Free The Girl in the Mirror by Sarah Gristwood Page A

back – as set as my shoulders are able to be. I will take our business off my father’s hands where necessary, and when business fails me, I will keep my mind firmly fixed on the trivialities. The gardeners should be getting the seeds in now, if we’re to eat green vegetables again before May: folly to say you can’t plant before spring, just because that’s how it was done in their grandfather’s day.
    But sometimes I think that the two weights, my work and my grief, will be enough to crush me. Now, though, there’s the faintest breath of relief – a tickle, at the corner of my mind’s eye. I’m not sure what it was but there was something – something about that boy.

PART II
I am melancholy, merry, sometimes happy and often
unfortunate. The court is of as many humours as the
rainbow hath colours, the time wherein we live more
inconstant than women’s thoughts, more miserable than
old age itself and breeding both people and occasions
that is violent, desperate and fantastical.
Letter from Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex,
to his sister Penelope
We princes are set on highest stage, where looks of all
beholders verdict our works; neither can we easily dance
in nets so thick as may dim their sight.
Letter from Elizabeth I to James VI of Scotland

Jeanne
Autumn 1597
    ‘You won’t be needing livery – the secretaries don’t. Just wear something neat, dark and discreet. No ruffs,’ the steward added, sharply. I nodded, as if curbing an inclination to finery, though the truth was I was only too glad to be let off an accessory that would have to go to an expensive laundress every few days.
    ‘Here – you might want to take this, though. You’ll find it’s something of a passport.’ It was a metal cloak badge with the Cecil crest, and as I pinned it on I felt at the same time a small tug of vexed pride, and a tiny glow of warmth. It seemed I had not just accepted a post, I had joined a community.
    That had been six weeks ago, and I was finding I liked this new sense of family. I’d kept my own room in Blackfriars for the nights, of course. It wasn’t as if sharing with three other young male clerks was really a possibility. But I found that more and more often I was getting up early in the morning to walk along Fleet Street and break my fast in the hall at Burghley House, not just for the fine white manchet bread the steward occasionally let slip to our table, but for the company.
    I suppose I’d always assumed that I’d stick out like a sore thumb in any group I tried to join, but on the clerk’s table everyone was an oddity. There was one old man, with his delicate small paws and twitching mouse’s face, kept on for the beauty of his calligraphy. There was one gangling youngster with a lantern jaw and spluttering speech, who read seven languages fluently. There were two silent watchful men who rarely spoke of the day’s business, though one had a passion for part singing and the other for archery, and they carried an air of warning about them. The music lover was one of the best breakers of cipher in the country, I was told quietly.
    Not all the business in the Burghley household was open for all to see. But there was nothing secret about the job laid down for me, in between the routine tasks I’d be given, translating and transcribing whatever was necessary. All the world knew that Master Gerard was about to publish his great Herbal, and dedicate it to Lord Burghley. This was my first chance to read it, in the original copy, and of course I did so avidly. Some of its information seemed strange to me – I’d heard Jacob and the other herbalists speak of Gerard’s work before, and not always kindly – but Master Pointer had said that such a book, and written not in Latin but in the vernacular tongue, would be a great help to the industry. And Gerard’s vivid descriptions of the yellow loosestrife in the meadows towards Battersea, of the kidney vetch growing on Hampstead Heath, brought