SARAH GRISTWOOD

The Girl in the Mirror

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Prelude

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V

Epilogue

General Historical Note

Elizabeth and Essex

Select Bibliography

Five related gardens

Fact and Fiction

Copyright

About the Publisher

I grieve and dare not show my discontent

I love, and yet am forced to seem to hate;

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant;

I seem stark mute, but inwardly do prate.

I am, and am not; I freeze and yet am burned,

Since from myself my other self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun –

Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,

Stands, and lies by me, doth what I have done;

His too familiar care doth make me rue it.

No means I find to rid him from my breast,

Till by the end of things it be suppressed.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,

For I am soft, and made of melting snow;

Or be more cruel, Love, and so be kind.

Let me float or sink, be high or low;

Or let me live with some more sweet content,

Or die, and so forget what love e’er meant.

Elizabeth I

Prelude

Sometimes I think that I can feel the garden, like a prickle of awareness on my skin. As if sight – and smell, and sound – were not enough and I want to wrap myself in it, like you wrap yourself in a fur on a winter’s day. I suppose those times should come most often in the mayday, the hay day, when the roses and the fleur de luce and the honeysuckle are in flower. When, in the knot gardens of my childhood, gillyflowers jostled strawberries, with the fruit already beginning to show. When, in the great gardens where they bring even the meadows within their walls, they’re already scything the bloomy purple grasses, fine as the silk tassel on a nobleman’s cloak. I have always loved the garden then, of course I have, but sometimes I thought I loved it better earlier, when the pinkish apple blossom and the green-white pear first begin to break out on the grey lichened branch, or before that, in the time of violets and Lenten lilies. When the grass is sparser and the great trees are still bare, and things bloom with less of a rash and threatening luxury. Or earlier still, when the first snowdrops show above the frosty ground; a promise, but only of the most modest kind. The kind of promise in which one can trust, without too much uncertainty.

I forgive the garden the dog days, the sullen weeks between the hay and the harvest. I forgive it, even though wet days leave the tired plants spoiled and leaden, and on dry ones the gardeners have to trail twisted rags between water tank and root; and sometimes the change comes so suddenly that the ground steams, as though the earth were no more than a giant stew pot. I like the fact that the garden, then, is not for everyone; only for those who will come on its own terms, at the beginning or the end of the day. The weather has dried leaf and bud, and from childhood I remember the thrill of dead husks yielding life between the fingers – the sharp oily strength of lavender as it’s crushed. I’ve seen other ways, since, to deceive the heat – gardens with canals big enough to row a boat around, planted with overarching trees for shade. But it’s still the smell of lavender, every time I open a linen chest, or turn over in new sheets, that brings the garden close to me.

Every husbandman loves the first sniff of autumn, when the golden days light up each separate leaf. Days when the bite in the air goes hand in hand with the sunshine, like the claws emerging from a velvety cat’s paw. Even in winter – when the only colour comes from the tied bundles of the onion tops, and a trace of gilding on the rosemary leaves left over from the last visit of the queen’s majesty, when they dip sticks in honey and sweet wine and put them in the hives to keep the bees alive – the garden was always my place of safety.

Except when it wasn’t. Except when it was a place of puzzlement, of mystery. Of a dead bird thrown over the garden wall, of a warning given, cryptically. Of a man’s teasing face as he dodged between high dark hedges, laughing out at me. Of not knowing what or where my place should be.

The garden in May-time is a place for lovers, with flowers dotting the grass like stars in the sky. The garden in autumn is a place of maturity. In early spring, perhaps it’s for the children, who will crouch down by each new flower and give it the tribute of a wondering eye. I used to crave the early springtime, but now it’s roses and cherry blossom, great lakes of bluebells and the lush smell of the new shrub, the lilac, they have in the garden on the Strand that fill all my fantasy.

When I was a child, the garden seemed a magic place. Not so much for the miracle of the annual rebirth – perhaps only adults, who’ve understood death, can appreciate that – but for its smallness, its perfection, the low clipped hedges of the sweet herbs dividing and defining a bright tiny world, safe and ordered as it should be. I’ve seen other gardens since that aim at more than safety. Where plants are brought from strange new lands, and bright jewels are painted into the walls of an aviary. Where statues spell out subtle messages, where fountains run with wine, and hidden water jets spring up to soak the unwary. These too I am learning to love.

Fashions move quickly: there was a time, not so long ago, when every man at court dyed his beard bright red, they say. Fashions change in the garden also – but then, everything changes. It’s the one thing gardeners, more than anyone else, should know with certainty.

Everything changes. Even me.

Jeanne The English Channel, 1583

We’d been on the boat for all my lifetime, or so it seemed, suspended in an eternity between black water and black sea. The sailors hadn’t wanted to set out in this weather, that much I’d understood, but the shouting mob of passengers, desperate to get away, and the fists waving money had persuaded them. There’d been no cabins left, but Jacob had settled us on deck, said it would be easier that way, and I’d almost believed him – until we cleared the harbour from Antwerp and the first freezing slap of a wave washed over me. Then the lurching began, and the strange feeling in my belly, and though I knew that five years was too old to be a baby, I started to cry. I would have cried for Maman, but I knew that was no use. I knew by now that, however much I wanted her, she couldn’t come to me. Because we hadn’t been on this boat forever, not really, and before the terror here there’d been the terror at home, where things ought to have been safe, behind us in the Low Countries.

What I remember most is the moment before it started – a pause in time, like the pause of a bee hovering in the air, before it crawls into the bell of the flower. It had been a mild day, almost sunny, and I remember the flat warm light on the canal waters, and a moored boat rocking, and the blue of my new dress as I walked slowly, brimful of pride.

Then out of nowhere my mother had been there, snatching at my hand. ‘Run!’ she panted. ‘Run, Jeanne, that’s right, quickly.’ I looked sideways at her, consideringly, and I did run, but not that fast. I could almost have thought it was a game, if it weren’t for the little mewing sounds she was making as she tried to catch her breath, and the fact that her grip on my arm was hurting me. It had been weeks and weeks that she hadn’t wanted to play any games, or to do anything that meant moving quickly, but now she was a pace ahead and tugging me along, despite her huge swollen belly.

We’d almost reached the canal water by the bridge when she stopped, as hard as if she’d run into a brick wall. ‘Oh, mon Dieu. Oh God protect us, they’re here already.’ I didn’t know who she was talking to. ‘Maman,’ I said clearly, ‘where is Papa?’

She looked at me almost as if I were a stranger. Or as if I were a grown-up, maybe.

‘They got him,’ she said, as if she wanted me to remember. ‘They came to the silk merchants’ district first. Everyone knows where the chief Protestants live in this city.’ While she spoke her eyes were casting around. ‘There!’ she said, and stumbled sideways down an alley. I followed, but I didn’t move as fast as she did. My petticoats were in the way, and I didn’t understand why we were running, anyway. At the corner I paused as I heard a man yell. A man with a curved metal cap on his head, and something long and shining in his hand. He yelled again, with a sound of triumph in it. He was pointing at me.

As we reached the end of the street Maman was banging on a door. I knew the man who opened it; I’d watched him talking with my father, though he’d never spoken to me. ‘They’re coming, they’re coming, you can get away, you’ve got money, if you can only get up north there’ll be a boat to take you away. You won’t be on the list, Jacob, they won’t stop you, you’ll be all right, only you must take Jeanne.’ She was talking so fast she sounded as if she were crazy, like the old woman in the house next door. Maman always said her wits had gone awry. Jacob was slinging his bags round his shoulders. He must have packed them already. His head jerked up, like a bird when you startle it. The man in the tin hat was rounding the corner, leisurely, and I could see that he was laughing, I could see his black beard and his dark eyes. At that moment my mother doubled over, clutching at her stomach, and giving a gasping little cry.

‘Go!’ she hissed at Jacob, fiercely. As he darted away round the corner she sank down against a wall. Whoever lived in that house had been doing their washing, and the sheets were all hung up to dry. My mother pulled one down right over her, almost as if she were hiding, but that’s silly. ‘Go, go.’ It was as if she were screaming in a whisper to me. For a second I hesitated, then I dashed round the corner. From the dark of a doorway a hand reached out and Jacob grabbed me.

‘Shhh –’ Then, as if to make sure, he clamped his hand over my mouth. From behind us I could hear soft thuds, like the blows a baker gives to the dough, and voices in a foreign language, and my mother’s voice crying ‘No!’ and a scream cut off. I would have run back but Jacob was holding me. There was a horrible rasping, gurgling sound, then the voices were moving away. For what seemed like long minutes Jacob held on, until at last he released me. There was a pile of white and red where my mother used to be. The corner of the sheet had fallen over her face and below it … I gazed, uncomprehending. I couldn’t understand the glistening mass of red tubes and bags, like something left over on the butcher’s counter, as being part of her in any way.

‘Dear God in Heaven,’ said Jacob behind me. I could hear someone retching, but it was him, not me. I was staring at a strange small figure, like a deformed doll or like a devil in an old wall painting, lying bloody on the ground beside my mother, and at the hilt of the knife standing up from her belly.

Beside me on the boat Jacob half reached out a hand, but uneasily. As if he were trying to comfort me, but didn’t quite know how. Maybe he didn’t know about children. Or maybe there wasn’t any comfort. When he touched my blue dress it was slimy and stinking, from when I hadn’t been able to lean over in time, and I’d just been sick down my own front until everything inside me was aching. Around us, I could hear other people crying and moaning but I was tired, so tired, and as I slid down to sleep the dreams took me.

My dreams were full of jolting, and the running, the not being able to run fast enough. Not the blood, or only occasionally. After that there had been the squeak of the cart wheels, and the cold of the night air, and me not understanding yet that it was no use to cry for my mother, and Jacob telling me to hush, we weren’t safe yet, and the piles of still, silent shapes by the roadway. Another child screaming on one high note, and the sound growing and fading as the cart moved closer and then slowly away. A man pinned to a wall – if I did see this, or did I imagine it? – pinned there with spikes, and his hands and his feet lying a few yards away. Other people, people who weren’t dead or dying but who looked away as we passed by in our little island of catastrophe.

‘Bloody Papists,’ the man next to me had muttered, but Jacob hushed him.

‘That’s not the way.’ Later, remembering, I realised he sounded almost resigned, as if none of this were a surprise to him. As if, when he’d opened the door to my mother, it had been just the latest chapter in a long unfolding story.

A long time later there had been warmth and a fire, and a strange woman trying to persuade me to eat, even while she was crying quietly. I took the bread and pretended to mumble it, and some kind of unconsciousness overcame me. When I woke the next morning, trying to understand where I was, I could hear Jacob talking with urgency.

‘… can’t keep her. What am I to do with a five-year-old?’ he was saying. ‘If you’ll take her, I’ll leave you half the money.’ The woman was protesting when I sat up, and they saw me.

Then there were more nights, and more carts, until Jacob said we were getting near the sea. He’d begun talking to me by now, though I didn’t always understand him, and he said he’d decided to go right away.

‘We fled once before, after St Bartholomew’s Day,’ he said. ‘France to the Low Countries, frying pan to fire. What a mistake that turned out to be! The north’s trying to hold out but, mark my words, the Spanish will soon be all over this country, and their Inquisition with them. There’s only one boundary I trust, and that’s the sea.’

Jacob had settled me on the deck, propped up against his bags and with his cloak over me. There was something hard sticking into my back, and cautiously I poked my hand inside the sack. My fingertips felt a book, but fatter and somehow more bumpy than a book ought to be, and between the pages strange shapes, thin and scratchy. Then the ship gave another lurch, and once again, though I’d retched until my stomach was empty, the sickness overcame me.

As the storm began to slacken and a grey light dawned, for the first time we could see each other clearly. Jacob was gazing at me almost in horror, as if he’d never seen anything like me before, and I gazed back at him defensively. I could smell that there was sick in my hair, and my dress was filthy. Jacob cast his eyes around the weary huddle of other passengers, rummaged in the sack where he kept his money, then went over to the nearest family. They had two little boys with them, and the youngest was staring at me, his thumb in his mouth. They didn’t look happy, but they looked better than me. Jacob came back with some clean shabby clothes. The rough breeches felt strange, but then everything now was strange to me. Jacob told me we were going to London – ‘though sometimes I wonder why. A vile climate, and the English hate foreigners like poison. But there are people I know and there’s work I can do, and there’s no doubt it’s a great city.’

It didn’t look great, through my bleary eyes. The voyage had been so slow it was almost dark again when we clambered from the big ship into rowing boats, and then up a shingle bank. Broken crates of cargo were all I could see, with piles of reeking oyster shells and a stink like the privy. But there was a large man talking to Jacob, not in the French I’d spoken at home with Maman but in the Flemish I understood just as easily.

‘… safer this way than docking nearer the City. The authorities sympathise with refugees in theory, but the sheer numbers are making them queasy.’ His well-fed face turned to acknowledge me. ‘But I’m sure you’ll soon make a home here,’ he said to Jacob, ‘you and your boy.’

PART I

To every thing there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under the heavens;

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant,

and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal, a time to break down,

and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn,

and a time to dance.

Ecclesiastes 3:2

For it is an old saying. The pot or vessel shall ever savour

or smell of that thing wherewith it is first seasoned.

A Werke for Householders, Richard Whitforde

Spring 1584

‘Are you John or Jan?’ He was eight or nine, older than me, and sturdy with the gap-toothed, scrawny sturdiness of the London streets, but though his feet were apart and his chin thrust forward, and the scabs and the bruises spoke him a fighter, he was looking at me with curiosity rather than hostility.

‘I’m Jeanne, Jeanne Musset,’ I said honestly, pronouncing it the French way my mother had taught me.

‘That’s what I told Diggory. I told him if they called you Jan, it meant you’d come from the flat countries. Is it true they have to dig ditches there to soak up the sea?’

I nodded dumbly, and he seemed to realise I was too shy, or just too uncomprehending, for there to be any more interest in me. But from that moment I had the acceptance, or at least the tolerance, of the boys in the street. The other boys, I should say.

I’d arrived in England in boys’ clothes, and boys’ clothes were the next set bought for me. I’m not sure Jacob ever declared to himself a decision to deceive. Simply, he had no framework in which to imagine the rearing of a girl. Later I understood that he could just about envisage the company of a boy, a younger Jacob. An apprentice, you might say. And I suppose, without any conscious sense of reluctance on my part, I set about becoming what he needed me to be.

That was one thing I learned in the garden where we went on summer evenings and on Sundays. Plants can adapt to the most extraordinary conditions – a geranium forced to bloom in winter, blanched celery grown up without light, or an espaliered pear tree. The garden didn’t belong to us, I learned. Like many others, Jacob rented his little patch of land, just outside the City. Like the others he grew cabbages and radishes, frilled parsley and gooseberries, and from the last tenants we had inherited a fine russet apple and a walnut tree. But he also grew flowers, and rarities when he could get them – new shades of double primrose, or martagon lily.

As a child, I loved our Sundays. ‘Their gardens are the best thing about the English,’ Jacob said grumpily. Even he would warm and soften as he packed the earth around some young seedling with a tenderness he was never able to show me. But he did set me free to run along the rows of twining peas and small jewelled strawberries. There was a seat made of packed earth and turves, which he planted with low growing periwinkle, and sometimes, if he were working late, he’d perch me there when I got drowsy. I was allowed to trample the heaps of good-smelling cuttings, of hyssop or thyme or rosemary; to pinch the dead heads off the gillyflowers, and stick my fingers into the foxglove bells.

‘Watch out for the bees,’ the fat market-women would tell me, smilingly, and I’d listen to the humming from the skeps on the wall, before I ran off again to chase the butterflies. Outside, in the street, I’d seen little girls playing with scraps of cloth on sticks, or twisting handfuls of straw into dollies. But in the garden there were no girls or boys. There was just pretty.

I’d pick snails and caterpillars off the leaves, and fetch water in a copper pot from the well that served the gardens. I began to notice that different plants grew in different ways, and sometimes, if I sat near Jacob’s feet of an evening when he read his gardening books, he would pass them over to me. Once I saw that he was looking down at me, oddly. ‘Your mother loved gardens, too,’ he said quietly.

I remembered it, because it was so rarely either of us spoke of the past, or of my family. It was as if a kind of shyness held us both in thrall. Greedily, silently, over the years I hoarded every tiny detail Jacob did let slip, and secretly, in my mind later, I would add another minute piece to the jigsaw puzzle of my family.

Sometimes, in our garden, he’d grumble that in this country the grass grew so lush it choked all the flowers, and as he set me to pull up the fat emerald clumps, I fancied I could remember a shorter, spikier turf under my fingers, and a mead where the flowers shone out more brightly. Once, wishing perhaps to praise me for picking out the Latin name of some strange flower, he said it would have made my father happy.

As I grew older, just occasionally, he’d tell me stories from his own past – or that part of it which touched on the plants and the gardens. That book I had felt on board the ship was his greatest treasure – a hortus siccus, a whole garden of dried plants arranged according to their form, the Continental way. I learned that the great adventure of our age lay in understanding the way a weed grew, just as much as in travelling over the sea. This was one field where we of the new religion led the way, he told me proudly. He’d studied botany at the great university of Montpellier in the south of France, where many fled from persecution in the north. Though at first I understood little of what he told me about it, gradually the names of the men became familiar to me – Andrea Cesalpino (‘He works for the Pope now. Pity, a pity …’); Charles de l’Écluse, who ran the emperor’s botanic garden in Vienna, with his elegance and his generosity; Matthias de l’Obel with his orderly mind, classifying plants by the shape of their leaves and the way they grew from the stem or the tree. I liked it, when Jacob showed me how that was done. There was something about the sureness of it that pleased me.

Several of the great plantsmen were living in London now: Master de l’Obel visited us from time to time, and he and Jacob would chew over the plants and gardens they had seen until they came alive in my memory, too. They seemed to avoid anything more personal, however intently I might listen for it. Flemish gardens had more rare plants than any in Europe, Master de l’Obel said once, ‘But who can live in a land watered by blood?’ Then, catching me listening, he quickly changed the subject.

Jacob knew several of the other plant collectors here – James Garrett, the Huguenot apothecary, and Master Garth, whose connections with the southern Americas brought many rarities his way. They even passed some business to Jacob, but he was too uncompromising a man to fit for long into that or any other community. The few people who really made up my world came to me in other ways. There were the Hills, who rented the bigger patch of land beside ours, with cherry trees standing sentinel in the rows of herbs, and a pool and, most magical of all, a curved shape of willow like a tiny house with a vine growing all over it, and bunches of hard little grapes like beads hanging from the ceiling. They had a daughter – fourteen, almost grown up – who told me how to use the sops-in-wine and helped me play games with the cockleshells that edged the border. Master Hill was well to do, and though occasionally he grumbled his family would bankrupt him some day, more often he liked to boast that they had a garden that would do for a fine lady. Master Hill was a man of connections, Jacob said, and once he bought his wife a present that made me stare at it, round-eyed: the shape of a cocklolly bird, made all from living rosemary.

Master Hill paid Jacob to keep his accounts, and to write his letters neatly. So did other businessmen, one by one, and not all of them Dutch or French, though it helped that, besides the Latin, he spoke three languages easily. Four, in the end, for he came to teach himself Italian, and in doing so to teach me. He hadn’t the time or the patience to school a child in the rudiments, so I learnt to read and recite, and figure, at the petty school. I learnt to write there, too, but Jacob said it was a vile, clumsy hand they were teaching me. He said it to the dame, who announced the next day she wanted no more to do with me. So I stayed at home, and imitated Jacob’s beautiful curling writing, and ran loose in the shelves of his growing library as if in a row of peas. He was friends with all the booksellers around St Paul’s, and when he went to see them, he took me.

He made more than enough money to keep us both decently, if not luxuriously. He even made enough to employ Mrs Allen, the Dutch-born widow of a local seaman, to cook us one hot meal a day and to keep the house neat. Mrs Allen must have known my secret – though in truth it never seemed as dramatic as that word implies. Just once, I remember, when I was begging to go back to school like other children, she did look me right in the eye. ‘And what about the first time they take your breeches down for the birch? Have you thought about that?’ I dropped my gaze. It was the sort of thing neither Jacob nor I ever thought about directly. But she in her turn never said anything straight out, perhaps from respect for Jacob – ‘such a man of letters’, as she called him, a trifle breathlessly – just as she never said anything about the packed bags he always kept by the door, even after we’d been in England for years and developed a cautious acquaintanceship with the idea of safety. But it may also have been because she, too, was unable to envisage any other solution for me. If I were to be a girl, then I would need to marry, and who would want a girl with neither dowry nor family, with no idea how to sew or to make herself pretty? Looking back now, I’m grateful to Mrs Allen. Looking back, I think of her affectionately. And looking back, I think there might have been mothering there, had I been able to take it. But I was a child who’d learned, the hardest way of all, that safety lay in self-sufficiency.

Still, it was to Mrs Allen I owed the few festivities I knew – the old rites and revels that grow from the blood and bone of this English country, and that made me less of a stranger than I might otherwise have been. It was she who, in the first bright days of February, would take me to the English church to see the procession of candles on Candlemas Day. They didn’t hold with such things at the stricter Dutch church where Jacob took me – ‘Papist nonsense,’ they used to say. It was she who sent me out with other children begging for treats on St Valentine’s Day. ‘It’s one thing we can do right in this household, just like everybody else,’ I heard her say firmly to Jacob, and he stopped protesting and turned away. She took me out into the fields, to look for blossom on the first of May.

Sometimes, too, she’d take me to the playhouse. One of her husband’s cousins was in the business and he’d leave word with the doorman so we could get in for free. Sometimes, after, she’d take me behind the scenes, where the kings and villains became men with traces of grey hair gummed on their face and paint in the corner of their eyes – but still, men whose voices carried across the room, men whose air and gestures made everyone else in the room look paltry. Men in velvets and in lace, even if both were a little shabby. And with them the boys, the shrill-voiced pieces of vanity who’d don petticoats and act women in the play. I looked at those boys with a mixture of fear and the most burning curiosity.

There was one old actor, Ben, who took especial pains with me, showed me the tricks of posture and paint that made young into old and boy into girl – or, I suppose girl into boy. It was only later, as I grew, that I wondered how he had known that these things would interest me. But perhaps he just liked children. Children liked him, certainly. Ben had been to sea, when the acting work would not support him, and he had fabulous stories to tell – of lands where the waves flashed amethyst and turquoise, where emerald green birds with clamouring wings but no legs sucked the honey from scarlet flowers all day, and of the serpent hiss of hard rain beating on a tropical sea. I’d take the stories home to Jacob, like a bartering tool, and sometimes I could sting him into telling me tales of his old life in the south, where bushes of rosemary grew so high they used the branches for firewood, and clouds of pomegranate blossom glowed against a blazing sky.

By and large it was, I suppose, a lonely life, but I didn’t mind much. It was easier that way. As I grew older, I watched the young girls begin to blush and giggle as they filled their dresses, and the young men stare and swagger on their way to the butts, out past the laundresses on Finsbury Fields, and I knew neither was for me. I didn’t go to the butts, though the law said all boys should practise archery; I suppose here as elsewhere our foreignness protected me, explaining any differences away. It was not quite true, I’d found, that the English hated foreigners – not the Londoners, anyhow. What they really hated were those native-born English who were different in any way. For almost ten years, after we first arrived in England, I lived among them as a mouse lives in the wainscoting. Glimpsed, sometimes. Cursed at, occasionally. But on the whole, peaceably.

Winter 1593–94

You could live well here, if you chose to, within a network of others who had fled to Elizabeth’s England, some fleeing the Inquisition’s long arm, others simply to make money. It was easy to forget we were strangers in a strange land. Until something happened to remind you, and anything you’d learned about safety had to be unlearned, painfully.

I must have been turning fifteen when Jacob came home one day, his face bleached.

‘I’ve just seen Roderigo Lopez,’ he said. It was a mark of his anxiety that he was confiding in me. ‘Of course, it’s all an absurdity. But mud sticks, and these days, you never know what nonsense is going to get you into trouble.’

Indeed, that year had been far from easy. First we heard that the Spanish had another Armada on the way – terrifying for everyone, to be sure, but anathema to those who’d seen what the Spanish were doing in the Netherlands, from whence came bloodier stories every day. Next we heard that the winds had changed, and we were safe – certainly through another winter. But then came news that Henry of France, our Protestant hero, had turned Papist as the price of holding on to his country. He said Paris was worth a Mass: he should have heard what they said of him, the grave old men with their neat ruffs and their wine cups, in the Huguenot community. Even the plague had been worse than usual, so that people started talking about the great epidemic thirty years before, when one in four Londoners died. Jacob said the ordinary people, in their ignorance, were blaming ‘strangers’ – immigrants, like us – and keening over the wickedness of the country. Even the playhouses had been closed. But this was something different, apparently.

‘Roderigo should never have got across Lord Essex – never!’ Jacob exclaimed angrily, as I knelt to stoke up the fire. ‘That’s a young man who doesn’t forgive a slight – yes, and a young man in a hurry.’ I was sorry. I didn’t know much about the Earl of Essex, no more than I did of any of the grandees whom the other boys ran after when they rode through the streets, half in admiration and half in mockery. But I liked Dr Lopez, who’d always been kind to me. Jacob said he’d been a Jew once, but he’d become a Christian many years ago when he’d first come to this country from Portugal – ‘Had to, naturally.’ He eyed me with a rare impatience when I looked at him blankly; yes, I knew, of course I did, that no one practised the Jewish faith in this country. But the fact was, I looked at the world around me – the world of people, not of books, or plants – as little as might be.

When Dr Lopez was appointed the senior doctor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and even the queen’s own physician, Jacob said, it reflected credit on us all. Showed you could do service to England, even if you were born across the sea. ‘Shows that at least here you can get along, if you’ll just try to fit in and live quietly.’ As a child, all I knew was that, when Dr Lopez came to visit, he brought a bag of comfits for me. And as I grew, and Jacob let me stay up to listen to the grown-ups’ talk, I liked the way his cheeks creased up and his white beard trembled as he banged his beaker on the table so that the drops splashed red, and I liked to hear his stories.

Yes – he had told some about Lord Essex, maybe. Or at any rate a young noble patient who was suffering half from the spleen – ‘If he was a girl, we’d call it hysterics, but he thinks it gives him a hold over her majesty!’ – and half from some unnamed disease, the thought of which made the older men purse their lips slyly.

Perhaps now Jacob thought that it was time the men’s conversations ceased merely to pass over me like a ripple of water. Perhaps he just wanted to talk with somebody.

‘Lord Essex has got wondrous great these last two years. What, not out of his twenties yet, and a privy councillor already. And the favourite companion of the queen’s majesty – aye, and one who dares to slight her and say her nay in a way his father, God rest his soul, would never have done. The old Earl of Leicester, who married Essex’s mother, and brought this boy on as though he’d been his own flesh and blood,’ he explained impatiently. ‘Myself, I think that’s why the queen keeps him so close, for the old lord’s sake, but of course there are those who say –’

Mrs Allen came in then, so I didn’t hear what others say, though naturally I could guess. It sounded silly to me – the earl was in his twenties, after all, and the queen must be more than sixty. I didn’t hear, then, what Dr Lopez had done to annoy Lord Essex, except maybe talk too freely. But I was of an age by now to pick up scraps of information when anything interested me.

Advent didn’t bring us many callers – who sent out invitations to dine, when you had four weeks of fast days? – but when visitors did come on business I kept my ears open. I learnt that Lord Essex was white hot against the Spaniards, and anxious to lead an army off to war and make his fame that way. I learnt it was the Cecils, old Lord Burghley and his son, who were leaders of the peace party, and the queen, reluctant to spend blood or money, leaned their way in terms of policy. And that Lord Essex, pent up at home, was seeing Spanish spies under every bush, and claimed Dr Lopez – our Dr Lopez – had given house-room to Spaniards, or men in Spanish pay, plotting some dangerous conspiracy. Then Christmas came, and the feasting and the frost fair, and I forgot it all for the moment.

Christmas wasn’t out when Dr Lopez was arrested. It was only the first of January, and the news spread like a sickness from feasting house to feasting house, quenching each little light of merriment as surely as if it had been touched by the plague, and as swiftly.

‘They’ve taken him to Essex House. But Lord Burghley and his son – you know, Robert Cecil, the hunchbacked one – have been sharing the interrogation. They’re reasonable men, the Cecils. He’ll be out before Twelfth Night, you’ll see.’ It was our most cheerful neighbour, a dapper tailor once from Le Havre. Jacob glanced at him sourly.

‘Reasonable men, you say. Are reasonable men going to fight with Essex over the welfare of a foreigner, and a Jew at that? What have they found to charge him with, anyway?’

It was three days later when we heard. For two of those days Lord Essex had sulked – the Cecils had done the right thing, after all, they’d declared Lopez innocent, and the queen had believed them, to the earl’s fury – but on the third he had been busy. Lopez had been whisked into the Tower, and the earl set about declaring, beyond all doubt, a treasonable conspiracy, a Spanish plot to poison the queen, as her doctor could do so easily.

Terrified and confused, Lopez himself seemed half to agree. (‘Of course he agreed! They showed him the rack,’ said Jacob indignantly. I saw one of the other men there, another foreigner, rub his shoulder as if an old wound pained him, and stir uneasily.) Lopez had actually agreed he’d once taken Spanish pay, but only on the instructions of English agents, to lead King Philip astray. But that was back in the days of Walsingham, the old spymaster, and now Walsingham was gone, and couldn’t say yea or nay.

‘Take heed of that,’ Jacob said. ‘It’s hard enough not to get caught up in intrigue, if you’re a foreigner in this country. But the men who try to hire you will leave you in the lurch – by dying, if they can’t do it any other way.’ Privately he told me he had not the least hope; something about a job Lord Essex wanted for a friend of his, and the queen had given it to someone else, on Cecil advice, so that she’d want to soothe Lord Essex by yielding to him in some other way.

After the doctor and his associates were arraigned and sentenced, the little tailor took some comfort in the fact that the queen couldn’t bring herself to sign the death warrant at once.

‘She knows it’s wrong, she’ll let them out eventually.’

‘She knew it was wrong with her cousin, the Scots queen, but she still signed. Eventually –’ Jacob imitated the little tailor. ‘She’s the queen, isn’t she?’

When the news came that she had signed, he grew ever more gloomy. Lopez was to be tried and hanged, he said, on Tyburn tree. It was from the streets that I heard the full story.

‘Hanged all right, but not till he’s dead, or not unless he’s very lucky. Then they’ll cut him down alive and hack off his privities, and slit open his belly and pull his guts out before his eyes.’ One lad with a lazy eye seemed to know all about it. ‘Sometimes, if they like him, the crowd yell to the executioners to leave it, to let the man die first, at the end of the rope, but they won’t do that for a Christ-killer, you’ll see.’

‘Anyway,’ another boy chimed in, ‘they say Jews are built differently.’

The night before, Jacob told me he was going to watch. ‘I have to, the Lord knows why. Somewhere in that howling crowd, there has to be a friendly eye. But you’re to stay home – do you hear me?’

I nodded, my eyes fixed on my plate. In the last weeks, the dream had been coming back to me. It wasn’t of the knife, or the hilt in the belly, not precisely. It was the running, and the knowing that I couldn’t run fast enough, and that they were going to die because of me. The next morning, I pretended to be asleep as I heard Jacob leave. In his absence I tidied his desk, and cleaned out his inkwell. I was going to sharpen him some quills, but the knife disturbed me. Instead I set myself to copying the various pages of figures he had left me – for I helped him in his paid work by now – and tried not to count the time passing slowly. In the end, the suspense got to me – and the curiosity. I had to know. I had to see.

I left the house as quietly as a mouse leaves its hole with a cat there to pounce and, slipping surreptitiously from corner to corner, made my way towards Newgate, where the Holborn road leads west. It was one of those days, again, when everything seemed to move slowly. When each familiar sight of the streets struck me with unusual clarity. I suppose everyone in London can’t really have gone to see the sight, but that’s how it felt to me. As though I were a ghost – one of those spectres they used to paint for the casting down into Hell, mouth ever open in a silent scream – moving through an empty city. I saw Master de l’Obel, his face full of distress, but he did not see me.

Past the looming bulk of Ely Place, past the great chains across the road, to seal the way to the City when necessary, and soon I was in open country. In this dank weather the fields were just a sludgy mass of brown, cold and uninviting. Starting out so late, I was far behind the mass of the crowd, but the state of the track showed how many had gone before me.

I hadn’t realised it was such a distance. I’d been hurrying my steps, to try to catch up, and I’m not sure what it was that halted me. Maybe the smell brought back on the wind, or the sick low roar of the people pressing westwards ahead of me. I don’t really know what it was – the fire must have smelled like any other, even if they had lit it to burn the doctor’s privates, and the crowd was noisier for the football match every Accession Day. Maybe, as I started to find myself among squabbling families, and carts full of people as cheery as on market day, it was the look I saw on the faces of those others who were flocking that way.

In the end I never even reached Tyburn. Just as well, maybe. I heard later that Dr Lopez died shouting out that he loved her majesty better than Christ, and that one of the men who died with him tried to fight off the executioner, and they had to hold him down to slash his belly open. Up until now, I’d only half understood things Jacob tried to teach me – about quarrel, and dispute, and the passion of belief. About how it made men do things in God’s name that in fact the Creator would weep to see. I hadn’t understood why – when Mrs Allen nagged him into getting me ordinary school books – he’d snatched the discourse on rhetoric back at once, having caught me showing off for her admiring eyes, imitating the kind of rhetoric class real schoolboys had every day. At the time, I felt reproved for my vanity, but later I came to understand more clearly what Jacob had muttered under his breath about convincing and convicting, and about the wrong-headedness of teaching children that the important thing in the world was to prove their point, however blunted it might be.

Now I did understand, as I saw citizens’ kindly faces alight with a brutal glee. I stood there in the muddy track for a moment, cursing myself for folly. Then I turned back, and half ran towards the familiar streets. At the empty house I bent over the desk, trying to ignore the chill sickness inside, and took care not to look up when Jacob returned, his tread slower and heavier than when he had gone away.

I had other things to concern me, as I grew older. In my mind and in Jacob’s I was a boy, but my growing body heard a different story. Quietly, as she sat with our mending by the fire, Mrs Allen had made sure I’d know what I needed to know, though always imparting her information with the casual air of one who is talking for the sake of it. Never as if these were things that I might need to know personally. By the time I first bled I knew what to expect, though the pain like a knife grinding in my belly brought the dreams worse than usual, and I was glad that I did not bleed frequently. And that my shape stayed thin and unformed – slim enough in a stripling, but what in a girl you might have called scrawny.

Autumn 1595, Accession Day

Sometimes, when Jacob was out, I’d slip on my cloak and go down to the Thames, and wish the waters could take me … somewhere. To some other destiny. I heard Mrs Allen telling Jacob, in that comfortable way, that all young people were sometimes as wild as March hares, and I suppose it was true.

If I’d been of another disposition, it might have taken me to the bear-baitings, or the executions. If I’d been a proper girl it might have taken me to a boy’s arms. If I’d really been that boy, it might have taken me to the stews. As it was, it took me towards the court, for the jousts on Accession Day. Ascension Day, I almost said, when in the days of the old faith they celebrated the Virgin Mary. But now the altars and the blue robed, sweet-faced statues were gone. We celebrated another virgin queen, and after more than three and a half decades on the throne, in truth she seemed as much a fixture in the sky.

The tiltyard lay to the northwards of most of the palace buildings, though close enough that you could see its yawning doorways, close enough you could feel the beast’s hot breath down your neck. Close enough that the turrets and pennants loom like a fairy-tale castle. Other children heard fairy tales as something delightful, sweet as sugar comfits, but to me they were always frightening, with their world of things that were not as they seemed, of unknown possibilities. I knew you went to the tilt-yard not just for the fights, but for the masques and pageants and stories they used to dress up the fact that times had changed, and knights no longer really fought each other with spear-tipped poles under codes of chivalry. I was scathing of all that; the very young feel scathing easily.

This – I told myself, as I jostled along with the crowd trying to get in at the gates, squeezed by a merchant’s wife with a picnic basket on one side, and on the other by a courting couple who couldn’t even keep their hands off each other until they found a seat – was modern London, where you could buy anything from a Spanish orange tree to a copy of an Italian play, where every householder had by law to hang a light outside, so that the night streets were almost bright like day. Where the queen’s own godson had invented a flushing jakes, so that after you’d evacuated, a stream of water carried your filth away … But it was good, just for the moment, to be swept along with the crowd. To smell the damp sand of the arena, and the farmyard aroma of the horse lines, where the chargers were shitting with eagerness and fear.

The only place I could get was high up in the grandstand, so that what was going on below had an air of unreality, like something seen at the play. But I was happy enough to gaze down at the courtiers who were coming in last of all, to the seats beside the arena, furred and cloaked against the November air. Mulberry and tawny, sulphur yellow and ox-blood red, their very velvets seemed to warm the day.

At one end, the royal gallery still stood empty, fluttering with silks in the Tudor colours, green and white. The crowds were beginning to cheer some arrivals – clearly well-known personalities. The man beside me, a burgher as broad as he was tall, could see my ignorance, and was only too happy to enlighten me.

‘That’s Ralegh,’ he said, ‘see, the tall one? That’s the queen’s cousin, well, kinsman, Lord Howard the Lord Admiral, with the white beard. Look, that’s Master Cecil, Lord Burghley’s son – I daresay the old man will stay away, I doubt he’s got much taste now for a tourney. But Robert Cecil, he’s a rising man – and a sharp one, they say.’ There were no cheers for Robert Cecil, I noticed. In fact there were even some jeers as he took his place. He was a small man, I saw, and almost twisted – hunch-backed? – in some way, though for all that he managed his slight dark figure gracefully.

‘Ah,’ my neighbour said on a grunt of satisfaction, ‘here she comes, the queen’s majesty.’ Now there really was cheering. I peered downwards, hungrily. I hadn’t expected to make anything out, but as the stiff tiny mannequin advanced to show herself, I found I could see quite clearly. See where the blaze of jewels caught the winter sunlight, see the bright red fringe of curls around the white oval of her face. Around her clustered the young maids of honour, with one or two older ladies.

Jacob and his friends, talking of an evening, had nothing but contempt for the court – a nest of carrion crows grown fat, they said, of maggots feasting on decay. But even they would hush their wives when any of the talk – ‘Of course it’s a wig. My sister’s husband’s a perruquier, and he says she’s bald as an egg underneath!’ – came close to touching the queen’s dignity.

‘She may have her vanities as a woman,’ they’d say, ‘and why shouldn’t she? But she’s given us close on four decades of quiet – aye, I know things haven’t been so good this last year or two, but she can’t help the weather and the harvest, can she? Just look across the Channel if you want to see how bad things could be.’ And then they’d break off, with a sidelong glance at Jacob, and at me.

Something was happening, down in the lists. A herald on horseback, dressed in red and white, had trotted into the arena, and was making the circuit of its brightly painted wooden walls with something in his hand held high.

‘It’s a glove – they always do it,’ said my knowledgeable neighbour. ‘They put word out that Lord Essex would be sending early, to get a gage to show he rides in honour of her majesty.’ Indeed, the jewelled figure at the window of the royal gallery was holding up her hand, to acknowledge the tribute graciously. But the play wasn’t over, so it seemed. As the herald left, a good-looking youth in the same bold colours took his place in the arena, and looked around until he could be sure he had all eyes. He struck a pose, and began to declaim, though high up as we were the wind whipped his words away.

Three figures followed him, and knelt at his feet, in dumb show asking him to choose between them. The first, a soldier, was tall and armoured. It could have been anyone. It could have been Ralegh. The second drew a ripple of laughter from the crowd. It was barefoot in a hermit’s robe, but my neighbour hissed in my ear that the long beard and the staff were those of Lord Burghley. The laughter grew louder as the third figure, in a statesman’s dark clothes and waving documents of policy, leant sideways to hump one shoulder high in the air. I couldn’t make out Robert Cecil’s face, but he seemed to be bearing it quietly.

As the actors took their bows, to roars of approval, my eye was drawn to the end of the lists. A knight was watching there, in red-and-white livery. ‘The colours of love,’ said my knowledgeable neighbour and I stared – I wouldn’t have put him down as a man for heraldry – until I saw he had a printed bill, like they might hand out for a play.

The knight’s helmet was still off; I could see his hair and beard were tawny, and that his face was turned not towards the players but to the queen’s majesty. As the actors left the lists, he bowed his head to let the squire put on the metal headpiece, and snapped the visor down. Both knights were ready, their great heavy lances resting on the ground, waiting for the sign. It was the queen who gave it – an arm held up, a glove fluttering down, and the slow thunder of the horses’ hooves making the ground groan in sympathy.

It was Essex’s opponent who fell, and a great sigh went up from the crowd; I knew men were running in from the sides, and that he wasn’t hurt, or not seriously. But my eyes, now, were on the royal gallery. I was too far away to see properly, but in my mind’s eye I saw the tiny figure tense, the hand clench on the window frame as the great metal spikes steadied to hit home. I knew now what I’d come for, and I’d found it in the queen’s majesty.

‘Something more than a man – and something less than a woman,’ Lord Burghley had quipped, famously. Something else, at any rate. Something else, like me.

But I’d learnt another lesson, and one I put aside, uneasily. The queen watching Lord Essex was like Mrs Allen, waiting for a letter from her son, on business across the sea. Or Kate down the street, watching her man clambering drunk into the wrestling ring on fair day. Hopeful and fearful, proud and angry. A woman, for all she was queen, and statesman, and old, and majesty.

Cecil Autumn 1595, Accession Day

I’ll laugh about it later with Lizzie. I hold on to the thought of her forthright face, I imagine what Lizzie would say if she were here. Lizzie will say anything to anybody – ask her how much she paid for her gown, and she’ll answer you honestly. When I first saw her at court, I asked my cousin to find out whether my disability revolted her, before I asked if she would marry me. She reminds me of it – regularly – and every time she does, I could swear the twist in my shoulders grows slightly less. I know a little of the ache goes away. She says she married a man, not a set of muscles. If she were here, what would she say?

I do not say, my time will come. I see a future with Lord Essex riding high: I see a future without Lord Essex in it. I plan for all contingencies: that is what my father taught me. If my father were here, if he’d been well enough today, he would be brushing off the mockery as though it were no more than a few drops of rain on his miniver collar. When we meet in the hall tonight he may speak of it, but only if there is need.

He may say, it’s good that Essex is going too far, the queen doesn’t like her officers mocked too publicly. He may say, one of our men in place should be told to feed his lordship’s vanity. Or he may wear that disapproving look, that puffs out the pouches under his eyes and makes his years hang heavy, and say that we should damp down all comment, a period of quiet would be good for the country.

On the whole he is unlikely to say anything: as he grows older and his hand starts to shake, he assumes everyone will agree with him and I do, actually. How would I not, when he trained me so thoroughly? The one thing he is certain not to say is, Don’t let it hurt you. Flattery is for fools, vanity is for women, that’s what he’d say.

Thank God for Lizzie.

My ruff feels too tight around my neck but I know better than to lift a hand to ease it. There are too many eyes on me, watching for the least sign of discomfiture. I can see Southampton grinning spitefully. I remember him as a child, always trying to keep up with the older boys. I can see Francis Bacon, his profile turned away from me. He’s never forgiven us for that business over the Attorney General’s office, he’s linked his fortune to Essex’s chariot wheels, and it will be like the clever fool he is if he gets dragged the wrong way. But he won’t entirely be enjoying this – the same blood runs in the veins of both our mothers; at rock bottom we are family.

In the convoluted world of the court, there may even be some who believed we Cecils had a hand in writing Essex’s little story. My father has been painting himself as a hermit for years, asking leave to retire and tend his garden. And one thing we all learn at court, a veil of enmity can cloak allies as easily as a show of friendship cloaks enmity. They may think I have the subtlety, or the courage, to make fun of my own misshapen form, to consider the sting was a price worth paying to have made the queen laugh out loud.

I should be flattered by their thoughts, probably.

Essex himself is riding around the ring, that victor’s lap of honour where they hold the horse’s pace down so its oiled hooves flick up the dust contemptuously. As he passes he looks at me with a hot urgent eye. It was always that way, ever since he was young, one of the aristocratic orphans, like Southampton, raised in my father’s house. He’d do something outrageous, and then he’d come to peer at you, in his tall gangling way, looking for – what? Shock? Approval? Envy? Reassurance that you’d forgive him, come what may?

Perhaps now it is my jealousy he wants, for me to acknowledge that my feeble arm could never even bear the weight of his lance, so I give it to him, dipping my head a little and smiling slightly, like a fencer courteously acknowledging a hit.

Smiling is easy: my father always taught me to praise in public, and criticise secretly. Sweetness is easy: it is easy, actually, as I look at Essex, but why? Absurd, irrational, but there is something in the sight of that tall, trotting figure that melts some of the sore frozen core in me.

Perhaps that is something I will not say to Lizzie.

Jeanne Winter 1595–96

Around Christmas Mrs Allen’s cousin, the theatre man, sent word he wanted to see her. They’d been given a gift of clothes from some grand lady that needed altering to make players’ costumes, and she was clever that way. She took me along to help carry the bundles, and I went with more than usual alacrity. I was feeling restless since that day at the tourney – as if my little hole in the wainscot were no longer enough for me. It was not to the theatre we were to go today, but to the great lady’s house in Chelsea. The troupe had been hired to put on several shows during the festivities. It was the first time I’d actually been inside such a place and I looked around, wide-eyed, as we stepped inside the high, red-brick walls, welcoming but imposing too. When we mentioned the players, the porter nodded us through, albeit grudgingly.

‘Straight through the court and over to the right,’ he said. ‘Don’t go bothering the gentry!’

They were just ending a rehearsal when we got there, and I left Mrs Allen muttering with pleasure as she pawed through a heap of finery, lifting a scarlet doublet that hadn’t worn too badly. I went in search of old Ben, and found him carefully wiping paint from his face – a face more lined than it used to be. Another, younger, actor stood nearby. I almost said, young actor, but the truth is I found it hard to tell an actor’s age then, and I still do today. All I know is that he was slim, and brown, and pleasant looking and that Ben, who seemed preoccupied, eyed him from time to time almost hungrily.

‘Martin Slaughter’ – he made an actor’s gesture, introducing the younger man to me. ‘Take our young guest to see something of the place, why don’t you? It’ll get you out of my way.’

The slim man made me a light, almost mocking, bow. ‘Shall we?’ As we passed out into court again I asked a shade anxiously if Ben was all right, and before replying he paused slightly.

‘More or less all right. All right for this season, anyway. But an actor’s life isn’t easy as you start to age. The best parts are mostly for men in their prime, and the pretending gets harder every day.’ He turned the conversation, gracefully. ‘But, here, I’m being a poor host – even if my ownership is distinctly temporary. It’s too cold outside – let’s take a turn in the long gallery.’

‘Are we allowed?’ I was anxious here. It was all strange to me. The room was not so much, compared to some I’ve seen since, but at the time the floor seemed an ocean of polished oak, the walls a glowing forest of oil paint and tapestry.

‘Oh, yes. Of course, we bow low and turn tail if her ladyship appears, or any of the family.’

‘Who owns this house?’

‘Lady Howard, no less – the queen’s own cousin, or at least her father was – and her husband, naturally. You’ll have heard of him – Lord Charles, the Lord Admiral, one of the ones who saved all our bacon in Armada days. Off to save it again, when the spring comes, if it’s true what they say about the Spaniards eyeing the French ports, and another Armada on the way.’ I was dumb. Though I had more cause than most to fear the Spanish, the politics of it all still meant little to me. Martin Slaughter must have seen it.

‘Look, here’s a portrait of Lord Howard –’ And we began to walk the length of the painted images in the great gallery.

As we walked, we talked – or Martin did. It was only later that I wondered, a little, that he hadn’t asked anything about me. At the time, I just accepted it gratefully. He told me how he’d wanted to be an actor, since being taken up to the local great house once as a boy.

‘It was her ladyship’s father’s place – old Lord Hunsdon, he is, the Lord Chamberlain, it’s him whose mother was the queen’s aunt – and he’s always been a real patron of the players, licensed his own troupe. They put on a performance, because the queen was come to stay. And my father, he worked in the estate office, wangled us in to watch from the back, and that was it, a few dramatic speeches, and all I wanted to do was join an actors’ company. In the end my poor old father had to ask whether the Lord Chamberlain’s Men could find a use for me. I was with them until my voice began to break, playing the ladies, and then they tried to put me to work with an ironmonger, but I wouldn’t stay. I picked up work where I could find it, but for a while, with the plague, it was a bad time for the play. We all had to find another way to feed ourselves.’ Briefly, his eyes clouded, and a tiny silence fell. I felt I should offer a similar account of myself, but I didn’t know what to say, and in a moment he picked up again.

‘When my old man died and left me his savings, Master Henslowe was just moving into the Rose, with a new company. Under Lord Howard’s protection, it is – he and her ladyship, they’ve been good to me.

‘So now I’m a sharer in the Admiral’s Men, and everything is dandy! But of course, you’ll have heard all about us.’

I stammered, until I saw that he was teasing me.

I tried to ask him something of what an actor felt – whether it wasn’t a thrill, to be someone else every day. To my own surprise, I found I was waiting for his answer, quite as if it really mattered to me. There was a pause before he answered.

‘Yes, of course it is. You can be a lover, a lunatic, or a poet. You know what it’s like to be a girl as well as a boy, and that’s quite something – wouldn’t you say?’ He wasn’t looking at me.

‘It’s as if you get to look at the world through different eyes – or through the eye slits of different masks. You know, you can almost wind up despising those who only experience life one way.

‘But of course …’ He paused again. He’d turned away and was gazing down the gallery. ‘… of course, the most important thing is that you get to take the mask off at the end of the day.’

Katherine, Lady Howard Spring 1596

The queen’s furs should be sent to the skinner soon for beating, and stored away for the season in their bags of sweet powder. I must check whether we’ve enough summer hose from the silkwoman: the woollen stockings can go back to the hosier, to have their feet remade against next winter. The dresses of tawny and brazil colour that did for the cold should be put away; the peach satin furred with miniver, the russet satin nightgown and the robe striped in silver and couleur du roy. In their place come the lighter garments; the carnation-coloured hat embroidered with gold and silver butterflies, the yellow satin petticoat laid with silver lace to ripple like the sea and the velvet in light watchet blue trimmed with silver roses.

I had a dress that colour as a girl, with fine streamers off it to look like water; in my father’s house at Hunsdon, it was, when we all put on a masque to represent the rivers of England, because the queen was coming to stay. Still, I have finer dresses now, even if they do not look as good on me.

At court, of course, the queen’s ladies may wear only black and white, and I regret that occasionally. But I wear what I want to in my own house, needless to say. (Twenty years – more – First Lady of the Bedchamber: there is no way any lady in the land can raise herself higher by her own efforts, and efforts there have been, make no mistake, her majesty’s cousin though I may be.) There’s one dress the queen says she’ll give to me, in the dark brocade suited to a middle-aged lady, and one of my own that should be given away in turn, though I’ve given enough to the players this season already.

Perhaps there is something to be said for keeping one’s mind on the practical. It holds the fear at bay. Seven years ago, the Armada summer, it was almost easier, oddly. With invasion planned we were all in danger, every one of us, all London throbbing with the knowledge of how vulnerable we were, how close to the sea.

This time it’s different; it feels like a foreign war, this alliance with the French to drive the Spanish out of Calais and keep the Channel free of Spanish fleets, and with my boys, my girls, my own shrinking skin safe out of it, I have time to fret about my husband Charles as I sort taffeta and embroidery.

Mind you, some of Charles’ preparations have been domestic, too, in their way. You don’t take six thousand men to sea without victuals, prepared to sit there in the Channel for months if necessary. They’ve been at it since Christmas, almost, and knowing what to do with all those barrels of biscuits and salted beef was one of the more foolish worries they had to face when it looked as though the queen had cancelled the expedition again, as she has done so frequently.

Charles wrote to me that he felt like a merchant whose goods didn’t sell on market day. I’m inclined to doubt – though that may be prejudice – Lord Essex worried himself unduly.

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.

Jeanne Summer 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.

Cecil Autumn 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.

Jeanne Autumn 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.

Cecil Spring 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.

Jeanne Summer 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.

Cecil Summer 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.

There’s a discreet bustle by the house. I’ve dallied too long, and someone needs me. I set my shoulders as I turn back – as set as my shoulders are able to be. I will take our business off my father’s hands where necessary, and when business fails me, I will keep my mind firmly fixed on the trivialities. The gardeners should be getting the seeds in now, if we’re to eat green vegetables again before May: folly to say you can’t plant before spring, just because that’s how it was done in their grandfather’s day.

But sometimes I think that the two weights, my work and my grief, will be enough to crush me. Now, though, there’s the faintest breath of relief – a tickle, at the corner of my mind’s eye. I’m not sure what it was but there was something – something about that boy.

PART II

I am melancholy, merry, sometimes happy and often

unfortunate. The court is of as many humours as the

rainbow hath colours, the time wherein we live more

inconstant than women’s thoughts, more miserable than

old age itself and breeding both people and occasions

that is violent, desperate and fantastical.

Letter from Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex,

to his sister Penelope

We princes are set on highest stage, where looks of all

beholders verdict our works; neither can we easily dance

in nets so thick as may dim their sight.

Letter from Elizabeth I to James VI of Scotland

Jeanne Autumn 1597

‘You won’t be needing livery – the secretaries don’t. Just wear something neat, dark and discreet. No ruffs,’ the steward added, sharply. I nodded, as if curbing an inclination to finery, though the truth was I was only too glad to be let off an accessory that would have to go to an expensive laundress every few days.

‘Here – you might want to take this, though. You’ll find it’s something of a passport.’ It was a metal cloak badge with the Cecil crest, and as I pinned it on I felt at the same time a small tug of vexed pride, and a tiny glow of warmth. It seemed I had not just accepted a post, I had joined a community.

That had been six weeks ago, and I was finding I liked this new sense of family. I’d kept my own room in Blackfriars for the nights, of course. It wasn’t as if sharing with three other young male clerks was really a possibility. But I found that more and more often I was getting up early in the morning to walk along Fleet Street and break my fast in the hall at Burghley House, not just for the fine white manchet bread the steward occasionally let slip to our table, but for the company.

I suppose I’d always assumed that I’d stick out like a sore thumb in any group I tried to join, but on the clerk’s table everyone was an oddity. There was one old man, with his delicate small paws and twitching mouse’s face, kept on for the beauty of his calligraphy. There was one gangling youngster with a lantern jaw and spluttering speech, who read seven languages fluently. There were two silent watchful men who rarely spoke of the day’s business, though one had a passion for part singing and the other for archery, and they carried an air of warning about them. The music lover was one of the best breakers of cipher in the country, I was told quietly.

Not all the business in the Burghley household was open for all to see. But there was nothing secret about the job laid down for me, in between the routine tasks I’d be given, translating and transcribing whatever was necessary. All the world knew that Master Gerard was about to publish his great Herbal, and dedicate it to Lord Burghley. This was my first chance to read it, in the original copy, and of course I did so avidly. Some of its information seemed strange to me – I’d heard Jacob and the other herbalists speak of Gerard’s work before, and not always kindly – but Master Pointer had said that such a book, and written not in Latin but in the vernacular tongue, would be a great help to the industry. And Gerard’s vivid descriptions of the yellow loosestrife in the meadows towards Battersea, of the kidney vetch growing on Hampstead Heath, brought plant-hunting expeditions with Jacob back to me.

But Master Gerard’s health was poor at the moment and, as new plants arrived every month from abroad to be added to the records of the Cecil gardens, he couldn’t get out to sketch them easily, or to quiz the gardeners about their care. What’s more, Sir Robert had no intention of letting this new light of knowledge shine only in his own country. The Herbal was to be translated and finely bound up, with coloured illustrations and new additions wherever necessary, and then sent out to foreign dignitaries; a minor tool of diplomacy. It was a specialised task, which set me a little apart from the rest of the under-secretaries, just as surely as the small closet, with its window over the garden for a clear light, where I was allowed to spread my paints and papers. I felt so spoiled I was almost scared of it – half drunk with the freedom to borrow any book from the great library. For the first time in my life, in fabulous hand-tinted editions, I saw the plants from foreign countries spring to life in shades of saffron, cinnabar and verdigris. Maybe it was because Sir Robert’s rule over the household was so complete that I suffered no open signs of envy. Or maybe mine was a private pleasure, and the others didn’t envy me.

Sometimes I thought of Jacob, and wished that he could see me. Sometimes I thought what Jacob would say, if he could see the Herbal: I knew Master de l’Obel had begun to correct Master Gerard’s work, before its author took it back, indignantly; and truth to tell I wondered, I did wonder, when I read his description of how the barnacle geese that flock here each year spring from the shells shed by a Scottish tree. But in our age of marvels it might be foolish to query – it would certainly be foolhardy. I bent my head to the translation, industriously.

I was sent to make my bow to Master Gerard, of course – in this house they did things courteously. His brief glance made it clear he wouldn’t expect to be seeing too much of me, but if he felt any resentment, he didn’t show it. The only person in the house who seemed openly to disapprove of me was the nominal master himself, old Lord Burghley. He wasn’t there all the time – everyone knew that for years he’d been begging her majesty to let him retire, and that his greatest pleasure now was to ride around Theobalds, his country estate, on a mule, or to sit and watch his gardeners from the shade of a tree. But sometimes I would hear the clunk of his stick, and turn to see his small eyes fixed on me. Like a lot of old people, he had the habit of talking to himself aloud and once, ‘I suppose Robert knows what he’s doing,’ I heard, as he glared at me.

I ventured to mention it to the old clerk. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, twisting his hands below his pointed face, so that I almost expected to see whiskers twitching above a grain of corn, ‘he’s like that with everybody.’ And even for Lord Burghley, it seemed, in the end it was enough that Sir Robert had a purpose for me – just how good or useful a one would become clear eventually.

Katherine, Lady Howard, Countess of Nottingham October 1597

There are patches of time when too much seems to happen, so that in the end you feel punch-drunk, like a cheap fighter in the ring at the end of fair day. It was only yesterday, the twenty-third, that the queen paused on her way back from chapel, and handed to my husband the patent that made him Earl of Nottingham – and me the countess, naturally.

Of course we knew that it was coming – the queen herself had been in a little ripple of amusement when she beckoned me to walk to chapel with her that day. But even so there is something about the moment: I couldn’t step from my place in the queen’s train to be beside my husband, but after so many years of marriage, I could still feel his joy. The ceremony was all it should have been – I wished my father were alive to see. He once said these things were the nearest a gentleman could get to the drama, and of course he loved a play, and players – Lord Hunsdon and his Lord Chamberlain’s Company.

The earls of Shrewsbury and Worcester presented Charles, Sussex bore the cup and the shiny new coronet, Pembroke lent his robes and Robert Cecil read aloud the patent he had drafted, with a convincing gravity. Time was, no doubt, when any Howard would have been glad to see a Cecil done down, when we’d have stared at the idea of any friendship between these jumped-up pen gents and the old nobility. But one must try to move with the times, and new enemies make new allies. And of course these days, it’s hard to tell who is the old nobility. Look at my family – which means her majesty’s. And Robert Cecil, unlike others I could name, has always behaved with respect towards my husband and I.

So the next morning should have been good, and ordinary, surely? Maybe I would have had a chance to enjoy my new honours, maybe I would have gone around the court a little, to savour the greater depth of the bows that greeted me. Maybe – for one has, after all, experience in this world – I would, underneath, have felt a little flat, as often one can do after the event, but I’d sent for my sister Philadelphia and surely, at the very least, I could have enjoyed having her see me in my day of glory – she may have been grabbing everyone’s attention ever since she was in the nursery, and her husband may be the tenth Lord Scrope, but he isn’t an earl, and entitled to wear the purple, is he?

Well, enough of that. Everything was in train for my husband to preside over the new session of Parliament today. Instead what happens? A galloping messenger to say Lord Essex’s ship has been sighted off Plymouth, so we’ll have him trying to explain his latest folly, and trying to take the gloss off our new honours in any way he may. Oh yes, and as if that weren’t enough, they say a Spanish fleet is once again on the way.

Of course the two things are tied together. Essex’s job was to smash the Spanish fleet in the harbour, and ensure our safety. Instead he sets off on a wild-goose chase, all around the seas.

For Essex to disregard his orders is no new story. Sometimes when I reckon up his transgressions, I am frightened at the tally. None of the others, not even his stepfather, would have dared break the rules so frequently and I cannot help worrying, as on a sore tooth, at how the queen has let him do it with impunity. Whether her indulgence has become a habit, whether it’s that his battle cry seems to sound with the voice of half the young men at the court, and the sheer clamour makes her weary? Whether, even, the noise makes her doubt her own judgement or whether – my mind just touches on the thought – there is (was? is) something about his young man’s urgency? Something she allows herself to feel, and just for a breath I remember a time when feeling seemed easy.

Anyway, as any politician knows, the outcome is half the story: oh, you don’t get to be queen’s lady all these years without being a politician, in your heart. Essex was to have gone after Spanish treasure, yes, but only after he had destroyed the Spanish ships in their harbour. Then again, if the fleet had failed to sail, as fleets had failed before, if the treasure had proved rich, then maybe he would have been forgiven, even by the queen, though I for one would have kept the tally. Instead we have still a fleet to face, and barely a groat of prize money.

I knew it was bad when the boy came so early to say Burghley himself was waiting to see her majesty. He’s an old man now, and you wake early as you get old, but to face the day is another story. I knew it was bad, since he was here so that Robert wouldn’t have to be. Bad news rubs off on the man who brings it, and it’s only when you’ve been together as long as Burghley and the queen that you acquire a measure of immunity.

We sent word the queen would see him as soon as we’d dressed her, but he’d have known as well as I do that wouldn’t happen quickly. She sat still while we adjusted her wig, and pointed out where the white paint on her chest was looking patchy: I had the feeling she was jibbing, like a nervous horse, at having to face what might come this day. She made us try on three different gowns, until I for one could have screamed with the tension, but I think she put on strength with the finery. She signed me to stay as the girls left, and Burghley gave me a terse nod as he came in.

It was brusquely, almost with a sense of familiarity, that he said a dispatch had come in and that all the rumours are true, another Armada really is on the way. We had, after all, been here before – what, three times since that first appalling time, since Leicester’s death, since Tilbury? I swear, the first thing I felt was pure exasperation. Dear God, does Philip never learn? If he’s so sure he’s doing God’s work, does he never ask himself why God’s winds don’t allow him to succeed, once in a while?

But of course it’s serious, it has to be taken seriously. The more so for the fact that every year, every false alarm, tires us as much as it must tire the poor starved and taxed Spanish peasantry. We have more ships than we had before Tilbury, but we also have less energy. And all I could think is, why now? Why couldn’t they, why couldn’t fate, have just given these few days to me? As we pace the Privy Garden so fast the girls hustle to keep up with her majesty, I am in a bustle of anger that makes the crisp October air seem hot to me. I’ll admit that stupidity has always irritated me, even with my children when they were young.

If these messages are true, Spain’s fleet will be on the seas by now, while Essex let their treasure ship pass by, full of bullion from the Americas, through a sheer stupid piece of vainglory. It’s the thought of that bullion that’ll be working in the queen, making her anger rise up like bile, even more than when we first heard the tale of Essex’s folly. It’s the Cadiz voyage all over again, but worse – too serious, the possible results this time, for anyone to forgive him lightly.

We don’t know it all yet, and the queen won’t let her real anger out, not immediately. Like wine laid down, time only ripens the taste of her fury. But I’ll admit the fatigues of the last few days are getting to me. The crunch of the gravel under my boot only echoes the harsh sound in my head, and when the girls lag behind to giggle or exclaim over a late flower, I take it on myself to call to them not to be so lazy, and not delay her majesty.

Cecil Autumn 1597

The burst of friendship was never going to last. That was foreseen, naturally. But what has happened since the fiasco of this last voyage has an air of irrevocability. Essex is sure, now and forever, that Ralegh and I are his enemies: he will make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But more, he is convinced every man is against him. Every woman too, maybe.

Even if he thinks it, fool to show it so clearly. The queen has always been impatient with folly. But more than that, she is growing suspicious, and you don’t raise a Tudor’s suspicion lightly. I must try, again, to persuade Charles Howard to take Essex’s insult quietly. Yes, even though Essex is trying to get them to reword the very patent of poor Charles’ earldom, so that Essex can claim credit for the whole of last year’s Cadiz victory. Yes, even though the queen wavers over granting Essex another honour – what, Earl Marshal? – that would let him outrank Charles’ brief position as the premier earl in the country. ‘Your very patience shows your strength,’ is what I’ll have to say. ‘Believe me, the queen will appreciate you the more that you were willing to put aside your own grudges for the country.’ Briefly, I toy with the idea of speaking to Charles’ wife, but perhaps no word of advice is necessary to that shrewd lady.

What is it that Essex really wants? Just – just! – to be first in honour with her majesty? Or – there are things it’s treason to think, or to say. Yes, even for a state secretary, who must consider all things clearly.

Now he’s sulking at Wanstead, his house in the country. More folly – it’s another of Ralegh’s new aphorisms: distance breeds suspicion. The prince is most mistrustful of the mighty subject they cannot see. Absence magnifies your faults, and makes forgiveness come more slowly.

Where there is suspicion, there must be certainty. Not action, not yet, but it will come. There is a man: Ralegh’s cousin. I have begun to consider Ralegh differently. He bristled up like a country squire when one of the jesters had a touch at him the other day – oh, nothing so crude as a mockery of his Devon burr, but a strut of the walk that made the court smile knowingly. He looked baffled and angry, like a dog when it knows it’s being laughed at – but all the same, I begin to have a new respect for his abilities. It was he who brought this cousin, this Sir Ferdinando to me. Ferdinando Gorges, what a name. I hope I never have to give it to her majesty. But the man has the touch of tarnish on him, the readiness for things to go badly.

The laying out of plans, the agent’s consent, is like a seduction and, like seduction, it goes slowly. Small agreement by small agreement, until the final consent is a surety. Then a bargain that lies dormant like a seed in the earth: not knowing what the crop, or what the cost, or who in the end will pay.

The autumn is coming in. As I stroll in the garden to clear my head, the corrupt sweet smell of rotting leaves accompanies me. Often, I see the boy Jan sketching, and something about the nape of his neck, thin and vulnerable, almost reminds me of my daughter Frances. There is a figure waiting in the shadows by the door – one of the two secret secretaries. Of course, he wouldn’t have sent a page this time.

‘Sir Ferdinando is here to see you, Sir Robert.’

Quickly I nod. ‘Good. Take Gorges to the study – I’ll be with him directly.’

Jeanne Winter 1597

Sometimes – quite often – when I was drawing in the garden, I’d find Sir Robert was by my side, and stopping to speak to me. He didn’t spend all his time here, I’d learned – much of his work was done in the Duchy of Lancaster offices across the Strand – but he used to walk in these gardens very regularly. He’d rarely touch – he wasn’t one of those great garden owners who had to know better than the gardeners did – but his dark eyes were everywhere, quietly. He’d always stop by the aviary, and scatter a handful of the seeds that were kept ready nearby. Sometimes he’d raise his eyebrows in invitation, and pass a handful of seed to me.

‘Do you like the birds?’ he said one day. I knew him well enough by now to be aware that his most banal questions were the ones with the layers of meaning behind them, but I had to answer.

‘I’d like them better if they were free.’

He nodded, as if I’d said something intelligent – or maybe just something expected, and his was the intelligence, for having foreseen it so accurately.

‘If we set them loose now they’d be back for their food next day – those the sparrow hawk had spared, and that hadn’t been mobbed by their wild fellows.’

‘At least that would be their decision.’ I didn’t know why I was arguing the cause of liberty so passionately. I didn’t know why he was talking to me this way. But as he moved on, he gestured me to walk with him, our footsteps crunching on the icy gravel, our breath mingling on the frozen air. We must have looked like brothers as we walked there – he couldn’t have been much more than a decade older than me – but his containment, and the experience that wrapped him round like a cloak, made me feel like a callow child and, childishly, I found myself blurting out more than I meant as he asked me more about my upbringing and my family.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said gravely, when I told him how my parents died, and he led me on to speak of them, as I had done so rarely. How my father had always said he wanted to become the finest silk merchant in Antwerp, and how my mother joked she wanted a house with a garden, where the flowers would be brighter than all his woven finery.

‘And you? What do you want, Jan?’ I stared at him, dumbly, all my newfound ease of speech, all the pleasure of reminiscence, vanished like smoke, instantly. It wasn’t just the boy’s name he’d called me – the reminder that, while I kept my secret, there could be no true intimacy with anybody. A reminder that, while I kept my secret, I couldn’t dream a happy future with a girl’s dream or a boy’s. It was those things, but it was more. I’d never, you might say, allowed myself to want – not for anything more lasting than a sweet or a sunny day, or for the toothache to go away. I’d lived like the beggars in the streets, not wanting anything more than the food to get by. I felt inadequate, naked and ashamed, as Sir Robert stood there, eyeing me quietly. Then, with a slight twist of his lips and an inclination of his head, he allowed me to slip away.

They kept Christmas well in the great house. I’d found my way into the kitchens soon after I’d arrived. Even the dogs turning the spits were too busy to talk for long, but I don’t think they minded seeing me, especially after the master cook stopped shouting at the scullions long enough to fling a thin foreign book at me and demand I translated a recipe – leg of lamb it was, in the French way, its meat minced with spices, suet and barber-ries, and stuffed back into the skin again. I thought it sounded nasty, but the cook was pleased.

I didn’t care so much for the dairy, or the game larder where they hung birds of every size, ready to be stuffed one inside the other, from the quail to the turkey – nor even for the confectionary, with its candied mock flowers, its cloying marchpane and gilded subtleties. But they soon got used to me in the main kitchen and they’d tease me with tales of what I could expect in summer. Asparagus in a butter and ginger sauce, sweet potatoes boiled in wine, fresh sheep’s cheese and French Angelot. Pies of artichokes with bone marrow and dates, and the crisp, watery cowcumbers, of which I had heard but never tasted. Against the outside wall, the gardeners sheltered pots of herbs, to make sallats for Sir Robert even in winter and dress the celery they’d nursed through the cold days. The smell of the rotting manure came up from the melon pits – ‘Though if we’re not careful the master will be eating them raw as soon as they’re ripe,’ the under-cook said, ‘instead of baked in milk, the proper way.’ The household laughed at Sir Robert’s tastes, but they laughed affectionately.

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