Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  A quarter of an hour crawled by, and then a shrill breath ran through the crowd as the Jury filed in once more. The Attorney General was back in his place. The old white face of the Lord Chief Justice bent forward, hovering as a hawk hovers, under the silken canopy. ‘Gentlemen of the Jury, do you find the prisoner guilty, or not guilty?’

  ‘Guilty, My Lord.’

  Bess had known that it would be so, but the word fell upon her like a blow over the heart, none the less. Ralegh seemed as untouched by it as he was by the changing mood of the crowd. In the face of such a travesty of justice, he had been beaten, and known it, from the first, before ever he started his rear-guard fight for life and honour; but nothing of that had appeared in his bearing then, and nothing of it appeared in his bearing now. Only, above him, the peacock butterfly still beat and beat with frantic wings against the glass.

  Sergeant Heale had risen to demand judgment against the prisoner.

  The hovering white face was turned upon him. ‘Sir Walter, you have put yourself upon your country for judgment, and these your Country, find you guilty of the horrible crimes of which you have been accused. Have you anything to say why judgment of death should not be passed upon you?’

  Ralegh said: ‘My Lords, the Jury have found me guilty; they must do as directed. You see whereof Cobham hath accused me; you remember his protestation that I was never guilty. I desire the King should know of the wrongs done unto me since I came hither.’

  ‘Sir Walter, Sir Walter, you have had justice, and no wrong done unto you in this place.’ The Lord Chief Justice shook his head regretfully. ‘I thought I should never have seen this day to have stood in this place to give sentence of death against you; for I had thought it impossible that one of so great parts should so grievously have fallen.’ He made a slow gesture of Finis, with bowed head and spread hands. ‘Now it resteth to pronounce the judgment which I wish you had not this day to receive of me. For if the fear of God in you had been equal to your other great parts, you might have lived to be a singular good subject. But since you have been found guilty of these horrible treasons, the judgment of the Court is that you shall be had from hence to the place whence you came, there to remain until the day of execution; and from thence you shall be drawn on a hurdle through the streets to the place of execution, there to be hanged and cut down alive, and your body shall be opened, and your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes; then your head to be stricken from your body, and your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the King’s pleasure; and may God have mercy on your soul.’

  Cecil bowed his face into his hands.

  The butterfly was still battering its wings against the sunlit glass.

  For an instant the silence in the hall was so intense that the tiny frantic beating sounded clearly, like the beat of a racing heart. Then it was swallowed up in a rising murmur, an angry confusion of sound with a hornet note in it. The change in the mood of the onlookers was complete.

  But Bess knew nothing of that. With the last words of the appalling sentence roaring in her ears, ‘May God have mercy on your soul — God have mercy —’ she had crumpled quietly to the floor in the first and only dead faint of her life.

  *

  The other trials followed a few days later. Brooke was executed on December 6th, the executions of Cobham and his fellow conspirators were fixed for the 10th, and Ralegh’s for the 13th, all the sentences having been commuted to beheading.

  In the days between, Ralegh sank to humiliating depths. Suffering the most appalling reaction from the strain of his trial, he lost his courage and laid down his pride, and sued for his life to the King and the Council, promising anything, anything, if only he might live.

  And then at seemingly the last moment, he found his courage again, and took up his pride, and set himself to make a cleanly and shining finish.

  On the morning of December 10th, Bess, who was lodging close to the Castle, but had not been allowed to see him, received a letter from him. When the messenger who brought it was gone, she took it to the window, for though it was ten o’clock, it was raining and the light was bad. She opened it with a steady hand, for fear and hope alike seemed to have died in her, days ago.

  ‘You shall receive, dear wife, my last words in these my last lines.’ His bold writing flashed up at her. ‘I would not, with my last will, present you with sorrows, dear Bess. Let them go to the grave with me and lie buried in the dust. And seeing it is not the will of God that ever I shall see you in this life, bear my distruction gently, and with a heart like yourself. Baily oweth me two hundred pounds, and Adrien six hundred in Jersey, and I have much owing me beside. The arrearages of the wines will pay your debits; and howsoever you do, for my soul’s sake, pay all poor men. I send you all the thanks my heart can conceive or my pen express, for your many troubles and cares taken for me, which — though they have not taken effect as you wished — yet my debt is to you nevertheless; but pay it I never shall, in this world ... Get those letters, if it be possible, which I wrote to the Lords of the Council, wherein I sued for my life. God knoweth it was for you and yours that I desired it, but it is true that I disdain myself for begging for it ... I cannot write much. God knoweth how hardly I stole this time when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you, and either lay it at Sherborne if the land continue, or in Exeter Church, by my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and death do call me away ... My love I send you, that you may keep it when I am dead, and my council that you may remember it when I am no more. My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor boy for his father’s sake that chose you and loved you in his happiest hour. Pray for me. May the true God hold you both in his arms.’

  There was another sheet enclosed, and opening it, she read: ‘Take charge of this, dear Bess, since I have no means of doing so.’ And under, a few lines of poetry.

  Give me my Scallop shell of quiet,

  My Staff of Faith to walk upon,

  My Scrip of Joy, immortal diet,

  My bottle of Salvation.

  My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,

  And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.

  Blood must be my body’s balmer,

  No other balm will there be given.

  Whilst my soul, like quiet palmer,

  Journeys towards the land of Heaven.

  Over the silver mountains

  Where spring the nectar fountains.

  There will I kiss

  The bowl of bliss

  And drink mine everlasting fill

  Upon every milken hill.

  My soul will be a-dry before

  But after, it will thirst no more.

  A great quiet seemed to reach out to Bess through the written words. Strange that that quiet should be so vital a part of such a restless man. ‘It is the quiet at the heart of all things,’ she thought. ‘The still place at the centre of the whirlwind.’ — My scallopshell of quiet. It was out of that quiet that his dream came, the dream that was near to him as his own soul, nearer than she could ever be. ‘It was for you and yours that I desired it,’ he had written; but she knew that it was no more for her sake, that he had sued for his life, than it was because he was afraid to die. It was for his dream. He wanted time, time at all costs, out of which one day might flower the opportunity to follow his dream again.

  She folded both sheets very gently and put them into her hanging pocket, thinking how she might get those letters back for him. There would be time enough for tears later, all the time in all the empty years ahead.

  At that moment, in his cell at the old Royal castle, Ralegh was looking down from his window, on the scene being played out just below him on and around the scaffold that had been set up on Castle Green; Guards, clergy, populace, headsman in black velvet, all the trappings of an execution. Cobham and his fellows had been brought out to die. They had mounted the steps to the straw-spread scaf
fold and spoken their last words; the scaffold had been cleared, and Sir Griffin Markham was kneeling before the block. Ralegh could see the wide-eyed intensity of his face turned up for one last look at the sky. ‘It is so that it will be with me, in three days time,’ he thought. One of the steps to the scaffold dipped in the middle; in the hollow a puddle had collected, and the rain made rings in it.

  There came a sudden clatter of horse’s hooves. Below on the green, heads turned, fingers pointed. The Chaplain touched the headsman’s arm as though to bid him wait. The three men on the scaffold were staring towards the archway with a terrible hope. Nearer and nearer yet. A horse and rider swung in from the street, sweeping close under Ralegh’s window, the horseman, bent low in the saddle, calling: ‘Wait! In the King’s name!’ He reined back in full gallop, and dropping from his plunging mount, made towards the Sheriff, holding out a paper that shone very white in the sodden winter’s day.

  A reprieve in the nick of time; so dramatic, and so very well timed. A little smile twisted Ralegh’s mouth as he watched. But the horse should have been ridden further; it spoiled the effect a little, that the brute should be so perfectly fresh. ‘How like His Majesty,’ he said softly. ‘How very like His Majesty King James.’

  A few minutes later, the Governor came to tell him that the King’s mercy had extended even to himself. His Most Gracious Majesty had been pleased to lend all four of them back their lives. They were to be consigned to the Tower.

  Six days later, in a dun-coloured river fog, Ralegh rode through the streets of London to the Tower. Again, there were crowds to throng his route and see him pass. They were the same crowds that had milled around him, shouting for his blood, when he rode Westward some three weeks before; but their mood was not the same. They were angry crowds still, but their anger was no longer directed against Ralegh. The most extraordinary revulsion of feeling had swept through the country since the trial. Those who were present in Wolvesey Castle hall had spread the report of Ralegh’s superb fight against hopeless odds; and the English, loving a bonny fighter, loving fair play, and always on principle loving the under-dog, had found in him, rather ironically, a successor to their lost Jewel. Ralegh the wealthy favourite had been the best hated man in the Kingdom, Ralegh ruined and a prisoner was its hero, and in the eyes of all England, the verdict against him had become a verdict against the King.

  Chapter 15 - ‘Every Season His Contentment’

  AT a table drawn close under the window of his prison to catch what little light fell through the narrow aperture, Ralegh was writing a letter to his old friend Robert Cecil, lately become Lord Cecil of Essingdon and soon to become Earl of Salisbury. ‘Whatsoever your Lordship hath conceived,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot think myself to have been either an enemy or such a viper but that this great downfall of mine, this shame, loss and sorrow, may seem to your Lordship’s heart and soul a sufficient punishment and revenge. And if there be nothing of so many years love and familiarity to lay in the other scale, O my God! How have my thoughts betrayed me in your Lordship’s nature, compassion and pity. For to die in perpetual prison I did not think your Lordship could have wished to your strongest and most malicious enemy.’

  It was the first of many letters. many agonised appeals for freedom, to the King, to the Council, to the man who had been his friend and who he could still not bring himself to look on as an enemy. With all his faults, he had never himself betrayed a friendship, and he could not understand that it might be possible for the other man to do so. And indeed he was not altogether at fault. The Secretary of State had wanted his downfall lest he menace the smooth working of the new regime, and the rise of the house of Cecil; but he had not wanted his death. It had not been for effect, that he bent his face into his hands when he heard the judgment given, and it had been largely owing to his efforts that it had been commuted to imprisonment. And since then, he had done all he could for Bess and Little Watt, obtaining for them leave to share Ralegh’s prison, and for Ralegh himself leave to have his faithful John Talbot to attend him, and to receive visits from his friends.

  But to those agonised appeals, he returned no answer.

  So the first year wore away, and Ralegh wrote his letters and paced his cell, and stood below his slit window that was too high to see the world out of, staring up at the free sky, or sat hour after hour with his head in his hands, only to spring up and return to his pacing, to and fro, to and fro, until the old wound pulled him down again. Bess watched him helplessly, reminded of some great bird, caged and beating its wings against the bars until the brilliant feathers were bruised and tarnished and the free heart broken. She could not come near him to help him in those first days. Outwardly he behaved to her much as he had always done, but she knew that for all that, he was worlds away from her, battering at his prison to be out and free and following his dream; and the knowledge came very near to breaking her.

  Little Watt might perhaps have reached his father, even then, but the boy was too young to understand, too overset by the collapse of his whole sunny world into this dark and narrow ruin, to have anything over from himself and his own bewilderments.

  There was plague in the Tower in the summer; and in winter the river mists and all-pervading chill played havoc with Ralegh’s old wound, increasingly so as the second winter of his captivity dragged by. But at the end of that winter there came a brief gleam of hope. It was brought into the dark cell by Lawrence Kemys, who, though he had been set at liberty long since, had remained at Ralegh’s side, paying his own board and lodging.

  ‘Sir Walter, as I hear, the new Venetian Ambassador comes before the month is out, and the King is to entertain him for several days, here in the Tower!’

  The three of them looked at each other; one thought that they were careful not to speak, leaping between them. The Grace and Favour freeing of state prisoners was always a feature of such state visits.

  Bess tried not to hope. So long as one did not hope, one was armoured, but the smallest spark of hope made one vulnerable again. But despite herself, she did hope, not realising how much, until almost on the eve of the visit, Sir George Harvey, the Lieutenant of the Tower himself brought them word that since Ralegh had objected to the Tower’s lack of sanitation and to his son’s being forced to sleep in a cell next door to a woman with a plague sore, he was to be shifted to the Fleet Prison immediately, for a change of air.

  ‘So. His Majesty thinks of everything,’ Ralegh said quietly. Only his mouth twisted a little under the small clipped beard.

  ‘Sir Walter, believe me, I am most heartily sorry for this,’ said Sir George with sudden warmth.

  Ralegh smiled. ‘Nay, it is none of your fault, Sir George.’

  When they were alone again, he stood for a long time looking down at the scattered papers on his table, with which he had been occupied before the Lieutenant’s coming, while Bess, sick and shaking, pretended great industry over the shirt she was making by candle-light. A convulsive movement from him made her look up, and what she saw in his face brought her to her feet, spilling her sewing unheeded on the floor. It was as though the whole horror of his fate had swept over him in one moment of blinding and unbearable revelation. He said quite quietly, ‘It is for life, Bess,’ and then cried it wildly, despairingly: ‘My God! My God! It is for life!’

  But even then she could not reach him; for in the same instant as she moved towards him, he regained the control that had slipped so perilously, and sat down again to his papers.

  During the time that Ralegh was in the Fleet, Bess was not allowed to be with him. Mary Herbert would have had her come to Baynard’s Castle; Nicholas, with a brand new knighthood from King James, came to take her back to Beddington; but Bess would have none of these plans; and with Joan to look after them, took Watt to a little house in Broad Street that was part of her own small property. There she waited until, in due course, the Venetian Ambassador had gone back to his own place and Ralegh was returned to the Tower.

  He had been ill in the
Fleet, a sudden collapse. All word of it had been kept from her by his own command, and when she reproached him, he would only lean weakly against the wall of his cell and laugh at her, without quite enough breath for the laughter. And she was terrified.

  It was at that point that Sir George Harvey took a hand, with the result that, within a few days of his return, Ralegh had been shifted out of his old quarters into new ones on the upper floor of the Garden Tower, which were to be his home for eleven years. These quarters consisted of a good-sized room opening off the portcullis chamber, and various small cubby-holes which he could have the use of for Watt, John Talbot and Lawrence Kemys. Bess was allowed to have a bed brought in, and a few other pieces of furniture, even to cover the bare sandstone of one wall, in which so many prisoners had carved their names, with a square of tapestry depicting the parting of Hector and Andromache in a field of stiff heartsease and wild irises. Here, there would at least be room to move, daylight, and better air to breathe; and from the corner of the room a circular stair led up to a room above, and thence out to the rampart walk that made the circuit of the whole Inner Ward, on which Ralegh was to be free to walk at certain times daily.

  ‘We are so very grateful to you, Sir George,’ Bess said to the Lieutenant, standing outside Ralegh’s room, by the winding-gear of the great portcullis that guarded the only entrance to the Inner Ward. ‘When my husband grows strong again, and can make use of your leave to walk on the ramparts — oh, I cannot tell you what the enlargement will mean to him!’

  Sir George Harvey took the hand she held out. ‘When first your husband was delivered into my care, before ever he was tried, I confess I found him guilty and condemned him; from the time that the law condemned him, I began to find him innocent. Believe me, Lady Ralegh, I would give him wider liberty, if to do so were in my power.’ He hesitated. ‘One thing more, I can do. You will have noticed that there is a second entrance to this tower in the side towards the Lieutenant’s Lodging. That door shall be kept unlocked, and your husband is free of my garden, and most welcome to come and go in it as he chooses, as though it were his own. That is for yourself also, naturally.’