The Forgotten Sister

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘I wonder about that too,’ Arthur said. His gaze held hers.

  Lizzie took his face in her hands and kissed him before she could change her mind. For a second he didn’t respond and terrifyingly, she could read nothing of his emotions, and then everything changed. He slid a hand behind her head and the kiss became hotter and more urgent, and Lizzie felt the emotion explode, fusing his feelings with her own, and leaving her in freefall.

  ‘I have a sense,’ Arthur said, as they finally broke apart, ‘that we’ve just made everything a whole lot more complicated.’

  ‘Well, at least now we know,’ Lizzie said. ‘We’d better avoid doing that again. It could ruin the experience with anyone else.’

  She saw Arthur smile. ‘Tell me again that you’ve never had this sort of connection with anyone before.’

  Lizzie couldn’t begin to deal with how she was feeling. ‘It happens to me with everyone I kiss,’ she said shakily. ‘It’s very commonplace. I’d be lying if I said otherwise.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Arthur put his arms around her and kissed her again. She could feel him smiling against her mouth. This time there was no hesitancy, simply a rush of physical sensation that almost swept her away.

  ‘Lizzie Kingdom,’ Arthur said, his lips an inch away from hers. ‘Who would have thought?’ Then: ‘I should go. I really should.’

  Lizzie hesitated for a split second. She was aware of the conflict inside her, the old fear of intimacy, the need for emotional safety versus an excitement so vivid it lit her up. She’d never felt like this before. She had had no idea. All the times she had thought that there was something wrong with her because she didn’t want a relationship, she just wasn’t that into someone…

  ‘Stay with me,’ she said, ‘Arthur. Stay with me. Please.’

  Chapter 22

  Amy: Cumnor Place, Oxfordshire, April 1560

  It had been a day of sharp little gusts of wind that raised the tapestries from the wall at Cumnor Place and squally showers that shattered on the diamond window panes. By four of the clock evening was already drawing in and the promise of spring that had set the daffodils dancing only the day before had vanished. The day was dark but my mood was fair. Revenge on Robert for all the neglect and injustices and humiliation he had piled upon me was a wonderful tonic. I sat before the mirror in my grand chamber, brushing my hair slowly, dreamily, as I imagined what my life might be in the future. In the chest beside me, hidden beneath the folded clothes, the gloves, shawls, petticoats and gowns of a quality appropriate to the wife of the Queen’s favourite, was the money I had accumulated.

  Since coming to Cumnor I had been performing the most elaborate show. My entire life was now a play; a performance of devotion to my absent husband, of mute acceptance of his neglect, a display of sweet nature and pliability. Occasionally I would allow my sadness to show, as I had the previous day when Sir Anthony Forster had invited our neighbours to dine and I had mournfully pushed my food about my plate, rousing myself to smile and make conversation before sinking into reverie again. It was this pretty display of patience that had prompted my friends to visit me that afternoon – to cheer my mood or perhaps to feed on my misery. I did not care either way. They too were unwitting actors in my play.

  They had clattered into the parlour:

  ‘Dearest Amy, we are here to lift your spirits!’

  Lady Pollard had brought me sweetmeats and was sympathetic: ‘Our poor, dear Amy! What a cross you have to bear.’

  Mrs Wayneman was soothing and gave me a vial of sweet wine to help me sleep. ‘I am sure Sir Robert will send for you to join him at court soon,’ she said, her gaze darting away from mine as she spoke. We both knew she lied.

  Mrs Mutlowe was bracing and as usual she had brought nothing but trenchant advice: ‘Perhaps if you were to take the air more you would find that your humour improved,’ she said. Mrs Mutlowe, so conscious that she was lower born than the rest of us, made a virtue of plain speaking. ‘I’m a plain woman and I speak as I find,’ she would say.

  In truth I knew that they were all gleeful to discover me still so downcast. Misery loves company; their lives were almost as tedious as mine and it comforted them to see that for all my name and my status, I had a worse time of it than they. I was very glad of their spite. From the moment I had come to Cumnor Place I had used them to spread the rumours I wanted told against Robert:

  ‘Poor Amy Dudley is ailing again…’

  ‘She is so neglected she is in a despair.’

  ‘She has a malady of the breast…’

  ‘She fears poison…’

  For the past six months I had watched and listened as the stories of my unhappy life rippled outward like water from a tainted pool. I had followed their journey in my mind as they flowed from neighbour to neighbour, through alehouses and inns. I knew that they would run like a plague of rats through the villages and towns as far as all the great houses of England, for that was what gossip and scandal did. In time the tide of it would reach London and the court of Queen Elizabeth herself where my husband basked in her laughter and occupied her virgin’s bed.

  ‘The wife of the Queen’s favourite is such a sweet-natured, beautiful lady… She has been shamefully abandoned and is in fear of her life…’

  I had even greater ambitions for those stories. I wanted them to take sail across the sea to the courts of Europe, travelling through ambassadors’ quills and merchants’ talk, until they returned to England much embroidered. I wanted the whole country, the whole of Europe, to hate my husband.

  Robert, of course, had no notion how I stoked that fire of scandal. He wrote to me complaining that men spoke against him and that it would ruin all our plans. I wrote back soothingly, telling him I did all that I could to stem the flow of malice. My friends know how content I am, I wrote, and will spread the word to counter these vicious slanders.

  Alas for Robert, he believed me. The hope that he would soon be free to court the Queen dazzled him even more than before. He was drunk on her presence, on her very being. I hated that she possessed the power to entrance him so but I could see its uses. She kept him occupied. His obsession addled his brain and he had no more idea that I was deceiving him than that he could fly to the moon.

  Poor Robert, he never divined my plan, that I would take his money and his papers and begin my new life whilst he was perpetually locked into the old one. I knew that no matter how or why I ‘died’ Robert’s enemies would use it against him. He would never be able to escape the shadow of suspicion. It was a nightmare malady, incurable. The Queen would not marry him. He would never attain his heart’s desire. Cruel revenge, perhaps, but he had stolen my life. I could have been a wife and mother, the mistress of a fine house and a great estate, not some wraith passing from place to place.

  ‘You will be properly mourned,’ he had promised me on the last occasion we had met in London. ‘The whole court will observe it and I will give you a grand funeral to match your state.’ Perhaps he thought I would thank him, this man who was already thinking of me as dead.

  The only pang of sorrow I felt was for my brother Arthur. I had no wish to cause him pain. Anna, I thought, would not miss me but Arthur had been a true and steadfast friend to me through all, and it gave me some guilt to think that I was deliberately deceiving him. I entertained the idle idea that one day I might write to him from my new life. Yet I knew I could not.

  That afternoon, when Lady Pollard and Mrs Wayneman and Mrs Mutlowe had gone, I sat alone in the parlour for a little. My hands were idle but my mind was busy. The rumours were sown now and it was time to begin the next part of my plan. It was time to give my lord’s letter of instruction to Sir Anthony Forster. I stood up and smoothed the skirts of my gown. It was a new one, satin trimmed, with lace and ribbons tied in true lovers’ knots. I loved the deep indigo blue of it; it spoke of innocence and heavenly grace.

  Down in the cross passage I met one of the maids.

  ‘Is Sir Anthony in his study?’
I enquired. ‘I have a commission for him.’

  I need him to arrange my death.

  She dropped a curtsey and murmured her assent. I felt her gaze on my back as I walked away; I knew there would be pity in it. She, like all the others, believed me to be ill used.

  My hand was raised to knock on the study door. I felt the rush of cold air as the main door creaked open. I turned. The maid had gone and there was no one in the passage. The shadows shifted; cobwebs scuttered across the flagstones of the floor. It felt as though the world paused for a moment in its turning.

  I saw the boy standing beneath the arch of the tower door, the same boy I had seen at Baynard’s Castle, and had thought a ghost. As before, he was dressed in a hooded cape of black with boots and hose, and he looked young and gaunt. In his eyes was a desperation that clutched at my heart.

  ‘Amy!’ he said. ‘Oh, dear God, I have found you!’

  He spoke as though he knew me, but then over the years I had found that many people pretended to an acquaintance they did not possess. Usually it was because they hoped I had influence with Robert, although that had not happened recently, of course. I thought him a beggar boy, down on his luck. He certainly looked thin and threadbare enough.

  ‘If you go around to the kitchens,’ I said, ‘they will feed you—’

  I recoiled as he stepped forward and grabbed my arm. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Listen to me.’ He fumbled in the leather satchel that he wore across one shoulder. ‘Remember this,’ he said. ‘You gave it to me when I was a child.’

  He held out to me a little ornament; an angel carved from stone. It was a pretty piece, head bent, wings folded, hands outstretched as though in supplication. It did look familiar to me but I could not place it. I looked at him in bafflement. Poor boy, not only was he a beggar but surely his mind was turned. The thought prompted me to speak gently to him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember. But tell me how I can help you.’

  He laughed a little wildly at that. ‘It is I who have come to help you,’ he said. He stepped so close I felt his breath on my cheek. He smelled of sweat and chalk dust from the roads, and I tried not to shrink from him.

  ‘Your husband plans to murder you in secret,’ he whispered. ‘He will send a man to push you down the stairs, here at Cumnor Hall. You are to fall and break your neck. You must save yourself! Get away from this place!’

  The shock was absolute. This time I was the one who grabbed him, my nails digging into his arm.

  ‘Do not speak of this,’ I hissed. I could see at once what had happened: one of Robert’s retainers had spoken loosely during a drunken night in the brothels or stews, and this foolish boy thought to profit by it. Or perhaps he truly believed he could help me. I knew not. All I knew was that if a word of the plan, garbled or not, was to escape ahead of time, everything would be ruined.

  ‘Go!’ I said. I pushed him towards the door. ‘Go and never mention a word of this again or I will see to it that my husband’s retainers will hunt you down and kill you.’

  He scrambled back from me, his white face a mask of horror.

  ‘You do not understand—’ he started to say, but I gave him no time. The wind caught the oaken door again and it yawned wide, and I pushed him hard, out into the porch. He fell sprawling on the cobbles. He was there one moment – I saw the shock and despair in his face – and then, what seemed like a mere second later, he had vanished.

  Chapter 23

  Lizzie: Present Day

  Lizzie sat in the garden at The High, her tablet in her hand. The afternoon was mildly melancholy; there was the imprint of autumn in the way that the bars of low sun striped the grass and in the little breeze that chased the already fallen leaves. She was wearing a pair of her grandmother’s trousers and a big wool jumper that had belonged to her grandfather. Her own bags, which Jules had so kindly dragged all the way from London, remained largely unopened. Over the crumbling drystone wall, she could hear Avery exhorting her gardener to chop down the Leylandii hedge ‘because dearest Elizabeth would never sue us’. It was odd but comfortable to be in a place where she could hear the lives of other people unfolding around her, the sounds from the high street, the church bells and the snatches of conversation. She realised that everything about her flat had been designed to cut out this sort of interaction. It was isolation masquerading as privacy and luxury. She had appreciated that sometimes when life had been so manic but now, she realised how apart she had become, how divorced from reality. Her life was opening up again and it felt good.

  Arthur had left for Oakhangar Hall that morning and had rung her to say that Sam Appleyard, Johnny’s step-father, had finally got back from the Antarctic and that the police were coming over to brief him on the investigation. Lizzie had felt a huge burst of joy just to hear Arthur’s voice and then she had felt horribly guilty that in the middle of so much grief and uncertainty she felt so happy.

  She took a deep breath of the wood smoke-scented air, wrapped an old tartan rug more closely around her legs and opened up her tablet, typing in the name ‘Amy Robsart’. She’d had some vague idea that in the absence of any other clues to Johnny’s disappearance, the more she could learn about Amy, the more it might help. First, she looked for a portrait, and found some suitably melodramatic ones painted by the Pre-Raphaelites that showed Amy’s prone body tumbled at the bottom of the Cumnor stair. That was not what she wanted, though. Searching again she found a little miniature that historians had identified as possibly Amy Robsart. It was pretty and innocent-looking with the sitter recorded as aged eighteen years, her bodice adorned with a brooch that combined a spray of oak leaves and some yellow flowers.

  Lizzie’s first thought was that she looked remarkably like Amelia had done when they’d all attended a medieval banquet as part of some event organised by Dudley’s management years ago. It was uncanny.

  She turned to the written articles. There were hundreds, thousands, of entries listed. The mysterious circumstances of Amy’s death had clearly fascinated people for centuries. Lizzie deliberately chose a modern interpretation of events to try to counterbalance the blatant prejudice she had read in Hugh Tighe’s nineteenth-century version.

  Amy Robsart, she discovered, had died on 8th September 1560. Her body was found at the foot of a staircase at Cumnor Place. Amy had been living there as the guest of one of her husband’s friends whilst her husband of ten years, Robert Dudley, had been up to various high jinks with the Queen back in Windsor. The circumstances had not initially been considered suspicious; in fact, the implication was that it might have been suicide rather than murder. The servants said that Amy had been in a strange mood that morning, very insistent that they all go to the fair in Abingdon and leave her alone. When some of them refused because it was unseemly on a Sunday, she became angry with them. There were also plenty of acquaintances ready to come forward to say how unhappy Amy had been, that she had been ill and depressed, that she was suffering as a result of Robert’s neglect because his only interest was spending time with the Queen.

  Lizzie winced. Guilt pricked her. She and Dudley might not have had exactly the same sort of relationship as Elizabeth and Robert but there were sufficient similarities to make her feel very uncomfortable.

  She read on. On the other hand, the author of the article reported austerely, there are historians who have pointed out that Amy’s letters were cheerful and positive, that she had bought some new clothes and that she seemed excited about something.

  ‘Conflicting evidence,’ Lizzie muttered, ‘is clearly nothing new.’

  ‘It most certainly is not,’ Avery said, from behind her. ‘Only think of the different theories about the Princes in the Tower.’

  ‘Oh hello, Aunt Avery,’ Lizzie said, smiling. ‘I didn’t see you there.’ She gestured to the chair next to her. ‘Would you like a glass of that lovely lemonade you left for me? Have you slaughtered the Leylandii to your satisfaction?’

  She went to fetch a glass whilst Avery
laid her gardening gloves and secateurs on the table and eased herself into the cushioned seat.

  ‘You’re studying that poor child Amy Robsart,’ Avery said, when Lizzie came back. ‘Did she fall, was she pushed or did she jump?’

  ‘Something of the sort,’ Lizzie agreed. ‘It would be heartbreaking to think that she took her own life because she was so unhappy.’ She felt another jolt of guilt remembering the Z-list celebrities who had crawled out of the woodwork to say the same when Amelia had died.

  ‘Suicides were denied burial in consecrated ground in those days,’ Avery said sombrely. ‘It was considered shameful and wrong in the eyes of the church. By all accounts Amy Robsart was well liked. I doubt anyone would have wanted her memory besmirched by the church’s condemnation. If she did take her own life, they would probably have covered it up.’

  ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ Lizzie said. ‘You would have thought that a verdict of suicide would suit Robert Dudley best, though. That way no one could accuse him of murdering Amy to get her out of the way so he could marry the Queen.’

  ‘Yes,’ Avery said, ‘but perhaps even Robert couldn’t face condemning Amy’s immortal soul, no matter how little he cared for her anymore. Certainly, he pushed for an inquest and declared he wanted there to be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Amy’s death had been a complete accident.’ She sighed. ‘A lot of historians feel he tried to influence the inquest jury. You certainly don’t hear a word of regret or sorrow from him about Amy’s actual death, though. He knew he had lots of enemies and that they would accuse him of her murder and he was determined it wouldn’t be allowed to queer his pitch with the Queen. No, a complete accident was the only outcome for him because he would have been blamed for her suicide as surely as he was for her murder.’

  ‘You know a lot about it,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’m only just starting to find out the story.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve read about it a lot over the years,’ Avery said vaguely. ‘Poor child – Amy, I mean. Her story has a hold on the imagination. We always want to know the truth about a historical mystery even when it isn’t possible to be certain.’