He had almost reached the lower door that would let him out into the Strand, when his eye was caught by something incongruous to this springtime garden; a patch of orange-tawny that seemed to belong rather to the last warmth of St. Martin’s summer, glinting behind a mass of tall growing water plants and drooping apple branches. He halted in his tracks, and being of an enquiring mind, went to investigate.
The patch of orange-tawny proved to be the back folds of a small girl’s gown, and the wearer, sitting on her heels on the edge of the ditch, was apparently engaged in staring out of countenance a large and peculiarly repulsive toad who sat under a dock leaf and stared back. An autumn-coloured child, sitting very still, her thin attentive little body arched forward, her small brown hands folded in her lap, so intent upon the toad that she was quite unconscious of any presence beside her. For a few moments young Ralegh stood as still as she, holding aside the apple spray that had all but hidden her from view, and looking down at her. The little absorbed figure appealed to him oddly, and the vague springtime discontent of his mood crystallised into the desire to make her notice him. It was the merest whim of the April moment, but he was a man who acted on his whims. The question was how to catch her attention without startling her or the toad and so spoiling a pretty idyll. The tune which Fulke Greville had played on the lute a while back still lingered in his mind, and he puckered his lips into a low liquid whistling, not unlike the whitethroat’s in its quality.
The first few bars of Greensleeves whistled close above her made Bess sit back on her heels and glance up quickly. She was looking at a tall young man in a wonderful doublet of golden green, the colour of spring itself, who stood holding aside a blossoming apple spray from which a few crushed petals fell under his heedless hand, and looking down at her with the bluest eyes she had ever seen. A man like a drawn sword, like a dark flame in the sunlight. After her first startled gasp, she sat quite still, gazing up at him; and as she gazed, something in her small flat breast found wings and flew from her to the young man, that never in all her life returned to her again. If she had been a little dog she would have lain at his feet inviting him to trample on her; being a small girl, she sat and dimpled at him, her whole face shimmering with delight.
After they had surveyed each other in silence a few moments, the young man doffed his hat with the utmost gravity, sweeping it so low that the peacock’s feather in it whispered silkenly across her hand, and replacing it very much on the back of his head, sat down beside her, still without a word. Bess accepted his coming with a tiny movement of welcome, then turned her attention back to the toad. But either the toad had after all been disturbed by the new arrival, or the combined stares of Bess and the young man were too much for him, and he no longer seemed completely at his ease. Little tremors began to run through his body; he stirred uneasily in the shadow of the dock leaf, and then — was no longer there. His dive had been so swift that no eye could follow it; only the widening ripples in the ditch bottom told where he had disappeared.
‘Oh!’ Bess spoke for the first time. ‘He is gone!’
‘Do you mind?’ enquired the young man, turning to look at her. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’
‘Not really. Tom Sidney showed him to me last week, and this is but the second time I have seen him. Tom said maybe he was an alderman who somebody magicked into a toad for a grudge they bore him.’
‘We haven’t missed but one alderman lately, and he was eaten by the Lioness at the Tower,’ said the young man regretfully. Then, seeming struck by an idea, he added: ‘He might of course be a foreign princeling; no one keeps count of those, and princes are much more susceptible to enchantment than aldermen. You did not chance to notice if he was wearing a crown?’
Bess shook her head positively. ‘No, he was not.’
‘It is a grey world ... Ah well, there are other possibilities. He may be the Queen’s head cook who has met with reverses, or an enchanter who mingled the wrong spell in a moment of absentmindedness — or a poor devil of a soldier of fortune under a cloud, in which case he has my heartfelt sympathy as one sufferer to another.’
‘Are you a soldier of fortune under a cloud?’
For the first time he smiled, a swift and flashing smile, but rueful. ‘You could call me so, small mistress.’
Bess gazed at him pitifully. She knew something about being under clouds, and her faith in her new friend was unshaken and unshakeable. ‘Whatever it is,’ she said with the utmost firmness, ‘I do not believe you did it!’
‘Thank you. It — is not that sort of cloud.’
She said nothing, but her whole thin body and little eager face were one sympathetic question-mark that could not be denied.
‘Oh — lack of funds and lack of influence, and banging my head against circumstances until it sings like a beehive on St. Benedict’s Eve, trying to make the Queen’s Grace listen to me, and —’ The young man broke off with a laugh. ‘Nay, what am I talking about? You would not understand.’
Bess’s eyes were fixed on his face, gravely beseeching. ‘Indeed, I understand a great deal! I am all but eleven, and very sensible for my age. My Lord Burleigh says so.’
The young man surveyed her consideringly. ‘Does he so? Well then, give me proof of it. Have you ever heard of the possibility of a North-West passage to Cathay?’
‘Oh yes! Sir Martin Frobisher is going to discover it, and when he has discovered it, all the spices and silks of the East will be able to come by a shorter way, and so they will be cheaper in the London shops, and that will annoy Spain.’
‘You have it in a hazel husk,’ agreed the young man gloomily.
Bess noticed the gloom. ‘Do you not want to annoy Spain?’
‘Yes — I do, I do!’
She was puzzled. ‘But if Sir Martin Frobisher is going to discover the passage —’
‘God’s life! It is not his to discover! It is mine! Mine and my brother Humphrey’s!’ the young man burst out in swift indignation. He broke off a narcissus flower growing beside him, and beat it lightly on his open palm, glaring. ‘We always planned to find it, Humphrey and I. Humphrey tried once before to win letters patent from the Queen, but he had no success. I was but just started at Oxford, then, and the poor old lad’s not one to carry things through on his own, so ‘twas not surprising. But this time ‘twas another matter; this time he had me to load for him, and we put all the evidence together in a book and called it A Discourse for a Discovery of a New Passage to Cathay, and took it to the Queen’s Grace together.’
‘She did not like it?’
‘Oh, she liked it well enough.’ His young voice was suddenly weary. ‘She was greatly impressed with it — we knew she must be; it was bound to carry conviction. That was why she gave the search to Sir Martin Frobisher; because she said Humphrey had not the name for being either a leader or a navigator — which is damnably true.’
‘But you?’ suggested Bess softly, after a pause.
‘Me? I am only Walter Ralegh, a creature of no account. I still have to prove my sword before the Queen will entrust me with such a venture.’
Bess hesitated, then laid a small consoling hand for an instant on his knee. ‘But one day she will,’ she said. Surely, oh surely, one day the scales would fall from the Queen’s eyes, and she would see that this was the best of all her knights. ‘One day she is bound to; and then you will go to find it — and take Humphrey with you.’
‘Frobisher will have gained the Passage by then.’
‘You could always search for something else,’ said Bess, who knew as well as he that it is the search, more than the finding, that matters.
Her words acted like a charm, dissolving the barrier between man’s world and child’s. He turned and sat forward, arms laid across knees, vivid blue eyes fixed on her face, and burst into a spate of eager words, with as little thought of the dozen years dividing them as there had been between himself and Humphrey. ‘Aye, and I will, one day! It is full time and running over, that some soul fol
lowed John Cabot’s lead, to make good our claim in the New World! Every day the Dons strike deeper into the West Indies and the Orinoco country, carving an empire for themselves in the South; and every day France does the same in the North, and what do we? We sit on our haunches and twiddle our thumbs and belch! Save for a merry handful of fishermen and pirates we might not know that there is any world under bright Heaven but the old one! If the Queen’s England is to keep place and power among the nations, the Queen must have a greater Indies than Philip of Spain, and somebody must venture to win it for her. And God’s sweet life, what a venturing! A whole new world for the seeking through!’ With a swift movement, he thrust a hand into the breast of his doublet, and brought forth something which he held out to her on his palm, like an eager boy. ‘See, this came from the New World. My brother Humphrey gave it to me, years ago.’
In the brown palm, as Bess leaned forward, lay a tiny face — no, a mask, for there was nothing of humanity in it — carved from rose-quartz. Such a small thing to hold so much of awe and beauty, to speak so clearly of the unknown, the far country. ‘May I touch?’ she asked, her glance fleeting upward, then down again.
‘You can hold it, if you like.’
Bess advanced her hand, then hesitated, hovering it a moment over the tiny, terrible mask, then drew it back and glancing up again, shook her head. It was as though the thing itself had denied her. It was not for touching; not for Bess’s touching at all events.
A spate of words was pouring from the young man beside her; for Ralegh was now fairly launched on the subject of his heart. He was of the true minstrelsy, to whom the power is given to kindle the listener from their own fire; and sitting in the ditch, he declared to the child sitting beside him, his dream of colonisation, of exploration and empire building. The dream of a man of action lit through with a poet’s vision that transmuted its whole fabric into something infinitely more shining. And to Bess, caught up, dazzled and entranced, the ditch and the apple trees and the high sailing clouds dissolved away into the country of her companion’s dream. A country of wide green plains mazed by the tracks of the light-footed deer, of great rivers whose falls, seven times taller than the steeple of the tallest church in Christendom, filled their rainbowed gorges with a thunder of bells in their falling; of forests of flowering trees among whose branches there sang and fluttered birds of white and crimson and carnation ... A country beyond the sunset, yet not strange; for in some way that she neither understood nor questioned, but accepted joyfully, it lay as the Island of White Birds did, just beyond the wind-swayed shadows and the singing bird in the damson tree.
How long the enchanted hour lasted she never knew; it ended with a sharp pattering among the broad dock leaves, a scent rising like incense from the earth, and all around them, the shining lances of the next shower. The glory faded, and her companion was scrambling to his feet, the rose-quartz mask already restored to the breast of his doublet.
She sat among her outflung skirts, and blinked at him, not quite returned from the far place to which his spell-binding had carried her. ‘Run!’ he said. ‘Run indoors, or you will be soaked. Lord! It is later than I thought; I must be shogging or I shall miss supper.’
He was turning carelessly away as he spoke, and suddenly half crying, she did not know why, Bess gathered herself inelegantly together, and ran. Behind her as she scurried up the path, she heard the lower door slam, as Ralegh went to seek his waiting supper. The rain was already slackening as she reached the door into the courtyard, and she turned with a hand raised to the latch, half hoping that he might come back. But the moments passed, and he did not come. Only something of the glory he had conjured up remained behind him, under the apple trees in the shining rain.
Ralegh went his way, wondering a little at first what had possessed him to pour out his dream to the little maid in Lady Sidney’s garden; and by the time he reached his lodging in the Temple, forgetting that he had done so at all.
But Bess remembered.
Chapter 3 - The Triumvirate
BESS saw no more of Ralegh during that visit. She did not expect to; the shared hour among the dock leaves had been a thing complete and perfect, rounded on itself with no loose end to trail out into the life of every day.
Her visit being ended, she was duly returned to the stepmother who was inclined to be heavy-handed; and it was nine years before Westminster knew her again. She grew up very uneventfully, at first with her stepmother, later with Arthur and his wife at Paulersbury; later still, having reached years of discretion, at Beddington with her Uncle Francis Carew who had adopted Nicholas as his heir. The Throckmorton family were still, if not actually under a cloud, certainly not in favour, and the death of her cousin Francis, hanged at Tyburne for treason and popery in 1584 did nothing to bring even the Protestant branch of the family into better odour. Their ways lay far from the Court, and Bess’s way lay with theirs. She grew up very much to pattern, mastering all those arts from playing the lute to lancing boils, which became a gentlewoman; and failed to conform in only one thing: that at the unheard of age of nineteen, she was still unwed and seemed likely to remain so.
It was not for lack of asking, either. Having no particular beauty of feature, she was possessed of a warm and shadowy charm and the beauty of motion that made her tall rather thin body seem always to move to unheard music, as a reed bed when the wind blows over. Two perfectly respectable matches, Uncle Francis could have arranged for her; and the young man in each case most willing; but neither time had Bess been willing at all, and since Uncle Francis was unmarried and found it pleasant to have her for the Mistress of his house, he had made no attempt to force her.
But married or single, Bess was not destined for long to be the Mistress of Beddington. In her nineteenth spring she went for a while to be with Lady Sidney, who was newly widowed and sorely in need of the comfort and companionship which Mary, with the cares of a great house and a young family, could not give her. Lady Sidney was, as she always had been, a close personal friend of the Queen’s, and so it was that before the summer was out, Mistress Throckmorton was become one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour.
And so, after nine years, she met Walter Ralegh again.
She had heard of him in those years. Who had not? Only a few weeks after her first encounter with him she had heard that he was newly released from Newgate on promise of future good behaviour, after serving there six days for causing a breach of the peace by sealing up a friend’s beard and moustache with wax to stop him talking. Rumours followed of wild service in Ireland, from which he returned with his sword proven, a Captain’s commission and a reputation for reckless courage combined with ruthlessness that was remarkable, even in his day. Tidings reached her of his embassages to William of Orange and the Duc d’Alençon in the Queen’s service; of Royal gifts and Royal favour; Durham Palace to be his town house, green acres in Ireland, a knighthood, the Lord Wardenship of the Stanneries, the Captaincy of the Queen’s Guard. Word of expeditions to the New World, fitted out and financed by a man who yet himself remained behind at Court. Word also of his increasing unpopularity among ordinary folk, as a man too rich, too quickly raised to power, too insufferably proud. But she had held him in thought always as the companion who had sat with her in the ditch at the bottom of Lady Sidney’s garden, and declared unto her a far country. She had not allowed for changes; and changes there had been, in the years that had raised a young, eager soldier of fortune to be the Queen’s favourite and the Captain of her Bodyguard. The ruthlessness had deepened in his face, and some of the laughter had died from it; the flaming pride of his carriage had set into a harder and more considered arrogance. But these things Bess could forgive, together with the fact that he had forgotten the encounter in the ditch and was now as unaware of her existence as it was possible for the Queen’s Captain to be of one of the Queen’s Maids. What disappointed her, making the real man less than the remembered one, was something she had known all along, but which had not come truly home to he
r until she saw him again: that, having dreamed a dream, he had sent other men to follow it, instead of going himself.
At first he seemed almost unreal to her, a shining and remote figure in a silver breastplate, a great pearl drop in his left ear; unreal with the flashing unreality of a figure seen in sunshine from a place of shadows. For there was a shadow over the Court, those first few weeks of Bess’s service, and it made Ralegh’s dragon-fly brilliance appear brittle and heartless; the shadow of Philip Sidney’s death in action against Spain.
The whole court mourned for young Sidney, with a personal sense of loss, from the Queen herself to her newest Maid of Honour. To the Queen he had been something very like a son; ‘My Philip’ the gentlest and bravest of all the lighthearted lads she gathered round her. To Bess he was only a memory from that long-ago visit to Westminster: but a happy memory, nonetheless. And his mother, not yet fully recovered from her husband’s death, turned herself very quietly to follow him.
An autumn evening came: a golden evening, harking back regretfully to the vanished summer, though the brown leaves lay underfoot. It was fitting that Philip should have a golden day and not a grey one, Bess thought, as she rustled upstairs and down through Whitehall Palace, looking for a gold and coral button which the Queen, always prone to shed small portions of her attire, had lost from her sleeve.