The Girl in the Mirror (7 page)

She said when I wanted her I was to go into the garden, and there by the good grace of God she would find me. She said if God didn’t want to allow it she’d be having a word with him. She made me laugh, even then, actually. I went to the garden this morning, to Lizzie’s favourite rose tree. It’s covered in leaf shoots of stinging green – not long till the first buds are on the way. I gripped its trunk so hard, I was glad when the thorns pricked me. Oh, Lizzie.

Back to the business: it’s one thing she said to me then. ‘Work will be your salvation. You’ll see.’ Give me the work, spare me the sympathy. I cannot take the sympathy, although Charles for one wrote very kindly. I really feel something like friendship for Charles, beyond even the alliance of necessity.

This thing with Essex won’t hold, of course it won’t, but we can probably get Ralegh his captaincy. I say ‘we’, but in truth the queen may give it less because it is Essex who requests it than because she wants a firmer hold on one of Essex’s allies. It would never do if he and he alone held the loyalty of all the fighting men. Essex will probably get the money for his new Spanish voyage: the queen will hate it as much as I do, but it is needed.

Whether he’ll get her gratitude for whatever he brings home will be another story. Be sure that any news of her displeasure will be for my father or I to carry. It is our job, but it will fuel the fire of Essex’s suspicion, as if any fuel were needed.

Even Ralegh writes: ‘Whoso taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves to be so.’ The face of treachery is the devil’s face, in the form we see among us every day. But Essex spends his life peering through the bushes to trace the devil’s grin in the bark of an old tree. He knows every man is against him: in the end, they will be. I suppose it is his way of imposing order on the world. Less frightening, perhaps, than knowing his failure, like his success, is his own responsibility. As we pull up, the thought sends me into the house even more lonely.

Jeanne
Summer 1597

I wasn’t unhappy in the next year or so, or not precisely. Master Pointer’s was a kindly family, and his wife thought I was young to be alone in the world. I did not, unless I chose it, need to dine alone of a Sunday. And Master Pointer introduced me, carefully, to some of his gardening friends, always on the understanding that his work came first, that I was his discovery. But sometimes as I sat around the well-stocked table, a wave of unreality swept over me, and I watched them as wonderingly as I had watched, once, when a cousin of Mrs Allen’s had taken us to see the wild beasts in the Tower menagerie.

What had these people to do with the past I’d known? What had they to do with my real identity? Even if it hadn’t been for my secret, I’d had a family once, and look what happened. The way I lived was the only safe way. And dear God, where was this closeness going to end – with the suggestion I might marry one of their friendly daughters, and bring my skills into the family? And the next Sunday I’d make excuse, say I had to see an old friend, though in truth I would spend the day alone, wandering round all the gardens of London.

The gardens were my salvation, you might say – lucky there were so many. But the gardens were my danger, too, with their siren song of what might be. Master Pointer sold plants to many of the grandees, and he made sure that sometimes I went along with the delivery, to walk around and increase my knowledge as much as might be.

‘They won’t mind – they’ll be flattered someone wants to admire their taste. Show them one of your drawings if they query you,’ he said shrewdly. I remember a garden by the London Wall, close to sunset one late June day. A gardener was settling the new plants in, as tenderly as if they’d been new babies. The light had sunk to that low pitch when the blues sing clearly, and the yellow in the leaves makes each flowerbed a mirror of the sky on a sunny day. The roses were almost over, but a hint of their scent hung under the honeysuckle, and the air had cooled just enough to make you nostalgic for the morning’s heat. It was an evening for the touch and laughter, and dreams. For lovers … For a heartbeat, I almost felt the touch of skin on skin, and here was I, walking alone with a scrap of paper and a stick of charcoal, exploring a business opportunity.

That’s where I understood that some change had to come. That however lucky I’d been to survive so far, survival was not enough for me. That I couldn’t go on forever, like some lying ghost, haunting the fringes of some happy ordinary family; and nor could I push myself into the ranks of the plantsmen in my present identity.

I couldn’t just step back; I’d been Jan too long, and there was no way for Jeanne to live and make money. As a woman alone and without family – a woman neither child nor wife nor widow – there would be no place for me. I’d still be a freak, an anomaly.

I couldn’t see the way to change clearly, and yet change there had to be. And as I walked ever faster in the golden light, staring without seeing at the heartsease pansies, the thought of that Accession Day came back to me.

Every one of the great lords was a garden maker. Apart from anything else, it was known to be one way to the heart of the queen’s majesty. And Master Pointer sold plants to many of the grandees, but there was one family who truly loved their gardens. Time was, Lord Burghley had competed with the old earl, Lord Leicester, as to who could make the most dazzling fantasy. When Master Pointer spoke of the experiments at Theobalds, Lord Burghley’s country showplace, he did so with a glow of purest envy. Lord Leicester was long dead, and Lord Essex who had inherited his great house on the river had no name for being a plantsman, hadn’t the money for it, maybe. And Lord Burghley was failing, and begging the queen every day to let him retire. But his son Robert Cecil also loved a garden – a fair amateur of plants, said Master Pointer, respectfully.

The Pointers spoke of the nobles with a kind of familiarity. The summer Jacob died, I’d heard that Lord Essex had led a great expedition against the Spanish at Cadiz, and that Master Cecil had been made Secretary of State, and heard of them as things outside my own life. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder if, in that wider world, there might not be a tiny chink of a place for me.

The Cecils had a town house too, of course. Great tubs of the sharp Seville orange trees went there in bloom, once Master Pointer had nursed them through the winter, and the new nasturtiums with their hot colour, and the latest strain of auriculas, striped and pinked like a town buck on May Day.

A stream of gossip fed back in return, and though Mistress Pointer wanted to hear about the family, it was their garden plans that gripped her husband. I learned that Sir Robert used his contacts beyond the seas to send him the newest seeds or slips from foreign nurseries. Master Pointer spoke longingly of great books he’d been shown in Sir Robert’s library, ‘Ay, and he said he’d be having them translated, so I could read them too, one day. God’s breath, the Italians know a thing or two – did I tell you the tricks they play with water, they’ve a few toys like that at Theobalds, as well – but for my money, if it’s the plants you’re looking for, you still go to the damn Frenchies. No offence, lad,’ he’d add belatedly.

I’d never forgotten the little dark statesman who, at the joust, had taken insult so quietly. I found thoughts of that day were coming more frequently. Since I’d moved to Blackfriars, I saw the court crowds in the streets every day: young men whose clothes were stiff with embroidery, once the queen’s fool and once one of her ladies, in a misty blue gown trimmed with silver lace. They gave me the sense I’d had sometimes when I went down to the river and looked at the sky – a sense the world was larger than it seemed to be, and with more varied possibilities.

I could no more have approached one of those swans than I could fly. But the ugly duckling with the damaged wing, the sober man of work who did the queen’s business night and day – well, given Master Pointer’s connections, a move towards him might just be a possibility.

It was a September day and in the orchard the apples were ripening, while the heavy pear-shaped quinces perfumed the air around them. The emblem of happiness, I thought – I was young enough for superstition – and after all, what was I going to do that was so extraordinary? Only go with Master Pointer’s men when they took the pots of lavender held back from blooming early, and report to him how the vines he’d sold to the Cecils were fruiting, and see whether the new hazels were thriving in the nuttery.

It would be the purest chance if Sir Robert actually spoke to me, even if he did happen to be walking in the garden, as he did frequently. And if I did take my sheaf of sketches with me – well, nothing in that, surely?

Burghley House was a rambling comfortable building on the north side of the Strand, poised between the palace at Whitehall and the City, opposite the old Savoy. Kings had lived there once, but today its grandeurs were in ruins, while a poorhouse camped in the wreckage. The rich, odorous stew that was a London crowd grew even thicker and more exotic as one drew near, for all that the Strand held the palaces of the nobility. Deep-water sailors from distant countries eyeing liveried men at arms, cutpurses skirting the ordinary citizens just trying to get through the working day. No wonder Burghley House showed the street a long line of thick brick walls, with only three small windows to break their solidity. The Cecils were still near the people – of them, in a way – and this was a bustling place of business as much as a gentleman’s private residence, but that didn’t mean they took stupid risks.

A porter’s lodge stood in the middle of the wall, but Master Pointer’s men turned into another gateway. To the west of the house, the palace side, lay the service quarters and the vegetable beds, and the back way up to another arched gate which led out to the north and the open spaces of Convent Garden, where the monks or their servants used to tend their own beds and orchards in the old days. I walked and I wondered, along clipped hedges and gravelled pathways. I was on Master Pointer’s business, wasn’t I? And in any case, the afternoon would have encouraged an anchorite to linger.

The grass had its brightness back, after the summer drought, and the soft warm light brought out the reds and greens, making a little miracle out of the trees. In its plan perhaps the garden wasn’t as modern as it might be. I could feel the taste of old Lord Burghley. But it had still its element of fantasy. A mound rose up from a sunken garden, a man-made hollow and a man-made hill, and the winding path up to the summit guided your feet clearly. The plants themselves were extraordinary. One great flower had been left to form a seed head more than the spread of my hand across, and I was drawing it for Master Pointer when I sensed a presence beside me.

He was alone, but he must have moved lightly – his feet on the gravel made no sound as he approached. He was dressed in black – we’d heard that his wife had died recently, for I remember eager talk about whether it would be appropriate for the Pointers to send a gift in sympathy.

Perhaps that accounted for the lines that already showed on his face, but I suspect they came there naturally. It was the eyes that struck me, cool and grey under high arched brows.

He held out his hand. ‘May I see?’

Dumbly, I passed over my sheaf of drawings, barely remembering to jerk down into a bow, and he leafed through the pages, those brows raising slightly.

‘Impressive. Do you work for Master Pointer? In what capacity?’ He gestured me to fall in with him as he walked on. ‘My constitutional. If I’m taking you from your art, you must forgive me.’ He knew I’d come in his way on purpose, of course, but he was a polite man – polite in his soul – and he didn’t let the knowledge intrude.

As he walked he questioned me – my skills, my situation – and I answered him with a sense of inevitability, so completely had it fallen out as I had dreamed it. Though it was my penman-ship first caught his eye, it was my languages that seemed to interest him most. He’d ask me for the names of plants in French and Flemish, as well as Latin, as we passed by. He spoke to me of the great plant hunters from earlier in the century, of Turner and Gesner and of Mattioli before them, and of who was like to take up the mantle of Plantin in Antwerp, now that his great printing centre under the sign of the golden compasses had passed away. He spoke of his own commission to John Gerard, the surgeon and collector who’d had the ordering of the Cecil gardens, to produce the first great English Herbal in almost half a century. I was devoutly thankful to Jacob, and to all the evenings, since his death, I’d spent in solitary study.

‘I may be able to find a use for you, Master – de Musset?’ Of course he pronounced it correctly. ‘If Master Pointer can spare you, naturally. Come and see my steward tomorrow.’

When I went back next day, I didn’t see the steward, I saw Sir Robert himself. But I was then too new to the game to realise that was extraordinary.

Cecil
Summer 1597

I walk in the garden more and more these days – even when it’s wet, even when it’s too hot for comfort. It’s the only thing that makes the pain go away. Well, not go away, but step back a single pace, still snarling, like a dog when you pick up a stick and wave it menacingly. Round the beds, like a soldier on a route march, ticking off the success or failure of each plant in my head, like nature’s own litany. Rosemary for remembrance, the last seed heads of the heartsease pansy … Lizzie would give my bad arm that little shake that seemed to loosen more than it hurt me and tell me I was a secret sentimentalist, for all the rest of them thought I was so canny.

Lizzie.

I’m not alone in the garden this time, though usually the gardeners absent themselves now. I suppose one of the secretaries has tipped them off, tactfully. There’s a boy – at least, he looks no more than a stripling, brown-haired and neat, without being finicky. He’s standing in front of the Marvel of Peru, and he has a paper and a stick of charcoal in his hand, but from a certain self-conscious stiffness in his stance, I know he’s waiting for me.