The Girl in the Mirror Read Online Free PDF

and stories they used to dress up the fact that times had changed, and knights no longer really fought each other with spear-tipped poles under codes of chivalry. I was scathing of all that; the very young feel scathing easily.
    This – I told myself, as I jostled along with the crowd trying to get in at the gates, squeezed by a merchant’s wife with a picnic basket on one side, and on the other by a courting couple who couldn’t even keep their hands off each other until they found a seat – was modern London, where you could buy anything from a Spanish orange tree to a copy of an Italian play, where every householder had by law to hang a light outside, so that the night streets were almost bright like day. Where the queen’s own godson had invented a flushing jakes, so that after you’d evacuated, a stream of water carried your filth away … But it was good, just for the moment, to be swept along with the crowd. To smell the damp sand of the arena, and the farmyard aroma of the horse lines, where the chargers were shitting with eagerness and fear.
    The only place I could get was high up in the grandstand, so that what was going on below had an air of unreality, like something seen at the play. But I was happy enough to gaze down at the courtiers who were coming in last of all, to the seats beside the arena, furred and cloaked against the November air. Mulberry and tawny, sulphur yellow and ox-blood red, their very velvets seemed to warm the day.
    At one end, the royal gallery still stood empty, fluttering with silks in the Tudor colours, green and white. The crowds were beginning to cheer some arrivals – clearly well-known personalities. The man beside me, a burgher as broad as he was tall, could see my ignorance, and was only too happy to enlighten me.
    ‘That’s Ralegh,’ he said, ‘see, the tall one? That’s the queen’s cousin, well, kinsman, Lord Howard the Lord Admiral, with the white beard. Look, that’s Master Cecil, Lord Burghley’s son – I daresay the old man will stay away, I doubt he’s got much taste now for a tourney. But Robert Cecil, he’s a rising man – and a sharp one, they say.’ There were no cheers for Robert Cecil, I noticed. In fact there were even some jeers as he took his place. He was a small man, I saw, and almost twisted – hunch-backed? – in some way, though for all that he managed his slight dark figure gracefully.
    ‘Ah,’ my neighbour said on a grunt of satisfaction, ‘here she comes, the queen’s majesty.’ Now there really was cheering. I peered downwards, hungrily. I hadn’t expected to make anything out, but as the stiff tiny mannequin advanced to show herself, I found I could see quite clearly. See where the blaze of jewels caught the winter sunlight, see the bright red fringe of curls around the white oval of her face. Around her clustered the young maids of honour, with one or two older ladies.
    Jacob and his friends, talking of an evening, had nothing but contempt for the court – a nest of carrion crows grown fat, they said, of maggots feasting on decay. But even they would hush their wives when any of the talk – ‘Of course it’s a wig. My sister’s husband’s a perruquier, and he says she’s bald as an egg underneath!’ – came close to touching the queen’s dignity.
    ‘She may have her vanities as a woman,’ they’d say, ‘and why shouldn’t she? But she’s given us close on four decades of quiet – aye, I know things haven’t been so good this last year or two, but she can’t help the weather and the harvest, can she? Just look across the Channel if you want to see how bad things could be.’ And then they’d break off, with a sidelong glance at Jacob, and at me.
    Something was happening, down in the lists. A herald on horseback, dressed in red and white, had trotted into the arena, and was making the circuit of its brightly painted wooden walls with something in his hand held high.
    ‘It’s a glove – they always do it,’