His Last Letter

by Jeane Westin

  His drowsy, dark eyes opened wider. “You would share your triumph with me?”

  We have shared our lives! “Before the celebration, I command you to take the waters for a few days at Cornbury near Rycote in Oxfordshire.”

  Half asleep, he muttered, “Rycote. Always Rycote.”

  She put her hand in his.

  “But, Bess, I should be by your side if the Spaniards come around Scotland and try to land in the west or take Ireland with the help of the rebels.”

  “I can easily recall you. You will always be by my side.” She put her free hand on his face, almost pulling it hastily away. “You are burning, sweet Robin. This very hour, I will send to Whitehall for my doctors.” He did not answer and she thought he had fallen into an exhausted, feverish sleep.

  “Guards,” she called. “Bring a basin of cool water.”

  Almost at once, she had the basin and tore a soft linen cloth from her undershift, dipping it into the bowl. Removing a small vial of her perfume from about her neck, she sweetened the water. Did he smile? Yes, she thought, he knew that she was near.

  Elizabeth took the cooled cloth and traced the outlines of his face, the wrinkles fallen away, a pink glow of youth upon his skin. She bent and touched his lips lightly with her own. “Sweet Robin,” she murmured, remaining beside him through the night hours, seeing his face in the dim light, watching the rise and fall of his chest until the candles burned low.

  EPILOGUE

  LOCKED INSIDE THE ROYAL APARTMENTS

  ELIZABETH

  September 9, 1588

  Whitehall Palace, Westminster

  Robin is dead. The words echoed through her as Elizabeth stumbled over the threshold to her privy chamber. Once inside, all celebration of the armada’s defeat, all praise, all pleasure became hollow. Elizabeth rasped, her voice breaking, “Leave me . . . all of you.” She pushed those words out, but when she saw Cecil and her ladies hesitate, she screamed, “At once, by Christ’s wounds!”

  Cecil bowed, his lined face full of care and uncertainty. Anne Warwick reached out her hands and, Jesu forgive, Elizabeth turned her face from her old friend and faithful lady. Behind Anne, Kit Hatton loomed, and Elizabeth screamed again for them to leave her sight, her voice now so high it became a tortured squeal. I have no thought or love in my heart for anyone but Robin. I am not my father, feasting and caressing another, celebrating Anne Boleyn’s death before she is cold!

  All love was dead to her. Love was a face inside her head, a hundred—nay, a thousand pictured memories. Without Robin, there was no other love in her.

  Cecil bowed and closed the doors to the royal antechamber and Anne did the same to the ladies’ tiring-room. She scarcely heard them, though her empty chamber echoed with the silence that she would now live with forever.

  Elizabeth looked up later, knowing not how long she had lain in her bed trying to gasp breath into her empty breast—seeing that she was alone, understanding at once what alone would mean.

  Raising herself, she stepped on the soft, vibrantly colored Turkey carpet, stumbled to each door and drew its heavy bolt. She would see no one and no one would see her like this, brought lower than the lowest wretch of a woman in her realm.

  She was no sworn wife, but Robin was the only man she had ever loved as a husband . . . though not as much as her crown and throne. That truth tore at her breast, turning her about in circles, because he had known . . . he had known that his love was greater than hers. Though it was not, she never could explain rightly. No man understood, or wanted to understand, that he was not everything to the woman he loved.

  Her legs shook. She was suddenly kneeling on the marble floor, hard and cold, to open his letter, her hands shaking so that she placed the page flat upon the floor to hold it steady.

  Her gaze swept across the familiar handwriting once, twice. He told her that he mended much better from the good herbal potion she had sent to him by young Tracey than from anything his doctors prescribed. Of course, their physicks were worthless.

  “But, Robin, my potion was not good enough, either!” She heard her voice speak the words aloud as if he could hear them. She bent and kissed the page his hand had last touched. Had he kissed this page? She grasped it to her cheek.

  Reading on, she scanned the letter again and again for some private word, a word for her alone, not for the queen but for the woman, some memory only they had shared. But he could not dare that. Even with his last breath he had a care for his virgin queen.

  . . . with the continuance of my prayer for Your Majesty’s most happy preservation, I humbly kiss your foot. From your old lodging at Rycote . . .

  Rycote! Not her lodge, but where they had journeyed to be alone one night long ago. Had he died in that room? In that bed?

  Elizabeth looked up to the coffered ceiling of her privy bedchamber as if to find heaven there. Was this all . . . the end of a lifetime together from early days in her father’s schoolroom at Greenwich for his children and the children of his high councilors? Jane and Catherine Grey had been there, and Elizabeth’s half brother, Prince Edward. Yet all her mind pictured, would ever picture, was one boy, Robert Dudley . . . young Robin at eight years, then no taller than she, but with a manful stride and boy’s sword at his side.

  She thought him then and always the most handsome of all young gallants. At play, he was lively and full of fun, ready for any game, always inviting her to take part with him, even when her father named her bastard and banned the use of her royal title for all time. Even then he had whispered the word princess in her ear.

  Had she loved Robin then, or had her love grown through so many years of terror and companionship? Who knew the hearts of the young? Still, somehow when she came at last to womanhood, her love for him was there, waiting to awaken her full-grown body.

  She sat back on her heels, cursing the wide gown and shifts that nearly smothered her. His letter fell from her hand to the floor.

  And separated!

  Two pages? She snatched up the one unread and found it blank. Why a blank page?

  Almost at once, she knew the answer and pulled herself to her feet, catching the heel of her cork shoe in the hem of her gown, sending seed pearls flying across the floor.

  Of course! Lemon and alum combined were invisible until turned brown by heat. They had used such a device to shield their private messages from Cecil’s men and other prying eyes before . . . so long ago now, when young at the beginning of her reign, unable to be parted for an hour.

  Elizabeth, her strength of purpose holding her upright, walked to the hearth and collapsed into the soft upholstery of her chair. There was a candle on her side table. With shaking hands, she passed the flame near the page and, as it passed and heated the precious words, they turned brown and visible.

  Scanning swiftly, Elizabeth breathed in every word past a full throat. Over and over, she read the lines until they were as much a part of her as any God-given organ.

  She slumped against the chair back, not for comfort, but for support. Her bones were melting with grief . . . she had to be held by something, since Robin would nevermore hold her.

  The room darkened but she was scarcely aware. Her candles, unattended by her ladies and gentlemen of the bedchamber, had gone out one by one. She was stifled by the dark and found new candles in the linen closet and lit many until light flooded into every corner, brighter than the flashes of fireworks still exploding in the city and from outside the city in the liberties. Even the pick-a-pockets and whores celebrated there this night.

  She looked away from the celebration.

  On the far wall by the big case clock, she saw Robin as he had been when first she was queen . . . his stance proud, one leg thrust forward, his jeweled velvet cap crowned with a sweeping peacock feather, his hot, dark Gypsy eyes alight with some new planned mischief or delight for her. He wore no gloves on his strong hands and he held them out to her. She saw his veins pulsing his need for her as she had known them to do . . . so many times.
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br />   Was this an apparition sent by God to torment her, a vivid memory, or the result of little sleep and no appetite when he was not with her?

  She held out her arms to him, arms that he had always filled. “My Eyes! Come to me, for I cannot come to you.”

  He smiled and Elizabeth knew that the path between them was one-way and she could not make that journey yet.

  She raised her hands in prayer: Lord Jesus, I have borne wars and the Tower into which my sister, Mary, sent me to die, but I cannot bear this. I bore my own father naming me bastard; the near loss of my right to succession and suspicions of treason, but I cannot bear this. I bore Robin’s marriage to that She-Wolf because he wanted an heir, but I cannot bear this.

  Elizabeth opened her eyes and stared into the corner that held him as he had always been in her heart, only to see him slowly fade into a wraith, a chimera. She called to him, “Robin, wait yet awhile!” But he could not wait.

  From somewhere, she knew not where, sudden anger filled her and she struggled, dizzy, to her feet and raged at him, raged at cruel death. “How dare you desert us without our permission! We will not have it!” She pounded on her councilors’ table, but no one heard. She whispered a command, the whisper trailing into nothing. “Do not leave me, for I cannot live without you. . . .”

  Frustrated, she tore at her gown, spraying still more carefully sewn seed pearls in every direction, and watched with satisfaction as they rolled across the floor. Her temper not spent, she looked about her chamber to see what else she could destroy . . . as she was destroyed.

  A faint voice Elizabeth recognized as Anne Warwick’s came to her: “Your Grace . . . Majesty, I beg you, allow me to help you . . . please.”

  “Help? There is no help. . . .”

  Only his last letter could console her, and so she sat, unmoving without food or drink, by the dying fire until it had long been cold ashes—how long she did not know, though night turned to day and night again—reading the ciphered page over and over until her memory of it raced ahead of the written words. Dazed, she vaguely heard rapping on her doors and Lord Burghley’s voice . . . her Spirit . . . pleading with her to take food. She did not answer but snatched up the original page and wrote across the outside: His last letter.

  She rose and stumbled to her treasures box beside her bed, and under Robin’s miniature, the one Mary Stuart had coveted, she slipped the page. He would stand guard over her as he had done so many nights when she was ailing. Elizabeth returned, then, to her chair by the cold fire and read the cipher one last time, his words already fading to a light brown, soon to disappear:September 4

  From our lodge at Rycote

  My sweet Bess,

  It is very late at night and John Tamworth has given me enough of your potion to ease me, though it does not ease as much as your coronation portrait hanging across the room from my bed. A lantern shines on your dear face and yet does not relieve me as much as my dearest memories of the night we two lay in this bed together. Not one minute of the night has passed that I have not known again the sense of you in my arms and under my hands. The first faint light of morn creeps through the windows as it did that night when we were at Rycote and at last as true a husband and wife as ever any man and woman churched in the greatest cathedral in the realm. It is what I wanted so many years, though now I see it was always unnecessary. No woman and man were more wife and husband to each other than we, dearest lady.

  Elizabeth looked up as a new rising sun spilled light into her chamber windows, her eyes filling with the tears she seldom shed, though she knew they would return whenever, in years to come, she allowed herself to remember these words and that stolen night. She had never quite forgotten, but they had never spoken of what had happened that night, as he had promised, not even in their most private moments, the few rarely snatched from duty. Yet she had seen him remember, seen the remembrance in his face and his body more than once years later. Still he remained loyal to his promise.

  Bess, sweetest, I will never fully speak of this, but I cannot promise to forget. Do not ask of me what is impossible for any man.

  Had she promised to marry him that night, only to think better of it the next day when they returned to Cornbury and she was again Queen Elizabeth and not a girl frolicking with a handsome, beloved boy? Of course she had promised. What woman would not promise anything that her beloved wanted when the length and weight of his fine body lay over hers, his hands caressing her aching breasts even as she begged him to have a care while arching to meet his thrusts, abandoning every caution in her need to know him completely. When he had asked her to be his wife, she had not denied him. That came later, as it always did.

  As queen, she had stopped her summer progress through Oxfordshire in 1566 to take the waters at Cornbury and they had escaped to Robin’s lodge at Rycote . . . for one night, a night that must remain hidden from her subjects and which, through her great resolve, she had almost managed to hide from herself.

  I know I promised that your old ÔÔ would ever be by your side, but today I must leave you. God is hastily calling me to Him and I feel my soul draining from me. I have no choice, sweet Bess, just as I had no choice but to love you. Though it cost me everything, it gave me everything I value. Still I must leave you and all on this earth and you must rest content with your remembrance of me and of my love for you, the truest I ever knew.

  Our years have passed too swiftly, Bess. Was it so long ago we were children hiding in the great garden at Hampton Court? I took your little hand as we passed under the frightening statues of the gods, our feet and hosen turning red from the brick paths, walking the passages your father had laid out for your mother.

  You did not learn to love from Henry, Bess. Is it truth to say that I taught you love?

  Was it there up the stairs in the little columned temple where we swore never to part?

  Do not shed tears for me, my Bess. I welcome death now to end all my pains. I never sought to outlive you. Better the world be emptied of me than of you while I yet lived. . . . I could not bear such loneliness. But you will bear my death until so many suns set and rise, as God wills. I pray He sends you many untroubled years, for I cannot write more. Do not grieve for what is lost, but remember that we loved so many years. I have lived and so will die only yours.

  Ever your ÔÔ,

  Robin

  Elizabeth heard guards outside her doors and they began to pound on the wood, which eventually splintered. She held Robin’s secret letter to the candle’s flame and watched the words blacken and the paper burn and curl until only the last line remained . . . as it would always remain written upon her heart. Finally, even those precious words disappeared and she dropped the last corner of burning vellum into the cold ashes of her fireplace.

  Burghley was suddenly kneeling at her feet. “Majesty, I pray you listen and hear me; England needs you!”

  She heard her uneven voice croak from her dry throat. “Ah, my Spirit, you know the only words that will call me to myself.”

  “Madam,” he said, his head bowed. He could not look at her ravaged face. “I do know that you ever have good care for your people, above all.”

  “Rise, old man,” she said, giving him her hand, needing his strength more than he needed hers, in spite of his troubling gout.

  Anne brought her some lamb broth and spooned it into her mouth, whispering that she had fasted three days, though Elizabeth did not remember them. As strength flowed into her, she ordered: “I command my palace of Whitehall return to normalcy.”

  She would hold no official mourning for Robin. The She-Wolf would deal with that. Elizabeth’s mourning would be hidden in her heart forever.

  Almost at once, Walsingham appeared with a sheaf of orders for a day of national thanksgiving to God for England’s victory over Spain, and she signed and commanded as ever. She was bathed and dressed in fresh linen and a gown of black and white. Her face was covered with white paste of crushed alum and white lead, her cheeks reddened as if Elizab
eth, queen of this realm, had not changed, though she had for all time.

  Yet, through all, her heart echoed with his letter until all the words were a part of her, and his last line gave her the courage to lift herself to her duty for another day, for all her days: I have lived and so will die only yours.

  AUTHOR’S HISTORICAL NOTE

  This is a workof fiction, although with good, historical reasons for both story and passion. We can say with assurance only, “This is what happened.” In most instances, we cannot say, “This is how Queen Elizabeth and Robert, the Earl of Leicester, felt about it.” They did not leave a full written record of their nearly five decades of close association, but their contemporaries observed and wrote about what they saw and heard.

  Do we have absolute proof that they were lovers? Certainly, their lifelong behavior tells us that there was deep feeling between them. During the heat of their youth, especially in the early days after Elizabeth was crowned and free from the control of others, they were seldom apart, and there was no need of letters when there were ears to whisper into. If letters or notes were written, they were destroyed. The surviving letters they wrote in later life were full of health concerns for each other, matters of governance and protests of caring. If there were other letters of a more intimate nature from Elizabeth to her Robin, they were destroyed during the English Civil War, 1649-1660, when Kenilworth was stormed and looted by Parliamentarian forces. Oliver Cromwell later drained the great mere so that there is little left of the Kenilworth Elizabeth visited that glorious July of 1575. A local group has attempted to revive the garden to its original splendor. You can see their results at my Web site, www.jeanewestin.com.