Legacy

by Susan Kay

  For the space of roughly two minutes Elizabeth exerted an honest effort to be civil to this overdressed country mouse.

  It was wasted breath. Amy’s dislike was instinctive and she was not sufficiently disciplined to hide it beneath a polite veneer of conversation. Elizabeth sensed the hostility and took the point off her rapier with a clear conscience and disarming smile.

  “You are nervous,” she remarked silkily. “Is it me or the thought of the marriage bed that ties your tongue in my presence?”

  The indelicate suggestion sent a wave of beetroot colour creeping up Amy’s neck. Elizabeth sat back on the bench and watched her with satisfaction. This promised to be amusing.

  “Have they told you all men are brutes? Oh yes, I’m sure they have! But not Robin. I think I have seldom met a man more gentle with animals.”

  Amy, not quite as stupid as she had made herself appear, caught that barb and stiffened.

  “They say he is the best horseman in England,” continued Elizabeth innocently. “Do you also love horses, Amy?”

  “No, madam.” She was coldly, pointedly formal. “I am afraid of horses.” And of you—you are dangerous!

  “But you do ride, I suppose.”

  “Never, madam. I travel by litter.”

  Elizabeth’s delicate eyebrows arched in genuine astonishment.

  “Is that not inconvenient for a horseman of your husband’s stature?”

  “He doesn’t mind,” said Amy, defensive now. “Why should he?”

  Elizabeth smiled contemptuously behind her fan.

  “When you have been a little longer at court you will understand the necessity of mastering a horse for the hunt.”

  “I have no intention of living at court,” said Amy stiffly. “Father wouldn’t like it.”

  “Father gave you away—remember?”

  Amy flushed.

  “My estates in Norfolk will keep my husband fully occupied, Your Grace.”

  Suddenly, inexplicably Elizabeth lost her temper. She said very low, very controlled, very spiteful, “Madam, you’re not married to a simple country squire with no thought in his head beyond next lambing! If that’s all you have to offer him you won’t hold him past the first encounter!”

  Amy stared, silent, stunned. She was spoilt and smug and in all her sheltered life no one had ever said such a terrible thing to her. Her pretty face went first very red, then deathly white and she swayed a little where she sat.

  Elizabeth knew a moment of shamed panic. She did not want the girl to cry or faint at her feet; the last thing she could afford, in her tenuous position, was to draw the hostile attention of the bride’s father-in-law.

  “Kat, fetch Lady Dudley some wine. I’m afraid the excitement has been too much for her.”

  Kat departed with a hard, accusing look at her mistress and returned with a goblet of malmsey. Amy accepted it with a trembling hand and took a few gulping draughts. Slowly the colour crept back into her face and her lips set themselves into a thin, sulky line.

  “Amy.” Elizabeth leaned forward a little to touch a ruffle at the girl’s wrist. “Don’t look for kindness at court or anywhere else. The world is a hard place.”

  “Certainly,” said Amy pointedly, “it is full of cruel people.”

  Elizabeth smiled faintly.

  “I have found treason in trust and learnt to strike before I am stricken. Let us dispense with pretence—there can be no friendship between us. I fear neither of us desires it.”

  “Robert shall know how unkind you have been, madam.”

  “Only if you are fool enough to speak of it. What I told you was the truth and if you have any sense you will learn from it. Open your mind to his world and study the things that interest him. Be prepared to grow with him, Amy, because if you don’t you’ll wake up one day and find him gone. And believe me—the woman who takes him from you won’t be prepared to give him back without a fight.”

  Amy sat still with her hands clenched in her lap. She was no longer shocked or offended; she was simply sick with terror in the face of a declared enemy. She fixed wild eyes on the figures before the throne, until at last Robin turned, intercepted her distress signals, and hurried back, vaguely irritated by her obvious inability to hold her own for less than five minutes without him.

  Side by side they still sat; Amy agitated, almost dishevelled, as after some physical encounter of which she had plainly got the worst; and Elizabeth, with her finely chiselled poise, looking very—very as he had never seen her look before. Was it beautiful or merely mysterious? He could not have said, but on impulse he bowed over her hand and begged her to dance with him. Amy drew in her breath sharply but he ignored it.

  Elizabeth glanced at Amy, laughed and shook her head.

  “My lord, you should ask your wife.”

  “I have the rest of my life to dance with my wife.” He was annoyed, a little drunk, inclined to be heartless and belligerent. “And you owe me this measure, madam. Listen.” The musicians were striking up a haunting refrain. “Remember the day we learnt this at Hampton Court?”

  “Greenwich.”

  “Well—wherever! ‘Andante andante,’ you said and pinched me because I went too fast.”

  “You’ll always go too fast, Robin Dudley—”

  They were out of Amy’s hearing by now, but not out of sight. Her jealous eyes followed them, two bodies joined by the perfect harmony of rhythm. They laughed rather more than was in keeping with the sombre stateliness of the measure and when it was over they stood for an endless moment talking. Saying what? screamed a voice in Amy’s head.

  There was no opportunity to ask. Even as Robin raised Elizabeth’s hand to his lips, his eyes resting all the time on hers, a crowd of laughing women descended on Amy and bore her away to the bridal chamber. There she was undressed, teased mercilessly, and put naked into the big bed to wait for Robin.

  “Don’t worry,” someone said kindly. “After the first time it’s not so bad.”

  “Oh, don’t cozen her with nonsense, you know very well that it takes months—you take my advice, my dear, and give him a son quickly. Once you’ve done your duty they take their pleasures elsewhere and leave you in peace.”

  The matrons drew off, arguing good-naturedly and Amy lay very still, trying not to overhear snippets of their dreadful tales.

  “…it’s the last thing a man does before they put him in a box, you know.”

  “Aye—they’re all the same there—well, most of them, hey?”

  The conversation became muted, laced with sly laughter. Oh, Robert, why don’t you come and send them all away?…

  He came at length, wrapped in a long satin robe, and it seemed to Amy as though he had brought the entire court on his heels, a host of vulgar, drunken wedding guests who milled around the bed, laughing and shrieking like grotesque devils from the mouth of hell.

  But there was one who did not prance or shriek or sing rude innuendoes, one who was stone-cold sober and whose slender presence terrified her more than all the rest.

  She shut her eyes and did not open them again until the noisy multitude had jostled itself out of the room. What she saw then made her shrink into the shelter of Robin’s warm nakedness.

  Elizabeth was standing alone beside the bed. One hand rested lightly on the bedpost and the other on the curtain, so that her sweeping Boleyn sleeves unfurled like an angel’s wings. Candlelight made a red-gold halo of her hair and softened the sharp contours of her face to a gleam of extraordinary beauty. Beneath her hand, Amy felt Robin’s body stir and stiffen.

  No one spoke. Elizabeth laughed suddenly and swept the curtain across the bed, shutting them together in the little brocaded prison. They did not hear her leave the room, but they knew instinctively the moment she was gone; it was as though something beyond this world had withdrawn to its own sphere.

 
The room was very quiet after the noisy crowd. Robin lay rigid beneath the sheet, staring at the dividing curtain, and Amy sensed some fierce emotion had him in its grip. Before she could speak, he had wrenched the curtain aside with a violent jerk and strode naked into the room. By the hearth he paused to pour a goblet of wine and she watched him throw it down his throat as though it were water.

  “Robert.”

  “Be quiet!” he snapped.

  “But I don’t understand—what’s wrong?”

  “I said be silent, God damn you! Didn’t you promise to obey?”

  He flung the empty goblet across the room. It bounced off the wall and he stood staring at it for a long time. At length he returned to bed and made love to her in the rough, selfish fashion she had been led to expect. Afterwards he was moderately kind and wiped away her tears, reassuring her until she fell asleep beneath his arm.

  He lay awake, with her hair streaming across his bare chest and watched the room grow steadily lighter. He thought of Elizabeth, wondering what it would be like to lie beside her in the half light: and suddenly he was filled with a hollow sense of loss.

  All through the next day, as he followed the hunt, he was dogged by a curious depression which spoilt his pleasure in a good kill. He lingered over cards in the Great Hall and Amy was asleep when he came up; so he went back downstairs to find Guildford and the pair of them got roisteringly drunk.

  It was a curious relief to have been spared that nagging disappointment two nights in a row.

  * * *

  Once installed in Norfolk, it was less easy to avoid his wife; and when nothing in the length and breadth of that whole country gave him any satisfaction, he began to escape to court as often as he could without exciting comment. Discreet inquiries from his mother over the state of Amy’s health, coupled with puerile jests from Guildford (“Not got that mare of yours in foal yet, Robin?”) suddenly focused a new light on his nebulous dissatisfaction. How could a man be content, burdened with a barren cow who showed no sign of giving him a son and heir? After eighteen months he had at last succeeded in convincing himself that the sole cause of his bitter frustration was this persistent inability to be presented with a miniature replica of himself. And one dull, rainy evening at Syderstone saw them quarrelling peevishly on the subject.

  “Perhaps if you came a little more often to my bed—” she said on a sudden sob.

  He turned away impatiently.

  “For Christ’s sake, Amy—I’ve sown seed enough in you to father a dozen sons by now.”

  “That makes it my fault, of course.”

  “I suggested you should see a doctor. I never said it was your fault.”

  “But it’s what you meant.” Amy bit her lip. “And you were right. There’ll be no child. How could there be, when a witch overlooked me on my marriage bed?”

  His irritable stride up and down the room halted abruptly; he swung round to look at her with the curious, cautious look that people reserve for the mentally deranged.

  “Of all the brain-sick gibberish—” He stopped and his tone changed sharply as understanding dawned. “God’s blood—you mean Elizabeth, don’t you?”

  The casual use of that Christian name stung Amy like a pebble from a sling and made her reckless.

  “Everyone knows her mother was a witch—the King himself accused her. And it’s passed on in the blood to the next generation, like the French Pox. Father says that every witch—”

  He took a step towards her and slapped her silent; his face beneath its tan was quite white.

  “If you say just one more word,” he spat, “I’ll take my whip to you.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” she whispered, holding her flaming cheek.

  He gave her a tight smile, glacial, contemptuous, and turned away in silence.

  “I’ll tell Father,” she flung after him, suddenly desperate.

  “Please do,” he said evenly, from the door, “and when you do you might also ask him to send you a lawyer.”

  She began to tremble then. “A lawyer?”

  “You know on what business,” he announced curtly, and went out of the room.

  She knew. It was not the first time, he had clubbed her into silence with that hefty cudgel labelled “divorce.” She couldn’t afford to provoke him any further by giving free rein to her jealous tongue.

  She would not speak of the Lady Elizabeth again.

  * * *

  Robin stood alone in the half-lit hall, marshalling his resentments like a man inspecting a regiment.

  He had been a fool to marry the first pretty heiress to cross his path—just how great a fool was being revealed more clearly to him with every day that passed. Events were moving fast at court. As the King’s health failed, Warwick had said it might be necessary to alter the line of succession and Guildford was being schooled for marriage with Lady Jane Grey. Guildford—timorous and effete, always so afraid that life might have something nasty up its sleeve. Guildford Dudley to be King of England, for no better reason than that it had to be Guildford; while Robin rotted in Norfolk, married to a snivelling little country bitch who couldn’t even give him a son!

  And Elizabeth—

  He broke off there, as though faced with a grievance too painful even to acknowledge.

  Oh, yes. She was the catalyst in his simmering cauldron of discontent.

  But he would die before he admitted it to anyone. Least of all to himself.

  * * *

  What remained of Edward Tudor’s reign ticked relentlessly away in a welter of petty storms. Elizabeth lived like a nun at Hatfield, impeccably Protestant and beyond the reach of Warwick’s hand; she was not, in any case, his primary target. If Edward died, it was Mary who stood next in line to the throne, and it was Mary he persecuted mercilessly for her stubborn adherence to the Catholic faith, hoping to drive the sickly woman into exile, or better still, into the grave.

  When the King created him Duke of Northumberland he was at the zenith of his power, great soldier, wily diplomat, the most feared and hated man in all of England. The time had come when he could afford to rid himself of liabilities and secure his position as undisputed ruler. And first and foremost on his list was the Duke of Somerset.

  As the net of intrigue tightened inexorably around him, Somerset confided in Mr. Secretary Cecil that he suspected some ill.

  Cecil’s bland face had the look of one who has stepped straight from boyhood into middle age. Loyalty to the Duke was a damp cloak around his bowed shoulders, uncomfortable to wear, easy to shake off.

  And Cecil said coldly, “If Your Grace is innocent you may be of good courage. If you are guilty I have nothing to say but to lament you.”

  After this rank desertion, the Duke appeared to slip into apathy, making little effort to escape the fate that was closing in upon him so relentlessly. They came to arrest him at Hampton Court shortly afterwards and he accepted the charge of treason with curious indifference.

  Alone in his stone chamber in the Tower, he looked back down the inevitable path of his failure to that night of Edward’s christening. Life had seemed so full of promise that night, marred only by the disagreeable need to carry a little girl in his arms. If he could only go back to that night and walk down that corridor again, how differently would he have chosen his allegiances.

  Elizabeth walked endlessly across his mind and her eyes were hard and unforgiving. The longing to atone for his crime had become an obsession, and suddenly he knew the only way to do it, the one thing that could give her greater pleasure than his death. He took the last of his pride and offered it to her, in the form of a letter begging her shamelessly to intercede for his life.

  When her answer came—a cold, merciless little note calmly regretting that “being so young a woman I have no power to do anything on your behalf”—he imagined the immense satisfaction it had given her to write it
.

  And he was suddenly at peace with himself.

  Chapter 9

  Northumberland’s triumphant dictatorship lasted a little over a year. By May of 1553 he was face to face with the event which would spell ruin to his family when at last the King’s doctors were bullied into privately admitting the truth. There was no more to be done for the sixteen-year-old boy who lay in silent agony on his bed, coughing blood and black mucus. Northumberland swore the physicians to secrecy on pain of death and insisted that reassuring descriptions of the King’s health should be widely circulated. Meanwhile, he worked desperately against time to salvage his own future.

  The court was sealed like a tomb against any unwelcome interference from either of the King’s sisters. Elizabeth’s last, desperate attempt to force a meeting in April had been forestalled by armed guards and the message, supposedly from Edward himself, to return to Hatfield until further notice. All her letters to Edward were skilfully intercepted by Northumberland and she waited in vain in her outer darkness for a reply from her brother.

  On Whit Sunday, physically beaten into submission by her ruthless parents, Lady Jane Grey was married to Guildford Dudley in a hasty ceremony. Some time later, Northumberland bowed himself to the King’s bedside and there explained the absolute necessity of a new will, bequeathing the crown of England to his daughter-in-law.

  “The late King himself named your cousin, the Lady Jane, in direct line of succession,” he pointed out.

  “After my sisters.”

  “Half-sisters,” corrected the Duke smoothly. “And both bastards by English law.”

  The King’s eyes stared up at him confused by tortured logic. They could not both be illegitimate—not at the same time. That indeed had been Henry’s final dilemma, one which, in his usual autocratic fashion, he had simply chosen to ignore in his last testament.

  “To go against my father’s will—”

  “Is your duty, sire, in this instance. Only consider what the Lady Mary would do to wreck our work for the Protestant cause.”

  “Then surely Elizabeth—my sweet sister Temperance—”