The Girl in the Mirror (3 page)

Sometimes, too, she’d take me to the playhouse. One of her husband’s cousins was in the business and he’d leave word with the doorman so we could get in for free. Sometimes, after, she’d take me behind the scenes, where the kings and villains became men with traces of grey hair gummed on their face and paint in the corner of their eyes – but still, men whose voices carried across the room, men whose air and gestures made everyone else in the room look paltry. Men in velvets and in lace, even if both were a little shabby. And with them the boys, the shrill-voiced pieces of vanity who’d don petticoats and act women in the play. I looked at those boys with a mixture of fear and the most burning curiosity.

There was one old actor, Ben, who took especial pains with me, showed me the tricks of posture and paint that made young into old and boy into girl – or, I suppose girl into boy. It was only later, as I grew, that I wondered how he had known that these things would interest me. But perhaps he just liked children. Children liked him, certainly. Ben had been to sea, when the acting work would not support him, and he had fabulous stories to tell – of lands where the waves flashed amethyst and turquoise, where emerald green birds with clamouring wings but no legs sucked the honey from scarlet flowers all day, and of the serpent hiss of hard rain beating on a tropical sea. I’d take the stories home to Jacob, like a bartering tool, and sometimes I could sting him into telling me tales of his old life in the south, where bushes of rosemary grew so high they used the branches for firewood, and clouds of pomegranate blossom glowed against a blazing sky.

By and large it was, I suppose, a lonely life, but I didn’t mind much. It was easier that way. As I grew older, I watched the young girls begin to blush and giggle as they filled their dresses, and the young men stare and swagger on their way to the butts, out past the laundresses on Finsbury Fields, and I knew neither was for me. I didn’t go to the butts, though the law said all boys should practise archery; I suppose here as elsewhere our foreignness protected me, explaining any differences away. It was not quite true, I’d found, that the English hated foreigners – not the Londoners, anyhow. What they really hated were those native-born English who were different in any way. For almost ten years, after we first arrived in England, I lived among them as a mouse lives in the wainscoting. Glimpsed, sometimes. Cursed at, occasionally. But on the whole, peaceably.

Winter 1593–94

You could live well here, if you chose to, within a network of others who had fled to Elizabeth’s England, some fleeing the Inquisition’s long arm, others simply to make money. It was easy to forget we were strangers in a strange land. Until something happened to remind you, and anything you’d learned about safety had to be unlearned, painfully.

I must have been turning fifteen when Jacob came home one day, his face bleached.

‘I’ve just seen Roderigo Lopez,’ he said. It was a mark of his anxiety that he was confiding in me. ‘Of course, it’s all an absurdity. But mud sticks, and these days, you never know what nonsense is going to get you into trouble.’

Indeed, that year had been far from easy. First we heard that the Spanish had another Armada on the way – terrifying for everyone, to be sure, but anathema to those who’d seen what the Spanish were doing in the Netherlands, from whence came bloodier stories every day. Next we heard that the winds had changed, and we were safe – certainly through another winter. But then came news that Henry of France, our Protestant hero, had turned Papist as the price of holding on to his country. He said Paris was worth a Mass: he should have heard what they said of him, the grave old men with their neat ruffs and their wine cups, in the Huguenot community. Even the plague had been worse than usual, so that people started talking about the great epidemic thirty years before, when one in four Londoners died. Jacob said the ordinary people, in their ignorance, were blaming ‘strangers’ – immigrants, like us – and keening over the wickedness of the country. Even the playhouses had been closed. But this was something different, apparently.

‘Roderigo should never have got across Lord Essex – never!’ Jacob exclaimed angrily, as I knelt to stoke up the fire. ‘That’s a young man who doesn’t forgive a slight – yes, and a young man in a hurry.’ I was sorry. I didn’t know much about the Earl of Essex, no more than I did of any of the grandees whom the other boys ran after when they rode through the streets, half in admiration and half in mockery. But I liked Dr Lopez, who’d always been kind to me. Jacob said he’d been a Jew once, but he’d become a Christian many years ago when he’d first come to this country from Portugal – ‘Had to, naturally.’ He eyed me with a rare impatience when I looked at him blankly; yes, I knew, of course I did, that no one practised the Jewish faith in this country. But the fact was, I looked at the world around me – the world of people, not of books, or plants – as little as might be.

When Dr Lopez was appointed the senior doctor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and even the queen’s own physician, Jacob said, it reflected credit on us all. Showed you could do service to England, even if you were born across the sea. ‘Shows that at least here you can get along, if you’ll just try to fit in and live quietly.’ As a child, all I knew was that, when Dr Lopez came to visit, he brought a bag of comfits for me. And as I grew, and Jacob let me stay up to listen to the grown-ups’ talk, I liked the way his cheeks creased up and his white beard trembled as he banged his beaker on the table so that the drops splashed red, and I liked to hear his stories.

Yes – he had told some about Lord Essex, maybe. Or at any rate a young noble patient who was suffering half from the spleen – ‘If he was a girl, we’d call it hysterics, but he thinks it gives him a hold over her majesty!’ – and half from some unnamed disease, the thought of which made the older men purse their lips slyly.

Perhaps now Jacob thought that it was time the men’s conversations ceased merely to pass over me like a ripple of water. Perhaps he just wanted to talk with somebody.

‘Lord Essex has got wondrous great these last two years. What, not out of his twenties yet, and a privy councillor already. And the favourite companion of the queen’s majesty – aye, and one who dares to slight her and say her nay in a way his father, God rest his soul, would never have done. The old Earl of Leicester, who married Essex’s mother, and brought this boy on as though he’d been his own flesh and blood,’ he explained impatiently. ‘Myself, I think that’s why the queen keeps him so close, for the old lord’s sake, but of course there are those who say –’

Mrs Allen came in then, so I didn’t hear what others say, though naturally I could guess. It sounded silly to me – the earl was in his twenties, after all, and the queen must be more than sixty. I didn’t hear, then, what Dr Lopez had done to annoy Lord Essex, except maybe talk too freely. But I was of an age by now to pick up scraps of information when anything interested me.

Advent didn’t bring us many callers – who sent out invitations to dine, when you had four weeks of fast days? – but when visitors did come on business I kept my ears open. I learnt that Lord Essex was white hot against the Spaniards, and anxious to lead an army off to war and make his fame that way. I learnt it was the Cecils, old Lord Burghley and his son, who were leaders of the peace party, and the queen, reluctant to spend blood or money, leaned their way in terms of policy. And that Lord Essex, pent up at home, was seeing Spanish spies under every bush, and claimed Dr Lopez – our Dr Lopez – had given house-room to Spaniards, or men in Spanish pay, plotting some dangerous conspiracy. Then Christmas came, and the feasting and the frost fair, and I forgot it all for the moment.

Christmas wasn’t out when Dr Lopez was arrested. It was only the first of January, and the news spread like a sickness from feasting house to feasting house, quenching each little light of merriment as surely as if it had been touched by the plague, and as swiftly.

‘They’ve taken him to Essex House. But Lord Burghley and his son – you know, Robert Cecil, the hunchbacked one – have been sharing the interrogation. They’re reasonable men, the Cecils. He’ll be out before Twelfth Night, you’ll see.’ It was our most cheerful neighbour, a dapper tailor once from Le Havre. Jacob glanced at him sourly.

‘Reasonable men, you say. Are reasonable men going to fight with Essex over the welfare of a foreigner, and a Jew at that? What have they found to charge him with, anyway?’

It was three days later when we heard. For two of those days Lord Essex had sulked – the Cecils had done the right thing, after all, they’d declared Lopez innocent, and the queen had believed them, to the earl’s fury – but on the third he had been busy. Lopez had been whisked into the Tower, and the earl set about declaring, beyond all doubt, a treasonable conspiracy, a Spanish plot to poison the queen, as her doctor could do so easily.

Terrified and confused, Lopez himself seemed half to agree. (‘Of course he agreed! They showed him the rack,’ said Jacob indignantly. I saw one of the other men there, another foreigner, rub his shoulder as if an old wound pained him, and stir uneasily.) Lopez had actually agreed he’d once taken Spanish pay, but only on the instructions of English agents, to lead King Philip astray. But that was back in the days of Walsingham, the old spymaster, and now Walsingham was gone, and couldn’t say yea or nay.

‘Take heed of that,’ Jacob said. ‘It’s hard enough not to get caught up in intrigue, if you’re a foreigner in this country. But the men who try to hire you will leave you in the lurch – by dying, if they can’t do it any other way.’ Privately he told me he had not the least hope; something about a job Lord Essex wanted for a friend of his, and the queen had given it to someone else, on Cecil advice, so that she’d want to soothe Lord Essex by yielding to him in some other way.

After the doctor and his associates were arraigned and sentenced, the little tailor took some comfort in the fact that the queen couldn’t bring herself to sign the death warrant at once.

‘She knows it’s wrong, she’ll let them out eventually.’

‘She knew it was wrong with her cousin, the Scots queen, but she still signed. Eventually –’ Jacob imitated the little tailor. ‘She’s the queen, isn’t she?’

When the news came that she had signed, he grew ever more gloomy. Lopez was to be tried and hanged, he said, on Tyburn tree. It was from the streets that I heard the full story.

‘Hanged all right, but not till he’s dead, or not unless he’s very lucky. Then they’ll cut him down alive and hack off his privities, and slit open his belly and pull his guts out before his eyes.’ One lad with a lazy eye seemed to know all about it. ‘Sometimes, if they like him, the crowd yell to the executioners to leave it, to let the man die first, at the end of the rope, but they won’t do that for a Christ-killer, you’ll see.’

‘Anyway,’ another boy chimed in, ‘they say Jews are built differently.’

The night before, Jacob told me he was going to watch. ‘I have to, the Lord knows why. Somewhere in that howling crowd, there has to be a friendly eye. But you’re to stay home – do you hear me?’

I nodded, my eyes fixed on my plate. In the last weeks, the dream had been coming back to me. It wasn’t of the knife, or the hilt in the belly, not precisely. It was the running, and the knowing that I couldn’t run fast enough, and that they were going to die because of me. The next morning, I pretended to be asleep as I heard Jacob leave. In his absence I tidied his desk, and cleaned out his inkwell. I was going to sharpen him some quills, but the knife disturbed me. Instead I set myself to copying the various pages of figures he had left me – for I helped him in his paid work by now – and tried not to count the time passing slowly. In the end, the suspense got to me – and the curiosity. I had to know. I had to see.

I left the house as quietly as a mouse leaves its hole with a cat there to pounce and, slipping surreptitiously from corner to corner, made my way towards Newgate, where the Holborn road leads west. It was one of those days, again, when everything seemed to move slowly. When each familiar sight of the streets struck me with unusual clarity. I suppose everyone in London can’t really have gone to see the sight, but that’s how it felt to me. As though I were a ghost – one of those spectres they used to paint for the casting down into Hell, mouth ever open in a silent scream – moving through an empty city. I saw Master de l’Obel, his face full of distress, but he did not see me.

Past the looming bulk of Ely Place, past the great chains across the road, to seal the way to the City when necessary, and soon I was in open country. In this dank weather the fields were just a sludgy mass of brown, cold and uninviting. Starting out so late, I was far behind the mass of the crowd, but the state of the track showed how many had gone before me.

I hadn’t realised it was such a distance. I’d been hurrying my steps, to try to catch up, and I’m not sure what it was that halted me. Maybe the smell brought back on the wind, or the sick low roar of the people pressing westwards ahead of me. I don’t really know what it was – the fire must have smelled like any other, even if they had lit it to burn the doctor’s privates, and the crowd was noisier for the football match every Accession Day. Maybe, as I started to find myself among squabbling families, and carts full of people as cheery as on market day, it was the look I saw on the faces of those others who were flocking that way.

In the end I never even reached Tyburn. Just as well, maybe. I heard later that Dr Lopez died shouting out that he loved her majesty better than Christ, and that one of the men who died with him tried to fight off the executioner, and they had to hold him down to slash his belly open. Up until now, I’d only half understood things Jacob tried to teach me – about quarrel, and dispute, and the passion of belief. About how it made men do things in God’s name that in fact the Creator would weep to see. I hadn’t understood why – when Mrs Allen nagged him into getting me ordinary school books – he’d snatched the discourse on rhetoric back at once, having caught me showing off for her admiring eyes, imitating the kind of rhetoric class real schoolboys had every day. At the time, I felt reproved for my vanity, but later I came to understand more clearly what Jacob had muttered under his breath about convincing and convicting, and about the wrong-headedness of teaching children that the important thing in the world was to prove their point, however blunted it might be.