The Girl in the Glass Tower (8 page)

She sighed. ‘I know it is a difficult burden to bear, but bear
it you must. Your position comes with great responsibility; you are no ordinary girl; as the Queen’s precious heir you must be protected.’

I realized then, looking at the serious dark-grey eyes of the two-year-old me with that doll in my pudgy fist, that the image was an illusion, for it was I who was the doll and it was the Queen who had me clasped in her hand and could do what she wanted with me – even throw me to the dogs if she pleased.

‘How will I learn to be queen if I am never at court?’ The idea of my becoming Queen of England was too daunting to ponder on properly. ‘I will never be prepared for …’ I couldn’t articulate all the things I feared. Despite my copious learning, I felt I knew nothing of statecraft; I had the sense too that my house arrest at Wingfield was perhaps a preparation in itself, for to be queen meant living a life watched and restricted and under constant threat. ‘How will I command loyalty?’

‘Listen to me!’ Grandmother’s face almost broke into a smile, but not quite. ‘Managing my estates is much like running a country. It requires the same tenacity and attention to detail, the same respect from one’s staff. Watch me, and you will learn all you need.’ She stopped a moment and I remember wishing I could be more like her. She was the strongest person I knew. ‘You must know,’ she continued, ‘that Elizabeth was denied a place at court for many years before she took the throne and look how great she became. Everything will be different when we move to Hardwick.’ She said it as if Hardwick were Paradise and not just another more beautiful place where I would be held prisoner. She let her pearls fall to her lap and reached out for my hand, asking in an old ritual, ‘May I?’ I nodded and she took it in both of hers, which were chilled and papery. ‘I know it is difficult and I am here to help you. I understand you miss your horse and
the freedom of riding out. I understand how fond one can become of an animal; I do not have a heart of stone, as you believe, but my foremost care is for your safety – it must be.’

I nodded. I understood. I had witnessed the threat at first hand.

‘You are my most precious jewel, Arbella, and I will protect you if it is my last act on earth. The risk I took to bring your parents together –’ she let her words hang. I’d heard it often; the jeopardy of marrying her daughter, without royal sanction, to Charles Stewart, Earl of Lennox, a prince of the blood, and how she had been obliged to negotiate delicately with the Queen to avoid the fate of Charles’s mother, who had found herself in the Tower for aiding and abetting a potentially treasonous match.

I felt my frustration well. ‘And
you
never give a thought to the greatness you stand to achieve as the Queen’s grandmother?’ The words erupted from my mouth unbidden and laden with anger.

‘Your sarcasm is unbecoming, Arbella.’ Her expression was tight and I sensed her temper rousing too.

‘I am nothing but the final brick in your empire, the means by which you can make your elevation complete.’ I was shouting now. ‘And I must sleep in your bedchamber like an infant. So your investment is protected.’

She gave me a cold, hard stare. ‘I fear I have made a monster.’

‘No! It is your ambition that is monstrous.’ The painted girl was staring at me. ‘I’m not a thing that you can wind up to do your bidding.’

‘I know, I know.’ She had gained control of her anger, while mine was still boiling. There was not even the faintest tremor in her voice. ‘I know you are not a thing. I love you very much.’

She was completely calm as if those angry words had never been said.

I stormed from the chamber, stopping outside for a moment to allow my rage to subside and to regain my poise. Whispers were coming from the pages’ room, a welcome distraction.

‘They said he kissed the gentleman –’

‘You are wrong,’ interrupted someone. ‘Morley is a Catholic spy; that is why he was dismissed. No one’s supposed to know.’

‘How do
you
know then?’

‘I just do.’

I crept away with the sense of encroaching danger. The threat had always seemed something exterior, lurking outside, abstract, but this news of Morley brought the menace within. My already small world shrank further.

In the narrow space between my bed and Grandmother’s was a small table cluttered with objects. A much-thumbed bible atop a stack of books, a carved facsimile of the Talbot coat of arms, a dish containing various small items, pearls and buttons, a silver thimble, a pin cushion and other nameless things.

I picked up the oval miniature that lay amongst those objects. On one side, behind a perfect curve of glass, was Jane Grey, the executed queen, dark and sober, and on the other was her sister Katherine, golden with rosebud lips and teasing eyes, the opposite of serious Jane. Katherine’s fate was no less tragic than her sister’s; she’d been separated from her beloved husband and sons and died of grief.

I had been captivated as a child by those doomed girls who’d lain beside Grandmother’s bed for as long as I could remember. Jane had been willing to die for her faith – brave to the last, they said – and her death was recorded in the great Book of Martyrs that lay on the table outside the chapel. But it was Katherine who was the greater puzzle,
whose fate was more obscure, draped in shame, it seemed to me. It was whispered she starved herself to death. I im-agined her forfeiting nourishment as a last act of resistance, when she had no other way to take hold of her own destiny. I too knew how to befriend the pain of hunger, to feel the seductive power of resistance, to force the body into submission. There was no place for Katherine Grey in the great book, but to me she was a martyr – the cause she stood for: free will, or something like it.

‘Why do you keep the Grey girls here?’ I asked Grandmother as she got into bed.

‘To remind myself that even the best-laid plans can go awry,’ came her reply.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You can never know which way public opinion will fall when a childless monarch passes on.’ She paused and sighed deeply. ‘Not enough care was taken in the choice of Jane Grey’s husband. That was what led to her downfall.’

I didn’t fully understand what she meant but it was clear she didn’t want to be drawn out, for she extinguished her candle and drew her bed curtains.

Her words circled my head as I lay awake in the dark of my own curtained space, imagining those two tragic girls with their royal blood like mine and wondering if Morley truly was a Catholic spy and whether that, rather than my dawn wanderings, was the reason for the new sleeping arrangements. My only comfort came from the churning pangs in my gut and running my hands down the grille of my ribs and over the sharp jut of my hipbones.

It was not long after Morley’s sudden departure that my new tutor arrived. I remember clearly my first encounter with Starkey in Grandmother’s withdrawing chamber. I awaited his arrival sitting quietly in the window alcove with Margaret
and Cousin Bessie. Grandmother was being read to across the chamber by one of her women and Mister Reason was playing chess with Dodderidge. Margaret was embroidering a complicated woodland scene; she was deft with a needle and was always working on something spectacular. Grandmother used to say it was her only saving grace, for she wasn’t bright, but she was kind and loyal and I was fond of her. She was curious about the new tutor’s arrival. She hadn’t said anything but I could tell by the way she’d worn her best lace partlet and pinched her cheeks surreptitiously when we heard horses outside. I hoped for her sake he wouldn’t be some ancient parson; all I knew of him was that he was a chaplain.

Starkey turned out to be a fey young man with hay-coloured hair and a solemn demeanour; he was of a similar age to me, as far as I could tell. Entering slowly, he progressed diffidently across the floor, holding his hat in his hands. Margaret made a disappointed sigh and went back to her needlework – he was no dashing Morley, that was manifestly clear. His black clothes were spattered with mud and he apologized for it, seeming mortified.

Grandmother put him at his ease, insisting he draw up a stool beside her and tell of his journey. Despite her formidably intimidating presence she knew how to get the best out of a person and soon Starkey was describing the floods near Leicester and the high winds as he’d ridden over the ridge. He had an air of concentrated seriousness, as if he thought very carefully before speaking, and I knew instantly that I was going to like him, in much the way I’d known in moments that Dorcas and I were a match.

We were left alone, more or less, in a corner of the large chamber to discuss my studies and I suggested taking some air on the roof leads. Mister Reason was dispatched to keep an eye and mounted the stairs behind us, up and up to the top, wheezing and grumbling about the weather.

The wind was up, plucking at our clothing, and a procession of angry clouds scudded past. We came to a halt at the parapet’s edge, from where we could see the river coiling away into the distance and the mill far down in the valley, its wheel turning.

‘We might be birds perched up here,’ said Starkey. ‘If you could choose, what kind of bird would you be?’

I had never been asked such a question, hadn’t thought to consider such a thing, and replied without thinking, ‘A nightingale.’ As I said it I was reminded of the story of Philomel, which hadn’t crossed my mind since that time at court, and also that dead bird in the Stand Tower, how it had fallen.

‘Ah, the night singer,’ he said. ‘That’s a rather sad choice. Isn’t it always thought of as a lament?’

‘Not always; the nightingale heralds fine weather.’ I was determined to make something good of it. ‘Its song is the most beautiful. And you, what would you be?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I’d like to think something like an eagle or a buzzard but I’d more likely be something a great deal more commonplace – like a pigeon.’ He puffed up his chest and acted out a passable impression, cooing and strutting along the roof. Mister Reason looked over, perplexed, watching us laugh.

‘Why a pigeon?’ I asked.

‘I come from ordinary stock,’ he replied.

‘Yet you are not ordinarily educated or Grandmother would not have employed you.’

‘I suppose we shall see if I meet her standards.’ He looked away a moment into the distance, giving me a chance to inspect him unobserved. His doublet was ill-fitting, as if it had been intended for someone else, and had been carefully mended in several places, but his linen was crisp and white despite the fact he’d been on the road. It was his eyes that
drew my fascination, though; they were thickly lashed, quite lovely, and had an intensity of expression that suggested great depth.

‘Nothing wrong with ordinary stock.’

He turned to me. ‘If you were a commoner and had to have a trade, what would you be?’

I was struck by the way he seemed not to think of the fact that I was a woman. ‘A groom, perhaps.’

‘Ah yes, a fellow in the stables said you had a gift with horses.’

‘Though I only ride in the paddock these days.’

We fell silent for a time, and though we’d only made each other’s acquaintance minutes before, I was entirely at my ease with Starkey. I felt instinctively that he was someone who didn’t want anything from me, only, with his questions, to know what I was truly like. I was unused to that.

He turned those eyes on me after a while – his hair had blown awry in the wind – and asked, ‘What kind of queen do you intend to be?’ It was something else I had never considered; all I ever really thought of was my own inadequacy and whether I was up to the role.

On seeing my hesitation, he apologized. ‘I didn’t mean to confront you with a difficult … on our first meeting …’

‘No, you are right. It is something I must think of.’ I was running through all the great monarchs of England in my mind, pondering which I might emulate, when it came to me as a moment of epiphany, in a single word. ‘I will seek to be just. Yes, a
just
queen, that is what I want to be.’

‘Ah, then’ – he rummaged a hand beneath his clothes, procuring a volume of Plato’s
Republic
as if from nowhere – ‘we must look to Socrates first, I think.’ His eyes flashed bright and he stroked the book as if it were sentient and might respond to his affection.

Though Starkey served as chaplain in our household as well as tutor, and often reminded me that when I was queen I would be God’s envoy on earth, I never saw him touch a bible with the fondness he showed to that volume of Plato.

Ami arrives at the backfield, heaving the Mansfields’ dirty linens. The washerwomen eye her up and down and seem to approve as they introduce themselves and offer to share the hot water from their large communal vat that hangs over the brazier by the river. A number of small children scurry about collecting kindling and dry wood to keep it stoked. Their children, she supposes, which makes her feel her years. The other women are robust, with sturdy bodies, and half her age.

It is hard, physical work, layering the linens in the bucking tub, filling it with water, hefted by the bucketful from the vat and adding the lye, so sharp it stings her eyes and the back of her nose. As she labours she thinks of the irony that once she disguised herself as a laundress. She wonders whether she will be mentioned masquerading in Lady Arbella’s story. Donning the garb of a laundry maid hadn’t prepared her for the sharp reality of the back-breaking work. That familiar remorse prods at her, for failing her friend – but it was worse than that. Failing makes it sound accidental. Perhaps this work she does now is a penance. Hal also hovers about her thoughts. He hasn’t written back. It has been four days. Worries peck at her. She fears he hasn’t accepted her inadequate explanation and that he might have come to the truth about his paternity. But perhaps he is simply too busy to write.

Once her linens have been well soaked the women make space for her at the row of trestles, where they beat the dirt out of their whites together. It makes a rhythmic, thwacking sound, a music of sorts. They laugh as they go along the
tables, taking it in turns to confess who it is they imagine is at the other end of their washing bats receiving a beating. When it is Ami’s turn she says Alphonso’s name, and finds there is some satisfaction in this make-believe.

They exchange gossip and stories, local matters mainly: who has a fancy for whom, who’s been caught with their fingers in the pot, who’s having a baby that isn’t fathered by the husband. Ami doesn’t say much, afraid that her refined turn of phrase, learned from those years at court, might set her apart.

Inevitably talk turns to the big scandal: the court proceedings in which the King’s fallen favourite and his wife, the Earl and Countess of Somerset, are being tried for murder. It has captured the public imagination: a mysterious death in the Tower, the implication of a countess and the woman who’d been hanged for it already, a whiff of witchcraft, corruption seeping upwards through the court. Ami recalls meeting the Countess of Somerset, she was Frances Howard back then – a striking creature even at the age of twelve, with confidence beyond her years, the kind of girl who inspires envy.

Ami imagines telling the women that she has known the illustrious accused, laughing inwardly, for they’d doubtless assume she was spouting nonsense and think her half demented like Mad Dot, who wanders Clerkenwell looking for her dead babies – it is said they all died in a single night. It forces Ami to remember how far she has plummeted in the world, but there’s nothing to be done about it and the hard labour provides a distraction.

With the beating finished there is rinsing to be done, and then everything must be spread out on the grass to dry. Despite the ache in her back she feels a glow of satisfaction to see the neat rows of bright white linen against a carpet of green. The sun is shining but she wonders what she will do
when the weather is not so good. She pushes the thought away – there is no space for pessimism here.

She sits back with the women in the shade of the big oak and they pass round a flagon of small beer, still discussing the trial. She wonders if they gossiped about Lady Arbella out here, when that scandal was in its throes. Of course they did, everybody did. No one talks of her any more though. It is as if she never was.

‘Did you go to the witch hanging?’ There is silence and she realizes that all eyes are on her, waiting for her answer.

She stops herself blurting,
Why ever would I want to watch an innocent woman suffer?
saying instead, ‘I was not able.’

‘Shame,’ says Birdy, a dough-faced, stolid woman who couldn’t have been less like a bird if she’d tried. ‘It was quite an occasion.’

‘Next time come with us,’ says Dill. Ami has noticed that the others always agree with Dill. ‘P’raps they’ll hang that countess. I’d like to see that, but she’ll be done in private, I s’pose – not for the likes of us.’

Their eagerness is monstrous. Ami feels the gulf between her and these women and understands the depth of her loneliness since Hal departed for court, for though it is a mere two-week absence it signals the beginning of a more permanent departure. She cannot hold on to him for ever.

After the long day she has no energy to eat more than a hunk of bread with some dripping and, anyway, she is impatient to get back to her reading. But soon it will be too dark to read and candles are an expense she can ill afford. She considers using some of the dripping to make rush-lights, which would offer a few minutes of sputtering flame, but she has no rushes. Anyway, she finds herself dropping off even before darkness has fallen. She dreams that Lady Arbella is right there in front of her, speaking, saying something of great importance:
I want you to know that …
She is on the
brink of knowing, but the voice fades and she can hear nothing.

The next evening it is the same, and the next; her exhaustion gets the better of her and she makes excruciatingly slow progress with her reading. It is as if the manuscript bewitches her to sleep rather than revealing its secrets. But at least Mansfield is off her back.

When she arrives for the fourth consecutive day at the backfield, Dill says, ‘Four large loads in a week; that’s a lot of washing for one household, particularly as you live
alone
.’ The way she says it, with narrowed eyes, makes it clear that she is thinking more than she lets on.

‘Looks to me like she’s taking it in,’ says Birdy, looking directly at Ami, though addressing Dill.

Birdy had been glad to help Ami lift a heavy load of sodden sheets out of the bucking tub only the day before and had given her a gentle ribbing for her fine manners and all her ‘pleasing and thanking’, as she’d put it. She hadn’t meant it unkindly and had said, ‘Anyone can find themselves on hard times, wherever it is they might have started off.’

Ami understood that, however hard she tried to blend in, she was as rarefied in the eyes of those laundresses as the noblewomen at court had been to her. She knows only too well that difference at best causes curiosity but more often can be the source of suspicion. With the reception she gets on that fourth day, she realizes that while she was assumed to be nothing more than a woman fallen on hard times and having to do her own household linens, she was welcome in their ranks. But now they suppose her to be an impostor, a person after their trade, it is a different story.

Ami wonders if censorious Goodwife Stringer from next door has been gossiping about her impoverished circumstances, or worse. She called out from her stoop as Ami passed the previous day, with a load of dirty laundry, and
fired off a volley of questions which Ami answered evasively. The women in the field have closed ranks on her, that much is clear. But ignoring the sideways stares and disapproving whispers, she makes an attempt to light her own fire, scrubbing in the undergrowth for kindling and dragging logs from the nearby copse. She takes a light from the big fire under the hard gaze of Dill.

She labours on in silence, doing her best to ignore the huffs and whispers.

Once her whites are all laid out, she goes to the bushes to answer a call of nature, coming back to find someone has flicked ash over the lot. She forces back tears of exhausted frustration as she sets to work once more, knowing that if she shows weakness it will be the end of her.

Concealing her feelings is a lesson Ami had learned among the women at court, who could be every bit as cruel as these washerwomen. She tries not to cast her mind too far into the future, for a day at a time the work and the women are tolerable and the exertion leaves little time to worry about Hal’s continued silence; plus there is satisfaction at least in keeping her creditors at bay.