The Girl in the Mirror. Sarah Gristwood

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