Read Online The Girl in the Mirror by Sarah Gristwood - Free Book Online

needed.
    Even Ralegh writes: ‘Whoso taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves to be so.’ The face of treachery is the devil’s face, in the form we see among us every day. But Essex spends his life peering through the bushes to trace the devil’s grin in the bark of an old tree. He knows every man is against him: in the end, they will be. I suppose it is his way of imposing order on the world. Less frightening, perhaps, than knowing his failure, like his success, is his own responsibility. As we pull up, the thought sends me into the house even more lonely.
    Jeanne
Summer 1597
    I wasn’t unhappy in the next year or so, or not precisely. Master Pointer’s was a kindly family, and his wife thought I was young to be alone in the world. I did not, unless I chose it, need to dine alone of a Sunday. And Master Pointer introduced me, carefully, to some of his gardening friends, always on the understanding that his work came first, that I was his discovery. But sometimes as I sat around the well-stocked table, a wave of unreality swept over me, and I watched them as wonderingly as I had watched, once, when a cousin of Mrs Allen’s had taken us to see the wild beasts in the Tower menagerie.
    What had these people to do with the past I’d known? What had they to do with my real identity? Even if it hadn’t been for my secret, I’d had a family once, and look what happened. The way I lived was the only safe way. And dear God, where was this closeness going to end – with the suggestion I might marry one of their friendly daughters, and bring my skills into the family? And the next Sunday I’d make excuse, say I had to see an old friend, though in truth I would spend the day alone, wandering round all the gardens of London.
    The gardens were my salvation, you might say – lucky there were so many. But the gardens were my danger, too, with their siren song of what might be. Master Pointer sold plants to many of the grandees, and he made sure that sometimes I went along with the delivery, to walk around and increase my knowledge as much as might be.
    ‘They won’t mind – they’ll be flattered someone wants to admire their taste. Show them one of your drawings if they query you,’ he said shrewdly. I remember a garden by the London Wall, close to sunset one late June day. A gardener was settling the new plants in, as tenderly as if they’d been new babies. The light had sunk to that low pitch when the blues sing clearly, and the yellow in the leaves makes each flowerbed a mirror of the sky on a sunny day. The roses were almost over, but a hint of their scent hung under the honeysuckle, and the air had cooled just enough to make you nostalgic for the morning’s heat. It was an evening for the touch and laughter, and dreams. For lovers … For a heartbeat, I almost felt the touch of skin on skin, and here was I, walking alone with a scrap of paper and a stick of charcoal, exploring a business opportunity.
    That’s where I understood that some change had to come. That however lucky I’d been to survive so far, survival was not enough for me. That I couldn’t go on forever, like some lying ghost, haunting the fringes of some happy ordinary family; and nor could I push myself into the ranks of the plantsmen in my present identity.
    I couldn’t just step back; I’d been Jan too long, and there was no way for Jeanne to live and make money. As a woman alone and without family – a woman neither child nor wife nor widow – there would be no place for me. I’d still be a freak, an anomaly.
    I couldn’t see the way to change clearly, and yet change there had to be. And as I walked ever faster in the golden light, staring without seeing at the heartsease pansies, the thought of that Accession Day came back to me.
    Every one of the great lords was a garden maker. Apart from anything else, it was known to be one way to the heart of the