The Poison Bed

by Elizabeth Fremantle

  I flattered James and reminded him of the moments of joy we had once shared, how I loved him like a son and a subject. I tried and failed to cast out thoughts of Villiers standing at his shoulder, as James read, stifling laughter at my desperation. Even the memory of the hard punch I’d given him was no consolation.

  Her

  Frances’s nose was running with the cold but her handkerchief was not in her sleeve. With a jolt, she remembered it that morning, bobbing on the water like a white bird and then the gob of spit, launched from that snarling mouth in the throng of other faces, all distorted with rage. They would all rejoice if she was hanged.

  It was a good hour since Bacon and Coke had departed, leaving her alone with her thoughts in that empty room above the Watergate. She was having doubts about the confession she’d made to them, wondered if she had played the wrong card, whether the King’s word was good, whether he was playing his own game. Unfamiliar doubt stitched itself through her. She knew that a king’s promise, spoken rather than written, was easily retracted.

  But Frances retained her secret deterrent: King James’s dirty little secret. He knew she knew. That gave her power but she was only too conscious that people who make threats can be killed for their silence. She knew to keep that particular powder dry for the direst of circumstances.

  There was a noise beyond the door and the sound of bolts being pulled back. A gust of air caused the fire to stir and two men entered, holding either end of a large chest. Frances recognized it as the one she had taken with her to the Knollys’ and supposed her maid must have packed it with her effects. Balanced on top was a wicker cradle she had never seen before. They set the trunk down and lifted the cradle, which creaked like a laundry basket, asking her where she would like it.

  Frances was lost for words, dreading the possibility that she might be left on her own with her baby. They must have thought her witless as she simply stared at them, mouth half open. Lieutenant More returned, giving instructions to the men. He appraised her with his rodent eyes and tried to make conversation. She told him firmly that she would rather be alone.

  The workmen also left, returning a few minutes later with a bed, which they began to put together. Other pieces of furniture arrived. Someone who didn’t know her must have been sent to collect her belongings. The items they had chosen were not hers but from one of the spare bedchambers, where she had consigned all the things her husband owned that she didn’t like.

  A set of German bed hangings, depicting the life of John the Baptist, was spread on the floor, waiting to be hung. They were ugly but would keep out the January draughts. Frances expected that whoever had selected those curtains from her husband’s things had done so deliberately to communicate some kind of moral lesson to her. There was Salome holding her platter. She imagined it was Robert’s head spilling gore. That was not the lesson they’d intended.

  The men worked quietly, whispering instructions to each other so as not to disturb her. She sat staring blankly at the fire so she didn’t have to look at the wicker cradle, which had been placed beside the bed.

  She must have fallen asleep for a while, as she half woke to find the men gone and the fire almost dead. It was bitterly cold, the air was saturated and her body ached. Since the birth six weeks before she had felt the bones of her ribcage and hips drawing back together where they had opened to accommodate the baby.

  She stood, stretching and rubbing her eyes with her fists. A small cough jolted her and, looking round, she saw she was not alone. There was a girl with a pinched face and stringy hair standing in the shadows beside the bed.

  ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’ She took a diffident step forward. Her dress was drab. It had had several previous owners, as Frances could see the marks where it had been altered, and the fabric was almost bald in places.

  ‘Who on earth are you?’ Frances noticed the girl was shivering, either with cold or fear.

  ‘I’ve been sent to wet-nurse your baby.’ She pointed to the cradle where Frances then saw her baby was sleeping.

  ‘You?’ She looked so underfed she didn’t seem capable of nursing a cat, let alone an infant. Frances thought of the fat woman with the great pendulous breasts. ‘I suppose they had trouble finding anyone willing to put themselves in this dreadful place. Have you even any milk?’

  ‘I fed her once already, while you were asleep.’

  Her lips were tinged blue or perhaps it was just the grimy light. ‘Come closer to the fire.’ Frances stirred the embers with her foot, noticing the absence of a poker. Too much like a weapon, she supposed. ‘What are you called?’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. I’m Nelly.’ She smiled, revealing a haphazard jumble of teeth.

  ‘Well, Nelly, I hope you’re good at cards, for we shall be bored out of our minds shut up in this place.’

  ‘I am that. I can do a three-card trick.’ Her eyes gleamed.

  Frances was glad that this odd girl had been employed. Her apparent absence of affectation was a welcome distraction from contemplating her uncertain future, and Frances was sure she’d be better company than the dismal kind of well-bred young woman she might have expected. ‘You’ll have to show me.’

  A guard arrived with wood and began to build up the fire. ‘Surely that’s not a job you should be doing. Isn’t there a servant assigned to me?’

  ‘I don’t know about a servant but I didn’t want you left in the cold.’

  ‘You and I will get along very well, I think.’ Frances gave him the full force of her attention and watched him respond. She thought she might, one day, need a favour from him. She sat up so her breasts, still swollen from pregnancy, bulged slightly over her dress, watching his eyes glance over them.

  She asked his name, skimming the back of his hand with the tips of her fingers as if by mistake. He was a big lad, good-looking, dark and young with curved eyebrows and a cleft in his chin. He said his name was William. She could see he was already her captive.

  ‘Look,’ said Nelly. Both Frances and William turned to see she had produced a dog-eared pack of cards from somewhere and had placed three of them face down on the table. She turned them up: two black kings with an ace of hearts. ‘Follow the heart.’ She flipped them back down. ‘Don’t take your eyes off it.’

  She began to swap them round, sliding them swiftly over the surface of the table. Her hands were red, as if they’d recently been scrubbed with a hard brush, and her nails were short and very clean. When she stopped, she asked them to point to the heart. They both indicated the middle card. They were right. This happened again and Frances told the girl she was not very impressed.

  ‘I’m gaining your confidence,’ piped Nelly, undaunted by Frances’s frank sneer. ‘You see, if you were actually laying down bets, you’d think you’d be sure to win now.’

  Her expression was puckish and she repeated the process, moving the cards more slowly. Frances was sure she had the right card that time but when Nelly turned it over it was one of the kings. She laughed, glad of the distraction, and imagined the girl fleecing passers-by in the marketplace with her card trick.

  ‘I’m supposed to be guarding the door,’ said William. ‘I’ll get myself into trouble.’

  As he left, the door clanged, waking the baby, who began to wail. The noise tugged at Frances as if twin fishhooks had lodged themselves in her breasts, pulling her by some invisible force.

  She went to the window and pressed her forehead against the cool glass, imagining it shattering. She could see the courtyard below, busy with people, and looked at the buildings opposite, the round towers with their arched windows, like hooded eyes. Robert was trapped behind one, and she wondered whether he’d been offered lenience for a confession, sure he must have refused. She’d planted her warning too deeply in his head for him not to take heed of it.

  She could hear the creak of that basket cradle as Nelly lifted the baby out. When Frances turned, the girl was unlacing her bodice and deftly positioned it to feed. The wailing subsided,
replaced by quiet snuffling sounds. Frances crossed her arms tightly over her own front to stop the sharp tugging sensation. ‘So how did you come to be wet-nursing – a girl your age?’

  Nelly fell into a long, drawn-out story about how she found herself pregnant without being wed and was cast out by her family but that when the baby came it was stillborn.

  ‘When did you have this baby, Nelly?’

  ‘A few days ago.’

  Frances was shocked, thinking of her own six weeks of pampered recuperation, impressed by how this scrawny little creature had recovered so quickly and with an apparent absence of self-pity.

  ‘I have a cousin took me in for the birth and she is a laundress for the lieutenant here. I don’t quite know how it came about, but here I am.’

  Who are you with your clever tricks? thought Frances, as she watched the girl flicking through her cards with her free hand. But once she’d finished feeding she laid the baby on the bed cooing and clucking: ‘Is that a smile for your nursey, is it? Are you a perfect little poppet, are you?’ And Frances felt silly for imagining she was more than she said she was.

  They were well into their second week in the Tower when Nelly said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ as she settled the baby for her morning feed. Frances balked. That phrase usually hailed a question she didn’t want to answer, and she would have liked to say that this wasn’t how their relationship worked, that she didn’t answer questions. ‘But how is it you came to be here, you being a countess and all?’

  Frances cut the conversation dead, but Nelly persevered with dogged determination. A thought took her by surprise. She could use this girl to undermine her confession, at the very least, cast some ambiguity on it in the eyes of her prosecutors. They would surely want to have a few words with Nelly at some point, to see if she might inadvertently spill any incriminating confidences from the murderous Countess of Somerset.

  Frances would offer the girl her story, a version of it that would cast her confession as an act of sacrifice made to save a beloved husband – a husband who couldn’t prove his innocence, a husband who wasn’t innocent. How could they hang her then? But he would hang and make her a widow.

  What was it Anne had said once of widows? The best of all worlds. There was appeal in the idea of belonging only to herself. She sensed a perfect symmetry to her plan, felt as if she had once more taken up the reins.

  So, a story began to unfurl, winding right back to the first marriage of a girl called Frances Howard, an imagined Frances Howard who was wed seven years yet remained a virgin, right back to Essex’s grim Staffordshire house and playing Blind Man’s Buff.

  ‘I pulled the short straw. Uncle took his silk kerchief and wrapped it around my eyes. We were all playing...’

  Him

  I am waiting for the attorney general. More had come to warn me of his imminent arrival and I sensed a fragment of hope as Bacon was once a friend. But some of that hope was doused when More also gave news that my request to James for Frances’s freedom was not to be granted.

  Bacon arrives with a clerk. The stony look on his face instantly dissolves any vestiges of optimism I may have harboured. He removes his hat and I can see he has combed his hair in such a way as to disguise that it is thinning. It is russet in tone, like his beard, and I wonder if he colours it. He arranges his cloak very carefully over the back of a chair, balancing the hat on top, and comments vaguely on the weather. I cannot stand to think that it is spring outside and things are growing while I shrivel.

  He runs his eyes over me and I recall that once he tried to seduce me, long ago, before I belonged to the King. I rebuffed him. I suppose that won’t help my case. He is polite enough not to register any surprise at my appearance. Though I have tried to make sure I am well dressed and my clothes properly laundered, nothing can disguise my sallow skin and the black beneath my eyes, which I see reflected in the glass when I can bear to look.

  I notice the clerk’s curious glances. I suppose he thinks me a murderer too. Once seated, Bacon places both hands carefully flat on the table with the word ‘So.’

  The clerk lays out his papers. I try to see what is written there, but cannot. I ask Bacon where Coke is, if he remains in charge of the investigation, but he dodges my question with one of his own.

  ‘Am I right in thinking that you are in receipt of an annual pension from Spain?’ It is asked in a matter-of-fact way.

  He’s caught me unawares. I’d expected questions directly related to the case. ‘Absolutely not.’ My response is essentially true and I have no intention of telling Bacon that the Spanish ambassador had promised me an annuity but that it hadn’t yet been arranged.

  ‘Northampton had one.’ I don’t know if it is a question. Bacon seems quite sure that it is the case. I certainly know it to be true. ‘Northampton had rather more dealings with Spain than people thought.’

  He seems to wait for an answer but I say nothing. I know Bacon is clever, much too clever for me, and this could well be a trap. I try to remember what I said to Coke but it was months ago now and my memory is foggy.

  ‘Have you had many dealings with Spain?’ He says it lightly, as if asking whether I had ham for dinner.

  ‘Only when the King asked me to make enquiries into a betrothal for Prince Charles.’

  ‘But it came to nothing, didn’t it?’

  ‘The King was not prepared to accept the Spaniards’ conditions.’

  ‘So, you negotiated badly.’

  ‘I don’t see what this has to do with –’ I fear I sound petulant and I stop because I can see what he’s doing in trying to make me irate. ‘Perhaps that is so.’

  My silent cock-eyed servant brings us some bread and cheese and a jug of beer, which Bacon serves as if he is the host. My throat is dry from nerves. The beer soothes it a little. He digs further on the Spanish pension and I am forced to deny it vehemently several times. He brings up Northampton again and all sorts of queries about matters that seem irrelevant. I manage, in the main, to slide by with noncommittal answers. It is unclear what he wants from this line of questioning and he continues to come over as rather cordial, making it seem as if this is truly just a conversation.

  But without warning he changes the subject. ‘Were you aware of your wife’s antipathy towards Thomas Overbury?’

  I am completely unprepared, had been lulled into a false sense of security, and flail for a response. ‘I wouldn’t have put it like that.’

  He looks at me intently, with one eyebrow slightly raised, as if he can see right into my confusion of thoughts. His moustache prevents me reading his expression accurately. ‘How would you have put it?’

  ‘Frances isn’t like that.’ I wish I sounded more assertive. ‘She was naturally upset by the things Overbury said of her. It was more a case of him not liking her.’

  ‘Ah.’ Bacon taps the table with his index finger. ‘Then your friend was doing everything he could, to prevent you marrying a woman he loathed.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ I realize too late that I have walked into his trap and try to retract my statement. ‘Not exactly. It was ... it was not straightforward.’

  Bacon echoes me. ‘Not straightforward?’

  A long pause follows. I don’t know where to look but am conscious that my darting eyes must make me seem shifty.

  ‘Overbury’s death delivered what you desired.’

  ‘No!’ It came out as a kind of cry.

  ‘You say “no” but it certainly appears like that.’

  ‘I’m innocent!’ I exclaim, too loudly.

  ‘Your wife said you’d say that.’

  I can feel my anger rise, fast as milk on the boil, at the thought of this man questioning Frances – my broken Frances. My hate for him sucks the air from the room.

  ‘My wife said I’d say that because it is the truth.’ Frances walks into my mind. Where is she? But I can’t think of her, not now, or I will lose my composure completely.

  The light is going, evening has app
eared from nowhere, and Bacon sends his clerk in search of someone to light the candles. He gets up and walks about the chamber, picking things up and putting them down again. It is all I can do to prevent myself forcing him to stop.

  He is lifting the tapestry from the window. ‘You have a view of Tower Hill.’

  ‘Deliberate, I suspect.’ I find myself telling him that I saw Elwes executed from there.

  ‘He made a noble death,’ Bacon says. I wish now I hadn’t mentioned Elwes, who has fixed himself in my mind wearing a yellow-toothed grimace. ‘Not like Franklin. He made a dreadful fuss.’

  ‘I didn’t know Franklin,’ I say. Now the four who have been executed are hanging in my mind.

  The clerk has returned with a handful of candles, which I take from him for something to do. I place them in the holders, light them, then fill my pipe, touching it to a flame, drawing in the hot smoke. Almost immediately I regret doing so, as my hand is on display, trembling visibly.

  ‘Franklin had all sorts of things to say. I suppose you know a cat was given poison at Northampton House, as a test to see if it would kill her? Enough to kill twenty men, if Franklin is to be believed.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I sound defensive but it’s true: I don’t know of any dead cat. ‘I was rarely at Northampton House.’

  ‘Mistress Turner said you were there often. She believed you were in league with Northampton.’

  I try to explain that I was only friendly with Northampton because I was to marry his great-niece but I can tell he doesn’t believe a word of it. He mentions that some at court thought Northampton was a mentor, of sorts, to me. I cannot deny that. Then he says, And Franklin said he had dealings with you.’

  ‘He’s a liar. I never met Franklin.’ I know I sound desperate and sit back down at the table. My heart thrums and I am struck by the irony that the effect of love on the heart is identical to that of fear.