The women hurriedly cleared a path as Elizabeth left the tent, only Lady Helena having the presence of mind to seize her stiff jewelled train and run behind with it, holding it up out of the dirt.
Outside the sun was beginning to dip into early evening, its thin reddish light burning through the trees. Someone had kicked over their camp fire to quench it, and the drifting smoke left her eyes smarting.
Robert stood waiting like Herne the Hunter under the leafy vastness of an ancient oak, as sturdy as that wood. Age had not diminished his physique, superb in dark red jerkin and doublet, slashed sleeves glinting with gold, his cap feathered and set at an angle. She still thought of him as a young man, so gloriously handsome, his dark eyes bright with ambition and unfulfilled promise. Nonetheless, she did not fail to notice how his face had tightened with the years, the smudges under his eyes gradually deepening, his mouth smiling more warily these days, watching her as much with frustration as desire.
Once, in his youthful pride and arrogance, Robert had only thought to ask her ‘When?’ Now he knew better than to ask at all, seeming to prefer silence to outright rejection, though even his customary reticence was wearing thin. Whatever would follow it, she was yet to discover.
Her tone was clipped. ‘My lord Leicester.’
‘Your Majesty,’ he replied, bowing low, and Elizabeth felt a stab of satisfaction, glad that he was uncertain of her, remembering perhaps that she was his queen, not some other man’s wife whom he must fumble in doorways or under cover of darkness.
She swept past him to where her young page crouched, waiting to help his royal mistress step up into the covered wagon.
‘Good lad,’ she said with a sudden rush of affection, and tousled the boy’s head before setting her foot in his obediently cupped hands. ‘May you always serve your queen so well. And up!’
Three
The Brays, Kenilworth Castle
THE DAY HAD been the hottest she could remember. Lucy’s forehead was damp with sweat. She shook out the crumpled skirts of her gown and swayed, almost too weary to stand, peering down the narrow leafy lane that led towards Long Itchington. That was the direction the Queen’s entourage would take, or so everyone seemed to believe.
Furtively, she wiped her face with the torn shred of fabric that had been pressed into her hand an hour before.
‘Here,’ the man had muttered to each of those waiting at the front of the row. ‘Keep one for yourself and pass the rest back. Everyone’s to have a flag. As soon as you see the advance party, wave your flags high in the air and don’t stop until the Queen has passed through on to the tiltyard.’ The man had repeated these instructions in a hoarse yell as he shuffled along the assembled rows. ‘Is that understood? Keep waving and cheering until she’s out of sight.’
Their carts had been bouncing over rough tracks and through stifling, green-lit woodlands since early morning, and had only reached the vast reddish-brown walls of Kenilworth in the late afternoon. To the south of the castle lay great defensive earthworks, a series of rolling slopes covered in turf. Yet with the gate standing open it became a sun-baked valley through which the Queen’s entourage was to pass, while her people cheered her on from the high banks on either side. On arriving at Kenilworth, they had been herded into this place like cattle, allowed barely a jug of warm, metallic-tasting ale between ten, and a few loaves of bread dipped in gravy. The more senior women had been allowed to rest in the shade, but when Lucy tried to sit down on the grass verge to eat her meagre ration of bread, one of the men in charge had prodded her with the tip of his boot, shouting, ‘Get up!’
One of the older women there, a matron in a stiff linen cap, had dared to protest at this treatment, and the man had raised his heavy whip to them both, his thick Warwickshire burr hard to follow. ‘There’s to be no sitting down. You’ll wait in rows like you were told. We have to be ready for when the Queen arrives, see? That’s his lordship’s orders, good and simple, and any man, woman or child caught out of line will spend the night in the stocks. Is that clear?’
Gradually the sun began to dip below the horizon and the day grew less hot, to everyone’s relief.
A hard-faced, yellow-haired man in the now-familiar blue livery of Leicester’s staff came riding out along the line of earthworks Lucy had heard called the Brays, slowing to inspect the crowd assembled there on either side of the track.
As he drew level with her, the rider came to a halt. His horse fidgeted as he tightened his grip on the reins.
‘You there,’ he called down to her, his voice fierce and blunt. ‘Give me your name, girl, and tell me what your business is here.’
‘Lucy Morgan, sir. I travel with the Queen’s household.’
‘What position do you hold there?’
‘Entertainer, sir.’
‘You’re an entertainer?’ His watery blue eyes narrowed as once more he examined her from head to toe. There was a cold, sneering note to his voice. ‘What does that mean, I wonder?’
‘I sing and dance for the court, sir.’
The man studied her face a moment longer, almost as though suspecting her of insolence, then summoned one of the guards with a jerk of his head. ‘You there, move this one to the back. She’s to be kept out of sight of the procession.’
When the guard hesitated, obviously puzzled by this order, the rider grew angry.
‘Do as you’re told, man, and hurry up about it. It’s nearly dusk. The Queen’s party cannot be far off.’ He wheeled his horse about. ‘This is a good English stronghold. We can’t have Her Majesty frightened out of her wits by a Moorish face in the crowd, can we?’
Two guards seized Lucy and dragged her away from the other women, some of whom muttered rebelliously. Yet nobody dared protest, and Lucy found herself being pulled, without any attempt at gentleness or civility, several hundred feet away from the other entertainers and through a gap in the crowd where a steep, narrow track led to a grass bank and the castle wall behind it.
Forced into this dead end, she spun to face the two guards, breathless and ready to kick out, half expecting them to molest her. But although one shoved her backwards on to the ground, the older man shook his head warningly and pulled the other one away.
‘Best stay here, girl, until the Queen’s safe inside,’ he told her, not unkindly, ‘and keep out of sight if you know what’s good for you.’
Up on the grass bank, jostling for a clear view of the road, the waiting men were able to look down on her from both sides. Some even laughed as Lucy struggled up, wiping mud from her palms. She tried to ignore the crude comments from above. She was used to such jokes, though they still stung occasionally. It was something she had grown up with in London, the stares, the whispers, and the men on the streets calling after her whenever she dared go out alone.
‘If a man ever whistles at you in the street, whistle back until he comes running,’ one of her guardian’s theatrical friends had once suggested, winking at her across the supper table. ‘Then stick a knife to the bastard’s groin and take his purse while he stands whimpering.’
Her guardian, Master Goodluck, had been infuriated by this advice. ‘Pay no attention to Twist,’ he had insisted angrily. ‘That kind of behaviour is more likely to get you killed.’
All the same, her guardian had taken her aside later and painstakingly shown her how to defend herself in a fight: eyeball, throat, groin and kneecap, the weakest parts of a man’s anatomy. Especially the groin. ‘No need for a knife there,’ he had informed her with grim satisfaction.
In the distance, somewhere beyond the trees, a horn sounded three triumphant notes. For a moment there was silence, everyone standing perfectly still in the dim light. Then the blowing of the horn came again, louder, more insistent. ‘The Queen!’ a woman shouted, half hysterical. ‘Good Queen Bess!’ The crowd at the front cheered and a few white flags began to wave. The men in charge shouted hoarsely along the lines, then everyone was cheering and waving their flags.
Someone on the
grass bank high above had knelt down and was dangling his arm through the sea of legs.
‘Here, take my hand,’ a voice called, though she could barely hear him over the noise of the crowd. She couldn’t see his face but he sounded young and very serious. ‘I won’t drop you. I’ll pull you up on to the bank so you can see.’
She ignored him as she pulled grass from her hair. If those guards were to come back and find that she had vanished …
‘Hurry, the Queen is almost here!’
The cheering had intensified. Out of the corner of her eye, she could just see an arm waving about in the dim light, searching for her.
‘I shall miss her myself if you don’t take my hand,’ the voice said reproachfully.
Turning to speak sharply, Lucy stopped and stared. For the hand searching for hers was not white and pale as she had expected, but black like her own.
She reached up and placed her hand in his.
Strong and capable, his long fingers curled about hers, and she stared up at them in a trance, memorizing each fingernail and knuckle, the broad sinews of his wrist. Then another hand came down to grip hers and, with a grunt, he lifted her straight off the ground and up the side of the grassy bank.
Gaining a foothold, Lucy released his hand and climbed the rest of the way herself, not caring how dirty she made her gown, clambering up just in time to see the Queen’s party approaching.
‘Thank you,’ she said breathlessly, and looked up into the face of a young man as black as herself and only slightly taller. ‘You … You’re …’
‘Hush.’ He smiled, though seriously, as he pointed down the bank towards the Brays. ‘The Queen is here.’
Four
THE SIBYL, WHO had appeared to greet the royal entourage before the earthworks that marked the entrance to Kenilworth, gave a deep curtsey as her elaborate speech drew to a close. Thin as a cat, hair adorned with flowers and one shoulder bare in the Grecian fashion, scarcely decent in her sheath of white silk, the girl – fourteen, maybe fifteen years of age – peered up at her master the Earl of Leicester with praise-hungry eyes as if to ask, ‘So, was my speech performed well enough to please you, my good lord?’
Elizabeth, one gloved hand clenched on the rein of her horse, tried to keep the sting of jealousy from her voice.
‘A worthy protégée, my lord.’
At a nod, the girl backed away, her flowered head so low she was almost bent double, a courtesy no doubt hampered by the immodestly tight wrap of her costume. The royal entourage swayed forward once more, the Queen’s yeoman guards riding further back than her advisers had suggested. Elizabeth held herself erect in the saddle. She refused to enter Kenilworth as though afraid for her life, despite the usual rumours of plots and threats against her.
By God, she was tired, though. She ached after the long day’s ride, and her heavy cloth-of-gold gown, encrusted with jewels from hem to ruff, was stifling on this warm evening. Yet she could see the crowds ahead lining the broad walk and leaning precariously from Kenilworth’s battlemented towers, heedless of danger. They had come to see their queen, and she would not disappoint them by sagging in the saddle like an old woman or calling for her chair, to be carried in like her father towards the end of his reign, sick and barely able to walk. Tonight, though, she felt her forty-two years. Her skin hung baggy under her eyes, and no amount of white paint could disguise her pockmarks at close quarters.
Nonetheless, the signs of ageing did not seem to have lessened Robert’s desire to marry her. A queen was still a queen, regardless of saggings and wrinkles, and the Dudleys had always been an ambitious family.
As they approached the Gallery Tower, a black shadow loomed out of the dusk and swung low above their heads with a rustle of wings. A mutter ran through the packed mass of people on the grass banks above her, close enough to see what was happening, their white flags glimmering at intervals like will-o’-the-wisps.
‘Bats! Bats!’
Pale upturned faces in the crowd turned to watch the path of the creatures as they disappeared into the twilight.
No doubt the people thought it a good omen for the bats to be leaving the castle at her approach, and perhaps it was. John Dee had taught her to watch for such signs of significance in nature, and to use them to her advantage where possible; so here it would be said that her arrival drove out darkness and brought light back to Warwickshire.
Elizabeth gazed up at the tower, craning her neck to see better as Robert brought the court to a halt before its closed gate. High on its battlements stood inhumanly tall figures with vast trumpets – some five or six feet long – glinting in the light of the torches below.
‘What’s this? A guarded gate and tower, and locked against Your Majesty’s arrival? Where is the porter?’ Pretending anger, Robert raised his voice. ‘You, within! Heave open this gate for your queen, you insolent dogs!’
As though on cue, a door was flung wide and a huge porter appeared, ducking his head to avoid knocking it against the lintel. The man was eight or nine feet in height, a rough club gripped staunchly in one hand and a rattling bunch of keys in the other. Like the Sibyl’s before him, his costume was of white silk, wrapped about his paunch and barely concealing the comic bulge of his groin. His cheeks were flushed as though he had been drinking, an impression not denied by his ungainly swaying as he stumbled into the circle of torches.
Was the poor man on stilts?
The mummer played his part well, lurching towards the Queen with such a convincing roar that half the courtiers at her back scattered with undignified haste, leaving the watching crowd in helpless laughter.
‘What stir, what coil is here?’ he demanded, shaking his vast bunch of keys so violently at the crowd, he himself almost went over backwards.
Again the crowd laughed, partly at the man himself, partly at the old-fashioned language, though the nearest shifted carefully out of his reach. One of her own guards, hurriedly dismounting, took a threatening step towards the porter, but was brought to a halt by Robert’s upraised hand.
The porter’s voice boomed over their heads, echoing around the outer courtyard. ‘Come back, hold, whither now?’
Robert came to stand beside her in the fluttering torchlight. Fleetingly, his hand brushed hers, a taunt in his low voice. ‘Afraid, Your Majesty?’
‘Of a man on stilts, wrapped up in his own shroud?’
‘A man on stilts?’ His eyes danced, sharing her sense of the ridiculous. ‘Why, Your Majesty, this is none other than the great Hercules himself, commanded to guard the castle in my absence.’
‘But what dainty darling’s here?’ Pointing with his club at Elizabeth, sitting still and erect in the saddle, the porter pretended surprise. ‘O God, a peerless pearl!’
‘I am lost,’ she commented to the crowd. ‘He has seen me now.’
The crowd laughed and pushed closer, elbowing each other and cursing the guards who held them back, their sturdy pikes crossed. Robert, leaning familiarly against the side of her mount, toyed with his own pearl earring as he listened, the smile on his face that of a satisfied cat, his mouse caught and killed. No doubt he thought her half won already, seeing his popularity with the crowd, knowing how this progress would be memorable chiefly for her visit to Kenilworth.
‘This is no worldly woman,’ the porter continued, undaunted by the laughter, determined to deliver his lines as written, ‘but a sovereign goddess, surely? Her face, her hand, her eye – her features are all come from heaven, and with such majesty!’
‘Did you write this nonsense?’ Elizabeth asked softly.
‘Not I,’ Robert protested. ‘The author is John Badger, Your Majesty, a most worthy scholar and Oxford man. I could not stop him. He was insistent that he should play his part in this mummery. Indeed, I fear Master Badger has a certain liking for Your Majesty. Though no one can blame him for that.’
Master Badger had struggled to his knees in the dust now, requiring the help of another man in this effort at dutiful obeisance,
and was holding out his club and keys.
‘Come, most perfect paragon,’ he proclaimed bravely, ‘pass on with joy and bliss. Most worthy, welcome, goddess guest, whose presence gladdens all. Take here, have here, both club and keys. Myself I yield, these gates and all, submit and seek your shield.’
Applause echoed about the outer walls as the porter laid down his club and keys, and ordered the gates to be opened in the name of the Queen. As he knelt before her, the white silk costume, thin as a winding sheet, strained ever more tightly about his groin, its bulge obscene.
Elizabeth looked away while he adjusted himself. One of her ladies-in-waiting sniggered, hurriedly stifling the sound with the back of her hand. It was Lettice, of course.
‘We accept your allegiance,’ Elizabeth announced. ‘Now go and have some cooling ale, Master Badger, for you have earned it.’
The gate swung open in the dusk and the eight-foot-high effigies of trumpeters seemed to raise vast silvery trumpets on the battlements above, beginning an eerie chorus. Robert led her through the Gallery Tower gate at a sedate walk, and the court and her ladies followed them, their horses’ hooves clattering across the cobbles, drowning out the sound of trumpets.
Suddenly cold in the gloomy well of the tower, Elizabeth passed under its damp stones and remembered another tower which had housed her once in darkness and despair. She looked down, hoping for reassurance, but could no longer make out Robert’s face, just the dark silhouette of his head as they came clear of the gateway.
She shivered. Could the bats have been an ill omen, after all?
Five
‘WOULD YOU LIKE to see the rest of the show?’
Lucy drew her travelling cloak closer about her shoulders, wishing it was thicker. Now that the Queen and her shining entourage had disappeared, and those astonishing spectacles too, the beautiful girl in white silk and the giant porter, had both vanished inside the dark confines of the tower, the breeze from the lake felt suddenly cold on her face. She knew herself to be more tired than she had realized.
The Queen's Secret Page 3
