The Girl in the Mirror. Sarah Gristwood

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