A Book of Secrets

CHAPTER 2

We had a large dovecote at Framfield that we called the culverhouse. I used to like watching the white doves fly in and out, especially at sunset when the light turned them gold and I could imagine them phoenixes.

Framfield was the house in Sussex where I grew up. It overlooked the forest of the Weald, where the wind surged among the treetops in rushing waves and tugged away the autumn leaves. That forest was the source of my master's wealth. Sir Thomas Framfield owned one of the great iron furnaces that ate up the Wealden timber as fast as it grew and turned the iron ore from the soil into firebacks, cannon and shot. I was a maid and companion-almost a sister-to his daughter Anne, who I loved dearly. Framfield was my home and family, the only one I remembered, having been torn from my own as a very young baby.

That I am a Blackamoor is a book any man may read. Everything else about me has been put into a cipher so perfect I often have trouble decoding it myself. That being so, the plain and legible facts of my life are these:

I was born in Guinea where the gold comes from, on the coast of West Africa. My mother did not leave Guinea of her own free will. She and I were bought by Portuguese slavers who tore us from our home to trade for sugar in the Indies. They let me live. God knows why-I was a useless infant, still at the breast, and their most economic course would have been to dash my brains out against a post. They took my elder brother too, and what happened to the rest of my family, I do not know.

Our luck changed when the slavers were attacked by a ship captained by the famous John Hawkins. The English had no trade with the Guinea people yet, so all their gains in that region were got through privateering and stealing from the Spanish and Portuguese. Hawkin's crew killed the Portuguese and took all the bounty on the ship including us. Some of the goods and enslaved people they sold. Some, they brought back to the pale, wet, codfish country of England, so very different to the burning lands of Guinea. My brother was sold in Spain and died soon after, but they brought me and my mother home with them.

John Hawkins, who knew my master, sent my mother to him as a servant for the household. My master told me Hawkins' version of the story once:

"We put up some money for the voyage and he said the usual flowery stuff to me; anything I can do, any gifts I can bring you home. My wife asked him in jest for a blackamoor maidservant like those that serve the Spanish noblewomen, and a little one for the child-she was pregnant when Hawkins left. When he captured the Portuguese prize he thought it a very good joke to take her at her word and bring your mother home for her. I remember when you both arrived. He sent you with his servant and a letter. Your mother was sitting behind the servant on his horse, all hooded and cloaked, and when she took down her hood the stable boy screamed and ran. He thought it was the Devil come for him. And your mother showed no fright. She sat there like a queen and waited to be helped down. Then it was a whole new box of surprises when she took off her cloak and there you were, fast asleep in a sling around her back. Hawkins's letter just said:

As ordered; one Blackamoor lady & a child for the little one. She has learned English on board ship & claims she was a Princess in her home. I am told they must have been taken as prisoners of war-their clan are not usually sold as slaves and are too warlike to make good thralls, but treated well they will make excellent servants.

Well, my lady was charmed by your mother's grace, so here you stayed. Sussex had never seen such a thing. We had every neighbour for miles visiting on all kinds of pretexts to see the Guinea princess and her baby."

The knowledge of the way we came to Framfield left a scratch in my own love for the place, like a burr working against my skin. My childhood was happy, my master and mistress cared for me as they did their own kin. Yet I baulked at the notion of my mother and I as goods, as an order that John Hawkins had taken down and fulfilled. I knew my mother did not want to come to this country, that she did not want to leave her own.

Stranded in another country instead of being returned to our own, deposited on a household's doorstep, offered as servants-what dignity did it leave us? We were not to become slaves, but we had no choice at all in our servitude. I grew up knowing nothing else but for my mother, a princess in her own country, it must have been a bitter transformation.

Whatever her private feelings, she took steps to root herself in her new home. She converted to Christianity and we were both baptised a year after we arrived. Susan Katherine I have been ever since.

She died soon after, when I was only three. The sense I have of her is like the scent of wild chamomile or primrose; it vanishes if I try to keep it. The more I rest my mind on her, the more she slips away. Anything I do recall comes to me unasked, when I am suddenly and vividly overcome by a feeling-her fingers, gentle on my cheek, or the sound of her voice singing a haunting, off-tone song with words I can't catch. Never her face.

My lady Katharine had planned a portrait of us all-herself, Anne, my mother and I-but my mother died before it was halfway done. I used to trace her absence in the finished piece, which hangs at Framfield still. My lady seated, with Anne and I standing at her knees, and the space where my mother should be filled with a wall-hanging. Sometimes I reached up to touch that colourful emptiness. I felt the roughness of paint under my fingers as if she was beneath it, and if I picked the paint away I would find her face.

Whatever my past was, princess or peasant, wherever we came from and whatever our life was like in Guinea, it was all expunged by our journey, as if the sea washed it away on the crossing. I was brought up as an English lady's maid, learning the ways of a great household.

The Framfield family were Catholic and so was I raised, as an enemy of the newly Protestant state, in a creed that from my earliest years demanded deceit and subterfuge. Loyalty, love, silence and secrecy were all sewn up together in the chambers of my heart, and so it has been all my life.

When I was young it was still just possible to be a Catholic and perceived as a loyal citizen, in the time before Spanish plots and Jesuit missions prompted the Queen to make opposing her faith a treasonable matter. Because my master did not openly rebel or refuse to attend church as some recusant Catholics did, he managed not only to survive but to prosper. He hoped that the Queen might by marriage or persuasion be reconverted to the true faith, and until that time he wanted only to be left to worship in peace within his household.

My master was a landed man with a good name. He was sanguine and ruddy-faced, a sturdy man of great energies. I never saw him sit still. Even when he was reading or writing, he flung himself about in his chair and he preferred to walk when he was thinking, pacing up and down the long gallery or in the lime walk. He spoke four languages and was a scholar of Greek and Latin besides. Lacking a father of my own, I took him as my model of everything a man should be.

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's," he would say. "I give my temporal loyalty to the Queen and I will observe her laws, but my soul I owe only to God."

Over the years, priests stayed with us to offer Mass, lying in a concealed bolt-hole if strangers approached-for even in those days Mass was prohibited. They never set foot in the estate chapel, which had been whitewashed and stripped of bells, images, candles, and all its Roman Glory. When we knelt there on Sundays we said our prayers in English from the Book of Common Prayer, but the stories Lady Katharine read to us in the evening were the stories of Catholic saints and martyrs and there were rosary beads hidden among her jewels and sewing boxes.

"Elizabeth is a bastard," my lady told us, "and her mother Anne Boleyn was a witch and a whore."

She was the second kind of Catholic and believed that if England must return to the faith by force, through military invasion and dethroning of the Queen, then it was worth losing mortal lives in the endeavour in order to save immortal souls.

I clove to my master's more moderate faith, but it was my lady who taught me all my craft. Women are always less likely to be suspected of plots, intelligencing, and secret work, and that is a great advantage. My lady kept busy sending works of comfort or important messages to imprisoned Catholics and priests and she had many ways of concealing them.

I might have been seven or eight. I remember the smell of alum and vinegar in my nostrils and the weight of a white egg in my hand. Anne and I sat in my lady's private room. On the table, a bowl of eggs and two bowls of vinegar, one with an egg already sitting in it, looking fat and strange in its liquid bed.

"Keep careful hold of the new egg, Suky," said my lady. "Now Anne, fish out that egg there and put it on the plate. Gently now. Put it down softly, softly. There. Well done. How did it feel in your hand?"

Anne hesitated, in case her answer should be wrong.

"Soft," she said. "Not like a true egg. Is it a real egg, my lady?"

"Watch," said Lady Katharine, and took up a sharp knife.

We stared at the white egg,...