At Nonsuch, John Lumley says to his wife Elizabeth, ‘He won’t have forgotten the slight, Mouse. It’ll fester in that scheming head of his like a pustule. I could kick myself for it.’
He calls her Mouse out of deep affection. A less mouse-like woman would be hard to imagine. Lizzy is twenty-five years his junior and as skilled as the chatelaine of a grand household should be. She wears her fair hair seemingly, beneath a white-linen coif, but her grey eyes glint with good humour and generosity. She buys trinkets for the chamber-maids when she goes to London. She treats the grooms, the kitchen scullions and the gardeners like friends. Lizzy Lumley is the perfect remedy for her husband’s northern chill – literally so, for she’s always chiding him about his reluctance to have the many Nonsuch hearths lit.
They are together in his reading chamber, a cosy room set off the great library. John is attending to his correspondence. Lizzy is at her needlework, a small white spaniel snoring contentedly on her lap. From the window the Lumleys can look down into the inner court, where a marble fountain in the form of a rearing horse flows with clear spring-water. The fountain is not just for show, the water being piped into the house so that the Lumleys may wash their hands under a spigot when they prepare for bed. No need for a servant to bring them bowls when they wake. When King Henry built Nonsuch, he built it for luxury.
‘What slight is that, Husband?’ asks Lizzy, looking up from her sewing. ‘And who won’t forget it?’
‘Do you remember in the summer I spoke of the little boy they took from the river – the drowned vagrant child?’
‘How could I forget, John?’
Indeed, how could she forget? The subject of children is one of the few thorns marring the otherwise-perfect bloom of their marriage. The other being her husband’s colossal debts to the Crown. When he’d told her of the drowned infant destined for Fulke Vaesy’s dissection table, she’d almost wept. Such talk of a young life cruelly ended brought back the ghostly presence at Nonsuch of the three infants borne by John’s late wife Jane, all dead in infancy, and the very real absence of any from her own womb to replace them.
‘When the Cecils last came hawking,’ John continues, ‘I somewhat carelessly mentioned that Sir Fulke’s lecture was about deformity in the limbs of crippled infants.’
‘Ah,’ sighs Lizzy, imagining the crook-backed Robert Cecil she knows: full of thin-skinned Protestant zeal for sniffing out insults to himself and the realm – especially to himself. ‘But that was ages ago. I’m sure by now he’ll have forgotten all about it,’ she says bravely. ‘Besides, you meant him no slight – did you?’
‘Intention is not the point, Mouse. You know what he’s like: for a Christian man, Robert Cecil has a strange understanding of mercy and forgiveness.’
‘Well, if anyone’s deserving of God’s mercy, it’s the poor little mite Sir Fulke cut up into pottage-meat.’
‘You’re right, of course, Mouse.’
‘Anyway, why do you bring it up now?’
‘His father’s written to me again,’ he says, lifting the letter as if it’s a particularly soiled rag, ‘regarding the Henrician loan. It set me thinking.’
‘Oh, that,’ says Lizzy despondently. ‘I thought the queen had agreed to another easement of terms.’
‘She has, but that won’t stop Robert Cecil trying to steal Nonsuch from me and making her a present of it.’
John Lumley’s fears are warranted. He’s inherited Nonsuch from his late father-in-law, Henry FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel. One of old Arundel’s parting gifts was to embroil him in a plan to buy up on the open market an ancient loan the late King Henry had made to a cartel of Florentine bankers. ‘We’ll cream a percentage off the interest by taking on the paper risk,’ Arundel had told him. ‘After all, who can you trust in this world if not a Florentine banker?’
But the Florentines had paid just one instalment, and that was thirty years ago. They haven’t answered Lumley’s letters since. With Arundel now in the grave, John Lumley is the sole debtor. It’s only his friendship with the queen that forces Burghley to sign these waivers on the interest.
‘All I know is that John Lumley is more than a match for little crook-backed Robert Cecil,’ says Lizzy to the snoring spaniel. ‘Isn’t that so, Nug?’
‘You’re a wondrous boon to me, Mouse. I’d go down without you – you know that?’
‘The queen is steadfast in her friendships, John,’ Lizzy assures him with a smile. ‘She’ll not abandon you, whatever the Cecils tell her.’
Through the window John Lumley watches the wind snatching at the water in the courtyard fountain. The spray makes the marble horse look as though it’s in full gallop, barely a stride away from dashing itself into oblivion against the white ashlar walls of Nonsuch. He can almost feel the fatal impact of sinew and bone against stone. ‘Aye, Mouse,’ he says. ‘But these days there are so many plots against her. I fear she cannot risk being as steadfast as once she was.’
Lizzy fixes him with a concerned eye. ‘There’s nothing else, is there, John – other than the money? You’d tell me if there was?’
Lumley doesn’t answer at first, though by the tone of Lizzy’s voice, he ought to. He just stares at the fountain. Then he says, almost to himself, ‘No, Mouse. Nothing. But that won’t deter Robert Cecil.’
Elise dreams of the angel again.
First comes the blinding sunlight, then the silhouette of a woman stepping out of the trees on that country lane. Next, the blessed relief as the angel lifts Ralph from her shoulders and hugs him to her breast, soothing his fractious mewling. ‘Rest awhile, child,’ the angel says. ‘What are you doing out here alone with such a burden?’
‘I am running away from my mother, who is a bawd and often in drink,’ Elise replies in her dream. ‘It is not safe to live with her any more.’
‘But where are you running to, child?’
‘Ever since I was a little girl, my mother has told me stories of a grand house and a rich relative, in a place called Cuddington,’ Elise says, reciting the tale Mary had told her so often, before her descent into arak-induced silence. ‘That is where we’re going. But God has crippled my little brother Ralph because I talk too much, so as a penance I’m taking him there on my shoulders. We shall sleep on a goose-down mattress and not have to eat scraps that make my insides hurt.’
‘But I know an even better place,’ the angel tells her.
Waking from the dream, Elise remembers wanting so much to believe the angel that she’d never thought twice about following her.
In the angel’s house she’d been baptized in a tub of warm soapy water. Elise had never had a bath before. At first she refused to climb in, terrified it had no bottom and that she would sink without trace into the depths. With almost unbearable gentleness, the angel had calmed her, bathing the right side of Elise’s face where the skin was gnarled like tree bark from the time that customer of her mother’s had set fire to the truckle bed.
When the angel had come to her again a few days later with the news it was time to move elsewhere, Elise had offered not the slightest objection.
Why should she? Who on earth would not trust an angel to lead you to heaven?