The Noble Assassin. Christie Dickason

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.