The Virgin's Lover Read online

  He could hardly see her for the mist that rose before his eyes with his blinding anger. His tight voice came out short, as if it were wrested from him. “Amy, no man in the world would abuse me as you have done and live.”

  “Husband, I can promise you that thousands will call you worse. They will call you her boy, her plaything, a common little colt that she rides for lust.”

  “They will call me King of England,” he shouted.

  She whirled around and caught him by the collar of the linen shirt that she had darned so carefully for him, and shook him in her rage. “Never! You will have to murder me before she can have you.”

  He snatched her hands from his neck and thrust her away from him, down into the chair. “Amy, I will never forgive you for this; you will turn me from your husband and lover to your enemy.”

  She looked up at him and she collected spittle in her mouth and spat at him. At once, blind with rage, he rushed toward her and, quick as thought, she put her little feet up and kicked out, driving him back.

  “I know that,” she shouted at him. “Fool that you are! But what difference does your hatred make, when you lie like a swine with her and then lie with me and say ‘I love you’ to us both?”

  “I never said it!” he yelled, quite beyond himself.

  Behind him, Lady Robsart opened the door wide and stood in silence, looking at the two of them.

  “Go away!” Amy shouted.

  “No, come in,” Robert said quickly, turning from Amy and dabbing at the spittle on his shirt and pulling at his collar that she had wrenched. “For God’s sake, come in. Amy is distressed, Lady Robsart, help her to her room. I shall sleep in the guest room and leave tomorrow at first light.”

  “No!” Amy screamed. “You will come to me, Robert. You know you will. Your lust, your filthy lust, will wake you and you will want me again, and you will say, ‘I love you. I love you.’ You liar. You wicked, wicked liar.”

  “Take her away, for God’s sake, before I murder her,” he said to Lady Robsart, and brushed past her out of the room, avoiding Amy’s clutching hands.

  “You will come to me or I will kill you,” she screamed.

  Robert broke into a run up the narrow wooden stairs, and got away from his wife before she could shame them both anymore.

  In the morning Amy was too sick to see him. Lady Robsart, her voice like ice, spoke of a night of hysterical weeping and told him that Amy had risen in the early hours of the morning and fallen to her knees and prayed for God to release her from this agony that was her life.

  Robert’s escort was waiting outside. “You’ll know what it’s all about, I suppose,” he said shortly.

  “Yes,” Lady Robsart replied. “I suppose so.”

  “I rely on your discretion,” he said. “The queen would be much offended by any gossip.”

  Her eyes flew to his face. “Then she should not give the gossips such rich pickings,” she said bluntly.

  “Amy has to see reason,” he said. “She has to agree to a divorce. I don’t want to force her. I don’t want to send her out of the country to a convent against her will. I want a fair agreement and a good settlement for her. But she has to agree.”

  He saw the shock in her face at his frankness. “It would be worth your while,” he said silkily. “I would stand your friend if you would advise her of her best interests. I have spoken to her brother-in-law, John Appleyard, and he agrees with me.”

  “John agrees? My son-in-law thinks that she should give you a divorce?”

  “And your son Arthur.”

  Lady Robsart was silenced at this evidence of the unanimity of men. “I can’t say what her best interests would be in such a case,” she said with weak defiance.

  “Just as I have said,” Robert said bluntly. “Just as we say: us men. She either consents to a divorce with a good settlement, or she is divorced anyway and sent out of the country to a convent with no fortune. She has no other choice.”

  “I don’t know what her father would have made of this. She is crying and wishing for death.”

  “I am sorry for it; but they will not be the first tears shed nor, I suppose, the last,” he said grimly, and went out of the door without another word.

  Robert Dudley arrived at the queen’s apartments at Westminster during an impromptu recital of a new composition of some man’s song, and had to stand by, smiling politely, until the madrigal—with much fa-la-la-ing—was over. Sir William Cecil, observing him quietly from a corner, was amused by the scowl on the younger man’s face, and then surprised that even when he bowed to the queen his expression did not become any more pleasing.

  Now what are they doing, that he should look so sour and she so concerned for him? Cecil felt his heart plunge with apprehension. What are they planning now?

  As soon as the song was ended Elizabeth nodded Robert to a window bay and the two of them stepped to one side, out of earshot of the attentive courtiers.

  “What did she say?” Elizabeth demanded, without a word of greeting. “Did she agree?”

  “She went quite mad,” he said simply. “She said she would die rather than agree to a divorce. I left her after a night of weeping herself sick, praying for death.”

  Her hand flew out to his cheek, she stopped herself before she embraced him before the whole court.

  “Oh, my poor Robin.”

  “She spat in my face,” he said, darkening at the memory. “She kicked out at me. We were all but brawling.”

  “No!” Despite the seriousness of their situation Elizabeth could not help but be diverted at the thought of Lady Dudley fighting like a fishwife. “Has she run mad?”

  “Worse than that,” he said shortly. He glanced around to make sure that no one could hear them. “She is full of treasonous thoughts and heretical opinions. Her jealousy of you has driven her to the most extreme ideas. God knows what she will say or do.”

  “So we will have to send her away,” Elizabeth said simply.

  Robert bowed his head. “My love, it will make such a scandal, I doubt we can do it at once. You can’t risk it. She will fight me, she will raise a storm against me, and I have many enemies who would support her.”

  She looked at him directly, all the passion of a new love affair apparent in her flushed face.

  “Robert, I cannot live without you. I cannot rule England without you at my side. Even now Lord Grey is marching my army into Scotland, and the English fleet, God help them, are trying to prevent three times their number of French ships getting to Leith Castle where that wicked woman has raised a siege again. I am on a knife edge, Robert. Amy is a traitor to make things worse for me. We should just arrest her for treason, put her in the Tower, and forget about her.”

  “Forget her now,” he said swiftly, his first desire to soothe the anxious young woman he loved. “Forget her. I’ll stay at court with you, I’ll be at your side night and day. We will be husband and wife in everything but name, and when we have won in Scotland and the country is safe and at peace, we will deal with Amy and we will be married.”

  She nodded. “You won’t see her again?.”

  He had a sudden unbidden memory of Amy’s hand caressing him, and her sleepy unfolding of herself beneath him, of the way her hand had stroked his back and of his own whispered words in the darkness which might have been “Oh, I love you,” speaking from desire, not calculation.

  “I won’t see her,” he assured her. “I am yours, Elizabeth, heart and soul.”

  Elizabeth smiled, and Dudley tried to smile reassuringly back at her, but for a moment it was Amy’s dreamy, desirous face that he saw.

  “She is a fool,” Elizabeth said harshly. “She should have seen my stepmother Anne of Cleves when my father asked for a divorce. Her first thought was to oblige him and her second to obtain a reasonable settlement for herself. Amy is a fool, and a wicked fool to try to stand in our way. And she is doubly a fool not to ask you for a good settlement.”

  “Yes,” he assented, thinking that
Anne of Cleves had not married for love, and longed for her husband every night for eleven years, nor had she been in his arms making passionate love the very night before he asked her to release him.

  The court waited for news of the queen’s uncle, Thomas Howard, who had been sent away to suit the convenience of the lovers, but was now a key player on the sensitive border. He was to negotiate and to sign an alliance with the Scots lords in his headquarters in Newcastle, but they waited and waited and heard nothing from him.

  “What is keeping him so long?” Elizabeth demanded of Cecil. “Surely he would not play me false? Not because of Sir Robert?”

  “Never,” Cecil averred steadily. “These things take time.”

  “We have no time,” she snapped. “Thanks to you we have rushed into war and we are not prepared.”

  The English army, led by Lord Grey, was supposed to have assembled in Newcastle by January, and to have advanced on Scotland by the end of the month. But January had come and gone and the army had not stirred from their barracks.

  “Why does it take so long?” Elizabeth demanded of Cecil. “Did you not tell him he was to march on Edinburgh at once?”

  “Yes,” Cecil said. “He knows what he is to do.”

  “Then why does he not do it?” she cried out in her frustration. “Why does no one press forward; or if they cannot, why do they not retreat? Why do we have to wait and wait and all I hear is excuses?”

  She was rubbing at her fingernails, pushing the cuticles back from the nails in a nervous parody of her daily manicure. Cecil stopped himself from taking her hands.

  “News will come,” he maintained. “We have to be patient. And they were ordered not to retreat.”

  “We must proclaim our friendship with the French,” she decided.

  Cecil glanced at Dudley. “We are at war with the French,” he reminded her.

  “We should write a declaration that if their soldiers go home, we have no quarrel with France,” Elizabeth said, her fingers working furiously. “Then they know that we are ready for peace, even at this late stage.”

  Dudley stepped forward. “Now that is an excellent idea,” he said soothingly. “You write it. Nobody can marshal an argument like you.”

  An argument that is pure self-contradiction, Cecil thought to himself, and saw from the flash of Robert’s smile toward him that Dudley knew it too.

  “When do I have time to write?” Elizabeth demanded. “I can’t even think; I am so anxious.”

  “In the afternoon,” Dudley said soothingly to her. “And nobody can write like you can.”

  He gentles her like one of his Barbary mares, Cecil thought wonderingly. He manages her in a way that no one else can do.

  “You shall compose it and I shall take your dictation,” Robert said. “I shall be your clerk. And we shall publish it, so that everyone knows that you are not the war maker. If it comes to war they will know that your intentions were always peaceful. You will show that it is all the fault of the French.”

  “Yes,” she said, encouraged. “And perhaps it will avert war.”

  “Perhaps,” the men reassured her.

  The only piece of good news that came in March was that the French preparations for war had been thrown into disarray by an uprising of French Protestants against the French royal family.

  “This doesn’t help us at all,” Elizabeth miserably predicted. “Now Philip of Spain will turn against all Protestants; he will be in terror of it spreading, and refuse to be my friend.”

  But Philip was too clever to do anything that would help the French in Europe. Instead he offered to mediate between the French and the English, and the Seigneur de Glajon arrived with great pomp to meet with Elizabeth in April.

  “Tell him I am ill,” she whispered to Cecil, eyeing the powerful Spanish diplomat through a crack in the door from her private apartments to the audience chamber. “Keep him off me for a while. I can’t stand to see him, I really can’t, and my hands are bleeding.”

  Cecil stalled the Spanish don for several days until the news came from Scotland that Lord Grey had finally crossed the border with the English army. The soldiers of England were marching on Scottish soil. There was no denying it any longer: the two nations were finally at war.

  Elizabeth’s fingernails were immaculately buffed, but her lips bitten into sore strips when she finally met the Spanish ambassador.

  “They will force us into peace,” she whispered to Cecil after the meeting. “He all but threatened me. He warned me that if we cannot make peace with the French then Philip of Spain will send his own armies and force a peace on us.”

  Cecil looked aghast. “How should he do such a thing? This is not a quarrel of his.”

  “He has the power,” she said angrily. “And it is your fault for inviting his support. Now he thinks it is his business, he thinks he has a right to come into Scotland. And if both France and Spain have armies in Scotland, what will become of us? Whoever wins will occupy Scotland forever, and will soon look to the border and want to come south. We are now at the mercy of both France and Spain; how could you do this?”

  “Well, it was not my intention,” he said wryly. “Does Philip think he can impose peace on France as well as us?”

  “If he can force them to agree then it might be our way out,” Elizabeth said, a little more hopefully. “If we make a truce with him, he has promised me that we will get Calais back.”

  “He lies,” Cecil said simply. “If you want Calais, you will have to fight for it. If you want to keep the French out of Scotland, you will have to fight them. We have to prevent the Spanish from coming in. We have to face the two greatest countries in Christendom and defend our sovereignty. You have to be brave, Elizabeth.”

  He always called her by her title. It was a mark of her distress that she did not reprove him. “Spirit, I am not brave. I am so very afraid,” she said in a whisper of a voice.

  “Everyone is afraid,” he assured her. “You, me, probably even the Sieur de Glajon. Don’t you think Mary of Guise, ill in Edinburgh Castle, is afraid too? Don’t you think that the French are afraid, with the Protestants rising up against them in the heart of France itself? Don’t you think that Mary, Queen of Scots, is afraid with them hanging hundreds of French rebels before her very eyes?”

  “No one is alone as I am!” Elizabeth rounded on him. “No one faces two enemies on the doorstep but me! No one has to face Philip and face the French with no husband and no father and no help, but me!”

  “Yes,” he agreed sympathetically. “Indeed you have a lonely and a difficult part to play. But you must play it. You have to pretend to confidence even when you are afraid, even when you feel most alone.”

  “You would turn me into one of Sir Robert’s new troop of players,” she said.

  “I would see you as one of England’s players,” he returned. “I would see you play the part of a great queen.” And I would rather die than trust Dudley with the script, he added to himself.

  Spring came to Stanfield Hall, and Lizzie Oddingsell arrived to be Amy’s traveling companion, but no word came from Sir Robert as to where his wife was to go this season.

  “Shall I write to him?” Lizzie Oddingsell asked Amy.

  Amy was lying on a day bed, her skin like paper, her eyes dull, as thin as a wasted child. She shook her head, as if it were too much effort to speak. “It does not matter to him where I am anymore.”

  “It’s just that this time last year we went to Bury St. Edmunds, and then Camberwell,” Lizzie remarked.

  Amy shrugged her thin shoulders. “Not this year, it seems.”

  “You cannot stay here all the year round.”

  “Why not? I lived here all the years of my girlhood.”

  “It’s not fitting,” Lizzie said. “You are his wife, and this is a little house with no gay company, and no good food or music or dancing or society. You cannot live like a farmer’s wife when you are the wife of one of the greatest men in the country. People will talk
.”

  Amy raised herself up on her elbow. “Good God, you know as well as I that people say far worse things than that I do not keep a good table.”

  “They speak of nothing but the war against the French in Scotland,” Lizzie lied.

  Amy shook her head and leaned back and closed her eyes. “I am not deaf,” she observed. “They say that my husband and the queen will be married within a year.”

  “And what will you do?” Lizzie prompted gently. “If he insists? If he puts you aside? I am sorry, Amy, but you should consider what you would need. You are a young woman, and—”

  “He cannot put me aside,” Amy said quietly. “I am his wife. I will be his wife till the day of my death. I cannot help it. God bound us together; only God can part us. He can send me away, he can even marry her, but then he is a bigamist and she is a whore in the eyes of everyone. I cannot do anything but be his wife until my death.”

  “Amy,” Lizzie breathed. “Surely…”

  “Please God my death comes soon and releases us all from this agony,” Amy said in her thin thread of a voice. “Because this is worse than death for me. To know that he has loved me and turned from me, to know that he wants me far away, never to see him again. To know, every morning that I wake, every night that I sleep, that he is with her, that he chooses to be with her rather than to be with me. It eats into me like a canker, Lizzie. I could think myself dying of it. This is grief like death. I would rather have death.”

  “You have to reconcile yourself,” Lizzie Oddingsell said, without much faith in the panacea.

  “I have reconciled myself to heartbreak,” Amy said. “I have reconciled myself to a life of desolation. No one can ask more of me.”

  Lizzie stood up and turned a log on the fire. The chimney smoked and the room was always filled with a light haze that stung the eyes. Lizzie sighed at the discomfort of the farmhouse and of the late Sir John’s determination that what he had established was good enough for anyone else.

  “I shall write to my brother-in-law,” she said firmly. “They are always glad to see you. At least we can go to Denchworth.”