Constant Heart (26 page)

“Fasten it to the sleeve.”

She moved to pin it to the left sleeve.

I shook my head. “The right.”

Once she had finished, she took up my paints, but my fingers had begun to prick. And in rubbing them, I realized they were unadorned.

“I still need a ring.”

She returned to the box and lifted a hand to retrieve what I desired. “Which one?”

“Can I see them?”

She held the box before me, beyond the bounds of my ruff, so that I could look. I decided upon the emerald and reached in to the box to acquire it. It slipped from my fingers at the first. And then it fell away from them on my second attempt. I put my other hand to the box to steady it and tried again. In my scrabbling through the box after the jewel, Joan’s hand came to possess it and she offered it to me in her open palm.

Maddened, I reached for it, taking it up between my thumb and finger. But it tumbled from my grasp before I could thread it upon my hand. “Blast the ring! I do not want it now.”

But, in truth, I did. And later, after I had dismissed the chambermaid and Joan, I tried for the ring once more.

I opened the coffer and saw it lying upon a tray, hidden by nothing. But try as I might, I could not coax my fingers to possess it. I realized I had no choice but to go to court with my fingers bared.

But in leaving the room, my attention was arrested by a pair of gloves I had carelessly cast onto the table. I thought to take them with me to hide my fingers from view. But again, I could not grasp them. Finally, I swept them into one hand with the other and went out into the day.

But the episode had kindled a cold flame of fear within me. If I could not pick up a ring or put on a glove, then how could I sit a horse? How could I eat at a table? And how would I be able to hold my own sweet babe once it was born? I might have sent for a physician, but to what end? He would only have wanted to bleed or purge me, and I did not want to absent myself from court. I took a deep breath and ordered the flickering of anxiety within my belly to cease. The pricking would pass. The clumsiness would end. Why should it not?

And so I left, clinging to my hope that the ailment would be cured with the birth.

28

W
ith summer’s long, languorous days approaching, the earl’s thoughts turned to the pageant of Her Majesty’s Progress about the countryside to visit her people. And to the preparations to be made for the journey. He tried to convince me to stay at Lytham House, but I would not be coerced. For six weeks we were to have the pleasure of becoming an itinerant court. But that did not mean activities would not continue as was their habit. And I meant to be a part of them.

In fact, we had hardly time to arrange ourselves at Nonsuch when gossip began to circulate. One morning there was a hum emanating from the Presence Chamber as if from a beehive. As I stepped inside, I snared not one person’s attention. Courtiers were clustered in tight groups that did not invite guests.

Had Spain foresworn some new attack against Her Majesty?

Worse, had France joined with them?

I knew there was one who would know what there was to be told: Lady de Winter. Seeing my approach, she waved me to her side with her fan.

“Is it Spain? France?”

Her eyes glowed with unholy glee. “Worse, even! ’Tis Bess

Throckmorton.”

“What has she done?”

“Besides have Raleigh’s baby? She has been taken to the

Tower.”

“Why?”

Lady de Winter’s lips thinned and her eyes narrowed. “What else is to be done to a maid who entices Her Majesty’s pug onto her own lap?” She was shaking her head, pretending outrage when satisfaction was lurking all the while in her eyes. “Heed my words! There can be no love affairs at court. None but those pursued by Her Majesty. What can the girl have been thinking?”

I could guess. I knew. She had been bewitched. It had not mattered what she knew or what anyone else had thought. She had fallen in love.

Several days later the court was left reeling with the news that Raleigh too had found himself clapped into a cell in the Tower.

We spoke of it, Lytham and I, at dinner one noon as we ate at court of capons with spiced oranges, fish stuffed with currants, roast pig, parsnips and marigolds, and a spinach tart baked with rose water.

In fact, it was the topic of everyone’s conversation. “But now will she not have to take his estate from him?”

“The Queen? Why should she now if she has not before? She will forgive anything but being made a fool of. And Raleigh, God bless the man, is just the one to wriggle out of his responsibilities.”

He paused to work some meat away from a bone. “If Her Majesty asked him this day who was Bess Throckmorton, he would look her in the eyes and plead ignorance. And she would believe him! When has the Queen ever listened to reason where her heart is concerned? She is cuckolded by the very men she can never marry.”

“But why?”

“Why can she not marry? Who would have her? She is past the age of child-bearing. But more, who would she have? Any man she married would want the throne.”

The countess sitting on the other side of Lytham leaned past him to speak to me. “And ’tis the throne, her true love. Besides, she never wanted to marry.”

I leaned past Lytham to speak to the countess more directly.

“Why not?”

“Look what marriage did to her poor mother.” She drew a line across her neck with a finger. “And it did not seem to agree with her father.” She shook her head. “Seven times he was married! He could not make up his mind.”

Beyond the woman, her husband rose slightly from his chair to speak over his wife’s head “She is more like her father than she knows! Why get married when—” He was stopped from speaking when his wife stuck an elbow in his gut.

Lytham merely shook his head and resumed eating.

Frustration was at work that summer upon every person at court. And not on Raleigh’s account, but for cause of the weather. Wells had dried up across the kingdom and springs had stopped issuing water. Many beasts died that summer for thirst.

The birds could not be bothered to sing, though the earth gasped in relief at night to the rhythm of crickets’ screeching. Even the bees seemed indolent, unwilling to go about their business in the oppressive heat. We began to leave off layers in our dressing. And when waving our fans caused more perspiration than it abated, we left off doing that as well.

The court grew insolent. It lacked patience, it lacked humor, it lacked, quite frankly, of rain. And clouds. Of those dark events that serve to underscore the brightness of the light. Light, unrelieved, unabated, had become light unappreciated.

We left one house early that Progress, ere the sun had woke, and rode early to dinner at the next. We came to despise the banqueting houses constructed for our pleasure. They may have blocked the sun, but they also stored up heat. To step into them for the partaking of a dessert course was to step into a smelter’s furnace. At more than one estate, Her Majesty ate all of her dinner inside . . . and left the rest of us to blister in the smoldering temperatures.

A malaise began to spread through our ranks. A most mysterious and inconvenient disease that altered neither the appearance nor the constitution, but required the victim to retreat to a country estate to recover.

How I longed for water. How I wished to float upon the River Thames, making furrows in the water with my fingers, Lytham strumming upon the lute. If I closed my eyes, I could conjure visions of the swans and hear the watermen jostle for fares. But then we were told the river had dried up.

It was unimaginable. How could the city function without the river to supply transit? To cleanse it? How was one to visit a theater?

The Courts or the Bear Garden? London without the Thames was unthinkable.

But October brought the worst news of the year. As the Progress came to a close, word came that the plague had overtaken London. There would be no hope of the court’s return to the city. And indeed, a city without a river, a city that had closed up its theaters and quarantined itself against the plague, was a city to which there was no reason to return.

We found ourselves moored instead to the city of cupolas, turrets, and chimneys that was Hampton Court. At least we were not dancing on each other’s toes as we had at Nonsuch. Lady de Winter once told me Hampton Court had eight hundred rooms. I knew her to tell tales, but that statement might well have been the truth.

We had just arrived when Lytham decided to send me back to Holleystone for my lying-in.

“But I am not ill! I am just breeding!”

“And I want you to do it at my home.”

“There was one countess danced a galliard a week before she was brought to bed. At this very place.”

“I will not have my heir bounced out upon his head for want of his mother’s care.”

“I care very much about the health of this babe! And it is one month still until he makes his appearance.”

“A month I would know you safely at home.” Lytham drew me into his arms and aimed a kiss at my neck, but his approach was blocked by the babe growing in my belly. “The boy stands between us even now.”

He retreated to stand behind me and then resumed his sweet pursuits.

“How do you know him to be a boy?”

His lips paused. “Your belly wobbles a bit to the right, my sweet.

Your right eye is more brilliant. Your right cheek more flush.”

I felt my left cheek warm to match it. “And if you are mistaken?”

“Then
she
shall be the most beautiful girl in England and we will see her married to a future king.”

It took all of Lytham’s skills at persuasion to move me from Hampton Court to Holleystone. And in the end, he left court to accompany me there himself.

29

A
s I accompanied Marget with my men, the consequence of the drought was plain to see. England’s tidy farms lay in waste around us. The furrows that usually organized the fields into regiments had degenerated into chaos. The wheat that had been first stunted and then scorched by summer’s sun had been left to rot so that fields looked filled with corpses. Doors to huts hung open, creaking in the wind. Their roofs, which generally puffed with smoke, had fallen in. The landscape, bereft of trees, had no wood to kindle even the smallest of fires. We may have destroyed the Spanish Armada, but fitting out the navy had destroyed all of England’s trees.

Around us, the poor wandered like a group of finches in search of food. And not always on the road between villages but through the brush. Yet not one person pursued them to demand why they did not keep to the roads. And we saw no one being whipped back to a home parish for vagrancy. Indeed, it was as if the people had no home parish at all. It was alarming. Always, they were walking.

And no one seemed to know or care where. The only poor I saw motionless were those who had fallen into ditches, dead.

What was to become of England if people would not keep to their places? If they felt free to wander wherever they desired and whenever they wanted? And if they did not keep to their homes and do the work of their fathers, then who would do it? The closer we got to Holleystone, the less often the vagrants moved off the way when we passed.

Finally, I halted in front of one such a group.

They made no reverence. And they made no move to leave our path.

“Please, my lord, a bit of bread?”

“Please, my lord, a swallow of ale?”

“Have you a license for beggary?” I questioned.

“Not in this parish, my lord.”

“Then you are strangers. Why do you wander so far?”

“We have no home. We once had, but there is nothing to eat.

And none left in the village, my lord.”

“None?”

“None save us. We started with two children . . . but they . . .now they’re dead.” They were a ragtag bunch of six.

“You cannot just wander, man!”

“Then what shall we do, my lord? Sit down and die?” In his agitation, the man’s hood had slipped down his head. His lank hair hung in shocks, an ear protruding between them . . . or what was left of his ear. At some point it had been burned, leaving the remnants to curl in toward his skull. It was the mark of a vagrant, caught not once but twice. And the penalty for a third offense was death by hanging.

“This is not the first time you have wandered afar.”

The man straightened in a brazen manner. “And I will wander still farther if I must.”

I looked them over once more, then nodded and set my horse into motion.

Marget urged her own horse forward to ride beside me. “But did you not see his ear? He is a vagrant. A sturdy one. And caught twice for his crimes.”

“What should I have done? In this country, with no food in his possession, it cannot take long for him to die.”

When we reached Holleystone, we were home barely a forenoon when the steward announced trouble at the gate.

“ ’Tis the poor, my lord. Those that were and those that are now. The countryside has turned to beggary. And now that you are here . . .”

Lytham replaced his quill into his inkwell and walked to the window. He stood there so long a time and looked so troubled that I soon put aside my book to join him.