Jeanne
July 1599

I was happy in those next few weeks, and yet I was unsettled. I wasn’t at ease. I’d always thought of happiness as something calm and reassuring, like a warm coat on a winter’s day – the absence, for a while, of fear; a little pleasure, a new plant or a pasty; something interesting to chew on in my work. This was different. This was more like finding that a layer of my skin had been stripped away, so that everything I felt, I felt more sharply.

I went to the booksellers’ row round St Paul’s churchyard the Saturday after we got back, and it was thin of company. The poor scholars were still there, in their shabby black, and the foreign visitors too, but the young lawyers from the Inns of Court had gone home for the harvest holidays, and the gallants snickering over the latest Italian translations – the ones with the special illustrations, that the shopmen brought out from under counters, quietly – were likewise in the country. I spotted Martin Slaughter quite easily. Spotted him, and then stopped dead for a moment feeling oddly shy. Seeing him as a stranger might do, slight and inconspicuous with his brown hair and brown doublet – until, I thought, you noticed something quick and definite in his movements. A kind of gallantry … Or was that just to my eye?

I might almost have gone away that moment, but he turned and saw me – and beckoned, as if to an old friend, easily. He was leafing through a pile of new editions of some of the London plays, and expostulating on the cuts and errors in a way that made the bookseller eye him angrily. It was only later that I realised, looking back, he had been talking too much, too fluently – as if he were as nervous as I. He asked which stall I liked best, and I led him to the one with the great illustrated herbals, where a new barrel of the latest books came in regularly from the Low Countries. Afterwards, it seemed only natural that he should suggest we go to a nearby tavern, to sit outside in the summer warmth, and only natural for me to agree. It was the kind of thing I hadn’t often done, keeping myself one step away from those around as I had had to, and it came to me, with quite a different kind of warmth, that with a friend, someone who knew my past, there might be new pleasures open to me.

We came to meet almost regularly on the booksellers’ row, though always without acknowledging that there was any more than chance, without anything so close to commitment as an appointment. Books can be a path to anywhere and so they were for Martin and me. Showing him the illustration of a herb, or a way of growing, I told him about Sundays in the garden with Jacob. To talk of the publisher Christopher Plantin, Jacob’s friend, who had died in Antwerp but whose illustrations lived on, was to talk of the Low Countries and of what had happened to the Protestant refugees who had remained there. Even now, I said little. But what I did say, I think he understood. Maybe it was his actor’s craft, to feel dead or invented tragedies as if they lived anew. Maybe it was something of his own experience; though England had looked peaceful to Jacob and to me, it had known its troubles just as we had in the countries across the sea. These last few years, it seemed, one could remember that more easily.

Sometimes we walked; sometimes we sat, to watch the other people walking by. It was something I might once have dismissed as a waste of time, but for him it was a business to be taken seriously. He told me an actor must learn how to read the signs, so he can give an audience more about a character than mere words alone can ever say. He taught me to open my eyes – how this man walked bold, but had a thief’s brand on his hand, how the sailors in from foreign ports looked about them with as much bravado as curiosity. I learned, I suppose, that everyone has a story.

Showing me the play texts, Martin told me of parts he’d taken, and a little of his own early years in the smooth fertile Hertfordshire country, a placid land that yet remembered dramas from when Catholic and Protestant princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, had squabbled over the territory. He told me tales, too, of life on the road – tales to make me laugh, mostly. I came to be aware of reticences – that there were things he was not telling me. But that was all right; I’d grown up with silences and with secrecies. Martin had shown me I was not alone in that, but open-mouthed frankness might still have disconcerted me.

And yet behind the pleasure of those Saturdays, I had a growing unease. Sometimes his question, about the future, came back to me. It was one of those things of which I had managed not to think, and done it successfully. He never mentioned it again – I came to realise he was handling me warily, as one might a half-tamed animal lest it suddenly run away. But there was still a kind of challenge, not in anything he said but somehow in what he was. In what he was to me. I greeted that challenge almost resentfully.

Sometimes we talked of the news on the streets – it was hard not to, in those weeks. As July wore on the reports from Ireland grew worse every day. They were raising more trained bands in the City. The tavern drinkers still cheered Lord Essex’s eventual victory, but the more sober heads – Martin said – were setting their faces against further demands, and lamenting the monies already spent.

‘You should hear his excuses,’ Martin said once, with a flash of what looked like real anger. It was the kind of feeling he showed only rarely. ‘In the spring his force wasn’t ready to campaign, or so he said. In the summer he was too busy on other matters to march to where he’s supposed to be. Now autumn’s almost on us, and I suppose he’ll be declaring we’re past the fighting season, see you next year, and anyone could tell you how well that will go down with her majesty. Anyone but his lordship, anyway.’

He seemed well informed – I said as much, but he didn’t answer me directly. I suppose every ale-drinker was a bar-room general, though I wouldn’t have put Martin in that company. Some doubt must have showed on my face because ‘Actors hear things,’ he reminded me. ‘And when you think how many times I’ve waved a sword on stage, I swear they could give me charge of a company!’ I laughed, as I was supposed to, but it was a retreat, or so it seemed to me. And perhaps Martin’s nerves were a little on edge. As we left the tavern late, and set out through the darkening streets – only a few weeks past midsummer, but the evenings were drawing in already – he stopped, and grasped my arm suddenly. I didn’t know what he was going to say. For a single minute I thought he was going to kiss me – me, standing there in my doublet and hose. I wrenched my arm from his hand and almost ran down the street, calling an incoherent farewell behind me. I did not go to the booksellers the next Saturday.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
August 1599

I’d thought the rows were bad enough before he even went to Ireland. That’ll teach me. He hadn’t reached his ship before the complaining letters started, all about how he’d gone armed before but not behind, meaning that we’d be stabbing him in the back. As if we haven’t had other things to think about while he’s been away! It was the last of July or near when the report came secretly to my husband that the Spanish were on the move again, and he sent it on to Master Secretary. It was the very next day when another of Essex’s complaints turned up: I suppose, to be fair, he could hardly have known it in advance, but it’s hard not to feel that young man has always been his own worst enemy.

I knew the contents of that letter before the queen did; one learns how to arrange these things when you’ve lived in a palace as long as I have, but this time it was easy. The messenger was my own kinsman on my father’s side, a promising young Carey.

Three months’ campaigning and what had he to show for it? Nothing, not a single real victory. Oh, he complains the rebels fight in woods and bogs, skirmish and run away. They’re armed by Spain, and more numerous than his troops, and he feels the lack of backing here at home. He’ll have heard that while he’s been away, Cecil has won mastership of the Court of Wards, and all that money Essex needs so badly.

I think Charles almost sympathises with him, oddly – of course they have both campaigned for her majesty. I can’t say I do: a woman has different loyalties.

Well! Now at last the country has seen what my husband can do, I’m happy to say. Three days after that first secret warning, we all heard that a hundred Spanish ships were on the way, and as August broke the town was in a panic, chains down across the roads and closing the gates to the City. And who did they look to to defend them? Charles. Yes, even her majesty. Appointed lieutenant and captain general over all forces south of the Trent, with powers to defeat invasion and rebellion by whatever means he saw fit. Declare martial law, punish disorder at his own discretion, even make statutes, as long as they were necessary to govern the army. That’s what the queen does when she really has confidence in somebody, I tell Lord Essex, silently. When she is certain of their loyalty. And the army Charles pulled together at Tilbury! Fifty thousand men and forty ships, all from nowhere in less than three weeks. That’s what the people of this country can do when they actually trust somebody, for all Lord Essex is the one with the easy popularity.

Of course there were naysayers. At one point there were rumours the queen was dying; there were even rumours that Charles, if you please, had whipped up the panic, to show Lord Essex, the absent hero, ‘that others could be followed as well as he’. My sister Philadelphia, always standing up for Essex, sniffed that Charles was always one to make a mountain out of a molehill – but that was after we’d heard that the Spanish fleet had sailed on by, to deal with the Dutch in another country. It’s the fourth invasion scare in hardly more years, and I suppose it’s got to feel like the boy who cried wolf. But of course my husband is right when he says that one fair day should not breed opinion it will never be foul weather again.

I told Philadelphia, what a pity her husband can’t be here to help us – but then again, when you think of the turmoil Lord Scrope has managed to create in his governance of the Border countries … She blushed – we’ve both got the scarlet blush of the red-haired woman – and then I looked at her as if something had just caught my eye, and said what a pity that red hair like ours shows the grey so easily. Petty, in the context, maybe.

You’d have thought Essex might have been quiet, at least, while all this was going on. Maybe given us a little Irish victory. Instead, it was hardly a week later that the news came. He stood opposite Tyrone’s army at last, and what was the outcome? A truce treaty! He should have brought us Tyrone’s head on a spike, not splashed across a ford to shake hands with the enemy, in view of both their watching armies. And we’re to believe that, in some mysterious way, it’s for the good of the country? Tell that to someone who hasn’t been watching court quarrels so long. My enemy’s friend is my enemy. That’s a maxim I learned from her majesty.

I didn’t see the letter with that news. That one was brought not by a Carey but by Essex’s man, one Cuffe. Still, the queen’s anger knew no concealment, and I am left to wonder that his lordship shows his hand so clearly – or, whether the hand there now before him was quite the one he had meant to play? I’m not surprised that his friend Bacon warned him against Ireland, and has now abandoned Essex’s cause entirely. And maybe, maybe, I’m not surprised that, when his lordship clamoured for the Irish job, Sir Robert Cecil helped to make it a possibility.

There was some satisfaction in knowing he didn’t want to go, not really. But he’d bragged of being the right man for the job so often, he could hardly complain when they took him at his word. It was a winning situation, you might say. If Essex pacifies Ireland, well then England has her victory. If he fails miserably – well, scales and balances, it may take him down a peg or two. Every day, I find myself growing in admiration for Master Secretary.

It’s barely a month later and I don’t know what shocked me more – what happened this morning, or what I heard just now, as I came up through the pantry. We’d hardly got the queen out of bed when we heard the uproar, outside her very door. I remember we all froze there – her in her shift, with her hair, what there is of it, every which way, her wig on the stand, and the whalebone bodies laid out on the bed. There was one girl kneeling on the floor ready to roll the silk stocking on, another standing with the sleeves ready, and we all stuck as we were, like parts of the same clockwork toy run down.

As he stood there, the violence of the door slamming behind him made the dried cowslip blossoms dance in the bowl of white wine – nothing like it to drive wrinkles away – and I saw his eye light on a pile of stained brown bandages, like something off a mummified corpse. Soak them in solution of lady’s mantle and it keeps the breasts firm, but I’ll admit they don’t look pretty.

Even Philadelphia looked thoroughly startled. I suppose, as much as anything else, it was the sheer incredulity. Almost half a century on the throne and now it comes, the sound we were always waiting for in the early days; the sound of men outside the door – shouting, angry.

He stank – that was the first thing I noticed. He must have been in the saddle since he landed from Ireland, and stewing himself into a muck sweat every inch of the way. But he went down onto his knees, babbling some nonsense about making her understand, and I hardly heard the words but the gesture would do, he was on his knees, no sword in his hand. I suppose it was then we all began to breathe again, just barely.

She’s at her best in an emergency, of course – always was, from a girl. She held out her hand and she spoke to him kindly, and seemed not even to know what she looked like, she who manages these things so carefully. I think I admired her then as much as I ever have – to sit there as bare of grace as a plucked chicken and make believe she didn’t feel diminished in any way. When she told him she would see him later he went away quite quietly, leaving her to face the day, and us to shut the doors on the whole court outside, gawping, as well they may. Oh, of course the insult to her hurts. I think we all felt it, even the young girls. To have her caught out like this, it lowers us all. In this world, a woman needs her mystery. They say the queen has two bodies: as a mortal, and as a monarch, one step from a divinity. What I say is, when your mortal body has just been exposed like this, it’s hard to take comfort in a theory.

But, all of that, that’s not what most shocks me.

As we stood for that moment at the open chamber doors, as they led Lord Essex away, I saw a man in Howard livery, and made sure he caught my eye. He slid out after Essex’s party – we don’t keep fools in our employ. I snapped at the girls to put the queen’s combing cloth about her shoulders, and to use the box comb carefully, and that this time they might get a quill and clean the brushes properly. I was making more bustle than I had to, I suppose, but it relieved me. I waited long enough to see that Philadelphia wasn’t supervising the choice of ribbons as she should. My sister has not the brains of a coney. ‘Lady Scrope!’ I said sharply, in public reproof, and she started, and signed to a maid where the ribbon knots should be pinned on the gown, for when the queen was ready. Then I said her majesty might wish to dress her head with the other pearl border, and made excuse to slip away. By now I reckoned the servitor and his news might be ready.

For the most part his words were reassuring. Essex himself, or so he claimed, had only ever planned to speak with the queen, though some in his party had talked more wildly. They’d met with Lord Grey on the way, so the man said, quite casually, and they’d tried to hold him back, to keep the advantage of surprise, but Lord Grey had got away from them and galloped ahead to the palace to warn Master Secretary.

The words seemed to burn into my brain. He’d galloped ahead to warn the Secretary, and what did the Secretary do with the warning? Nothing. How far ahead of the Essex crew had Lord Grey been? Only a few minutes, maybe. Yes, but how many minutes does it take, to run from the Secretary’s chamber towards her majesty’s, to call the guards – to shout a warning from one man to the other. It’s not even as though we were in Whitehall – Nonsuch is a small palace, for all that it’s so pretty.

Oh, I’m sure Cecil knew or guessed there was no real danger. I can’t believe he’d have risked her majesty. But for all that I’ve said myself it would be best if the queen saw soon what Essex could do, for all that, this still shocks me. I’d thought myself so shrewd, so awake on every suit. Now I feel like a child, groping my way through a maze, while above my head others, more grown up than I, see their way clearly.

October 1599

There was a knot of serving men blocking the gravel path through the garden as I came in to work at Burghley House on Monday. Usually they kept their distance from the clerks, but today any hearer was better than none, and one of the more impertinent boys spun away from the group long enough to speak to me.

‘Did you hear? They’ve got him at York House, just up the road, in the Lord Keeper’s custody. Lord Essex, silly!’ he added. He must have thought I hadn’t understood, but behind the blankness of my face I felt as if all the barrels of the lock inside my head were suddenly clicking open. I hadn’t thought much of Lord Essex these last weeks. Well, months, maybe. When men – when Martin Slaughter – spoke of him, even, it was almost as if they were speaking of a public stranger, as if there was a safe wall between the me I had become and the day at Wanstead, the moment at the tourney.

But I hadn’t heard Martin Slaughter speak of anything, of course, since that August day, that evening in the alley. I hadn’t seen or heard of him, and it felt almost as though those few weeks of companionship we’d shared had been swept away. If I were hiding myself, then events had helped me. No one could expect you to stroll around booksellers while London was preparing for a siege, and in the Secretary’s house we were all too busy to go gallivanting, anyhow. On the heels of that reflection, I seemed to see Martin Slaughter’s face, a faint look of hurt in his brown eyes. As I flinched away, my mind’s eye fell greedily on Lord Essex’s image, with the blind determination of a baby grasping at the breast. Only a few hundred yards away!

I knew I had to see him. It had been six months, almost to the day, since he’d gone away and now, as if to make up for the summer’s disloyalty, my very gut seemed to have kept the tally. I might not get into his presence. But I had to try, even if all I got to do in the end was to sit in the courtyard with the soldiers and their stories. If he’d returned in triumph, I might have been content to stand at the back of the crowds as they cheered, but he’d returned a captive, under the queen’s displeasure, and that seemed to open a space for me.

A few drops of rain started to spit down as I turned towards the gate and I blessed them. They gave me the excuse to pull my cap low enough to hide my eyes. I’d have staked a guinea that panic stared from them as surely as from a doe’s when the hunts-men hold her down and bare her throat for the knife, or a horse’s, when they fit the headpiece on before the tourney.

The luck was with me. As I turned in to York House the porter’s lodge was crowded with men and reeking with beer, and a bubble of frantic laughter rose up in my throat. Of course – they’d want, just like everybody else, to talk over the events of the last few days. The porter jerked a piece of sacking over the barrel as he turned towards me, caught out and ready to be surly. I just held up my satchel, bulging with papers, and let the badge on my cloak speak for me.

‘It’s all right – you can let him through. It’s Master Secretary’s boy.’ It was a clerk of the house who called out from the back, and he added something under his breath that made the rest of the men laugh drunkenly.

The courtyard was still quiet – I thought that when my lord’s baggage and his servants really started arriving, that porter had better put his head under the pump and get ready for the fray. I didn’t know the house, but they’d have put him upstairs and at the back: honourable quarters – just in case he was back on top of the dung heap tomorrow – and far enough from the street that any supporters couldn’t get to him too easily. A lad with a bucket pointed me to the right staircase, and the badge and the papers were enough to make the guard open the door. I stopped dead inside. I didn’t even know why I was here, never mind what I was going to say.

He was alone, thank God. He showed no surprise at seeing me. I suppose the appearance of one of the Secretary’s servants really didn’t rank high in the surprises of these days. He just held out his hand, for the papers he supposed I’d brought. It was a minute before he even recognised me.

‘Why – Jeanne.’ He said it like a man waking slowly from a dream. ‘Janny …’ I gazed at him dumbly. So much had happened in Ireland, yet on the surface he didn’t look much different and that’s what I blurted out, indignantly.

‘Oh, Janny,’ his eyes creasing up with laughter, ‘ten months, and battles, and high politics and the queen’s displeasure, and what a thing to say. I’ve had the Council on at me for three days now about Tyrone. Surely there’s something other than my looks you’re supposed to ask me?’

‘Is it true, that you came back from Ireland without permission? And that you shoved into her majesty’s chamber early and found her …’

‘Yes! Every bit of it! They hadn’t even cleared away the pot she used to piss in. I felt like the fox who’d got shut in the hen house. Mistress Russell shrieked as though I’d violated the Vestal Virgins’ shrine, and I thought my Lady of Nottingham was going to make the sign of the cross at me.’

‘How did she look?’ I seemed to have got stuck on a loop of trivialities, but it was what everyone wanted to know. When you’ve spent a lifetime gazing at an image of jewels and face paint, and being told it’s an icon of beauty, the idea of pulling down the conjurer’s screen and showing how the trick is worked brings out the wicked schoolboy in everybody.

‘The queen? Old.’ He’d sobered suddenly. ‘If you want the truth, I wouldn’t have recognised her at once – not from behind. They hadn’t got her wig on, and there was just this short, grey stubble. In her nightgown, without the dress and the jewellery, it could have been an old man sitting there.’ His eyes flicked up at me.

‘You know she’ll never forgive you.’

‘What, for the treaty? No, I tell you –’ He’d explained it all to the lords. He seemed to have forgotten he had no need to justify himself to me.

‘Not the treaty – for having seen her like that.’ He gazed at me uncomprehendingly. ‘No woman would.’ I could see him registering slowly that this was one area where I could speak with authority. But he shrugged it away.

‘She always forgives me.’ He jumped up and began striding around the room. An inkwell on the desk crashed to the floor: the very force of his convictions must make him clumsy. The guard stuck his head around the door in alarm, but Essex waved him off, ignoring the spreading stain on the floorboards. The servants would curse, when they tried to scrub that one away.

‘She’s got to forgive me.’ He was off now, talking wildly, half to himself, about the queen’s enemies, how everyone was against him but they’d all see, how he was the only one who gave a toss for the country. The words hardly registered, everybody knew the theme, and truth to tell it was hard to take it more seriously than when old Nan down the street used to start yelling about how the end of the world was nigh. It was the kind of thing they came on and roared in a play. But not for Lord Essex. His face was red, and he was sweating slightly. I smelt a strange acrid tang on his breath as he grabbed my shoulders and rounded on me.

‘Whose sake brought you here? Is it for Cecil – or for me?’ When I didn’t answer, he shook me. I saw my master’s face in my mind’s eye, knowing eyes under those arched brows. It seemed to make no demands, to leave the judgement to me.

‘Me. I mean, my own sake. I’m here for myself.’ It seemed to satisfy Lord Essex – or at least, to make him lose interest in me.

It was time to get out. I didn’t know what I’d come for, but I’d been wrong: this was a different Essex from the man at Wanstead, or at the tourney. And at any moment, someone was going to come along who wouldn’t fall back in awe at the mere sight of a handful of papers. Someone who would query my presence later, in silken tones, to the Secretary. At the door, I turned.

‘My lord – if there’s ever anything I can do.’ I didn’t even know what I meant, but he seemed hardly to hear me, and just as well, maybe. Later, down the road in an empty wine shop, with a beaker of mulled ale to still the tremble in my legs, I remembered that promises of loyalty to Lord Essex had a way of coming home to roost. They should not be given lightly.

Back at work, Sir Robert set me to translating a new volume on herbs that he’d been sent from France, though the litany of vervain and tansy, mallow and chamomile didn’t soothe me as it usually would. I was relieved that he didn’t say anything about Lord Essex – but then why should he? It was only much later I realised the guard on the door probably took extra pay to keep his ears open, and the Secretary knew everything already.

As the days passed and autumn edged towards winter, and the chill began to stick out under the late sun like the ribs under an alley cat’s fur, the tavern talk was still all of Lord Essex, and of how he was growing sicker in captivity, and whether he’d be out of custody for the tilt this Accession Day.

There came a Saturday when I couldn’t resist the booksellers any longer. And in any case, I knew I was being silly. Had been silly, in the alley that day. And there were some references in that new herbal I didn’t understand, and maybe I’d find something else that could help me … At any rate, that’s what I told myself.

My heart gave a queer leap when I saw his back in that brown doublet. Only a turned shoulder and a cap, but I had no doubt that it was he. I had time to notice the cloth was getting shabby before I reached him and, tentatively, put a hand on his arm. He spun around and for a second I saw warm gladness in his eyes before something more complicated took its place.

‘Jan!’ This time, he pronounced it harder than he usually did, so the boy’s name came out quite clearly. The name everyone else called me. ‘How nice to see you again. Master Cuffe, might I present Master de Musset?’ I hadn’t even noticed the man standing beside him – why should I? But now I found myself making a hasty bow to a lanky man in black, who barely acknowledged me. I had time to eye him while Martin was explaining that he and I had met here before, that I was a fellow book lover though our tastes differed occasionally. He was speaking as if I were the most ordinary acquaintance, but I couldn’t blame him for that, after last time, I thought miserably. And how did I expect him to introduce me, anyway, me with my cropped hair and clerk’s outfit? It might have been different if this Cuffe had been another actor, but somehow I knew he had nothing to do with that all-forgiving company. A pale face and somehow puffy under the tall-brimmed black hat, an air of self-consequence. Until his eyes fell on my livery button, he hardly looked at me.

‘A pleasure, Master de Musset. Martin, shall we? That new place you promised to show me …’ And Martin was off behind him, with a stranger’s hasty bow to me, and another hard look I couldn’t understand. I was left standing there, more disturbed than I’d thought I could possibly be.

I walked for a while. I didn’t know where I was going, but eventually I found I was circling the gardens outside the City. That wouldn’t get me anywhere, and I needed to eat. There was a tavern where I’d been with Martin several times – after all, they knew me there, and I knew the food. And why shouldn’t I dine there as well as anybody?

I’d have had no chance to turn and run, he was watching out, and he sprang up as soon as he saw me.

‘Jeanne – thank God, I was afraid you wouldn’t come. Look, I’m sorry –’ But he broke off. Sorry for what, exactly? He seemed to realise that explanations would only get us into worse difficul-ties. With an air of lightness that was only slightly forced – he was an actor, after all – he began to talk of other things. The book he’d found, the unseasonable weather, and the news. Heaven knows, news wasn’t hard to come by.

Everyone knew Lord Essex had fallen sick of the Irish flux; just as they knew Tyrone had taken up arms again in Ireland, at the end of the month’s treaty. One of the secret clerks had said Lord Essex’s illnesses came as easily as a whore’s kisses, and for just the same reason – adding that, this time, if he were hoping to move the queen, it wasn’t going to work. I opened my mouth to force myself to tell Martin Slaughter that – I couldn’t go on just nodding about the harvest, and I had a dim sense that if we spoke of his lordship, Martin might somehow help me to make sense of the mixture of feelings that were in me. But he forestalled me.

‘Master Cuffe, whom you met earlier – he’s one of Lord Essex’s men. In fact, he’s one of his foremost secretaries. Professor of Rhetoric at Oxford, he used to be. It was who brought Lord Essex’s last letter back from Ireland.’ He was speaking not without effort, or so it seemed to me. And I was struggling to frame my reply.

‘A responsible position – especially in these times.’ I had to bite back other words. For God’s sake, why? When I’ve heard the disapproval with which you spoke of Essex before, why are you cosying up to his man, and why now are you sitting here speaking of him in this guarded way? I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’d had no training for this kind of thing in my life without society.

‘I must go. I’m glad to have seen you, Martin.’ He made no move to detain me. But he looked at me again, and this time I’d have sworn I could interpret it, as a plea. Or an apology.

 * * * 

One morning in early November, with the news from York House that Lord Essex was sicker, Sir Robert sent for me. I was to take a letter to York House, and give it into Lord Essex’s own hand. I was … He paused, as if uncertain what to say.

The study window gave out onto the garden. He stood there, gazing towards the river, though the day was too thick to see clearly. ‘Tell me how he really is,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got a doctor’s report for every time he takes physic, but they’re the stew without the meat. I don’t doubt he’s fretted himself into high fever by now, but is there any more to it? He always was one who could die of a cold for thinking it was a catalepsy, as our old nurse used to say.’ I had almost forgotten that they had been boys together. But for Sir Robert the memories, good and bad, can’t ever have been far away.

‘Take him some fruit, as a token of my good will. Nothing raw if he’s got the flux. Pears in wine? Or some of that quince jelly? Tell them to give you whatever you want. See if you can find anything in the garden, maybe.’ He met my eyes briefly, and I might almost have thought he knew the pleasure the giving would be to me. Knew that the wide-eyed gabble in the streets, that Lord Essex was failing and the doctors despaired, had felt like something gnawing a hole in me. Hastily, Sir Robert gestured me to go, as if half ashamed of sounding so solicitous over the man who was supposed to be his enemy.

I ordered the pears, and the jelly, and a bottle of the cordial of red rose hips, and a dish of crab apples baked in honey too. The beds in the garden were dug over by now, but I found a few sprigs of a bramble blooming late, and grey lavender spikes where the scent still lingered, and the first blue flowers of next year’s rosemary. Rosemary for remembrance. With fingers that trembled slightly in their haste, I bound them into a nosegay.

At York House, things were more in order than they had been. Lord Essex had never been allowed to have his own servants join him, but now he was attended – guarded – properly. I could never have bluffed my way in, as I did that first day. Even with Sir Robert’s authority, I was stopped at the door by my lord Essex’s doctor, who lifted the cloth from the basket I carried and sniffed at the content suspiciously.

‘What do you want to do, boy – poison him?’ The word hung in the air between us like an accusation, and the doctor retreated hastily. ‘I meant, such indigestible foods, for a man in his lord-ship’s condition …’ He signed for a man to carry the delicacies away, no doubt to be enjoyed at his own dinner, but I clung obstinately to my little nosegay.

‘A token of Sir Robert’s goodwill.’ The doctor nodded, grudgingly.

Inside the chamber, the air was foul. The servants had done what they could, but when the patient has voided, and voided again, the very hangings take up the smell of sickness, change the linen and the rushes as often as you may. The voice from the great bed was no more than a thread. ‘Janny?’

I would hardly have known him, his cheeks were so fallen in. There were sores around his mouth, and his long hair hung limply. Under the watchful eyes of his attendants, he held out a hand for the letter, but his grasp was too uncertain to break the seal and he gestured me closer. His breath was hot and sour. ‘Read it to me.’

The words themselves were nothing much. Sir Robert was grieved to hear of Lord Essex’s illness – wished to assure Lord Essex of his prayers and his friendship – hoped Lord Essex would soon be restored to health, as to her majesty’s most princely favour. He seemed to take them as routine – with disappointment, I thought, as a piece of mere court flummery. With a finger he brushed the flowers. ‘For me? From Sir Robert? Really?’ I shook my head dumbly. The ghost of his sweetest smile flickered over his face, and the bridle of pleasure seemed almost to lend him flush of strength. Absurd to think he could care that way for a mere nobody’s affection, but he’d always responded like a shy girl to flattery.

‘I give humble thanks to all my well wishers. Say as much to Master Secretary.’ He turned his face on the pillow, and the doctor hurried forward officiously. I made my way out into the street with my head in a whirl. In the pride of his strength and his ambition, Lord Essex had been able to turn my mind upside down. Now for the first time I had a presentiment that his weakness might give him an even stronger hold over me.

When I went back to the house to make my report, they told me Sir Robert was at Whitehall with the court, and had left word I should make my report to him there. The corridors and the courtiers no longer held quite the terrors they once would have for me – I’d been here before, stepping soft behind some more experienced secretary. But I stuck close to the page as he led me through the maze. It was a rambling, old-fashioned rabbit warren of a place, courtyards sprouting literally hundreds of doorways giving onto poky rooms, the kind of rooms made for secrets – and for disappointment, it seemed to me. But as we thrust onwards into its heart, further than I had ever been before, the richness of the decorations made me gasp. It was like stepping into the pages of a missal.

I checked when the page passed before me through the great hall, and the guards’ room, and to the doors of the very Presence Chamber. The boy, an impertinent scrap, contemptuously jerked his head for me to go on in. A throng of ladies and gentlemen were there, but among them to my relief I could see Sir Robert, talking to a middle-aged lady all in black, whose curls showed reddish under the back of her cap. Over her turned shoulder, he saw me. I knew him well enough to read his moods by now, and he was not sorry to come over and speak to me. I told him what I’d seen and he nodded as if to say, yes, after all, just what he’d known already, when there came a rustle of skirts and the click of heels on the floor and a sharpening of the atmosphere, as if the very air itself had sprung to attention, to tell me that this heralded her majesty.

I stood just inside the door, and lowered my eyes submissively. I tried to pretend I was part of the furniture, but of course she had no eyes for me.

‘Ah, Lady Scrope, as festive as ever, I see,’ she said in clear, cold tones as she swept past me, and the black-clad lady ducked her rusty head submissively. As her ladies followed hastily I heard an exasperated murmur – ‘Philadelphia …’ – spoken exasperatedly.

I could see the flowery hems of the younger maids’ skirts, and hear the hiss and bubble of their whispered chatter, but the queen and Sir Robert spoke together in low tones at the far end of the room. After a few minutes I grew bolder and peeped up under my lashes, only to find that the queen was looking directly at me. Drop my gaze as fast as I might, I was still hooked, like a fish on a line, by the power of that hard black eye.

Old she might be, and indeed, as she passed there had been the faintest whiff of decay. The image Lord Essex had conjured up for me had destroyed the illusion she was anything but an old woman, soon to die, and for the first time I truly understood the urgent squabbling, the need to secure a future, of those nearer at hand who lived with this knowledge every day. But nothing could take her force away.

I rode back to Burghley House behind the Secretary, behind the guards who went everywhere with him these days. These were hard times to be Sir Robert Cecil on the London streets, or even to wear any trace of his livery. Rumours of Lord Essex’s sickness, of his close imprisonment, were on every corner and the people knew who they blamed. Mostly it appeared only in their sullen eyes, but occasionally some urchin, bolder than the rest, would catcall, or yell out something about ‘pen gents’ from the safety of the crowd. As we drew near the house, men were scrubbing at the wall and I cocked an eyebrow at a groom, enquiringly.

‘Yes, another one, this morning,’ he confirmed in an under-tone. ‘“Here lies the toad”, it said.’ We were beginning to get used to the graffiti.

As we dismounted and the grooms came to the horses’ heads, I would have melted away, but a motion from Sir Robert stopped me. ‘Walk with me a little, in the garden,’ he said. ‘I need the fresh air to clear my head.’ To most people there would have been little to see except the bare shape of the borders, but he looked at the clipped hedges and fine raised earth of the neatly turned beds with a true gardener’s eye.

His servants knew his habits; even in winter, the sand on the paths was freshly raked, and there hadn’t yet been a frost hard enough to make them bring the birds indoors from the aviary. A small bag of grain hung ready to hand and he flung a pinch to the twittering occupants, absent-mindedly.

‘He’s been writing to Scotland, you know.’ No need to ask who ‘he’ might be. I suppose in a way it should have been no surprise. Everyone knew that, of all the contenders, the Scots king had to be the best bet to succeed her majesty. I daresay there wasn’t a courtier or an officer of state whose mind’s eye didn’t turn that way. But even to say so aloud was treason, and for a private citizen to approach the head of a foreign power, in a matter of such magnitude, was worse than that – it was treachery.

‘Are you certain?’ I said it baldly, almost as if I spoke to an equal, but he didn’t reprove me. Although he didn’t answer, either, just passed me the grain and gestured at the aviary. A dozen sentences hung around my lips – Do you have proof ? and Surely he wouldn’t? and Now’s your chance to crush him, if you want to – but there seemed nothing I could safely say.

After a minute he moved on, by the wall where in summer the peach tree bloomed, and where, on a warm evening, you could hear the laughing couples on the other side make their way up to the fields. Abruptly he paused, and though his grave face gave no sign, I felt his dismay.

A robin lay at his feet, its feathers bright as on the aviary birds, but a stick had been driven through its red breast, heavy enough to carry it over the wall, if flung with sufficient force. The man whose name was often made into Robin gazed at it a second, summoning his calm, then stepped back towards the house without a word. It was I, left behind, whose eyes pricked with a sudden burn of sympathy.

I grabbed the stick and would have thrown it back – but the more people who saw it, the more the insult would be a tavern story. Instead I seized a spade that a gardener had left and began digging a shallow grave, clumsily. I was too angry to think of the question I should have been asking. The news about Lord Essex and the Scots king – no doubt it was true. He’d never neglect such an opportunity. And Scotland was far enough away that maybe James would believe Lord Essex when he said he alone could rule the queen. Or maybe not. Everyone said the Scots king was canny. But – and it only came to me that night, when the call of the Watch had woken me – true or not true, prudence or treachery, why was Sir Robert telling me?

Cecil
October 1599

He’s been writing to Scotland: well, of course he has. Cuffe must be putting something together every week, or nearly. Erratic in his behaviour Essex may be, but he’s not such a fool as to ignore what any ploughboy in the field could see, that her majesty cannot grace the throne forever, that change must come sure as night follows day. And I’m sure he’s loving it – a clandestine correspondence, with all its perfume of rebellion and of secrecy; a chance to preen himself again as England’s saviour, and for a new audience which hasn’t already seen through his games. James may take Essex at his own valuation – or nearly, everyone agrees that the Scots king is canny. But they also say good-looking young men can hope he’ll look on them indulgently.

That could never have been my way to appeal to him. I would not want it to be. But any question of approach is for the future: for now, the faintest question of it is impossible. Ruination if it came to the queen’s ears – though just occasionally the dizzying thought takes me, what if the queen is one step before me? What if she knows we are all calculating the future, and it’s from the safety of that knowledge that she allows herself to indulge her folly? For it is folly, for an old and childless monarch to scream that to speak of her successor is to set her winding sheet before her eyes; and yet her majesty is the furthest thing from a fool; and so logically … I push the thought away, for there is no profit in it. Even if I could safely send letters north I wouldn’t do it; not to appear as second-best claimant to the king’s attentions at a moment when he is dazzled by Essex, when Essex will have told him I am the enemy.

My father could never understand that I am a gambling man. I told him it gives me good access to the gallants at court to play, and to play high. He nodded, grudgingly. But one thing gambling has taught me: I know when the player who sits out a round may rise the winner at the end of the evening, and I know other things too. I know the value of a wild card, and that’s what I have been offering Essex, ever since I sent Jeanne to Wanstead that day.

Oh, the chances of its paying dividend could never be rated high, but in this game you scatter your bread upon the waters and if one crumb in a thousand comes back to you as a loaf, you’re happy. There are spies informing upon spies in the Essex household, but knowledge can never be too dearly bought, as Walsingham used to say. Not that the gathering of information is all of it, of course: information, disinformation; lies to draw truths, sprats to catch mackerel; and the faint fishy reek of scandal to be spread, maybe. We can use Jeanne’s innocence as well as her isolation, and perhaps even the uncertainty over her sex. I could have had no excuse to send a girl to Lord Essex, openly; but he would never have treated a real boy so, at the tourney. We can use Essex’s charm as well as his vanity: use your opponent’s own strengths to overthrow him, the sergeant used to tell the boys – the other boys – when they practised in the armoury.

You can always use charm, and in more ways than one. You can always use vanity. My father could count on Walsingham’s spies: now Walsingham’s daughter is married to Lord Essex, and I have to do things differently.

So: James. I do not move, I wait. I wait and see. It’s what my father would expect of me. On his deathbed he laid it on me as a charge, to ensure a smooth transition for our country. But it was not rash action he had in mind: nothing ill-considered, nothing hasty. Rather an onward-looking gardener’s eye, to see that the beds which hold the future’s crop are dug and seeded carefully. Only – I do wonder sometimes, how it would be, to live in the present, unquestioningly. To know that the future is out of your hands, as surely as a gambler when he turns over the cards, or a milkmaid who’s been with a boy, and can’t do anything else but wait for the missed courses and the tender breasts that mean an unwanted pregnancy.

Jeanne
November 1599

Queen Elizabeth had sat on the throne of England since before I was born and I suppose we had all come half to believe the legend of her immortality. But sometimes, it’s as if your eyes have been opened to a particular subject and suddenly, that’s all you can see. Of course I’d thought about the future – the future after Queen Elizabeth – who hadn’t? The ploughboy in the field maybe. But somehow, underneath the speculation, there must have lain a vague sense that these things were sorted out somewhere. That someone knew what the answer would be. The king of Scots, the Earl of Hertford’s son, or my lord of Shrewsbury’s niece. Even, God forbid, the Infanta of Catholic Spain, and that thought had seemed to bring it closer to me. Seemed almost to make me think that everyone had a part to play.

Now, not only did every tavern conversation half heard seem to contain an illicit whisper, but I truly understood for the first time how anxious, how ambitious, how afraid all the nobles were – the ones too highly placed to hide their heads in a crowd, the ones with most to lose. Yes, even – especially – the Secretary.

A new king, or queen, might seek new advisers. The race would be to those who had offered their support early. Yet who was more firmly barred from offering support than he who was tied to the old regime most closely? It must be like one of those baitings, where they tie the bear so tight he can’t even fight against the dogs. Or one of those dreams, where you can see the danger coming, but it’s as if you’re mired in quicksand, and can’t run away.

I said as much to Martin Slaughter, sitting inside the tavern, this time, driven in by the threat of rain. This was the first Saturday I’d seen him without Master Cuffe at his side (yes, I had been keeping watch) and I was determined to make the most of the opportunity. But it seemed to me, sadly, that we were glad, now, of a subject of conversation outside ourselves. As I spoke, he looked at me – what? I almost thought, contemptuously. That, or as if he felt sorry for me. I suppose I had been slow on the uptake. I suppose I didn’t grasp as much as I should of the world around me. In my confusion, I almost said that his friend Master Cuffe must know all about that problem, but I bit the words back as they rose to my lips. Just as well I did – almost as I began speaking, a dark shadow materialised behind me.

‘Martin – are you ready?’ I don’t think Master Cuffe even glanced at me. A tiny spark of anger rose in me. I didn’t have much sense of my own importance, but it was too much to be ignored this way.

‘You have an appointment, Martin? You should have told me.’ Now Cuffe did flick his eyes down to me.

‘Master Slaughter is taking a role in a very special new play,’ he informed me, and my tiny bubble of pride was pricked, like the pigs’ bladders boys blow up and explode on fairground day. He hadn’t told me.

‘Oh, you should have said. I must come to see it.’ Now Martin looked embarrassed, quite definitely, and it was Master Cuffe who answered, shortly.

‘It’s a private theatre – near Blackfriars. You’ll have heard of them, no doubt, but they’re only for the gentry.’

Martin had leapt to his feet when Cuffe arrived. Now, silent, he allowed himself to be ushered away.

The news from York House was always worse. Lord Essex could only be lifted from his bed long enough for the servants to change the sheets soaked with black voided matter. Lord Essex was so sick his doctors despaired; and the preachers in the London pulpits offered prayers for his recovery. The queen didn’t like that, so they said. She’d never been a woman who wanted to share her place in the sun, and now, when so much in life had left her, she clung onto the love of her people, jealously. But she sent her own doctors to him: teams of them – a sign she still cared, surely?

‘A sign she prefers a man when he’s beneath her, not on top,’ said the gangling clerk, grinning bawdily.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
29 November 1599

I swear, now I see the queen in the cold winter sunlight, that black satin sleeve looks positively faded, and as I stand behind her chair, my face, I may trust, as expressionless as ever, there is an angry litany running through my head of what I’ll say when I have the maids alone.

Must I go down into the park myself, I’ll say, and pull the ivy off the trees? And then mash the leaves until the rinsing water runs dark – or is it just possible that one of you could see the laundresses do their work properly? I can see in my mind’s eye the pout there’ll be on each young face, but they won’t voice their thoughts, not in front of me. Mind you, her majesty won’t be wearing much more black this season, or not if I have anything to say about it. We’ve got enough crows at court already.

If Lady Essex wants to wear mourning while her husband is in prison, well, I suppose I’ve nothing to say. He is her husband, after all, and the poor girl with a baby on the way. But Philadelphia! What cause has she to go into mourning, pray? – and then to go round telling everybody Lord Essex’s troubles have taken her joy in living away. I suppose I may be thankful she didn’t take it upon herself to spell out to the queen precisely why she feels – I trust I have her words right – that while virtue and valour lie smitten to the heart, it is time to mourn for the country. I told her, if she wasn’t careful people would be saying she was just another old woman fallen for a handsome young face, and she pretended to look shocked and to hush my mouth, as if I need lessons in discretion from the likes of her, as if I’d be meaning her majesty. And then she said, with that little dazzle of conscious daring on her face, the one she had as a child when she knew she was being naughty, that that’s what the men do so why shouldn’t we, and she hadn’t seen Emilia around court so much recently. And I had to hold my hands hard not to slap her, for we all know my father had Emilia Lanier in keeping the years before he died but to mock like that at his memory … And then she said, how is Charles, by the way? I told her, with forty far behind it was time to put off these young girl’s tricks, and she said I’d never been young, anyway. My sister is a flighty woman. I was never able to be flighty. Those six years in age I have over her feel more like something she has over me. Six years, just the length of the reign of old Queen Mary, so that I grew up in the dark days, the burning days, when anyone with Boleyn blood in their veins walked fearfully, while she stepped straight out from the schoolroom into our own queen’s first heyday. Any disturbance in the court sees her darting above it, zestful as a gadfly. It’s enough to make me wish that husband of hers would come down from his precious northern castle occasionally and give her something else to think about: all these years of marriage she’s had and just the one baby.

These last few weeks, the queen has been calling for Philadelphia to sit up late with her as often as for me.

I couldn’t believe it when Lady Warwick told me where they’d been yesterday. I thought everything was as it should be. Tomorrow the queen will have her complaints against Lord Essex read out, and it will be Charles’ chance to have his say. He’ll be able to tell the world that if he’d had the army Lord Essex was given, he could have marched it clear to Spain, as he has so often said to me. I could have sworn the queen was as annoyed by Philadelphia’s folly as I am myself: she’s certainly been speaking of it despitefully. But then to go out on the river with just Lady Warwick, and to have herself rowed down to York House privately. Lady Warwick swears they didn’t even get to Essex’s sickroom, in the end, just walked in the garden with the Lord Keeper, and came away quite quietly, but that’s almost worse in a way. Well, no, not worse, but it makes the queen look like a lovesick laundry maid, or one of those laughable suitors in the old songs who just wanted to be near their beloved and probably wouldn’t have known what to do about it if they were wedded and bedded decently.

She’d said that if Lord Essex had been her own son she’d have had him shut up in the highest tower in England for his wicked folly. When the wife of one of Lord Essex’s crew – Lady Harington, it was – tried to excuse her husband’s part in it all, she said that no doubt Lady Harington was doing her wifely duty, but that she was the queen and she had her duty to her husband the country. Now this. It makes her look foolish. It makes me feel foolish, as if there are things about the queen I’ve failed to understand. As if there are things that are closed to me. And the worst of it is, I see Philadelphia’s hand, even though she may not have been in the boat with her majesty.

What, my sister intercedes for Essex, and Essex has become the proposer of James, and next thing we know we have a king who owes his crown to Philadelphia’s meddling? All my life I’ve been careful to stand a little apart, to ask few favours of her majesty. It is one reason why she trusts me. But this – I’ve tried never to have much truck with fear, or no more than any woman with children must do. No truck with the foolish fears, at least. We who grew up in the middle of this century knew there were enough real dangers to endure, without going out to meet ideas halfway. But now I find myself fearful, and I do not quite know why. I do not know which thought rattles me more: that the queen may still have a foolish heart for Essex, or that there may be sense in Philadelphia’s folly.

Cecil
30 November 1599

I look on it as one of my advantages that I never make the mistake of underestimating her majesty – unlike so many others, unlike even my father, maybe. He spoke to her always as an elder, however respectfully – I must frame my words more carefully. But care comes naturally to me. And I am aware that I have never known for certain how much she is really – was really? – under Essex’s spell, or whether she dices with danger as one leans over the side of a ship, half dreaming the next big crash of the waves might carry you away. Or, as one stakes one’s last card at the tables, maybe.

When I said that to Lizzie once, she looked at me as if I were missing something important – almost pityingly. I am reluctant to take onto my back the burden of doubt such a thought would load on me, but better that than really to have failed to understand. The queen has two bodies, and one is frail and mortal, all too surely. If it is sense enchantment we are talking here, the sheer power of his long body, then I can make reckoning, whether or not I understand. And there are other things I do understand: I understand that the queen, that any woman, has fears that may be hidden from me.

I have never been a man who has much truck with fear; not like Essex with his suspicious mind, and his imagination’s tyranny. Dangers are real and present and all around us, and I see them clearly, as my father trained me to do. But by the grace of God, rewarding our own uttermost efforts, we can prevail against them and the world work out the ordained way.

Oh, I understand fear, as any effective statesman must do: I have doled it out in judicious measure, as a doctor might a pill – spread whispers about our enemies, had a witness shown the rack – but its conquest, in myself, has been my victory. Still the thought of the queen and Essex makes me uneasy, makes me wonder what wheels have been turning where even I cannot see. Makes me wonder – just faintly, in moments of fatigue, in the night – whether I and my like have got things wrong, and that thought does frighten me.

Jeanne
December 1599

The more word spread of my lord Essex’s illness, the more the people in the streets grumbled he’d been treated harshly.

‘Held in close confinement without even a trial, shows they know they’ve got nothing against him. Why, you wouldn’t treat a dog that way.’

That must be why the queen had her complaints against him read out, and every member of the Council, from the Secretary to the Lord Admiral, had their bit to say. That he had mismanaged the Irish campaign, that he had wasted a fortune in public money, and made a shameful treaty with the Irish leader. But in the clerks’ room I had to listen to even darker stories. I’d taken to dropping in there at the end of the day, with a flagon of warm ale from the inn on the corner. The old clerk cracked a scribe’s joke about Greeks and gifts, but he let the spicy heat melt his discretion away.

There were letters – he said – decoded in the utmost secrecy, from agents in Ireland who suggested Lord Essex had been something more than clumsy. That it wasn’t just Tyrone had been one too many for him, and that he’d let himself be manoeuvred into that foolish treaty – that the friendship between them was of older date, that when Lord Essex was sent to Ireland he already had an alliance with the man he was supposed to defeat, and maybe even ideas what he could do if he struck a deal for that man’s army. I’d always seen him as a mouse of a man, with eyes grown rheumy and little wizened paws to hold his papers, and I’d come to grow fond of him over the months, but now I must have gazed at him as if he’d bared a rat’s fangs.

‘What, made a fool of you too, boy, has he?’ He said it almost jeeringly, though his face was turned away. I answered something so pompous I could have learned it from a prayer book, about being horrified at such perfidy, and he bared yellow teeth and snuffled into his mug disbelievingly.

 * * * 

There came a day after the middle of the month when, having been out at Twickenham viewing a new consignment of plants Master Gerard had ordered, I was making my way back to the horse ferry near Whitehall through the clammy yellow light at the fading of the day. As I rode east it seemed to me that there were more crowds gathered than was usual for a week day and, now I thought of it, surely as I’d come up from the village to the south I’d heard the ghost of bells tolling on the wind. I kicked the horse to go faster, and leant forward anxiously. At the great house there was no more bustle than usual – or no more than I could be sure wasn’t just my fancy, but I hurried to the clerks’ room just the same. The gangling boy was there, with his loose wide mouth and the shiny-faced pleasure he always seemed to show in others’ misery. He raised a mug in a mocking toast.

‘What, you come back to join the mourning party?’

I froze. It seemed to me my face must have ceased to function the way it normally did, but luckily he went on, oblivious.

‘You’ve missed a fine day of it, trekking all that way out after a few new daisies. Some fool spread the story his lordship had finally shat himself to death, and they’ve been ringing the bells all over London.

‘Oh, it’s not true,’ he added, regretfully. ‘But the rumours, and the counter rumours, and the wailing in the streets – you can guess how well that went down with her majesty. Sir Robert’s been off to the palace, and I doubt he’ll be back today.’ He giggled, and drank again. It had become a funny story. I raised a hand, as if to gesture ‘I give up’ or ‘Tell me another one’, and turned away. I think I managed the ghost of a grin but it didn’t matter, he wasn’t really looking at me.

As I walked back to my lodging I was worrying, like a dog with a bone, at two distinct feelings inside of me. One was a shudder for what might have been. I’d had the tale with the truth, the fever with the medicine, but there was still a shiver there for what might have been. I was glad I had gone to Twickenham that day. But there was maybe, too, just a faint cold surprise, like a powdering of frost, that the thought of a world without Lord Essex didn’t touch me more deeply.

The next day I found out what did touch me: nothing here I could even pretend to find funny. I was walking in to work in the morning when I recognised the voice behind me. Sure enough it was Master Cuffe, with Martin Slaughter a pace behind him, like a lackey. We all came to a halt, of course, and this time even Master Cuffe deigned to acknowledge me with a nod, though he went on with what he’d been saying to Martin.

‘… and now everyone can see. Why, there were women sobbing in the streets as though it were the queen herself had passed away.’

Martin and I both blenched. No one who wanted to keep their ears spoke openly, in the streets, about death and her majesty in the same breath, but there was an air of barely contained excitement about Master Cuffe, and he swept on regardless.

‘I told his lordship it just showed how the people feel about him, and as you yourself said, Martin’ – he nodded, condescendingly – ‘every actor knows there’s one moment when he has to step out on stage and make his presence felt, and if you don’t seize it you’ll be stuck forever on the sidelines of the play.’

I looked at Martin in quick horror, but he wouldn’t catch my eye. He was nodding at Cuffe, almost sycophantically. What had he been saying, what was this role Lord Essex was supposed to play? We’d talked about this, we both understood deep in our gut that what mattered in real life wasn’t drama and glory, not if blood in the streets was the price you had to pay. We both agreed. Didn’t we? Cuffe must have mistaken his meaning – sure enough, Martin was holding out a restraining hand and I breathed again. He’d explain that he’d only been talking for talk’s sake, God forbid anyone should take it seriously. But no –

‘Henry’ – Henry? – ‘not here. You never know who might be listening.’ This was worse. This meant for sure they weren’t just talking generalities. And then Martin put his hand on Cuffe’s arm, to turn him away from me. From me. I went on to Burghley House deeply uneasy – yes, and more than uneasy. I was angry.

We shared a camaraderie these days, we Secretary’s men. One or two of the brighter sparks even took to sporting a quill pen through the lacing of their cloak. Pen gents, were we, and despised by those who liked their lords all hot for death or glory? Well, we’d see who laughed loudest in the end, wouldn’t we? I laughed along with that, too, and it wasn’t altogether a lie. My thoughts of Lord Essex didn’t permeate, quite, the rest of my life. They were like some dangerous animal I kept in another room, and had to feed occasionally.

The animal could live as well off curses as kindness; grew fat on disapproval and jealousy. As Christmas drew near, we heard Lady Essex had been allowed to see her husband – had hung around the court, dressed in mourning weeds, until the queen took pity. We heard his sister visited too; and if ever I’d fantasised making one in the group around his bedside, that news killed the foolish daydream in me. I’d seen her at court, swishing by in a fanfare of pearls and lace, and lawn so fine her beauty shone through it. She hadn’t noticed me – another dun clerkly mouse – but it made me uneasy to be around that triumphant femininity.

There was no such sting in the thought of the old queen. That Christmas, as she feasted at Richmond there was talk of her taking a new favourite, Pembroke’s heir; a new suitor in preparation for a new century. She danced three or four galliards at the Twelfth Night celebrations, and I am sure I wished her happy. I wondered if Martin Slaughter would be celebrating with Master Cuffe, and in a mood of sheer self-pity, I wondered if I were the only one lonely.

 * * * 

Winter is the waiting season. Sometimes in London you can forget that, but it only took a few moments in the garden to remind me. The brown frozen beds preached patience. Wait – for the warmth, for the new shoots, for the turn of the year. It was as if the earth itself were holding its breath.

When the change does come, it comes quickly – in the earth, anyway. It was only a week after the melt of the snow before the first snowdrops showed their heads. I picked a few, when the gardeners weren’t looking, and sniffed their faint powdery fragrance. Soon there would be a gleam of yellow in the stiff buds of the wild daffodils, the Lent lilies, and a touch of green – the buds schoolboys nibble for the first fresh taste of the season – on a sheltered hawthorn tree. It was still February when I found the very first of the fat sweet violets, their leaves almost as perfumed as the velvet flowers, were dropping purple heads. Soon they would make a pool under the mulberry tree.

‘Amazing flowers, I always think. Something so lush should really come out in May.’ I pulled myself together and bowed, hastily. Sir Robert had come up behind me. ‘Have you ever noticed that these big scented violets actually come out before the little woodland sort? I’m sure there’s food there for an allegory.’ He went on with hardly a break: ‘I shall be going to York House this afternoon.’ He paused for a moment. ‘I think perhaps you should come with me.’ He sounded almost regretful – or perhaps it was just that he had phrased it oddly. But I wasn’t thinking about Sir Robert, I wasn’t even questioning why me, out of all the clerks who could take any notes more appropriately. As I dropped my flushed face in acknowledgement, my heart was beating too rapidly.

Sir Robert ordered a carriage, unusually, for such a short journey, and summoned me to sit with him, but he hardly spoke. When I ventured to peep sideways, he looked like a man with a lot on his mind. Just what, was known to everybody.

The queen had ordered that Lord Essex should face trial in Star Chamber, so that his faults, she said, should be plain to see. Those who the beer had made pot-valiant said, instead, that this was his chance to prove his own case. Perhaps that was what was making Sir Robert look like a soldier in the cold light of dawn, when he knows the battle is on the way. I heard him sigh, as if he had reached a decision about something, but one he did not enjoy.

Lord Essex was no longer in his bedchamber. He was seated in the study that by rights belonged to the master of York House; and when Sir Robert was announced he paused before he rose, just long enough to make it clear that this was no more than a voluntary courtesy, to a commoner from a member of the nobility.

‘Master Secretary – how kind of you to visit me. I am all the more grateful since the pleasure has been so long delayed.’ It was the flourishing salute before a duel of words, but Sir Robert, I saw, was not going to play. He stood silent a moment, head slightly bowed, and suddenly I saw them as the boys they must have been – Sir Robert four years the elder, to be sure, but, with his slight frame and stooping back, outstripped by the other every day.

‘My lord – I am happy to see you so much recovered. The more so since I have come to make your lordship a plea.’ I stood three steps behind, lost in admiration, as the web of words wove round me.

He said he had no desire for the trial to go ahead. I could see Essex quickly casting around in his mind to judge whether this was a bluff, and deciding it was not. His nature, and his life, had made him see bogeys wherever he looked, but he was not a fool. Perhaps, too, that shared boyhood had given each some understanding of the other. Or perhaps it just made it easy for Lord Essex to underestimate the Secretary.

The master was sketching a picture of the chaos that might follow the conflict of a trial. The rioting in the streets, the rumours in the night. And this was the beauty of it: no one could doubt the truth of Sir Robert’s hatred of chaos, his conviction that the order of England must be maintained. It was not quite clear whether he was suggesting the rioters would be protesting or celebrating the queen’s or the earl’s victory … It was not quite clear whether he was urging (begging!) the earl to put an end to the situation for his own safety, or for her majesty’s. Both at once – the pill, and the pastille too, maybe.

He managed to suggest to the earl that – again – his country needed him: needed him first, of course, to set himself at liberty by putting an end to this comedy, but needed him, too, more fundamentally, needed the kind of man of action he had proved himself to be. The kind he, Robert Cecil, Robert Crookback, Master Secretary could never be.

I was ashamed, when I thought about it afterwards, but at the time, I fell for it completely. Ashamed, most of all, that I let my master, the cleverest man in England, convince me that he was a creature of no moment, just because his limbs were not long, and he didn’t have the kind of charisma a street corner comedian might envy. But when the earl, wholly dazzled but still slightly doubting, glanced around the room for reassurance until his eyes lit on me, I know mine glowed back at him with an urgent plea.

I almost spoiled the point of the quill in my eagerness, when Sir Robert signed me to take down the earl’s letter of apology to her majesty.

‘The tears in my heart have quenched all the sparkles of pride that were in me,’ he dictated, with moisture, indeed, brightening his eyes. The words were abject, but we were wrought up to a pitch, all three of us, where subjection seemed like glory. Yes, I still think, all three. The best tellers of tales believe their own story, at least for as long as their performance lasts.

It was enough. There would be no trial, no riots. For Lord Essex, no sentence publicly proclaimed – but also no public victory. As we walked back to the carriage, the letter safe in my satchel, I noticed my master was limping slightly, the slight cast to his shoulders more noticeable than usual. His lips were stretched into a smile that held as much of pain as pleasure. It was the smile of someone who has won, but who resents the means they have used to win the victory.

Any fool, in the wrestling ring, can down an opponent smaller than they, but the skilful can use their opponent’s very weight against them. Can make a weapon of their own vulnerability. I realised afresh just how formidable Sir Robert Cecil was as an adversary.

Cecil
February 1600

There are things I do, and will continue to do, because I see that they are necessary. You use whatever weapons you have: that is what my father taught me, although I do not think, looking back, that he was ever forced to practise what he preached quite so completely. I do not think he was ever forced to display, like a leper’s sore, the most shameful, the tenderest, place, in his whole mind or body. But I did it: it served its purpose, and I am sure I am only imagining that my shoulder is paining me.

But somehow, when we get back to the house, I find I do not want to have Jeanne near me. It is not her fault: she saw only what I arranged for her to see. But she seems to feel it too – she bows without a word and leaves, silently. A woman’s tact, maybe.

I am positively glad to feel a hovering presence, and see one of the secret secretaries. A visitor, cloaked and come by the back way. In my present mood I am glad of what I might otherwise find dirty. At any rate, it’s a matter of business and brains. Nothing messy.

He is unhappy at having come here. In a man less clever, I would call it sulky, but Francis Bacon’s fast mind analyses even his own moods, and dismisses what is unnecessary. A shame that leaves him so ill placed to deal with the rest of humanity.

‘I don’t like it. It’s dangerous,’ he says.

‘Oh, tush. We’re cousins, we’re both in her majesty’s service, there could be a thousand reasons for a visit. And nobody saw you, anyway.’ That’s the other thing about Francis; he takes everything so seriously that he is the only man in whose presence I feel myself frivolous, or nearly.

‘So you’ve done it.’ He sounds grudging, and I allow myself to bow my head in acknowledgement of victory.

‘He’s made a good apology. There should be no trial, no pot boys shouting his praises in the streets, no public declaration of his guilt – or of the contrary. At least’ – I check myself – ‘not if her majesty takes it as I hope.’ And from his sharp sound of alarm it’s obvious he agrees with me. Her majesty’s mind, and its incalculability. But I’ve long understood that Francis and I don’t feel the same here, though he probably assumes we must agree. He sees only the weakness of the queen’s way. He doesn’t see the skill which uses her very defects so peerlessly. He sees only the flaws in her mind; he doesn’t see its beauty, and I smile at him, now, a little sadly.

‘All well and good, so far, but what comes next? Reinstatement? You know he’s writing to James, secretly?’ I shrug my shoulders and raise the corners of my mouth in a way I know will annoy him. What will be, will be.

‘Robert, for heaven’s sake! You must have a plan.’ He eyes me, baffled, not sure if my silence is discretion or inadequacy. He can see there must be hidden layers of intention here, but that is as far as he can see. He does not know everything Gorges has told me. He does not know about the countess and the actor, and about Cuffe’s malleable vanity. He does not understand the value of timing, the delicacy and the subtlety of it; that tomorrow, Lord Essex’s plight may not seize the townsman in the tavern in the way it does today. He has infinite subtlety, my cousin, but his mind always circles a maze of its own making, and there are possibilities he cannot see.

My cousin Bacon does not know I am aware that his are still divided loyalties: that when he advises my lord of Essex, he does so only partly so that he can then advise me. Gratitude for Essex’s past kindnesses does not weigh with him, naturally. But he is drawn, like an alchemist to gold, to the idea of being the brain behind Essex’s party, and if that party brings the Scots king to the kingdom, he would love not to play second fiddle there to me.

That sharp mind registers that I am not telling him everything, that there is a door that is closed. He will worry at the problem, unwearyingly. He will make himself useful to my lord of Essex, and he will be useful to me. I pass on to talk with him of our gardens. It is one of the subjects of which I enjoy his mastery. It is the one on which we will always agree.

Jeanne
March/April 1600

Spring is the itching season. Nothing wants to wait for its right order: the days draw out before the warmth begins. And everywhere in the streets I seemed to hear a mutter, the same sullen rhythm that was beating in my veins. Soon after Christmas we’d heard Lord Essex was mending, by the end of January he had quit his bed. Now surely the time had come for the queen to forgive him. What was he supposed to do – stay shut up alone in York House until his beard went grey and the boredom turned his head? But down in the kitchens where speech was free they were saying, too, it was easier to get milk from a bull than forgiveness out of the queen’s majesty.

There was a pale profusion of primroses, now, where the snowdrops had held place only days before. I saw them when I’d walk out into the fields – not anywhere near where the booksellers had stalls – on a Sunday. I saw the blackthorn trees turn white with blossom, and the first green fronds of cow parsley.

Around my feet there was a sprinkling of colour, though when I looked up into the high trees the branches were bare. The spring had not got into the bones of the land. It was too early: they’d still be feeling winter in the country. I noticed everything more sharply than I did usually, because every step I took, down lanes where new shades of green appeared every week, I was aware I was seeing what Lord Essex could not. Even this first faint fore-taste of the year made me feel his captivity. Or maybe it was that this time – this year – we all felt captive within the moody city.

But at least the queen had given permission – the doctors urged it – that Lord Essex should now be allowed to walk in the garden every day. And when I saw our gardeners plant new slips to fill holes in the lavender hedge – when I saw them take up the spent hellebores, and put in seedling of granny’s bonnet, aquilegia, and young oxslip plants brought in baskets from the country – I imagined that he was seeing them too, just along the river bank, hardly a mile away.

Talking to imaginary companions is a game for a lovesick girl – or boy – not a secretary to a Master Secretary. But I had never allowed myself to dream when I was young, never known who I should dream of, and now, like the plague that hides away in the winter, only to return more strongly with the first heat, perhaps the infection came all the stronger for the fact that it came unseasonably.

I didn’t see Martin Slaughter, and I told myself I didn’t want to, not unless I could see him without his shadow Cuffe, the way it used to be. I was growing angrier with him in his absence, and had we met I might have told him so, but he made no attempt to see me. That made me angry too, and I’d never had the conversations with girls – or boys – that might have told me how there were some things not meant to go easily.

I hadn’t seen Lord Essex either, though I did once succumb to folly. Just once, the impulse was too strong for me, and I tied up another tiny nosegay, sweeter and softer than the November blooms. I slipped into the courtyard of York House, and handed them to a young serving boy. ‘For his lordship,’ I said firmly, and the child eyed the badge on my cloak and nodded eagerly. I saw no sign of Cuffe, or of Martin, and I left no message, naturally, but for two days after, my stomach churned. It was dangerous, of course it was; what if anyone thought it worth their while reporting to the Secretary? In the event, no one asked me, but I knew I should never again indulge myself so stupidly.

It was only later that I realised, fearful though I had been then, that taking a token to a state prisoner had actually seemed less dangerous than thinking of Martin Slaughter too freely.

Sometimes the promise of the seasons is not fulfilled. Sometimes even the events of the year come out of order, and in the fierce grip of a backwinter the early shoots are covered by new snow. A few balmy days of sunshine were followed by weeks of rain, and a freezing wind that seemed to blow the buds back into the trees. No pleasure to be enjoyed in the garden but to kick the clods of heavy soil and watch the stunting of leaves that had unfurled too early. It was as if the paralysis that held us all had infected the land, so that not even the movement from the earth could progress properly.

We heard that Lord Essex had grown religious in captivity. Down on his knees, praying for forgiveness, sending for his old tutor from Oxford to talk of his immorality. Sending letters to his friends, urging them to repent in misery. Some of his supporters in the taverns said wisely that his lordship knew what he was doing; if straight appeal wouldn’t move the queen, then maybe it would work this way. The woman who served the drinkers their ale, whose cheeks had grown rougher and her voice huskier over the last year, said in truth he had plenty to repent of. But her man had gone to Ireland in Essex’s train, and had never come home again. For me, I had seen how fast his moods could change. He had no nerves to play this waiting game the queen imposed on him; he could easily have fallen into true despair, I told myself – it must be better that he should take this way.

We’d heard he was to be allowed home, to Essex House, though still in the conditions of captivity. Hard to know how he’d live there, though. He’d been told to dismiss his household, those two hundred men in their bright orange livery, and as April came in I often thought about what he might be doing now, racketing around all those empty corridors. It was enough to drive any man to misery. The old clerk told me it even worried our master.

‘It’s not natural to Master Robert, all this shilly-shallying. He can be slow and devious when he has to be, none better, but the trouble is, his mind is tidy.’ He’d known Sir Robert since he was a boy, and when he talked of him, it was most often to me.

As Easter came and a few first stunted bluebells with it, and sharp gusts still blew the apple blossom from the trees, the old man told me there was a fresh source of worry – the coming of St George’s Day. Lord Essex was a Garter Knight, of course – one of that select band who (so the theory ran) the sovereign had deemed most worthy. Now he’d written to Sir Robert that the rules of the Order decreed he should wear his robes on Garter Day.

‘He’s quite right, too. We checked,’ the secretary who took care of these things interjected, fussily. So did this mean he should wear them in the Garter Procession? (‘which would mean his being allowed back into public, to a degree’). Should he do honour to the order by dining in state in Essex House? (‘All very well, but if we’re not careful, that one could turn into some kind of private rival ceremony.’) Or was he to wear them only in the privacy of his bedroom? I gaped at the absurdity. ‘Oh, you may laugh, young man, but I’d wager you that’s what it will come to, when Sir Robert asks her majesty.’

They knew a thing or two, those old men. Three days later we in the scribes’ room heard that Lord Essex had been refused permission to join the court, or to break in any way the conditions of his captivity. Which meant … ‘A feast in all his splendour, and no one there to see!’ It was one of the younger boys, this time, making a chant of it; a chunky, cheeky lad, on whom the ink stains under his fingernails looked like an anomaly. He didn’t see any pathos in the situation, that’s for sure, but I don’t think I was the only one in the room to feel the diminution of the earl.

Even Master Secretary felt it, I found. Everything his father had taught him schooled him to cut down the too-tall poppy, for fear of spoiling the bed. Everything in him told him to shun the ‘man of blood’. But still –

‘Go to Lord Essex today, at dinner time. Take him a dish of those candied violets, with my compliments.’ Sir Robert glanced up from his letter. ‘He’ll be pleased to see you,’ he said. I stared at him disbelievingly. Of course he meant that Lord Essex would be glad to see anybody, anyone to break his boredom, since no visitor would be allowed save one who came direct from the queen or the Secretary. But to my greedy heart, it sounded almost as if Sir Robert were acknowledging a bond – I’d blush even to suggest it aloud – between the earl and me.

The present was in the kitchen, waiting and ready, and of course the sweetmeats weren’t really the point, even though they’d bulked the violets up with squares of milk jelly, and confit of quinces, and a few candied roses the confectioner must have been hoarding: England’s flower for England’s saint’s day. The silver dish on which they rested was worth a king’s ransom – or an earl’s, maybe. I wondered whether Sir Robert would have mentioned his present to her majesty. I wondered if, when he looked to the future, he ever thought of the possibility their positions would be reversed, and Essex would once again be riding high.

‘We’d best send a guard with you, if you’re carrying that,’ said the steward, signing two burly men-at-arms to fall in behind me. He was wise: on the short journey over the Strand I saw that the street was packed, with everything from apprentices in crudely painted dragon masks to vendors with their pickled fish and their mutton pies.

Only Essex House stood quiet, its courtyard empty. The very façade seemed to stare at me reproachfully, and even the porter sounded almost grateful to see me. As my two guards turned gladly back into the throng, he bowed low at Sir Robert’s name – word had got round, it was the Secretary saved the earl from the indignity of a public trial – and whistled up a boy to show me the way to his lordship’s chamber.

They had taken most of the dishes away. Perhaps there hadn’t been that many – he had never eaten with any great interest; his appetites did not lie that way – but he had obviously been drinking heavily. I could see a red flush where the white ostrich feather and the black heron’s plume swept down over his cheek, and there was a splash on his velvet sleeve. He was indeed in all his finery.

‘Why, Janny. How very good of you to visit me. I dare not hope it’s for the pleasure of my company. As you can see’ – he waved an arm vaguely around the empty room – ‘that’s a pleasure the rest of the world seems able to resist quite easily.’ I stammered something graceless, about Sir Robert’s wishing to send him a gift and the compliments of the day.

‘Sir Robert, Sir Robert. Is there no end to the kindnesses I’m fated to receive from Master Secretary? Sometimes I think they may yet be the death of me. But come’ – he seemed to pull himself together – ‘I am being a poor host. Sit down and have a drink with me.’ He pulled up a chair next to his own, and I subsided into it, uncomfortably. It was hardly proper, for a clerk to be seated by England’s premier earl, but at this tiny table, at the end of his bedstead, there was no above and below the salt.

‘That right. Now, have a drink, if there’s any left – Aha, what have you got there? Another present for me?’

I blushed. It was true – before I left, I’d begged from the housekeeper a bottle of the new cowslip wine. Its sweet honey taste spelt the spring to me, the spring we’d shared only in my fantasy. But on the way I’d had time to realise how ridiculous I was – taking a country bottle to one of the greatest men in the land, for all the world as though I’d been visiting my old granny.

‘A present from yourself, perhaps. If so, I’ll drink it the more gladly.’ He spoke more soberly, and with some gentleness. ‘Here, let us strike a bargain. For the next hour or two, I’ll forget that I’m the earl, or that Master Secretary hates me.’ I looked up sharply to protest, that my master’s overtures weren’t feigned, that they weren’t really enemies –

‘Hush, no …’ He laid a finger on my lips. ‘Let’s forget, I said. And you – what do you have to forget, my Jeanne Janny? Or should it be, who?’ I gazed at him dumbly. I was back in the maze, more than eighteen months before, that summer’s day.

He was looking at me intently. ‘There’s something different about you. There’s been somebody.’ But now he took pity on me, or so I thought, and began showing off the Garter insignia. ‘I suppose you know this story?’ He gestured to the blue ribbon round his thigh, and I shook my head.

‘It was old King Edward – Edward III, two centuries ago – at a court dance with his daughter-in-law, Joan of Kent. A beauty, so they say. In the pace of the dance step the garter holding her stocking fell down, and the courtiers sniggered to see her lingerie. King Edward picked it up, and said to them all “Honi soit qui mal y pense”. I’ve always rather admired him for being so ready to spare embarrassment to a lady.’

He held out his leg towards me. ‘I don’t need to translate for you, surely? Not for Master, or Mistress, French Secretary.’ I shook my head as he gestured me to look closer. ‘Shame be on him who thinks evil.’

His finger traced the golden words embroidered on the ribbon, and as I bent forward his other hand smoothed down my short hair and closed around the nape of my neck, caressingly. ‘Do you know how they make a brood mare ready for the stallion? If you’re Master of Horse, you know all about making good foals. They bring in another horse, just to get her juices flowing, and then they take the poor beast away unsatisfied so that the real stallion, the bloodstock male, finds her receptive and easy. They call the other beast the teaser. Has someone been the teaser for me?’

His words hardly reached me, I felt only his body. I could no more have resisted than a fly in a spider’s web as his lips came forward to meet me. I felt my mouth open under his. His breath tasted of wine, but his hand moved with deliberation across the front of my doublet, and through the rushing in my head I heard him give a half laugh as he realised just how firmly it concealed what lay beneath.

‘A good disguise, by the Life. But I think the time for that is over.’ He fumbled only briefly with the fastening before his hand slipped below. As I felt it close around my breast, my bowels seemed to be turned to water. ‘Not a full rose here, just a little bud.’ His other arm was around me, urging me up as he pressed me back towards the bed. I was leaning backwards against the pillows and he was kneeling over me, his hands tugging at his own clothing, when –

‘No!’ I hardly knew where the voice came from, but from the frenzy with which I was pushing at his arm, it had to have been from me. He gaped at me, too surprised to insist. It was only later I thought, too, that perhaps sex was another of the things for which he was not truly greedy.

‘I can’t! I mustn’t … Please – my lord – I’m sorry …’ I could see him rallying his forces, the wine beginning to leave his head. Recollecting the servant who could come in any moment, recollecting who had sent me.

‘As you wish.’ He said it thickly, with something of a grudge in his voice, but after a second he said it again, more clearly. ‘As you wish.’

I was yanking my doublet closed with such speed I almost broke the laces. I stammered again, ‘I’m sorry.’

He had himself under control now. It would, after all, be beneath him to show even if he cared, that he’d been discommoded in any way. ‘Don’t even think of it, my dear. It’s of no consequence.’ I must still have been looking stricken, because he added, wryly. ‘I’m used to it, after all.

‘Thank Master Secretary for his gift,’ he called after me.

Back in the street, making my way home towards Blackfriars, without the guards this time, I wondered what he meant – used to the brush-off, or used to the preliminaries of love, cut off too early? Uncomfortably, I realised that, either way, he was probably thinking of her majesty. He’d said something else, too, about other men, and horses, but I couldn’t think about that properly. As I cleared the corner of the house I saw a brown figure going in where I’d just come out and faltered a moment, shrunken into stillness like a woodland creature. I’d recognised Martin Slaughter but I hoped, I did hope, he hadn’t seen me.

May/June 1600

I told myself I’d just been prudent. I told myself that I was lucky. If heartbreak had been the worst of it I’d have got off lightly; no one can walk the London streets without seeing the women and their babies. But in the days and weeks ahead I knew it hadn’t been just prudence talking, when I pushed him away. It had been something deeper. If before that I was Jan, then who would I be after? And I did not ask myself whether, if Martin had been the man, I would still have reacted in the same way.

For a second my mind even hovered over the question of what the queen might have felt, why she had sent suitor after suitor away. Pushed away Leicester, and Hatton, and Essex; and only at the very last minute, some say.

I didn’t see Lord Essex, and we heard no more, as the hawthorn blossom whitened and then grew brown and powdery on the branches, smelling like the kitchen on washing day. The real spring had come at last, as it always does, and in the gardens they had wild purple geranium, and fleur de luce and the yellow poppy. In the country the bluebells came properly, in lakes so blue it burned the eye, and then began to fade; in the lanes when I walked of a Sunday the greens – the dark green of reed, the pale green of barley, the sullen grey green of the nettles – made a tapestry. I registered each one with a kind of determination, because the truth was, the lanes these days did not mean so much to me. Just occasionally, I caught myself wondering whether they would matter again, if I were walking there with somebody. But I stopped, before ever there was a face on the figure beside me.

But I did seem to be seeing everything differently, as if someone had clapped a pair of spectacles over my eyes. I noticed the young men in the streets; and not just to be sure my impersonation didn’t err in any way. I noticed the ladies; and how the sway of their huge bell skirts gave their movement a languorous rhythm, like the thrust of a man’s hips.

I noticed the scars and the roughness on my own ink-stained hands, and I bought a salve of mallow and goose grease from an old herb woman. I rubbed it into my skin every night, though I had to wash the residue off me every morning before I went to my work, for fear the faint scent should betray me. Once, I even bought a musk ball, but I found the smell disturbing, and I threw it away.

Lord Essex continued in his imprisonment, but as the warm air came, and the rioting season, the people began to mutter. I wished I knew whether Henry Cuffe was still pushing his dangerous enthusiasms, and if so, what Martin had to say. The old clerk told me that Sir Robert had been urging his mistress to act decisively. Although, as he added with his dry, almost painful, smile, men had been urging action on this queen for more than half a century.

At last came news. The queen, who never said anything definitely, had never quite put the idea of a trial away. So now in the first week of June there would be – not a trial, but a private commission of inquiry. This time it was the gangling clerk who told me, and I grabbed his arm as he stared at me, offended.

‘Who’ll be there? Can anyone go?’

‘No, not anyone. Two hundred invited guests. But they’ll always find standing room for Sir Robert’s secretaries. What are you getting so het up about, anyway?’

It was to be held back at York House, and I would be there early. The milky midsummer morning was still at the cool of the day when I choked down some ale and a half slice of bread and made my way to the porter’s lodge. Perhaps it was my satchel of papers did the trick again, or Sir Robert’s badge, or perhaps the porter recognised me, but he nodded me through to the benches where the clerks sat, ready to take down the events of the day.

It was nearly eight in the morning when the commissioners shuffled in to take their seats at the long table, well over a dozen of them, shuffling their papers, their own clerks at the ready. Eight o’clock had struck when Lord Essex came in, escorted like the prisoner he was, and fell to his knees before them. I winced at the bang, and so did the old Archbishop of Canterbury. He asked if his lordship might not have a cushion. I suspect Lord Essex was a little reluctant to have anything take away from his dramatic effect, but he accepted it gracefully.

The first to speak was the queen’s Sergeant at Law. He told of how the queen had discharged Lord Essex’s debts before he went into Ireland, given him as much money again to equip his army, and yet despite all he’d lost for her would not have him proceeded against in a court of law, such was her gracious clemency. It was all as carefully rehearsed as a confrontation in a play.

At the end of it, Essex began to get up off his knees before they even brought the footstool for him to sit on. They’d briefed him well, and I thought, with rising hope, that it must be true: at the end of the day he would be allowed to rise to his feet and walk out free.

Next came the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke, and he laid out the charges against Essex’s conduct in Ireland precisely. Disobedience to orders, all along the way.

We all knew that it was true. We all knew the transgressions would have been forgiven, if only they’d led to victory. In fact, as Coke thundered away, him and his three categories of wrong – quomodo ingressus, quomodo progressus, quomodo regressus – I could feel a rise of sympathy for the earl.

‘The ingress was proud and ambitious, the progress disobedient and contemptuous, the regress notorious and dangerous.’ Yes, but we had the man himself before us, his long legs hunched foolishly on the low stool. They weren’t talking about treason, surely, but about the kind of errors that are the stuff of humanity.

All day it went on, until the time came at last for Lord Essex to speak himself. He began calm, but his sense of his wrongs was too much for him and, as Coke tried to shout him down, he began to speak faster and more chaotically. ‘At first I believed it when the queen said she meant to correct and not to ruin me. But the length of my troubles, and the increase of her indignation, have made men shrink away from me. Every chattering tavern-haunter says what he likes of me, my reputation is in the dust. I am thrown into a corner like a dead carcase, gnawed on and torn by the basest creatures on earth.’ He was on his feet now, and glaring wildly around the room. ‘There are those who envied me her majesty’s favour, now they have grown used to hating me, they spread malicious stories about me …’ His answer came in Sir Robert’s cool tones.

‘My lord, this commission is not called to look into the terms of your custody. And your lordship is protesting more than the situation requires. You claim you never wavered in your loyalty to the queen. My lord, if you look at the charges against you, you’ll see none of them mentions disloyalty. One wonders why the thought of it weighs on your mind so heavily.’ It might have been a veiled threat, but I hoped it was a warning, and Lord Essex took it so, sketching a nod of gratitude towards the Secretary.

‘I have to thank Sir Robert for his reminder; and to ask this commission only that it should deal honourably and favourably with me. If my disordered speeches have offended any, blame my weak body and my aching head.’

After almost twelve hours in that close room, his was not the only aching head. Even the commissioners could hardly wait to conclude their business. Briskly, they declared Essex guilty on all the counts charged – guilty of folly, if not disloyalty – and declared that had this been an official trial he would have been sent to the Tower, but as it was he should return to his house to await her majesty’s pleasure. It was clear the punishment had been decided already – the verdict too, presumably. We were almost exactly where we had been at the start of this interminable day.

As they led him out into the fading summer twilight, I saw he was indeed so tired that he was stumbling slightly. I felt a foolish qualm that there would be nobody who would see him looked after properly, but of course that was ridiculous. Servants apart, he had his sisters – and his wife, naturally.

Others were waiting, too. As I came out into the street, I saw an anxious party standing there, most of them in Lord Essex’s livery. Cuffe was there, and – yes, I knew it. I sent a long accusing stare at Martin Slaughter, and this time he returned it, hardily.

Katherine, Countess of Nottingham
June/July 1600

It is my sister Philadelphia who brings Lord Essex’s letter, holding it out as she sinks down into a curtsey so deep it’s almost a prostration, picking her moment so we can all see. She always did have to have the starring part, even in the nursery games, and I always had to let her, because I was older than she. But I can’t help myself, I crane round to see if I can guess from the queen’s reaction whether it was worth the delivery, and perhaps she understands, for when she’s finished reading she passes it over for me to see.

Essex writes of his longing to kiss her hand again – her ‘fair correcting hand’? – in apology. He writes of how he’d prefer death to living in her displeasure, and denied access to her doorway. But somehow it’s a letter all about himself – his situation, his regrets. It’s as if he doesn’t even see the living woman, just a symbol of power in paint and jewellery.

I understand, as they do not, that these are not the words to move her and before I catch myself I feel an urge to step forward with a word of instruction, to tell them how it used to be. When Christopher Hatton used to write, twenty years ago now, he used to write more passionately. They made us laugh, his letters, and I swear he must have composed them with a twinkle in his eye. But for all that, they were the letters of a man who knew the woman he was writing to. I think even Leicester would have admitted as much, though when she showed off a page from Hatton he half died of jealousy – his own letters could have been any farmer writing home, waiting in town for market day. Her health, his health, a grumble about the weather and a dollop of advice. Leicester’s letters didn’t breathe romance, they breathed domesticity. They were, if you like, a husband’s letters and she used to tease him by telling him so. It was, I suppose, an unkind joke, when all Europe knew that her husband was just what he’d hoped to be.

Essex’s letters are certainly a contrast. Eloquent, if you like that sort of thing, and the queen says as much to Francis Bacon, who smirks complacently, as well he may, since we all know he’s been coaching my lord every step of the way.

‘These letters breathe a proper spirit of regret,’ she says. ‘But perhaps, Master Bacon, you knew that already?’ He is a clever man, undoubtedly, but I’d hate for her to let him think he was cleverer than she. Cleverer than we – we of the Chamber, the queen’s closest, we bond together these days. ‘And behind all his talk of love and duty, I can’t but feel his real concern is for his income from the sweet wine levy.’

Bacon bows apologetically. A complicated man, like his cousin Cecil, but writ in darker colours, and even after all my years at court, to see him here as Essex’s mouthpiece still astonishes me. It’s only, what, a few weeks since he stood up at the hearing as one of his lordship’s accusers and I’ll admit he made his case eloquently. I remember seeing the earl himself, who’d been still till then, hunch a shoulder defensively.

Bacon had begun by reminding us that any existing bonds of loyalty to the earl should be put away. He’d certainly shed his own very easily. It was he who did most to expose the earl’s real vulnerability. Whereas the others had talked of his mistakes, Bacon had spoken of his motives. He’d quoted a letter Lord Essex had written almost two years before, after one of those quarrels with the queen some might still have thought loverly. ‘What, cannot princes err? Cannot subjects suffer wrong?’ Such a challenge, read out in such a place, had made a creeping unease come over me.

Lord Essex must have felt the mood in the room, for he’d flung himself back down on his knees, and spoken out with what, like him or not, sounded like sincerity.

‘I will never excuse myself from any crimes of error, negligence, or inconsiderate rashness – not as long as they are those of youth, folly, or my own manifold infirmities. But I must ever profess a loyal, faithful and unspotted heart, and a desire to serve her majesty. I would tear that heart out of my breast with my own hands if ever a disloyal thought had entered it.’

He might have left it there with his audience’s goodwill. Abject repentance was a set part of the script; so was the protestation of loyalty. But no, he’d had to start to argue every point of his conduct in Ireland, while his audience fidgeted. Still, I suppose I could hardly grudge him his chance to speak out. By then it seemed every man at court had already had their say.

Every man at court. I see now, more clearly than ever I had before, that women must go about their business differently. And so today – later at night, when my chance comes – I am ready. I knew the queen would be restless: it has been a hard day. The business of giving audience, the endless suitors, the reports from the Treasury – this year, pray God, a better harvest, but so far it’s not looking that way. Summer used to be the time of pleasure, but it seems now, what with one thing and another, we can hardly ever get away.

In the end she calls for a cup of Hippocras, though usually she drinks abstemiously. I linger while they serve it, arranging the ivory combs on the dressing table, putting the agate toothpick back in its holder, and sure enough she gestures the others to move further off, nods to me to stay.

She signs me to sit, and on a stool not a cushion. So, it is to be a conversation between cousins, though the ghost of Essex and his letters hover in the air like a third party. I know what I have to do; to bring the other ghosts of the past alive so she can see, see, that things are different now, that Essex doesn’t have their love, their loyalty. I cast around for something, some memory, that will do it, and I see there’s no need, she’s ahead of me already.

Do I leave it at that? No. The point is worth the hammering. I know a brief stab of compunction as I think of Leicester with his gout and his vanity, and his arrogance on top and underneath it his loyalty. He took two of my brothers to the Netherlands with him as volunteers, and he brought them back safely; and this is his boy, the stepson he loved and brought to her majesty. I harden my heart: if Leicester trusted Essex to continue his own work then he shouldn’t have, should he? It was as foolish as – well, as for the queen to think she can keep yesterday’s relationships alive with the men of today. Not that this queen would ever allow one to couple her and folly … That’s it, that’s the point that will touch her. In this, she is like me.

‘I’m glad your majesty showed Master Bacon you’re awake to his games,’ I say brightly. ‘Lord Essex seems to think he can play the rest of us like a child pushing the counters around a tiddlywinks tray. Well, that’s a young man for you, thinking the rest of us are as foolish as he.’

Jeanne
August 1600

The mood in London was sullen that summer. We rush to embrace the warmth when it returns, bringing the light and the liveliness of the land, but in July and August come the dog days, with the pest and the sweat, as if the earth were already tired of its own fertility.

This was a wet summer, too. The harvest would be bad again, the seventh year in a row, and there were those who said half openly it would not be good until a barren old woman no longer reigned over the country.

I went about my work, and dropped into the clerks’ room when I could. Lord Essex continued in his confinement. In fact the custodian in charge of him had been withdrawn, we heard, but so long as he was ordered to keep within his house, it was still a kind of captivity.

When midsummer had been and gone but the long twilight hours encouraged lingering at the end of the day, I called in on the old clerk. This time, several people were there already, bent over the desk, and they looked round at me, I thought, almost with hostility. Only the old man himself made room for me.

‘The lad’s all right,’ he said to the others. ‘He’s one of the confidential secretaries.’ The stranger seated at the clerk’s desk – a stranger with a sharp, swarthy face – nodded curtly, and bent to the letter he was copying. Inconspicuously as I could, I peered over his shoulder, and with a shock recognised Lord Essex’s hand.

‘What’s this bit? I can’t make it out,’ the copyist said to the company at large, and that gave me the excuse to look openly.

‘… you have believed I have been kind to you, and you may believe I cannot be other,’ I read. ‘I never flew with other wings than desire to merit, and confidence in, my sovereign’s favour, and when one of these wings failed me I would light nowhere but at her feet, though she suffered me to be bruised with my fall.’

I looked a startled query at the old man, and silently he pushed another letter towards me. This one was written in a different hand. It was addressed to ‘My lord’ – Essex, I supposed – and it was signed … Francis Bacon? ‘But – at the inquiry –’ I stammered confusedly. The clerk just jerked his chin at the paper.

‘You’ll see.’ I read on, furiously.

‘… I humbly pray you to believe that I aspire to the conscience and commendation first of bonus civis, which with us is a good and true servant to the queen, and next of bonus vir, that is an honest man. I desire your lordship also to think that though I confess I love some things much better than I love your lordship, such as the queen’s service, her quiet and contentment, the honour, her favour, the good of my country, and the like, yet I love few persons better than yourself, both for gratitude’s sake and for your own virtues …’

It was an effort not to crumple the paper in my hand. This, to the man who had attacked him at the hearing? I was surprised Essex had replied so mildly. I looked back down.

‘… I was ever sorry that your lordship should fly with waxen wings, doubting Icarus’ fortune … of the growing up of your own feathers, no man shall be more glad.’

For one soaring moment I was captivated. What I resented most about Bacon’s letter was the aptness of the analogy. Icarus, who made wings of wax and feathers to fly with the gods, but flew too near the sun so they melted and sent him crashing to his death on earth. But then I realised it wasn’t the contents of the letter that had struck me so forcefully, nor even that Bacon seemed to be again aligned with Essex, though that alone might have made one dizzy.

‘These letters – how did they come into your hands? Our hands,’ I corrected hastily.

‘You’ll not have forgotten Bacon’s mother was our master’s aunt, before she married into the pig family?’ While the other men glanced at me with renewed suspicion, I thought the old clerk was watching me with something like pity.

At the end of August, Sir Robert was one of those sent to tell Lord Essex he was to be set free. Only, that he must not come to court; he’d already been stripped of the Mastery of the Ordinances, and of the great office of Earl Marshal. The Mastership of the Horse was all that remained to him; the same that had been the start for Leicester, Robert Dudley. In my naivety, I thought that his liberty was the great good news, but the old clerk disillusioned me.

‘When he was shut away, at least no one could get at him, but now the creditors will all want their pound of flesh, won’t they? Yes of course he’s got debts, haven’t they all, but now how’s he going to make any money, to beg favours and sell them on again? How’s he going to keep his followers happy? He may say he’s going to live retired in the country, but with the bailiffs at the door he can’t do that very comfortably. And you’ve seen how they live now, the lords, you with your visit to Theobalds.’ He nodded at me, amiably.

‘It’s true Essex never splashed out on houses like that. They always said he was the poorest earl in the country. But all the same, he can’t just settle down in a cottage and tell his wife to do her own laundry.’

That was the general opinion, I found. The earl was writing a string of increasingly desperate letters to the queen. I saw them all, now that I was on the strength of the secret clerks’ room, so to speak, and heard that Bacon had half dictated them, too, which made me feel strangely. It seemed Essex, like they all did, had lived off a tax – the right to take a levy off the people, if I looked at it honestly. A slice off the top of the duty paid on all the sweet wines to come into the country. Trouble was, his rights to it ended this year, and it would only be renewed by favour of her majesty. It was obvious by now that even he did not rate his chances highly.

Summer is the strolling season, they say, though there hadn’t been much sense of freedom or pleasure this summer. But before the season was out came word we would all go up to Theobalds again: Sir Robert for his own reasons, and me, because of some plant that needed drawing, or so the chief clerk told me briefly. Packing my bags, I could have wept, remembering with what excitement I set out there last year. And of the hopes with which I returned. But in fact, the atmosphere in London was such that, even though the skies were still weeping as we left, I was – I think we all were – glad to get away.

I saw the fountains and grottoes, the lakes and waterways. The gillyflowers and snapdragons in their pots were all but over, yet I could see they’d boasted as many double flowers as they used to. The citrus trees, free of the seasons, still showed flowers and fruit all at once, like something out of a picture of Paradise. But somehow, this time, they couldn’t touch me. Perhaps it wasn’t only me – all festivities, that summer, seemed to have desperation in their gaiety.

I did not go back to the little pavilion where Martin had taken me. But the thought of it surely brought him to my mind because, as the rain drove me from the garden back into the house, I almost fancied I saw a familiar brown figure darting into another doorway. With the miserable wet outside I started to explore indoors – the galleries painted with the Knights of the Golden Fleece, with the arms of England’s nobles and the products of their counties, the great cities of the world with their customs and their features; it was as if Lord Burghley had turned schoolmaster to instruct me. At last I drew near to the private apartments of the family – or of Sir Robert, I should say. I was just outside the door when it opened quietly. It was with a sense of shock that I saw Martin Slaughter come out – and at the same time, with a sense that I’d known it already.

For him, I think, it was much the same, but he gestured to me quickly. ‘Not here.’ I was reminded, horribly, of that scene with Cuffe, but Theobalds had other, Cuffe-free, memories. ‘Meet me in’ – for a brief second I thought he was going to say, the pavilion, but he would never be that clumsy – ‘in the orchard.’ A gleam of rueful humour. ‘We should have it to ourselves today.’

In the orchard, the fruits were beginning to swell on the dripping trees. The rain had mercifully halted for the time, but I hurried under lowering skies. He was there waiting for me already – he clearly knew the paths better than I – and there was a look on his face I hadn’t seen before, at once stern and naked. With the long grass at our feet, between the grey framework of branches, we faced each other like adversaries.

He stood there, silently. Perhaps he was more experienced at this than me. I spoke first.

‘What are you doing here? They haven’t announced a play.’

‘I’m not here as an actor.’ He paused. ‘I’m here doing other work,’ he said deliberately. We both remembered our other conversations, here, and elsewhere. He’d told me once that many actors do other work, travelling as they do all around the country. That they wind up as messengers, information gatherers, emissaries.

‘What work?’ I put it crudely but my brain was making calculations like an abacus. ‘That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? That’s why you’re hanging round Lord Essex’s house. You’re acting for Sir Robert.’

He paused again, oddly. ‘Not entirely. Not him only. I have Sir Robert’s interests at heart, but also those of … somebody.’

‘Oh, why not? After all, that way you get two salaries!’ I was becoming angry. ‘I’m surprised you have any time left to devote to the drama. Or is it they aren’t hiring you for the plays?’

He didn’t visibly wince. He rallied quickly. ‘I’ll be doing some of those too. Not in the theatres – at Lord Essex’s house. You know my lord of Southampton, his lordship’s friend, is a great patron of the drama.

‘Don’t look at me like that, my dear.’ The endearment came almost insultingly. It wasn’t his normal style of speech, or it wasn’t with me. ‘You take work where you can get it, if you’re an actor – my kind of actor, anyway.’ He paused. ‘And besides, just at the moment, Essex House is an interesting place to be.’ I knew he wouldn’t shirk the confrontation. Not finally.

What he did was take the initiative. ‘You can hardly expect me to give you script and scrippage – tell you exactly what I’m doing, and for who. You could work out the important part for yourself, if you looked at it clearly.

‘Just think, Jeanne. We’ve talked about this, haven’t we? Do you really believe Lord Essex’s way is the best way of running a country?’ He didn’t even wait for me to shake my head. ‘And who are you working for, yourself? Who is it pays your salary? Never mind what little extra-mural visits you might make.’ So he had seen me, on Garter Day.

‘You’re not wrong, and neither am I.’ His face softened slightly. ‘Look, don’t think that I don’t understand. This business isn’t easy for anybody. And for you –’ He stopped. I must have moved slightly. ‘But the fact is, a number of people agree that, whatever plans Lord Essex is brewing, it would be best if they came to a head, quickly. So that everyone can see the damage, from the market girl with the pickled herrings right up to her majesty. Do you think that’s wrong? Do you, really?’

‘So that’s why you and Cuffe –’

His mouth twisted. ‘Master Cuffe is exactly what he appears to be. The more honourable of him, maybe. But Master Cuffe has Lord Essex’s ear, and I –’

‘Have Master Cuffe’s,’ I finished bitterly. ‘As long as you fawn round him like a dog all day.’ I didn’t know quite why I was so angry, but I felt as if everything I thought I knew was crumbling away from me. ‘And now Cuffe’s been telling Lord Essex the terms of his freedom are an insult, that he shouldn’t accept retirement quietly! Someone in the clerks’ room told me. What is it you want to happen?’

‘What do you want?’ he flung back instantly. Then he stepped towards me. ‘Jeanne, can’t we –’

It all rose up, all of it, from further back than I could see. I screamed at him. I’ve never screamed at anybody.

‘Stay away from me!’

His face went awry, as if I had slapped it. He spun on his heel smartly. His figure moved for once without eloquence as he walked away.

As we rode back towards London a few days later, I hardly had time to worry about the clumsy horse they had given me. Something in me accepted what Martin had said, but something fought it, too. You can’t choose that easily. Just pick Sir Robert, head not heart? You can’t split people like that, and I should know. Wasn’t it what I’d tried to do all my life? Tried and failed, and what had the trying done to me? At that moment my horse pecked and stumbled, and I put thought aside, gladly.

 * * * 

Back at Burghley House, I went into the garden often, now that the days would soon be drawing in. It was as if everything smelt the sweeter for the sharp knowledge of how soon autumn would come. One day I found Sir Robert there, sniffing the last late rose; the damask with the musky smell, the one they had brought in from Italy that flowered for a second spring. There was a minute when I looked at him with a kind of horror, the memory of Theobalds before me. But he was so much the same – so small, so neat, so reassuring – that it was more a kind of appeal I felt, though luckily he couldn’t see.

He seemed disposed to chat – asked me how the work was going, waited for me to fall in step as he strolled along the pathways, chatting gently of roses, and grafting and cultivation, and of the new strains that were coming to join the old varieties.

‘You know my favourite story about the rose? It comes from the last century. That when the two great houses were squabbling for the throne, they met once in a garden. And everyone who followed Lancaster picked a red rose, and everyone who followed York a white.

‘I doubt very much it’s true. I suspect Warwick and the rest didn’t do their business so prettily. And of course – as her blessed majesty likes us to remember – the red rose and the white are united in the house of Tudor today.

‘But all the same, Jan, there does tend to come a time when people have to decide where their loyalties lie.’ At the time I took it as a truism, and simply bowed my head respectfully. I should have remembered how wide was his network of information, and wondered if he was warning me.