The Girl in the Mirror (22 page)

When midsummer had been and gone but the long twilight hours encouraged lingering at the end of the day, I called in on the old clerk. This time, several people were there already, bent over the desk, and they looked round at me, I thought, almost with hostility. Only the old man himself made room for me.

‘The lad’s all right,’ he said to the others. ‘He’s one of the confidential secretaries.’ The stranger seated at the clerk’s desk – a stranger with a sharp, swarthy face – nodded curtly, and bent to the letter he was copying. Inconspicuously as I could, I peered over his shoulder, and with a shock recognised Lord Essex’s hand.

‘What’s this bit? I can’t make it out,’ the copyist said to the company at large, and that gave me the excuse to look openly.

‘… you have believed I have been kind to you, and you may believe I cannot be other,’ I read. ‘I never flew with other wings than desire to merit, and confidence in, my sovereign’s favour, and when one of these wings failed me I would light nowhere but at her feet, though she suffered me to be bruised with my fall.’

I looked a startled query at the old man, and silently he pushed another letter towards me. This one was written in a different hand. It was addressed to ‘My lord’ – Essex, I supposed – and it was signed … Francis Bacon? ‘But – at the inquiry –’ I stammered confusedly. The clerk just jerked his chin at the paper.

‘You’ll see.’ I read on, furiously.

‘… I humbly pray you to believe that I aspire to the conscience and commendation first of
bonus civis
, which with us is a good and true servant to the queen, and next of
bonus vir
, that is an honest man. I desire your lordship also to think that though I confess I love some things much better than I love your lordship, such as the queen’s service, her quiet and contentment, the honour, her favour, the good of my country, and the like, yet I love few persons better than yourself, both for gratitude’s sake and for your own virtues …’

It was an effort not to crumple the paper in my hand. This, to the man who had attacked him at the hearing? I was surprised Essex had replied so mildly. I looked back down.

‘… I was ever sorry that your lordship should fly with waxen wings, doubting Icarus’ fortune … of the growing up of your own feathers, no man shall be more glad.’

For one soaring moment I was captivated. What I resented most about Bacon’s letter was the aptness of the analogy. Icarus, who made wings of wax and feathers to fly with the gods, but flew too near the sun so they melted and sent him crashing to his death on earth. But then I realised it wasn’t the contents of the letter that had struck me so forcefully, nor even that Bacon seemed to be again aligned with Essex, though that alone might have made one dizzy.

‘These letters – how did they come into your hands? Our hands,’ I corrected hastily.

‘You’ll not have forgotten Bacon’s mother was our master’s aunt, before she married into the pig family?’ While the other men glanced at me with renewed suspicion, I thought the old clerk was watching me with something like pity.

At the end of August, Sir Robert was one of those sent to tell Lord Essex he was to be set free. Only, that he must not come to court; he’d already been stripped of the Mastery of the Ordinances, and of the great office of Earl Marshal. The Mastership of the Horse was all that remained to him; the same that had been the start for Leicester, Robert Dudley. In my naivety, I thought that his liberty was the great good news, but the old clerk disillusioned me.

‘When he was shut away, at least no one could get at him, but now the creditors will all want their pound of flesh, won’t they? Yes of course he’s got debts, haven’t they all, but now how’s he going to make any money, to beg favours and sell them on again? How’s he going to keep his followers happy? He may say he’s going to live retired in the country, but with the bailiffs at the door he can’t do that very comfortably. And you’ve seen how they live now, the lords, you with your visit to Theobalds.’ He nodded at me, amiably.

‘It’s true Essex never splashed out on houses like that. They always said he was the poorest earl in the country. But all the same, he can’t just settle down in a cottage and tell his wife to do her own laundry.’

That was the general opinion, I found. The earl was writing a string of increasingly desperate letters to the queen. I saw them all, now that I was on the strength of the secret clerks’ room, so to speak, and heard that Bacon had half dictated them, too, which made me feel strangely. It seemed Essex, like they all did, had lived off a tax – the right to take a levy off the people, if I looked at it honestly. A slice off the top of the duty paid on all the sweet wines to come into the country. Trouble was, his rights to it ended this year, and it would only be renewed by favour of her majesty. It was obvious by now that even he did not rate his chances highly.

Summer is the strolling season, they say, though there hadn’t been much sense of freedom or pleasure this summer. But before the season was out came word we would all go up to Theobalds again: Sir Robert for his own reasons, and me, because of some plant that needed drawing, or so the chief clerk told me briefly. Packing my bags, I could have wept, remembering with what excitement I set out there last year. And of the hopes with which I returned. But in fact, the atmosphere in London was such that, even though the skies were still weeping as we left, I was – I think we all were – glad to get away.

I saw the fountains and grottoes, the lakes and waterways. The gillyflowers and snapdragons in their pots were all but over, yet I could see they’d boasted as many double flowers as they used to. The citrus trees, free of the seasons, still showed flowers and fruit all at once, like something out of a picture of Paradise. But somehow, this time, they couldn’t touch me. Perhaps it wasn’t only me – all festivities, that summer, seemed to have desperation in their gaiety.

I did not go back to the little pavilion where Martin had taken me. But the thought of it surely brought him to my mind because, as the rain drove me from the garden back into the house, I almost fancied I saw a familiar brown figure darting into another doorway. With the miserable wet outside I started to explore indoors – the galleries painted with the Knights of the Golden Fleece, with the arms of England’s nobles and the products of their counties, the great cities of the world with their customs and their features; it was as if Lord Burghley had turned schoolmaster to instruct me. At last I drew near to the private apartments of the family – or of Sir Robert, I should say. I was just outside the door when it opened quietly. It was with a sense of shock that I saw Martin Slaughter come out – and at the same time, with a sense that I’d known it already.

For him, I think, it was much the same, but he gestured to me quickly. ‘Not here.’ I was reminded, horribly, of that scene with Cuffe, but Theobalds had other, Cuffe-free, memories. ‘Meet me in’ – for a brief second I thought he was going to say, the pavilion, but he would never be that clumsy – ‘in the orchard.’ A gleam of rueful humour. ‘We should have it to ourselves today.’

In the orchard, the fruits were beginning to swell on the dripping trees. The rain had mercifully halted for the time, but I hurried under lowering skies. He was there waiting for me already – he clearly knew the paths better than I – and there was a look on his face I hadn’t seen before, at once stern and naked. With the long grass at our feet, between the grey framework of branches, we faced each other like adversaries.

He stood there, silently. Perhaps he was more experienced at this than me. I spoke first.

‘What are you doing here? They haven’t announced a play.’

‘I’m not here as an actor.’ He paused. ‘I’m here doing other work,’ he said deliberately. We both remembered our other conversations, here, and elsewhere. He’d told me once that many actors do other work, travelling as they do all around the country. That they wind up as messengers, information gatherers, emissaries.

‘What work?’ I put it crudely but my brain was making calculations like an abacus. ‘That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? That’s why you’re hanging round Lord Essex’s house. You’re acting for Sir Robert.’

He paused again, oddly. ‘Not entirely. Not him only. I have Sir Robert’s interests at heart, but also those of … somebody.’

‘Oh, why not? After all, that way you get two salaries!’ I was becoming angry. ‘I’m surprised you have any time left to devote to the drama. Or is it they aren’t hiring you for the plays?’

He didn’t visibly wince. He rallied quickly. ‘I’ll be doing some of those too. Not in the theatres – at Lord Essex’s house. You know my lord of Southampton, his lordship’s friend, is a great patron of the drama.

‘Don’t look at me like that, my dear.’ The endearment came almost insultingly. It wasn’t his normal style of speech, or it wasn’t with me. ‘You take work where you can get it, if you’re an actor – my kind of actor, anyway.’ He paused. ‘And besides, just at the moment, Essex House is an interesting place to be.’ I knew he wouldn’t shirk the confrontation. Not finally.

What he did was take the initiative. ‘You can hardly expect me to give you script and scrippage – tell you exactly what I’m doing, and for who. You could work out the important part for yourself, if you looked at it clearly.

‘Just think, Jeanne. We’ve talked about this, haven’t we? Do you really believe Lord Essex’s way is the best way of running a country?’ He didn’t even wait for me to shake my head. ‘And who are you working for, yourself? Who is it pays your salary? Never mind what little extra-mural visits you might make.’ So he had seen me, on Garter Day.

‘You’re not wrong, and neither am I.’ His face softened slightly. ‘Look, don’t think that I don’t understand. This business isn’t easy for anybody. And for you –’ He stopped. I must have moved slightly. ‘But the fact is, a number of people agree that, whatever plans Lord Essex is brewing, it would be best if they came to a head, quickly. So that everyone can see the damage, from the market girl with the pickled herrings right up to her majesty. Do you think that’s wrong? Do you, really?’

‘So that’s why you and Cuffe –’

His mouth twisted. ‘Master Cuffe is exactly what he appears to be. The more honourable of him, maybe. But Master Cuffe has Lord Essex’s ear, and I –’

‘Have Master Cuffe’s,’ I finished bitterly. ‘As long as you fawn round him like a dog all day.’ I didn’t know quite why I was so angry, but I felt as if everything I thought I knew was crumbling away from me. ‘And now Cuffe’s been telling Lord Essex the terms of his freedom are an insult, that he shouldn’t accept retirement quietly! Someone in the clerks’ room told me. What is it you want to happen?’

‘What do you want?’ he flung back instantly. Then he stepped towards me. ‘Jeanne, can’t we –’

It all rose up, all of it, from further back than I could see. I screamed at him. I’ve never screamed at anybody.

‘Stay away from me!’

His face went awry, as if I had slapped it. He spun on his heel smartly. His figure moved for once without eloquence as he walked away.

As we rode back towards London a few days later, I hardly had time to worry about the clumsy horse they had given me. Something in me accepted what Martin had said, but something fought it, too. You can’t choose that easily. Just pick Sir Robert, head not heart? You can’t split people like that, and I should know. Wasn’t it what I’d tried to do all my life? Tried and failed, and what had the trying done to me? At that moment my horse pecked and stumbled, and I put thought aside, gladly.

 * * * 

Back at Burghley House, I went into the garden often, now that the days would soon be drawing in. It was as if everything smelt the sweeter for the sharp knowledge of how soon autumn would come. One day I found Sir Robert there, sniffing the last late rose; the damask with the musky smell, the one they had brought in from Italy that flowered for a second spring. There was a minute when I looked at him with a kind of horror, the memory of Theobalds before me. But he was so much the same – so small, so neat, so reassuring – that it was more a kind of appeal I felt, though luckily he couldn’t see.

He seemed disposed to chat – asked me how the work was going, waited for me to fall in step as he strolled along the pathways, chatting gently of roses, and grafting and cultivation, and of the new strains that were coming to join the old varieties.

‘You know my favourite story about the rose? It comes from the last century. That when the two great houses were squabbling for the throne, they met once in a garden. And everyone who followed Lancaster picked a red rose, and everyone who followed York a white.

‘I doubt very much it’s true. I suspect Warwick and the rest didn’t do their business so prettily. And of course – as her blessed majesty likes us to remember – the red rose and the white are united in the house of Tudor today.

‘But all the same, Jan, there does tend to come a time when people have to decide where their loyalties lie.’ At the time I took it as a truism, and simply bowed my head respectfully. I should have remembered how wide was his network of information, and wondered if he was warning me.

PART IV

Change thy mind since she doth change,
Let not fancy still abuse thee;

Thy untruth cannot seem strange,
When her falsehood doth excuse thee.

Love is dead, and thou art free.
She doth live, but dead to thee.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex

When I was fair and young, and favour graced me,
Of many was I sought unto, their mistress for to be.
But I did scorn them all, and said to them therefore,
‘Go, go, go seek some otherwhere, importune me no more.’

But there fair Venus’ son, that brave, victorious boy,
Said, ‘What, thou scornful dame, sith that thou art so coy,
I will so wound thy heart, that thou shalt learn therefore: