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Dedication

To George Szirtes,

with love and gratitude

The Principal Actors, 1609

Anne Turner, holder of patent for yellow starch, mother of six, wife of Dr. George Turner

Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, ill-treated wife of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Daughter of the Earl and Countess of Suffolk

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, husband of Frances Howard, father beheaded 1601

George Turner, Treasurer to the College of Physicians and medical doctor at the Court of James VI & I

Katherine, Countess of Suffolk, mother of fourteen children, ten still living, including daughters Elizabeth, Frances and Catherine, and seven sons including Theophilus, Robert and Harry

Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, Lord Chamberlain, one of the King’s Trinity of Knaves with his uncle, Henry Howard (Lord Northampton), and Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury

Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, Lord Privy Seal, great-uncle to Frances Howard

Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, Lord High Treasurer and Secretary of State

King James VI of Scotland & I of England and Ireland, son of Mary Queen of Scots and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley

Queen Anna, Queen Consort of Scotland, England and Ireland, second daughter of King Frederick II of Denmark

Prince Henry, heir to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland

Sir Robert Carr (formerly Kerr), gentleman of the bedchamber and the King’s favorite since 1607

Sir Thomas Overbury, best friend and adviser to Sir Robert Carr, knighted in 1608

Richard Weston, bailiff to Dr. George Turner

Old Maggie, Anne Turner’s maid

Eustace Norton, Anne Turner’s brother

Mary Hinde, Anne Turner’s sister

Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, favorite lady-in-waiting to Queen Anna. Member of the Essex crew

Sir Arthur Waring, close friend to Anne Turner

Simon Forman, necromancer and physician

James Franklin, corrupt apothecary

James Palmer, Purchaser of Paintings to Prince Henry

Sir Edward Coke, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, later Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench

Dr. Edward Whiting, minister of the Church, confessor employed by the King’s Bench

Mary Woods, cunning woman

Sir Gervase Elwes, Lieutenant of the Tower of London

Epigraph

What griefs lie groaning on the nuptial bed?

What dull satiety? In what sheets of lead

Tumble and toss the restless married pair,

Each oft offended with the other’s air?

…

And to their wives men give such narrow scopes,

As if they mean to make them walk on ropes:

No tumblers bide more peril of their necks

In all their tricks than wives in husbands’ checks.

—Ben Jonson’s prophetic Masque of Hymen, 1606,

written to celebrate the wedding of the young

Earl and Countess of Essex

PART ONE

January 1609

1

The servant led the way as if into battle, his torch throwing monstrous shadows of my form against the walls. Fog muffled the light and dewed the stone. Although midmorning, the place felt to be just waking.

As we threaded our way through a maze of passages, the cries of a woman disturbed the torpid peace. The servant sped up. It troubled me that we charged toward the sounds of anguish.

I confess, so that you hold no illusion of me, I have never learned to govern most of my faults, nor even tried very hard, especially those of ambition, curiosity and pride. A godly woman would have run from that place as from the maw of hell; everyone knows that the jeweled façades of courtiers thinly veil their greedy, scurrilous, vain, lascivious souls.

Me? I rushed in.

Crossing an inner courtyard, we passed a fountain on which figures in pale marble wrestled, their naked limbs frosted by the English winter. The water at their feet was stopped and a stench rose from the puddle in its scalloped bowl, yellow with the piss of noblemen and their dogs; even the places these people relieved themselves were not ordinary.

We arrived on the third floor of a building against the Thames and entered a large apartment. Here the crying was loud enough to be described as wailing without risk of exaggeration, although the people standing in the entrance hall ignored it. I twisted my head about like a pigeon; every surface glowed with polish, tapestry or gilt, the air itself perfumed with such exotic scents that my nose was as greedy as my eyes for the extravagance with which I was enveloped. A tall gentleman tried to attract the servant’s attention. He accompanied a man clutching a drawing board, a painter, I assumed, but the servant ignored them and I was chivvied through a series of magnificent rooms glinting even in the dull January light. Too soon we reached a door upon which he knocked, gave me a look that said, “God’s blessings, you’ll need them,” and fled.

The door was unlatched and an old eye looked at me blankly through the crack.

“I am Mistress Anne Turner, wife of Dr. Turner,” I announced over the noise from within. “I have been summoned.”

The servant opened the door on a scene fit for the Globe. A hundred candles illuminated the tableau of a woman, a girl really, on her knees and sobbing. Long chestnut hair swung about her blotchy face, giving the appearance of a lunatic, an impression heightened by the undershirt slipping off her shoulders, kept up by nothing but a black armband. In one hand she clutched a string of pearls, while the other was buried in the silken pelt of a small white dog that whined each time she howled. The chamber appeared to have been ransacked. The contents of a sewing box were strewn upon the floor among shoes, undershirts, bird droppings and a little pile of dry dog turds. From the bed canopy swung a green parrot and circling like distressed mayflies were three maids, the ancient one who had opened the door and two very young ones, holding lace-edged handkerchiefs, hairbrushes and wine.

As another of my faults is not to know my place as well as I should, I stepped forward. “My lady,” I said with a deep curtsy, for this unhappy creature was the Countess of Essex, Frances Howard. She was wife to an earl, daughter to an earl, great-niece to an earl and lady-in-waiting (second rank) to the Queen. The Howards were as close to the King as his own family; oftentimes they appeared more favored. I had not seen Frances in the three years since her wedding nor had I ever known her intimately, but we were acquainted, both our families being Catholic and living within a short distance of each other in the country, near Saffron Walden. “My husband is Dr. Turner, your husband’s physician.”

She gave no indication of having heard me. Slowly, however, after much hiccupping and sniffing, her crying subsided. The silence that ensued was not of the peaceful kind. No one moved, the fire did not spit, all eyes were on the bowed figure, even her dog gazed into her face with concern. As her stillness became unbearable, she extended an arm. Without hesitation, the maid with the cup stepped forward and placed it in the girl’s outstretched fingers. She drained it and sat back on her heels. With eyes closed, she pushed the hair back from her damp face. Only then did she look at me.

Although her cheeks were mottled with crying, still I received a little shock from her beauty. Her hair and eyes were a lustrous brown and her skin, as if laid on cream not flesh, was that which comes only from dining on the food of princes. Life was coiled tight within her and it sparked in me a moment of envy, for I had borne six children and sometimes endured days in which I yawned more than I spoke.

There seemed no point in asking how she did, so I repeated my name and explained that I had received a note that morning from her mother. She scowled and opened her mouth to comment but at that very moment the lady of whom we spoke, the Countess of Suffolk, sailed into the room like a ship fully rigged in court dress, every inch swinging with pearls and gold chains. Behind her came her other two daughters, one older, one younger than Frances, sumptuously apparelled but plain by comparison to their sister. They came to a halt, skirts swaying on willow hoops as wide as their arm spans, a priceless armada. The little dog shot under Frances’s undershirt.

“Do I look like a kennel, Brutus?” Frances said.

“A sty,” exclaimed her mother. In the fingers of one hand she was rolling what looked like an owl pellet. “Why are you not ready? What is this, hmm?” She gazed around her daughter’s chamber as if a stranger to it. Under Queen Elizabeth, when she was not yet a countess, she had not the nerve to develop strange tics. But the fortunes of her family had soared with the arrival of King James and she adorned her new status with a variety of affectations, the most annoying of which was a rising “hmm” at the end of her pronouncements. Perhaps she thought it fashionably French. Or was it to disguise her guile as intellect? The achievement of her vaulting ambition had been entirely due to a generous dowry, uncommon comeliness and the fortunate quality of having no scruples. I have known her all my life, for my mother was in her acquaintance and remained so even after she sacrificed her position to marry my father; so lean is society in the countryside that the Countess would have had no company at all if she had been too strictly observant of rank.

“I cannot hear you.”

“I crave your blessing,” muttered her daughter.

“Why is Larkin out there? He is meant to be taking your likeness,” said her mother, rather foolishly, I thought; no portrait I had seen took distress as its subject. “Your father is furious. When you feel sorry for yourself, remember that he was already widowed by your age as was I. Think of your family, even if you cannot please yourself with your match. ‘We must marry our daughters before they marry themselves,’ he always says, and he is right, especially in your case,” said the Countess, slapping the back of her hand against the girl’s forehead, peering at her as one might at an animal with a leg missing.

“You are not feverish. Stand up. Turn around.”

Her daughter rose, flinching as if wasps stung her, and swiveled on unsteady feet. As she turned, her back was revealed through a rip in her undershirt from collar to coccyx. The skin was slit all over with bleeding welts. I could feel the burning pain in those lashes and the hair on my forearms pricked up in shock and pity for this girl. How furious her mother would be at the damage inflicted on her beautiful child.

Yet there was no cry of horror, not even a gasp. To protect one’s child is the first compulsion of any parent; to determine cause and fault follows later. Not, it seemed, with Frances’s mother. Her sisters also stood mute. “Why are you still not dressed, hmm?” said the Countess, her face glistening, hard as a sugar sculpture. She turned to me. Every time we met she affected barely to know me unless we were alone. “I have heard you are talented with apparel,” she said. I curtsied but said nothing, unsure what the statement insinuated. “You have come to help my daughter dress.”

It was not a question.

“I cannot dress,” mumbled Frances.

Her mother stepped forward, I thought to hold her, but instead she put ringed fingers under her daughter’s chin and forced the girl to look at her. Was she envious? The Earl of Suffolk was known to favor Frances above his other children—perhaps above his wife too? Did he whisper in the girl’s ear that she understood him best? I have seen daughters thus favored become unhappy wives when they cannot bewitch their spouses as they did their fathers.

“If you do not attend today, your husband will send you to his estate at Chartley, hmm?” she said, as if to a half-wit. “It is far away and comfortless. He will keep you there, whipping you without cease if he wishes, until you submit to your marriage as your sisters have done to theirs.”

I sensed the distance between myself and Frances Howard contract and wanted to take her in my arms. It is a hard fate to have a cruel husband. He was barely seventeen and already pitiless.

“You will feel better when you look better,” said the older sister, Elizabeth, not kindly.

“Do you?” asked Frances.

The sister flushed. “Your self-interest reflects badly upon us all. You have not even the hardest of it.” Frances only shrugged. Her mother put the white object she had been pinching into Frances’s hand and tugged her daughter’s shift into place as if it were a presentable thing not ripped and bloodied by her son-in-law.

“Please see that she is dressed by midday,” she said, neither looking at me nor making clear how she intended to make my intervention worthwhile. She left, trailed by her more tractable daughters.

Frances sent out her maids, then glared at me.

“My mother pays you to make me obedient?”

“Indeed, no. I had no idea why she called me here and will leave at once if you permit it.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at me and took a long drink straight from the bottle in the manner of an apprentice on his day off. “I remember who you are now. You are the wife of the fashionable doctor.”

“My husband was physician to our late Queen, God rest her soul. We are hardly the latest thing,” I said, dissembling. I considered myself ahead of the latest thing.

“And you concoct medicines and colored starch like an apothecary and dress boldly. And word is that you have a lover in the Prince’s household. Put off your cloak.” The gossip was relayed with a hint of admiration and was true. Even so, I did not like to be spoken to in so familiar a tone by a girl of eighteen years at most.

I could have marched out, as her mother had done, and no one would have blamed me. I was not a servant to be ordered about. My mother was Margaret St. Lowe, sole heir of Sir William St. Lowe. My father, Thomas Norton, was a Cambridgeshire yeoman whose family bore arms with eleven quarterings and had the head of a greyhound in a golden collar as his crest. My two elder brothers had good houses in or near Hinxton, the village where I was born, on the road between Cambridge and Saffron Walden. My youngest brother, Eustace, was falconer to the royal family and my only sister, Mary, had married Sir Edward Hinde, recently knighted, inheriting the family farm after my father’s death. My own husband, George, had no title but was a member of the College of Physicians and on good terms with Sir William Paddy, its President. The late Queen herself instructed her Chancellor to recommend his election when the College hesitated due to his Catholicism. It was just as George had said that morning: “The Howards always take more than they give.”

Throughout our nineteen-year marriage I had nagged him to take me to Court, to find clients for my fashioning, but he had always refused.

“The place is a cesspit. All depravity is there, bed-hopping and syphilitic, trussed up in velvet. Who could know that better than their doctor? Do we not have enough? We are happy, aren’t we?”

“Very happy, husband,” I had said, kissing the back of his soft, baggy hand. We shared love for our children and pride in our fine household in Fetter Lane. Of each other we were fond and trusting. Only the Court did he deny me.

“Do not go.”

There was a firmness in this command that I rarely heard from him. It so surprised me that I laughed.

“You would stop me?”

“That place ruins people.”

I meant no insult to him, but it is a foolish woman who puts her whole trust in a husband. My own father drank and gambled away my mother’s inheritance and together they died in want; grief for her lodged in my ribs and has not waned. It is a hurt without remedy. One cannot act as if these things never happened. George neither drank nor gambled, but to move in Court circles, even as a doctor, incurred enormous expense. Debt hung around our necks and a short run of bad luck would have bankrupted us. If there was something I could do to make our lives less precarious, and to recover the honor forfeit by my mother for marrying beneath her, I would do it.

I took off my cloak and put it on the bed. The miserable young Countess looked at me for so long I thought I should charge. What did she find? I took great pains to preserve the remnants of my youth so the years between us were less marked than they might have been. We could pass for sisters, just. Compared to her rich potency, my looks are muted. Blue eyes brighten an oval face framed with pale gold curls. I have been called beautiful, but I am not vain. For my blessings I thank God and my angel keeper, who embraces me with unfelt hands and guards me from harm even though I spend little time at confession.

“You dress like a man,” she finally pronounced.

She was beguiling and noble, but exceedingly rude.

“Moll Cutpurse dresses like a man. I dress as if I am not afraid,” I countered.

She paused a moment to consider that. “My mother does not like to be outshone. Why would she ask you to dress me? Does she think that if I look like a harlot, as you do, my husband will bed me more often?”

How was I to reply to that? “Does he need encouragement?” I said.

She was angry with him, perhaps with everyone. With a combative lift to her chin she weighed up what was safe to tell. I tried to feel indifferent to her judgment but something of her defiant spirit had already captured me. “Better a sheep than a shrew,” the saying goes, but not to my mind. My courage would appeal to her, and my greater age and lower rank would save us from rivalry, but my taste would be too outlandish.

“I can trust no one,” she said, “not even my family and servants.”

I shrugged slightly, making clear it made no difference whether she confided in me or not. She lifted her chin higher, yet never took her eyes from mine. Suddenly her face softened. She took a great breath and a step closer, as if spies listened at the door.

“My husband beats me because he has been home from his travels for two months and I am still a virgin.”

That net of words and meanings, cast with little self-pity and great faith in my discretion, ensnared me. I was fascinated that the most appealing young wife at Court remained a virgin; nosiness is another of my failings. Frances kicked at the clothes forming soft piles on the floor, like molehills. She was a most disheveled creature, but not defeated.

“Has he not suffered from the pox since his return?” George had told me this.

“He is not too ill to whip me. I am of the new way of thinking about marriage, in which man and wife are friends, the wife is not slave to the husband,” said Frances.

“Of course,” I replied, “but husbands rarely are.” I looked at the clock on the mantel, an elaborate confection of golden mermaids who rode their dolphins valiantly but could not steer back time. There was less than an hour ’til midday.

“I advise you to dress. It seems you will be unhappier if you refuse.”

“I will kill myself,” she said, pausing for a response, but I felt only embarrassment at her irreligion. I busied myself with picking up clothes and laying them on the bed. Her mother dressed her in fungal hues, perhaps to dampen her allure.

“If you take your life you will go to hell, which is worse than marriage,” I said.

“It will be hot, otherwise the differences will be few.”

“A woman should not decide her future.”

“I am deciding against a future.”

“That is the same. If you obey your husband, he might be kinder,” I said, knowing that she would already have been told that a hundred times. Indeed, she snorted.

“He only cares for horses and dogs. Even those he thrashes. He says women are parasites, like ticks.” She sat abruptly on the edge of the bed, head bowed. “I am very unhappy,” she whispered, and slipped her hand into mine.

A powerful memory rose to the surface. I had taken my older children to see a baby elephant in the Tower. The dejected creature was so thin its skin hung off its bones and it kept its eyes to the ground as though ashamed. Yet, even in dejection, the animal placed its trunk in the hand of its keeper, as if its trust were not broken. The keeper, long hardened to the prolonged deaths of his charges, had no clue what to do with it. We left that place quickly, our hearts sore. The fantastical nature of the beast had not brought us the pleasure we had anticipated. I felt the same that moment with Frances Howard. The wealth and distance in rank of this young woman were not sufficient to shield me from her anguish, and I could not remain unmoved by the soft weight of her hand in mine.

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