The Girl in the Glass Tower (26 page)

Grandmother’s final illness was my first opportunity in almost three years to escape the claustrophobia of court. Since the Powder Treason, suspicion reigned, and my freedom had once more been curtailed. I was watched closely, as were many in the Queen’s household, particularly the Catholics. But I couldn’t be refused a visit to my dying grandmother, though Cecil insisted on an accompaniment of guards for my protection – I knew well enough what that meant.

The winter going was hard on the Great North Road and we made slow progress with the ice, which was invisible and lethal in places. That February the weather was so cold the Thames had frozen solid and there had been a frost fair on the ice that even a hog roast hadn’t melted.

Somewhere near Nottingham Dodderidge persuaded me to dismount Dorcas and join the women in the carriage where there were clay warmers for our hands and feet. Margaret Byron, who was recently widowed and had returned to my service, was talking tearfully to Bridget about her son. He had been sent to the household of a relative and Bridget was soothing her, saying that it would give him a chance to become a man, that he’d go soft if he stayed with his mother for ever. It didn’t seem to assuage poor Margaret’s chagrin and made me think myself glad to never have had to suffer that loss. Perhaps I had resigned myself then – an old maid of thirty-two – to the impossibility of marriage and motherhood. It had always filled me with a kind of horror, anyway, the thought of something taking shape within my body – something over which I had no control.

I passed the time reading through my correspondence
with Mistress Lanyer. Her excitement sprang out of the pages; her defence of Eve was taking shape, she said.
I have pages and pages of verse and it begins to make sense
, she wrote,
inspiration springs from my fingertips as if from some divine source
. I was a little envious, for though I had found peace in my writing and a sense of optimism and purpose, I was making no progress with the
Tragedy of Philomel
.

The tragedy had been her idea. ‘I think it particularly apt for you,’ she’d said of it once. ‘It is dark, I know, but it is ultimately a tale about a silenced woman overcoming misfortune and using her resourcefulness to make herself heard.’

‘I think of it more as a story about seeking freedom – the nightingale flying away to the forest,’ I’d replied. It is clear to me now, the way each of us interpreted the tale in the light of our own preoccupations.

‘But the nightingale is singing, telling her story. It is the song of her silence. So perhaps it is not a tragedy in the conventional sense but a tale of hope.’

‘And escape,’ I’d added.

I hadn’t been able to write more than a few muddled pages; the story simply wouldn’t emerge; there was no inspiration springing from
my
fingertips. I was a little jealous, I think.

A red-eyed and dishevelled Aunt Mary greeted me at the Hardwick gates, those same gates by which I had sought to escape, five years before.

‘She’s gone,’ my aunt said. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

She scooped me into a stifling embrace, holding it for what seemed an age, not seeming to want to let me go, and for once didn’t comment on my thinness. A dark figure appeared in the window upstairs, giving me a jolt. I pointed up with a small gasp.

‘It’s only Henry,’ she told me and I realized my imagination was playing tricks with me, for it was clearly Uncle Henry
with his broad shoulders and balding head. I hadn’t ever seen him upstairs at Hardwick, he’d been banished long before we moved there.

She led the way inside. The house was bitterly cold, all its polished surfaces unforgiving, and ghosts flitted, weaving in and out of the hangings, whispering in corners. I stood by the fire, rubbing my frozen hands together, but the warmth didn’t seem capable of penetrating the chill of six days on the road.

‘Would you like to go up now, or wait until later?’ Aunt Mary asked.

‘I don’t know.’ A paralysis came over me.

‘Come and join the family, anyway. We are all in her withdrawing chamber. She’s up at the top.’

‘She’d like that,’ I said, and not kindly. I could feel bitterness abrading me, dulling my sheen.

She began to lead the way through the familiar rooms and up the wide stone steps. ‘You don’t have to see her just yet. She’ll still be there later.’ A wild laugh burst from her, transforming into a wet sorrowful grimace. ‘I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.’

A line of gloomy Cavendish uncles awaited me: Henry, William, Charles, and Gilbert Shrewsbury – there had been no love lost there. He was probably glad the old debt to Grandmother, the bone of contention, would never have to be paid. Uncle Henry seemed more angry than sad, everything about him clenched and brooding. There was Aunt Frances, whom I hadn’t seen for years, looking old, her face blotched with grief. Several cousins: Frances’s brood, Lizzie, Grace and Robin Pierpont, a trio of virtual strangers, and Uncle William’s offspring, whom I knew well, as they’d lived at Hardwick for years. They clustered round their mother, Wylkyn with, shockingly, a full beard and little Frannie, little no more, looking just like her father. Cousin Bessie gave me
a crumpled smile; at last a face that hadn’t changed. I began to thaw but a headache emerged from nowhere, pounding at my temples.

‘Here,’ said Cousin Bessie, pressing into my hands a cup of warm spiced wine, which I took gratefully and drank back quickly, glad of the fuzziness it brought. Aunt Mary stayed by my side and I wondered which of us needed the other more. The house was encroaching on me. Uncle Henry came over and sat at my side. His face was a map of red veins, his nose bulbous. There was nothing left of the flamboyant uncle seducing us all with his magic and tricks – all except Grandmother.

‘She cut us out completely, you and me,’ he said. I could see the resentment written into him and for a moment saw him as others might: a man who felt he was owed a splendid life, thwarted, eaten away with disappointment.

‘She was good to her word, then,’ was my reply. I had not expected anything.

‘And William is relishing his barony. Baron Cavendish of Hardwick.’

It was old news; William had been given his honour nearly three years before and I wondered if Henry had brought it up because he felt I should have offered it to him. He was the oldest, after all. But I’d only done it to please Grandmother. It hadn’t worked.

‘He looks well,’ I said, and then wondered if Henry would take that as a slight too, but I didn’t really care what Henry thought any more.

Aunt Mary refilled my cup and we sat in silence. I cradled the hot wine for comfort, sipping occasionally. Henry was thrumming his fingers on the table until Mary put her hand over his to still him. Food was passed round.

‘You must have something after your journey,’ said Mary, when I refused it.

‘We stopped to eat only an hour ago,’ I said, glad that Dodderidge wasn’t present to witness my lie. My hunger was keeping me from being swallowed up by the past.

‘I think I’m ready to see her,’ I said eventually to my aunt. ‘Will you come with me?’

We left the family and climbed on up the stairs. I had become used to the splendour of the royal palaces in the last six years but still that staircase, ending on a landing flooded with light from two of Grandmother’s vast windows, took my breath away. I remained intimidated by the grandeur; that had been the intention of the design, to strike awe into the hearts of visitors.

We stopped a moment outside the door. I felt the old apprehension that had always gripped me when I was about to confront her. The door creaked open. There were hangings to block out the light and I couldn’t stop myself from wondering how they had found panels big enough and how they had managed to put them up. Lamps burned in sconces all around the chamber, giving everything a fiery glow, making it seem like a scene from a play – the witches of
Macbeth
or
Doctor Faustus
’s hell.

She was in the middle on a bed. Joan was kneeling beside her, weeping, but stood when I approached and crouched in a curtsy before leaving the room. She had grown very stout. I wondered if she too was remembering all her little cruelties. I felt Starkey there with me, holding my hand, and mustered the courage to look at Grandmother then; surprised to see she had taken on an air of benevolence in death that she never showed in life. Her skin was papery and her hands neatly folded over her chest; her eyes were shut and sunken into shadowy sockets.

I didn’t feel anything and hated myself for that. It might have been better to heave with tears, go mad with grief, like the others. But I didn’t know how. I wanted to touch her,
curious to know what a corpse felt like, but it didn’t seem right; I feared I might disrupt her calm. She wore her pearls. Someone, Joan probably, had carefully pinned them so they sat correctly. A wicked thought popped into my head that Uncle Henry would have swiped them, given half a chance. Perhaps that was one of the reasons for Joan’s vigil.

‘I know she didn’t leave you anything,’ said Mary, ‘but you must take something while you are here. There’s no need to mention it to the others.’ I could see the tears on her face glistening. I blinked several times but still couldn’t muster any of my own.

‘I don’t know,’ I said but then had an image of myself wearing those pearls at court. How impressed they would all be; even Queen Anna would think them splendid. Perhaps they would help me fit in. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Sleep on it,’ said Mary. ‘No need to decide just yet. But you should have something to remember her by.’

That night I dreamed of Grandmother. She was standing over my bed as she often had when I was ailing, as I had stood over her earlier that day; her face was set like a wax figure, the eyes blank, and I felt fear catch hold in me like a spark in tinder.

‘He hanged himself,’ she hissed, decanting those pearls from one cupped hand to the other, the clattering becoming louder and louder, unbearably loud. ‘You might as well have tied the noose yourself.’

I screamed but no sound came, though the effort must have woken me. I lay drenched in cold sweat, slowly drawing myself out of the dream, putting a hand back to touch the smooth solid wood of the bedhead as if it might anchor me, realizing that there was a storm outside and the terrible cacophony was only the rain against the window.

I understood then how foolish I had been to wish for those pearls. It is one thing to want to remember and quite
another to not be able to forget. An image came to me, of the goblet that had been presented to her at the glassworks all that time ago, before our fondness had been eroded by circumstance. I remembered my wonder on first seeing it, so fine at the edges it was almost like air; it would be silent enough and invisible enough to bear.

But even that goblet had been a mistake. It had survived in the same spot at Hardwick for two decades. But I had not considered that the peripatetic nature of my new life was not compatible with an object so fragile. It was moved from palace to palace in a carton packed with straw, and I was constantly anxious for its welfare, daring only occasionally to remove it from its packing to make sure it remained intact. I wondered how long it would survive.

The boys are quietly working on their numbers; the youngest, Peter, has been coughing all morning and Ami is worried he’s sickening for something. The weather is fine so the door is open to let in the day and the new window hangings ruffle prettily in the breeze.

She opens her hands out on the table in front of her. In six weeks they have healed with only a single stubborn callus to remind her of her days on the backfield. Her arrangement with Mansfield has been a success and at last she has a little money to spare, and time to write in the evenings when her pupils have gone home. The verses pour out of her, she has filled pages and pages with them, as if the inspiration from all that time when she was unable to write had gathered in a reservoir and only now found its release.

Edwin Mansfield and his two brothers have all proved bright and eager to learn. Two other local boys had started with her last week, through Mansfield’s recommendation. They crowd round the table in her small downstairs room, hunched silently over the work she sets. It makes for a good feeling, the sense that she is contributing something good to the world in helping these few boys. She has a soft spot for little Peter; he had asked why he needed to learn to read when he first arrived.

‘Because without reading you only have half a life,’ she’d said, watching his puzzled face. ‘Reading will open doors for you to new worlds.’ He had looked at her in wonder then.

‘Like the men who sail to the Americas?’

‘Yes, something like that.’

It turned out that Peter had a voracious appetite for learning, spurred on by a curiosity that led him to question everything. He reminded her of Hal as a small boy, not because they were in any way physically alike, but because Hal too had a thirst for knowledge.

Nothing could touch the deep sense of loss she felt at Hal’s silence but her writing has gone some way to filling the void and hope finally came yesterday in the shape of a letter, curt and brief, a mere three lines to say he was being offered a paid position and that on Sunday he would be home. She could see his anger in the pressure he’d applied to the quill, making deep indentations in the paper, but it was a good sign nonetheless that he was going to come and see her, though he had given no indication of how long he would stay. His visit, however short, would at least offer her the opportunity to explain things to him, to show him the letters his father wrote to her, to give him a sense of who Henry Hunsdon was.

Edwin asks Ami to explain a principle of geometry, coming to sit next to her while she draws out a diagram. As they are discussing it she notices a young woman half hidden behind the open door, who ducks away when their eyes meet.

‘Leave us be, Joyce!’ shouts Edwin. ‘You’ve no business here.’

‘It’s your sister?’ Ami asks.

‘Yes, she won’t stop bleating about wanting to learn her letters.’ He makes a scowl.

Ami can see the girl’s head now at the window, an explosion of straw-coloured curls barely tamed by a linen coif and the same square face of her brothers and father.

‘Let her come in,’ says Ami. ‘It can’t hurt for her to see what goes on here. It’s almost time to break, anyway.’

‘Fa won’t like it.’ Edwin shrugs and little Peter jumps up to grab his sister’s hand to pull her inside.

The girl stands at a loss in the cramped room and Ami makes the boys shuffle down on the bench to accommodate her. Edwin sighs pointedly.

‘So you are Joyce Mansfield?’ Ami says.

‘I am.’ Her timidity makes her seem younger than she is, but now she can see her properly Ami estimates she must be the oldest of the Mansfield siblings and it disappoints her that Edwin should treat her with such disdain.

‘And you’d like to learn to read?’

‘I truly would,’ Joyce whispers.

‘I know what Fa’ll have to say about that,’ says Edwin, and just as Ami is about to respond, little Peter begins to cough again. This time it is the distinctive hacking bark of croup. Joyce is on her feet in an instant and rubbing his back.

‘Take him home, why don’t you,’ says Edwin.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ rasps Peter. ‘I’m perfectly fine.’

‘Why don’t you go up and lie on the bed for a while,’ suggests Ami, reaching for the pot of lavender honey she keeps on a high shelf. She remembers nursing Hal through the croup, how small he had seemed in the big bed. The memory stings more than it should, like a paper cut. She spoons out a measure of honey, giving it to the little boy to soothe his throat.

‘That’s an unusual jar,’ says Joyce, running a finger over a line of indecipherable writing carved into the pottery surface.

‘It is, isn’t it? I found it here when I moved to the house. It serves me well as a honey pot.’

Ami sends the others out to eat their dinner on the stoop and takes Peter’s hot little hand, leading him up to the bedchamber. Joyce follows them to help, folding back the covers and closing the shutters.

‘He seems feverish,’ says Ami, noting the bright patches of red on his cheeks.

‘The baby’s been ailing. He must have caught it off her,’ says Joyce. ‘Shall I fetch a damp cloth for his forehead?’

Ami explains where she will find the ewer of water and the clean cloths and asks her to tell one of her brothers to run home and warn their mother. She inspects the child’s body for signs of a rash, finding nothing sinister, but his skin is burning.

‘I’m fine.’ His voice is feeble.

‘You’re not,’ she says. ‘But if you rest, you shall be in a day or so. Close your eyes.’ She begins to sing a lullaby, one she used to sing to Hal as an infant. Joyce returns and sits on his other side, folding the cool cloth over his head, and before long he has drifted off so Ami tiptoes out, leaving the girl with her brother.

Downstairs, Edwin has returned, puffed out from running. ‘Ma asks if he can stay here for the meantime and Fa’ll come and get him later. She can’t leave the baby, see.’

Ami settles the boys back down to their lessons and through the afternoon they can hear Peter hacking upstairs until Mansfield arrives.

‘I hear the little lad’s afflicted.’

‘He’s up in bed,’ Ami says. ‘His sister’s minding him.’

Mansfield’s manner with her has completely transformed; it is almost as if he sees her as an equal, as if the evidence of her learning has somehow divested her of her dubious reputation, taken a little of the woman out of her. He remains at a respectful distance and no longer silently appraises her body.

‘Sorry to have burdened you with his care but my missus has her hands full with the baby.’ He looks awkward, as if he doesn’t like to feel indebted.

‘It’s been no trouble. Joyce has done it all, really. Listen, why doesn’t he stay for a couple of days?’

‘I couldn’t …’

‘I have room for him here and with your wife so busy …’

‘Well …’

‘Perhaps Joyce could stay and care for him. I assume she’s already had the croup. It’ll take the weight off Mistress Mansfield.’

He seems hesitant, so Ami says, ‘Look, I’d
like
to do it.’

She’s fond of little Peter but she has another motive, wants an excuse to have Joyce under her roof for a few days. If the girl’s so keen to learn to read then what better opportunity to get her started? She hasn’t forgotten Mansfield’s words about not wanting his daughters ruined by book learning, suspects his newfound respect for her education might not extend to his own girls. But she can’t bear to think of Joyce missing out on an education for no better reason than that she was born female. So when he reluctantly agrees, she reins in her enthusiasm for fear of arousing his suspicion.

That evening, when Peter is settled, they leave him with a little bell beside the bed in case he should wake. Joyce’s delight is palpable when Ami suggests that she begin learning to read.

‘Oh yes!’ she exclaims. ‘I didn’t dare so much as to dream of such a thing.’

‘But don’t mention it; not even to your brothers. I’m not sure your father would understand. He fears learning will spoil you.’

‘I won’t say a thing. I know what Fa’s like. ’Spect he’ll come round in the end though. He’s softer than he lets on.’

They sit at the table and Ami begins to explain the way each letter makes a sound and how the sounds join up to make words. Joyce is a quick learner and is soon concentrating on copying out simple phrases while Ami gets on with her own writing.

Distracting thoughts swirl about her head. She had noticed a certain hostility in the marketplace recently and it
is niggling at her. The pie-woman was odd, wouldn’t look her in the eye, and said she’d sold out when Ami could clearly see several pies in a basket behind the stall. She has also been aware of people whispering and glancing her way, but she puts her worries to the back of her mind, trying to dismiss them as unfounded, telling herself that she’s allowing her imagination to run away with her. Turning her thoughts to her writing, she cogitates on the extent to which Lady Arbella was misunderstood by the Queen’s women and how she might convey it. People can so easily misread a person’s actions.

They’d thought Lady Arbella such a ruthless wit when truly it was nothing but her desire to express things exactly as she saw them – she couldn’t have been more oblivious. Once Ami had witnessed a pair of the Queen’s women sidling up to her; one was dressed head to toe in embroidered satin, so new you could almost smell the tailor’s chalk on it.

‘How do you find my new outfit?’ she’d asked, opening her arms out and swaying from side to side to best display the hang of her skirts.

Lady Arbella had looked her up and down for some time before saying, ‘It looks much like your old one.’

A snort of laughter had escaped from the woman’s companion, leaving her looking, in her splendid dress, as if she’d been slapped.

‘Why is she laughing?’ Lady Arbella had whispered.

‘She thinks you witty,’ Ami had replied.

‘I merely say things as I see them. The dress is identical to the one she usually wears, only in a different fabric.’

‘But nobody speaks the truth in this place. That is what makes it funny.’

Lady Arbella had seemed utterly baffled. It was in those seemingly insignificant moments that Ami began to understand her acquaintance as someone who did not fit easily,
even in the rarefied world of the court where she naturally belonged.

‘What is it you are working on?’ asks Joyce, drawing Ami away from the past and back to her small room.

‘I’m telling someone’s story. Well, rather, they have told their own story and I am shaping it into verse.’

Joyce is silent for several moments and then says, ‘What an incredible thing, to think of a whole life in words.’ Her face is filled with wonder as if she’s just witnessed an eclipse or some other inexplicable happening. ‘It’s a kind of magic, that marks on a page can say so much.’

The following day two more of her pupils have fallen ill, so they are a depleted group, with just the two older Mansfield boys doing their lessons. But by the end of the week little Peter is well enough to return home and convalesce, leaving Joyce despondent at the thought of not being able to continue her lessons.

‘We shall think of something,’ Ami says. ‘And my door is always open to you, if you can find a reason to get away in the evenings.’

She settles back into her writing once Joyce has gone. Now the inspiration is flowing it is hard for her to remember what it was like when she was unable to write. Thoughts of Lady Arbella flap about her mind. The story has begun to possess her in a disturbing way she hadn’t expected and exacerbates, rather than diminishes, her guilt. She returns to the pages, shuffling through them, re-reading sections, believing she might find the answers she knows are not there.
Emotion jostles me
. ‘Tell me what you mean,’ she whispers, but there is no answer, only the rumbling purr of the cat.

Verse slides from her pen, weaving itself into shape until it becomes too dark to continue and she notices that the fire has burnt right down. She throws a log on the hearth,
watching the bark catch and flare up, crackling, sending brightness into the room. Taking a taper, she touches it to the flames and goes to the box of candles, finding only a single one left, when she is sure there had been at least half a dozen. The unnerving thought that someone has been in her house, rummaging through her things, strikes her suddenly.

She looks around, suspicious now, and everything seems to have been moved slightly, her papers disordered, the kitchen utensils untidied, the instruments on the high shelf out of place. She climbs on a stool with the candle to see if the patterns of dust will reveal anything but there is no dust to speak of. Perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her.

She sits back down to continue her work but unease prods, distracting her, so she goes to bed, lying awake in the dark, thinking of Hal’s visit on Sunday. But she worries, remembering the curt tone of his letter, and lying in the pitch black she feels the weight of her inadequacies as a mother and as a friend and neither can she shake off that feeling that a trespasser has been in her house.