The Girl in the Glass Tower (4 page)

‘
Noli me tangere
,’ blurted someone with a burst of laughter.

‘She’s only royal, not divine,’ laughed another.

I yearned to disappear and considered running out, back through the tangle of corridors to the stables and Dorcas – riding her all the way Derbyshire at a gallop. How could I have known then how that odious term would stick to me? I would for years, well beyond Elizabeth’s reign, be known as ‘
Noli me tangere
’ – ‘Touch me not’. Never to my face, of course, but I would not be allowed to forget that initial humiliation.

It was Lady Rich who came to my rescue. I didn’t know who she was then but she appeared as if from nowhere. ‘Leave the poor child alone.’ She crouched down to my level and smiled broadly. Grandmother’s voice passed through my head:
Don’t smile, it will make you seem meek
. But there was nothing enfeebling about Lady Rich’s smile; on the contrary, it was dazzling and made her seem like the only person in the place worth looking at.

‘Ignore them,’ she said quietly. ‘They’d all kill each other to have a drop of your blood, so hold your head high and make for the door. I will be right behind you.’

Once we were out of earshot she said: ‘What a collection of small-minded old crows, they are. Don’t listen to them.’ She laughed in an abandoned burst, throwing her head back before turning to me. ‘I am Penelope Devereux, or Lady Rich for those who prefer, and your aunt sent word asking that I keep an eye on you until she arrives.’

‘Then your father is the Earl of Essex?’ I said, glad to remember the Devereuxs in Grandmother’s great book of the peerage.

‘Was,’ she replied. ‘It is my brother who is now the earl.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ I felt crushed at having made yet another
faux pas – how could I have forgotten the famous, young Earl of Essex – but she smiled that dazzling smile once more.

‘For goodness’ sake, how would you have known. You’ve not been here five minutes. You’ve never seen my brother.’ She paused and I noticed how people gawped at her as we passed. If I had wondered about the dark woman’s unusual beauty I was sure of Lady Rich’s. It was not only her obvious qualities – the tumbling golden hair, the bright black-star eyes that the poets had written of – it was also her sheer presence that seemed to diminish all those around her. ‘Wait until you do,’ she added. Making me wonder if the brother was at all like her.

‘It’s a shame we missed the end of the poem,’ she continued. ‘Do you know the story?’

I shook my head.

‘No, I suppose you’re thought too young for such things.’

We walked on in silence until eventually we arrived at my aunt’s rooms, where my maids were unpacking and Dodderidge was checking items off on a list.

As Lady Rich made to leave I asked, ‘How does the story of Philomel end?’

She looked at me for a moment as if deciding how to phrase her response. ‘Well, let’s just say the sisters got their revenge but the price was high and the gods turned Philomel into a nightingale to save her from her brother-in-law’s wrath.’

I wanted to ask more, to know what Philomel’s revenge was and its high price, but she had disappeared down the passage before I could form my question.

I did not have to wait long to find out if the Earl of Essex was like his sister. He was seated to my right at supper and she was on his other side. They were a gilded pair, as if God
had used up all His quota of charisma when making them. I hardly dared look at him.

The Queen was to my left. Of course I had been filled with trepidation on encountering her but she made a great fuss of me, which made
me
feel gilded too. I felt quite at home in her presence, for she was intimidating in much the same way as Grandmother – strict, self-possessed, guarded – so I knew exactly how to behave to gain her approval. She talked to me of Grandmother with fondness, told me she had known her almost all her life and that she hoped she would accompany me to court the next time.

‘Your grandmother is one of the most astute women I know,’ she said. ‘I admire her greatly.’

The Queen ate with her gloves on. I had never seen that before, all the grease soaking into the chamois making it dark. They were replaced swiftly, by a servant, between courses, allowing me a glimpse of her age-spotted hands. She, like Grandmother, didn’t really smile, though her brown eyes flashed occasionally if something amused her. Supper was a sedate affair, a musician strumming quietly nearby, the soft babble of conversation, and the Queen carefully sipping watered wine and eating little.

The presence of Essex on my other side pulsated, igniting in me a kind of profound and inexplicable embarrassment. I had never been at such close proximity to such a creature. He smelled of flowers, a thick scent like hyacinths, I had never known a man to smell like that, not even Uncle Henry, whom Grandmother always said was ‘given to flamboyance’. His hair fell in glossy dark tendrils and his eyes, though I didn’t dare look at them properly, were a piercing violet blue. His manner with the Queen was shockingly casual. He spoke across me to her, saying something to the effect that she was looking comely, as if she were some wench in the laundry and not the Queen of England.

She leaned over and pinched his cheek, quite hard, leaving a pink blot, saying, ‘Bad boy,’ whereupon he laughed, murmuring, ‘You know you’re fond of it.’

The French ambassador and his wife were presented later in the evening and she said, placing one of those gloved hands lightly on my head, ‘One day she will be even as I am.’ I noticed a whisper pass round the chamber as her words were repeated from mouth to ear. I saw Lord Burghley and his unprepossessing son Robert Cecil nod between themselves in approval. I knew them as great friends of Grandmother’s. She had told me that the court danced to Burghley’s tune but that it would not seem so. That was his gift, she said, to seem innocuous, and that I was to make a good impression on him and his son, for it would set me in good stead.

As I was distracted watching that seemingly innocuous pair, Essex leaned in to me and said very quietly, ‘I hear you are a cold fish, Arbella Stuart,’ not using my title, as he should have. I was quite light-headed with the whiff of that lush floral scent and grappled for a response when he added, ‘My sister says you don’t like to be touched.’

I didn’t know if he was mocking me.

‘Lost your tongue?’ he said.

I was reminded of Philomel – inevitably – and her severed tongue.

Then, beneath the table, he took his index finger and stroked it slowly over the back of my hand. I dared not move a hair. The place where his finger had met my skin felt seared, as if he had branded me. ‘But your birth and blood give you the right to remoteness and, cold fish or not, I plan to wed you when you are old enough to –’ He stopped mid-sentence and turned away to speak to someone else, leaving me hanging.

I racked my brains to think of what he might have meant
to say. Did he not know I was to be promised to the Duke of Parma, whoever that was? I saw that Robert Cecil had his eyes fixed firmly on Essex as if he had been trying to lip-read. The look on his face was stony and he turned to say something to his father, who in turn looked towards the earl. It made me suddenly feel out of my depth and I was glad when Aunt Mary finally arrived and asked permission that I might retire for the night.

As we were preparing for bed and I stood in nothing but my thin shift while my maid rummaged in the trunk for my nightgown, Aunt Mary said, ‘Look, sweeting, you are becoming a woman.’ She pointed at me. I followed the direction of her finger down to my chest, where the outline of my new bud breasts was visible through the fine linen. I crossed my arms firmly over them, turning away, pretending to look for something so I didn’t have to meet her gaze. I didn’t want to become a woman. All the talk of marriage had unsettled me.

‘Have your monthlies started?’ she asked, oblivious to my discomfort.

‘No.’ I pretended to search for something in my jewellery box, removing its contents and replacing them item by item.

‘May I?’ she asked, holding up a comb.

I nodded, allowing her to stroke it through my hair. It was a familiar ritual, the asking and granting of permission, and seemed entirely natural, but I was reminded of those taunting women and felt an echo of the earlier humiliation. Then a question surfaced in my mind: would my husband have to ask my permission? Just the idea of it – the act – mortified me.

‘Do you eat properly?’ asked Aunt Mary as she teased a knot out of my frizz of hair. ‘If you don’t eat properly it can prevent your monthlies from starting.’

I said nothing but my mind was whirring. She had unwittingly given me a solution. I would not become a woman.

We settled into the bed and she said, ‘You did well this evening, sweeting, acted far beyond your years. The Queen was impressed, Burghley and Cecil too; that counts for a lot.’ She was quiet a moment and I felt glad to have her beside me. In the dim candlelight I could see my mother in her face, her uncomplicated gaze, her generous mouth and the cloud of wild chestnut hair that was escaping from her nightcap. ‘What did Essex say to you?’

I thought I oughtn’t tell her but did. ‘He said he’d marry me one day.’

She huffed out a sigh. ‘I wouldn’t listen to that, if I were you. It won’t be Essex who decides where you will wed.’

‘Am I to be wed to the Duke of Parma, then?’

‘Heaven knows,’ she replied. ‘I suspect the Queen is trying to win him over with a promise she has no intention of delivering.’

‘So I won’t be wed to him?’

‘It’s unlikely, I’d say. I doubt she’d want you married to a Catholic and producing heirs of the wrong faith.’

I wanted to ask her more but she sounded slightly bitter, I didn’t know why, and then she leaned over to snuff out the candle before saying in the dark something I’d heard more times than I could count from Grandmother: ‘Shame you were not born a boy, things would be much more straightforward.’

I touched my fingers to the bud breasts, pressing them hard as if to push them back inside.

A bang at the door wakes Ami. She is momentarily disorientated and realizes she must have fallen asleep reading. There is another bang, this time accompanied by a shout. She assumes it is Hal, until she remembers he left for court the day before. Lady Arbella’s papers are spread over her lap.
Shame you were not born a boy
: the memory of what she was reading before she’d dropped off sidles back to her.

It had been slow going; the papers were half destroyed and barely legible in places, scrawled as if written in urgency, the ink smeared and smudged. She has found no sign yet that she was forgiven. But to find herself briefly there – her younger self – was like a glimpse of her own half-obscured reflection in a window. She’d been nineteen and acutely aware of her lack of nobility among those terrifying women, who looked down on her for her low birth and perceived loose morals. They resented being forced into grudging politeness, for Henry Hunsdon was the Queen’s first cousin and it wouldn’t do to upset his young mistress. They’d all assumed she’d be discarded in a month but she hadn’t been. Six years she’d loved Henry Hunsdon and he her, confounding them all.

Ami remembered the incident. Lady Arbella – just an unsmiling, big-eyed girl of thirteen then, with nobility stitched through her – abruptly leaving the reading. She hadn’t understood at the time what had happened, didn’t know what to make of the biblical snippet of Latin:
Noli me tangere
. Perhaps the child was frightened by the story. Truth be told, she’d been glad that the girl hadn’t had to hear about how Procne murdered her son and served him up to his father. Those Greeks, the lengths they would go for revenge!

She is pondering on the coincidence that she’d thought the writings might be that very same tragedy transformed to drama by Lady Arbella when another bang jolts her properly awake.

‘Widow Lanyer. You know the reason I am here. My patience is wearing thin.’ She hates being called ‘Widow’; it makes her feel as if her time is spent. She may be forty-six years old but there is life in her yet. There is a currency in widows, but they must be either young or rich and she is neither.

‘Widow Lanyer!’ It is Mansfield here for payment – again. One of his men replaced a number of tiles for her last winter and made some other repairs to her falling-down dwelling. Mansfield is respected here in Clerkenwell; a man who has pulled himself up by his own boot straps. She doesn’t want to get on his wrong side but there’s little she can do; she knows she hasn’t the means to settle the bill.

She continues to sit motionless, hoping he will assume she is out, but can’t help thinking of the bucket half filled with rainwater that sits in the upstairs bedchamber – testimony to yet another lost tile. She supposes that Hal will be paid for his services at the palace. Thanks to Queen Anna’s inexhaustible enthusiasm for masques and entertainments, there are opportunities. But it will be a pittance; most of the musicians have their own means, or a benefactor of one kind or another, and play at court for the status. It will go no way to settle the debts that are building up. Mansfield is not her only creditor.

He is knocking at the window now; she can see his outline through the thick glass. She can no longer afford the fine panes she was once accustomed to and her mind turns to wondering whether the chance opportunities of her youth have left her unprepared for the straitened circumstances she finds herself in. Thinking back to the comforts
of her childhood under the wing of a countess, a woman who saw in Ami, lowly born as she undeniably was, some spark of intelligence that pleased her, she cannot help but feel a sense of loss. Ami’s father had been her lutenist; she’d taken pity when both he and Ami’s mother had died in the same week.

She consoles herself with the reminder that she may no longer have the luxuries of her early years, nor the illustrious connections and the sense that doors would open with ease, as if well oiled, but what she will never lose is the education that the countess had invested in her. And what is education if it is not a means to opening doors?

Mansfield has his face pressed right up to the glass now, his forehead flattened and yellow. ‘I can see you there. Open up!’

She puts the papers to one side and pulls herself out of the chair, still fuzzy with sleep, making for the door which she opens ajar.

‘I’m so very sorry, Mister Mansfield, but I haven’t the means to pay you.’

‘Every time! What is your excuse now?’ His tone is bereft of sympathy.

‘I have no excuse –’ She is about to tell him of Hal’s employment at the palace but he shoves the door open, pushes her aside and steps into the room.

He is a broad man with a shock of straw-coloured hair and large hands. Mansfield started as a labourer and now has several working for him. He’s known as a grafter; people like him and she supposes it is for the fact that he is a living demonstration that it is possible, with hard work, to go up in the world.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘Can I offer you something to drink? A cup of beer perhaps.’

He nods and makes a grunt of assent, seating himself
uninvited at the table. ‘I find it hard to believe you are lacking in funds. Isn’t there a book with your name on it?’

‘I wish I could say my poems earned me a living, but sadly that is far from the case.’

‘It is put about that you have noble patrons – ladies and countesses. Surely they will not see you go short?’

She pours a measure of beer into a leather cup and hands it to him. ‘That may have once been true, but it is no longer so.’

‘What is it about then, this book of yours?’

‘It’s about Eve.’ She sees little point in explaining to him that the aim of her work was to excuse womankind’s sins and his response proves her right.

‘A book about a wicked woman? I’d have thought you wouldn’t be able to print them fast enough.’ He grins at her.

‘It is not the kind of book you imagine. Do you think if it were as popular as you say, that I would be going about in a dress such as this?’ She lifts her arms to show her sleeves where they are almost worn through at the elbows and scarred from where the pearls have been snipped off and sold. He clasps hold of one of them, stroking the threadbare fabric, allowing his hand to move further up, so the back of it skims her breast. Her breath stutters. It is a long time since she has been touched by a man in such a way.

‘Perhaps, then, you can pay me in kind.’ His mouth is slightly open and he inhales abruptly, as if attempting to keep control of himself.

Pulling her arm away, she says, ‘Do you have some musical instruments that need mending? That I can do for you.’ She is being disingenuous. She knows what he’s getting at.

‘I do have an instrument that needs attention, as it happens.’ He brings a hand to the front of his breeches, laughing, seeming pleased with his joke.

She doesn’t laugh. ‘What is it? A lute? A viol?’

‘Don’t be coy with me.’ He stands, grabbing her by the waist, and pushes her up against the table. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’ He is right up close so she can smell the beer and tobacco on his breath.

She turns her face away sharply. ‘Take your hands off me, or I will shout for the neighbour.’

She doubts whether Goodwife Stringer would even respond, and if she did, seeing her in this unwanted clinch would only serve as evidence of Ami’s perceived immorality and add fuel to the woman’s suspicions.

‘So you don’t mind whoring if the man is noble enough, but not for scum like me.’ He is growling tight to her ear, has pushed his hand right up under her skirts and is touching her. She struggles to get out of his grip. ‘Your legs only open to access the court. Is that what you are saying?’

She will not dignify his comments with an explanation. His fingers continue to excavate her private parts. She crosses her legs tightly.

‘I’ve heard it said that the nobleman who made you his mistress’ – with this word a little shower of spit lands on her cheek, causing her to flinch and him in turn to grip her more tightly – ‘was old enough to be your grandfather.’

There is barely a soul on this earth who believes the truth: that she loved Henry Hunsdon deeply despite his age and that she would have loved him just as much if he’d not been who he was.

‘Remove your hands from me. I will not say it again.’ She is surprised at how steady and firm her voice sounds.

He pushes himself up to her further so the hard edge of the table presses into the back of her thighs. His skin has the sharp yeasty smell of mouldy bread.

‘Do you truly want this on your conscience? What will you say of it come Judgement Day?’

He steps back, dropping her, as if she is hot from the oven, turning away, hiding his shame.

She is at a loss to know who to turn to for help. If Hal knew, he would drop everything, take on labouring work to help pay the debt, but she will not draw him into this. He has a foothold at court and it could take him somewhere. Hal has a gift and soon it will be recognized; there will be some noble patron who will want to sponsor his talent. Were it not for her he could live with barely a care in the world, instead of having to keep a roof over his mother’s head. She thinks of the Queen’s jewel, the sole thing that has shored her up against destitution. It would fetch quite a price at one of the Cheapside dealers, though they would doubtless try to fleece her.

‘If you give me a little time …’ she begins, but stops herself. Even if she sells the jewel she doubts its price will cover her husband’s debts. That jewel can surely serve her better.

She inwardly curses her dead husband for frittering away the money Hunsdon had bestowed on them. It was a large sum; vast, some might say. That is what it costs to buy a husband for your pregnant mistress to save her from public shame. She has often wondered what might have happened if Hunsdon had lived a few years longer.

Alphonso never liked her, always resented the circumstances. He loved the money, though, fancied himself as a gentleman, and it is surprising how short a time it can take for such a sum to disappear if you are determined to compete with the wealthy. He had invested what wasn’t spent on gaudy fripperies in a hare-brained building scheme.

It makes her physically sick to think of it, for he not only lost everything but also found himself, through his own foolishness, owing a large sum to the blackguards who took his money in the first place. The only reason they are not beating her door down is the fact that they know she cannot pay
them, but were she to sell her jewel and pay off Mansfield and his like, word would get out and they would soon be at her door. All this is running through her head while Mansfield eyes her from across the room.

‘Time, you have had time enough.’ He has his arms crossed over his chest and his gaze is direct to the point that she feels stripped naked. ‘If you come to me willingly and give me what I ask, in a mere half-hour you will owe me less. We could make a regular thing of it.’ He steps closer to her once more. She takes a stride backward.

Her mind continues to seek a solution. A half hour, it is so short a time? He is muscular beneath that jerkin, and strong, and is a good decade her junior. Would it be so very bad?

‘Be your whore?’

‘I wouldn’t use that word. “Mistress” might serve us better.’

‘Whatever you call it, it would be the same. Besides, do you not think you will be judged for adultery as much as for’ – she cannot quite bring herself to call it rape – ‘the other thing.’

‘There would not be space enough in hell if all adulterers were sent there.’

Her thoughts are spinning in a vortex. What has she to offer but this?