Alchemy (21 page)

My lady was saddened that she could not wear all her jewels to walk in the procession for her steward, Hugh Davys, coming after her from Cardiff with them, had been attacked, his head broken in several places and robbed of his precious cargo. ‘Yet it was no ordinary theft,’ my lady said, ‘but malice by those who oppose my authority in the city and tore down my walls and walks. I know who is to blame and will prosecute them through the courts and in the court itself to defend my rights and those of my son which I hold in trust.’

I was sorry for the injuries done to Hugh Davys who had always been my friend in the household with none of that envy I perceived in others who thought the countess put too much trust in me. He was never to recover from his injuries and so I lost one who might have aided me in my own affliction. Also my lady dwelt too much upon the evil done to her and I could find no means to distract her from it, either with diversions or physic. She saw that the death of the queen had changed our world for ever and could not be reconciled to the new order that should come about.

‘I am become an old woman, tedious and of no account, while power and position are given to youth and new favourites.’

This she said when she learned she was not to be one of those ladies summoned to escort the new queen, Anne, from Scotland, although her daughter, the Lady Anne, being among them was some consolation. I found the countess at the end of April gazing from her window down at the river below busy with barges and skiffs though we were too high to hear the shouts of the watermen.

‘Ah Amyntas to be fourteen again and being rowed up river with all the Sidney flags fluttering about me, to some great occasion of state or pleasure. I find no comfort in my own psalms in these times when all my world is turned upside down. My faith deserts me when there is none to share it. What will happen to the Protestant cause now that the great men, as my uncle Leicester and my noble brother, are dead? Rumour says her majesty inclines towards the pope. They say, too, the king will make peace with Spain and if they live may marry one of the little princes to a papist. Then perhaps we shall have a papist prince again in time.’

Nine days later, His Majesty King James having lain four days at Sir Robert Cecil his house of Theobalds, entered the city by the charterhouse where he was entertained for three nights by Sir Thomas Howard before making his way to Whitehall and then by barge to the Tower. There he was received with a great cannonade of the whole ordnance of two hundred and fifty guns. Two days after, the king having visited the several rooms of the Tower and baited the lions with dogs, before dinner he made many new lords and knights, among the first being my lady’s brother, Sir Robert Sidney, as Lord Sidney of Penshurst.

Now we began to have many alarms of the spread of the plague in London and elsewhere so that men wondered if the king and queen would be crowned at all. Her majesty was long
in coming, being entertained at houses and towns along the way as Althorp with a lavish masque and the city of York with a civic feast. On the 27th of June she reached Sir George Farmer his house near Northampton where the king rode out from London to meet her and escort her back with a great train.

The king was eager to bind men to him and to this end created a great many knights. For the ceremony the royal couple resided at Windsor and there my lady went to greet her daughter who had accompanied the queen south, and to perform her own homage to her majesty among the other countesses and ladies, leaving me behind in Baynard’s Castle, that gloomy pile beside the Thames. There at Windsor too the king created the young earl a Knight of the Garter and his brother Philip a Knight of the Bath.

The following week the court removed to Westminster at last for the coronation but by reason of the plague increasing so that near a thousand died in those days, all were forbidden to come near except they who had a part to bear as my lady who attended upon the queen.

The countess returned, weary with the weight of her robes and jewels, saying that all were leaving London that could and that we should make haste to Wilton where the court intended to come, her two sons being high in his majesty’s favour, and she herself appointed with her brother, Lord Robert and her daughter Anne, to be of the queen’s court whenever the two should separate while her sons were to follow the king.

And now I understood that our quiet country pastimes were no more and indeed that my lady had matters of state to occupy her, as well as the loss of her jewellery and the murder of her steward for he had never recovered from his wounds and died three months later in great pain. I felt too that there began a coldness towards me. She no longer asked my advice or cared to be read to while we sat close together. She began to call for unguents as that would keep her skin youthful, and richer
perfumes than the jasmine and rose water she had been used to use. She no longer came to the dispensary or laboratory and indeed was so busy ordering the house against the court’s arrival that all else must be neglected. One day she scolded me for being underfoot and would banish me to Ramsbury with the duenna, saying their majesties liked only young faces about them and merry ones at that. Yet I knew that in heart she too was sad for I often heard her sigh. But then she would tell me upon my enquiring that she did very well, and lacked nothing I could prescribe.

My supervisor Dr Davidson thought I should elaborate my synopsis before we met again. Presumably with my new status I can turn up any time with the excuse that I need to use the library. This has the added bonus of being true because I do need to do some research if I’m to present him with a more credible take on my notional thesis. I have to crank up my rusty writing skills, unused except for legal briefs since uni. At first I think I’ll do just that: turn up at Wessex and work there. But then I begin to wonder what monitoring technology their library computers might have programmed into them. Taking a book off a shelf is safer than searching the internet, unless their CCTV records every action, every title consulted. It’s a mad world my mistresses. Orwell didn’t predict the half of it. The brothers are watching you and you’re watching everyone else. Spies and eyes everywhere. Just as in Amyntas’ time with Walsingham’s police network, carefully undercutting the seals on letters, sending reports in invisible ink, infiltrating his
agents provocateurs
until men and women ended up broken, hanged, cut down alive and disembowelled, put to the flames.

We’re more subtle now of course, in some countries anyway. Our forms of torture are mostly threats, blackmail, confusion, the dark, the hood, uncertainty, assassination. And endless
surveillance. Yet still people revolt, plot, duck and weave to escape. Where did I read that we’re the most overseen people in Europe, our streets and highways sown with all-seeing eyes that we accept because their blurry images might also show us a child being led away to murder, a student stabbed by a gang, a woman dragged into the bushes beside the unlit car park?

Coming from the North where people left their doors on the latch when they were kids, Linda and Rob still shake their heads over our lack of trust. ‘But Mam,’ I said once, ‘Nana didn’t have anything worth stealing. You’ve said so. Now everyone’s got something other people want. We’re the top nation for burglary in Europe.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘It’s because we’ve always been more interested in our own homes and turning them into little castles or palaces. That’s what we like to spend our money on and now we’ve got more to spend we still eat cheap junk food but the kids all have mobiles and Playstations, and the house has new everything and the garden’s decked in, with a water feature and perpetual solar lighting.’

‘That’s progress, that is.’

Yet when Christmas comes round they’ll give Roger’s children expensive toys so as not to appear mean and because they know about the peer pressure of the playground for all the gaudy ephemera with built-in obsolescence. How did I get to Christmas toys from Wessex library? Anyway it’s not worth the risk. I’ll do what I need to on my own computer and then chance the books on the shelves. After all I can pretend they’re what I want to consult without really giving anything away.

I need to look into that Spinks Davidson mentioned and his study of Tudor cross-dressing. I had to flannel my way through that because I’d never heard of the guy. So I type him in and hey presto there he is, expensively published by a top US university
press. I order a copy, fumble for my credit card and are assured the book will be delivered in a week. Which means I have to be inventive and stall a bit longer.

Galton implied there was a US presence behind Wessex but it isn’t too obvious at first inspection. True Davidson himself is a damned Yankee, like Molders, but then so was Marlowe, though Chandler started off in old England and it was never a problem for me before. How we loved Tracy and Hepburn, Ginger and Fred: benign images that beguiled Linda and Rob in the forties: glancing repartee, witty feet tapping out a message of hope. But back then we thought we had a place in the world. Now we’re not sure we can control even our own lives, let alone what’s happening elsewhere. Decisions are made for us while we’re being fed the sugar sops to keep the baby happy. You’re old and cynical, Jade. Settle and Fixit took away your adolescent illusion that the law was an honourable trade and Helen Chalmers taught you that love was a commodity.

Briefly I wondered whether the firm was really pleased that I’d encouraged the client to settle and avoid any bad publicity. After all they lost a potentially fatter fee if the case had dragged on through a week or so in court. But on the other hand it isn’t good to lose a case. It soon gets about as I quickly discovered when I joined Settle and Fixit. Gossip among lawyers is as potent and juicily enjoyed as in any other sphere or profession. I remembered the phrase ‘a Pyrrhic victory’ and tried it out on James Chalmers when we gathered for a debriefing. The negotiation over the settlement had needed all his suavity and skill not to let the other side know we wanted out and to get a good face-saving price for withdrawing.

‘I’m sure you’re right, Jade. That’s exactly what it would have been if we’d stood out for a million and been splashed all over the tabloids as greedy Goliaths who’d taken the little guy’s sling away. As it is the client’s seen the sense of it and is pleased with
us and their half a million. Especially pleased with you. They’ll come to us again. Why don’t you take Helen out for the day. I’m sure she’s longing for a ride on your bike.’

What did he mean? Was it all some kind of fit-up? Was he innocent or complicit? Maybe this was how they ran their marriage and she went home from me with the titillating details. I’d read that some people, lovers whose passion has staled, long-marrieds, turn each other on in this way. I had no personal experience of it though a couple I’d been drinking with in my local pub had once suggested a threesome. I had a hard time wriggling out of that one, without giving offence or seeming a prude. Loveless sex isn’t really my scene though I tried it at uni, clubbing, hopelessly in love with Zena who only saw me as a friend, tried it, scared of not seeming hip, of not being cool, regretting it next day, in the morning-after hangover of a one – night stand,
triste omne animal.

I couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe Helen would kiss and tell. Hadn’t she chased me as much as I had her? But even then I could see that didn’t mean she felt as I did. What had Drewpad said that suggested she liked to pull the newcomers to the firm? I tried to remember his exact words but they wouldn’t come right. Anyway where was his evidence? If I asked him he probably wouldn’t tell me. There would be more innuendo but no substance. His suspicion of ‘the bosses’ had grown as he became more convinced that he was given more than his fair share of the rough, searches, lengthy witness statements to prepare along with essential back-up documents, but none of the front line where the real action and the glamour were.

Perhaps I should warn Helen that he was increasingly disaffected, suspecting that he was the wrong colour, had studied at the wrong place, was there only as window dressing to give the firm a liberal face. I was a bit of the decoration too, not Oxbridge but Sussex. Probably the Chalmerses joked about us both over the breakfast table if not in bed. It was a bad moment. I was
back at my desk. Drew had gone to Bread, Love and Dreams to queue for sandwiches for us both. Surely she wouldn’t betray me, join in some jokey conspiracy of what I’d said or we’d done. Suddenly I was glad I’d never admitted I was in so deep, had never mentioned love.

Some moments you never forget, like sitting for an exam, waiting for a result and opening the envelope, passing the driving test, your first taste of death. If anyone asks me what I was doing when such and such an earth-shaking event took place, the assassination of a world leader, the outbreak of a war, an earthquake, a terror attack, like most people I can’t remember and I always suspect that those who seem to are inventing to get their moment of limelight, in front of the microphone or camera. The remembered moments are those of personal expectation or fear when the adrenaline flooded through you. So I can recall perfectly the feel of the wooden desktop under my hands, how a spotlight bounced back off the computer screen so that when I wanted to use it I would have to adjust its position to cut out the highlight. It was a moment of black doubt. I should have turned back then, got out from under. But it was already too late. I had fallen in love with the boss-lady. The rose in my hand was for her and its thorn was already causing my blood to flow.

And then the phone rang. ‘Hallo. How are you?’

‘Fine.’ But already at the sound of her voice my heart seemed to be truly in my mouth, a live thing that had leapt up in my throat and cut off the oxygen supply, making my ears buzz as if I was strung on a stretched humming wire.

‘Jim says you’ve earned a day off and could take me out somewhere.’

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Somewhere quiet. How far could we get? To the sea?’

‘Your wheels or mine?’