, a woman does whatever she has to do to get by.
Whatever
she has to do,’ she said at last, and it was with an unexpected pang I watched the back of her plump worsted figure walk rapidly away.

I found myself doing a strange thing the following Sunday. The lease of our little garden would end with Jacob’s death, and I had to go there to find the caretaker and hand back the key. But before I did that, I set to work, as though he were beside me. I clipped the hedges and cut back the herbs, selecting the strongest to leave for seed. I sowed carrots and beet as though I’d be the one to eat them next year; searched out the seedling of the cowslips and bear’s ears and transplanted them carefully. The double daisies had been Jacob’s favourite and, when I left, Heaven knows why, I took a pot of them with me. I clutched them to the chest of my boy’s doublet as I walked through streets ringing with the news of Lord Essex’s great sea victory, and realised that for the first time the news, the crowds, the little decisions of every day were things to which I would answer as myself, and no longer as Jacob’s protégé.

Cecil
Autumn 1596

I felt sorry for Essex, briefly. He had come back from the sea aglow with victory. He and Charles Howard had planted England’s flag on the Continent again, in a way we never hoped to see, the King of Spain’s fleet smashed at Cadiz so that Calais itself was freed as a sideshow, or nearly. I remember and salute Charles’ joint command of the campaign, but that’s something Essex himself will have managed to forget quite easily.

He’d landed on the south coast and ridden to court, so hot foot he was lame from a fall along the way. Instead of the hero’s welcome he expected, he found the queen dressing him down before every giggling maid and gawping serving man, for all the world like an errant schoolboy.

Why, in his vainglorious pride in victory, had he let the Spanish treasure fleet sail by unmolested? Why, having once taken Cadiz, had he simply sailed away? What became of the fifty thousand pounds his exploits had cost her majesty, and where was the recompense to be? I could see the red creeping up under the square beard – a folly, that, it will never please her – his lordship had grown on the voyage home, and I could hear the queen’s voice cracking with fury.

The irony is, it wasn’t Essex’s fault, or not entirely. Not in the short term, anyway. Fast as he had ridden to the court, we’d had a faster report from a serving man on board: he’d wanted to go hunting for the treasure fleet but the other, more experienced, commanders had brushed his views away. Commanders like Ralegh: now he’ll know how to make a gain from Essex’s disgrace, and another from selling his share of the booty.

Of course we won’t say as much, or not precisely. But I believe my father will try to calm the queen’s displeasure. We take the long view, naturally.

It is a great task, at court, to prove one’s honesty, and yet not spoil one’s fortune, and the role of peacemaker befits an honest man. Even my father won’t succeed in curbing the queen’s rage: already, she’s declaring she’ll have no victory celebrations in this city. But when the real facts of the Cadiz debates seep out, as in the end they will, the queen will remember that we Cecils did not attack her favourite (still, her favourite?) too bitterly. And Essex will bask in her favour again, and being Essex he will boast of his favour, immoderately. The suitors will clamour for his voice to the queen, and he will clamour for their requests, loudly. And every voice that huzzas him in the streets will come to fret her majesty.

‘Men of depth are held suspect by princes. There is no virtue but has its shade, wherewith the minds of kings are offended.’ So says my clever cousin Bacon: clever in everything except his conviction that he will be able to steer my lord Essex into prudence and make his own career that way.

Princes fear, Bacon says, that clever men may be able to manipulate them, popular men may overshadow them. Brave men are too turbulent and honest men too inflexible. Who – I asked him once – are the men that will thrive? If he’d ever stop to listen, I could have given him the answer. The men who make the prince’s problems go away. They’ll thrive. Well, for a time, at least.

Bacon urges Lord Essex to courtiers’ ways. Never complain of past injuries. Never stand on your dignity – you have none, compared to her majesty. Learn the subtle ways of flattery – invent a pressing reason to visit your estates, then cancel the proposed journey on the grounds that you can’t bear to be away. Study her majesty’s moods and trim your suits accordingly, and don’t disdain the advice of those most close to her, even if it’s only the maid who’s waiting by the door when they take her chamber pot to empty.

This to Essex, who has a hundred moods of his own and can’t master any. Can’t even dissemble them successfully. Who has never understood that his virtues may become vices to the queen, who mistrusts a soldier because a battlefield is the only field where she cannot lead her country. Her majesty has always made her weaknesses into virtues: look at the way she, a spinster, held every prince in Europe in thrall to her very availability.

At first, Essex’s follies charmed the queen – his passionate conviction, his inability to flatter, his impetuosity. But now? He is blamed for his insatiable pride: but without his pride who would he be? Who would he see, when he looks in the mirror each day? Not that he does look in a mirror frequently, if that beard is anything to go by. With his pride, how long can he survive? It is a matter that has to be decided, a question not only of policy, but practicality.

Jeanne
Autumn 1596

I’d found a room easily enough, and a decent one too, fires and laundry included. There was a dent in the wall where the last tenant had made the bedstead rock, but it was no dirtier than it might be. The landlady sniffed when I ran my finger over the cupboard checking for dust, and said young gentlemen weren’t usually so pernickety. So I put a touch of accent into my voice and said that in my country we were used to having things clean, and I heard her going down the stairs and muttering ‘damn Frenchies’. Her little brown-and-white dog stayed behind a moment, wagging at me curiously.

With Jacob I had always lived up on the northern fringes of London, but now I had chosen a street near Blackfriars, hard up by the City’s walls, not far from the western suburbs and the great palaces on the Strand – not that I imagined, then, they’d concern me directly. It seemed a world away from our old home, but it still had enough immigrants in it for safety.

I swept the landlady an exaggerated foreign bow and went out to buy myself some necessities. Candles enough to write by, a painted cloth to cover the marks in the wall, a posy of marjoram and lavender to take the mustiness away. At the nearest cookstall I bought a pasty, big enough I could share it with the dog, and an orange, and a small flask of Rhenish, and went home and called myself happy.

Well, content.

Well, lucky.

Yes, by comparison with those I’d known – and those I saw on the street around me – definitely lucky.

The work, and the money, were the easy part, oddly. For that I have Master Pointer to thank, and my thoughts do thank him every day. He first sent for me before Jacob had been buried three days. He did it with apologies, but his affairs, he explained, were at that point where he had to take the turn of the tide or else … I warmed to him, not only because he took trouble to explain to me, but because something in his urgency, his hot desire to catch the tide of the times, raised an answering warmth in me. I soon learned that while simple fruit trees and hedgings might be the core of his business, he was passionate about new plants and opportunities, and sold slips and seedlings to many of the nobility. It was no strange thing, of a Sunday, to see ladies and gentlemen strolling around his gardens out at Twickenham to inspect the latest rarity. Once, I even saw the stooping figure of Sir Robert Cecil, leading by the hand two small children, as grave and as slight as he.

‘Look at this! Look at this, Master Moosay!’ – this was Master Pointer’s version of Musset. I peered at two small, rather hairy, leaves which he assured me would soon sprout a flower the like of which had only been seen in the palaces before, but would soon be in every garden. The goal, I learnt, was novelty – novelty, and the charm of bloom when no bloom used to be.

‘Think of it, we’ll soon have borders as bright in August as they are in May.’ Though some of the new plants, from lands far beyond the sea, came direct to England, others went first to the growers in the Netherlands or Italy, whom he regarded with a blend of comradeship and envy. With a few such, he had struck up a deal, but to keep it going required a skill in languages beyond him. That is what Jacob had done; that I could do easily. I’d been working for Master Pointer a few weeks when he found I had another useful ability.

From a child I’d loved to draw, though with Jacob it was always the words and the thought behind them that would be taken most seriously. But one day, Master Pointer was labouring to dictate me a description of a seedling – ‘two leaves like heart shapes, spring direct from the stem, and veined like – like – like the ribs of a ship?’

‘No, it’s more like this, surely?’ Hastily I sketched out what I meant, and he gazed at me thoughtfully.

‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ he said. From that time on, his catalogues went out with my line drawings, printed from etched blocks of wood, and kindly, he said that it increased his sales. He said it was a lucky chance that had shown him my skill. But I think Master Pointer was one of those men in whose genial warm presence people, like plants, did understand their capabilities.

Cecil
Spring 1597

I always knew the meal was never going to agree with me. They don’t keep good cooks at Essex House: for all his grandeur, his lordship is served but carelessly. I don’t suppose he even noticed – from a boy, I remember him just cramming what was in front of him into his mouth, and that only when the waiting men nudged him that they wanted to take the plates away. Gulping down the mouthful with his eyes fixed where his speech was directed, intent on winning your response to whatever he was trying to say. I doubt Ralegh cared for the food either, though I saw him drinking deep.

But then none of us were there for our stomach’s sake, were we?

The puzzle of the court is how one day’s enemy is the next day’s friend: more unexpected, surely, than a friend lapsing into enemy? My clever cousin Bacon says ‘love your friend as if he were to become an enemy, and hate your enemy as if he were to become your friend’: he was so proud of the thought, he showed the letter to me. Does even he know what he means, I wondered. I have become more irritable since Lizzie –

His mother, my aunt Anne, told her sons when they first came to court that anyone who spoke them fair was doing it to serve their turn. ‘He that never trusteth is never deceived.’ ‘It is better to suspect too soon than to mislike too late.’ ‘As a wolf resembles a dog, so does a flatterer a friend.’ ‘Don’t write letters that can be held against you, don’t speak without looking to see who can hear, and then not openly.’ I get impatient with the flood of warning sometimes, even though I have forged my career by following the maxims attentively. They translated the sayings of Erasmus in my grandfather’s day: ‘It is wisdom in prosperity when all is as thou would have it, to fear and suspect the worst.’ What, are we never to be happy?

Lizzie and I were happy.

The strange thing is that Essex’s father was as full of good advice as mine, or as Lady Anne: I suppose we all react differently to the medicine. Now it’s Ralegh penning advice for his son. Which is why he was here tonight, in a way – Ralegh needs both our help if he is ever to get back his captaincy of the Guards. The queen has never forgiven him for having run off with one of her maids of honour, and less so than ever now that they’ve started a family.

Essex needs all the help he can get, too, if he’s to persuade her majesty to finance another voyage against the Spanish. And I? Well, it’s true there’s the business of the Duchy of Lancaster. The chancellor’s post would come easier if no one were opposing me too actively.

And of course, I am committed, always, to seek unity: I must send to Charles Howard tomorrow, make sure he understands there is no threat to him in this rapprochement with Essex. He’s doing an Achilles at the moment, still baffled that the people see Essex as the sole hero of Cadiz, but his wife is a lady shrewd enough to ensure he doesn’t sulk in his tent too long.

All the same, as I climb into the litter for the brief ride home, the old black mood sweeps over me. The whole question of the chancellorship of the Duchy wouldn’t be so tetchy if we hadn’t been there already with the Court of Wards, but Lizzie was so pleased when we won it for her brother, in the teeth of Essex’s man …

Lizzie.

Two months, almost to the day, since the doctors told me there was nothing they could do, and I had to open the bedroom door and go inside to meet her eye. I have spent a lifetime dissembling, but I couldn’t do it this time. In the end, it was she told me, with the ghost of her old briskness, we had a lot to agree together, and not to cry. She wanted the children brought up away from the bad airs of the town. She did not say, away from the corruption of the court, and from a father who has to wallow in it every day, but it’s true they’re better off at my brother’s in the country.