‘Yes,’
He nodded. ‘Then we will suffer together, as you say. And I will look after you.’
‘As far as my guardian permits.’ I wanted to hug him. Because my skirts made that impossible, I settled for a smile. Tomorrow I would ask if he had ever received my warning letter. Not today. Today was just right as it was.
But the right time to ask eluded me. Henry and I saw each other again several times after our meeting in the gardens and took pleasure from each other’s company. But we were always surrounded by a court racing in full cry after the pleasures of my uncle’s continued visit. Treason was not a subject for a snatched moment on the way to a banquet or tilt. Sooner or later, I would confront my fear of knowing the worst. But not yet.
Because I was not made for fear and gloom, I began to thread the bewildering events of my temporary new life together, to order them like a string of bright beads. Rashly, after the bad beginning of that first evening, I began to believe that I needed less protection than Henry and I had feared.
Though still an object of curiosity, I was only one of many entertainments on offer during my uncle’s visit. Courtiers vied to present the most lavish banquets and masques. Members of every noble family in England displayed their looks and skills as dancers and singers in these shows. So many spectators, supporters and enemies alike, crowded to see and discuss the performances that the women were forbidden to wear their wide-hooped farthingales in order to make more room.
Dressed in one or another of the new gowns that had put Lady H into a fever and emptied my guardian’s purse, I sat on the royal dais at as many of these masques as I could. There, I learned how much delight the stern-living Haringtons had denied me at Combe. I saw the true purpose of my lute lessons and my dancing master. Here was magic made real. A safe ecstasy. The perfect marriage of wonder and glue.
‘Did you ever see such things before?’ Anne would murmur close behind me. ‘Oh, just look at that!’
Transported out of my everyday self, I watched the sun rise behind wood and canvas mountains. I saw ladies of the court transformed into musical nymphs. Earthquakes destroyed temples. Monstrous lions roared out fire. Gods descended from the roof or sprang from cloven rock. A sky full of candles burned, and red, green and blue lanterns, and other mysterious lights that I could not name but which stirred unnamed memories and elusive wisps of lost dreams. The jewels that flashed in the folds of my gowns looked suddenly like fallen stars and my thoughts felt opened as wide as the night sky.
‘I didn’t know such things existed!’ I told Henry under my breath, when we met once at the door of the Royal Chapel before evening prayers. ‘Please tell me that you don’t think all the ways of the world are wicked!’
Sometimes the king was present with my uncle at these performances, though he would often fidget violently, then spring up in the middle of a song and leave before the final dance. Sometimes he stayed away altogether, reportedly locked in debate with his attendant wits or drinking in his lodgings, with or without my uncle. Sometimes, he vanished altogether to hunt at Newmarket or Royston, or at Theobald’s, Cecil’s great estate in Hertfordshire. I heard whispers that he disliked crowds and found excuse to avoid them, fearing a sudden assassin.
Whatever the reason for them, I rejoiced in his absences,which let me forget fear. With whole-hearted pleasure I could then attend tilts and applaud my brother fighting in the lists. I could marvel at fireworks where dragons spat flames at each other, Catherine Wheels blossomed on trees and rockets briefly imitated the stars. I could listen to music that made me want to weep with joy, as if the vibrating strings of the viols were the strings of my own heart. My body would lie singing under those bows.
‘Was that not fine music tonight?’ Anne would ask as we bedded down for sleep. ‘You could almost sing the tune along with the players. I do prefer the old songs, don’t you?’
One night, freed from my father’s heavy-lidded gaze, I danced for the first time with a man, in the general dancing that followed the masque. None of Lady H’s warning words had armoured me against his smiling gallantry nor against the disturbing yet exciting smell of a heated adult male body so close to mine. As we turned around each other, carried shoulder-to-shoulder on the music, face looking into face, I felt my future quiver with sudden, unexpected brightness.
We danced again. His blue eyes pressed into mine but shifted away just before I could grow awkward with self-consciousness. I glanced at his mouth, under his fair, curly moustache. He bowed over my hand and delivered me back to my chair. I danced with other men. Smiled at Anne as I passed her in a figure. Then I danced with my first partner again. And again. Whenever the drums began, I flew.
‘Elizabella.’ Henry arrived at my side when I sat down to catch my breath. He looked magnificent in cream-coloured silk embroidered with pearls. His russet hair gleamed. He studied the heaving mass of dancers below us. Nodding and smiling at acquaintances, he said under his breath, ‘It’s fitter exercise for women than for men.’
I scarcely heard him. I was watching the slim lean shape of my first partner as he danced with a fair-haired young woman. She had full breasts, I noted, trapped quiveringbehind her bodice top. And a knowing look in her eyes that I envied.
Henry followed my gaze. ‘A Seymour,’ he said, meaning the man. ‘William, has a brother, Thomas. Distant cousins who carry royal Tudor blood.’ He stared at the girl, but did not name her.
We watched William Seymour duck his neatly barbered head to lead his partner under the arched arms of another couple.
‘I’m told that he has hopes of marrying you,’ said Henry.
‘If marriage means nothing but dancing,’ I said, ‘he would suit me very well.’
Henry shook his head earnestly. ‘Our father will never let an ambitious English noble get so close to true power.’
‘Then I must be content to dance with him.’ But in truth, I was sobered by the cold purpose I now knew lay behind that smiling gallantry. I felt foolish, out of my depth. I could never lower my guard.
After that night, I lost much of my taste for masques and dancing and began to take refuge whenever I could in a more familiar haven, the royal stables in Scotland Yard. They held wonders never seen at Combe. Rows and rows of shining flanks. An entire barn full of saddles and tack. War saddles with sheaths for weapons. Ceremonial saddles set with gold. Ladies’ side-saddles with curved heads and X-shaped heads. Embroidered saddlecloths and jewelled cushions.
Wearing an old gown, with my farthingale left off, I persuaded the grooms to let me curry and brush my own horses several times a week. When finished in the stables, I wandered into the royal kennels where a greyhound bitch had just whelped, to watch the pups clamber over each other and nose for the teat. The King’s Master of the Hounds welcomed me and let me select a pup to have when it was weaned.
I chose one of the two dogs. I watched him wriggle to thetop of the squirming pile, latch on to a teat and hang on undeterred even when another pup stepped on his face. ‘Mars,’ I said.
The Master of the Hounds also told me that the lioness in the menagerie at the Tower, named Elizabeth after me, had whelped. Poor Anne had to come with me from Whitehall and attend me for hours as I sat by the stacked-up cages, on a chair carried there for me, watching the infant lions suckling and learning to play.
‘I can’t think why you like it so much here,’ muttered Anne in a rare moment of rebellion. ‘It stinks.’
‘You just want to go back to Whitehall so you can flirt,’ I said. I had spoken lightly and was startled to see my old playmate’s cheeks burn as red-hot as a sunset.
Then, I saw my first play, performed by the king’s own company of players in the temporary Banqueting Hall, built when the old one burned down. Not a mix of songs, dances and poetic declamations like the masques. Just bald, unadorned words, spoken as we speak ourselves, if a little more loudly. With the exception only of the murderous queen in the story, who struck me as strange until I finally saw that she was played by a boy, the players seemed to live as we did, progressing through time, breathing, loving, loathing, fighting, scheming, suffering, murdering.
But what braced me upright in my chair was the whiff of truth that drifted down from the trestle stage of the King’s Men. Not all men at court were flatterers after all, even when they wore flatterers’ clothes. This play had been written for my father, to be presented before him and my Danish uncle. It was tricked out in the usual flowery dedication. And yet it spoke terrible truths, more truth than any of the flattering poetry of the masques I had seen.
I looked around the Banqueting Hall. I could not believe that no one else noticed. An ambitious, Scottish would-be king. From a place described as ‘too cold for hell.’ A king who killed his rivals for the throne. A man with a vast and fearful imagination that showed him vividly what horrors might await him. A man of foreboding. Of changeable purpose.
‘Faith, here’s an equivocator,’ complained the player Porter. ‘… that could swear in both scales against either scale…’
I could not look at my father, seated at the centre, on my left. In the side of my eye, I saw his foot jiggling impatiently.
‘He means that traitor Jesuit, Garnet,’ a voice murmured behind me. ‘Who was complicit in the Gunpowder Treason and equivocated his way to the scaffold.’
‘No doubt,’ another low voice replied, unconvinced. ‘No doubt.’
I did not turn my head to see who spoke. Sideways, I watched my father drink, and lean to speak to the young man sitting at his side, a different youth from the night my uncle arrived. I watched the king smile and nod, and pick at his buttons, and drink again, and sometimes watch the stage where blood dripped from royal Scottish hands.
Vengeful enemies attacked. The ghost of a murdered man returned. My father’s demons walked and spoke on that stage. It was disguised. It was cleverly confused, with witches, different names and a wicked queen, but I felt the hard dark core of the piece. My family’s history, perceived and related for what it was.
I looked at the other spectators around me with new eyes.
Not simply a clumping of ambitious, powerful men and women around the central power of my father. For the first time I saw the court as an animal with its own independent life and strengths. My father… our family… merely rode it for the time. Like a well-schooled horse, it colluded, allowing the rider to rule it. Though larger and stronger, it permitted the rider to determine when to go, to stop. To choose direction and speed. Like a horse, it was more powerful than its rider and might choose at any time to disobey.
Even though a forest began to advance across the stage and a climax of some sort seemed to be near, I could no longer listen to what the players were saying. My thoughts grew treasonous. Directly opposed to all that my father said and wrote. Opposed to his will, and to God’s. They were thoughts to be slammed behind heavy doors.
The Scottish king was being killed, out of sight behind the central curtain. The killer returned with the king’s head and saluted another man. ‘Hail, King of Scotland!’
Order, said the play, was being restored to the world. The king was dead. Long live the new king.
How did they dare? Who gave them this licence? How could they survive?
Until seeing that play, even after all of Mrs Hay’s tales, I had not truly understood that my father could be unseated. I glanced at him again, still drinking, still smiling and talking over the voices of the players as if he had failed to notice this terrifying reality.
You’ve drunk too much, I told myself. You’re wine-addled.
‘So thanks to all at once,’ said the new player king, ‘and to each one, whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone.’
My father was applauding before the last trumpet flourish died. Then he was on his feet, cutting through the spectators, demanding a piss pot and another glass of wine.
Standing by my chair, I clapped the bowing players until my hands burned, a secret new recruit to treason.
THEOBALD’S, HERTFORDSHIRE, 1606
A few days later, on a clear spring afternoon, I rode with the royal party to attend what was to be the climax of my uncle’s visit, Cecil’s own entertainment for the two kings. We arrived at dusk at Theobald’s, the vast, golden brick and stone house in Hertfordshire that Cecil’s father, Lord Burleigh, had built for entertaining Queen Elizabeth.
‘Everyone says that the Chief Secretary means to outdo the grandeur of anything seen so far during your uncle’s visit,’ Anne whispered to me, as we rode through the entrance gate at the top of the long drive. ‘Look at those lights up in the trees! However did they get them all the way up there?’
Lanterns sparkled in the branches of the beech avenue leading to the house. As we rode behind the two kings down the double river of lights, hidden musicians played in the bushes on either side. Inside the big gatehouse, decorated with twisting double chimneys and arched niches filled with classical busts, more musicians played in the first of the huge courtyards. Sweet-smelling fires of apple wood and herbs burned in braziers. Grooms rushed forward to seize our horses and lead them away to the stables.
In the great hall of the house itself, grew a tall oak rustling with silk leaves. On each leaf was written ‘WELCOME'. Clockwork birds sang in its branches.
‘Look,’ whispered Anne. ‘Musical birds. Don’t they look real!’
‘The place is far too fine for a king!’ my father proclaimed loudly, gazing up at the intricate, lace-like plaster ceiling. ‘I suppose it might just about do for a Chief Secretary.’ Without looking, he threw his cloak into a pair of waiting hands.
There was a subdued titter among his followers. A few people glanced at Cecil, who stood waiting to welcome his monarch.
‘Enough gawping. I need wine.’ Without glancing at the marvellous tree, my father steered the Danish king out of the hall by the arm, with Cecil scurrying behind them. ‘We’ll help ourselves,’ I heard him say over his shoulder as he disappeared. ‘I ought to know by now where to find it.’