A Court Affair

But now … Now there is no work for me to do even if I were able. Now I sit in the homes of strangers as a gracious, idle, and ailing houseguest with too much time on my hands and weighing heavily upon my mind. I was brought up to believe that idle hands are the Devil’s tool, but I think that is equally true of an idle mind. Rumours, fears, and fancies prey on me, they bite deeply like fanged monsters, and I can no longer distract myself and stave them off with work as I used to do. It is not just my body that is failing. Now my mind is a mass of contradictions—I think or say one thing and then another, I veer from the highest heights of hope to the deepest pit of dark despair, one moment joy rules my life, then, in a finger snap, I am fury incarnate or drowning in deep blue doldrums; I grasp greedily at life yet long for death, I fight to survive and then sink down, ready to yield, admit defeat, and surrender. I’ve lost control of my own mind, and I don’t know what I want any more when I used to be so certain. I’ve strayed so far from the woman I was and the woman I always meant and wanted to be. I’ve lost my way, and now it is too late to remedy my course, to stop, stand still, get my bearings, and think, turn back to the crossroads of Fate and choose a different path. As my father would say: “You’ve made your bed, Amy my lass, and now you have to lie in it!”

Some rumours already claim that I am a madwoman kept chained in an attic for my own good and the safety of others and that loyal Pirto is not my maid turned nurse but actually my keeper.

“Poor Robert!” those who hear the rumours—both the ones that tell the truth and the ones that lie—must say and sigh as they dolefully shake their heads and pat his shoulder or back sympathetically if they are acquainted with him well enough to take such liberties with his person. Under the circumstances, even those who dislike him—and there are a great many who do—cannot begrudge him his extravagances and pleasures. Eight-and-twenty is far too young to be burdened with such a wife, they no doubt think or even say outright. “Poor Robert” indeed! Healthy, handsome, virile, strong, and vigorous Robert, riding like the wind and dancing the night away, his ambitions blazing like a comet so bright, they almost turn night into day, spending every waking hour fawning over and flattering the Queen, paying poets to write her sonnets he can sign his own name to, gambling as if gold were as common as shit and all he has to do is squat down over a pot to get more, racking up debts buying her costly gifts—silk stockings by the score and an emerald that would have paid for us to have a real home of our own if such had been his desire—and dreaming of the day when he will be free of me to marry her and become King Robert I of England. It’s always “Poor Robert!” never “Poor Amy!” though eight-and-twenty is far too young to be burdened with the fatal canker of cancer in her once-beautiful breast, to live every day locked in a brutal, unbreakable embrace of pain that can only be numbed by a powerful powder of opium poppies mixed into strong wine that brings strange dreams, both sleeping and waking, that hopelessly muddles fact and fiction in her poor, befuddled brain, to live every moment knowing that her days are numbered and ever dwindling, and in such pain that she often falls upon her knees and prays to God to deliver her from her desperation. Yes, “Poor Robert” indeed! Dancing the volta with the Queen and showering kisses onto her perfect alabaster breasts; rolling silk stockings up or down her long, fair legs; flaunting his prowess on the tennis court and in the saddle; riding to the hunt or against an opponent in the tiltyard; and sitting on the Queen’s Council to arrogantly contradict the wise Sir William Cecil because he resents the trust that exists between the Queen and the Secretary of State. Robert wants to reign supreme! If Cecil said black were white, Robert would bang his fists down hard upon the table and shout, “Nay, it is green!” then pout and sulk with a face as dark as a storm cloud if Her Majesty chose to take Cecil’s word over his. Such is my husband’s life. “Poor Robert” indeed; he is the one truly deserving of sympathy, not me! If I were dead, he would be free, he would be King, but my weak and waning body stands between him and his Destiny. Poor Robert! How the heavens must weep for him!

Dried chamomile bobs about my breasts, but I don’t look down; this disease has already killed my vanity and murdered all the delight my body ever gave to me. I sometimes wonder if it has been visited upon me as a punishment for my vanity, the pride and pleasure I once took in baring and flaunting my breasts before my husband to entice and excite him and enflame his lust. Whenever Pirto helps me dress and undress, I keep the candles at a distance and my eyes fixed straight ahead. I never look down, even though I know ignoring it will not make it go away. I tried that when I first discovered the inwardly turned dimple that later pointed outward in an emphatic and angry lump that demanded my attention and could not be ignored. I shun the looking glass now and drape it in black velvet as if I were already dead and this were a house in mourning. But even though I avoid looking, I know exactly what I would see if I did. My right breast perfect and plump, like a creamy custard crowned with a cherry pink nipple, the left marred, mottled, swollen, and florid, with an ugly, oozing lump but half a thumb’s span from my nipple, as if it were my nipple’s ugly, grossly deformed twin, a grotesquerie made to nurse Death’s pet imp. Sometimes I dream that he is there, a wicked little gargoyle, a tiny bilious green and black sulphur-stinking devil, dainty only in his size, with pointy ears and a forked tail, glowing red eyes, and needle-sharp fangs he sinks with ravenous relish into the lump to suckle and suck the life out of me and make me either scream out in agony or fall fainting and breathless to the floor, defenceless against the onslaught of pain his suckling brings. I used to dream of someday having a baby, a little girl with my golden curls or Robert’s dark ones, to nurse at my breast, but instead I have this evil imp called Cancer to suck from me, and instead of good and wholesome mother’s milk my nipple leaks a foul discharge, sometimes milky in further mockery of my dreams, other times tinged pink by my blood to remind me of the pink dresses and hair ribbons I would have given the little girl I know now I will never carry under my heart, feeling her flutter and kick inside the warm, safe nest of my womb.

The swelling extends beneath my left arm so that I feel always tender and sore there. I try to carry myself carefully, as if I were a woman fashioned from the finest Venetian glass, but often, out of habit, a lifetime of moving freely without thought or worry, I forget. It has happened so many times that hearing me gasp and cry out has become commonplace; those about me have heard it so often that the maids seldom even look up from their work, or Mrs Forster and Mrs Oddingsells from their game of cards or backgammon, and Mrs Owen, who as the wife of one doctor and the mother of another, one might have expected a show of compassion from, has become immune to human suffering. At such times I fancy I could run stark naked shrieking like a banshee through the house with my hair on fire, and no one would even look up.

The candlelight is kind to me, for which I am grateful, as I am for any kindness that is given me. Lately the disease has lent a yellow tint to my skin and the whites of my eyes—jaundice. But in the kind, flattering light of the candles it isn’t obvious; it is the harsh, unsparingly honest light of the sun that cruelly gives my secret away and shows the world that I am like a woman made of straw, brittle and yellow from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, and everyone waits with bated breaths for the inevitable day when I will break, like a piece of dry straw snapped in two.

“All right, love?” Pirto asks as she finishes rinsing my hair.

I nod and smile. “Just dreaming of cinnamon cakes and apple cider, Pirto; they remind me of home, and the cider made from the apples from Father’s orchards at Syderstone. I remember how we used to celebrate the harvest, with dancing and apple bobbing and a great feast with every dish made with apples—every single one, even an apple in the roast pig’s mouth! And hair ribbons, Pirto!” I flash an even brighter smile and half turn round in my bath. I stubbornly ignore the protesting pain, sharp and grinding, at the base of my spine that makes my breath catch, though I hastily hide that, quickly turning it into a sigh of eager excitement instead. For Pirto, I pretend I am once again that giddy young girl she used to know, excited about a day at the fair. “They’re sure to have hair ribbons at the fair, aren’t they, Pirto? I’ve a fancy for buttercup yellow, maiden’s blush pink, and Our Lady’s blue.”

“Indeed they are, pet, to be sure, they will!” Pirto beams back at me. I can tell it does her heart good to see me like this—excited and looking forward to something, even a rustic and rollicking country fair.

“And apple green and cherry red! I want My Lord to see me with a rainbow of ribbons streaming down my back when he comes to visit me!” I add, still smiling, as the pain gives my spine another brutal twist, like a master torturer manning the rack to make his victim howl and beg for mercy and divulge her most deeply guarded secrets.

“Aye, love.” Pirto nods excitedly. “And if we can find one in primrose pink, it will match the new dress you’ve ordered from Mr Edney just grand, it will!”

“We must look out for one, then,” I say, the smile frozen on my face as the pain causes pearls of sweat to bead my brow as it twists round in the small of my back like a spring wound dangerously tight until it threatens to break. “Oh, I do hope Mr Edney finishes my new gown in time—dusky rose velvet embroidered with bright pink roses with the collar fringed in gold, like the one on the russet taffeta he made for me. I ordered it to match the gloves My Lord sent me for my birthday. Surely that is a sign that he still cares for me, Pirto? If he did not care, he would not have taken the time to choose something so pretty that he knew would please me so much. I want to wear it for him with the gloves when he comes to me. And surely he will come soon; the court is not very far … Windsor Castle is only half a day’s ride away. Only half a day …” I sigh. “Half a day!”

The thought of the husband I still love so much, even though I know I should not, and long to see even though with all this talk of poison and murder he now frightens me, fills me with such sorrow that the tears I have fought to hold back for so long threaten to overwhelm and drown me from within if I do not let them out. Why do I still love him when he no longer loves me? Why do I still strive to win back a love long gone? Why do I desire a man who has shattered all the trust that ever lay between us, just as he has dashed all my hopes and destroyed all my dreams? He has even tried to murder me. And yet … my head says no, but my heart cries yes, and even as I fear and hate, I still love and long. Life will never be the same as it was again, this I know, but of the dream I cannot let go. Right or wrong, I still love him.

“Come, the sheet now, Pirto.” I swallow back the tears and force myself to smile as I nod towards it, draped over the back of a chair to warm before the fire. “I will get out now and sit by the fire while you comb my hair.”

I grit my teeth and brace myself to stand up. But stand I must, and stand I will. Summoning all my strength, steeling myself against the pain that I know will flare beneath my arm and explode like fireworks within my chest, I bite my bottom lip and, with Pirto hovering anxiously beside me holding up the drying sheet, ready to wrap me in it, I lever myself up. It takes everything I have not to scream and to fight back the faintness that threatens to knock me off my feet, and the unrelenting pain twisting agonisingly in the small of my back. It feels as though a little dog were sewn inside me friskily chasing his tail round and round and bumping my spine at every turn, then rounding on it in sudden fury for getting in the way and spoiling his play. But I succeed and step triumphantly from the tub, straight into Pirto’s outstretched arms that wait to wrap me in the sheet. It is just a simple white linen sheet, no longer fit for use on a bed but perfectly fine for drying off with after a bath, and yet, as she drapes it round me, I am struck by the sudden horrific notion that it is not a sheet at all but a shroud, and it’s all I can do not to tear it from me, give way to tears, scream the house down, and curse God for the unfairness of it all.

“I’ll not have a shroud,” I say suddenly to Pirto, blurting it out before I can stop myself. “When I die, bury me in my wedding gown.”

“Now, none of that grim, melancholy talk, Miss Amy,” Pirto gently chides me as if I were still a little girl. “You’re to have a good time at the fair today and think naught but happy thoughts!”

“Yes, Pirto,” I nod and smile and say obediently as I let her lead me to sit beside the fire. She helps me to gently lower myself onto a padded stool, with a quilted purple velvet cushion as plump as the juiciest plum, then comes to stand behind me and begins to draw the comb through the wet yellow waves of my hair. Carved into the stone of the great fireplace, angels and demons fight their eternal battle, mirroring the war that rages between my heart and head, and the skirmish inside my mind as dreams and reality grapple for supremacy when the medicine blurs the boundary between the two.

I close my eyes and dream of groves of sun-kissed lemon trees and chamomile blossoms swaying in the breeze and the pink-cheeked, barefoot hoyden I used to be, running wild and free, before the chains of cancer enslaved, slowed, and weighted me. Oh, how I wish I could be her again, even if it were just for one more day! I would live it to the fullest and make every moment count! To kick Pain in the bum and tell him to clear off and leave me be until the stroke o’ midnight! I miss the Amy I used to be. Even before I banished the looking glass from my life, I no longer recognised the pale, thin wraithlike woman with the dark-shadowed, pain-glazed eyes who stared back at me. That was not the Amy I knew! That was not the Amy I was inside, and not the Amy Robert Dudley fell in love with ten years ago.

I sit and drowse and dream by the fire as my hair dries into a wealth of spun gold curls; then Pirto gently breaks my reverie. “It is time to be dressing you now, love,” she says. She helps me to rise as I grimace and brace myself against the deafening though silent scream that only I can hear that my spine unleashes inside of me. Will a day come, I wonder, when it will stop screaming and simply snap in the ultimate protestation against my defiance of the pain? Though numbness may seem like a blessing at times, not being able to move at all or feel anything fills me with such fear, I think I will drown in it. Sometimes I think I feel too much, but to live and feel nothing at all is a living death and absolutely terrifies me.

Gently, Pirto eases the sheet from my shoulders. I know what comes next and lift my chin and obstinately stare straight ahead, focusing on the inky blackness outside my window; even though I fear losing my soul in darkness, it is still better than looking down and seeing the rot and ruin of my flesh. Although I have only just bathed, already the fetid stink of decay wafts up to my nostrils as the lump begins to weep ugly tears. It isn’t right, it isn’t fair; a body shouldn’t decay until after death! Although some people are not very particular about cleanliness and bathing, I have always been, yet, no matter how much I bathe, no matter what perfume I wear, the stench of death always hovers about me, seeping from my breast.

From the corner of my eye a movement distracts me. I turn and catch Pirto reaching for the big cork-stoppered earthenware jar that holds a special blend of powders that Dr Biancospino left for me. When mixed with water, it becomes a thick paste of lime, hemlock, and belladonna that, with the deft brushstrokes of a master artist, the exotic foreign doctor used to paint my breast with, creating hope where there was none before, and whitewashing the ugliness of mottled and festering red flesh and charred-looking dead black tissue. When it dried, it hardened so that my breast appeared to have turned to white marble, as though Pygmalion’s Galatea were starting to turn back into a statue after having lived, for the brief span allotted her by the gods, as a flesh and blood woman.

I remember that story. Years ago, in the early days of our marriage, when I saw him more often, Robert used to write poetry and sometimes make clever remarks with classical allusions, but I never understood what he meant. Seeing my puzzled face, he would frown, deplore my ignorance, and sometimes even shout at me or stomp out, grumbling that talking to me was about as sensible as trying to hold a conversation with the sheep. I asked my old swain, my first sweetheart, Ned Flowerdew, who succeeded his father as my father’s steward, to send to London for a book of mythology for me, something simple and easy to understand, writ for a child new to the subject perhaps. And each and every night while I waited for my husband to come back to me, I would sit by the fire, with my father dozing nearby in his chair, and my cats, Onyx and Custard, curled up next to me, and read the stories of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, my tongue tripping and tangling as I tried to sound out their peculiar names. But it was too little too late. By the time I knew who Aphrodite, Persephone, Artemis, and Athena were, Robert was already kneeling at the feet of the flame-haired Tudor goddess he worshipped and adored with all his ambitious passion, praying for his regal reward.

“Not that one!” I cry out, startling Pirto so that she jumps and nearly drops the jar. “The other one—the sticky one that looks like honey the wise-woman sent.”

Confusion and uncertainty furrow dear Pirto’s brow. “But I thought …”

“No, Pirto, no,” I plead as tears pool in my eyes and cause a quaver in my voice. And, seeing the tears that threaten to spill over, Pirto sighs as she, reluctantly, puts the jar back and reaches for the other, the one she thinks, perhaps rightly so, is more chicanery than cure.

The truth is, I don’t trust anyone any more, not even myself. I didn’t trust Dr Biancospino when he first came to me; like most “ill-bred country folk”, as Robert would no doubt disdainfully call us, I believed the lurid tales I had heard of the Italians and their skill at concocting and administering deadly poisons, stories of poison-doused gloves and gowns, and fiendish poisoners so adept at their nefarious craft, they could poison but a single side of a knife and sit down and boldly share a repast with their victim that would end in death for only one of them. I was so afraid he had been sent to kill me. He was like no one I had ever met before. An air of mystery hung about him, as exotic and peculiar as his accent and the blend of Italian and Arabic blood that flowed beneath his olive skin. He would only say that he had been sent by someone who wished me well and whom I had no cause to fear, someone who had heard all the disturbing rumours about my health and my husband’s intentions and wanted only for me to get well and have the best of care, free from the worry and suspicion of harm masquerading in the guise of medicine.

“This is a sincere and well-intentioned gift, else I would not be here, my lady,” he assured me.

He would only confirm that it was not my husband who had sent him, but the name of the person who had he would never reveal; he was sworn to secrecy.

“Madame, I have come to make you well if I can, not to play at guessing games,” he would smilingly chide me when I tried to guess my mysterious well-wisher’s name.

Then, in spite of myself, I began to trust him. He was able to do more for me than any English doctor or wise-woman I had seen. And, deep in my heart, as if it were buried alive, that trust kept fighting to claw its way back out of the premature grave I had consigned it to. Then the plain-wrapped parcel arrived from London, with no name writ upon it, nor could the courier tell me who it was from. Inside was a big leather-bound book, its worn gilt edges gleaming seemingly with malice. It was a long and learned, detailed and thorough, tome all about poisons, written by my Italian-Arab physician—Dr Kristofer Biancospino. When I read it, I felt the blood freeze inside my veins. There were horrors within its pages that still give me nightmares! And, stuck amongst its pages, like a bloodstain marring the creamy vellum, was a lone strand of long red hair that told me exactly who had sent it—my rival, my enemy—the Queen, Elizabeth. But my mind was too afraid and befuddled; I could not figure out if she meant to warn or merely frighten me, scare me into doing what I indeed did—send Dr Biancospino away so Death could regain the ground that He had lost while I was under that skilled physician’s care.

After I received the book of poisons with his name, Dr Kristofer Biancospino, on the title page, and a tale of terror, a litany of suffering, dispassionately detailed on every page thereafter, I would have no more of him or the medicines he gave me, some of which I knew to contain the deadly plants he wrote about—monkshood, mandrake, hemlock, thornapple, henbane, and belladonna, the deadly nightshade that has nothing to do with beauty despite its name, though I have heard it said that the Italian ladies dare to use it in their cosmetics and even put drops of it in their eyes to make their pupils larger, but I shudder at the thought of doing either. I think sometimes women go too far in their pursuit of beauty.

Again and again he came to my door, begging to come in, to just sit and talk with me, but I hardened my heart and barred my door against him and refused to answer the letters he sent. Right or wrong, I let myself become afraid of the one person who could help me.

Even now, on the table beside my bed—in the pretty little heart-shaped trinket box lined in rose pink velvet that Robert won for me in a game of skill, throwing coloured wooden balls through a hoop, at a country fair when we were courting—his last letter lay folded into a tight square, containing—if I were brave enough to take it—one last chance to save my life. A gamble, a risk, a life-and-death wager I might win or lose, he told me frankly, showing his respect for me by telling me the truth unvarnished, just as he had done when he first described this daring and dangerous procedure to me, but a chance that no English doctor, whether quack or from the College of Physicians, or even the Queen’s own doctor himself, could offer me, an operation nigh as excruciating and brutal as the hanging, drawing, and quartering condemned traitors were subjected to, but one, though it skirted death by a hairsbreadth, that might, if God were willing, save my life and let me live to be an old woman with silver hair and grandchildren. But the time to think had almost passed; today I must decide. It was now or never.

That was why I wanted to be alone today while the others were having a fine, merry time at the fair, to think, to ponder, with no distractions of any kind, to look back and decide whether I wanted to go forward, whether my life was worth saving now that I had lost everything that mattered. I had lost my husband’s love, as well as his presence, and the cancer had already destroyed my beauty, and the operation that might cure it would complete the destruction and leave me disfigured in such a way that no man, least of all my fastidious Robert, would ever want me again. What man would ever look with desire upon a woman with an ugly, scarred, and gutted crater where her breast, full, creamy, pink-tipped, and tempting, used to be?

After she returns from the fair, I will send Pirto to the inn with my answer, and Dr Biancospino will either stay or go on his way depending upon my answer, whether it comes in the form of stony, distrustful silence or words writ upon paper; I know that he will wait, and hope, for me for one more day. And I will use that day well, to weigh life against death.