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Essex: I can’t think of him without remembering that masque last Accession Day. All about him, and about how he can do the work of a statesman and a soldier too, I suppose he thinks the queen should give him both the Council and the army. As if it had been he, and not my Charles, who led the country against the Armada.
But seven years is a long time at court; that’s all but forgotten today. Well, not forgotten by the queen. She lives in the past a lot these days, and one can see why. The present bare of ease, and the future no ally. But I’ve always told Charles, it’s no use thinking he can just sit back on his victory, not if he still means to have any part to play. Well! No cloud without the lining, as they say. We may be sailing to war again, but at least it gives Charles an opportunity.
Seven years ago, our family were allowed to sit out the danger at my house in Chelsea: it was young Essex who was held at court to keep the queen company. Now he’s challenging Charles for control of the army, and I’m needed here at court today.
The queen has been maddening: even Lord Burghley says so, and I may agree without disloyalty. Everyone else believes that war is necessary. When the City merchants were told at Sunday sermon that London needed to raise troops, they rallied a thousand men before the end of the day. And there’s Charles and Essex sitting at Dover, and the ships all ready, and the quays stacked with supplies called up from the surrounding counties, and the queen says it’s off – and on – and off again.
Not, mind you, that I don’t understand. These are the kind of nights that make me positively glad it was one Boleyn girl, not the other, wrested a wedding ring out of old King Henry. Great-aunt Anne, not Grandma Mary. Charles used to joke – in the early days, when we still had our own night-time secrecies – that he was glad to be in bed with Mary’s side of the family. Ambition in the Boleyn blood is like a sleeping dragon and you never know what will wake it, but the Boleyn blood didn’t run as strong in Mary, or so my father used to say. Not that the Boleyn girls weren’t half Howard; and not that my Howard husband is really so far above the fray.
That business with the report: too childish of Essex to have done what he did, scrawling his signature so large at the bottom there was no space left for Charles to add his name. Either of my boys would have been whipped, if they did anything so petty, and so I told my sister Philadelphia when she tried to excuse Essex’s folly. But for Charles to take a knife and cut the paper apart … My lord Essex needs cutting down to size all right, but not like that. And then Charles had to go and write to Cecil that he wanted to resign his charge and only serve her majesty as one of the common soldiery. Cecil will damp it down, thank God, but some whisper will get through, and while half of me wants to be cheering Charles on, the cautious side knows better. We know what can happen to the ambitious, in my family. Ambitious women, especially.
Maybe it’s just as well that I am here at court, to limit any damage there may be. But oh, I can’t wait to be at my house at Chelsea, where the pear blossom will be green-white against the wall and the birds will be coming back with the spring to wheel above the river. My house, with the silver that would once have graced an abbot’s table and some of the fine tapestries my father has given to me. A better house than my sister Philadelphia got with her husband; Lord Scrope’s northern castle may reek of ancient nobility, but don’t tell me it isn’t draughty, whatever work they did there in her mother-in-law’s day. My house in Chelsea, that the queen granted to me, directly. Other women in this world can only make their way by marriage, but I already had a position to bring my husband, like another dowry, on my wedding day.
One of the younger maids comes scuttling round the doorway. The queen is calling for me. As I approach she looks up from her writing desk with a smile like sunshine, one of those smiles for which one would forgive her anything. She beckons me over, and displays with a flourish the paper before her. It’s a letter she is composing, to Essex, and I brace myself, momentarily.
‘I make this humble bill of requests to Him that all makes and does, that with His benign Hand He will shadow you … Let your companion, my most faithful Charles, be sure that his name is not left out in this petition.’
‘My most faithful Charles,’ she repeats, extending her hand to me, and obediently I bend to kiss it as I sink down into a curtsey.
JeanneSummer 1596
The summer agues came badly this year. Many fell sick and died between dawn and dinner time the same day. Yet Jacob had seemed much as usual, grumbling over the news from court, and the cost of kitting out Lord Essex’s sally against the Spanish, all in the name of foolish glory. I thought nothing of it when he complained of the heat one morning; it would indeed be a warm day. I was out all morning, delivering documents he’d completed, and when I came back in, Mrs Allen turned a tear-blotched face to me. They had sent for the physician, she said, but … I brushed past her and went to where he was lying on the bed. He didn’t look afraid, he looked angry. His breath began to rattle before the doctor arrived, and an hour later he was dead.
I told Mrs Allen to go home, and I was alone in the front room when the shop door opened and a solid, florid-faced man came in. I knew him, he was Master Pointer, a nursery gardener, who put a lot of work our way. He was talking of business and I gazed at him stupidly. I felt death should have put a mark on the door. When I told him the news he was genuinely sorry, but after a moment I realised he was sounding me.
With Jacob gone – what a loss, his deepest sympathy – what would my own plans be? He would still need someone to deal with his letters, someone who knew the names of the plants, and he was sure many of Jacob’s other clients would feel the same way. Of course, of course, it wasn’t the moment … But we understood each other before, with a squeeze of the hand, he left me. The past and the future were bleeding into each other, and it was making me dizzy.
We buried Jacob quickly, as the law required, and I was touched at how many came out, with the sickness all around, to pay their respects. They all spoke to me with kindness, but I wasn’t sure I understood their sympathy. I’d had my great sorrow in the Netherlands, a decade before. No one ever spoke to me of that, and I’d learned to lock it away. Now this new frost of loss fell on ground already frozen: I would mourn Jacob, but not too deeply. He’d have understood that – like me, since the Netherlands, he’d kept part of himself locked tight away, and I’d never presumed to give him more affection than he was happy to accept from me.
I owed him as great a debt as one human being can owe another, and never to try to grow too close was the only way I could pay. Children understand these things instinctively. Now, as an adult, or something near to it, I understood that the framework of my life had changed, but that I was not wounded in myself, or no worse wounded than I had been already.
He left me all that he had. Forty pounds – I was amazed, but we had always lived frugally. I’d have to quit the house, of course, but I’d be able to find rooms easily. The officials of the borough came to see me, since I’d not reached legal maturity, but were only too ready to accept there was no need to worry.
Mrs Allen came to help me move out, and I thought she was looking at me curiously. It was only later that I realised she’d half felt she should offer a home to me. It had never occurred to me, and the idea withered unspoken away. But on the last day, as we said goodbye, she seemed again to be struggling with what to say.
‘Remember, in this world, a woman does whatever she has to do to get by. Whatever she has to do,’ she said at last, and it was with an unexpected pang I watched the back of her plump worsted figure walk rapidly away.
I found myself doing a strange thing the following Sunday. The lease of our little garden would end with Jacob’s death, and I had to go there to find the caretaker and hand back the key. But before I did that, I set to work, as though he were beside me. I clipped the hedges and cut back the herbs, selecting the strongest to leave for seed. I sowed carrots and beet as though I’d be the one to eat them next year; searched out the seedling of the cowslips and bear’s ears and transplanted them carefully. The double daisies had been Jacob’s favourite and, when I left, Heaven knows why, I took a pot of them with me. I clutched them to the chest of my boy’s doublet as I walked through streets ringing with the news of Lord Essex’s great sea victory, and realised that for the first time the news, the crowds, the little decisions of every day were things to which I would answer as myself, and no longer as Jacob’s protégé.
CecilAutumn 1596
I felt sorry for Essex, briefly. He had come back from the sea aglow with victory. He and Charles Howard had planted England’s flag on the Continent again, in a way we never hoped to see, the King of Spain’s fleet smashed at Cadiz so that Calais itself was freed as a sideshow, or nearly. I remember and salute Charles’ joint command of the campaign, but that’s something Essex himself will have managed to forget quite easily.
He’d landed on the south coast and ridden to court, so hot foot he was lame from a fall along the way. Instead of the hero’s welcome he expected, he found the queen dressing him down before every giggling maid and gawping serving man, for all the world like an errant schoolboy.
Why, in his vainglorious pride in victory, had he let the Spanish treasure fleet sail by unmolested? Why, having once taken Cadiz, had he simply sailed away? What became of the fifty thousand pounds his exploits had cost her majesty, and where was the recompense to be? I could see the red creeping up under the square beard – a folly, that, it will never please her – his lordship had grown on the voyage home, and I could hear the queen’s voice cracking with fury.
The irony is, it wasn’t Essex’s fault, or not entirely. Not in the short term, anyway. Fast as he had ridden to the court, we’d had a faster report from a serving man on board: he’d wanted to go hunting for the treasure fleet but the other, more experienced, commanders had brushed his views away. Commanders like Ralegh: now he’ll know how to make a gain from Essex’s disgrace, and another from selling his share of the booty.
Of course we won’t say as much, or not precisely. But I believe my father will try to calm the queen’s displeasure. We take the long view, naturally.
It is a great task, at court, to prove one’s honesty, and yet not spoil one’s fortune, and the role of peacemaker befits an honest man. Even my father won’t succeed in curbing the queen’s rage: already, she’s declaring she’ll have no victory celebrations in this city. But when the real facts of the Cadiz debates seep out, as in the end they will, the queen will remember that we Cecils did not attack her favourite (still, her favourite?) too bitterly. And Essex will bask in her favour again, and being Essex he will boast of his favour, immoderately. The suitors will clamour for his voice to the queen, and he will clamour for their requests, loudly. And every voice that huzzas him in the streets will come to fret her majesty.
‘Men of depth are held suspect by princes. There is no virtue but has its shade, wherewith the minds of kings are offended.’ So says my clever cousin Bacon: clever in everything except his conviction that he will be able to steer my lord Essex into prudence and make his own career that way.
Princes fear, Bacon says, that clever men may be able to manipulate them, popular men may overshadow them. Brave men are too turbulent and honest men too inflexible. Who – I asked him once – are the men that will thrive? If he’d ever stop to listen, I could have given him the answer. The men who make the prince’s problems go away. They’ll thrive. Well, for a time, at least.
Bacon urges Lord Essex to courtiers’ ways. Never complain of past injuries. Never stand on your dignity – you have none, compared to her majesty. Learn the subtle ways of flattery – invent a pressing reason to visit your estates, then cancel the proposed journey on the grounds that you can’t bear to be away. Study her majesty’s moods and trim your suits accordingly, and don’t disdain the advice of those most close to her, even if it’s only the maid who’s waiting by the door when they take her chamber pot to empty.
This to Essex, who has a hundred moods of his own and can’t master any. Can’t even dissemble them successfully. Who has never understood that his virtues may become vices to the queen, who mistrusts a soldier because a battlefield is the only field where she cannot lead her country. Her majesty has always made her weaknesses into virtues: look at the way she, a spinster, held every prince in Europe in thrall to her very availability.
At first, Essex’s follies charmed the queen – his passionate conviction, his inability to flatter, his impetuosity. But now? He is blamed for his insatiable pride: but without his pride who would he be? Who would he see, when he looks in the mirror each day? Not that he does look in a mirror frequently, if that beard is anything to go by. With his pride, how long can he survive? It is a matter that has to be decided, a question not only of policy, but practicality.
JeanneAutumn 1596
I’d found a room easily enough, and a decent one too, fires and laundry included. There was a dent in the wall where the last tenant had made the bedstead rock, but it was no dirtier than it might be. The landlady sniffed when I ran my finger over the cupboard checking for dust, and said young gentlemen weren’t usually so pernickety. So I put a touch of accent into my voice and said that in my country we were used to having things clean, and I heard her going down the stairs and muttering ‘damn Frenchies’. Her little brown-and-white dog stayed behind a moment, wagging at me curiously.
With Jacob I had always lived up on the northern fringes of London, but now I had chosen a street near Blackfriars, hard up by the City’s walls, not far from the western suburbs and the great palaces on the Strand – not that I imagined, then, they’d concern me directly. It seemed a world away from our old home, but it still had enough immigrants in it for safety.
I swept the landlady an exaggerated foreign bow and went out to buy myself some necessities. Candles enough to write by, a painted cloth to cover the marks in the wall, a posy of marjoram and lavender to take the mustiness away. At the nearest cookstall I bought a pasty, big enough I could share it with the dog, and an orange, and a small flask of Rhenish, and went home and called myself happy.
Well, content.
Well, lucky.
Yes, by comparison with those I’d known – and those I saw on the street around me – definitely lucky.
The work, and the money, were the easy part, oddly. For that I have Master Pointer to thank, and my thoughts do thank him every day. He first sent for me before Jacob had been buried three days. He did it with apologies, but his affairs, he explained, were at that point where he had to take the turn of the tide or else … I warmed to him, not only because he took trouble to explain to me, but because something in his urgency, his hot desire to catch the tide of the times, raised an answering warmth in me. I soon learned that while simple fruit trees and hedgings might be the core of his business, he was passionate about new plants and opportunities, and sold slips and seedlings to many of the nobility. It was no strange thing, of a Sunday, to see ladies and gentlemen strolling around his gardens out at Twickenham to inspect the latest rarity. Once, I even saw the stooping figure of Sir Robert Cecil, leading by the hand two small children, as grave and as slight as he.
‘Look at this! Look at this, Master Moosay!’ – this was Master Pointer’s version of Musset. I peered at two small, rather hairy, leaves which he assured me would soon sprout a flower the like of which had only been seen in the palaces before, but would soon be in every garden. The goal, I learnt, was novelty – novelty, and the charm of bloom when no bloom used to be.
‘Think of it, we’ll soon have borders as bright in August as they are in May.’ Though some of the new plants, from lands far beyond the sea, came direct to England, others went first to the growers in the Netherlands or Italy, whom he regarded with a blend of comradeship and envy. With a few such, he had struck up a deal, but to keep it going required a skill in languages beyond him. That is what Jacob had done; that I could do easily. I’d been working for Master Pointer a few weeks when he found I had another useful ability.
From a child I’d loved to draw, though with Jacob it was always the words and the thought behind them that would be taken most seriously. But one day, Master Pointer was labouring to dictate me a description of a seedling – ‘two leaves like heart shapes, spring direct from the stem, and veined like – like – like the ribs of a ship?’
‘No, it’s more like this, surely?’ Hastily I sketched out what I meant, and he gazed at me thoughtfully.
‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ he said. From that time on, his catalogues went out with my line drawings, printed from etched blocks of wood, and kindly, he said that it increased his sales. He said it was a lucky chance that had shown him my skill. But I think Master Pointer was one of those men in whose genial warm presence people, like plants, did understand their capabilities.
CecilSpring 1597
I always knew the meal was never going to agree with me. They don’t keep good cooks at Essex House: for all his grandeur, his lordship is served but carelessly. I don’t suppose he even noticed – from a boy, I remember him just cramming what was in front of him into his mouth, and that only when the waiting men nudged him that they wanted to take the plates away. Gulping down the mouthful with his eyes fixed where his speech was directed, intent on winning your response to whatever he was trying to say. I doubt Ralegh cared for the food either, though I saw him drinking deep.
But then none of us were there for our stomach’s sake, were we?
The puzzle of the court is how one day’s enemy is the next day’s friend: more unexpected, surely, than a friend lapsing into enemy? My clever cousin Bacon says ‘love your friend as if he were to become an enemy, and hate your enemy as if he were to become your friend’: he was so proud of the thought, he showed the letter to me. Does even he know what he means, I wondered. I have become more irritable since Lizzie –
His mother, my aunt Anne, told her sons when they first came to court that anyone who spoke them fair was doing it to serve their turn. ‘He that never trusteth is never deceived.’ ‘It is better to suspect too soon than to mislike too late.’ ‘As a wolf resembles a dog, so does a flatterer a friend.’ ‘Don’t write letters that can be held against you, don’t speak without looking to see who can hear, and then not openly.’ I get impatient with the flood of warning sometimes, even though I have forged my career by following the maxims attentively. They translated the sayings of Erasmus in my grandfather’s day: ‘It is wisdom in prosperity when all is as thou would have it, to fear and suspect the worst.’ What, are we never to be happy?
Lizzie and I were happy.
The strange thing is that Essex’s father was as full of good advice as mine, or as Lady Anne: I suppose we all react differently to the medicine. Now it’s Ralegh penning advice for his son. Which is why he was here tonight, in a way – Ralegh needs both our help if he is ever to get back his captaincy of the Guards. The queen has never forgiven him for having run off with one of her maids of honour, and less so than ever now that they’ve started a family.
Essex needs all the help he can get, too, if he’s to persuade her majesty to finance another voyage against the Spanish. And I? Well, it’s true there’s the business of the Duchy of Lancaster. The chancellor’s post would come easier if no one were opposing me too actively.
And of course, I am committed, always, to seek unity: I must send to Charles Howard tomorrow, make sure he understands there is no threat to him in this rapprochement with Essex. He’s doing an Achilles at the moment, still baffled that the people see Essex as the sole hero of Cadiz, but his wife is a lady shrewd enough to ensure he doesn’t sulk in his tent too long.
All the same, as I climb into the litter for the brief ride home, the old black mood sweeps over me. The whole question of the chancellorship of the Duchy wouldn’t be so tetchy if we hadn’t been there already with the Court of Wards, but Lizzie was so pleased when we won it for her brother, in the teeth of Essex’s man …
Lizzie.
Two months, almost to the day, since the doctors told me there was nothing they could do, and I had to open the bedroom door and go inside to meet her eye. I have spent a lifetime dissembling, but I couldn’t do it this time. In the end, it was she told me, with the ghost of her old briskness, we had a lot to agree together, and not to cry. She wanted the children brought up away from the bad airs of the town. She did not say, away from the corruption of the court, and from a father who has to wallow in it every day, but it’s true they’re better off at my brother’s in the country.
She said when I wanted her I was to go into the garden, and there by the good grace of God she would find me. She said if God didn’t want to allow it she’d be having a word with him. She made me laugh, even then, actually. I went to the garden this morning, to Lizzie’s favourite rose tree. It’s covered in leaf shoots of stinging green – not long till the first buds are on the way. I gripped its trunk so hard, I was glad when the thorns pricked me. Oh, Lizzie.
Back to the business: it’s one thing she said to me then. ‘Work will be your salvation. You’ll see.’ Give me the work, spare me the sympathy. I cannot take the sympathy, although Charles for one wrote very kindly. I really feel something like friendship for Charles, beyond even the alliance of necessity.
This thing with Essex won’t hold, of course it won’t, but we can probably get Ralegh his captaincy. I say ‘we’, but in truth the queen may give it less because it is Essex who requests it than because she wants a firmer hold on one of Essex’s allies. It would never do if he and he alone held the loyalty of all the fighting men. Essex will probably get the money for his new Spanish voyage: the queen will hate it as much as I do, but it is needed.
Whether he’ll get her gratitude for whatever he brings home will be another story. Be sure that any news of her displeasure will be for my father or I to carry. It is our job, but it will fuel the fire of Essex’s suspicion, as if any fuel were needed.
Even Ralegh writes: ‘Whoso taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves to be so.’ The face of treachery is the devil’s face, in the form we see among us every day. But Essex spends his life peering through the bushes to trace the devil’s grin in the bark of an old tree. He knows every man is against him: in the end, they will be. I suppose it is his way of imposing order on the world. Less frightening, perhaps, than knowing his failure, like his success, is his own responsibility. As we pull up, the thought sends me into the house even more lonely.
JeanneSummer 1597
I wasn’t unhappy in the next year or so, or not precisely. Master Pointer’s was a kindly family, and his wife thought I was young to be alone in the world. I did not, unless I chose it, need to dine alone of a Sunday. And Master Pointer introduced me, carefully, to some of his gardening friends, always on the understanding that his work came first, that I was his discovery. But sometimes as I sat around the well-stocked table, a wave of unreality swept over me, and I watched them as wonderingly as I had watched, once, when a cousin of Mrs Allen’s had taken us to see the wild beasts in the Tower menagerie.
What had these people to do with the past I’d known? What had they to do with my real identity? Even if it hadn’t been for my secret, I’d had a family once, and look what happened. The way I lived was the only safe way. And dear God, where was this closeness going to end – with the suggestion I might marry one of their friendly daughters, and bring my skills into the family? And the next Sunday I’d make excuse, say I had to see an old friend, though in truth I would spend the day alone, wandering round all the gardens of London.
The gardens were my salvation, you might say – lucky there were so many. But the gardens were my danger, too, with their siren song of what might be. Master Pointer sold plants to many of the grandees, and he made sure that sometimes I went along with the delivery, to walk around and increase my knowledge as much as might be.
‘They won’t mind – they’ll be flattered someone wants to admire their taste. Show them one of your drawings if they query you,’ he said shrewdly. I remember a garden by the London Wall, close to sunset one late June day. A gardener was settling the new plants in, as tenderly as if they’d been new babies. The light had sunk to that low pitch when the blues sing clearly, and the yellow in the leaves makes each flowerbed a mirror of the sky on a sunny day. The roses were almost over, but a hint of their scent hung under the honeysuckle, and the air had cooled just enough to make you nostalgic for the morning’s heat. It was an evening for the touch and laughter, and dreams. For lovers … For a heartbeat, I almost felt the touch of skin on skin, and here was I, walking alone with a scrap of paper and a stick of charcoal, exploring a business opportunity.
That’s where I understood that some change had to come. That however lucky I’d been to survive so far, survival was not enough for me. That I couldn’t go on forever, like some lying ghost, haunting the fringes of some happy ordinary family; and nor could I push myself into the ranks of the plantsmen in my present identity.
I couldn’t just step back; I’d been Jan too long, and there was no way for Jeanne to live and make money. As a woman alone and without family – a woman neither child nor wife nor widow – there would be no place for me. I’d still be a freak, an anomaly.
I couldn’t see the way to change clearly, and yet change there had to be. And as I walked ever faster in the golden light, staring without seeing at the heartsease pansies, the thought of that Accession Day came back to me.
Every one of the great lords was a garden maker. Apart from anything else, it was known to be one way to the heart of the queen’s majesty. And Master Pointer sold plants to many of the grandees, but there was one family who truly loved their gardens. Time was, Lord Burghley had competed with the old earl, Lord Leicester, as to who could make the most dazzling fantasy. When Master Pointer spoke of the experiments at Theobalds, Lord Burghley’s country showplace, he did so with a glow of purest envy. Lord Leicester was long dead, and Lord Essex who had inherited his great house on the river had no name for being a plantsman, hadn’t the money for it, maybe. And Lord Burghley was failing, and begging the queen every day to let him retire. But his son Robert Cecil also loved a garden – a fair amateur of plants, said Master Pointer, respectfully.
The Pointers spoke of the nobles with a kind of familiarity. The summer Jacob died, I’d heard that Lord Essex had led a great expedition against the Spanish at Cadiz, and that Master Cecil had been made Secretary of State, and heard of them as things outside my own life. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder if, in that wider world, there might not be a tiny chink of a place for me.
The Cecils had a town house too, of course. Great tubs of the sharp Seville orange trees went there in bloom, once Master Pointer had nursed them through the winter, and the new nasturtiums with their hot colour, and the latest strain of auriculas, striped and pinked like a town buck on May Day.
A stream of gossip fed back in return, and though Mistress Pointer wanted to hear about the family, it was their garden plans that gripped her husband. I learned that Sir Robert used his contacts beyond the seas to send him the newest seeds or slips from foreign nurseries. Master Pointer spoke longingly of great books he’d been shown in Sir Robert’s library, ‘Ay, and he said he’d be having them translated, so I could read them too, one day. God’s breath, the Italians know a thing or two – did I tell you the tricks they play with water, they’ve a few toys like that at Theobalds, as well – but for my money, if it’s the plants you’re looking for, you still go to the damn Frenchies. No offence, lad,’ he’d add belatedly.
I’d never forgotten the little dark statesman who, at the joust, had taken insult so quietly. I found thoughts of that day were coming more frequently. Since I’d moved to Blackfriars, I saw the court crowds in the streets every day: young men whose clothes were stiff with embroidery, once the queen’s fool and once one of her ladies, in a misty blue gown trimmed with silver lace. They gave me the sense I’d had sometimes when I went down to the river and looked at the sky – a sense the world was larger than it seemed to be, and with more varied possibilities.
I could no more have approached one of those swans than I could fly. But the ugly duckling with the damaged wing, the sober man of work who did the queen’s business night and day – well, given Master Pointer’s connections, a move towards him might just be a possibility.
It was a September day and in the orchard the apples were ripening, while the heavy pear-shaped quinces perfumed the air around them. The emblem of happiness, I thought – I was young enough for superstition – and after all, what was I going to do that was so extraordinary? Only go with Master Pointer’s men when they took the pots of lavender held back from blooming early, and report to him how the vines he’d sold to the Cecils were fruiting, and see whether the new hazels were thriving in the nuttery.
It would be the purest chance if Sir Robert actually spoke to me, even if he did happen to be walking in the garden, as he did frequently. And if I did take my sheaf of sketches with me – well, nothing in that, surely?
Burghley House was a rambling comfortable building on the north side of the Strand, poised between the palace at Whitehall and the City, opposite the old Savoy. Kings had lived there once, but today its grandeurs were in ruins, while a poorhouse camped in the wreckage. The rich, odorous stew that was a London crowd grew even thicker and more exotic as one drew near, for all that the Strand held the palaces of the nobility. Deep-water sailors from distant countries eyeing liveried men at arms, cutpurses skirting the ordinary citizens just trying to get through the working day. No wonder Burghley House showed the street a long line of thick brick walls, with only three small windows to break their solidity. The Cecils were still near the people – of them, in a way – and this was a bustling place of business as much as a gentleman’s private residence, but that didn’t mean they took stupid risks.
A porter’s lodge stood in the middle of the wall, but Master Pointer’s men turned into another gateway. To the west of the house, the palace side, lay the service quarters and the vegetable beds, and the back way up to another arched gate which led out to the north and the open spaces of Convent Garden, where the monks or their servants used to tend their own beds and orchards in the old days. I walked and I wondered, along clipped hedges and gravelled pathways. I was on Master Pointer’s business, wasn’t I? And in any case, the afternoon would have encouraged an anchorite to linger.
The grass had its brightness back, after the summer drought, and the soft warm light brought out the reds and greens, making a little miracle out of the trees. In its plan perhaps the garden wasn’t as modern as it might be. I could feel the taste of old Lord Burghley. But it had still its element of fantasy. A mound rose up from a sunken garden, a man-made hollow and a man-made hill, and the winding path up to the summit guided your feet clearly. The plants themselves were extraordinary. One great flower had been left to form a seed head more than the spread of my hand across, and I was drawing it for Master Pointer when I sensed a presence beside me.
He was alone, but he must have moved lightly – his feet on the gravel made no sound as he approached. He was dressed in black – we’d heard that his wife had died recently, for I remember eager talk about whether it would be appropriate for the Pointers to send a gift in sympathy.
Perhaps that accounted for the lines that already showed on his face, but I suspect they came there naturally. It was the eyes that struck me, cool and grey under high arched brows.
He held out his hand. ‘May I see?’
Dumbly, I passed over my sheaf of drawings, barely remembering to jerk down into a bow, and he leafed through the pages, those brows raising slightly.
‘Impressive. Do you work for Master Pointer? In what capacity?’ He gestured me to fall in with him as he walked on. ‘My constitutional. If I’m taking you from your art, you must forgive me.’ He knew I’d come in his way on purpose, of course, but he was a polite man – polite in his soul – and he didn’t let the knowledge intrude.
As he walked he questioned me – my skills, my situation – and I answered him with a sense of inevitability, so completely had it fallen out as I had dreamed it. Though it was my penman-ship first caught his eye, it was my languages that seemed to interest him most. He’d ask me for the names of plants in French and Flemish, as well as Latin, as we passed by. He spoke to me of the great plant hunters from earlier in the century, of Turner and Gesner and of Mattioli before them, and of who was like to take up the mantle of Plantin in Antwerp, now that his great printing centre under the sign of the golden compasses had passed away. He spoke of his own commission to John Gerard, the surgeon and collector who’d had the ordering of the Cecil gardens, to produce the first great English Herbal in almost half a century. I was devoutly thankful to Jacob, and to all the evenings, since his death, I’d spent in solitary study.
‘I may be able to find a use for you, Master – de Musset?’ Of course he pronounced it correctly. ‘If Master Pointer can spare you, naturally. Come and see my steward tomorrow.’
When I went back next day, I didn’t see the steward, I saw Sir Robert himself. But I was then too new to the game to realise that was extraordinary.
CecilSummer 1597
I walk in the garden more and more these days – even when it’s wet, even when it’s too hot for comfort. It’s the only thing that makes the pain go away. Well, not go away, but step back a single pace, still snarling, like a dog when you pick up a stick and wave it menacingly. Round the beds, like a soldier on a route march, ticking off the success or failure of each plant in my head, like nature’s own litany. Rosemary for remembrance, the last seed heads of the heartsease pansy … Lizzie would give my bad arm that little shake that seemed to loosen more than it hurt me and tell me I was a secret sentimentalist, for all the rest of them thought I was so canny.
Lizzie.
I’m not alone in the garden this time, though usually the gardeners absent themselves now. I suppose one of the secretaries has tipped them off, tactfully. There’s a boy – at least, he looks no more than a stripling, brown-haired and neat, without being finicky. He’s standing in front of the Marvel of Peru, and he has a paper and a stick of charcoal in his hand, but from a certain self-conscious stiffness in his stance, I know he’s waiting for me.
I would have gone over anyway. Always know everything that’s happening in your household – and for your household, read the whole country, or as much of it as you can manage. That’s another thing my father taught me. And, never ignore any thing that comes to you. You never know where you’ll find an opportunity.
I hold out my hand for the paper he is working on. ‘May I see?’
He hands over his sheaf of drawings, silently.
‘Impressive. Do you work for Master Pointer? In what capacity?’ I gesture him to fall in with me. As we walk I question him, and I believe he answers me honestly. There is something held back, of course, there always is. If there weren’t, he would be too simple to be of much use to me, and I can use him – on the garden records, certainly. New plants are arriving every day. Gerard’s indisposition is likely to be lengthy, so the physicians say, and it would be a crying shame if our records were to remain incomplete, and his book left with only English eyes to admire it. I ask the boy for the names of plants in French and Italian as we pass by. He speaks Flemish too, which is less ordinary. It only takes two sentences for him to tell me why.
It carries me back ten years to that first journey, my first taste of a diplomatic mission, and me barely past twenty. I’d gone to the Netherlands in an older man’s train, to see if Parma could be bought off, with the great Armada on the way. It hadn’t worked – no one ever thought it was likely to – but the time bought was something. What I remember most wasn’t the negotiations, nor even the hard riding that made my shoulder ache, but the inns where they served up half a herring as a feast, and then stood around to watch as we ate it, and the miserable state of the country. That was when I truly understood that peace in a land matters more than anything. That it is worth dying for – or arranging others’ deaths, if necessary.
I should like to help this boy, apart even from the question of his use to me. Never dismiss your kindly impulses – they can be as useful as any other, so my father used to say. My father used to do a lot of saying, before age made him as twisted as me, as twisted as Lizzie just before she –
‘Come see my steward tomorrow,’ I tell the boy. Pointer won’t make any trouble – he’ll understand the value of a friend at court, to make sure all the Cecil business doesn’t go any other firm’s way.
