The Noble Assassin. Christie Dickason

the small wilderness that provides coppiced garden stakes and firewood.

      ‘There’s little to see there at this time,’ the steward warns. ‘And the paths will be muddy.’

      ‘Frozen mud.’ I go through the arch and stop. Edward would have called it ‘theft’, a crime punishable by hanging.

      Before me lie row upon row of neatly tended cabbages, late turnips, and the remains of vast onion beds. A long line of old diamond-paned windows leans against the wall, protecting dung-heap hot beds, recently dug over. I see a vast bean patch with dried haulms hanging on some of the tripod supports. A mountain of frosted carrot tops rises from the corner of another cleared and newly manured plot. Far more vegetables are being grown here than could ever be needed by the skeleton-house family left in residence when the owners of Bedford House are elsewhere.

      I know that we lease some of the garden to local people who lack growing space in the crowded city. But those gardens lie beyond a farther, locked gate. This is private land, for the use of Bedford House only. The knuckles of Mudd’s clenched hands gleam white under his skin.

      ‘Your labour, our land,’ I say mildly. ‘I see no difficulty with your enterprise, so long as you pay fair rent.’

      ‘Of course, Your Grace! It’s just that I . . .’ He makes the wise choice and swallows his excuse.

      ‘How long have you been growing vegetables to sell?’

      He clasps his hand over his mouth, then mumbles, ‘Two years.’

      I weaken in the face of his distress. And the thought of how little Edward pays him. ‘We shall calculate what you owe . . . and start from now.’

      He drops to his knees on the frozen earth. ‘Madam, I thank you! God bless you!’

      ‘But when you next undertake commerce using someone else’s land, ask permission first. Or you might find yourself hanged after all.’ Before he can begin to weep and protest his gratitude any further, I tell him to get up or else he will freeze his knees.

      The truth is that I need all the allies I can muster.

      ‘Before the light goes,’ says Kit, when we are returned to the warmth of the house, ‘you must come with me to admire a wonder.’

       Chapter 12

      Ice crunches under our boots. The silence is eerie. No slapping of water against the stone steps. No would-be passengers shouting, ‘Oars here! Oars here!’ No thump of colliding boats, no rattling of rowlocks. Standing on the Strand water stairs, I look out over the Thames. Knives of icy air stab my lungs. I hold my silky beaver-fur muff to my face, inhaling the musty animal smell, warming my nose with my exhaled breath.

      Kit points at the sinuous black ribbon at the centre of the river. ‘The water grows narrower every day.’

      It is the coldest winter in living memory. The Thames is freezing outward from its banks.

      A flock of gulls arrives suddenly out of a grey sky and swoops to land on the river. They slither and slide on the ice in a comical flapping of wings. Dignity recovered, they sit, perplexed, on the new, hard lid over the water, waiting to reconnect with what they knew.

      I watch two small boys testing the ice, too far out.

      The air is luminous and thick in the growing dusk. On the opposite bank of the Thames, Southwark, where I had visited only four years past as the favourite of the Queen, is dissolving into a faint hint of buildings in the beginning of snow. Soon it will disappear altogether and leave me looking across the river at nothing. As insubstantial as the past.

      Time behind us might as well never have been. It’s gone. Today is what there is.

      Suspended there above the freezing river, I feel a cold clarity enter my thoughts.

      I was right to have come. Too many women in my position lay meekly down in the narrow coffin of duty. The Lord would have to forgive me. Whilst I am alive, I mean to live. Until Death steps into my path and raises a beckoning finger, I will not accept impossibility.

      I’d had a close call on that ice cliff between Moor Park and Chenies. I’d almost given up.

      The first icy needles of new snow prick my face as we watch the two boys arguing. Their bodies tell the story as clearly as words. One of them slides a foot a little farther out towards the black ribbon of water, which looks as lithe and alive as the back of a moving snake. The other boy steps back, ready to sprint for the shore.

      A dark crack opens in the glinting white surface. With shrill cries, they fall onto their bellies and push furiously with their arms, sliding like young seals towards the bank.

      Kit runs down the icy steps towards them. Then they are safe on the thick ice near the shore, brushing snow and ice from the front of their coats, their excited voices as sharp as the cries of the gull. Kit returns to my side. A dog barks from the far side of a nearby wall. The rhythm of horses in the street behind me is jagged as they struggle on the ice. Church bells begin to crack the cold air with metallic hammer blows.

      Two weeks ago, I was prepared to kill myself, even at the risk of damnation. I had not imagined how soon I would be here in London again, half fearful, half filled with exhilaration, examining my weapons like an old warrior coming out of retirement to fight once more for his life.

      We turn away from the river to return to Bedford House. A passer-by would see only a handsome woman of middle years, in fine but mended clothes, crunching across the ice-filled street attended by a single waiting gentleman, and a maidservant and groom who can scarcely contain their eagerness to get back to the warmth of a fire. He would not have seen a fallen countess who meant to raise ghosts and make them dance again.

      Later I lie in my narrow bed on down pillows and feather bed over the base of wool and straw. Agnes has been given a cot in the next room, with her maid on a pallet on her floor while Annie snores on mine. Unable to sleep, I listen to the old familiar night noises of the city. Moor Park already feels distant and a little unreal. The creak of its damp leaning walls and the screams of foxes have been replaced by church bells, dogs, shouts of the night watch, and fainter, more distant voices and music from the tightly packed houses and inns around our walls.

      I hear an explosion of shouts in the street. Then abrupt silence.

      Perhaps from the Savoy. The derelict hospital stands nearby, across the Strand from Bedford House, its rooms now occupied by vagabonds, criminals, indigent students, and the occasional poet.

      I shift my head on the pillows. I will not think about poets tonight.

      Tonight, I will not think about loss, only what I hope to regain. I pull the coverlet up to just below my nose, close my eyes and breathe in the resinous smell of pine from the fire that still burns brightly to warm the room. I would make it all happen again.

      With the scent of burning pine branches in my nostrils, I again pulled on red silk stockings. Fastened a white heron feather in my hair. Draped a veil. Little by little, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, transformed herself into a magical creature.

      It was the masque, Hymenaei, celebrating the marriage of the new young Earl of Essex to the daughter of the Duke of Suffolk, Frances Howard.

      I pinned a jewel at the front of my hair. I turned my head. My third eye, my Cyclops eye, flashed and winked. My jewelled shoes turned my steps to bursts of spangled light. Behind me revolved a huge golden globe. ‘Behold the world, how it is whirled round,’ a court poet had written.

      We all floated together on the music. The space beneath my ribs grew as large as the sky. We inhaled starlight.

      I smiled as I spun past the silent mouthing and hungry, anxious eyes of Ben Jonson, the poet and playwright whose words we sang. Then I spied the straggling locks and thoughtful frown of the court painter Master Jones, the God who had created the revolving world that would soon open like a flower bud. Together we three had made these ‘lies’, as my husband called