Watch the Lady (51 page)

Leaving her chambers, without bothering to put on her overgown, she seeks out her brother, finding Anthony Bacon alone in Essex's privy rooms. He is jaundiced, his eyes a livid yellow, and he seems in terrible pain, wincing when he shifts position.

“You are not well, Anthony,” she says needlessly.

“My health is the last thing that concerns me.”

“Do you have news yet from the Earl of Mar? Perhaps we can at least try and persuade them to see the sense in delaying things until Mar's arrival. Once he has spoken to the Queen in my brother's favor, things might look very different. Mar speaks for King James, after all.”

“I have word he is on his way but I'm afraid he has not crossed the border yet. He is traveling slowly. It will be a good ten days . . .” He looks at her as if she might have an answer to this situation. “I fear we do not have that much time.”

“Indeed, this lot will not be held at bay for long.” Realizing, with a shiver, that she is cold without her overgown, she sits on a stool close to the fire. “What do you know about this play?”

“Oh dear!” he sighs. “They had the bit between their teeth. It was Cuffe's idea and he got a number of others behind them, Meyrick . . . that fellow Gorges too. Your brother did nothing to stop them—he seems to have fallen into a kind of . . .” Anthony looks at her again, pressing his lips together as if he doesn't trust what will come out of them.

“Madness,” she says. “You may as well say it, Anthony. Everybody is thinking it.”

“It
is
like a mania.”

“Yes—a mania; he swings between that and complete inertia; in either state it is impossible to reason with him.”

“I wish Blount were here,” he says. “Essex listens to Blount.”

“You are not alone in that.” She can't help the resignation in her voice and the distance of her beloved seems so great, as if he has traveled as far as the stars. She tries to think of his image of the compass's two conjoined arms, but it brings no comfort. “So—the play?”

“They intend to pay the company forty shillings to put it on tonight. I tried to stop them.”

“Forty shillings, good Lord! That is a week's takings.”

“I imagine the deal is struck by now and word will be spreading already. They hope to generate further support for your brother. Get London on its toes in readiness.”

Neither of them needs to articulate what they are readying themselves for. All those years of quietly negotiating for the Devereuxs' future, she never truly imagined it would come to this.

“Do you think Cecil truly sought to put the Infanta in line as Uncle Knollys is supposed to have heard?”

“It seems like folly to champion a Catholic for the throne,” he says. “But Cecil may have seen some political advantage there. It is possible, I suppose.”

They hear shouting on the steps outside and Essex bursts in with Southampton. The pair of them are flushed and high-strung with nervous excitement, pacing back and forth across the room. Essex is ranting about Ceciland sucking urgently on a dead pipe: “We will remove him and all the others, by force if need be. That man seems not to care that people are starving on the streets. He persists in his evil policies. I will rescue her from him.” His eyes are rotating. “They all want me dead: Cecil, Ralegh . . . all the rest . . .”

“Robin,” says Penelope, rising and attempting to place an arm about his shoulders.

But he shakes her off. “You don't understand.” A shower of spittle lands on her face. “
You
have never had to wield a sword or fight for your life. You think you have the answer for everything but you are just a
woman
.”

She suppresses an angry retort, tempering her tone. “There are peaceful means to achieve what you want.”

“You sound like
Cecil
now.” He throws his pipe across the room. “I cannot even get satisfaction from that blasted thing.”

“This is folly, Robin. Can you not hold your fire until the Earl of Mar arrives, at least?”

“She's right,” says Anthony.

“It's true, she has a point,” says Southampton, upon which Essex grabs his shoulders and presses his forehead to Southampton's with a snarl.

“Not you too! Afraid, are you?”

Southampton shakes his friend off. “Not afraid, no! I stand by you and fall by you. But your sister has wisdom to her fingertips.”

“My clever sister . . .” Essex begins to rant again, barely making sense, and Southampton tries to calm him, eventually luring him into his bedchamber with the promise of tobacco. Her brother seems to have regressed into childhood, has entirely lost control of himself.

After some silence Anthony adjusts his position with a groan. “I think we have reached a point when we need to gather as much support from credible nobles as possible.”

“I will do what I can. Cecil has enough enemies to make an army.” She spits out a caustic laugh. “Leave it with me.”

“It is only a play,” says one of the Queen's women, “no cause for concern.”

The Queen lifts the edge of her headdress to scratch beneath it with a long finger. “Do you not see,
I
am the second Richard.” She turns to Cecil, asking, “Are you sure the deposition scene was left in?”

“Absolutely sure, madam,” says Cecil. He is weighing up how best to approach this. He has it from a good source that the performance was paid for by someone in the Essex camp.

The Queen lets out a frustrated “Agh” and rips off her headgear—“That thing!”—flinging it to the floor and going at her scalp, scratching hard with both hands. Pins scatter, the loudest sound in the room, and a couple of pearls break away, rolling over the floor. There is a moment's stasis; no one knows how to react until a woman crouches down to pick up the pearls. A maid follows suit, retrieving the hood and the pins, carefully replacing them one by one into a pincushion. She hovers with the headdress, waiting for instructions. The Queen looks up. Cecil has never seen her hair uncovered and is surprised that it is almost white, remembering then that she is nearly seventy. “Just fetch me a plain coif. I've had enough of that discomfort,” she says to the waiting girl.

When the maid has gone, she beckons Cecil to come closer and whispers, “I know not what to do.” He is shocked to see her so forlorn. “If only your father were here.”

He interprets it as a slight; the inference is that he is not up to the job. “As do I,” he says, surprising himself with his own frankness. She is looking at him, waiting for a suggestion. “Send Knollys. Let him gently persuade the earl to come to you.” He is thinking of the Scottish King. He will never forge those ties without the earl.

“Essex has twice refused my summons,” she mutters. “Do you suppose him truly to be ailing as he says?”

“I think not, madam; I think he is afraid.”

She seems puzzled to hear this, sitting up straight with a quizzical expression. Perhaps she cannot imagine her warrior earl afraid of anything, least of all her; perhaps she cannot see that every last person here is afraid of her. He tries to imagine what it is like to be her, Elizabeth; how it must be to have everyone tread on eggshells about you out of fear, yet not know it. It makes him consider how entrenched people become, when they are old, in their ideas of others. It is as if she has a version of Essex in her mind and anything that veers from it is unrecognizable.

“Organize it, Cecil. Send Knollys, but not alone. Have Essex brought to me that he may plead his case in person.”

As he goes to leave, she calls him back. “You stay here with me, Pygmy.” Adding very quietly at the end, “I need you.”

A flower of satisfaction opens in him and he feels, for an instant, that he is what people think he is: the most powerful man in England. But the sensation is defiled by the realization that these words from the Queen, words that he has waited to hear for two decades, have come too late: everyone is looking to the future now and she is the past.

It is not long past dawn and from her bed Penelope can hear men shouting down in the yard, a brutish sound that charges her with dread. Things have gathered their own momentum, there will be no waiting for the Earl of Mar to come from Scotland now; it is far too late for that. She had been there last night when the coordination of arms and forces was discussed. Her brother's close circle sat about the table in the great chamber; a number of nobles had joined their ranks by her careful persuasion. Their blood was up and Penelope was unable to turn them from their warmongering; none would listen to reason. Southampton had laughed openly at her suggestion that Essex accept the Queen's summons; only Anthony Bacon had been in agreement with her, though he sat with his head in his hands for most of the meeting.

“It is a trap, he will be murdered, or at the very least arrested if he goes anywhere near that place,” Southampton had said to her, enunciating as if she were a child who needed her Greek vocabulary explained.

There had been a dispute about what to do first: march on the court, muster supporters in the city, or capture the Tower with its arsenal and the mint. Southampton and Gorges came near to blows. Essex said almost nothing, just sat stiffly at the table's head wearing a blank expression, muttering about trust and jumping at the slightest sound. She quietly suggested he retire.

“To be murdered in my bed?” he replied with force and she understood, more from his wild expression than his words, that he had come to the very edge of his sanity.

She had tried to make a suggestion about flight, thinking the only way to prevent this rebellion—for that is what it has become, a monster that has crept up on them—was to get her brother away, abroad. She had been shouted down. There had been no agreement and tempers became frayed. When another messenger arrived from court with a further summons and was dispatched with the excuse that the earl's health would not allow it, she yet again tried to make her brother see the sense in going to plead his case at the palace.

“They do not seek to hear me—that council of varlets—they seek to silence me for good,” is what he had replied.

Later, in bed, it occurred to her that as long as they couldn't agree on the best course of action, there would be no action. She felt only slightly reassured by that and had barely slept, missing Blount desperately, trying to comfort herself by imagining she was at Wanstead with him, surrounded by their children. It would be just an ordinary day, unremarkable. They would ride out, see the early lambs, and count the crocus heads piercing the earth in promise of spring. They would play cards on their return and then all gather for music; she would sing and the children would accompany her on their instruments. Then they would go to bed and she would lose herself in her lover's arms—a commonplace life.

She tried to remember what it was like to lie in Blount's embrace, the tang of him—sage rubbed between finger and thumb—the way he touched her, how his skin felt against hers, but she couldn't conjure up the remotest sense of him and began to ask herself if he existed only in her mind. Try as she might she couldn't keep her thoughts on happier things because she could hear the hubbub of the men in the courtyard, talking, making plots with her brother at their heart. She lit a candle and reread all Blount's letters, though she knew them by heart, seeking succor in the sight of his script. When sleep came it was uneasy and too shallow to bring any rest.

Once morning has come they all gather again in the great chamber, to continue the heated disagreement about either taking the court by stealth or mustering men in London—there is some fellow named Smyth in the city who can bring a thousand men to their cause, or so Gorges asserts. Gorges, with those unnerving eyes, seems to have so many of them in his thrall.

But what
is
their cause, Penelope wants to ask, for there are some who seek only to be rid of the Queen's bad council, but others . . . She cannot even think the thought. Gorges's fervor and seeming eagerness for a fight is cause for grave concern.

She takes Meyrick aside and asks, “Can Gorges be entirely trusted?”

“I shouldn't worry about that, he fought beside your brother in France . . . bravely, too.”

“You are sure of him?”

Meyrick places a vast steadying hand on her forearm. “Absolutely.” She allows herself to dismiss her suspicions of Gorges, remembering Meyrick's years of loyalty to the Devereuxs and his uncanny ability to detect calumny. They watch in silence then as Gorges and Southampton descend once more into full dispute.

Southampton calls the other man “dog-hearted,” tossing his mane and adding, “We march on the court, take them by surprise.”

“We are too few for that. A full thousand men await us in the city, if you would throw up that opportunity, then you are more of a fool than I thought.” Southampton reaches for his sword, causing Gorges to puff his chest out and step forward to stand barely an inch away from his adversary. Penelope notices, for the first time, that Gorges's doublet is threadbare at the elbows, in contrast to Southampton's splendid damask. Meyrick tries to pull Gorges away but Southampton grabs him by the throat, ripping that worn doublet at the collar.

“Call me a fool, you miscreant,” Southampton spits. “Think you can conjure a force of a thousand from nowhere . . . you, a
nobody
 . . .”

Essex barely moves a muscle, just watches, stonily.

Penelope leaves the chamber and makes for the stairs, racking her brains for someone to turn to: her mother, Essex might listen to
her
at least. She dismisses the thought. It dawns upon her that Lettice has waited years for a moment such as this—bred them all to it. Lettice, in one sense or other, will achieve her own personal revenge if Essex pulls off his coup. She has never yet thought ill of her mother and hopes it is the lack of sleep and the relentless worry, rather than the blackness of her heart, that has infected her mind with such disloyalty.