Watch the Lady (57 page)

Cecil draws in a sharp breath, racking his mind to remember saying this and to whom. He may have vaguely alluded to such a thing in passing in the confines of a private meeting with the Spanish ambassador, as a way to tease out that thwarted peace treaty, but to a member of the Privy Council, never!

Essex is still shouting. “If that is not a plausible reason for me to wish this evil influence from Her Majesty's orbit, then I do not know what is.”

The earl collapses back into his seat and the place falls silent. Cecil garners his courage and, thinking of that burning letter, stands and draws back the curtain that conceals him in a single swift movement. It makes a loud metallic swish, like the drawing of a sword, and a gasp goes up through the chamber. Cecil stands erect, feeling for a moment, with all those faces turned his way, that he is acting a part in a play. He then takes the wooden stairs slowly, his uneven footsteps ringing out through the hush. As he makes his way over the vast expanse of floor towards Buckhurst, he can sense his anger brewing, as if he is a pot left too long on the heat and his lid will burst off. But he keeps his mind on that burning paper and on Lady Rich's marble handshake, reminding himself that he has complete control over the game.

He drops to the floor before Buckhurst, something he has only ever done for the Queen, but it seems an appropriately overblown gesture for the occasion. “I beg permission to answer this false accusation, my lord.”

“Permission is granted.” Even Buckhurst, leaning forward in his seat, is unable to hide the eagerness, spread over his baggy face, to hear what Cecil has to say.

Cecil turns to his adversary, speaking slowly and clearly. “My Lord of Essex, the difference between you and me is great. You surpass me in wit, and in nobility, and at the sword, of that there is no doubt.” He pauses, locking his eyes onto the earl's. They do not have the beguiling intensity of his sister's and, despite his appearance of absolute confidence, Cecil can see something else there, something resembling doubt. He has seen it often enough in the looking glass. “But I have innocence, conscience, truth, and honesty to defend me against this scandal, and in this court I stand as an upright man, and your lordship as a delinquent. Had I not seen your ambitions inclined to usurpation, I would have gone on my knees to Her Majesty to have done you good; but you conceal a wolf's body beneath a sheep's robe . . .”

Essex wears a smile and has a haughty tilt to the head as he replies, making no effort to hide his sarcasm. “I thank God for my humiliation, that you in the ruff of all your bravery have come here to make your oration against me.”

Cecil will not be cowed. “I beg of you, enlighten this court as to which councillor has heard me speak of such intrigues. Name him, if you dare.”

“It is no fiction,” says Essex. “Southampton here, he heard it as well as I.”

Southampton, who looks green with trepidation, mumbles out that he has it on good authority that Sir William Knollys said such a thing.

“Bring Sir William Knollys forth,” says Buckhurst.

An usher is dispatched to hunt down Knollys, who has kept a distance from the proceedings. After all, he risks much if he tries to save his nephew. A chair is procured for Cecil and they wait. He straightens the pleats in his cuffs, though they are already aligned to perfection, while his mind churns over the possibilities of what might be about to happen and the old fears return. Has Essex concocted a trumped-up charge with his uncle; will they produce faked documents to support their words; has Essex decided that if he is to fall he will take Cecil with him?

After what seems an interminable time Knollys arrives and is sworn in. He looks towards Cecil and then to his nephew, before beginning a lengthy preamble. It takes all Cecil's control to stop himself from interrupting and insisting he cut to the heart of the matter. Then: “I did indeed hear Mr. Secretary utter such a thing”—Cecil feels his insides crumble, his bowels loosen—“but it was in the context of a discussion by some members of the council on a tract entitled
Conference on the Next Succession
, which we had been charged with looking into.” Cecil slowly expels a long breath, as relief washes over him for the second time today. “Mr. Secretary had remarked, ‘Is it not a strange impudence in that the author gives equal right in the succession of the crown to the Infanta of Spain as to any other?' There is no corruption there, I think.” Knollys glances wistfully at his nephew, blinking slowly and pressing his lips together with a slight hunch of the shoulders, as if to say he has no way of saving him from his inevitable demise.

“The remark was reported to me in another sense,” says Essex lamely, completely deflated. The final moves have been made and the pieces are being cleared from the board.

The verdicts are pronounced: each peer speaking in turn: “Guilty, my lord, of high treason, upon my honor.” Lord Rich twists his eyes up and away as he says it. Cecil wonders, briefly, what is going on in
his
sorry mind. Essex, maintaining his composure, makes a plea for Southampton to be spared; it is a gesture that reminds the entire company of his nobility. Southampton loses his legs beneath him and has to be propped up as he implores Buckhurst for mercy in a quivering voice.

As Buckhurst announces the sentence all Cecil can hear is his father's voice:
Water hollows a stone, not by force but by falling often
.

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 94

“Why?” asks Penelope.

Essex looks back with a perturbing gaze that follows her about the room. He is dressed in white, a tight doublet of notched satin the color of spring clouds, stockings like swans' down, a snowy ruff frames a face that wears a small smile which cannot quite disguise a tiredness about the eyes. He is wearing Sidney's sword; only the hilt is visible. She thinks about young Robert, her fearless nephew who is now an earl, riding into London a month ago ahead of the newly crowned King James, as his sword-bearer—how he looked like his father. But it was not King James's sword he carried. Before the procession, in the chaos as everyone was dressing in their regalia, Penelope had slipped Sidney's sword into the King's scabbard, pressing a finger to her lips when her nephew opened his mouth to question her actions.

For her that sword had come to represent the spirit of something intangible, the elusive standard Sidney had stood for, of goodness and rightness and chivalry. By the time Robert was mounted on his father's favorite horse and came to draw the sword, holding it up vertically before him, no one could see that beneath the boy's hand were the intertwined initials
PS.
All eyes were on the new King. Seeing the splendor of it all, the crowd abounding with hope, she'd thought of the old Queen; in those two final years of her life she had seemed made of straw.

Penelope rode behind, with Lizzie and the newly pardoned Southampton, his prettiness a little soured from a brace of years in the Tower but reanimated by his freedom nonetheless. He didn't mention her brother and nor did she. As they turned a bend Robert glanced back and caught his aunt's eye with a smirk; Penelope felt herself ring with pride to see a Devereux back at the head of things, the future secured.

“Why?” she asks her brother again.

His painted face, with its half-hidden smile and tired eyes, is mute.

“Why?”
She shouts it this time, feeling an eruption of anger, imagining gouging out splinters from the panel that bears his portrait with her fingernails, but her voice echoes aimlessly about the Wanstead gallery.

Cecil had come to her again, on the day of her brother's execution. He was the only one. She supposed no one else could gain entry to Sackford's gloomy house. She thought she might receive a letter from her mother, though Lettice was mourning the loss of both a husband and a son.

But Cecil visited and was kind. “I'm sorry it came to this,” he had said. His spindly legs and hunched torso, clad in shimmering black, gave him the appearance of a crow. He had removed his hat; even the servants didn't bother to bare their heads for her in Sackford's house, not that she cared particularly.

“You are sorry?” she said.“But this outcome was your life's work, surely.” His face crumpled then and she thought, strangely, he might cry.

“I believed it was what I wanted,” was his reply. “I was wrong.”

Something had changed in Cecil; he had never been one to admit his mistakes. And the way he had always looked at her, that wretched leer that made her feel like a sweetmeat, was gone, replaced by a look that seemed full of respect—as if she were not a woman at all.

“Did you see him die?” Her voice was small and fractured from holding back her grief.

He nodded. “He died well . . . bravely.”

She remembers the sense of desolation coming to her violently, like a bullet to the heart. She had refused to entertain, until that moment, the thought of her beloved brother meeting his end. He had seemed at once so fragile and yet invincible, and somewhere deep inside she harbored the belief that he would be pardoned. She looks again at the painting, imagining a different world, a world in which her snow-white brother had a stay of execution, stewed in the Tower for a couple of years, to be released by King James. It would have been he, not Robert, carrying the King's sword. She will never become accustomed to his absence. A soldier once told her that years after losing his leg in battle, he still felt pain in the place where it had been.

She had asked Cecil what were his last words.

“He begged forgiveness, said he never intended to harm Her Majesty, and when he knelt there was not so much as a tremor in his hands.” Cecil held out his own hands in imitation but they trembled horribly, like a drunkard's, and he tucked them back beneath his robe. “He cried, ‘Executioner, strike home!' Then it was done.”

She felt herself collapse inside as her imagination conjured the scene, her brother courageous to the last. Cecil didn't tell her then that it had taken three strikes of the axe to sever his head. She discovered that later. It was the Queen who told her, seeming horrified by what she had done, desolate with grief. The Queen never fully recovered her strident demeanor, as if her regret had opened a fissure in her, through which her life slowly ebbed away. She was like a wraith for those two final years. Penelope wondered if the Queen had thought of Essex on her deathbed. It is remorse that does for you in the end.

Her painted brother watches her still. “Why?” she asks again, whispering this time, but there are no answers to be had there.

She is back in that grim room with Cecil, learning of her brother's death. Cecil seemed uncomfortable, twisting his hands, unable to look her in the eye.

“And the Queen?” she asked. “How did she respond, once he was . . .” She couldn't put it into words. “Once it was done?”

“She cannot speak of it. Is shut away in her bedchamber. She wept and cared not who saw.”

Penelope tried to imagine that—the Queen weeping—but couldn't.

“There is something else,” she said to Cecil, “something you are not telling me.” She could see it in his posture, his arms crossed over his body.

He shook his head minutely and they were silent for a moment.

It was Cecil who spoke eventually. “I should tell you he denounced you.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “Who denounced me?”

“Your brother. He gave testimony that it was you who pushed him into rebellion, that you were the source of the whole affair. Said you told him his friends all thought him a coward, that it was your idea that he should march on the court—to ‘get the thing done properly,' is how he put it.” It seemed Cecil, having decided to speak, could not get his words out fast enough.

“My brother said those things?” She was hollowed out; the brother she had cared for, nursed through melancholy, supported, loved—how she had loved him—had denounced her in a futile attempt to save his own skin. It was difficult to breathe, as if there was not enough air in the entire world to keep her alive, and she had a picture in her mind of his head struck from his body, repeating over and over again.

Her eyes return to the painting, and his face is that of a stranger. “Was it easy?” she asks that face. “Would you have rather seen
me
go to the block? You would have been eaten away with guilt, Robin.” She can feel her throat clog and her eyes begin to smart, but shakes the feeling away.

She wanted to quiz Cecil, ask him for each and every detail of her brother's damning statement, but didn't, for neither could she bear to hear more of it. She looked to her hands, only then realizing that they had been fisted so tightly her nails had drawn blood in the soft pads beneath her thumbs. She clasped them together so Cecil would not see the depth of her anguish. “Why do you tell me this?”

“In the spirit of honesty,” is what he said.

A snort of disbelief had escaped from her. “Honesty?” She was clinging to the last shreds of her self-control.

“Yes, now we have an agreement, it seems right to start from a place of truthfulness.”

“I wonder if I have not made a pact with the devil,” she said, making it sound like a jest, somehow able to disguise the profound loathing in her voice.

“As do I,” he replied with a smile. “You will find I am a man of my word.”

That has turned out to be the truth—she has her life, her freedom, an elevated place at court, and he is chief advisor to the King—they both kept their promises.

Once Cecil was gone the surge of anger surprised her; it took hold of her body with a force she could not control and she picked up a chair, hurling it at the wall, then the other chair, then the table—terrible sounds came out of her, sounds that might have raised the dead, and still that image remained: scarlet blood streaming from his severed head, a river of blood. She broke every last object in that room of Henry Sackford's and collapsed onto the floor, entirely spent.