when he went to see them, he took me.
He made more than enough money to keep us both decently, if not luxuriously. He even made enough to employ Mrs Allen, the Dutch-born widow of a local seaman, to cook us one hot meal a day and to keep the house neat. Mrs Allen must have known my secret – though in truth it never seemed as dramatic as that word implies. Just once, I remember, when I was begging to go back to school like other children, she did look me right in the eye. ‘And what about the first time they take your breeches down for the birch? Have you thought about that?’ I dropped my gaze. It was the sort of thing neither Jacob nor I ever thought about directly. But she in her turn never said anything straight out, perhaps from respect for Jacob – ‘such a man of letters’, as she called him, a trifle breathlessly – just as she never said anything about the packed bags he always kept by the door, even after we’d been in England for years and developed a cautious acquaintanceship with the idea of safety. But it may also have been because she, too, was unable to envisage any other solution for me. If I were to be a girl, then I would need to marry, and who would want a girl with neither dowry nor family, with no idea how to sew or to make herself pretty? Looking back now, I’m grateful to Mrs Allen. Looking back, I think of her affectionately. And looking back, I think there might have been mothering there, had I been able to take it. But I was a child who’d learned, the hardest way of all, that safety lay in self-sufficiency.
Still, it was to Mrs Allen I owed the few festivities I knew – the old rites and revels that grow from the blood and bone of this English country, and that made me less of a stranger than I might otherwise have been. It was she who, in the first bright days of February, would take me to the English church to see the procession of candles on Candlemas Day. They didn’t hold with such things at the stricter Dutch church where Jacob took me – ‘Papist nonsense,’ they used to say. It was she who sent me out with other children begging for treats on St Valentine’s Day. ‘It’s one thing we can do right in this household, just like everybody else,’ I heard her say firmly to Jacob, and he stopped protesting and turned away. She took me out into the fields, to look for blossom on the first of May.
Sometimes, too, she’d take me to the playhouse. One of her husband’s cousins was in the business and he’d leave word with the doorman so we could get in for free. Sometimes, after, she’d take me behind the scenes, where the kings and villains became men with traces of grey hair gummed on their face and paint in the corner of their eyes – but still, men whose voices carried across the room, men whose air and gestures made everyone else in the room look paltry. Men in velvets and in lace, even if both were a little shabby. And with them the boys, the shrill-voiced pieces of vanity who’d don petticoats and act women in the play. I looked at those boys with a mixture of fear and the most burning curiosity.
There was one old actor, Ben, who took especial pains with me, showed me the tricks of posture and paint that made young into old and boy into girl – or, I suppose girl into boy. It was only later, as I grew, that I wondered how he had known that these things would interest me. But perhaps he just liked children. Children liked him, certainly. Ben had been to sea, when the acting work would not support him, and he had fabulous stories to tell – of lands where the waves flashed amethyst and turquoise, where emerald green birds with clamouring wings but no legs sucked the honey from scarlet flowers all day, and of the serpent hiss of hard rain beating on a tropical sea. I’d take the stories home to Jacob, like a bartering tool, and sometimes I could sting him into telling me tales of his old life in the south, where bushes of rosemary grew so high they used the branches for firewood, and clouds of pomegranate blossom glowed against a blazing sky.
By and large it was, I suppose, a lonely life, but I didn’t mind much. It was easier that way. As I grew older, I watched the young girls begin to blush and giggle as they filled their dresses, and the young men stare and swagger on their way to the butts, out past the laundresses on Finsbury Fields, and I knew neither was for me. I didn’t go to the butts, though the law said all boys should practise archery; I suppose here as elsewhere our foreignness protected me, explaining any differences away. It was not quite true, I’d found, that the English hated foreigners – not the Londoners, anyhow. What they really hated were those native-born English who were different in any way. For almost ten years, after we first arrived in England, I lived among them as a mouse lives in the wainscoting. Glimpsed, sometimes. Cursed at, occasionally. But on the whole, peaceably.
Winter 1593–94
You could live well here, if you chose to, within a network of others who had fled to Elizabeth’s England, some fleeing the Inquisition’s long arm, others simply to make money. It was easy to forget we were strangers in a strange land. Until something happened to remind you, and anything you’d learned about safety had to be unlearned, painfully.
I must have been turning fifteen when Jacob came home one day, his face bleached.
‘I’ve just seen Roderigo Lopez,’ he said. It was a mark of his anxiety that he was confiding in me. ‘Of course, it’s all an absurdity. But mud sticks, and these days, you never know what nonsense is going to get you into trouble.’
Indeed, that year had been far from easy. First we heard that the Spanish had another Armada on the way – terrifying for everyone, to be sure, but anathema to those who’d seen what the Spanish were doing in the Netherlands, from whence came bloodier stories every day. Next we heard that the winds had changed, and we were safe – certainly through another winter. But then came news that Henry of France, our Protestant hero, had turned Papist as the price of holding on to his country. He said Paris was worth a Mass: he should have heard what they said of him, the grave old men with their neat ruffs and their wine cups, in the Huguenot community. Even the plague had been worse than usual, so that people started talking about the great epidemic thirty years before, when one in four Londoners died. Jacob said the ordinary people, in their ignorance, were blaming ‘strangers’ – immigrants, like us – and keening over the wickedness of the country. Even the playhouses had been closed. But this was something different, apparently.
‘Roderigo should never have got across Lord Essex – never!’ Jacob exclaimed angrily, as I knelt to stoke up the fire. ‘That’s a young man who doesn’t forgive a slight – yes, and a young man in a hurry.’ I was sorry. I didn’t know much about the Earl of Essex, no more than I did of any of the grandees whom the other boys ran after when they rode through the streets, half in admiration and half in mockery. But I liked Dr Lopez, who’d always been kind to me. Jacob said he’d been a Jew once, but he’d become a Christian many years ago when he’d first come to this country from Portugal – ‘Had to, naturally.’ He eyed me with a rare impatience when I looked at him blankly; yes, I knew, of course I did, that no one practised the Jewish faith in this country. But the fact was, I looked at the world around me – the world of people, not of books, or plants – as little as might be.
When Dr Lopez was appointed the senior doctor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and even the queen’s own physician, Jacob said, it reflected credit on us all. Showed you could do service to England, even if you were born across the sea. ‘Shows that at least here you can get along, if you’ll just try to fit in and live quietly.’ As a child, all I knew was that, when Dr Lopez came to visit, he brought a bag of comfits for me. And as I grew, and Jacob let me stay up to listen to the grown-ups’ talk, I liked the way his cheeks creased up and his white beard trembled as he banged his beaker on the table so that the drops splashed red, and I liked to hear his stories.
Yes – he had told some about Lord Essex, maybe. Or at any rate a young noble patient who was suffering half from the spleen – ‘If he was a girl, we’d call it hysterics, but he thinks it gives him a hold over her majesty!’ – and half from some unnamed disease, the thought of which made the older men purse their lips slyly.
Perhaps now Jacob thought that it was time the men’s conversations ceased merely to pass over me like a ripple of water. Perhaps he just wanted to talk with somebody.
‘Lord Essex has got wondrous great these last two years. What, not out of his twenties yet, and a privy councillor already. And the favourite companion of the queen’s majesty – aye, and one who dares to slight her and say her nay in a way his father, God rest his soul, would never have done. The