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been well enough today, he would be brushing off the mockery as though it were no more than a few drops of rain on his miniver collar. When we meet in the hall tonight he may speak of it, but only if there is need.
    He may say, it’s good that Essex is going too far, the queen doesn’t like her officers mocked too publicly. He may say, one of our men in place should be told to feed his lordship’s vanity. Or he may wear that disapproving look, that puffs out the pouches under his eyes and makes his years hang heavy, and say that we should damp down all comment, a period of quiet would be good for the country.
    On the whole he is unlikely to say anything: as he grows older and his hand starts to shake, he assumes everyone will agree with him and I do, actually. How would I not, when he trained me so thoroughly? The one thing he is certain not to say is, Don’t let it hurt you. Flattery is for fools, vanity is for women, that’s what he’d say.
    Thank God for Lizzie.
    My ruff feels too tight around my neck but I know better than to lift a hand to ease it. There are too many eyes on me, watching for the least sign of discomfiture. I can see Southampton grinning spitefully. I remember him as a child, always trying to keep up with the older boys. I can see Francis Bacon, his profile turned away from me. He’s never forgiven us for that business over the Attorney General’s office, he’s linked his fortune to Essex’s chariot wheels, and it will be like the clever fool he is if he gets dragged the wrong way. But he won’t entirely be enjoying this – the same blood runs in the veins of both our mothers; at rock bottom we are family.
    In the convoluted world of the court, there may even be some who believed we Cecils had a hand in writing Essex’s little story. My father has been painting himself as a hermit for years, asking leave to retire and tend his garden. And one thing we all learn at court, a veil of enmity can cloak allies as easily as a show of friendship cloaks enmity. They may think I have the subtlety, or the courage, to make fun of my own misshapen form, to consider the sting was a price worth paying to have made the queen laugh out loud.
    I should be flattered by their thoughts, probably.
    Essex himself is riding around the ring, that victor’s lap of honour where they hold the horse’s pace down so its oiled hooves flick up the dust contemptuously. As he passes he looks at me with a hot urgent eye. It was always that way, ever since he was young, one of the aristocratic orphans, like Southampton, raised in my father’s house. He’d do something outrageous, and then he’d come to peer at you, in his tall gangling way, looking for – what? Shock? Approval? Envy? Reassurance that you’d forgive him, come what may?
    Perhaps now it is my jealousy he wants, for me to acknowledge that my feeble arm could never even bear the weight of his lance, so I give it to him, dipping my head a little and smiling slightly, like a fencer courteously acknowledging a hit.
    Smiling is easy: my father always taught me to praise in public, and criticise secretly. Sweetness is easy: it is easy, actually, as I look at Essex, but why? Absurd, irrational, but there is something in the sight of that tall, trotting figure that melts some of the sore frozen core in me.
    Perhaps that is something I will not say to Lizzie.
    Jeanne
Winter 1595–96
    Around Christmas Mrs Allen’s cousin, the theatre man, sent word he wanted to see her. They’d been given a gift of clothes from some grand lady that needed altering to make players’ costumes, and she was clever that way. She took me along to help carry the bundles, and I went with more than usual alacrity. I was feeling restless since that day at the tourney – as if my little hole in the wainscot were no longer enough for me. It was not to the theatre we were to go today, but to the great lady’s house in Chelsea. The troupe had been hired to put on several shows during the