The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  ‘Straight through the court and over to the right,’ he said. ‘Don’t go bothering the gentry!’

  They were just ending a rehearsal when we got there, and I left Mrs Allen muttering with pleasure as she pawed through a heap of finery, lifting a scarlet doublet that hadn’t worn too badly. I went in search of old Ben, and found him carefully wiping paint from his face – a face more lined than it used to be. Another, younger, actor stood nearby. I almost said, young actor, but the truth is I found it hard to tell an actor’s age then, and I still do today. All I know is that he was slim, and brown, and pleasant looking and that Ben, who seemed preoccupied, eyed him from time to time almost hungrily.

  ‘Martin Slaughter’ – he made an actor’s gesture, introducing the younger man to me. ‘Take our young guest to see something of the place, why don’t you? It’ll get you out of my way.’

  The slim man made me a light, almost mocking, bow. ‘Shall we?’ As we passed out into court again I asked a shade anxiously if Ben was all right, and before replying he paused slightly.

  ‘More or less all right. All right for this season, anyway. But an actor’s life isn’t easy as you start to age. The best parts are mostly for men in their prime, and the pretending gets harder every day.’ He turned the conversation, gracefully. ‘But, here, I’m being a poor host – even if my ownership is distinctly temporary. It’s too cold outside – let’s take a turn in the long gallery.’

  ‘Are we allowed?’ I was anxious here. It was all strange to me. The room was not so much, compared to some I’ve seen since, but at the time the floor seemed an ocean of polished oak, the walls a glowing forest of oil paint and tapestry.

  ‘Oh, yes. Of course, we bow low and turn tail if her ladyship appears, or any of the family.’

  ‘Who owns this house?’

  ‘Lady Howard, no less – the queen’s own cousin, or at least her father was – and her husband, naturally. You’ll have heard of him – Lord Charles, the Lord Admiral, one of the ones who saved all our bacon in Armada days. Off to save it again, when the spring comes, if it’s true what they say about the Spaniards eyeing the French ports, and another Armada on the way.’ I was dumb. Though I had more cause than most to fear the Spanish, the politics of it all still meant little to me. Martin Slaughter must have seen it.

  ‘Look, here’s a portrait of Lord Howard –’ And we began to walk the length of the painted images in the great gallery.

  As we walked, we talked – or Martin did. It was only later that I wondered, a little, that he hadn’t asked anything about me. At the time, I just accepted it gratefully. He told me how he’d wanted to be an actor, since being taken up to the local great house once as a boy.

  ‘It was her ladyship’s father’s place – old Lord Hunsdon, he is, the Lord Chamberlain, it’s him whose mother was the queen’s aunt – and he’s always been a real patron of the players, licensed his own troupe. They put on a performance, because the queen was come to stay. And my father, he worked in the estate office, wangled us in to watch from the back, and that was it, a few dramatic speeches, and all I wanted to do was join an actors’ company. In the end my poor old father had to ask whether the Lord Chamberlain’s Men could find a use for me. I was with them until my voice began to break, playing the ladies, and then they tried to put me to work with an ironmonger, but I wouldn’t stay. I picked up work where I could find it, but for a while, with the plague, it was a bad time for the play. We all had to find another way to feed ourselves.’ Briefly, his eyes clouded, and a tiny silence fell. I felt I should offer a similar account of myself, but I didn’t know what to say, and in a moment he picked up again.

  ‘When my old man died and left me his savings, Master Henslowe was just moving into the Rose, with a new company. Under Lord Howard’s protection, it is – he and her ladyship, they’ve been good to me.

  ‘So now I’m a sharer in the Admiral’s Men, and everything is dandy! But of course, you’ll have heard all about us.’

  I stammered, until I saw that he was teasing me.

  I tried to ask him something of what an actor felt – whether it wasn’t a thrill, to be someone else every day. To my own surprise, I found I was waiting for his answer, quite as if it really mattered to me. There was a pause before he answered.

  ‘Yes, of course it is. You can be a lover, a lunatic, or a poet. You know what it’s like to be a girl as well as a boy, and that’s quite something – wouldn’t you say?’ He wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘It’s as if you get to look at the world through different eyes – or through the eye slits of different masks. You know, you can almost wind up despising those who only experience life one way.

  ‘But of course …’ He paused again. He’d turned away and was gazing down the gallery. ‘… of course, the most important thing is that you get to take the mask off at the end of the day.’

  Katherine, Lady Howard

  Spring 1596

  The queen’s furs should be sent to the skinner soon for beating, and stored away for the season in their bags of sweet powder. I must check whether we’ve enough summer hose from the silkwoman: the woollen stockings can go back to the hosier, to have their feet remade against next winter. The dresses of tawny and brazil colour that did for the cold should be put away; the peach satin furred with miniver, the russet satin nightgown and the robe striped in silver and couleur du roy. In their place come the lighter garments; the carnation-coloured hat embroidered with gold and silver butterflies, the yellow satin petticoat laid with silver lace to ripple like the sea and the velvet in light watchet blue trimmed with silver roses.

  I had a dress that colour as a girl, with fine streamers off it to look like water; in my father’s house at Hunsdon, it was, when we all put on a masque to represent the rivers of England, because the queen was coming to stay. Still, I have finer dresses now, even if they do not look as good on me.

  At court, of course, the queen’s ladies may wear only black and white, and I regret that occasionally. But I wear what I want to in my own house, needless to say. (Twenty years – more – First Lady of the Bedchamber: there is no way any lady in the land can raise herself higher by her own efforts, and efforts there have been, make no mistake, her majesty’s cousin though I may be.) There’s one dress the queen says she’ll give to me, in the dark brocade suited to a middle-aged lady, and one of my own that should be given away in turn, though I’ve given enough to the players this season already.

  Perhaps there is something to be said for keeping one’s mind on the practical. It holds the fear at bay. Seven years ago, the Armada summer, it was almost easier, oddly. With invasion planned we were all in danger, every one of us, all London throbbing with the knowledge of how vulnerable we were, how close to the sea.

  This time it’s different; it feels like a foreign war, this alliance with the French to drive the Spanish out of Calais and keep the Channel free of Spanish fleets, and with my boys, my girls, my own shrinking skin safe out of it, I have time to fret about my husband Charles as I sort taffeta and embroidery.

  Mind you, some of Charles’ preparations have been domestic, too, in their way. You don’t take six thousand men to sea without victuals, prepared to sit there in the Channel for months if necessary. They’ve been at it since Christmas, almost, and knowing what to do with all those barrels of biscuits and salted beef was one of the more foolish worries they had to face when it looked as though the queen had cancelled the expedition again, as she has done so frequently.

  Charles wrote to me that he felt like a merchant whose goods didn’t sell on market day. I’m inclined to doubt – though that may be prejudice – Lord Essex worried himself unduly.

  Essex: I can’t think of him without remembering that masque last Accession Day. All about him, and about how he can do the work of a statesman and a soldier too, I suppose he thinks the queen should give him both the Council and the army. As if it had been he, and not my Charles, who led the country against the Armada.

  B
ut seven years is a long time at court; that’s all but forgotten today. Well, not forgotten by the queen. She lives in the past a lot these days, and one can see why. The present bare of ease, and the future no ally. But I’ve always told Charles, it’s no use thinking he can just sit back on his victory, not if he still means to have any part to play. Well! No cloud without the lining, as they say. We may be sailing to war again, but at least it gives Charles an opportunity.

  Seven years ago, our family were allowed to sit out the danger at my house in Chelsea: it was young Essex who was held at court to keep the queen company. Now he’s challenging Charles for control of the army, and I’m needed here at court today.

  The queen has been maddening: even Lord Burghley says so, and I may agree without disloyalty. Everyone else believes that war is necessary. When the City merchants were told at Sunday sermon that London needed to raise troops, they rallied a thousand men before the end of the day. And there’s Charles and Essex sitting at Dover, and the ships all ready, and the quays stacked with supplies called up from the surrounding counties, and the queen says it’s off – and on – and off again.

  Not, mind you, that I don’t understand. These are the kind of nights that make me positively glad it was one Boleyn girl, not the other, wrested a wedding ring out of old King Henry. Great-aunt Anne, not Grandma Mary. Charles used to joke – in the early days, when we still had our own night-time secrecies – that he was glad to be in bed with Mary’s side of the family. Ambition in the Boleyn blood is like a sleeping dragon and you never know what will wake it, but the Boleyn blood didn’t run as strong in Mary, or so my father used to say. Not that the Boleyn girls weren’t half Howard; and not that my Howard husband is really so far above the fray.

  That business with the report: too childish of Essex to have done what he did, scrawling his signature so large at the bottom there was no space left for Charles to add his name. Either of my boys would have been whipped, if they did anything so petty, and so I told my sister Philadelphia when she tried to excuse Essex’s folly. But for Charles to take a knife and cut the paper apart … My lord Essex needs cutting down to size all right, but not like that. And then Charles had to go and write to Cecil that he wanted to resign his charge and only serve her majesty as one of the common soldiery. Cecil will damp it down, thank God, but some whisper will get through, and while half of me wants to be cheering Charles on, the cautious side knows better. We know what can happen to the ambitious, in my family. Ambitious women, especially.

  Maybe it’s just as well that I am here at court, to limit any damage there may be. But oh, I can’t wait to be at my house at Chelsea, where the pear blossom will be green-white against the wall and the birds will be coming back with the spring to wheel above the river. My house, with the silver that would once have graced an abbot’s table and some of the fine tapestries my father has given to me. A better house than my sister Philadelphia got with her husband; Lord Scrope’s northern castle may reek of ancient nobility, but don’t tell me it isn’t draughty, whatever work they did there in her mother-in-law’s day. My house in Chelsea, that the queen granted to me, directly. Other women in this world can only make their way by marriage, but I already had a position to bring my husband, like another dowry, on my wedding day.

  One of the younger maids comes scuttling round the doorway. The queen is calling for me. As I approach she looks up from her writing desk with a smile like sunshine, one of those smiles for which one would forgive her anything. She beckons me over, and displays with a flourish the paper before her. It’s a letter she is composing, to Essex, and I brace myself, momentarily.

  ‘I make this humble bill of requests to Him that all makes and does, that with His benign Hand He will shadow you … Let your companion, my most faithful Charles, be sure that his name is not left out in this petition.’

  ‘My most faithful Charles,’ she repeats, extending her hand to me, and obediently I bend to kiss it as I sink down into a curtsey.

  Jeanne

  Summer 1596

  The summer agues came badly this year. Many fell sick and died between dawn and dinner time the same day. Yet Jacob had seemed much as usual, grumbling over the news from court, and the cost of kitting out Lord Essex’s sally against the Spanish, all in the name of foolish glory. I thought nothing of it when he complained of the heat one morning; it would indeed be a warm day. I was out all morning, delivering documents he’d completed, and when I came back in, Mrs Allen turned a tear-blotched face to me. They had sent for the physician, she said, but … I brushed past her and went to where he was lying on the bed. He didn’t look afraid, he looked angry. His breath began to rattle before the doctor arrived, and an hour later he was dead.

  I told Mrs Allen to go home, and I was alone in the front room when the shop door opened and a solid, florid-faced man came in. I knew him, he was Master Pointer, a nursery gardener, who put a lot of work our way. He was talking of business and I gazed at him stupidly. I felt death should have put a mark on the door. When I told him the news he was genuinely sorry, but after a moment I realised he was sounding me.

  With Jacob gone – what a loss, his deepest sympathy – what would my own plans be? He would still need someone to deal with his letters, someone who knew the names of the plants, and he was sure many of Jacob’s other clients would feel the same way. Of course, of course, it wasn’t the moment … But we understood each other before, with a squeeze of the hand, he left me. The past and the future were bleeding into each other, and it was making me dizzy.

  We buried Jacob quickly, as the law required, and I was touched at how many came out, with the sickness all around, to pay their respects. They all spoke to me with kindness, but I wasn’t sure I understood their sympathy. I’d had my great sorrow in the Netherlands, a decade before. No one ever spoke to me of that, and I’d learned to lock it away. Now this new frost of loss fell on ground already frozen: I would mourn Jacob, but not too deeply. He’d have understood that – like me, since the Netherlands, he’d kept part of himself locked tight away, and I’d never presumed to give him more affection than he was happy to accept from me.

  I owed him as great a debt as one human being can owe another, and never to try to grow too close was the only way I could pay. Children understand these things instinctively. Now, as an adult, or something near to it, I understood that the framework of my life had changed, but that I was not wounded in myself, or no worse wounded than I had been already.

  He left me all that he had. Forty pounds – I was amazed, but we had always lived frugally. I’d have to quit the house, of course, but I’d be able to find rooms easily. The officials of the borough came to see me, since I’d not reached legal maturity, but were only too ready to accept there was no need to worry.

  Mrs Allen came to help me move out, and I thought she was looking at me curiously. It was only later that I realised she’d half felt she should offer a home to me. It had never occurred to me, and the idea withered unspoken away. But on the last day, as we said goodbye, she seemed again to be struggling with what to say.

  ‘Remember, in this world, a woman does whatever she has to do to get by. Whatever she has to do,’ she said at last, and it was with an unexpected pang I watched the back of her plump worsted figure walk rapidly away.

  I found myself doing a strange thing the following Sunday. The lease of our little garden would end with Jacob’s death, and I had to go there to find the caretaker and hand back the key. But before I did that, I set to work, as though he were beside me. I clipped the hedges and cut back the herbs, selecting the strongest to leave for seed. I sowed carrots and beet as though I’d be the one to eat them next year; searched out the seedling of the cowslips and bear’s ears and transplanted them carefully. The double daisies had been Jacob’s favourite and, when I left, Heaven knows why, I took a pot of them with me. I clutched them to the chest of my boy’s doublet as I walked through streets ringing with the news of Lord Essex’s great sea victory, and realised that f
or the first time the news, the crowds, the little decisions of every day were things to which I would answer as myself, and no longer as Jacob’s protégé.

  Cecil

  Autumn 1596

  I felt sorry for Essex, briefly. He had come back from the sea aglow with victory. He and Charles Howard had planted England’s flag on the Continent again, in a way we never hoped to see, the King of Spain’s fleet smashed at Cadiz so that Calais itself was freed as a sideshow, or nearly. I remember and salute Charles’ joint command of the campaign, but that’s something Essex himself will have managed to forget quite easily.

  He’d landed on the south coast and ridden to court, so hot foot he was lame from a fall along the way. Instead of the hero’s welcome he expected, he found the queen dressing him down before every giggling maid and gawping serving man, for all the world like an errant schoolboy.

  Why, in his vainglorious pride in victory, had he let the Spanish treasure fleet sail by unmolested? Why, having once taken Cadiz, had he simply sailed away? What became of the fifty thousand pounds his exploits had cost her majesty, and where was the recompense to be? I could see the red creeping up under the square beard – a folly, that, it will never please her – his lordship had grown on the voyage home, and I could hear the queen’s voice cracking with fury.

  The irony is, it wasn’t Essex’s fault, or not entirely. Not in the short term, anyway. Fast as he had ridden to the court, we’d had a faster report from a serving man on board: he’d wanted to go hunting for the treasure fleet but the other, more experienced, commanders had brushed his views away. Commanders like Ralegh: now he’ll know how to make a gain from Essex’s disgrace, and another from selling his share of the booty.