The King's Daughter (46 page)
These heavy beasts would march ahead of us into the Royal Chapel on our wedding day, the trumpets and cheers truly for them, not us. Then, I feared, they would follow us into our wedding bed and hunker down between us on the sheets.
I glanced at Frederick. He stared straight ahead at the far end of the gallery. In the uncertain torchlight, his eyes were shadowed.
I felt moment of pure terror. Without him, I would be only a shard of my former self. A tree trying to grow with only half its roots.
Is this the underlying truth of love? I suddenly asked myself. This new possibility of loss? And seeing suddenly how many new forms loss can take?
‘Let’s go back!’ I swung around and headed towards my lodgings. Our startled attendants scattered and pressed themselves back against the wooden walls to let us pass.
Frederick followed without question. I was grateful for his silence. I could not have explained that I had suddenly seen
trowies
waiting for us in the darkness at the end of the gallery.
England had not had a royal wedding since my great-grand-cousin Mary Tudor married Philip of Spain more than half a century ago. Boats were unloading at Whitehall Stairs after coming upstream from the Revels Office at St Johns. I watched them arrive with timber planks, scaffolds, rolls of painted cloths, vices, wires, metal, odd shapes of wood, glue. Crates labelled ‘Rocks, Mounts, Battlements, Trees, Clouds and Houses.’ Whole cities, heavens and underworlds waited to sprout in theatres and halls. Armies were carried ashore in crates. Monsters and demons arrived packed into wicker baskets.
In Scotland Yard, beyond the Chapel, I saw a forest of raw wood growing into the supports for all those bales of painted cloth, just to celebrate my marriage. Men hammered, sawed, cursed, and shouted instructions to each other as they stretched sails of cloud-painted canvas and nailed them taut to frames. I smelled the burnt hair stink of the hot glue pots. Wooden columns leaned against the walls of the orchards. A shimmer of gold leaf drifted in the air.
In one corner of the yard, a man wearing a tasselled Italian cap moved his head forwards and back like a pigeon, as he touched in the shadows of painted swags of golden fruit and drew back to squint at a bunch of golden grapes.
Songs and poems piled up in sliding heaps on desks and tables in offices, weighed down by fulsome dedications from hopeful poets.
… Eliza goes to breed and bring
Forth to the light, sons of a noble kind,
Whose worth one day shall make us Britons sing…
A castle was growing across the river in preparation for Sir Francis Bacon’s masque rumoured to enact a battle between a Christian Navy and the Turks. Another castle sprouted on the Court side.
I would be forced to attend, though I found a mock-battle offensive as a marriage celebration. I would have to pretend to smile at him and pretend to accept his humble respect and this supposed gift of his, which felt like an evil portent. I would have to watch him trying to oil his way into my father’s favour and his cousin Cecil’s shoes. Given the whispers of Cecil’s corruption that Bacon has started, how did he have the gall? Unless he was acting on my father’s orders when he killed Henry.
Being so close to escape, I was overwhelmed by fears of how I might be prevented. Though my father now acted as if he meant to marry me to Frederick, I could not be certain. If he had ordered his own son to be killed, I could be certain of nothing. I found myself tasting my food with extra care, trying to detect a foreign taint. Every time my stomach ached, I waited for the griping pains and for my heart to falter. A man who said that he could not feel love and who wanted only to be amused might well entertain himself with a fatal game of cat and mouse.
Sunday. The last asking of the banns in the Chapel. No one objected to the match, at least, not aloud, not even my mother. After the suspected Catholic plot to assassinate Frederick, thecity of London had mustered five hundred musketeers to guard the ceremony and celebrations, and a supervising alderman. Shouts of their drilling carried each day from Scotland Yard.
Frederick seemed far out of reach. Our thoughts had to leap across the tops of playing cards and wine glasses. We were never left alone together. Avid eyes constantly judged how we looked at each other. Ears assessed our tone of voice. Even when they seemed to be busy with some other matter, people watched. Behind our backs, they discussed every nuance of our actions together. Careful as they were, no one could resist the game. I heard them.
‘But he’s much too young and small-timbered to carry out the duties of a husband…’
‘In truth, she’s wilful…’
‘But they seem pleased enough with each other…’
Pssst. Pssst.
Though it was never said in my hearing, I knew what lay beneath this chatter – the planting of an heir for Protestant Europe.
Frederick and I both feared the new darkness that surrounded us after Henry died. Both of us felt how much had changed since that moment of our first meeting, when Henry had grinned at me afterwards and clapped Frederick on the shoulder and called him ‘brother'. Then, Frederick had clutched my hand for safety. Now he was my safety line anchored at the far end to a piece of solid ground I could not yet see.
Kept apart and constantly observed, we learned to woo with our hands.
Sometimes, when we sat thirty feet apart at dinner or across from each other in a crowded room, our hands played a delicious secret game. Not seeming to look at him, I would curl my fingers and lay my hand on my sleeve with my forefinger pointing at the creases of my sleeve. As if by accident, Frederick would do the same. Then, seeming to talk to the nobleman beside him, he would lift his hand and touch his chin. Talking just as animatedly to my neighbour, I touched my own chin. We found ourselves so much in harmony that we sometimes guessed the other’s intent and dropped our napkins or scratched our noses at exactly the same time.
The king now seemed fixed on the match. My Frederick was a marvel, a wizard of seduction. My father hung on his words. He made him sit beside him on the dais and patted his cheek while Carr sulked. I suspected that Frederick’s New Year’s gift to the king might have played some part in his sudden rise in favour.
It was a bottle carved from a single agate. When giving it, Frederick also promised my father… his father-to-be… more gems from the mines of Bohemia, where, Frederick said, there was talk of making him the next king.
In the false, feverish gaiety that had replaced deep mourning, I didn’t know whether or not to believe him. I didn’t care. Cecil would have learned at once whether Frederick spoke the truth about becoming king in Bohemia or was merely employing new diplomatic skills to hold the king firm in his intent to let us marry. Truth or lie, it didn’t matter, so long as my father chose to believe it.
When Frederick was engaged elsewhere and I was not needed to stand while my new gowns are fitted, I rode in the Park or wandered at a loss, driving Anne to distraction. I could take only so much silk grosgrain, tawny velvet, whalebone and fur lining. And so many beaver hats, fringes, tassels, spangles and brocaded flowers, and so many miles of gold and silver Spanish and Venetian lace.
One day, drawn by the nutty smell of browning butter and the bitter-sweet tang of burnt sugar, I visited the kitchens. Knives thumped down. Lids rattled shut. Hands were wiped on aprons as everyone stopped working to bow or curtsey. I admired a table of moulded jellies in the shapes of castles.
The men and women in the kitchen stood by their chopped blanched almonds, earthenware crocks of half-stoned olives, pickled cucumbers and salted spinach, as impatient as leashed dogs. Frozen in mid-act some held sprigs of sage and rosemary and handfuls of currants, lemons to be sliced. I felt them waiting for me to go so they could get on with their urgent work of preparing for my marriage. I had interrupted what truly mattered. I smiled and left again. I was a nuisance, in the way of the preparations for my own wedding.
As I walked in the privy garden one evening while Frederick was dining with my father, I heard a counter-tenor practising on the other side of the wall. He climbed towards his highest note. Fell off. Tried again. And again. Then he cursed, thinking himself alone.
Heaven the first hath thrown away
Her weary weed of mourning hue
And waits Eliza’s wedding-day
In starry-spangled gown of blue…
An earlier self would have trilled ‘Bluuuuue!’ and flung it back over the wall in cheerful, mocking challenge. Now, Thames shook a warning finger at me. This poor singer might have to sing in front of me and the court. I must not be cruel, even in jest. More than that, I was afraid to jostle life in any way, lest I disturb its smooth running towards my marriage.
The cost of love – learning to behave myself.
I wandered. My life felt unreal. Who was that creature in the glass? That little face above all that sea of cloth-of-silver? Where was my wolf?
With no further help from me, the day arrived.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, 14 FEBRUARY 1613.
So many of the populace were curious to see me that I was to walk the long way round to the Royal Chapel. I stood in the great hall waiting to set out, with my hair loose, almost to my waist, interwoven with gold spangles, pearls, precious stones and diamonds. A gold coronet set with diamonds and pearls had been wired in place on the top of my head. I braced the muscles of my neck against the weight that tried to tip my head back.
‘Worth nine hundred thousand crowns, the royal jewels!’ my father announced at large, in case anyone had failed to notice the coronet’s richness or his lavish spending on his daughter. His own clothes, however, made me uneasy, even now.
Oddly and ominously, he himself seemed dressed more for hunting than for this spectacle of splendour. A loose Spanish cloak, his stockings sagging around his knees. But the feather in his hat was anchored by the glittering diamond that his men had dredged out of the Thames mud.
My dress – more proof of his lavishness – was cloth of silver, its sleeves sewn with more diamonds. Neither whiteto proclaim my virtue nor black to mourn my brother, but a bright metallic silk embroidered with still more gold and silver. Diamonds flashed on my sleeves whenever I moved my hands. I stood at the heart of a chilly fire. In spite of the cold February air, a drop of sweat ran down between the tops of my shoulder blades before being dammed by buckram and whalebone.
‘You will dazzle and amaze the eyes of the beholders,’ said Anne. She and the other ladies who would carry my train wore white satin gowns embroidered with more silver and jewels.
It began to seem that this marriage was going to take place after all.
Our procession formed with the usual delays and false starts that plague such moments. The Lord Chamberlain and assorted secretaries sent grooms running in every direction with messages, throwing off bow waves of purpose. They debated precedence, waved people first here and then there. I stood in the still centre, both there and not there. I felt a faint tickle of nausea and the need to sit down. I needed to bury my face in Belle’s soft fur.
My old guardian, Lord Harington stopped in front of me, wearing his familiar look of puzzled concern.
‘Your grace,’ he began. Then he looked at me more closely. He touched my hand. ‘All will be well,’ he said. ‘The Duke, your brother, and I will serve as your hounds and lead the pack out. You have only to ride after us.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice. ‘Your mother is arrived.’
She stood turned away from me. Her dress was no more reassuring than my father’s. She wore plain white and almost no jewellery.
Then off we went. Lord Harington, with the two bridemen, Baby Charles and the Earl of Northampton, flanking him.
Then me, the tiny nugget of flesh encased in Protestant union and a fortune in gems, dragging a silver train.
My father and mother followed behind me, he in hisflapping Spanish cape, sagging stockings and jewelled hat, the great diamond rescued from the river, now perched above his right eye. My mother in undecked white like a ghost.
Through the palace, we went: through the Presence Chamber, the Guard Chamber, the Banqueting House, out by the Court Gate. People sprouted everywhere, in windows, doorways, leaning out of staircases, even on rooftops. Shouts and cheers rained down on us. Blessings were thrown like flowers. I tried to give them the smiles I knew they wanted from me. Radiant Thames on the way to meet her Rhine.
We progressed along Whitehall itself, where more people hung from every window, pushing for a better view until I feared that someone would fall. They jostled at the sides of the street, straining to see us.
An old woman pushed forward suddenly, ducking under elbows, and knelt to touch my silver hem. I raised my hand to stop the man-at-arms who would have beaten her back. We passed the Jewel House, under a window where a very old man hung perilously far out, shouting ‘God bless you, your grace! God bless you!’
After walking almost from Charing Cross to the westernmost part of Whitehall, we passed along a gallery to the great chamber stairs. The storm of cheers and shouts still pounded at us as we passed through the great chamber, into the lobby, and then, at last, through the quiet of a closet that led to the Chapel.
When we reached the Chapel door, I heard Lady Harington behind me, scolding my attendant ladies, pushing them aside and taking control of my train herself. Even at such a moment, her severity made me smile. My lady guardian sounded as determined as I was that nothing go wrong.
But as I entered the chapel door, I faltered. In the middle of the Chapel, a large scaffold had been built. My eyes counted. Six steps. I saw Sir Everard Digby climbing six steps to his death. I remembered my own conviction that I too was about to be beheaded. Then the murmur stirred by my entrance roused me. I blinked away the image and watched Baby Charles mount the scaffold with the Earl. I followed.