Three days passed. Then an odd message came from the Queen to say that she was indisposed and nearing her time, but that her husband the King would grant his sister-in-law an interview. She could not have put a better opportunity into Elizabeth’s hands.
Wear your richest attire, Mary commanded, as if she were to meet not only Philip of Spain, but his father the Emperor, and all their nobility. Her what? By rich, Mary meant crimson, violet, double, figured velvet, cloth of gold, board-hard jewelled embroideries, gold lacework, massive necklaces. Elizabeth had other ideas.
Since she was a prisoner, she would play the game as it should be played, as the children did, and bid the Base — somehow lure the Prince of Spain into the game with her, because he was her only salvation. With him as her champion, she would be safe. Mary would no more cross his will than desecrate the Mass. Elizabeth would fish for the soul of Philip.
First, the bait. She decided upon white. As she had come into London when first arrested last year, ill and alone, a prisoner, facing death. The undyed attire of innocence. White satin and damask, rather than velvet or cloth of silver. White lawn collar with white silk, embroidered flowers, starched to stand out and frame her face and neck. Mary would certainly not have considered it rich or suitable, but it was more than striking in its own way. Jewels? Perhaps that rosary of white coral with gold gauds which Mary had given her in the hope that she would tell the beads, mumble Ave Maria, bless the Pope and accept the Mass. She would not, but the King might notice it and approve. To counterbalance it she would wear the little gold book holding her brother King Edward’s dying prayer; any sniff of the Mass would have been treason to him.
Hair hidden? Not this time. Smoothed down flat with the palm of a hand rubbed with scented oil. Neat and maidenly under a gold mesh caul, just a gleam of bright colour showing. Enough to intrigue. No gems like coloured jellies set in gingerbread. Maybe a small pearl or two. Her hands, half concealed by ice-white ruffles to match her collar. Ruffles to shake back in a fall to reveal a long, bone-white hand, like that of a carved image from Spain. Elizabeth soaked her hands in lemon juice, then in scented oils, and put on no rings. The Spanish taste, she had heard, was not for Mary’s kind of richness, which they considered vulgar. They favoured chasteness of line, subtle colours, plain but beautiful fabrics harmonizing with each other. The mirror revealed to Elizabeth much chasteness of line.
It was worth many hours of trouble. Not that she cared a fig for Spanish taste, or for Spanish Philip. But Spanish Philip was susceptible to women. If she could win the King, then she would have the Queen, and the Bishop would be powerless. Mary doted on her husband. Bishop Gardiner was their servant. Elizabeth armed herself, as Judith the Israelite had before she cut off the head of Holofernes, before he had a chance to seduce her. This game of Prisoner’s Base was not for children. Elizabeth was determined to play, and to remain a virgin.
The Prince of Spain visited his sister-in-law on a rainy May morning, when the climbing jasmine over the window of Elizabeth’s room sent a steady tattoo of drips beating on the sill, and the gardens were deserted and silent, except for the pattering of the rain, the music of the gutters, the twittering of the birds, who seemed to enjoy a downpour. Rows of raindrops like crystal necklaces adorned the railings of green and white that divided the garden; the lawns grew at an unnatural pace, all squidgy with worm casts. The King came by a roundabout route through the Palace to avoid getting wet. He was always dodging the English rain, or being soaked by it.
Philip saw framed in the window, against the green, dripping misery of an English May, a very slim, straight-backed figure, all in white, like a lily growing and adorning a dismal marsh. He bowed, stiff and formal, his little foot in its spotless indoor shoe pointing.
Elizabeth was already kneeling. She was kneeling on a particularly fine Turkey carpet, Philip noticed, in blood reds and vein blues. His first thought was of an odalisque, because of the carpet, then of a nun, because of the white, and the bowed head. But nuns did not have waists.
‘Please, to stand up, so I may see you,’ he requested, in Latin.
She stood. Upright, she found her nose about level with the top of his head. She had not expected such a dainty little fellow. He and Mary together must look like a pair of dolls. Philip was accustomed to being small, and to looking up at women. He wore a hat with a tall crown, and used to practise standing up very straight with his back against a wall. He was dressed in just the taste that Elizabeth had anticipated, and she congratulated herself. Smoke-coloured velvet, amethyst silk, and emeralds from the Americas set in gold which looked edible, like egg-rich pastry. Emeralds — Elizabeth had never seen stones of such a size, even on her father, and Philip wore them as buttons. Was he generous with gifts? She felt confident, yet afraid.
He spoke in Latin, not wasting his time on his few stilted English phrases. He was surprised to be answered with such fluency in the same language. Introductory platitudes. His beard wagged up and down as he spoke; Elizabeth wanted to pull it, to find out if it were all beard, or merely a disguise for a huge Hapsburg chin. The tension within herself was inducing hysterical frivolity.
‘All will be well,’ said Philip, reassuringly and stiffly friendly. How could he make such a trite remark. He had never been a prisoner with old Stephen Stockfish after him. Yet if anyone could make it well, it was him.
‘Jack shall have Jill,
Nought shall go ill,
The man shall have his mare again,
And all shall be well.’
So all the reactionaries had hoped, when Mary came to the throne. Elizabeth realized that she had recited out loud, and that Philip was looking at her blankly. He could not understand any colloquial English.
She was glad to discover that there were ways of disconcerting him. For the first time she raised those white eyelids and he was confronted by large, dark-coloured eyes, startling in that milk-and-water face; onyx eyes, striking from a distance, but close to his glance slid off them, as if from a very hard, shiny substance. His glance slid off everyone’s eyes, Elizabeth was quick to discover. Philip flinched from any contact which might disclose any part of his secret self to others.
‘If you are subjected to any unauthorized inquiry, sister, I should be glad to hear of it.’ He was gravely examining the Turkey carpet.
‘I am grateful for Your Highness’s assurance of friendship. I only wish to receive one word of friendship and forgiveness from my sister the Queen — then I would count myself doubly fortunate.’ Her voice reminded him of flutes.
When he had left, bowing as formally as when he arrived, Elizabeth expelled her breath in an unladylike whistle, and used one of the riper oaths she had learned from the Lord Admiral. Then, relieved, she congratulated herself on her handling of this first encounter.
That night in London the rumour arose that the Queen had been delivered of a son just after midnight, and the pealing of the city bells made people jump out of their beds in the middle of the night, to celebrate. They set fire to the bonfires which were waiting for the event, but the firewood was wasted, all that had been delivered was a false rumour.
The next evening at ten o’clock, when Elizabeth sat, as she sat every evening, alone with her ladies — for she was not allowed visitors — in her loose gown and smock, playing her lute and trying to put off going to bed, a summons came from the Queen. This seemed a frightening summons, the time was strange, the suddenness was strange, the appearance of Mary’s friend Susan Clarencieux, sent to fetch her, flustered Elizabeth.
‘But I am not properly dressed to see the Queen,’ she exclaimed, prevaricating now the very thing she had pleaded for had been granted.
‘That is of no importance, Madam,’ said Mrs Susan. ‘The Queen is ready to see you, and must not be kept waiting.’ Her face expressed only too clearly her attitude to Elizabeth and her devotion to Mary. She wore an ‘Anne Boleyn was mentioned’ face.
Elizabeth panicked. ‘Pray for me,’ she implored theatrically
, to her ladies. ‘For I may never come back!’ This was enough to spread consternation and hysteria.
‘Ttch!’ said Mrs Susan.
Poor Sir Henry Bedingfield was called, just when he was looking forward to his bed, and they all trooped in procession the considerable distance from Elizabeth’s lodging to the Queen’s. It was not raining as they crossed the gardens, but it had been; the sound of pattering drips came from the trees, the torches illumined shining rain-slick leaves, and blind, dark, dripping vistas. Elizabeth, holding her skirts and stepping round the puddles, began to collect herself. Mary must have talked with her husband and come to a decision and issued the summons on the principle of no time like the present. The Prince of Spain must have spoken on Elizabeth’s behalf. Yet her heart hammered and her mouth was dry, for she did not know what she would find.
She was taken alone by Susan Clarencieux from the entrance of the royal apartments, leaving the others to wait. She found the Queen crouching in a dimly lit room, like the chancel of a church; in fact the smell of incense was present, as it was all over the place now. Crouching was the only word to describe how Mary sat, low among a heap of cushions. She was nursing a belly big enough for twins. It was so startling to see her sister so evidently pregnant, after the dubious rumours she had heard, that Elizabeth was momentarily lost for words, and knelt at the door, as if in prayer before a holy vision. Mary sat with her arms clasping her pregnancy, just as Elizabeth sat when her unwelcome, not-often-monthly visitation gripped her.
‘Come closer,’ Mary said, irritably, in her rumbly, grumbly voice. ‘You know I can’t see you properly at that distance. You like putting me at a disadvantage.’
This was not a good start. To this sort of remark there was no answer. Elizabeth shuffled herself along on her knees, until her face was about a foot from her sister’s huge protuberance. She could see every tiny wrinkle in the skin of Mary’s clasped hands; they were like fish skeletons, decked with gob-stopper rings so heavy that they rotated slackly as the fingers shifted. Her wedding ring was a plain band of gold. Mary was enormous in the one place, but skinny as a starved child elsewhere; there were scooped, salt-cellar hollows near her neck. Elizabeth dreaded having to look up into her face.
‘I have waited seventeen months to be permitted to see Your Majesty. I am as innocent now as then of any treason.’ Desperation made Elizabeth come straight to the point.
‘So you still will not confess.’ Mary’s increased irritation had brought bass notes to her baritone voice. ‘You stand up very stoutly for what you call the truth. I pray God it will turn out to be so.’
‘If it does not, then I will request neither favour nor pardon at Your Majesty’s hands.’ Elizabeth raised her eyes at last above the level of the pregnancy, and experienced another shock. Mary looked ghastly ill, her big, bumpy forehead, with its widow’s peak of hair and invisible eyebrows, was the colour and sheen of lard; there were squashed damson shadows under her eyes. Elizabeth could scarcely bear to meet Mary’s eyes, because they produced in her a feeling not so much of pity as of contagious misery. Mary’s eyes haunted her court like ghosts of past desolations and cut her off from it by the fog of extreme short sight. Elizabeth was close enough now to see them respond by focusing upon her own.
Mary fought to outstare her sister’s eyes, Anne Boleyn’s dark, blankly shining eyes. She was the Queen; she should not be outstared. Mary’s eyes were the watery colour of a winter sky. They held an awful yearning, as if she very much wanted to find something likable in her sister, but sad, fearful, suspicious and angry that she could not.
Mary was the first to lower her eyes. It was a capitulation.
‘Well, you persevere in your truth,’ she said, grudgingly. ‘Very likely all you will confess to is that you have been unjustly punished.’ Mary could always turn a statement to show up her own feeling of guilt.
‘But I could never say that, Your Majesty, not to you.’ Elizabeth’s eyes, downcast again and veiled by white lids, watched the pregnancy expand, and the fishbone hands twitch, as if they groped for words the tongue could not find.
‘Why then, if not to me, you will to others.’ Mary was determined to be miserable and persecuted.
‘No! If it please Your Majesty, I have borne my burden and put up with it. It is over. I humbly beseech Your Majesty to have a good opinion of me, and to think me your true subject, as long as life lasts.’ Elizabeth’s voice rang with unmistakable sincerity. She did not like to be hated.
Mary shifted, heaving her bulk, as if to escape discomfort. ‘You have won,’ she said, dully. ‘You always do.’ Another unanswerable remark.
Elizabeth noticed, for the first time, the cradle. It stood near where Mary sat, so that she could put out her hand and touch it. Big enough to accommodate triplets, it was waiting, painted with the arms of England and Spain. A coral hung on a cord, for the baby to suck and gnaw, and a rattle, for his amusement — him, of course. Piles of exquisite little clothes would no doubt do duty if by some disaster it was her, instead. There was a couplet inlaid in wood, on either side of the cradle, in Latin and English:
The child which Thou to Mary, O Lord of Might hast send,
To England’s joy — in health preserve, keep and defend.
Beside it, stood the gilded rosemary bush with spangles that Elizabeth had wanted so long ago. The New Year gift to the four-year-old, happy, cherished Mary, Princess of Wales, saved through all those barren, spinster years for this time. It should have been a joyful time, but Mary was so sickly. No woman in such a pitiable state of health could safely bear a child, not at thirty-eight. If the Queen died, then Elizabeth…
‘You will not find me vindictive,’ Mary rumbled dismally on. ‘You are free now, no longer a prisoner. You will be treated as my sister, and you will behave as a sister should.’ It cost Mary a great deal to say this, for it was the one thing she could not bear to believe, that Elizabeth was her father’s daughter.
‘But Your Majesty is the only sister I have in the world!’
‘If that indicated that I had your affection, then I would be a happier woman than I am…’ Mary went on to say something in her halting Spanish — a question, by the sound of it.
Spanish! Someone Spanish was here. Elizabeth’s eyes darted like a startled hare’s. She held her breath, straining her ears. There was no sound. Behind that screen of tooled Spanish leather. An eavesdropper. The Prince of Spain lurked, like the Prince of Darkness, in the shadows. What a nasty, peeping Tom’s trick! No wonder Mary had capitulated, offered the olive branch, talked of sisterhood. Philip must have pressed her to do so, for Mary changed her attitudes as readily as the leopard his spots.
Elizabeth hoped that she had put on a good performance. Sufficient humility and noble, suffering innocence — Susannah before the elders.
Mary dismissed her then. Philip obviously did not intend to show himself, and Elizabeth was relieved. She would prefer to play Prisoner’s Base on her own ground where her sister could not join in.
*
‘How many good people were long in despair
That this little England should lack a right heir.
But now the sweet marigold springeth so fair,
That England triumpheth without any care.’
Thus sang Robert Dudley savagely, and spat, accurately and with venom, a satisfying distance from the boat. ‘Sweet Marygold indeed! More like deadly monkshood,’ he growled to his brother Ambrose who sat in the bows with his feet up and his hat over his eyes. Their two fishing rods leant on the side, waiting for a bite. The boat bobbed and swayed gently on the silky water of the Thames near Hampton Court.
‘The period of human gestation,’ Robert continued, ‘is not eleven months. England’s heir was due by May Day. It is now July and fools are still saying wait for August, which is a year in my calculations.’
‘Isn’t there a story that the wicked King Richard III lay two years in his mother’s womb?’ yawned Ambrose.
‘Yes — and was bor
n with a full set of teeth and hair down to his crooked shoulders. Tell that one to the fishes!’
The boat lurched, as Robert yanked angrily on the oars.
‘Steady!’ protested Ambrose. ‘The fishes won’t come near enough to be told anything, let alone be caught.’ Robert in this mood was unlikely to have much success at the patient man’s sport of fishing.
‘There was some story that the Queen was delivered of a mole months ago.’
‘Rumours!’ Robert roughly hauled in his line. There was a minnow hooked on it. He detached the thing and hurled it back in the river. ‘It’s my belief,’ he said, ‘that this is nothing but a ghostly pregnancy, and no thanks to the Holy Ghost either. I’ve had the same trouble occasionally with bitches. All the symptoms, swelling, mother behaviour and broodiness, nest-making, even milk coming in their tits. I’ve even heard that last one reported from the palace — it’s what makes them so certain that there must be a birth. It would not surprise me to hear the Queen is losing her wits.’
‘What then?’ questioned Ambrose.
‘Elizabeth.’
The long grass on the river bank sighed in an inclement wind. It was chilly and damp for July. Rain was not falling, but the sky looked full of it. The grass was amazingly lush, long and green, the bushes and undergrowth more than usually dense; the river ran high, encroaching on the grass, which appeared to grow out of the water, like reeds.
‘Rain, rain, go to Spain,’ the children sang hopefully, but it did not, and the English harvest was ruined before it could grow knee high. It was the worst weather for fifty years, and two wet summers meant misery, dearth and discontent. The rain doused the fires at Smithfield and tortured the martyrs with slow burning. At St Paul’s, in the concourse, traitors — or loyal supporters of the Princess Elizabeth — thronged.
‘Look,’ Ambrose said, ‘the Swan Uppers are out.’
Down the river on their way from Kingston, the Dyers and Vintners companies were out in a fleet of boats, marking their swans. They would put paid to the Dudley’s fishing trip more surely than Robert’s bad temper. The hissing and threshing from the swans and the shouting from the markers would drive even the smallest minnow away.
None But Elizabeth Page 10