Watch the Lady (24 page)

What exactly happened defies explanation. It was a moment of sudden intimacy—they had stood about a foot apart, neither one moving, looking at each other with an intensity that grabbed her by the gut. Without understanding how it came about, she found herself in his arms, the rough stubble of his chin scraping hers, her lips pressed to his, her tongue exploring his mouth, her body melting away. They were interrupted by the chaplain and Blount had hidden behind a tapestry while Penelope, still burning from the surprise of their embrace, had stifled her sudden laughter enough to stoop and pretend she was looking for a dropped trinket, which had the chaplain on his hands and knees searching with her.

When she was alone with Blount once more, they had kissed again, slowly this time.

“I am falling,” he said.

“From grace?” she teased.

“For you.”

She felt like a long-desiccated plant that had been watered at last and was unfurling, sprouting hopeful shoots, vivid green and new.

She sighs, then becomes aware of herself, sitting up straight in her seat, saying to Cecil, “Blount, is it? I didn't recognize him. After a title, is he, or a seat on the Privy Council?” She makes an adequate impression of sarcasm.

Cecil continues talking scathingly about all the shallow courtiers blessed with good looks who curry favor with the Queen, but Penelope isn't listening because she has suddenly become aware of the shape of her life, as if a light has been shone on it, exposing its contours. As she watches Blount gallop towards his opponent in the lists, it is as if time is folding back on itself, and she is watching Sidney on his quicksilver steed, the two men becoming inextricably intertwined in her mind. Understanding alights: fate is offering her a second chance at happiness.

•  •  •

Once the tilt is done she makes her way to the stables. Her brother is there, still in his armor, with Meyrick and a group of other men, emitting gales of laughter and making animated toasts, passing round a flagon.

“Ah! My beautiful sister,” he says. “What brings you down from your gilded tower?” He is bursting with elation and it is infectious.

“I came to congratulate you on your performance, Robin. You were spellbinding.”

“The Queen was pleased, wasn't she?”

She remembers the small boy he used to be, forever seeking approval.

“There is no doubt of that. She was delighted.”

“Here,” says Meyrick, holding out the flagon. “Will you join us in a toast, my lady?” With his bulk he seems such a brute but when he smiles, as he does now, he is transformed. She is glad her brother has such loyal men about him.

They are all watching her, assuming she will give him short shrift for expecting her to lower herself to drink from an earthenware ewer with a crowd of rowdy men, so she takes the jug. “What am I drinking to? The death of disgrace!”

“The death of disgrace!” The men echo her words in unison and with both hands she lifts the flagon to her mouth, gulping down a measure. A cheer goes up. The liquid burns her throat, making her splutter and cough and then laugh.

“What on earth is it?” she asks, once her composure is regained.

“I'm sure you had worse in the maids' chamber,” says Essex.

“And
you
would know what goes on amongst the maids,” she replies, “given you spend so much time in their company.” This provokes a new wave of laughter.

A cart trundles by. It is piled high with butchered carcasses. They have been wrapped in linen but the blood has seeped through, making it look like an executioner's barrow.

“For the feast,” says Meyrick. “We will eat well tonight.”

“If you do not drink too much of that poison.” Penelope points to the ewer. “Or you will be sleeping under the table and wake with a sore head. Now, gentlemen, I must take my leave of you.” She smiles and turns to go.

“Where are you going? The privy chamber is in the other direction,” says Essex.

“I must fetch Spero. I left him with one of the grooms.” The fib slides smoothly out of her mouth and goes unquestioned.

Her head is swimming pleasantly from the drink as she enters the western stable block beside the orchard and is reminded of her encounter there with Sidney all that time ago—that blasted ferret—on the day she learned of her betrothal. That was after a joust too and she remarks on the strange symmetry of life and how events repeat differently in its pattern. It had been spring then and the blossom was out in the orchard; now the ground is covered in a mulch of forgotten apples, giving rise to the heady stench of rotting fruit. The building is not the same either, and it takes her a moment to remember that the old block had been demolished some five years ago and this one built in its stead. Inside it has the same engulfing odor of dung, though, which takes her back to that moment. “I have to see you again” is what he had said. She was green as a new shoot then—but not now.

A groom walks by.

“Could you tell me where I might find Sir Charles Blount?” she says.

When she finds him, he is brushing down his horse with his back to her. She stands in the doorway watching the way the muscles move in his shoulders, and the way his dark hair twists into whorls at his nape. He is whistling and occasionally breaks off to whisper something to his horse, which responds with a quiet wicker.

“Should your groom not be doing that?” she says eventually.

He turns, eyes wide with surprise—and delight, she hopes. Putting a finger to her lips, she enters, bolting the door behind her, before unpinning her cap and allowing it to slide to the straw-strewn floor.

She approaches him, reaching out for the fabric of his shirt, lifting it over his head, and pressing her face to his chest, breathing him in. He has the earthy tang of sage rubbed between finger and thumb. She twists round so he can unlace her.

Her stiff layers of clothing come away piece by piece until she is in nothing but her shift. They explore the terrain of each other's body with their hands, like sightless people. She has imagined, many times, touching a man like this, but is unprepared for the intensity of feeling, sweetened by sin, that is aroused in her. Their breath deepens, each taking the other's rhythm. Time has slowed and the world outside has disappeared.

Cecil feels foolish in his hermit's garb; the thick cassock is too heavy for the early summer heat and drags on the ground. Despite Cecil's protestations Burghley had insisted upon the outfit. Cecil feels it signifies his father's disappointment in him. The ridiculous costume is part of Burghley's planned garden entertainments for the Queen's visit—the hermit in his cave representing humility and making light of the fact that Burghley is spending too much time away from court, hidden away here at Theobalds; something the Queen complains about often. She had laughed when she saw Cecil—laughed
at
him, not with him—as he appeared in the cave's mouth, reciting a poem, stumbling slightly over the lines.

“Oh, Pygmy. You are not accustomed to performance, are you?” she'd said, wiping her eyes as if she'd just watched Lord Strange's men perform one of their best comedies. All he could think of, as he tittered in agreement, was that Essex would never stoop so low as to play a hermit, and a comedy hermit at that. “Walk with me, show me your father's garden.”

This had been the artifice: Cecil would wander the gardens with the Queen, the hope being that as each horticultural symbol revealed itself he would impress his faithfulness upon her and his fitness for high office, a recognition that continues to evade him. How he loathes the courtly games. They stop before a maze planted with flowers and the gardener points out that each of the nine blooms represents one of the muses, indicating an effigy of the Queen at the maze's center, where the plants have woven themselves about a hidden wired structure creating a floral statue that seems to have grown thus of its own accord.

“All this for me?” she says, as if no one had ever planted so much as a daisy for her.

Cecil thinks he might faint in the heat of his cloak and puts a hand up to the slim trunk of a cherry tree to steady himself, before they walk on to the arbor. The gardener there proudly shows off the different strains of eglantine that have grown through the trees, pointing out the bright blooms, some white, some palest pink, and others deeply blushed, almost crimson. He picks one with outer petals that are scarlet and a heart of white.

“It is a Tudor rose,” she says, twirling it in her fingers.

“They say the roots of eglantine run so deep into the ground that even the ferocious heat of the Spanish sun cannot scorch it,” says Cecil, as his father had told him to.

“You are referring to our great triumph over the Spanish Armada, I think.”

“That is so, madam.”

“I like it very much.” She smiles at him and thanks the gardener, who melts away, leaving them to walk on towards the lake, where a miniature fleet of galleons bobs on the surface.

“I am sending Essex to Normandy,” says the Queen, absently pulling the petals off the eglantine and letting them drop.

This irks him, for it feels like preferment: Essex has been maneuvering to lead an army to France for months. But Cecil wonders if it might be a good thing to have Essex out of the way for a time. Though if he gains martial glory his popularity will spread beyond comprehension. He is already more popular than Cecil had thought possible—it is quite unfathomable to him the extent to which Essex is loved by the people—and the Queen makes a pretense of refusing him but always relents. She had done so with the sweet wines, with Leicester House, and now with France. Essex had begged to be sent there; he had described the threat of Catholic Spain to a divided France. His speech was laced with the usual fanciful embellishments.

“Your great and glorious defeat of the Armada, madam,” Essex had said on his knees like a supplicant whilst gesticulating with his arms, “has made the Spaniards like angry wasps. They must be curtailed, for if they gain a foothold in France it is only a step before they are here on our shores.” And he had dragged out all the old horror stories that circulated in anticipation of the Spanish invasion, about what the enemy would do to our English maids were they ever to step on our soil.

“I have already sent a force to help Henri of France.”

“But the Catholics are gaining ground. I beg you let me go—”

She interrupted the pleading earl. “I haven't the funds to support a full-blown war in France. My answer is no.”

Cecil was there, he heard it with his own ears, and that was not the only time. Essex's response was to storm off into self-imposed rustication at Wanstead until she changed her mind. What is incomprehensible to Cecil is the effectiveness of such infantile behavior in a grown man—all that mooning and sulking.

“It will be his first command,” says the Queen, stopping beside a row of foxgloves. There are bees buzzing in and out of the purple bells.

Perhaps he will get himself killed, thinks Cecil. He had known this was coming; he has a boy in Essex's kitchens who gives him snippets of information for a shilling. Essex's wife is with child again—one shilling; Lady Rich is carrying on with the Blount fellow—two shillings; Lord Rich is aware of it and says nothing—three shillings; Essex has sent out word to muster men and horses to take to France—four shillings. The lad will soon be rich enough to buy himself a knighthood. Cecil had begun to wonder if the boy wasn't making it all up and thought perhaps he should devise some kind of test to verify his honesty, but now the Queen has confirmed this last piece of news, everything else seems, all of a sudden, quite plausible.

“I hope no harm comes to him, madam. For that wife of his is in foal again.”

“Do not try and rile me, Pygmy. I already know Frances is with child. Essex himself told me.”

She walks ahead, coming upon a stone fountain set into a wall, and, picking up one of the cups that are stacked beside it, fills it. From nowhere a pair of guards appears, one taking the cup from her hand and sipping tentatively at the contents. They all wait, as if time has been suspended, watching the man for signs of poison taking hold. Cecil is thankful he was not called upon to perform that task. It is the sort of thing Essex might do, snatch the cup and drink it back, slapping his lips, provoking some kind of comment from her like:
You would lay down your life for me?
Eventually, the guard nods and fills a new cup for her, before he slides away with his companion. She takes a sip. “Wine? Ha! What an invention.”

Cecil is wondering how Essex told her about the pregnancy when he has not been at court. There must have been a letter that missed his eyes. His shilling-hungry boy is not doing his job properly. He remembers his father's words:
Water hollows a stone, not by force but by falling often
, repeating the phrase in his head to calm himself. He thinks of his own son in the cradle at home, his longed-for son, born after the string of miscarriages that had made him develop a distaste for his wife. Essex's first baby had been a boy, just like that, and now he has another on the way. How easy everything is for him. Sometimes Cecil wonders if a demon hasn't got inside him, so great is his hatred of Essex. He hears his father's voice:
Do not make him your enemy
.

He must be wearing that thought on his face, for the Queen asks, “Are you dispirited, Pygmy?” She hands him a cup, seeming amused at adopting the role of server. He drinks it back in one to slake his thirst, instantly regretting it, as the wine is sharp and causes his head to spin slightly. He draws a hand over his brow to wipe away the sweat.

“No, madam, I could never be despondent when I have you here at my side.”

“I hope not, because if you are going to be petulant, I shall change my mind about having you sworn on to the Privy Council.”