On a pallet in a gallery somewhere in Whitehall, I know! But will no one tell me what my situation is? What are my circumstances now? Oh, Lord! I’m going to cry! Hunger, that’s all it is. You need sleep, girl, if you hope to keep your wits about you on an empty belly.
Should be used to stares by now, but sometimes they wear me out. Make it hard to think straight. Even with my eyes closed, I can still hear the breathing. And belching, and sighing and scratching. Now that one’s snoring… more like farting through her nose. Packed bodies reek just as much here in Whitehall as they do in Southwark… there’s something alive in this straw… Even with my eyes closed, I can feel the stares. Pushing at me. Push. Push!
You, there… yes, you. Let’s see if you’re so bold when I stare back. Ha! Got you!
… No, Tallie, don’t do that! Danger. Danger! You swore you wouldn’t. Please God! Don’t let her get a bellyache or cut her thumbfor the next fortnight, or else she’ll cry, ‘Black witch!’ and swear that I put the evil eye on her.
Don’t get rattled. You don’t know exactly where you are, but just think where you might be instead… If she sends me back, I’ll jump from the boat, this time, even if my skirts pull me under.
I’ll make her keep me.
I thought I had hooked her with the music. But she slipped off again. Is that wooden angel above me playing a viol? I think so. It’s a sign. Don’t get sent back!
Who’d have thought I’d end up sleeping under angels! Ha! Not funny.
If I can ever sleep!
Crying from hunger, nothing more.
More angels on the ceiling… can’t see clearly. Their wings look like they’re moving in the torch light. The ceiling is flapping its wings and flying away. Feel sure that real angels must be more like winged dragons, hot and quivering with light like the heart of a charcoal fire. They might even be black, like me… the real ones, not all those little pink and gold babies on her ceiling, with their useless wing stubs and baby nut-cocks. I’d wager that painter had a little baby’s nut and never saw a real cock.
Truth! Her grace… madam… tempting me to be honest. She lives with painted lies but wants me to tell her the truth, does she? What can she know of truth, standing there in her silks and jewels, surrounded by her yes-madam-no-madam ladies? Does she think truth is some novel form of entertainment? Doesn’t she know – princess, duchess, whoever she is – that telling the truth is like springing a leak? Hard to control once it starts. And a truth like mine can sink you. She’ll get no more truth from me. I don’t owe her truth. Truth isn’t dangerous to her.
No one bought my truth.
I feel like a coiled spring… a serpent coiled at the bottom of the sea. Lying low. I’m protecting the bones of my mother, no face… memory of warm. Don’t know yet what the serpent can do. There are ships to swallow, sailors to terrify. Ladies to chew up into littlepieces and spit out again… that gristly bitch with the slanting eyes and loud voice, speaking nice and slow to be certain I understood. Keep an eye on her. I can wait. I know what always happens to the serpent in the stories. Or to the dragon. I won’t go the same way, I promise! I’ll wait and watch and work out another ending, if I live long enough… Sleepy at last. May sleep after all…
Uncoiling. I’m a long, brown sinuous shape sliding out of my cavern in the rocks, with needle teeth and eyes like shining green glass. Fanned by living lace, I drift in a warm turquoise sea, steering with the tiniest flick of my tail, wings tucked to my sides like fins. Overhead, a mirror reflects back my undulating image. Can’t see what lies above. I pierce the mirror and soar up with a great clap, trailing the glitter of broken waves from the edges of my wings…
The cherries had begun to soften. Their plump skins were dented with brown spots. I tipped them out of the silver box and ordered fresh ones.
I stood still in the morning light for Lady Anne and my maid to dress my hair and pin the side of my stomacher firmly to the bodice of my gown. I put on my amber necklace with diamond clasps to hold it in position on my shoulders. I washed my hands carefully in a basin and rubbed them with the linen towel to remove any last scent of monkey, dog and horse.
‘Will you attend me?’ I asked Anne.
She nodded, as pale and silent as if I had again suggested jumping off the roof.
Leaving the Herd looking curiously after us, I took only Anne and a footman to carry the silver box and headed for the long gallery that crossed Whitehall. I was grateful for my imagined map. I saw my route clearly. From the Parkside, where I lodged tucked in with the cockpit, tiltyard and large tennis court, by way of the gallery on the upper floor of the Holbein Gate, across Whitehall to the Riverside, where my parents lived. The two parts of the palace were like halves of a leaf divided by a central vein. Outside the Holbein Gate,the vein of Whitehall continued like a stem, as the Street. Inside the gate, on the Riverside, the king’s lodgings lay on the Thames to the south, upstream. The queen’s apartments lay to the north.
When I reached the queen’s lodgings, I ran out of map. I had not entered them before.
Anne saw me hesitate. ‘Would it not be better to wait?’ she asked. ‘If no one knows that you’re coming, her majesty might be away.’
‘But I want to catch them all unawares.’
I prepared myself to outface my mother’s guardians. I had learned enough in the last months to know that they might look as much like gentlewomen as soldiers, but guardians they would be.
I would find her. ‘I know,’ I would say. ‘You have no need to say anything.’ And I would cross the space between us and slide into her arms again.
We would talk and laugh as we had done at supper at Holyrood. I might even dare to tell her what had happened to me in the forest at Combe. Looking back, it seemed to me now that I had been very brave for such a young girl. My mother would never betray me. At last, someone who cared for me could tell me that I had shown great courage. I needed to hear it confirmed before it would be true.
I advanced our little party into a small reception chamber and met myself looking back from a hanging glass. I stopped again, scarcely aware of the stir I was causing in the room.
I was thinking like the child I had left behind. I wore a stiff-hooped farthingale like a grown woman. My mother would likely be wearing one too. Rather than embrace, we would clasp hands across our ledges of pleated silk and look into each other’s eyes. We might both be a little shy and uncertain. She might need a quiet moment to take in how I was grown almost to full womanhood. But, seeing me, she would then be eased in her grief for the loss of my two infantsisters and a short-lived infant brother left buried in Scotland, about whose birth I had not known at the time.
First, I would thank her for her gift, though I still didn’t know what the devil to do with it. Then I would say how happy I was to be with her alone at last. I would tell her that I enjoyed watching the games she sometimes played with her ladies in the privy garden and hoped one day to be allowed to join them.
Though she must surely know already, I would remind her that I could sing and dance, that I played the lute and virginal tolerably well, and dared to hope that I might soon be invited to take part in one of her masques. I would give her all the reasons she could possibly need for taking me back into her life.
Then we passed the open door of an ante-room where I saw the queen’s ladies sitting. Startled faces looked at me. My heart began to rush.
I took the silver box. ‘Stay here.’
I went through the door alone. Lucy, Countess of Bedford, raised her eyebrows but led me to the closed door of an inner room.
A tall thin woman in white stood staring our of the window at the river.
Lucy withdrew back to the ante-chamber and closed the door behind her.
This long-nosed woman at the window, with her slightly protruding teeth, looked very little like her youthful wedding portrait, which I had once seen. Or like the splendidly dressed, slightly feverish woman of court celebrations to whom I had curtsied on state occasions or watched from the gallery of the Banqueting Hall, whose extravagance was deplored in Cecil’s accounts. She looked even less like the smiling, swollen-bellied mother I remembered from Edinburgh.
After a moment, I turned my head to see what held herattention on the water. But I saw only the little wherries and rowing shallops that constantly crossed from one shore to the other and ferried passengers up and down stream. In the silence, the shadow of a bird dipped across the window and disappeared. In her plain dress of pale grey silk, she looked like a ghost.
I shifted my weight to make the wooden floor creak.
She didn’t move. The reflected light from the water wavered across her cheek and nose.
‘Madam?’ I said cautiously. I remembered Holyrood and how she had sung to Baby Charles and me in French.
‘Maman?
‘
‘Who are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m your loving daughter, madam,’ I stammered. ‘I wrote…’
The queen turned to me at last. Her eyes glinted as she studied my face, my hair, my bitten nails, my clothes. ‘Is this wild girl the babe I bore?’ She shook her head and turned back to the river. ‘Not mine any longer. Never mine.’ She closed her lips tightly across her teeth as if to hide them.
I slithered wildly on the ice of her words. Was I not, then, a princess? Not a Stuart? Was I my father’s bastard by another woman? Or merely not good enough to acknowledge?
At last, I asked, ‘Did you not bear me then, madam?’
‘I cried for you, sure enough.’
‘Then I am your true child.’
The teeth slipped into view again. The pretty girl of her wedding portrait was long gone. ‘I have no children.’
‘Who are we then… Henry and me and Baby Charles?’ I asked desperately. My body still yearned to run to her, to embrace her as I had done in Edinburgh, to feel her hand on my hair. It occurred to me that she was mad.
She raised her hands between us, as if warding off an invisible evil. Gems flashed and burned on her taut fingers.
‘You’re the king’s children. Not mine. His majesty stole all my babes… the ones that God didn’t take. “The bairns", hecalled you, as if that made you some other sort of creature that a mother could not love.’
She turned back to the window and leaned on the windowsill. In her long limbs and sudden awkward movements, I felt a terrible echo of my own still-growing, unwieldy limbs ‘I thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘God speed you, mistress…’
Look at me! I wanted to shout. If you look at me, you will see how I am your child.
We stood in silence. I wanted to scream, or tear off one of my sleeves, or hurl a stool crashing through the diamond panes into the river.
My mother looked at me sideways, without turning her face from the window. ‘How is the other one? The boy? That was once
my
boy?’
‘Henry?’
‘That dangerous heir who must be kept locked away like a wolf or bear.’ She glanced at me again. ‘As you have been too, for that matter, caged somewhere in Warwickshire, and then at Kew. My husband may have toppled his own mother from her throne while he was still in swaddling cloths… but a girl? What harm does he think you might do him?’
I could never tell her now about the young man in the forest who had turned out to be a devil. Nor about this devil’s terrible, gallant death, and my own certainty that I was next on the scaffold. I should have kept my mouth shut, but her words stung me.
‘I think he fears me as he fears Henry, madam.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. You’re a female and will soon be a woman. We offend his eyes, the likes of us. We don’t wear breeches or show our legs in silk stockings, and swagger and swear that we love our dear, sweet “kingy-wingy” better than we love God… No! I lie!’ Her voice rose. ‘We must swear that our dear, darling, and ever-generous “kingy-wingy” is God Himself…’ She clappedher hands in mock astonishment. ‘La! Listen to me prattle. But I’m only a woman – what else would you expect?’
My mouth had opened as I listened. I closed it.
‘Why did you ask to see me?’ The queen seemed suddenly calm again.
I swallowed. ‘To thank you, your highness, for your gift.’
‘My gift?’ She sounded genuinely puzzled. ‘Oh, the blackamoor, do you mean?’ She waved a dismissive hand. ‘A title-seeking petitioner brought me two, a boy and a girl. I kept the boy for a groom. He looks very well with my grey gelding… at the banquet for Henry’s christening, we had the chariot of Ceres drawn by a noble blackamoor instead of a lion, for fear of frightening the ladies. He was a former soldier. My groom is not such a noble moor as that one, but like Titania… like the goddess Diana… I will have my changeling boy.’
Our conversation seemed ended. Still, I could not move. Not until she ordered me. The silence grew.
The glittering eyes suddenly turned full on me for the second time. ‘Are you happy, child?’
I inhaled. ‘No.’
‘Good.’ She nodded as if I had given the correct answer to a catechism. ‘You begin well. Learn never to expect happiness. You’re female. You will be married. Learn duty, and how to smile, and to pass the time tolerably, but learn never to expect happiness.’
I shook my head dumbly.
‘Make yourself what happiness you can but be prepared to see it taken from you.’
‘Yes, madam,’ I whispered. Now I wanted to run.
‘Let me tell you all that you need to know.’ She pulled her lips across her teeth again and curved them in a taut smile. ‘May I give you a mother’s advice?’
I nodded but my hands lifted as if to push her away.
‘When you breed – as you must – don’t ever attach your heart to that little piece of your own flesh that pats your bosomwith tiny hands. Don’t give in to loving it, as charming as it may be… as delicious as its head smells, and though it looks into your eyes and lies close and warm against you as if you were all the world… Are you listening closely?’