Authors: Elizabeth Fremantle

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Psychological, #Political, #General

The Girl in the Glass Tower (41 page)

BOOK: The Girl in the Glass Tower

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I feel Starkey’s hand slip beneath my pillow for my bag of treasures. He takes something from it then reaches for Moundford’s pestle and mortar. The glass tear clinks as it falls into the bowl.

He brings the pestle down hard, several times, shattering it prettily into a million sparkling pieces. All the tears I have never shed.

I feel my own fate in my hands – it is substantial, real – raw, like a cut of meat. It is mine.

He drops the fragments one by one into my open mouth, wide-open like a ravenous cuckoo. I feel them pass into my throat.

If you count back far enough you reach infinity
, he says.

Arbella is perched up by the ceiling, wings tucked up neatly. She can see people come and go below.

Nan is kneeling beside her empty body, clutching her bag of treasures; she is weeping.

Doctor Moundford explains something to two men Arbella has never seen before. ‘She was unable to ingest anything at all,’ he is saying. She notices his use of
unable
rather than
refused –
loyal to her even now, when it no longer matters.

Aunt Mary is there, furious, tearful. ‘She is …’ – her voice breaks – ‘was … my niece. I should have been made aware. I could have comforted her at the end.’

Or tried to convert me
, Arbella thinks. Mary looks up, suddenly, as if she heard the thought.

‘She asked that you not be admitted, My Lady.’ It is the lieutenant who tells her this. ‘I was obliged to do her bidding.’

Arbella sees everything. She sees Aunt Mary’s dismay on hearing that. She watches her aunt pick up the Agnus Dei from the window ledge and slip it into her glove.

A pair of servants is sorting through her possessions, unhooking the hangings, folding them carefully, collecting up her bits and pieces, her almost-empty jewel box. One of them pilfers a brooch; he is not aware it is made of glass and worth pennies.

The lieutenant surveys the chamber, lifting things to look beneath them, inspecting Arbella’s collection of books, occasionally choosing one and flicking through its pages. He turns Plato on its side to decipher her marginalia, but fails to understand what she has written. He is more stupid than he thinks.

He picks up the stack of written papers on the table, reading passages randomly, rolling his eyes, before taking a fresh sheet of paper and writing something on it:
The Lady Arbella – TO BE DISCARDED
. She can hear his thoughts. He thinks her scribblings are the outpourings of a lunatic.

Taking a length of frayed ribbon, which she has worn sometimes in her hair, he ties the sheaf of papers and tosses it to one side with the other detritus that is of no use to anyone.

‘This lot can be got rid of,’ he says.

She feels Starkey’s presence as a breeze, lifting her, carrying her along, up, away, until she spreads open her wings and flies out into the open expanse of sky.

Clerkenwell

Ami is crying, great racking sobs. She is running with tears, a sea of grief, partially obliterating what she has written.

‘What is it?’ asks Joyce. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘They are the tears of another.’ Ami replies, taking the handkerchief the girl holds out and wiping her face, blowing her nose. Joyce looks baffled by her answer but is too polite, too tactful to ask for an explanation. ‘It is a curse to be unable to cry.’

‘I s’pose it is.’ The girl goes quietly back to her book and Ami reads for the thousandth time those final fragments, hoping against hope that she will find herself there. Her absence screams out. Perhaps, she tells herself, as she has told herself many times before, she is in a part that is lost.

Taking up her pen, she turns to her verse, allowing words to drift towards her from nowhere, inky marks writing themselves into a perfect final couplet:

For although her tongue is gravely still,

Sweet Philomel’s song the air doth fill.

The door bursts open and Hal appears with a man, a ghost from the past.

‘Goodness, Mister Seymour!’ Ami gets up from the table.

‘Mistress Lanyer.’

They stand in silence looking at each other, like men preparing to fight. She can’t help but think of the last time she saw him, the absurd beard, his seething rage:
I will never forgive you
. But he is there, before her, older, a little lined and a smile opens over his face, that same elfin smile she remembers so well.

Neither of them seems to know what to say to the other but Hal makes introductions and produces a jug of wine, handing round cups.

‘You must find us very meanly housed, Mister Seymour,’ she says, making talk to ease the awkwardness, ‘but our fortunes took a tumble. They are on the rise once more, though. Has Hal told you about the school I plan to open?’

‘He has. I think it a wonderful project and I was hoping you would accept my sponsorship.’

‘I don’t know what to say. That is a very kind offer.’ He has wrong-footed her with his generosity. ‘I am most grateful, but I have no need. I have ample funds.’ She likes the idea of the school being entirely hers, of not being beholden to anyone. ‘I’m setting it up in your wife’s honour.’

Now she has brought Lady Arbella into the room the atmosphere is in suspension, like the quiet that comes before turbulent weather. Hal, always tactful, has led Joyce over to the hearth, where they are talking very softly. She can see Will Seymour’s sorrow. Those sad grey eyes, so vividly described by Lady Arbella’s pen, show that his loss has not faded and she wishes he would shout at her, be angry as he was before, for she deserves it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘So very sorry.’

He holds up a hand to stop her. ‘It is I who should apologize.’

‘I don’t understand.’

He is holding a worn leaf of paper. It is a letter. ‘I cannot give it to you to read, for it is a last letter to me, found amongst her things, and contains passages of great intimacy that I cannot share. But in it she asks me to convey to you her deep and heartfelt gratitude for the great risk you took on our account.’ He hesitates, the paper quivering in his fingers. ‘She wanted you to know that, although she may not have put it into words, she always considered you as a dear and precious
friend and that thoughts of you and your poems gave her great comfort, even’ – his voice breaks slightly – ‘even in her final days.’

Ami feels something shift, deep in her mind, like the unpicking of a lock or the untying of a tight knot.

‘She has taught me,’ he continues, ‘that you cannot condemn a person for a single frailty.’ He stops, looking down and then up again, directly at her. ‘I beg your forgiveness, Mistress Lanyer.’

‘You have it, unequivocally.’ The thicket of shame she has been tangled in for so long now opens, unravelling.

She looks over at Joyce and Hal, seeing how they, red-cheeked, stealthily unclasp their hands when they notice she is beckoning them over. A smile spreads over her, inside and out.

Then, raising her cup, she says, ‘Let’s drink to forgiveness!’

Author’s note

The Girl in the Glass Tower
is a work of fiction, though one which is largely based in fact. Arbella Stuart, Aemilia Lanyer and almost all the characters surrounding them in the novel are historical figures but they also exist in the world of the novel as my own inventions. Through the filter of my fictional scheme the events of Arbella’s life are, in the main, accurately depicted, but of course there is much of her story that lies outside my text. To anyone interested in reading her full biography I wholeheartedly recommend Sarah Gristwood’s meticulously researched and wonderfully readable
Arbella: England’s Lost Queen
.

Like many women of her time, Arbella was a prolific letter writer and, because of her political significance, many of her letters still exist, which offered me a unique perspective on her complex inner world. To see her writing veering from a perfectly regimented italic to an almost illegible scrawl, sometimes in a single letter, and to read her meandering thoughts allowed me to understand something of her state of mind during particular periods of her life. The content of her letters often exposed her intimate voice, from which I was able to excavate the quirks and tics of her character that were to form the basis of the Arbella of my novel.

Of course, the found manuscript in the novel is my own fabrication. I did not seek to create a pastiche of early modern women’s life writing, the few examples of which are nothing like Arbella’s autobiography as I have imagined it. But it was a means by which I was able to explore the theme of storytelling and the invisibility of early modern women’s lives – a constant personal preoccupation.

My characterization of Aemilia Lanyer, an English female poet of some significance, although very little known nowadays, was different. I wanted to bring her into the light, and in doing so she became an ideal cipher to carry the motif of women, voice and silence in the novel. I had little to go on in terms of the biography of her later life but her published poetry offered insights and helped form my depiction of her. I chose to ignore the theories that she was the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets as there is no hard evidence to support this. Her published work and the few facts we know of her life can be found in
The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer
, edited by Susanne Woods

Ami’s story is interwoven with Arbella’s as a way to support the thematic aims of my novel rather than with an eye to historical veracity, and the passages in which she helps William Seymour escape from the Tower are entirely imagined. The aspersions of witchcraft are also fictional, though such suspicions abounded in the period and were often directed at lone women who didn’t conform.

She was, however, orphaned and taken into the household of the Countess of Kent and under the wing of the Countess of Cumberland and, aged only eighteen, became the mistress of Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin, Henry Lord Hunsdon, who was some forty years her senior. She was married to Alphonso Lanyer when she became pregnant with Hunsdon’s son. Alphonso left her in debt but she eventually acquired the means to open a school in St Giles-in-the-Fields. Another truth is that her son Henry married a girl named Joyce Mansfield.

The only firm link I have found between the two women is Aemilia’s poem dedicated to Arbella and the fact that they would both have been amongst Queen Anna’s coterie simultaneously; but they sit side by side in
The Girl in the Glass Tower
because their stories chime together.

Elizabeth Fremantle, November 2015

Acknowledgements

There are two women without whom
The Girl in the Glass Tower
would not exist: my agent Jane Gregory and my editor Maxine Hitchcock. I am truly grateful for their unerring support and wisdom. Both are surrounded by a host of talented individuals who work together to turn an almost incoherent stack of written pages into a novel on the shelves of bookshops. Thank you to the team at Jane Gregory and Company, in particular Stephanie Glencross, and also to the team at Penguin: amongst others, Louise Moore, Liz Smith, Francesca Russell, Clare Parker, Kimberly Atkins, Eve Hall, Tim Broughton, Claire Bush, Emma Brown, Chantal Noel and the rights team, Martin Higgins and Isabel Coburn, as well as Lee Motley and Gill Heeley, who continue to surprise and delight me with their cover designs. My hawk-eyed copy-editor Trevor Horwood also has my unreserved appreciation. Lastly, I must thank Katy Green for helping me understand what I ought to already know.