Elizabeth I (126 page)

She took a long time drawing in her breath. “Perhaps not so soon.”

“Catherine, we have had jubilant news. The Irish war is over.”

She merely looked at me, as if she did not understand. Or as if it were no matter. “Oh.”

I shot a look at her husband, standing helplessly by the bed. “Charles and I are elated.”

“Yes,” she murmured, and closed her eyes. “I am glad for you.”

“Be glad for England,” I corrected her.

“Indeed.” Her eyes stayed closed.

Charles took her hand, stroked her arm. “Dearest, open your eyes.”

She tried, but the lids seemed to have weights on them, drawing them down. “Forgive me,” she whispered. “I need ... I must ... sleep.”

I reached out and touched her forehead, which felt like a heated poker. I jerked my hand away. “Jesus!” I cried. Could anyone be this hot and live? “Water! Water!”

Together Charles and I raised her head and tried to make her drink, but she could not.

Now fear gripped me. I looked around the chamber, at its shadowed corners, and suddenly felt a darkness waiting there, waiting to creep out and fasten itself on Catherine.

“Let us carry her into the private withdrawing chamber off this room. She will have more privacy there,” I said. As if a change of room would banish the specter in the larger room. With the help of the attendants, the bed was lifted and moved into the smaller room. She had spent many an hour in this little room, laughing and arranging my linens and ruffs.

The physician returned with a pail of ice and began rubbing her arms and legs with jagged pieces. One icicle was ideal, being slender, allowing him to rub one leg down its entire length. She moaned and cried, “Cold, cold, cold!” but otherwise did not stir.

Charles, standing beside the bed, burst into tears. I took his hand and led him out into the larger chamber.

“She's gone, she's gone,” he cried. “She has passed the boundary line. She has gone over
there
. There's no pulling her back.”

“No, Charles.” I argued fiercely. “Let the ice do its work. They gave me up for dead when I had smallpox. But I came back.”

“You were twenty-nine. She is nearing sixty.”

“She is strong.”

Charles kept shaking his head. “Not so strong,” he said. “She kept much from you.”

The physician emerged from the chamber. “She seems to be weakening. I cannot get her to drink, and without that, she will lose all her water in the sweating.”

“What
is
it?” I cried. “Is it the sweating sickness?”

“I do not know,” he said. “I have never seen a case of that. It has not struck in England for twenty-five years.”

Was he that young? God's teeth, was I served only by children?

“But does it not cause just such a sudden collapse, and much sweating?”

“So they say,” he said.

“Some recover from the sweat,” I told Charles. “I remember.”

“Not many,” he said. “It left thousands dead in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. Half the students perished.”

“Perhaps it is not the sweating sickness. Perhaps it is just tainted food.” But I had eaten the same food and I was well.

Catherine moaned from within the room, and we rushed in. The bed was soaked with sweat, the linens looking dark around her. Touching them, I could feel the moisture. “Oh, my dear.” I smoothed her brow, slick with sweat.

I had fed Burghley in his final days. I had seen Walsingham's sickbed. But I had never witnessed as swift and complete a collapse as this one. She seemed changed from just the few minutes we had left her.

The young physician's assistant arrived, but together they stood helpless at the foot of the bed. “Make her comfortable,” one said. “We must change the linens again.”

I knelt down beside her. If there was little time left, then I must use it to speak. Later I could not. “My dearest companion, my cousin, do not hurry away,” I said. I took her hand, like a burning coal. “I have lost so many, but I cannot lose you.”

I felt a slight squeeze on my hand. Her eyelids fluttered open. “I feel my feet slipping away. I am being pulled down, into a tunnel. I promise you, I do not wish to leave. Help me. Hold tight. Keep me here!”

I gripped her hands, together. “I have you. I will not let go.”

“They are pulling ... pulling ... I slide ...”

“No, no.” I tightened my hold on her. “You are right here. In the bed. You are lying flat. No slant, no slide. It is a bad dream.” I looked around. “The room is here. You are here. Why, just beyond is the water closet we laughed about. It is still here. All is just as it was. Nothing is changed.”

Charles knelt on the other side and put his big hands on her forearms. “I will keep you here. I can hold you. I am stronger than the tunnel.”

For a few moments her eyes closed and I could feel the resistance in her limbs, as if she were pushing against the lid of the opening beneath her. She squeezed my hand and whispered, “They call. I must go. But I cannot. I remain here. Get the pillow.”

“No,” I said. “Not that.”

“It will ease my going,” she said. “I must go, but it is hard. I pray you, as one last favor, get the pillow.”

Charles looked quizzically at me. But I knew what she meant.

If I sent for it, I was acquiescing in her death. But it was her last request. I stood up, my body stiff from the odd position it had been in. I went out into the privy chamber and told one of the guards, “Go to the Bishop of Ely. Request the black lace pillow. He will know what I mean.”

The black pillow of Ely: It had been woven by a nun in that village, and when death approached, it was placed under the sufferer's head, then gently pulled away. When the head hit the mattress, the person was released.

Within an hour the pillow was delivered. I turned it over gingerly. The pillow of death. But no, it merely eased death. It could not cause it. As some babes come into the world with difficulty, some of the dying have difficulty leaving it. Both are hard passages.

The pillow was a small one, worked all over with lace. It was black as a moonless night. I carried it into the room and held it before Catherine.

Her sunken eyes opened and she smiled, as if recognizing the pillow, although she had never seen it before. “My friend,” she murmured. “I have long expected you, and dreaded you. Come here.” She seemed to be seeing only the pillow, not anyone else in the room. She stared at it in rapture, as if it were the Holy Grail.

Carefully Charles and I placed it under her wet head. Then, each of us taking our leave of her, kissing her forehead, together we pulled it out from under her. Her head fell back on the bed.

She gave a little sigh, a muffled cry. Then she was silent, and her breathing stopped.

I clutched the pillow, digging my fingers into it. She was gone.

In the privy chamber, the letters from Ireland and Venice sat on my desk, my triumph of the day, of the decade. But matters of state and matters of the heart run on different tracks. It would be days before I would think of them again.

I could not order the court into mourning, for Catherine was not royalty nor a personage of state, but its mood was one of mourning nonetheless. For myself, I dressed all in black, but my thoughts were darker still.

Filled with grief, I noticed Charles, who showed the strain of mourning. He was bent with despair and suddenly looked much older than his sixty-seven years. He looked as old as Old Parr. Charles looked at the black pillow with loathing and kept muttering, “It should be destroyed. It should be destroyed.” Once he tried to throw it in the fire, but I took it away, reminding him that it belonged to the Bishop of Ely and was revered in that region.

“We destroy papal relics, and this is worse,” he said.

“It has helped many people, and Catherine asked for it,” I reminded him.

John Harington attempted to amuse me, kneeling before me with some of his satirical verses, but I waved him away. “When you feel creeping time at your door, such frivolities will no longer please you. I am past my relish for such matters.” My relish for everything had fled, leaving a featureless landscape of the mind as bereft of life as the wintry one surrounding us. I felt a stab of regret at robbing my godchildren of care and company, so I summoned Eurwen and told her, “I give my first and last godchildren to one another. John, take Eurwen under your wing, and look after her. Eurwen, consider him your older brother at court.”

“Ah, but this sounds too biblical!” said John. “Surely we are not at the foot of the cross, being told, ‘Woman, behold your son!' and ‘Son, behold your mother.'”

“I told you, I am in no mood for jesting,” I warned him. “Begone!”

The remaining ladies of my chamber moved like shades drifting through fields of asphodel in Hades. Helena had returned. She was my last companion from the old days, and she acknowledged it.

“I cannot make up for all the ones who have left us,” she told me, “but I will never desert you.”

“I will not hold you to it,” I said, attempting to smile.

“After almost forty years at your side, I have learned to disregard your low moods,” she said.

She did not understand. This was not a low mood but an unflinching look at what lay ahead.

It was time. I heard the summons, not far off, like a rumble of thunder when I dined outdoors.

As she helped me prepare for bed, brushing out my hair—contrary to rumor, I still had hair, quite a bit of it, but gray now, no longer red—Helena was solicitous. She told me what her children were doing and inquired about the coming season at court.

It does not matter,
I thought, while answering her as best I could.