The Girl in the Mirror (21 page)

But I did seem to be seeing everything differently, as if someone had clapped a pair of spectacles over my eyes. I noticed the young men in the streets; and not just to be sure my impersonation didn’t err in any way. I noticed the ladies; and how the sway of their huge bell skirts gave their movement a languorous rhythm, like the thrust of a man’s hips.

I noticed the scars and the roughness on my own ink-stained hands, and I bought a salve of mallow and goose grease from an old herb woman. I rubbed it into my skin every night, though I had to wash the residue off me every morning before I went to my work, for fear the faint scent should betray me. Once, I even bought a musk ball, but I found the smell disturbing, and I threw it away.

Lord Essex continued in his imprisonment, but as the warm air came, and the rioting season, the people began to mutter. I wished I knew whether Henry Cuffe was still pushing his dangerous enthusiasms, and if so, what Martin had to say. The old clerk told me that Sir Robert had been urging his mistress to act decisively. Although, as he added with his dry, almost painful, smile, men had been urging action on this queen for more than half a century.

At last came news. The queen, who never said anything definitely, had never quite put the idea of a trial away. So now in the first week of June there would be – not a trial, but a private commission of inquiry. This time it was the gangling clerk who told me, and I grabbed his arm as he stared at me, offended.

‘Who’ll be there? Can anyone go?’

‘No, not anyone. Two hundred invited guests. But they’ll always find standing room for Sir Robert’s secretaries. What are you getting so het up about, anyway?’

It was to be held back at York House, and I would be there early. The milky midsummer morning was still at the cool of the day when I choked down some ale and a half slice of bread and made my way to the porter’s lodge. Perhaps it was my satchel of papers did the trick again, or Sir Robert’s badge, or perhaps the porter recognised me, but he nodded me through to the benches where the clerks sat, ready to take down the events of the day.

It was nearly eight in the morning when the commissioners shuffled in to take their seats at the long table, well over a dozen of them, shuffling their papers, their own clerks at the ready. Eight o’clock had struck when Lord Essex came in, escorted like the prisoner he was, and fell to his knees before them. I winced at the bang, and so did the old Archbishop of Canterbury. He asked if his lordship might not have a cushion. I suspect Lord Essex was a little reluctant to have anything take away from his dramatic effect, but he accepted it gracefully.

The first to speak was the queen’s Sergeant at Law. He told of how the queen had discharged Lord Essex’s debts before he went into Ireland, given him as much money again to equip his army, and yet despite all he’d lost for her would not have him proceeded against in a court of law, such was her gracious clemency. It was all as carefully rehearsed as a confrontation in a play.

At the end of it, Essex began to get up off his knees before they even brought the footstool for him to sit on. They’d briefed him well, and I thought, with rising hope, that it must be true: at the end of the day he would be allowed to rise to his feet and walk out free.

Next came the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, and he laid out the charges against Essex’s conduct in Ireland precisely. Disobedience to orders, all along the way.

We all knew that it was true. We all knew the transgressions would have been forgiven, if only they’d led to victory. In fact, as Coke thundered away, him and his three categories of wrong –
quomodo ingressus, quomodo progressus, quomodo regressus
– I could feel a rise of sympathy for the earl.

‘The ingress was proud and ambitious, the progress disobedient and contemptuous, the regress notorious and dangerous.’ Yes, but we had the man himself before us, his long legs hunched foolishly on the low stool. They weren’t talking about treason, surely, but about the kind of errors that are the stuff of humanity.

All day it went on, until the time came at last for Lord Essex to speak himself. He began calm, but his sense of his wrongs was too much for him and, as Coke tried to shout him down, he began to speak faster and more chaotically. ‘At first I believed it when the queen said she meant to correct and not to ruin me. But the length of my troubles, and the increase of her indignation, have made men shrink away from me. Every chattering tavern-haunter says what he likes of me, my reputation is in the dust. I am thrown into a corner like a dead carcase, gnawed on and torn by the basest creatures on earth.’ He was on his feet now, and glaring wildly around the room. ‘There are those who envied me her majesty’s favour, now they have grown used to hating me, they spread malicious stories about me …’ His answer came in Sir Robert’s cool tones.

‘My lord, this commission is not called to look into the terms of your custody. And your lordship is protesting more than the situation requires. You claim you never wavered in your loyalty to the queen. My lord, if you look at the charges against you, you’ll see none of them mentions disloyalty. One wonders why the thought of it weighs on your mind so heavily.’ It might have been a veiled threat, but I hoped it was a warning, and Lord Essex took it so, sketching a nod of gratitude towards the Secretary.

‘I have to thank Sir Robert for his reminder; and to ask this commission only that it should deal honourably and favourably with me. If my disordered speeches have offended any, blame my weak body and my aching head.’

After almost twelve hours in that close room, his was not the only aching head. Even the commissioners could hardly wait to conclude their business. Briskly, they declared Essex guilty on all the counts charged – guilty of folly, if not disloyalty – and declared that had this been an official trial he would have been sent to the Tower, but as it was he should return to his house to await her majesty’s pleasure. It was clear the punishment had been decided already – the verdict too, presumably. We were almost exactly where we had been at the start of this interminable day.

As they led him out into the fading summer twilight, I saw he was indeed so tired that he was stumbling slightly. I felt a foolish qualm that there would be nobody who would see him looked after properly, but of course that was ridiculous. Servants apart, he had his sisters – and his wife, naturally.

Others were waiting, too. As I came out into the street, I saw an anxious party standing there, most of them in Lord Essex’s livery. Cuffe was there, and – yes, I knew it. I sent a long accusing stare at Martin Slaughter, and this time he returned it, hardily.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
June/July 1600

It is my sister Philadelphia who brings Lord Essex’s letter, holding it out as she sinks down into a curtsey so deep it’s almost a prostration, picking her moment so we can all see. She always did have to have the starring part, even in the nursery games, and I always had to let her, because I was older than she. But I can’t help myself, I crane round to see if I can guess from the queen’s reaction whether it was worth the delivery, and perhaps she understands, for when she’s finished reading she passes it over for me to see.

Essex writes of his longing to kiss her hand again – her ‘fair correcting hand’? – in apology. He writes of how he’d prefer death to living in her displeasure, and denied access to her doorway. But somehow it’s a letter all about himself – his situation, his regrets. It’s as if he doesn’t even see the living woman, just a symbol of power in paint and jewellery.

I understand, as they do not, that these are not the words to move her and before I catch myself I feel an urge to step forward with a word of instruction, to tell them how it used to be. When Christopher Hatton used to write, twenty years ago now, he used to write more passionately. They made us laugh, his letters, and I swear he must have composed them with a twinkle in his eye. But for all that, they were the letters of a man who knew the woman he was writing to. I think even Leicester would have admitted as much, though when she showed off a page from Hatton he half died of jealousy – his own letters could have been any farmer writing home, waiting in town for market day. Her health, his health, a grumble about the weather and a dollop of advice. Leicester’s letters didn’t breathe romance, they breathed domesticity. They were, if you like, a husband’s letters and she used to tease him by telling him so. It was, I suppose, an unkind joke, when all Europe knew that her husband was just what he’d hoped to be.

Essex’s letters are certainly a contrast. Eloquent, if you like that sort of thing, and the queen says as much to Francis Bacon, who smirks complacently, as well he may, since we all know he’s been coaching my lord every step of the way.

‘These letters breathe a proper spirit of regret,’ she says. ‘But perhaps, Master Bacon, you knew that already?’ He is a clever man, undoubtedly, but I’d hate for her to let him think he was cleverer than she. Cleverer than we – we of the Chamber, the queen’s closest, we bond together these days. ‘And behind all his talk of love and duty, I can’t but feel his real concern is for his income from the sweet wine levy.’

Bacon bows apologetically. A complicated man, like his cousin Cecil, but writ in darker colours, and even after all my years at court, to see him here as Essex’s mouthpiece still astonishes me. It’s only, what, a few weeks since he stood up at the hearing as one of his lordship’s accusers and I’ll admit he made his case eloquently. I remember seeing the earl himself, who’d been still till then, hunch a shoulder defensively.

Bacon had begun by reminding us that any existing bonds of loyalty to the earl should be put away. He’d certainly shed his own very easily. It was he who did most to expose the earl’s real vulnerability. Whereas the others had talked of his mistakes, Bacon had spoken of his motives. He’d quoted a letter Lord Essex had written almost two years before, after one of those quarrels with the queen some might still have thought loverly. ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects suffer wrong?’ Such a challenge, read out in such a place, had made a creeping unease come over me.

Lord Essex must have felt the mood in the room, for he’d flung himself back down on his knees, and spoken out with what, like him or not, sounded like sincerity.

‘I will never excuse myself from any crimes of error, negligence, or inconsiderate rashness – not as long as they are those of youth, folly, or my own manifold infirmities. But I must ever profess a loyal, faithful and unspotted heart, and a desire to serve her majesty. I would tear that heart out of my breast with my own hands if ever a disloyal thought had entered it.’

He might have left it there with his audience’s goodwill. Abject repentance was a set part of the script; so was the protestation of loyalty. But no, he’d had to start to argue every point of his conduct in Ireland, while his audience fidgeted. Still, I suppose I could hardly grudge him his chance to speak out. By then it seemed every man at court had already had their say.

Every man at court. I see now, more clearly than ever I had before, that women must go about their business differently. And so today – later at night, when my chance comes – I am ready. I knew the queen would be restless: it has been a hard day. The business of giving audience, the endless suitors, the reports from the Treasury – this year, pray God, a better harvest, but so far it’s not looking that way. Summer used to be the time of pleasure, but it seems now, what with one thing and another, we can hardly ever get away.

In the end she calls for a cup of Hippocras, though usually she drinks abstemiously. I linger while they serve it, arranging the ivory combs on the dressing table, putting the agate toothpick back in its holder, and sure enough she gestures the others to move further off, nods to me to stay.

She signs me to sit, and on a stool not a cushion. So, it is to be a conversation between cousins, though the ghost of Essex and his letters hover in the air like a third party. I know what I have to do; to bring the other ghosts of the past alive so she can see,
see
, that things are different now, that Essex doesn’t have their love, their loyalty. I cast around for something, some memory, that will do it, and I see there’s no need, she’s ahead of me already.

Do I leave it at that? No. The point is worth the hammering. I know a brief stab of compunction as I think of Leicester with his gout and his vanity, and his arrogance on top and underneath it his loyalty. He took two of my brothers to the Netherlands with him as volunteers, and he brought them back safely; and this is his boy, the stepson he loved and brought to her majesty. I harden my heart: if Leicester trusted Essex to continue his own work then he shouldn’t have, should he? It was as foolish as – well, as for the queen to think she can keep yesterday’s relationships alive with the men of today. Not that this queen would ever allow one to couple her and folly … That’s it, that’s the point that will touch her. In this, she is like me.

‘I’m glad your majesty showed Master Bacon you’re awake to his games,’ I say brightly. ‘Lord Essex seems to think he can play the rest of us like a child pushing the counters around a tiddlywinks tray. Well, that’s a young man for you, thinking the rest of us are as foolish as he.’

Jeanne
August 1600

The mood in London was sullen that summer. We rush to embrace the warmth when it returns, bringing the light and the liveliness of the land, but in July and August come the dog days, with the pest and the sweat, as if the earth were already tired of its own fertility.

This was a wet summer, too. The harvest would be bad again, the seventh year in a row, and there were those who said half openly it would not be good until a barren old woman no longer reigned over the country.

I went about my work, and dropped into the clerks’ room when I could. Lord Essex continued in his confinement. In fact the custodian in charge of him had been withdrawn, we heard, but so long as he was ordered to keep within his house, it was still a kind of captivity.