LADY IN WAITING
The powerful love story of Walter Ralegh and Bess Throckmorton
Rosemary Sutcliff
© Rosemary Sutcliff 1956
Rosemary Sutcliff has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd in 1956.
This edition published by Endeavour Press in 2015.
Table of Contents
PART ONE - ELIZABETH
Chapter 1 - The Quartz Mask
Chapter 2 - The Island of White Birds
Chapter 3 - The Triumvirate
Chapter 4 - The Open River
Chapter 5 - The Stars and the Sea
Chapter 6 - Orlando Furioso
Chapter 7 - The Crock of Gold
Chapter 8 - ‘Fortune My Foe’
Chapter 9 - ‘Here We Go Up — Up — Up’
Chapter 10 - The Gazing-Crystal
Chapter 11 - ‘Our Jewel Is From Us Gone’
Chapter 12 - Faith in Israel
PART TWO - JAMES
Chapter 13 - A Mesh of Many Strands
Chapter 14 - The Verdict
Chapter 15 - ‘Every Season His Contentment’
Chapter 16 - ‘Thy Pity Upon All Prisoners’
Chapter 17 - The Wind Goeth Over
Chapter 18 - The Sword and the Sheath
Chapter 19 - Off-Shore Wind
Chapter 20 - The Scarlet Feather
Chapter 21 - The Passover
Chapter 22 - King David’s Beard
Chapter 23 - Traitor’s Gate
Chapter 24 - The Tide Running to the Sea
Chapter 25 - The Night and the Morning
Extract from The Rider of the White Horse by Rosemary Sutcliff
PART ONE - ELIZABETH
Chapter 1 - The Quartz Mask
THE boy at the end of the Ralegh pew leaned far forward, his hands on his knees, his eager face lifted to the old stout figure of the Rector, who had a short while before mounted into the pulpit. The intent and vivid stare of his very blue eyes was a little disconcerting to the Rector, but certainly it was gratifying. It was always gratifying to feel that one had touched the shining spirits of the young. There came to the old man in that moment a warm sense of encouragement, and he leaned forward to thunder in a tone even louder than was usual to him at sermon time, against the sin of Sabbath-breaking. He spent so much of his time thundering against the manifold sins of his parishioners, so much of his strength in fighting the Devil and striving to plant the good seed in decidedly stony ground; and it was not often that he saw the good seed quickening into life, as in the wrapt face of this child.
In actual fact, the boy at the end of the Ralegh pew was not conscious of the Rector at all. He was watching the dancing golden dust-motes in the shaft of evening sunlight that slanted down like a sword blade from the high window beside the pulpit; and he heard the old man’s thundering only as a background to his own thoughts, like the wuthering of the high west wind round the ancient walls of the church.
He was lost in a pleasant dream in which those bright, dancing motes turned out to have real gold in them, and he devised some means of catching them and separating the gold from the rest. A large bag of gold-dust would be so very useful to the Ralegh family, even enabling them to live again in the great house at Fardel, as they had done before he was born and they came on hard times. Only that would mean leaving Hayes Barton. No, on consideration, he would not give his family enough of the gold-dust to return to Fardel. Instead, he would give his father an Indian falcon and his mother a ruby bilament, and presents in proportion to the rest of the family, always supposing that they were not being tiresome as they sometimes were. And with the remainder of the gold? There were so many things that one could do with a large bag of gold-dust, even when the price of a ruby bilament and an Indian falcon and all the other things had come out of it. But Walter Ralegh had no hesitation. He would use it to build ships.
A fleet of three, to begin with, he decided; and he would call them the Garland, the Crane and the Revenge. His gaze left the dancing motes in the sunbeam, and came unconsciously to rest on a carved bench end just across the aisle. The carved bench ends of East Budleigh Church had been his solace through many and many a sermon. They were wonderful carvings, each one different; a dragon, a man in a feather headdress, a monster eating someone from the feet upwards, and loveliest of all, this one; this ship. A valiant cockle-shell of a ship, storm-tossed but still jaunty, with a look-out posted in her rigging as though she expected her land-fall at any moment. Walter knew ships; ships at a distance, watched from the cliff tops beating up channel in a rain squall, or outward bound into the unknown. He knew them at close quarters too, for he had good friends along the coast, at Exmouth and Budleigh Salterton, who often took him on board their vessels; salt-stained and redolent of rope and pitch and bilge-water, salt fish and raw hides and wool; less obviously romantic, but more satisfying. Ships and the sea, they were in Walter’s blood; for between them, his mother and father claimed kinship with almost every great sea-faring family of the West. Grenvilles, Stucleys, Courtneys, St. Legers, Champernouns; they all had their part in him, and the Gilberts more perhaps than all beside.
Walter was very fond of the Gilberts, his mother’s sons by a former marriage. For the large Ralegh half-brothers who now and then returned home on visits, he had little feeling save a vague jealousy when they laid claim to his father. But with the Gilbert half-brothers it was quite otherwise. When they put affectionate arms round his mother’s shoulders, he did not begrudge even John and Adrian their share in her; and with Humphrey, he would cheerfully have shared his head — or the bag of gold-dust. There was a strong bond of friendship between Walter and Humphrey, which took no account of the fact that one was twelve and the other twenty-four; a bond of understanding and shared dreams and enthusiasms; for with his share of the gold-dust, Humphrey Gilbert — soldier though he was — would also have built ships and sailed to discover the glories of the New World.
The Rector’s voice boomed on, but Walter no longer heard it, even as a background to his thoughts. He was the man in the rigging of the carved ship, no longer part of a wooden bench end, but live and rejoicing in her liberty, and riding seas mountains high. Humphrey was the crew (Humphrey was always the crew on these secret voyages, given precedence even over Walter’s adored cousin, Richard Grenville), and Walter, naturally, was the Master. What the Master was doing in the rigging he did not trouble to consider; one could, presumably, do as one wished and go where one wished, in one’s own ship. The wind sang past his ears, strumming through the rigging as through the strings of a lute, the salt taste of the spume was on his lips, and all around him swelled the great sails, and the green seas hissing along the ship’s sides far below. The horizon rose and tilted and dipped as the mast-head swung, so that now there was the deck below him, and now only the dark foam-streaked trough of the sea; and he shielded his eyes with his hand, gazing into the fiery distance for the first sight of land.
A violent poke from Carew — thirteen years old, home from his first term at Oxford and taking his position as elder brother heavily — fetched him abruptly out of his dream, to find that the sermon was over and the congregation rising to their feet. He sprang up, causing the bench to rock violently, and creating a disturbance that made people look round. Carew, who found his younger brother something of a responsibility in church, blushed furiously, but Walter was completely unabashed. If others wished to blush for him, they were welcome to do so; he never wasted time or energy in blushing for himself. Never in all his life.
Evensong drew to a close, and presently they were out in the churchyard, where
the wind from the sea hummed around the buttresses and laid the long grass over in swathes among the leaning head-stones. There were many little groups in the churchyard, and the Ralegh family’s progress to the gate seemed to Walter — no longer dream-bound, and beginning to feel hungry — to be made unbearably slow by their many halts to speak to this one or that. But they reached it at last, and passing through the huddle of cottages below the church, turned into the lane that led home.
The wind blustered overhead, lashing through the storm-twisted oak scrub that crested the banks, and filling the lane with the soft turmoil of the distant surge and the sway and flicker of moving shadows and westering sun that rimmed the shrivelled leaves with gold. And through it all, the Ralegh family walked home sedately as a family should walk home from church; Mr. Ralegh and his wife in front, he holding on to his bonnet, she clutching at her dark cloak as the wind tried to snatch it from her, yet both contriving somehow to keep the dignity proper to the occasion. Then small Margaret, demure but with a dancing step, her blue cloak and her bell-shaped skirt billowing joyously in the wind. Finally the two boys in their Sunday doublets of French-green broadcloth, Carew kicking at stones as he went, Walter with an exaggerated seaman’s roll which he had seen and admired the week before in Budleigh Salterton.
The lane rose and dipped, turned and twisted, following the contours of the land, until the oak-crowned bank gave place to tamarisk feathering darkly above a cob wall, and a huddle of reed-thatched roofs beyond, and they were home. ‘Look!’ said Margaret, ‘Someone is come!’ And she pointed into the stable yard where Tom the groom was rubbing down a chestnut horse with a posting brand on its shoulder. She raised her voice in an enquiring squeal. ‘Tom! Tom! Who is it?’
But the wind was high and Tom rather deaf, and Mr. Ralegh was already opening the garden door; and so the guest dawned upon them unannounced as they trooped into the courtyard garden and a tall young man with a murrey-coloured Spanish cloak flung back from his shoulders sprang up from the porch bench and came striding down the path, with the dogs of the house cantering around him.
‘Humphrey!’ cried the family in one breath, and Mrs. Ralegh let go her cloak and hurried to meet him with little chirping cries of welcome; while Mr. Ralegh hung back slightly, as always in the first moment of his stepson’s arrival, with a shy man’s shrinking from intrusion. The children, having no such scruples, thrust after her like eager puppies to greet the newcomer.
To all the young Raleghs, Humphrey’s unheralded arrivals were occasions for rejoicing, both because he was Humphrey, whom they delighted to honour, and because of the entrancing presents that generally came with him. But to Walter they were events of shining splendour, accompanied by unheard trumpets sounding to high adventure; and now, as always, those soundless fanfares were blowing down the wind, and the garden with its storm-wrecked tangle of late summer flowers quickened into magic at the call.
In the midst of a clamorous group of children and dogs, Humphrey had both his mother’s hands in his; and she was saying in tones of gentle reproach, ‘Humphrey, have you forgot what day it is? Could you not have contrived to reach us yesterday?’
‘I had meant to, indeed and indeed.’ Humphrey smiled down at her apologetically. ‘But Silver went lame in the off foreleg, and I must needs spend the night at the inn at Countess Weare, and come on post this morning. Tell me you are glad to see me, My Lady Mother.’
‘You know that I am always rejoiced to see you,’ said Mrs. Ralegh, and reached up to kiss him.
He gave her a quick, warm hug, and turned to shake hands with his stepfather; touched Margaret’s round pink cheek with one finger, and enquired after Carew’s spar-hawk which had been only a half-made eyas when he was last here. But as the whole family made their way up between the battered pinks and snapdragons to the porch, he and Walter were walking together, and his hand was on the boy’s shoulder.
They were the last of the little cavalcade, but at the door, Margaret turned suddenly and darted back to them, slipping a hand into Humphrey’s free one, and gazing up at him confidingly. ‘Humphrey, dear Humphrey, have you brought me my golden thimble?’
Walter looked at her with distaste. He had reached the age when one did not ask, one merely hoped — in his case, for a dagger.
Humphrey cocked a vague eyebrow. ‘Thimble? Was there some talk of a thimble? Alas, my poor memory.’
Margaret’s round pink face was suddenly tragic, and her lower lip trembled a little. No one, not even herself, knew exactly why she had set her heart on a golden thimble, but she had. And Humphrey, seeing that quivering lip, cursed himself for a brute. He could never resist the temptation to tease Margaret, and always he was sorry the moment after. He said quickly, ‘And yet I seem to have seen a golden thimble somewhere, not long since.... Yes! a golden thimble with a fleur-de-lis fretted on the tip! I wondered what such a thing might be doing among my gear, for I do not sew, and it was something small for my finger beside. Do you think that we should go after supper and see if it fits yours?’
And presently, supper being over in the parlour where the great ilex tree made sea-hushings outside the window, they went, the four of them, for Carew and Walter had contrived to attach themselves to the party, crowding upstairs to the boys’ room. There was a fine guest-chamber, with a bed hung with curtains of faded sea-green damask and a long mirror of polished steel on the wall; but the boys had laid claim to Humphrey long since, and he always shared their room, sleeping on the truckle-bed which normally lived under their own. Now it had been pulled out, and made up with one of the best linen head sheets, and the gay but shabby coverlet worked with knots and small fantastic birds, which Mrs. Ralegh kept for the best beloved but not particularly honoured among her guests. Humphrey’s saddle-bags lay on the big clothes chest, among hawk leashes, pots of glue and odd shaped lumps of unknown substances, all the property of Carew and Walter. His tasselled riding gloves had been tossed down on the window seat, and his velvet-sheathed rapier hung from the foot of the boys’ uncurtained bed. It had been growing dusk on the stairs, but here the last windy sunshine of the August evening slipping sideways through the star-shaped panes of the window which was the room’s one beauty, filled the embrasure with an amber radiance.
Blinking in the sudden light, the three followed Humphrey to the clothes chest, and stood watching with bated breath while he delved into the contents of a saddle-bag. Several objects spilled out, among them a small packet wrapped in crimson silk, which chimed faintly as it fell. Humphrey gathered it up, folding back the brilliant stuff. ‘Finger please.’ Margaret put out an eager right hand, with thimble-finger extended, and with ceremony proper to the occasion, he slipped a minute golden thimble on to it. ‘A trifle large,’ he said, critically regarding the result. ‘You will have to grow to it, baby.’
Margaret spread her hand like a plump pink starfish, and gazed at the golden thimble, speechless with happiness; then raised her eyes to the young man’s face and heaved a deep sigh.
‘So; that is well then, small sister Meg,’ said Humphrey, smiling down at her as he freed something else from the folds of crimson silk. ‘Carew, I hope you have not belled your hawk yet?’ He tossed the boy a pair of silver hawk bells.
Carew caught them with a whoop of delight. ‘I say! Oh I say!’ He tossed one in the palm of each hand, listening to the chime, one bell a semi-tone higher than the other. ‘Milanise!’ he proclaimed blissfully. ‘Humphrey, I’d do anything for you!’
He began to hover from foot to foot as he spoke, torn between his desire to rush straight down to his beloved hawk with the new Milanise bells, and a feeling that it was rude to rush away the moment somebody had given you a present. Humphrey saw his predicament and laughed. ‘Do you go and bell your hawk; the sooner ‘tis done, the more time will she have to grow used to them before we fly her.’
Before the words were out of his mouth, Carew was off and away; and hard on his heels, Margaret had flown to show her golden thimble to her mother; and
Humphrey and Walter were alone together. As by common consent, they moved into the window.
‘And now, having provided for housewife and country gentleman,’ began Humphrey, and was struck for the first time by the significance of the gifts that he had brought for his three young kinsfolk. He took something from the breast of his doublet; something much too small to be a dagger. ‘For you — this.’
For an instant Walter was conscious of acute disappointment, then he was gazing in bewilderment at the thing Humphrey had put into his hand. A piece of pink quartz, not much larger than a bean. It lay on his brown palm, translucent in the last reflection of the sunset, with a glow of deeper warmth at its heart. ‘What is it?’ he asked at last.
‘Only rose-quartz, but it comes from the New World. Turn it over.’
With excitement stirring in him, Walter did as he was bid, and found himself looking down at a face — no, a mask, for there was nothing of humanity in it — carved from the rose-quartz. A laughing mask with a certain haunting beauty that in some indefinable way was part of its grotesqueness and not in contradiction to it. For a long moment he remained staring at the thing, silent; then without looking up, he demanded: ‘What is this thing? How did you get it?’
‘An amulet — a talisman of some sort. Maybe it is the face of some god or hero. I bought it in Dartmouth from a seaman who was light in the pockets, and he told me he had come by it in the New World. He did not say how.’
‘The New World,’ said the boy, with an odd lingering in his voice; and an instant later looked up with a flashing smile. ‘I wanted a dagger — but I’d a hundred times sooner have this.’
‘It was in my mind that you would,’ said Humphrey, and seated himself on the broad window-sill. Walter remained standing, cherishing the tiny quartz mask in his hand, his face turned to the last slantwise gold of the West. The wind hurried by, bringing with it the wet thunder of the distant surge. It would be a wild night presently, and the sunset was a tumbled glory that spread southward behind the dark mass of Hayes Barton woods; a chaos of dun and purple clouds rimmed with incandescent gold, from the midst of which a great sunburst leapt upward to burst fountainwise against the very floor of heaven. But Walter, his wide eyes full of the brightness, did not see it, for he was looking beyond it, a long, long way beyond. The dream that he was to follow all his life was not born in that moment, for it had been within him always, but it had suddenly gained purpose and vitality; it was no longer a child’s dream, and the symbol of it was the tiny and terrible mask in the palm of his hand.