The Virgin's Lover Read online

  “I have always thought that she was not the true heir; but I thought she was the best choice for the country, until now.”

  “Why, what has happened now?” he demanded.

  “She is turning against the true religion, and supporting the Protestant rebels in Scotland,” she said levelly. “She has imprisoned all the bishops, except those that have been forced into exile. There is no church anymore, just frightened priests not knowing what they should do. It is an open attack on the religion of our country. What does she hope for? To make England and Scotland and Wales and Ireland all Protestant? To rival the Holy Father himself? To make a Holy Empire of her own? Does she want to be a Pope in petticoats? No wonder she does not marry. Who could bear such a wife as she would be?”

  “True religion?” Robert exclaimed. “Amy, you have been a Protestant all your life. We were married by King Edward’s service in his presence. Who have you been talking with to get such ideas in your head?”

  She looked at him with her usual mildness. “I have been talking with no one, Robert. And our household was Papist for all of Queen Mary’s years. I do think, you know. In the long hours that I spend alone, I have nothing to do but to think. And I travel around the country, and I see what Elizabeth and her servants are doing. I see the destruction of the monasteries and the poverty of the church lands. She is throwing hundreds into beggary; she is leaving the poor and sick without hospitals. Her coins are worth next to nothing, and her churches cannot even celebrate Mass. No one who looked at England under Elizabeth could think of her as a good queen. All she has brought is trouble.”

  She paused, seeing his appalled expression. “I don’t talk like this to anyone else,” she reassured him. “I thought it would be all right to share my thoughts with you. And I have wanted to speak to you about the Bishop of Oxford.”

  “The Bishop of Oxford can rot in hell!” he burst out. “You cannot talk to me of these matters. It’s not fitting. You are a Protestant, Amy, like me. Born and bred. Like me.”

  “I was born a Catholic; then I was a Protestant when King Edward was on the throne,” she said calmly. “And then I was Roman Catholic when Queen Mary was on the throne. Changed and changed about. Just as you have been. And your father recanted his Protestantism and called it a great error, didn’t he? He blamed all the sorrows of the country on his heresy, those were his very words. We were all Catholics then. And now you want to be Protestant, and you want me to be Protestant, just because she is. Well, I am not.”

  At last he heard a note that gave him the key to her. “Ah, you are jealous of her.”

  Amy’s hand went to her pocket to touch the cool beads of her rosary. “No,” she said steadily. “I have sworn I will not feel jealousy, not of any woman in the world, least of all her.”

  “You have always been a jealous woman,” he said frankly. “It is your curse, Amy—and mine.”

  She shook her head. “I have broken my curse then. I will never be jealous again.”

  “It is your jealousy that leads you into these dangerous speculations. And all this theology is just a mask for your jealous hatred of her.”

  “Not so, my lord. I have sworn I will renounce jealousy.”

  “Oh, admit it,” he said, smiling. “It is nothing but a woman’s spite.”

  She reined in her horse and looked at him so steadily that he had to meet her eyes. “Why, what cause have I for jealousy?” she demanded.

  For a moment Robert blustered, shifting in the saddle, his horse nervous under a tightened rein.

  “What cause have I?” she demanded again.

  “You will have heard talk about her and me?”

  “Of course. I assume that all the country has heard it.”

  “That would make you jealous. It would make any woman jealous.”

  “Not if you can assure me that there is no foundation to it.”

  “You cannot think that she and I are lovers!” He made it into a joke.

  Amy did not laugh; she did not even smile. “I will not think it, if you can assure me it is not true.” In her pocket she was gripping tight on her rosary. It felt like a rope that might save her from drowning in the deeps of this dangerous conversation.

  “Amy, you cannot think that I am her lover and plotting to divorce you, or to murder you as the gossipmongers say!”

  Still she did not smile. “If you assure me that the rumors are false then I will not attend to them,” she said steadily. “Of course I have heard them, and very vivid and unpleasant they are.”

  “They are most scurrilous and untrue,” he said boldly. “And I would take it very badly in you, Amy, if you were to listen to them.”

  “I don’t listen to them, I listen to you. I am listening very carefully now. Can you swear on your honor that you are not in love with the queen and that you have never thought of a divorce?”

  “Why do you even ask me?”

  “Because I want to know. Do you want a divorce, Robert?”

  “Surely, you would never consent to a divorce if such a thing were ever proposed?” he asked curiously.

  Amy’s eyes flew to his face and he saw her blench as if she were sickened. For a moment she was frozen on her horse before him, her mouth a little open as she gasped, and then, very slowly, she touched her horse with her little heel and preceded him down the track toward home.

  Robert followed her. “Amy…”

  She did not stop, nor turn her head. He realized that he had never before called her name without her immediate response. Amy always came when he called her; generally she was at his side long before he called her. It felt very strange and unnatural that little Amy Robsart should ride away from him with her face as white as death.

  “Amy…”

  Steadily she rode on, looking neither to right nor left, certainly not looking back to see if he was following. In silence, she rode all the way home, and when she got to the stable yard she handed her reins to the groom and went into the house in silence.

  Robert hesitated, and then followed her up the stairs to their bedroom. He did not know how to manage this strange new Amy. She went into their room and closed the door; he waited in case he could hear the sound of her turning the key in the lock. If she barred the door against him he could be angry, if she locked him out he was within his legal rights to break down the door, he had a legal right to beat her—but she did not. She closed the door; she did not lock it. He went forward and opened the door, as was his right, and went in.

  She was seated at the window in her usual seat, looking out, as she so often looked out for him.

  “Amy,” he said gently.

  She turned her head. “Robert, enough of this. I need to know the truth. I am sickened to my heart by lies and rumor. Do you want a divorce or not?”

  She was so calm that he felt, incredulously, a glimmer of hope. “Amy, what is in your mind?”

  “I want to know if you want to be released from our marriage,” she said steadily. “I am perhaps not the wife you need, now that you are become such a great man. That has become clear to me over recent months.

  “And God has not blessed us with children yet,” she added. “These alone might be reasons enough. But if half the gossip is true then it is possible that the queen would take you as her husband if you were free. No Dudley could resist such a temptation. Your father would have boiled his wife in oil for such a chance, and he adored her. So I ask you, please tell me honestly, my lord: do you want a divorce?”

  Slowly Robert realized what she was saying; slowly it dawned on him that she had been preparing herself for this, but instead of a sense of opportunity he felt rage and distress growing in him like a storm.

  “It’s too late now!” he exploded. “My God! That you should say this to me now! It’s no good you coming to your senses now, after all these years, it’s too late. It’s too late for me!”

  Startled, Amy looked up at him, her face shocked at the suppressed violence in his voice. “What d’you mean?”


  “She has given me up,” he cried, the truth bursting out of him in his agony. “She loved me and she knew it; she wanted to marry me and I her, but she has to have an ally for a war against France and she has given me up for the archduke or that puppy Arran.”

  There was an appalled silence. “Is that why you are here?” she asked. “And why you are so grave and quiet?”

  He sank into the window seat and bowed his head. Almost he felt he might weep like a woman. “Yes,” he said shortly. “Because it is all over for me. She has told me she has to be released and I have let her go. There is nothing left for me but you; whether you are the right woman or not, whether we have children or not, whether we will waste the rest of our lives together, and die hating each other, or not.”

  He had his hand to his mouth; he closed his teeth on his knuckles, forcing any more words back into silence.

  “You are unhappy,” she remarked.

  “I have never been in a worse case in all my life,” he said shortly.

  She said nothing, and in a few moments Robert mastered himself, swallowing his grief, and raised his head to look at her.

  “Were you lovers?” she asked very quietly.

  “What does it matter, now?”

  “But were you? You can tell me the truth now, I think.”

  “Yes,” he said dully. “We were lovers.”

  Amy rose, and he looked up at her as she stood before him. Her face, against the brightness of the window, was in shadow. He could not see her expression. He could not tell what she was thinking. But her voice was as calm as ever.

  “Then I must tell you: you have made a very grave mistake, my lord. A mistake in my nature, and in what insults I will tolerate, a mistake in yourself and how you should live. You must be mad indeed if you make such a confession to me, hoping that I might sympathize. Me, of all women: who am most hurt by this, I, who know what it is to love without return. I, who know what it is to waste a life in loving.

  “You are a fool, Robert, and she is a whore indeed, as half the country thinks. She will have to invent another new religion entirely to justify the hurt that she has done to me, and the peril she has led you to. She has brought you to sin and danger; she has brought this country to the brink of ruin, to heartbreak and poverty; and she is only in the first year of her reign. What wickedness will she undertake before she is done?”

  Then she drew her skirts back from him as if she would not have him touch even the hem of her gown, and walked out of the room they had shared.

  The November mist was cold on the river. The queen, looking down on the shrouded Thames from the high windows of Whitehall, shivered and drew her furred gown a little closer around her.

  “Still a lot better than Woodstock.” Kat Ashley smiled at her.

  Elizabeth made a face. “Better than arrest in the Tower,” she said. “Better than a lot of places. But not better than midsummer. It’s freezing cold and deadly dull. Where is Sir Robert?”

  Kat did not smile. “Visiting his wife still, Princess.”

  Elizabeth hunched her shoulder. “There’s no need to look like that, Kat. I have a right to know where my Master of Horse is. And I have a right to expect him to attend court.”

  “And he has a right to see his wife,” Kat said stoutly. “Letting him go was the best day’s work you ever did, Princess. I know it is painful for you, but…”

  Elizabeth’s face was peaked with the loss of him. “It’s not a good day’s work done; your congratulations are too early,” she said sulkily. “It is a sacrifice I have to make fresh, every day. It was not the work of one day, Kat, every single day of my life I have to live without him and to know that he is living without me. Every morning I wake and know that I may not smile at him and see him look at me with love. Every night I lie down to sleep aching for him. I don’t see how to bear it. It has been forty-one days since I sent him from me, and still I am sick with love for him. It does not ease at all.”

  Kat Ashley looked at the young woman whom she had known from girlhood. “He can be your friend,” she said consolingly. “You don’t have to lose him altogether.”

  “It’s not his friendship I miss,” Elizabeth said bluntly. “It’s him. The very person of him. His presence. I want his shadow on my wall, I want the smell of him. I can’t eat without him, I can’t do the business of the realm. I can’t read a book without wanting his opinion, I can’t hear a tune without wanting to sing it to him. It’s like all the life and color and warmth has bled out of the world when he is not with me. I am not missing my friend, Kat. I am missing my eyes. I can’t see without him. Without him I am a blind woman.”

  The doors opened and Cecil came in, his face grave. “Sir William,” Elizabeth said without much warmth. “And bringing bad news, if I judge you rightly.”

  “Just news,” he said neutrally, until Kat Ashley stepped away from the two of them.

  “It’s Ralph Sadler,” he said shortly, naming their agent in Berwick. “He sent our money, a thousand crowns of it, to the Lords Protestant; and Lord Bothwell, a turncoat Protestant serving the regent Mary of Guise, intercepted him and stole it. We can’t get it back.”

  “A thousand crowns!” She was appalled. “That’s nearly half of all the money we raised for them.”

  “And we were right to do so. The Lords Protestant are selling their very knives and plates to arm their forces. And who would have thought that Bothwell would dare betray his fellow lords? But we have lost the money, and, worse than the loss, the queen regent will know now that we are arming her enemies.”

  “It was French crowns, not English coins,” she said rapidly, rushing to a lie. “We can deny everything.”

  “It came from our man, Sadler at Berwick. They can hardly doubt it was our money.”

  Elizabeth was appalled. “Cecil, what are we going to do?”

  “It is sufficient reason for the French to declare war against us. With this, we have given them just cause.”

  She turned and walked away from him, her fingers rubbing at the cuticles on her nails. “They won’t declare war on me,” she said. “Not while they think I will marry a Hapsburg. They wouldn’t dare.”

  “Then you will have to marry him,” he pressed her. “They will have to know that it is going ahead. You will have to announce your betrothal and name the date of your marriage: Christmas.”

  Her look was bleak. “I have no choice?”

  “You know you have not. He is making ready to come to England right now.”

  She tried to smile. “I shall have to marry him.”

  “You will.”

  Robert Dudley came back to find the court in feverish mood. Duke John of Finland had arrived to represent his master, Prince Erik of Sweden, and was scattering money and promising favors to anyone who would support his proposal of marriage to the queen.

  Elizabeth, sparkling with counterfeit gaiety, danced with him, walked and talked with the archduke’s ambassador, and mystified them both as to her real intentions. When Cecil drew her to one side the smiles fell from her face like a dropped mask. The news from Scotland was grim. The Lords Protestant were encamped before Leith Castle, hoping to starve out the regent before reinforcements arrived from France; but the castle was impregnable, the queen regent inside was well supplied, and the French would be coming soon. No one trusted the Scots to hold the siege. They were an army for a speedy at tack and victory; they had no discipline for a long war. And now everyone knew that it was a war, not some petty rebellion. It was a full-blown, perilous war and none of the court’s brittle gaiety could conceal its anxiety.

  Elizabeth greeted Robert pleasantly but coolly, and never invited him to be alone with her. In return, he gave her a slow, sweet smile and kept his distance.

  “Is it all over between you forever?” Mary Sidney asked him, glancing from the queen seated very straight on her chair, watching the dancing, to her brother’s dark gaze, watching Elizabeth.

  “Doesn’t it look like that?” he asked.
r />   “It’s obvious that you no longer seek each other out. You are never alone with her anymore,” she said. “I wondered what you were feeling.”

  “Like death,” he said simply. “Every day I wake and know that I will see her and yet I cannot whisper in her ear, or touch her hand. I cannot tempt her away from her meetings, I cannot steal her away from others. Every day I greet her like a stranger and I see the pain in her eyes. Every day I hurt her with my coldness and she destroys me with hers. It is as bad being away from court as it is being near her. The coldness between us is killing us both and I cannot even tell her that I pity her.”

  He glanced briefly at his sister’s aghast face and then he looked back at the queen. “She is so alone,” he said. “I see her holding herself together by a thread. She is so afraid. And I know that, and I cannot help her.”

  “Afraid?” Mary repeated.

  “She is afraid for her own life, she is afraid for her country, and I imagine she is utterly terrified that she is going to have to take us into war with the French. The old Queen Mary fought the French and they defeated her and destroyed her reputation. And they are stronger now than they were then. And this time the war will be on English soil in England.”

  “What will she do?”

  “Delay as long as she can,” Robert predicted. “But the siege has to break one way or another, and then what?”

  “And what will you do?”

  “Watch her from a distance, pray for her, miss her like a mortal ache.”

  In the middle of November Robert’s question was answered. The worst news came: the French queen regent’s forces had stormed out of the trap of Leith Castle and thrown their Protestant tormentors back to Stirling. The regent, for her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, held Edinburgh once more, and the Protestant cause in Scotland was utterly defeated.

  Winter 1559-60

  AMY TRAVELED on the cold, wet roads back to Stanfield Hall, her girlhood home in Norfolk, for the winter season. The skies arching above the flat landscape were gray with rain clouds, the land beneath was brown speckled with gray flints, as drab as homespun and as poor. Amy rode through the cold with her hood up and her head down.