The Noble Assassin

The child in her belly gives a violent kick. Her womb is riding very low, a sign that the birth is not far off.

Not yet, she begs. Please, not until I find refuge! Or else, I may give birth to an icicle. You know you don’t want to be an ice baby.

From here at the front of the line, she cannot see the end of the caravan, but she knows that farther back men and women are still slipping away into a familiar countryside. Back to their mountains, back to their villages. Like Rupert’s nurse.

She imagines the nurse’s husband or lover, perhaps a soldier, pulling her by the arm away from her charge. Saying, ‘This fight is nothing to do with us. Leave the royal brat. Come home!’

The army would not fight for us, she thought. If soldiers desert, why expect more of maids and grooms and ladies of the bedchamber?

She ducks her head under her hood against sudden needles of sleet. If all her new subjects left her, she would manage perfectly well without them.

Without a palace, what need did she have for so many people?

Once past the approach to the city gates, the road divides. Before word of the onward advance has had time to reach the rearmost carts, Hopton asks, ‘Where do we ride, madam?’

‘Custrin,’ she says at once, with authority. Another of Brandenburg’s castles, just as unsuitable, he said. But she is running out of choices. ‘A few days more. Perhaps only two. At Custrin, we’ll have fires and real beds. Tonight we will find a sheltered place to stop and sleep in the carriages.’ Her ears catch the sound of a child crying behind her. ‘We shall curl up together as warmly as a litter of pups.’ She lays a calming hand on the agitation in her belly.

There is still enough charcoal left to keep their braziers alight for another night. The two remaining cooks might even manage hot soup. They will lose a few more animals to exhaustion and the cold, but that can’t be helped. A few more men will slip away to warmer beds.

‘We won’t be able to wash,’ she says cheerfully. ‘But there are worse things than beginning to smell like a dog as well as sleeping like one.’

Chapter 7

LUCY – MOOR PARK, DECEMBER 1620

‘I must go to London,’ I say. We are at dinner in the damp, draughty hall at Moor Park, eating vegetable soup from pewter bowls, the silver plate having long been sold. The long table is half-empty. Though we still keep our personal retinues, they have shrunk. Only three servers stand behind our chairs, where once there would have been one for every diner. Once, musicians would have played while we ate. Once, when we had finished eating, we would have pushed back the table to dance.

The Third Earl sets down his spoon, hugs his injured arm to his chest and looks at me over his barricade. ‘Why?’

At the bottom of the table, our steward holds up a finger to signal the coming point of his story to the four heads leaning towards him, including that of my chief lady, Lady Agnes Hooper, the widow of a local knight. I have no patience with the strict Protestant protocol in which I had been raised, and keep an informal house.

‘To mend our fortunes,’ I say quietly.

The steward’s listeners laugh, settle back on their stools and resume eating.

I am tempted to add, ‘as I did before’. But my husband’s agreement would make my project easier and a great deal more pleasant.

I chase a cube of turnip around my bowl, braced for the frown and pursed lips that always precede refusal.

Even before his accident, Edward had preferred to say ‘no’. ‘Yes’ pained him. It suggested action, feeling, thought.

‘I believe that the muscles of your cheeks and lips will creak if you say “yes”,’ I had once observed.

‘No’ lets him purse his lips. ‘Yes’ hints at a smile. Whenever he is forced into agreement, his mouth stiffens with reluctance, as if it hurts him to stretch it wide enough to let ‘yes’ escape.

The dislike I see in his eyes still startles me. Eyes that are too close together, huddled near his nose.

‘London?’ he echoes, puzzled and querulous like the old man he is rushing to become.

I would have preferred him to shout.

My tongue speaks of its own will. ‘You remember London, do you not? A city to the south of us, on the Thames? Less than a day’s ride . . .’

He flinches. I have used a wrong word again. ‘Ride.’ He had been thrown from his horse, against a tree, while hunting. He could no longer tolerate the word ‘ride’. Even ‘horse’ makes him uneasy.

Why could I play the courtier with everyone but my husband? Close your ears. Keep your eye on your destination, I tell myself.

‘I forbid you to go,’ he says. ‘This is another of your fancies. And certain to cost us dear, like all the rest.’ He bends to his bowl again.

Eyes around the table suddenly grow intent on soup and the roasted duck from our ponds.

That was not a request, I think. I was telling you what I mean to do.

I have had many such silent conversations with him. The smell of the soup sickens me. I set down my spoon. I fold my napkin exactly on its creases and lay it on the table – once we could have afforded a waiting groom to take it from me. I stand up. ‘I pray you all, excuse me.’

Stool and bench legs scrape on the stone floor as the others rise with me. Everyone but my husband.

‘Sit down!’ He speaks as if to one of his dogs. Even whores are granted the courtesy of ‘mistress’, and I am a countess.

‘Sir, I need air.’

‘Sit!’ he snaps again.

I hear breaths drawn around the table and see glances exchanged. My thoughts cloud as if I had drunk too much wine, though we were making do with over-watered ale. My heart grows white hot and swells against the inside of my ribs, pounding as if I were at court, in costume, waiting to fling myself onto the table of a thousand eyes. I have the sensation that my bones shift subtly inside my skin.

I catch the eye of my lady and the steward. I widen my own eyes.

‘If you will treat me as one of your dogs, sir, you must allow me out for a run.’

Someone snorts. Agnes Hooper hides a smile. Followed by my husband’s astonished gaze, I leave the room. Calmly. I walk through the cold passages to a side door. Unhurried. I open the door and step outside.

I run. My heeled shoes slip on patches of mud in the vegetable gardens. The long icy orchard grass turns to glass under my feet.

I look back. No one follows me. I plunge deeper into the orchard, colliding with trees like a drunken dancer, cursing and wiping my nose on my lace cuff.

A sow nosing for frozen windfall apples squeals and flees from my path, baggy teats swaying, followed by panicked, flap-eared scraps of piglet.

No farther, or else my heart will explode. I fling myself back against a tree. My throat opens. A scream rises from my feet, swells, pours out and quivers the leaves above my head, a dark animal scream like the demon shriek of copulating foxes.

I am drowning in ‘No!’

I scream again, pounding my fists into the tree behind me.

Everything gone! Fallen from chief lady-in-waiting at court to this! Tied down by my husband’s constant ‘No’. By poverty. The Queen, dead, and her court dispersed. My dear friend, Prince Henry, dead. My Elizabeth, married, gone, and now a fugitive . . . another exile.

Stop! The voice in my head is firm, the necessary voice that had always before pulled me back from folly, just in time.

I scream again.

Stop! the reasonable voice repeats. Someone will hear you and come.

The thought of anyone coming to force me back to the dining table is even more intolerable than the sudden storm inside me.

My thick brocade skirt and winter petticoat, together with the padded sausage of my bum-roll tied around my waist, have rucked up in a lump behind my waist and hips. The rough grey, lichen-covered apple bark snags at my hair.

I clamp down on the next scream and press my hands to my face to close out the world.

Into the darkness float the faces of loss. My parents. My queen. Elizabeth. And my infant daughter, who had lived inside me, kicking at the inside of my belly, dancing at music, stirring when I laughed. At the sight of her, complete and perfect, a miraculous new person who met my eyes with puzzled astonishment, the milk had leapt into my breasts and flowed from my nipples.

I had never suckled her. Even the sow could suckle her young. My daughter stayed with me for only two hours. I lost her. Like my son, my first babe, Edward’s precious heir who had lived one whole month. Long enough to be christened, at least. Losing my babes had cut out one of my vital organs and left me diminished, like a fatal illness from which I would never recover.

I drop my hands and try to narrow my thoughts to the fan of brown grass near my left foot. But another lost face arrives there.

John would have seen a metaphor in that dead grass, would have resurrected it with the miracle of his words, given it new, eternal life in verse and human comprehension. He would have made its little patch of mud here under an old apple tree as huge as the world of the soul.

The rough grey tree bark tugs at my hair when I shake my head. Don’t think of him.

Though still in this world, he is now dead to me, but his words are still alive and insinuating in my head. I have them trapped in ink shaped by the movement of his hand, locked into my chest of papers like hostages.

I stare down, puzzled, at the blood on the sides of my fists.

I am meant to be the wild, merry Countess of Bedford, who can be relied on to lead each new diversion, who lightens the heavy spirits of others. Who soars in witty debate. Her spirits are never seen to weigh her down. In my thirty-nine years of conscious life, I had met Melancholy more than once, but always in secret. I had refused to entertain it.

Now, I feel too heavy to move. I could not even have kicked my horse over the edge of the snow bank. I bow my head, pulling my hair free. I lick the blood and flecks of bark from the side of my right hand, absently noting the tiny points of roughened skin that scrape against my tongue.

From the age of thirteen, I have tried to be a dutiful wife. I knew what was required of me.

After Edward had spent the modest fortune for which he had married me, losing his own money along with mine through his folly and bad judgement, I made over to him my own portion, which should have been mine alone, my protection, my safeguard. He had insisted. I was still, then, a dutiful wife. My portion was long gone.

There is nothing he could do to me now to make me any unhappier than I am already. Except to lock me away like a madwoman or chain me to my bed.

I imagine rising from the table again, but this time, I walk to the stables. I mount my horse, standing already saddled with a gold-embroidered, red velvet saddle-cloth. I turn his head south to London and kick him gently. It is spring. I wear a fine silk satin gown, deep blue, not frayed and not mended. The African ostrich plume on my hat curves down to tickle the lobe of my ear. I again wear my wedding diamonds, and the pearl eardrops I had worn when I first danced for the Queen.

I hear the sow grunt in the distance. A woman’s shadow moves among the trees. I slide around the tree to buy a few more moments of freedom.

‘Madam?’ calls a tentative voice. Agnes Hooper, my chief lady.

At least, my husband has not sent the watchman, or a man-at-arms to restrain me like a madwoman.

Take care, warns the voice in my head. You’ve just behaved like a madwoman. Don’t risk being thought possessed. Don’t hand a naked blade to your enemy. Even Edward might be tempted to use it.

I sigh and step from behind the tree.

Back in the big house, I smile at my husband, nod pleasantly to the others at the table and sit down again as if nothing at all had happened. Reassured by my smiles, the diners unfreeze and begin to murmur and chew again. The surface of the afternoon closes over us though it remains a little uneasy. Only Agnes glances at me from time to time with a small frown of concern. With grim satisfaction, I note that I still have the power to bend the spirits of others and to shape the mood.

Except that of my husband.

Edward Russell, Third Earl of Bedford, is watching me over his dinner with an air of puzzled reproach. In public, as always, he endures with heroic patience the harridan that his wife has become.

Look at her! his eyes beg the other diners. What man has ever been so tormented by his spouse?

Let it pass! I warn him with my eyes. Can’t you see the danger you’re in? Can’t you feel how your dutiful wife has just changed?

Chapter 8

My husband continues to eat slowly and calmly, to show everyone who rules in this house. But he eats without appetite. He still watches me, with the progress of his thoughts clear in his eyes.

He had seen. He had noticed. He feels the change in me and doesn’t know what to do. I almost pity him in his confusion.

Everyone waits for his response while they pretend to eat. By rights, he should assert his male authority. Perhaps even try to beat me later.

But he does not know what to do and hates himself for not knowing. He hates me for making him not know.

His eyes shift away. I have long suspected and am now certain. He is afraid of me. Just as he had once feared his formidable father.

Poor, poor Edward, I think.

Whatever manhood he ever had seems to have leaked away through his cracked arm bone, along with his youth and any vitality, as if the crack had let in a sense of death. The tree trunk that met his head had not cracked his skull, but it seemed, nevertheless, to have shaken his wits.

After the horse threw him, he had surrendered himself to becoming clumsy and lop-sided. He seemed to aim at the world askew, anticipating dislocation and, therefore, finding it.

At first, I had tried to coax him into healing. ‘It’s only an arm,’ I said. ‘Not your neck, or back. It will soon mend.’

‘What do you know of twisted sinews and constant aches that gnaw at your spirits?’

I had bitten back my impatient reply and offered him the cup of pain-killing draught.

Now he gives up on eating, shoves away his plate and stands up from the dinner table. Everyone else stands. He lifts a foot, then hesitates.

I recognise that hesitation. He lurches forward. Looks around. Everyone pretends not to see.

His secretary, his steward, his three attending gentlemen, and all the rest, stand politely, waiting to see what he will do, or wish them to do.

A show of respect for his position, I think. Not for the man.

Every year since his accident, the Earl shrinks a little more. Everything grows less. His movement, his appetites, his will. His fortune. His dignity. The space he occupies in this world.

He looks at me accusingly, as if I had caused the floor to shift beneath his feet.

I have to look away. I cannot bear his wilful determination to suffer.

On the last time that we truly spoke to each other, he had pointed at me with his good hand. ‘I stumble towards the grave,’ he had said. ‘I’m dying, and no one on this earth cares that I am afraid of death yet wish for it at the same time – least of all you, who should care most of all. My wife.’

‘You’re not dying,’ I said. ‘You can walk. And you could ride again, if only you would.’

‘What do you know of suffering?’

I could only look at him, wordless.

‘Get out of my sight,’ he had said. ‘Stop taunting me with your lithe moves and your sudden little dance steps.’ His gaze had fallen on the ridged mud plot outside the window, a frozen maze of ditches and string, which would one day become my new garden. ‘Go look for joy out there in the mud you love so much.’

Unless I shared in his misery, I insulted him with any pleasure I took in life.

‘And in case you hope to make a life without me here in this godforsaken place,’ he said, ‘I will tell you that no one of any consequence will ever come see your blasted garden!’ He steadied himself against the tabletop, waving away my offered hand. ‘What good do you imagine that making a garden has ever done anyone?’

He turned his face away from the window, squinting his eyes as if hurt by the light.

‘I know that you hide from me out there, amongst all those costly infant trees we can’t afford. I’ve seen you wrapping them tenderly against the cold. And when it’s too cold to coo over trees or seedlings in some gardener’s hands, you bury yourself away from me making sketches and diagrams. You make your garden only to torment me, to punish me for what I have become, even though it was not my fault.’

I had stood wordless, unlike my usual self, my breath taken away by this mistaking of the truth, and from fear of what I felt coming.

‘How dare you imply reproach, as if I were a useless husband?’ His knuckles whitened on the edge of the tabletop. ‘I lifted you from country into court. And to no purpose! You have killed my family’s line. You can’t even produce me a living heir!’

I keep my eyes averted now until I hear him move away from the table. I watch him leave the hall. He walks uncertainly, as if unsure where to go. His two gentlemen of the bedchamber, the sons of neighbouring knights, exchange glances then follow him. I see his old nurse hobble to meet him in the passage outside the hall, take his good hand and lead him away to the safety of her care.

Chapter 9

Falling asleep that night, the heaviness of the orchard ambushes me again. To fight it, I repeat to myself all the reasons that life has changed and will continue to change.

Elizabeth, in flight and without a home, needs me. The newly married princess, in love with her young husband, headed for his beloved Palatine, had not needed me. Then she had lost her one close English friend, Lady Anne Dudley Sutton, gone with her to Germany after her marriage. She will need to see a well-known face. She will need a trustworthy friend. She needs me now as much as her mother ever did.

I turn over in my bed and yank at a wrinkle in the sheet that feels like a mountain ridge under my shoulder. I listen to Annie’s gentle snores from her pallet on the floor.

If she is to come home, Elizabeth must believe that the English still love her. I must reassure her. And that I too still love her. That I will protect, inform and amuse her. Then, when she returns, she will make me her first lady of the bedchamber as her mother did. I will again be the older almost-sister, trusted once more with private access to both her person and her secret thoughts. I will be back where I belong and have purpose again.

My restless foot meets the solid weight of one of my small hounds, which has managed to slip into my chamber and jump onto the bed. I feel the animal go very still, pretending to sleep, waiting for the command to get down. But I welcome the heavy warmth. After a moment, the dog sighs and softens in sleep.

I cannot sleep. She might already be a captive. Or even dead, executed by the Hapsburgs, or from loss of blood in childbirth. Her confinement must be soon.

I close my eyes and feel for her in the darkness of my bed. Surely, I would feel an emptiness if she had died?

Elizabella, please write to tell me that you are well!

I am still awake to hear the first birds warming up after the night.

I do not tell my husband that I mean to defy him. I make an inventory of my remaining jewels not yet sold to try to pay our debts or to buy winter feed for the horses, or salt and sugar for our table. Or Edward’s claret. I rifle through my secret, shrinking store of plate, silver pomander cases, embroidered gloves, silver-gilt boxes and other baubles for the gifts and bribes needed to navigate Whitehall.

At Whitehall, appearances matter. The surface is held to reveal the inner man. Or woman.

And I am going back to Whitehall.

With my lady Agnes Hooper and my maid Annie, I lay out my old court gowns, pairs of bodies, embroidered petticoats, cloaks, gloves, hats and shoes to choose what to take with me. I examine worn cuffs and finger torn lace ruffs. One pair of heeled shoes, in which I had once danced before the whole court, had been mended twice and the leather of the toes rubbed nearly through.

I imagine the aghast astonishment of my former protégés, the poets, artists and musicians who had once received my generous patronage.

Or worse: no longer being of use to them, I might have turned invisible.

The thought of being pitied makes me hot. My skin burns as if I have a rising ague.

‘Poor thing!’ I could hear a woman whisper it, the Rutland girl, or one of the acid-tongued Howards. ‘She may have risen to become a countess, but look where it got her.’

‘An invalid husband, mended shoes . . .’ says another voice.

And the constant search for someone to loan us more money.

My skin has grown thinner, I think as I stitch a loose strip of gold sequins back onto the front panel of a petticoat.

‘If I brush this carefully, it will serve, don’t you think?’ says Agnes, holding up a hat of Muscovite beaver fur.

I nod as I bite off the thread.

Once, I would not have cared. But now, unprotected by the love of my queen or my poet, I feel an urgent need for at least one new gown to face both my enemies and my friends who remain at Whitehall.

‘You too must have a new gown,’ I tell Agnes. ‘Madam.’ She curtsies and tries not to look too pleased, but the severe planes of her face rearrange themselves into something like a smile. Though her husband had been a knight, his estate was sold to pay old debts and she now depends on me for survival.

I glance at the patched soles of her shoes where she kneels by a chest. I need a pair of new shoes, I think. We both need new shoes.

So much for my ‘learned and masculine soul’, once praised by Master Jonson. But, as I have said, we are impure creatures. Only saints and demons can be entirely consistent.

Then Agnes shakes her head. She knows most of my secrets, good and bad. ‘Where will you find the money, madam?’

‘Watch me,’ I say.

I fetch one of Edward’s old doublets that I had filched from his chambers. He has not worn it since his exile from court by the Old Queen for his entanglement in the Essex rebellion, seven years after our marriage – when he was old enough to know better. He would never miss it now.

I pull my little knife from where it hangs on a ribbon under my skirt.

I begin to cut off the jewelled buttons on the front of the doublet.

At least, this is not your foolish head, I think as I slice off the first button with my knife. You had a lucky escape from the scaffold. Though the fine of five thousand pounds imposed by the Queen had begun our ruin. And his exile had made it impossible for him to acquire all the money he’d borrowed to pay back the fine.

I give the button to Agnes, who sets it carefully on the table.

I saved us once before . . . with my ride to Berwick . . . I slice off another button.

I shall have to do it again . . .

Another button off.

Whether you want me to, or not.

This one jumps from my fingers and rolls away under my bed. Without losing a fraction of her lean, straight-backed dignity, Agnes sinks to the floor in a pool of skirts, presses her head to the side of the bed and extends her arm into the dark space beneath.

I cut off another button. ‘I have it!’ cries Agnes in triumph. She unfolds upwards, puts the escaped button beside the others on the table, shakes her skirts and begins to pick dust kittens from her sleeve.

‘Thirteen,’ I count. We look down at the glittering line of small golden baskets, woven from gold wire, each set with a diamond.

‘Lucky thirteen,’ she says. ‘If you believe such things.’

One button buys me rich golden taffeta a little darker than my hair and the making of it into a court gown in the latest style, with a soft farthingale and embroidered sleeves. Two more buttons buy a gown for Agnes, and new saddlebags for me, along with a new side-saddle to replace the old one that is stained with sweat, patched, and has a girth as crumpled and limp as an old stocking. The other ten, I put into a purse against the expenses of London.