The Girl in the Mirror (25 page)

‘We’d best get back. But, Jeanne …’ He paused again, as if he were trying to decide what to say. ‘You know, you’re going to have to take risks again some day.’

I didn’t want to understand him. ‘You’ve just told me to take care! To get away.’

He made an actor’s gesture of dismissal. ‘You know what I mean. Though I’ll admit right now it sounds odd, when we’re standing in the eye of a storm that’s going to break over us any day. But you do know what I mean.’

He paused, and when I didn’t reply: ‘What is it you’re waiting for? For all the fears to go away? For a talisman to keep you safe for ever and a day?’

I managed half a smile as I shook my head. The dirty little bags of magic herbs, the lucky stones, were not for me. ‘I don’t have talismans.’

‘Everyone has a talisman of some kind, even if it’s a place or a tree. Here –’ He reached out to catch a snowflake and made as if to press it in my palm. I looked down. It was melted already. ‘Well, that’s the way with talismans. There is no guarantee of safety. You just have to learn to trust along the way.’ He seemed to have no more to say, but instead looked up at the darkening sky. ‘We’d better hurry.’ We stepped out faster and in silence, through a ghost landscape where the hoar frost coated each branch with menace, and the violet shadows were the only colour in a landscape turning to grey. We’d turned in the gate before he spoke again, and then it was with a casual air of normality.

‘You’re not the only one who loves a garden, you know. When I’m in London, I go to the garden by St Helen’s, before dinner, whenever I’m free. Maybe I’ll see you there, one of these days.’ He didn’t wait for me to answer, but instead just made me an actor’s bow, and I stood there dumbly to watch him walk away.

February 1601

Once or twice, as January sobbed and blustered its way in and out, I had found myself by Bishopsgate, near St Helen’s, and I looked in. But Martin Slaughter was never there, and in truth, for most of those weeks, the weather was enough to keep even the hardiest away.

It occurred to me too that an actor knows when to exit the stage, and Heaven knew these were tense times on the London streets, full of tales of clashes between Essex men and Essex’s enemies. It did not occur to me, then, that this might be a private performance, for an audience of one, directed at me.

I spent a lot of time alone in the garden on the Strand, and in one way I was glad of the solitude. Something strange seemed to be happening to me. No doubt to the household I was much as I had been, but inside I felt like a young child. Naked, like a performer in an Italian comedy when he pulls the painted mask away. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or sorry. It was like the pins and needles when a dead limb comes back to life. Once, I looked at the ground where the first green shoots were beginning to show: I wondered if the garden, too, was reborn each year only in pain and difficulty.

The first days of February brought a drier sort of chill, and the gardeners wagged their heads with a pleasurable melancholy. ‘If Candlemas be fair and bright, come winter have another flight …’ But even the new light in the sky brought no release from the dull ache of tension that was gripping me. Gripping all of us, maybe. Even the old clerk exploded one day.

‘Jesu! It’s like waiting by a deathbed. In the end you just want it to be over, since it can only end one way. If nothing else, you want the surgeon to give you some idea – next week, tomorrow, don’t leave the room – and all they do is look wise, and bill for another fee.’

I stared at him in surprise. Somehow I’d never thought of his having a life outside these walls, where people close to him lived and died. But wait – hadn’t someone told me he’d been married, once? I’d not been used to eyeing the people around me too closely. It had always seemed safer that way. But now I felt … guilty?

It was the first Friday in February when the message came. I was on my way back into Burghley House, just before dusk, when the porter stopped me.

‘There was someone asking for you,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘Well-dressed, well-spoken sort of fellow – thought he was a gentleman at first, but he turned out to be one of them players.’ My heart gave a lurch within me. ‘Wanted you to know he’d be playing tomorrow, down at the Globe.’ I nodded thanks and hurried in with my face down, in case it should betray me.

The performance wouldn’t begin till two next day. I didn’t pass the morning easily. It was barely dinner time when I was headed towards the bridge, with the Globe’s pennant snapping in the breeze in front of me.

I hadn’t been to a performance there in the eighteen months since they built the place, and the rougher entertainments of the Paris Gardens held no charms for me. But I knew the area – every immigrant did. This was where you went to buy cuts of meat that made the English butchers roll their eyes, or find hose knitted in the continental way. This was the area of the stinking trades, the slaughterhouses and the tannery.

Close to, the theatre was enormous. I squeezed my way through the crowds, looking for a back way in. Martin Slaughter must have told the boy who kept the door that I’d be coming, for it was only a moment before he was standing before me.

I laughed a little to hide the effect the sight of him had on me. ‘Goodness, Martin, you look very grand. Who are you playing – the king?’ His velvet suit was a little worn, but it must once have been some nobleman’s favourite finery.

‘Which one of them?’ he said, as lightly. I must have looked blank, because he added, ‘You do know the play?’ I shook my head.

‘We’re playing
Richard II
– and you had no idea? Well, maybe they didn’t want to advertise this one too widely.’ The truth was that there may well have been playbills handed out – I’d simply been too nervous to see. And some of my confusion must have shown in my face, because he went on to explain more slowly.

‘My lord Southampton, and several of the Earl of Essex’s friends, came to the performance yesterday. Oh, not this play – some comedy, it was, and I wasn’t here, just the regular company. They told them, the lords, that they wanted a special performance of
Richard
, today.

‘Well, the bosses protested, of course. That’s so fast it’s ludicrous, even if it weren’t for the question of the play.’ It must have been my fate, that day, to gape at him like the village idiot, but he’d obviously decided to forgive me.

‘You saw it when it first came out? Or read it, maybe? Well, no matter, the printed version had all the important bits cut out.

‘This play is about the moment that started it all off,’ he continued, earnest now. ‘Richard II pushed off the throne by his cousin, starting a hundred years of civil war, ended only by our beloved Tudor dynasty. An enfeebled monarch deposed, and the deposer presented as – well, maybe not the hero of the tale, but a man of honour, or something close. Now do you see?’

I did, of course I did, and the danger of what I saw appalled me.

‘They depose the king?’ I was working my way through it, slowly. ‘With arms, with violence?’ Martin nodded at me, the way a kind schoolmaster does when his pupil gets the right answer eventually. ‘And the old king, Richard – they don’t – is he –?’ Again, Martin nodded. It struck me that he was apprehensive and excited, both at once, and, like the actor he was, registering both emotions clearly.

‘Can you believe it – someone was saying they actually wanted us to put Richard into a red wig?’ he said, inconsequentially.

‘But why ever did they agree? And what are you doing? You’re not even tied to the company.’

‘Well, they were promised an extra fee. Rather a large one, actually – and those lords weren’t to be gainsaid easily. As for me, I’m just a jobbing actor, you go where the good parts are and if you turn a company down one time, they may not ask you again too quickly.’ He had dropped the bantering manner, and as he turned away his face looked older and more wary than the one I was used to seeing.

‘No, I promise you, I’m just in this one as a player. Unless – well, perhaps you might say I owed their lordships something.’ There was a shadow on his face and with a stab of guilt I realised – yes, for the first time – that I might not have been the only one who hadn’t found decisions easy.

‘And, of course,’ he added, ‘I do have … insurance, you might say.’ He flung that reminder at me with an air of bravado, pointedly, as if daring me to remember that the subject of our quarrel had never entirely gone away. But I shook my head quickly, and he seemed to understand me. No trouble between us, not now, not with this other danger all around us. Now, the whole question of our anger seemed as outworn as the green wreaths after May Day. Now it was I, who’d always been the skittish quarry, who put my hand on his arm placatingly. He turned to clasp it with his own. It must have been the first time we moved to touch, or nearly.

I’d forgotten to ask again what part he was playing. It wasn’t the king, either of the kings (‘not for an occasional extra’ – I could almost hear his voice in my ear), but it was one of their cousins, a Lord Aumerle. Loyal to the old king, even to the point of folly. I was glad of that, foolishly.

There was one line he had that struck me as true – something about having a hundred characters in one body – as I sat (for Martin had told them to let me through up into the gallery) brushing away offers of nuts, and gingerbread, and beer. Even the vendors were excited, and though the crowd was thinner than it might be, in this huge arena, they were roaring as if they were at a bull-baiting or a tourney. Tough men they were, for the most part, with more than one scarred face I recognised from the courtyard at Essex House. I turned my cloak badge in, so no one would challenge me.

A few lines did make me wince. About Bolingbroke, the young pretender, doffing his cap to every oyster woman and charming his way into the people’s sympathy. Had Essex really found us that easy? And another, older, actor, playing John of Gaunt, had a speech about England that touched me. If you came here an immigrant you do forget – dodging the filth running down the streets, complaining about the weather and the taxes – you forget just how much it had meant to come here, and be free.

But I do remember that, as I gazed down from my height at the small figures under the big stage canopy, between the gilt lions and the great marbled pillars, I was puzzled, as much as dismayed. The main theme apart, I could see why the play would appeal to Lord Essex and his followers. This was a lament for the old chivalric England that probably never even existed. The kind you tried to recreate, when you put a girl’s flowers in your doublet and rode out to the tilt on Accession Day. It was a question about what a king was, once stripped of his majesty. As naked as – as a girl, if ever she put off the boy’s clothes that had given her an identity.

What it wasn’t was a triumphant hymn to king-killing, or so it seemed to me. What had it led to? Each side banging the other over the head, and shouting that they were putting an end to violence that way. The deposed King Richard sent for a mirror, to see if he still had the face of majesty, and I thought that in the aftermath none of them would recognise their reflections easily. As the play came to an end, and the actors gave those stage bows that seemed always to have an element of mockery, I thought that for everyone on the stage, for each of the warring parties, this venture into dissent had ended very badly. And as they knelt down on the stage for the prayers for the queen’s safety, I wondered if I was the only one who felt that way.

And of course, there had been one moment struck me particularly. Hit home so hard, I had to turn my face away. King Richard’s queen walks into a garden, and learns her husband’s fate from the gardener’s chatter. But before she does, the chief gardener is instructing one of his underlings, the way the head gardener at Burghley House might do any day. ‘Go thou’ he says,

‘and, like an executioner,
Cut off the heads of too fast-growing sprays
That look too lofty in our commonwealth.’

The words had been written years ago, I knew they had. It was just a typically flowery poetic simile. But as I looked around the rapt audience, as they began to jostle their way out of the thea-tre, I did not understand how everyone else could hear them so hardily.

 * * * 

I got back to Burghley House to find the place in a fluster. The master had gone to court, and from there to a hastily called meeting of the Council. He would not be returning quickly. The old clerk came clucking towards me, when I appeared, like a hen with one chick and I was touched: I hadn’t realised he had an affection for me. For a second I wondered, as I’d never let myself before, just what he saw when he looked at me.

The urgency of the moment pushed the thought away. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘Never mind that, lad – it’s not what’s happened, it’s what’s about to,’ he said cryptically. ‘That stage play you went to – oh yes, I know – wasn’t far off a declaration of intent. They’ll send for Essex to know what he means by it. Question is, will he go peaceably?’

All around us was a controlled bustle – not so much an ant heap disturbed, as a market where every stallholder has decided to pack up simultaneously. Papers being sorted and locked away in strongboxes, windows shuttered firmly.

Sunday, 8 February, morning

None of us slept very much that night – even those who had less to think about than I did. The gates of the great house were locked and barred, but they couldn’t shut all the sounds out; and from well before daybreak – the cold late dawn that comes so reluctantly this early in the year – we’d heard in the still night the sounds of men and horses on the move. I’d slipped out into the courtyard when one cry woke me, and I’d found I was not alone to do so. Supporters of Lord Essex, coming from the south? Her majesty’s soldiery?

‘If they were coming from my lord of Southampton’s, they’d not pass this way,’ one of the secret clerks said. I think it was the first time he’d ever spoken, voluntarily.

By morning the master had not returned. ‘It’s coming, then,’ the old clerk said – grimly, and yet with a kind of satisfaction. But it didn’t come, or not immediately. Breakfast was served, albeit with scant ceremony, and some of the bolder spirits suggested going out to listen to the sermon, though the steward vetoed that one sharply.