The Triple Goddess (17 page)

‘I had no choice in the matter. As beautiful as Bess was in her youth—thou wouldst find it hard to credit now—her temper hath always been so fiery as to make me seem a very milksop by comparison. She and the Queen are the two most fearsome women I have known, and compliance with their wishes was ever the best option.’

‘As I understand it, Sir Walter, the families of important personages like yourself were allowed to accompany them to the Tower, as well as their servants. If her ladyship does not live with you, as I believe to be the case, is she not at least a frequent visitor?’

‘My wife, who was also for a time imprisoned in the Tower owing to the Queen’s anger at our having got married secretly without her permission…in a separate cell, thank God…is not easily drawn back to the place…the Deity be praised again. After her younger son was born and christened here, my Bess was released by her royal namesake. She doth not care to be reminded of her double confinement within these walls.’

A look of alarm crossed Ralegh’s face. ‘If thou art indeed a girl, is’t possible thou art acquainted with my wife? Or worse, art thou her emissary? Answer me honestly!’ He sucked fiercely on his pipe as he glared at her.

‘You may rest easy on that count. I have not had the pleasure of meeting your wife.’

The knight exhaled a stream of smoke and relief. ‘Bess!’ he said hoarsely, ‘how could I have traded Gloriana’s favour for that virago?’ He halted, perhaps embarrassed by the indiscretion. ‘There were not enough cloaks in the world to cover the puddles of my shame at incurring the Queen’s displeasure; no poems I could write extolling her beauty and virtue, that were of sufficient merit in her eyes to win her forgiveness.’

‘Ah yes, the verses to Cynthia, as you called her.’

‘When they proved ineffective, I hit upon the idea of regaining her favour by profiteering in the Caribbean. Being ever desirous to fill the Treasury with King Philip’s gold, though we were not at war with Spain at the time she was moved to agree. Officially, I was forbidden during my voyage to “robbe or spoile by sea or by lande, or do any acte of unjust or unlawfull hostilitie, to any of the subjects of us, our heirs or successors, or to any of the subjects of any [ ] the kings, princes, rulers, governours, or estates, being then in perfect league and amitie with us….”

‘Nonetheless, the Queen gave me every unofficial encouragement to act as a Privateer in bringing home as many carracks and galleons as I might be able. But Fate, alas!, was against me, and I—who had once been a shining star in her firmament, with the titles of Captain of the Guard, Governor of Jersey, Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, Vice Admiral of the West, and Lord Warden of the Stannaries bestowed upon me—sank in her esteem and affection lower than a heavily broadsided vessel.’

‘The Stannaries?’

‘The Cornish tin mines.’

Arbella said hesitantly, ‘Sir Walter, might you care to elaborate upon the plot you were involved in, after Queen Elizabeth’s death, to unseat King James and put Arbella Stuart on the throne? It is a subject that…’

Ralegh sighed. ‘James, or ‘“The wisest fool in Christendom” as Henri the Fourth of France, or it may have been his minister Sully, dubbed our King, easily confounded us. I regret to admit that I had grown desperate and careless in mine affairs by the time that dandiprat Scot slithered down from the north. Nonetheless Arbella Stuart, I remain convinced to this day, would have made the perfect replacement for such a foppish excuse for a monarch—a man who will be remembered for nothing but his treatises on smoking, and witchcraft, and as the author of a poor poem,
The Kingis Quair
, the King’s Book.’

Arbella breathed the only lines of it that she could remember:

‘

The bird, the beast, the fish eke in the sea,

They live in freedom each in his kind,

And I a man, and lacketh liberty.

’

She added, ‘You might have written the lines yourself.’

Ralegh spat, ‘Doggerel, pure doggerel. What doth James know of the loss of freedom? I, on the other hand, my voyages and
History of the World
attest to my compulsion to travel and explore. Even in captivity when one is forcibly restrained from indulging one’s peripatetic urges, a mind such as mine draweth a circle on a map with a pair of compasses; thus may one leg circumscribe the earth while the other remaineth affixed to the centre.’

‘After King James reprieved you, Sir Walter, and you made your second expedition to the Orinoco, in your absence you were accused of treason for conspiring with King Philip of Spain against the Crown.’

‘A vile calumny. So confident was I that everyone would disbelieve such fabrication, knowing me to be ever an unwavering and implacable foe to the Spaniard, that I returned home when I could have altered course for France. The extraordinary plan that serpent James had in sending my fellow snake of a kinsman Stukely to meet me, was to give me that very opportunity in order that I might condemn myself. They should have known it would have gone against the grain of my character to slip away like a common criminal: a man like myself can live in confinement, but not in exile. But either way, I was lost.’

‘Returning to the subject of your wife, if you wouldn’t mind...you didn’t mention the cause of your estrangement.’

Ralegh looked nervously at the door. ‘Bess plagueth me at intervals, and hath announced that when I am executed she shall carry my head around with her in a red leather bag for the rest of her unnatural life. I depend upon my servant Grammaticus to keep her at bay. When Bess is drunk—her consumption of wine and spirits is immoderate—she oft arriveth to address me on what she believeth to be my failings. She begrudgeth me the necessities of civilized existence, videlicet, my garments:’—Ralegh fingered the embroidery on his doublet—‘I have a reputation to uphold in the standard of my dress, besides which, just because I am a prisoner does not mean I must wear rags. A certain lawyer who spent several years before the mast as a young man wrote that, “Every sailor knows that a vessel is judged, a good deal, by the furl of her sails.” Lawyer he may have become, but he wrote sooth: for if there is too much bunt, or if the clews are too taut or slack, or if any sail is abaft the yard, the ship cannot perform ataunt. As it is for a ship so it goeth for a man.’

Arbella vowed to herself always to furl herself to best advantage; not to let her skin get baggy or allow her clews to get slack (over-tautness was reckoned unlikely as one got older); and, above all, never to have to buy extra material to cover abaft her yard.

‘Also,’ Ralegh continued, ‘one is expected to maintain a certain standard of fare at the table and to keep a decent cellar. I am the recipient of lavish hospitality from the Lieutenant of the Tower, which I am obliged to repay. And Northumberland, who himself employeth two French cooks, cannot be served a mess of pottage in a wooden porringer. Bess—my wife, that is, for I would never speak in such familiar terms of Cynthia—hath one grievance against me in particular. After what she describeth as her having endured many years of my profligacy with her family’s money, she objected to my having pawned a jewel, a diamond that was a gift to her from the late Queen. What my wife faileth to appreciate is the scandalous cost of maintaining one of my station in moderate comfort. Take furnishings, for example: a Gobelin tapestry or two, a Turkey carpet, velvet for the curtains...the expense is hideous. Is it unreasonable to wish to display paintings by artists who are not anonymous? Though men may bring their own drinking cups and knives to dinner, even the effeminate fork, is it vain to entertain on one’s own gold and silver services? As to fine linen: it is through no fault of mine that my tailor’s and haberdasher’s bills grow ever larger; knowing how discriminating my tastes are, they keep putting their prices up.

‘To no avail do I remind Bess, from a distance, that it is impossible for a man to earn a proper income while “
Brooding in dark cellars of thought |Calcified in flagstones of the pooling hours.”’

‘Is that a quotation? I don’t recognize it.’

‘Nay, it is from a poem I wrote this morning. One must keep the mind active. “Be not solitary, be not idle”: so Burton recommends, and he is right, if one is to ward off melancholia. I have no choice but to be alone, for the most part, but I do my best to stay busy. It helpeth also to take my mind off my health, for I am not a well man. I have stabbed myself on several occasions, hoping to end my life upon my own terms. I have suffered two strokes.

‘Despite which, when I was unwell a physician who came to see me at the behest of my friend Ben Jonson reported to the Lieutenant that, in order to win sympathy, I had used an ointment to rupture my skin and swallowed an emetic to cause convulsions. Marry! a brave man should not be brought to such a pass.’

‘Nonetheless,’ said Arbella, ‘I read that after Northumberland’s friends had visited you they commented that your illness appeared most variable, especially when you were moved to participate in their conversation.’

‘Tush! Pish!’ Ralegh tapped the dead ashes from his pipe onto the floor. ‘I had been ill for a week before they took the trouble to come. I could have been dead by then for all they cared.’

The silver stem of Ralegh’s pipe glinted, and both of them looked to the window. As the sunlight gained in intensity it spread throughout the room and coated everything in gold, and despite the murkiness of the glass they could see that the sky was now an unblemished blue.

‘At last!’ exclaimed the knight; ‘what with all this weather and talk I have made myself late. I have a consultation with my leech regarding an ingrowing toenail, and one of my physicians is sending someone to clean the coffee and tobacco stains from my teeth.’

‘Coffee? You drink coffee?’

‘It is a new drink that the Queen introduced me to. After she established trading relations with the Ottoman Empire, some sacks of the beans it is made from arrived in a shipment of goods from Smyrna. My wife’s younger son picked up the habit from me and got into the coffee business...on the strength, literally, of mine addiction.’ Now that there was no call for candles, the filament of amity between the pair was broken and Ralegh’s tone became distant again. ‘What is thy name, girl?’

‘Now you ask. It is Arbella.’

Ralegh jumped as if he had been electrocuted and stared at her. ‘Arbella?’

‘In full, Arbella Mary Stuart Stace. Sir Walter Ralegh was Arbella’s staunchest advocate and she had cause to be very grateful to him.’

‘Arbella Stuart? Is’t possible? But her hair was redder than thine.’

‘Yes, mine is naturally auburn. As to the historical connection, you will know that Arbella Stuart also had no love for King James, although he was her first cousin and responsible for establishing her at Court as England’s “Second Lady”. It was James who forbade Arbella to marry William Seymour. And it was James who had her brought here to her last place of confinement at the Tower of London, where she committed suicide by starvation. Arbella Stuart was a model for the Duchess in John Webster’s play
The Duchess of Malfi
.’

After continuing to stare a while longer while Arbella returned a neutral gaze, Ralegh put his arm across his waist and bowed. Then, sticking his pipe in his mouth upside down he turned on his heel, marched to the wall, grabbed his cloak, swirled it around his shoulders, donned his bonnet, and departed leaving the door open behind him. As Arbella blew out the candles and felt the room empty around her, her sense of the present, that intrusive and unwelcome tense, returned.

Chapter Eleven

That night Arbella Stace had a dream.

King James the Third of England, or Jug Ears as he was known to his subjects, had caused his Lord Chamberlain to write offering her a newly created position at the Royal Court of His Britannic Majesty. As Mistress of the Plants, she would oversee a large staff dedicated to the tending of Jugs’ massive botanical collection in the royal hothouses, conservatories, greenhouses, and seed banks. This meant ensuring that the royal trees, plants, shrubs, and flowers were properly housed or stored, and embedded, fed and watered, and organically fertilized; as well as talked, sung madrigals, and played Bach to for five minutes every hour around the clock.

Although it was common knowledge that King James was so batty as to make his numerical equivalent amongst the Hanoverian Georges seem as sane as a Charlemagne, suppressing her astonishment Arbella agreed to go to London to be received by His Royal Highness and discuss the matter.

At Buckingham Palace she was ushered into the royal presence and offered a cup of camomile tea and a slippery-elm pastille, both of which she declined in favour of Diet Coke, of which the Palace had none. Most of what the moody monarch had to say was unintelligible, owing to his whispering into a flowerpot as if he was concerned that its occupant might be offended at being ignored.

After half an hour His Majesty signalled that the interview was over by rippling the cartilage of his auricles. The movement was so forceful that it blew out a candelabra, the candles of which were made from beeswax from the King’s hives mixed two parts to one part of wax from his own ears, which he was testing as an alternative to the electric light that he found so objectionable on aesthetic and environmental grounds, and was considering banning throughout the kingdom as part of his initiative against light pollution.