The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  ‘After King James reprieved you, Sir Walter, and you made your second expedition to the Orinoco, in your absence you were accused of treason for conspiring with King Philip of Spain against the Crown.’

  ‘A vile calumny. So confident was I that everyone would disbelieve such fabrication, knowing me to be ever an unwavering and implacable foe to the Spaniard, that I returned home when I could have altered course for France. The extraordinary plan that serpent James had in sending my fellow snake of a kinsman Stukely to meet me, was to give me that very opportunity in order that I might condemn myself. They should have known it would have gone against the grain of my character to slip away like a common criminal: a man like myself can live in confinement, but not in exile. But either way, I was lost.’

  ‘Returning to the subject of your wife, if you wouldn’t mind...you didn’t mention the cause of your estrangement.’

  Ralegh looked nervously at the door. ‘Bess plagueth me at intervals, and hath announced that when I am executed she shall carry my head around with her in a red leather bag for the rest of her unnatural life. I depend upon my servant Grammaticus to keep her at bay. When Bess is drunk—her consumption of wine and spirits is immoderate—she oft arriveth to address me on what she believeth to be my failings. She begrudgeth me the necessities of civilized existence, videlicet, my garments:’—Ralegh fingered the embroidery on his doublet—‘I have a reputation to uphold in the standard of my dress, besides which, just because I am a prisoner does not mean I must wear rags. A certain lawyer who spent several years before the mast as a young man wrote that, “Every sailor knows that a vessel is judged, a good deal, by the furl of her sails.” Lawyer he may have become, but he wrote sooth: for if there is too much bunt, or if the clews are too taut or slack, or if any sail is abaft the yard, the ship cannot perform ataunt. As it is for a ship so it goeth for a man.’

  Arbella vowed to herself always to furl herself to best advantage; not to let her skin get baggy or allow her clews to get slack (over-tautness was reckoned unlikely as one got older); and, above all, never to have to buy extra material to cover abaft her yard.

  ‘Also,’ Ralegh continued, ‘one is expected to maintain a certain standard of fare at the table and to keep a decent cellar. I am the recipient of lavish hospitality from the Lieutenant of the Tower, which I am obliged to repay. And Northumberland, who himself employeth two French cooks, cannot be served a mess of pottage in a wooden porringer. Bess—my wife, that is, for I would never speak in such familiar terms of Cynthia—hath one grievance against me in particular. After what she describeth as her having endured many years of my profligacy with her family’s money, she objected to my having pawned a jewel, a diamond that was a gift to her from the late Queen. What my wife faileth to appreciate is the scandalous cost of maintaining one of my station in moderate comfort. Take furnishings, for example: a Gobelin tapestry or two, a Turkey carpet, velvet for the curtains...the expense is hideous. Is it unreasonable to wish to display paintings by artists who are not anonymous? Though men may bring their own drinking cups and knives to dinner, even the effeminate fork, is it vain to entertain on one’s own gold and silver services? As to fine linen: it is through no fault of mine that my tailor’s and haberdasher’s bills grow ever larger; knowing how discriminating my tastes are, they keep putting their prices up.

  ‘To no avail do I remind Bess, from a distance, that it is impossible for a man to earn a proper income while “Brooding in dark cellars of thought |Calcified in flagstones of the pooling hours.”’

  ‘Is that a quotation? I don’t recognize it.’

  ‘Nay, it is from a poem I wrote this morning. One must keep the mind active. “Be not solitary, be not idle”: so Burton recommends, and he is right, if one is to ward off melancholia. I have no choice but to be alone, for the most part, but I do my best to stay busy. It helpeth also to take my mind off my health, for I am not a well man. I have stabbed myself on several occasions, hoping to end my life upon my own terms. I have suffered two strokes.

  ‘Despite which, when I was unwell a physician who came to see me at the behest of my friend Ben Jonson reported to the Lieutenant that, in order to win sympathy, I had used an ointment to rupture my skin and swallowed an emetic to cause convulsions. Marry! a brave man should not be brought to such a pass.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ said Arbella, ‘I read that after Northumberland’s friends had visited you they commented that your illness appeared most variable, especially when you were moved to participate in their conversation.’

  ‘Tush! Pish!’ Ralegh tapped the dead ashes from his pipe onto the floor. ‘I had been ill for a week before they took the trouble to come. I could have been dead by then for all they cared.’

  The silver stem of Ralegh’s pipe glinted, and both of them looked to the window. As the sunlight gained in intensity it spread throughout the room and coated everything in gold, and despite the murkiness of the glass they could see that the sky was now an unblemished blue.

  ‘At last!’ exclaimed the knight; ‘what with all this weather and talk I have made myself late. I have a consultation with my leech regarding an ingrowing toenail, and one of my physicians is sending someone to clean the coffee and tobacco stains from my teeth.’

  ‘Coffee? You drink coffee?’

  ‘It is a new drink that the Queen introduced me to. After she established trading relations with the Ottoman Empire, some sacks of the beans it is made from arrived in a shipment of goods from Smyrna. My wife’s younger son picked up the habit from me and got into the coffee business...on the strength, literally, of mine addiction.’ Now that there was no call for candles, the filament of amity between the pair was broken and Ralegh’s tone became distant again. ‘What is thy name, girl?’

  ‘Now you ask. It is Arbella.’

  Ralegh jumped as if he had been electrocuted and stared at her. ‘Arbella?’

  ‘In full, Arbella Mary Stuart Stace. Sir Walter Ralegh was Arbella’s staunchest advocate and she had cause to be very grateful to him.’

  ‘Arbella Stuart? Is’t possible? But her hair was redder than thine.’

  ‘Yes, mine is naturally auburn. As to the historical connection, you will know that Arbella Stuart also had no love for King James, although he was her first cousin and responsible for establishing her at Court as England’s “Second Lady”. It was James who forbade Arbella to marry William Seymour. And it was James who had her brought here to her last place of confinement at the Tower of London, where she committed suicide by starvation. Arbella Stuart was a model for the Duchess in John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi.’

  After continuing to stare a while longer while Arbella returned a neutral gaze, Ralegh put his arm across his waist and bowed. Then, sticking his pipe in his mouth upside down he turned on his heel, marched to the wall, grabbed his cloak, swirled it around his shoulders, donned his bonnet, and departed leaving the door open behind him. As Arbella blew out the candles and felt the room empty around her, her sense of the present, that intrusive and unwelcome tense, returned.

  Chapter Eleven

  That night Arbella Stace had a dream.

  King James the Third of England, or Jug Ears as he was known to his subjects, had caused his Lord Chamberlain to write offering her a newly created position at the Royal Court of His Britannic Majesty. As Mistress of the Plants, she would oversee a large staff dedicated to the tending of Jugs’ massive botanical collection in the royal hothouses, conservatories, greenhouses, and seed banks. This meant ensuring that the royal trees, plants, shrubs, and flowers were properly housed or stored, and embedded, fed and watered, and organically fertilized; as well as talked, sung madrigals, and played Bach to for five minutes every hour around the clock.

  Although it was common knowledge that King James was so batty as to make his numerical equivalent amongst the Hanoverian Georges seem as sane as a Charlemagne, suppressing her astonishment Arbella agreed to go to London to be received by His Royal Highness and discuss the matter.


  At Buckingham Palace she was ushered into the royal presence and offered a cup of camomile tea and a slippery-elm pastille, both of which she declined in favour of Diet Coke, of which the Palace had none. Most of what the moody monarch had to say was unintelligible, owing to his whispering into a flowerpot as if he was concerned that its occupant might be offended at being ignored.

  After half an hour His Majesty signalled that the interview was over by rippling the cartilage of his auricles. The movement was so forceful that it blew out a candelabra, the candles of which were made from beeswax from the King’s hives mixed two parts to one part of wax from his own ears, which he was testing as an alternative to the electric light that he found so objectionable on aesthetic and environmental grounds, and was considering banning throughout the kingdom as part of his initiative against light pollution.

  Taking her into his office afterwards, the Lord Chamberlain elucidated what his liege lord had in mind. The job was no sinecure. In addition to the tasks already cited, Arbella would be expected to attend many formal dinners, and to fulfil speaking engagements around the country promoting the King’s programs of Conservation, the use of Green building materials from ecologically self-sustainable sources, Green power, the reversal of global warming, the reduction of greenhouse gases, the elimination of carbon footprints, recycling, the growth of organic foods, the elimination of chemicals in food, and a campaign advertising the colour green.

  To which agenda had been added, so recently that the idea had only entered Jugs’ mind...one was going to say popped into his head, but it was a long and circuitous journey into his cerebral cortex...an hour before she arrived, a plan to grow vegetables in outer space. Mitigating the hard work that would be required of Arbella was that the position came with a Grace-and-Favour apartment at His Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, in the White tower, which, built by William the Conqueror in 1078 AD upon a Roman bastion, was the oldest of the towers. It was an immense quadrangular building pierced with Norman arches and windows; and corner turrets and modern casing designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

  The residence, a penthouse triplex, boasted views of the river on one side and the Waterloo Barracks and moat on the other. It would be staffed by a full complement of domestic staff including butler, cook, footmen, maids, and a secretary. These were to be accommodated on the lower floors, from which the galleries of historical weaponry had been cleared and the exhibits put into storage elsewhere in the Tower.

  To assist Arbella in making a decision—she had been thinking in terms of a Knightsbridge flat close to Harrods and Harvey Nichols, but this offer she found intriguing—it had been arranged that she should be escorted there forthwith and shown around.

  For one who was so protective of her privacy, and whose greatest phobia in life was that of intrusion into her personal domain, what better place could Arbella have wished for or choose to live in than the White tower, in the centre of the Inner Ward of the Tower of London? From childhood she had imagined a massive structure like this, a donjon or keep with towers, thick walls, drawbridge, portcullises, and surrounding moat. The building was ninety feet high with walls varying from fifteen feet thick at the base to eleven in the upper parts. Above the battlements rose four turrets, three of them square and one circular where the first Royal Observatory had been housed.

  It was a more practical version of the Renaissance ivory tower of literature, from which, as the place’s exclusive reclusive tenant she might invisibly look down on the world; where no one could pry into her soul, read her thoughts and feelings, or demand or compel her to do anything that she did not want to.

  The Caen stone exterior of the White tower had been sandblasted clean, the better to reflect its name. At Jugs’ order the bombards, which fired stone balls, and cannons on the roof had been removed and melted down, and the metal given to the royal artists for the peaceable purpose of turning into classically inspired creations for exhibition in His Majesty’s sculpture park.

  This tasteful space occupied the site of the former Tate Modern Museum, which the King had commanded to be razed and the rubble and installation art dumped at sea. The Director and Curators had been redeployed shoveling manure on one of King James’s organic establishments, and the demon-infested location had been exorcized by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  The apartment itself was a delight to behold. No expense had been spared in restoring the Tower to its original designation as a Royal Palace, and to erase its functional image as a top-security prison. The rooms were filled with light.

  The fixtures and fittings were magnificent…if a little green in the colouring of the fabrics and window treatments and wall and trim interior matte and gloss and eggshell paintwork, which varied and vacillated from grass-green to apple-green to baize-green to bottle-green to viridian to Kelly-green to lime-green to lovat-green to loden-green to chartreuse-green to jade-green to emerald-green to eau-de-Nil to sea-green to holly-green to pea-green to avocado-green to ivy-green to olive-green to sage-green to racing-green to Lincoln-green to Kendal-green to Veronese-green to malachite-green to fluorescent-green to bile-green in hue and tint.

  The walls were hung with a mixture of Old Masters on loan from the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Tate Britain Museum, interspersed with bucolic scenes painted by the monarch himself, in the same as the aforementioned shades of green from his palette, with brushes made from naturally shed animal fur that had been donated by its owners in return for medical benefits and a retirement plan.

  There were Flemish tapestries on the walls, oriental rugs on the polished hardwood floors, and antique furniture throughout. The bed in the master bedroom suite, which was a replica of the Great Bed of Ware at the Victoria and Albert Museum, boasted a Vogue Flex Deluxe mattress, thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets, St Geneve eiderdown pillows, and Charlotte Thomas “Bespoke” handmade bed linen with twenty-two carat gold thread woven into the finest Merino wool fabric backed with silk jacquard.

  Laid out on the counterpane was a silk chemise gown from the Satin collection by Argentovivo.

  The refurbished and remodelled White tower was, naturally, a Green building. Rainwater was collected from the roof and stored in cisterns. That for potable use was filtered, subjected to ultraviolet disinfection, and piped to the sinks. Another set of pipes took non-potable water to toilets that used only one pint per flush. The new sanitary system recycled the sewage waste as compost to fertilize the royal plants. Urine from waterless urinals was enzymatically purified and sterilized, mixed with “grey water” from sinks and baths and showers, and utilized for botanical irrigation.

  Heat was provided by a combination of air-source heat pump and solar panels. And although the walls were so thick that the interior remained cool even in the hottest weather, there was a climatic conditioning system that ensured a perfect balance of temperature and humidity, less for the benefit of the occupant than of the botanical species that each room contained; but one did not look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when that horse was one’s sovereign.

  Residence at the Tower came with a single condition, one so important that Arbella would have to sign a certificate of compliance. There was one room, in the Waterloo Barracks, that she must give her solemn pledge never to enter. As a precaution in case she should be overcome by Pandoran curiosity, the door would be locked and guarded twenty-four seven by Yeoman Warders, or Beefeaters. Any attempt on Arbella’s part to force or wheedle her way past them would come to the King’s ears.

  This she had no reason to doubt, for the satellite dishes that effloresced from the sides of Jugs’ head looked as though they could pick up a mouse fart on Pluto.

  Arbella called the Lord Chamberlain that afternoon and accepted the position; and King James, upon being informed, called for his pipe, his drum, and his Fiddlers Three, got off the lavender-padded seat of the throne, and danced a jig. So chuffed was he that he commanded a peal of bells to be rung in Westmins
ter Abbey, and, moved to generosity, ordered that Arbella should be allowed to avail herself, instead of one of the palace carpool vehicles that were rechargeable at roadside stations where they were plugged into the rears of rotational teams of large farm animals: of the Gold State Coach for her transportation needs.

  The coach, which had been built for King George the Third (nudge-nudge-wink-wink-say-no-more) required eight horses to pull it, had a silk-upholstered and -cushioned interior and was decorated with gold leaf and painted panels, cherubs, crowns, palm trees, lions’ heads, tritons, and dolphins.

  At her palace investiture Arbella curtsied to the King, went to the desk behind which the Lord Chamberlain was standing, crossed the fingers on her left hand behind her back, and signed a parchment scroll contract and certificate of compliance with a quill pen—illegibly. A rebellious spirit was already rising within her. The Master of the Rolls added his signature as witness, and impressed the Great Seal of the Realm upon hot red sealing wax at the bottom.

  Then Arbella lay face-down on the floor, and Jugs waved a sword made of willow recycled from a cricket bat over her head, narrowly missing hitting her for an easy run.

  Chapter Twelve

  Over the centuries in Blighty the bloodlines of royalty and horses had become crossed into a genetic cat’s-cradle. Ever since Queen Victoria’s reign, when the families of every major ruler from London to Vladivostok were so closely related that brothers and sisters had the same parents-in-law, their intermarriages were so frequent that their chromosomes had given up trying to straighten themselves out, and decamped to the stables, where they found the situation just as confused.