by Lucy Jago
This unpleasant recollection was interrupted by Frankie’s steward announcing Mr Palmer. He entered, sweating in a felted and flowered cape that looked as if he might have made it himself, a rolled parchment in his hand. He gave us both an exquisite bow and kissed our hands, mine at some length. We had spent many hours with him over the summer. He thought women capable of wisdom to rival, or even outshine, that of men and for that alone I admired him.
‘I hope nothing ails you?’ he asked Frankie.
‘Not at all, just a little rebalancing of the humours,’ she said.
‘Forgive my tardiness, but I have moved home. I am now your near neighbour, my lady,’ he said, bowing again to Frankie. ‘The Viscount Rochester has found me lodgings near the tennis court so that I might more closely oversee his growing collection.’
This pleased me greatly; our meetings would be more frequent.
‘He has asked that I find you a painting to celebrate your recent birthday and I have come to enquire whether it should be Dutch or Italian?’ Mr Palmer had been continuing Frankie’s education in painting and statuary, begun in the Long Gallery of Northampton House. Robert Carr often joined the lessons, as did I. Mr Palmer had a gentle curiosity that worked like sunlight on me; he asked questions and, beguilingly, listened to the answers. How rare is the man who does that. Perhaps it was a sign of my advancing years that I found such kindness attractive.
‘Dutch. There is enough bare flesh in here now. Are you writing as well as painting?’ said Frankie, pointing to the scroll in his hand.
‘This is Sir Thomas Overbury’s work,’ he replied, perhaps thinking to impress us with the acquaintance. Overbury never came to Frankie’s apartments with Carr, so Mr Palmer could not know how much we disliked him. ‘He writes rhyming sketches of milkmaids, lawyers and such, and this one has proved popular. Shall I read it to you?’
We both shook our heads and Mr Palmer laughed so hard tears fell from the corners of his eyes. ‘I have yet to meet someone who likes the man,’ he said, once he had recovered himself. He tucked the scroll away and began to discuss Dutch artists when Frankie interrupted.
‘Oh, Lord! It is too hot to think. Let’s go on the river.’ She sent her coach to collect my three youngest children as I salved and bandaged her foot. By three o’clock, Mr Palmer was handing us down into her barge. He could not spend the afternoon with us but, as he kissed my hand, he pressed the scroll into it.
‘This is much discussed. It might be best to read it,’ he said quietly.
As we pushed off, we heard a shout. Robert Carr was running down the passage to the stairs. The craft was moving away from the bank. Frankie screamed at him not to risk falling in the water for he would be swept away. With a mighty yell, he leapt from the top stair and travelled through the air so fast that he nearly toppled out of the other side of the barge as he landed. Mary, Katherine and Henry shrieked and grabbed him. He fell into the bottom of the boat and pulled them down on top of him, rolling about like a hog and making them squeal like piglets. He picked up each child in turn and pretended to chuck them overboard, dangling them above the sparkling water so that the toes of their shoes were wetted as they kicked and screeched with delight.
‘Shoes off!’ he ordered. The children could not get them off fast enough, stockings too, and he sat them on the edge of the boat, holding them as they leant forward to get their legs into the water. He looked over at Frankie and me. ‘Shoes off!’ he commanded again. I hesitated, for fear they would notice the darns in my stockings, but Frankie was next to my children in a flash and I stuffed my poor footwear out of sight. The poem, I stuck in my shoe.
Frankie held my children as Carr took off all the clothes he could with decency. The boat was the only place in which they felt free from the spies paid for by her family and probably by others too. Even so, Frankie, Carr and I all donned large sunhats to protect ourselves from the heat and from gossip – the river was always busy and the barge carried Frankie’s arms.
Through the hot months that summer we often took refuge on the river. When Carr could not accompany us, we stayed in the houses of her family on the shores of the Thames, all the way to Oxford. She disliked being in Westminster in the heat, but wanted to be near Carr when business brought him back to Whitehall from the King’s summer progress. We spent many days lying under the shade and privacy of the barge’s canopy, the flitting of blue-green dragonflies exaggerating the torpor of the world around us. Elsewhere there was drought, hunger and plague; but on Frankie’s gilded craft, on the glass-green stillness of the river, we were at peace.
‘You look like toadstools,’ said Henry, giggling at our huge hats. Carr grabbed him and dunked him to the waist, my boy crying he laughed so hard.
‘Ladies are not foul funghi,’ Carr said, and I smiled to think how Frankie once dressed in the colours of one and how long ago that seemed.
‘What’s this?’ said Katherine, pulling the scroll from its hiding place. Frankie grabbed it and began to recite in her most pompous voice, imitating Sir Thomas Overbury. ‘“The Wife”,’ she began. The first verses were to be expected; the usual things about woman being the daughter of Eve, made of man to obey him. She lifted her eyebrows at: ‘One, thus made two, marriage doth re-unite, And makes them both but one hermaphrodite.’ By the eighteenth verse she was flagging, irritated by the poet’s insistence that love can only in one person be found and, once married, no weak and worthless lust should rupture that bond. Carr clapped her performance, which pleased Frankie at first, but after a while it annoyed her that he did not see what we both did.
‘“Rather in her alive one virtue see,
Than all the rest dead in her pedigree.
Gentry is but a relic of time past:
And love doth only but the present see …”’
Frankie looked at Carr. She could say little in front of my children but it was clear that the poem was a pointed and public criticism of her. She read on, reciting aloud the most offending phrases.
‘“Domestic charge doth best that sex befit,
Continuous business; so to fix the mind,
That leisure space for fancies not admit:
Their leisure ’tis what corrupteth woman-kind.”’
Carr pretended to point out fish to my children, but his attention was fixed upon Frankie’s anger.
She handed me the scroll and I read the forty-seven stanzas, most of them dealing with women’s moral weakness. Overbury insisted upon the worthlessness of beauty, especially if its owner bestowed it on more than one man, and its lack of value when compared to goodness and obedience.
‘Your friend advises you very publicly,’ I said finally, my outrage too great to smother.
‘I do not dictate his scribbles,’ said Carr, not arguing with the fact that the poem was a denunciation of Frankie.
‘He attacks my honour,’ she said. It was both statement and warning.
‘He knows nothing of love. Let us not waste this beautiful day fuming at his poetry.’
Frankie took the scroll and, staring at Carr, tore it into little pieces and threw them into the river. They floated, like ash or petals, but fish soon came and swallowed them.
‘I heard that you challenged Sir Thomas Overbury to a duel,’ I shouted to Sir David as we struggled through a mob pressed together like eels in a barrel. It was the end of June. We pushed forward until we reached the stage on which stood the gallows.
As I had entered Palace Yard, just after dawn, it was clear that here was none of the carnival atmosphere typical of a public hanging. The usual crowd of flap-eared newsmongers, lawyers, drabs, thieves, beggars, and innocents up from the country to pursue a claim in the courts, was swollen by tidings of witches in Pendle and Northamptonshire that had brought the fearful out with the sight-seers. I was dressed soberly and masked, but it was no protection. Within a few minutes of arriving, a hand grabbed my privities.
‘Lift your skirts, Molly. I’ll have you for sixpence!’
All the
fury I had quashed, at Arthur’s irresolution and the myriad indignities of widowhood, burst from me. I elbowed my attacker so hard that he let out a great belch.
‘Widow Turner?’
I whipped round, appalled that someone had witnessed the skirmish. Sir David Wood, a Scottish courtier, was grinning at me.
‘Ah’ll nae take my chances with ye in a fight!’ he said, bowing as best he could in the mob.
‘Sir David.’ I dipped a knee.
‘Let me be of service,’ he said, putting a hand in the small of my back and pushing us towards the gibbet. The man about to die was a Scot, and Robert Carr had asked me to move amongst the crowd to hear what was said of the ‘beggarly blue-bonnets’, as those who had ridden into England with King James were known. I would tell him the truth. In the short time since he had become Frankie’s lover, we had come to feel sympathy for each other. Despite his finery, he was a foreigner in London, despised by people afraid that he and his kind were taking what was theirs.
‘Overbury refused tae come into the field,’ Sir David answered. ‘That malicious dog bites the heads off others tae stand taller himself. There’s a man who could hang without a tear shed.’ I was prevented from asking what offence Overbury had offered Sir David by a great roar from the crowd announcing the arrival of the condemned man. Baron Sanquhar, a Scottish noble, had murdered the man who put out his eye in a fencing lesson several years before. Taking a life for an eye was more than the Bible advised, but the life had been a common one while the eye belonged to a Baron of three hundred years’ pedigree. No one expected him to hang.
‘He was avenging his honour, the bloody fool,’ shouted Sir David into my ear. ‘He only ever held his son in his left arm, so the boy would nae be scared by seeing his blinded eye.’ I did not know that the Baron had a son; the boy was not born of Lady Sanquhar. On the few occasions I had met his estranged wife, she had struck me as profoundly aggrieved to have been married to a Scottish lout and proven kidnapper. I could picture her expression later that day if he was not granted a gallows pardon, a wounded resignation that would not disguise her relief at being set free.
‘That’s Sir Edward Coke. They say he’ll be made up tae Lord Chief Justice. He’d be glad tae see a Catholic hang,’ Sir David said, nudging me to follow his gaze. Coke sat in his coach, his gaze pitiless. I guessed him to be in his early sixties but with none of the softness of some old men. He was very lean, his face all sharp angles and points. ‘His delight has always been tae trample on the unfortunate. I’ll be looking at his face when the pardon arrives!’ Sweat tingled in my armpits to see hatred of our mutual faith so openly displayed.
‘Let it be known,’ bellowed Sanquhar, ‘today I die a true Catholic!’ The answering scream of rage from the crowd hurt my ears and my heart. Sir David and I moved closer together. The rest of the speech was swallowed up by insults hurled at the condemned nobleman. Silence fell only when the noose was placed over Sanquhar’s head. He craned his head towards the stairs, searching for the messenger who would convey the King’s forgiveness, but none appeared. Only as he was manoeuvred over the trap door did his face lose all colour. Only then did he believe he was to die. I pitied him to have so little preparation then thought perhaps it was better that way.
I looked away as he dropped. However miscreant, this was still a life created from his mother’s body, brought into the world at great risk, nurtured for year upon year, fed, taught, loved but ended in ignominy with no legitimate issue. I hoped his mother no longer lived to know the shame of it, and that someone would care for the son who knew only one side of his father’s face.
I was not sure what to report to Robert Carr: that I was afraid the crowd would beat me to death if they knew I too was Catholic? That Sir David had stopped shouting once he saw the murderous looks his accent provoked? That it seemed justice, life and death were dispensed at the whim of the King?
‘I thought he would be forgiven,’ said Sir David, his eyes bright with tears. ‘He must have given offence once too often. It’s a lesson for us all.’ Whether he was shaken by the loss of a fellow Scot or the arbitrariness of the King’s justice, I could not tell.
14
Only in November did storms and fierce winds break the summer’s hold. I was busy with new commissions for the Princess’s wedding to the Elector of Palatine; so many guests were expected that the King had banned the wearing of farthingales and women were anxious about how to display their family’s wealth on so reduced a canvas. I was tired after a night disturbed by drinkers, celebrating the King’s deliverance from the Powder Plot. Barbara and John were nearly always in the household of Baron Ellesmere and I missed them and their help with the younger ones. The draughty house made the candles burn down fast and the latest batch of syrup I had made for Mary’s cough was too thin. The summer seemed to belong to another life.
I had just persuaded Mary to take a nap when Arthur walked in. I was so startled that I cried out, but he paid no heed at all. He took me in his arms but all the while stared about as if looking for a lost and most beloved child. We had not spoken since our quarrel. He sent notes with our monthly stipend, explaining why I should apologise, but I had not.
‘Arthur? What is it? Have you a fever?’
‘It was the swim at Richmond,’ he said, holding me at arm’s length but not looking at me. ‘The doctors say he ate too many oysters beforehand. They put pigeons on his feet.’ I led him to a stool on to which he dropped, head in hands. Our children came to the door and he beckoned them in, hugging each of them fiercely. ‘He had beaten us all at tennis, he was hot and spent an hour in the river.’ He shook his head back and forth, like a horse bothered by flies, and I gently shooed the children out of the room. ‘They shaved off his hair.’ I stroked his back as he talked, raved almost. It was a good while before he calmed and leant his weight against me. He put his arms around my waist and his head against my belly, as he had done when I carried his babies. Then he was still for so long I wondered if he had fallen asleep, as children often do after a storm of weeping.
‘Arthur?’ I whispered. ‘What has happened? Is it your father?’
He looked up at me then, confused. ‘My father?’
‘Someone has died?’
Arthur let go of me and looked down at his hands as he clasped and unclasped them.
‘My father’s death would be sad indeed but not against Nature,’ he said. I sat on a stool and put my hands on his, suddenly afraid. Of what grief was I to learn?
‘Arthur?’
‘It is the Prince. Prince Henry has died.’
I could only stare as if he had told me that one of my siblings was killed. The heir to the throne was not my son, but every woman I knew wished that he were son, husband or brother to them, in such high esteem was he held. That God could take His great hope from us augured ill, though I did not know why I felt quite so profound a dread.
‘Forgive me,’ Arthur said quietly. ‘I have cared too much what others think.’ We looked at each other a long time. The light from the flames changed his countenance continuously, from young man to old husk, as if I saw before me all the ages of man. He must have seen and thought the same, for he stared at me with care and longing and fear all whipped up together in his expression. He took my hands in his. I knew before he spoke what he would ask and so loud a buzzing filled my whole body, even out through my skin, that I could not hear his words. He waited for my response, his eyebrows raised a little.
‘I could not hear you, there was such a ….’
‘Will you marry me?’ he repeated, pulling me close. Our long pent-up desire was poured into the kiss he gave me. At first it was tentative; I was the one who pressed my lips harder to his, to bring heat into his love. Very quickly he was kissing me as if I was air, sun and rain in one and our tears mingled, each of us wiping them from the other’s cheeks. Of course, I said yes.
Arthur had to leave soon after to guard the Prince’s body. The following day he returned, deprived of sle
ep, and every day thereafter for the four weeks that the Prince lay in state. As Master of Arms, Arthur and the grooms of the bed chamber attended the corpse in shifts. He described how the body had been embalmed and lay on view in a coffin under a black velvet canopy. The chamber, and the three that led to it, were draped in black from floor to ceiling and lit only by candles. Every mirror in the palace was turned to the wall. Only churches and the gates of St James’s Palace were crowded. Food markets were allowed brief and hushed trading hours, while all other business and entertainment was suspended. I remained at home with the children. The death of our Prince, the calamity to our nation of his passing, made petty the rupture between my lover and myself. Arthur and I wanted to marry quickly, but death was all that was being commemorated.
Not until the day of the funeral did I venture beyond my parish, and only then because Frankie requested it. The streets were empty of wheeled traffic, the city hard with frost. I walked in the black stream of mourners that surged through Ludgate on to the Strand, joining others until an ebony river flowed around Westminster Abbey where the body of our beloved Prince was to be buried.
In the bitter air, the grieving were wreathed in white by their sighs. The windows of every house along the funeral route were draped in black and the sky boiled with yellow and grey clouds laden with snow. Death had snatched colour away with the Prince’s life. He was to have been the redeemer, the clean-living, fervent young man who would deliver the country from the strange times of King James. His death was a terrible blow to us all.
Frankie was sitting red-eyed in her chamber, Brutus in her arms. She did not look up as I entered but stared into the fire. ‘There is a rumour that the King poisoned Henry, from jealousy,’ she said.
I tutted and removed my outer clothing. ‘He fell ill after swimming in the river. He went in hot and there was a bad odour,’ I said, bending to kiss Frankie’s cheeks. She looked at me sharply, for only Arthur could have told me that, and I hoped she would broach the subject so that I did not have to bring it up myself, but she did not. ‘If anyone left off their mourning weeds they would be set upon,’ I said.