‘You will need an escort,’ Cecil said.
‘I’ll manage without.’
‘I think not.’
‘I know the way,’ I protested. ‘I’ll take a lady and a groom.’
‘Is your memory so short, your grace?’
I stared, trying to think how to answer. Then it was too late to pretend innocence. Our gazes met and held.
‘The third in line to the throne can’t trot about the countryside unguarded,’ he said. His high, wide forehead contracted in thought. ‘Would you like to carry out a secret mission for me?’
‘A secret mission, my lord?’ I stammered, confused by this unexpected shift in direction.
He gave me a sudden smile. I realised that I had never before seen him smile. A civil upward twitch of the lips, yes, many time. But never this open grin that narrowed his eyes and showed small square, yellowish teeth. His odd, high-browed, slipped-down face grew bright like a naughty child’s. His smile invited me to collude.
‘What mission?’ I asked suspiciously. But I rather liked the thought of acting as a secret agent.
‘Delivering a personal letter. A small matter of estate management. I will organise an escort for you.’ He searched his desk for a clean sheet of paper and began to write. ‘You haven’t accepted. Surely, there’s no harm in a letter?’ His voice was light with private amusement.
The next afternoon, I set off for Hertfordshire with an escort of men-at arms arranged by Cecil. Anne rode with me. I had to leave Tallie in London because she said she had never learned to ride a horse.
‘Why such secrecy about a small matter of estate management?’ I had finally dared to ask Cecil before I left him. In my purse, I carried a sealed letter addressed to his Master of Hounds at Theobald’s.
‘If all goes well, you will soon learn,’ was all he would say.
As I rode, trying to rehearse my speech to my father, I kept hearing Cecil say, ‘Surely, there’s no harm in a letter.’
At Theobald’s, the steward told me that the king had just ridden back from a good kill. Through a gateway, I saw the body of a stag still lying on the courtyard stone. I asked to see the Master of Hounds and delivered Cecil’s letter. Then I asked to see the king, at once. And, no, I could not wait until the following day.
My father was in his bedchamber with Robert Carr when I was announced. Both men were in shirtsleeves. Their doublets lay thrown over chairs. The king sprawled in a chair by the fire while the Golden Weasel dried his bare feet. A basin of water steamed on the floor beside him.
‘What the devil is she doing here?’ My father glared at the steward as if the poor man were to blame for my interruption. ‘Who let you in?’ He turned his glare onto me. ‘Make an appointment like everyone else.’
‘I did! With your Chief Secretary.’ I had meant to be calm,formal and reasonable, but my voice climbed before I had spoken four words. I forgot my prepared speech.
‘I won’t marry him! I’ll kill myself first!’
‘Who’s that?… Don’t stop, laddie.’ He turned back to Carr as if I weren’t there ‘Feels good.’
‘Frederick Ulrich!’
‘The German princeling?’ he asked. ‘The young Lutheran warrior who stirred a bit of life into that monastery your brother keeps at St James’s?… Aye, that’s the spot,’ he added to Carr.
‘He drinks too much and he stinks!’ I said. ‘His hair is lank, his nose is already going red with booze. He has a foul, blasphemous mouth and can’t keep his hands off the waiting women!’ I drew a breath. ‘And he kicked my dog and laughed.’
‘Am I to gather that y’don’t like the lad?’ My father’s amused smile infuriated me out of all caution.
‘I won’t end up like you and my mother!’ I warned him in a shaking voice. ‘Not speaking, pretending to be civil on the rare occasions that you are forced to meet!’
I thought, but had the sense not to say, that I would never let myself be driven so mad that I hated the sight of my own children.
‘She’s done her breeding,’ he said. ‘Why should the two of us speak any longer? Only dead babies come out of her now. But I still respect her as the mother of the next king. And that’s what you must pray to become, lassie – a “mother of kings".’
‘Not with him, I won’t! Not with that great, stinking, red-faced hulk who everyone says will give me the pox as soon as a son!’
My father withdrew his left foot from Carr’s lap and replaced it with his right. ‘Aye, rub just there above the ankle. Do you remember how I eased your leg with my hands like that, after you broke it?’
‘I won’t do it!’ I shouted. ‘Do you hear me?’
He gazed into the fire as if I hadn’t spoken.
My hand acted without my will. I seized a squat glass wine bottle from the nearby table and hurled it. He threw up an arm to protect his head.
The good angels guided my flung bottle away from the king’s head. It smashed instead with a satisfying explosion of wet glistening shards on the hearth beside the Golden Weasel. My father’s privado leapt up, shaking off broken glass, his white shirt blotched with red, his pretty, stupid face both fearful and outraged. My father lowered his arm.
‘You can see why I wish to avoid the inconvenience of your opinion,’ he said.
‘I won’t!’ I said into the silence. ‘You can’t force me!’ I saw myself in the forest, pressing the point of my dirk against my throat. ‘Not even you!’ Tears of rage filled my eyes.
‘I can, and I will.’ My father picked up his tankard, drank, looking at me over the rim. ‘But why are you in such a lather, Bessie? The lad was sent back to Brunswick yesterday, with a broken heart. Did no one think to tell you?’
32
Ouff!
When I regained my breath, I saw how my father had shifted the war. I could defy him all I liked. He would still out-manoeuvre me. I rode back from Theobald’s with my escort, feeling like a prisoner again, fighting melancholy and exhaustion. I had let myself be lured out of cover and had been shot down.
Wrapped in the last of my tattered defiance and still badly out of humour, I went uninvited to a rehearsal of my mother’ new masque. I had a right to go. Thalia Bristo was my musician, taken back by the queen without my permission.
My mother must have seen me on my stool at the side of the hall but she said nothing. No one else dared ask me to leave, not even the queen’s Master of Revels.
I ignored my mother just as she ignored me. I sat on my stool and glowered, feeling worse than if I had moped alone in my rooms. I should have learned my lesson the last time I presented myself to her uninvited.
‘These things are but toys,’ Sir Francis Bacon had written of masques. But he saw only the surface show and missed the deeper meanings. The jostlings for power and preference. The coiling and uncoiling of connections. The coded messages inthe assignment of roles and relative richness of costume. In who was made beautiful and who was condemned to be grotesque. Even in where people stood and by whom they chose to stand.
This particular complex ‘toy’ was my fault, it seemed. First, I had reminded my mother about her gift. Then one of my ladies must have blabbed that the princess’s new blackamoor could sing and play the lute.
Heeding Thalia’s first warning, I had appointed her as merely of my musicians not my mistress of music. Once they grew accustomed to her strangeness, my ladies, including Anne, could now ignore her, as no more than an unusual chair or wall-hanging, adding to the pleasantness of life without needing to be greeted or otherwise spoken to. The rest of my musicians were men, who did not expect to play in my bedchamber after I had settled for the night. Therefore they could not envy her.
Now I was the one feeling jealousy.
When Thalia had returned after her first summons from the queen, I called her into my bedchamber. I waited until Anne left the room to make me a soothing posset.
‘So?’ I demanded, holding out my arms so that my maid could untie my sleeves from my bodice. ‘Has my moth
er taken back her gift?’
‘She wants me to perform.’ Thalia released a ripple of notes from the strings. ‘Her majesty has a fancy to turn poet and write a masque.’ She offered me this confidence as if to salve her forced betrayal. ‘We’ve all been sworn to secrecy. The true author will be revealed only after the final triumph.’
I flinched at that ‘we'. I was not among them. I waved away my maid and tied the ribbons of my night-dress myself as I had always done in Scotland and at Combe.
‘Why does she risk making a fool of herself?’ I tried to think of the pale woman at the window dancing in a masque, let alone writing one.
Thalia looked down at her lute.
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.
‘Wondering which of you I serve now.’
‘Would it change your answer?’
‘Of course!’ Her eyes told me that I had asked a foolish question.
I climbed into the bed turned back by my chamberer and pulled the covers up to my chin. ‘Then you had best decide.’
She shook her head. ‘Don’t mock me. You know it’s not my choice.’
‘At this moment, here in this room, it is.’
She gave me a long look. ‘In truth?’
‘Do you call me a liar?’
She smiled thinly and avoided my question. ‘The queen has not assigned me a place to eat in her household mess. If I want to eat, I believe I’m still yours.’
I leaned back into the shadows of the bed so that she could not see my secret gratification.
Her fingers now began the melody of an old French lullaby while she spoke over the music. ‘We must all pretend that a Mr Daniels is the author, who seems to be her majesty’s tame poetaster.’
‘You never answered my question,’ I said. ‘Why does the queen take this risk?’
‘I believe,’ said Thalia carefully, ‘that no poet would agree to write what her majesty wants.’
Anne returned with my posset. ‘Do you speak of the queen’s new masque?’ she asked eagerly. ‘I have been asked to sing in it, as well as Mistress Bristo. And Frances Howard, and the Other Elizabeth.’ She offered me the warm, foam-topped mug of milk, egg, sugar and sherry. ‘My aunt is pleased with me. It’s an unexpected honour!’
I bent my face to my drink. I understood. My mother meant to act as if I were already gone from England.
‘This new masque is to be a reply to the masque we missedwhile we were still at Combe,’ Anne went on happily. ‘Do you remember, your grace? All that excitement about the Gunpowder Treason and the marvellous bonfires that followed it? It was that same year, but much earlier.’
I did remember. For Twelfth Night, 1605, the beginning of the year that ended so badly for me, my mother had commissioned her first masque at the English court.
‘On Twelfth Night.’ Anne rambled on, undressing for bed in her turn. ‘Her majesty’s first court masque in London. The Masque of Blackness, it was called. The queen and all her ladies blacked their faces and bosoms and arms with soot.’
Thalia stopped playing.
In The Masque of Blackness, my mother, six months pregnant, had played the chief Nymph and Daughter of Niger.
‘But the transformation scene, when they were all to be washed white and cleansed of their sins by the power of the king of Albion… Albion meaning “white” of course’ – Anne’s head reappeared through the neck of her sleeping smock – ‘as well as “England”… it failed disastrously. Frances says that the greasy blacking paste would not wash off on stage. It clung to their faces and came off only when scrubbed hard with soap and warm water. Master Jones had to rewrite the ending without the happy transformation. Now her majesty has been inspired by the arrival of Mistress Bristo to try again.’
‘She means to call it, The Return of Niger to Albion,’ said Thalia in a flat voice.
‘Lucy, Countess of Bedford, says that the queen has six apothecaries working day and night to make a blackening paste that will easily rinse away.’ Anne climbed into bed beside me.
I now attended the rehearsal when the Daughters of Niger were to try the new blacking paste for their skins. The ladies had stripped to their smocks and under-petticoats baring their shoulders and arms.
My mother, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, Lady Arbella Stuart,and two others retired to a neighbouring antechamber to black themselves in private. I watched them leave.
My quiet, older, distant-cousin Arbella always made me uneasy. She had attended my mother for as long as I could remember. Her father had been the younger brother of my grandfather, Lord Darnley and her hand had often been offered by my father in his political manoeuvring, but never given. I had heard rumours that he once intended to marry her himself instead of my mother, to strengthen his dynastic claim in England. I sometimes wondered if she ever dreamed of being queen in place of the woman whose train she carried on state occasions.
When the queen was gone, the rest of the ladies laughed and jostled at the three watery looking glasses hung on the wall for the occasion, as they began to sponge onto their faces, bare arms and bosoms the queen’s new paste of soot, borage oil and water.
‘Mistress Music!’ Frances Howard called to Thalia, who waited quietly on a stool with her lute in her lap. ‘We all try to look like you today. What do you think?’
She did not reply. But I thought that she shone more strange and mysteriously beautiful as the others grew blacker and more like clowns.
‘Are we not lovely?’ The ladies shrieked with laughter and rolled their eyes. There was a mock fight to look in the mirrors. Bare blackened shoulders and knees gleamed like obsidian.
‘I might paint myself up like this for dinner and give them all a fright!’
‘I swear that my soul feels more wild and savage already,’ said Frances Howard. ‘May I have a bite of your arm please? I begin to feel hungry.’
‘How do I look, your grace?’ Anne stood shyly in front of me. Or I believed that it was Anne. Her face was a comical mask of thick black paste around the white rimmed patches of her eyes.
The rehearsal itself began with the now-black Nymphs of Niger singing their music while they walked through the more-or-less correct positions.
‘Great Albion, again we come.
Once more we beg your healing powers…’
As was usual in a court masque, the chief parts were sung by the court ladies, while the court musicians filled out the sound and anchored the tune.
I watched Thalia, now waiting on a wood and canvas rock while the black-faced queen and her ladies, half-clothed in fragments of their eventual costumes, went over and over the more difficult passages of their opening song. Though a mere musician, Thalia had been given a solo.
When her turn came to sing, I understood why she was the reported inspiration for the new masque. The hall fell silent when she began her lament. In her husky voice, she expressed, most movingly, her deep sorrow at having to remain behind, black and still impure, while her sisters sailed for Albion to try again for the purification that had eluded them before.
Unlike that of her sisters, her blackness would never be washed away.
There was a hush when she finished, then applause.
If I had not been so unhappy at being left out, I might have wondered how she felt about her role. At that moment, however, I hated her for being the one in the masque, for singing so beautifully, and even more, for earning a ‘well-sung’ from the queen.
I was not the only one to notice the queen’s praise. I saw Frances Howard exchange looks with another young gentlewoman above a fixed smile.
The queen, Lady Arbella, and two of the other older ladies again retired to wash in private. Only Lucy, Countessof Bedford, who was closest to the rest of us in age, remained.
‘Ladies…!’ The Master of Revels tried to call them to order. ‘We will now attempt the libation scene – that troublesome transformation. In the performance, of course, your chosen gallant will help to wash you, but today, these grooms will assist.’ He p
ointed to a group of red-faced boys standing-by with water jugs. ‘Please go now to your positions beside your seashell ship on the shore of Albion.’
Dash not our hope but let us bloom
As snow-drop white as vernal flowers…
They held out beseeching soot-blackened hands. The grooms poured water from the jugs. There was a burst of hilarity and shrieks. ‘That’s too cold! I freeze!’ Water splattered and spread in puddles on the stone floor. More shrieks.
‘My ladies!’ cried the Master of Revels. ‘Please attempt the lines again.’
With shameful satisfaction I watched the song dissolve into chaos. The new blackening paste did not appear to rinse off much more easily than the original one had done. The Daughters of Niger were soon streaked black and white, their gowns sodden and smeared with the soot. Fabric clung to wet skin. The odd breast was exposed. A string of pearls broke and bounced across the floor. I leaned sideways and picked up one that rolled as far as my skirt hem.
‘Back to the beginning, I beg you,’ prompted the Master of Revels. ‘Great Albion… ’ He was wasting his breath.
‘Whoops!’ High-heeled shoes skidded. Grooms frantically wiped up water from the floor and ran to fetch more jugs of water. With helpless dismay, a tailor watched the ruin of his silk shawls and sashes.
‘I vow, Frances, the more pure you become, the more lewd you look!’ I could no longer recognise the speaker.
‘All the better to attract a man!’ cried Frances Howard. ‘I know who I want to wash me clean.’
‘But you’re already married, you wicked creature!’
Frances ignored her. ‘It’s not coming off this time, either! It’s like the old saying. “As soon wash white the Ethiop".’ She glanced up at Thalia.
Thalia sat unmoving, as if she had not heard. I felt the first quiver of apprehension invade my misery.
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