We danced back and forth, the occasional steel scrape ringing out as our blades touched. Prince Henry was good, elegant and skilled, but I had complete control, though made it look otherwise, sensing the importance of putting on a show. I knew well enough that audacity would win me the crowd. I may have lacked his refinement but I was older – twenty-four and in my prime – and I knew I was better, faster, more aggressive. I’d learned to fight rough, with my fists, and I wasn’t going to lose, not in front of her. No matter what trouble it might cause me.
His foil whistled close by my cheek. I ducked.
‘Mind your pretty face, Carr,’ Southampton called scornfully.
Pretending not to hear, I saw my chance. In a moment’s hesitation from Henry I made my lunge, the tip of my weapon landing on the side of his neck, where a great blood vessel runs. Had it been a real fight our shoes would have been drenched red with Stuart blood.
‘You’ve made your point.’ Southampton was tugging at my sword arm and added, under his breath, ‘You’d better watch yourself.’
‘What did you say?’ It was clear he’d have liked to pick a proper fight. Despite his years, he was battle-hardened and I knew he wouldn’t be so easily beaten. ‘Is that a challenge?’ A ripple ran through the company. I shrugged my arm from his grip and looked him full in the eye. ‘Is it?’
I had the King behind me. I had his ear, I had his trust, I had his love, and ill-bred or not, I had a great deal more influence than Southampton. But still he pushed his face up tight to mine, like a rutting stag. I spat out a laugh. ‘I thought you were hopeful of a place on the Privy Council?’
He pulled back, flushed, half turning away, and I couldn’t help whispering, ‘I knew you didn’t have the balls.’
Henry stepped between us, slapping a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m grateful to you, actually, Carr. I shan’t develop my fencing skills by being allowed to win.’ His generosity of spirit made me forget a moment that we were rivals for the attention of Frances Howard, who was watching us carefully as we walked back inside together. ‘Here,’ he said, taking the bronze shepherd from its plinth and handing it to me.
It was heavier than I’d expected, a dead weight, and it crossed my mind that it would have made an effective weapon, but I returned it to its place. ‘It’s better off here, where it will be appreciated.’
If I’m honest, the little sculpture seemed to me quite ordinary but Frances was transfixed. ‘The lines are exquisite,’ she was saying, in her low voice. ‘See here, the way his weight seems to fall into his staff – and that backward glance. He is perfectly balanced.’ She paused, giving a small sigh. ‘Why is it when we see things of beauty we want to possess them?’ She was running a finger over the curve of the bronze thigh. Henry watched her, head cocked. We must both have been imagining ourselves as that tiny man beneath her finger.
The doors opened, breaking the spell, and Northampton appeared. ‘Uncle,’ she said, moving towards him, her voice velvet smooth. ‘Where have you been? You’ve missed all the excitement.’ I saw a rare glimpse of girlishness about her beside her great-uncle. He wasn’t particularly tall, though he carried himself as if he were, with the poise of a much younger man that belied his grizzled appearance. I noticed, seeing them together, the extent to which they were alike. They shared the same high forehead and arched brows, giving them the patrician air that came with centuries of good breeding.
But there was a trace of menace beneath his elegant surface. It made the atmosphere in the room shift, everyone seeming to shrink back a little. Even the prince’s close companions vibrated with begrudged respect and Northampton seemed to expand under their attention.
‘I have a rather pressing private matter to discuss with Your Highness …’ He and Henry moved away together towards the window alcove.
‘Come with me.’ She beckoned. Like a dog, I followed at her heel as she walked to the far end of the room. I was close enough to hear the whisper of her dress as she moved.
‘I enjoyed that.’ She had come to a halt. She was tall, as tall as I, her eyes level with my own. ‘The swordplay.’ I searched for a response but my wit had deserted me. She lifted a finger, inspecting it. ‘Look, it’s broken.’ She held it out so I could see the nail, which she then pinched tightly, ripping it away with a little wince, tossing the fragment to the floor. I followed it with my eyes, and when I looked up again she was pulling her finger from her mouth.
‘Give me your hand.’ She took it – ‘Strong hands’ – unfurling my fist to examine the lines of my palm, running that damp finger across it. ‘Shall I tell you what I see?’
Desire had near paralysed me. All I could manage was a nod.
‘I see love.’
Remembering what she’d said to the girl earlier, I found my voice: ‘I suppose you say that to everyone.’
‘I only say what I see.’ One of her eyebrows rose minutely.
‘You’re teasing.’ I smiled – but she didn’t.
‘You think this is a game?’ Her grip was firm. ‘There,’ she prodded the mound below my thumb, ‘I see death and …’ She shook her head slightly.
‘And what?’
‘No,’ she whispered.
Northampton was calling her over. ‘I’m coming.’ As she turned she caught me with a look, a smile – that smile – so secretive, so knowing, I felt she’d had a glimpse of my soul. I belonged entirely to her.
Her
A male scream echoes through the saturated air, and another, then silence.
‘At least that hellish racket’s stopped,’ says Nelly, who sits opposite Frances, unlacing her bodice. In a single movement she pulls out her breast, positioning the baby to feed. She’s such a scrap of a girl, with a pinched face and dull hair the colour of hay, Frances can hardly believe she is able to sustain the voracious baby.
Through the quiet Frances can hear the lap and glug of water, reminding her that just below, on the other side of the wall, the river slides by. There is a patch of mildewed damp blossoming near the window and she imagines the water rising, soaking through the stones as if they are made of sponge.
Sometimes in the dark she believes she is floating, that her bed has become a boat and the objects around her – a gown hanging from a peg, the high-backed chair, the wicker cradle – are the ghosts of the room’s previous inhabitants. The bed is heavy and carved with hideous winged creatures. Frances hates it, and the ugly set of German bed-curtains conceived with a grander space in mind than the room above the watergate. But at least she is no longer alone.
‘Watch this!’ With her free hand, Nelly picks up a playing card, flipping it, making it dance from finger to finger, like a butterfly. Then, with a smirk, she flicks it, so it flits through the air landing on Frances’s lap. She gives a whoop of laughter, exposing a muddle of teeth. Over the last few days, Frances has come to rather like Nelly’s audacity and her apparent obliviousness to the deference expected of her.
‘Please tell us,’ the girl implores. ‘Just a few snippets. I only want to know how it can happen that a person like you,’ she looks straight at Frances, ‘that’s been so kind to me, listened to me grumbling about my problems and – well – treated me as a human being, when most would barely look at me, can –’ She stops, as if unsure how to put it.
‘Can fall from grace?’ Frances says. ‘You must know.’ The pamphleteers have published every detail of the scandal and much more, so she must have a good idea. Nelly won’t know of her confession, though, and Frances is determined to remain evasive.
‘I have the gist but I’m sure you’re not what they say you are.’
‘What do they say I am?’ Frances is anxious to know exactly what the girl has heard.
‘That you’re a witch and talk with demons. Some even say you’ve had …’ she looks at the other woman to see if she’s gone too far, but Frances tells her to continue ‘… relations with the devil,’ she mouths.
‘Yes, I heard that too.’ Frances laughs tightly, making light of
it. It occurs to her, not for the first time, that the girl may have been planted here to milk her for incriminating information.
‘I knew a cunning woman. She was our neighbour. People went to her for remedies but I know she would sometimes cast spells.’
‘Spells?’ Frances raises her eyebrows. She is remembering how she got on the wrong side of such a woman once. Her suspicion flickers: is the girl deliberately trying to draw her into a conversation about witchcraft, hoping something will spill? ‘I expect she was nothing but a swindler.’
‘She cast a spell on a man and he was found dead in his bed within the hour.’
‘Sounds more like murder to me.’ As Frances says it she wishes she hadn’t.
‘They found her guilty. She hanged for it.’
The girl’s green eyes are drilling into her. Who are you? Frances asks silently. ‘Who taught you?’ She points at the cards, changing the subject.
‘My pa. Soon as I was old enough he used to take me out with him. Card tricks was his living, see.’ She manoeuvres the baby on to her other breast, ‘Besides, you’re not the only one round here to have taken a fall.’ She stresses the final word, as if she means the fall from Eden.
Frances is tempted to shut down the conversation, berate the girl for her insolence, but she senses she must tread carefully. ‘Is that so?’
‘I got myself in the family way without a husband and birthed a dead baby.’
‘I know that, Nelly. That is how you came to be here.’ Beneath the girl’s hard shell Frances thinks she can discern a well of sadness, making her question her earlier misgivings, thinking it unlikely that Bacon or Coke would come into the orbit of a creature like her. Some well-born young woman, with a grudge, sent to report back perhaps, but a girl like Nelly, she doubts it. God knows, it must have been hard enough finding someone for the job of wet-nurse to a murderess’s infant.
‘But what you don’t know is who fathered my baby.’
She has pricked Frances’s interest. ‘So, who was he?’
Nelly looks at her lap. ‘My father.’
Frances hadn’t expected that. She is well aware such things go on but nonetheless she’s shocked. In her world virginity is too valuable an asset to be adulterated. But this girl has nothing of value about her except her wits.
‘You don’t believe me? That’s no surprise. People like you never do believe people like me.’ Nelly seems not to have an ounce of self-pity.
Frances feels a burst of compassion. ‘You must have –’ She stops herself before suggesting that Nelly must have wished the next-door witch had cast a spell on her father. It would be unwise to turn the conversation back to witchcraft. Instead she says, ‘You must not have known whom in the world you could trust. Is that why your mother cast you out?’
Nelly is nodding. ‘Some things can’t be changed, can they?’
‘That’s true.’ Frances is impressed by the girl’s stoicism. It is a quality she admires.
‘Stupid, really, but I used to wish I’d been born into a family like yours, have a marriage all set up with some rich …’ Her words trail off. ‘What was it like?’
Despite herself, Frances begins to open up. ‘I expect you already know that I was married to the young Earl of Essex when I was a girl.’ It strikes her now that a dozen years have passed since that wedding. ‘The union was designed to mend an old rift between my family and his.’ There is something comforting about sharing her story after all those secrets to be kept. ‘We lived separately at first. He went abroad for his education. I was still very slight, you see, and my mother thought I’d struggle with a birth. The trouble didn’t begin until much later, once we’d set up house together.’
∞
I pulled the short straw. Uncle took his silk handkerchief and wrapped it around my eyes. We were all playing: my two maids; Uncle and his man; my favourite brother Harry; Essex’s three gentlemen; even the chaplain wanted to join in. Only Essex refused and sat in a nearby chair, stiff as if he’d been cut from card. He’d barely said a word since we arrived that afternoon.
His house, Chartley, was remote. We’d been five days on the road before we saw the great ruined castle perched on a ridge and the house tucked behind it. I can’t pretend I wasn’t disappointed on arriving: although it was vast it smelt of dust and was gloomy, the windows too small to light the rooms properly. The whole place was sullen – it creaked and groaned at night as if ghosts were trapped beneath the floors, and it was crooked: if you put a bead at one end of the hall it would roll all the way to the other. When you are accustomed to houses like the ones I grew up in – new and splendid with their acres of glass and sleek cool marble, splashed with sun, looking out over gently rolling vistas, places filled to the brim with life – it spoils you.
Uncle, Harry and I waited in the hall for Essex to appear and I tried to imagine what kind of man he had become after all his years away. An old clock ticked loudly and his painted relatives glowered at me from the walls, reminding me that I’d been raised to think of them as Howard adversaries. His father, the old Earl of Essex, was silk clad and smug, as if he owned the world.
‘He was insufferably cocksure,’ said Uncle, pointing up at the picture. ‘Glad he’s out of the way.’ He made a chopping motion against his neck. ‘Shame his faction of bloody Protestant fanatics endures.’ A disingenuous smile spread over his face. ‘Ah, but we’re all supposed to be friends now.’
‘Thanks to me.’ I couldn’t hide my bitterness. I was inwardly cursing the marriage that had put me in this gloomy place.
His response was cold: ‘You’re twenty now, quite old enough to understand the importance of diplomacy.’
Of course I’d grown up with my own set of painted relatives hanging on the walls. My grandfather and greatgrandfather had been executed too, long before. It occurred to me that decapitated antecedents were all Essex and I had in common.
A prickling at my back, the sensation I was being watched, made me turn to see Essex standing in the gallery above. ‘I hope your journey wasn’t too arduous.’ He began to descend the stairs and I wondered if he’d overheard us.
Once he was closer I could see that he was no longer the fresh-faced boy I remembered from the altar six years before. I tried to conceal my shock behind a smile. I was aware that he’d suffered a bad bout of the smallpox – it had put him out of action for a good eighteen months and delayed our reunion. I expected him to have a few pocks and scars, but nothing could have prepared me for the angry-looking craters that covered his cheeks and the way the skin around his right eye was swollen and pulled out of shape, as if he’d been badly burned.
‘You find me monstrous,’ he said. He did look monstrous next to Harry, who was younger but taller, with unblemished skin and sleek dark hair. Harry was like me.
‘No.’ My smile had become rigid. ‘But does it give you pain?’ I willed myself not to stare.
‘I don’t seek your sympathy.’ He had shrugged, changing the subject, asking one of the servants to show us to our rooms.
The blindfold was tightly tied, leaving me in absolute darkness. Unidentified hands began to spin me and I was left, arms outstretched in the middle of the floor. I could hear laughter and the shuffling of feet as I took a few tentative steps. They began to taunt me, scuttling about calling, ‘Over here,’ as I flailed, finally catching a shoulder. I realized it was Essex when he said, ‘Not me,’ pushing me away harder than was necessary so I stumbled and nearly lost my footing. After what seemed an interminable chase I finally caught the edge of someone’s garment in my fist.
‘Who can it be?’ I ran my hands over clothes I recognized instantly as Uncle’s. I pretended otherwise, walking my fingers up his neck and over his face, through his hair, deliberately poking and prodding, saying, ‘I know only one person with hair growing from his ears.’
‘You little minx,’ Uncle guffawed. He lifted my blindfold. ‘For that you will have to be punished.’ He began to tickle me. ‘Say you are sorry.’
<
br /> I collapsed to the floor, helpless with laughter, gasping for breath, begging him to stop. He wanted an apology. It was an old ritual: I would never give in. I would have held out until I went blue and fainted if I’d had to, but somewhere through my hysteria I heard my husband say, ‘I’m not staying to watch this indecent display.’
The room fell silent. Uncle let me go and we watched as Essex marched from the room.
‘It’s only a bit of harmless fun,’ I called after him. ‘Oh dear.’ I felt suddenly at a loss. ‘It seems I’ve married a killjoy.’ I attempted a laugh but it rang hollow.
‘Well, he didn’t live up to his early promise, did he?’ said Harry. He was right. I remembered the bright, keen boy I’d married and this one didn’t match up. ‘Did someone put a poker up his backside on his travels round Europe?’
One of the maids snorted behind her hand and Uncle said, quietly, so the others couldn’t hear, ‘Don’t worry, Frances, he’ll soon change his tune when he’s had the pleasure …’
I slapped his hand and told him not to be so crude.
Later I thought it wise to pay a visit to Essex’s rooms to make amends and found him on his bed, half undressed. He was not alone.
He glared at me. ‘What in Hell’s name are you doing in here uninvited?’ He was shouting. ‘Get out, you stupid girl.’
I would have turned and run, but was rooted to the spot and, not knowing what else to do, stood blankly waiting for the pair of them to untangle. She was still half behind the bed curtains, fumbling to get her stockings on. They were expensive ones, fine silk, embroidered with a pattern of roses, and I wondered if they’d been a gift from him. He stood up and we faced each other as if primed for a fight.
‘Just go!’ His spit landed on my face. I didn’t move. He collapsed back on to the bed, dropping his face into his hands, reminding me of an infant who hides its face, thinking it can’t be seen.
The Poison Bed: 'Gone Girl meets The Miniaturist' Page 2