Why can’t I do anything?
Why?… why?… why?
The day after the funeral service for mother and child, held at Trinity church, Nicholas stands in the lying-in chamber at Grass Street. Now it’s just another empty room – a sloping floor that creaks when you walk on it, irregular pillars of oak holding up a low sagging ceiling, a small leaded window giving onto the lane, the shutters open for the first time in weeks.
Just another room.
He puts out one hand to touch the uneven plaster. He thinks of the recent nights he’s spent on the other side of this wall, straining his senses to catch Eleanor’s soft, feminine murmurs, longing to be with her. He stares at his splayed fingers pressed against the surface, barely recognizing them as his own. The room is silent now, empty. He could call to the wall for eternity and never receive a reply. Weak with grief, he lets go of the wall and sinks to his knees.
Just another room.
Someone else’s hand.
Someone else’s tragedy.
His gaze comes to rest on a patch of plaster beside the door frame, where he and Eleanor had planned to make a mark each birthday to record their child’s growth. They’d agreed to stop at thirteen. If it’s a boy, they’d decided, he’ll grow too fast. If it’s a girl, at thirteen she’ll think such fancies childish. Now the wall will stay unmarked for ever.
Time has become something ugly and distorted for him now. Minutes have become confused with years. Crouching by the door, he remembers the incredibly slow pace of their betrothal. Their parents had given them a year’s indulgence, to see if their attachment was anything but a foolish passing fever. When it had become clear it was not, the serious business had begun: acreages measured for the dowry, searches conducted to ensure there were no undeclared mortgages hanging over houses or holdings, no errant uncles with papist tendencies, no undisclosed cattle thieves amongst recent ancestors. Day passing slowly into day, with always another day to wait. It all seems so long ago now, yet at the same time it’s unfolding in his mind as though for the first time. Years, days, hours – how it is that time tricks you so?
The next day a letter arrives at Grass Street. He has Harriet read it to him because his eyes don’t seem able to focus the way they used to:
… the harvest is well in hand… your brother Jack is a tower of strength, as usual… your mother is well… she’s received the fine psalter you sent her and reads a psalm from it each night before we sleep. It looks expensive. You must be doing well. Eleanor’s father asks you to kiss his daughter for him. And the best of news: your sister-in-law has been safely delivered of another sturdy acorn.
4
Across the gentle slopes of the North Downs three men ride out to fly their hawks and bring home coney and pigeon for the pot. It’s early September, feels more like autumn. The air is still, the sky shroud-white. When the birds fly from the glove they instantly become mere darting shadows, almost lost against the trees. The world’s span has shrunk to the next hedgerow.
Down sunken lanes and across meadows strung with bejewelled spider-silk, past manor house and parish church, through fords that Caesar’s legions once muddied with their boots, the hunters follow a long, lazy circuit from Ewell through Epsom and back across Cheam Common. The fruit-pickers in the orchards appear from the mist like ghosts, hoping for a glimpse of them.
For these riders are no ordinary men. Servants hurry after them across the fields, bearing hampers of mutton and cheese, skins of the best Rhenish wine. This is not hunting as any humble man might imagine it.
‘’Tis beyond doubt, Master Robert, you have a fine bird there,’ says John Lumley to his nearest companion, as a sudden flurry of bloody feathers drifts on the slack air. ‘Your Juno is putting my Paris to shame.’
Lumley is the host of today’s agreeable expedition. His long, mournful Northumbrian face seems made for the weather, his deep shovel-cut beard glistens with dew. In addition to being patron of the College of Physicians’ chair of anatomy, Lumley is also the over-mortgaged owner of Nonsuch, the magnificent hunting lodge built in the rolling Surrey countryside by Elizabeth’s father, King Henry. Nonsuch. So beautiful there is none such place to match it. Nonpareil, as the Frenchies would have it. Prettier by far than Greenwich, more striking even than Cardinal Wolsey’s vast temple to vanity at Hampton Court. And what its owner really means, when he compliments young Robert Cecil on the quality of his falcon, is: I wonder if you’re training her to pluck out my heart, so you can steal Nonsuch from me and hand it to the queen as a gift? You think it would raise your stock in her estimation.
Just because you hunt with a fellow, it doesn’t mean you trust him. Not in these uncertain times.
Juno settles on her master’s outstretched glove with a blurred thrashing of her wings and a tinny peal of the little bells tied to her leather jesses.
‘Did you see how artfully she took her prey?’ Robert Cecil asks boastfully, reaching into his saddlebag and rewarding the bird with a morsel of raw rabbit flesh, while a servant runs across the muddy field to recover the corpse. ‘I’ll warrant my Juno can open up a body a deal more swiftly than even your friend Fulke Vaesy. And she doesn’t cost me forty pounds per annum, either.’
Lumley thinks, I wonder if you’ve also taught her to spy on me, count the size of the debts I owe the Crown. Save yourself the trouble – just ask your father.
In his seventy-first year, and by no means in the best of health after long and arduous service to his monarch, Robert’s father William Cecil sits upon his horse so comfortably that you’d think they’d been joined since birth, which in private moments the horse probably laments they have been. When lesser men wish to compliment William Cecil on how audaciously his falcon has plucked a pigeon out of the sky, or sent a coney tumbling stonedead through the grass, they do not cry, ‘Well done, William!’ Most call him ‘Your Grace’ or ‘my noble Lord Burghley’, the pre-eminent of his numerous titles. At Whitehall they call him ‘my Lord Treasurer’, which is his office of state. There’s only one person in all England who calls him whatever she pleases, and that is the queen. Mostly she calls him ‘Spirit’. Nicknames are a favourite game of hers. At court a nickname means you’ve arrived. At twenty-seven, Robert Cecil is still waiting for his. He considers it long overdue – along with his knighthood.
‘Is it true what I hear, Lord Lumley – that Sir Fulke is the greatest anatomist in all England?’ Robert asks casually.
‘I believe so, Master Robert.’
‘It must be most instructive – observing at such close quarters God’s miraculous handiwork. I should like to attend one of his lectures, if court duties afford me the leisure.’
‘The College would be honoured, I’m sure.’
Old Burghley chuckles. ‘Slicing a man to pieces on the dissection table… court business – much the same basket of apples, if you ask me! What say you, Lumley?’
Lumley, who has spent a lifetime at court bending to the wind of the queen’s changeable temper, merely smiles.
‘And who was the subject of Vaesy’s recent lecture, my lord?’ Robert Cecil asks. ‘Some hanged felon? It’s right, don’t you think, that those who refuse to be governed should give something back at the end? Lord knows, they thieve enough from us while they’re alive.’
‘A young boy – about four or five.’
‘Are we hanging children now?’ asks Burghley with a scowl.
‘A drowned vagrant, Your Grace, taken from the river. Of no name or consequence, as far as we could determine.’