The Girl in the Mirror (15 page)

‘You should hear his excuses,’ Martin said once, with a flash of what looked like real anger. It was the kind of feeling he showed only rarely. ‘In the spring his force wasn’t ready to campaign, or so he said. In the summer he was too busy on other matters to march to where he’s supposed to be. Now autumn’s almost on us, and I suppose he’ll be declaring we’re past the fighting season, see you next year, and anyone could tell you how well that will go down with her majesty. Anyone but his lordship, anyway.’

He seemed well informed – I said as much, but he didn’t answer me directly. I suppose every ale-drinker was a bar-room general, though I wouldn’t have put Martin in that company. Some doubt must have showed on my face because ‘Actors hear things,’ he reminded me. ‘And when you think how many times I’ve waved a sword on stage, I swear they could give me charge of a company!’ I laughed, as I was supposed to, but it was a retreat, or so it seemed to me. And perhaps Martin’s nerves were a little on edge. As we left the tavern late, and set out through the darkening streets – only a few weeks past midsummer, but the evenings were drawing in already – he stopped, and grasped my arm suddenly. I didn’t know what he was going to say. For a single minute I thought he was going to kiss me – me, standing there in my doublet and hose. I wrenched my arm from his hand and almost ran down the street, calling an incoherent farewell behind me. I did not go to the booksellers the next Saturday.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
August 1599

I’d thought the rows were bad enough before he even went to Ireland. That’ll teach me. He hadn’t reached his ship before the complaining letters started, all about how he’d gone armed before but not behind, meaning that we’d be stabbing him in the back. As if we haven’t had other things to think about while he’s been away! It was the last of July or near when the report came secretly to my husband that the Spanish were on the move again, and he sent it on to Master Secretary. It was the very next day when another of Essex’s complaints turned up: I suppose, to be fair, he could hardly have known it in advance, but it’s hard not to feel that young man has always been his own worst enemy.

I knew the contents of that letter before the queen did; one learns how to arrange these things when you’ve lived in a palace as long as I have, but this time it was easy. The messenger was my own kinsman on my father’s side, a promising young Carey.

Three months’ campaigning and what had he to show for it? Nothing, not a single real victory. Oh, he complains the rebels fight in woods and bogs, skirmish and run away. They’re armed by Spain, and more numerous than his troops, and he feels the lack of backing here at home. He’ll have heard that while he’s been away, Cecil has won mastership of the Court of Wards, and all that money Essex needs so badly.

I think Charles almost sympathises with him, oddly – of course they have both campaigned for her majesty. I can’t say I do: a woman has different loyalties.

Well! Now at last the country has seen what my husband can do, I’m happy to say. Three days after that first secret warning, we all heard that a hundred Spanish ships were on the way, and as August broke the town was in a panic, chains down across the roads and closing the gates to the City. And who did they look to to defend them? Charles. Yes, even her majesty. Appointed lieutenant and captain general over all forces south of the Trent, with powers to defeat invasion and rebellion by whatever means he saw fit. Declare martial law, punish disorder at his own discretion, even make statutes, as long as they were necessary to govern the army. That’s what the queen does when she really has confidence in somebody, I tell Lord Essex, silently. When she is certain of their loyalty. And the army Charles pulled together at Tilbury! Fifty thousand men and forty ships, all from nowhere in less than three weeks. That’s what the people of this country can do when they actually trust somebody, for all Lord Essex is the one with the easy popularity.

Of course there were naysayers. At one point there were rumours the queen was dying; there were even rumours that Charles, if you please, had whipped up the panic, to show Lord Essex, the absent hero, ‘that others could be followed as well as he’. My sister Philadelphia, always standing up for Essex, sniffed that Charles was always one to make a mountain out of a molehill – but that was after we’d heard that the Spanish fleet had sailed on by, to deal with the Dutch in another country. It’s the fourth invasion scare in hardly more years, and I suppose it’s got to feel like the boy who cried wolf. But of course my husband is right when he says that one fair day should not breed opinion it will never be foul weather again.

I told Philadelphia, what a pity her husband can’t be here to help us – but then again, when you think of the turmoil Lord Scrope has managed to create in his governance of the Border countries … She blushed – we’ve both got the scarlet blush of the red-haired woman – and then I looked at her as if something had just caught my eye, and said what a pity that red hair like ours shows the grey so easily. Petty, in the context, maybe.

You’d have thought Essex might have been quiet, at least, while all this was going on. Maybe given us a little Irish victory. Instead, it was hardly a week later that the news came. He stood opposite Tyrone’s army at last, and what was the outcome? A truce treaty! He should have brought us Tyrone’s head on a spike, not splashed across a ford to shake hands with the enemy, in view of both their watching armies. And we’re to believe that, in some mysterious way, it’s for the good of the country? Tell that to someone who hasn’t been watching court quarrels so long. My enemy’s friend is my enemy. That’s a maxim I learned from her majesty.

I didn’t see the letter with that news. That one was brought not by a Carey but by Essex’s man, one Cuffe. Still, the queen’s anger knew no concealment, and I am left to wonder that his lordship shows his hand so clearly – or, whether the hand there now before him was quite the one he had meant to play? I’m not surprised that his friend Bacon warned him against Ireland, and has now abandoned Essex’s cause entirely. And maybe, maybe, I’m not surprised that, when his lordship clamoured for the Irish job, Sir Robert Cecil helped to make it a possibility.

There was some satisfaction in knowing he didn’t want to go, not really. But he’d bragged of being the right man for the job so often, he could hardly complain when they took him at his word. It was a winning situation, you might say. If Essex pacifies Ireland, well then England has her victory. If he fails miserably – well, scales and balances, it may take him down a peg or two. Every day, I find myself growing in admiration for Master Secretary.

It’s barely a month later and I don’t know what shocked me more – what happened this morning, or what I heard just now, as I came up through the pantry. We’d hardly got the queen out of bed when we heard the uproar, outside her very door. I remember we all froze there – her in her shift, with her hair, what there is of it, every which way, her wig on the stand, and the whalebone bodies laid out on the bed. There was one girl kneeling on the floor ready to roll the silk stocking on, another standing with the sleeves ready, and we all stuck as we were, like parts of the same clockwork toy run down.

As he stood there, the violence of the door slamming behind him made the dried cowslip blossoms dance in the bowl of white wine – nothing like it to drive wrinkles away – and I saw his eye light on a pile of stained brown bandages, like something off a mummified corpse. Soak them in solution of lady’s mantle and it keeps the breasts firm, but I’ll admit they don’t look pretty.

Even Philadelphia looked thoroughly startled. I suppose, as much as anything else, it was the sheer incredulity. Almost half a century on the throne and now it comes, the sound we were always waiting for in the early days; the sound of men outside the door – shouting, angry.

He stank – that was the first thing I noticed. He must have been in the saddle since he landed from Ireland, and stewing himself into a muck sweat every inch of the way. But he went down onto his knees, babbling some nonsense about making her understand, and I hardly heard the words but the gesture would do, he was on his knees, no sword in his hand. I suppose it was then we all began to breathe again, just barely.

She’s at her best in an emergency, of course – always was, from a girl. She held out her hand and she spoke to him kindly, and seemed not even to know what she looked like, she who manages these things so carefully. I think I admired her then as much as I ever have – to sit there as bare of grace as a plucked chicken and make believe she didn’t feel diminished in any way. When she told him she would see him later he went away quite quietly, leaving her to face the day, and us to shut the doors on the whole court outside, gawping, as well they may. Oh, of course the insult to her hurts. I think we all felt it, even the young girls. To have her caught out like this, it lowers us all. In this world, a woman needs her mystery. They say the queen has two bodies: as a mortal, and as a monarch, one step from a divinity. What I say is, when your mortal body has just been exposed like this, it’s hard to take comfort in a theory.

But, all of that, that’s not what most shocks me.

As we stood for that moment at the open chamber doors, as they led Lord Essex away, I saw a man in Howard livery, and made sure he caught my eye. He slid out after Essex’s party – we don’t keep fools in our employ. I snapped at the girls to put the queen’s combing cloth about her shoulders, and to use the box comb carefully, and that this time they might get a quill and clean the brushes properly. I was making more bustle than I had to, I suppose, but it relieved me. I waited long enough to see that Philadelphia wasn’t supervising the choice of ribbons as she should. My sister has not the brains of a coney. ‘Lady Scrope!’ I said sharply, in public reproof, and she started, and signed to a maid where the ribbon knots should be pinned on the gown, for when the queen was ready. Then I said her majesty might wish to dress her head with the other pearl border, and made excuse to slip away. By now I reckoned the servitor and his news might be ready.

For the most part his words were reassuring. Essex himself, or so he claimed, had only ever planned to speak with the queen, though some in his party had talked more wildly. They’d met with Lord Grey on the way, so the man said, quite casually, and they’d tried to hold him back, to keep the advantage of surprise, but Lord Grey had got away from them and galloped ahead to the palace to warn Master Secretary.

The words seemed to burn into my brain. He’d galloped ahead to warn the Secretary, and what did the Secretary do with the warning? Nothing. How far ahead of the Essex crew had Lord Grey been? Only a few minutes, maybe. Yes, but how many minutes does it take, to run from the Secretary’s chamber towards her majesty’s, to call the guards – to shout a warning from one man to the other. It’s not even as though we were in Whitehall – Nonsuch is a small palace, for all that it’s so pretty.

Oh, I’m sure Cecil knew or guessed there was no real danger. I can’t believe he’d have risked her majesty. But for all that I’ve said myself it would be best if the queen saw soon what Essex could do, for all that, this still shocks me. I’d thought myself so shrewd, so awake on every suit. Now I feel like a child, groping my way through a maze, while above my head others, more grown up than I, see their way clearly.

October 1599

There was a knot of serving men blocking the gravel path through the garden as I came in to work at Burghley House on Monday. Usually they kept their distance from the clerks, but today any hearer was better than none, and one of the more impertinent boys spun away from the group long enough to speak to me.

‘Did you hear? They’ve got him at York House, just up the road, in the Lord Keeper’s custody. Lord Essex, silly!’ he added. He must have thought I hadn’t understood, but behind the blankness of my face I felt as if all the barrels of the lock inside my head were suddenly clicking open. I hadn’t thought much of Lord Essex these last weeks. Well, months, maybe. When men – when Martin Slaughter – spoke of him, even, it was almost as if they were speaking of a public stranger, as if there was a safe wall between the me I had become and the day at Wanstead, the moment at the tourney.

But I hadn’t heard Martin Slaughter speak of anything, of course, since that August day, that evening in the alley. I hadn’t seen or heard of him, and it felt almost as though those few weeks of companionship we’d shared had been swept away. If I were hiding myself, then events had helped me. No one could expect you to stroll around booksellers while London was preparing for a siege, and in the Secretary’s house we were all too busy to go gallivanting, anyhow. On the heels of that reflection, I seemed to see Martin Slaughter’s face, a faint look of hurt in his brown eyes. As I flinched away, my mind’s eye fell greedily on Lord Essex’s image, with the blind determination of a baby grasping at the breast. Only a few hundred yards away!

I knew I had to see him. It had been six months, almost to the day, since he’d gone away and now, as if to make up for the summer’s disloyalty, my very gut seemed to have kept the tally. I might not get into his presence. But I had to try, even if all I got to do in the end was to sit in the courtyard with the soldiers and their stories. If he’d returned in triumph, I might have been content to stand at the back of the crowds as they cheered, but he’d returned a captive, under the queen’s displeasure, and that seemed to open a space for me.

A few drops of rain started to spit down as I turned towards the gate and I blessed them. They gave me the excuse to pull my cap low enough to hide my eyes. I’d have staked a guinea that panic stared from them as surely as from a doe’s when the hunts-men hold her down and bare her throat for the knife, or a horse’s, when they fit the headpiece on before the tourney.

The luck was with me. As I turned in to York House the porter’s lodge was crowded with men and reeking with beer, and a bubble of frantic laughter rose up in my throat. Of course – they’d want, just like everybody else, to talk over the events of the last few days. The porter jerked a piece of sacking over the barrel as he turned towards me, caught out and ready to be surly. I just held up my satchel, bulging with papers, and let the badge on my cloak speak for me.