The King's Daughter (34 page)

Though the details were blurred, I could see the broadshape of my future clearly. I would do my duty. Leave England. Be miserable for the rest of my life. Grow to be like my mother, after all. I began to feel the truth in her instruction not to attach my heart to what I must lose.

I felt myself closing up, even with Tallie, like the mussels on the rocks in Scotland, which were sometimes torn loose in storms. I began to want my marriage over and done with, so I could get on with attaching myself to my new rock.

I hid from my father, excusing myself whenever I could from state occasions when he was likely to be present. I thanked God for his obsession with the hunt which kept him away for weeks at a time at Royston, Newmarket or Theobald’s, which, two years earlier, Cecil had been forced to give to the king in exchange for an older, more modest house at Hatfield in Hertfordshire.

When he was in London, my father’s humour had turned dangerous after his fight with Henry in the chapel. I was certain that others at court felt increased peril in his humours. He drank more, shouted, cursed. He took sudden frights and hid in his lodgings, then re-emerged to crash about the palace. He planted kisses on Robert Carr and didn’t care who saw. Once, I was told, he turned to Frances Howard and asked her whether this was not indeed a bonny lad.

He would pull thoughtfully at his lower lip and stare with a new malevolence from under lowered brows at Henry, at me, at anyone who dared to contradict him or fail to laugh at one of his bawdy jests. At Cecil. Even Carr sometimes had a wary, uncertain look in his stupid, crafty eyes.

The king was already angry with Cecil, who had failed to raise ‘the dark clouds of irreparable misery', as the king called his constantly increasing debts. The Chief Secretary, also Lord Treasurer since 1608, had in the last year undertaken to persuade Parliament to grant the crown a regular sum to meet the king’s expenses, in place of a complicated system of
ad hoc
taxes, fees and grants. This sum would cover theking’s extravagant gifts to his favourites of estates and jewels, as well as the king’s own clothing and jewels, his horses, his hunting, his wine and feasting, and all the other costs of running large, luxurious royal households at Whitehall, Windsor and Greenwich. Parliament had refused even Cecil’s most ingenious compromises.

‘The penny-pinchin’ dwarf', my father had taken to calling the man who had once been his own ‘Little Beagle'.

I lay awake at night, even though Tallie sang and played quietly at the bedside until the fire died and the room grew cold. I woke once from an uneasy half-doze and heard Anne asleep beside me and Tallie asleep on her stool, both snoring gently.

I began to sleep later and later into the day and did not want to wake. Having an opinion about anything began to exhaust me. I could barely make myself stroke Belle and Cherami. I fed my birds only to keep them from starving and from sheer weariness lent Baby Charles my monkey, for which he had been begging. I lost my taste for riding or playing my virginal or lute. I no longer wanted to dance. Tallie and I no longer played duets together.

‘You must practise more, your grace,’ she once scolded me.

‘Why?’ I asked bleakly. ‘For whose delight? My own is gone.’ I heard how woefully pitiful I sounded and braced myself for the tart response I deserved.

‘Hey-ho, my poor Lady Elizabeth.’ She studied me, sucking in her lips as she did when thinking hard. ‘Let me comb your hair, then.’

She unpinned it and began to comb with her fingers.

I almost told her to stop. I had not cried in a very long time, but the feel of her hands tugging gently at the tangles in my hair brought me dangerously close.

Henry seemed to work night and day, whenever he was not exercising.

‘What letters do you write today?’ I would ask. Then listen while he explained licences, possible trade alliances, the search to find the right stone for an architrave, good Flemish glass-makers, and the best horses for war.

One day I found him glumly reading a letter from the Jamestown settlement on Chesapeake Bay.

‘Only now do I learn that the supply ship we sent with provisions was sunk in a
horricano.
Without those supplies, they went hungry. ‘

‘Hungry in Eden?’ I asked.

‘I tell you this in confidence,’ he said. ‘The investors must not be discouraged. The difficulties will pass with continued investment and strong leadership. The settlers have lacked a strong leader since Captain Smith was injured.’

He folded the letter. ‘I would like to sail to Chesapeake Bay to see for myself how this new Eden can best be made to flourish. Our other kingdom.’

‘We will never be the King and Queen of the Americas.’ I no longer believed that he and I would ever sail together to visit Cape Henry, named after him in the New World, nor the new English colony. ‘Those were childish imaginings,’ I said dully.

‘They were not!’ he protested. ‘When I am king, I will visit my American subjects and invite you to accompany me. No husband could be cruel, or foolish, enough to forbid his wife to accept an invitation from the king of England, Scotland and the Americas.’

I shrugged. ‘Who knows where I’ll be by then?’

I could scarcely pretend interest in his outrage a few weeks later at the arrival from Florence of the portraits of two Catholic Medici princesses.

How could I ever before have imagined that I felt old?

One morning, a doctor was waiting among my petitioners. Cecil had sent him.

‘I’m quite well!’ I said angrily.

‘Being not entirely well himself, Lord Salisbury is alert for signs of illness in others,’ the man said tactfully. ‘Perhaps you would allow me to reassure him?’

I was so startled by the news that Cecil himself was not well that I allowed the doctor to feel my pulse, examine my eyes and tongue and smell my breath. I had no doubt that the contents of my close stool had already been carried off and scrutinised. He said only that I might want to take more air and not to over-tire myself.

I was already taking that advice. More and more often, I went to sit on the Privy Stairs.

‘You don’t mean to swim like his highness, your brother, then?’ one of the men-at-arms asked me the first few times.

I knew he wanted one of my pert replies to repeat in the guardroom, but I could only shake my head. The jest soon grew stale. The guards grew used to me and continued to talk quietly among themselves while I looked down into the water for an hour at a time and imagined sinking deeper and deeper until no one could ever find me. I wondered if Henry ever imagined the same. If I had ever had any secret strength, my father had now disarmed me with constant confusion and uncertainty.

49

I was taking refuge in my brother’s company at St James’s one rainy afternoon, pretending to leaf through a pile of architect’s drawings on a window seat in the white-plastered small presence chamber, when Bacon arrived. A cool silence greeted him.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Bacon. ‘Your highness.’ He gave his tight-lipped smile that reminded me of a snarl. ‘Nursing sore heads today, are we?’ He bowed. Then bobbed his head again at me. His eyes made an inventory of who was there.

Sir John Harington and one or two others gave him polite smiles. However, Bacon’s quarry was Henry.

‘Your highness,’ said Bacon. ‘I beg leave to presume and speak to you as a true friend.’

Cecil must be very ill indeed, I thought. His cousin is already elbowing into his place.

‘A true friend never needs to beg,’ said Henry. ‘May I hope that you mean to offer me another piece of writing?’

‘Mere spoken words, this time, your grace.’ Bacon jerked his head at the other gentlemen. ‘In private, if it please your highness.’

Henry let Bacon draw him aside, to the side of the gallery where I was standing by a window now watching raindropsrun down the diamond panes to join in little rivers along the lead joints. Henry’s knights withdrew to the far end of the long gallery.

‘I have been hoping to find you alone, your highness,’ said Bacon. ‘But you are always so densely surrounded by your many admirers that I began to despair, wondering how I was to unburden my heart of a matter that concerns me deeply.’ He pressed one hand against his heart as if his concern could scarcely be contained except by force. ‘I pray that you will not think me presumptuous if I say that some of my concern is for your royal self.’

Over Bacon’s shoulder, Henry sent me a quick amused look. I know what you think of the man, said his eyes. But it’s my duty to listen to him. And possibly, to learn. Then he turned onto Bacon the open, attentive and friendly regard that made both men and women love him. Only I knew how hard he worked to achieve that look and how tiring he often found it.

Sir Francis clearly found it encouraging. ‘I have noted, your highness, that you have of late seemed cast down and I am willing to hazard that I…’ He turned his back to me and leaned close to my brother, speaking so low that no one else could hear.

At first, I felt rather than saw the change in Henry.

As Sir Francis murmured into his ear, my brother reddened, then went white, not merely pale, but chalky, paler than the most slighting word from our father had ever bleached him. Even from my distance, I could see a white border form around his mouth like a welt.

I still pretended to watch the rain.

Sir Francis seemed to notice nothing amiss. Even when Henry stepped sideways as if trying to escape, Bacon merely turned with him, still murmuring, his eyebrows raised in expectation of some sign of agreement.

How could the man not see Henry’s clenched fists? Evenfrom my window niche, I saw my brother’s knuckle bones threatening to split the skin. Even from twenty feet away, I could feel the icy chill of his frozen stillness.

Oblivious, Sir Francis made smooth gestures with his well-manicured hands. He waved away an invisible thing, an unworthy thought. On one hand, we reject this, said his gestures. And then, on the other we have this, you and I, oh, how much, much better. He leaned even closer to my brother. And I offer it to you, said his hands.

Henry bowed his head, a gesture which Sir Francis seemed to read as acquiescence.

Sir Francis continued to murmur to my brother, both grovelling and condescending at the same time, as only he could manage. Henry raised his head again and stared fixedly past him, waiting for the man to finish. Sir Francis reached his conclusion. He touched my brother’s arm with an insinuating intimacy and stepped back looking pleased with himself.

Henry’s eyes dropped to his sleeve, where Bacon had touched him. His lips puckered as if he meant to spit out a gobbet of rotten meat. The silence grew. I heard boots shifting on the floor farther along the gallery. Bacon began to look puzzled.

‘How do you dare?’ The words escaped between Henry’s clenched teeth, so quietly that I barely heard them. ‘Men hang for that.’

‘Your highness?’ Bacon leaned closer again, as if he had either not heard or else disbelieved. He shook his head. ‘Not kings.’

Henry stared past him. ‘I forbid you ever to speak to me on this or any other subject. I do not want to see you again at St James’s nor my lodgings here at Whitehall. I don’t yet, alas, have the power to banish you from the court altogether, but I will do it when the power is mine, if you ever again dare show your face to me!’

I had never seen my brother so angry.

‘Your highness, I never meant…!’

‘Leave me!’

‘But wherein did I speak false?’ Bacon still looked startled and a little aggrieved, as if a previously friendly dog had just bitten his hand.

Henry raised his head and gave Bacon a look that stood the hairs up on my neck. Bacon staggered a step back, recovered his balance, bowed, and left.

His footsteps were the only sound in the room. When he passed me, puzzlement and disbelief were already giving way to calculation in his sharp dark eyes.

Henry flung himself to the nearest window and stared out.

‘By Cock, that man leaves a bad taste in the mouth,’ said Sir John.

‘Fine in the box,’ said Henry tightly without taking his eyes from the rain.

Silently, Sir John put his tuppence in the swearing box. We all listened to the tiny dull clink. I decided that he had sworn as a deliberate diversion. ‘A good afternoon for tennis,’ he observed after a moment. ‘Henry?’

My brother waved for them all to go. I decided that I had not been included in his wave.

‘Was he slandering Cecil again?’ I ventured when the others had gone.

‘Leave me alone! Don’t you, of all people, start prying into my private life!’ He turned and left the gallery, headed for his own lodgings.

I watched him go, feeling as if he had slapped me. I was also certain that he was crying. And that I had seen fear in his eyes as well as rage.

50

I had seen Henry angry. I had seen him downcast. I had seen him fretful and half-dead with tedium. But I had never before seen him lose his grip on himself, not even when our father snubbed him in public. My world wobbled. Like the shorn Samson, my ally and protector had lost his strength. Bacon had cast a dark spell on my brother. I didn’t know how it might be lifted, but I knew that I must try. My turn to rescue him. It was an odd thought.

Henry ate supper in his rooms that night. After supper, I went to his bedchamber, where his chamberer told me that the prince had gone to sleep early with a megrim.

I found several of his gentlemen playing cards by the fire in the presence chamber. Lynn told me that the prince had not come to join the after-supper tennis. Filled with fear for him, I gave up for the moment and went back to my own lodgings.

The following day, the rain stopped. In the late morning, crossing the gallery over the Holbein Gate, I spied my brother in the tiltyard, practising on foot with two of his men-at-arms, thrusting at each other with tilting lances across a waist-high barrier. I knew him even at a distance by his fierce strength and the unicorn on his helmet. I ran down into the spectators’ gallery.

Yesterday’s rain had turned the dust to mud, which clumped onto the fighters’ feet to give them pudding-bowl hoofs like plough horses. Henry thrust at his opponent again and again with the short lance used when they fought without horses, beating at the breast-plate of the half-armour they wore. I listened to the thud and clang and watched my brother beat ferociously at his opponent.