The King's Daughter (31 page)

I was afraid even to turn my head to her.

A woman in a nun’s habit came next. Demure, downcast eyes gave me a chance to catch my breath. The nun lifted off her coif and shook down a head of bright red hair never given to her by God. She gazed into the look-hole with wide-eyed innocence.

It was like choosing a mare from a market parade ring.

I shook my head. ‘What am I supposed to do?… I can’t…’

‘Just choose one, dammit!’ Tallie clapped her hand to her mouth. Her eyes widened in the shadows. ‘Forgive me, your grace!’ she whispered.

‘Tell them whatever you like,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

She left so abruptly that I wondered if she meant to return. I touched my purse to reassure myself that I had money and was just imagining how I would call, ‘Oars! Oars, here!’ when Tallie came back.

At almost the same time, Mrs Taft opened the door of the other room. She ushered in a youth wearing green silk velvet, kidskin boots and a terrified expression that attempted disdain. Mrs Taft poured him a glass of amber liquid from a jug and sat him on the side of the bed. Then she left him alone.

‘He looks sick with fear!’ I breathed.

‘He is.’ Tallie leaned her head close to mine. ‘A virgin, sent here by his father for breaking after the father’s own mistress failed. And he doesn’t know we’re here.’

‘Poor thing!’ I remembered the duke’s eyes. ‘I had never thought that the man might be frightened…’

‘The more they bluster, the more they fear.’

His narrow head turned to the door. His mouth opened a little. He did not stand up for the woman who entered.

I didn’t know whether I was relieved or frightened by Tallie’s choice – the first young woman in the smock. The one who was the most like me.

The girl sat on the bed beside the young man, who now looked ready to leap up and run.

‘Now it begins,’ said Tallie. ‘Not too fast, or he might bolt. See how first she chatters, as if they had no business in hand – Mrs Taft will have primed her with latest gossip. Now… just touches him as if by chance. And leans her breasts on his arm when she reaches for the wine jug.’

Like Frances Howard with my brother, I thought.

‘And she now rests her hand, as if to steady herself, on his thigh. There! She made him laugh. A good beginning. Not too much wine, or he’ll stay limp as a shoelace. Now she laughs as if he were the wittiest man alive… See how she licks the wine from her finger? Now she will invite him to do the same… and now she licks his finger… and again, slowly, with the tip of her tongue, looking into his eyes. I’ll vow he’s beginning to stir.’

‘It’s degrading!’ I whispered. ‘Like training a dog.’

‘It’s a kindness,’ replied Tallie between her teeth. ‘He’ll be grateful enough when he finally thrusts home, triumphant. And leaves feeling that he’s now a man and can swagger at last in front of his father.’

Then I realised that the young woman, like a player on a stage, was making certain that whoever was behind the lookhole had a clear view of everything she did. The young man, on the other hand, clearly had no idea that anyone was spying on him.

‘Now she begins to niggle him in earnest.’ Tallied sucked in her lips in the way I had come to recognise as retreat into thought.

I watched the girl’s hand teasingly explore the young man’scodpiece. She probed deeper, exclaimed in delight. Untied the laces and produced the cousin of Henry’s pink worm, slightly swollen. She brushed it lightly with her fingers.

‘Now she’ll lift him on.’ Tallie now sounded matter-of-fact, as if reciting a catechism or the course of a tennis match.

I watched the young woman’s hand move up and down the slowly-growing cock. She raised her head and flicked a glance at the look-hole. This could be your tool in my hand, said her eyes.

Tallie herself must have been taught these things, I thought. Perhaps at this very look-hole. If she had not been bought as a gift for my mother, she might well have been in there on her knees now.

I glanced sideways at her shadowy profile. That thought must have occurred to her, too. I felt slow-witted and clumsy. I felt fearful, as I had feared when holding a caged bird, that I might damage it.

The girl in the other room slid down onto her knees between the young man’s legs. She braced one hand on the bed. Her head bobbed up and down.

‘She has him in her mouth,’ whispered Tallie. ‘Alas, she can’t show you more without giving the game away.’ She leaned back against the wall, arms folded.

Chilled and repelled, I stared through the look-hole. Please, God, I would never need to practise what I was learning!

‘But she’ll be sure to stop before he’s satisfied.’ Abruptly, Tallie left the cupboard.

I watched the lifting of the smock, the placing of his hand. I watched the girl push him back a little and straddle his lap. I tried to imagine Tallie still here, in that girl’s place.

I followed Tallie out into the bed chamber. ‘I can’t watch any longer. They’ve reached the part I already know.’

Tallie was sitting in the upright chair, staring down at her knees. She did not look up. I turned back and pulled the hanging back over the cupboard, even though, to judge by my last sight of him, the young man in the next room would not have heard us if we had started to bellow a marching song.

Without looking up, she said, ‘One of the whores training me advised me, “Whilst it’s happening, go somewhere else. The country of your mind is as vast as the world… as the Heavens… plenty of places in there to run and hide".’

‘Why are some people so hungry for it?’ I asked. Even some of my ladies. ‘I don’t understand.’

She seemed not to hear.

‘Tallie,’ I said. ‘I thank you.’

She looked up at that, and nodded. ‘Have you learnt enough?’

I tried to imagine myself doing those things with German Frederick. ‘More than enough.’

‘Shall we go back, then?’ She waited for my reply, as if she had asked a real question. Then I understood that it was.

‘I’m not leaving you here!’ I said. ‘Did you think I would?’

She unhooked her hat from the corner of the chair back and opened the door.

As we crossed the river back to Whitehall, Tallie asked quietly, ‘And what do you think of me now?’ We were alone in the wherry ordered for us by Mrs Taft.

I could not let her know that my mouth was still dry and my stomach still clenched at what I had just seen. ‘I know now why you were so afraid of being sent back.’

She nodded, frowning.

‘Well, you’re safe now. You’ve left the place for good,’ I said.

‘Do you still want a would-have-been whore as your companion?’

There was a long silence, filled only by the splashing of the oars and forward surge of the boat.

‘You yourself told me that I was for sale too.’ I stopped her protest with a lifted hand. ‘And don’t say now that you merely spoke in anger. We both know that it’s true. Even if my price is higher.’ I swayed with three more surges. ‘And I fear that I will need a whore’s skills.’

‘You may be lucky. There are some good men in the world. If not…’ She looked past me, back at the receding Southwark shore. ‘… the country of your mind is as vast as the world. Wide as the Heavens… plenty of places in there to run and hide.’

‘You don’t need to hide now.’

‘It’s not so simple as that,’ she said. ‘I learned something tonight. I hated every moment we were back there, but I also felt relief that I could stop pretending. While I was there with the whores, and now with you.’

‘You’re not the same Tallie who arrived at Whitehall.’

‘But I’ll never settle as a fine English lady, neither. I can’t spend the whole of my life pretending to be what I’m not and hiding what I am, whatever that is now… or was raised to be. Fearing exposure.’

After a long silence I asked, ‘Does that mean that you can’t spend the whole of your life with me?’

‘I don’t know what it means.’ But she couldn’t take her words back. ‘Your life will change,’ she said. ‘Just as mine did. Perhaps just as much. When I still lived at Fish Pool House, those women were all my world and I couldn’t imagine life without them. Even the ones I feared or despised. Now I can’t imagine life with them again.’ She looked back at the shrinking lights of Bankside. ‘You may not want me in your new life.’

An evening already so strange made me reckless. ‘You may not want me in yours,’ I said.

She blew out a sharp breath, as if I had winded her and turned to look at me. Her face was a steady darkness against the dancing sparks on the black water. ‘What if I said you were right?’

I swallowed a belch of sour desolation. ‘I would let you go.’ And then I would have no one. Tallie gone. Henry left behind. My mother had been right. I must guard my heart against everyone, even Tallie.

‘"Let"?’ she repeated to herself. ‘"Let you…"’ She had the advantage of the lantern light from the bow of our wherry and leaned closer to see my face. ‘I could live very well without the princess,’ she said after a moment. ‘But never without Elizabeth. Not unless forced by events neither of us can control.’ She reached out and picked up my fist from my knee. ‘I promise to stay while we try to find you a good man.’

I turned my face away and caught a tear with my tongue.

45

The next day we were both quiet. Exhausted, I sat numbly listening to petitioners. When the last of them left, I put on a thick wool cloak against the rain, even though it was June, and walked across the park in search of Henry, hoping that he too had finished his public duties for the morning. Rather than go all the way around to the big northern gatehouse, I slipped into the palace by the kitchens on the south side, which opened onto the park.

I found my brother in his pale-walled study, just off his bedchamber with windows overlooking the park, in the shadow of King Henry’s Tower. As the door opened, I saw him cover his work. He had no clerk or secretary with him. There was ink on his fingers. When he saw that it was only me, and that I was alone, he uncovered his papers again.

I shook my cloak carefully and gave it to a groom who took it away to dry in front of a kitchen fire. I had a question for him that he might, this time, be willing to answer.

‘Letters from Virginia,’ Henry explained when the door had closed. ‘A ship has arrived from my third kingdom in the Americas… our third kingdom.’ He smiled at me and selected a letter from the pile. ‘I’m almost done. Then youmust come let me show you what else has arrived with these letters.’

Oddly enough, ever since our meeting in the garden, we were friends again, as if Frances Howard had never come between us.

He waved a letter. ‘George Percy writes here to me about his explorations. The land, he says,
“is flowing over with fair flowers of sundry colours and kinds, as though it had been in any garden or orchard in England. There be many strawberries and other fruits unknown
…” Ah, Elizabella, it is those
“fruits unknown”
that we seek. He calls the place
“this Paradise".
With the
“woods full of cedar and cypress".
There’s even talk of silver. And I’ve just been sent treasure of a different kind.’ He dropped his already-quiet voice. ‘I’ve now written promising to send more money, ships and guns. The Spanish are taking an interest again.’

He signed his name at the bottom of a letter and blotted it with sand.

‘Our cousin Arbella,’ I said. ‘Why do I feel that our father is afraid as well as offended by her marriage?’ Under Cecil’s tutoring, my brother had begun to gain a firmer grasp on the ‘whys’ as well as the ‘whats'.

Very seriously, Henry began to fold his letter so that the contents could not be read once it was sealed. ‘Because you’re right. Above all, our father is afraid. He sees the marriage as a direct challenge to his authority.’ He fell silent while he concentrated on melting a stick of sealing wax and dripping a small red puddle onto the letter. Then he imprinted the puddle with his signet, worn on a gold chain around his neck.

He sends money ships and guns to a new colony, I thought. I use my signet to seal the contract of sale for silver buttons and peacocks.

Henry stood up, shook his right hand to loosen his ink-stained fingers and began to pace, stretching his muscles, shaking out his shoulders, which were now as broad as thoseof a full-grown man. I noticed a new, coarser golden stubble glistening on his chin.

‘You might wonder at the absence of a clerk,’ he said. ‘Wee Bobby has taught me to write my own letters – like these – when there’s need for secrecy. Can you think what the king would say if he knew I was playing a part in a venture begun by the discredited Ralegh? He’s so fixed on saving Europe that he overlooks the best future interest of England, in the New World.’

He gathered up the Virginia papers and locked them into his painted leather and walnut writing chest. ‘Cecil trusts no one with his true secrets. “Never trust your secretaries,” he says.’ He put the key to the writing chest into a pouch inside his breeches, then locked the door of his study with a second key. ‘Now, come see my new American treasures.’

As we trotted down the wooden staircase in King Henry’s Tower, Henry turned his mind to my last question. ‘Our father is afraid,’ he said, ‘because, in some eyes, our cousin Arbella has far more right to the English throne than our foreign-born father. A right strengthened when she chose to marry another royal cousin, William Seymour, with his own rightful claim to the throne.’

He rounded a carved newel post topped by a bowl of sturdy oak fruit. Our feet drummed down another short flight of stairs between the landings.

‘All the same,’ he said, ‘Cecil doesn’t think we need fear a popular uprising or other political disturbances on her behalf.’

‘Popular uprising? Is she so dangerous?’

Henry shrugged. ‘Our father believes she is, and that’s what matters. Don’t be deceived by his swaggering. Our family’s on sufferance here, Elizabella. And Arbella is the queen
manqué.’

‘Does Cecil tell you that?’

‘Not in so many words, but he has made me understandthat our chief strength as Stuarts lies in the promise of a stable dynasty.’ He paused with his hand on the crowning apple of another bowl of wooden fruit. ‘Our weakness,’ he said, ‘… is that the king is foreign-born. And all his surviving heirs are foreign-born – me, Baby Charles, you. The English may swear that they love us, but to many of them, we’re still foreign Scots!’