Legacy

by Susan Kay

  “Rabbits?” he echoed vaguely.

  “Distant relatives of yours, perhaps—they too are obsessed with perpetuating the species.”

  “With respect, madam,” he said pointedly, “this matter deserves serious discussion.”

  She gave him a hard little smile that made her lips look like a closed trap and said silkily, “I stand corrected, Mr. Secretary.”

  It would have silenced any other man, even Robin. But Cecil had courage. In spite of the sudden prickle of sweat above his upper lip, he had his teeth into the subject now and he did not mean to let go without a struggle.

  “Your Majesty, I repeat, the present situation is insupportable. Your suitors—”

  “My suitors,” she interrupted with a hostility that was now unmistakable, “are a box of rotten apples. Show me one without a maggot big enough to consume me and England too and I’ll marry him tomorrow!”

  Retreating hastily from his blunder he said uncomfortably, “Madam, I don’t deny there are grave difficulties—”

  “I’ve had enough of the subject,” she snapped. “If you have nothing else to say then get out of here and leave me in peace.”

  “Your Majesty.” He inclined his head automatically and began to talk of other business, giving in to her once more as he was finding it necessary to do with increasing frequency these days. She was easily ruffled of late, flippant and cantankerous by turns and it was extremely difficult to judge which way her mood would turn. Their relationship was suffering in consequence and he believed he knew the reason why. There was only one man in this court who could make her behave like an adolescent girl in love, stubborn and intractable, blind to all reason. Robert Dudley, that undesirable young upstart, a married man it was true, but with a meek little wife who kept herself discreetly in the country, childless and divorceable. If the Queen should choose Robert Dudley to be her consort, Cecil had a shrewd idea what his own fate would be.

  They began to discuss arrangements for armed men to march on Scotland; and the atmosphere between them as they did so was decidedly frigid.

  * * *

  Soft yellow candlelight filled the Queen’s bedchamber, winking on the jewels of a select little group of courtiers, the favoured, privileged few who had spent the evening in her company. Talk and laughter faded slowly in their wake as they kissed her hand and began to file out into the Privy Chamber.

  Robin lingered long over kissing her hand. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave and now he stood with her hands in his as though force alone would make him tear himself away.

  She was beautiful tonight, an elegant column of black velvet stamped with golden oak leaves, her chin framed by a ruff of finely worked lace. Slowly, deliberately, he drew her forward into his arms and there was a breathless silence as their lips met. For a long moment she was locked in his urgent embrace, and then at last she drew away and pressed her hands against his shoulder, gently pushing him back. He whispered something in her ear; those by the door heard her laugh softly and saw her shake her head, then he bowed deeply, reverently, and backed out of the room, his eyes never leaving her face. The door closed behind him and she stood staring at it, smiling, oblivious to the tense, uneasy glances her women exchanged as they materialised from the corners of the room and came forward to begin the arduous ceremony of the Disrobing. Nobody spoke; nobody dared. Elizabeth sat down at her dressing-table and stared into her mirror with distant eyes.

  Lettice Knollys removed the little pearl-studded cap and began to brush the Queen’s long hair until her arm ached. Lettice was one of her many Boleyn cousins, a light-natured, impudent chit of a girl with a sharp malicious tongue that often amused her cynical mistress. But the woman who watched her now in the mirror was not preparing to be amused. She had caught Lettice smiling very warmly at Robin this evening, and consequently felt less than cousinly towards her.

  When the brush tugged at a tangled curl and flew from Lettice’s grasp, she was more than ready for her.

  “I’m sorry, Your Majesty—”

  Elizabeth turned very slowly from the mirror, holding the moment for her embarrassment.

  “Take care how you treat your Queen’s possessions,” she remarked pointedly.

  The cold formality of Elizabeth’s challenge covered Lettice with confusion as she groped uncertainly for the brush.

  “Shall I—shall I continue, madam?”

  “Thank you.” Elizabeth took the brush out of the girl’s quivering hand. “I think I would prefer to keep what little hair is left after your clumsy ministrations.”

  “I’m truly sorry, madam—I swear I never saw the snarl.”

  “Yes—I have observed your eyes to be elsewhere more than once this evening.”

  Lettice turned a dull brick-red and tiny beads of perspiration broke out above her upper lip.

  “Madam, I beg—”

  “I have no further need of you tonight, Lettice. You may withdraw.”

  Lettice curtsied and hurried out of the room and the Queen leaned her chin on her hands, still staring dreamily into the mirror. It was seldom necessary for her to put anyone in their place more than once; she put Lettice out of her mind as easily as she might have closed a book.

  “Your Majesty—I must speak to you.”

  Elizabeth dragged her eyes unwillingly from her reflection and looked up to find Mrs. Ashley at her side, nervously twisting her wedding ring.

  “What the devil’s wrong with you, Kat? You look as though all the hounds of hell are on your tail.”

  Kat slipped painfully to her knees and groped for the Queen’s hands. The hounds of hell would be the least of her worries once she had said what she knew she must.

  “Madam, forgive me—forgive me, but I must say this. Lord Robert Dudley—” She hesitated, groping for the right words, and Elizabeth sighed faintly.

  “Madam, to allow him such freedom—such liberties with your person—”

  Elizabeth smiled and touched the faded face at her knee with affection.

  “Kat! Lord Robert is like a brother to me. Why shouldn’t he kiss me goodnight?”

  Kat glared up at her through red-rimmed eyes. When a brother and sister kissed like that there was a very ugly word for it.

  “Such behaviour will ruin your reputation,” she insisted.

  Elizabeth picked up the brush and began to brush her hair lazily.

  “If you continue to cluck like an old hen I shall simply ignore you, Kat.”

  In all her years of tending Elizabeth, Kat had never once lost her temper. But she lost it now.

  “You can’t behave like this—do you think the people will stand for it?”

  “Kat—”

  “By Christ’s soul, madam, I would I had strangled you in your cradle before I let you live to see this day.”

  The room was suddenly utterly silent. All the women waited with taut anticipation for Katherine Ashley to have her ears boxed, but they waited in vain. Elizabeth turned from the mirror and laughed.

  “I was four years old when I first came into your care, Kat. Never tell me I was still in a cradle!”

  Mrs. Ashley dissolved into hopeless, incoherent tears.

  “Oh, yes—that’s Your Grace all over—mocking, poking fun—but it won’t do, I tell you, it won’t do. For God’s sake, madam, marry him and put an end to all these terrible rumours.”

  “What rumours?” inquired the Queen steadily. Kat’s angry gaze fell to the floor.

  “The whole of Europe is saying that—that you and he—”

  “Then the whole of Europe is wrong, as you quite well know. I have done nothing that would bring me into dishonour.”

  Elizabeth rose slowly from her chair and her loose ermine robe hung open over a white nightdress embroidered with diamond-eyed butterflies. Her narrow face was suddenly weary and strangely sad.

 
; “Kat.” Her voice was gentle, as though she spoke to a dull-witted child. “I have lived in this world for twenty-six years now with very little joy. Robin is my loyal subject, my best friend, and I don’t want to hear another word against him—do you understand?”

  “But Your Majesty—”

  “I said, enough!” Suddenly the patience exploded like a treacherously dormant firecracker. She picked up the hairbrush and hurled it at the door. “God’s death, woman, are you stupid? Outside that door are guards and ministers and courtiers. Have I a chance in hell of leading a dishonourable life?”

  In the deathly silence she stalked to the curtained bed, threw off her robe, and plunged between the sheets. First Lettice, now this. It was intolerable!

  She glared across the room.

  “But I tell you this, Kat Ashley, if I ever had the wish to live in dishonour, I’m damned if I know of anyone who could forbid me.”

  The silence deepened and she punched her pillows furiously before burying her face in them. The women who had frozen, horrified, about their various duties, now came forward warily to curtsey and bid her goodnight. She did not look up or reply to any of them.

  Mrs. Ashley signed to them to leave and blew out the remaining candles; Elizabeth was left alone to stare hot-eyed and miserable through a sleepless night.

  Chapter 7

  Cecil paused in the doorway of the Privy Chamber and was aware of instant irritation at the sight which greeted his eyes.

  The Queen was sitting on cushions in the window-seat, virtually surrounded by Dudleys. Robert sat beside her, as though it were his right, Mary and Katherine sat on the floor, and Mary’s husband leaned against the panelled wall. The whole room was ringing with their rude laughter—evidently, from its shrill, spiteful sound, they were having fun at someone’s expense. And Cecil immediately felt threatened and uneasy.

  No one had noticed his arrival and for a moment he hesitated in the shadows, wondering how best to break the news which had brought him here. Always laughing these days, he thought sourly, never serious, never listening to him as she had sworn to do. “Put not your trust in princes” said the old adage—he was beginning to think it might be sound advice!

  He was very close, close enough now to hear their conversation and see Robin, with familiar ease, snap shut the Queen’s comfit box and hand it to his sister Mary.

  “Take them away or Her Majesty will eat no supper.”

  It was a bad sign, thought Cecil bleakly, that the Queen, instead of responding to this rank insolence with anger, merely smiled at Mary.

  “Temperance is a virtue, as your brother so rightly reminds us,” she said calmly. “Perhaps he would be happy to set us all a good example by following the diet I shall draw up for him.”

  There was a moment’s silence, followed by immediate laughter at Robin’s expense.

  “Dear madam, Mother told him years ago he would eat his way into an early grave. If you put him on a diet, I beg you, hold him to it.”

  “Aye,” said Henry Sidney slyly, “the wing of wren for breakfast and the leg for supper.”

  “The twentieth part of a pint of wine and as much of St. Anne’s sacred water as he cares to drink—”

  “Poor Robin—he’ll fade away.”

  “My dear Kitty, where could all that flesh fade to?”

  Robin got up with dignity and pulled the Queen lightly to her feet.

  “Madam, let me remove you from the presence of these gaggling geese. Come riding with me and I will show you that exercise is more beneficial than any diet.”

  “Oh, but I believe the kind of exercise you have in mind cannot be conducted on horseback!”

  He drew her firmly away from the others with no difficulty.

  “You’d be surprised what I can do on horseback when I put my mind to it.” He smiled meaningfully. “I’m a man of many parts.”

  “Yes,” she said with a sly glance at his jewelled codpiece, “some of them more prominent than others.”

  Suddenly they both caught sight of the Secretary and halted; the raucous laughter behind them also stopped abruptly in that same moment.

  Robin’s hand rested possessively at the back of Elizabeth’s waist in a gesture that was just short of an embrace. Cecil was aware of hostile glances from the Dudley faction and a certain coolness in the Queen’s eyes.

  “I don’t recall sending for you, Cecil.” Her voice was neutral, faintly bored.

  “Madam, I bring news from Scotland.”

  “Oh? From the length of your face I take it to be less than good.”

  “Cecil never smiles,” remarked Robin spitefully, “but with your leave, madam, I could instruct him.”

  Cecil directed a look of contemptuous loathing at the young man and turned to appeal quietly to the Queen.

  “Madam, I should be grateful for a private audience.”

  “If you bring bad news we can all hear it.” She stepped away from Robin’s encircling arm; her face was suddenly like finely chiselled stone. “Spit it out and be quick about it.”

  Cecil was appalled by her change of tone. Impossible to remind her in public of the promise she had made to give him private audience whenever he desired it.

  “Madam.” He took a faltering breath, “our troops have been defeated at Leith.”

  “What!” Her eyes narrowed on his face like splinters of ice. “Did I not tell you to let the Scots slit their own throats? How many dead?”

  He looked away in the tense silence that had fallen.

  “Five hundred, madam.”

  A gasp echoed round the room and was stilled on the next breath. Robin was not alone in hoping to see the distinguished Secretary get what was clearly coming to him.

  Then suddenly, inexplicably, she decided not to make a public scene of this after all and snapped her fingers to the little group behind her.

  “Leave me—yes, Robin, you too—Sir William has a little explaining to do!”

  Cecil watched them go with grateful relief, and thanked God that she was going to be reasonable after all. But when the door had closed behind them and he dared to look once more into her face, his heart sank into his boots.

  He emerged from her room more than an hour later, pale and exhausted after the most blistering interview he had ever endured in his life. He had known she had a temper, but never, never had he dreamed she would ever speak to him like that—so coldly, contemptuously, as though she would never trust his opinion again. The fact that he had eventually persuaded her to send more troops counted for nothing against that memory. He was suddenly so bitter with disillusion that he felt quite murderous with rage. How could she have changed so soon, promised so much and then gone back on her word, when he had been so sure—so certain—that she was different from all the rest? Put not your trust in princes!

  He was not a violent man; he could not even remember the last occasion on which he had lost his temper. He was dimly aware of his servants’ glances of surprise, as he sat at length in his small, panelled study, drumming his fingers on the desk and gazing stonily at the wall. It took a long time for the unaccustomed rage to leave him, but when it had gone it left him stone cold, like iron forged in heat and left to cool. And in such a mood, this quiet, unassuming man was infinitely dangerous.

  With complete dispassion, he began to examine the policy that appeared to have so deeply displeased her. At first she had liked it well enough. Lending underhand assistance to the Protestant rebels in Scotland had suited her nature admirably. It committed her to nothing and it had worked quite handsomely, until the Earl of Bothwell intercepted three thousand pounds of English gold in transit to the rebels. The scandal provoked by that would have precipitated open hostilities, had not Elizabeth’s convincing lying mollified the French and Scots ambassadors. In all his life Cecil had never met a more plausible, smooth-tongued woman. She could tell you b
lack was white—and you’d believe it! For weeks she had lied like a Trojan and after she had made such a good job of smoothing the situation it had been very, very hard to get her to agree to open war. During the course of a heated disagreement he had threatened to resign over the issue. It had been a calculated risk and it had paid off. Quite suddenly she seemed to change her mind and in March an English army had advanced into Scotland. Philip of Spain promptly responded with such threatening gestures that Elizabeth was obliged to humour him with a promise to marry Spain’s latest candidate for her hand, the Archduke Charles.

  A delicate situation admittedly, but not one without hope of success even now. The defeat at Leith should prove no more than a temporary setback; indeed Cecil had it on good authority that the Scottish Regent, Mary of Guise, was near to death and in despair of receiving help from her French allies.

  Why then was Elizabeth suddenly so hostile? Because he had almost certainly committed her to marriage with the Archduke—was that it? And if that was so, then it needed little imagination to see who was stoking the fires of her indignation—Dudley, panicking at a move which would be the death knell of his own ambitions. For weeks now Cecil had suspected that Dudley was behind his own unlooked-for disfavour with the Queen. History was full of incidents which proved how easily a malicious tongue could pour poison into the royal ear. Anne Boleyn had destroyed Cardinal Wolsey by that very means—slow, insidious, but devastatingly effective!

  The scandal of Dudley’s undesirable association with the Queen had already run the length and breadth of Europe. The English Ambassador to Brussels had written back in December to tell Cecil that the rumours were so bad he dared not repeat them. Everyone who loved the Queen and England longed to see “the Gypsy” dead or disgraced. The young Duke of Norfolk had said publicly it was a disgrace that the realm could not produce one man of sufficient spirit to dagger the knave. But no one would dare to do that and risk facing the Queen’s vindictive wrath. She would rend to pieces the men she held responsible for that deed, and Cecil knew that he, along with Norfolk and Sussex, would certainly be suspected if the event took place. It could be arranged of course, easily enough, but it was far too dangerous even to be seriously entertained as a last resort. No, the elimination of Dudley, however desirable, was not the answer to the Secretary’s dilemma.