Sarah Gristwood - The Girl in the Mirror

I swept the landlady an exaggerated foreign bow and went out to buy myself some necessities. Candles enough to write by, a painted cloth to cover the marks in the wall, a posy of marjoram and lavender to take the mustiness away. At the nearest cookstall I bought a pasty, big enough I could share it with the dog, and an orange, and a small flask of Rhenish, and went home and called myself happy.

Well, content.

Well, lucky.

Yes, by comparison with those I’d known – and those I saw on the street around me – definitely lucky.

The work, and the money, were the easy part, oddly. For that I have Master Pointer to thank, and my thoughts do thank him every day. He first sent for me before Jacob had been buried three days. He did it with apologies, but his affairs, he explained, were at that point where he had to take the turn of the tide or else … I warmed to him, not only because he took trouble to explain to me, but because something in his urgency, his hot desire to catch the tide of the times, raised an answering warmth in me. I soon learned that while simple fruit trees and hedgings might be the core of his business, he was passionate about new plants and opportunities, and sold slips and seedlings to many of the nobility. It was no strange thing, of a Sunday, to see ladies and gentlemen strolling around his gardens out at Twickenham to inspect the latest rarity. Once, I even saw the stooping figure of Sir Robert Cecil, leading by the hand two small children, as grave and as slight as he.

‘Look at this! Look at this, Master Moosay!’ – this was Master Pointer’s version of Musset. I peered at two small, rather hairy, leaves which he assured me would soon sprout a flower the like of which had only been seen in the palaces before, but would soon be in every garden. The goal, I learnt, was novelty – novelty, and the charm of bloom when no bloom used to be.

‘Think of it, we’ll soon have borders as bright in August as they are in May.’ Though some of the new plants, from lands far beyond the sea, came direct to England, others went first to the growers in the Netherlands or Italy, whom he regarded with a blend of comradeship and envy. With a few such, he had struck up a deal, but to keep it going required a skill in languages beyond him. That is what Jacob had done; that I could do easily. I’d been working for Master Pointer a few weeks when he found I had another useful ability.

From a child I’d loved to draw, though with Jacob it was always the words and the thought behind them that would be taken most seriously. But one day, Master Pointer was labouring to dictate me a description of a seedling – ‘two leaves like heart shapes, spring direct from the stem, and veined like – like – like the ribs of a ship?’

‘No, it’s more like this, surely?’ Hastily I sketched out what I meant, and he gazed at me thoughtfully.

‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ he said. From that time on, his catalogues went out with my line drawings, printed from etched blocks of wood, and kindly, he said that it increased his sales. He said it was a lucky chance that had shown him my skill. But I think Master Pointer was one of those men in whose genial warm presence people, like plants, did understand their capabilities.

Cecil Spring 1597

I always knew the meal was never going to agree with me. They don’t keep good cooks at Essex House: for all his grandeur, his lordship is served but carelessly. I don’t suppose he even noticed – from a boy, I remember him just cramming what was in front of him into his mouth, and that only when the waiting men nudged him that they wanted to take the plates away. Gulping down the mouthful with his eyes fixed where his speech was directed, intent on winning your response to whatever he was trying to say. I doubt Ralegh cared for the food either, though I saw him drinking deep.

But then none of us were there for our stomach’s sake, were we?

The puzzle of the court is how one day’s enemy is the next day’s friend: more unexpected, surely, than a friend lapsing into enemy? My clever cousin Bacon says ‘love your friend as if he were to become an enemy, and hate your enemy as if he were to become your friend’: he was so proud of the thought, he showed the letter to me. Does even he know what he means, I wondered. I have become more irritable since Lizzie –

His mother, my aunt Anne, told her sons when they first came to court that anyone who spoke them fair was doing it to serve their turn. ‘He that never trusteth is never deceived.’ ‘It is better to suspect too soon than to mislike too late.’ ‘As a wolf resembles a dog, so does a flatterer a friend.’ ‘Don’t write letters that can be held against you, don’t speak without looking to see who can hear, and then not openly.’ I get impatient with the flood of warning sometimes, even though I have forged my career by following the maxims attentively. They translated the sayings of Erasmus in my grandfather’s day: ‘It is wisdom in prosperity when all is as thou would have it, to fear and suspect the worst.’ What, are we never to be happy?

Lizzie and I were happy.

The strange thing is that Essex’s father was as full of good advice as mine, or as Lady Anne: I suppose we all react differently to the medicine. Now it’s Ralegh penning advice for his son. Which is why he was here tonight, in a way – Ralegh needs both our help if he is ever to get back his captaincy of the Guards. The queen has never forgiven him for having run off with one of her maids of honour, and less so than ever now that they’ve started a family.

Essex needs all the help he can get, too, if he’s to persuade her majesty to finance another voyage against the Spanish. And I? Well, it’s true there’s the business of the Duchy of Lancaster. The chancellor’s post would come easier if no one were opposing me too actively.

And of course, I am committed, always, to seek unity: I must send to Charles Howard tomorrow, make sure he understands there is no threat to him in this rapprochement with Essex. He’s doing an Achilles at the moment, still baffled that the people see Essex as the sole hero of Cadiz, but his wife is a lady shrewd enough to ensure he doesn’t sulk in his tent too long.

All the same, as I climb into the litter for the brief ride home, the old black mood sweeps over me. The whole question of the chancellorship of the Duchy wouldn’t be so tetchy if we hadn’t been there already with the Court of Wards, but Lizzie was so pleased when we won it for her brother, in the teeth of Essex’s man …

Lizzie.

Two months, almost to the day, since the doctors told me there was nothing they could do, and I had to open the bedroom door and go inside to meet her eye. I have spent a lifetime dissembling, but I couldn’t do it this time. In the end, it was she told me, with the ghost of her old briskness, we had a lot to agree together, and not to cry. She wanted the children brought up away from the bad airs of the town. She did not say, away from the corruption of the court, and from a father who has to wallow in it every day, but it’s true they’re better off at my brother’s in the country.

She said when I wanted her I was to go into the garden, and there by the good grace of God she would find me. She said if God didn’t want to allow it she’d be having a word with him. She made me laugh, even then, actually. I went to the garden this morning, to Lizzie’s favourite rose tree. It’s covered in leaf shoots of stinging green – not long till the first buds are on the way. I gripped its trunk so hard, I was glad when the thorns pricked me. Oh, Lizzie.

Back to the business: it’s one thing she said to me then. ‘Work will be your salvation. You’ll see.’ Give me the work, spare me the sympathy. I cannot take the sympathy, although Charles for one wrote very kindly. I really feel something like friendship for Charles, beyond even the alliance of necessity.