Free The Girl in the Mirror by Sarah Gristwood Page B

plant-hunting expeditions with Jacob back to me.
    But Master Gerard’s health was poor at the moment and, as new plants arrived every month from abroad to be added to the records of the Cecil gardens, he couldn’t get out to sketch them easily, or to quiz the gardeners about their care. What’s more, Sir Robert had no intention of letting this new light of knowledge shine only in his own country. The Herbal was to be translated and finely bound up, with coloured illustrations and new additions wherever necessary, and then sent out to foreign dignitaries; a minor tool of diplomacy. It was a specialised task, which set me a little apart from the rest of the under-secretaries, just as surely as the small closet, with its window over the garden for a clear light, where I was allowed to spread my paints and papers. I felt so spoiled I was almost scared of it – half drunk with the freedom to borrow any book from the great library. For the first time in my life, in fabulous hand-tinted editions, I saw the plants from foreign countries spring to life in shades of saffron, cinnabar and verdigris. Maybe it was because Sir Robert’s rule over the household was so complete that I suffered no open signs of envy. Or maybe mine was a private pleasure, and the others didn’t envy me.
    Sometimes I thought of Jacob, and wished that he could see me. Sometimes I thought what Jacob would say, if he could see the Herbal: I knew Master de l’Obel had begun to correct Master Gerard’s work, before its author took it back, indignantly; and truth to tell I wondered, I did wonder, when I read his description of how the barnacle geese that flock here each year spring from the shells shed by a Scottish tree. But in our age of marvels it might be foolish to query – it would certainly be foolhardy. I bent my head to the translation, industriously.
    I was sent to make my bow to Master Gerard, of course – in this house they did things courteously. His brief glance made it clear he wouldn’t expect to be seeing too much of me, but if he felt any resentment, he didn’t show it. The only person in the house who seemed openly to disapprove of me was the nominal master himself, old Lord Burghley. He wasn’t there all the time – everyone knew that for years he’d been begging her majesty to let him retire, and that his greatest pleasure now was to ride around Theobalds, his country estate, on a mule, or to sit and watch his gardeners from the shade of a tree. But sometimes I would hear the clunk of his stick, and turn to see his small eyes fixed on me. Like a lot of old people, he had the habit of talking to himself aloud and once, ‘I suppose Robert knows what he’s doing,’ I heard, as he glared at me.
    I ventured to mention it to the old clerk. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, twisting his hands below his pointed face, so that I almost expected to see whiskers twitching above a grain of corn, ‘he’s like that with everybody.’ And even for Lord Burghley, it seemed, in the end it was enough that Sir Robert had a purpose for me – just how good or useful a one would become clear eventually.
    Katherine, Lady Howard, Countess of Nottingham
October 1597
    There are patches of time when too much seems to happen, so that in the end you feel punch-drunk, like a cheap fighter in the ring at the end of fair day. It was only yesterday, the twenty-third, that the queen paused on her way back from chapel, and handed to my husband the patent that made him Earl of Nottingham – and me the countess, naturally.
    Of course we knew that it was coming – the queen herself had been in a little ripple of amusement when she beckoned me to walk to chapel with her that day. But even so there is something about the moment: I couldn’t step from my place in the queen’s train to be beside my husband, but after so many years of marriage, I could still feel his joy. The ceremony was all it should have been – I wished my father were alive to see. He once said