The Girl in the Glass Tower (11 page)

‘But I mean, to whom?’ She looked as if she’d been slapped.

‘Some local boy, a Byron, good family. He has
seen
you somewhere.’ I pictured it, Margaret, allowing her gaze to flicker minutely towards some faceless fellow, catching his desire like a hooked fish. Margaret was that kind of girl; I was not.

‘Oh.’ She plucked at her cuff. ‘So I am not to go to court?’ She wouldn’t look directly at me. ‘And you.’ Her eyes became shiny with tears, dissolving my acrimony. ‘Who will keep an eye on you?’

‘There are plenty to do that,’ I said, knowing that was not what she meant. I led the way to the arbour where there was a bench, only slightly damp. ‘You will have a house of your own and infants.’ She had talked of these things almost constantly:
When I have a home and a string of babies
; she would stuff a pillow up her dress saying,
I think I shall make an excellent mother-to-be
.

If
I
thought too long on the idea of something growing in me it made me cold with panic.

‘But what about you? We will be separated.’

‘When I am queen, I shall make you a lady of the bedchamber. How would you like that?’ I said it to reassure her and this it seemed to do, for she wiped her eyes on her sleeve and took out a scrunched square of linen to blow her nose.

‘I should like that very much indeed.’

A memory popped into my mind of those solemn girls who had sat day in, day out with the Queen of Scots, as much prisoners as their mistress, and shivered as if someone had walked over my grave.

‘
You
will be matched soon,’ she continued.

‘Perhaps.’ I did not repeat Grandmother’s caution about marriage.

I could hear Mister Reason calling for me. ‘I suppose we’d better go in.’

The cart from Chatsworth was being unloaded as we approached the house. All the warmth generated from running had dissipated, leaving me, in my drenched shoes and stockings, cold to the bone.

While Reason’s attention was elsewhere, I whispered to the carter, ‘Anything for me?’ He shook his head. Disappointment spilled into me; the forbidden letters from my flamboyant uncle were small highlights in my dull existence and made me feel connected to the world outside.

The great hall was busy with people, a group of pages loitered to one side, eyeing up the maid who was sweeping away the mud that had been trodden through; a scribe hovered with a stack of papers that probably needed signing and Grandmother was at the centre of it all, inspecting the tapestries – scenes from the trials of Job – which had been partially rolled out over the long table.

There was the sound of someone dismounting outside
and a messenger rushed into the hall. He was panting, filthy from the road, and must have travelled quite a distance, judging by the state of him. He dipped in a bow before Grandmother and fumbled with the fastening of his satchel, having to remove his gloves to untie it. Eventually, with us all watching in silent expectation, he pulled out a letter. I instantly recognized Cecil’s neat hand. Grandmother took it and gestured to Reason to give the fellow a coin and direct him to the kitchens for nourishment.

She turned her back to open the letter, little shards of the seal scattering about her feet. I remember tension in the air, though there couldn’t have been, for a letter from Cecil was a regular occurrence and none of us knew in that moment the extent to which things were to change as a result of that missive’s contents.

I noticed Grandmother’s body stiffen as she read. Then she turned, plainly seething, her eyes hard as pebbles, and said through gritted teeth, ‘There has been a change of plan. You will not be going to court as arranged.’ She cast me a look of accusation that I didn’t understand. I waited for an explanation, watching her ball up the paper tightly and throw it into the hearth, seeming not to realize that there was no fire lit. It was unusual for her to be so distracted. I kept one eye trained on the screwed-up letter for fear it might disappear if I looked away. ‘Oh, and Essex is dead,’ she added. ‘The day before yesterday.’

Margaret gasped and began to make little choked sobs.

Grandmother swept off without another word.

Mansfield walks in and sits himself at the table uninvited as if he is the master of the house. Ami hurriedly puts a lid on the pot of dripping and shoves the sheaf of rushes out of sight. She has been making rush-lights and doesn’t want him to see that she has been reduced to lighting her evenings in such a humble way. She is aware that, given he knows only too well her diminished state, it is a futile gesture, but she can’t help wanting to preserve the little pride she has left. She thinks of the beeswax candles she grew up with, their clean, silent, odourless light, and feels for the first time in some years the loss of the countess whose household she was raised in. Were she still alive, she would have taken Ami in, of that there is no doubt.

Dumping a sack on the floor beside him, Mansfield says, ‘Linens for you.’

It is stuffed full; Ami’s heart sinks, for it has been raining and she has nowhere inside to hang that quantity of washing, not with all the rest she has. She has started taking in linens from elsewhere too, to earn a little more for necessities.

She is nearing the end of her second week as a laundry maid and she can feel the dull ache in her body from all the lifting. The washing bat has rubbed her palms sore; her hands are chapped raw and blistering. She is unravelling with the exhaustion. In her head she has a picture of Mistress Mansfield and her numerous children clad in brilliant white like a host of angels – they must all have clean linen at the very least once a day, given the rate she has been washing for them. Last week was the same. ‘Those are done.’ She indicates one of the neatly folded stacks of clean sheets that she set near the hearth earlier to air.

‘Good girl.’

She takes a breath, resisting the urge to snap back at him to mind his manners. Whether he is mocking her or belittling her or both she cannot tell, and part of her wants to laugh, for it is a ridiculous thing to call a woman of her age – unless, the thought surprises her, it is said in the throes of passion, when foolish things are often whispered.

‘Don’t suppose there’s a cup of small beer for me, is there.’ It ought to be a question but it is not. She was woken that morning by the gentle
plink
of rain dripping into the bucket upstairs. He still has not sent a man round to mend that tile.

‘I might have some dregs left.’ She can feel his eyes on her as she bends to lift the heavy ewer from the corner. ‘My roof still needs mending.’

‘Tomorrow.’

She tips a measure of the cloudy liquid into a cup and hands it to him.

‘Your boy coming back soon?’ he asks.

‘Yes, soon.’ In truth she doesn’t know exactly when Hal will be back; he still hasn’t written. ‘He’s due back Sunday.’ This is the truth, at least, but whether he will turn up or not, she doesn’t know.

‘I see that playwright fellow met his end.’ He taps at the papers on the table. ‘Did you know him? You being a woman of letters – thought you might have.’

‘I did once, as it happens.’ Her mind is cast back to the old days when she was surrounded by musicians, players, writers; her youth was made up of them. It was Will Shakespeare who had encouraged her to put her own pen to paper in the first place. She has him to thank for that. No one knew of him back then but everyone believed he would make something of himself. He could work magic with words like no one else. His death is a great loss to that world but it is a world she is no longer a part of.

Mansfield picks up one of Lady Arbella’s papers as if to read it, though she knows he cannot. Despite her desire to discover what has been written – about her, about that cauterized friendship – she has hardly managed to read a thing since she began the washing work. Reaching to take the paper off him, she finds her hand captured in his. Looking at it, he draws in a breath through pursed lips. ‘Must be sore.’ He softly brushes her raw skin with the pad of his index finger.

She snatches her hand away, tucking it in the folds of her apron. ‘It’s the starch.’

‘Not used to hard toil?’

She doesn’t answer but meets his gaze directly.

‘’Spect you’ve always had someone to do your housework for you.’

She still says nothing and remembers how life used to be before she’d had to let the servant girl go – all that time to think and write. If only she could write now, she might feel closer to the person she used to be, but she hasn’t even time to read. Her mind drifts way back; when she was Henry Hunsdon’s she wanted for nothing. Her greatest chore was to read to him – ‘you have a voice pure as running water,’ he used to say – or accompany him to the theatre – if she closes her eyes she can still hear the roar of the crowd and the laughter – or entertain him in the bedchamber – ‘You make me feel immortal,’ he had told her once. She had all the time in the world then to compose poetry. When you are eighteen you have no idea of the finite nature of things. She senses time bearing down hard on her.

‘Ten days ago you had fine hands.’ The softly spoken compliment sounds odd on Mansfield’s coarse lips.

‘I still have eight fingers and two thumbs; that’s what matters.’

He takes a swig of his drink and she watches him. His own hands dwarf the cup, one of his nails is black and she
notices for the first time that he is missing the tip of his left little finger, astonished she hadn’t seen it before, for it seems now startlingly apparent. She wants to know what happened, feels a kind of sympathy. He is not entirely an unattractive man; rough, yes, but not unattractive.

‘There is no
need
for you to labour in such a way.’ His voice has dropped an octave.

Not this again
, she thinks. But in spite of herself she is imagining those hands – that stump of a finger – on her naked flesh. A shiver grabs her.

‘It is not such great hardship,’ she says. ‘There are worse ways to make a living than doing laundry.’ For some reason she thinks of the smell of the lye, so pungent it makes her retch.

‘I suppose it is convivial, if nothing else.’

‘It is that,’ she replies. She will not give him the satisfaction of knowing how the washerwomen have ostracized her and make him believe she will weaken and relent to becoming his whore. It is clear he still hopes for that, even after her firm rebuffs, though she fails to see why he would want a woman of forty-six when with his money he could pick up a wench down in Southwark on any day of the week, even Sunday.

‘But a woman like you is not cut out for such work … An educated woman.’ She thinks she can detect a note of disapproval beneath his words.

‘Sadly, my education has not well prepared me for a real life. There is not much call for a female clerk.’ She emits a sour laugh.

‘There
is
another way.’ He has adhered his gaze on to her breast, though she has crossed her shawl over and tucked the ends into the waist of her apron so there is not an inch of flesh visible. ‘Surely it’s not
such
a terrible prospect.’

‘It is not
terrible
, no,’ she says. She knows well enough that a man whose pride has been dented can become vindictive
and that is the last thing she needs. ‘But neither is it a prospect I can consider.’

She doesn’t look at him, keeps her eyes fixed on her blistered hands and wonders if it shows on her face that she is lying, for she
is
considering it. She thinks of her time liberated for reading, imagines Arbella’s papers offering up their secrets. Acquiescence is beginning to seem inevitable.

Essex is dead!
It reverberated in my ears. More than anything, more than the sorrow that was twisting its way through me, I felt a fool, for I believed I had known Essex, but all I had known was an imaginary creature conjured up for my own comfort.

Crouching down, I plucked Grandmother’s discarded letter from the ashes in the unlit hearth, secreting it up my sleeve before going to comfort Margaret, who was crouched over the table, spilling tears on to Job’s dead woven children.

My hand hovered over her head, not quite touching. ‘Don’t cry. You barely knew Essex.’ Her tears were delaying my opportunity to discover the contents of Cecil’s letter and my impatience began to loom.

‘It’s just …’ she snorted into her handkerchief. ‘It’s just that everything’s about to change and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.’

‘Things cannot stay the same for ever.’ As I said the words I was struck by the thought that for me life
was
to stay the same for ever. My world, on the brink of opening, was to have its lid rammed back on. I was to continue waiting for my real life to begin.

I had the urge to scream at her, tell her how lucky she was that her life was in motion, but pushed that thought away and mustered some sympathy. ‘You always talked of wanting a husband, infants.’ I found my arms opening for her and, without questioning, she leaned into my awkward embrace. Her body felt unpleasantly soft in contrast to my own, and the thought of her damp tears and oozing nose meant it took all my strength of will to sit still. I wanted, I tried, to be warm
but simple affection felt so very difficult to me; I was unused to it, I suppose, and that letter was burning a hole in my sleeve. Once her sniffing had abated, I said: ‘Why don’t you go to the kitchens and fetch some sweetmeats? That will cheer you up.’

I hustled her off and took the stairs to the first floor. I felt my life shrinking once more, as if soon it would be too small to accommodate the whole of me at one time – perhaps, I thought, I would have to hack off pieces of myself to fit.

Grandmother was in the withdrawing chamber, sitting in the half-light, tapping her fingernails on the arm of her chair.

‘Shall I light some candles?’ I said.

There was no reply, only the thrum of those fingernails.

‘Would you like me to fetch you something?’

Tap, tap, tap.

‘A drink, perhaps?’

Tap, tap, tap.

It was as if I no longer existed, and for a moment I wondered if I had become invisible, silent, transparent, like her windows.

‘Grandmother,’ I said, approaching, standing so close she couldn’t ignore me. ‘What is it? What have I done?’ My mind was churning with possible reasons for this sudden withdrawal of affection, things that might have been revealed in the letter in my sleeve. What did other people do in such circumstances, I asked myself. Do they get on the floor to supplicate, leaking tears, do they beg and paw and cling? I didn’t know.

‘Don’t,’ is all she said, with a small dismissive flick of her wrist.

I hoped my dejection wasn’t apparent in my expression. Grandmother couldn’t bear a weakling, so I stood tall and walked on through, leaving her in the gloom.

As I was half out of the door I heard her utter those familiar words, ‘If only you’d been a boy.’

To get to my own chamber I had to pass through hers, for the other door, which led to the corridor, was kept locked for my protection. I occasionally allowed myself to imagine armed men scaling the building in the darkness and spiriting me away. At first it was a petrifying thought but over the years it had transformed into a kind of hope, driven by a fantasy of escape. I never allowed myself to imagine the full consequences of such an event – marriage to a Catholic, an army raised, the Queen ousted, or worse, an executioner looming above me. No, it was just the escape itself, with Dorcas, galloping away into the night.

In Grandmother’s room there were two men dismantling my bed. Its blue and white canopy was loosely folded on the floor and they had set about taking apart the frame.

‘What are you doing?’

The two men turned to me, removing their caps. ‘The dowager countess instructed us to put it in your own bedchamber.’

‘My bedchamber?’ I said stupidly, as if I didn’t quite comprehend, pointing at the connecting door.

‘That is correct, My Lady.’

‘Well, carry on then, I suppose.’ Paradoxically, I felt devastated, rejected, though I had dreamed for years of being liberated from sharing Grandmother’s chamber.

My own chamber was smaller and I wondered how they would fit the big tester in, supposing they would have to remove the existing bed, where Margaret slept with one of the other maids.

I sat on the floor by the crackling fire, pulling the paper out. It left an ashy smear on my frilled linen cuff from where I’d plucked it from the dead hearth. I opened it up and, angling it towards the remaining light, began to read.

Most esteemed Dowager Countess,

Essex met his end this morning and there has been little grief. The events of the past month have wrought changes that we could not possibly have foreseen. The political climate has altered irrevocably and it would seem that Her Majesty has turned her thoughts for the succession away from Lady Arbella and towards King James. Nothing has been said, but with my knowledge of her, I feel I am well placed to interpret her feelings and actions on the matter.

Speculating upon her intentions, I can only imagine she feels England has no appetite for another of her own sex on the throne; there seems no other motive to elevate a foreigner above a legitimate English heir. It is for this reason that I regret to announce the indefinite withdrawal of Her Majesty’s invitation to the Lady Arbella to court.

It is my greatest desire, dear Dowager Countess, that you can find it in yourself to understand I have had no choice but to bow to Her Majesty’s desires in this matter. But my regrets run deep, for, as you know, my greatest wishes have long lain with your granddaughter.

The best we can now hope for is that your jewel is matched favourably with the Queen’s blessing and I assure you I will work tirelessly to achieve such an end. There are a number of foreign princes desiring of an allegiance with our royal house who might make appropriate potential suitors for her hand.

R. C. On the twenty-fifth day of February, in the year of Our Lord 1601

‘My Lady.’ It was the men dismantling my bed outside the door. ‘Would it inconvenience you greatly if we brought the bed through now?’

‘No, of course.’ I touched the corner of the paper to the flames and held it, blazing, until it threatened to burn my fingers, only then dropping the last fragment into the fire.

I stood, smoothing the front of my dress with my palms.
My world was spinning and I felt that if I moved I would tumble right off the edge of it. The trajectory of my life had been altered irrevocably but I was still the same person and didn’t know what to do. Gathering my thoughts, I resolved to find Starkey. His counsel would help. The men returned holding candles, looking ghoulish in their light. For a moment I imagined them catching the hangings, flaring up, flames licking at the fine plasterwork ceiling. I made to leave.

The miniature of the Grey sisters was on my desk. The men must have put it there, supposing it mine. An old conversation flashed through my mind:

Why do you keep the Grey girls here?

To remind myself that even the best-laid plans can go awry.

What do you mean by that?

You can never know which way public opinion will fall when a childless monarch passes on. Not enough care was taken in the choice of Jane Grey’s husband. That was what led to her downfall.

I remembered not really understanding what Grandmother meant by that at the time, but now I was beginning to get a sense of the jostling for position as the Queen aged and it was clear that I had been elbowed out of the way.

I gave my head a little shake in an attempt to dispel the image which had appeared in my mind of Jane Grey blindfolded, kneeling at the block.

I don’t know how I made it to the schoolroom downstairs without falling but I must have found some inner resource of steadiness. Starkey was in there as I expected, reading in the dim light of a single flame. Though I was not supposed to be with Starkey unchaperoned, I found it easy to circumvent this restriction and the schoolroom had become a sanctuary where he and I passed many hours together, sometimes in silence, separately scribbling our thoughts on to paper, sometimes engaged in a lively exchange of ideas.

‘You will ruin your eyes,’ I said, taking a taper and lighting more candles as a means to calm my inner turmoil. ‘My trip to court has been –’

‘Postponed,’ he interrupted. ‘Yes, the servants were talking about it.’

‘Not postponed, no. The invitation is rescinded.’

‘What is the reason given?’ He was frowning.

I sat and explained the contents of Cecil’s letter, forcing myself to remain steady and not allow the frenzy that was moving through me in waves to break my surface.

‘This is a setback, that is all. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I’m not so sure. The Queen seems adamant, according to Cecil.’

‘Listen to me; you were born to take your rightful place, it is not a question of choice. Remember Socrates: for a just society each must perform his ordained role. Doctors must heal, soldiers must fight, rulers must –’

‘Rulers must rule.’ I was always reassured by Starkey’s ordered version of the world, in which everything took its proper place, but I had begun to suspect that, in the face of outside forces, such an ordered world might be less straightforward than I’d once believed. ‘But Cecil … Cecil is the man who decides. You know enough of him to understand that. He may insist it is the Queen’s wish that my cousin takes the throne, but he wears his ambition too close to the surface. Even I, who know so little of men, know that. If he believes there is advantage to him in James becoming king then that is what will happen, despite what he has said in his letter about it being solely the Queen’s wish.’

‘Have faith. God has His plan for you.’ There was a quiet fervour in him, in his eyes and the way he pressed his palms together and was moving them back and forth like a supplicant. Between God and Socrates, Starkey had built around
me an impregnable edifice. It was a refuge, with its own certain logic, in which we had existed comfortably.

‘Your cousin,’ he continued, ‘is a foreigner. He has no right to your throne, no matter what Cecil’ – he spat the name as if it were the devil’s – ‘wants. It is what God wants that will come to pass.’

‘And the Queen? If it is
her
wish then that must reflect God’s desire, for she is His emissary.’

‘It is –’ His mouth opened but he seemed unable to force a sound out of it. Sudden as a sneeze the words came: ‘…
not
her wish.’ He then repeated it calmly. ‘It is not her wish.’ Starkey’s unwavering confidence had a powerful allure that drew me in tightly and he regarded me with a beatific smile that seemed filled with love. ‘God has shown me in a dream … you know this anyway.’

‘Your dream of me crowned.’ When the barren years were stretching out and I was despairing of ever being recalled to court, Starkey had spent a day in prayer, begging for a vision of the future. When he slept, that was his dream. ‘I wish I had your faith.’ I banged my fist down on to the table, hard enough to bruise the knuckles.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please.’ He offered his hand like a question. I nodded my assent and he took my bruised fingers very gently, inspecting the damage.

‘Cecil is seeking a foreign match for me.’ I was thinking of the conversation earlier with Grandmother about marriage and how it was to be avoided until I was on the throne, but everything had been different only a few hours ago. My world was like a reflection in a convex mirror, nothing quite as it should be.

‘There will be ways to prevent that.’

He seemed so sure. I longed for his unassailable conviction.