The Triple Goddess (28 page)

Anxious not to let a look of open-mouthed surprise betray her disbelief, Arbella listened to herself gabbling, ‘One of your ancestors was in the Tower? How fascinating. Who was he? George the Marrow-, I mean, Beefeater, who is prone to exaggeration, tells me there are lots of ghosts, so many that he has difficulty in remembering their names when they greet him. At night the place is filled with screams and wailing, and rattling chains, and visions of headless bodies walking through walls. The ghosts love an audience and they follow poor George about trying to distract him from doing his job by hamming it up and doing impressions of the Lieutenant. He finds it very annoying, especially as they have such a small repertoire.’

‘My father is not one of those poor lost spirits, and won’t have anything to do with them. In fact, they are afraid of him.’

Enough was enough. ‘Come on, Mr Carew, pull the other one. You can’t expect me to believe that your father is a prisoner, at least not in the Tower of London…sorry, I don’t mean to.... The last state prisoner was Rudolf Hess in nineteen forty-one, but he was there for less than a week, and the Kray twins spent a few days after they were rounded up from going AWOL on National Service. I’ve got it! this is a riddle, isn’t it? Your father must be the Lieutenant himself who lives in the Lieutenant’s Lodging on Tower Green where we sat on the bench. Or he might be one of the Yeoman Warders, though I thought I knew all of them.

‘Am I right? If so it would explain the red carpet treatment you got from George yesterday. Or perhaps your father is the truly odd gentleman [madness runs in the family, she thought] whom I met in the Lieutenant’s garden yesterday after you scarper…hobbled off. A person came into the garden-house where George suggested I take shelter during the storm, and was very put out to find me there. He was in Elizabethan costume and said he was Sir Walter Ralegh, would you believe.’

Carew knocked over his coffee cup—he seemed unlucky with beverages, though this time the cup was empty, and the porcelain did not break—, shot to his feet and stood rigid, staring ashen-faced at Arbella.

‘What?’

Here we go again, thought Arbella. ‘He carried it off very well, I must say, much better than you would expect from the sort of actor who is hired to participate in Tower pageants. He stayed in character until the weather cleared, though I told him it was unlikely he would be needed again, everything would be too wet and the event would be cancelled. But maybe they’ll reschedule and I’ll have a chance to see him again. You could come too if you like.’

Carew looked over his shoulder, sat down, and lowered his voice. ‘That was no actor. You met the real Sir Walter Ralegh. My father was...is…Sir Walter Ralegh. And I see quite enough of him as it is.’

‘But your name is…not that it means anything, they change down the centuries.’

‘Carew is my Christian name, not my surname. The acronym for my syndicate, C.A.R., stands for Carew A. Ralegh. The A. is for Arthur.’

‘Sir, this mock Tudor gentleman and I were playing a game to pass the time, and we seem to be doing the same today. The only similarity you bear to the person I mentioned is, from what I gathered from him, a shared love of practical jokes.’

‘My father doesn’t play games unless there’s money involved, and these days only cards. Sir Francis Drake took many a crown off him at bowls, but cards became his only option at the Tower after the Lieutenant caught him playing bowls on Tower Green with faces painted on the woods as if they were heads. As a family we’re poor dissemblers. Queen Elizabeth, who was not unsusceptible to flattery, didn’t fall for a word of his
Cynthia
poems. After she cracked her makeup with laughter reading them aloud to William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, the floor looked like it was covered with broken eggshells.’

Arbella tried to keep the exasperation out of her voice. ‘All I’m saying, Mr Carew, is that this very belligerent man was stubborn about sticking to his part, almost to the point of being convincing.’

‘To call Sir Walter Ralegh belligerent and stubborn is the understatement of the millennium. I’m sorry, I know how implausible this is. How can I explain? You’re obviously aware that Ralegh spent a good many years in the Tower of London.’

‘Of course. Thirteen.’

‘That was just for starters. As the result of certain unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances, Sir Walter Ralegh has proved impossible to dislodge from the place, despite his own best efforts and those of others. The Ralegh you met is the real Ralegh...the ur-Ralegh. It is Himself.’

Arbella said automatically, ‘Well I never.’ But when the thought occurred to her that possibly Carew was sane and telling the truth, and she was wrong not to be sceptical but wrong not to accept his assurance, she knocked over her own coffee cup, which also was empty and unbroken.

Carew watched as Arbella righted both cups. ‘It’s more than odd. My father is extremely withdrawn and not at all the self-promoting figure of yore who wallowed in publicity, and loved nothing better than to talk about and listen to himself at the same time. The man who was in company when alone, is now alone in company.’

‘I caught him very off his guard. The unexpected storm had shaken both of us up rather.’

‘These days he has nothing and nobody to be on guard against. What I don’t understand is how you were able to see him. Nobody else can, except for me and…’

‘Yeoman Warder George sees the ghosts.’

‘He doesn’t see Sir Walter Ralegh, or know that he is there. I beg your pardon, but I can assure you that my father, while invisible to the world, is still as much flesh and blood as you and I are. Anomalous as that may seem, it is a proven fact.’

‘Proven to whom?’

‘That’s a long story and one I’m not ready to get into.’

‘Well, he saw me all right and persisted in calling me a boy. Finally after I kept on that I was a girl, a woman, and told him my name, he came over very strange—rather like you did—but he took me at my word.’

Carew smacked his forehead with both hands. ‘Of course, that’s it!’ he said hoarsely. ‘It’s because he knew Arbella Stuart! There was a…sympathy between them. When Arbella was presented at Court at the age of twelve, my father said that he “wished she were fifteen”. In his poem that begins “As you came from the holy land”, it was her that he was describing:

‘

As you came from the holy land

Of Walsinghame

Mett you not with my true love

By the way as you came.

…

She is neyther whyte nor browne

Butt as the heavens fayre

There is none hathe a forme so divine

In the earth or the ayre.’

Such an one did I meet, good Sir,

Suche an Angelyke face,

Who lyke a queene, lyke a nymph, did appere

By her gait, by her grace.

She hath lefte me here all alone,

All allone as unknowne,

Who somtymes did me lead with her selfe,

And me lovde as her owne.

…

I have lovde her all my youth,

Butt now ould, as you see,

Love lykes not the fallyng frute

From the wythered tree.

…

Butt true Love is a durable fyre

In the mynde ever burnynge;

Never sycke, never ould, never dead,

From itt selfe never turnynge.

‘Arbella was in the gallery at my father’s trial to lend him moral support, when he was being prosecuted by that fatuous fool Sir Edward Coke for “compassing or imagining” the King’s death. Her presence there was due to her love for our family, and had nothing to do with politics. Every time Papa’s quicksilver wit and intelligence scored a point against Coke’s pompous rhetoric, Arbella smiled and sent him a message of encouragement. And there was more than sympathy…an empathy one might call it, deeper than love, betwixt her and my brother.’

‘Your brother?’

‘My elder brother, also named Walter, whom we called Wat. He was besotted with Arbella. She was his Stella, which was the name Sir Philip Sidney gave to Penelope Devereux in his sonnets, and he was constantly writing verses to her and about her. Papa approved and was greatly disappointed when Arbella agreed to marry a man much cleverer and wealthier than Wat, William Seymour.

‘It was not a love match. Arbella had been very fond of Wat when they were young, and for a time they were soul-mates and on the brink of romance. But inevitably, given her translucent beauty and charm, and because she was Mary Queen of Scots’ cousin, she was swept away to Court...where her aversion to politics and religious causes did not preclude her from becoming the focus of much intriguing by those, including my father, who wanted to adopt her as their candidate to replace James on the throne.’

‘All I’m aware of is that Lady Arbella’s time in the Tower overlapped with Sir Walter’s, and that she died there. So I suppose they would have been able to meet, all three of them. The rules about visiting, as well as the living arrangements, were very lax in those days.’

Something about the subject of Wat and her namesake made Arbella feel reluctant to continue on the subject. ‘This Ralegh, the one I met yesterday, also talked about his friend the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Henry Percy. And he let me help him take down and stack the tobacco leaves that were curing on washing lines in the room.’

‘He calls Lord Henry “The Wizard Earl” because he is, literally, a whizz at all things scientific.’ Carew looked gloomy. ‘It sounds as though my father said more to you in an afternoon than he has to me in ages.’

‘When you see this person…I mean Sir Walter, again, do tell him how much I enjoyed meeting him, in retrospect.’

‘You should know,’ said Carew almost harshly, ‘that my father and I, although we see each other frequently, have never got along. Father took against me from the day I was born. There was nothing in particular that came between us, it was just that he always preferred Wat. Yesterday it was Father who sent that damned raven, Corvax, to nail me in the foot with his beak. He must have spotted me from his window in the Bloody tower, and because yesterday wasn’t one of my visiting days he was annoyed that I should have come, and in company. I always go alone. That’s the reason the Beefeaters know me so well, because I’m there twice a week, they think just as a break from work.’

‘Though it was very dark in the garden-house I’m surprised he didn’t recognize me as the one who had been with you.’

‘He’s not the most observant of men except when it comes to his own appearance. He would have been furious if I had come inside with you. He declared the garden-house off-limits from the beginning, to all including me.’ Carew sighed. ‘We’re both far too old for such tension and animosity, but there it is.’

‘After three hundred and fifty plus years, I should say so. But I don’t understand: in Sir Walter’s last letter, which he wrote to your mother, Bess, just before he
died
, if I remember correctly, and I usually do, I’ve got that sort of brain, he asked her in the tenderest terms to “Blesse my poore boy.” Since Wat was dead, he must have been referring to you.’

‘No, it was Wat he meant. My father wrote that letter during his last voyage, before my brother was killed in a skirmish with the Spanish at San Thomé in Guiana. He never sent the letter, but kept it in his possession against the day that James might revoke his reprieve and have him executed. When it was found amongst my father’s papers after Wat’s death and his own, quote, demise, unquote, it was presumed to refer to me.’

‘The tone of the letter to Bess is very loving…which, forgive me for saying so, seems strange if they were not getting along. Not that it’s any of my business.’

‘Father always admired Mother’s fiery spirit, and they rubbed along fine until Bess decided that living in the Tower of London, when she was again a free woman, was not a style to which she wished to become accustomed. That her husband was such a spendthrift upon his own luxuries, and so free with her family’s money, had always been a source of great contention between them.

‘Things continued to degenerate, and they’ve been at it hammer and tongs ever since. You can spend a lot of money in three hundred and fifty years if you try, and my father tries quite hard.’

‘I don’t…’

‘Bess, my mother, she is still living too, though not in the Tower.’

‘Oh.’

‘As to my brother, Wat alive or Wat dead—and he did die—in my father’s mind is immortalized in an image of perfection; whereas I, though alive, am dead to him. When my father’s execution order was issued the year following Wat’s death, Papa couldn’t wait to be reunited with him, his darling boy.’