The Virgin's Lover ttc-4 Read online

  “I must have it back,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “And he must never see it in your hands,” she said. “He would know at once that it had come from me.”

  Cecil nodded again.

  “When will you do it?” she asked.

  “At once,” he replied.

  “Not on my birthday,” she specified like a child. “Let me be happy with him on my birthday. He has planned a lovely day for me; don’t spoil it.”

  “The day after then,” Cecil said.

  “Sunday?”

  He nodded. “But you must not risk conceiving a child.”

  “I will make an excuse.”

  “I will need you to play a part,” Cecil warned her.

  “He knows me too well; he sees through me in a moment.”

  “Not play a part to him. You will have to make some remarks to others. You have to set a hare running. I will tell you what to say.”

  She wrung her hands. “It will not hurt him?”

  “He has to learn,” Cecil said. “You want this done?”

  “It must be done.”

  Would to God I could just have him murdered and be done with it, Cecil thought as he bowed and left the room. Kat Ashley was waiting outside the queen’s chamber as Cecil came out and they exchanged one brief, appalled glance at the mess in which this new queen was entrapped in only the second year of her reign.

  But though not dead I shall bring him down so low that he knows he can never be king, Cecil thought. Another Dudley generation and an other disgrace. Will they ever learn? He stalked along the gallery past the queen’s forebears, her handsome father, the gaunt portrait of her grandfather. A woman cannot rule, Cecil thought, looking at the kings. A woman, even a very clever woman like this one, has no temperament for rule. She seeks a master and God help us, she chose a Dudley. Well, once he is cut down like a weed and the path is clear she can seek a proper master for England.

  The page, reporting that the doctor would not attend Lady Dudley, was summoned before Mrs. Forster.

  “Did you tell him she was ill? Did you say Lady Dudley needed his help?”

  The lad, wide-eyed with anxiety, nodded his head. “He knew,” he said. “It was because she is who she is that he wouldn’t come.”

  Mrs. Forster shook her head and went to find Mrs. Oddingsell.

  “Our own physician will not attend her, for fear of being unable to cure her,” she said, putting the best appearance on the matter as she could.

  Mrs. Oddingsell paused at this fresh bad news. “Did he know who his patient would be?”

  “Yes.”

  “He refused to come in order to avoid her?”

  Mrs. Forster hesitated. “Yes.”

  “So now she has nowhere to go, and no physician will heal her?” she demanded incredulously. “What is she to do? What am I to do with her?”

  “She will have to come to terms with her husband,” Mrs. Forster said. “She should never have quarreled with him. He is too great a man to offend.”

  “Mrs. Forster, you know as well as I, she has no quarrel with him but his adultery and his desire for a divorce. How is a good wife to meet such a request?”

  “When the man is Robert Dudley, his wife had better agree,” Mrs. Forster said bluntly. “For look at the strait she finds herself in now.”

  Amy, a little better after a rest of two days, walked down the narrow circular stair from her room to the buttery below, and then through the great hall into the courtyard, her hat swinging in her hand. She walked across the cobbled courtyard, putting her hat on her head and tying the ribbons under her chin. Although it was September the sun was still very hot. Amy went through the great archway and turned left to walk on the thickly planted terrace before the house. The monks had walked here in their times of quiet prayer and reading, and she could still trace the paving stones of their circular walk in the rough-cut grass.

  She thought that they must have struggled with greater difficulties than hers, that they must have wrestled with their souls and not worried about mere mortal things like whether a husband would ever come home again, and how to survive if he did not. But they were very holy men, she said to herself. And learned. And I am neither holy nor learned, and in fact I think I am a very foolish sinner. For God must have forgotten me as much as Robert has done if they could both leave me here alone, and in such despair.

  She gave a little gulp of a sob and then rubbed the tears from her cheek with her gloved hand. No point in crying, she whispered miserably to herself.

  She took the steps down from the terrace to walk through the orchard toward the garden wall, the gate, and the church beyond.

  The gate was stuck when she pulled at it, and then a man stepped forward from the other side of the wall, and pushed it free for her.

  “Thank you,” she said, startled.

  “Lady Amy Dudley?” he asked.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a message for you from your husband.”

  She gave a little gasp and her cheeks suddenly blushed red. “Is he here?”

  “No. A letter for you.”

  He handed it over and waited while she examined the seal. Then she did an odd thing. “Have you a knife?”

  “What for, my lady?”

  “To lift off the seal. I don’t break them.”

  He took a little dagger, sharp as a razor, from its sheath in his boot. “Take care.”

  She inserted the blade between the dried shiny wax and the thick paper and lifted the seal from the fold. She tucked it into the pocket of her gown, returned the knife to him, and then unfolded the letter.

  He saw that her hands were shaking as she held the letter to read it, and that she read very slowly, her lips spelling out the words. She looked at him. “Are you in his confidence?”

  “I am his servant and his liegeman.”

  Amy held out the letter to him. “Please,” she said. “I don’t read very well. Does that say that he is coming to see me tomorrow at midday, and that he wants to see me alone in the house? That I must clear the house of everyone and wait for him alone?”

  Awkwardly, he took the letter and read it quickly. “Yes,” he said. “At midday tomorrow, and it says to dismiss your servants for the day and sit alone in your chamber.”

  “Do I know you?” she said suddenly. “Are you new in his service?”

  “I am his confidential servant,” he said. “I had business in Oxford and so he asked me to take this letter. He said there would be no need of any reply.”

  “Did he send me a token?” she asked. “Since I don’t know you?”

  The man gave her a thin smile. “I am Johann Worth, your ladyship. And he gave me this for you.” He reached into his pocket and gave her the ring, the Dudley signet ring with the ragged staff and the bear.

  Solemnly she took it from him and at once slipped it on her fourth finger, snugly it fitted above her wedding ring, and she smiled as she put her fingertip on the engraving of the Dudley crest.

  “Of course I shall do exactly as he asks,” she said.

  The Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, staying at Windsor for the weekend of Elizabeth’s birthday, found himself opposite Cecil to watch an archery tournament on the upper green before the palace gardens on Friday evening. He noticed at once that the Lord Secretary was looking as grave as he had done since his return from Scotland, and was wearing his customary black unrelieved by any slashing, color, or jewelry, as if it were an ordinary day and not the eve of the queen’s birthday.

  Carefully he worked his way round so that he was near the Lord Secretary as the party dispersed.

  “And so all is prepared for the queen’s birthday tomorrow,” the Spanish ambassador observed. “Sir Robert swears he will give her a merry day.”

  “Merry for her, but little joy in it for me,” Cecil said incautiously, his tongue loosened by wine.

  “Oh?”

  “I tell you, I cannot tolerate much more of it,” Cecil continued in a to
ne of muted anger. “Everything I try to do, everything I say has to be confirmed by that cub.”

  “Sir Robert Dudley?”

  “I’ve had enough of it,” Cecil said. “I left her service once before, when she would not take my advice over Scotland, and I can do it again. I have a beautiful house and a fine young family, and I never have time to see them, and the thanks I get for my service is shameful.”

  “You are not serious,” the Spaniard said. “You would not really leave?”

  “It is a wise sailor who makes for port when a storm is coming,” Cecil said. “And the day that Dudley steps up to the throne is the day that I step out into my garden at Burghley House and never see London again. Unless he arrests me the moment I resign, and throws me into the Tower.”

  The ambassador recoiled from Cecil’s anger. “Sir William! I have never seen you so distressed!”

  “I have never felt such distress!” Cecil said bluntly. “I tell you, she will be ruined by him and the country with her.”

  “She could never marry him?” de Quadra asked, scandalized.

  “She thinks of nothing else and I cannot make her see reason. I tell you, she has surrendered all affairs to him and she means to marry him.”

  “But what of his wife? What of Lady Dudley?”

  “I don’t think she will live very long if she stands in Dudley’s way, do you?” Cecil asked bitterly. “He is not a man to stop at much with a throne in his sights. He is his father’s son, after all.”

  “This is most shocking!” the ambassador exclaimed, his voice hushed to a whisper.

  “I am certain he is thinking of killing his wife by poison. Why else would he put it about that she is ill? Though I hear that she is quite well and has now employed a taster for her food. What do you think of that? She herself thinks he will murder her.”

  “Surely the people would never accept him as king? Especially if his wife died suddenly and suspiciously?”

  “You tell her,” Cecil urged him. “For she will hear not one word against him from me. I have spoken to her, Kat Ashley has spoken to her. In God’s name, you tell her what will come from her misconduct, for she may listen to you when she is deaf to all of us.”

  “I hardly dare,” de Quadra stammered. “I am not in her confidence.”

  “But you have the authority of the Spanish king,” Cecil insisted. “Tell her, for God’s sake, or she will have Dudley and lose the throne.”

  De Quadra was an experienced ambassador, but he thought that no one had ever before been entrusted with such a wild mission as to tell a twenty-seven-year-old queen on the very morning of her birthday that her most senior advisor was in despair, and that everyone thought she would lose her throne if she did not give up her love affair.

  Her birthday morning started with a stag hunt and Robert had all the huntsmen dressed in the Tudor colors of green and white and the entire court dressed in silver, white, and gold. Elizabeth’s own horse, a big white gelding, had a new saddle of red Spanish leather and new bridle, a gift from Dudley.

  The Spanish ambassador held back as the queen and her lover rode at their usual breakneck speed, but when they had killed, and had drunk a glass of wine over the stag’s head to celebrate, and were riding home, he eased his horse beside hers and wished her a happy birthday.

  “Thank you,” Elizabeth gleamed.

  “I have a small gift for you from the emperor back at the castle,” the ambassador said. “But I could not contain my good wishes a moment longer. I have never seen you in such health and happiness.”

  She turned her head and smiled at him.

  “And Sir Robert looks so well. He is a happy man to have your favor,” he started carefully.

  “Of all the men in the world he has earned it,” she said. “Whether in war or peace he is my most trusted and faithful advisor. And in days of pleasure he is the best of companions!”

  “And he loves you so dearly,” de Quadra remarked.

  She drew her horse a little closer to him. “May I tell you a secret?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he swiftly assured her.

  “Sir Robert will soon be a widower and free to marry,” she said, keeping her voice very low.

  “No!”

  She nodded. “His wife is dead of an illness, or very nearly so. But you must tell no one about it until we announce it.”

  “I promise I shall keep your secret,” he stumbled. “Poor lady, has she been ill very long?”

  “Oh, yes,” Elizabeth said carelessly. “So he assures me. Poor thing. Are you coming to the banquet tonight, sir?”

  “I am,” he said, he tightened his grip on the horse’s reins and fell back from her side. As they rode up the winding road to the castle he saw Cecil, waiting for the return of the hunt, on the little battlements above the entrance. The ambassador shook his head toward Elizabeth’s advisor as if to say that he could make sense of nothing, that it was as if they were all trapped in a nightmare, that something very bad was happening, but no one could know quite what.

  Elizabeth’s birthday celebrations, which had started with a roar of guns, ended in a blaze of fireworks that she viewed from a barge in the Thames, heaped with late roses, with her closest friends and her lover at her side. When the fireworks died down the barges rowed slowly up and then down the river so that the people of London, lining the banks to admire the show, could call out their blessings on the twenty-seven-year-old queen.

  “She will have to marry soon,” Laetitia observed to her mother in a muted whisper. “Or she’ll have left it too late.”

  Catherine glanced toward the profile of her friend and the darker shadow behind her which was Robert Dudley. “It would break her heart to marry another man,” she predicted. “And she’ll lose her throne if she marries him. What a dilemma for a woman to face. Pray God you never love unwisely, Lettice.”

  “Well, you’ve seen to that,” Laetitia said smartly enough. “For being betrothed without love I am unlikely to find it now.”

  “For most women it is better to marry well than to marry for love,” Catherine said, unruffled. “Love may follow.”

  “It didn’t follow for Amy Dudley,” Laetitia observed.

  “A man like Robert Dudley would bring trouble for his lover or his wife,” her mother told her. As they watched, the barge rocked and Elizabeth stumbled a little. At once Robert’s arm was around her waist and, careless of the watching crowds, she let him hold her, and leaned back against him so that she could feel the warmth of his body at her back.

  “Come to my room tonight,” he whispered in her ear.

  She turned to smile up at him. “You’ll break my heart,” she whispered. But I cannot. It is my time of the month. Next week I shall come back to you.”

  He gave a little growl of disappointment. “It had better be soon,” he warned her. “Or I shall come to your bedchamber before the whole court.”

  “Would you dare to do that?”

  “Try me,” he recommended. “See how much I would dare.”

  Amy dined with her hosts on Saturday night and ate a good dinner. They drank the health of the queen on this, her birthday night, as did every loyal household in the land, and Amy raised her glass and touched it to her lips without flinching.

  “You are looking better, Lady Dudley,” Mr. Forster said kindly. “I am glad to see you well again.”

  She smiled and he was struck with her prettiness, which he had forgotten while thinking of her as a burden.

  “You have been a kind host indeed,” she said. “And I am sorry to come to your house and immediately take to my bed.”

  “It was a hot day and a long ride,” he said. “I was out that day and I felt the heat myself.”

  “Well, it will be cold soon enough,” Mrs. Forster said. “How quickly time passes. It’s Abingdon fair tomorrow, think of that already?”

  “I am riding over to Didcot,” Mr. Forster said. “There’s some trouble with the tithes for the church. I said I would listen to the vi
car’s sermon and then meet him and the churchwarden. I’ll dine with him and come home in the evening, my dear.”

  “I’ll let the servants go to the fair then,” Mrs. Forster said. “They usually have a holiday on fair Sunday.”

  “Will you go?” Amy asked with sudden interest.

  “Not on the Sunday,” Mrs. Forster said. “All the common folk go on the Sunday. We could ride over on Monday if you wish to see it.”

  “Oh, let’s go tomorrow,” Amy said, suddenly animated. “Please say we can. I like the fair all busy and filled with people. I like to see the servants all dressed up in their best and buying ribbons. It’s always best on the first day.”

  “Oh, my dear, I don’t think so,” Mrs. Forster said doubtfully. “It can be very rough.”

  “Oh, go,” her husband recommended. “A little bustle won’t hurt you. It’ll lift Lady Dudley’s spirits. And if you want any ribbons or anything you will know that they have not sold out.”

  “What time shall we go?” Mrs. Oddingsell asked.

  “We could leave at about midday,” Mrs. Forster suggested, “and take our dinner at Abingdon. There’s a good enough inn, if you wish to dine there.”

  “Yes,” Amy said. “I should love to do that.”

  “Well, I am glad to see you so restored to health that you want to go out,” Mr. Forster said kindly.

  On Sunday morning, the day they were all to go to the fair, Amy came down to breakfast looking pale and ill again.

  “I slept so badly, I am too ill to go,” she said.

  “I am sorry,” Mrs. Forster said. “Do you need anything?”

  “I think I will just rest,” Amy said. “If I could sleep I am sure I would be well again.”

  “The servants have all gone to the fair already, so the house will be quiet,” Mrs. Forster promised. “And I will make you a tisane myself, and you shall take your dinner in your room, in your bed if you wish.”

  “No,” Amy said. “You go to the fair as you planned. I wouldn’t want you to delay for me.”