manage everything to the outcome of his choosing, whatever that may be. And I should be there, watching and gossiping with everyone else.
My son Henry, at service in Robert Dudley’s household, writes me that Dudley will never allow a marriage which would displace him from Elizabeth’s side, and that he will oppose Cecil as soon as that old fox shows his hand. But I am for the marriage—any marriage. Pray God that she will have him. She has left it as late as any woman dare; she is thirtyfive, dangerously old to give birth to a first child, but she will have to grit her teeth and do it. We have to have a son from her; we have to have an heir to the throne of England. We have to see where we are going.
England is a business, an estate like any other. We have to be able to plan ahead. We have to know who will inherit and what he will get; we have to foresee what he will do with his inheritance. We have to see our next master and know what his plans will be. We have to know whether he will be Lutheran or Papist. Those of us living in rebuilt abbeys and dining off church silver are especially anxious to know this. Please God this time she settles on this suitor, marries him, and gives us a new steady Protestant master for the trade of England.
Elizabeth is a hard mistress to serve, I think, as I command the carpenters to mend the gaps in the floorboards. This would have been our first Christmas at court, for me and my lord the earl. Our first Christmas as newlyweds, the first Christmas I would have been a countess at court, where I should have sparkled like a snowflake and taken great joy in settling old scores from my newly raised position. But instead, the queen allowed my husband the earl only a couple of days with me before dispatching him to Bolton Castle to fetch the Scots queen while I set to work on this hovel.
The more I repair this halfruined wreck of a house, the more ashamed of it I am, though God knows it is no fault of mine. No house of mine would ever fall into disrepair like this. All of my properties—most of which came to me through the good management of my second husband, William Cavendish—were renovated and rebuilt as soon as we acquired them. We never bought anything without improving it. Cavendish prided himself on parceling together plots of land and swapping one farm for another till he made a handsome estate, which I would then run at a profit. He was a careful man, a great businessman, an older man, over forty when he married me, his bride of nineteen.
He taught me how to keep an accounts book for our household and make it up every week, as faithfully as reading a sermon on Sunday. When I was little more than a girl, I used to bring my household book to him like a child with her schoolwork, and he would go through it with me on a Sunday evening, as if we were saying our prayers together, like a pious father and daughter, our heads side by side over the book, our voices murmuring the numbers.
After the first month or so, when he saw that I had such an aptitude and such a love for the figures themselves, as well as the wealth they represented, he let me see the accounts book for the small manor he had just bought, and said that I could keep it too, to see if I would manage it well. I did so. Then, as he bought more properties, I took care of them. I learned the wages of field laborers as well as housemaids; I learned how much we should pay for carting as well as for washing the windows. I started to run his farms as I ran our house and I kept the books for them all the same.
He taught me that it means nothing to own land or money as the old lords own their estates and waste them from one generation to another. Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have. He taught me to love the order of a wellkept accounts book