The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell Read Online Free Page A

the fact that the place was now one of his official destinations. The Privy Council table was the very heart of government, and he was at home there. Indeed, the other Privy councilors, all older and, they believed, wiser, were forced to begrudgingly admit that Essex was a faithful and hardworking cohort. No one, in fact, spent more time at Council business. No one demonstrated more raw enthusiasm for the job. He was young and wild and too well loved by the queen for his own good, but the older men were, in the end, forced to agree that he was a brilliant logician, a clever tactician, and regularly spouted unique solutions to previously insoluble problems.
    A final turn down a short hall found Essex at a doorway undistinguished other than by the two armed soldiers who guarded it. At sight of the men, he silently congratulated himself, recognizing them as Elizabeth’s personal guard of this hour, who protected whichever room in which the queen was present. He greeted them, warmed by their obvious admiration for him. They were common men, brave soldiers who had seen battle, and they respected him. The public, he knew, perceived him, despite his title and standing with the queen, as a man of the people. He liked that, liked that he was welcome in the company of low- or highborn men.
    When Essex entered, the guards uncrossed their halberds and opened the door.
    As ever, the sight of Elizabeth amazed him, paralyzed him. Bathed in orange afternoon light, she stood for her portrait wearing a low-bodiced, brocaded gown, draped round in a robe the color of fire. Her eyes were fixed on the young Flemish artist, and though she had not turned when the door opened, Essex was sure she knew it was he who had entered.
    Quietly he shut the door behind him and, moving behind Marcus Gheerhaerts, settled himself on a bench, the better to gaze at the queen and the nearly completed portrait.
    There was a fabulous quality to the painting, undoubtedly the most sumptuous and beautifully wrought that he had ever seen. In ways, it re-created Elizabeth in shocking, lifelike reality, yet it imagined much. It sang with allegory, Gheerhaerts having planted dreamlike, mythical ele-ments at every turn, allowing one to stare endlessly at the portrait and continue discovering its mysterious details.
    Despite the pale gray that shadowed Elizabeth’s temples and cheeks, the artist had chosen to depict the queen’s angular features with a lush roundness, a fullness of the lips and breasts, the soft, sloe-eyed gaze of a lover. ’Twas as though the painter had chosen to see the woman at her life ’s ripest moment. The way, thought Essex, that Leicester had described Elizabeth in her thirties, when they still shared a bed.
    The gown’s high, rounded ruffs were such fine gauze as to be transparent, only noticeable by their jeweled borders, and the tips of the proud, feathered headdress that evoked Diana, goddess of the hunt, were lost beyond the top of the canvas. Her wig, hung with huge, teardrop-shaped pearls, was the color of fresh carrots, its long, curled tendrils hanging down along her bosom. Pearls hung as ear bobs, ropes of fat pearls encircled her neck as well as a necklace dangling in the cleft of her pale raised breasts. On her puffed left sleeve, a jeweled snake symbolizing fidelity was made all of pearls and twisted into a love knot, whilst the serpent grasped in its mouth a red ruby heart.
    Clearly Gheerhaerts had reworked the fire-colored cloak draped round Elizabeth’s left shoulder and right hip since Essex had seen it last, for now it was dotted—most extraordinarily, he thought—with eyes, ears, and mouths! This young Netherlander, thought Essex, must indeed have studied the queen’s life in some detail before beginning his portrait.
    How else would he have known to symbolize in his rendition of her the three most important men in her life? From the earliest days of her reign, Elizabeth had literally called Leicester “My Eyes.”