And I didn’t like the way he kept eyeing me.
‘God’s Body, Henry!’ he exclaimed over dinner. ‘Your sister is handsome!’
‘His sister is sitting right here and capable of being addressed directly,’ I said.
Frederick emptied his wineglass and held it out for more. I saw baffled irritation in his eyes. I felt certain that he wanted to make a sharp reply but could not form a suitable one in English.
‘Here in St. James’s, you must pay a shilling fine each time you swear,’ said Henry. He pointed at a small iron money chest with a slit in the lid, sitting on a sideboard. ‘In the swearing box.’
Frederick Ulrich grinned. ‘You want to be a soldier, and you never swear?’
Henry jerked his thumb at the money chest. ‘St James’s is not Whitehall.’
‘God’s Cock! You are in earnest!’
‘And again,’ said my brother. ‘Your second fine.’
Frederick stared at him. Then he swore in German and called for one of his attendants, eating at the serving-men’s mess in the next chamber. He gave the man a heavy purse and waved at the fine box. ‘Put in all,’ he ordered. ‘Save time.’ He turned to Henry. ‘By God…’
‘Third,’ said Henry doggedly.
I hid my smile in my glass. Frederick had misjudged my brother if he thought Henry could be laughed out of anything he thought to be right.
‘A good strategy for when you command your army!’ Frederick threw up his hands in mock amazement. ‘You don’t pay your soldiers to fight. You make them pay you!’
I smiled again, with him this time. For an instant, I almost liked him.
Then, after supper, while Henry had gone to relieve himself, Frederick rose from his chair, grabbed me like a lout and tried to kiss me.
He was sweaty and smelled rank. Sour gusts rose from his clothing. His breath reeked like my father’s when he was drunk. He cut my lip against my teeth.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘I saw you smiling at me at supper.’
So that’s what kissing a man is like! I thought. I wiped my mouth with my hand.
‘You’ll learn to like it soon enough! And more.’
‘Not with you!’ I could not imagine spending the rest of my life exiled to Brunswick with this self-satisfied boor. Under his rod, obedient to him as my lawful husband. I heard Belle yelp under the table as he returned to his chair.
‘Did you just kick my dog?’
Even Henry felt the ice in the air when he returned.
‘You can’t always expect gentle behaviour from a soldier,’ Henry said to me later, uncertainly. ‘Frederick Ulrich is a very good soldier.’
‘Does the king like him?’
‘Well enough.’
With an icy reserve, I attended the official festivities planned for the German prince’s entertainment. Jointly and severally my ladies whispered how, before the end of his first week in England, Frederick Ulrich had put his hand down the bosom of a laundress, then up the skirts of a sewing woman, a chamberer and two ladies’ maids. Tallie reported that at last, he succeeded in taking one of the maids into his bed.
I detected hesitation in her voice. ‘Did he try to fumble you as well?’
She looked at the floor.
‘Tallie…’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, of course. A man like that will grope anything with tits, so long as it moves. And then give her the pox.’
Nein! Nie!
Never! I didn’t wish to expose my ignorance by asking her if you might catch the pox from a slobbering kiss.
I sent my excuses to St. James’s Palace for supper that night, then sat down and wrote a letter to my father.
‘Learn not to expect happiness,’ my mother had said. But there were limits to the misery I was prepared to accept. When I thought of that flash of irritation in Frederick Ulrich’s eyes, I felt uneasy. The thought of having to let him touch me or kiss me made me feel sick. Even being forced to be civil to him for the rest of my life was beyond imagining.
A lifetime spent stumbling in German, being closed out by rapid murmurs in a foreign tongue. Watching the court ladies and all the serving women, wondering which of them my husband was fumbling. Or worse, meeting a pair of knowing, triumphant eyes, like Robert Carr’s when he looked at my mother. I knew that my wits would turn even wilder than hers had done. I did not imagine that I could avoid a political marriage, but I knew I would not survive marriage to Frederick Ulrich of Brunswick.
At the end of the following day, one of my father’s secretaries replied to my letter. The king was away hunting. It was not known when he meant to return.
I set off at once through the Whitehall maze to the offices beyond the Great Court which were used by the Chief Secretary. Wee Bobby gave me a tired smile. ‘I’d like to speak to the king myself, your grace. He is needed here. There’s work for him to do, and he ignores all my letters and messengers.’
‘Is he hunting at Theobald’s?’ I asked.
‘So far as I know.’
‘I must speak with him.’
Cecil cocked his head, inviting me to say more.
Friend or foe?
‘In person?’ he asked.
I nodded. Any letter I wrote to the king would burst into flames from the heat of my words. Or else he would throw my letter aside unread, as he had thrown Cecil’s letters. ‘I must go to Theobald’s at once,’ I said. In truth, I was so swollen with fury and fear that I would explode unless I could take action myself, at once, any action, so long as I did not have to wait, yet again, for someone, somewhere else, to make a decision.
‘You will need an escort,’ Cecil said.
‘I’ll manage without.’
‘I think not.’
‘I know the way,’ I protested. ‘I’ll take a lady and a groom.’
‘Is your memory so short, your grace?’
I stared, trying to think how to answer. Then it was too late to pretend innocence. Our gazes met and held.
‘The third in line to the throne can’t trot about the countryside unguarded,’ he said. His high, wide forehead contracted in thought. ‘Would you like to carry out a secret mission for me?’
‘A secret mission, my lord?’ I stammered, confused by this unexpected shift in direction.
He gave me a sudden smile. I realised that I had never before seen him smile. A civil upward twitch of the lips, yes, many time. But never this open grin that narrowed his eyes and showed small square, yellowish teeth. His odd, high-browed, slipped-down face grew bright like a naughty child’s. His smile invited me to collude.
‘What mission?’ I asked suspiciously. But I rather liked the thought of acting as a secret agent.
‘Delivering a personal letter. A small matter of estate management. I will organise an escort for you.’ He searched his desk for a clean sheet of paper and began to write. ‘You haven’t accepted. Surely, there’s no harm in a letter?’ His voice was light with private amusement.
The next afternoon, I set off for Hertfordshire with an escort of men-at arms arranged by Cecil. Anne rode with me. I had to leave Tallie in London because she said she had never learned to ride a horse.
‘Why such secrecy about a small matter of estate management?’ I had finally dared to ask Cecil before I left him. In my purse, I carried a sealed letter addressed to his Master of Hounds at Theobald’s.
‘If all goes well, you will soon learn,’ was all he would say.
As I rode, trying to rehearse my speech to my father, I kept hearing Cecil say, ‘Surely, there’s no harm in a letter.’
At Theobald’s, the steward told me that the king had just ridden back from a good kill. Through a gateway, I saw the body of a stag still lying on the courtyard stone. I asked to see the Master of Hounds and delivered Cecil’s letter. Then I asked to see the king, at once. And, no, I could not wait until the following day.
My father was in his bedchamber with Robert Carr when I was announced. Both men were in shirtsleeves. Their doublets lay thrown over chairs. The king sprawled in a chair by the fire while the Golden Weasel dried his bare feet. A basin of water steamed on the floor beside him.
‘What the devil is she doing here?’ My father glared at the steward as if the poor man were to blame for my interruption. ‘Who let you in?’ He turned his glare onto me. ‘Make an appointment like everyone else.’
‘I did! With your Chief Secretary.’ I had meant to be calm,formal and reasonable, but my voice climbed before I had spoken four words. I forgot my prepared speech.
‘I won’t marry him! I’ll kill myself first!’
‘Who’s that?… Don’t stop, laddie.’ He turned back to Carr as if I weren’t there ‘Feels good.’
‘Frederick Ulrich!’
‘The German princeling?’ he asked. ‘The young Lutheran warrior who stirred a bit of life into that monastery your brother keeps at St James’s?… Aye, that’s the spot,’ he added to Carr.
‘He drinks too much and he stinks!’ I said. ‘His hair is lank, his nose is already going red with booze. He has a foul, blasphemous mouth and can’t keep his hands off the waiting women!’ I drew a breath. ‘And he kicked my dog and laughed.’
‘Am I to gather that y’don’t like the lad?’ My father’s amused smile infuriated me out of all caution.
‘I won’t end up like you and my mother!’ I warned him in a shaking voice. ‘Not speaking, pretending to be civil on the rare occasions that you are forced to meet!’
I thought, but had the sense not to say, that I would never let myself be driven so mad that I hated the sight of my own children.
‘She’s done her breeding,’ he said. ‘Why should the two of us speak any longer? Only dead babies come out of her now. But I still respect her as the mother of the next king. And that’s what you must pray to become, lassie – a “mother of kings".’
‘Not with him, I won’t! Not with that great, stinking, red-faced hulk who everyone says will give me the pox as soon as a son!’
My father withdrew his left foot from Carr’s lap and replaced it with his right. ‘Aye, rub just there above the ankle. Do you remember how I eased your leg with my hands like that, after you broke it?’
‘I won’t do it!’ I shouted. ‘Do you hear me?’
He gazed into the fire as if I hadn’t spoken.
My hand acted without my will. I seized a squat glass wine bottle from the nearby table and hurled it. He threw up an arm to protect his head.
The good angels guided my flung bottle away from the king’s head. It smashed instead with a satisfying explosion of wet glistening shards on the hearth beside the Golden Weasel. My father’s
privado
leapt up, shaking off broken glass, his white shirt blotched with red, his pretty, stupid face both fearful and outraged. My father lowered his arm.
‘You can see why I wish to avoid the inconvenience of your opinion,’ he said.
‘I won’t!’ I said into the silence. ‘You can’t force me!’ I saw myself in the forest, pressing the point of my dirk against my throat. ‘Not even you!’ Tears of rage filled my eyes.
‘I can, and I will.’ My father picked up his tankard, drank, looking at me over the rim. ‘But why are you in such a lather, Bessie? The lad was sent back to Brunswick yesterday, with a broken heart. Did no one think to tell you?’
Ouff!
When I regained my breath, I saw how my father had shifted the war. I could defy him all I liked. He would still out-manoeuvre me. I rode back from Theobald’s with my escort, feeling like a prisoner again, fighting melancholy and exhaustion. I had let myself be lured out of cover and had been shot down.
Wrapped in the last of my tattered defiance and still badly out of humour, I went uninvited to a rehearsal of my mother’ new masque. I had a right to go. Thalia Bristo was my musician, taken back by the queen without my permission.
My mother must have seen me on my stool at the side of the hall but she said nothing. No one else dared ask me to leave, not even the queen’s Master of Revels.
I ignored my mother just as she ignored me. I sat on my stool and glowered, feeling worse than if I had moped alone in my rooms. I should have learned my lesson the last time I presented myself to her uninvited.
‘These things are but toys,’
Sir Francis Bacon had written of masques. But he saw only the surface show and missed the deeper meanings. The jostlings for power and preference. The coiling and uncoiling of connections. The coded messages inthe assignment of roles and relative richness of costume. In who was made beautiful and who was condemned to be grotesque. Even in where people stood and by whom they chose to stand.
This particular complex ‘toy’ was my fault, it seemed. First, I had reminded my mother about her gift. Then one of my ladies must have blabbed that the princess’s new blackamoor could sing and play the lute.
Heeding Thalia’s first warning, I had appointed her as merely of my musicians not my mistress of music. Once they grew accustomed to her strangeness, my ladies, including Anne, could now ignore her, as no more than an unusual chair or wall-hanging, adding to the pleasantness of life without needing to be greeted or otherwise spoken to. The rest of my musicians were men, who did not expect to play in my bedchamber after I had settled for the night. Therefore they could not envy her.
Now I was the one feeling jealousy.
When Thalia had returned after her first summons from the queen, I called her into my bedchamber. I waited until Anne left the room to make me a soothing posset.
‘So?’ I demanded, holding out my arms so that my maid could untie my sleeves from my bodice. ‘Has my mother taken back her gift?’
‘She wants me to perform.’ Thalia released a ripple of notes from the strings. ‘Her majesty has a fancy to turn poet and write a masque.’ She offered me this confidence as if to salve her forced betrayal. ‘We’ve all been sworn to secrecy. The true author will be revealed only after the final triumph.’
I flinched at that ‘we'. I was not among them. I waved away my maid and tied the ribbons of my night-dress myself as I had always done in Scotland and at Combe.
‘Why does she risk making a fool of herself?’ I tried to think of the pale woman at the window dancing in a masque, let alone writing one.
Thalia looked down at her lute.
‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.
‘Wondering which of you I serve now.’
‘Would it change your answer?’