Elizabeth of Bohemia

by David Elias

  My fondest hope is that I shall yet have reason to burn this letter and laugh to think I should have written these next words, but I confess to some misgivings at the cause of this affliction. I pray they are but the ramblings of a mind made sick by fever, but I wake nightly into a dreamlike state to find a man standing at my bedside in a Paris beau that rests crookedly upon his head. He stares down at me with eyes half-closed, the skin beneath them sagging to expose the pink flesh there. Now he doffs his hat oddly and leers at me with a crisp “Monsieur,” brings his hand behind my head to lift it from the pillow, takes from beneath his robes a small vial, and brings it to my lips with the words “I dare not, and yet I must. I must not, and yet I dare.”

  When I go to speak he puts a finger to his lips, shakes his head from side to side in a manner so menacing I am paralyzed into silence. Though I try meekly to resist, he holds fast to my chin and pours the liquid in, waits for me to swallow. No sooner have I done so than he returns the vial to his pocket, executes a short bow, and is gone.

  Surely this is a dream, I tell myself, even as the bitter taste yet lingers on my tongue. I should be glad to dismiss the entire episode as imaginary but for this: I’m certain I saw this same man in conversation with my father at Whitehall not more than a fortnight ago! I swear it. There was no mistaking the Paris beau, the sagging skin beneath his eyes. I would know, Elizabeth, whether you ever remember seeing such a man at court, or indeed anywhere else for that matter? It would be a relief to know I am not hallucinating, though such an assurance might portend worse.

  A haunting weariness has overtaken me and I can write no more. I know you are doing everything you can to see me, and I ask in your absence that you do one thing: pray for me. But for you, dear sister, I truly never had a family.

  Your loving brother,

  Henry

  What was I to make of this? My head reeled. I felt as though I should faint. I couldn’t recall seeing such a man as my brother described, and yet I had the greatest misgiving that this was no dream.

  “Your Majesty.” Captain Hume saw my distress. “I had thought to bring you comfort with this letter but I fear it has had the opposite effect.”

  I resolved that I should keep the contents of this letter to myself for now, that the fewer people who saw it the safer my brother should be, and here a dread surged through me I had never felt before, as of a world where no one could be trusted, everyone a possible enemy.

  “Perhaps I had best take my leave. I can come back at a more convenient time.”

  “What? No, I would hear the rest. What of the cordial?” I asked. “You managed to give him some?”

  “Upon handing me the letter the Prince fell back upon his pillow, silent and with eyes distant, as though he had taken leave of my presence. I took up the vial to try and spoon some between his parched lips when he roused himself yet once more and pulled me close, looked at me as though he would speak some great and final truth, eyes wide, mouth open, and at that very moment Dr. Mayerne and Alfonso Ferrabosco come barging into the room and I was banished at once.”

  There were noises now, and calls without that could be heard beyond the walls. Lady Anne went to the door, stepped out for a moment before returning to the room. “There is a general restlessness about the halls of the palace,” she said. “People scurrying about in whispers and cries.”

  “What do they say?”

  “The Archbishop has been summoned.”

  “I am going to him this very instant,” I said. “Naught but a dagger in my breast shall stop me. Captain Hume, will you come with me and bear arms that we might see our way in?”

  “I shall, Your Highness.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  There was a knock upon the door, and Dr. Butler stepped into the room, followed by Lady Anne and Count Schomberg as well as the Palatine. I saw by the look on the Doctor’s face that he had news, perhaps of some more drastic measure of treatment now to be taken.

  “You have word of my brother?” I asked.

  “Such as I would forfeit my life to keep from uttering.”

  “Then do not,” I said, “and join us, for we go, all of us, to attend my brother’s bedchamber and will not be turned away. It has come to a head and we shall bring him hope and remedy. Will you join us?”

  “There is no need.”

  “That’s good news, then.” I turned to Captain Hume. “He must have taken some of the cordial. But can it be so sudden?” I turned back to Dr. Butler. “A moment ago I had grave misgivings, but you mean to say the worst is over?”

  Lady Anne stepped toward me, took my hands in hers. “Your brother’s suffering is ended, Your Highness.”

  “Forgive me.” Dr. Butler turned to Lady Anne with such a pained expression I could hardly think what troubled him. “I know not how to tell it.” He looked down at the floor.

  “You’ve said enough,” I offered, “and thanks for the good news.”

  “But I was with him no more than an hour ago,” said Captain Hume, as though to himself.

  “Sir.” The Palatine addressed himself to Dr. Butler. “I beg you speak plainly, that she not be made to suffer one more moment’s false promise.”

  “Sir, I do my best.”

  “Tell it.”

  “The Prince of Wales . . .”

  “He has told it,” I cut him off, “and that the worst is over. Nevertheless we will go.”

  “You need not.”

  Lady Anne stood before me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “He means, Madam, that your brother is now beyond such good or harm as earthly endeavours may bring about.”

  I looked at the Doctor.

  “He has been taken from us.”

  “Say yet plainer,” said Lady Anne, never once taking her eyes from mine.

  “The Prince of Wales is dead.”

  In the darkness of that hour all my comfort vanished upon an instant. I resolved that though I lost parent or child, sibling or spouse, no blade of grief should ever again cut so deep nor wound so gravely. There in that moment I pulled in the reins of my heart, vowed to apportion any and all future affection into more bearable increments. My brother took some part of me with him that day, and the tomb where they laid him to rest should ever after be the keeper of it.

  Chapter Seven

  Upon my brother’s death, the cloak of dread that had hovered over me descended with a vengeance to smother all my hopes. By day friends and family, courtiers and clergymen, appeared and disappeared like apparitions, shadowy players upon a darkened stage. I wandered through the world and yet I was not in it. I became a ghost, forced to bear the weight of each day’s passing in solemn ceremony, my needs seen to by Lady Anne alone. As much as possible I kept myself in solitude at Richmond, but when I allowed that Count Schomberg might pay a visit to Lady Anne, the two of them pressed me to admit Prince Frederick, who was eager to offer his condolences.

  “If the Palatine hopes to gain favour by such means,” I told them, “it will condemn him for a certainty.”

  “He would but convey his sympathies.”

  “There’s little to commend what serves merely as a means to an end.”

  “He is in earnest. Give him an audience, I pray.”

  “If I cannot take solace even from a close acquaintance, how then from a stranger?”

  “Betimes a stranger may succeed where others fail.” Lady Anne assumed a gentle aspect.

  “He dare not seek to flatter my grief.”

  “How then if to impart his own?”

  “He hardly knew my brother. They spent a mere few hours together, conversed but a little. And as for me, we shared little more than pomp and ceremony at the hands of my father, and now he would commiserate? I think not.”

  So went our conversation, but in the end he was admitted, and I allowed that he might approach and make his sentiments known. I rose
when he entered the drawing room, and offered my hand, which he took most graciously and bowed. He looked older than I remembered, and I wondered if he thought the same of me.

  “Forgive me, Madam, if I say that in all this mourning and sadness I am yet glad to see you.”

  “I know naught of gladness. I have become a stranger to such sentiments.”

  “And yet your company brings me warmth.”

  “Even as I shiver in grief. There’s naught here but cold comfort.”

  “May I offer my deepest sympathies for the loss of your brother?”

  “These are but words.”

  “Words fail, I grant, as surely they must in these matters. Mourning takes a course no vessel of language can follow. But believe me, that I do ache to see you in such pain and would offer remedy if I could.”

  “Believe this also: that my grief stands unaltered by your compassion.”

  “Then, Madam, I will offer naught but my silence, if you will receive it.”

  “But why should you offer that for which I have no use?”

  “For selfish reasons, that I would employ it to my own ends. I confess my sorrow finds me unprepared, that I should grieve for someone I had only just met, and yet it is so. I offer myself in service to you, if you should have need of it, and would remain here in London that I might be allowed to attend the funeral.”

  “I seek not for any company save my own, but stay for the funeral if you like, and thanks for your concern.”

  We sat quietly for a few moments and I had to admit that his solemn and silent attention gave me a modicum of ease, served as a buttress against the posturing court which strutted and boasted its bereavement in shameless spectacle. Then again, perhaps this was merely a tactic designed to weaken my resolve.

  My brother lay in state at St. James’s Palace under a canopy of black velvet; day after day, thousands upon thousands of mourners filed past his coffin. You may wonder as I did why so many should have felt such sorrow for someone they had no acquaintance of. My brother would have insisted that he was no more entitled to their grief than to their worship, but it occurred to me they wept not so much for his passing as for their own yet to come. Whatever our age or circumstance we all of us, in death, forfeit some lost destiny. Surely such a fate calls for a very great deal of weeping indeed.

  Each night I waited until they had closed off the room where Henry lay before venturing to pay my own visit by way of a private entrance, moving silently across the floor to his casket, the sound of every hushed footfall or whisk of fabric amplified by the marble and stone. I reached out to touch his robes of state, his sword, the cushion laid upon the casket for his cap and coronet. This set my fingers tingling, my body to humming with a kind of frantic and unwanted energy, a disturbing frenzy of remorse. Later, when troubled and restless sleep overcame me at last, I had the same dream of standing among a crowd of spectators along a cobblestone street, watching Henry ride past mounted upon a white steed. Dressed all in armour and lace, he sat his horse with regal posture, locks thick and wavy around his shoulders, a page at his side holding his plumed helmet. Onlookers remarked how nobly the young prince had come into manhood, the last vestiges of boyhood innocence departed from his countenance, when before my eyes his face began to wither, eyes and cheeks to hollow out until he resembled a skeleton. And always, just before the horror of it tore me out of my slumber, Henry leaned down to me where I stood among the people, pulled me close with teeth bared, eyes bloodshot, and rasped, “Sister, they have killed me.”

  On the day of the funeral, the sky was overcast as I walked along behind the casket, followed by an endless procession of mourners, some on foot, some in carriages and on horseback. Six horses, all of them draped in black and plumed with black feathers, pulled the open funeral carriage, the clop of their hooves hollow on the cobblestone, steam hissing from their nostrils. A likeness of the Prince of Wales had been fashioned out of wax and placed over his casket, clothed in robes of purple velvet hemmed with ermine, complete with cap and coronet, gold sceptre in one hand and shining sword in the other. It struck me with a sudden fierceness that such a likeness must by then bear little resemblance to the withered tissues and brittle bones lying in the casket. And yet I wondered whether those disembowelled remains might yet harbour some relic of my brother’s soul not yet departed.

  Those walking solemnly behind the funeral carriage included my brother Charles, now heir to the throne, holding on to his mother’s hand. My father was not among them. I looked for him, in spite of myself, thought if I might see him and read in his countenance a genuine expression of grief it should bring me some small respite from those misgivings that tortured me endlessly. I discovered upon his return some days later that he had made sure to take himself out of the city entirely until all ceremony had been dispensed with. For this unforgivable transgression he made no apology, and offered way of explanation only that he detested funerals.

  When the procession arrived at Westminster Abbey the coffin was taken down from the carriage to be carried into the cathedral. Mourners filled the pews, and elegies of praise and songs of mourning commenced, one following upon the other. I had pleaded that Sir Raleigh be allowed to attend, even under heavy guard, but my father had left strict orders to the contrary. Henry’s death would have come as a terrible blow to Sir Raleigh, for it meant not only the loss of someone dear to him but also condemned him to languish in the Tower without hope of release.

  I did manage to arrange for Captain Hume to play a piece upon his viola da gamba, as Henry would have wanted him to. The Captain’s usual disregard for appearance, manners, and decorum brought me assurance somehow, and when he took up his place before the assembled mourners, leaned his body into his instrument to feather the bow across the strings, his playing brought forth notes of such lamentation I thought the grey and towering arches of the abbey itself must crumble into broken stone under the enormity of their grief. Nestled within that exquisite music were some few notes that spoke of my own salvation, a day in some distant future when I might find a way to redeem myself for suffering a brother to die alone.

  Perhaps it was an unhealthy conceit to seek atonement for something that was really out of my hands. The cordial might not have saved him in any case, as Sir Raleigh had cautioned that it would not work against poison. I found myself searching among the pews of the Abbey for a man in a Paris beau with sagging eyes, all the while wondering whether those nightly visitations my brother had described might have been nothing more than the fevered hallucinations of a dying man.

  When the ceremony ended at last they carried the casket into the Lady Chapel and prepared to lower it into the crypt. Just as the interment commenced a young man, entirely naked and pale as Dover, sprang from the crowd, ran up to the coffin, and threw himself upon it with such a wailing as sent shivers through me. Then quick as a cat he turned and lunged at me, seeming to mean me harm, but a number of bystanders intervened and sought to get hold of him. Still he struggled and fought to free himself, crawled on his hands and knees toward me, threw himself forward, and clutched at the hem of my skirts.

  “Do you not recognize your own brother?” he pleaded, “For I am that same ghost.”

  A number of guards grabbed hold of him, dragged him up by his arms and pulled him away from me. Even as they did so his eyes, full of terrifying madness, stayed on me, froze me to his countenance so that try as I might I could not look away.

  “Sister,” he uttered, “they have killed me.”

  Presently the guards dragged him through the crush of shocked bystanders to a small door that led from the chapel into the adjacent courtyard. He clutched at the portal and, before they managed to pry his fingers off the stone to take him out, shouted, “Mark it for a sign, all you who witness here today, that Prince Henry’s ghost spoke thus.”

  “Naught but woe can come of this,” I heard someone near me say.

  “It b
odes ill indeed,” said another.

  “Why should a ghost appear but to alert those yet living to treachery and untimely death?”

  The burial was allowed to continue, but it was this episode that threatened to undo me entirely.

  I woke up next morning from a sleep unnatural into a kind of paralysis, a stillness I had never experienced before, out of which emerged the faint sound of something cracking, breaking, followed by a sudden and violent concussion, an explosive collapse inside my head. Some part of me fell in upon itself, shattered inside me. In the silence that followed I became aware of an intense ringing in my ears, growing louder and louder, an affliction that has never left me from that moment to this. I have learned to live under the tyranny of its insistent din over the years, and for short periods of time I can even push it out of my awareness entirely, but always it re-emerges out of the false silence.

  I fell for a time into an existence in which each breath became a chore, each utterance a trial. Lady Anne looked in on me at regular intervals, did her best to see that I ate something, and one day brought me news regarding the fate of the young man claiming to be my brother’s spirit. He had managed to break free of his captors and make his escape along the banks of the Thames. My father, having returned from the countryside and learned of the incident at the abbey, sent forth a party of his best spies to ascertain the fugitive’s identity and apprehend him at all cost, but without success. The young man seemed to have vanished entirely from the face of the earth, and to my knowledge was never seen or heard from again.

  I wondered whether things might have gone a little better for me if my father had managed to track him down and he had turned out to be nothing more than another discontented Puritan intent on wreaking havoc upon the profligate and debauched rulers of the kingdom, or perhaps a deranged individual driven by forces only he was privy to, but as it was, my imagination conjured up all manner of explanations that were a good deal more insidious.