Legacy

by Susan Kay

  “So,” she said guardedly, “hardly an arranged marriage.”

  He laughed, “If I’d proposed to a peasant it couldn’t have caused more trouble. Oh, she’s wealthy enough, even Mother couldn’t fault her there—but of no standing, you see, nothing to further the family’s interests at court. But I’ll be hanged before I play a pawn on Father’s chessboard. If I ever find power in England, no man shall say I first went hunting it beneath my own wife’s petticoats.”

  There was a curious expression on her face. She lifted her hand to her lips as though to hide a smile and he instantly took the gesture for mockery.

  “I have amused you,” he continued stonily. “Doubtless you prefer men to be cold-blooded, ruthless graspers like—”

  “Like your father,” she finished for him pleasantly.

  He smiled uneasily and conceded the point. Did she know just how close he had come to flinging the Admiral’s name at her, like a gauntlet? Her eyes regarded him steadily, hard and bright, quietly superior with an unvoiced depth of knowledge that touched him with the first moment of self-doubt. His world had been uncomplicated, coloured simply in black and white, and he had been sure of himself and his desires. Now suddenly, unexpectedly, there was confusion, an area of indistinct greyness and uncertainty which he did not care to examine too closely—

  It had been easy to fall in love with Amy—too easy, he thought suddenly, remembering the rough kick Warwick had dealt him beneath the cover of the Robsarts’ table.

  “Paws off, Robin, I know that look of yours! When we leave here tomorrow I don’t want old Robsart running after us yelling ‘rape.’”

  It was an indignity and it had stung deep, transforming a moment’s normal, healthy lust into a pitched battle for independence. Marriage with the Robsart heiress was the first serious campaign Robin had ever waged against his father’s authority and he won it sooner than he had expected. Warwick, preoccupied with pressing matters of state, had neither the time nor the inclination to master a belligerent man-cub whose stubborn wilfulness was vaguely reminiscent of his own. He had always had a soft spot for Robin, of all his sons the nearest mirror image of himself—and the girl had money that might be useful. So he gave way; the contract was drawn up, a date agreed, and Robin was complacent at his victory; or had been, until this moment.

  “Seventeen,” remarked Elizabeth casually, “is very young for a man to put his head willingly into a noose.”

  He was silent, shaken, infuriated. Young! Now what exactly did she mean by that—naïve, immature, ignorant? He, twelve months her senior in an age when many lads of his station had already fathered the next generation—he, young? Too young to recognise a passing fancy in time to retreat from it? Was that what she meant to imply?

  “You must come to the wedding,” he said curtly and they walked on in hostile silence for a while, with the old spaniel padding between them.

  The fountain was still, supported by frozen cherubs. Close by stood a sundial designed to show the hour in thirty different ways, but today, thickly covered by a layer of snow and ice, it showed none of them. Elizabeth chiselled at the frozen mass with a stick. After a while she asked casually what he knew of the Protector—it was safer ground.

  “Somerset’s finished,” said Robin flatly.

  “He’s still alive.”

  Robin smiled. “For the moment.”

  She paused, with the stick suspended in one hand and her eyes met his across the sundial.

  “When?” she whispered.

  He was silent, weighing the risks of indiscretion.

  “When it pleases the people?” she persisted.

  “Oh—the people don’t count!” Robin shrugged carelessly. “When it happens—if it happens—it will be at my father’s convenience.”

  She asked no more. She had learned all she wanted to know; the Duke’s days were numbered. Snow began to swirl around them and they went back to the palace, where she returned Robin’s cloak in silence.

  Further down the corridor there was a sudden movement. A sombre, unimposing figure began to walk steadily towards them and she recognised him at last, in the winter half-light, as Somerset’s secretary.

  “Here comes that bloodless wonder, Cecil.” Robin’s voice in her ear was contemptuously amused. “He’ll have to shift soon if he wants to save his skin. They say you’ll always be able to judge which way the wind’s blowing by the way Master Cecil trims his sails. Father’s cultivating him, thinks he might prove useful. Personally, I wouldn’t bother. He’s just a spineless weathercock like all the rest of the Council.”

  Elizabeth turned to look at the gentleman in question, a small man, dull and insignificant to look at; she wondered why her heart should jump at the sight of him. It was the second time now that she had felt this extraordinary jolt, as though something had touched her soul at its very core.

  Cecil stopped in front of them and bowed sketchily, taking the hand she automatically extended to him. He seemed about to speak when an angry voice cut between them, rebounding down the empty passage from an open door beyond.

  “Robin! Devil take that boy, he’s never about when I need him.Mary—cut along and find the lovesick lout—”

  The door closed abruptly, cutting off the strident tones in the middle of an oath. Robin didn’t wait for his sister to appear in person.

  “Damned dog,” he said, bending to slap the spaniel’s rump affectionately. “If I had more sense and less heart I’d have you put down and save myself a deal of trouble.”

  He straightened up briskly to kiss Elizabeth’s right hand and found Cecil holding it. There was a moment of pointed silence while he glared at the older man, waiting for him to give way. Then Elizabeth offered her left hand and he was forced to take it, so that for a curious second the three of them stood physically linked in a triangle. The moment lengthened past convention, charged with significance beyond their present ken, until Elizabeth laughed and withdrew her fingers from Robin’s fierce grasp.

  “Dogs and horses,” she remarked to the secretary, “I believe they even follow him to bed when they can. You’re a married man, Mr. Cecil—you had better warn him that his wife will be jealous.”

  Robin made her a mocking bow.

  “Your Grace may keep an easy mind on the matter. However crowded the bed, there’s always room to fit in a wife—wouldn’t you agree there, Cecil?”

  The secretary stared with vague distaste, and Elizabeth’s sudden laughter confirmed his suspicion that he had missed the point of some vulgar jest. The knowledge irritated Cecil, and his precise mind, trained to a lawyer’s obsession with detail, began to gnaw at the innuendo. Always room to—He stiffened in disgust as the young man departed cockily—fast, foul-tongued, symbolic of a jumped-up race he instinctively despised.

  The geriatric spaniel, sensing hostility, gazed at him balefully, before ambling after his master in a leisurely fashion; Elizabeth and Cecil were left alone in the dimly lit corridor, wrapped in a pulsing silence.

  “Do you too jump when Warwick roars, Mr. Secretary?” she asked at last, wondering why he stood and stared at her in that strange manner. “I understand that soon you may be in need of a new master.”

  “We must all seek out one whom we can serve with love and loyalty, Your Grace. However long the search I shall find my true master—or mistress—in the end.”

  The words had an indescribable ring, and for a moment it was as though the outer world had faded, leaving them to face one another on a spiritual plateau, divorced from time and space, a sixteen-year-old princess of doubtful reputation and a colourless, twenty-seven-year-old lawyer, whose morals and intellect were equally impeccable. Her right hand still lay in his, as though some unseen force had suddenly soldered them together.

  When she spoke at last it was in a whisper.

  “It may be that soon I shall need a surveyor to handle my landed prop
erties—it would be a minor post with a salary of roughly twenty pounds a year.” Her voice was now charged with that same strange ring. “I need someone to watch over my interests, Cecil. Are you prepared to take on that extra duty?”

  At last he raised her hand to his cool lips.

  “I believe the position you have in mind would in no way hamper the discharge of my present offices. I shall be happy to serve your interests, madam—in whatever direction they may lie.”

  Their eyes met and held and in that moment they both knew they were bound together until death.

  * * *

  Kat curbed her delighted curiosity until she was alone with her mistress.

  “Well,” she said at last, unable to hide the thrill of pleasure in her voice, “what did you think of him, Your Grace?”

  Elizabeth looked up with a start.

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “Such a fine figure of a man, but then I always said he would be—did Your Grace say whom?—why young Robert Dudley of course.”

  “Oh, him!” Elizabeth affected a bored yawn and removed her coif; Kat’s excitement visibly disappeared, like a pricked bubble.

  “He has no more to recommend him than when I saw him last—and that as I remember was precious little.”

  “Your Grace! How can you say such a thing about so handsome and charming a young man who—”

  “Who is to be married in June.”

  “Oh!” It came on a note of bitter disappointment. Kat picked up a comb and began to draw it slowly through Elizabeth’s hair.

  What a pity, she thought, and was silent.

  Chapter 8

  Elizabeth attended Robin’s wedding later that summer, one of many unwilling guests obliged to show their faces at a series of Dudley unions. Only the day before, Robin’s eldest brother, Jack, had married the Duke of Somerset’s daughter, a shrewd political move which had thrown many off the scent. Men had begun to remark on the “outward great love and friendship between the Duke and the Earl”; but the Duke still went about the court looking haggard; and his daughter wept.

  Then it was Robin’s turn, and the congregation sweated through the vows in the hot sunlight which filled the chapel at Richmond.

  “…with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship…”

  The Earl of Warwick, fingering his prayer book with bored indifference, let his idle glance fall on the Princess Elizabeth, and surprised a look on her face that made him smile with fond pride. Robin was a fine young ram, there was no mistake about that—he had left more than one thin-lipped young lady watching enviously. But Elizabeth—still mourning the Admiral? Somehow he did not think so. The extreme pallor spoke of a more immediate cause and Warwick was faintly amused. A low-born Dudley, hey? Her tastes were not what they should be, but they were healthy—by God, he’d say so!

  The day was depressing for Elizabeth, the jousting dull, the feasting repugnant, the increasing round of frivolity meaningless and exhausting. Amy was insipidly pretty and Robin was attentive. Elizabeth withdrew to the hearth with her ladies and mentally wandered back down that dark path which ended in a dead man’s arms.

  She had not retreated far, when a shadow fell over her and a quiet voice jerked her back into the uncomfortable present. Looking up into the thin, strained face of the Duke of Somerset, she froze into wary immobility.

  “I must stand,” he said softly, “unless Your Grace invites me to sit.”

  “Stand then,” she retorted with barely controlled venom, “stand until you rot—my lord.”

  A look of distress touched his ravaged face; he looked suddenly ready to weep.

  “There is something I must say to you,” he muttered hoarsely, “something I must beg you to hear whether you will or not.”

  Her hostile stare burnt him, like the touch of black ice, and she was grimly silent.

  He glanced nervously about the crowded room and then his eyes swivelled back to hers, filled with all the servile appeal of a beaten dog.

  “Five minutes of your time, madam, is all I ask to tell you how it was—how it truly was between myself and my brother.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but he gave her no chance. The broken words flowed out of him like a bloody flux.

  “I never desired his death—I swear it. I did what I could—begged him to account for his activities in private. He refused my help—after that it was taken out of my hands. Madam, I have suffered torments of guilt since the deed was done—”

  “I pray daily for a speedy end to your suffering on this earth, my lord.”

  He smiled tiredly, almost with admiration.

  “Yes,” he murmured, “you are your father’s daughter and like him spare no man in your anger. You could prove very powerful.”

  Her eyes widened, shocked out of their hostility.

  “Remember me when you are Queen, madam,” he continued quietly. “Remember how I failed and learn from my mistakes. I was a fool to trust the men who served me. Trust no one, madam, not even your own shadow, and beware of this land you covet so badly. England is a fickle shrew that may break even your stony heart.”

  “You would know more about shrews than most, my lord,” she said unsteadily. “God knows you married one.”

  He shook his head slowly, without bitterness.

  “Madam, let me make my peace with you.”

  “Make it with God,” she said curtly and turned away to speak to an attendant.

  He bowed low and shuffled away into the milling crowds, a sad and weary figure, aged beyond his years by guilt, the heaviest of all human burdens. Elizabeth looked down at her hands and found they were trembling violently; the music echoed dimly around her and the guests frolicked before her unseeing eyes. Black thoughts claimed her, fencing her off from the merriment with a stone wall of hatred.

  At the far end of the hall, Warwick was holding court beside the King’s chair, with Henry Grey toadying to him, bobbing his silver head in obsequious agreement to every word the great man uttered. Guildford Dudley was dancing in sulky silence with the Greys’ eldest daughter, Lady Jane. He looked bored, and at the end of the measure seemed disposed to return to the wine table. Warwick said nothing, merely fixed a steely glance on the boy, and Guildford immediately turned back and led Jane out on to the floor for the galliard.

  This curious little side play penetrated Elizabeth’s vacant gaze just sufficiently to prick her sense of self-preservation; it was a rather more sturdy plant than it had been the previous year. She had a small stake in life now—not much, but enough to make her care whether or not she would celebrate her next birthday, and what she saw now between Warwick and Grey was sufficient to alarm her. The King was plainly sick, no matter how many doctors cheerfully said otherwise, and Jane was third in line to the throne. After today, Guildford Dudley was Warwick’s only remaining marriageable son. And Guildford had plainly been told to dance with Jane. So—

  Following Guildford’s progress across the hall, Elizabeth saw Robin bend his head swiftly and steal a kiss from the pretty little nobody he had married. Tears pricked suddenly and unexpectedly at the back of her eyes; she smoothed the feathers of her fan and stared into the fire, willing them not to fall.

  Robin, looking over to the yawning hearth, saw her sitting surrounded by her ladies and thought that she looked more solitary, more isolated, than if she sat alone. He turned to his wife and said suddenly, inexplicably sharp, “Come, I shall present you to the Lady Elizabeth.”

  If he had offered to introduce her to an adder Amy could hardly have shown more alarm.

  “Oh no, Robert, don’t! Please don’t do that.”

  He stared at her in honest amazement. She fumbled with the ribbons trailing down from the bodice of her gown and muttered something about already being presented.

  “That was mere court formality,” he insisted. “Two wo
rds and a curtsey are hardly sufficient to make anyone’s acquaintance.”

  Against his impelling arm Amy hung back like a reluctant child.

  “Don’t make me, Robert. I can’t. She’s so clever and so—” But there were no words to describe what she felt about Elizabeth, who had chilled her at first glance. She gave him the look of kittenish appeal which had never yet failed to move him, but in his present mood it glanced off him without effect and his hand remained firm beneath her elbow.

  “You must learn to be at ease with my friends, my love,” he said pleasantly enough, but in a tone that brooked no opposition.

  Short of making a public scene, there was nothing Amy could do but accompany him to the hearth with precious little grace. Resentful and agitated, she sank down in her wedding gown before a remote figure that raised her to her feet with the cool touch of a long white hand.

  Elizabeth’s hand fascinated and intimidated Amy; she had never seen anything so delicate, so flawless as those beautiful fingers, each capped with a perfectly formed nail. She could not recall any other hand ever riveting her attention in this unnatural fashion and was suddenly uncomfortably conscious of her own. Well kept, even by court standards, they now felt as clumsy as a row of sausages on a pair of wooden platters.

  Hands like Elizabeth’s, she thought darkly, had no place in this mortal world; hands like that must surely be reserved for the Devil’s work! She recalled a few things her father’s chaplain had told her of how evil disguised itself under beauty’s mantle: and she clung a little harder to Robin’s arm.

  The opening gambits of conversation passed over her head, quick, clever sallies of court wit which she scarcely heard and would not have understood even had she done so. She said, “Yes, madam,” “No, madam,” where it seemed appropriate and was just beginning to be satisfied that that was all that was required of her—to stand at his side and look decorative—when a boy in livery summoned Robin to the King’s side. He went at once, leaving Amy, alone with Elizabeth, staring after him in dismay.