The Girl in the Mirror. Sarah Gristwood

flourish the paper before her. It’s a letter she is composing, to Essex, and I brace myself, momentarily.

      ‘I make this humble bill of requests to Him that all makes and does, that with His benign Hand He will shadow you … Let your companion, my most faithful Charles, be sure that his name is not left out in this petition.’

      ‘My most faithful Charles,’ she repeats, extending her hand to me, and obediently I bend to kiss it as I sink down into a curtsey.

      Jeanne Summer 1596

      The summer agues came badly this year. Many fell sick and died between dawn and dinner time the same day. Yet Jacob had seemed much as usual, grumbling over the news from court, and the cost of kitting out Lord Essex’s sally against the Spanish, all in the name of foolish glory. I thought nothing of it when he complained of the heat one morning; it would indeed be a warm day. I was out all morning, delivering documents he’d completed, and when I came back in, Mrs Allen turned a tear-blotched face to me. They had sent for the physician, she said, but … I brushed past her and went to where he was lying on the bed. He didn’t look afraid, he looked angry. His breath began to rattle before the doctor arrived, and an hour later he was dead.

      I told Mrs Allen to go home, and I was alone in the front room when the shop door opened and a solid, florid-faced man came in. I knew him, he was Master Pointer, a nursery gardener, who put a lot of work our way. He was talking of business and I gazed at him stupidly. I felt death should have put a mark on the door. When I told him the news he was genuinely sorry, but after a moment I realised he was sounding me.

      With Jacob gone – what a loss, his deepest sympathy – what would my own plans be? He would still need someone to deal with his letters, someone who knew the names of the plants, and he was sure many of Jacob’s other clients would feel the same way. Of course, of course, it wasn’t the moment … But we understood each other before, with a squeeze of the hand, he left me. The past and the future were bleeding into each other, and it was making me dizzy.

      We buried Jacob quickly, as the law required, and I was touched at how many came out, with the sickness all around, to pay their respects. They all spoke to me with kindness, but I wasn’t sure I understood their sympathy. I’d had my great sorrow in the Netherlands, a decade before. No one ever spoke to me of that, and I’d learned to lock it away. Now this new frost of loss fell on ground already frozen: I would mourn Jacob, but not too deeply. He’d have understood that – like me, since the Netherlands, he’d kept part of himself locked tight away, and I’d never presumed to give him more affection than he was happy to accept from me.

      I owed him as great a debt as one human being can owe another, and never to try to grow too close was the only way I could pay. Children understand these things instinctively. Now, as an adult, or something near to it, I understood that the framework of my life had changed, but that I was not wounded in myself, or no worse wounded than I had been already.

      He left me all that he had. Forty pounds – I was amazed, but we had always lived frugally. I’d have to quit the house, of course, but I’d be able to find rooms easily. The officials of the borough came to see me, since I’d not reached legal maturity, but were only too ready to accept there was no need to worry.

      Mrs Allen came to help me move out, and I thought she was looking at me curiously. It was only later that I realised she’d half felt she should offer a home to me. It had never occurred to me, and the idea withered unspoken away. But on the last day, as we said goodbye, she seemed again to be struggling with what to say.

      ‘Remember, in this world, a woman does whatever she has to do to get by. Whatever she has to do,’ she said at last, and it was with an unexpected pang I watched the back of her plump worsted figure walk rapidly away.

      I found myself doing a strange thing the following Sunday. The lease of our little garden would end with Jacob’s death, and I had to go there to find the caretaker and hand back the key. But before I did that, I set to work, as though he were beside me. I clipped the hedges and cut back the herbs, selecting the strongest to leave for seed. I sowed carrots and beet as though I’d be the one to eat them next year; searched out the seedling of the cowslips and bear’s ears and transplanted them carefully. The double daisies had been Jacob’s favourite and, when I left, Heaven knows why, I took a pot of them with me. I clutched them to the chest of my boy’s doublet as I walked through streets ringing with the news of Lord Essex’s great sea victory, and realised that for the first time the news, the crowds, the little decisions of every day were things to which I would answer as myself, and no longer as Jacob’s protégé.

      Cecil Autumn 1596

      I felt sorry for Essex, briefly. He had come back from the sea aglow with victory. He and Charles Howard had planted England’s flag on the Continent again, in a way we never hoped to see, the King of Spain’s fleet smashed at Cadiz so that Calais itself was freed as a sideshow, or nearly. I remember and salute Charles’ joint command of the campaign, but that’s something Essex himself will have managed to forget quite easily.

      He’d landed on the south coast and ridden to court, so hot foot he was lame from a fall along the way. Instead of the hero’s welcome he expected, he found the queen dressing him down before every giggling maid and gawping serving man, for all the world like an errant schoolboy.

      Why, in his vainglorious pride in victory, had he let the Spanish treasure fleet sail by unmolested? Why, having once taken Cadiz, had he simply sailed away? What became of the fifty thousand pounds his exploits had cost her majesty, and where was the recompense to be? I could see the red creeping up under the square beard – a folly, that, it will never please her – his lordship had grown on the voyage home, and I could hear the queen’s voice cracking with fury.

      The irony is, it wasn’t Essex’s fault, or not entirely. Not in the short term, anyway. Fast as he had ridden to the court, we’d had a faster report from a serving man on board: he’d wanted to go hunting for the treasure fleet but the other, more experienced, commanders had brushed his views away. Commanders like Ralegh: now he’ll know how to make a gain from Essex’s disgrace, and another from selling his share of the booty.

      Of course we won’t say as much, or not precisely. But I believe my father will try to calm the queen’s displeasure. We take the long view, naturally.

      It is a great task, at court, to prove one’s honesty, and yet not spoil one’s fortune, and the role of peacemaker befits an honest man. Even my father won’t succeed in curbing the queen’s rage: already, she’s declaring she’ll have no victory celebrations in this city. But when the real facts of the Cadiz debates seep out, as in the end they will, the queen will remember that we Cecils did not attack her favourite (still, her favourite?) too bitterly. And Essex will bask in her favour again, and being Essex he will boast of his favour, immoderately. The suitors will clamour for his voice to the queen, and he will clamour for their requests, loudly. And every voice that huzzas him in the streets will come to fret her majesty.

      ‘Men of depth are held suspect by princes. There is no virtue but has its shade, wherewith the minds of kings are offended.’ So says my clever cousin Bacon: clever in everything except his conviction that he will be able to steer my lord Essex into prudence and make his own career that way.

      Princes fear, Bacon says, that clever men may be able to manipulate them, popular men may overshadow them. Brave men are too turbulent and honest men too inflexible. Who – I asked him once – are the men that will thrive? If he’d ever stop to listen, I could have given him the answer. The men who make the prince’s problems go away. They’ll thrive. Well, for a time, at least.

      Bacon urges Lord Essex to courtiers’ ways. Never complain of past injuries. Never stand on your dignity – you have none, compared to her majesty. Learn the subtle ways of flattery – invent a pressing reason to visit your estates, then cancel the proposed journey on the grounds that you can’t bear to be away. Study her majesty’s moods and trim your suits accordingly, and don’t disdain the advice of those most close to her, even if it’s only the maid who’s waiting by the door when they take her chamber pot to empty.

      This