The Girl in the Glass Tower (31 page)

We arrived at Chatsworth on the seventeenth of September. Uncle Henry had grown fat and still harboured his glowering resentment but I decided to turn my remaining residue of charm on him. There was no sense in holding on to old grudges. In his way he had sought to free me, to put me on the throne where I thought I belonged, even if he had hoped to better himself in the process. The house was dilapidated, the roof was leaking in places and ivy had found its way into my bedchamber through a window that wouldn’t quite shut. It was growing up the hangings and winding about the plasterwork and was rather lovely in its own way, bringing the outside in, though seemed also to be the harbinger of ruin for that once splendid house.

The place was groaning with guests, both our party and several others I didn’t know. From my ivy-invaded window I watched a game of bowls take place below among a group of young men, swigging periodically from a great ewer containing God only knew what. They became increasingly rowdy and began to throw down wagers, then two of them got into a scuffle over something. I wondered if they were some of the men whom Uncle Henry had once hidden in the woods around Hardwick, ready to spirit me away to my marriage, but shut down that thought before it led to others of my previous intended’s brother, whom I couldn’t bear to name even silently in my head.

God knows how Uncle Henry could afford to feed us all but the boards were heaving come suppertime: a suckling pig, a side of venison, several geese and other birds, a vast eel pie and another fishy concoction. I didn’t eat but pretended
as I used to, with Ruff profiting beneath the table. Even cake had lost its allure and my soft fleshiness had soon melted away.

A ruddy-faced man was presented to me but in the hubbub I missed his name. He was dressed in satin the colour of egg yolk and wore a fistful of expensive rings. He spoke with his mouth full and I couldn’t hear what he was saying, only fragments. ‘Shame we didn’t manage to pull it off … what a coup it would have been … splendid, splendid …’ I nodded. He wiped his mouth with a large napkin and went at his teeth with an ivory toothpick, making my stomach lurch. ‘Do you hear horses?’

I nodded again, ‘I believe so.’

‘That’ll be my boy …’

I made an excuse – ‘I’m in want of repose after my journey’ – and left the company to squirrel away in my bedchamber with Bridget and Margaret. Soon after, Dodderidge and Crompton came to bid us goodnight.

‘Couldn’t get away,’ said Dodderidge. ‘Goodness, I don’t know how you managed to escape Lord Beauchamp. He monopolized you for the entire evening.’

‘Lord Beauchamp?’ I didn’t understand.

‘You were talking to him all night,’ interjected Crompton. ‘He sat beside you at supper.’

‘That was Beauchamp?’

‘The very same.’

I lowered myself on to the bed, light-headed.

The two men left and Bridget was cleaning hair from a comb at the window. ‘The birds’ll like it for their nests,’ she was saying. ‘Now, what needs doing? I’d better go and rinse these so they’ll be dry in the morning. They’re filthy from the road. Would you give me a hand, Margaret?’ The two women gathered up a few of the fine linens. ‘Will you be all right here alone for a few minutes?’

My head was churning. What was it Beauchamp had said as the horses approached?
That’ll be my boy …
Which boy? The one I’d been betrothed to or the other one; the one who had crushed my heart?
My father put me up to it
; his words were seared into me. Questions circled. Had I stumbled upon a wasps’ nest? Was this yet another plan concocted by my Uncle Henry? Which brother had arrived?

Something incomprehensible was happening to me, over which I had no control: a quake, a longing opening up like a vast mouth, that rapacious appetite awakened. I feared that if I set eyes on Will Seymour, despite everything, my resolve would crumble. Yet paradoxically I found myself hoping, against my better judgement, that it
was
he who’d clattered into the yard during supper.

I went to the window but darkness had fallen and no one was about, just a couple of men guarding the gates haloed in the dim glow of their lamps. I imagined him downstairs at the table in the seat I had vacated. Would he know that I had been there only minutes before, had I left a scent like a bitch in season? Grandmother made herself known:
Desire is a demon; it will possess you, my girl, if you don’t take pains to resist it.
I feared it was too late for that.

I tried to remind myself of my powers of self-denial, the strength I could draw on, and bring some of that to bear upon my situation. I had to get away, away from the danger. We would pack up and leave under cover of darkness. But the roads were teeming with thieves and brigands; we would have been dead by dawn. I forced myself to think of God, but it was no good. Will Seymour had set up camp in me and there was nothing else; even Starkey had been pushed to the side.

Bridget and Margaret came bounding back full of talk from the kitchens. Bridget was flushed and shiny and seemed a little drunk. ‘They’re a rough lot in your uncle’s employ.’

‘I hope no one has upset you, Bridget.’

‘Don’t worry on my part, My Lady. I can look after myself. The cook was grumbling about a party arriving late and having to produce more food when the meal had been cleared. He got into a row with Mister Seymour’s man over it.’

‘Mister Seymour – which one?’ I forgot to hide my eagerness.

Bridget inspected me with a quizzical look. ‘Don’t vex yourself, it’s not the one you were promised to, it’s one of the other ones. What’re their names? You know.’

‘I can’t remember.’ My voice was too firm, like that of a child who hasn’t yet learned to fib effectively; I was remembering there was a third brother, Francis, who was younger, but Bridget was on to the next topic and didn’t notice my discomfort.

‘You should see the state of the kitchens.’

‘It is Will Seymour,’ said Margaret. ‘I heard someone say it.’

A wave of nausea broke over me.

I found a sheet of paper and scrawled a note:
Meet me at the Stand Tower. It is on the hill to the south-west of the house. At first light. A
. I folded it, sealed it and said to Bridget, ‘Will you see that Mister Seymour gets this. Give it to his man.’

She was regarding me with that look again. ‘It’s only a query about Mistress Lanyer’s poem for the Prince. You should curb your curiosity before it kills you.’ This time the fib was convincing.

Dawn diluted the darkness. First a single bird sang out then another in reply and soon the chorus was in full voice. I had slept fitfully, unable to quell the clamour in my mind and that great inner mouth demanding to be fed. Sliding out of bed, I dressed quietly so as not to wake Bridget and Margaret. It didn’t seem to matter that my laces weren’t properly tied; the
usual trussed-up feeling seemed incompatible with my mood. I threw on a hooded cloak and tucked Ruff under my arm as an excuse, should anyone wonder what I was doing out alone at dawn.

I could hear the kitchen staff beginning to wake as I passed, and once outside I slunk by the bakehouse where they were already hard at work. My senses were assaulted by the smell of fresh bread; I snatched a sweet roll from a tray left outside to cool and sank my teeth into its soft body, stuffing it in, unable to control my greed, wanting more as soon as it was gone, filching a second.

I crept on past the stables and through the orchard, allowing Ruff to run ahead, and began to climb the hill. There was not much cover; just the occasional tree, and I hoped I wasn’t being watched from the house. I had worn my slippers for stealth but they were wet through with dew within minutes, as was the hem of my dress, which flapped cold against my ankles. But I barely noticed the discomfort, nor was I aware of the ache in my thighs from climbing the steep path. I could have walked uphill the length of England that morning.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the tower might have been locked. The keyhole was cobwebby and it looked as if the building hadn’t been used in a decade. A memory struck me of that door, freshly sanded, leaning against the wall, waiting to be fitted, and that dead bird falling like a stone. Now the same door was rotten in places and there was a hole at the bottom large enough to admit rats or even foxes. The latch was rusted but I jerked it out of its slot and, holding it up, heaved my shoulder against the door. Nothing budged, so I admitted defeat and sat on the steps watching the path.

He came on horseback through the woods to the rear; to avoid being seen from the house, he said of it later. I stood as he dismounted, something flailing in my stomach, and
Ruff rushed to greet him, dancing about his feet. He seemed taller than I’d remembered, altogether bigger, not a boy at all but a man.

I began to speak as he did and we both stopped, looking at each other across a gulf of awkwardness.

‘The tower’s locked,’ I said, finally.

‘I thought my heart would break these last weeks.’ His face was crumpled.

I wanted to dismiss it, say something glib like
It sounds as though you’ve been reading too much poetry
, to lighten the atmosphere. But I couldn’t.

‘Are you able to forgive me?’

I didn’t know how to respond; all the words that came to mind seemed trite in the face of my overwhelming urge to feel his body against mine. ‘Come,’ I said, leading the way round to the back of the building.

As I touched him with my ungloved hand, the mere graze of fingers, flesh on flesh, I felt the full force of my lust, understanding only then how it can transform a person until they become unrecognizable even to their own self. It was a blessed relief not to be me, but to be some animal version of me, something dormant for millennia reawakened. Was that the demon Grandmother spoke of? We fell to the ground in a scramble, mouth to mouth, limpets suckered to one another. Then we lay in the grass, I with my head on his chest, he stroking my hair.

‘My father told me you’d be here at Chatsworth. I couldn’t stay away but I said I wanted no part in any new plot involving you. We fought over it last night. He was drunk. I hit him, bloodied his nose.’

‘You hit him?’ I was secretly glad and hoped Beauchamp’s nose had bled all over his egg-yolk satin. ‘Does he know you are here with me now?’

‘No and he won’t know. This is between you and me.’

I sat up and looked him in the face. ‘I don’t care about anyone else or what they think.’ I had an image of the future spread out before me. In it we were wed and I had come into my father’s lands – I was a woman of means. We had a house of pale stone, with modest windows and wild gardens where grew a flowering cherry. ‘I will marry you when the time is right.’

A smile broke over his face. ‘I’m supposed to be the one to propose.’

‘Well, I am not any ordinary woman who waits to be asked.’ I was smiling too, yet still heard Grandmother’s old refrain:
it will make you seem meek
, even heard the faint clicking of her pearls. She’d been wrong.

We fell back into our embrace.

I pulled away. ‘So what is your answer?’ I said it to tease him, surprised by my uncharacteristic levity.

‘It was not a question. I didn’t know I had a choice.’

‘You don’t!’

We kissed again.

‘But this must be kept secret for the time being.’ It occurred to me that I would have to reach some kind of agreement with the King. ‘We wouldn’t want to ruffle any feathers.’ A stream of thought passed through my head. Any threat I might have posed once had faded to inconsequence. A darker truth prodded at me, but I cast it off.

‘The King’s permission. Will he give it?’

‘I fancy he will.’ I refused to entertain the possibility that he wouldn’t. ‘More than anyone, he believes wholeheartedly in the institution of marriage.’

‘So do I,’ said William, ‘and more so with permission. I don’t want my children born in the Tower, as my father was.’

That pulled me up, made me feel wrong to have had unkind thoughts of Beauchamp when he had been born into such misfortune. ‘Can he remember his mother?’

‘He rarely talks of her but once he told me he had a memory of being wrenched from her. She was screaming, begging for them not to be separated.’

I pressed my mouth over his to silence him. I had sensed my freedom just in front of me, so near if I reached out I might have felt it against my fingertips; but his story made it seem further away, indistinct.

‘I once came up here as a child with one of the grooms, dressed in a pair of breeches I’d pilfered from the laundry, and rode bareback like a demon.’ He looked at me, his curiosity apparent. ‘They all wanted me to be a boy, you see, and so did I.’

‘You are perfect as you are,’ he said.

I realize now that of all the people who have ever come close to me, he was the only one who never made a comment about my thinness or implied that my body was unwomanly. I’d been called whip thin, garcon manqué, straight up-and-down, but no one had called me ‘perfect’ before.

We lay in silence for a while. I listened to the throb of his heart through his clothes, evidence that he was a living thing – my living thing. Part of me broke off and watched that woman in the grass at ease, entwined, opening herself to such close scrutiny, wondering what had possessed her, feeling something resembling contempt for her lack of control.

The sun had crept up and was dappling us with bright spots of light through the trees, meaning our moment of ordinary bliss would have to be brought to an end.

The idea of separation was unbearable; I wanted to shrink him and slip him inside my clothes to wear beside my heart. The watching part of me was scornful, derided such a desire, reminded me that this man with his Tudor blood, like mine, represented a transaction – a play for power. But I was not
listening to that part of me and, determined to have a relic to keep, took my penknife from my purse.

‘What are you doing?’ There was a minuscule flash of alarm in his eyes that I liked. It made me feel he was in my power.

‘Trust me.’

I held a whorl of his sand-coloured hair between my fingers and sliced it off at the roots.