The Girl in the Mirror. Sarah Gristwood

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      Jacob knew several of the other plant collectors here – James Garrett, the Huguenot apothecary, and Master Garth, whose connections with the southern Americas brought many rarities his way. They even passed some business to Jacob, but he was too uncompromising a man to fit for long into that or any other community. The few people who really made up my world came to me in other ways. There were the Hills, who rented the bigger patch of land beside ours, with cherry trees standing sentinel in the rows of herbs, and a pool and, most magical of all, a curved shape of willow like a tiny house with a vine growing all over it, and bunches of hard little grapes like beads hanging from the ceiling. They had a daughter – fourteen, almost grown up – who told me how to use the sops-in-wine and helped me play games with the cockleshells that edged the border. Master Hill was well to do, and though occasionally he grumbled his family would bankrupt him some day, more often he liked to boast that they had a garden that would do for a fine lady. Master Hill was a man of connections, Jacob said, and once he bought his wife a present that made me stare at it, round-eyed: the shape of a cocklolly bird, made all from living rosemary.

      Master Hill paid Jacob to keep his accounts, and to write his letters neatly. So did other businessmen, one by one, and not all of them Dutch or French, though it helped that, besides the Latin, he spoke three languages easily. Four, in the end, for he came to teach himself Italian, and in doing so to teach me. He hadn’t the time or the patience to school a child in the rudiments, so I learnt to read and recite, and figure, at the petty school. I learnt to write there, too, but Jacob said it was a vile, clumsy hand they were teaching me. He said it to the dame, who announced the next day she wanted no more to do with me. So I stayed at home, and imitated Jacob’s beautiful curling writing, and ran loose in the shelves of his growing library as if in a row of peas. He was friends with all the booksellers around St Paul’s, and 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 СКАЧАТЬ