The Virgin's Lover

by Philippa Gregory

  I will go no further until I have your instructions, but perhaps you will come and see the house and land very soon. Mr. and Mrs. Hyde send you their good wishes and this basket of early salad leaves. Lady Robsart tells me we have eighty lambs born this year at Stanfield, our best ever year. I hope you will come soon.

  Your devoted wife

  Amy Dudley

  PS I do hope you will come soon, husband

  Amy walked to church across the park with Mrs. Oddingsell, over the village green through the lych-gate into the churchyard and then into the cool, changeless gloom of the parish church.

  Yet, it was not changeless, it was strangely changed. Amy looked around and saw a new great brass lectern at the head of the aisle and the Bible spread out on it, wide open as if anyone could be allowed to read it. The altar, where it was usually kept, was conspicuously empty. Amy and Lizzie Oddingsell exchanged one silent look and shut them selves into the Hyde family pew. The service proceeded in English, not the more familiar Latin, following King Edward’s prayer book rather than the beloved Mass. Amy bowed her head over the new words and tried to feel the presence of God, even though his church was changed, and the language was changed, and the Host was hidden.

  It came to the moment for the priest to pray for the queen, and he did so, his voice shaking only a little, but when it came for him to pray for their beloved bishop, Thomas Goldwell, the tears in his voice stopped him from speaking altogether and he fell silent. The clerk finished the prayer for him and the service went on, ending with the usual bidding prayer and blessing.

  “You go on,” Amy whispered to her friend. “I want to pray for a moment.”

  She waited until the church was empty, and then she came from the Hyde pew. The priest was on his knees at the rood screen, Amy quietly went and knelt beside him.

  “Father?”

  He turned his head. “Daughter?”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  He nodded. His head bowed low as if he were ashamed. “They are saying that our Bishop Thomas is not our bishop at all.”

  “How is this?” she asked.

  “They are saying that the queen has not appointed him to Oxford, and yet he is no longer Bishop of St. Asaph. They are saying that he is betwixt and between, that he belongs nowhere, is bishop of nothing.”

  “Why would they say such a thing?” she demanded. “They must know he is a good and holy man, and he left St. Asaph to come to Oxford. He is appointed by the Pope.”

  “You should know as well as I,” he said wearily. “Your husband knows how this court works.”

  “He does not…confide in me,” she said, picking the right word carefully. “Not about court matters.”

  “They know our bishop is a man faithful till death,” the priest said sadly. “They know he was Cardinal Pole’s dearest friend, was at his deathbed, he gave him the last sacraments. They know he will not turn his coat to please this queen. He would not dishonor the Host as he is ordered to do. I think they will first strip him of his Holy Office, by this sleight of hand, and then murder him.”

  Amy gasped. “Not again,” she said. “Not more killing. Not another Thomas More!”

  “He has been ordered to appear before the queen. I am afraid it is to go to his death.”

  Amy nodded, white-faced.

  “Lady Robsart, your husband is spoken of as one of the greatest men at court. Can you ask him to intercede for our bishop? I swear Father Thomas has never spoken a word against the accession of the queen, never a word against her as queen. He has only spoken out, as God has commanded him to do, in defense of our Holy Church.”

  “I cannot,” she said simply. “Father, forgive me, God forgive me, but I cannot. I have no influence. My husband does not take my advice on court matters, on policy. He does not even know I think on such matters! I cannot advise him, and he would not listen to me.”

  “Then I will pray for you, that he turns to you,” the priest said gently. “And if God moves him to listen, then, daughter: you speak. This is the life of our bishop at stake.”

  Amy bowed her head. “I will do what I can,” she promised without much hope.

  “God bless you, child, and guide you.”

  Robert’s clerk handed him Amy’s letter on the afternoon after his investiture as a knight of the garter. Robert had just hung the blue silk of the garter over the back of a chair and stepped back to admire it. Then he pulled on a new doublet, scanned the letter swiftly, and handed it back.

  “Write her that I am busy now, but I will come as soon as I can,” he said as he opened the door. His hand on the latch, he realized that the ill-formed letters were Amy’s own hand, and that she must have dedicated hours to writing to him.

  “Tell her that I am very glad she wrote to me herself,” he said. “And send her a small purse of money to buy gloves or something she wants.”

  He paused, with a nagging sense that he should do more; but then he heard the herald’s trumpet sound get the jousting and there was no time. “Tell her I’ll come at once,” he said, and turned and ran lightly downstairs to the stable yard.

  The joust had all the pageantry and color that Elizabeth loved, with knights in disguise singing her praises, and composing extempore verses. The ladies gave out favors and the knights wore their ladies’ colors over their heart. The queen was wearing one glove of white silk and holding the other in her hand, when she leaned forward to wish Sir Robert the best of fortune as he came to the royal box to look up at her, high above him, and pay his respects.

  Accidentally, as she leaned forward, the glove slipped through her fingers, and it fell. At once, almost quicker than anyone could see, he had spurred his horse on, the great warhorse wheeled, responsive at once, and he caught the glove in mid-air before it fell to the ground.

  “Thank you!” Elizabeth called. She nodded to a page boy. “Fetch my glove from Sir Robert.”

  With one hand holding back the curvetting big horse, he raised his visor with his other hand and put the glove to his lips.

  Elizabeth, her color rising, watched him kiss her glove, did not demand its return, did not laugh away the gesture as part of the jousting courtesies.

  “May I not keep it?” he asked.

  She recovered herself a little. “Since you so cleverly caught it,” she said lightly.

  Robert brought his horse a little closer. “I thank you, my queen, for dropping it for me.”

  “I dropped it by accident,” she said.

  “I caught it by intent,” he replied, his dark eyes gleaming at her, and tucked it carefully inside his breastplate, wheeled his horse around, and rode down to the end of the lists.

  They jousted all afternoon in the hot April sunshine and when the evening came the queen invited all her special guests onto the river for an evening sail in the barges. Londoners, who had expected this end to the day, had begged and borrowed and hired boats in their thousands, and the river was as crowded as a marketplace with boats and barges flying gaily colored pennants and streamers, and every third craft with a singer or a lute player on board so that haunting tunes drifted across the water from one boat to another.

  Robert and Elizabeth were in the queen’s barge with Catherine and Sir Francis Knollys, Lady Mary Sidney and her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, a couple of the queen’s other ladies, Laetitia Knollys, and another maid of honor.

  A musicians’ barge rowed beside them and the lingering notes of love songs drifted across the water, as the rowers kept pace to the gentle beat of a drum. The sun, setting among clouds of rose and gold, laid a path across the darkening Thames as if it would lead them all the way inland to the very heart of England.

  Elizabeth leaned on the gold-leafed railing of the barge and looked out at the lapping waters of the river, and the panorama of the pleasure boats keeping pace with her own, at the bobbing lanterns which illuminated their own reflections in the water. Robert joined her and they stood side by side for a long while, watching the river in silence.
/>   “You know, this has been the most perfect day of my life,” Elizabeth said quietly to Robert.

  For a moment the constant erotic tension between them was eased. Robert smiled at her, the affectionate smile of an old friend. “I am glad,” he said simply. “I would wish you many more such days, Elizabeth. You have been generous to me and I thank you.”

  She turned and smiled at him, their faces so close that his breath stirred a strand of hair that had escaped from her hood.

  “You still have my glove,” she whispered.

  “You have my heart.”

  Generous indeed, William Cecil said drily to himself, as the court rode out on May Day morning to visit Robert Dudley in his new home of the Dairy House at Kew, an enchantingly pretty place built at the very edge of the park, just ten minute’s walk from the palace. A flight of grand white stone steps led to a double-height arched double door, framed by two windows. Inside, a great hall gave way to small, intimate retiring rooms that overlooked the gardens on each side. A hedge bordered the front of the house with two perfectly pruned trees as round as plums, on sentinel each side.

  Robert Dudley greeted the small party at the front door and led them straight through the house to the pretty walled garden at the back. It was planted partly with flowers and partly as an orchard, very much in the new fashion of making a garden appear as much as possible like a flowery mead. A table was spread with a white linen cloth and a breakfast was ready for the queen. In a typical Dudley conceit, all the servants were dressed as milkmaids or shepherds, and there was a little flock of lambs, absurdly dyed the Tudor colors of green and white, gamboling under the blossom in the apple orchard.

  Elizabeth clapped her hands in delight at the sight of it all.

  “Oh, Robert, this is exquisite!”

  “I thought you would like to be a simple country girl for the day,” he said quietly into her ear.

  She turned to him. “Did you? Why?”

  He shrugged. “A crown is a weight as well as an honor. The people who flock about you all the time always take from you; they never give. I wanted you to have a day that was filled with pleasure and laughter, a day for a pretty girl, not an overburdened queen.”

  She nodded. “You understand. They want so much of me,” she said resentfully.

  “And these new suitors the worst,” he said. “The two Hapsburg dukes, who want your glory to hitch them up from poor dukes in Austria to King of England in one great leap! Or the Earl of Arran, who wants to drag you into war with Scotland! They offer you nothing, and expect everything in return.”

  Elizabeth frowned, and for a moment he was afraid he had gone too far. Then she said, “All they offer me is trouble, but what they want from me is everything that I am.”

  “They want nothing of you,” he corrected her. “Not the real you. They want the crown or the throne or the heir that you might give them. But they are counterfeit suitors, false gold, they do not know you, or love you as I…” He broke off.

  She leaned forward, she could feel his warm breath on her face and he saw her breathe in with him.

  “You?” she prompted.

  “As I do,” he whispered very low.

  “Are we going to eat?” Cecil demanded plaintively, from the group waiting behind them. “I am weak with hunger. Sir Robert, you are a very Tantalus to spread a feast before us but never to bid us to dine.”

  Robert laughed and turned away from the queen, who took a moment to recover her sense of the others, of the eyes upon them, of the tables laid with the snowy cloths in the sunshine-filled orchard. “Please…” he said, gesturing like a grand lord that they should take their places.

  They sat down to a breakfast that was as sophisticated as an Italian banquet but served with the stylish insouciance that was Dudley’s signature, and then, when the meal was ended and the sugared plums were on the table, the shepherds and the milkmaids performed a country dance, and sang a song in praise of the shepherdess queen. A small boy, blond and cherubic, stepped forward and recited a poem to Elizabeth, Queen of all the Shepherds and Shepherdesses, and presented her with a crown of may, and a peeled wand of willow, and then a band of musicians, uncomfortably hidden in the branches of the apple trees, played an opening chord and Robert offered Elizabeth his hand and led her out in a country dance, a May Day dance on this very day for courtship, when tradition had it that even the birds were marrying.

  Pretty enough, William Cecil said to himself, glancing at the sun which was now almost overhead. Half the day wasted and a mountain of letters for me to read when I get back to court. Bad news from Scot land, no doubt, and still no money forthcoming from the queen to support our coreligionists, though they beg us for our help and demand, with reason, what we think we are doing: abandoning them when they are on the very brink of victory?

  He looked a little closer. Robert Dudley’s hand was not where it should be, on the queen’s back as he guided her forward in the steps of the dance, but around her waist. And she, far from standing upright as she always did, was most definitely leaning toward him. One might almost say yearning, he thought.

  Cecil’s first thought was for her reputation, and the marriage plans. He glanced around. Praise God, they were among friends: the Knollys, the Sidneys, the Percys. The queen’s irritable young uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, would not like to see his kinswoman in the arms of a man as if she were some serving wench at a roadside inn, but he would hardly report her to the Hapsburg ambassador. There might be spying servants in the party, but their words would carry little weight. Everyone knew that Elizabeth and Dudley were intimate friends. There was no harm done by the evident affection between the young couple.

  And yet, Cecil said quietly to himself. And yet, we should get her married. If she lets him caress her, we’re safe enough, he is married and can do no more but light a fire which will have to burn out. But what if a single man took her fancy? If Dudley arouses her desires, what if some clever young buck presents himself, and happens to be both handsome and free? What if she thought to marry for love and undo England’s policy for a girl’s whim? Better get her married and soon.

  Amy was waiting for Robert’s arrival.

  The whole household was waiting for Robert’s arrival.

  “Are you sure that he said he was coming at once?” David Hyde asked his sister, Elizabeth Oddingsell, the second week in May.

  “You saw the letter as well as I,” she said. “First his clerk wrote he was busy but that he would come as soon as he could, then in the second sentence he corrects the first and says that he will come at once.”

  “My cousin in London, who is kin to the Seymour family, says that he is all day every day with the queen,” Alice Hyde observed. “She went to the St. George’s Day joust and she heard someone say that he carried the queen’s glove in his breastplate.”

  Lizzie shrugged. “He is her Master of Horse; of course she favors him.”

  “Mr. Hyde’s cousin says that in the evening he sailed with her in the royal barge.”

  “As he should be, honored among others,” Lizzie maintained stoutly.

  “She visited him for a May Day breakfast at his new house at Kew and stayed all the day.”

  “Of course,” Lizzie said patiently. “A court breakfast might well last for most of the day.”

  “Well, my cousin says that the word is that she never lets him out of her sight. He is at her side all day and they dance together every night. She says that the queen’s own kinsman the Duke of Norfolk has sworn that if he dishonors her, he is a dead man, and he would not make such a threat lightly or for no reason.”

  Lizzie’s look at her sister-in-law was neither sisterly nor warm. “Your cousin is obviously well informed,” she said irritably. “But you can remind her that Sir Robert is a married man about to buy land and build his first house with his wife and that this will happen at any day now. Remind her that he married his wife for love, and that they are planning their life together. And you can tell her that there i
s a world of difference between courtly love, which is all show and fol-derol and poetry and singing, done by every man at court to please the queen, and real life. And your cousin should bite her tongue before she gossips about her betters.”

  The Spanish ambassador, Count Feria, deeply weary of the dance of Elizabeth’s courtship which he had gone through once on account of his master, Philip of Spain, did not think he could bear to watch it played out all over again with a fellow ambassador and another suitor: the Hapsburg archduke. At last, King Philip responded to his pleas and agreed to replace him with another ambassador: the astute Bishop de Quadra. Count Feria, barely able to hide his relief, asked Cecil for permission to take his leave of Elizabeth.

  The experienced ambassador and the young queen were old adversaries. He had been the most loyal advisor to Queen Mary Tudor and had recommended consistently and publicly that she execute her troublesome heir and half-sister, Elizabeth. They were his spies who over and over again brought evidence of Elizabeth plotting with English rebels, plotting with French spies, plotting with the magician Dr. Dee, plotting with anyone who would offer to overthrow her sister by treason, by foreign armies, or by magic.

  He had been Mary’s truest and steadiest friend and he had fallen in love and married her most constant lady-in-waiting, Jane Dormer. Queen Mary would have released her beloved friend to no one but the Spanish ambassador, and she gave them her blessing on her deathbed.

  Obeying tradition, the count brought his wife to court to say her farewell to her queen, and Jane Dormer, holding her head very high, walked into Whitehall Palace once more, having walked out of it in disgust the day that Elizabeth became queen. Now a Spanish countess, her belly curved with pregnancy, Jane Dormer returned, pleased to be saying good-bye. As luck would have it, the first person she met was a face from the old court: the royal fool, Will Somers.

  “How now, Jane Dormer,” he said warmly. “Or do I call you my lady countess?”