‘Worthy of the greatest monarch of Europe,’ my father said.
‘Yes, she’s handsome enough,’ the duke answered at last.
I stiffened, suddenly alert to something in his tone.
‘She will do very well,’ he added. His voice carried more meaning than his words.
I looked him in the eye.
‘His highness will be pleased with her face,’ said the duke.
‘Your grace!’ protested the painter.
I looked away. Heat rose from my bodice towards my neck. I was not too innocent to know that the duke’s eyes had moved on from my face and were now undressing me. My thoughts began to flap like hens at the sight of a fox.
Trying to keep my head still, I swivelled my glance away from the watching men to the rare, glorious afternoon outside the window.
I tried to think of something else… Wainscot needed exercise… Distraction wasn’t working. I felt coated in slime by the duke’s insinuating eyes.
‘Do sit down, man!’ I heard my father say impatiently.
I watched a servant bring Cecil a stool.
‘I beg you, your grace!’ cried the painter. ‘I am addressing your eyebrows. When you turn your head in the least…’ With the handle of his brush held between his teeth, he scraped at his panel with a small knife.
‘But you re-invent me in any case!’ I protested. ‘Why must I be still, whilst you do it?’
‘A hit!’ said my father. Today, he was all noisy good-humour.
‘A very pretty hit,’ echoed the Golden Weasel.
‘On the contrary, your grace.’ The painter held his ground. Brush in hand again, he stared hard at a point between my eyes. ‘I struggle to do justice to your true loveliness.’
I snorted. For this portrait, my hair had been tortured upward into a great domed sugar loaf in an attempt to make me appear regal. I thought it made me look like a startled acorn.
My bodice stays dug into the top of my belly. I straightened my back and heard the painter sigh.
‘Forgive me, sir,’ I said. ‘I do see your difficulty. I have only to sit still – whereas you must strike the exact balance between telling the truth and flattery.’ I wished at once that I had kept my mouth shut.
‘Brava!’
said the duke.
‘Expound, Bessie!’ my father ordered.
My skirts bulged and heaved as Belle woke and turned around under my petticoats. I shifted my feet to give her room, ignoring the artist, who flicked his eyes towards Heaven.
‘Expound,’ prompted my father. ‘Display for the duke your wit as well as your face!’
Instantly, my mind became a blank.
‘Tell, tell!’ cried the Golden Weasel.
I thought I detected sympathy in Cecil’s eyes.
The painter laid down his brush in resignation.
‘At this moment,’ I said stiffly, ‘the artist is far more important than I am…’
‘That’s your proposition,’ my father interrupted. ‘Get to the argument!’
Belle flopped across my feet again. I groped for coherent thought. All the time, I could see the duke watching me avidly. Amused. Curious. Judging.
‘My portraits are sent abroad to foreign princes or dukes, to influence negotiations for my marriage,’ I said. ‘By shapingthe image in the portrait, the artist’s brush therefore shapes the negotiations.’
‘Yet another unproved proposition,’ said the king. ‘Give us an instance. We wait!’
I unclenched my teeth. ‘A blob of paint on the tip of my chin might lower my worth in Heidelberg.’
The duke laughed.
‘An over-sensuous curve to my upper lip could raise questions about the diplomatic honesty of the English in Savoy.’ I stared at the far wall.
‘Conclude,’ said my father.
I thought that I had concluded. ‘If a man can be burnt at the stake for misrepresenting an angel,’ I ventured wildly, ‘as I have heard can happen in Italy, what might the penalty be for smudging a princess?’
‘Nay, that’s mere rhetorical flourish, not a conclusion.’ But my father looked at the duke in triumph.
‘Both handsome and spirited,’ said the duke. ‘She will serve very well indeed. The Palsgrave is young and will need every encouragement.’
I felt myself go still.
My father and the Weasel laughed loudly as men do when more is meant than is said. Cecil looked at the floor.
For the last three years, I had been wilfully blind.
With another laugh, they were gone. I looked after them.
It was like looking for the first time at the truth of my own death. Under my skirt, Belle sighed and shifted her warm weight on my feet again, a small hot point on my cold body.
‘… will serve very well.’
Serve. To render service. To be used.
I saw what I had managed, somehow, not to see, just as I had not seen danger when Digby stepped into my way. I understood what Frederick Ulrich had meant by ‘more', which I had refused then to understand even when I felt it in his clumsy urgency, smelled it rising from his clothes and tasted
it on my cut lip. The voice and eyes of the Duc de Bouillon had finally cracked my shell of wilful ignorance.
Every brush stroke recording my face, my bosom, or my waist was a message in obscene code, expressing my suitability, or lack of it, for that thing that must happen to me in marriage, whether I wished it or not.
What I was really for. The reason for that over-loud male laugh. The adult secret that I would soon be forced to share. For the first time, I asked myself what exactly marriage would mean for me beyond exile and loneliness. For the first time, I thought that the raw brutal facts, learned from watching animals in fields and stable yards, might apply to me, as well as to beasts.
But surely, it must be different for people! I thought. Not violent like the breeding of horses, filled with huge dark shapes beneath the stallions’ bellies, and biting and squealing so that you feared the mares would be killed. Nor almost comical like the vacant-eyed pumping of a dog mounting a bitch. There must be more to learn, that would allow room for the human soul, a way for this soft flesh in its jewel-crusted gown and this bundle of fragile thoughts that was me to survive the dreadful invasion.
Liking, or not liking, my future husband took on urgent new meaning. My certainty that I would not survive marriage to Frederick Ulrich had been right.
Belle yelped and emerged from under my skirts.
‘Forgive me!’ I bent to scoop her up. I pressed her steppedon paw to my lips, then buried my face against her curly back.
Just as urgent was the question of why some women failed at what they were good for, being wives. Why some, but not others, were humiliated and cast off. Even queens could fail, like Anne of Cleves. It was suddenly clear from what I had just heard that such women had not provided the necessary ‘encouragement'. They had not done ‘very well'. They hadnot served. I could already imagine my father’s rage and scalding mockery if I were to be rejected and returned. Frances Howard would no doubt know all the answers, but I was not Frances Howard.
A strong smell of resin reached me. When I looked up, the painter was cleaning his brushes with turpentine-soaked rags.
‘I can’t stand any longer today,’ I said.
‘I had gathered as much, your grace.’ Although I was certain that he would have liked to throw one of his stone pestles at me, the painter managed a thin smile and deep bow as I left.
Outside the Presence Chamber, I stopped, with Belle in my arms, uncertain where to go next. I felt awash with ignorance again. It was intolerable. I turned into the long river gallery that led away from the king’s chambers.
Most of all, I was angry with myself. My only true talent was lying to myself. I had been a child playing at learning about the world, spying and prying with Tallie’s help, in order to defy my father. Flattering myself that I was suited to be the First Daughter of England, while, in truth, I was only an ignorant girl who knew nothing and had nothing at all to say about her own life. I didn’t know the first thing about my chief duty, the only thing I was good for. My maid most likely knew more than I did.
I climbed a stone staircase up onto the open walk on the gallery roof, where I stood looking out over the Thames. For a long while, I watched shards of broken sunlight jittering on the wind-stirred water. I breathed in the balmy air. Once again, I was calmed by the river and the great open space beyond it. I watched the criss-crossing wherries filled with people going busily about their own lives, lives just as important to them as mine was to me.
I might be the First Daughter of England, whose life had never been her own to choose. I could, however, choose what to make of the life I had.
‘No more of feeling sorry for myself,’ I told Belle after a time. ‘No more wolf crouched with its leg caught in a trap, waiting helplessly for the hunter.’ I thought of my mother, and her helplessness, and the losses that had made her refuse to love.
I won’t end up like her! I vowed again. I had let myself forget my secret, learned from my meeting with Digby in the forest. Though I was young, I was not powerless.
The more I learned, the more I could control. And what I could not control, I could at least be prepared for. Willing or unwilling, my heart would be ready.
Thoughtfully, I continued to watch the distant people in the wherries. My eyes followed the waving red feather of one man’s hat all the way across the river, from the Whitehall water steps below me to the far shore.
I need to talk to a man, I decided. For a start. One whom I could trust to tell me the secrets of men’s minds and what they expected, but without laughing at me and making me feel a fool. He might even be able to tell me – if I ever found one of my suitors tolerable – how I should go about making the man want me urgently enough to override my father’s wilful indecision.
Briefly, I considered asking John Harington. But, in or out of humour, Henry was the only male I could wholly trust.
I found him after supper in the Privy Garden, marching briskly around the perimeter as he often did. Two of his hounds trotted at his heels. Some evenings, one or more of his gentlemen marched with him. But tonight both his attendants and mine were content to sit gossiping on benches in the last of the sun, to wander pensively along the water rill, or flirt in the deepening shadows of the big sundial.
He did not look at me but did slow his pace when I dropped in beside him. Even so, I had to hold my farthingale firmly to keep it from swinging as I trotted to keep up.
‘Please speak to me,’ I begged. ‘I need you to answer some questions.’
Henry raised his eyebrows but did not reply. We rounded the corner at the farthest end of the garden.
‘Questions about men,’ I said, breathing hard. ‘And marriage.’
Henry stopped marching and stared at me. ‘What?’
‘You’re the only man I dare ask. What really happens in marriage, for example?’
His face reddened.
‘I know that you’re bedded,’ I said quickly. ‘But what does that mean, exactly? Consummation? For humans, I mean, not in the stable yard. I can’t believe that it’s the same.’ I felt hot. Blood drummed in my ears. ‘Does it hurt terribly when a maidenhead is broken? How exactly does that happen? What will be expected of me?’
‘We shouldn’t speak of such things.’
‘If we can’t, then who else can I speak to?’ I made my face as miserable and desperate as I could manage.
He scowled. ‘Ask one of your ladies.’
‘And expose my ignorance?’
Not even to Tallie, not on this question. Tallie knew so much about me while I knew so little about her. I might be the princess, but the power of knowledge was entirely hers. From time to time the voice of Lady Harington still muttered that I should keep Tallie in her place, that nothing good could come of upsetting the natural order.
‘I scarcely rule my ladies as it is,’ I said, ‘without giving them one more reason to laugh at me behind their hands.’
He knelt down and busied himself scratching the ears of his hound. The other hound licked his ear.
‘You already know the worst about me,’ I said. ‘And have sworn that you loved me all the same. If you love me still, help me!’ I stooped down in a pool of skirts and stroked the dog’s back so that our hands moved in unison.
‘Dearest Hal, please! You always say that knowledge underpins true power. And you have Wee Bobby as your tutor.’ I watched our rings, moving together. ‘Even I can see how he’s building your power with all his letters and news from his intelligencers.’
Absently, I felt the second hound push its nose under my other hand. ‘I don’t have a Cecil,’ I said. ‘You must be my teacher.’ I took Henry’s hand from the dog’s head and held it in both of mine. ‘I fear what I don’t know. Please, dearest brother! Is fearful ignorance what you wish for your sister? Should the Queen of the Americas not know all that she can?’
Henry pulled away his hand. ‘You already know the sad truth from the stable yard,’ he said stiffly. ‘I fear that men are no better than the beasts, however much they deceive themselves with talk of love, and however much the poets may dress it up with fine words.’
Like the beasts after all, I thought. Like dogs and horses. But this unwelcome information still left me confused and fearful. What dreadful reality needed deceit and fine words to dress it up? And, however beastly, man could not be like both a stallion and a miniature greyhound at the same time. In body or soul.
I knew that I should not ask. I knew what Henry would say. I swallowed. ‘May I see your cock?’
‘No!’ Henry drew a deep breath and stood up. ‘Of course not!’
‘Where is the sin?’ I asked, scrambling to my feet. ‘We are the same flesh, brother and sister, two halves of a single soul. Babes from the same womb.’
He turned away from me.
‘Look!’ I pulled at the ring that he had given me in Edinburgh. ‘I am giving this to you now!’
‘Don’t be a fool!’
We walked on a few paces in silence.
‘Please, Hal! Your beloved little sister is so afraid – more afraid than you could ever be, of anything.’
We walked a little farther. Then he exhaled sharply. He stopped walking, wavered. Exhaled again. Then, scarlet-faced, he turned his back on the garden and motioned me to stand in front of him. Reluctantly, with another look over his shoulder, he untied the placket of his trousers and fished inside his underclothes. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Not much to fear, is it? I hope your anxiety is settled now.’