The Queen played chess with the Lord of Kenilworth upon a table chequered with crystal, onyx and jasper, moving crystal men set in gold and silver. Outside the windows the sun beat down upon a drowsing world. They waited for late afternoon to go hunting the hart.
They walked on the terrace to catch the breeze and watched the peacock spread his tail. Elizabeth let him and his wives peck grain from her hand and laughed at the tickle of their beaks. She ate sun-warmed strawberries from the stalk, hung one from her ear, and laughed again. Warwickshire lay spread before her, mere and chase and forest, green and more green, fading into blue distances.
A fountain of white marble played into a pool where red-gold carp lazed under lily pads. Nearby, an aviary had been built against a sunny wall, where birds from the Indies and from Africa fluttered on branches and nested in holes in the wall. Birds coloured like jade, amber and jasper flashed like jewels.
On a velvet July night they floated in a gilded boat upon the silk of the mere. Cleopatra on the Nile was not more royally entertained. The Queen reclined upon perfumed cushions among flowers, and boys’ voices, piercing as angels’, sang across the water. The sound of flutes was heard among the reeds.
Fireworks made sunbursts in the sky, shooting stars and flying fireballs. Wheels of scented fire spun dizzily round, changing from green to red to blue. An Italian acrobat walked on a rope stretched high between the castle walls, and appeared to turn himself inside out, like an old glove.
One day there was a grand bear-baiting, a ferocious pack of dogs were set on thirteen bears in a great battle between old enemies. Blood and fur and bets flew indiscriminately, and the human spectators made nearly as much noise as the fight. The local people from Warwick and round about were allowed to come to watch the outdoor shows, and roared their approval, according to whether their fancy was dogs or bears. Elizabeth put her money on the bears, and won, because most of them survived to fight another day.
When it came on to rain, she spent an afternoon wandering through the rooms of Kenilworth looking at Robert’s most precious possessions. He especially loved Eastern carpets, and glass and crystal ware, things so rich in colour, and others so clear and colourless. One very fine Turkey carpet must have been fifty feet long, sky-coloured, with lozenges of red and yellow. Glassware the envy of princes, diamond-clear: sapphire, amethyst, garnet-red. Glass imitating agate, white porcelain from Cathay, or lapis lazuli. Ice-glass beakers blown from frost, and a Venetian cup of millefiori colours, little flowers trapped like flies in amber. A room hung with scarlet Spanish leather, another full of mirrors in gilded frames.
On the second Sunday a village wedding was invited up to the castle from the parish church. They brought their great cakes, the bride cup, the posies and the ribbons, the morris dancers with the fool, Maid Marian and their jingling bells. The bridegroom nearly fell off his horse, tilting at the quintain, and another was whacked over the head by the dummy.
Among the crowd of country people, the Queen kept seeing a boy of about eleven or twelve always managing to wriggle to the front. A rustic cherub of a boy, with fair curls and rosy cheeks, an ordinary face, but with an extraordinary expression for one so young. She had never seen anyone gaze upon dancers and players and fools and fireworks and music with such absolute, rapt attention, as if his mind were called to wander among the spheres, out of human understanding. Kenilworth surely opened dazzling windows of glass in that boy’s mind, revealing Pharaoh’s palace and the shining Alexandrian shore.
They walked on the terrace late in the evening to catch the breeze. The moon rode high above them, a sickle shape of silver. Behind them, taller than Robert, was a hedge of clipped holly, a dark foil for a moon goddess.
Diana. She sent him to pick strawberries by moonlight, and he had to feel among the leaves for ripe ones, cool and damp now with dew. She took the strawberries from the palm of his hand, as she had accepted all that Kenilworth had to offer. She had always been as quick to show delight as she was displeasure.
The moon-washed face of Elizabeth looked up at her Earl, the white skin silvered over with light. Fine lines marked the corners of her eyes and her mouth. Pretty mouth at this moment though, still pretty, but serious. A mouth to make ugly or hard or bitter at will, or to laugh. She could fill it with swearwords as easily as with strawberries, with envenomed darts as readily as words of pure golden majesty. She had grown more infinitely variable with the years, not less.
The hair bound with a garland of flowers made of seed pearls and wire had silver threads in it now, and the plaited arrangement at the back, stuck with pearl-headed pins, did not belong to the same head as those little curls in the front, where the silver threads were. Her chin rested on a neat dish of a ruff, edged with lace. Her sleeves were of lawn with blackwork carnations and butterflies, delicate against a gown of dove-grey silk and black velvet, embroidered with the July strawberries, cherries and peasecods, on which crawled caterpillars, ladybirds and bees. The neckline was filled with blackwork to match the sleeves, leaving a triangle of flesh bare in a provocative place. Though she was not endowed like Lettice, she was not without charms, even now at forty-two.
Just then she drew in her breath and touched Robert’s arm. ‘The scent!’ she said.
A whole bed on one side of the terrace was massed with dame’s violet, the sweet rocket, a froth of white. Its scent in the evening outdid all others. Nothing during the day, at night better than the other stocks.
‘I love white flowers,’ Elizabeth said. Because he knew that, Robert had filled the rooms of his castle with lilies, roses, snowy pinks and carnations.
The scent went to her head, and she moved away from the shadow of the holly, and hummed and danced a solitary, grave pavanne across the terrace lawn. Robert fell in step beside her, and together they paced out the steps lightly, coloured like ghosts in the moonlight, as if ghostly music whispered behind the holly hedges. A fountain playing let a drift of silvery drops damp their faces. His arm encircled her waist as they moved again to the backdrop of dark holly.
‘Green groweth the holly…’ Robert sang softly.
‘As the holly groweth green,
And never changeth hue,
So I am, ever hath been,
Unto my lady, true.’
A high voice, thin and bright as the riding moon, answered him.
‘As the holly groweth green,
With ivy all alone,
When flowers cannot be seen,
And the greenwood leaves be gone…’
A melancholy little dying fall of song, like the leaves pattering down in autumn.
‘An old-fashioned song,’ proclaimed the singer, thus dismissing it and its emotions.
‘Your Majesty’s father wrote that.’
‘But not for me, or you, to sing.’ It reminded her of days best forgotten, days that had died before she had been born. ‘A midsummer night’s dream,’ she said.
Elizabeth became aware that Robert was preparing to kiss her in a way that he had not done for a very long time. She wondered for a moment whether she would allow him to, and decided in his favour. A very practised kiss, long-lasting and exploratory. She wanted him to go on, and on. But not on like that — she felt his fingers slide down the neck of her gown, meet their target. Her body leapt like a hare startled into jumping over the moon. Elizabeth flinched, and his hand fell away. Next moment he would have her skirts up, and that was not all that was up, either.
‘I have been waiting twenty years!’ He was almost groaning.
‘No!’ That was the only answer she would give.
Twenty years. The bodily passions did not alter, but the body did. He was getting fat. His hair was receding and had white wings at the sides, as some elderly blackbirds have. She knew that she was thin, not voluptuous like Lettice, and had a leg ulcer which needed dressing twice a day, and teeth which led a rebellious life, and death, of their own. In daylight, such things would be inadmissible, even to herself.
In the mor
ning, her cousin Lettice was like a sunflower, its petals turned to greet the day. Elizabeth looked for bite marks on her neck. None, disappointing. But Lettice had spent last night in Robert’s bed. Elizabeth knew she had. The green holly was false, never had been true, not since it first grew in the world. None of them were. Men.
‘I shall go.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why?’
‘You have no evidence.’
‘I need none. I have eyes. Today I pack my bags. Not another night under the same roof as that whore!’
‘I deny it.’
‘That for your denial!’ Slap! Her hand met his ear.
‘So Your Majesty would disappoint my friends and servants who have prepared entertainments for you?’
‘Your friends must sink or swim with you!’
But by keeping onto this tack he won, as he knew he would. A red ear was small price to pay to keep her from spoiling his Kenilworth. For a couple of days she threatened to leave, but did not refuse two afternoons’ good hunting. One of the shows he had planned had to be cancelled. Robert did this out of discretion, for it harped too much on the desirability of the Queen accepting a suitor, and marrying, to be tactful while the thunderclouds threatened. In its place, he asked Mr Gascoigne to devise something more likely to persuade her to stay. The play produced proved more apt and successful than he could have hoped, and the pleas of Deep Desire (meaning himself), lamenting within a grove of green holly, were accepted, and the Queen stayed on another week. Lettice had discreetly removed herself, going home to Chartley to prepare for the royal visit in her husband’s absence.
Surprisingly, the visit to Chartley was not cancelled. The Queen did not wish to insult the Earl of Essex. The female claws were sheathed most of the time, merely kneading in and out, ready for use. Then Elizabeth was charmed by Lettice’s four children, two boys and two girls. They were astonishingly beautiful children. Two of them, Penelope, the eldest, and Robert, the heir, had their mother’s dark-red hair, and velvet-brown eyes. Robert at eight did not yet have the self-assurance of his sisters, and when it came to kissing the Queen’s hand, he hid and would not show his face. An emotional boy, prone to floods of tears, and flights of ecstatic happiness, a difficult boy just of an age to know his mother was in love with Leicester, and that his father was betrayed. A delicate boy, skinny and gangling and blushing. The Queen won a smile from him in the end, but Leicester did not.
***
‘I will not tolerate it! Marriages!’ Slap! ‘Behind my back!’ Slap! For a woman, Elizabeth had a far from weak and feeble hand.
‘Hole-in-corner, hideaway weddings!’ Another slap. ‘You must have something to be ashamed of, Mary Shelton, to hide from your Queen!’
The weeping heap which had subsided on the floor, scarlet-cheeked from the slaps, had married without royal consent. Nothing enraged Elizabeth more. She felt that she stood in loco parentis to her Maids of Honour, and hated having her discipline flouted. As she also hated giving permission for love matches, as opposed to sensible business arrangements between mothers and fathers, her Maids were forced to choose between becoming old maids and provoking the Queen’s anger. This alternative was usually braved, because it was the more short-lived.
Mary Shelton had married James Scudamore at an inauspicious time, when Elizabeth announced her dislike of marriage on every opportunity. When Parliament met a few weeks later, it was just the subject chosen to harp on, as it had been in all five previous parliaments. Suitors had come, and suitors had gone. The Archduke Charles of Austria had lasted a long while; the two sons of the Queen of France, the Dukes of Anjou and Alençon, had been more recent hopes, though both were twenty years younger than Elizabeth herself. But always Elizabeth had deferred her decision. This time she took refuge in an old image, symbol for her of personal freedom.
‘If I were a milkmaid with a pail upon my arm, whereby my private person might be of little account, I would not forsake the single state to match with the greatest monarch. Not that I condemn the double knot, or judge those who are forced by necessity and cannot choose another way of life. But I wish that no one would make the change, except those who cannot keep within moral limits. Yet on your behalf, I would willingly spoil myself quite of myself (as I should put off my outer clothing when it wearies me).
‘I know I am but mortal…’ She was well launched into the second half of one of her best speeches. A little admonishment laid in with a light hand. ‘Let good heed be taken that, in reaching too far after future good, you do not imperil the present, and begin to quarrel before it is decided who shall wear my crown.’
*
‘The appearance of a comet in the heavens has always been said to herald great changes.’
‘For good or evil?’
‘One man’s meat is another’s poison.’
Dr John Dee’s beard had turned white — the young Apollo had become a patriarch. His blue eyes were even more startling, pure sky blue, the eyes of a watcher of the skies.
‘Does Your Majesty wish the window to be covered? Such an unnatural light is bad luck to look on,’ someone said nervously.
‘Unnatural? How may that be, when a comet is a phenomenon occurring in the heavens as part of the natural order of things?’ Elizabeth opened the casement and put out her head. The eerie light of the giant shooting star rimed her hair, each little curl, each pearl.
‘Iacta est alea,’ she said, ‘the dice is thrown.’ Whatever change was to come, it was her destiny.
No one wanted the comet to be interpreted as portent of a change of Queens in England. They looked at her, gazing out of the window, and feared that she tempted fate too often.
Dee would have liked to be at home, watching through his telescope. But he was always honoured to be invited to Richmond.
‘In Madrid,’ he said, ‘the King of Spain will look out upon this comet, or hide from its light, according to how he is ruled by superstition. He will hope, or fear, according to the changes that will most affect him and his empire.’
‘It is possible, Dr Dee, to initiate change, and thus checkmate fate.’
‘If you do not, someone else will seize the opportunity. King Philip wants to change England — old faith, new Queen.’
‘His enterprise will fail.’
‘The King of Spain cannot support his armies in the Netherlands, nor anywhere else, without silver and gold from the New World.’
‘So we hit my brother of Spain where it hurts most — in his pocket! Little mole, he would riddle the world with his tunnels, but we can do a greater thing. We can throw a girdle around the globe itself.’
‘If anyone can, and I think it possible, Drake is the man.’
‘Is he ready?’
‘To circumnavigate the world, for Your Majesty. He has renamed his ship Pelican The Golden Hind, as a compliment to Mr Christopher Hatton.’
‘Mr Christopher has persuaded me to invest a good deal of money.’
‘When Your Majesty sees the riches Drake brings back, the investment will prove only a fraction of the interest!’
‘Ah, my philosopher, you are worldly-wise, also.’
*
‘A comet is held to be a portent of great changes.’
‘My situation is changed already by the death of my husband.’ Lettice murmured in her lover’s ear.
‘You have not suffered materially by that.’
The open casement of the little house at Buxton spa let in a pleasant, fresh night air. The surrounding hills rose dark and secret against the intrusion of the comet’s light. The Earl of Leicester and the Countess of Essex watched its path with interest, and only the faintest twinge of superstition.
‘Yet my status could change again.’ Lettice had the same persistence in unwelcome subjects as her royal cousin.
‘I cannot marry you, Lettice. You know my situation does not change.’
‘You dare not.’
‘Very well, I dare not. But if I did, you might find you
r position changed in quite a different way to what you want. We could find ourselves in the Tower.’
‘She would not dare.’
‘Remember whose daughter she is. The Book of Proverbs says: “A King’s rage is like a lion’s roar, his favour like dew on the grass.” Gone before eleven.’
When a letter came from that royal daughter, Robert did not show it to Lettice. It both amused and irritated him, and touched a little secret core of tenderness, just as the writer so often did. She had a tendency to mock his spasmodic battle against encroaching fat with the complacency of one always confidently thin. She knew he liked his food, while she ate scarcely enough for a wren. Her suggestion that he dine upon the shoulder of a wren, and sup upon the leg, and that Ambrose, who was fatter, should be denied even the leg, was but another instalment of a long-standing joke at his expense.
Even while Leicester enjoyed light suppers and fresh air at Buxton with his brother and his mistress, not many miles away, at Sheffield, the Queen of Scots watched the comet in the heavens also, and prayed for deliverance, for Spanish aid and for the eclipse of Elizabeth.
A year after the appearance of the comet, Elizabeth felt an unreasoning fear of coming changes, which had nothing to do with her sister Queen, her enemy, or with Philip of Spain. To court came widow Lettice. Elizabeth eyed her cousin with venom, sugar-coated. Lettice wore black, which flattered her. Hypocrite, mourning for poor cuckolded Walter. Elizabeth pursued unwanted conversations, hoping to detect and pounce on insolence or sly looks.
None But Elizabeth Page 28