‘The bird is most grateful to be loosed.’
‘How did you come to be caught?’
‘I saw the blue woodbine,’ Bess began: but before she could get further he had reached up and broken off the flower, and was holding it out to her. She took it from him wordlessly; she had not wanted it picked, but she would not have told him so for anything the world could give her. The calyx was brilliantly, vibrantly blue, the very colour of joy, as she bent her head to fasten it into the low square cut breast of her gown. It took her a little while to accomplish this, for the stiffened bone-lace flutings of her ruff made it hard to see what she was doing; but when she looked up again, Ralegh had not moved.
He was standing very still, watching her, his face puzzled and almost indignant. He demanded with the air of one whose rightful inheritance has been kept from him, ‘Why have I not seen you before?’
She was puzzled in her turn. ‘But you have, almost daily when you have been in attendance on the Queen. You have even danced with me, often and often.’
‘Oh that —’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘I have danced with all the Queen’s Ladies. Why have I not seen you — as I see you now?’
There was a little silence, and an odd hush seemed to have fallen on Bess. ‘You did, once,’ she said after a moment. ‘Just once before. But it was sixteen years ago, and you have forgotten.’
‘Make me remember.’
‘The ditch at the bottom of Lady Sidney’s garden,’ she prompted. ‘You were but lately come home from Flanders, and I was ten years old. It had been raining, and it rained again at the end, and you went away to your supper.’
Light sprang up in his face. ‘There was a toad with a gold crown on his head.’
‘No, it was because he had no crown, and therefore could not be a prince under a spell, that you said he was maybe a poor devil of a soldier of fortune under a cloud.’
‘And you remembered,’ with a note of wonder in his voice. ‘All these years you have remembered, while I forgot. Forgive me.’
But it was typical of him that even now it was a command, not an appeal, just as the hands he held out to her were a command. They were broad hands, strong and sensitive, and a little ruthless, and she knew more surely than she had ever known anything before, that if she put hers into them, life would take her henceforth, for making or breaking. There would be no return to the backwater, and she had always been afraid of the open river. She did hesitate, but for the merest breath of time; then she put her hands into his.
Something leapt between them through their linked palms; something as positive, as irrevocable as the firing of a charge. They parted touch, a little shaken, and stood looking at each other.
‘I must go,’ Bess said. ‘The Queen will be going to her supper in half an hour.’
‘Last time it was my supper, and now it is the Queen’s. You are an Elizabeth, too, are you not?’
‘For the most part, I am called Bess.’
‘Bess,’ he said; and the name became a caress; but he did not touch her again, and she was grateful to him for the forbearance. ‘Do not you go leaving me for fifteen years, Bess.’
‘It will scarcely take so long to set the Queen’s table,’ Bess said softly. And she swept up her skirts and went hurrying back through the wood without a glance behind her. The blue convolvulus in the breast of her gown was already fading, but it would revive in water, and the colour would deepen again to the blue that was the very colour of joy.
In after years Bess remembered that summer as wearing a bloom of light. A kingfisher summer, all the more shining because it might have no aftertime. Love between those nearest to the Queen so often had no aftertime. There were snatched moments in the Palace gardens; brief meetings under the scented lime trees; the lingering of hand in hand when the galliard brought them together. For Bess, that summer, the scent of lime blossom on the evening air, the notes of a lute, the praying hands of a candle flame, became things of exquisite and painful joy, and the whole world was transmuted. But for Ralegh, though the joy was there for him too, there was also a growing discontent. It was not so, in secret snatches, as though it were a shameful thing, that he wanted his love.
Matters would have come to a head before long, but at summer’s end, word reached England of the fate of the Revenge and the death of Sir Richard Grenville.
‘And so, because the Queen cannot spare her Captain, Richard dies,’ Ralegh said to Bess, bitterly, on the day he received the full details. And within a few days he was spending every free moment, every thought on writing ‘A Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Azores’, to silence the critics who were already calling Grenville’s conduct in question.
Before this blazing defence of his beloved cousin was published, the Queen, perhaps wishing to recompense herself for the failure of the first venture, had given him leave to fit out another expedition, even promising to hazard a small sum herself. Ralegh brought to the second project an even fiercer eagerness than he had brought to the first, for now, added to hopes that he had had before, there was the need to avenge Richard. He pledged almost everything he possessed to raise money; he rode to and fro between London and Plymouth like a man bedevilled, all winter long; even when the Queen gave him the Manor of Sherborne for a New Year gift, he scarcely spared the time to look at it, though he had loved it in his passing to and fro, since he was a boy.
So while winter came, and turned to spring, between the trips to Plymouth and the business of the Fleet, the stolen meetings with Bess continued.
And then on a May evening, she came in haste along the upper gallery of Whitehall Palace, while below her the great hall swam in an amber haze under the torches and the candle sconces that hung like crowns of light from the rafters, and the shifting throng came and went, jewelled and peacockwise to the thrumming of many lutes: and in the deep shadows at the foot of a private stair, found Ralegh waiting for her.
‘Bess!’ he whispered, as she checked in the narrow arched entrance, and held out his arms; and she went straight into them. He was in his uniform as Captain of the Guard, for there had been a state revel that night in honour of a stout Venetian Ambassador; and the unyielding cold of his breastplate bit through the thin stuff of her gown; but his arms round her were warm and vital, and she sniffed the fragrance of tobacco smoke that seemed always in his hair and beard, and which, because it was part of him, had grown familiar and dear. But after an instant she freed herself.
‘Walter, we should not be here. It is madness.’
‘Then how sweet is madness! I have not seen you alone since I returned from Plymouth; and in a few days I ride again to join my Fleet in good earnest.’ Then with a sudden burst of exasperation, ‘Bess, Bess, how long is it to be like this? How long am I to have you only in stolen moments like a kitchen wench stealing to be tumbled under a hedge by her backgate lover?’
There was an angry, almost disgusted note in his voice; and Bess was conscious of a chill. She had had no sense of guilt in her stolen meetings with him; but for him, evidently it was otherwise, and suddenly she was afraid. ‘Walter, I cannot help it! — What can I do?’ she protested, as though he had accused her of something.
‘You can marry me before I join the Fleet,’ Ralegh said.
She caught her breath, her heart suddenly racing. ‘The Queen would never allow it. She cannot bear her maids to marry, and you are — the Queen’s Captain.’
Ralegh said very deliberately. ‘She need not know, until afterwards.’
‘You mean? — Walter, no! I daren’t!’
‘Do you love me, Bess?’
‘God knows I do! It is because I love you so much that I am afraid ...’ Her voice trailed into silence.
‘Afraid? Of the Queen’s anger?’
‘I am afraid that her anger might do to your love what it did to Robin Devereux’s.’
Ralegh did not answer at once, and when he did, he was stuttering with indignation. ‘Are you d-daring to suggest that I c-could send you b-back
to your mother, to pleasure the Queen?’
‘I haven’t got a mother!’ Bess almost wailed.
Instantly his indignation died, and he was holding her close, rubbing his bearded cheek against hers. ‘Dear Bess, we belong to one another, you and I, like the two halves of a hazelnut, making one whole and perfect. Even the Queen cannot undo that ... Marry me before I ride for Plymouth.’
‘I daren’t! I daren’t!’ She drew her breath in a sob, clinging to him. ‘After you come back — let us wait until then. Please Walter — please!’
‘What shall waiting avail us? Bess, cannot you see? I am no better proofed against Spanish shot than was my kinsman Richard; I want my wife now, while my arms are warm to hold her, lest maybe I hold her not at all.’
In the long pause that followed, Bess heard the music in the hall below very clearly. That fear had been with her for months, sleeping with her at night, waking with her in the morning. How many, many women, since the world began, had carried the same fear, refusing to acknowledge it lest by doing so they gave it substance. How many had listened to the urgent pleading, ‘Now, come now, lest there be no other time.’
‘I will come,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Bess,’ Ralegh said very simply. He was silent a moment; then, having gained his point, plunged into rapid plans. ‘Now listen, for we may have no other opportunity to speak together before the time comes. You are pledged to go down to Beddington on Tuesday, are you not? Who rides with you?’
‘My uncle always sends one of his grooms.’ Bess readjusted herself to the swift change of mood.
‘The same one?’
‘No, not always.’
‘Good. Then write to your uncle, bidding him not to send the man. You cannot come at present — the Queen cannot spare you — you will know the best tale to tell. Let me have the letter tomorrow, and I will arrange for its dispatch; then forget that you ever wrote it. On Tuesday at noon, a groom will come for you, but he will be no man of your uncle’s. Go with him, and he will bring you to my house at Islington.’ He checked abruptly. ‘What of your maid?’
‘Joan? I would trust my life to her; she has been with me since I was a little girl.’
‘Bring her with you, then. I shall leave Court that morning as though for Plymouth, ride to Islington and have everything in readiness for our marriage. Your maid and the man I send for you will serve to witness our declaration, and —’
‘Walter,’ Bess interrupted. ‘I would like a Minister of the Church.’
‘Sweet, what difference can the few mumbled words of a parson make? Our declaration before witnesses will join us in the eyes of the world; we are already joined in the eyes of God.’
She hesitated. ‘I wish that you were less contemptuous of all religion.’
‘If you had seen, as I have, the evil that men can do to each other in the name of religion — aye, Protestant as well as Papist — maybe you would feel as I do.’
Bess knew the evil that he meant. She knew that he had seen the smoking out of Catholics in the caves where they had taken refuge, in the year of the Bartholomew Massacre. She knew that he had seen that Massacre, and what it had done to him, a boy of sixteen. Still, ‘I would like a Minister of the Church,’ she persisted.
Ralegh laughed softly. ‘You shall have the Archbishop himself, if ‘twill make for your happiness.’
‘The Vicar of Islington will serve.’
‘You shall find him waiting you on Tuesday, and be married as you wish.’
‘And after?’
‘After, we shall have three shining days and nights to bend into an eternity. Then, I go to join the Fleet, and you, back to Court, as from your Uncle’s house.’
‘And the Queen?’
‘When I come back with riches of the Indies and King Philip’s beard for a peace offering, we will go hand in hand, and tell the Queen.’
‘God help us!’ Bess said quietly. ‘I will write to my Uncle before I sleep. Walter, let me go now; every moment that we are here together adds to the danger of our being seen.’
‘I will let you go until Tuesday.’ He kissed her and dropped his arms; and stood looking after her as she gathered her pale skirts and sped away down the gallery. Then he turned back to the private stair.
They had parted none too soon, for someone was coming along the gallery, and Bess checked her frightened speed at sight of him. But it was only Robin Cecil with some papers in his hand.
Chapter 5 - The Stars and the Sea
IT was under weeping skies, and accompanied by a grimly disapproving henchwoman perched up behind the unknown groom, that Mistress Throckmorton set out for her wedding. Joan, in the few days since the news of the intended marriage was broken to her, had been anything but a cheery companion. ‘A man like that’s no good to any woman, for his life be already full without one,’ had been her constant theme. ‘Why else should a’ be still unwed, I’d like to know, and forty if he’s a day?’ And her henchwoman’s constant prophesies of doom, together with her own misgivings had given poor Bess a very heavy heart, which the rain blowing down the chill spring wind did nothing to lighten.
She was possessed, too, of a forlorn sense of loneliness. She would have so dearly liked to have someone of her own with her; Arthur or Nicholas — even Robin Cecil. She would have liked them at least to know that this was her wedding day, and wish her well. Then she put the thought away from her. Better for them that they should know nothing; it would be unfair to risk embroiling them in the Queen’s displeasure.
They passed Charing Village, and swung into the Strand. The Carillon of the Fleet Bridge Conduit was chiming as they rode by, the high sweet bell notes caught and tossed to and fro by the wind as though it were juggling with them, so that it almost seemed to Bess that she could see them like silver balls dancing above the fretted gables of the Conduit. It was surely a happy thing, she thought, that the bells should ring for her as she rode by; and unreasoningly, her heart lightened a little, from that moment.
When they turned northward soon after the Fleet Bridge, leaving the busy Strand for the quiet of a lane through market gardens, she reined back a little, to allow her escort, who had been riding half a length behind, to draw abreast of her, which after a perceptible hesitation, he did.
He was a stockily built man, some ten years younger than Ralegh, she judged, with a bullet head covered by crisp, dark curls, and a pleasant face lit by far-sighted grey eyes; seaman’s eyes, Bess would have said. She had been puzzled by him from the first, and as he ranged alongside, she turned to look at him again. ‘Now that we have leisure for such things,’ she said, ‘may I know who rides with me?’
‘For today, I am Sir Walter’s groom,’ he replied gravely.
‘But on other days?’
He smiled. ‘On other days, I am Lawrence Kemys, one of Sir Walter’s Captains. Do I make so poor a showing as a groom?’
She surveyed him carefully; the flat cap and homespun jerkin, the leather leggings, the broad pillion-belt round his waist, to which the dour Joan was clinging, were all in keeping with the part; but the eyes were undeniably those of a seaman. ‘As to your clothes, a most perfect groom,’ she assured him, smiling in return. ‘Yet I think I should have known you for a seaman, had I met you in the habiliments of an Archbishop.’
‘And yet I was not always a seaman — save in my inclination. I was Notary and Bursar of Balliol when Sir Walter took me for his man.’
He was a friendly soul, and responded to her encouragement with a half-shy eagerness that made him seem younger than he was. And as the market gardens gave place to fields, and they followed the narrow lane onward between hedges of rain-wet, hawthorn, he told her a little of his old home — he was a Somerset man — and his days at Oxford, and a great deal about his service with Ralegh, who was clearly his God.
They clattered through the cluster of cottages and small merchants’ houses that was Islington, and turning down beside the Church, reined in before an open gate in a wall of ancient
rose-red brick. A genuine groom had appeared from a huddle of stable buildings and gone to the horses’ heads, and then Ralegh himself was there; Ralegh in a pearl-coloured doublet, far more bridal than Bess in her tawny velvet riding dress; standing bareheaded in the rain to lift her down. ‘Kemys, you are an accomplice without peer! Bess, Sweeting, I have captured the Vicar.’ She slid from the saddle into his arms, and was set down lightly, while Lawrence Kemys swung a leg over his horse’s neck, and dropping from his own saddle turned to dismount the still rigidly disapproving Joan.
As in a breathless dream, Bess was swept up a flagged path and into the house. Someone was taking her wet cloak from her. ‘You should have sunlight,’ Ralegh was saying. ‘Sunlight, and all the bells of London ringing for your wedding!’
‘The Fleet Bridge Carillon was chiming as we rode by,’ she said.
There were stairs then, Joan thumping up behind her with the saddle-bags, and a low-ceiled bed-chamber where she was to make ready for her wedding. It was an impersonal room, having the air of one used only rarely in passing. Very clearly, it was a man’s room, but some attempt had been made to prepare it for a woman. A hand mirror of fine Venetian glass lay before the plain steel mirror on the dressing chest, and beside it, someone had set an inexpert posy of pinks and early roses in a silver cup. Her room, and Walter’s.
But she must not keep him waiting.
While her tirewoman, in grim silence that developed gradually into a doleful sniffing, began to unpack the saddle-bags and set out the few possessions she had been able to bring with her, Bess herself took off her small beaver hat, tenderly smoothing the drooping white paradise plume that had suffered from the weather, and set herself to do what she could about her dress and her damp hair. There was little enough to be done. She had dared to bring no change of dress with her, since she kept two or three gowns at Beddington, and so never carried more than a change of linen with her on her visits there. She gathered the damp masses of her hair into a caul of gold mesh, shook out and brushed her skirts, twitched and pulled at her close ruff, which being too small to need starch, had suffered less from the weather than might have been expected. On a sudden impulse, she took a musk rose from the silver cup, a white rose, but with buds faintly yellow and delicately pointed as candle flames, smelled the warm sweetness of it, and stuck it into her pomander girdle.