Читать книгу The Noble Assassin - Christie Dickason - Страница 18

Chapter 11

LONDON, JANUARY 1621

I turn my horse left out of St Martin’s Lane. The house stands ahead of me on the north side of the Strand, as lanky and narrow-shouldered as I remembered it. I have never liked Bedford House, built in London for my husband by his father in the days of the Old Queen. It strikes me as unfriendly, with its long roof, seven steep sharp gables and the empty posturing of a mock-military turret tower. It looks south across the Strand, past York House, home of the Lord Keeper Francis Bacon, to the Thames. Only being near to the river is in its favour.

I can hear the distant shouts of boatmen from the different water stairs as I let my horse pick his way through the frozen rubbish in the street. After passing under the arch of the gatehouse at the far end of the house front, my small party clops into a large, irregular, open courtyard.

A tall, fair-haired man bursts out of the higgledypiggledy wing on my left. ‘I hear that a new horse has arrived for the stables! And it’s not half-dead, neither.’

‘Sir Kit!’ I cry.

He runs to take my horse as if he were still a groom, but I’d had Christopher Hawkins made up to knight as soon as he was old enough – one of the first favours I asked after arriving in London with the new queen. The young groom who had ridden with me to Berwick is now my London Master of Horse. When he married the year after his advancement, I persuaded Edward to give him the lease of a small house in the tangle of streets that abut the west wall of Bedford House, along with a small annual income. So far as I know, he survives the paltry stipend granted to him by Edward by teaching the aspiring sons of successful London merchants how to ride.

Now I look down at the delight in his face and watch him stroke my horse’s nose with a broad callused hand. Here is one of the few men I know I can trust.

In the big entrance hall, steward, clerk, secretary, cook, house grooms, chamber grooms and maids wait to greet me. It is a smaller company than it had once been, even allowing for absent scullery grooms and gardeners. But a London house can supply itself from the city bakers, fishmongers, butchers, brewers, vintners, poulterers and pigmen, and does not need its own. It need not pretend to be a self-feeding country estate.

The steward looks ill, I note. I will ask later if he needs to give up his position.

I hand my fur-lined gloves to my maid. Agnes Hooper unhooks my travel cloak and takes it away to dry. I look about me.

I’m pleasantly surprised. Bedford House feels drier than either Chenies or Moor Park, and far more welcoming than when I had first seen it as a new young wife. When we married, my husband was lodged there with his aunt, the Countess of Warwick, for whom I had been third choice.

Raised from slumber by my arrival, the house smells of the lavender and rosemary used against moths and of hastily applied beeswax polish. But there is not the odour I remember from other visits of mustiness and mice. The entrance hall and chief receiving room, like much of the house, are half-empty, their paintings and furniture having been sold to help pay Edward’s fine. But the smoke rises straight in the fireplaces. The wooden floors are warmer underfoot than the stone floors of Chenies and Moor Park, the low-ceilinged rooms easier to heat.

The steward, who bears the unfortunate name of Mudd, escorts me to the chief sleeping chamber. Looking through open doors as we pass, I see that some of the upholstered chairs and stools still wear their protective linen covers. But then, I had given very little warning of my arrival.

At the threshold of the great bedchamber, I stop. For a moment, I think I will not be able to enter. The ornately carved bed, with its newly brushed silk hangings and velvet coverlet embroidered with harsh, slightly tarnished gold threads, wrenches open the door of memory.

My wedding night at Bedford House: duty on both our parts. Impatience on his. Pain. Sticky slime.

I had counted off the month. I bled. I had failed to conceive.

Tried again. Again, not with child.

I felt sick in the mornings, but not in the right way. Again. Still not with child.

My husband’s eyes were cold and resolute when he bedded me.

I must not want to conceive, he said. I wasted my vital force in court frivolities. I unwomaned myself with my pen, by aspiring to have a manly soul. I loved the Queen and played the man with her so that I was no longer a true woman. I murdered my babes with my mind before they could grow.

Again I bled.

I conceived but lost the babe soon after.

My guilt grew plainer in his eyes.

Again we mated.

Again, I failed. I disappointed and disgusted him in every way.

And my money was going fast.

It was because I could not give him an heir that I had signed over to him my own marriage portion, my own money, my protection. Because I was still young and hoped to be valued, even if not loved.

In spite of many offers, I was not tempted to repeat the carnal experience with another man. I hid my distaste with flirtation and outrageous talk. For the next several years, I was that rare case, a woman who was as virtuous in life as she was painted in verse.

‘I will sleep in my old parlour,’ I say now. ‘A smaller bed will do.’

Mudd disappears to arrange it.

I summon Sir Kit to the little parlour and call to a groom to bring us warmed wine and tobacco pipes.

Kit brings with him a faint odour of horse and cold fresh air. His new leather jacket creaks as he shifts in his chair, smiling at me. I feel that he would rather be in motion, but will sit for the moment to please me.

‘Now, tell me all the gossip,’ I order. ‘How has London entertained itself in my long absence?’

‘Very ill, without you.’

‘Kit! Please don’t turn courtier on me or I’ll have your knighthood revoked. Tell me the worst.’

‘Lord Bacon is on trial for corruption. His old enemy Coke leads the prosecution.’ He grins with glee. His firm chin wears a stubble that it had lacked on our ride to Warwick, but otherwise, he looks no older. ‘With Killer Coke sniffing after him, he’s done for.’ Coke had also prosecuted the Gunpowder Plotters. All of them were executed.

I pass Kit a long-stemmed clay pipe and light my own with a coal from the fire.

‘Rumour . . .’ He draws on his pipe. ‘. . . whispers that Buckingham already has his eye on Bacon’s house, York Place.’

‘My neighbours do not improve,’ I murmur.

‘Buckingham still climbs in the King’s favour.’ ‘That may not be entirely bad.’ I had plans for Buckingham.

We finish our pipes with the special relish of wickedness. Smoking defies authority. The King loathes the ‘stinking weed’ tobacco. My friend Henry Goodyear had written that courtiers at Whitehall are forced to huddle in furtive groups in the open air if they want to share the fashion for smoking pipes.

Sir Kit drops his voice. ‘Buckingham now controls all access to the King . . . and I know this from more than gossip during riding lessons.’ He takes my mug and warms my wine again with the poker. ‘He drives others from the court.’

‘My friends?’

‘Southampton.’ The poker hisses in his mug. ‘Cranborne and Suffolk . . .’

‘So many?’ All these men were old friends. Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton. Lord Cranborne, the son of my old protector and friend, Robert Cecil.

‘And what of my dear old letter-writing friend, Sir Henry Goodyear?’

‘He’s with the King, in all things. Sings the praises of a Spanish marriage for the Prince.’

Perhaps to be trusted, perhaps not.

The number of safe allies at court has dwindled. ‘And Arundel?’ I ask. ‘Does he still chase after antiquities with his old hunger?’

From a prominent Catholic family, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel had survived the taint of Catholic treason after the Gunpowder Treason against the King in 1605. Who could blame him if he found art safer than politics?

Kit sets the poker carefully on a trivet. ‘He now woos Buckingham.’

‘And so must we all, from what you say.’ I upturn my mug and drain it with an unladylike gusto that would have made my husband purse his lips and look up to Heaven.

Neither of us asks after the other’s family. Kit’s wife, like me, has failed to breed, and like me grows near the end of her child-bearing years.

‘Now I will inspect the gardens, before it grows too dark.’ I call the steward.

His face bleaches when I say what I wish to do. ‘Tonight?’ He swallows.

‘Is there some difficulty?’

‘None, madam.’

The house groom kneeling by the fireplace grows intent on placing a new log. I glance at Kit but he is engrossed in buttoning his coat.

The Bedford House gardens run in a long narrow belt along the wall, beyond the outbuildings at the far end of the big courtyard and the stable yard to its right. Beyond them and our wall lies the open space of Covent Garden – forty acres of rough land and patches of wilderness. Standing below the garden wall, I can hear the voices of people using the diagonal track that cuts across the Long Acre between Drury Lane at Holborn and St Martin’s Lane near the Royal Mews.

At first, I see no cause for the steward’s ill-concealed distress. The box hedges in the small knot garden just behind the house have been neatly trimmed. No weeds or other disorder explain his unease. I head for the arched gate to my right that leads to our kitchen gardens, orchard and 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.’