Lady in Waiting

by Rosemary Sutcliff

  ‘If nothing but my prayers and my gratitude stood between you and damnation,’ Bess said softly, ‘I think that you would be safe, Sir George.’

  In the better air of the Garden Tower — the Bloody Tower, people were beginning to call it, remembering the two little princes who had choked out their lives in the upper room, and been dragged down that winding stair — Ralegh’s intense vitality reasserted itself, and he began to mend. He was quieter since his illness; as though his utter collapse had allowed something that endangered his very reason to escape. It was not merely the enlargement of his surroundings, Bess knew that. His longing for freedom was far too great to be assuaged by a rampart walk and the use of a walled garden; that was but the exchange of a small cage for a larger one, to a bird used to the whole sky. And yet in some way, Ralegh had begun to come to terms with himself and with fate. The longing for freedom was as urgent within him as ever, but it no longer rode him as it had done in those first dreadful months.

  He had turned once more to his books, and now that he was allowed more frequent visitors, began to gather the old circle round him again; Ben Jonson, Hariot and the rest. Only John Dee, now gone to explore more mysteries in his alchemist’s Heaven, was lacking. Bess was accustomed to leave him alone with these gatherings. She could always find plenty to do; housekeeping in the Tower was only different in degree from housekeeping in Durham House, and, save in the coldest weather, there was always the Lieutenant’s garden.

  She drifted down there one evening, when two strangers had come to see Ralegh on business. The time of hesitant snowdrops was gone by, and there were jonquils and early wallflowers in the long borders now, the leaves breaking on every spray, and somewhere in the garden a blackbird singing. There was an atmosphere about this small green plot within the great fortress that was oddly moving. The heads of the crowding towers frowned above the trellised coping and everywhere was the consciousness — tangible as threatening thunder — of prison walls. Fortress, Palace, Prison; the very stones black with long-spilled blood, scarlet with blood that was as new as tomorrow’s sunrise. How many men and women had died in this place, of the rack and the headsman’s axe; of long-drawn heartbreak, the eating out of the years? Yet here in the Lieutenant’s garden, a blackbird sang, and carefully tended vegetables grew in rows, and the first hyacinths were in flower. To Bess, it seemed a statement of faith; it was life in the midst of death, love in the midst of hate, the Grace of God in the midst of dreadful things.

  No one else was in the garden this evening, and so, feeling that her presence was no intrusion upon its rightful owners, she lingered there, sitting on a bench under a pleached honey-suckle beside the disused hen-house — Sir George’s predecessor had kept poultry — until the twilight came up through the three apple trees. The chill green twilight of spring, that of all times and lights and seasons, tears the heart out of the breast with longing for forgotten things. And when at last she turned back to the narrow doorway of the Garden Tower, the yellow glow of candle-light squaring the dark wall above it stabbed her with a sudden aching homesickness for other candle-light in other windows. She was so tired; so very tired. If only she could go home to Sherborne and lay down her weariness in the peace of the Blackmore Vale, and rest! All at once she could scarcely drag herself up the winding stair.

  Ralegh was alone in the room when she reached it, after looking in on Little Watt, who was in the throes of going to bed under John Talbot’s supervision. He was sitting at his table, with the usual litter of papers before him, in a blaze of candle-light. But one look at his face told her that if John Talbot had not lit the candles, he would have sat on in the dark.

  ‘Walter, what is it?’ she asked in quick anxiety. ‘What did they want, those men?’

  Ralegh pushed back his stool, and got up. ‘They want Sherborne,’ he said levelly.

  Sherborne, their home. The home which — since Ralegh had had it conveyed to his son some years before, and therefore the Attainder had been unable to touch it — was the one thing left to them out of the wreck. ‘Sherborne?’

  ‘Yes. It appears that Robert Carr has seen the place with the same eyes as once I saw it; and Daft Jamey can deny his Robin nothing — even though it be not his to give.’

  She stared at him across the candles. ‘But Walter, they cannot touch it, for it is not yours either; it is Watt’s. You have the deed of conveyance — Lawrence Kemys witnessed it.’ She was speaking quickly, as much to reassure herself as anything else.

  ‘There is a flaw in the deed of conveyance, it seems,’ Ralegh said, in the same level tone.

  ‘A flaw? Walter, in Heaven’s name, what are you saying?’

  ‘I am saying that the copying clerk left out the words “Shall and will from henceforth stand and be thereof seized”.’

  ‘And because of that, they will take Sherborne from us?’

  ‘I think so. Yes.’

  She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes dilating. She had begun to shiver, and the cold nausea rose against her breast-bone. Suddenly she flared out at him in a fury that seemed to tear and rend her as she was rending him. ‘Oh my God, I might have known it! I have been your wife long enough to know what I might expect from you! You fool, you fool! Could you not even see that the copying clerk did his work properly? Can you never be trusted to carry anything through in proper manner? Have you no care for the child, let alone for me, that you could not take so small a pain to come between us and destitution? ...’ She heard her own voice going on and on, high-pitched and ugly, but she could not stop. Never before had she reproached Ralegh for anything, and she was never to do so again; but standing there in the candle-light by the littered table, she rent him; rent him with a passion born of her own tortured nerves, and without one shred of pity; while he stood before her, his eyes slowly widening, and a look on his face as though she had struck him.

  At last he turned from her towards the window, and seemed to be looking out into the darkening garden.

  ‘Always it is the same!’ she flung at him. ‘Always! Always! You mar everything you touch! I think that you were born under failing stars!’

  And then suddenly the bitter stream of accusation was spent to the last drop, and she was emptied. She stood silent, looking at his back, waiting for him to justify himself, and then slowly realising that he was not going to attempt to justify himself. He was still staring out into the garden, where there could be nothing now to see. His shoulders sagged. He looked beaten — beaten as she had never seen him before; certainly not in the great hall at Winchester.

  ‘Walter,’ she said.

  No answer.

  ‘Walter, I — meant none of it.’

  He raised his head as though it were very heavy, and turned slowly towards her. ‘But it is true,’ he said. ‘It is true, Bess. I have never in all my life handled anything, that I did not in some sort fail in it. Even the knife, I bungled.’

  She gave a little choking cry. ‘Walter, don’t.’

  He looked at her in silence a moment. Then his voice came a little hoarsely. ‘I am so sorry, Bess — for everything.’

  ‘Oh my dear.’ She went to him. ‘I am sorry too. It is that I am tired; no more than that. I have been so afraid for you — for all of us. I am not a very brave woman.’

  ‘Then God give me a like cowardice,’ Ralegh said.

  ‘Surely even the King will not dare to rob us on so small a legal quibble? But if he does, there is still my money, my little estate at Mitcham; we can do well enough on that.’

  She had slipped down on to the stool from which he had risen at her coming in; and he was kneeling at her side, his arms round her. She held his head against her breast, rocking a little, as though it were a child she held there. After a long silence, she asked: ‘Walter, whose was the idea of looking for a flaw in the deed of conveyance?’

  ‘I think it was Robert Cecil. To get Sherborne for the King’s Robin would raise him yet further in the King’s favour, you see, Bess.’

 
‘How very terrible it must be, to be Robert Cecil. It is better to be us — to be you and me.’

  His arm tightened convulsively round her. ‘God forgive me, Bess, for the little happiness and much sorrow that I have brought you. Better for you that I had never come to free your sleeve from the alder tree.’

  Bess said softly, ‘I am remembering something Penelope once said to me. It was when an old kinswoman of hers died. She said: “It must be so sad to have nothing to look back upon, not even sorrow”. It was so with me, before you came.’

  ‘Yes, at the least I have saved you from that,’ Ralegh said bitterly. ‘Sorrow in plenty you will have to look back upon, because of me. And I love you so dearly, I that have brought you into this hideous darkness.’

  Still holding his head against her breast, Bess said very softly: ‘Every month has its flower, and every season his contentment. So that it be with you, I am content.’

  She held him until, by little and little, she felt him relax from his rigid misery. All the many months that she had been unable to reach him, fell away, and he was near to her as he had never been before; so near that she seemed to feel his life beating in her own breast. The flames of the candles were soft and swollen on her sight, like stars before rain.

  Chapter 16 - ‘Thy Pity Upon All Prisoners’

  A FEW weeks later, Bess knew that she was carrying another child. It was eleven years since Little Watt was born, and it had seemed that he was to be the only one. And now, out of that night when she had first known that they were going to lose Sherborne, a new life was begun. In a way she had known, even while she lay quiet in Ralegh’s arms, after he had fallen asleep, that something must be begun. It was as though for that one time his whole spirit had turned back from its seeking to meet hers as it had never done before, as it would most probably never do again; and out of that one perfect and complete meeting, more than by any act of their bodies, the new life was quickened.

  When she told Ralegh, the result was somewhat as though she had dropped a spark into a powder keg. He strode up and down his room raging — against her, against himself, against fortune that had seen fit to perpetrate this jest for the gods. Finally, crashing both fists on the table, he delivered his ultimatum. ‘Back you go to Broad Street, my Lady. It may be a prisoner’s brat, but by God’s wounds, it shall not be born in prison!’

  But Broad Street was on the other side of London, and Bess refused with all the gentle mulishness which she could put forth when occasion arose, to go so far from him. So a compromise was reached at last, and she moved into lodgings in a house on Tower Hill; and there, at the dark end of the year, Carew was born.

  But long before that, they had lost Sherborne.

  James did not, after all, quite dare to seize the Manor on the strength of a few missing words in the deed of conveyance; but his adored Robert Carr continued to beg for the place, and eventually he bought it compulsorily for five thousand pounds — a small sum down and the rest in yearly instalments, when Bess could wring them out of the Treasury, which was to be seldom.

  Little Watt did not go with his mother to the lodging on Tower Hill, stating with the utmost firmness when the matter was broached to him, that he was staying with his father. A change had come over their relationship since those first bewildered months the boy had spent in the Tower. With the crumbling of his secure and happy world, his worship of the father who had not been able to prevent it had crumbled too; but in its place was growing up something — stormy enough at times, for Watt was as wild as an unmade hawk — that would one day be friendship in its deepest and strongest form.

  So Bess left her menfolk to themselves on the inside of the fortress walls, and went to have her baby by herself in the outer world.

  She did not return to her place beside Ralegh after Carew was born, for the Tower was no place in which to rear a baby; but from the time that she could crawl out of bed, she spent much of every day with him.

  April came again, and again the blackbirds sang in the Lieutenant’s garden, and Bess with a half-made shirt in her lap sat under his favourite singing tree, and watched Ralegh and Watt and Lawrence Kemys, doublets laid aside and sleeves rolled high, all hard at work on the disused hen-house which Sir George Harvey had bestowed on his prisoner for conversion into a laboratory.

  It would be good for Ralegh to have a laboratory again, his chemical experiments being of the kind best not made in the room where one has to eat and sleep; so many of them ended in repulsive smells, if in nothing worse. And watching him now, Bess was thankful from the bottom of her heart for the return to his old interests that had made a laboratory necessary.

  Presently, from somewhere beyond the high garden wall, they heard the arrival of a carriage and a mounted party, faint sounds of bustle, then a woman’s laugh, very clear, sweet and gay. But the things that happened beyond the wall had nothing to do with them.

  The three heads were bent close together over some tricky piece of fitting, when some while later, the door at the far end of the garden opened, and Sir George Harvey appeared, ushering in a lady. A lady in a satin gown of ginger-line — the very latest colour — over a preposterous catherine-wheel farthingale, a mannish feathered hat perched on the lint-pale masses of her hair, who came through the doorway with a lilting step, then turned, laughing, to dismiss the flutter of silks and swords that showed for an instant behind her. ‘Ah — Shoo! — Shoo! You shall walk round by the pr-roper way, all of you; it is for me only, the short cut.’

  ‘Good God!’ Bess heard Ralegh say softly. ‘It is the Queen.’ She rose to draw back, aware as she did so, that Ralegh was standing his ground. She knew what was happening in his mind; Sir George had evidently not realised his presence in the garden, but that was no fault of his. He would not put himself forward, but neither would he give back one inch. If it made for awkwardness that the Queen should be thus brought face to face with her husband’s wrongful prisoner, he could not help it. So he stood his ground beside the converted hen-house, and the others with him.

  The Queen was coming along the path, smiling radiantly up at her escort. She had put aside the black velvet mask which almost all women wore in public, nowadays, and it lay on the whiteness of her shoulder. Bess saw Sir George become suddenly aware of their presence in the garden, saw his momentary hesitation, as the poor man tried to make up his mind how to act; saw him come to his decision, and turn towards the little uncompromising group by the hen-house, with a small quick gesture to Ralegh to advance.

  ‘Your Majesty, grant that I bring to your remembrance —’

  But the Queen was before him, swirling round with a warm, impetuous gesture of spread hands. ‘But I remember him already; very well! It is the old Queen’s Captain! They said that he had done — Oh, I know not what! — And me, for a little I believed them, but not now!’

  Ralegh bowed over her hand, and it came to Bess, looking on, that another man, even another innocent man, might have seemed slightly at a disadvantage. But this tall man with the insolent shoulders and heavy-lidded sapphire blue eyes, was completely master of the situation. Only his mouth was faintly sardonic. ‘You are very kind, Madam.’

  She looked at him with a kind of laughing dismay. ‘I think that I am only tactless; I speak what is in my heart and I do not think. Pray you forgive me, and present to me Lady Ralegh. This is Lady Ralegh? Ah yes, her also I remember — but last time it was not — not happy. So you shall present her to me again, and we will make the fresh start.’

  Bess, drawn into the group, sank into a deep curtsey, and rising again, found herself looking into the flushed and laughing face of the Queen who she had last seen on that disastrous day when Ralegh had presented to the peace-loving King his plans for another attack on Spain, and been instantly dismissed his Captaincy of the Guard. A vivid, eager face, whose overlarge features were turned to beauty by the warmth of colour and expression. The last time Bess had seen it, the chill mask of royal disapproval had shuttered its natural warmth; now it seemed t
o glow, and she was reminded suddenly of Penelope Rich.

  ‘All these so sad things that have happened,’ the Queen was saying, her voice warm and impetuous as the rest of her, the fact that she was Danish apparent in a slightly foreign arrangement of the words rather than in any definite accent. ‘We should have known each other so much better. You should have come to Court.’ Her large eyes went from Bess to Ralegh and back again; and Bess knew that this was not mere foolish and insensitive chattering; the Queen was trying to tell them, as clearly as she dared, that she was their friend. ‘So gay! We have such masques! Master Ben Jonson — he is a friend of yours I think, yes? — he writes them for us, and we all act in them, and it is of the most joyous and amusing. He is writing a new one for us now; it is to be called News from the New World! That would be a thing to interest you, Sir Walter? ... Ah, but tell me, what is it that you do here? Is it that you build a hen-house?’

  Ralegh smiled. ‘Madam, that was done before my time. Sir George has most generously put it at my disposal, and I am converting it into a laboratory.’

  ‘A laboratory?’ The Queen’s pretty brows went up. ‘And what is it that you will make in a hen-house laboratory?’

  ‘Chemical experiments, Madam.’

  ‘And — Alchemical?’

  Ralegh shook his head. ‘Nay, Madam, even if it be so, who will you ever find to admit that search, save among his fellow seekers?’

  ‘Ah, but how do you know that I am not a fellow seeker? How if I recite to you the pr-roper sequence of colours on the way to the Philosopher’s Stone, this Flower of the Sun? Listen — “the pale citron, the green lion, the crow, the peacock’s tail, the plumed swan — and —”’ She broke off, laughing. ‘And I have forgot the rest.’