Watch the Lady (41 page)

“But don't go making it common knowledge. Discretion is the thing . . . and for goodness' sake don't mention it to Frances. She would die of shock.”

Lizzie stifles a laugh, her usual verve reinstated. “Sweet Frances, straight as a die.”

Robert is running towards them. He has the same round brown doe eyes as his mother, but where hers flicker with timidity, his are bright and direct. He holds what appears to be a snake in his hands, the head pinched between his thumb and index finger, the rest coiled about his opposite wrist. Penelope gasps, but doesn't call out for fear of Frances looking up from her book and panicking.

She stands and moves towards him, seeing as she approaches that it is reassuringly dull green and not the patterned adder she had feared it might be. A scream of terror sounds out behind her and Penelope turns to see Frances, white as chalk, running towards them with Dorothy in pursuit.

“It's just a grass snake. It's harmless,” she calls. Dorothy is trying to calm her but Frances seems terrified, her arms flailing.

“I know how to handle a snake, Aunt Penelope,” says the boy. “The gardeners showed me. If you grip it by the head, it cannot bite.”

“It is wise to leave snakes alone, Robert, you never know. Let the poor creature go; it must be petrified.” Penelope is thinking once more of how like his father he is, apparently fearless but also oblivious to the fears of others, and she can't help turning her mind again to Essex out in Ireland, facing God knows what kind of enemy. Her nephew looks at her with surprising defiance and seems about to insist upon keeping the creature but she meets him with an expression that gives him no choice. He drops the snake to the ground and watches it slither away into the undergrowth before stomping off in a sulk to find Henry.

•  •  •

Despite the bright day outside, Rich's study, in the old part of the house, is dark and cool. Rich looks drawn.

“Are you quite well?” she asks.

“Do you care?”

“I care, yes. You
are
my husband, for what it's worth. And the father of my children.”

“Not the father of
all
your children.” She is surprised at this, for it is something that is rarely spoken of between them.

“No.” His eyes are hollow. She notices for the first time that he has lost his looks; however unattractive she found him, he was handsome once. She finds herself wondering if it is harder for him to entice boys into his bed these days, if he is obliged to pay them for their flesh as well as their silence. “I have never sought to deceive you. You have what you want and so do I.”

“But you have made me a laughingstock.”

He seems so pathetic when he says this. It doesn't even occur to her to remind him that he is as much responsible for their situation as she. But a man cannot wear cuckold's horns without being the butt of a few jests. “To hell with the jokers—at least they do not know the truth. Then you would be more than a laughingstock amongst your Puritans.”

His head seems to sink down into his shoulders and she feels truly sorry for him. “I envy you, Penelope. I envy your insouciance, the way you seem not to care how people judge you, the confidence you have that you will always smell of roses when the rest of us have the stench of the gutter. That comes from breeding. I thought by marrying you I would have some of it for myself, that it would rub off on me.” He laughs resentfully. “But I realize now that you have to be born to it.”

“What is all this?”

“I need you,” he mumbles into his collar.

“You
need
me?”

“I have a dispute over a large tract of land. I risk losing the greater part of all I own.” He pauses, turning a ring on his finger. “But if we are seen to be united, that I have the force of your family behind me. Well, then . . .” He doesn't finish, just sighs deeply. “I am not considered seriously.”

She can see what it has taken for him to come to her begging for help. The last of his pride is in tatters. “Of course! I will do whatever it takes. Arrange a meeting. We are man and wife and if anyone chooses to overlook such a fact, then they will have the weight of the Devereuxs on their backs.”

There might have been a time when she would have been glad of this—the knowledge that he needed her. She might have appreciated the leverage. But not now, not now she has an approximation of what she wants. Besides, she wonders for how long the Devereux name will hold such sway if her brother loses royal favor permanently. She reaches out to take his hand but he snatches it away as if she is leprous, bringing it to his forehead, so his fingers weave through his steel-streaked hair.

“I suppose you have often wished me dead.”

“What do you mean?” She is shocked to hear him say this, not because it is untrue, but because it is true. There have been occasions, but hearing him articulate it makes the guilt wind about inside her like poison ivy.

“If I were you, I would have wished it.”

She realizes only now that their situation has been so heavily weighted in her favor, for he has been trapped by his own sense of hypocrisy. His faith has condemned him to the lower rung of life. “Do you still believe as you did?”

“My faith has had extreme challenges, but yes, despite everything I have not lost sight of God.”

“I have never believed God would condemn you for . . .” She doesn't know how to say it. “For where your desires have alighted.”

He drops an acerbic laugh into the silence, before saying, “Are you trying to tell me it is not a sin?”

“We are all sinners. What I am saying is, there are worse things. Perhaps if you—”

“I don't need your suggestions,” he snaps. “How can you possibly know what it is like to be me?”

“I cannot know. But I do know that God will find a way to forgive you.” She feels silly saying this. What does she know of his God?

“It is men rather than God I fear.”

“Tell them to look to the planks in their own eyes.”

They sit for a while, with just the occasional creak of an ancient beam punctuating their silence, and she notices it has become quite dark; night has fallen without them realizing. She is wondering about Blount. They had been hoping for a few days alone at Wanstead to celebrate the transfer of ownership of the house. It seems, though, that this business of Rich's will keep her here longer than she'd hoped; then she will need to return to court and get on her knees before the Queen, to plead her brother's part once more.

“Will you read through these and I will arrange for the meeting.” Rich hands her a thick ream of papers.

“The sooner the better,” she says. “I am needed at court.” He looks at her askance and she continues before he has a chance to speak. “It is for the good of us all. You stand to benefit as much as I from my connections.” She doesn't elaborate on her brother's troubles with the Queen, his lack of funds for the army; there is nothing Rich can do by knowing.

The early-morning light wakes Cecil. His bed hangings are open and he is still dressed. He sits up, confused for an instant, feeling a sharp spasm that moves from his nape and down through his shoulders. He rubs his neck with the flat of his palm—it is an age since he was properly touched by another's hand. Even his wife, in their most intimate moments, kept her hands to herself. He has sometimes paid young women, and, like his wife, they could never quite hide their disgust. But despite those women seeming clean in appearance he suffered weeks of anxiety in the aftermath of those few episodes, convinced he had contracted something unspeakable from them, scrutinizing his bodily emissions and consulting his physician repeatedly.

His page knocks softly and enters to stoke the fire. Cecil notices the paper, slightly crumpled, on the bed and remembers what it was that kept him up last night. He rereads it, deciphering the scrawl where he supposes his man must have copied it in haste. It is from Essex to the Queen:

But why do I talk of victory or success? Is it not known that from England I receive nothing but discomforts and soul's wounds? Is it not spoken in the army that Your Majesty's favor is diverted from me, and that already you do bode ill both to me and it? Is it not believed by the rebels that those whom you favor most do more hate me out of faction than them out of duty and conscience?

He is ashamed of the truth, scrawled there in black ink: that he, Cecil, hates Essex more than he hates the enemy.

Dropping the paper to his lap, he mutters, “What have I become?” only realizing he has spoken aloud when his page replies, asking if there is anything he can do to be of service. He sends the boy away. He cannot bear a witness to his guilt; it is enough to be aware of God's all-seeing eye. Since when, he wonders, did he stop serving the Queen and England altogether? Since when did he begin serving his hatred alone?

If Essex fails in Ireland, it will be entirely Cecil's responsibility. It is he who has ensured that half the council has lost faith in Essex; he who has ensured that supplies have not been sent; he who has kept back important intelligence that might have helped the earl's cause; he who has poisoned minds against Essex's closest allies. Some of Essex's stalwarts have been recalled, and he has a direct royal order to demote Southampton from his position as Master of Horse: all Cecil's doing, one way or another. And then there is Francis Bacon . . . He scratches at some spilt wax on the table beside his bed and lines up the objects there, a candlestick, a few books, a small timepiece, the complicated workings of which used to bring him great joy, but no longer. He has lit the touchpaper to his adversary's destruction, a destruction that may well lay England open to the Spanish, and now the flame will not be extinguished.

He thinks of his botched attempt at diplomacy last summer with the new Spanish King, how high his hopes had been to carve out a peace treaty. But the whole thing that started with several careful conversations and letters exchanged with the ambassador had become a debacle. A misinterpretation of intelligence or foul play had made him believe there was a Spanish fleet gathering off the coast of Brest and invasion was imminent. He had ordered an emergency mobilization of troops under Blount, and the whole of the country was on the brink of panic, expecting invasion at any moment. He feels such a fool remembering it.

“Ah, Pygmy!” the Queen had said as he entered the watching chamber with the intention of discreetly imparting the news that had just come to him. “Your great Spanish Armada was nothing more than a fleet of fishing boats.” She expelled a howl of laughter that was taken up by those around her, a row of eyes mocking him, open mouths filled with mirth at his expense. It was all he could do to stop himself storming from the room. He forced a small self-deprecating laugh from his lips, but the Queen had the wind behind her. “And I suppose you think this glass bead”—she plucked at a decoration on the hat of one of her pages—“a diamond!” Untrammeled titters ensued. “And this pet”—she waved a hand in the direction of one of her ladies' lapdogs—“is a wolf, I assume!”

He saw Ralegh amongst the company, shoulders heaving, and Carew with a hand over his mouth, Knollys wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. Only Francis Bacon was not laughing. He stood watching the scene, those slender hands folded together, with an expression of inscrutable indifference on his face, as if undecided as to which way he might jump.

“And this”—it was one of the Queen's ladies joining in, pointing to a flower embroidered on her dress—“is a rosebush.”

Cecil was wishing that the floor would swallow him up, as a stage trapdoor makes players disappear in a puff of smoke. He was rendered small, like some kind of idiotic fool, there only for the cruel amusement of the court. I am Secretary of State, he reminded himself. I am untouchable. But nothing could cut through the humiliation he was feeling that catapulted him back to the ruthless ribbing of the boys in his father's household.

“And I suppose you think
me
,” said the dwarf Ippolyta, “the Queen herself.”

“That's a good one,” cried Ralegh. It went on and on; even days later courtiers were coming up with ever more ingenious examples of his supposed stupidity: pigeons mistaken for peacocks, squirrels for stallions, needles for knives.

And now Cecil's dreamed-of peace treaty with Spain lies in shreds. Perhaps God is punishing him for his loathing of Essex—he knows well enough that it is a sin to hate in the way he has done. He places his hands together in an attempt at prayer, but cannot think how to form his supplications and instead tries to imagine how his father would have advised him. He might have said:
Sometimes to achieve one's ends may require deeds that are not entirely moral, but if they are for the good of Queen and country, then they are justified
. He expels a puff of defeat on imagining the depth of his father's disappointment.

The door flies open, dragging him out of his torpor, and his page enters once more, flushed and out of breath.

“I thought I told you to leave me be,” barks Cecil.

“No but . . .” The boy is nervously twisting his fingers together. “There is someone to see you. He says it is urgent.”

“Well, who is it, boy?” At this moment a man steps into the doorway, a great brute of a fellow. Cecil can't quite place him and there is nothing on his clothing to identify who he is.

“Sir Thomas Grey,” the man says, removing his headgear and dipping into a bow.

Cecil tries to remember if Grey is important. “I assume you have news for me.” He thinks Grey might be part of the guard that was sent to protect the south coast from Spanish attack.

“It is My Lord of Essex,” says Grey.

“What about him?” Cecil's mind is agitating, wondering why this man has come to him with news of Essex. Perhaps the earl is dead. He allows that thought to percolate, feeling the first sensations of rapture.