“I only hope she’s worth it.”
“He thinks she is, and that’s all that matters.”
“Even if he gets there, he’ll never find her. England is a vast place, many more people than here, spread about the countryside in hamlets big and small, as well as teeming towns with folk packed in like rabbits in a warren.”
“He’ll find her,” Rory said.
“And then what? She’ll welcome him when she’s married to another? A rich man, no doubt, whom she’ll reject in favor of my brother? He’s an idiot who thinks so.”
“She’s carrying your brother’s child,” Rory reminded him.
“All the more reason for her to stay with the man who could best provide for it,” Aidan said.
There was a pause while they watched the waves and the vanishing figure in the curragh.
“Well, good cess to him,” Rory said, clapping
Aidan on the back. “He’s doing what he wants, and so should we all. Let’s go back to the camp and have a drop on it.”
The prospect of a drink cheered Aidan, and the two men headed inland as the departing boat grew smaller in the distance, heading toward the horizon.
Chapter 9
The word must is not to be used to princes...
—Queen Elizabeth I
“Lady Selby!”
Alexandra whirled at the sound of her name to see Mary Howard running toward her, skirts flouncing.
“The queen!” Mary said, gesturing in the direction of the privy council chamber at Richmond Palace. As Alex looked past her, the elaborately carved doors burst open and the helmeted guards stationed on either side of them banged their axes on the floor.
“No more war, my lords!” the queen announced, concluding the council session an hour early. She strode purposefully out of the room and into the hall. Mary and Alex floated to the floor in curtsies as she swept past them, calling, “Attend me!” over her shoulder.
The two women stood up and hurried after her, exchanging glances as the old lady muttered her usual post council imprecations about “bankrupting my treasury with their military exploits” and “impotent old fools playing at toy soldiers.” The councilors streamed out of the room behind her, murmuring to each other as they packed up their papers. Among them was the principal secretary, hunchbacked Robert Cecil, son of gouty old Lord Burghley. The younger Cecil, nicknamed “Pygmy” by the queen for his stunted stature, had inherited leadership of the anti-Essex faction from his dead father. The men stopped to confer in small clusters, casting apprehensive glances at the queen as she marched away, still in a pother.
Guardsmen snapped to attention as she passed, and her path cleared before her as if by magic. Elizabeth walked briskly along the paved stone corridor, the courtiers she passed bowing from the waist and the ladies sinking gracefully to mark her progress.
“I will hear no more of Ireland!” she said to no one in particular as Alex and Mary hastened to keep up with her. “Three years ago I sent thirty-five hundred men to that benighted place, and within a year twenty-five hundred of them were dead, fled, or converted to the Irish. My soldiers disappear into those bogs as if melted by the fairy mist.”
She turned in at her privy chamber, and the door flew open before her. A startled Lady Warwick put aside one of the silk wigs she had been combing and curtsied abruptly. Two tirewomen making up the royal bed in the next room fell to their knees in fright.
“And Essex!” the old lady went on, taking no notice of the response of her servants. “I followed up his flagship last spring with sixteen thousand foot soldiers and thirteen hundred horsemen. And what have I to show for it? Not defeat for the rebels, as I was promised, but a truce, thank you very much. A truce, by Jesu’s wounds, with that wily, scheming, thieving rascal Tyrone!”
Alex was careful to shift her glance away from that of her mistress. The debacle in Ireland had been worse than she ever could have imagined.
“And now these varlets ask for more money for another campaign under Mountjoy! They will drive me to distraction with their demands. I will replace every one of them and have some blessed peace in my kingdom for my beleaguered and overtaxed people. Far better for my councilors to serve my interests by laboring on the charter for the East India Company and leave off Ireland altogether.”
The queen seemed to notice suddenly that everyone in the room had frozen. “Get up, get up,” she said, waving aside their obeisances. “Go about your business again. I merely wish to change my costume before receiving the French ambassador, but these two ladies can do for me well enough.”
Lady Warwick fled as Alex and Mary moved in on the queen, and Alex began to unlace her bodice when she gave the sign.
“Think you that Mr. Hurault de Maisse will like the silver cloth with the crimson kirtle and the slashed sleeves?” the queen asked.
“It’s a lovely dress, ma’am,” Mary said.
“The red taffeta lining becomes me not,” the queen said, fishing for a compliment.
“Your Majesty looks very well in red,” Mary said.
“But not so well as in some other colors,” Elizabeth said.
This was a trap, and both women knew it.
“Your Majesty can wear any color to excellent effect,” Alex said smoothly, “but perhaps the ambassador would prefer the red since it is new from France. It has always pleasured him to see you in his country’s latest fashions.”
“Well said,” Elizabeth remarked approvingly. She had spent her life fencing with diplomats, and she could recognize one anywhere. She stood still as the women dressed her in the new outfit and then said, “Bring the curled wig. This one is too heavy and it tires me.”
Mary lifted the auburn wig from the old woman’s head and repinned the sparse gray hair it had covered. When the new wig was brought, Mary set it on the royal head gently. She had been cuffed more than once when she was deemed too rough.
“Ah, better,” the great lady said, examining her image in her looking glass.
She gestured for her jewel box and added the touch of a circlet of rubies and pearls to match the pearl drops in her ears. Elizabeth lifted her long fingered hands, of which she was very proud, and studied the rings she wore, exchanging a heavy carnelian set with diamonds for a star sapphire embedded in gold.
“There,” she said when the sapphire was settled on her finger. “Now bring me the attar of roses scent the ambassador sent ahead of him. If I wear it, he may recognize it.”
Alex brought the crystalline bottle, and the old lady uncapped it and held the stopper to her nose.
“Bah!” she said, slamming the bottle down on her dressing table, where the contents slopped over onto the lace cover and stained it dark.
“This potion reeks. The man would have me stinking like a whore in the Southwark stews. Take it away.”
Alex, who knew the queen’s sensitive nose, removed both the bottle and the lace doily and put them in the other room.
“I will have the marjoram,” the queen said, indicating a pot of her favorite, lighter scent.
Mary fetched it for her, and Elizabeth sprinkled herself liberally with the perfume.
“Now I am ready,” the queen announced, handing the jar back to Mary. Her wrinkled face, heavily painted with alum and borax to enhance its natural whiteness, crinkled as she smiled at them, exposing the gap on the left side of her mouth where most of the teeth were missing. It was said that her physician kept fenugreek at hand to draw her teeth, since so many of them were yellowed and rotten— a consequence, Dr. Butts believed, of the queen’s fondness for sweets. Still, bejeweled and attired in rich clothes, she made an impressive figure for an ancient crone of sixty-six. And her intellect, as all who served her knew, was as sharp as the day she had ascended the throne forty-one years earlier.
“You are dismissed,” the queen said to Mary and Alex. “Remain here and await my return.”
She swept out to her audience with the ambassador, and the two younger women collapsed onto chairs as soon
as she was gone.
“Aye me,” Mary said, adjusting her headdress. “What a tizzy she’s in! I would not change places with my lord of Essex for a chest full of silver guilders.”
Alex had seen him shortly after she had begun to serve the queen, the night he’d arrived back from Ireland, fresh off his horse, his face and clothes still splashed with mud from the wild ride. He had taken the queen by surprise at Nonsuch, bursting into her apartments when she was still in her night-clothes, surrounded by her women, her gray hair about her shoulders. The old lady had been speechless at his apparition; she had thought him still in Ireland and suddenly found him on his knees before her, covering her hands with kisses and begging her indulgence to let him explain his abrupt and unsanctioned return.
That had been the beginning of the end for him.
“How are the mighty fallen,” Alex said.
“Favorites change. When you’ve been at court longer, you’ll learn.” Mary brightened suddenly. “How is the babe?”
Alex winced. “Kicking.”
“When is it due to be born?”
“January, Dr. Butts says.”
“It will arrive with the new year and the new century,” Mary said. “It’s a good omen.”
Alex smiled and nodded. Mary, a distant cousin of hers with the dark eyes and hair of her mother’s people, was near her age. She had a homely philosophy of life and was given to such remarks.
“The father will be so proud,” Mary said.
The father will never see it, Alex thought, turning her face away so Mary would not notice her expression.
Mary laughed. “And who would have thought this of old Selby? There’s no cure for the ills of age like making merry with a young girl. As my childhood nurse was wont to say, you shouldn’t put an old horse out to pasture before his true time, there still might be some seed left in him.”
Alex said nothing. She had been careful to let everyone think that Selby had sired her child, but it still bothered her whenever people talked about it.
The baby’s real father lived in her mind as vividly as if she had left him yesterday, and it was difficult for her to pretend otherwise. She felt like a traitor going along with the fiction, a traitor to herself and to her memory of Burke, but for the future of the child she carried she had no choice.
“Her Majesty may want to play the virginals when she returns,” said Mary. “She asked for some new Italian sheet music, madrigals I think, this morning. Perhaps we should alert the singers, as she’ll want them to take their parts.”
Alex sighed. She did not share her monarch’s passion for the harpsichord, and after several hours of listening to the queen pound the instrument, especially when accompanied by her chorale, Alex usually wound up with an aching head.
“I’m so happy we got her dressed without incident.” Mary stood and checked the next room, empty now, and then opened the door to the hall and looked into the corridor. She returned and whispered to Alex, “She gets worse every day. On Tuesday she kicked me when I told her that my lord chamberlain had said there was no more of that small beer she likes for her dinner.”
Poor Mary seemed to come in for the worst of it. Once, when she wore a fancy dress that the queen thought too grand for her station as lady-in-waiting,
Elizabeth took it away and kept it, even though it did not fit her.
“We’ve ordered vats of that light ale,” Mary went on, “but she goes through it like it’s water.”
“It almost is. She insists on diluting it so much I don’t know how she can tell the difference,” Alex replied.
Capricious, the queen certainly was, and exasperating, but those who served her endured her tantrums not only because they had to, but because her essential nature inspired devotion. She was in love with the romance of her own reputation as a great lady, and she always eventually lived up to it, even if others did not agree with her estimation of what that required. She never forgot an act of kindness or fealty, and she repaid loyalty with loyalty, like with like.
“I’d best get rid of this perfume before Her Majesty returns,” Alex said, rising and clearing away the debris. She rinsed her hands at a wall laver, but the heavy smell still clung to them, making her head light and her stomach unsteady.
“You’d think that Frenchman would learn that giving her strong scent is a poor idea,” said Mary.
“It’s a premier product of his country.”
“But not highly regarded in these hallowed precincts.” They both giggled.
Lady Warwick returned, carrying a folded stack of the queen’s silk chemises. “Help me sort through these before the queen returns,” she said. “She’s been complaining that the seams are too thick on some of them and are thus chafing her skin.”
The women exchanged glances, but then set to the work in silence, ruled once more by a magisterial whim.
* * * *
Burke had been at sea two days when a fierce storm swamped his small boat and tossed him into the churning waves. He saw a ship in the distance and swam for it, going under several times before he reached its side and was pulled aboard, half-drowned and coughing water. He passed out on deck.
When he woke up he found himself confronted by a sunburned blond man in a surprisingly neat uniform.
“What’s your name?” the captain of the vessel demanded in English as Burke blinked salt rime from his eyes.
Burke was silent.
“What were you doing at sea?”
“Trying to get to England,” Burke grudgingly replied.
“From Ireland, I assume.”
Burke said nothing.
“Oh, you’ll get to England all right,” the captain said. He turned to one of the men at his elbow and said, “Let him sleep ‘til morning and then feed him a good breakfast. He looks fit enough, he should be ready to work by then. Set him to repairing the mainsail.” The captain surveyed him. “Congratulations, paddy, you are now a sailor in the British Imperial Navy. You’ll take your orders on this ship and obey them smartly. If you disobey, you will be shot. If you desert, you will be shot. You are entitled to wages of two pounds a month at Her Majesty’s grace, though I wouldn’t count on it if I were you. We haven’t been paid in a year.”
He turned away abruptly, and both Englishmen disappeared.
Burke fell back on the deck, not as unhappy as he might have been. Impressment of seamen was common, and he could certainly do his share of the work long enough to get to England. He was alive and intact, and he knew that sooner or later the vessel would have to put in to port.
When it did, he would jump ship and find Alexandra.
* * * *
The cold winds of autumn gave way to the freezing sleet of winter. In late November, Alex and Mary were gathered with a small group of courtiers surrounding the queen as she sat next to the fire, playing chess with Sir Walter Raleigh.
Elizabeth was dressed in one of the fantastic outfits of her old age, a black velvet dress with pink slashes, her wig drawn up into a gold net spangled with sequins and pearls. In these later years she favored black and white, both colors admirably suited to a pale-skinned woman with red hair. Raleigh was himself arrayed in the fine apparel he typically cultivated—he’d once paid six hundred Spanish maravedis, part of his seafaring booty, for a pair of Italian shoes. Today his long, lean frame was graced by a burgundy velvet doublet embroidered with silver and gold thread, and his elegant legs were encased in costly silken hose. He studied the chess board intently, stroking his full beard, the firelight gleaming on his thick black hair, as Elizabeth fingered one piece dreamily and then seized another.
“An error, Water,” she said gleefully, using her nickname for him. “If you had used such tactics in Cadiz, methinks you would have emerged from that fray no hero.”
“You outwit me at every turn, madam,” Raleigh said in his broad Devonshire accent, inclining his head.
Alex looked on, admiring the adept way he handled the queen. In his youth he had been as hotheaded and
impetuous as the banished Essex, but now he was a favorite, an older man who had learned to temper his behavior. Poet, businessman, warrior and courtier, as versatile as he was mercurial, Raleigh had years earlier fallen out of favor for violating a lady-in-waiting and getting her with child. He had lost his position as captain of the guard, and everyone at court had written him off as a fallen power, never to rise again.
But Raleigh knew how to play a waiting game. As time passed he had worked his way back into the queen’s good graces, unlike the boyish Essex. He had been known to turn his back on the queen in contempt and had even drawn his sword when she’d refused his advice on the touchy subject of Ireland.
“Your Majesty is a strategist. You should have field command of the army,” an onlooker said from the sidelines.
“Think you that I could do better than some who have lately been in Ireland?” Elizabeth asked.
“You have not lost there, Your Majesty, only stayed the fight for another, better day,” said Sir John Harington, her godson and Essex’s friend, knighted by him in Ireland.
“That may well be true, ma’am,” Raleigh said. As Essex’s constant rival in glorious naval exploits as well as in the queen’s affections, he could afford to be gracious now that Essex was in prison and in disgrace.
“That fight should have been concluded ere this,” said another onlooker, Francis Bacon, a former friend of the defrocked favorite.
“We shall see, we shall see,” said Elizabeth. She looked up to notice Alex and Mary Howard standing in the background.
“Lady Selby,” she called, “some wine to quench our thirst. And a plate of those almond sweetmeats my Walter favors.”
It was the queen who favored the candy, but no one contradicted her. Alex walked over to a sideboard and poured Alicante wine and water into a goblet, mixing the liquids three-quarters water and one-quarter wine as the queen liked. She filled another goblet with the undiluted wine for Raleigh and added a pile of sugared almonds to a gold plate, placed all of it on a heavy inlaid tray, and carried it to the chess table.
The Highwayman Page 15
