That was one thing I learned in the garden where we went on summer evenings and on Sundays. Plants can adapt to the most extraordinary conditions – a geranium forced to bloom in winter, blanched celery grown up without light, or an espaliered pear tree. The garden didn’t belong to us, I learned. Like many others, Jacob rented his little patch of land, just outside the City. Like the others he grew cabbages and radishes, frilled parsley and gooseberries, and from the last tenants we had inherited a fine russet apple and a walnut tree. But he also grew flowers, and rarities when he could get them – new shades of double primrose, or martagon lily.
As a child, I loved our Sundays. ‘Their gardens are the best thing about the English,’ Jacob said grumpily. Even he would warm and soften as he packed the earth around some young seedling with a tenderness he was never able to show me. But he did set me free to run along the rows of twining peas and small jewelled strawberries. There was a seat made of packed earth and turves, which he planted with low growing periwinkle, and sometimes, if he were working late, he’d perch me there when I got drowsy. I was allowed to trample the heaps of good-smelling cuttings, of hyssop or thyme or rosemary; to pinch the dead heads off the gillyflowers, and stick my fingers into the foxglove bells.
‘Watch out for the bees,’ the fat market-women would tell me, smilingly, and I’d listen to the humming from the skeps on the wall, before I ran off again to chase the butterflies. Outside, in the street, I’d seen little girls playing with scraps of cloth on sticks, or twisting handfuls of straw into dollies. But in the garden there were no girls or boys. There was just pretty.
I’d pick snails and caterpillars off the leaves, and fetch water in a copper pot from the well that served the gardens. I began to notice that different plants grew in different ways, and sometimes, if I sat near Jacob’s feet of an evening when he read his gardening books, he would pass them over to me. Once I saw that he was looking down at me, oddly. ‘Your mother loved gardens, too,’ he said quietly.
I remembered it, because it was so rarely either of us spoke of the past, or of my family. It was as if a kind of shyness held us both in thrall. Greedily, silently, over the years I hoarded every tiny detail Jacob did let slip, and secretly, in my mind later, I would add another minute piece to the jigsaw puzzle of my family.
Sometimes, in our garden, he’d grumble that in this country the grass grew so lush it choked all the flowers, and as he set me to pull up the fat emerald clumps, I fancied I could remember a shorter, spikier turf under my fingers, and a mead where the flowers shone out more brightly. Once, wishing perhaps to praise me for picking out the Latin name of some strange flower, he said it would have made my father happy.
As I grew older, just occasionally, he’d tell me stories from his own past – or that part of it which touched on the plants and the gardens. That book I had felt on board the ship was his greatest treasure – a hortus siccus, a whole garden of dried plants arranged according to their form, the Continental way. I learned that the great adventure of our age lay in understanding the way a weed grew, just as much as in travelling over the sea. This was one field where we of the new religion led the way, he told me proudly. He’d studied botany at the great university of Montpellier in the south of France, where many fled from persecution in the north. Though at first I understood little of what he told me about it, gradually the names of the men became familiar to me – Andrea Cesalpino (‘He works for the Pope now. Pity, a pity …’); Charles de l’Écluse, who ran the emperor’s botanic garden in Vienna, with his elegance and his generosity; Matthias de l’Obel with his orderly mind, classifying plants by the shape of their leaves and the way they grew from the stem or the tree. I liked it, when Jacob showed me how that was done. There was something about the sureness of it that pleased me.
Several of the great plantsmen were living in London now: Master de l’Obel visited us from time to time, and he and Jacob would chew over the plants and gardens they had seen until they came alive in my memory, too. They seemed to avoid anything more personal, however intently I might listen for it. Flemish gardens had more rare plants than any in Europe, Master de l’Obel said once, ‘But who can live in a land watered by blood?’ Then, catching me listening, he quickly changed the subject.
Jacob knew several of the other plant collectors here – James Garrett, the Huguenot apothecary, and Master Garth, whose connections with the southern Americas brought many rarities his way. They even passed some business to Jacob, but he was too uncompromising a man to fit for long into that or any other community. The few people who really made up my world came to me in other ways. There were the Hills, who rented the bigger patch of land beside ours, with cherry trees standing sentinel in the rows of herbs, and a pool and, most magical of all, a curved shape of willow like a tiny house with a vine growing all over it, and bunches of hard little grapes like beads hanging from the ceiling. They had a daughter – fourteen, almost grown up – who told me how to use the sops-in-wine and helped me play games with the cockleshells that edged the border. Master Hill was well to do, and though occasionally he grumbled his family would bankrupt him some day, more often he liked to boast that they had a garden that would do for a fine lady. Master Hill was a man of connections, Jacob said, and once he bought his wife a present that made me stare at it, round-eyed: the shape of a cocklolly bird, made all from living rosemary.
Master Hill paid Jacob to keep his accounts, and to write his letters neatly. So did other businessmen, one by one, and not all of them Dutch or French, though it helped that, besides the Latin, he spoke three languages easily. Four, in the end, for he came to teach himself Italian, and in doing so to teach me. He hadn’t the time or the patience to school a child in the rudiments, so I learnt to read and recite, and figure, at the petty school. I learnt to write there, too, but Jacob said it was a vile, clumsy hand they were teaching me. He said it to the dame, who announced the next day she wanted no more to do with me. So I stayed at home, and imitated Jacob’s beautiful curling writing, and ran loose in the shelves of his growing library as if in a row of peas. He was friends with all the booksellers around St Paul’s, and when he went to see them, he took me.
He made more than enough money to keep us both decently, if not luxuriously. He even made enough to employ Mrs Allen, the Dutch-born widow of a local seaman, to cook us one hot meal a day and to keep the house neat. Mrs Allen must have known my secret – though in truth it never seemed as dramatic as that word implies. Just once, I remember, when I was begging to go back to school like other children, she did look me right in the eye. ‘And what about the first time they take your breeches down for the birch? Have you thought about that?’ I dropped my gaze. It was the sort of thing neither Jacob nor I ever thought about directly. But she in her turn never said anything straight out, perhaps from respect for Jacob – ‘such a man of letters’, as she called him, a trifle breathlessly – just as she never said anything about the packed bags he always kept by the door, even after we’d been in England for years and developed a cautious acquaintanceship with the idea of safety. But it may also have been because she, too, was unable to envisage any other solution for me. If I were to be a girl, then I would need to marry, and who would want a girl with neither dowry nor family, with no idea how to sew or to make herself pretty? Looking back now, I’m grateful to Mrs Allen. Looking back, I think of her affectionately. And looking back, I think there might have been mothering there, had I been able to take it. But I was a child who’d learned, the hardest way of all, that safety lay in self-sufficiency.
Still, it was to Mrs Allen I owed the few festivities I knew – the old rites and revels that grow from the blood and bone of this English country, and that made me less of a stranger than I might otherwise have been. It was she who, in the first bright days of February, would take me to the English church to see the procession of candles on Candlemas Day. They didn’t hold with such things at the stricter Dutch church where Jacob took me – ‘Papist nonsense,’ they used to sa
y. It was she who sent me out with other children begging for treats on St Valentine’s Day. ‘It’s one thing we can do right in this household, just like everybody else,’ I heard her say firmly to Jacob, and he stopped protesting and turned away. She took me out into the fields, to look for blossom on the first of May.
Sometimes, too, she’d take me to the playhouse. One of her husband’s cousins was in the business and he’d leave word with the doorman so we could get in for free. Sometimes, after, she’d take me behind the scenes, where the kings and villains became men with traces of grey hair gummed on their face and paint in the corner of their eyes – but still, men whose voices carried across the room, men whose air and gestures made everyone else in the room look paltry. Men in velvets and in lace, even if both were a little shabby. And with them the boys, the shrill-voiced pieces of vanity who’d don petticoats and act women in the play. I looked at those boys with a mixture of fear and the most burning curiosity.
There was one old actor, Ben, who took especial pains with me, showed me the tricks of posture and paint that made young into old and boy into girl – or, I suppose girl into boy. It was only later, as I grew, that I wondered how he had known that these things would interest me. But perhaps he just liked children. Children liked him, certainly. Ben had been to sea, when the acting work would not support him, and he had fabulous stories to tell – of lands where the waves flashed amethyst and turquoise, where emerald green birds with clamouring wings but no legs sucked the honey from scarlet flowers all day, and of the serpent hiss of hard rain beating on a tropical sea. I’d take the stories home to Jacob, like a bartering tool, and sometimes I could sting him into telling me tales of his old life in the south, where bushes of rosemary grew so high they used the branches for firewood, and clouds of pomegranate blossom glowed against a blazing sky.
By and large it was, I suppose, a lonely life, but I didn’t mind much. It was easier that way. As I grew older, I watched the young girls begin to blush and giggle as they filled their dresses, and the young men stare and swagger on their way to the butts, out past the laundresses on Finsbury Fields, and I knew neither was for me. I didn’t go to the butts, though the law said all boys should practise archery; I suppose here as elsewhere our foreignness protected me, explaining any differences away. It was not quite true, I’d found, that the English hated foreigners – not the Londoners, anyhow. What they really hated were those native-born English who were different in any way. For almost ten years, after we first arrived in England, I lived among them as a mouse lives in the wainscoting. Glimpsed, sometimes. Cursed at, occasionally. But on the whole, peaceably.
Winter 1593–94
You could live well here, if you chose to, within a network of others who had fled to Elizabeth’s England, some fleeing the Inquisition’s long arm, others simply to make money. It was easy to forget we were strangers in a strange land. Until something happened to remind you, and anything you’d learned about safety had to be unlearned, painfully.
I must have been turning fifteen when Jacob came home one day, his face bleached.
‘I’ve just seen Roderigo Lopez,’ he said. It was a mark of his anxiety that he was confiding in me. ‘Of course, it’s all an absurdity. But mud sticks, and these days, you never know what nonsense is going to get you into trouble.’
Indeed, that year had been far from easy. First we heard that the Spanish had another Armada on the way – terrifying for everyone, to be sure, but anathema to those who’d seen what the Spanish were doing in the Netherlands, from whence came bloodier stories every day. Next we heard that the winds had changed, and we were safe – certainly through another winter. But then came news that Henry of France, our Protestant hero, had turned Papist as the price of holding on to his country. He said Paris was worth a Mass: he should have heard what they said of him, the grave old men with their neat ruffs and their wine cups, in the Huguenot community. Even the plague had been worse than usual, so that people started talking about the great epidemic thirty years before, when one in four Londoners died. Jacob said the ordinary people, in their ignorance, were blaming ‘strangers’ – immigrants, like us – and keening over the wickedness of the country. Even the playhouses had been closed. But this was something different, apparently.
‘Roderigo should never have got across Lord Essex – never!’ Jacob exclaimed angrily, as I knelt to stoke up the fire. ‘That’s a young man who doesn’t forgive a slight – yes, and a young man in a hurry.’ I was sorry. I didn’t know much about the Earl of Essex, no more than I did of any of the grandees whom the other boys ran after when they rode through the streets, half in admiration and half in mockery. But I liked Dr Lopez, who’d always been kind to me. Jacob said he’d been a Jew once, but he’d become a Christian many years ago when he’d first come to this country from Portugal – ‘Had to, naturally.’ He eyed me with a rare impatience when I looked at him blankly; yes, I knew, of course I did, that no one practised the Jewish faith in this country. But the fact was, I looked at the world around me – the world of people, not of books, or plants – as little as might be.
When Dr Lopez was appointed the senior doctor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and even the queen’s own physician, Jacob said, it reflected credit on us all. Showed you could do service to England, even if you were born across the sea. ‘Shows that at least here you can get along, if you’ll just try to fit in and live quietly.’ As a child, all I knew was that, when Dr Lopez came to visit, he brought a bag of comfits for me. And as I grew, and Jacob let me stay up to listen to the grown-ups’ talk, I liked the way his cheeks creased up and his white beard trembled as he banged his beaker on the table so that the drops splashed red, and I liked to hear his stories.
Yes – he had told some about Lord Essex, maybe. Or at any rate a young noble patient who was suffering half from the spleen – ‘If he was a girl, we’d call it hysterics, but he thinks it gives him a hold over her majesty!’ – and half from some unnamed disease, the thought of which made the older men purse their lips slyly.
Perhaps now Jacob thought that it was time the men’s conversations ceased merely to pass over me like a ripple of water. Perhaps he just wanted to talk with somebody.
‘Lord Essex has got wondrous great these last two years. What, not out of his twenties yet, and a privy councillor already. And the favourite companion of the queen’s majesty – aye, and one who dares to slight her and say her nay in a way his father, God rest his soul, would never have done. The old Earl of Leicester, who married Essex’s mother, and brought this boy on as though he’d been his own flesh and blood,’ he explained impatiently. ‘Myself, I think that’s why the queen keeps him so close, for the old lord’s sake, but of course there are those who say –’
Mrs Allen came in then, so I didn’t hear what others say, though naturally I could guess. It sounded silly to me – the earl was in his twenties, after all, and the queen must be more than sixty. I didn’t hear, then, what Dr Lopez had done to annoy Lord Essex, except maybe talk too freely. But I was of an age by now to pick up scraps of information when anything interested me.
Advent didn’t bring us many callers – who sent out invitations to dine, when you had four weeks of fast days? – but when visitors did come on business I kept my ears open. I learnt that Lord Essex was white hot against the Spaniards, and anxious to lead an army off to war and make his fame that way. I learnt it was the Cecils, old Lord Burghley and his son, who were leaders of the peace party, and the queen, reluctant to spend blood or money, leaned their way in terms of policy. And that Lord Essex, pent up at home, was seeing Spanish spies under every bush, and claimed Dr Lopez – our Dr Lopez – had given house-room to Spaniards, or men in Spanish pay, plotting some dangerous conspiracy. Then Christmas came, and the feasting and the frost fair, and I forgot it all for the moment.
Christmas wasn’t out when Dr Lopez was arrested. It was only the first of January, and the news spread like a sickness from feasting house to feasting house, quenching eac
h little light of merriment as surely as if it had been touched by the plague, and as swiftly.
‘They’ve taken him to Essex House. But Lord Burghley and his son – you know, Robert Cecil, the hunchbacked one – have been sharing the interrogation. They’re reasonable men, the Cecils. He’ll be out before Twelfth Night, you’ll see.’ It was our most cheerful neighbour, a dapper tailor once from Le Havre. Jacob glanced at him sourly.
‘Reasonable men, you say. Are reasonable men going to fight with Essex over the welfare of a foreigner, and a Jew at that? What have they found to charge him with, anyway?’
It was three days later when we heard. For two of those days Lord Essex had sulked – the Cecils had done the right thing, after all, they’d declared Lopez innocent, and the queen had believed them, to the earl’s fury – but on the third he had been busy. Lopez had been whisked into the Tower, and the earl set about declaring, beyond all doubt, a treasonable conspiracy, a Spanish plot to poison the queen, as her doctor could do so easily.
Terrified and confused, Lopez himself seemed half to agree. (‘Of course he agreed! They showed him the rack,’ said Jacob indignantly. I saw one of the other men there, another foreigner, rub his shoulder as if an old wound pained him, and stir uneasily.) Lopez had actually agreed he’d once taken Spanish pay, but only on the instructions of English agents, to lead King Philip astray. But that was back in the days of Walsingham, the old spymaster, and now Walsingham was gone, and couldn’t say yea or nay.
‘Take heed of that,’ Jacob said. ‘It’s hard enough not to get caught up in intrigue, if you’re a foreigner in this country. But the men who try to hire you will leave you in the lurch – by dying, if they can’t do it any other way.’ Privately he told me he had not the least hope; something about a job Lord Essex wanted for a friend of his, and the queen had given it to someone else, on Cecil advice, so that she’d want to soothe Lord Essex by yielding to him in some other way.
The Girl in the Mirror Page 2