A Net For Small Fishes

by Lucy Jago

Genres: Friendship; Historical Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

"A bravura historical debut . . . a gloriously immersive escape." —Guardian

Wolf Hall meets The Favourite in Lucy Jago's A Net For Small Fishes, a gripping dark novel based on the true scandal of two women determined to create their own fates in the Jacobean court.

With Frankie, I could have the life I had always wanted . . . and with me she could forge something more satisfying from her own . . .

When Frances Howard, beautiful but unhappy wife of the Earl of Essex, meets the talented Anne Turner, the two strike up an unlikely, yet powerful, friendship. Frances makes Anne her confidante, sweeping her into a glamorous and extravagant world, riven with bitter rivalry.

As the women grow closer, each hopes to change her circumstances. Frances is trapped in a miserable marriage while loving another, and newly-widowed Anne struggles to keep herself and her six children alive as she waits for a promised proposal. A desperate plan to change their fortunes is hatched. But navigating the Jacobean court is a dangerous game and one misstep could cost them everything.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books

Release date: November 9, 2021

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

1



The servant led the way as if into battle, his torch throwing monstrous shadows of my form against the walls. Fog muffled the light and dewed the stone. Although midmorning, the place felt to be just waking.

As we threaded our way through a maze of passages, the cries of a woman disturbed the torpid peace. The servant sped up. It troubled me that we charged toward the sounds of anguish.

I confess, so that you hold no illusion of me, I have never learned to govern most of my faults, nor even tried very hard, especially those of ambition, curiosity and pride. A godly woman would have run from that place as from the maw of hell; everyone knows that the jeweled façades of courtiers thinly veil their greedy, scurrilous, vain, lascivious souls.

Me? I rushed in.

Crossing an inner courtyard, we passed a fountain on which figures in pale marble wrestled, their naked limbs frosted by the English winter. The water at their feet was stopped and a stench rose from the puddle in its scalloped bowl, yellow with the piss of noblemen and their dogs; even the places these people relieved themselves were not ordinary.

We arrived on the third floor of a building against the Thames and entered a large apartment. Here the crying was loud enough to be described as wailing without risk of exaggeration, although the people standing in the entrance hall ignored it. I twisted my head about like a pigeon; every surface glowed with polish, tapestry or gilt, the air itself perfumed with such exotic scents that my nose was as greedy as my eyes for the extravagance with which I was enveloped. A tall gentleman tried to attract the servant’s attention. He accompanied a man clutching a drawing board, a painter, I assumed, but the servant ignored them and I was chivvied through a series of magnificent rooms glinting even in the dull January light. Too soon we reached a door upon which he knocked, gave me a look that said, “God’s blessings, you’ll need them,” and fled.

The door was unlatched and an old eye looked at me blankly through the crack.

“I am Mistress Anne Turner, wife of Dr. Turner,” I announced over the noise from within. “I have been summoned.”

The servant opened the door on a scene fit for the Globe. A hundred candles illuminated the tableau of a woman, a girl really, on her knees and sobbing. Long chestnut hair swung about her blotchy face, giving the appearance of a lunatic, an impression heightened by the undershirt slipping off her shoulders, kept up by nothing but a black armband. In one hand she clutched a string of pearls, while the other was buried in the silken pelt of a small white dog that whined each time she howled. The chamber appeared to have been ransacked. The contents of a sewing box were strewn upon the floor among shoes, undershirts, bird droppings and a little pile of dry dog turds. From the bed canopy swung a green parrot and circling like distressed mayflies were three maids, the ancient one who had opened the door and two very young ones, holding lace-edged handkerchiefs, hairbrushes and wine.

As another of my faults is not to know my place as well as I should, I stepped forward. “My lady,” I said with a deep curtsy, for this unhappy creature was the Countess of Essex, Frances Howard. She was wife to an earl, daughter to an earl, great-niece to an earl and lady-in-waiting (second rank) to the Queen. The Howards were as close to the King as his own family; oftentimes they appeared more favored. I had not seen Frances in the three years since her wedding nor had I ever known her intimately, but we were acquainted, both our families being Catholic and living within a short distance of each other in the country, near Saffron Walden. “My husband is Dr. Turner, your husband’s physician.”

She gave no indication of having heard me. Slowly, however, after much hiccupping and sniffing, her crying subsided. The silence that ensued was not of the peaceful kind. No one moved, the fire did not spit, all eyes were on the bowed figure, even her dog gazed into her face with concern. As her stillness became unbearable, she extended an arm. Without hesitation, the maid with the cup stepped forward and placed it in the girl’s outstretched fingers. She drained it and sat back on her heels. With eyes closed, she pushed the hair back from her damp face. Only then did she look at me.

Although her cheeks were mottled with crying, still I received a little shock from her beauty. Her hair and eyes were a lustrous brown and her skin, as if laid on cream not flesh, was that which comes only from dining on the food of princes. Life was coiled tight within her and it sparked in me a moment of envy, for I had borne six children and sometimes endured days in which I yawned more than I spoke.

There seemed no point in asking how she did, so I repeated my name and explained that I had received a note that morning from her mother. She scowled and opened her mouth to comment but at that very moment the lady of whom we spoke, the Countess of Suffolk, sailed into the room like a ship fully rigged in court dress, every inch swinging with pearls and gold chains. Behind her came her other two daughters, one older, one younger than Frances, sumptuously apparelled but plain by comparison to their sister. They came to a halt, skirts swaying on willow hoops as wide as their arm spans, a priceless armada. The little dog shot under Frances’s undershirt.

“Do I look like a kennel, Brutus?” Frances said.

“A sty,” exclaimed her mother. In the fingers of one hand she was rolling what looked like an owl pellet. “Why are you not ready? What is this, hmm?” She gazed around her daughter’s chamber as if a stranger to it. Under Queen Elizabeth, when she was not yet a countess, she had not the nerve to develop strange tics. But the fortunes of her family had soared with the arrival of King James and she adorned her new status with a variety of affectations, the most annoying of which was a rising “hmm” at the end of her pronouncements. Perhaps she thought it fashionably French. Or was it to disguise her guile as intellect? The achievement of her vaulting ambition had been entirely due to a generous dowry, uncommon comeliness and the fortunate quality of having no scruples. I have known her all my life, for my mother was in her acquaintance and remained so even after she sacrificed her position to marry my father; so lean is society in the countryside that the Countess would have had no company at all if she had been too strictly observant of rank.

“I cannot hear you.”

“I crave your blessing,” muttered her daughter.

“Why is Larkin out there? He is meant to be taking your likeness,” said her mother, rather foolishly, I thought; no portrait I had seen took distress as its subject. “Your father is furious. When you feel sorry for yourself, remember that he was already widowed by your age as was I. Think of your family, even if you cannot please yourself with your match. ‘We must marry our daughters before they marry themselves,’ he always says, and he is right, especially in your case,” said the Countess, slapping the back of her hand against the girl’s forehead, peering at her as one might at an animal with a leg missing.

“You are not feverish. Stand up. Turn around.”

Her daughter rose, flinching as if wasps stung her, and swiveled on unsteady feet. As she turned, her back was revealed through a rip in her undershirt from collar to coccyx. The skin was slit all over with bleeding welts. I could feel the burning pain in those lashes and the hair on my forearms pricked up in shock and pity for this girl. How furious her mother would be at the damage inflicted on her beautiful child.

Yet there was no cry of horror, not even a gasp. To protect one’s child is the first compulsion of any parent; to determine cause and fault follows later. Not, it seemed, with Frances’s mother. Her sisters also stood mute. “Why are you still not dressed, hmm?” said the Countess, her face glistening, hard as a sugar sculpture. She turned to me. Every time we met she affected barely to know me unless we were alone. “I have heard you are talented with apparel,” she said. I curtsied but said nothing, unsure what the statement insinuated. “You have come to help my daughter dress.”

It was not a question.

“I cannot dress,” mumbled Frances.

Her mother stepped forward, I thought to hold her, but instead she put ringed fingers under her daughter’s chin and forced the girl to look at her. Was she envious? The Earl of Suffolk was known to favor Frances above his other children—perhaps above his wife too? Did he whisper in the girl’s ear that she understood him best? I have seen daughters thus favored become unhappy wives when they cannot bewitch their spouses as they did their fathers.

“If you do not attend today, your husband will send you to his estate at Chartley, hmm?” she said, as if to a half-wit. “It is far away and comfortless. He will keep you there, whipping you without cease if he wishes, until you submit to your marriage as your sisters have done to theirs.”

I sensed the distance between myself and Frances Howard contract and wanted to take her in my arms. It is a hard fate to have a cruel husband. He was barely seventeen and already pitiless.

“You will feel better when you look better,” said the older sister, Elizabeth, not kindly.

“Do you?” asked Frances.

The sister flushed. “Your self-interest reflects badly upon us all. You have not even the hardest of it.” Frances only shrugged. Her mother put the white object she had been pinching into Frances’s hand and tugged her daughter’s shift into place as if it were a presentable thing not ripped and bloodied by her son-in-law.

“Please see that she is dressed by midday,” she said, neither looking at me nor making clear how she intended to make my intervention worthwhile. She left, trailed by her more tractable daughters.

Frances sent out her maids, then glared at me.

“My mother pays you to make me obedient?”

“Indeed, no. I had no idea why she called me here and will leave at once if you permit it.”

The girl narrowed her eyes at me and took a long drink straight from the bottle in the manner of an apprentice on his day off. “I remember who you are now. You are the wife of the fashionable doctor.”

“My husband was physician to our late Queen, God rest her soul. We are hardly the latest thing,” I said, dissembling. I considered myself ahead of the latest thing.

“And you concoct medicines and colored starch like an apothecary and dress boldly. And word is that you have a lover in the Prince’s household. Put off your cloak.” The gossip was relayed with a hint of admiration and was true. Even so, I did not like to be spoken to in so familiar a tone by a girl of eighteen years at most.

I could have marched out, as her mother had done, and no one would have blamed me. I was not a servant to be ordered about. My mother was Margaret St. Lowe, sole heir of Sir William St. Lowe. My father, Thomas Norton, was a Cambridgeshire yeoman whose family bore arms with eleven quarterings and had the head of a greyhound in a golden collar as his crest. My two elder brothers had good houses in or near Hinxton, the village where I was born, on the road between Cambridge and Saffron Walden. My youngest brother, Eustace, was falconer to the royal family and my only sister, Mary, had married Sir Edward Hinde, recently knighted, inheriting the family farm after my father’s death. My own husband, George, had no title but was a member of the College of Physicians and on good terms with Sir William Paddy, its President. The late Queen herself instructed her Chancellor to recommend his election when the College hesitated due to his Catholicism. It was just as George had said that morning: “The Howards always take more than they give.”

Throughout our nineteen-year marriage I had nagged him to take me to Court, to find clients for my fashioning, but he had always refused.

“The place is a cesspit. All depravity is there, bed-hopping and syphilitic, trussed up in velvet. Who could know that better than their doctor? Do we not have enough? We are happy, aren’t we?”

“Very happy, husband,” I had said, kissing the back of his soft, baggy hand. We shared love for our children and pride in our fine household in Fetter Lane. Of each other we were fond and trusting. Only the Court did he deny me.

“Do not go.”

There was a firmness in this command that I rarely heard from him. It so surprised me that I laughed.

“You would stop me?”

“That place ruins people.”

I meant no insult to him, but it is a foolish woman who puts her whole trust in a husband. My own father drank and gambled away my mother’s inheritance and together they died in want; grief for her lodged in my ribs and has not waned. It is a hurt without remedy. One cannot act as if these things never happened. George neither drank nor gambled, but to move in Court circles, even as a doctor, incurred enormous expense. Debt hung around our necks and a short run of bad luck would have bankrupted us. If there was something I could do to make our lives less precarious, and to recover the honor forfeit by my mother for marrying beneath her, I would do it.


Copyright © 2021 by Lucy Jago