When Tallie left me, I rolled onto my side, curled into a tight ball and pressed my kneecaps so hard against my teeth that my lips bled. I still could not wipe out the unbearable thoughts that filled my head. The guilt was not Bacon’s alone. Nor the king’s.
I clutched my granite fragment so hard that it cut my palm. I shoved the edge of my coverlet into my mouth so that I would not scream, and moaned like the wind between the rocks on the crags. My eyes swelled with tears I could not shed.
A kind of storm swept through me, as dry as dust. Exhausted, I threw myself onto the pillows and thought back and remembered all that I should have seen earlier. How Henry had tired too soon while playing tennis. His violent shivering in Cecil’s boat, which I had blamed on the cold water. The effort it had cost him to rise from his bed to greet visitors.
Now that I let myself see it, my brother had been ill since Easter. I had blamed his pallor and the bruise-like circles under his eyes on grief for Cecil. I had accepted his reassurances to me.
If only I had let myself see what I had not wanted to see!
If only Henry had not been so determined to hide any weakness and to laugh off all concern. It was possible that he had been slowly poisoned ever since Easter.
A strong young man in good health strengthened by discipline and exercise might have survived a poison subtle enough to avoid detection. He had been weakened first.
A long, gradual weakening with one poison, followed by a ferocious, murderous finish with another.
If I had paid attention instead of being blinded by unspeakable fear… if Henry had been more willing to admit to frailty, poison might have been detected in time to save him. We might all have taken precautions. His gentlemen and serving people would have been alerted. The poisoner – whether Bacon or not – would almost certainly have been deterred from further attempts.
Henry would still be alive.
I kissed his gold ring, then held it in my mouth. The cold metal had a taste that eluded me, just as Henry’s living face had already grown less clear. Blurred by the strangeness of his shaved, knobbed skull, and by the painted image on his coffin, that was like him but not him at all.
He had sent to me for help. I had failed him.
I got up, found Tallie’s copy of Bacon’s eulogy for my brother and tried to read it again by the light of the night-fire. I could prove nothing against him, yet I believed what Tallie had seen. I believed my brother’s ring. I remembered Bacon’s eyes when my brother had banished him from his presence – the eyes of a man who knew he had just made an enemy of the future king.
Bacon had not published this eulogy. Why not?
I was certain he had killed my brother. I did not know whether he acted alone or on the orders of the king. I read his writings again. Somewhere in the spaces between the words, he might tell me.
‘Marry in secret,’ advised Anne, who had been invited into the councils of war. ‘Then it will be too late for the king to forbid you.’
‘And finish in the Tower like my cousin Arbella?’ Because I was a direct heir to the throne, my open defiance of the king’s will would be clear treason. But I found myself thinking about what she had said, nevertheless. I had learned that I could be a secret traitor. I had studied my father, looking for the unarmoured gaps at armpit and groin.
‘Walk with me,’ I ordered Tallie after dinner.
We left my ladies grateful by the fire, even Anne, though her eyes followed us out of the room. We did not speak until we entered the long narrow tiltyard gallery.
Every third wooden shutter stood open, letting in enough gloomy light to show that the gallery was deserted. This year, it would not be decked with pine and holly for Christmas tilts. Instead of fresh pine, it smelt only of damp wood, sand, mice and horse droppings from the other side of the shuttered wall, in the long yard where horses were exercised during the worst of the weather. I stared down at the hem of my black skirt, barely visible in the shadowsof the floor. I felt filled with shadowy dread, a darkness as dense and heavy and hard to move as a boulder.
‘Tallie, help us. If I can’t marry Prince Frederick, my wedding bed must be a grave.’
Our relationship had changed since Henry’s death. She had taken my place at my dying brother’s side. She was the hand that held both of ours and joined them across the distance my father had decreed. She and I were now one in a way I could not have imagined when she first came to me.
‘Speaking plain, or courtier-like?’ she asked. Whatever change I might feel in our relationship, and in spite of my letter of manumission, Tallie still pretended never quite to trust me and continued to tease me with tests of my willingness to hear the truth.
‘I am distraught,’ I said. ‘I stare into the depths of hell.’
‘You survived without the Palsgrave before.’
Our breaths made grey-white puffs in the dark, cold air of the gallery. Our shoes clacked on the creaking wooden floor.
‘I survived by ignorance. Because I could not imagine a marriage that would give me joy!’ I said. ‘But now I know Frederick! I lost my Henry. I will not lose my Frederick too!’
I understood now the desperation that made my mother beat her fists against her own belly when the Countess of Mar refused to hand over Henry. Even though she murdered the babe inside. Nothing mattered to me now, either, but to be with Frederick. My only safety. My only husband. My only hope.
‘La,’ said Tallie. ‘You surpass yourself in immoderation.’
‘Don’t talk so much like Cecil!’ I wanted to pound my fists on my face, to tear out my hair. In my ignorance, I had once thought such acts to be poetic excess. Now I knew them to be urgent and inarguable. My fists clenched and wavered in the air. ‘I can’t bear it!’
‘Someone must try to speak sense in the place of that poordead wee man.’ Tallie was frowning at me with impatient concern. ‘The country’s been in the hands of fools and weasels since he died.’ She rubbed her lower lip with the pink ball of her back-curved thumb.
‘Spit it out!’ I ordered. ‘I know that look of yours. I pray you, save me from the “fools and weasels".’
She diverted her steps to one of the un-shuttered openings. She put her head out into the tiltyard, then pulled it back. ‘You’ll get nowhere by flapping about like a headless chicken… though I don’t suppose Cecil would have said it in quite those words.’ She glanced sideways at me. ‘You and your sharp wits can do better than that.’
I wanted to tear out a handful of her hair. Or fling myself to the floor in hopes of sinking into it. Then, listening to the echo of her harsh words hanging in the dark air, quite suddenly, I saw that she was right.
I shook myself, a dog emerging from a sudden dive into the icy pond of reason. I wanted to clutch at her hands but protected my dignity with a little distance, and an edge in my voice. ‘So what miracles of good sense does the ghost of the late Secretary whisper in your ear?’
We leaned close together so that our skirts met and the clouds of our breaths mingled. ‘The Palsgrave must act the attacking general,’ she said.
Attack and Frederick did not sit easily together.
‘He’s too much in awe of your father,’ Tallie said. ‘The king finds awe tedious. He sees too much of it and loves impudence. Awe turns the Palsgrave into just another favour-seeking courtier.’
Frederick had dignity and self-possession. But, impudence? With my father?
I suddenly saw my new love in a raw, exposing light, unclothed by my private knowledge of him. His youth made vulnerable, his fine limbs reduced to ‘small stature'. I tried to imagine his wonderful gleam of laughter and collusionunder attack from my harsh, raw-edged, canny father. Frederick’s delightful gentle humour would be beaten senseless by my father’s shouts of coarse, malicious wit.
‘The king dismisses him as a half-grown boy,’ said Tallie carefully. ‘Calls him the “German Mouse” because of the fright he took at the gun salutes when he arrived. Or so the rumours run.’
‘He’s not a mouse!’ I cried. ‘You know it’s not true!’
Tallie shrugged. ‘What I know counts for nothing. Your father sees only the quivering boy of the gossip.’ She hesitated. ‘The king believes himself to be a man of reason…’ Her words trailed away.
We both knew what she left unsaid. My father’s reason was seeming less and less able to govern his actions. Since Cecil had died, no one had guided him honestly. Now that no one swept aside the smaller decisions for him, he foundered amidst too many decisions. His reason might urge one way, but if his impulse – or Robert Carr – urged another, that way he would lean. And wine was loosening his reason even further. To say nothing of the storm in his soul that stood for grief at Henry’s death.
I tried to imagine Frederick outfacing Carr, the new
de facto
ruler of England.
‘Your Frederick’s as handsome as any of your father’s chamber gentlemen…’
‘What are you suggesting?’ I demanded, my voice rising.
‘Only that, just now, with Carr flirting openly with that Howard woman, the king may welcome a new, handsome young man who will tell him what to do next.’
At last, I nodded. ‘My poor Frederick. This will be yet another test of his stomach.’
We turned together at the end of the gallery, like a pair of dancers in a figure, and started to walk back.
‘Am I so immoderate?’ I asked.
Silently, Tallie rolled her eyes to Heaven. But she didn’tdeceive me. I could see that she was relieved I had taken her advice so well.
Frederick and I met on horseback in St James’s Park. After his threat to arrest me, I did not dare to defy the king openly, but Frederick might.
‘Ignore the king’s orders to leave England,’ I told him.
‘But I have already acknowledged them,’ he said miserably. ‘I can’t now pretend.’
‘Tell your people to delay packing. Lose papers. Order a new suit of clothes that you must wait to have finished. Arrange for a leak in your flagship.’
Understanding bloomed in his eyes.
Arbella’s stubborn refusal to hear or obey orders had delayed her removal to imprisonment in Durham long enough for her to attempt to escape to the Continent. I would have to succeed where she had then failed.
We leaned together and snatched a kiss under the trees with cold-roughened lips. Reluctantly, I straightened in my saddle. ‘While your people dawdle, you must make a foray into the enemy camp.’
My chosen husband, my love, my sweetest Frederick, looked alarmed.
‘I will have you and none other,’ I said. ‘Remember, you are also Henry’s choice.’
Frederick nodded and swallowed. ‘I am your true knight. Point me out the dragon’s lair.’
In his voice, I heard both fear and resolve.
Uninvited, Frederick would accompany James to Hertfordshire, to console the king, he would say. With luck the king would not object. He seemed hardly to notice who rode with him.
Tallie and I rehearsed Frederick’s part with him.
I told him how sorely the king missed the political advice of Cecil. Frederick must remind him that, with Henry dead,
Frederick was now the greatest hope of the anti-Hapsburg Protestant alliance in Europe, balancing the new threat of a conjoined France and Spain.
‘And you must amuse him.’
‘Amuse the king?’
‘You must be a gallant.’ I did not let myself look at Tallie. ‘Show him how you can swagger! Take him hunting but never shoot the stag yourself. Then lean close and smile into his eyes. Tell him that he is the wisest, most handsome king in the world! And then ask him about…’ I tried to think what investigation or philosophy was now the king’s chief amusement. ‘Tallie will try to learn the subject of the latest trial of wits at his dinner table. Ask anything and then listen. But above all, make him laugh.’
Frederick looked aghast. ‘So soon after your brother’s death?’
‘Trust in me,’ I said. ‘Most of all, he wants to laugh. Don’t fear. It won’t all rest on your shoulders. While you’re with the king, I will play my part.’
Frederick, Baby Charles and I then piled into a coach to visit my father in Kensington. Then Baby Charles and I returned to Whitehall, leaving Frederick behind to travel with my father to Theobald’s.
‘I want you to give me Belle,’ said Baby Charles.
I had been staring out of the coach window, thinking of Frederick, who must now try to change the king’s mind. I turned to stare at my younger brother. ‘Want what you like,’ I said. ‘You can’t have her.’
Baby Charles gave a sly look. ‘You must. You have to be kinder to me now that Henry is dead.’
‘Have I not been kind?’
‘You treat me like a baby. And laughed when I couldn’t lift Henry’s sword.’
Please, God, I thought. Let Frederick hold his nerve.
‘I want Belle,’ Baby Charles repeated. ‘She’s prettier than any of my bitches.’ He met my eye coolly. ‘I will be the next king. I shall ask our father to make you give her to me.’
I shook my head in protest. ‘She’s my favourite dog.’
At twelve years old, my brother was still small and as spare as a miniature greyhound. His hair was still thin and baby-fine, but his voice had begun to break. Adult angles were beginning to sharpen his narrow, delicate child’s face. A new, chilly consideration had replaced the hopeful puppy look in his eyes.
That is England’s next king sitting there, I thought with a jolt. Instead of Henry.
‘I will have her,’ he said.
‘Will you leave me nothing?’
‘I want her.’
As we tried to stare each other down, I saw that I had lost two brothers, not one.
Back in Whitehall, I invited the Sir Francis Bacon to join me in my barge, telling no one what I intended.
‘You’re a crazed green girl.’ Bacon looked away over the cold grey water as if he found my words tedious. We sat like two boulders of wool, wrapped against the cold wind off the Thames. The clouds overhead scudded in from the north, bringing icy mist from the Russian steppes. Moving slowly upriver against the descending tide, we watched the Surrey shore slide by. The dark towers of Lambeth Palace grew larger.