Lady in Waiting

  ‘But what of these new plans for a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles and the little Princess? Will not the King fear to endanger them by letting you go free — and to Guiana of all places, which Spain claims for her own?’

  ‘There is a strong faction at Court who are against the Spanish marriages,’ Ralegh said. ‘And furthermore, even the King must be well aware that both marriage plans are like to end in smoke whatever he does, since Spain’s terms for them are that England be returned to the Papacy by Royal Mandate. Even Daft Jamey knows that is beyond him.’

  A long silence, and then Bess said almost timidly: ‘Now that your old enemies are dead or fallen from grace, could you not buy a pardon that did not hang on this New World mine? Oh I know it would mean heavier bribes, but we would contrive to raise the money somehow. Then we could live quietly at Mitcham — or if you like, sell Mitcham and go back to the West Country. Maybe if you tried again, you could even buy back Hayes Barton after all. Walter, you have earned your rest.’

  ‘Rest?’ Ralegh said, lingering over the words as though testing it in his mind and finding it wanting. ‘No, Bess, we will put the money to nobler uses.’

  She tried once more, rising and moving close to him. ‘Surely the enterprise is for younger men.’

  He turned slowly from the fire, to look at her. ‘It is not like you to be cruel,’ he said. ‘Bess, Bess, don’t you see that there could be no more appalling fate for me than that, to have outlived my dream — my destiny? I am growing old, and there is so little time; so little time — all these years in the Tower eating into what I had left. Now it seems that there may be one more chance for me, one last throw of the dice, one last venturing ...’ He smiled at her, suddenly fond and rueful. ‘Dear Bess, try to understand.’

  ‘I do try, so hard,’ Bess said. ‘All these years I have tried, God knows.’

  The five o’clock bell was sounding, small and harsh in the fog; and she reached for her discarded cloak, and turned to go. She always left the moment the bell sounded, hating to be fetched away by the warder.

  Ralegh put the cloak round her, muffling her close in its folds, and they went out together into the portcullis chamber. Beyond the little window the fog swathed by, visible where the light of a flambeau turned it to thick golden smoke, making her cough as it wreathed in through the unglazed aperture.

  Ralegh was talking still, his voice low and eager, his hand on her wrist to detain her.

  ‘If I can but bring back the gold — enough gold — who knows, the King may yet be steered into braver courses. With enough gold in his pockets, he may be done with this mad subservience to Spain. The great days may return to us yet, and we may see an English Empire in the New World! And if that should come to pass, Bess, it will be my hand that brought the thing to birth!’

  Bess was staring down through the little window. St. Thomas’s Tower rose opposite, its crest lost in the night and the rolling murk, but below it, where the flambeau cast its stagnant radiance across Water Lane, she could just make out the archway of the Traitor’s Gate; the worn steps descending to the water. How many feet had walked up those steps; the feet of the guilty and the innocent. The tide was in, and the black water flowing high through the iron grills caught fish-scales of light from the flambeau, where it lapped against the steps. She shivered uncontrollably, and turned away. ‘And if you fail?’ she said. ‘How then, Walter?’

  She could not see his face, but the angle of his bent head against the candle-light in the room behind him told her that he was looking at her intently. The pearl drop, hanging forward against the angle of his jaw, was rimmed with milky light. ‘I think that I shall pay for the failure with my head,’ he said. And then: ‘Bess, you would not have me rot gently into my grave — rusting out for lack of use, like an old sword forgotten in the sheath?’

  Bess had a sudden, piercing vision of him as she had seen him that first time of all; a young man like a drawn sword, like a dark flame in the sunlight. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, not that, my very dear.’ She reached up and took his head between her hands, and drawing it down to her, kissed him as she might have kissed Watt. ‘We will sell Mitcham and build a ship.’

  The warder’s heavy step sounded below them.

  Chapter 19 - Off-Shore Wind

  VERY early on a blustery blue March morning, in a hired coach laden with books, scientific instruments and all the accumulated gear of his long imprisonment, Ralegh passed out under the Byward Tower and across the moat causeway into the world he had left thirteen years ago; and was driven through the narrow, awakening ways of the City, to his wife’s house in Broad Street.

  Bess was waiting for him at his destination, where she had gone a few days earlier, that all might be in readiness for his coming; and the sound of the coach wheels rumbling up the street brought her from the parlour before the clumsy vehicle lurched to a stop at the door and John Talbot leapt down from his perch beside the driver. The door of the coach was flung open at the same instant, and Ralegh stepped down on to the cobbles, and paused to gaze around him as though he were a little dazed. The morning sky above the gables was milky blue; at the far end of the street, the trees in the churchyard of Allhallows-by-the-Wall were purple-bloomed with rising sap, tossing in the wind that fretted the garbage along the kennels yet seemed also to carry with it a whisper of the country. And for a moment, Bess was aware of it all through his senses; the dazzled senses of thirteen prison-buried years.

  Then she was hurrying out to him, and as she did so, another figure appeared in the coach doorway. For an instant she thought that it was Lawrence Kemys, though she knew that he had already betaken himself to lodgings of his own. But the man who stepped down was not Kemys; it was a long, lean man, in respectable black clothes, with a long blue chin and an eye as brightly enquiring as a jackdaw’s. At sight of him she checked, her greeting unspoken. ‘Walter, who is this?’

  Ralegh glanced round. ‘This? This is my keeper; my shadow to go with me all my days until I sail for Guiana. Partridge by name. You can furnish him with a place to sleep?’ He spoke to the man over his shoulder. ‘I know not the precise nature of your orders, Master Partridge, but I presume that you are not required to pass your nights as well as your days in my company?’

  Master Partridge appeared deeply wounded. ‘Now, Sir Walter, there’s no need to be cantankerous. We all has our duty to perform and happy them as can perform theirs without unpleasantness all round. John Partridge is not the man to go making himself unpleasant. You furnish me board and lodging — with beer — and let me know when you feels like taking your walks abroad; and I asks no more.’

  ‘Joan will see to it,’ Bess said hurriedly, becoming aware that, early as was the hour, a little crowd of idlers was gathering out of nowhere. Somebody’s serving maid in a cherry striped kirtle, a couple of prentice lads sent out on errands, several ragged children, an old man from the Gresham Almshouse, an itinerant chair mender. They called out sympathetic greetings to Ralegh, and commented freely among themselves on his worn appearance. They were joined by a couple of seamen, and a fat woman with a basket of vegetables on her arm, who became involved with one of the piles of books and gear which Talbot and Master Partridge were carrying into the house. Bess would have liked to retreat into the house also, away from the curious stares of these well-meaning people. But Ralegh had always enjoyed an audience, whether he was its villain or its hero. He was enjoying his little sympathetic audience now, she knew that; so for his sake she continued to endure the interest of the public, until the last pile of books had been carried indoors, when he paid the driver, took his leave of the crowd with a gravely courteous gesture and followed her into the house.

  In the narrow parlour, with its one window looking down into the street and the other into the walled city garden, they turned to each other. ‘Bess, you are the one familiar thing in a damnably strange world,’ Ralegh said, and held her at arm’s length, looking at her. ‘Sweet, you are crying.’

  The door opened,
and Joan entered with breakfast. She also was crying, her chin trembling and her old nutcracker face creased with smiles. ‘Ah Sir Walter, I never thought to see this happy day. Not but what, when my bird first married you, I never thought a day would come when I should be glad to see your face again!’ proclaimed Joan, thumping down her load on the damask-covered table by the garden window. ‘But —’ she looked from Ralegh to Bess and back again, ‘There’s one thing I beg to know: do I have to have that serpent in my kitchen?’

  ‘If you mean Master Partridge,’ said Ralegh serenely, ‘you do. But take comfort, Gossip Joan; I shall be from home much of the time, and where I go, he goes also.’

  Joan snorted, setting out bread and dried figs and a flask of muscatel with unnecessary clatter. Meanwhile Carew, who she had detained by main force in the kitchen until now, had entered behind her, but was hanging back in the doorway, suddenly shy of the father he had known only as a prisoner. It was the spaniel Hodge who broke the ice by trotting forward and smelling enquiringly at the stranger’s shoes. Ralegh stooped, holding a hand to the cold, questioning muzzle. ‘Ah, Carew! — and this, if I mistake not, is Hodge.’

  Carew came forward, forgetting his shyness and suddenly eager as a puppy, himself. ‘Yes father, that’s Hodge. He — he likes you.’

  ‘Dogs generally do,’ Ralegh said. ‘That is a thing that you have had small opportunity of knowing about me. Presently we must learn many things concerning each other, you and I.’

  He laid a hand on Carew’s shoulder, and smiled into the flushed and adoring face of the younger son he had never been able to love or understand as he did Watt.

  At that moment Watt appeared in the doorway, side-stepped to allow Joan past him on her way out, and in a couple of strides, was across the room to his father, and had both arms round him. ‘Father! Oh, it is good to see you here!’ he said huskily, and Bess saw that his eyes were wet. Then with a convulsive hug he released Ralegh, and stepped back, laughing. ‘Marry-come-up! What a sodden salutation! There’s Joan flooding the kitchen with salt water, and Mother with tears on her lashes, and I must needs add mine to the general inundation! Sir, I vow you can seldom have been damper in the Tower than you are this minute ... Mother, can we have breakfast now? I am as empty as a wine-skin after Twelfth Night.’

  Ever after, Bess remembered that meal of bread and wine and dried fruit, eaten by the open window. She put from her all thought of Master Partridge and the implication of his presence in the house, all thought of the bitter past and menaced future. Her menfolk were here with her, free and safe in the circle of the present moment. The ilex tree in the little garden was tossing in the spring wind, filling the air with faint sea-music; the first wallflowers were opening in the bed below, and the scent of them on the wind was warm as though it were the fragrance of the sunlight that puddled the white damask cloth with gold. There was a twittering of happy sparrows under the eaves. An odd shyness held them all; they would be very merry one moment, then fall unaccountably silent, catch each other’s eye and look hastily away, or be unsure how to look away at all.

  Ralegh was constantly glancing about him, with that wide, all-embracing intensity that Bess had seen in his gaze when he left the coach. He ate little, and seemed restless, and as soon as the light meal was ended, thrust back his chair and got up saying, ‘Watt, do you go tell Master Partridge that if convenient to himself, I should like to walk abroad now.’

  ‘Would Master Partridge be the blue-jowled individual I glimpsed a while since, swilling beer in the kitchen, under Joan’s malevolent glare?’

  ‘It would,’ said Ralegh.

  Watt hesitated an instant, watched by his mother and brother. ‘You wish to go alone, I take it, Sir?’

  ‘Alone, save for my shadow,’ Ralegh said.

  And alone, save for his shadow, he went; and all that day wandered about London and Westminster, seldom recognised, looking at the world after thirteen years.

  First to the Strand. Essex House, Arundel House, Somerset House, Baynard’s Castle, each in turn, he lingered by them, and passed on; pausing by the still standing shell of Durham House itself, to glance up at the blind window of his own turret study. He wandered into the great Abbey, and found the tombs of old comrades in arms, and of the Queen whose Captain he had been. He turned his steps back towards the City; sat for a while in the Temple Gardens, watching the busy traffic of the river; wandered on again like an unquiet spirit.

  He did not return home until near supper time, when the candles were already lit in the parlour, and Broad Street quenched in shadows. Bess, who had been anxiously listening for him, let him in herself, and saw Master Partridge depart to the kitchen. Watt had gone out with some kindred spirits; Carew was with Joan, who would keep him for supper, and so for a little while she and Ralegh could be alone to themselves.

  ‘Did you go to the Mermaid for dinner?’ she asked, when she had drawn him upstairs into the quiet candle-lit room.

  ‘I forgot about dinner; my own, and my shadow’s.’ He smiled at her with dark smudges under his eyes, and turning, limped heavily over to the garden window. Behind the topmost branches of the ilex tree the last warmth of the afterglow still lingered like an echo. ‘I am glad there is an ilex tree,’ he said.

  ‘Walter, you are so tired; you have walked too far.’

  ‘There was so much to see, so many old haunts to be revisited; and some, when I went to look for them, no longer there. I feel like a ghost returned to my old world and finding everything strange ... I saw the Queen’s tomb in the Abbey, Bess. Her effigy is not very like her; the features are there, but the fires are out, and she was fire more than feature. That was why we thought her beautiful.’ He turned from the dusk-dimmed garden, and looked at Bess. ‘Tomorrow I shall ride down to Deptford, to set matters afoot for the building of my flagship.’

  ‘Another Ark Ralegh?’ Bess asked.

  ‘No; a Destiny.’

  Later that evening he showed her his commission from James to seek out the mine, passing it across the hearth to her as she sat relaxed in the fire glow. She read it through carefully, then refolding the stiff parchment, sat holding it between her hands. ‘Walter, why are certain of the words scored out?’

  ‘Trusty and well-beloved? — But I am neither trusted nor well-beloved, by the King. It was the same with the commission that I had from Elizabeth for my first Guiana voyage; but she left the words out entirely, having a more delicate touch than James.’

  ‘But Walter, I do not understand. Why does he give you the commission if he feels so?’

  Ralegh leaned back in his chair, pressing his hand with the old betraying gesture over the place where the Cadiz wound ached. ‘He wants the gold; but he wants it without committing himself too deeply,’ he said, turning his head on the leather squab, to stare into the fire. ‘He has rebelled in this matter against Count Gondomar, but he knows that he cannot keep up the rebellion. If I succeed in the enterprise, he will have gold past even his needs — immediate and certain gold to balance against the possible damage to his alliance with Spain. If I fail, he hopes that my head on a charger will make his peace with Spain for him. That is what James calls diplomacy.’

  Certainly if he was to fail, it would be through no lack of thought and energy on his own part. He set about the preparations for his venture in his old whirlwind fashion, straining heart and soul for its success; and in all things he had the loyal and devoted help of Watt and Captain Kemys. Bess sold her little estate at Mitcham, and the great elm keel of the ship it was to build was laid down in the Deptford shipyard. The Earl of Arundel had become one of Ralegh’s sponsors, Nicholas and Arthur, George Carew and many other friends gave him their support, and little by little, the venture began to take shape.

  The Destiny, finally launched and lying at anchor in the Thames, soon became a fashionable rendezvous, and many people came to see over her and talk with her Admiral; and among them came men clad in the sombre fashions that at that time made most foreigners look lik
e crows to English eyes. They came unobtrusively, and did not make loud report of their conferences with Sir Walter Ralegh in the stern gallery of his Destiny; but neither did they make any particular attempt at secrecy. The French Resident sought to persuade him to bring his squadron, when completed, under the Bourbon flag; envoys of the Duke of Savoy tried to interest him in a raid on Genoa which was to all intents and purposes Spanish property — for there had been changes since James had planned to marry his son and daughter in that direction, and Savoy was now at war with Spain — and Ralegh listened to both of them, most courteously.

  Bess, almost frantic with anxiety, protested to him one night. ‘Walter, how can you? And with Partridge actually on board.’

  He laughed. ‘Why not? There is no law to hold a man from selling his sword to any power not actually at war with England. Many of our gay lads are doing that now, with Venice for the purchaser.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it is playing with fire!’ Bess insisted.

  ‘Fire is very bright, to play with.’

  ‘It burns.’

  ‘Where else would be the point in playing with it?’

  So Ralegh went on listening courteously to the propositions of the foreign gentlemen; and went on fitting out his fleet to follow his dream.

  Meanwhile Count Gondomar was protesting furiously again and again to the King. Gondomar, who had been sent ‘to keep the King good’, had long since by threats and intrigue, got James almost exactly where he wanted him; and he felt for Ralegh all a Spanish patriot’s loathing for the man who had inherited Drake’s position as the scourge of Spain, together with a strong personal animus on behalf of that kinsman of his who had suffered the indignity of capture and ransom at the Englishman’s hands.