The Virgin's Lover

by Philippa Gregory

  “Of course,” Robert said urbanely. “He can have his pick from a dozen.”

  The queen scanned the room. “Ah, my lord,” she said pleasantly to one of the waiting men. “How glad I am to see you at court.”

  It was his cue for her attention and at once he stepped forward. “I have brought Your Grace a gift to celebrate your coming to the throne,” he said.

  Elizabeth brightened; she loved gifts of any sort, she was as acquisitive as a magpie. Robert, knowing that what would follow would be some request for the right to cut wood or enclose common land, to avoid a tax or persecute a neighbor, stepped down from the dais, bowed, walked backward from the throne, bowed again at the door, and went out to the stables.

  Despite the French ambassador, a couple of lords, some small-fry gentry, a couple of ladies-in-waiting, and half a dozen guards that Cecil had collected to accompany the queen, Dudley managed to ride by her side and they were left alone for most of the ride. At least two men muttered that Dudley was shown more favor than he deserved, but Robert ignored them, and the queen did not hear.

  They rode westerly, slowly at first through the streets and then lengthening the pace of the horses as they entered the yellowing winter grassland of St. James’s Park. Beyond the park, the houses gave way to market gardens to feed the insatiable city, and then to open fields, and then to wilder country. The queen was absorbed in managing the new horse, who fretted at too tight a rein but would take advantage and toss his head if she let him ride too loose.

  “He needs schooling,” she said critically to Robert.

  “I thought you should try him as he is,” he said easily. “And then we can decide what is to be done with him. He could be a hunter for you, he is strong enough and he jumps like a bird, or he could be a horse you use in processions, he is so handsome and his color is so good. If you want him for that, I have a mind to have him specially trained, taught to stand and to tolerate crowds. I thought your gray fretted a little when people pushed very close.”

  “You can’t blame him for that!” she retorted. “They were waving flags in his face and throwing rose petals at him!”

  He smiled at her. “I know. But this will happen again and again. England loves her princess. You will need a horse that can stand and watch a tableau, and let you bend down and take a posy from a child without shifting for a moment, and then trot with his head up looking proud.”

  She was struck by his advice. “You’re right,” she said. “And it is hard to pay attention to the crowd and to manage a horse.”

  “I don’t want you to be led by a groom either,” he said decidedly. “Or to ride in a carriage. I want them to see you mastering your own horse. I don’t want anything taken away from you. Every procession should add to you; they should see you higher, stronger, grander even than life.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “I have to be seen as strong; my sister was always saying she was a weak woman, and she was always ill, all the time.”

  “And he is your color,” he said impertinently. “You are a bright chestnut yourself.”

  She was not offended; she threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, d’you think he is a Tudor?” she asked.

  “For sure, he has the temper of one,” Robert said. He and his brothers and sisters had been playmates in the royal nursery at Hatfield, and all the Dudley children had felt the ringing slap of the Tudor temper. “Doesn’t like the bridle, doesn’t like to be commanded, but can be gentled into almost anything.”

  She gleamed at him. “If you are so wise with a dumb beast, let’s hope you don’t try to train me,” she said provocatively.

  “Who could train a queen?” he replied. “All I could do would be to implore you to be kind to me.”

  “Have I not been very kind already?” she said, thinking of the best post which she had given him, Master of Horse, with a massive annual income and the right to set up his own table at court and to take the best rooms in whichever palace the court might visit.

  He shrugged as if it were next to nothing. “Ah, Elizabeth,” he said intimately. “That is not what I mean when I desire you to be kind to me.”

  “You may not call me Elizabeth anymore,” she reminded him quietly, but he thought she was not displeased.

  “I forgot,” he said, his voice very low. “I take such pleasure in your company that sometimes I think we are still just friends as we used to be. I forgot for a moment that you have risen to such greatness.”

  “I was always a princess,” she said defensively. “I have risen to nothing but my birthright.”

  “And I always loved you for nothing but yourself,” he replied cleverly.

  He could see her hands loosen slightly on the reins and knew that he had struck the right note with her. He played her as every favorite plays every ruler; he had to know what charmed and what cooled her.

  “Edward was always very fond of you,” she said softly, remembering her brother.

  He nodded, looking grave. “God bless him. I miss him every day, as much as my own brothers.”

  “But he was not so warm to your father,” she said rather pointedly.

  Robert smiled down at Elizabeth as if nothing of their past lives could be counted against them: his family’s terrible treason against her family, her own betrayal of her half-sister. “Bad times,” he said generally. “And long ago. You and I have both been misjudged, and God knows, we have been punished enough. We have both served our time in the Tower, accused of treason. I used to think of you then; when I was allowed out to walk on the leads, I used to go to the very threshold of the gated door of your tower, and know that you were just on the other side. I’d have given much to be able to see you. I used to have news of you from Hannah the Fool. I can’t tell you what a comfort it was to know you were there. They were dark days for us both; but I am glad now that we shared them together. You on one side of that gate and me the other.”

  “Nobody else can ever understand,” she said with suppressed energy. “Nobody can ever know unless you have been there: what it’s like to be in there! To know that below you, out of sight, is the green where the scaffold will be built, and not to know whether they are building it, sending to ask, and not trusting the answer, wondering if it will be today or tomorrow.”

  “D’you dream of it?” he asked, his voice low. “Some nights I still wake up in terror.”

  A glance from her dark eyes told him that she too was haunted. “I have a dream that I hear hammering,” she said quietly. “It was the sound I dreaded most in the world. To hear hammering and sawing and to know that they are building my own scaffold right underneath my window.”

  “Thank God those days are done and we can bring justice to England, Elizabeth,” he said warmly.

  This time she did not correct him for using her name.

  “We should turn for home, sir,” one of the grooms rode up to remind him.

  “It is your wish?” he asked the queen.

  She gave him a little inviting sideways smile. “D’you know, I should like to ride out all day. I am sick of Whitehall and the people who come, and every one of them wanting something. And Cecil with all the business that needs doing.”

  “Why don’t we ride early tomorrow?” he suggested. “Ride out by the river, we can cross over to the south bank and gallop out through Lambeth marshes and not come home till dinner time?”

  “Why, what ever will they say?” she asked, instantly attracted.

  “They will say that the queen is doing as she wishes, as she should do,” he said. “And I shall say that I am hers to command. And tomorrow evening I shall plan a great feast for you with dancing and players and a special masque.”

  Her face lit up. “For what reason?”

  “Because you are young, and beautiful, and you should not go from schoolroom to lawmaking without taking some pleasure. You are queen now, Elizabeth, you can do as you wish. And no one can refuse you.”

  She laughed at the thought of it. “Shall I be a tyrant?”

&
nbsp; “If you wish,” he said, denying the many forces of the kingdom, which inevitably would dominate her: a young woman alone amidst the most unscrupulous families in Christendom. “Why not? Who should say “no” to you? The French princess, your cousin Mary, takes her pleasures, why should you not take yours?”

  “Oh, her,” Elizabeth said irritably, a scowl crossing her face at the mention of Mary, Queen of Scots, the sixteen-year-old princess of the French court. “She lives a life of nothing but pleasure.”

  Robert hid a smile at the predictable jealousy of Elizabeth for a prettier, luckier princess. “You will have a court that will make her sick with envy,” he assured her. “A young, unmarried, beautiful queen, in a handsome, merry court? There’s no comparison with Queen Mary, who is burdened with a husband, the Dauphin, and ruled by the Guise family, and spends all her life doing as they wish.”

  They turned their horses for home.

  “I shall devote myself to bringing you amusements. This is your time, Elizabeth; this is your golden season.”

  “I did not have a very merry girlhood,” she conceded.

  “We must make up for that now,” he said. “You shall be the pearl at the center of a golden court. The French princess will hear every day of your happiness. The court will dance to your bidding, this summer will be filled with pleasure. They will call you the golden princess of all of Christendom! The most fortunate, the most beautiful, and the most loved.”

  He saw the color rise in her cheeks. “Oh, yes,” she breathed.

  “But how you will miss me when I am at Brussels!” he slyly predicted. “All these plans will have to wait.”

  He saw her consider it. “You must come home quickly.”

  “Why not send someone else? Anyone can tell Philip you are crowned; it does not need to be me. And if I am not here, who will organize your banquets and parties?”

  “Cecil thought you should go,” she said. “He thought it a pleasant compliment to Philip, to send him a man who had served in his armies.”

  Robert shrugged. “Who cares what the King of Spain thinks now? Who cares what Cecil thinks? What d’you think, Elizabeth? Shall I go away for a month to another court at Brussels, or shall you keep me here to ride and dance with you, and keep you merry?”

  He saw her little white teeth nip her lips to hide her pleased smile. “You can stay,” she said carelessly. “I’ll tell Cecil he has to send someone else.”

  It was the dreariest month of the year in the English countryside, and Norfolk one of the dreariest counties of England. The brief flurry of snow in January had melted, leaving the lane to Norwich impassable by cart and disagreeable on horseback, and besides, there was nothing at Norwich to be seen except the cathedral; and now that was a place of anxious silences, not peace. The candles had been extinguished under the statue of the Madonna, the crucifix was on the altar still but the tapestries and the paintings had been taken down. The little messages and prayers which had been pinned to the Virgin’s gown had disappeared. No one knew if they were allowed to pray to Her anymore.

  Amy did not want to see the church she had loved stripped bare of everything she knew was holy. Other churches in the city had been desanctified and were being used as stables, or converted into handsome town houses. Amy could not imagine how anyone could dare to put his bed where the altar had once stood; but the new men of this reign were bold in their own interests. The shrine at Walsingham had not yet been destroyed, but Amy knew that the iconoclasts would come against it some day soon, and then where would a woman pray who wanted to conceive a child? Who wanted to win back her husband from the sin of ambition? Who wanted to win him home once more?

  Amy Dudley practiced her writing, but there seemed little point. Even if she could have managed a letter to her husband there was no news to give him, except what he would know already: that she missed him, that the weather was bad and the company dull, the evenings dark and the mornings cold.

  On days such as this, and Amy had many days such as this, she wondered if she would have been better never to have married him. Her father, who adored her, had been against it from the start. The very week before her wedding he had gone down on his knee before her in the hall of Syderstone farmhouse, his big, round face flushed scarlet with emotion, and begged her with a quaver in his voice to think again. “I know he’s handsome, my bird,” he had said tenderly. “And I know he’ll be a great man, and his father is a great man, and the royal court itself is coming to see you wed at Sheen next week, an honor I never dreamed of, not even for my girl. But are you certain sure you want a great man when you could marry a nice lad from Norfolk and live near me, in a pretty little house I would build for you, and have my grandsons brought up as my own, and stay as my girl?”

  Amy had put her little hands on his shoulders and raised him up, she had cried with her face tucked against his warm homespun jacket, and then she had looked up, all smiles, and said: “But I love him, Father, and you said that I should marry him if I was sure; and before God, I am sure.”

  He had not pressed her—she was his only child from his first marriage, his beloved daughter, and he could never gainsay her. And she had been used to getting her own way. She had never thought that her judgment could be wrong.

  She had been sure then that she loved Robert Dudley; indeed, she was sure now. It was not lack of love that made her cry at night as if she would never stop. It was excess of it. She loved him, and every day without him was a long, empty day. She had endured many days without him when he had been a prisoner and could not come to her. Now, bitterly, at the very moment of his freedom and his rise to power, it was a thousand times worse, because now he could come to her, but he chose not to.

  Her stepmother asked her, would she join him at court when the roads were fit for travel? Amy stammered in her reply, and felt like a fool, not knowing what was to happen next, nor where she was supposed to go.

  “You must write to him for me,” she said to Lady Robsart. “He will tell me what I am to do.”

  “Do you not want to write yourself?” her stepmother prompted. “I could write it out for you and you could copy it.”

  Amy turned her head away. “What’s the use?” she asked. “He has a clerk read it to him anyway.”

  Lady Robsart, seeing that Amy was not to be tempted out of bad temper, took a pen and a piece of paper, and waited.

  “My lord,” Amy started, the smallest quaver in her voice.

  “We can’t write ‘my lord,’ ” her stepmother expostulated. “Not when he lost the title for treason, and it has not been restored him.”

  “I call him my lord!” Amy flared up. “He was Lord Robert when he came to me, and he has always been Lord Robert to me, whatever anyone else calls him.”

  Lady Robsart raised her eyebrows as if to say that he was a poor job when he came to her, and was a poor job still, but she wrote the words, and then paused, while the ink dried on the sharpened quill.

  “I do not know where you would wish me to stay. Shall I come to London?” Amy said in a voice as small as a child’s. “Shall I join you in London, my lord?”

  All day Elizabeth had been on tenterhooks, sending her ladies to see if her cousin had entered the great hall, sending pageboys to freeze in the stable yard so that her cousin could be greeted and brought to her presence chamber at once. Catherine Knollys was the daughter of Elizabeth’s aunt, Mary Boleyn, and had spent much time with her young cousin Elizabeth. The girls had formed a faithful bond through the uncertain years of Elizabeth’s childhood. Catherine, nine years Elizabeth’s senior, an occasional member of the informal court of children and young people who had gathered around the nursery of the young royals at Hatfield, had been a kindly and generous playmate when the lonely little girl had sought her out, and as Elizabeth became older, they found they had much in common. Catherine was a highly educated girl, a Protestant by utter conviction. Elizabeth, less convinced and with much more to lose, had always had a sneaking admiration for her cousin’s
uncompromising clarity.

  Catherine had been with Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, in the last dreadful days in the Tower. She held, from that day on, an utter conviction of her aunt’s innocence. Her quiet assertion that Elizabeth’s mother was neither whore nor witch, but the victim of a court plot, was a secret comfort to the little girl whose childhood had been haunted by slanders against her mother. The day that Catherine and her family had left England, driven out by Queen Mary’s anti-heresy laws, Elizabeth had declared that her heart was broken.

  “Peace. She will be here soon,” Dudley assured her, finding Elizabeth pacing from one window in Whitehall Palace to another.

  “I know. But I thought she would be here yesterday, and now I am worrying that it will not be till tomorrow.”

  “The roads are bad; but she will surely come today.”

  Elizabeth twisted the fringe of the curtain in her fingers and did not notice that she was shredding the hem of the old fabric. Dudley went beside her and gently took her hand. There was a swiftly silenced intake of breath from the watching court at his temerity. To take the queen’s hand without invitation, to disentangle her fingers, to take both her hands firmly in his own, and give her a little shake!

  “Now, calm down,” Dudley said. “Either today or tomorrow, she will be here. D’you want to ride out on the chance of meeting her?”

  Elizabeth looked at the iron-gray sky that was darkening with the early twilight of winter. “Not really,” she admitted unwillingly. “If I miss her on the way then it will only make the wait longer. I want to be here to greet her.”

  “Then sit down,” he commanded. “And call for some cards and we can play until she gets here. And if she does not get here today we can play until you have won fifty pounds off me.”

  “Fifty!” she exclaimed, instantly diverted.

  “And you need stake nothing more than a dance after dinner,” he said agreeably.

  “I remember men saying that they lost fortunes to entertain your father,” William Cecil remarked, coming up to the table as the cards were brought.