Lord Howard de Walden. Uncertain.
The Great Cham of Tartary.
The Devil.
‘Don’t trouble yourself trying to find letters or other signs of love from the last two,’ I told Tallie. ‘My father speaks for them himself.’
I had expected her to be a good listener when I lent her to other companies of musicians to widen her freedom to roam Whitehall. I had guessed that she might have dog-sharp ears for gossip. But I wondered where she had learned her astonishing skill at smuggling portraits, borrowing documents and stealing copies of official letters. I ached to learn more about her than she was willing to tell. Questions quivered on the tip of my tongue every time she slipped another filched paper from her sleeve or fished a clandestinely borrowed miniature out of her bodice. But, remembering her anger when I had jested about thievery, I never quite dared to ask. Even with the hedgehog subdued.
In the early triumph of a successful hunt, I confused thecapture of names with a grasp on reality. As if he knew what I was trying to do, my father constantly changed his stated intentions, blowing hot, blowing cold, rejecting, pursuing, until the growing list of my suitors swam under my eyes.
Prince Otto of Hesse. Protestant.
Prince Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Protestant…
All of them possible. None yet certain. I began to feel more confused than when I had known nothing. Through Henry, I learned that even those closest to the king had difficulty keeping up with his ever-changing thoughts on my marriage. Even the subtleties of influence on him were elusive.
Cecil might or might not have influence. Carr very likely carried weight though he would undoubtedly echo his master’s choice. My Catholic convert mother, when asked, quite naturally favoured a Catholic match. I knew from Henry that several of the militantly Protestant German princes, including Brunswick, Hesse and the Palsgrave, or castle-holder, of the Palatine, were already pressing him, in secret communications, to become an ally in the threatened religious war on the Continent. My brother had entered into a war of wills with the king, threatening the king’s purpose in Europe by his vigorous opposition to a Catholic match for either of us.
Hot with satisfaction at having made peace between England and Spain in 1604 after forty years of war, my father had taken to calling himself ‘The Peacemaker King’ and announced his intention of mediating like another Solomon between the Catholic and Protestant states on the Continent. He would marry one of his two older children to a Catholic, the other to a Protestant. And until he decided how to arrange this even-handedness, he meant to keep me hanging in the balance.
I didn’t know even what language to pray in.
* * *
‘I’ve seen the Dauphin’s portrait,’ Tally reported one night. ‘It’s kept in full sight in the king’s lodgings, in his small presence chamber, which is difficulty enough. And the frame is too large for me to smuggle, even if I could manage to foist it. You’ll have to come see it for yourself.’
The king was away hunting at Theobald’s. Even when he was at Whitehall, he would never permit me to enter as far as his small presence chamber. When he was away, I would have no reason to try.
‘Only his close male friends are welcome there,’ I said. ‘How did you manage?’
‘The same way you will. I’ll tell you how when it’s time.’
From the gallery of the bowling alley tucked behind my lodgings, I watched the Earl of Arundel cast his ball. I listened to his shouts, and those of his friends, urging the ball to roll straight, and heard the pleasing wooden clatter of his direct hit. Then I heard a burst of male laughter.
Near the door, still wearing his travel cloak, the Seigneur de St Antoine waved his arms and mimed tearing his hair. Arundel and the others gathered around him, still laughing. The Seigneur staggered as if in despair. He bayed like a hound, then fell to his knees before his delighted audience, threw his arms around an invisible neck and passionately kissed the air.
Sir John Harington, my guardian’s nephew and close friend of my brother, broke away from the others. ‘You should hear this tale, your grace!’ he called up to me. ‘The king’s favourite hound Brutus disappeared last week from the hunting pack. His majesty was distraught, certain that the dog had been stolen. But then a few days later…’ He met me on the little stairs and offered his hand. ‘The Seigneur says that the beast suddenly reappeared in the pack as if it had never been gone.’
St Antoine leapt to his feet when he saw me, but I waved him back down to his knees to continue his antics.
‘Och, my sweet Brutus!’ he resumed in a fair imitation of my father’s voice. ‘Ye came back tae me! ‘Wheer’ ha’ye been sae lang?’ Kiss. Kiss. Then he mimed discovery and astonishment. ‘What’s this? What can this be, tied to yer collar?’
He stood up and resumed his own voice. ‘It was a stern letter to the king,’ he said. ‘Unsigned but reeking of Cecil… who else would have dared? “Come back to London, your majesty,” it said. “You are needed here. There’s work to be done."’
I clapped my hand to my mouth.
There was more laughter, but it had turned thoughtful.
‘How did the king take it?’ asked Harington.
‘Evilly! He was out of temper for the rest of the day. But he obeyed the summons like a dutiful schoolboy and has returned to London.’
The men exchanged glances. If I had not been there, I’m certain they would have said more.
My father must never guess the part I had played, I thought. In a boil of terror and delight, I saw myself again, Cecil’s clandestine agent, handing his secret instructions to the Master of Hounds. Then the delight faded. Once again, my father’s gaze would weigh me down. And his return might make it impossible for me to see the Dauphin’s portrait after all.
Two nights later, I sat in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, watching Henry dance with Frances Howard. She smiled shyly up at him, then looked down blushing, as if overcome by his nearness. When the set finished, he invited her to sit with him and watch the next dancers. As always, Henry was so civil and charming that it was impossible to tell what he truly thought.
I would not have recognised that demure, simpering creature sitting beside him as the cold-eyed knowing youngwoman I had dismissed, if I had not seen her lean against his arm as if by accident, so that the side of her breasts pressed against him. My brother jumped and blushed.
I felt another body settle beside me.
‘She has vowed publicly that she’ll have his maidenhead.’
When I turned my head to look into the Countess of Bedford’s narrow, pretty face, I saw only the intent to inform. No malice.
‘How widely is it known?’
‘Wagers are being laid in the guard room,’ she murmured.
‘At what odds?’ I felt sick with apprehension. Other eyes in the great hall were assessing my brother and his companion.
Lucy shook her head slightly, refusing my question. In silence, we watched my brother being urged on in conversation by wide blue fascinated Howard eyes. The breasts had retreated but hung provocatively, not far, promising another accidental touch.
I felt a tremor of excitement run through the big hall. My brother, widely thought to still be a virgin, had never been seen to favour a woman. I suspected that the same thought was in many heads, including Lucy’s. I was certain that it was in the minds of the Howards. The Howard family had put two of their women on the throne as wives of the last King Henry. The first one, the old queen’s mother, Anne, had almost wrecked England and paid for it by losing her head. The second one, too, soon lost her head.
As if reading my mind, Lucy leaned closer. ‘I never believed the old saw about “third time lucky",’ she murmured. ‘I think this one will bring herself down, just like the first two.’
I almost trusted her with a reply but merely nodded instead. Then Sir John Harington asked me to dance and I lost track of Henry and Frances Howard as we took our places in a set, joking quietly about the adventures of Br
utus the Mystery Hound. As I emerged from the bottom of theset after stripping the willow, I saw Tallie waiting in the shadows of one of the tall wooden pillars. She made urgent eyes at me. I excused myself to my partner and skipped out of the set.
‘You go first,’ I said. ‘Then I have a new task for you.’
‘Plead a megrim! Now!’ She pushed me down onto a stool and laid a warm hand on my forehead. ‘Poor lady!’ she said loudly. ‘To come on so sudden. No more dancing for you tonight. Shall I help you to your bedchamber?’
She led me out of the Banqueting Hall, but not back to my lodgings on the Parkside. Instead, we went into a cool room in the nearby pantries.
‘Her grace needs quiet,’ she told the serving groom asleep in one corner, supposedly guarding the cheeses.
‘You may go,’ I murmured, taking up my part at last. ‘Mistress Bristo will tend me.’ I was certain I saw Tallie wink and slip the boy a coin. She closed and barred the door.
‘Now’s your chance to see the Dauphin.’ She shook out the bundle in her arms. A serving man’s livery in my brother’s red and gold.
‘Why so urgent?’
‘These clothes belong to Peter Blank. He’s waiting half-naked in a cupboard just down the passageway till I return. Put them on. Quickly! He must go back soon to St James’s with the prince… Pull the collar up!’
I could smell Peter’s scent on his shirt. Putting on the smell of a man felt even odder than the clothes themselves. I tried to glimpse my strange new male self in my glass.
‘No time for that.’ Tallie pulled me away.
Stumbling after her towards the king’s lodgings, in over-large boots and carrying a pair of candlesticks, I felt like a rustic clown in an anti-masque. I was certain my father would suddenly appear and yank off my cap.
‘Go set the candlesticks on the tall sideboard,’ said Tallie. ‘The picture is there.’
‘So are a great many people!’
‘They won’t see you, I promise, so long as you keep your eyes down and don’t bump into anyone.’
Heart thumping, I obeyed. By the time I had walked half the length of the room, I saw that Tallie was right. People see what they expect to see. No one looked at me twice in my groom’s livery. I felt my limbs loosen. I may even have swaggered a little in my over-sized boots.
I reached the sideboard, set down the candlesticks and snatched a hungry glimpse of the Dauphin’s dark, trout-like profile. I moved the candlesticks a few inches to the left, to buy more time to look at my possible future. Not only was he much younger than I was, he looked both melancholy and arrogant. I remembered Mrs Hay’s relish for the latest scandal from France.
‘You must never say that I told you,’ she had whispered. ‘I have heard that he often throws up his shirt to show his cock to all the court ladies, and then asks the queen and her ladies to tickle it. “Please, maman, tickle my pipi!” he says.’
I wanted to stare longer but could not risk getting Peter Blank into trouble. Or being recognised.
‘Did you enjoy being invisible?’ asked Tallie when I met her again in the passage.
‘Yes!’ I said with surprise. ‘I think I did.’ Even if I might have to marry a melancholy baby trout. Who might ask me to tickle his pipi.
On balance, however, I thought I might survive him better than Frederick Ulrich. The Dauphin was a year younger than Baby Charles. I should be able to manage him. Marriage to Brunswick would warp me into a ghost, like my mother.
‘I would like to be invisible forever,’ I said.
I was almost asleep in my bed before I remembered to tell her to trawl for gossip about Frances Howard. I wanted toknow what her husband and his family thought of her behaviour and what they meant to do about it. I could not bring myself to ask even Tallie if she thought that my brother had ever bedded a woman.
37
WHITEHALL, MAY – JUNE 1610
The stir had reached all the way to the stable yard. Throwing dignity to the wind, with my attendants puffing behind me, I trotted back from the stables after an early morning ride in St James’s Park. There had been unfamiliar French grooms and strange horses still steaming in the yard. The stable hands had goggled at me wide-eyed until I wanted to shout ‘What ails you? I don’t know either, do I?’
As if I could explain anything yet. But I meant to learn.
As I crossed the Great Court, the hair lifted on my neck. My father’s roar of unreasoning fury could be heard throughout the Riverside of Whitehall. I heard a distant crash. The maid scrubbing the floor of the passage lifted her head and froze. A groom paused as he replaced a burnt candle with a new one. Two more stood motionless with their chins hoiked up over armloads of firewood. They all scrambled to attention when they saw me, but no one spoke.
Was it possible that he had learned about my trespass to see the picture in his absence? I crept closer, into the next corridor, to try to hear what he said.
Hearing the shouts, a secretary paused, turned back, thenchanged his mind twice more in a way that in other circumstances would have been comical. At last, reluctantly, seeming not to have noticed me, he continued onwards towards the source of the outcry.
I’m the First Daughter, I reminded myself. I couldn’t run away to hide just because my father was enraged. I walked on into the great gallery of the king’s lodgings.
‘That Papist viper cunt!’ His voice carried clearly along the gallery. ‘So! Ma bairn’s no a fit match for the spawn of that great whore of France? Are ye tellin’ me that? The royal widow’s got her nose up the arse of Spain, has she?’
Not my trespass, after all. France.
I entered an antechamber filled with silent petitioners. Everyone listened, not daring to breathe.
‘She’ll marry her whelps with Spain now, will she? A double marriage, you say? She spits in the eye of the king of England, does she? Weel, you go tell her that I’ll marry my daughter to…’
Someone closed the door of the room where the king was. I could still hear my father ranting, but his words would no longer be distinguished.
I rushed back to the stables and found the groom just leading Wainscot into her stall.
‘Please saddle her up again,’ I said.
Henry sat with his head on his arms. When he raised his face, I saw that he had recently been crying. Several of his gentlemen sat around him in postures of dejection. The Seigneur de St Antoine leaned against the wall, head down and red-eyed.
‘My other father is dead,’ said Henry. ‘Cecil had word three days ago, but I refused to believe it until confirmation came today from France.’
I took off my cloak and slung it into a pair of waiting arms.
Henri IV of France had been assassinated.
I decided not to announce that our father was in a rage at Henri’s widow. I sat down and let Henry pour out his grief to me.
‘On the eve of setting off to make war against Germany,’ said Henry. ‘Oh, Elizabella, why does God allow the great men to die too soon? I had looked forward to having him as your father-in-law. He had every virtue our father lacks. He would have taught me how to be a king.’
I knew it was wicked of me to be secretly grateful that I might not now have to marry the great man’s son. I should be grieving, not wondering who would replace the Dauphin in my father’s ambitions.
How did you judge a man, anyway? I wondered. How could you guess, from the glimpse of a portrait, or the official language of a letter, whether he would make a tolerable husband or would wither you into an empty, half-mad shell, like the queen?
No matter how often I went to stand on the privy stairs, I could not see where I was. I visited the Haringtons at Kew. I received petitioners, even though they wanted only insignificant trifles from me – a place for their niece among my chamberers, or a commission to make me a new wired collar or saddle for one of my horses. Men offered to give me a puppy or silver goblet engraved with all the Muses, if I would ask Henry to hear their petitions for weightier favours than I could
offer. They did not ask me for licences, military commissions, interventions or backing for founding settlements in the New World. Nor for my consent to marriage.
At Tallie’s suggestion, I gave new jackets to my gentleman musicians. Remembering her very first warning, I also gave Anne a magnificent pair of velvet sleeves, closely cross-hatched with golden threads and a pearl set at every crossing. Also, a dainty chain of gold and enamel flowers very like my own.
My ladies were now wondering openly how soon I would make a match for Tallie with the free-born Peter Blank, great-great-grandson of the royal trumpeter.
‘Do you like him?’ I asked her. It would be easy enough to arrange. Though I could not bear the thought of her leaving to live with a husband in my brother’s household.
‘I believe that we share chiefly the colour of our skin,’ she said. ‘And even that’s not as great a resemblance as it might seem. His mother’s as white as you are. But I don’t discourage him. He’s pleasant enough company and more than happy to gossip with me about the prince’s household.’
Tallie continued to play her lute and listen. She continued to widen her acquaintance among the palace serving people. She read people as I did and understood what I wanted to know, beyond the names of future husbands. Who attended on whom. Who quarrelled and passed each other in silence with averted eyes, or else smiled too civilly. Who exchanged quick secret smiles, or else looked away too quickly. Who waited to petition my father, who petitioned my mother, and who sought favours from Henry. And which men, like Sir Francis Bacon, petitioned all three.
She failed only in learning how Frances Howard progressed with setting her cap at my brother. My brother never spoke with his gentlemen about their relationship, or lack of one. His intimate servants deflected bribes. The Howards had built a wall of loyal retainers around themselves that even Tallie could not penetrate.
I listened to her evening reports when she came into my chamber with her lute, as if to sing me to sleep. Every time I added the name of a prospective husband to our list in dark oak gall ink, I waited for the pen to leap or twitch in my fingers as a sign. But each new name oozed from the nib and lay inert on the page, as lifeless as the others.
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