The Virgin's Lover Read online

  “Who would finish it for us?” Cecil asked, knowing the most likely answer. “What commander would the Scots follow that would be our friend?”

  One of the Privy Councillors looked up. “Where is the Earl of Arran?” he asked.

  “On his way to England,” Cecil replied, hiding his sense of smugness. “When he gets here, if we can come to an agreement with him, we could send him north with an army. But he is only young…”

  “He is only young, but he has the best claim to the throne after the French queen,” someone said farther down the table. “We can back him with a clear conscience. He is our legitimate claimant to the throne.”

  “There is only one agreement that he would accept and that we could offer,” Norfolk said dourly. “The queen.”

  A few men glanced at the closed door as if to ensure that it did not burst open and Elizabeth storm in, flushed with temper. Then, one by one, they all nodded.

  “What of the Spanish alliance with the archduke?” Francis Bacon, brother to Sir Nicholas, asked Cecil.

  Cecil shrugged. “They are still willing and she says she is willing to have him. But I’d rather we had Arran. He is of our faith, and he brings us Scotland and the chance to unite England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. That would make us a power to reckon with. The archduke keeps the Spanish on our side, but what will they want of us? Whereas Arran’s interests are the same as ours, and if they were to marry,” he took a breath, his hopes were so precious he could hardly bear to say them, “if they were to marry we would unite Scotland and England.”

  “Yes: if,” Norfolk said irritably. “If we could make her seriously look twice at any man who wasn’t a damned adulterous rascal.”

  Most of the men nodded.

  “Certainly we need either Spanish help or Arran to lead the campaign,” Knollys said. “We cannot do it on our own. The French have four times our wealth and manpower.”

  “And they are determined,” another man said uneasily. “I heard from my cousin in Paris. He said that the Guise family will rule every thing, and they are sworn enemies of England. Look at what they did in Calais; they just marched in. They will take one step in Scotland and then they will march on us.”

  “If she married Arran…” someone started.

  “Arran! What chance of her marrying Arran!” Norfolk burst out. “All very well to consider which suitor would be the best for the country, but how is she to marry while she sees no one and thinks of no one but Dudley? He has to be put out of the way. She is like a milkmaid with a swain. Where the devil is she now?”

  Elizabeth was lying under an oak tree on Dudley’s hunting cape, their horses were hitched to a nearby tree, Dudley was leaning against the tree behind her, her head in his lap, twisting her ringlets around his fingers.

  “How long have we been gone?” she asked him.

  “An hour perhaps, no more.”

  “And do you always pull your mistresses off their horses and bed them on the ground?”

  “D’you know,” he said confidingly, “I have never done such a thing in my life before. I have never felt such desire before, I have always been a man who could wait for the right time, plan his time. But with you…” He broke off.

  She twisted round so she could see his face and he kissed her on the mouth: a long, warm kiss.

  “I am full of desire again,” she said wonderingly. “I am becoming a glutton for you.”

  “I too,” he said softly and pulled her up so that she was lying like a sinuous snake along him. “It’s a satisfaction that brings with it only more appetite.”

  A long, low whistle alerted them. “That’s Tamworth’s signal,” Robert said. “Someone must be coming near.”

  At once Elizabeth was up and on her feet, brushing the leaves off her hunting gown, looking around for her hat. Robert snatched up his cloak and shook it out. She turned to him. “How do I look?”

  “Uncannily virtuous,” he said, and was rewarded by the flash of her smile.

  She went to her horse and was standing at its head when Catherine Knollys and her groom rode into the little glade followed by Tamworth, Dudley’s valet.

  “There you are! I thought I had lost you!”

  “Where did you get to?” Elizabeth demanded. “I thought you were behind me.”

  “I pulled him up for a moment and then you were all gone. Where is Sir Peter?”

  “His horse went lame,” Robert said. “He is walking home in the sourest of moods. His boots are pinching. Are you hungry? Shall we dine?”

  “I am starving,” Catherine said. “Where are your ladies?”

  “Gone ahead to the picnic,” Elizabeth said easily. “I wanted to wait for you, and Sir Robert stayed to keep me safe. Sir Robert, your hand if you please.”

  He threw her up into the saddle without meeting her eyes and then he mounted his own hunter. “This way,” he said, and rode ahead of the two women to where the ride crossed a small river. On the far side, a pavilion hung with green and white had been erected and they could smell venison roasting on the fire and see the servants unpacking pastries and sweetmeats.

  “I am so hungry,” Elizabeth exclaimed with pleasure. “I have never had such an appetite before.”

  “You are becoming a glutton,” Robert remarked to Catherine’s surprise. She caught the quick, complicit look that passed between her friend and Sir Robert.

  “A glutton?” she exclaimed. “The queen eats like a bird.”

  “A gluttonous peacock then,” he said, quite unreproved. “Greed and vanity in one,” and Elizabeth giggled.

  On Wednesday evening Denchworth church seemed to be deserted, the door unlocked but shut. Tentatively, Amy turned the big iron handle and felt the door yield under her touch. An old lady in the pew at the back looked up and pointed silently toward the lady chapel at the side of the church. Amy nodded and went toward it.

  The curtains were drawn across the stone tracery separating the chapel from the main body of the church. Amy drew them aside and slipped in. Two or three people were praying at the altar rail. Amy paused for a moment and then slipped into the rear pew near to the priest, who was in close-headed conference with a young man. After a few moments the youth, head bowed, took his place at the altar rail. Amy went beside Father Wilson and knelt on the worn cushion.

  “Heavenly Father, I have sinned,” she said quietly.

  “What is your sin, my daughter?”

  “I have failed in my love of my husband. I have set my judgment above his.” She hesitated. “I thought I knew better than him how we should live. I see now that it was the sin of pride, my pride. Also, I thought I could win him from the court and bring him back to me and that we could live in a small way, a mean way. But he is a great man, born to be a great man. I am afraid that I have been envious of his greatness, and I think even my beloved father…” She strained her voice to speak the disloyal criticism. “Even my father was envious.” She paused. “They were so far above our station… And I fear that in our hearts we both reveled in his fall. I think that secretly we were glad to see him humbled, and I have not been generous about his rise to power ever since. I have not been truly glad for him, as a wife and helpmeet should be.”

  She paused. The priest was silent.

  “I have been envious of his greatness and the excitement of his life and his importance at court,” she said softly. “And worse. I have been jealous of the love that he bears the queen and suspicious of that. I have poisoned my love for him with envy and jealousy. I have poisoned myself. I have made myself sick with sin and I have to be cured of this sickness and forgiven this sin.”

  The priest hesitated. In every alehouse in the land there were men who swore that Robert Dudley was the queen’s lover and they were giving odds on that he would put his wife aside on some excuse, or poison her, or drown her in the river. There was little doubt in the priest’s mind that Amy’s worst fears were near to the truth. “He is your husband, set above you by God,” he said slowly.


  She lowered her head. “I know it. I shall be obedient to him, not just in my acts but in my thoughts too. I shall be obedient to him in my heart and not set myself up to judge him or to try to turn him from his great destiny. I shall try to teach myself to be glad for him in his fame, and not to hold him back.”

  The priest thought for a moment, wondering how to advise this woman.

  “I am cursed by a picture in my head,” Amy said, her voice very low. “I overheard someone say something about my husband, and now I see it all the time, in my head, in my dreams. I have to free myself from this …torment.”

  He wondered what she might have heard. Certainly, some of the talk that had come to his ears had been vile.

  “God will free you,” he said with more certainty than he felt. “Take this picture to God and lay it at his feet and he will free you.”

  “It’s very…lewd,” Amy said.

  “You have lewd thoughts, daughter?”

  “Not that give me any pleasure! They give me nothing but pain.”

  “You must take them to God and free your mind of them,” he said firmly. “You must seek your own path to God. However your husband chooses to live his life, whatever his choices are, it is your duty to God and to him to bear it gladly and to draw nearer to God.”

  She nodded. “And what am I to do?” she asked humbly.

  The priest considered for a moment. There were many stories in the Bible that described the sacred slavery that was the state of marriage, and he had exhorted many an independent-minded woman to obedience with them. But he did not have the heart to coerce Amy, whose face was so white and whose eyes were so pleading.

  “You are to read the story of Mary Magdalene,” he said. “And you are to consider the text “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” We are not ordered by God to judge each other. We are not even ordered by him to consider another person’s sin. We are ordered by God to let Him consider it, to let Him be judge. Wait until God’s will is clear to you and obey it, my child.”

  “And a penance?” she prompted.

  “Five decades of the rosary,” he said. “But pray on your own and in secret, my child; these are troubled times and devotion to the church is not justly respected.”

  Amy bowed her head for his whispered blessing and then joined the other five people at the altar rail. They heard the priest moving about behind them, followed by silence. Then, in his vestments, and carrying the bread and wine, he walked slowly up the aisle and went through the rood screen.

  Amy watched through the network of her fingers, through the fret- work of the rood screen, as he turned his back to them and said the prayers in the timeless Latin, facing the altar. She felt an ache in her breast which she thought was heartbreak. The priest had not told her that her sorrows were imaginary, and that she should put them out of her mind. He had not recoiled from the suggestion and denied the gossip of the kitchenmaid, of the spitboy. He had not reproached her with the vanity of wicked suspicions against an honest husband. Instead, he had counseled her in her duty and in courage as if he thought she might have something to endure.

  So he knows too, she thought to herself. The whole country knows, from the Denchworth cook to the Denchworth priest. I must have been the last person in England to learn of it. Oh God, how deeply, how very deeply I am shamed.

  She watched him raise the bread and drew her breath at the miraculous moment of change, when the bread became the body of Christ and the wine became his blood. Every bishop in the land had defied Elizabeth to insist that this was the truth; every priest in the land still believed it, and hundreds continued secretly to celebrate Mass like this, in the old way, in hiding.

  Amy, dazzled by the candles and comforted by the presence of the Living God, too sacred a being to be shown to the congregation, too sacred to be taken every Sunday, so sacred that He could only be watched through the lacing of her fingers, through the tracery of stone, prayed again that Robert might choose to come home to her, and that when he came, she should find some way to hold up her head, rinse those pictures from her mind, be free of sin and glad to see him.

  Cecil managed to catch Elizabeth before the great banquet at the Duke of Arundel’s magnificent palace, the Nonsuch, and delay her a moment in her privy chamber.

  “Your Grace, I have to speak with you.”

  “Spirit, I cannot. The duke has prepared a banquet for an emperor. He has done everything but roll the meat in gold leaf. I cannot insult him by being late.”

  “Your Grace, I am duty-bound to warn you. The Pope has increased his threat against you, and there is much gossip against you in the country.”

  She hesitated and frowned. “What gossip?”

  “They say that you are favoring Sir Robert over and above any other man.” Mealy-mouthed, Cecil scolded himself. But how can I tell her to her face that they are calling her Dudley’s whore?

  “And so I should,” she replied, smiling. “He is the finest man at my court.”

  Cecil found the courage to be clearer. “Your Grace, it is worse than that. There are rumors that you and he have a dishonorable relationship.”

  Elizabeth flushed red. “Who says this?”

  Every alehouse in England. “It is widely said, Your Grace.”

  “Do we not have laws to prevent me being slandered? Do we not have blacksmiths to cut their tongues?”

  Cecil blinked at her fierceness. “Your Grace, we can make arrests, but if something is widely spoken and widely believed we are at a loss. The people love you but…”

  “Enough,” she said flatly. “I have done nothing dishonorable, and neither has Sir Robert. I will not be traduced in my own hearing. You must punish the gossips that you catch and it will die down. If it does not I shall blame you, Cecil. No one else.”

  She turned but he detained her. “Your Grace!”

  “What?”

  “It is not just a matter of the common people gossiping about their betters. There are men in the court who say that Dudley should be dead before he brings you down.”

  Now he had her full attention. “He is threatened?”

  “You are both endangered by this folly. Your reputation has suffered and there are many who say that it is their patriotic duty to kill him before you are dishonored.”

  She blanched white. “No one must touch him, Cecil.”

  “The remedy is easy. His safety is easy. Marry. Marry either the archduke or Arran and the gossip is silenced and the threat is gone.”

  Elizabeth nodded, her hunted, fearful look on her face again. “I will marry one of them, you can count on it. Tell people that I will marry one or the other, this autumn. It is a certainty. I know that I have to.”

  “Caspar von Breuner will be at dinner. Shall he be seated beside you? We have to recruit his support for our struggle with Scotland.”

  “Of course!” she said impatiently. “Who did you think would sit next to me? Sir Robert? I have given everyone to understand that I am reconsidering marriage with the archduke; I have shown his ambassador every attention.”

  “It would be better for us all if anyone could believe you this time,” Cecil said frankly. “The ambassador has hopes, you have seen to that; but I do not see you drawing up a marriage treaty.”

  “Cecil, it is August, I am on progress, this is not a time to draw up treaties.”

  “Princess, you are in danger. Danger does not stop because someone has cooked you a banquet and the hunting is good and the weather is perfect. The Earl of Arran should be in England any day now; tell me that I can bring him to you the moment that he arrives.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You can do that.”

  “And tell me that I can draw funds for him and start to muster an army to go north with him.”

  “Not an army,” she said at once. “Not till we know that he has the stomach to command one. Not till we know from him what his plans are. For all you know, Cecil, he could have a wife tucked away somewhere already.”

 
; That would hardly prevent you, judging from your present behavior with a married man, Cecil thought, ill tempered. Aloud, he merely said: “Your Grace, he cannot be victorious without our support, and he has the greatest claim to the Scottish throne. If he will lead our army to victory, and you will take him as your husband, then we have made England safe against the French not just for now, but forever. If you will do that for England, you will be the greatest prince that the country has ever had on the throne, greater than your father. Make England safe from France and you will be remembered forever. Everything else will be forgotten; you will be England’s savior.”

  “I will see him,” Elizabeth said. “Trust me, Cecil, I put my country before anything. I will see him and I will decide what I should do.”

  The candles and crucifix were brought out of storage, polished, and displayed on the altar of the Royal Chapel at Hampton Court. The court had returned from its summer progress in spiritual mood. Elizabeth, going to Mass, had taken to curtsying to the altar and crossing herself on arrival and departure. There was holy water in the stoop and Catherine Knollys ostentatiously walked out of the court every morning to ride to London to pray with a reformed congregation.

  “What is all this now?” Sir Francis Bacon asked the queen as they paused at the open doorway of the chapel and saw the choristers polishing the altar rail.

  “This is a sop,” she said disdainfully. “For those who wish to see a conversion.”

  “And who are they?” he asked curiously.

  “For the Pope who would see me dead,” she said irritably. “For the Spanish whom I must keep as my friends, for the archduke to give him hope, for the English Papists to give them pause. For you, and all your fellow Lutherans, to give you doubt.”

  “And what is the truth of it?” he asked, smiling.

  She shrugged her shoulder pettishly and walked on past the door. “The truth is the last thing that matters,” she said. “And you can believe one thing of the truth and me: I keep it well hidden, inside my heart.”

  William Hyde had a letter from Robert’s steward, Thomas Blount, requesting him to be ready for Robert’s men who would come within three days to escort Amy and Mrs. Oddingsell to the Forsters at Cumnor Place for a brief visit, and then on to Chislehurst. A scrawled note inside from his lordship told William the latest news from court, of the gifts that Robert had received from the queen, now returned to Hampton Court, and indicated that William would shortly be appointed to a profitable post in one of the Oxford colleges, by way of thanks for his kindness to Lady Dudley, and to maintain his friendship for the future.