The Girl in the Mirror

by Sarah Gristwood

  The present was in the kitchen, waiting and ready, and of course the sweetmeats weren’t really the point, even though they’d bulked the violets up with squares of milk jelly, and confit of quinces, and a few candied roses the confectioner must have been hoarding: England’s flower for England’s saint’s day. The silver dish on which they rested was worth a king’s ransom – or an earl’s, maybe. I wondered whether Sir Robert would have mentioned his present to her majesty. I wondered if, when he looked to the future, he ever thought of the possibility their positions would be reversed, and Essex would once again be riding high.

  ‘We’d best send a guard with you, if you’re carrying that,’ said the steward, signing two burly men-at-arms to fall in behind me. He was wise: on the short journey over the Strand I saw that the street was packed, with everything from apprentices in crudely painted dragon masks to vendors with their pickled fish and their mutton pies.

  Only Essex House stood quiet, its courtyard empty. The very façade seemed to stare at me reproachfully, and even the porter sounded almost grateful to see me. As my two guards turned gladly back into the throng, he bowed low at Sir Robert’s name – word had got round, it was the Secretary saved the earl from the indignity of a public trial – and whistled up a boy to show me the way to his lordship’s chamber.

  They had taken most of the dishes away. Perhaps there hadn’t been that many – he had never eaten with any great interest; his appetites did not lie that way – but he had obviously been drinking heavily. I could see a red flush where the white ostrich feather and the black heron’s plume swept down over his cheek, and there was a splash on his velvet sleeve. He was indeed in all his finery.

  ‘Why, Janny. How very good of you to visit me. I dare not hope it’s for the pleasure of my company. As you can see’ – he waved an arm vaguely around the empty room – ‘that’s a pleasure the rest of the world seems able to resist quite easily.’ I stammered something graceless, about Sir Robert’s wishing to send him a gift and the compliments of the day.

  ‘Sir Robert, Sir Robert. Is there no end to the kindnesses I’m fated to receive from Master Secretary? Sometimes I think they may yet be the death of me. But come’ – he seemed to pull himself together – ‘I am being a poor host. Sit down and have a drink with me.’ He pulled up a chair next to his own, and I subsided into it, uncomfortably. It was hardly proper, for a clerk to be seated by England’s premier earl, but at this tiny table, at the end of his bedstead, there was no above and below the salt.

  ‘That right. Now, have a drink, if there’s any left – Aha, what have you got there? Another present for me?’

  I blushed. It was true – before I left, I’d begged from the housekeeper a bottle of the new cowslip wine. Its sweet honey taste spelt the spring to me, the spring we’d shared only in my fantasy. But on the way I’d had time to realise how ridiculous I was – taking a country bottle to one of the greatest men in the land, for all the world as though I’d been visiting my old granny.

  ‘A present from yourself, perhaps. If so, I’ll drink it the more gladly.’ He spoke more soberly, and with some gentleness. ‘Here, let us strike a bargain. For the next hour or two, I’ll forget that I’m the earl, or that Master Secretary hates me.’ I looked up sharply to protest, that my master’s overtures weren’t feigned, that they weren’t really enemies –

  ‘Hush, no …’ He laid a finger on my lips. ‘Let’s forget, I said. And you – what do you have to forget, my Jeanne Janny? Or should it be, who?’ I gazed at him dumbly. I was back in the maze, more than eighteen months before, that summer’s day.

  He was looking at me intently. ‘There’s something different about you. There’s been somebody.’ But now he took pity on me, or so I thought, and began showing off the Garter insignia. ‘I suppose you know this story?’ He gestured to the blue ribbon round his thigh, and I shook my head.

  ‘It was old King Edward – Edward III, two centuries ago – at a court dance with his daughter-in-law, Joan of Kent. A beauty, so they say. In the pace of the dance step the garter holding her stocking fell down, and the courtiers sniggered to see her lingerie. King Edward picked it up, and said to them all “Honi soit qui mal y pense”. I’ve always rather admired him for being so ready to spare embarrassment to a lady.’

  He held out his leg towards me. ‘I don’t need to translate for you, surely? Not for Master, or Mistress, French Secretary.’ I shook my head as he gestured me to look closer. ‘Shame be on him who thinks evil.’

  His finger traced the golden words embroidered on the ribbon, and as I bent forward his other hand smoothed down my short hair and closed around the nape of my neck, caressingly. ‘Do you know how they make a brood mare ready for the stallion? If you’re Master of Horse, you know all about making good foals. They bring in another horse, just to get her juices flowing, and then they take the poor beast away unsatisfied so that the real stallion, the bloodstock male, finds her receptive and easy. They call the other beast the teaser. Has someone been the teaser for me?’

  His words hardly reached me, I felt only his body. I could no more have resisted than a fly in a spider’s web as his lips came forward to meet me. I felt my mouth open under his. His breath tasted of wine, but his hand moved with deliberation across the front of my doublet, and through the rushing in my head I heard him give a half laugh as he realised just how firmly it concealed what lay beneath.

  ‘A good disguise, by the Life. But I think the time for that is over.’ He fumbled only briefly with the fastening before his hand slipped below. As I felt it close around my breast, my bowels seemed to be turned to water. ‘Not a full rose here, just a little bud.’ His other arm was around me, urging me up as he pressed me back towards the bed. I was leaning backwards against the pillows and he was kneeling over me, his hands tugging at his own clothing, when –

  ‘No!’ I hardly knew where the voice came from, but from the frenzy with which I was pushing at his arm, it had to have been from me. He gaped at me, too surprised to insist. It was only later I thought, too, that perhaps sex was another of the things for which he was not truly greedy.

  ‘I can’t! I mustn’t … Please – my lord – I’m sorry …’ I could see him rallying his forces, the wine beginning to leave his head. Recollecting the servant who could come in any moment, recollecting who had sent me.

  ‘As you wish.’ He said it thickly, with something of a grudge in his voice, but after a second he said it again, more clearly. ‘As you wish.’

  I was yanking my doublet closed with such speed I almost broke the laces. I stammered again, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He had himself under control now. It would, after all, be beneath him to show even if he cared, that he’d been discommoded in any way. ‘Don’t even think of it, my dear. It’s of no consequence.’ I must still have been looking stricken, because he added, wryly. ‘I’m used to it, after all.

  ‘Thank Master Secretary for his gift,’ he called after me.

  Back in the street, making my way home towards Blackfriars, without the guards this time, I wondered what he meant – used to the brush-off, or used to the preliminaries of love, cut off too early? Uncomfortably, I realised that, either way, he was probably thinking of her majesty. He’d said something else, too, about other men, and horses, but I couldn’t think about that properly. As I cleared the corner of the house I saw a brown figure going in where I’d just come out and faltered a moment, shrunken into stillness like a woodland creature. I’d recognised Martin Slaughter but I hoped, I did hope, he hadn’t seen me.

  May/June 1600

  I told myself I’d just been prudent. I told myself that I was lucky. If heartbreak had been the worst of it I’d have got off lightly; no one can walk the London streets without seeing the women and their babies. But in the days and weeks ahead I knew it hadn’t been just prudence talking, when I pushed him away. It had been something deeper. If before that I was Jan, then who would I be after? And I did not ask myself whether, if Martin had been the
man, I would still have reacted in the same way.

  For a second my mind even hovered over the question of what the queen might have felt, why she had sent suitor after suitor away. Pushed away Leicester, and Hatton, and Essex; and only at the very last minute, some say.

  I didn’t see Lord Essex, and we heard no more, as the hawthorn blossom whitened and then grew brown and powdery on the branches, smelling like the kitchen on washing day. The real spring had come at last, as it always does, and in the gardens they had wild purple geranium, and fleur de luce and the yellow poppy. In the country the bluebells came properly, in lakes so blue it burned the eye, and then began to fade; in the lanes when I walked of a Sunday the greens – the dark green of reed, the pale green of barley, the sullen grey green of the nettles – made a tapestry. I registered each one with a kind of determination, because the truth was, the lanes these days did not mean so much to me. Just occasionally, I caught myself wondering whether they would matter again, if I were walking there with somebody. But I stopped, before ever there was a face on the figure beside me.

  But I did seem to be seeing everything differently, as if someone had clapped a pair of spectacles over my eyes. I noticed the young men in the streets; and not just to be sure my impersonation didn’t err in any way. I noticed the ladies; and how the sway of their huge bell skirts gave their movement a languorous rhythm, like the thrust of a man’s hips.

  I noticed the scars and the roughness on my own ink-stained hands, and I bought a salve of mallow and goose grease from an old herb woman. I rubbed it into my skin every night, though I had to wash the residue off me every morning before I went to my work, for fear the faint scent should betray me. Once, I even bought a musk ball, but I found the smell disturbing, and I threw it away.

  Lord Essex continued in his imprisonment, but as the warm air came, and the rioting season, the people began to mutter. I wished I knew whether Henry Cuffe was still pushing his dangerous enthusiasms, and if so, what Martin had to say. The old clerk told me that Sir Robert had been urging his mistress to act decisively. Although, as he added with his dry, almost painful, smile, men had been urging action on this queen for more than half a century.

  At last came news. The queen, who never said anything definitely, had never quite put the idea of a trial away. So now in the first week of June there would be – not a trial, but a private commission of inquiry. This time it was the gangling clerk who told me, and I grabbed his arm as he stared at me, offended.

  ‘Who’ll be there? Can anyone go?’

  ‘No, not anyone. Two hundred invited guests. But they’ll always find standing room for Sir Robert’s secretaries. What are you getting so het up about, anyway?’

  It was to be held back at York House, and I would be there early. The milky midsummer morning was still at the cool of the day when I choked down some ale and a half slice of bread and made my way to the porter’s lodge. Perhaps it was my satchel of papers did the trick again, or Sir Robert’s badge, or perhaps the porter recognised me, but he nodded me through to the benches where the clerks sat, ready to take down the events of the day.

  It was nearly eight in the morning when the commissioners shuffled in to take their seats at the long table, well over a dozen of them, shuffling their papers, their own clerks at the ready. Eight o’clock had struck when Lord Essex came in, escorted like the prisoner he was, and fell to his knees before them. I winced at the bang, and so did the old Archbishop of Canterbury. He asked if his lordship might not have a cushion. I suspect Lord Essex was a little reluctant to have anything take away from his dramatic effect, but he accepted it gracefully.

  The first to speak was the queen’s Sergeant at Law. He told of how the queen had discharged Lord Essex’s debts before he went into Ireland, given him as much money again to equip his army, and yet despite all he’d lost for her would not have him proceeded against in a court of law, such was her gracious clemency. It was all as carefully rehearsed as a confrontation in a play.

  At the end of it, Essex began to get up off his knees before they even brought the footstool for him to sit on. They’d briefed him well, and I thought, with rising hope, that it must be true: at the end of the day he would be allowed to rise to his feet and walk out free.

  Next came the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, and he laid out the charges against Essex’s conduct in Ireland precisely. Disobedience to orders, all along the way.

  We all knew that it was true. We all knew the transgressions would have been forgiven, if only they’d led to victory. In fact, as Coke thundered away, him and his three categories of wrong – quomodo ingressus, quomodo progressus, quomodo regressus – I could feel a rise of sympathy for the earl.

  ‘The ingress was proud and ambitious, the progress disobedient and contemptuous, the regress notorious and dangerous.’ Yes, but we had the man himself before us, his long legs hunched foolishly on the low stool. They weren’t talking about treason, surely, but about the kind of errors that are the stuff of humanity.

  All day it went on, until the time came at last for Lord Essex to speak himself. He began calm, but his sense of his wrongs was too much for him and, as Coke tried to shout him down, he began to speak faster and more chaotically. ‘At first I believed it when the queen said she meant to correct and not to ruin me. But the length of my troubles, and the increase of her indignation, have made men shrink away from me. Every chattering tavern-haunter says what he likes of me, my reputation is in the dust. I am thrown into a corner like a dead carcase, gnawed on and torn by the basest creatures on earth.’ He was on his feet now, and glaring wildly around the room. ‘There are those who envied me her majesty’s favour, now they have grown used to hating me, they spread malicious stories about me …’ His answer came in Sir Robert’s cool tones.

  ‘My lord, this commission is not called to look into the terms of your custody. And your lordship is protesting more than the situation requires. You claim you never wavered in your loyalty to the queen. My lord, if you look at the charges against you, you’ll see none of them mentions disloyalty. One wonders why the thought of it weighs on your mind so heavily.’ It might have been a veiled threat, but I hoped it was a warning, and Lord Essex took it so, sketching a nod of gratitude towards the Secretary.

  ‘I have to thank Sir Robert for his reminder; and to ask this commission only that it should deal honourably and favourably with me. If my disordered speeches have offended any, blame my weak body and my aching head.’

  After almost twelve hours in that close room, his was not the only aching head. Even the commissioners could hardly wait to conclude their business. Briskly, they declared Essex guilty on all the counts charged – guilty of folly, if not disloyalty – and declared that had this been an official trial he would have been sent to the Tower, but as it was he should return to his house to await her majesty’s pleasure. It was clear the punishment had been decided already – the verdict too, presumably. We were almost exactly where we had been at the start of this interminable day.

  As they led him out into the fading summer twilight, I saw he was indeed so tired that he was stumbling slightly. I felt a foolish qualm that there would be nobody who would see him looked after properly, but of course that was ridiculous. Servants apart, he had his sisters – and his wife, naturally.

  Others were waiting, too. As I came out into the street, I saw an anxious party standing there, most of them in Lord Essex’s livery. Cuffe was there, and – yes, I knew it. I sent a long accusing stare at Martin Slaughter, and this time he returned it, hardily.

  Katherine, Countess of Nottingham

  June/July 1600

  It is my sister Philadelphia who brings Lord Essex’s letter, holding it out as she sinks down into a curtsey so deep it’s almost a prostration, picking her moment so we can all see. She always did have to have the starring part, even in the nursery games, and I always had to let her, because I was older than she. But I can’t help myself, I crane round to see if I can guess from the queen’s
reaction whether it was worth the delivery, and perhaps she understands, for when she’s finished reading she passes it over for me to see.

  Essex writes of his longing to kiss her hand again – her ‘fair correcting hand’? – in apology. He writes of how he’d prefer death to living in her displeasure, and denied access to her doorway. But somehow it’s a letter all about himself – his situation, his regrets. It’s as if he doesn’t even see the living woman, just a symbol of power in paint and jewellery.

  I understand, as they do not, that these are not the words to move her and before I catch myself I feel an urge to step forward with a word of instruction, to tell them how it used to be. When Christopher Hatton used to write, twenty years ago now, he used to write more passionately. They made us laugh, his letters, and I swear he must have composed them with a twinkle in his eye. But for all that, they were the letters of a man who knew the woman he was writing to. I think even Leicester would have admitted as much, though when she showed off a page from Hatton he half died of jealousy – his own letters could have been any farmer writing home, waiting in town for market day. Her health, his health, a grumble about the weather and a dollop of advice. Leicester’s letters didn’t breathe romance, they breathed domesticity. They were, if you like, a husband’s letters and she used to tease him by telling him so. It was, I suppose, an unkind joke, when all Europe knew that her husband was just what he’d hoped to be.

  Essex’s letters are certainly a contrast. Eloquent, if you like that sort of thing, and the queen says as much to Francis Bacon, who smirks complacently, as well he may, since we all know he’s been coaching my lord every step of the way.