The Girl in the Mirror. Sarah Gristwood

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