Queen's Pleasure

by Brandy Purdy

  “Madame”—Cecil smiled at me in marked admiration—“you are a marvel! And never fear; I shall see to it personally. When all is finished, the Count de Feria may stand directly before you with a quizzing glass at his eye and not know the difference.”

  “Thank you, Cecil.” I took his arm again as I smilingly accepted his compliment. “I hope I may always astonish you all. God preserve me from the day when my people can read me like a child’s hornbook. Now, about the Council, I shall keep some of Mary’s, of course, ones who are good Englishmen before they are good Catholics, but we shall infuse the Council with new blood, and blend the old with new... .” And we continued our stroll around the denuded garden, our footsteps crunching the gravel, as we discussed matters of immediate importance to the realm.

  That night in my bedchamber I found myself possessed of a boundless energy. Even as Kat undressed me and helped me into my white linen nightgown, I could not stand still; I was still wide awake and had not the least desire for sleep. Though it would have been unseemly to do so, as I had decreed three days of mourning for Mary, I was sorely tempted to summon musicians and some fun young people to dance with me. “I could dance all night and still be just as nimble on my feet come cock’s crow!” I said to Kat, who just shook her head and smiled indulgently as, humming to myself, I whirled and spun, kicked and leapt all around the room, my bare feet flying like fearless doves through the intricate and boisterous steps.

  “Robert!” I breathed when I heard a soft tap upon the door. He had said he would come, and now I would have someone to dance with me. And, ignoring Kat’s protests that it was unseemly to entertain a man alone in my bedchamber, I laughed and ran to throw wide the door and drag him in to dance with me.

  He came in his nightclothes—a rich wine velvet dressing gown ornamented all down the front with gold frogs and tassels worn over a long white linen nightshirt with matching tasseled and embroidered velvet slippers. And he was carrying a fresh loaf of white bread and a jar of strawberry jam.

  “I thought Your Majesty might like to partake of a midnight picnic,” he said with a smile.

  “Oh, Rob, how well you know me!” I cried, and I pulled him farther into the room. “But come, put those things aside for now. I want to dance and dance—tonight I wouldn’t mind dancing with the Pope or the Devil or even Philip of Spain himself!”

  “Your wish is my command!” Robert said gallantly as he unhesitatingly swept me up into his arms, swung me around, high in the air, making my hair whip and swing through the air, and my nightgown bell and sway about my limbs, and then led me back and forth and ’round and ’round in the most joyous, boisterous gavotte, ending with a kiss at the end as we fell together onto the big feather bed, ignoring Kat’s pursed-lipped disapproval as she took a seat by the fire, folded her arms across her chest, and stubbornly refused to budge and leave me alone with Lord Robert. Our danger-spiced dealings with Tom Seymour had left my dear Kat more a cautious rather than a curious cat.

  Robert bounced up to retrieve the bread and jam, then came back and flopped down beside me. And, like naughty children, we feasted, laughing and licking our fingers.

  “This is delicious!” I declared of the jam. I picked up the jar and studied the script on the label, the word Strawberry written in wavering, hesitant, uncertain letters that sprawled wide across the label as though a child had written it. Only much later, when I saw her letters, would I realize that it was Amy’s hand, that she loved to gather berries and help in the kitchen when they made jellies and jams.

  “I shall see that my cook is appointed to your kitchens; she shall be the first of many jewels I give my gracious queen, who rules my heart as she does this realm,” Robert said with fluid gallantry, taking my hand, covering it with kisses, and licking and sucking away the jam that lingered on my fingertips.

  He pressed me back onto the bed and began fanning my hair out across the pillows, saying it was like “flames of red silk,” but when his lips covered mine, and the press of his body and his kisses became too ardent, I pushed him away and, covering my nervousness with laughter and hoping that my nightgown hid my quivering knees, went to my writing desk and pulled out the chair.

  “What are you doing?” Robert asked, leaning on his elbow and eyeing me curiously. “Come back to bed!” He patted the mattress beside him.

  “I am writing a letter to your wife,” I said, as I selected a quill and pulled forward a sheet of paper. “I want to ask her to serve as one of my ladies. Your position as Master of the Horse will require you to be constantly at my side, and ...”

  “Please don’t do that,” Robert said, frowning and serious, as he came to my side and plucked the quill from my hand.

  “But why not?” I asked. “She will surely be very lonely without you.”

  Robert shrugged. “She has the cats.”

  “Cats?” I exclaimed, laughing and incredulous. “Being a woman myself, though, granted, an unmarried one, I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that cats, however sweet and loving and amusing they are, are hardly a fit substitute for a beloved husband.”

  “She will not come and will not like for you to ask her. She is afraid of London and the court and will cry and make herself sick, fearing that her refusal will offend you or that you will be angry and send guards to force her to come anyway,” Robert explained, looking very distressed and glum. “Her coming would bring no happiness to either of us. We are estranged.”

  “And embittered too, I see.” I nodded, crumpling the letter I had started to write in my hand.

  “Amy was a mistake of my youth, better put behind me, better left in the country, which she likes far better than the city. She is content, Elizabeth; she will understand the requirements of my position and not begrudge me, or you, the time we spend together, I assure you. There is no love lost between us; it all died long ago. It never really was love. My place is at your side, Elizabeth.” He knelt and took my hand and pressed it to his lips. “You know it, and I know it; do not send me away, and do not rub salt in my wounds by talking of my wife, who is better left forgotten. She doesn’t want me, and I don’t want her—only you!” He kissed my hand again.

  “Very well, Robin,” I said softly, as I nodded, but my mind was very far away, remembering his wedding day, when I had stood beside Kat and watched the loving couple and wondered aloud, “What will be left for them after the lust pales?” Now I knew the answer—regrets and bitterness for both of them. I knew Amy was a country girl at heart; I had seen with my own eyes how much she loved it and how ill at ease she seemed with the high and nobly born people who had come from London and the court to attend her wedding. Perhaps she truly was content with her life, to dwell in the country with her pets. I hoped so. I remembered the golden-haired girl with the rosy pink cheeks, irrepressible smile, and the bright blue green eyes, in her grandiose rendition of a milkmaid’s garb, and her crown and bouquet of buttercups, and her bare feet. She had one of the most beautiful smiles I had ever seen. Such a pure and loving radiance shone like a sunbeam from her that day, I hated to think of her frowning and weeping, spending her days and nights submerged in melancholy, with the warm, happy sunshine of her life replaced with night black darkness and bleak, cold, rainy-day grayness.

  Robert’s arms were about my waist again, and his warm lips were nuzzling my cheek. “Come back to bed,” he whispered. “Oh, Bess, I have waited so long... .”

  I put him from me with a commanding hand as firm as steel. “If you are tired, go to your own bed, My Lord. Kat! Show Lord Robert to the door if he cannot find it himself, and let no one else trouble me this night. It’s late, and I have much to do on the morrow and all the other morrows to come! Good night, Robert!”

  But I slept scarcely at all that night. Whenever I would close my eyes, the phantom shade of my stepfather, Thomas Seymour, would come to caress and fondle the body whose lusts I so insistently denied and to tauntingly sing his courting song of “Cakes and Ale.”

  I gave
her Cakes and I gave her Ale,

  I gave her Sack and Sherry;

  I kist her once and I kist her twice,

  And we were wondrous merry!

  I gave her Beads and Bracelets fine,

  I gave her Gold down derry.

  I thought she was afear’d till she stroked my Beard

  And we were wondrous merry!

  Merry my Heart, merry my Cock,

  Merry my Spright.

  Merry my hey down derry.

  I kist her once and I kist her twice,

  And we were wondrous merry!

  Even with my hands clutched tightly over my ears, pressing with all my might, tossing and turning in my bed, moaning and groaning as though I had the bellyache, still that maddening song plagued me, and the memory of how he had once kissed and caressed me; and in my dreams, as he did so, his image blurred and merged with Robert’s until at times the two seemed almost one.

  At last I bolted from my bed with an anguished cry and ran to my desk to spend the last dark hours before the dawn perusing the papers Cecil had left for me. If I could not sleep, I would work; England had need of me, more so than my body had of carnal pleasure and the disillusion and disappointment that followed hard on its heels thereafter.

  “Never surrender!” my mother had once whispered adamantly into my ear, with such urgent emphasis that the words had been burned, branded, into my brain forever. My mother had learned there is sometimes a very fine line between winning and losing. And she had learned the great and terrible price all womankind pays for letting a man straddle, master, and break her, and giving him the power of life and death over her. With the lance of flesh between his thighs, an inept midwife, the fever that often burns out a woman’s life following childbirth, a French executioner’s sword, an English headsman’s ax, or the might and rage of his bare hands, surrendering to a man gives him the power to destroy her.

  “Never surrender!” I repeated as I bent over my desk. “Never surrender!” I already knew what it was like to dance in the arms of danger and to lie down with it, weak-kneed and burning with the fever of lust between my thighs; Tom Seymour had taught me well, and I had seen in the panoply of those who had come and gone throughout my life—my father and his six wives, my sister and her Spanish bridegroom—the pain, and the price to be paid for letting passion have free rein. And I didn’t want to spend any more of myself.

  “Never surrender!” I whispered again, and I resumed reading reports on the state of my newly inherited kingdom. I knew that, in England, I had found a lover who would never forsake or disappoint me, and our love would never die, wane, or turn bitter, even if the passions of my body must be denied. England was well worth the price; it was mine, and I was going to keep it. I would let no man take it from me; my England would not be forfeited to a husband as my dowry. I looked up and caught my reflection in the darkened window glass. “I am mistress here and will have no master!” I said proudly, and tossed my hair back. Then I banished all distracting thoughts of lust and its consequences from my mind and gave myself fully to my work—to England.

  16

  Elizabeth

  Whitehall Palace, London

  December 1558–January 1559

  We celebrated the Twelve Days of Christmas and the New Year at Whitehall. Robert, zealously diving into his duties as Master of the Horse with a headfirst plunge, never let a day be dull or dreary. From the moment I rose until I laid my head down on the pillow well after midnight, all was fun and splendor. There were lavish banquets, masques and plays, music and dancing, and jousts and tournaments. And gifts—always gifts—a plethora of presents from favor-seeking courtiers, fond friends, would-be suitors, and foreign ambassadors playing at matchmaker on behalf of their royal masters.

  “They all want me!” I cried, jubilantly spinning around, with the replica of Philip’s rubies about my neck; a fine, well-tamed, hooded falcon from the Duke of Prussia perched upon my leather-gauntleted wrist, flapping its wings, causing the little golden bells on its jesses to jingle, startled by my display of exuberance; a sapphire as big as a carbuncle on my right hand from the elderly but nonetheless ardent Earl of Arundel; an emerald bracelet on the same wrist from the Earl of Shrewsbury, whom I affectionately called Gooseberry for the color of his eyes and his short, round figure; a most becoming feathered hat sitting at a rakish tilt atop my gold-and-pearl-netted hair from the debonair Sir William Pickering; and a cloak of sumptuous sables draped about my shoulders so long it swept the floor behind me, the last from Prince Eric of Sweden.

  Robert caught me in his arms and took the bird from me and called abruptly for its handler to take it to the mews and be gone.

  “When you were a little girl of eight,” he began, with a fond, indulgent smile and a twinkle in his dark eyes, “you told me—and quite adamantly too, I remember—that you would never marry.”

  “And I never will.” I pulled free of him. “I have not forgotten.”

  “But you are Queen now,” Robert persisted, “and you must, the succession ...”

  “Oh, Robert, leave off!” I cried peevishly, slipping my arm through a sable muff with a great starburst of diamonds pinned upon it, another gift from Eric of Sweden. “Please, not you too!” I pouted. “Marriage, marriage, marriage—I hear nothing but, from Cecil, and the whole of my Council, from my ladies, from the foreign ambassadors, from my people. Everyone wants to know who I will marry and when I will marry. All of you want to see me wedded and bedded with a baby in the cradle and another in my belly on the way, to give England an heir and a spare, and I say to you all—Never! I would sooner be a nun than a wife!”

  Robert came and slipped his arms around me again, pressing his lips against my neck.

  “Do you remember what I said when you, as a determined little girl of eight, told me that you would never marry?” he asked.

  “Aye.” I smiled. “You said you would remind me of it when you danced with me on my wedding day.”

  All seriousness now, Robert took my hand, still draped with the Swedish prince’s sable muff, the diamonds flashing in the light that poured in through the diamond-paned windows, as he solemnly knelt before me. He gazed up at me for a long moment and then, most earnestly, implored, “Let it be when you dance with me on our wedding day that I remind you of your childish words.”

  “Our wedding day?” I repeated, pulling away from him. “But, My Lord Robert”—I took shelter in formality—“there cannot be such a day for us, as you have a wife already, living happily in the country, or so you tell me.”

  “Elizabeth, my Bess.” Robert caught my hand again and pressed it to his lips, then held it tightly, determined never to let go of me. “You are Queen now, and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a title your mighty sire created when, like a man driving his fist through granite, he persevered and changed the world to divorce his wife to wed your mother. Amy is not Catherine of Aragon; she’s a country lass of no consequence, too timid and ignorant to fight or oppose us. All you need do is—”

  “No!” I yanked my hand away. “Do not presume to speak to me of this again, Robert. Put all such thoughts from your mind if you wish to retain my favor, for I assure you, I can take away all that I have given you. As I have raised you, so can I lower you—my father once spoke similar words to my mother, when he had tired of her, and his eye had already turned to another—and I speak them to you now. I will not abuse my power thus, to satisfy a carnal lust; even if I desired to marry, I would not do it. Leave me now!” I turned my back on him and strode across the room to stand before the great marble fireplace in stony, stormy silence, tapping my nails against the blue-veined marble mantel.

  “If it had not been for such a carnal lust being strong and overpowering enough to change the world, you never would have been born!” Robert shouted at me.

  I snatched a bronze figure of a phoenix rising from the mantel and flung it at him, but Robert neatly dodged it.

  “And if our desire is not strong enough for you t
o grant me a divorce, to right a wrong I committed in my foolish, lust-mad youth, our son will never be born!” he continued. “And England will be denied a king as great as the late Harry!”

  “So be it!” I said simply, and I slammed through the door of my bedchamber, barking an order at Kat to bar the door and let no one enter.

  But I could never stay mad at Robert for long. On Twelfth Night, when I went into my bedchamber to dress for the evening’s entertainments, I found lying upon my bed, its full skirt spread out like a fan, an evergreen velvet gown with its bodice and petticoat latticed in gold embroidery and pearls, and a stiffened collar of beautiful gold lace, like exquisite golden filigree, that stood up to frame my face. There was also a pair of gold-embroidered green velvet slippers twinkling with emeralds, and even green silk ribbon garters to hold my stockings up. There was a net of gold to contain my hair and pins tipped with emeralds and diamonds, an array of emerald rings for my fingers, and a beautiful necklace of deep green stones, the very color of evergreen boughs.

  When I was dressed and about to leave my apartments, Robert appeared on the threshold, kneeling before me, clothed all in evergreen velvet and cloth-of-silver twinkling with the green fire of emeralds and the icy sparkle of diamonds. Suddenly he reached boldly beneath my gown, even as Kat and my other ladies gasped aloud, shocked at Lord Robert’s touching the Queen of England so presumptuously. But Robert was undeterred. Smiling roguishly, the movement of his arms causing my taffeta petticoats to rustle, he untied my left garter and rolled my woolen stocking down, swiftly removing my slipper before he peeled it over my toe. From his doublet he took a handful of black silk, and, with a flourish of his hand, he unfurled it. “Silk!” he announced before he proceeded to slip the stocking over my toe, and slowly, caressingly, roll it up my leg, then tie my garter below my knee. Then he did the same with my right leg, first stripping it of wool, then sheathing it in silk.