The Virgin's Lover ttc-4 Page 30

  “I would have married him if he had come,” she said. “But I could not marry a man I had never seen, and Cecil, as God is my witness, I am pulled so low I cannot think of courtship now. It is too late to save me from war whether he stays or goes, and I never cared a groat for him anyway. I need a friend I can trust, not a suitor who has to have everything signed and sealed before he will come to me. He promised me nothing and he wanted every guarantee a husband could have.”

  Cecil did not correct her. He had seen her under house arrest, and in fear of her own death, and yet he thought he had never seen her so drained of joy as she was at this feast, only her second Christmas on the throne.

  “It’s too late,” Elizabeth said sadly, as if she were already defeated. “The French have sailed. They must be off our coasts now. They were not enough afraid of the archduke; they knew they would defeat him as they defeated Arran. What good is he to me now the French are at sea?”

  “Be of good cheer, Princess,” Cecil said. “We still have an alliance with Spain. Be merry. We can beat the French without the archduke.”

  “We can lose without him too,” was all she said.

  Three days later Elizabeth called another meeting of the Privy Council. “I have prayed for guidance,” she said. “I have spent all night on my knees. I cannot do this. I dare not take us to war. The ships must stay in port; we cannot take on the French.”

  There was a stunned silence, then every man waited for Cecil to tell her. He looked around for an ally; they all avoided his eyes.

  “But the ships have gone, Your Grace,” he said flatly.

  “Gone?” She was aghast.

  “The fleet set sail the moment you gave the command,” he said.

  Elizabeth gave a little moan and clung to the high back of a chair as her knees gave way. “How could you do this, Cecil? You are a very traitor to send them out.”

  There was a sharp indrawn breath from the council at her use of that potent, dangerous word, but Cecil never wavered.

  “It was your own order,” he said steadily. “And the right thing to do.”

  The court waited for news from Scotland and it came in contradictory, nerve-racking snippets that sent people into nervous, whispering huddles in corners. Many men were buying gold and sending it out of the country to Geneva, to Germany, so that when the French came, as they were almost certain to do, an escape might be easily made. The value of English coin, already rock bottom, plummeted to nothing.

  There was no faith in the English fleet, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned, no faith in the queen, who was clearly ill with fear. Then came disastrous news: the entire English fleet, Elizabeth’s precious fourteen ships, had been caught in a storm and were all missing.

  “There!” the queen cried out in wild grief to Cecil before the whole Privy Council. “If you had let me delay them, they would have avoided the gales, and I would have a fleet ready to go, instead of all my ships missing at sea!”

  Cecil said nothing; there was nothing he could say.

  “My fleet! My ships!” she mourned. “Lost by your impatience, by your folly, Cecil. And now the kingdom open to invasion, and no sea defense, and our poor boys, lost at sea.”

  It was long days before the news came that the ships had been recovered, and a fleet of eleven of the fourteen had anchored in the Firth of Forth and were supplying the Scots lords as they laid siege once more to Leith Castle.

  “Three ships lost already!” Elizabeth said miserably, huddled over a fire in her privy chamber, picking at the skin around her fingers, more like a sulky girl than a queen. “Three ships lost, and not a shot fired!”

  “Eleven ships safe,” Cecil said stubbornly. “Think of that. Eleven ships safe and in the Firth of Forth, supporting the siege against Mary of Guise. Think how she must feel, looking from her window and seeing the Scots beneath her walls and the English fleet in her harbor.”

  “She only sees eleven ships,” she said stubbornly. “Three lost already. God save that they are not the first losses of many. We must call them back while we still have the eleven. Cecil, I dare not do this without certainty of winning.”

  “There is never a certainty of winning,” he declared. “It will always be a risk but you have to take it now, Your Grace.”

  “Spirit, please, don’t ask it of me.”

  She was panting, working herself into one of her tantrums, but he continued to press her. “You may not rescind the order.”

  “I am too afraid.”

  “You cannot play the woman now; you have to have the heart and stomach of a man. Find your courage, Elizabeth. You are your father’s daughter; play the king. I have seen you be as brave as any man.”

  For a moment he thought that the flattering lie had persuaded her. Her chin came up, her color rose, but then he saw the spark suddenly drain from her eyes and she drooped again.

  “I cannot,” she said. “You have never seen me be a king. I have always been nothing more than a clever and duplicitous woman. I can’t fight openly. I never have. There will be no war.”

  “You will have to learn to be a king,” Cecil warned her. “One day you will have to say that you are just a weak woman but you have the heart and stomach of a king. You cannot rule this kingdom without being its king.”

  She shook her head, stubborn as a frightened red-headed mule. “I dare not.”

  “You cannot recall the ships; you have to declare war.”

  “No.”

  He took a breath and tested his own resolve. Then he drew his letter of resignation from inside his doublet. “Then I have to beg you to release me.”

  Elizabeth whirled around. “What? What is this?”

  “Release me. I cannot serve you. If you will not take my advice on this matter which so nearly concerns the safety of the kingdom then I cannot serve you. In failing to convince you, I have failed you, and I have failed my office. Anything in the world I can do for you, I will. You know how dear you are to me, as dear as a wife or a daughter. But if I cannot prevail upon you to send our army to Scotland then I have to leave your service.”

  For a moment she went so white that he thought she might faint. “You are jesting with me,” she said breathlessly. “To force me to agree.”

  “No.”

  “You would never leave me.”

  “I have to. Someone else who can convince you of your right interest should serve you. I am become the base that drives out the good. I am disregarded. I am lightweight. I am counterfeit like a coin.”

  “Not disregarded, Spirit. You know…”

  He bowed very low. “I will do anything else Your Grace commands, any other service though it were in Your Majesty’s kitchen or garden; I am ready without respect of estimation, wealth, or ease to do Your Majesty’s commandment to my life’s end.”

  “Spirit, you cannot leave me.”

  Cecil started to walk backward to the door. She stood like a bereft child, her hands outstretched to him. “William! Please! Am I to be left with no one?” she demanded. “This Scotland has already cost me the only man I love; is it going to cost me my greatest advisor and friend? You, who have been my constant friend and advisor since I was a girl?”

  He paused at the door. “Please take steps to defend yourself,” he said quietly. “As soon as the Scots have been defeated, the French will come through England faster than we have ever seen an army move. They will come here and throw you from your throne. Please, for your own sake, prepare a refuge for yourself and a way to escape to it.”

  “Cecil!” It was a little wail of misery.

  He bowed again and went to the door. He went out. He waited outside. He had been certain that she would run after him, but there was silence. Then he heard, from inside the room, a muffled sob as Elizabeth broke down.

  “You are so devout, people are starting to say that you pray like a Papist,” Lady Robsart of Stanfield Hall remarked critically to her stepdaughter Amy. “It doesn’t reflect very well on us; your brother-in-law said only
the other day that you looked very odd in church, you were still on your knees as people were going out.”

  “I am very much in need of grace,” Amy said, not in the least embarrassed.

  “You’re not like yourself at all,” her stepmother went on. “You used to be so… lighthearted. Well, not lighthearted, but not pious. Not one for constant prayer, at any rate.”

  “I was once secure in my father’s love, and then secure in my husband’s love, and now I have neither,” Amy said flatly. Her voice did not quaver; there were no tears in her eyes.

  Lady Robsart was stunned into momentary silence. “Amy, my dear, I know there has been much gossip about him but…”

  “It is true,” she said shortly. “He told me the truth himself. But he has given her up so that she can marry the archduke to get Spain to join with us in a war against the French.”

  Lady Robsart was stunned. “He told you this? He confessed it all?”

  “Yes.” For a moment Amy looked almost rueful. “I think he thought I would be sorry for him. He was so sorry for himself he thought I must sympathize. I have always sympathized with him before. He is in the habit of bringing his sorrows to me.”

  “Sorrows?”

  “This has cost him very dear,” Amy said. “There must have been a moment when he thought she might love him, and I might let him go, and he might fulfill his father’s dream and put a Dudley on the throne of England. His brother married the heir to the throne, Jane Grey; his sister is married to Henry Hastings, next in line after Mary, Queen of Scots; he must feel it is his family’s destiny.” She paused. “And of course, he is deeply in love with her,” she said, matter-of-fact.

  “In love,” Lady Robsart repeated, as if she had never heard such words before. “In love with the Queen of England.”

  “I can see it in everything he says,” Amy said quietly. “He loved me once, but everyone thought he condescended to the marriage, and it was always true that he thought very highly of himself. But with her it is different. He is a man transformed. She is his lover but still his queen; he admires her as well as desires her. He…” She paused to find the words. “He aspires to love her, whereas I was always an easy love.”

  “Amy, are you not heartbroken?” her stepmother asked, feeling her way with this new, composed woman. “I thought he was everything to you?”

  “I am sick to my very soul,” Amy said quietly. “I never knew that anyone could feel such a grief. It is like an illness, like a canker which eats at me every day. That is why I seem devout. The only relief for me is to pray that God will take me to his own and then Robert and she can do as they please, and I will be free from pain at last.”

  “Oh, my dear!” Lady Robsart stretched out her hand to Amy. “Don’t say that. He’s not worth it. No man in the world is worth shedding a tear for. Least of all him who has cost you so much already.”

  “I think my heart is really broken,” Amy said quietly. “I think it must be. The pain in my breast is so sharp and constant that I think it will be the death of me. It is truly heartbreak. I don’t think it will mend. It doesn’t matter whether he is worth it or not. It is done. Even if she were to marry the archduke and Robert were to come riding home to me and say that it was all a mistake, how could we be happy again? My heart is broken and it will always be broken from now on.”

  The queen’s ladies could do nothing to please her; she stalked about her rooms at Whitehall Palace like a vexed lioness. She sent for, and then dismissed, her musicians. She would not read. She could not rest. She was in a frenzy of worry and distress. She wanted to send for Cecil; she could not imagine how she would manage without him. She wanted to send for her uncle, but no one knew where he was, and then she changed her mind and did not want to see him anyway. There were petitioners waiting to see her in her chamber but she would not go out to them; the dressmaker came with some furs from Russia but she would not even look at them. Prince Erik of Sweden had written her a twelve-page letter, pinned with a diamond, but she could not be troubled to read it.

  Nothing could free Elizabeth from the terror that rode her like a hag. She was a young woman in only the second year of her reign, and yet she had to decide whether or not to commit her kingdom to war against an unbeatable enemy, and the two men she trusted above all others had both left her.

  Sometimes she was certain that she was making a mistake from her own cowardice; at other moments she was certain she was protecting her country from disaster; all the time she was terrified that she was making a deep and grave mistake.

  “I’m going for Sir Robert,” Laetitia Knollys whispered to her mother after watching Elizabeth’s frantic turning all morning from one unfinished activity to another.

  “Not without her order,” Catherine replied.

  “Yes,” Laetitia insisted. “He’s the only man who can comfort her, and if she goes on like this she will make herself ill and drive us all mad.”

  “Lettice!” her mother said sharply but already the girl had slipped from the room and gone to Robert’s chambers.

  He was paying bills, a great money chest open before him, his steward presenting accounts and counting out coins for the huge costs of the stables.

  Laetitia tapped on the door and peeped into the room.

  “Mistress Knollys,” Robert said levelly. “This is an improper honor indeed.”

  “It’s about the queen,” she said.

  At once he leapt up, his quizzical look quite gone. “Is she safe?”

  Laetitia noted that his first thought was that Elizabeth might have been attacked. So her father was right; they were all in the greatest of danger, all the time.

  “She is safe, but much distressed.”

  “She sent for me?”

  “No. I came without being told. I thought you should come to her.”

  He gave her a slow smile. “You are a most extraordinary girl,” he said. “Why did you take such a task on yourself?”

  “She’s beside herself,” Laetitia confided. “It’s the war with Scotland. She can’t decide, and she has to decide. And now she has lost Cecil, and she seems to have lost you. She has no one. Sometimes she thinks ‘yes’, sometimes she thinks ‘no’, but she’s not happy with either decision. She is as jumpy as a rabbit with a ferret on its scut.”

  Robert frowned at the impertinence of her language. “I’ll come,” he said. “And I thank you for telling me.”

  She slid him a flirtatious smile under her dark eyelashes. “If I was the queen, I would want you at my side all the time,” she said. “War or no war.”

  “And how are your wedding plans?” he asked urbanely. “Dress made? Everything ready? Groom impatient?”

  “Thank you, yes,” she said, quite composed. “And how is Lady Dudley? Not ill, I hope? Coming to court soon?”

  In the queen’s chambers, Elizabeth was at her seat by the fire, her ladies scattered around the room, tensely waiting for what she might next demand. Other courtiers stood about, hoping to be invited to speak with her, but Elizabeth would hear no petitions, would be distracted by no one.

  Dudley came in, and at the sound of his step she turned at once. The leap of joy into her face could not be hidden. She rose to her feet: “Oh, Robert!”

  Without further invitation he went up to her and drew her with him into a window bay, away from the curious stares of her ladies. “I knew you were unhappy,” he said. “I had to come. I could not stay away a moment longer.”

  “How did you know?” she demanded. She could not stop herself leaning toward him. The very scent of his clothes, of his hair, was a deep comfort to her. “How did you ever know that I need you so badly?”

  “Because I cannot rest without being near you,” he said. “Because I need you too. Has something upset you?”

  “Cecil has left me,” she said brokenly. “I cannot manage without him.”

  “I knew he had gone, of course; but why?” Robert asked, though he had received a full report from Thomas Blount on the day that C
ecil left.

  “He said he would not stay with me unless we made war on the French and I don’t dare, Robert, I really don’t dare, and yet how can I rule without Cecil at my side?”

  “Good God, I thought he would never leave you. I thought you and he had sworn an oath.”

  Elizabeth’s mouth was working. “I thought he never would,” she said. “I would have trusted him with my life. But he says he cannot serve me if I will not listen to him, and Robert …I am too afraid.”

  The last words were a little thread of sound; she glanced around the room as if her fear were a most shameful secret that she could only trust to him.

  Ah, it’s not just the war, he thought. Cecil is like a father to her. He’s the advisor she has trusted for years. And Cecil has a view of this country unlike any other. He really does think of it as a nation in its own right, not a motley crew of warring families which was my father’s view… mine too. Cecil’s love of England, his very belief in England, is a greater vision than mine or hers. He keeps her steady, he keeps her faithful, even if it’s nothing but a dream.

  “I’m here now,” he said, as if his presence would be enough to comfort her. “We’ll talk together after dinner, and we will decide what should be done. You’re not alone, my love. I am here to help you.”

  She leaned closer. “I can’t do it on my own,” she whispered to him, “It’s too much. I can’t decide, I am too afraid. I don’t know how to decide. And I never see you now. I gave you up for Scotland, and now it has cost me Cecil too.”

  “I know,” Robert said. “But I will be at your side again, I’ll stand your friend. No one can blame us. The archduke has cooled of his own accord, and Arran is defeated, good for nothing. No one can say that I’m standing between you and a good marriage. And I’ll get Cecil back for you. He shall advise us and we shall decide. You don’t have to be the judge of it on your own, my love, my dearest love. I shall be with you now. I shall stay with you.”

  “It can make no difference to us.” She hesitated. “I can’t be your lover ever again. I shall have to marry someone. If not this year, then next.”