The Virgin's Lover Read online

  “You can call me Jane,” she said. “As ever. How are you, Will?”

  “Amusing,” he said. “This is a court ready to be amused, but I fear for my post.”

  “Oh?” she asked.

  The lady-in-waiting who was escorting Jane to the queen paused for the jest.

  “In a court in which every man is played for a fool, why should anyone pay me?” he asked.

  Jane laughed out loud. The lady-in-waiting giggled. “Give you good day, Will,” Jane said fondly.

  “Aye, you will miss me when you are in Spain,” he said. “But not miss much else, I would guess?”

  Jane shook her head. “The best of England left it in November.”

  “God rest her soul,” Will said. “She was a most unlucky queen.”

  “And this one?” Jane asked him.

  Will cracked a laugh. “She has all the luck of her sire,” he said with wonderful ambiguity, since Jane’s conviction would always be that Elizabeth was the child of Mark Smeaton, the lute player, and his luck was stretched to breaking point on the rack before he danced on air from the gallows.

  Jane gleamed at the private, treasonous joke, and then followed the lady-in-waiting toward the queen’s presence chamber.

  “You’re to wait here, Countess,” the lady said abruptly, and showed Jane into an anteroom. Jane rested one hand in the small of her back and leaned against the windowsill.

  There was no chair in the room, no stool, no window seat, not even a table that she might lean on.

  Minutes passed. A wasp, stumbling out of its winter sleep, struggled against the leaded window pane and fell silent on the sill. Jane shifted her weight from one foot to another, feeling the ache in her back.

  It was stuffy in the room, the ache in the small of her back traveled down to the calves of her legs. Jane flexed her feet, going up and down on her toes, trying to relieve the pain. In her belly, the child shifted and kicked. She put her hand on her stomacher and stepped to the window embrasure. She looked out of the window to the inner garden. Whitehall Palace was a warren of buildings and inner courts; this one had a small walnut tree growing in the center with a circular bench around it. As Jane watched, a pageboy and a serving maid loitered for five precious minutes whispering secrets and then scampered off in opposite directions.

  Jane smiled. This palace had been her home as the favorite lady-in-waiting of the queen, and she thought that she and the Spanish ambassador had met by that very seat themselves. There had been a brief, joyful time, one summer, between the queen’s wedding and her triumphant announcement that she was with child, when this had been a happy court, the center of world power, united with Spain, confident of an heir, and ruled by a woman who had come to her own at last.

  Jane shrugged. Queen Mary’s disappointment and death had been the end of it all, and now her bright, deceitful little half-sister was sitting in her place, and using that place to insult Jane by this discourteous delay. It was, Jane thought, a petty revenge on a dead woman, not worthy of a queen.

  Jane heard a clock strike from somewhere in the palace. She had planned to visit the queen before her dinner and already she had been kept waiting for half an hour. She felt a little light-headed from lack of food and hoped she would not be such a fool as to faint when she was finally admitted to the presence chamber.

  She waited. More long minutes passed. Jane wondered if she could just slip away; but that would be such an insult to the queen from the wife of the Spanish ambassador that it would be enough to cause an international incident. But this long waiting was, in itself, an insult to Spain. Jane sighed. Elizabeth must still be a filled with spite, if she would take such a risk for the small benefit of insulting such a very unimportant person as herself.

  At last the door opened. The lady-in-waiting looked miserably embarrassed. “Do forgive me. Will you come this way, Countess?” she asked politely.

  Jane stepped forward and felt her head swim. She clenched her fists and her nails dug into the palms of her hands so the pain of it distracted her from her dizziness and from the ache in her back. Not long now, she said to herself. She can’t keep me on my feet for much longer.

  Elizabeth’s presence chamber was hot and crowded, the lady-in-waiting threaded through the many people and a few of them smiled and acknowledged Jane, who had been well liked when she had served Queen Mary. Elizabeth, standing in blazing sunlight in the center of a window bay, deep in conversation with one of her Privy Councillors, seemed not to see her. The lady-in-waiting led Jane right up to her mistress. Still there was no acknowledgment. Jane stood and waited.

  At last Elizabeth concluded the animated conversation and looked around. “Ah, Countess Feria!” she exclaimed. “I hope you have not been kept waiting?”

  Jane’s smile was queenly. “Not at all,” she said smoothly. Her head was thudding now and her mouth was dry. She was very afraid of fainting at Elizabeth’s feet; there was little more than determination holding her up.

  She could not see Elizabeth’s face, the window was a blaze of white light behind her, but she knew the taunting smile and the dancing black eyes.

  “And you are expecting a child,” Elizabeth said sweetly. “Within a few months?”

  There was a suppressed gasp from the court. A birth within a few months would mean that the child had been conceived before the wedding.

  Jane’s calm expression never wavered. “In the autumn, Your Grace,” she said steadily.

  Elizabeth fell silent.

  “I have come to bid you farewell, Queen Elizabeth,” Jane said with glacial courtesy. “My husband is returning to Spain and I am going with him.”

  “Ah yes, you are a Spaniard now,” Elizabeth said, as if it were a disease that Jane had caught.

  “A Spanish countess,” Jane replied smoothly. “Yes, we have both changed our places in the world since we last met, Your Grace.”

  It was a shrewd reminder. Jane had seen Elizabeth on her knees and weeping with pretended penitence before her sister, had seen Elizabeth bloated with illness, under house arrest, under charge of treason, sick with terror, begging for a hearing.

  “Well, I wish you a good journey anyway,” Elizabeth said carelessly.

  Jane sank to the ground in a perfect courtly curtsy; no one could have known that she was on the very edge of losing consciousness. She rose up and saw the room swim before her eyes, and then she walked backward from the throne, one smooth step after another, her rich gown held out of the way of her scarlet high heels, her head up, her lips smiling. She did not turn until she reached the door. Then she flicked her skirt around and left, without a backward glance.

  “She did what?” Cecil demanded incredulously of an excitable Laetitia Knollys, reporting, as she was paid to do, on the doings of the queen’s private rooms.

  “Kept her waiting for a full half hour, and then suggested that she had the baby in her belly before marriage,” Laetitia whispered breathlessly.

  They were in Cecil’s dark paneled study, the shutters closed although it was full day, a trusted man on the door and Cecil’s other rooms barred to visitors.

  He frowned slightly. “And Jane Dormer?”

  “She was like a queen,” Laetitia said. “She spoke graciously, she curtsyed—you should have seen her curtsy—she went out as if she despised us all, but gave said not one word of protest. She made Elizabeth look like a fool.”

  Cecil frowned slightly. “Watch your speech, little madam,” he said firmly. “I would have been whipped if I had called my king a fool.”

  Laetitia bowed her bronze head.

  “Did Elizabeth say anything when she had gone?”

  “She said that Jane reminded her of her sour-faced old sister and thank God those days were past.”

  He nodded. “Anyone reply?”

  “No!” Laetitia was bubbling with gossip. “Everyone was so shocked that Elizabeth should be so …so…” She had no words for it.

  “So what?”

  “So nasty! So rude
! She was so unkind! And to such a nice woman! And her with child! And the wife of the Spanish ambassador! Such an insult to Spain!”

  Cecil nodded. It was a surprising indiscretion for such a controlled young woman, he thought. Probably the relic of some foolish women’s quarrel that had rumbled on for years. But it was unlike Elizabeth to show her hand with quite such vulgarity. “I think you will find that she can be very nasty,” was all he said to the girl. “You had better make sure you never give her cause.”

  Her head came up at that, her dark eyes, Boleyn eyes, looked at him frankly. She smoothed her bronze hair under her cap. She smiled, that bewitching, sexually aware Boleyn smile. “How can I help it?” she asked him limpidly. “She only has to look at me to hate me.”

  Later that night Cecil called for fresh candles and another log for the fire. He was writing to Sir James Croft, an old fellow-plotter. Sir James was at Berwick but Cecil had decided that the time had come for him to visit Perth.

  Scotland is a tinderbox, he wrote in the code that he and Sir James had used to each other since Mary Tudor’s spy service had intercepted their letters, and John Knox is the spark that will set it alight. My commission for you is to go to Perth and do nothing more than observe. You should get there before the forces of the queen regent arrive. My guess is that you will see John Knox preaching the freedom of Scotland to an enthusiastic crowd. I should like to know how enthusiastic and how effective. You will have to make haste because the queen regent’s men may arrest him. He and the Scottish Protestant lords have asked for our help but I would know what sort of men they are before I commit the queen. Talk to them, take their measure. If they would celebrate their victory by turning the country against the French, and in alliance with us, they can be encouraged. And let me know at once. Information is a better coin than gold here.

  Summer 1559

  ROBERT FINALLY ARRIVED at Denchworth in the early days of June, all smiles and apologies for his absence. He told Amy that he could be excused from court for a few days since the queen, having formally refused the Archduke Ferdinand, was now inseparable from his ambassador, talking all the time about his master, and showing every sign of wishing to change her mind and marry him.

  “She is driving Cecil mad,” he said, smiling. “No one knows what she intends or wants at all. She has refused him but now she talks about him all the time. She has no time for hunting, and no interest for riding. All she wants to do is to walk with the ambassador or practice her Spanish.”

  Amy, with no interest in the flirtations of the queen or of her court, merely nodded at the news and tried to turn Robert’s attention to the property that she had found. She ordered horses from the stables for Robert, the Hydes, Lizzie Oddingsell, and for herself, and led the way on the pretty cross-country drover’s track to the house.

  William Hyde found his way to Robert’s side. “What news of the realm?” he asked. “I hear that the bishops won’t support her.”

  “They say they won’t take the oath confirming her as supreme governor,” Robert said briefly. “It is treason, as I tell her. But she is merciful.”

  “What will she …er…mercifully do?” Mr. Hyde asked nervously, the burning days of Mary Tudor still very fresh in his memory.

  “She’ll imprison them,” Robert said bluntly. “And replace them with Protestant clergy if she cannot find any Catholics to see reason. They have missed their chance. If they had called in the French before she was crowned they might have turned the country against her, but they have left it too late.” He grinned. “Cecil’s advice,” he said. “He had their measure. One after another of them will cave in or be replaced. They did not have the courage to rise against her with arms; they only stand against her on theological grounds, and Cecil will pick them off.”

  “But she will destroy the church,” William Hyde said, shocked.

  “She will break it down and make it new,” Dudley, the Protestant, said with pleasure. “She has been forced into a place where it is either the Catholic bishops or her own authority. She will have to destroy them.”

  “Does she have the strength?”

  Dudley raised a dark eyebrow. “It does not take much strength to imprison a bishop, as it turns out. She has half of them under house arrest already.”

  “I mean strength of mind,” William Hyde said. “She is only a woman, even though a queen. Does she have the courage to go against them?”

  Dudley hesitated. It was always everyone’s fear, since everyone knew that a woman could neither think nor do anything with any consistency. “She is well advised,” he said. “And her advisors are good men. We know what has to be done, and we keep her to it.”

  Amy reined back her horse and joined them.

  “Did you tell Her Grace that you were coming to look at a house?” she asked.

  “Indeed yes,” he said cheerfully as they crested one of the rolling hills. “It’s been too long since the Dudleys had a family seat. I tried to buy Dudley Castle from my cousin, but he cannot bear to let it go. Ambrose, my brother, is looking for somewhere too. But perhaps he and his family could have a wing of this place. Is it big enough?”

  “There are buildings that could be extended,” she said. “I don’t see why not.”

  “And was it a monastic house, or an abbey or something?” he asked. “A good-sized place? You’ve told me nothing about it. I have been imagining a castle with a dozen pinnacles!”

  “It’s not a castle,” she said, smiling. “But I think it is a very good size for us. The land is in good heart. They have farmed it in the old way, in strips, changing every Michaelmas, so it has not been exhausted. And the higher fields yield good grass for sheep, and there is a very pretty wood that I thought we might thin and cut some rides through. The water meadows are some of the richest I have ever seen, the milk from the cows must be almost solid cream. The house itself is a little too small, of course, but if we added a wing we could house any guests that we had…”

  She broke off as their party rounded the corner in the narrow lane and Robert saw the farmhouse before him. It was long and low, an animal barn at the west end built of worn red brick and thatched in straw like the house, only a thin wall separating the beasts from the inhabitants. A small tumbling-down stone wall divided the house from the lane and inside it, a flock of hens scratched at what had once been a herb garden but was now mostly weeds and dust. To the side of the ramshackle building, behind the steaming midden, was a thickly planted orchard, boughs leaning down to the ground and a few pigs rooting around. Ducks paddled in the weedy pond beyond the orchard; swallows swooped from pond to barn, building their nests with beakfuls of mud.

  The front door stood open, propped with a lump of rock. Robert could glimpse a low, stained ceiling and an uneven floor of stone slabs scattered with stale herbs but the rest of the interior was hidden in the gloom since there were almost no windows, and choked with smoke since there was no chimney but only a hole in the roof.

  He turned to Amy and stared at her as if she were a fool, brought to beg for his mercy. “You thought that I would want to live here?” he asked incredulously.

  “Just as I predicted,” William Hyde muttered quietly and pulled his horse gently away from the group, nodding to his wife for her to come with him, out of earshot.

  “Why, yes,” Amy said, still smiling confidently. “I know the house is not big enough, but that barn could become another wing, it is high enough to build a floor in the eaves, just as they did at Hever, and then you have bedrooms above and a hall below.”

  “And what plans did you have for the midden?” he demanded. “And the duck pond?”

  “We would clear the midden, of course,” she said, laughing at him. “That would never do! It would be the first thing, of course. But we could spread it on the garden and plant some flowers.”

  “And the duck pond? Is that to become an ornamental lake?”

  At last she heard the biting sarcasm in his tone. She turned in genuine surprise. “Don’t
you like it?”

  He closed his eyes and saw at once the doll’s-house prettiness of the Dairy House at Kew, and the breakfast served by shepherdesses in the orchard with the tame lambs dyed green and white, skipping around the table. He thought of the great houses of his boyhood, of the serene majesty of Syon House, of Hampton Court, one of his favorite homes and one of the great palaces of Europe, of the Nonsuch at Sheen, or the Palace at Greenwich, of the walled solidity of Windsor, of Dudley Castle, his family seat. Then he opened his eyes and saw, once again, this place that his wife had chosen: a house built of mud on a plain of mud.

  “Of course I don’t like it. It is a hovel,” he said flatly. “My father used to keep his sows in better sties than this.”

  For once, she did not crumple beneath his disapproval. He had touched her pride, her judgment in land and property.

  “It is not a hovel,” she replied. “I have been all over it. It is soundly built from brick and lathe and plaster. The thatch is only twenty years old. It needs more windows, for sure, but they are easily made. We would rebuild the barn, we would enclose a pleasure garden, the orchard could be lovely, the pond could be a boating lake, and the land is very good, two hundred acres of prime land. I thought it was just what we wanted, and we could make anything we want here.”

  “Two hundred acres?” he demanded. “Where are the deer to run? Where is the court to ride?”

  She blinked.

  “And where will the queen stay?” he demanded acerbically. “In the henhouse, out the back? And the court? Shall we knock up some hovels on the other side of the orchard? Where will the royal cooks prepare her dinner? On that open fire? And where will we stable her horses? Shall they come into the house with us, as clearly they do at present? We can expect about three hundred guests; where do you think they will sleep?”

  “Why should the queen come here?” Amy asked, her mouth trembling. “Surely she will stay at Oxford. Why should she want to come here? Why would we ask her here?”