Watch the Lady (44 page)

Is she mocking him with a silken insult? All he wants to do is reach out and stroke her cheek to see if it is truly as velvety as it appears.

“The affairs of state do not wait for any man to rest.”

“Perhaps you should acquire a pet,” she says, stroking the dog's head. “A little furred companion is most soothing for the troubled soul.”

He is wondering if his own troubled soul registers on his countenance and is framing a smooth smile in the hope of disguising it, when she plops her spaniel into his lap. Horrified, he pushes the filthy thing off. The sister puts a hand to her mouth, feigning a cough, which is surely laughter.

“Poor Fides,” coos Lady Rich, taking the animal in her arms, allowing it to lick her face. Cecil's stomach turns and he brushes at the white hairs it has left on his jet-black hose. “He is not accustomed to rejection.”

“Nor is your brother, it would seem. He has been sulking for months.” As the words leave his mouth he regrets rising to her provocation, but he cannot stay them.

Lady Rich surprises him with another smile, entirely incongruous with the content of her words. “My brother is gravely ill, he is under lock and key with Death knocking at his door, and he is not even permitted a visit from his loving sister, nor his wife, who has lately given him a daughter. I feel sure that with your influence”—she touches his shoulder, allowing her hand to rest there lightly for a moment—“you could persuade Her Majesty to at least give me leave to see him.” Only then does the smile drop from her face. “I truly fear for his life.”

“My influence is not so great in this matter as might be thought. I should like to see the earl released into more comfortable surroundings where he can regain his health, as much as you, but the Queen is quite adamant.” This is partly true. His conscience has been troubling him, but he has the upper hand at last. There can be only a single victor in his power struggle with the earl, and Cecil has discovered that his integrity is no match for his will to win.

She then bends forward to hiss in his ear. “I know your game, Cecil.”

He feels himself hardening and a gush of heat rises from his groin to his face. Try as he might he cannot tear his gaze from the smooth white mounds of Lady Rich's bosom. He forces his eyes to the bland rush matting on the floor, focusing on the plaited weave, counting the rows and taking several steady breaths.

“If I were you,” he says, once he is composed and has managed to place his own disingenuous smile onto his face, “I would take care.”

“Of what, exactly?” This is Lady Northumberland, who stands with her hands on her hips.

“Your sister's presence at Essex House seems to have become a magnet for disaffected supporters of the earl's cause.” Lady Rich appears not to be listening and stands cooing to the dog in her arms as if it is a baby. “They seem to think she will take up your brother's part in his absence. The Queen senses the rumblings of rebellion in the air. She does not like it.”

“There are just a few waifs and strays gathering there,” says Lady Rich, looking up from the pet, not seeming discomfited in the slightest. “Whether they are loyal to my brother is neither here nor there, and they are mistaken if they think I will take up any kind of cause. But they are welcome at Essex House. Did not St. Peter himself tell us to be hospitable?”

He brushes at his hose again, plucking off another dog hair, while he tries to find a suitable retort. “How can you be sure there is not a Judas amongst them?” He thinks of Francis Bacon who is, under his own commission, poring over that tract of under a year ago that compared the earl to Henry IV, scrutinizing it for any slight sniff of treason and the means to send Essex to the block. Bacon, the sly fox, had approached Cecil with the tract when the earl was leaving for Ireland, since when Cecil has done everything in his power to suppress the publication; the last thing he needs is the masses conceiving of the earl as some kind of heroic Henry IV figure. Next thing they would want to see him on the throne. More peculiar things have happened and Essex does have a measure of royal blood. Fortunately, Cecil had succeeded in keeping the tract from the general public. But now it might be of use to him if it can cast the earl in a light of treachery.

When Bacon had first handed it to Cecil, he had made the gesture seem offhand, but Cecil sensed his cousin was ready to change his affiliation. He must be delighted now to have put his money on the winning cock. Cecil wonders if Anthony is aware of his brother's defection. Francis says not, but then he might be playing a duplicitous game—he is doubtless clever enough—

Lady Rich interrupts his thoughts. “A Judas! One can never be sure. Besides, I will soon be at Richmond for Christmas so all my brother's admirers will have to gather elsewhere.” The way she uses the term “admirers” makes the dissenting rabble sound like a circle of poets. Then, taking her sister's elbow, she turns and walks away towards the Queen's rooms, leaving Cecil straightening his collar and adjusting the lacing on his doublet, with the distinct feeling that he has been taken for a fool.

The Christmas festivities in anticipation of the new century have an air of feverish excitement, more so than usual. It is as if the Queen must shore herself up with pleasure. There has been feasting of gargantuan proportions, at each meal course after course of poultry is served; every feathered fowl Penelope has ever heard of and some she hasn't, spatch-cocked, or spit-roasted, or boiled, or baked, or stuffed one inside the other and cooked in a coffin. And then the meat: entire sides of venison, great knuckle joints of mutton, hams as big as soldiers' thighs, suckling pigs, thick slices of beef served with indigestible vegetables from the New World, and salads and pies and tarts and custards and suckets and cheeses, until it seems there cannot be a bird or beast or plant left alive in the land.

The presence chamber is garlanded with decorations; the Queen sits in there every night and cannot be persuaded to retire until the last dance has been danced, the final song has been sung, and the very dregs of the wine have been glugged back. Her older ladies sit in heaps on cushions, yawning, barely able to keep their eyes open, whilst the young ones skip about the boards until they have holes in their slippers and still the Queen cries out for more.

Penelope stands in the gallery with her sister, watching the revelries continuing below, sickened by it all, thinking of her brother, locked away at York House. He ails from something and can neither sleep nor eat. Penelope fears he will not live the week and still she has not seen him, despite trying everything. She even offered one of his guards an emerald hung from a string of pearls that had been a gift from Blount. The jewel almost persuaded him, he had it in the palm of his hand and inspected it with bright eyes, but just as the deal was about to be struck he had a change of heart; she supposed he had been threatened with dire consequences. She has pleaded with God until her knees are bruised but in her heart she knows it will take more than prayer to save her brother.

The worry is wearing her thin. Responsibility falls to her but she fears she has not the strength to hold up the Devereuxs alone. Dorothy provides a little moral support but, as when they were children, it is Penelope who is expected to engineer a miraculous solution. Lettice has taken a house in Richmond near the palace and has been pressing Penelope to do more to help her brother. “You know how to deal with Elizabeth.
You
have had her favor for years,” she had said. “Find a way.”

Penelope could hear the bitterness beneath her words, as if her mother were casting around for someone to blame. “I am doing all I can,” was her reply.

“Anyone would think you cared nothing for your brother.”

Stung, Penelope said, “We must not let this pull us apart. I love my brother as much as you do.”

“You are right.” Lettice slumped in despair. “That woman means to take every last person I have ever loved from me.”

She spots Moll Hastings below, sitting to the side, and is flooded with memories of the maids' chamber, the gossip, the romantic intrigues. How straightforward life was then, though she hadn't thought it so at the time. Wild Moll leading them all astray, peevish cousin Peg—she died in childbed—and Martha, whatever happened to Martha? Moll has never wed, forced to live out her whole life at court. She remembers how their heads all turned like sunflowers as Sidney passed by, and lines of poetry alight in her mind:
Let my whispering voice obtain / Sweet reward for sharpest pain
. When she reflects on it with the wisdom of distance, she understands how Sidney re-created her with his poetry, formed out of the parts of her a woman who did not exist, yet one who still endures in words—will continue to do so after she is gone. That creation is a woman she is often mistaken for, but not by Blount. For Blount she is flesh and blood. Yet she feels Sidney's loss even now, even after so much else has come to pass. She will not lose her brother too.

Penelope has beseeched the Queen, countless times, to allow her a single visit to her sick brother, to no avail. And now it is Christmas, Elizabeth is in a frenzy of pleasure and will be petitioned no more. She considers the excesses of the season, wondering what God, who asks for moderation in all things, must think of such carousing. Looking down, she seeks out Blount, who is beside the Queen. She is laughing, her head thrown back. Penelope watches her lover recite a ballad, which has amused the Queen so greatly she wants to hear it over and over again. Penelope keeps herself out of the way. Her last encounter with the Queen was a frosty one indeed, and she fears it will not be long before she too is asked to leave court—or worse.

A hurdy-gurdy starts up with a relentlessly jaunty Christmas tune and people line up on the floor to dance. The Queen claps along. Despite her merry mask—the elaborate dress cut obscenely low, the painted face, the ropes of pearls—she looks old. Her increasingly bad eyesight makes her seem befuddled as she confuses one person for another, and her intransigence has hardened as it does in the elderly. It is no wonder her subjects—the ordinary men and women who live outside the bubble of court—are apprehensive; no wonder there has been unrest. They are gripped with the fear, though no one dares say it, that she will die before she names an heir and chaos will reign—that has always been the fear but now she has passed her threescore years the dread has hardened. The Queen still lives in her glory days but England is spent, her people are starving, and the terror of Spanish attack lurks. The uncertainty is like a poison seeping into every crevice of the realm. It is no wonder men turned to her brother. He became a figure of hope, but now . . . it hollows her out to think of him in his lonely prison.

“Look,” says Dorothy, nodding her head to where the Queen has taken Blount's hand to be led to the floor, as the musicians start up another dance. All Penelope can think of is her brother last Christmas, dancing hand in hand with the Queen, as Blount is now. How they had all been teeming with optimism then—the favorite returned to the fold. Blount is dancing with her now and soon it will be
him
in the Irish mud.

“How history repeats itself,” she whispers. Unease sits over her, blocking her light.

She can see her husband down there too, wandering about, trying to ingratiate himself with a group of privy councillors—he has been less than useless in advancing Essex's case, but even he is doing his best. At least his coffers remain full and he hadn't lost that land dispute, thanks to her intervention. Cecil is lurking with his cronies; he glances up, catching her eye—she doesn't smile, and nor does he—before he turns away sharply. She remembers her encounter with him the other day at Whitehall with a shiver of disgust; the way he looks at her, as if she is one of those spatchcocked chickens on the Christmas table, makes her flesh crawl. As he swings high on fortune's wheel the Devereuxs are plummeting. That man's influence has become unassailable. She cogitates exhaustively on how to shift that wheel back in their favor.

She feels sure that it is Cecil behind Blount's appointment to Ireland. He had talked of it with such insouciance, as if they are all marionettes, there to enact his own drama while he pulls the strings unseen. But she girds herself with the thought that perhaps Cecil will regret giving Blount charge of the greatest army ever mustered. She absently touches her fingers to the thong about her neck that holds the leather purse hidden beneath her clothes. Cecil thinks he knows everything but perhaps there are things he will never know, until it is too late.

She can see him now, whispering something to Francis Bacon, who is folding and unfolding his delicate hands. She knows Francis Bacon can't be trusted, there is something slyeyed about clever Francis—too clever for his own good—that always raised misgivings in her, and now she has proof. It was his brother, Anthony, who first discovered that Francis was now Cecil's ally. “Do nothing, my lady,” he had advised. “We shall watch on, silently. We may be able to use this knowledge to our advantage.” She saw then how deep Anthony's loyalty was to the Devereuxs, that he would put Essex's cause before brotherly love.

The hurdy-gurdy blares on, its insistent drone penetrating her skull. The beginnings of a headache descend, the slight burn of light at the edges of things that heralds hours of pain in a darkened room.

“Penelope!” her sister says, jolting her from her thoughts. “I think Blount is trying to get your attention.” She looks down to see that he has been released from the Queen's clutches and is looking up towards her.

“Come up,” she mouths, and he slips out of sight towards the steps.

“Do you think, if the worst comes to the worst, that Northumberland will take up our cause?” she says to Dorothy.

“The worst comes to the worst?” Dorothy's face is aghast. Dear Dorothy, who always believes things will turn out well.