The accommodation was none too ample, for there were always extra people staying in the house, not relatives like Arwenack or casual callers, but men visiting and staying with Sir Walter to discuss some project, mathematical, theological, parliamentary or colonial. They would sit long into the night, their talk ranging far beyond the confines of the subject they had come to discuss. Perhaps a dozen such men visited regularly and these I came to know well; a few would stay for weeks at a time, a part of the household and of its intellectual life. Such intimates were George Chapman, a poet, Thomas Hariot, an astronomer, Matthew Royden, a free-thinker, the Earl of Northumberland, an alchemist, Dr Dee, the Queen’s astrologer, and of course Laurence Keymis who was an Oxford fellow and a mathematician and was closest to Ralegh of all these men.
Lady Ralegh was a tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, woman of about 30, with a slender neck and a subtle smile. Although many more beautiful women came to the house I never saw Sir Walter look at any one of them with that interest which betrays a straying fancy. Lady Ralegh was the ideal hostess for him, taking all incursions upon her hospitality with determined calm. Sometimes she would sit through a stormy intellectual argument, her head slightly lowered, taking no part yet by her presence keeping the argument from becoming an outright quarrel; sometimes she would rise and go to her household duties or to care for baby Wat, and the talk would be less sparkling for her absence.
Yet she never contributed to it, and indeed I believe the talk most times went too deep for her. Sir Walter also most times went too deep. She could not follow the unrestricted, imaginative flights of his mind. Her subtlety was comparatively shallow but her judgment was more sure, and watching her, one could see the way her wits detected the working difficulties of what he proposed. When she did criticise a plan or a notion of his, he paid her too little regard.
They both doted on their son who was now near two years of age and a vigorous happy boy. Indeed their life, one would have thought, was idyllic. Their love for each other was manifest. Their magnificent 450-acre estate set with fine trees and full of wild life was large enough to occupy any country man’s love of land. Ralegh bred horses, his falcons were the best in Dorset, he planted trees and shrubs and supervised with all his rare energy the cultivation and the improvement of his land. And he kept a new kind of open court to which came not the aristocracy and the powdered gallants of Westminster but the cream of England’s art and thought.
An idyll, but there was a worm in the bud. Sir Walter was still excluded from the Queen, his office of captain of her guard was in abeyance; he had no power in the land. And Sir Walter, I soon saw, joined with his splendid intellect and towering imagination a festering ambition to be back in the Queen’s favour.
Adding new poison to the first months of my stay with him was the reception given to his adventures in Guiana. The Queen was not impressed and still would not see him. Cecil was cold and unwelcoming, asking what profit Sir Walter had to show for the money invested. Howard, as became a sailor, was more downright about it, saying Ralegh was a fool to have pursued legendary gold mines when there was gold on the high seas already mined and waiting to be seized by a bold man.
But worse was to come. A rumour spread no one knew whence it came but Keymis was of the opinion that it had originated with the Bacons that Sir Walter, a man of action in his youth but a courtier tied to the Queen for far too long, had thought better of personally undertaking such an expedition with all its hardships and hazards and at the last had not accompanied it at all but had spent the summer with his relatives the Killigrews in Cornwall and had rejoined the ships at Falmouth when they returned.
I remember the evening when Sir Walter came back from Westminster and first told this story to his wife and Carew Ralegh and Laurence Keymis and Arthur Throgmorton, Lady Ralegh’s brother. Sir Walter was a man of considerable temper; but under strain he went white, his skin more sallow, that was all. However, neither Keymis nor Throgmorton a great supporter of his brotherin-law were so concerned with restraint. Their anger overflowed like lava from the lip of a volcano. Carew Ralegh, Sir Walter’s elder brother, was quieter in his manner and more sophisticated.
“It is at best a foolish story,” he said, “for it can so easy be denied. Slander is most dangerous when it’s hard disproved. We have a hundred men who can swear where Walter spent his summer.”
“My hundred men are in Portsmouth and Weymouth and dissipated over the west country. Where this calumny will do harm is at Westminster and Greenwich. Those of influence in those places who can answer for me are relatives and friends whose word may be suspect.”
“I’m surprised that Robert Cecil does not speak for you,” Lady Ralegh said. “I wrote him so soon as I heard you was home. And none could be closer to the Queen.”
“Oh, Cecil,” said Arthur Throgmorton, contemptuously, “you rest too much on his goodwill. His only concern is for himself, and his friends can go hang.”
“You’re wrong, Arthur,” Ralegh said sharply. “Robert Cecil is our friend and always will be. But his position is delicate, with the Queen still favouring Essex. In any event he could only recommend my case to Her Majesty, he can prove nothing of my whereabouts since he only has my word for ‘em.”
“And your word is not enough!” said Keymis explosively. “That’s what I find hard to stomach. They even choose to cast doubts upon the whole voyage by saying we picked up Topiawari’s son on the Barbary coast. One is truly staggered to observe the lengths malice will go to!”
“You have kept notes and diaries, Walter,” Lady Ralegh said. “Why do you not send them to the Queen or to Cecil asking that they be examined and pronounced on? It’s impossible to fabricate such pages, thumbed and stained with the marks of travel.”
Ralegh tapped out his unlit pipe. “By the living God, Bess, I think it is an ideal But I would improve on it: the story would be better writ up and published, not as diaries but as a sober account of all we saw and did. If they pretend to believe I could conjure out of my imagination all the wonders of that voyage, then they’ll defeat their own object by making fools of themselves ! “
“Even then it will not succeed unless it reaches the Queen,” murmured his brother. “There will be jealous hands ever ready to snatch it away.”
“She cannot fail to read it!” Sir Walter said, getting up sharply and moving about the tall green candle-lit room on his long legs. Again his height seemed greater than it was, and the flames scrawled calculating shadows over his face. “The problem is not how to get it to her but how quickly it may be got to her. If I’m to prepare for a full expedition next spring, things must be set in train before the turn of the year.”
“I’ll help you, Walter,” said Keymis. “There must be a good map drawn and all scientific data. Is John Shelbury free?”
“No, he’s in Islington on business for me and will not be back for two weeks. If “
“Can this boy write?”
Sir Walter looked coldly at me. “That’s what he was brought for.”
“And is it readable what he writes?”
“You’ve read it in letters already without hardship.”
“Try me,” I said.
“That we will.” Sir Walter in his pacing passed by his wife and laid a loving hand on her shoulder. “And tonight.”
“Tonight?” said Lady Ralegh. “But no! You’ve rid all day. Supper is waiting.”