The Girl in the Glass Tower Read Online Free PDF

The web of corridors necessitated frequent consultation of the plan, and as we passed into ever more private areas my nerves began to prod. I might have turned and run but the carved doors were opening and Dodderidge was handing me in to the usher, who announced me loudly – ‘The Lady Arbella Stuart’ – so there was no going back.
    The room was of quite modest proportions and contained a dozen women, none of whom I had set eyes on before. They were all decked magnificently, making me understand why my maid had insisted I wear the embellished gown I was trussed into, and I thanked her silently for her bullying. I was hustled around, inspected thoroughly by curious eyes, and introduced to all present, but my nerves made their names slip out of my head. I wished desperately for the formidable presence of Grandmother – Grandmother who knew all the rules – when only minutes before I had been luxuriating in my freedom from her.
    ‘How is dear Lady Shrewsbury?’ said someone.
    ‘She is exceedingly well,’ I replied.
    ‘Too busy building houses to join us at court, I suppose.’
    ‘She
is
very busy,’ I replied. Someone less green than I was then might have noticed the slightly disapproving tone. People, I learned later in life, could not quite reconcile themselves to success, particularly in a woman, and always sought subtly to undermine it. Those women would have been acutelyaware that Grandmother, though she was the countess to one of England’s greatest earls and a friend of long standing to the Queen, was born a Derbyshire squire’s daughter, albeit one with a canny instinct for making the right connections: she had married-up four times and amassed great wealth with her astute dealings. Despite her humble origins, she had the ultimate trump card in me, for none of those blue-bloods at court had a granddaughter who was heir to the throne. But I was oblivious to that complex web of hierarchy then.
    I finally landed on a bench.
    ‘Aren’t you to be matched with the Duke of Parma?’ my neighbour, an ancient lady, the Countess of somewhere, had asked me.
    I couldn’t think of a satisfactory response. It was the first I’d heard of such a match and my insides began to shrivel at the idea of being sent off to a foreign court to wed a stranger. I was floundering for a response when, thankfully, the ancient countess continued. ‘I thought the idea was that a marriage contract between the Queen’s heir and the Spanish King’s cousin might put an end to his plans to invade.’
    ‘That is likely,’ I said, pleased with my non-committal answer. No one had spoken to me directly about marriage or anything else, but Grandmother had impressed upon me the importance of always appearing as if I knew exactly what was going on and to ‘act like the heir to the throne and don’t smile, it will make you seem meek and ingratiating’. The talk of imminent invasion had even reached Derbyshire and the servants chattered about it constantly, but then I suppose they’d all known the Queen of Scots in one way or another and the Spaniards were, by all accounts, bent on vengeance for her death. She had died a traitor, or a martyr, it depended which way you saw it.
    That day, a year earlier, when the news arrived of the Scottish Queen’s execution was indelibly inked into my memory.I’d overheard my step-grandfather, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had witnessed the event, discussing it with his steward:
… butchered her, hacked at her neck. It was inhuman. To do such a thing to an anointed queen … I will be damned for it. I wish she had never fallen into my orbit
. I was horrified – that kindly woman I’d once met, hacked at as if she were nothing more than a length of timber. The earl had her little dog beneath his arm. I recognized it, remembered it sitting on her lap and her hand squeezing mine, the warmth of her smile. Nausea washed up my body.
And this creature
, the earl continued,
will not leave off pining. I can’t