The Noble Assassin

Losing your position at court . . . I tighten the cord around the neck of the purse . . . means losing all the means by which money can be made. You no longer receive fees for granting licences, patents, monopolies. You might lose all the rights formerly granted to you – the income from harbour fees and taxes on imported goods. You lose the gifts of gratitude given in exchange for favours, like access to the Queen, or a kind word spoken into a powerful ear, or finding a position for a young female cousin as a lady-in-waiting, or placing a young son as a groom in a noble house. You can no longer grant favours for favours in return.

I tie the purse around my waist and tilt my Italian glass to be certain that my petticoats hide the bulge.

Voilà! No purse.

A week later, while my maid Annie, assisted by my chamberer, makes piles of clean linens and matches stockings, I start to pack a few books into my travelling chest. To Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, begins one of them. To the Countess of Bedford, begins another. And, To My Golden Mistress . . .

The only verses I truly value have been written but not yet published.

To the Most Esteemed . . . I snap the book closed and return it to the cupboard.

A poor woman cannot serve as patron to poets and playwrights. A poor woman is not called ‘the Morning Star’ or ‘Brightest star in the Firmament’ in exchange for putting food on a poet’s table.

But poverty means more than merely losing the flattery of your protégés. Or even scrimping to buy feed for your horses or the lack of fashionable gowns. It means hopelessness. It blocks the means by which you can hope to prosper and progress. Poverty closes doors. It stitches up your pockets so that no money can enter them. It dulls your senses and your wits with constant grinding need.

I know that I should be grateful. Compared to a beggar, I am rich.

I know that the soul should rise above such worldly concerns. It should console you for lack of material goods by a richness of the mind and hope for the Next Life. But in truth, I have never met an artist or poet who did not tell me that poverty crowds out the imagination and dulls the action of the wits with its endless round of the petty problems of daily survival. I share their conclusion.

On the other hand, I think as I brush the feathers on my beaver hat, if you’re poor, no one marries you for your money. I try on the hat and assess my reflection in my glass.

Plausible, though not impressive. If I squint, I can ignore the tracks of Time on my face. Praise God, my hair still keeps its original bright red-gold.

I set the hat on top of my folded winter cloak.

My route is not yet clearly mapped, but I know where I am headed. I can take the first step.

To London.

I will let the whispers and raised eyebrows in Whitehall roll off me like water off wax.

And then . . . when I have found Elizabeth and brought her back, and we are close again . . . The excuses and closed doors that drove me away from court will be retracted and opened again. And I will forgive, or not, as I decide. Lucy Russell, born a Harington, is not finished yet.

When I am ready, I go to Edward’s chambers. He looks up from his brooding examination of his fire, startled to see me there. His old nurse pauses in her folding and smoothing of a shirt to glare at me.

‘I leave for London tomorrow,’ I say. ‘All is arranged. I will send back word how the house and gardens have been tended in our absence.’

He does not pretend surprise. If he has failed to notice the dressmaker and the loss of his doublet, he must have seen the cart that is to follow me with my belongings as it stood being repaired in the stable yard. Or the chests standing open in the hall. Or the ale kegs and small stack of hams in the screens passage. He must have heard the noisy chase after a dozen laying hens and their indignant squawks at being crammed into their travelling crate.

‘Back to your poets and lovers?’

‘You know that I can’t afford poets any longer.’ I weaken, foolish enough still to hope for a word of approval. ‘I have a purpose that will benefit us both.’

‘Another of your schemes?’ He hugs his shattered arm to his chest, swaddled in its fur muff. ‘What will this one cost us?’

‘Less than my ride to Berwick.’

He rolls his eyes to Heaven. God spare me her impudence!

But he waves his good hand to dismiss me. ‘Do as you will, madam. I’m too weary to fight you. I don’t care where you go or whom you see. You’re of no use to me.’

I take that as his formal permission. I have already sent word to our London house that I am coming.

Chapter 10

ELIZABETH STUART – CUSTRIN, GERMANY, DECEMBER 1620

‘Are you ordered to turn us away?’ Elizabeth demands.

The castle steward shifts uneasily on his horse. ‘The Elector of course welcomes you, if you truly wish to stay. In the circumstances.’ He had intercepted them at the bridge before they could enter the town.

From behind him on his horse, Elizabeth stares over Hopton’s shoulder. Custrin Castle looks very much like the grim fortress described in the Elector of Brandenburg’s letter.

. . . the walls are without tapestries, the cellars empty of wine, the granaries bare of corn. From my own sense of honour . . .

Elizabeth had snorted when she read that word ‘honour’ in Berlin. Now all impulse to laugh has left her. She could have recited the vile letter word by word.

. . . I cannot allow Your Majesty and your attendants to suffer the inconvenience of lodging in a place devoid of food and fuel, without fodder for your horses.

‘I wish to stay,’ she says. ‘Just for one night. No civilised man would make a pregnant woman sleep in a snowdrift, even if she were not a queen.’ The child in her womb heaves and kicks as if infected by her fury and despair. A belt of muscle tightens around the base of her gut.

The steward shrugs and turns his horse back to the castle. Hopton kicks his mount to follow. Elizabeth grabs clumsily at his belt with numb hands to keep from being jolted off when the horse slips on the ice on the bridge.

We are turned enemy, she thinks, still disbelieving the speed and distance of their fall. One moment at dinner together in Hradcany Palace, monarch and ally. The next moment in wild flight, the guest no one dares to entertain.

The great fireplace in the hall of Custrin Castle stands cold and cave-like. The huge iron firedogs are empty of logs. No waiting fire has been laid. The bare stone walls ooze damp. Although the absence of icy wind makes the interior of the castle warmer than the back of a horse, her teeth still rattle. Her feet are numb, untrustworthy blocks. The tight belt of muscle around the base of her belly has slackened, but she knows it will tighten again at any moment.

‘There must be firewood in the village, if you have none here,’ says Elizabeth. ‘We badly need fires. And food.’

Someone in the village must have food, even if the castle larders do not.

‘Your Highness.’ The steward looks past her, wild-eyed, at the shivering crowd of attendants and royal children.

The Elector must have believed that the English princess would understand the true message of his letter. He had given no orders what to do if Her Highness ignored it.

‘I’m certain we can find enough for one night,’ the steward says. He would have to see that the captain of the castle garrison doubled the night watch.

The child shifts in her belly. Elizabeth pulls off her gloves and flexes her icy fingers.

The Elector did not lie in his letter. The place does not suit a queen. Cold air flows down from the small, high windows. Icy currents seep under the door and wash around their ankles. Everywhere she looks, she sees only more grey dampness.

But she is in.

‘I assume that you have a suitable chamber for me, with clean sheets on the bed,’ she says. ‘And chambers for the Prince, the Princess and my ladies. The rest can be laid out on pallets so long as there are fires. The carters and drovers, too.’ She gazes around the grey, grim hall. ‘I’m quite sure that your master has a few bottles left in his cellars for just such emergencies as this one.’

‘Madam.’ The man bows and begins to back away. ‘I must just . . .’

As he is about to leave the hall, she adds, ‘And bring me pen and ink. Tomorrow morning, I will give you a list of my needs for the next month, including a midwife. As soon as we have fires, I will also write to the Elector to tell him that I have decided to stay here at Custrin until my child is born.’

If he dares to throw me out, she writes to friends in England, . . . let him try to explain to the English people – and to their King – why an heir to the English throne was born – and very likely frozen to death – in a German snowdrift.

LUCY, DECEMBER 1620

Her letter reaches me just before I leave Moor Park for London. She is not only alive but sounds like her former undaunted self. The tale is almost comical as she relates it, but her anger glints through her words.

She must learn to be more guarded in what she writes, I think. Or at least use a cipher. I put this letter with her other ones in my writing chest that will travel under my eye on my horse’s hindquarters.

Chapter 11

LONDON, JANUARY 1621

I turn my horse left out of St Martin’s Lane. The house stands ahead of me on the north side of the Strand, as lanky and narrow-shouldered as I remembered it. I have never liked Bedford House, built in London for my husband by his father in the days of the Old Queen. It strikes me as unfriendly, with its long roof, seven steep sharp gables and the empty posturing of a mock-military turret tower. It looks south across the Strand, past York House, home of the Lord Keeper Francis Bacon, to the Thames. Only being near to the river is in its favour.

I can hear the distant shouts of boatmen from the different water stairs as I let my horse pick his way through the frozen rubbish in the street. After passing under the arch of the gatehouse at the far end of the house front, my small party clops into a large, irregular, open courtyard.

A tall, fair-haired man bursts out of the higgledypiggledy wing on my left. ‘I hear that a new horse has arrived for the stables! And it’s not half-dead, neither.’

‘Sir Kit!’ I cry.

He runs to take my horse as if he were still a groom, but I’d had Christopher Hawkins made up to knight as soon as he was old enough – one of the first favours I asked after arriving in London with the new queen. The young groom who had ridden with me to Berwick is now my London Master of Horse. When he married the year after his advancement, I persuaded Edward to give him the lease of a small house in the tangle of streets that abut the west wall of Bedford House, along with a small annual income. So far as I know, he survives the paltry stipend granted to him by Edward by teaching the aspiring sons of successful London merchants how to ride.

Now I look down at the delight in his face and watch him stroke my horse’s nose with a broad callused hand. Here is one of the few men I know I can trust.

In the big entrance hall, steward, clerk, secretary, cook, house grooms, chamber grooms and maids wait to greet me. It is a smaller company than it had once been, even allowing for absent scullery grooms and gardeners. But a London house can supply itself from the city bakers, fishmongers, butchers, brewers, vintners, poulterers and pigmen, and does not need its own. It need not pretend to be a self-feeding country estate.

The steward looks ill, I note. I will ask later if he needs to give up his position.

I hand my fur-lined gloves to my maid. Agnes Hooper unhooks my travel cloak and takes it away to dry. I look about me.

I’m pleasantly surprised. Bedford House feels drier than either Chenies or Moor Park, and far more welcoming than when I had first seen it as a new young wife. When we married, my husband was lodged there with his aunt, the Countess of Warwick, for whom I had been third choice.

Raised from slumber by my arrival, the house smells of the lavender and rosemary used against moths and of hastily applied beeswax polish. But there is not the odour I remember from other visits of mustiness and mice. The entrance hall and chief receiving room, like much of the house, are half-empty, their paintings and furniture having been sold to help pay Edward’s fine. But the smoke rises straight in the fireplaces. The wooden floors are warmer underfoot than the stone floors of Chenies and Moor Park, the low-ceilinged rooms easier to heat.

The steward, who bears the unfortunate name of Mudd, escorts me to the chief sleeping chamber. Looking through open doors as we pass, I see that some of the upholstered chairs and stools still wear their protective linen covers. But then, I had given very little warning of my arrival.

At the threshold of the great bedchamber, I stop. For a moment, I think I will not be able to enter. The ornately carved bed, with its newly brushed silk hangings and velvet coverlet embroidered with harsh, slightly tarnished gold threads, wrenches open the door of memory.

My wedding night at Bedford House: duty on both our parts. Impatience on his. Pain. Sticky slime.

I had counted off the month. I bled. I had failed to conceive.

Tried again. Again, not with child.

I felt sick in the mornings, but not in the right way. Again. Still not with child.

My husband’s eyes were cold and resolute when he bedded me.

I must not want to conceive, he said. I wasted my vital force in court frivolities. I unwomaned myself with my pen, by aspiring to have a manly soul. I loved the Queen and played the man with her so that I was no longer a true woman. I murdered my babes with my mind before they could grow.

Again I bled.

I conceived but lost the babe soon after.

My guilt grew plainer in his eyes.

Again we mated.

Again, I failed. I disappointed and disgusted him in every way.

And my money was going fast.

It was because I could not give him an heir that I had signed over to him my own marriage portion, my own money, my protection. Because I was still young and hoped to be valued, even if not loved.

In spite of many offers, I was not tempted to repeat the carnal experience with another man. I hid my distaste with flirtation and outrageous talk. For the next several years, I was that rare case, a woman who was as virtuous in life as she was painted in verse.

‘I will sleep in my old parlour,’ I say now. ‘A smaller bed will do.’

Mudd disappears to arrange it.

I summon Sir Kit to the little parlour and call to a groom to bring us warmed wine and tobacco pipes.

Kit brings with him a faint odour of horse and cold fresh air. His new leather jacket creaks as he shifts in his chair, smiling at me. I feel that he would rather be in motion, but will sit for the moment to please me.

‘Now, tell me all the gossip,’ I order. ‘How has London entertained itself in my long absence?’

‘Very ill, without you.’

‘Kit! Please don’t turn courtier on me or I’ll have your knighthood revoked. Tell me the worst.’

‘Lord Bacon is on trial for corruption. His old enemy Coke leads the prosecution.’ He grins with glee. His firm chin wears a stubble that it had lacked on our ride to Warwick, but otherwise, he looks no older. ‘With Killer Coke sniffing after him, he’s done for.’ Coke had also prosecuted the Gunpowder Plotters. All of them were executed.

I pass Kit a long-stemmed clay pipe and light my own with a coal from the fire.

‘Rumour . . .’ He draws on his pipe. ‘. . . whispers that Buckingham already has his eye on Bacon’s house, York Place.’

‘My neighbours do not improve,’ I murmur.

‘Buckingham still climbs in the King’s favour.’ ‘That may not be entirely bad.’ I had plans for Buckingham.

We finish our pipes with the special relish of wickedness. Smoking defies authority. The King loathes the ‘stinking weed’ tobacco. My friend Henry Goodyear had written that courtiers at Whitehall are forced to huddle in furtive groups in the open air if they want to share the fashion for smoking pipes.

Sir Kit drops his voice. ‘Buckingham now controls all access to the King . . . and I know this from more than gossip during riding lessons.’ He takes my mug and warms my wine again with the poker. ‘He drives others from the court.’

‘My friends?’

‘Southampton.’ The poker hisses in his mug. ‘Cranborne and Suffolk . . .’

‘So many?’ All these men were old friends. Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton. Lord Cranborne, the son of my old protector and friend, Robert Cecil.

‘And what of my dear old letter-writing friend, Sir Henry Goodyear?’

‘He’s with the King, in all things. Sings the praises of a Spanish marriage for the Prince.’

Perhaps to be trusted, perhaps not.

The number of safe allies at court has dwindled. ‘And Arundel?’ I ask. ‘Does he still chase after antiquities with his old hunger?’

From a prominent Catholic family, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel had survived the taint of Catholic treason after the Gunpowder Treason against the King in 1605. Who could blame him if he found art safer than politics?

Kit sets the poker carefully on a trivet. ‘He now woos Buckingham.’

‘And so must we all, from what you say.’ I upturn my mug and drain it with an unladylike gusto that would have made my husband purse his lips and look up to Heaven.

Neither of us asks after the other’s family. Kit’s wife, like me, has failed to breed, and like me grows near the end of her child-bearing years.

‘Now I will inspect the gardens, before it grows too dark.’ I call the steward.

His face bleaches when I say what I wish to do. ‘Tonight?’ He swallows.

‘Is there some difficulty?’

‘None, madam.’

The house groom kneeling by the fireplace grows intent on placing a new log. I glance at Kit but he is engrossed in buttoning his coat.

The Bedford House gardens run in a long narrow belt along the wall, beyond the outbuildings at the far end of the big courtyard and the stable yard to its right. Beyond them and our wall lies the open space of Covent Garden – forty acres of rough land and patches of wilderness. Standing below the garden wall, I can hear the voices of people using the diagonal track that cuts across the Long Acre between Drury Lane at Holborn and St Martin’s Lane near the Royal Mews.

At first, I see no cause for the steward’s ill-concealed distress. The box hedges in the small knot garden just behind the house have been neatly trimmed. No weeds or other disorder explain his unease. I head for the arched gate to my right that leads to our kitchen gardens, orchard and the small wilderness that provides coppiced garden stakes and firewood.

‘There’s little to see there at this time,’ the steward warns. ‘And the paths will be muddy.’

‘Frozen mud.’ I go through the arch and stop. Edward would have called it ‘theft’, a crime punishable by hanging.

Before me lie row upon row of neatly tended cabbages, late turnips, and the remains of vast onion beds. A long line of old diamond-paned windows leans against the wall, protecting dung-heap hot beds, recently dug over. I see a vast bean patch with dried haulms hanging on some of the tripod supports. A mountain of frosted carrot tops rises from the corner of another cleared and newly manured plot. Far more vegetables are being grown here than could ever be needed by the skeleton-house family left in residence when the owners of Bedford House are elsewhere.

I know that we lease some of the garden to local people who lack growing space in the crowded city. But those gardens lie beyond a farther, locked gate. This is private land, for the use of Bedford House only. The knuckles of Mudd’s clenched hands gleam white under his skin.

‘Your labour, our land,’ I say mildly. ‘I see no difficulty with your enterprise, so long as you pay fair rent.’

‘Of course, Your Grace! It’s just that I . . .’ He makes the wise choice and swallows his excuse.

‘How long have you been growing vegetables to sell?’

He clasps his hand over his mouth, then mumbles, ‘Two years.’

I weaken in the face of his distress. And the thought of how little Edward pays him. ‘We shall calculate what you owe . . . and start from now.’

He drops to his knees on the frozen earth. ‘Madam, I thank you! God bless you!’

‘But when you next undertake commerce using someone else’s land, ask permission first. Or you might find yourself hanged after all.’ Before he can begin to weep and protest his gratitude any further, I tell him to get up or else he will freeze his knees.

The truth is that I need all the allies I can muster.

‘Before the light goes,’ says Kit, when we are returned to the warmth of the house, ‘you must come with me to admire a wonder.’

Chapter 12

Ice crunches under our boots. The silence is eerie. No slapping of water against the stone steps. No would-be passengers shouting, ‘Oars here! Oars here!’ No thump of colliding boats, no rattling of rowlocks. Standing on the Strand water stairs, I look out over the Thames. Knives of icy air stab my lungs. I hold my silky beaver-fur muff to my face, inhaling the musty animal smell, warming my nose with my exhaled breath.

Kit points at the sinuous black ribbon at the centre of the river. ‘The water grows narrower every day.’

It is the coldest winter in living memory. The Thames is freezing outward from its banks.

A flock of gulls arrives suddenly out of a grey sky and swoops to land on the river. They slither and slide on the ice in a comical flapping of wings. Dignity recovered, they sit, perplexed, on the new, hard lid over the water, waiting to reconnect with what they knew.

I watch two small boys testing the ice, too far out.

The air is luminous and thick in the growing dusk. On the opposite bank of the Thames, Southwark, where I had visited only four years past as the favourite of the Queen, is dissolving into a faint hint of buildings in the beginning of snow. Soon it will disappear altogether and leave me looking across the river at nothing. As insubstantial as the past.

Time behind us might as well never have been. It’s gone. Today is what there is.

Suspended there above the freezing river, I feel a cold clarity enter my thoughts.

I was right to have come. Too many women in my position lay meekly down in the narrow coffin of duty. The Lord would have to forgive me. Whilst I am alive, I mean to live. Until Death steps into my path and raises a beckoning finger, I will not accept impossibility.

I’d had a close call on that ice cliff between Moor Park and Chenies. I’d almost given up.

The first icy needles of new snow prick my face as we watch the two boys arguing. Their bodies tell the story as clearly as words. One of them slides a foot a little farther out towards the black ribbon of water, which looks as lithe and alive as the back of a moving snake. The other boy steps back, ready to sprint for the shore.

A dark crack opens in the glinting white surface. With shrill cries, they fall onto their bellies and push furiously with their arms, sliding like young seals towards the bank.

Kit runs down the icy steps towards them. Then they are safe on the thick ice near the shore, brushing snow and ice from the front of their coats, their excited voices as sharp as the cries of the gull. Kit returns to my side. A dog barks from the far side of a nearby wall. The rhythm of horses in the street behind me is jagged as they struggle on the ice. Church bells begin to crack the cold air with metallic hammer blows.

Two weeks ago, I was prepared to kill myself, even at the risk of damnation. I had not imagined how soon I would be here in London again, half fearful, half filled with exhilaration, examining my weapons like an old warrior coming out of retirement to fight once more for his life.