Elizabeth I (99 page)

Hoisting the basket up onto one shoulder, I made my way back into the house. I was on the river side, where I heard no street noises, just the sound of the Thames flowing past. Inside the house I would scurry into the laundry quarters to deposit my basket. Thank God I did not have to iron. I had not the skill. We sent the ruffs out to be professionally starched and ironed, but the rest was done here.

As I came back through the main room, I saw Robert sitting in a thronelike chair, gripping its arms and looking morose. Christopher was hunched on a stool beside him, speaking in a low voice directly into his ear.

“A fine day,” I said, attempting to sound cheerful.

They looked up, annoyed to be interrupted. “Yes, fine,” Robert muttered. He was still thin from his ordeal; his strength had been broken. A spindly hand extended from his sleeve, fretfully peeling an apple.

“It is November 16,” said Christopher. “We wait.”

“Oh, Robert.” My heart, which I had thought completely numb, was stabbed with pain for him. “It is too late for you to go, even if you heard from her. You have no costume, no pageant car, no presentation shield.”

“If I heard, I could create something overnight. If I heard—”

“You must shut that window and stop watching out of it.”

“He has crawled, humiliated himself, and been ground underfoot. I agree with you—if he is to be a man, he must stop.” Christopher looked disgusted, scowling at Robert as he dropped the peeling knife. Christopher grabbed it up and with one swipe, cut the peel off. “Here.” He thrust the apple back at Robert.

“You are right,” said Robert, turning the apple over and over as if he did not know what to do with it. “I always hated the tilts anyway. The expense. The time wasted coming up with a theme. To hell with them. All I want is the renewal of the sweet wines license. Now that she's insulted me, she can turn around and give that to me. Perhaps that is
why
she has been so publicly unkind.”

“You are a dreamer, Robert. You always have been. She's unkind because she's a mean woman and enjoys it,” said Christopher.

“She's more complicated than that,” I said. “Our best course is to keep silent.”

“I have no choice. I cannot write her again.”

“Damn right you cannot!” said Christopher.

Just then Robert's steward, Gelli Meyrick, appeared. He was scowling, as usual. He was intensely loyal but a hothead. “Why are you cowering indoors like a crone?” he said. Close behind him was Henry Cuffe, the scholarly secretary for foreign correspondence. He knelt and delivered a letter to Robert, who took it with trembling hands.

“Well?” demanded Christopher and Gelli.

“I shall open it in private,” said Robert, pressing it against his chest.

“Don't you trust us?” they asked.

“I am entitled to read a private letter in privacy!” said Robert, rising and drawing his robe around him. He stalked off to his bedchamber.

I turned hopefully to Cuffe. If no invitation came from nearby, at least our foreign allies remembered our existence. “Can you tell me—” I began.

“I am sorry,” he said. “I am not at liberty to tell you anything about the letter.”

“It had a royal seal on it,” said Gelli. “We are not fools. It is not from France, nor from Sweden, nor Russia. Where else but Scotland?”

“About time,” grunted Christopher. “After Robert has had his little show of independence, he'll let us read it. Perhaps—perhaps—”

“Don't even say it,” I warned him. The whole dalliance with James VI seemed pointless to me. It was so obvious that James would do nothing to jeopardize his standing with Elizabeth, and certainly not for a disgraced courtier. Yes, James was growing impatient, but Robert could not help his case.

I left them. Increasingly I was preferring the company of Frances and the grandchildren to these frustrated, petulant men. The siege of ill fortune had transformed her into a creature who showed sparks of fire. She had allowed the marriage of her daughter to Roger Manners, the Earl of Rutland, to go forward, but only because the headstrong girl fancied herself in love with him.

“It is very difficult to argue with a fifteen-year-old,” I had agreed with her. It did not get any easier, I thought, but I did not tell her that. Penelope and Dorothy had hardly become docile and passive as the years passed.

“Perhaps I'll have another daughter to replace her,” said Frances as we had commiserated over unmanageable daughters. That was her way of announcing that she and Robert were expecting again. They had consoled each other, then, in the ancient way after he had been allowed his freedom.

I was pleased to hear it. I trotted out the old phrase “Just as long as it is healthy—”

“Oh, yes, I am feeling quite well,” she said. “God forgive me, I know it is selfish, but it has been my delight to have Robert home and not roaming.”

Little Rob, his namesake, was nine now but seemed to prefer indoor pursuits to outdoor ones. Perhaps he would become a scholar or a church-man. I would not be sad to see the end of the martial ambitions of the Devereux men. Rob, with his mop of golden curls, was a dreamy boy who liked making up stories. He was the same age my Robert had been when his father died and he inherited the title of earl. Perhaps he would have the privilege of pursuing the things that suited his nature best, rather than being forced to make his way prematurely in the world.

Frances had laid aside her black clothes when Robert was freed but still dressed plainly. Since we were not invited anywhere, the lack of means to buy fancy clothes was not obvious. We passed the afternoon in quiet conversation, sipping heated wine and nibbling on little cakes. We both pretended we would have it no other way.

One always imagines that the days that change one's life must be marked with something extraordinary in nature—storms and lightning, darkness at noon, and so on. In truth they are indistinguishable from any other, which is one reason we feel mocked, as if the world is telling us we are inconsequential. The day that we got word of the Queen's decision about the sweet wines was a dull November day, cold but not overly so, drizzling but not pouring. She did not even deliver the verdict to us but let it trickle to Essex House by general gossip. The man delivering cabbages and onions to our kitchen said to the cook, “Pity about the sweet wines.” She asked him what he meant and he said, “That the Queen is keeping them for herself. I heard it at the market.”

Later a blacksmith confirmed it, having heard it on the street. Then, with darkness already falling, a bulletin from court, from Secretary John Herbert. He informed us of various decisions taken that week, regulations for the distribution of grain, a change in the day the swans were to be marked, increased fines for garbage in the city, and then, oh yes, Her Majesty was reserving the revenues of the duty on sweet wines for the Crown, as she wished to spare her loyal and beloved subjects any further taxation. I kept staring at the paper, rereading it, seeing words but rejecting their meaning. It could not be. But it was. The words remained on the page, not fading or changing no matter how many times I read them.

We were ruined. Ruined. We could not survive. We owed more than we could ever repay now. They would take us to Marshalsea Prison as debtors, and there we would die. I stumbled into my room and groped for a candle; suddenly I was afraid to sit in the dark.

Oh, there'll be dark enough in that cell, my terrified mind shouted. But you'll want it dark, so you can't see the filth and the rats in the straw. I was shaking all over. Until that moment, I had not known I had trusted the Queen to show mercy at the last minute, had never really allowed myself to live in any other alternative. “Oh, my God,” I whispered. I was beyond tears, beyond any remedy to relieve the shock and fear.

“Damn her to hell and flames!” Christopher was standing in the doorway, a bottle in his right hand. He raised it and drank directly from it in long slurps. “Curse her evil bones!” He was drunk. He slouched into the room and knelt down beside me. “What're ya sitting here in the dark for?” His breath stank of ale. He was no help; was there no help anywhere?

“I'm afraid, Christopher,” I said. “The darkness seemed kinder than the light.”

He grabbed my sleeve. “Sittin' here like a snivelin' coward, that's not my wife. Here, have some.” He thrust the bottle up to my mouth, but I turned away.

“You oughta be happy. It's all out in the open now. We donna have to pretend. She's our enemy, that's that.”

Who was this coarse, simplistic stranger? When had he replaced my Christopher? “No, she's not our enemy,” I said. “She is merely looking out for herself.” I paused. “I doubt—I doubt we are even enough in her mind for her to call us enemies. We are negligible now, no one who needs to be considered.” I was back where I had been as a child in exile, a nobody. But no, our family was important enough we had to go into exile. That meant something.

His only response was to take a swig of the liquor.

“Money, it's only money that matters,” I said. “Blood, service, bravery, loyalty—without money, they don't matter.” What good Robert's noble lineage and small amount of royal blood? The rats at Marshalsea would not heed them.

“You just now see that? Even a child knows that.” He found another candle to help the feeble one I had lit, and suddenly the light was doubled. “Maybe it isn't her,” he said. “Maybe her mind has been poisoned.”

“Don't console yourself with that delusion,” I said. “A weak king or queen can be the pawn of bad counselors and advisers, but this one is a pawn of no one. Never has been.” Oh, she had been clever and self-possessed ever since I had known her, outwitting those in power with ease even as a young princess. I wished I had shared that trait. Instead, I saw now, I had been a good schemer but a poor strategist, unable to plan for contingencies. But what good did it do me to recognize that now? It was too late to help and only served to deepen my despair.

“We'll see,” he said ominously. Then he reeled out of the room.

How long I sat there I do not know. I heard the street cries dying down as curfew was rung and the night deepened. Finally my shaking stopped. I should go to Robert. No, I should leave him his privacy. I should not barge in on him and Frances. Stumbling toward my bed, I lay down to obliterate the day and wake to another.

I awoke to dull light coming from a sun muffled in clouds. I had been dreaming of horses, riding slowly along a high cliff with the sea foaming far below. The air was syrupy with salt, but I loved the way it smelled, of seaweed and waves. I dismounted and stood at the edge of the cliff, watching the water roll in and dash against black rocks. Down below, between two jagged boulders, something was caught, bobbing. A body? Then I saw the sea strewn with timbers and debris and knew it was a shipwreck. Was it the Armada? Spaniards had washed up on shore in Ireland, they said. Ireland ...

“Mother!” Someone was shaking my shoulder. “Oh, help!”

I was pulled from the surging sea back to Essex House. Frances was standing by my bed. In the dim light I could see tears on her cheeks. “What is it?”

“Robert. He won't rise. I think he's—he's unconscious.”

I tumbled out of bed and pulled on a robe, then rushed with her to their room. A trail of discarded clothes led to the curtained bed. I pulled them back and saw Robert sprawled out, not sleeping but unresponsive.

“Drunk?” I asked, hoping it was true. Oh, let him merely be drunk. Christopher had been drunk. It was their way of shutting things out, things too painful to look at straight on. I smelled his breath, but it did not smell of ale or sack or wine. Instead, it had a strange, sweet odor.