The Girl in the Mirror (16 page)

‘It’s all right – you can let him through. It’s Master Secretary’s boy.’ It was a clerk of the house who called out from the back, and he added something under his breath that made the rest of the men laugh drunkenly.

The courtyard was still quiet – I thought that when my lord’s baggage and his servants really started arriving, that porter had better put his head under the pump and get ready for the fray. I didn’t know the house, but they’d have put him upstairs and at the back: honourable quarters – just in case he was back on top of the dung heap tomorrow – and far enough from the street that any supporters couldn’t get to him too easily. A lad with a bucket pointed me to the right staircase, and the badge and the papers were enough to make the guard open the door. I stopped dead inside. I didn’t even know why I was here, never mind what I was going to say.

He was alone, thank God. He showed no surprise at seeing me. I suppose the appearance of one of the Secretary’s servants really didn’t rank high in the surprises of these days. He just held out his hand, for the papers he supposed I’d brought. It was a minute before he even recognised me.

‘Why – Jeanne.’ He said it like a man waking slowly from a dream. ‘Janny …’ I gazed at him dumbly. So much had happened in Ireland, yet on the surface he didn’t look much different and that’s what I blurted out, indignantly.

‘Oh, Janny,’ his eyes creasing up with laughter, ‘ten months, and battles, and high politics and the queen’s displeasure, and what a thing to say. I’ve had the Council on at me for three days now about Tyrone. Surely there’s something other than my looks you’re supposed to ask me?’

‘Is it true, that you came back from Ireland without permission? And that you shoved into her majesty’s chamber early and found her …’

‘Yes! Every bit of it! They hadn’t even cleared away the pot she used to piss in. I felt like the fox who’d got shut in the hen house. Mistress Russell shrieked as though I’d violated the Vestal Virgins’ shrine, and I thought my Lady of Nottingham was going to make the sign of the cross at me.’

‘How did she look?’ I seemed to have got stuck on a loop of trivialities, but it was what everyone wanted to know. When you’ve spent a lifetime gazing at an image of jewels and face paint, and being told it’s an icon of beauty, the idea of pulling down the conjurer’s screen and showing how the trick is worked brings out the wicked schoolboy in everybody.

‘The queen? Old.’ He’d sobered suddenly. ‘If you want the truth, I wouldn’t have recognised her at once – not from behind. They hadn’t got her wig on, and there was just this short, grey stubble. In her nightgown, without the dress and the jewellery, it could have been an old man sitting there.’ His eyes flicked up at me.

‘You know she’ll never forgive you.’

‘What, for the treaty? No, I tell you –’ He’d explained it all to the lords. He seemed to have forgotten he had no need to justify himself to me.

‘Not the treaty – for having seen her like that.’ He gazed at me uncomprehendingly. ‘No woman would.’ I could see him registering slowly that this was one area where I could speak with authority. But he shrugged it away.

‘She always forgives me.’ He jumped up and began striding around the room. An inkwell on the desk crashed to the floor: the very force of his convictions must make him clumsy. The guard stuck his head around the door in alarm, but Essex waved him off, ignoring the spreading stain on the floorboards. The servants would curse, when they tried to scrub that one away.

‘She’s got to forgive me.’ He was off now, talking wildly, half to himself, about the queen’s enemies, how everyone was against him but they’d all see, how he was the only one who gave a toss for the country. The words hardly registered, everybody knew the theme, and truth to tell it was hard to take it more seriously than when old Nan down the street used to start yelling about how the end of the world was nigh. It was the kind of thing they came on and roared in a play. But not for Lord Essex. His face was red, and he was sweating slightly. I smelt a strange acrid tang on his breath as he grabbed my shoulders and rounded on me.

‘Whose sake brought you here? Is it for Cecil – or for me?’ When I didn’t answer, he shook me. I saw my master’s face in my mind’s eye, knowing eyes under those arched brows. It seemed to make no demands, to leave the judgement to me.

‘Me. I mean, my own sake. I’m here for myself.’ It seemed to satisfy Lord Essex – or at least, to make him lose interest in me.

It was time to get out. I didn’t know what I’d come for, but I’d been wrong: this was a different Essex from the man at Wanstead, or at the tourney. And at any moment, someone was going to come along who wouldn’t fall back in awe at the mere sight of a handful of papers. Someone who would query my presence later, in silken tones, to the Secretary. At the door, I turned.

‘My lord – if there’s ever anything I can do.’ I didn’t even know what I meant, but he seemed hardly to hear me, and just as well, maybe. Later, down the road in an empty wine shop, with a beaker of mulled ale to still the tremble in my legs, I remembered that promises of loyalty to Lord Essex had a way of coming home to roost. They should not be given lightly.

Back at work, Sir Robert set me to translating a new volume on herbs that he’d been sent from France, though the litany of vervain and tansy, mallow and chamomile didn’t soothe me as it usually would. I was relieved that he didn’t say anything about Lord Essex – but then why should he? It was only much later I realised the guard on the door probably took extra pay to keep his ears open, and the Secretary knew everything already.

As the days passed and autumn edged towards winter, and the chill began to stick out under the late sun like the ribs under an alley cat’s fur, the tavern talk was still all of Lord Essex, and of how he was growing sicker in captivity, and whether he’d be out of custody for the tilt this Accession Day.

There came a Saturday when I couldn’t resist the booksellers any longer. And in any case, I knew I was being silly. Had been silly, in the alley that day. And there were some references in that new herbal I didn’t understand, and maybe I’d find something else that could help me … At any rate, that’s what I told myself.

My heart gave a queer leap when I saw his back in that brown doublet. Only a turned shoulder and a cap, but I had no doubt that it was he. I had time to notice the cloth was getting shabby before I reached him and, tentatively, put a hand on his arm. He spun around and for a second I saw warm gladness in his eyes before something more complicated took its place.

‘Jan!’ This time, he pronounced it harder than he usually did, so the boy’s name came out quite clearly. The name everyone else called me. ‘How nice to see you again. Master Cuffe, might I present Master de Musset?’ I hadn’t even noticed the man standing beside him – why should I? But now I found myself making a hasty bow to a lanky man in black, who barely acknowledged me. I had time to eye him while Martin was explaining that he and I had met here before, that I was a fellow book lover though our tastes differed occasionally. He was speaking as if I were the most ordinary acquaintance, but I couldn’t blame him for that, after last time, I thought miserably. And how did I expect him to introduce me, anyway, me with my cropped hair and clerk’s outfit? It might have been different if this Cuffe had been another actor, but somehow I knew he had nothing to do with that all-forgiving company. A pale face and somehow puffy under the tall-brimmed black hat, an air of self-consequence. Until his eyes fell on my livery button, he hardly looked at me.

‘A pleasure, Master de Musset. Martin, shall we? That new place you promised to show me …’ And Martin was off behind him, with a stranger’s hasty bow to me, and another hard look I couldn’t understand. I was left standing there, more disturbed than I’d thought I could possibly be.

I walked for a while. I didn’t know where I was going, but eventually I found I was circling the gardens outside the City. That wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I needed to eat. There was a tavern where I’d been with Martin several times – after all, they knew me there, and I knew the food. And why shouldn’t I dine there as well as anybody?

I’d have had no chance to turn and run, he was watching out, and he sprang up as soon as he saw me.

‘Jeanne – thank God, I was afraid you wouldn’t come. Look, I’m sorry –’ But he broke off. Sorry for what, exactly? He seemed to realise that explanations would only get us into worse difficul-ties. With an air of lightness that was only slightly forced – he was an actor, after all – he began to talk of other things. The book he’d found, the unseasonable weather, and the news. Heaven knows, news wasn’t hard to come by.

Everyone knew Lord Essex had fallen sick of the Irish flux; just as they knew Tyrone had taken up arms again in Ireland, at the end of the month’s treaty. One of the secret clerks had said Lord Essex’s illnesses came as easily as a whore’s kisses, and for just the same reason – adding that, this time, if he were hoping to move the queen, it wasn’t going to work. I opened my mouth to force myself to tell Martin Slaughter that – I couldn’t go on just nodding about the harvest, and I had a dim sense that if we spoke of his lordship, Martin might somehow help me to make sense of the mixture of feelings that were in me. But he forestalled me.

‘Master Cuffe, whom you met earlier – he’s one of Lord Essex’s men. In fact, he’s one of his foremost secretaries. Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, he used to be. It was who brought Lord Essex’s last letter back from Ireland.’ He was speaking not without effort, or so it seemed to me. And I was struggling to frame my reply.

‘A responsible position – especially in these times.’ I had to bite back other words. For God’s sake, why? When I’ve heard the disapproval with which you spoke of Essex before, why are you cosying up to his man, and why now are you sitting here speaking of him in this guarded way? I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’d had no training for this kind of thing in my life without society.

‘I must go. I’m glad to have seen you, Martin.’ He made no move to detain me. But he looked at me again, and this time I’d have sworn I could interpret it, as a plea. Or an apology.

 * * * 

One morning in early November, with the news from York House that Lord Essex was sicker, Sir Robert sent for me. I was to take a letter to York House, and give it into Lord Essex’s own hand. I was … He paused, as if uncertain what to say.

The study window gave out onto the garden. He stood there, gazing towards the river, though the day was too thick to see clearly. ‘Tell me how he really is,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got a doctor’s report for every time he takes physic, but they’re the stew without the meat. I don’t doubt he’s fretted himself into high fever by now, but is there any more to it? He always was one who could die of a cold for thinking it was a catalepsy, as our old nurse used to say.’ I had almost forgotten that they had been boys together. But for Sir Robert the memories, good and bad, can’t ever have been far away.

‘Take him some fruit, as a token of my good will. Nothing raw if he’s got the flux. Pears in wine? Or some of that quince jelly? Tell them to give you whatever you want. See if you can find anything in the garden, maybe.’ He met my eyes briefly, and I might almost have thought he knew the pleasure the giving would be to me. Knew that the wide-eyed gabble in the streets, that Lord Essex was failing and the doctors despaired, had felt like something gnawing a hole in me. Hastily, Sir Robert gestured me to go, as if half ashamed of sounding so solicitous over the man who was supposed to be his enemy.

I ordered the pears, and the jelly, and a bottle of the cordial of red rose hips, and a dish of crab apples baked in honey too. The beds in the garden were dug over by now, but I found a few sprigs of a bramble blooming late, and grey lavender spikes where the scent still lingered, and the first blue flowers of next year’s rosemary. Rosemary for remembrance. With fingers that trembled slightly in their haste, I bound them into a nosegay.

At York House, things were more in order than they had been. Lord Essex had never been allowed to have his own servants join him, but now he was attended – guarded – properly. I could never have bluffed my way in, as I did that first day. Even with Sir Robert’s authority, I was stopped at the door by my lord Essex’s doctor, who lifted the cloth from the basket I carried and sniffed at the content suspiciously.

‘What do you want to do, boy – poison him?’ The word hung in the air between us like an accusation, and the doctor retreated hastily. ‘I meant, such indigestible foods, for a man in his lord-ship’s condition …’ He signed for a man to carry the delicacies away, no doubt to be enjoyed at his own dinner, but I clung obstinately to my little nosegay.

‘A token of Sir Robert’s goodwill.’ The doctor nodded, grudgingly.

Inside the chamber, the air was foul. The servants had done what they could, but when the patient has voided, and voided again, the very hangings take up the smell of sickness, change the linen and the rushes as often as you may. The voice from the great bed was no more than a thread. ‘Janny?’

I would hardly have known him, his cheeks were so fallen in. There were sores around his mouth, and his long hair hung limply. Under the watchful eyes of his attendants, he held out a hand for the letter, but his grasp was too uncertain to break the seal and he gestured me closer. His breath was hot and sour. ‘Read it to me.’

The words themselves were nothing much. Sir Robert was grieved to hear of Lord Essex’s illness – wished to assure Lord Essex of his prayers and his friendship – hoped Lord Essex would soon be restored to health, as to her majesty’s most princely favour. He seemed to take them as routine – with disappointment, I thought, as a piece of mere court flummery. With a finger he brushed the flowers. ‘For me? From Sir Robert? Really?’ I shook my head dumbly. The ghost of his sweetest smile flickered over his face, and the bridle of pleasure seemed almost to lend him flush of strength. Absurd to think he could care that way for a mere nobody’s affection, but he’d always responded like a shy girl to flattery.

‘I give humble thanks to all my well wishers. Say as much to Master Secretary.’ He turned his face on the pillow, and the doctor hurried forward officiously. I made my way out into the street with my head in a whirl. In the pride of his strength and his ambition, Lord Essex had been able to turn my mind upside down. Now for the first time I had a presentiment that his weakness might give him an even stronger hold over me.