A sudden calm descended on him. This was a life or death crisis. He was good at those. It was only young girls for whom he was responsible who threw him. This was different. He looked Jane up and down, and a separate part of his brain noted the startled and even rather fearful effect this produced on her. He was undressing her in his mind, right enough, but not for that reason. Not yet, anyway. This was business.
Lady Downing. Sarah. Married at around Jane's age to a semi-senile suitor, she had enjoyed her husband's wealth and compensated for what he could not provide by starting an affair with Gresham, one of his very first acquaintances with a lady-in-waiting. Except that Sarah had been very bad at waiting. Their physical relationship had lapsed when she had married her second husband, but they had stayed good friends. Sarah had married a mere stripling of forty-six after her first husband died, and been plunged into mourning when he too had died of a canker some three years later. They were about the same height* Sarah and Jane, and seemed to push out against their dresses in more or less the same places. Sarah would help. Thank God they had remained the best of friends when the business between the sheets had ended. As for seamstress, alterations, ribbons and… and things girls cared about, it was still daylight, and money talked.
'MANNION!' Gresham bellowed. In time of need… Mannion was never far away from Gresham, but this time the old fool must have been hovering outside the door.
Gresham turned to Jane. 'I'm sorry… I should've thought. There's an answer. Lady Sarah Downing. She's an old friend of mine.' To his credit, Mannion kept a straight face. 'She's got a stock of Court dresses a mile high.' Did Jane's face lift a little at this? 'She's about your size. We'll go there now in the coach. You — ' he turned to Mannion — 'find me three seamstresses and two jewellers. Get them here, the first with their kit and the second with their wares. Tell the seamstresses they'll be working through the night and most of the morning. Tell 'em why — it'll make them more committed — and offer them three times the going rate. This is a crisis.'
He turned to Jane. 'I hope…' What he saw with his intuitive instinct for reading faces was the most extraordinary kaleidoscope of emotions he had ever witnessed. In business mode now, he was detached, needing to cut to the quick and to identify what the quick actually was. 'Please tell me what it is you want to say?'
Jane appeared almost in despair. 'My Lord,' she said, 'I have never appeared before a Queen. Never dreamed that I would be presented at Court. I have nothing to prepare me for this. But…'
'But what?' said Gresham, impatient.
'But Lady Sarah Downing? Two jewellers?'
She waited. Gresham said nothing.
‘I am a person of no breeding!' she said at last. 'I can't appear before the Queen in rags. But at the same time I can't appear as mutton dressed as lamb! Overdress me and I'm as humiliated as if I was under-dressed.'
A number of memories of Sarah floated before Gresham's eyes. Some were unprintable. All were happy.
'Sarah's a great Court lady,' he said, 'but she's human, and surprisingly normal. Try to trust her, if you can. Tell her just what you've told me.'
Mannion had left, and the yard was full of the noise of a great house being woken up.
'Thank you,' said Gresham, still in business mode, 'for making something I was dreading surprisingly easy.'
'Thank you,' said Jane, 'for letting a girl of no breeding meet the Queen of England.'
Why had it all gone so easily?
Gresham had not heard the brief conversation that had preceded her meeting with him. By some strange coincidence, Mannion had bumped into the hastily dressed Jane on her way to the Library.
'He needs yer to say yes to goin' with the both of us to Scotland.'
'And?' said Jane, cocking an eye to one of the very few men she had come to trust. If she had learned anything from Henry Gresham it was to mask her feelings, although her heart seemed to have speeded up to three times its normal rate.
'It's bloody dangerous,' Mannion said factually. 'But fer Christ's sake, say yes, and give 'im an easy time of it.'
Jane looked him in the eyes for a brief moment, then nodded carefully, before going to meet Gresham.
Gresham was relieved at the outcome of his request. He was staggered when, the next morning, he saw its product. The dress Jane and Sarah had chosen was of the finest dark-green velvet. It seemed to hug Jane's upper body, and then glance splendidly off her waist, cascading like a waterfall. Yet she had reserved the greatest stroke of genius for herself. Such a dress would be slashed to reveal perhaps an irridescent blue or even a pure black silk. Against the dressmaker's entreaty, Jane had insisted that the rich slashings show underneath not an oasis of blue or black, but simply more of the dark-green velvet. The only concession she had made was to ask for the openings to be lined with a modest number of small pearls. We are here, the pearls seemed to say, and if we thought we were more than we are we could be used to reveal a glow of colour that would rival a mallard's neck. But we are not so. We are simply a young girl in a borrowed dress, and we know who we are. As ever, the lack of pretension made a more powerful point than a week's artifice would have achieved.
Gresham's jaw dropped when Jane was presented to him. He had not seen this girl — this woman — before. She was extraordinarily, stunningly beautiful. It was not the dress with its cunning line, or the make-up so sparingly and skilfully applied, nor the wonders they had done with her lustrous hair. She was not made beautiful by what she wore. She made what she wore look beautiful. He looked at her for a moment, his face expressionless, sensing her yearning for his approval.
'Wait here a moment, please,' he said, and left the room. Five, ten, tense minutes passed before he returned, bearing a box.
'Something so beautiful deserves something equally beautiful,' he said quietly, as he drew forth the necklace. On a simple gold chain, the ruby was like an open heart pulsing with extraordinary colour. He moved behind Jane, slipping the necklace over her neck, feeling the warmth of her skin at his fingers' ends.
'It was my father's,' he said. 'It seems a shame for such a thing to lie in the dark. It'll be your only jewel. They'll know whence it came. And they will not call you mutton dressed as lamb.'
Well, at least he had struck her speechless for once.
He had thanked Sarah from the bottom of his heart. There had been no malice in their meeting, and when their time was done there had been no malice in their parting.
'I enjoyed it,' she had said simply. 'It made me feel young again.' She did not mention that she had no children of her own. 'Tell me, have you slept with her?'
'No I have not!' said Gresham with a vehemence partly fuelled by the thoughts he had had at the sight of Jane in her finery. Because of these thoughts, he could guess other men's reactions. As a result he felt himself aggressively protective towards Jane.
'Do you really know what you've got there in that girl? Sarah asked.
'A target for every man at Court?' asked Gresham glumly, ‘I hadn't realised she would make me act gamekeeper as well as poacher.'
'However beautiful, the body will always decay over the course of life,' answered Sarah. 'The mind,' she added gnomically, 'stays with us all our lives, God willing.'
It was difficult to say whether the radiance that lit Jane came from the superb job Sarah — and Jane — had made of an instant Court dress, or from within her own sense of well-being. Gresham never doubted that the meeting with the Queen would go well. Whatever her failings, Elizabeth had a soft spot for young girls, provided they did not marry against her will or bed one of her favourites.