The Puritan Princess

by Miranda Malins

  Some time later I find myself talking to Robert. As time passes, we play a game where every hour more that we have to ourselves is a decade of our life together – the future he was so desperate not to lose. I tell him the story of our life as it happens: the mistletoe we find on the great oak at Leighs Priory; the summers we spend there with his family, the autumns at court, riding and hunting and dancing just as we had on our wedding day; the schemes Robert invents to improve the running of his family estates; his ennoblement to the Other House and work on various committees for foreign affairs – the golden future of the Cromwell family just as Giavarina had painted it. I tell him of the children we have – four boys and two girls; of their names, looks and habits, as clear as crystal in my mind’s eye. How the oldest boy Robert (though we call him Robin) is the spit of my father and how his school friends christen him ‘Old Noll’ in tribute. Of our littlest girl, named Anne after Robert’s dead mother, who is quite the match for her brothers and how her father calls her his ‘little scholar’ just as mine used to call me.

  I tell him how, when he is much admired in silvered middle age, my brother Richard, now Lord Protector, sends him on various embassies abroad, how he holds the fate of nations in his hands and is showered with honours for his shrewd diplomacy; how I join him at the courts of Europe, where poets write of our great romance and still handsome good looks. And I tell him how we grow old and cross together, bickering happily as our grandchildren grow up around us …

  A servant knocks, interrupting my thoughts, and I shout for them to go away, just as Robert did on the morning after our wedding: if that was our wedding, this is our marriage. I pull the covers up even higher over us both, clinging to Robert even as his body chills mine. But however hard I try I cannot stop the sky lightening outside nor the morning noises of the palace occupants, who rise unthinking from their beds to another innocuous day. The third time there is a knock at our door, my shouts have no effect and the door opens.

  I hear footsteps, feel Mother’s ringed hands on me, but I will not move, will not give him up: ‘No! No! Leave us!’

  When they eventually prise me from Robert and my fingertips leave his skin I scream and beat against them with my fists, swinging my arms around, knocking the water jug to smash on the floor. They carry me somewhere and a warm liquid is trickled into my mouth until everything vanishes into black silence.

  I am blind. Blind with pain. Blind with rage. I do not know the day nor the time of day. I am moved from room to room, into and out of beds. Katherine changes me from nightgowns into dresses and back again. I eat a bowl of soup but taste nothing. Now a glass of strong wine, glinting in the firelight. People come and go. Faces peer at me and lips move. Mother is there. Later Father, reading from his Bible. Elizabeth and John bring me a puppy that licks my hand. Someone says that cousin Lavinia died the same night as Robert but I cannot remember who she is. I lie down, I sit up, I walk. I breathe. I talk even, though I cannot hear my own words.

  I do all this and yet I am dead.

  Though I feel utterly and completely alone in my grief, it seems everyone else wishes for a portion and the whole court sinks into the deep, formal mourning customary for a royal death. Father clothes himself in purple, the imperial colour of mourning allowed only to princes; bells are silenced, all singing and dancing cease. I do not see all this for myself but hear it from Elizabeth who tells me of everyone’s sadness at Robert’s loss, of the kind words whispered with shaking heads, of the grand gestures, the letters of condolence and get-well gifts, of the tears Robert’s grandfather the Earl of Warwick sheds on Father’s shoulder. But I can feel no empathy for any other’s pain but my own and can find no solace in the actions of others when my beloved will never stir his hand again. I do not want anyone to come between us even now.

  They tell me that Robert’s body had lain in state at Warwick House like a prince before being taken home to Leighs Priory in Essex for burial but I do not understand. I panic that they will take his things too, and rush blindly into my rooms, howling like a wolf at the servants who are even then packing away his clothes. With startled, staring eyes they melt away before me and I snatch an armful of Robert’s shirts and drag them into the bed with me as a vixen would take her kill back to her den. Burying my face in his linen, I slide towards sleep both yearning for it and fighting it; longing for the oblivion where I can live with Robert in the half-light while knowing that I will wake each time only to die of grief all over again. But the temptation to see him is too much and I drop into a heavy sleep, the smell of his laundry seeping into every pore of my face. My body relaxes as Robert comes to me in my dreams. I hear his low voice on the pillow beside me, feel his breath on my cheek, watch him come in and out of rooms, his laughter vanishing around doorframes with his shadow.

  Now that I am once more in my own rooms, I refuse to leave them. I am convinced that something of Robert lingers here with me, some spirit, some presence, and that if I once leave our rooms he will not be there when I return. And so well-wishers come to me and sit holding hopeless conversations with the space where I should be while I barely mask my desire to be left alone. Mother, Elizabeth and Bridget are there most often, their visits timed so well I suspect them of having drawn up a rota. Once Mother brings Signor Giavarina with her, hoping, I imagine, that my Italian pet will be able to coax a smile from me. But the ambassador is solemn, telling me first that the Turks have retaken the Dardanelles as he feared, before talking to me of Dante’s love for Beatrice and how it transcended her death to inspire his work: ‘We Italians understand love and death, Principessa. I know how you suffer.’

  In this way, my visitors bring their own experiences and understanding of grief to lay as trophies at my feet as if, by listening to their survival stories, I can learn how to return to my life. Katherine speaks to me of losing her husband William at Marston Moor. As she dresses me and brushes my hair she tells me how she coped as a widow and how she has found new life with Jeremiah. Her personal account barely registers with me; indeed I hardly hear her voice above the roar in my ears. But there is one whose words somehow reach me, stirring my bitterness.

  ‘I too know what it is to lose a beloved husband, dearest,’ Bridget whispers over a bowl of porridge, breaking off her words to blow on the steaming oats before she offers me a spoon. ‘Nothing can take away the pain but I promise its sting will begin to ease in time; everything is God’s will.’

  ‘What God? Besides, how can you know?’ I lash out, blind to any pain but mine. ‘Robert was all my own – I chose him, we had to fight to be together. Father arranged your marriage to Henry and you married Charles quickly enough when he died.’

  Even in my angry haze I see her wince as she touches a spoon of porridge with her tongue to see if it has cooled. ‘Hush, dearest,’ she says after a few moments, offering me the spoon again. ‘You were too young to understand.’

  ‘I can feed myself.’

  ‘Of course, here.’ Bridget passes me the bowl and sits back in her chair, folding her thin hands in her lap and twisting her mourning ring absently between her thumb and forefinger.

  I am still glaring at her when a soft knock brings a tall young man into the room. He approaches us slowly and it takes me a good length of time to fight through the fog to remember who he is: John Russell, Harry’s brother-in-law, who I last saw on my wedding day when he brought me my beautiful bird. I feel Robert’s kiss on my hand, hear him applauding.

  ‘Lady Frances, I – I am so very sad, so very, very sorry for your loss. Here.’ He reaches into his pocket. ‘I have a letter for you from your brother. It came in the post bag from Ireland with his letters to my family and I thought you would like it straight away.’

  I take the square of folded paper from him, the action stirring the memory of when I took a letter from his hands once before – the page on which Harry had urged me to marry the man I loved. I think I manage a small smile in thanks, though I cannot tell as my cheeks are numb; my face no longer feels
part of my body. I begin to open the letter, then change my mind and lay it on the counterpane beside me. I do not think I can handle any more condolence for the moment, especially not the guesswork of my adored big brother who never witnessed my love for my husband, never saw me wed and now never will.

  ‘He won’t know his little sister when he comes home,’ I say, neither to John Russell nor Bridget but to the room at large. ‘She no longer exists.’

  Time stretches before me like a twisted rope. It snaps and coils, flattens and kinks so that I cannot tell if days, weeks or mere hours pass me by. Occasionally I hear sounds or news of the wider world – a world without Robert – and it pins me to a calendar. The church bells that ring across Westminster tell me it is Sunday. Dick apologises for having been away for a week in Hampshire. My brother-in-law John brings me a vase of budding daffodils and tells me of the great triumph of Father’s mediation between Sweden and Denmark with a peace treaty signed at Roskilde. Yet John says there is little outward celebration as the court continues to mourn Robert. I think of my first argument with Robert at Ambassador Meadowes’ appointment ceremony when he doubted we could secure peace in the Baltic. All I want to do is tell him I told you so.

  Giavarina tries to cheer me with news that the details of the royalist plot for the Spanish invasion have been uncovered: ‘A triumph for Signor Thurloe’s spies,’ the Italian says, his eyes glimmering over his wine glass with the delight of an ambassador with superior information about his host nation. But I cannot summon any enthusiasm for this news; it is too late for Robert to take me home to Leighs Priory, so what do I care?

  Though time passes in a blur, there is one marker I do notice, or rather I notice the absence of it. I realise that I have not bled since Robert died and I begin nervously and then desperately to wonder if I might be with child. I have no idea how long it has been but I know that it has been too long. The thought swells within me until I can think of nothing else and pin all my hopes on a miracle; on the tiny chance that I could be carrying a fragment of Robert within me, that a part of him might still live. I tell no one of my hopes but start to take more care of myself; to rest and to eat properly. I can see the joy in Mother’s face that I am no longer refusing food and I know she thinks, falsely, that it is a sign that I am coming back to the light. The thought of Robert’s baby restores some purpose to me and replaces my memory of his death as my first thought on waking. Each time I slip my fingers below my nightdress and bring them gingerly to my eyes, praying not to find blood.

  But my prayers go unanswered. Any shred of faith in God’s Providence that had survived Robert’s death drains out of me with the blood when it eventually comes. It is a cruel blow, tearing open the bandaged wound of my grief once more as Robert dies before my eyes all over again. I turn my face to the wall and send all food away while Mother cries in the corner of my room.

  I sink beneath the waves once more, seeing nothing, hearing no one but Robert’s voice in my head and an emptiness in my belly. I hover on the edge of consciousness, the days and nights measured only by the burning down and replacement of the candle I can see on my nightstand. I speak to no one. Indeed I have quite made peace with my own death when a solitary voice reaches deep within me and turns me from the wall.

  Mary. Mary has come back to me.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mary is all mine. She sits by my bed by day and sleeps in it with me at night, just as she did when we were children. I cling to her greedily and somehow, as the days pass, I find my senses returning to me like pins and needles.

  ‘Thomas?’ I ask her eventually as we lie side by side in the darkness, the firelight, now flickering low in the grate, occasionally catching the gold thread that criss-crosses the deep green velvet canopy above us. ‘Tell me.’

  I hear her breathe a few deep breaths and know she is choosing her words.

  ‘He is a good man, kind, considerate. He gave me a beautiful pair of grey mares as a wedding present. He rises early but if I am tired bids me stay in bed and sends the maid up with hot apple juice and toast. He travels a good deal. But if he is at home then in the evenings he reads the news-sheets while I play the virginal for him.’ She takes my hand, her fingers small and cold in mine, not like Robert’s. ‘He brought me back to you when I asked.’

  It is a thin list of kindnesses, spare and lean. I listen, examining Mary’s words as if I could see them hovering above our heads, searching within them for a fraction of the love I have for my husband. Robert flashes before my eyes like a passing reflection in a window. I see him talking and teasing me as he sits in the bath, his wet pruning fingers laced through mine; hear him laugh at a joke across the supper table before catching my eye, his wink assuring me he will repeat the jest for me later; feel a rustle beside me in the bed as he turns in his sleep and folds himself around me, his sleepy lips creeping up my back as he rouses himself. The hopeless irony of our position floods me once again, welling up inside me until it overflows in tears.

  ‘You accepted Thomas so I could be with Robert,’ I say, the words choking out of my mouth like bubbles. ‘But now you could have been free to have anyone you wanted. God is cruel: he will give you and Thomas the long life of marriage he denied to us in penance for our bargain. I know that now.’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Mary shakes her head, rubbing the pillow beside mine, her voice urgent, fierce. ‘You must not regret the choices we made. And who is to say my husband and I will not love each other in time, or that you may one day love again? God has purpose still for all of us, I know it.’

  She is wrong but I say nothing. I cannot take her faith from her, not after everything she has already given me.

  Robert comes to me in my waking hours when I receive a parcel from his father. Mary reads me the letter from Lord Rich but I scarcely hear his words as I unfold the layers of paper to find a miniature portrait of my beloved. A younger Robert smiles up at me from where he nestles in my palm and I grip the tips of my fingers around the tiny gilded frame, pressing him into my flesh. He lives in my hand from then on, sometimes displayed in the open, at others held under a fold of my skirt, in a pocket or beneath my pillow. I find myself growing stronger.

  Lord Rich’s letter is followed soon afterwards by a visit from his own father, Robert’s grandfather, the Earl of Warwick. He slopes into my rooms, his once tall frame, which had been as rigid as the masts on the ships he commanded to the far side of the world, now bent over, all the air gone from his sails. He sinks into a chair opposite me and stretches out a large bony hand to take mine. He says nothing but lets his eyes rest on my stomach for so long I begin to worry he is looking for a sign of a child; a boy to pick up his line where Robert, his sole heir, has dropped it. I try very hard to swallow the bile that rises into my throat.

  ‘My dear,’ he says at last, dragging his eyes back up to meet mine. ‘I am sorry to disturb you but I come on a commission from my son.’

  I nod my understanding, running my thumb along the smooth edge of Robert’s oval frame.

  ‘Robert’s father wishes to ask a great kindness of you. I imagine it is the very last thing that you would want to do at the moment, Frances, but my son wonders, hopes that you would consent to sit for a portrait.’

  I stare at him blankly.

  ‘You see,’ he presses on, ‘the whole family was greatly looking forward to Robert bringing you home to us in Essex. My little granddaughters – Robert’s half-sisters – had talked of little else for months. They adored Robert you see …’

  The earl pauses then, pretending to search for something in his pocket while I watch him fight his tears.

  ‘You will always be one of the family, Frances, of course. But the girls and their father would like a permanent reminder of your marriage to Robert, of your love. We have a fine portrait of him – painted when he reached his maturity – and it is our dearest wish to have a matching likeness of you to hang beside it at Leighs Priory.’

  I am quite overcome by the request. Though the
earl is right that the idea of reassembling and prettifying myself sufficiently to sit for one of the court painters is unimaginable in my current state, I love the idea of Robert and I spending eternity together, watching other lives unfold beneath us side by side on the wall.

  ‘I will,’ I say, though no other words form to follow them.

  ‘Bless you,’ the earl says.

  Father commissions John Michael Wright, the famed Italianate portrait artist, to paint his grieving daughter. Lord Rich had wanted to pay but Father insists the painting will be his gift to the Rich family; an act of penance for the dead bridegroom he never wanted. Master Wright is a puffed-up peacock who takes every chance to flaunt the years he spent learning his craft in Rome at the temple of the old masters. But he is kind and gentle with me, instructing and soothing me as if I am a frightened doe; I imagine he has experienced all shades of humanity from behind his outstretched paintbrush. And, strangely, there is something calming in the way I must sit in still silence for hours at a time, nothing more expected of me than immobility.

  In any circumstances but these I would have been thrilled by this honour, fussing over my dress and hair, equal parts nerves and excitement. But my new self spends not one thought on how I look, indeed I have not even asked for a mirror to see how my sisters and Katherine have put me back together. Gently they bathed me, and Katherine dried my hair, curled and pinned it while Mary and Elizabeth chose my clothes and jewels, whispering their consultations as they ran their fingers over my things like housewives at a haberdasher: ‘The silver-blue gown with the lavender trim.’ ‘Really, not the green?’ ‘The pearls, she loves those.’ ‘But will they complement the brooch? Robert gave that to her, I know she will want to wear it.’ I barely feel the expensive silks and pearls as they are layered onto me, as if they are being laid on another body, a porcelain doll’s. It is as if all of my vanity died with Robert. The young woman who danced as the goddess Venus, soaking up the admiration of the court, has gone. Who cares what I look like now? Robert will not be able to look on me as I hang beside him, but he will have what I believe he loved of me most: my conversation, my companionship.