The Virgin's Lover ttc-4 Page 3

  Slowly, he rose from the table. “Lady Robsart,” he said quietly, “I warn you not to push me too far. I am defeated now but you should not seek to humiliate me further.”

  “Oh, why not?” She was enjoying herself. “I hardly fear the mightiness of your revenge.”

  “Because it is petty of you,” he said with dignity. “I am very low, as you say. I am a defeated man and I am grieving for the loss of my brother, of three beloved brothers lost in the last two years by my fault. Think of what that means to a man! You could show a little charity even if you have no kindness. When I was Lord Robert, neither you nor Amy’s father wanted for anything.”

  She did not answer, and he rose to his feet. “Come, Amy.”

  Amy did not obey. “I will come in a minute.”

  Lady Robsart turned her head to hide her smile.

  “Come,” Robert said irritably, and held out his hand.

  “I have to clear the plates, and sweep the board.” Amy excused herself.

  He would not ask her again. He turned on his heel at once and went to the door.

  “You will be in the stable yard at dawn, ready for work,” Lady Robsart called after him.

  He closed the door on her triumphant voice.

  Amy waited till they heard him walk away and then she rounded on her stepmother. “How could you?”

  “Why should I not?”

  “Because you will drive him away from here.”

  “I don’t want him here.”

  “Well, I do! If you drive him away then I will go too.”

  “Ah, Amy,” her stepmother counseled. “See sense. He is a defeated man, he is good for nothing. Let him go. He will go back to Philip of Spain or on some other adventure and in some battle or another he will be killed and you will be free. Your marriage was a mistake from start to finish, and now you can let it finish.”

  “Never!” Amy spat at her. “You are mad to even dream it. If he goes out with the plow then I will go out with the plow. If you make him your enemy then you make me your enemy too. I love him, I am his, and he is mine, and nothing will come between us.”

  Lady Robsart was taken aback. “Amy, this is not like you.”

  “No. This is me. I cannot be quiet and obedient when you abuse him. You try to divide us because you think I love my home so much that I will never leave here. Well, hear this: I will go! There is nothing in the world more important to me than Lord Robert. Not even my love for my home, not even my love for you. And even if you will not respect him for himself, you should respect him for me.”

  “Toll loll,” Lady Robsart said with reluctant admiration. “Here’s a thunderstorm for nothing.”

  “It is not nothing,” Amy said stubbornly.

  “It can be nothing.” Her stepmother offered a truce. “You have saved him from the fields, but you will have to find him some occupation. He has to do something, Amy.”

  “We’ll get him a horse,” she decided. “A cheap young horse, and he can break it and train it and we will sell it on and he can buy another. He is a master of horses, he can almost speak to them.”

  “And what will you use to buy his horse?” Lady Robsart demanded. “You’ll have nothing from me.”

  “I will sell my father’s locket,” Amy said staunchly.

  “You’d never sell that!”

  “For Robert, I would.”

  The older woman hesitated. “I’ll lend you the money,” she said. “Don’t sell the locket.”

  Amy smiled at her victory. “Thank you,” she said.

  She left Robert alone for an hour to cool his temper and then she went upstairs to the cramped back bedroom, expecting to find him in their little rope bed, eager to tell him that she had won their battle, that he would not go to the fields, and that he should have a horse to train, perhaps the first of many. But the plain linen sheets were turned down, the headboards undisturbed, the room was empty. Robert was gone.

  Summer 1558

  ROBERT DUDLEY came to court with a grim determination. He had faced the abuse of his wife’s family, and thought he could not fall much lower. But now, in Richmond, the new-built beautiful palace that he loved as his own home, he discovered what it was to be humbled every day. Now he joined the crowd of petitioners that he had once walked past, wondering idly that they could find nothing better to do than beg for favors. Now he joined the ranks of the men who had to wait for the attention of their betters, in the hopes of being introduced to someone higher up the stair of ambition. Everything at the Tudor court came from the throne as the fountain-head of money, position, and place. Power flowed into the lesser tributaries of the great positions of the court and from there was divided and subdivided. Torrents of wealth cascaded from the badly managed treasury; but you had to be in favor with a man who was already in favor to tap a little of the flow for yourself.

  Robert, who had once been the greatest man at court, second only to his father who ruled the king, knew only too well how the system worked from the top. Now he had to learn how it worked at the very bottom.

  He spent days at court, staying in the household of a friend of his brother-in-law, Henry Sidney, seeking preferment: anything, a place or a pension, or even service in the household of a minor lord. But no one would employ him. Some men would not even be seen speaking with him. He was overeducated for any lowly place; how could you ask a man who could speak three languages to write a list of goods that needed to be fetched from another house? He was despised by the ruling class of Catholic lords, who had seen him and his father drive through the Protestant Reformation in King Edward’s years. He was far too glamorous and bold and colorful for anyone to seat below the salt at their table, or use as a junior equerry. No petty lord gained an advantage with the eye-catching Robert Dudley standing behind his chair. No one would take the risk of being outshone by their own servant. No lady of any reputation could take a man who exuded such powerful sexual charm into her household; no man would employ him near his wife or daughters. No one wanted Robert Dudley, with his dazzling dark looks and his sharp wit, in any personal office, and no one would trust him out of their sight.

  He hung around court like a handsome leper and learned to the last chilly note the voice of rejection. Many men who had been glad to be his friend and his follower when he had been Lord Robert now denied that they had ever known him. He found that memories were extraordinarily short. He was outcast in his own country.

  Philip of Spain’s favor now counted for nothing. He seemed to have abandoned England and her queen. He was living in his glamorous court in the Netherlands and was said to have taken a beautiful mistress. Everyone said he would never come to England again. His deserted wife, Queen Mary, confessed that she had been mistaken for a second time—she had failed to conceive his child, she would never now give England an heir. She shrank inside her clothes, and hid inside her private rooms, more like a widow than a ruling queen.

  Robert, unable to trade in his own dishonored name, sign a legal bond, or join a company of merchants, knew that he would never progress until the slur of treason was lifted from his name, and only Queen Mary could restore him. He borrowed a new hat and a new cape from his brother-in-law Henry Sidney and stood in the queen’s presence chamber one damp, misty morning, waiting for her to come out of her rooms on the way to her chapel. Half a dozen other petitioners waited nearby, and they stirred as the door opened and the queen, head down and dressed in black, came out, accompanied only by a couple of women.

  Robert feared she would go past him without looking up, but she glanced at him, recognized him, and paused. “Robert Dudley?”

  He bowed. “Your Grace.”

  “You wanted something of me?” she asked wearily.

  He thought he would have to be as blunt as her. “I wanted to ask you to lift the attainder for treason against my name,” he said frankly. “I served your husband at St. Quentin and Calais and it cost me what was left of my fortune, and also my young brother’s life, Your Grace. With this mark again
st my name I cannot enter into business nor hold my head up. My wife has lost her inheritance, a little farm in Norfolk, and you know I have lost all my father’s gifts to me. I would not have my wife demeaned and in poverty for marrying me.”

  “Women always share in their husband’s fortune,” she said flatly. “Good and bad. And a bad husband is a wife’s despair.”

  “Yes,” he said. “But she has never admired my fortunes. She only wanted to live quietly in the country and I would have done better for her if I had done as she wished. We cannot even live together now; I cannot endure her family, and I cannot buy her a roof to put over her head. I have failed her, Your Grace, and it is wrong of me.”

  “You were at the fall of Calais,” she remembered.

  Robert met her eyes with a look that was as bleak as her own. “I never forget it,” he said. “It was an ill-managed business. The canals should have been flooded to serve as a moat, but they did not open the sea-gates. The forts were not maintained and manned as we were promised. I did the best I could with my troop, but the French outnumbered and outmastered us. I did not fail you for lack of trying, Your Grace. Your husband himself commended my fighting at St. Quentin.”

  “You always were silver-tongued,” she said with a little ghost of a smile. “Your whole family could charm their way to Paradise.”

  “I hope so,” he said. “For too many of them are there already. Those of us who are left are brought very low in these days. I had seven brothers and five sisters in the nursery with me, twelve bonny children; and now there are only four of us left.”

  “I too am very low,” she confessed. “When I came to the throne, Robert, when I defeated you and your father, I thought that all my troubles would be over. But they were just beginning.”

  “I am sorry it brought you so little joy,” he said gently. “The crown is not a light burden, especially for a woman.”

  To his horror he saw her dark eyes fill with tears, which spilled down the tired skin of her cheeks. “Especially a woman alone,” she said softly. “Elizabeth may yet find that out for herself; though she is such a proud spinster now. It is unbearable to rule alone, and yet how can one share a throne? What man could be trusted with such power? What man can take the throne, and take a wife, and yet let her rule?”

  He dropped to his knee and took her hand and kissed it. “Before God, Queen Mary, I am sorry for your sadness. I never thought it would come to this.”

  She stood for a moment, comforted by his touch. “Thank you, Robert.”

  He looked up at her and she was struck with what a handsome young man he was: as dark as a Spaniard, but with a new hard line of suffering drawn deeply between his black eyebrows.

  “But you have everything ahead of you,” she said wryly. “You have your youth, and good health, and good looks, and you will believe that Elizabeth will have the throne after me, and restore your fortunes. But you must love your wife, Robert Dudley. It is very hard for a woman if her husband neglects her.”

  He rose to his feet. “I will do,” he promised easily.

  She nodded. “And do not plot against me, or my throne.”

  This was an oath he took more seriously. He met her eyes without flinching. “Those days are gone,” he said. “I know you are my rightful queen. I bend the knee, Queen Mary, I have repented of my pride.”

  “So,” she said wearily. “I grant you the lifting of your attainder for treason. You can have your wife’s lands back, and your own title. You shall have rooms at court. And I wish you well.”

  He had to hide the leap of his delight. “Thank you,” he said, bowing low. “I shall pray for you.”

  “Then come with me to my chapel now,” she said.

  Without hesitation, Robert Dudley, the man whose father had powered the Protestant reformation in England, followed the queen into the Catholic Mass and bent his knee to the blaze of icons behind the altar. A moment’s hesitation, even a sideways glance, and he would have been questioned for heresy. But Robert did not glance sideways nor hesitate. He crossed himself and bobbed to the altar, up and down like a puppet, knowing that he was betraying his own faith, and betraying the faith of his father. But bad judgment and bad luck had brought Robert Dudley to his knees at last; and he knew it.

  Autumn 1558

  ALL THE BELLS IN HERTFORDSHIRE, all the bells in England were ringing for Elizabeth, pounding the peal into her head, first the treble bell screaming out like a mad woman, and then the whole agonizing, jangling sob till the great bell boomed a warning that the whole discordant carillon was about to shriek out again. Elizabeth threw open the shutters of Hatfield Palace, flung open the window, wanting to be drowned in the noise, deafened by her own triumph, and yet still it went on, until the rooks abandoned their nests and went streaming into the dawn skies, tossing and turning in the wind like a banner of ill omen, and the bats left the belfry like a plume of black smoke as if to say that the world was upside down now, and day should be forever night.

  Elizabeth laughed out loud at the racket which hammered out the news to the unresponsive gray skies: poor sick Queen Mary was dead at last, and Princess Elizabeth was the uncontested heir.

  “Thank God,” she shouted up at the whirling clouds. “For now I can be the queen that my mother intended me to be, the queen that Mary could not be, the queen I was born to be.”

  “And what are you thinking?” Elizabeth asked archly.

  Amy’s husband smiled down at the provocative young face at his shoulder as they walked in the cold garden of Hatfield Palace.

  “I was thinking that you should never marry.”

  The princess blinked in surprise. “Indeed? Everyone else seems to think I should marry at once.”

  “You should only marry a very, very old man, then,” he amended.

  A delighted giggle escaped her. “Why ever?”

  “So that he would die at once. Because you look so enchanting in black velvet. You should really never wear anything else.”

  It was the rounding off of the jest, it was the turning of a pretty compliment. It was what Robert Dudley did best in the world, along with horse-riding, politics, and merciless ambition.

  Elizabeth was wrapped from her pink nose to her leather boots in mourning black, blowing on the tips of her leather-gloved fingers for warmth, a black velvet hat at a rakish angle on her mass of red-gold hair. A train of chilled petitioners trailed away behind the two. Only William Cecil, her longtime advisor, was sure enough of his welcome to interrupt the intimate talk between the two childhood friends.

  “Ah, Spirit,” she said fondly to the older man who came toward them, dressed in clerkly black. “What news d’you have for me?”

  “Good news, Your Grace,” he said to the queen, with a nod to Robert Dudley. “I have heard from Sir Francis Knollys. I knew you would want to be told at once. He and his wife and family have left Germany and should be with us by the New Year.”

  “She won’t be here in time for my coronation?” Elizabeth asked. She was missing her cousin Catherine, in self-imposed exile for her fierce Protestant faith.

  “I am sorry,” Cecil said. “They cannot possibly get here in time. And we cannot possibly wait.”

  “But she has agreed to be my lady-in-waiting? And her daughter— what’s her name?—Laetitia, a maid of honor?”

  “She will be delighted,” Cecil said. “Sir Francis wrote me a note to accept, and Lady Knollys’s letter to you is following. Sir Francis told me that she had so many things that she wanted to say, that she could not finish her letter before my messenger had to leave.”

  Elizabeth’s radiant smile warmed her face. “We’ll have so much to talk about when I see her!”

  “We will have to clear the court so that you two can chatter,” Dudley said. “I remember Catherine when we had ‘Be Silent” tournaments. D’you remember? She always lost.”

  “And she always blinked first when we had a staring joust.”

  “Except for that time when Ambrose put his mouse
in her sewing bag. Then she screamed the house down.”

  “I miss her,” Elizabeth said simply. “She is almost all the family I have.”

  Neither of the men reminded her of her flint-hearted Howard relations who had all but disowned her when she was disgraced, and now were swarming around her emerging court claiming her as their own once more.

  “You have me,” Robert said gently. “And my sister could not love you more if she were your own.”

  “But Catherine will scold me for my crucifix and the candles in the Royal Chapel,” Elizabeth said sulkily, returning to the uppermost difficulty.

  “How you choose to worship in the Royal Chapel is not her choice,” Cecil reminded her. “It is yours.”

  “No, but she chose to leave England rather than live under the Pope, and now that she and all the other Protestants are coming home, they will be expecting a reformed country.”

  “As do we all, I am sure.”

  Robert Dudley threw a quizzical look at him as if to suggest that not everyone shared Cecil’s clarity of vision. Blandly, the older man ignored him. Cecil had been a faithful Protestant since the earliest days and had suffered years of neglect from the Catholic court because of his loyalty to his faith and his service of the Protestant princess. Before that, he had served the great Protestant lords, the Dudleys themselves, and advised Robert’s father on the advance of the Reformation. Robert and Cecil were old allies, if never friends.

  “There is nothing Papist about a crucifix on the altar,” Elizabeth specified. “They cannot object to that.”

  Cecil smiled indulgently. Elizabeth loved jewels and gold in church, the priests in their vestments, embroidered altar cloths, bright colors on the walls, candles and all the panoply of the Catholic faith. But he was confident that he could keep her in the reformed church that was her first and earliest practice.

  “I will not tolerate the raising of the Host and worshipping it as if it were God Himself,” she said firmly. “That is Popish idolatry indeed. I won’t have it, Cecil. I won’t have it done before me and I won’t have it held up to confuse and mislead my people. It is a sin, I know it. It is a graven idol, it is bearing false witness; I cannot tolerate it.”