The Virgin's Lover

by Philippa Gregory

  Gently, he put her into a chair and closed the shutters and bolted them. He unsheathed his sword and laid it to hand, on the table.

  “Robert, I thought he had come for me. I thought he would murder me, where I walked in my own garden.”

  “You’re safe now, my love,” he said gently. He knelt beside her chair and took her hand. She was icy cold. “You are safe with me.”

  “I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know where to run. I could only think of you.”

  “Quite right. You did quite right, and you were very brave to run.”

  “I wasn’t!” she wailed suddenly, like a child.

  Robert lifted her from the chair and drew her onto his knees. She buried her face in his neck and he felt her sweaty face and the wetness of her tears. “Robert, I wasn’t brave at all. I wasn’t like a queen at all; I was like a nothing. I was as full of fear as a market girl. I couldn’t call for my guards, I couldn’t scream. I didn’t even think to turn and challenge him. I just went faster, and when he went faster, I went faster.

  “I could hear his footsteps coming behind me faster and faster and all I could do…” She burst into another wail. “I feel such a child! I feel like I am such a fool! Anyone would think that I was the daughter of a lute player…”

  The enormity of that shocked her into silence, and she raised her tearstained face from his shoulder. “Oh, God,” she said brokenly.

  Steadily, lovingly, he met her eyes, smiled at her. “No one will think anything of you, for no one will know,” he said softly. “This is between us two and no one else will ever know.”

  She caught her breath on a sob and nodded.

  “And no one, even if they knew, could blame you for being afraid, if a man comes after you. You know the danger that you are in, every day. Any woman would be afraid, and you are a woman, and a beautiful woman as well as a queen.”

  Instinctively, she twisted a tendril of hair and tucked it back behind her ear. “I should have turned on him and challenged him.”

  Robert shook his head. “You did exactly the right thing. He could have been a madman; he could have been anyone. The wisest thing to do was to come and find me, and here you are, safe. Safe with me.”

  She nestled a little closer to him and he tightened his arms around her. “And no one could ever doubt your fathering,” he said into her red hair. “You are a Tudor from your clever copper head down to your swift little feet. You are my Tudor princess and you always will be. I knew your father, remember, I remember how he used to look at you and call you his best girl Bessie. I was there. I can hear his voice now. He loved you as his true-born daughter and heir, and he knew you were his, and now you are mine.”

  Elizabeth tipped her head back at him, her dark eyes trusting, her mouth starting to curve upward in a smile. “Yours?”

  “Mine,” he said certainly and his mouth came down on hers and he kissed her deeply.

  She did not resist for one moment. Her terror and then the feel of safety with him were as potent as a love potion. He could smell the sweat of her fear and the new scent of her arousal, and he went from her lips to her neck and down to the top of her gown, where her breasts pressed tight against the laced bodice as she panted lightly. He rubbed his face against her neck, and she felt the roughness of his chin and the eager licking of his tongue and she laughed and caught her breath all at once.

  Then his hands were in her hair, slipping out the pins, and taking a handful of the great tumbling locks and pulling her head back so that he could have her mouth once more and this time he tasted of her own sweat, salty on his mouth. He bit her, licked her, filled her with the heat of his desire and with the very taste of him as he salivated as if she were a dish he would devour.

  He rose up from the chair with her in his arms and she clung to his neck as he swept the scroll from the table and laid her on it, and then climbed up, like a stallion covering a mare, onto her. His thigh was pushing between her legs, his hands pulling up her gown so that he could touch her, and Elizabeth melted under his touch, pulled him closer to her, opened his mouth for his kisses, ravenous for the feel of him everywhere.

  “My gown!” she cried in frustration.

  “Sit up,” he commanded. She did as he obeyed and twisted around, offering the laces on the back of the tight stomacher. He struggled with the threaded laces and then pulled it off her and threw it aside. With a groan of utter desire he buried his hands, and then his face, in her linen shift to feel the heat of her belly through the thin fabric, and the rounded firm curves of her breasts.

  He threw off his own doublet and tore off his shirt and pressed down on her once more, his chest against her face as if he would smother her with his body, and he felt her sharp little teeth graze his nipple as her tongue lapped at the hairs on his chest and she rubbed her face against him, like a wanton cat.

  His fingers fumbled at the ties of her skirt, and then, losing patience, he took the laces and with one swift tug, broke them and pushed her skirt down from her waist so that he could get his hand on her.

  At his first touch she moaned and arched her back, pushing herself against his palm. Robert pulled back, unlaced his breeches, pulled them down, and heard her gasp as she saw the strength and power of him, and then her sigh of longing as he came toward her.

  There was a loud hammering on the front door. “Your Grace!” came an urgent shout. “Are you safe?”

  “Knock down the door!” someone commanded.

  With a whimper, Elizabeth rolled away from him and flew across the room, snatching up her stomacher. “Lace me!” she whispered urgently, pressing the tight garment against her throbbing breasts, and turning her back to him.

  Robert was pulling up his breeches and tying the ties. “The queen is here, and safe with me, Robert Dudley,” he called, his voice unnaturally loud. “Who is there?”

  “Thank God. I’m the commander of the watch, Sir Robert. I will take the queen back to her rooms.”

  “She is…” Dudley fumbled with the lacing of Elizabeth’s gown and then thrust the laces into any holes he could manage and tied it up. From the front she looked quite presentable. “She is coming. Wait there. How many men have you?”

  “Ten, sir.”

  “Leave eight to guard the door and go and fetch ten more,” Robert said, buying time. “I will take no risks with Her Grace.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They ran off. Elizabeth bent her head and tied what was left of the strings at the waistband of her skirt. Robert snatched up his doublet and pulled it on.

  “Your hair,” he whispered.

  “Can you find my pins?”

  She was twisting it into bronze ringlets and tucking it under the ebony combs that had survived his embrace. Robert dropped to his knees on the floor and hunted for pins under the bench and under the table and came up with four or five. Swiftly, she speared them into her hair, and pinned her hood on top.

  “How do I look?”

  He moved toward her. “Irresistible.”

  She clapped her hand over her mouth so that the men waiting outside should not hear her laugh. “Would you know what I had been doing?”

  “At once.”

  “For shame! Would anyone else know?”

  “No. They will expect you to look as though you have been running.”

  She put out her hand to him. “Don’t come any closer,” she said unsteadily when he stepped forward. “Just hold my hand.”

  “My love, I must have you.”

  “And I you,” she breathed as they heard the tramp of the guard coming to the door.

  “Sir Robert?”

  “Aye?”

  “I am here with twenty men.”

  “Stand back from the door,” Robert said. He took up his sword and opened the drawing-room door, and then unbolted the front door. Carefully, he opened it a crack. The queen’s men were outside, he recognized them, he threw open the door. “She is safe,” he said, letting them see her. “I have her safe.”
/>   To a man they dropped to their knees.

  “Thank God,” said the commander. “Shall I escort you to your chambers, Your Grace?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “Sir Robert, you will dine with me in my privy chamber tonight.”

  He bowed politely. “As you command, Your Grace.”

  “He was upset, because he was disappointed,” Amy said suddenly at dinner to her hosts, as if she were continuing a conversation, though they had been eating in silence. William Hyde glanced at his wife; this was not the first time that Amy had tried to convince them that what they had seen was a small tiff between a comfortably married couple. As if she were trying to convince herself.

  “I had been so foolish as to make him think that the place was finished, ready for us to move into this summer. Now he will have to stay at court, and go on progress with the queen. Of course he was disappointed.”

  “Oh yes,” said Lizzie Oddingsell in loyal support.

  “I misunderstood him,” Amy continued. She gave an awkward little laugh. “You will think me a fool but I was still thinking of the plans we made when we were first married, when we were little more than children. I was thinking of a little manor house, and some rich meadows around it. And of course, now he needs more than that.”

  “Will you look for a bigger estate?” Alice Hyde asked curiously.

  Lizzie glanced up from her place and gave her sister-in-law a sharp look.

  “Of course,” Amy said with simple dignity. “Our plans are unchanged. It was my mistake that I did not understand quite what my lord had in mind. But now that I know, I shall set about finding it for us. He needs a grand house set in beautiful parkland with good tenant farms. I shall find it for him, and I shall commission builders, and I shall see it built for him.”

  “You’ll be busy,” William Hyde said pleasantly.

  “I shall do my duty as his wife,” she said seriously, “as God has called me to do, and I shall not fail him.”

  Elizabeth and Dudley sat opposite each other at a table laid for two and ate breakfast in her privy chamber at Greenwich Palace, as they had done every morning since their return from Kew. Something had changed between them that everyone could see but no one could understand. Elizabeth did not even understand it herself. It had not been the sudden leaping up of her passion for Dudley; she had wanted him before, she wanted other men before, she was used to curbing her desires with a heavy hand. It was that she had run to him for safety. Instinctively, with a court of men bound to serve her, with Cecil’s spies somewhere in her chamber, she had taken to her heels at the first sign of threat and run to Dudley as the only man she could trust.

  Then she had wept in her terror like a child, and he had comforted her like a childhood friend. She would not speak of it to him, nor to anyone. She would not even think of it herself. But she knew that something had changed. She had showed herself and she had showed him that he was her only friend.

  They were far from alone. Three servers waited on them, the server of the ewery stood behind the queen’s chair, a page stood at each end of the table, four ladies-in-waiting sat in a little cluster in the window embrasure, a trio of musicians played, and a chorister from the queen’s chapel sang love songs. Robert had to quell his desire, his frustration, and his anger as he saw that his royal mistress had walled herself in against him once more.

  He chatted to her politely over the meal, with the easy intimacy that he could always summon, and with all the warmth that he genuinely felt for her. Elizabeth, returning to her confidence after her fright, delighting in the thrill of Robert’s touch, laughed, smiled on him, flirted with him, patted his hand, pulled at his sleeve, let her little slippered foot slide to his under the shield of the table, but never once suggested that they should send the people away and be alone.

  Robert, apparently unperturbed by desire, made a hearty breakfast, touched his lips with his napkin, held out his fingers to be washed and patted dry by the server, and then rose from the table.

  “I must take my leave of you, Your Grace.”

  She was amazed, and she could not hide it. “You’re going so early?”

  “I am to meet a few men in the tilt yard, we are practicing for the joust of the roses. You would not want me unhorsed in the first tilt.”

  “No, but I thought you would sit with me for the rest of the morning.”

  He hesitated. “Whatever you command.”

  She frowned. “I would not keep you from your horse, Sir Robert.”

  He took her hand and bowed over it.

  “You were not so quick to let me go when we were together in your rooms at Kew,” she whispered to him as she had him close.

  “You wanted me then as a woman wants a man, and that is how I want to come to you,” he said, as fast as a striking snake. “But since then you have summoned me as a courtier and a queen. If that is what you want, I am at your service too, Your Grace. Always. Of course.”

  It was like a game of chess; he saw her turn her head and puzzle how she could outwit him.

  “But I will always be queen,” she said. “You will always be my courtier.”

  “I would want nothing less,” he said, and then he whispered, so she had to lean forward to hear him, “but I long for so much more, Elizabeth.”

  She could smell the clean male scent of him and he felt her hand tremble in his. It took an effort for her to make herself move away, sit back in her chair, and let him go. He knew what it cost her; he had known women before who could not bear to lose a moment of his touch. He smiled at her, his dark, saturnine, knowing smile, and then bowed low, and went toward the door.

  “Whatever you command, you know you will always be queen of my heart.” He bowed again, his cloak swirled from his shoulders as he turned and he was gone.

  Elizabeth let him go, but she could not settle without him. She called for her lute and she tried to play but she had no patience for it, and when a string broke she could not even be troubled to retune it. She stood at her writing table and read the memoranda that Cecil had sent her but his grave words of warning about Scotland made no sense. She knew that there was much that she should do, that the situation with the currency was desperate, and that the threat to Scotland and to England was a real and pressing one, the French king was on his deathbed and once he died then the safety of England died too; but she could not think. She put her hand to her head and cried: “I have a fever! A fever!”

  At once they were all over her, the ladies fluttered around her, Kat Ashley was called and Blanche Parry. She was put to bed, she turned from their attentions, she could bear no one to touch her. “Close the shutters, the light burns my eyes!” she exclaimed.

  They would send for physicians. “I will see no one,” she said.

  They would prepare a cooling draught, a soothing draught, a sleeping draught. “I want nothing!” she almost screamed with her irritation. “Just go! I want no one to watch me. I don’t even want anyone outside my door. Wait in my presence chamber; I don’t even want anyone in my privy chamber. I shall sleep. I must not be disturbed.”

  Like a troubled dovecote they fluttered out as they were bid, and went to the presence chamber to discuss her. In her bedchamber, through two closed doors, Elizabeth could still hear their concerned murmur and she turned her hot face to the pillow, wrapped her arms around her own slim body, and held herself tight.

  Sir Robert, riding slowly up and down the line of the tilt yard, made his horse wheel at the bottom, and then took the line again. They had been doing the exercise for more than an hour. Everything depended on the horse’s willingness to ride a straight line, even though another horse, a warhorse, with a knight in full armor on its back, his lance down, was thundering from the other end, only a flimsy barrier between the two creatures. Sir Robert’s horse must not swerve, not even drift aside, it must hold its line even when Sir Robert, lowering his own lance, was one-handed on the reins, it must hold to the line even if he rocked in the saddle from a blow, and all b
ut let it go.

  Robert wheeled, turned, did the line at a trot, wheeled, did the line again at full gallop. His horse was blowing when he pulled it up, a dark patina of sweat marking its neck. He wheeled it round and raced down the line once more.

  A ripple of clapping came from the entrance to the yard. A serving girl was standing at the entrance where the riders came in and out, a shawl around her shoulders, a mobcap becomingly perched on her head, a lock of red hair showing, her face pale, her eyes black.

  “Elizabeth,” he said in quiet triumph, as he recognized her, and rode toward her. He pulled up the horse and dropped down from the saddle.

  He waited.

  She nipped her lip, she looked down, looked up again. He saw her gaze dart from his linen shirt where his sweat was darkening the cloth at his chest and on his back, to his tight riding breeches and his polished leather riding boots. He saw her nostrils flare as she took in the scent of him, her eyes narrow as she looked up at him again, at his dark head silhouetted against the bright morning sky.

  “Robert,” she breathed.

  “Yes, my love?”

  “I have come to you. I can be away from my rooms for no more than an hour.”

  “Then let us not waste one moment,” he said simply and tossed the reins of his warhorse to his squire. “Put your shawl over your head,” he said softly, and slid his arm around her waist, leading her, not to the palace, but to his private rooms over the stables. There was a small gated entrance from the garden; he opened the door and led her up the stairs.

  In Robert’s apartments, Elizabeth dropped the shawl and looked around. His chamber was a big room with two tall windows, the walls of dark linenfold paneling. The plans for the next day’s tournament were spread out on the table; his desk was littered with business papers from the stables. She looked toward the door that was behind the desk, the door to his bedchamber.