The Virgin's Lover

by Philippa Gregory

Robert nodded. “It has brought me very low,” he said softly. “So low that I cannot think how to rise again. I think of her, and I remember her when I first met her, and first loved her, and I know I am the sort of fool who picks a flower to put in his buttonhole and then drops it and leaves it to die from mere wanton carelessness. I took her up like a primrose, as my mother called her, and then I tired of her, and I dropped her as if I was a selfish child; and now she is dead and I can never ask her forgiveness.”

  There was a silence.

  “And the worst thing,” Dudley said heavily, “is that I cannot ever tell her that I am sorry that I hurt her so badly. I was always thinking of myself; I was always thinking of the queen; I was chasing my own damned ambition and I did not think what I was doing to her. God forgive me, I put the thought of her away from me, and now she has taken me at my word, and gone away from me, and I will never see her again, and never touch her, and never see her smile. I told her I did not want her anymore, and now I do not have her.”

  “I will leave you,” Cecil said quietly. “I did not come to intrude on your grief; but just to tell you that in all the world, at least you have one friend.”

  Dudley raised his head and reached out his hand for Cecil.

  The older man gripped it hard. “Courage,” he said.

  “I cannot tell you how thankful I am that you came,” Robert said. “Will you remember me to the queen? Urge her to let me come back to court as soon as the verdict is known. I won’t be dancing for a while, God knows, but I am very lonely here, Cecil. It is exile as well as mourning.”

  “I’ll speak to her for you,” Cecil assured him. “And I will pray for you, and for Amy’s soul. You know, I remember her on her wedding day. She just shone with happiness; she loved you so much. She thought you the finest man in the world.”

  Dudley nodded. “God forgive me for teaching her differently.”

  Windsor Castle

  Memorandum to the queen

  Saturday 14th September 1560

  1. The jury has delivered a verdict of accidental death on Amy Dudley and so Sir Robert may return to court to his usual duties, if you wish.

  2. The scandal of his wife’s death will always cling to his name; he knows this, and so do we all. You must never, by word or deed, indicate to him that this shame could ever be overcome.

  3. And so you will be safe from any further proposals of marriage from him. If you must continue your love affair it must be with the utmost discretion. He will now understand this.

  4. The matter of your marriage must be urgently addressed: without a son and heir we are all working for nothing.

  5. I shall bring to you tomorrow a new proposal from the archduke that I think will be much to our advantage. Sir Robert cannot oppose such a marriage now.

  Thomas Blount, Dudley’s man, stood at the back of the church of St. Mary the Virgin at Oxford and watched the Dudley standard of the ragged staff and bear ride past him at slow march, followed by the elaborate black-draped coffin that was all that was left of little Amy Robsart.

  It was all done just as it should be. The queen was represented, and Sir Robert was not there, as was the custom. Amy’s half-brothers and the Forsters were there to show Lady Dudley every respect in death that she had lacked in the last days of her life. Lizzie Oddingsell did not attend; she had gone back to her brother’s house, filled with such anger and grief that she would speak to no one of her friend except to say once, “She was no match for him,” which Alice Hyde gleefully fell on as proof of murder, and which William saw as a fair description of a marriage that had been ill-starred from start to finish.

  Thomas Blount waited to see the body interred and the earth shoveled in the ground. He was a thorough man, and he worked for a meticulous master. Then he went back to Cumnor Place.

  Amy’s maid, Mrs. Pirto, had everything ready for him, as he had ordered. Amy’s box of jewels, locked with their key, Amy’s best gowns, folded neatly and wrapped with bags of lavender heads, the linen from her bed, the furniture that traveled with her wherever she went, her box of personal goods: her sewing, her rosary, her purse, her gloves, her little collection of wax seals cut from the letters that Robert had sent her over the eleven years of their marriage, and all his letters, tied with a ribbon and arranged by date, worn by constant handling.

  “I’ll take the jewel box and the personal things,” Blount decided. “You shall take the rest back to Stanfield and leave them there. Then you can go.”

  Mrs. Pirto bowed her head and whispered something about wages. “From the bailiff at Stanfield when you deliver the goods,” Thomas Blount said. He ignored the woman’s red eyes. All women wept easily, he knew. It meant nothing, and as a man, he had important business to transact.

  Mrs. Pirto murmured something about a keepsake.

  “Nothing worth remembering,” Thomas Blount said roundly, thinking of the trouble that Amy had caused his master in life and in death. “Now you get on, as I must.”

  He tucked the two boxes under his arm and went out to his waiting horse. The jewel box slid easily into his saddlebag, the box of personal effects he handed to his groom to strap on his back. Then he heaved himself up into the saddle and turned his horse’s head for Windsor.

  Robert, returning to court wearing dark mourning clothes, held his head high and looked scornfully around him as if daring anyone to speak. The Earl of Arundel hid a smile behind his hand, Sir Francis Knollys bowed from a distance, Sir Nicholas Bacon all but ignored him. Robert felt as if a chill circle of suspicion and dislike was wrapped around him like a wide black cape.

  “What the devil is amiss?” he asked his sister. She came toward him and presented her cold cheek to be kissed.

  “I assume that they think you murdered Amy,” she said flatly.

  “The inquest cleared me. The verdict was accidental death.”

  “They think you bribed the jury.”

  “And what do you think?” He raised his voice and then abruptly spoke more quietly as he saw the court glance round at the two of them.

  “I think you have taken this family to the very brink of ruin again,” she said. “I am sick of disgrace; I am sick of being pointed at. I have been known as the daughter of a traitor, as the sister of a traitor, and now I am known as the sister of a wife murderer.”

  “Good God, you have not much sympathy to spare for me!” Robert recoiled from the blank hostility of her face.

  “I have none at all,” she said. “You nearly brought down the queen herself with this scandal. Think of it! You nearly ended the Tudor line. You nearly destroyed the reformed church! Certainly, you have ruined yourself and everyone who bears your name. I am withdrawing from court. I can’t stand another day of it.”

  “Mary, don’t go,” he said urgently. “You have always stood by me before. You have always been my sister and friend. Don’t let everyone see that we are divided. Don’t you abandon me, as everyone else has.”

  He reached out to her, but she stepped away and whipped her hands behind her back so that he could not touch her. At that childish gesture which recalled her in the schoolroom so vividly to him, he nearly cried out. “Mary, you would never abandon me when I am so low, and I have been so wrongly accused!”

  “But I think you are rightly accused,” she said quietly, and her voice was like ice in his ears. “I think you killed her because you thought in your pride that the queen would stand by you, and everyone else would wink at it. That they would all agree it was an accident and you would go into mourning a widower and come out the queen’s betrothed.”

  “That could still happen,” he whispered. “I did not kill her, I swear it. I could still marry the queen.”

  “Never,” she said. “You are finished. The best you can hope for is that she keeps you on as Master of Horse and as her little disgraced favorite.”

  She turned from him. Robert, conscious of the eyes of everyone upon him, could not call her back. For a moment, he made a move to catch the hem of her gown
and jerk her round, before she got away; but then he remembered that everyone watching believed him to be a man who was violent to women, a man who had killed his wife, and his hands felt heavy.

  There was a stir at the door of the privy chamber and Elizabeth came out. She was very pale. She had not been out riding nor walking in the garden since the day of her birthday, when she had told the Spanish ambassador that Amy was dead or nearly so—three days before anyone knew that Amy had been found dead. There were many who thought that her opinion, three whole days before the announcement of the death, that Amy was dead “or nearly so,” was more than a lucky guess. There were many who thought that Robert had been executioner, and Elizabeth the judge. But none of them would dare say such a thing when she could come out of her room, as now, flick her eye around the presence chamber, and count on the support of every great man in the country.

  She looked past Robert and on to Sir Nicholas; she nodded at Sir Francis, and turned to speak to his wife, Catherine, who was behind her. She smiled at Cecil and she beckoned the Hapsburg ambassador to her side.

  “Good day, Sir Robert,” she said, as the ambassador moved toward her. “I give you my condolences on the sad and sudden death of your wife.”

  He bowed and felt his anger and his grief swell up so strongly that he thought he might vomit. He came up, his face betraying nothing. “I thank you for your sympathy,” he said. He let his angry look rake them all. “I thank all of you for your sympathy which has been such a support to me,” he said, and then he stepped to a window bay, out of the way, and stood all alone.

  Thomas Blount found Sir Robert in the stable. There was a hunt planned for the next day and Sir Robert was checking the horses for fitness, and inspecting the tack. Forty-two saddles of gleaming supple leather were arranged in long rows on saddle horses in the yard, and Sir Robert was walking slowly between the rows looking carefully at each saddle, each girth, each stirrup leather. The stable lads, standing alongside their work, were as rigid as soldiers on parade.

  Behind them the horses were standing, shifting restlessly, a groom at each nodding head, their coats gleaming, their hooves oiled, their manes pulled and combed flat.

  Sir Robert took his time but could find little wrong with the horses, the tack, or the stable yard. “Good,” he said finally. “You can give them their evening feed and water, and put them to bed.”

  Then he turned and saw Thomas Blount. “Go into my office,” he said shortly, pausing to pat the neck of his own horse. “Yes,” he said softly to her. “You don’t change, do you, sweetheart?”

  Blount was waiting by the window. Robert threw his gloves and whip on the table and dropped into the chair before his desk.

  “All done?” he asked.

  “All done quite correctly,” Blount said. “A small slip in the sermon.”

  “What was it?”

  “The stupid rector said that she was a lady ‘tragically slain’ instead of ‘tragically died.’ He corrected himself, but it jarred.”

  Sir Robert raised one dark eyebrow. “A slip?”

  Blount shrugged. “I think so. A nuisance, but it’s not strong enough to be an accusation.”

  “It adds grist to the mill,” Robert observed.

  Blount nodded.

  “And you dismissed her staff, and you have her things?” Deliberately Robert kept his voice light and cold.

  “Mrs. Oddingsell had gone already. Apparently she had taken it very hard,” Blount said. “Mrs. Pirto I sent back to Stanfield with the goods and she will be paid there. I sent a note. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Forster; they have a sense that a great scandal has been brought to their door.” He smiled wryly.

  “They will be compensated for their trouble,” Dudley said shortly. “Any gossip in the village?”

  “No more than you would expect,” Blount said. “Half the village accept the verdict of accidental death. Half think she was murdered. They’ll talk about it forever. But it makes no difference to you.”

  “Nor to her,” Robert said quietly.

  Blount fell silent.

  “So,” Robert said, rousing himself. “Your work is done. She is dead and buried and whatever anyone thinks, no one can say anything that can hurt me more.”

  “It’s finished,” Blount agreed.

  Robert gestured for him to put the boxes on the table. Blount put down the keepsake box and then the little box of jewels with the key beside it. He bowed and waited.

  “You can go,” Robert said.

  He had forgotten the box. It was his gift to Amy when they had been courting; he had bought it for her at a fair in Norfolk. She had never had many jewels for the small box. He felt the familiar irritation that even when she had been Lady Dudley, and commanded his fortune, still she had nothing more than a small jewel box, a couple of silver-gilt necklaces, some earrings and a ring or two.

  He turned the key in the box and opened it up. On the very top lay Amy’s wedding ring, and his signet ring with his crest, the bear and ragged staff.

  For a moment, he could not believe what he was seeing. Slowly, he put his hand into the box and lifted out the two gold circles. Mrs. Pirto had taken them from Amy’s cold fingers and put them in her jewel box and locked it up, as a good servant should do.

  Robert looked at them both. The wedding ring he had slipped on Amy’s finger that summer day eleven years ago, and the signet ring had never left his own hand until he had put it on Elizabeth’s finger to seal their betrothal, just four months ago.

  Robert slipped his signet ring back on his finger, and sat at his desk while the room grew dark and cold, wondering how his ring had got from the chain around his mistress’s neck to the finger of his dead wife.

  He walked by the river, a question beating at his brain. Who killed Amy? He sat on the pier like a boy, boots dangling over the water, looking down into the green depths where little fishes nibbled at the weed on the beams of the jetty, and heard in his head the second question: Who gave Amy my ring?

  He rose up as he grew chilled, and strolled along the tow path, westward toward the sun which slowly dropped in the sky and went from burning gold to embers as Robert walked, looking at the river but not seeing it, looking at the sky but not seeing it.

  Who killed Amy?

  Who gave her my ring?

  The sun set and the sky grew palely gray; still Robert walked onward as if he did not own a stable full of horses, a stud of Barbary courses, a training program of young stallions, he walked like a poor man, like a man whose wife would give him a horse to ride.

  Who killed Amy?

  Who gave her my ring?

  He tried not to remember the last time he had seen her, when he had left her with a curse, and turned her family against her. He tried not to remember that he had taken her in his arms and she in her folly had heard, and he in his folly had said: “I love you.”

  He tried not to remember her at all because it seemed to him that if he remembered her he would sit down on the riverbank and weep like a child for the loss of her.

  Who killed Amy?

  Who gave her my ring?

  If he thought, rather than remembered, he could avoid the wave of pain which was towering over him, ready to break. If he treated her death as a puzzle rather than a tragedy he could ask a question rather than accuse himself.

  Two questions: Who killed Amy? Who gave her my ring?

  When he stumbled and slipped and jolted himself to consciousness he realized that it had grown dark and he was walking blindly beside the steep bank of the deep, fast-flowing river. He turned then, a survivor from a family of survivors who had been wrong to marry a woman who did not share his inveterate lust for life.

  Who killed Amy?

  Who gave her my ring?

  He started to walk back. It was only when he opened the iron gate to the walled garden that the coldness of his hand on the latch made him pause, made him realize that there were two questions: Who killed Amy? Who gave her my ring? but only one answer.

&nbs
p; Whoever had the ring owned the symbol that Amy would trust. Amy would clear the house for a messenger who showed her that ring. Whoever had the ring was the person who killed her. There was only one person who could have done it, only one person who would have done it:

  Elizabeth.

  Robert’s first instinct was to go to her at once, to rage at her for the madness of her power. He could not blame her for wishing Amy gone; but the thought that his mistress could murder his wife, the girl he had married for love, filled him with anger. He wanted to take Elizabeth and shake the arrogance, the wicked, power-sated confidence out of her. That she should use her power as queen, her spy network, her remorseless will, against a target as vulnerable and as innocent as Amy, made him tremble like an angry boy at the strength of his feelings.

  Robert did not sleep that night. He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling but over and over again he saw in his mind’s eye Amy receiving his ring, and running out to meet him, with his signet ring clenched in her little fist as her passport to the happiness she deserved. And then some man, one of Cecil’s hired killers no doubt, greeting her in his place, breaking her neck with one blow, a clenched fist to her ear, a rabbit chop to her neck, and catching her as she fell, carrying her back into the house.

  Robert tortured himself with the thought of her suffering, of her moment of fear, perhaps of a moment of horror when she thought the killer came from him and the queen. That thought made him groan and turn over, burying his face in the pillow. If Amy had died thinking that he had sent an assassin against her then he did not see how he could bear to live.

  The bedroom window lightened at last; it was dawn. Robert, as haggard as a man ten years his senior, rose to the window and looked out, his linen sheet wrapped around his naked body. It was going to be a beautiful day. The mist was curling slowly off the river and somewhere a woodpecker was drilling. Slowly the liquid melody of a song thrush started up like a benediction, like a reminder that life goes on.

  I suppose I can forgive her, Robert thought. In her place, I might have done the same thing. I might have thought that our love came first, that our desire must be satisfied, come what may. If I had been her, I might have thought that we have to have a child, that the throne has to have an heir, and we dare not delay. If I had absolute power as she does I would probably have used it, as she has.