The Girl in the Mirror (34 page)

I will take care not to think of Jeanne again, not unless it is necessary, though if she continues with Martin Slaughter I suppose she may come my way. I wish her well, I hope her happy – to know yourself is the most valuable education: those old men, with their manuals of advice, that’s what they should say.

But that is all. It must be. I shall go into the garden, and smell the witchhazel, and I will go to the bed where the violets grow, and I will not let myself be overwhelmed by the memories. Now that my father is dead I am laying out my own garden at the new house across the Strand. This place belongs to my brother now, but no doubt I will still walk here frequently. I will not be able to stay away.

Lizzie.

Jeanne
26 February 1601

I woke to a morning of sharpness, but of sunshine. A morning when you know the ripe of the day will offer just an hour or two’s pledge that spring is on the way. That though it’s felt as though the ground would be frozen forever the thaw must come eventually. A morning that might tempt any Londoner to take the air. I yelled to the kitchen boy to bring me hot water; yes, I’d pay the extra fee.

The fine soapballs I’d brought last night were scented with lavender. I’d bought and I’d bought, yielding to all of the shopgirl’s suggestions, and some of my purchases were strange to me. A water with chamomile and wormwood in it, and a paste of alum to rub under the arms. A linen bag to rub over my teeth, filled with ashes of rosemary. A tiny twist of paper filled with orris root powder had cost more than the rest put together. I rubbed it over my chest and behind my ears, gingerly.

I pulled the linen shift over my head first, and only the fineness of the fabric gave me pause. I shivered a little, as the silky coolness touched my skin. The whalebone stiffness of the bodice felt not unlike a doublet, though I had an impulse to clutch at my bare expanse of chest, in all its immodesty.

As I reached for the petticoats I gritted my teeth. I was moving into unfamiliar territory. As I hooked them into place they fell too limply. Oh yes – ‘the bum-roll’, as the assistant had told me, grinning mockingly. Man, woman or hermaphrodite; I could even manage a brief giggle, now, over what she must have thought of me. A top petticoat with a coloured panel at the front; dressing as a man, I’d had it easy. I yanked my way into the dress until a snagging of the embroidery made me halt, and then I went more slowly. I turned to face myself in the glass, and a woman looked back at me.

It would be a day of promise, outside. This time of year, when February is turning to March, every day brings something new. In the garden there are the first of the Lent lilies, and the swell of bud on the grey apple branch, and the men are taking the sacking off the tubbed olive trees. When we walk out into the fields there will be new buds on the primroses, lamb’s tail catkins shaking yellow in the breeze, and the first of the celandines a golden glory. Even if the tall trees are still bare, there will be the red filament of blossom on the young elms and new leaf sprouting on the little hazels. Spring starts from the bottom up, and that seems right to me.

Just for a second I thought of Burghley House, where every tree was a known friend. I knew in my bones Sir Robert would be out there, noting every new bud with his careful eye, whatever else might claim the Secretary’s attention on such an important day. But the garden at Burghley House was not the only garden in the City. In the churchyard at St Helen’s some City father had paid for them to plant up the nodding bulbs of spring, in honour of his wife’s name day.

People would be out early today, alive in the spring sunshine. Even yesterday, as I went about my purchases, I’d felt a kind of tremor in the blood. Sometimes, in the garden, I’d wonder where the spring
comes
from – pushing blindly through the frozen earth, fighting the cold every inch of the way – but something of the same was happening in me. The spring comes too slowly to register as a miracle until suddenly it overtakes you on your way. This was a day when you could look at the bare boughs of a tree, and know that the sap was working secretly. The dress I’d bought was apple green. ‘Made it for a young lady up from the country,’ the tailor had said confidingly. ‘But the money isn’t there to settle the bill, so I can let you have it cheaply.’ Perhaps it was light, for so early in the season, but the panel on the underskirt was the pink of blossom, the fabric was embroidered with sprays of tiny leaves. I fingered it delicately. I’d seen a girl yesterday on her young man’s arm, face aglow with a warmth that had nothing to do with her thin clothing, and as I gazed in the mirror now, she seemed to be smiling along with me. I’d had a sense I’d never really felt before, of how much pleasure was to be had in this city – if you knew how to take it, and how to share it, maybe. Of how men and women did lean together, laugh together; and if there were still secrets and shadows in their world, well, sometimes they laughed anyway.

In the country soon, those first fragile pokes of primroses will turn into fragrant platefuls of the palest gold, and curved green spikes will spring up overnight; the cuckoo pint, the Lords and Ladies. Then the moment when the world at your feet becomes a carpet of emerald, and cherry is white on the trees. A moment when the spring looks back at you from far down the road ahead, and she too is laughing over her shoulder, kindly.

There is a portrait of the queen at the house on the Strand, a treasure of the Cecil family. She wears a low-cut white dress, edged with gold and embroidered with spring – heartsease pansies and cowslips, honeysuckles and gillyflowers. A rainbow showed in the sky overhead, to admire a timeless beauty. She herself might be old now, but the portrait would shine out for all eternity. The embroidery on her skirt, of watchful eyes and listening ears, told a darker story, but I pushed that thought away. I pulled fine wool stocking up my legs, stepped into shoes of red Spanish leather. We were none of us spies today. Not in a world where, as the weeks move on, we’ll be seized by the first scarlet advance guard of poppies, and the gold of the buttercups will make rich men of us all. When summer will bring days when the air itself is so heavy you should be swimming in it, languorously. Oh, the summer may be bad again, sure enough, the harvest poor and the people sulky. But there’ll still be a few days like these. There will be.

I turned to face the glass again, and I was pleased by what I could see. Even my face seemed to have more contours to it – or perhaps it was just that, in all those years, I’d taken care never to look too clearly. I took the ruff from its box – yes, I’d bought that too, though only a small one – and pinned it to the collar, unhandily. It framed my face like the petals do the gold heart of a daisy. Tentatively, I fluffed a bit of my hair forwards onto my cheek. It was still boy-short, of course, but it would grow eventually. For the first time, I dared to see a future ahead of me.

The light coming in through the window seemed to put courage into me. The gillyflowers the queen wore weren’t in season, but I’d buy violets from the flower woman that would smell as sweetly. I’d tuck them into my bodice – the queen wore her flowers for symbols, but I wanted ornament, modesty. But when I went to St Helen’s churchyard, to find Martin Slaughter, I would be as fine as she.

General Historical Note

The story of a plea, sent by Essex on the eve of his execution but kept from the queen, was first suggested in 1620 in John Webster’s
The Devil’s Law Case
. It was however later in the seventeenth century when, in the anonymous
A Secret History of the Most Renowned Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex
, the story of the ring was established in the form we know it today. Essex, so the story goes, passed the ring out of the window to a boy instructed to take it to Philadelphia, Lady Scrope, who would get it to the queen. Alas, the boy gave it instead to Lady Scrope’s sister, the Countess of Nottingham, who physically resembled her, but whose husband the Lord Admiral was Essex’s mortal enemy.

The countess in malice kept the ring, confessing to Elizabeth only on her deathbed. ‘God may forgive you, but I never can’, said Elizabeth bitterly. The tale never went away – features largely, indeed, in the 1939 Bette Davis and Errol Flynn film,
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
, though by this point the Countess of Nottingham no longer figures, as she had done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Essex’s discarded and vengeful lover. The ring itself – gold, with a cameo of the queen – can still be seen in the Chapter House Museum of Westminster Abbey. But sadly, for all its long history, its near-contemporary credentials, the tale is surely apocryphal – no more than a romantic story.

The Countess of Nottingham was known to be in Chelsea in January 1601: there is no evidence she even returned to court in February. Moreover, two years later, grief at the countess’s death was believed to have played a part in hastening the queen’s own end. That cold the countess suffered in January 1601, a cold her husband mentioned in a letter to Cecil, may have marked the start of a long decline. She died on 24 February 1603, to be followed within weeks by her royal mistress. The news of Elizabeth’s death was carried north to Scotland by the countess’ brother, Robert Carey, who bore with him by way of proof a ring originally sent by King James, and thrown to Carey out of a window by his sister Lady Scrope. Another token ring, another story.

The execution of the Earl of Essex had marked a further decline in Elizabeth’s already failing fortunes. Her godson John Harington observed how, alone, she would pace her rooms in rage, thrusting into the arras with a rusty sword. For their part the people, it was said ‘were weary of an old woman’s governance’. The question of Elizabeth’s successor, with the frantic canvassing of more than a dozen possibilities, had long been a topic of secret speculation, but though few knew it, Essex’s death was a turning point. Literally within weeks, Robert Cecil (aided by details of Essex’s correspondence with Scotland, wrung under interrogation from Henry Cuffe) took advantage of his rival’s disappearance from the scene to begin his own negotiations with King James, always in the deepest secrecy.

Cecil kept his loyalty: the condition for his support was that Elizabeth should not be menaced or deposed during her lifetime. But when she finally died James – belying the widespread fears of confusion and civil war – succeeded to the throne of England ‘without so many ripples as would shake a cockle boat’, as Cecil himself put it complacently. In gratitude for his vital part in these negotiations, the new king would eventually create Cecil Earl of Salisbury. The Earl of Nottingham, too, prospered under the new regime. Within months of his wife’s death he had married again, a woman forty years his junior, and was getting something of a reputation as a court dandy. But while Nottingham lived to be almost ninety, Robert Cecil died before he was fifty – due in large part, his contemporaries believed, to his unhealthy habit of eating fruit every day.

Private letters show Cecil’s grief at the loss of his wife and sensitivity to his disability. The abortive progress of Essex’s rebellion is of course a matter of historical record, but so too are all the incidents I describe in the course of his turbulent relationship with the queen, and with the Cecils. Even the thunderstorm in which Essex set off for Ireland is a matter of historical record, as is the queen’s visit to the dying Burghley, while Essex’s one-man Garter ceremony – even the public comment about the wicked ways of London watermen, even the touring theatrical manager Henslowe’s concerns about his spinach and his stockings, back home – survive in letters and diaries. Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Ralegh, Lord Essex’s father and most notably Francis Bacon were indeed among the many who wrote manuals of advice, from which the maxims I use were taken. Wherever possible, and especially on public occasions, I have tried to use the recorded speech of these very public personalities, while letters quoted are drawn from actuality.

The government’s role in the demonising of Henry Cuffe is explored in Lacey Baldwin Smith’s book
Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia
. Smith suggests that Essex’s rebellion was reconfigured into a more acceptable stereotype by making it less a reaction to the pressures of those fraught years, or an unpardonable lapse into folly by one of England’s premier peers, than the results of evil counsel. The fruit of a base man’s ‘motiveless malignity’, in the term Shakespeare used to describe Iago just three years later. Cuffe was sentenced to death in March 1601 and, unlike his employer, suffered the full horror of hanging, drawing and quartering, protesting to the last that he had been victimised.

As concerns other details of the plots I suggest, the more one reads about the late sixteenth century and its infinitely complex network of spies and informers, the more almost
anything
comes to seem a possibility. Francis Bacon’s role in Essex’s downfall was a cause of widespread discussion and debate even at the time, with allegations he had been poisoning the queen’s ear against his former patron, and disapproval of the double role – as Essex’s advisor, and as his accuser – that he seemed to play. The suggestion of the leaked letters, however, is my own – though, again, the trade in such potential sources of spin was well established: at one point Francis Bacon was known to have been writing letters purportedly exchanged between Essex and Francis’ brother Anthony, the real purpose of which was to be displayed to Elizabeth as ‘evidence’ of Essex’s fidelity.

Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a follower of Essex’s and a cousin of Ralegh’s (and, later, a founding father of the state of Maine) did indeed speak against the rebels moving on the court as well as the City and did, on the day before the rebellion, hold a meeting with Ralegh. We cannot know exactly what loyalties Sir Ferdinando carried to that meeting, nor exactly what was said there: though it is recorded that Gorges told (warned?) Ralegh that Essex had been ‘making his house into a Guard’; and went away to inform the earl that he was in danger, a statement that could only foster Essex’s suspicions. Gorges did indeed release the hostages contrary to Essex’s orders and subsequently gave evidence against Essex at his trial. Nonetheless, in the world of sober fact it is certainly possible that he was merely half-hearted in Essex’s cause rather than actively suborned against him. I might offer a putative apology to him, as to Bacon, for aspersions cast, if it were not that the latter at least fits very uneasily into the ‘injured innocent’ category.