The Girl in the Glass Tower (21 page)

In order to get to my cousin I had to negotiate my way past Lennox, the Cyclops at the mouth of his cave, and then another group of Scots, lotus-eaters drinking and smoking in the anteroom, who laughed openly as I passed. I feared I had dirt on my face or that Lucy Bedford might have pinned a note to my back in jest. Once in the King’s presence, there was the Scylla and Charybdis of Erskine and pretty-boy Hay to be dealt with. They gazed disdainfully, with whirlpool eyes, as I made my way across the chamber, fearing ridicule.

The King appeared rough, pale and slack-skinned with chapped lips and a sparse beard, as if he had been left outside for too long in bad weather. His clothes were surprisingly plain and I noticed a small stain on the front of his doublet.

I addressed him in Latin, assuming such a gesture would warm him to me, but he said, not to me but to Erskine, with one eye directed my way, ‘I don’t like a woman with Latin, do you? Makes them seem cunning.’ His Scots accent made him hard to understand and it took a moment for me to grasp what he had said. When I did, I immediately became light-headed with embarrassment, wishing I was a child and could run from the room. Then, directly, he asked, ‘Are you any good with a needle? Queen Anna’s a fine needlewoman.’

‘Her Majesty is certainly a better needlewoman than I.’ I was grateful to find the bland compliment amongst my dithering thoughts.

‘I’ve had one or two marriage proposals for you. I suppose it was inevitable. Nassau is keen.’ He seemed to be talking to himself. His tongue made the circuit of his dry
lips. ‘But if I match you with him it risks upsetting the Spanish and we are so very’ – he pinched his thumb and forefinger together for emphasis – ‘close to a treaty. I can’t put that in jeopardy. The King of Poland’s been sniffing about; he’s sending an envoy. Wants to have a look at you.’

Erskine muttered something unintelligible and Hay responded with a smirk.

‘Queen of Poland?’ The King had turned his bloodhound eyes on me, smiling openly so I could see the morsels of food in his teeth. Grandmother’s voice wormed its way into my head:
Don’t smile, it will make you seem meek
. Smiling certainly didn’t make my cousin seem meek, far from it. I couldn’t tell if he was making some kind of joke at my expense. ‘I suppose I’ll have to restore your father’s lands to you if you wed. Can’t have you going off to Poland penniless, can we?’ I still had no idea if he was toying with me. I knew how long Grandmother had negotiated in vain to gain my father’s bequest on my behalf. ‘You’ll be a rich bride, Coz.’ He laughed and I remained silent. ‘You don’t seem very pleased. Do you think me a Scottish miser whose word’s no good?’

‘No, Highness, indeed I am overwhelmed at the thought of it.’ I hoped he couldn’t detect the weight of cynicism my voice carried. I couldn’t help it. Those lands might have bought me my freedom but he dangled them over me as a makeweight for marriage.

He sucked his teeth. ‘You’ll have to fatten yourself up before the envoy comes; there’s nothing of you. He might mistake you for a boy!’ Hay sniggered at that. James reached out a fist and grabbed the top of my bodice. ‘See, empty!’ The trio of men then burst into laughter and I longed for the floor to swallow me.

‘What do you think I should do about it all?’ he asked.

Do about what? Did he mean what should he do about my body?
I
felt their eyes on me, stripping me bare, finding me wanting. My mind churned for something to say. But he carried on. ‘Cecil is of the mind that you should stay here where we can see you – not be married abroad. He thinks We wouldn’t want any of your pups claiming Our throne.’

I felt a flare of anger towards that snake Cecil, still holding sway over my destiny as he always had, and wanted to ask what exactly he might have meant by that.

‘You have two sons to see any pretenders off, Highness,’ said Hay with a smug air, as if he’d had something to do with the making of Prince Henry Frederick and baby Charles himself.

‘Ah yes, my two boys.’

‘Dynasties are built on boys,’ Erskine smarmed, locking his gaze on to me and smoothing his beard with the tips of his fingers. I wanted to shout at him, tell him that
I
of all people should know that.

‘What do you think?’ James’s question was directed at me.

Fortunately, I’d quickly realized he had no desire to know my thoughts on anything, least of all on whether I should be married or not.

‘I think I should like to be obedient to Your Highness in such matters, and if Cecil is of the mind that I ought to stay here, then I consider it a privilege that Your Highness might also wish it so. I am most grateful for your kindness –’

‘It’s all very well,’ he cut in, ‘that Cecil should want you to remain a maid but I ask myself, what is an unmarried woman for?’ He paused, allowing his question to hang. ‘Unless she is a queen, I suppose.’

A grim feeling overcame me. ‘I … I don’t –’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, and with a wave of his hand I was dismissed.

As I backed from the chamber, my mind turned over his question, finding no proper answer: what
was
my purpose? I remembered Margaret Byron’s comment about birthing her
boy:
That was what I was for
. I was almost at the door, preparing to confront the lotus-eaters once more, when the King called out, ‘Do you share my wife’s faith?’

I wondered if it was a trap, a trick question, but if it was I didn’t know what answer would redeem me. I heard Starkey in my ear:
The truth leads to the light
. ‘I do not, Highness.’

‘Ha!’ he turned to Hay, slapping the younger man’s shoulder. ‘You owe me ten English shillings.’

It was only as I walked away that I realized there had been no mention of the trial.

I was glad to return to the calm of Sheen while the court left on progress, stalked by the plague, hangers-on dying here and there, it was said, forcing the great train to move on ceaselessly. The King didn’t mind, or so the gossip went, as it gave him ample excuse to hunt with his close coterie of Scots. The King’s fondness for hunting was forcing the privy councillors to chase him around the shires to attend to the business of running the country.

Catholics began to emerge from the shadows. The first in my orbit was Bridget: ‘I can be truthful now, My Lady, and confess to my Catholic faith,’ she said. ‘I had kept it concealed for fear of ever compromising you.’

I remembered that time in the garden at Hardwick, when I thought she’d crossed herself. How fearful I’d been then. It was unsurprising, given I’d been living under the constant threat of kidnap by Catholics for a decade. With hindsight I thought it a wonder I hadn’t completely lost my mind as people had been led to think. But the threat had not diminished with my new circumstances, it had merely changed, become something I understood even less.

‘I had my suspicions,’ I said to her. ‘And what about Aunt Mary?’ I thought of that glimpse I’d had once of a dangling crucifix.

‘She too,’ was Bridget’s reply. No wonder people thought I’d be willing to convert.

Aunt Mary and Uncle Gilbert wrote long letters from Sheffield, begging for my news, and I felt thankful, given it seemed I no longer existed for Grandmother, that my aunt and uncle continued to treat me tenderly. I harboured a small uncertainty, however, over Aunt Mary’s part in Uncle Henry’s foolhardy plan, the extent to which she knew of his aims. But I felt I couldn’t ask her, feared she would be irretrievably hurt by my aspersions.

I felt a great affinity with Uncle Gilbert as he, too, had long been on the wrong side of Grandmother’s affections – indeed, we were numerous, Grandmother’s outcasts. But she, anyway, belonged to a world that had passed. Aside from the fact of our fondness for each other I was aware that the Shrewsburys were powerful allies for me. I had come to learn, being out in the world, that family allegiance was of paramount importance; I had known it, but only then did I fully understand it. I felt protected in the marchioness’s tranquil world but, outside of it, I sensed the fragility of my position, only too aware of the impending trial, which, I concluded in my darker moments, could easily be used to get rid of an inconvenient royal cousin who might prove a threat to the throne.

On the way to the trial the coachmen had a wager on whether Ralegh would be executed. It was The Lord High Admiral, Nottingham, who accompanied me. He was an old associate of Grandmother’s, a frequent visitor to Hardwick. I remembered noticing as a girl that he’d easily squeezed deference out of Grandmother, so concluded he was a powerful ally. And it seemed he meant to take me under his wing, as he murmured encouragements: ‘You must not fret over this, My Lady.
You
are not on trial.’

The journey was arduous, two days in the wind and rain,
and our carriage had to be hauled out from the mud on more than one occasion, with me standing shivering under a tree, shrouded in Nottingham’s cloak. As we approached the bishop’s palace, where the trial was to take place, we had to push through a hostile crowd which had amassed, shouting against Ralegh, saying he had a Spanish heart and worse, unrepeatable, things. I hadn’t realized the extent to which he was loathed; why would I have, in my cocoon?

The carriage drew up right beside the entrance to avoid the rain and the crowds, but my clothes were still damp as clay. The great hall was a cavernous space, teaming with people and echoing with their excited gabbing; they were like a crowd awaiting a bear-baiting. They noticed me enter with Nottingham, who thankfully stuck close by my side, their chatter dulling as they watched me cross the expanse of floor. My gut churned and I feared I would be unable to speak, when I was called upon to do so.

Cecil was there and I could barely muster the words to return his greeting as I was led to a pew. I kept my eyes down. The Attorney General, Coke, in a mountain of robes, eventually called for silence. A hush fell, so quiet that I could hear his chain of office chink as he took his seat. I shook uncontrollably and hoped people would assume it was the cold.

When it was Ralegh’s turn to be questioned there were jeers as he strode to the front, seeming unperturbed, as if he were to be rewarded rather than condemned.

‘Never forgiven for his part in Essex’s downfall,’ whispered Nottingham. I hadn’t considered until then the reach of Essex’s popularity, even more than two years after his death, and perhaps it was more so because he had died a kind of martyr for the Stuarts. I gathered that in the end Essex
had
supported my cousin James’s claim, so it was inevitable, I supposed, that his perennial enemy Ralegh would lose favour once James was installed. I felt dangerously ignorant, as if I
might unwittingly make a false step at any moment and find the tables turned on me.

The crowd continued to bay outside all morning, and throughout the proceedings I was trying not to think of how I would cope with the kind of tricky interrogation Ralegh was being subjected to by Coke. ‘Just tell the truth,’ Aunt Mary had advised, but I felt sure Coke would twist my answers and turn on me. I wished to God she were by my side but she’d been ailing and was still convalescing in Sheffield.

Coke continued to badger Ralegh. ‘You meant to make Arbella a titular queen,’ he insisted repeatedly. Every time my name left the Attorney General’s lips he caught me with his eyes and held them on me for longer than was comfortable, as if he knew something I didn’t, and I felt further dug into the business. Ralegh cast me as a nonentity in his responses, as if I weren’t even sufficiently noble in his eyes to be the Queen on a chessboard. He thought to belittle me but the gallery didn’t like it, stomping their feet in protest. Better I were a nonentity, I thought, than the object of men’s ambitions.

As the questioning continued, Ralegh, deft as an acrobat, refused to condemn himself, tying Coke in knots and distancing himself from Cobham, whose guilt had already been proven. Coke was no match for Ralegh’s quick wits and his exasperation became increasingly apparent. He hooked me with his eyes once more, asking Ralegh, ‘Are you suggesting, then, it was Lady Arbella who approached
you
with this proposition?’

I gasped and the jury’s eyes turned on me, each of them wearing a look of undisguised bloodlust – they might have been a pack of wolves.

Strangely it was Cecil who jumped to my defence: ‘Let us not scandal the innocent by confusion of speech. She is innocent of all these things as I, or any man here …’

I felt a wave of nausea break over me, knowing I was about to be called to the stand. But in the end Nottingham insisted upon speaking on my behalf, denouncing Ralegh in the strongest of terms for seeking to draw me into his treason. I was publicly deemed blameless. So Cecil had meant what he said when he had declared it a mere formality.

Ralegh was convicted. Coke’s words could barely be heard above the heckling as he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered and packed off to the Tower with Cobham to await his fate.

The crowds outside were jubilant and the weather suddenly improved, the sun making an appearance for our journey home. But though there seemed an abundance of good will directed my way, I still could not shake off the sense of doom that had settled over me; for surely, I reasoned, there would always be those who sought to use me for their own ends and they would doubtless come disguised in friendship.

Ami reads on, completely absorbed, deciphering the tangle of text; she has barely stopped to sleep or eat. The past returns vividly; she remembers it all, the old Queen’s passing and the atmosphere of tension, as if England had been a pot on the boil with its lid too tight. The coronation had felt like a great expulsion of breath across the nation. She remembers the relentless rain but no one said it was a bad omen. They were all too relieved to have avoided a conflict at the old Queen’s passing. No one so much as mentioned that it might have been Lady Arbella on the throne.

The Countess of Cumberland had invited Ami and her family to watch the procession from the window of her Westminster house. Ami had dedicated a poem to the countess and read it aloud to great delight. It felt like an achievement as she’d been labouring over it for months. But Alphonso had drunk too much of the countess’s wine, had fallen asleep, snoring through his wife’s recital, leaving her obliged to invent embarrassed excuses for him. Hal had been delighted to see the royal children pass. ‘I think I will marry the Princess Elizabeth when I’m grown up,’ he’d said, making the whole company laugh. He was nine. It chokes her to think of him now and his relentless silence.

She remembers Ralegh’s trial too. Strangely, she’d forgotten it was the Lady Arbella who’d been the focus of his plot. People only talked of Ralegh and what a filthy traitor he was. How loathed he’d become, when a decade earlier he had still been thought a hero. It had shocked her at the time to see how fortune can turn so easily; but now her own fortune has
plummeted she understands that it takes only a single small event to send fate utterly awry.

Evening is falling, so she takes a stool on to her stoop to catch the last of the light, reading on like a woman possessed. She can sense that her own story is about to intersect with Lady Arbella’s. The idea excites her, makes her wonder how she will be portrayed, whether she will recognize herself. Will she be there substantially, at the heart of the story, or as a ghost in the margins?