by Susan Kay
“All right,” he said, as the pressure at his throat tightened inexorably. “Name your price, madam, and let me go.”
“Fifty gold pieces.”
“Fifty!” he was outraged. “Judas sold the Lord for less.”
“The River Jordan,” said Elizabeth calmly, “was considerably cleaner than the Thames. Fifty gold pieces spares you a soaking—and a forfeit, of course.”
“Madam?” He looked at her suspiciously; he knew that smile.
“Fill your boots with water—and put them on again.”
Mary held her breath as her brother stared at the Queen, terrified that this might prove the final straw. In spite of its outrageous absurdity, it remained a direct command, a test of her ultimate authority. If he defied her—and what man of Robin’s temper would not?—it could be the end of his career at court.
She watched, with her hand pressed to her mouth, until she saw him shrug and bend down to pull off a boot. Wild relief coursed through Mary; she began to laugh and found she could not stop. The Queen turned towards her and for a moment the two women clung to each other for support, squealing like over-excited schoolgirls, until Elizabeth’s cough intervened.
“I shouldn’t laugh,” gasped Mary, “he’ll never forgive me for it. Oh, madam, if only you had told him to jump in!”
“I know, I know—he would have done it too, wouldn’t he? Oh look! The great fool is actually going to put them back on.”
Elizabeth ran the few steps to the water’s edge and laid her hand on his arm.
“Don’t,” she said, and became incoherent as the cough seized her again.
Robin took her hand and stood up in alarm, his ruined boots suddenly forgotten.
“Your hand is burning—you’ve got a fever, madam.”
She shook her head.
“It’s nothing. Just a chill, the doctor says.”
“Perhaps.” He put one arm firmly around her waist and began to walk her in the direction of the palace, with Mary hurrying behind. “I’d be happier with a second opinion on that. There’s that German doctor Hunsdon speaks so highly of. Will you let me send for him?”
“All this fuss,” grumbled Elizabeth. “You know how I hate doctors.”
“At least consult the fellow—just to please me. And if he too says it’s just a chill I shall be very happy to believe him.”
It was smallpox.
She had the good Dr. Burcot thrown out of her room for making the dreadful diagnosis, screaming he was a knave and could get out of her sight; but a week later she lay in a coma, without a mark on her body, and the court physicians told Cecil that her death was imminent.
In desperation they sent again for the pear-shaped, opinionated alien, but Dr. Burcot had been insulted. He said with a curse that she could die for all he cared, and was only returned to her bedside with a knife at his back.
Once there he took in her condition at a single glance. Still no eruption on the skin, the worst possible thing that could have happened.
“Almost too late,” he announced grimly. “Build up the fire and set a mattress in front of it. The infection must be sweated out—”
While Burcot worked, the Council met in confused and terrified debate to determine her successor. It had begun to look as though Lady Katherine Grey would have to be trotted out of the Tower after all, but in their hearts they all knew nothing would prevent the Scottish Queen sweeping down from the North to claim her inheritance.
They were poised on the very brink of civil war when Burcot emerged exhausted from the Queen’s room.
“The fever has broken,” he announced pompously. “With care, she will live.”
The councillors surged about him, yelling like schoolboys, thumping him on the back and wringing his hand, laughing and weeping so that he felt like God. When they had all dispersed in a mad scramble to celebrate, the Secretary, who had taken no part in the hysterical frolics, came quietly to shake his hand.
“You will be well rewarded for what you have done, sir. The Queen’s gratitude—”
“Do not speak to me of your Queen’s gratitude,” snapped the doctor with an angry laugh. “She does not know the meaning of the word—her first conscious words were a complaint. Her hands—her beautiful, incomparable hands, if you please—are marred by a few spots and may be marked. She will never forgive me, never.”
“Delirious, perhaps,” suggested Cecil cautiously.
“No, sir, quite in her wits. I asked her by God’s pestilence if she would rather be dead!”
Cecil discreetly neglected to inquire what her reply had been and the doctor did not trouble to enlighten him. Instead he kicked his bag across the room in an excess of irritation.
“The woman deserves to be disfigured—yet on her face, virtually nothing. I might add that she almost paid for her face with her life.” Burcot swung round and glared at Cecil. “I never saw a woman in greater need of a master, sir. I advise you to find her a husband with a strong whip hand without a moment’s delay, or you will have trouble there. Oh, yes—a great deal of trouble.”
Cecil opened his mouth to comment and shut it again as the door opened behind him.
Robin stood there, dishevelled and pale from his long vigil.
“Burcot,” he said brusquely, “the Queen requests your attendance.”
The German turned to look at him with faintly raised eyebrows.
“Your Queen requests?”
“My sister is ill. The Queen fears—”
“Of course.” Burcot bent automatically to retrieve his bag and walked to the door. “I will come at once. You will be very fortunate, my lord, to avoid contagion yourself—”
Cecil was left alone to ponder that delightful possibility and all that the natural elimination of Dudley would mean to him.
* * *
Only an informed observer would have described Elizabeth’s gaiety as false, as she sat on the edge of Mary Sidney’s bed with a shawl around her wasted frame.
“It’s a rough sort of justice that allows him to walk back to the palace in his stockinged feet and not catch so much as a cold,” she remarked cheerfully.
Mary smiled up at Robin, standing beside the Queen, and held out her hand to him.
“I am glad he was spared, madam.”
“Well, he’s never ill, is he? There ought to be a law against being so horribly healthy—and so damned smug about it. He thinks he’s no end of a man for being exposed twice and not catching it. The devil looks after his own, of course.”
“And who would know that better than you, madam?” Robin’s smile held that same faintly forced brightness and the pressure of his hand upon the Queen’s shoulder tightened a little, as they both looked at the masked woman in the bed.
There was silence for a moment. Elizabeth played with the fringe of her shawl, sucking it and twisting it round her fingers. Suddenly she leaned forward and gently touched the gauze mask which covered her friend’s face.
“Take it off, Mary. I don’t want you to hide your face from me.”
Mary shrank back uncomfortably against the pillows.
“Please, madam,” she protested faintly. “It’s truly better that you don’t see.”
Elizabeth looked at her gravely.
“You nursed me night and day. Let me see what it cost you.”
With mute reluctance, Mary pulled the ribbon. The gauze mask fluttered to the coverlet and, in spite of her determination to show nothing, Elizabeth gasped. Robin had warned her, but no words could prepare her for the dreadful sight of her friend’s ruined face. The skin, which had been so smooth, now had the spongy consistency of long-congealed porridge, an ugly lunar landscape of blistered scabs and deep pitted craters.
She wanted to cry, but knew she must not do that for Mary’s sake, so to stifle her tears she began to talk feverishly of sending abroad
to find a doctor who could help—there were many treatments—
“But no cure,” said Mary quietly, “only resignation to God’s will.”
“God!” The Queen seemed to choke on the word. “God didn’t do this to you. I did.”
“Madam—” Mary faltered and looked at Robin for support. He nodded and she reached out for the Queen’s frail hands. “Madam, I beg you, let me leave your service. Let me go home and make a life in retirement—I can’t stay at court like—like this.”
Elizabeth stared at the coverlet and Robin saw the struggle in her eyes, the struggle of a selfish woman in the act of making a real sacrifice. There were very few women that she cared for and he knew how much she had come to depend on Mary’s affection. Her instinct was to talk her friend out of this, to beg her to stay, but she strangled it, knowing that, if she asked it, Mary would not deny her.
“Of course.” She looked up and forced herself to smile. “You must go home to your family. I have kept you from your children over long and no doubt Henry—pest take him!—will want more sons. But you will come back and see me from time to time, won’t you? Your room shall be set aside in all my palaces.”
Mary lifted the Queen’s hand and treasured it against her ravaged cheek. Elizabeth felt hot tears spilling through her fingers.
“Thank you, madam—you have been so understanding, so kind—”
The Queen flushed hotly, and looked hastily away.
“I’m not kind, Mary, I’m as hard as a nail and twice as selfish. Ask your brother if you doubt it.”
Mary looked at her and a slow smile touched her face with a fleeting gleam of its former beauty.
“Dearest madam,” she said softly. “You do not know yourself.”
* * *
In the corridor beyond Mary’s room, Elizabeth released her caged emotion in a flood of savage curses.
“With all the mean, sly, ugly bitches in this palace to choose from—why did it have to be her?”
“You must not blame yourself,” Robin said uneasily.
“She bears my disfigurement in addition to her own—how then can I be blameless?”
He started to say that was untrue, absurd, that she was overtired by the visit and morbidly fanciful, but she cut him short.
“Look at me,” she commanded, and he lifted his eyes hesitantly. “Is there a mark upon my face?”
He shook his head slowly.
“And do you call that natural?”
“It’s not for me to—”
“Is it natural?”
The words pummelled his unwilling ears with the icy force of hail; his eyes rolled over her face and then quickly away.
“No,” he said at last in a strained whisper, “I’ve never seen anyone survive unscathed.”
“Nor anyone so disfigured as your sister—is that not so?”
“Don’t question God’s will,” he said quickly. “It’s never wise.”
Her eyes seemed enormous in her pale face. She laid her hand on his arm and he felt it trembling.
“Someone grants me a charmed life,” she said softly. “I wish I could believe it was God.”
He was silent as he escorted her back to her rooms, remembering things he had heard whispered about her. Renard had said she had “a spirit full of incantation,” Feria had called her the daughter of the Devil; even Quadra had written home to tell Philip, “I think this woman must have ten thousand devils in her body.”
Certainly she appeared to have more lives than the proverbial cat—
Robin found that he too had begun to wonder.
* * *
Elizabeth’s illness galvanised Parliament to life with all the maddened ferocity of a half-broken stallion that has felt the cruel sting of a spur. They had been patient long enough and now in the certain knowledge that miracles, like lightning, are notoriously disinclined to strike twice in the same place, the Lords and Commons joined their voices in an irritation parrot cry for marriage and a settlement of the succession.
She could do neither of these things—both, for many reasons, were equally impossible politically and personally—but she could not tell them so, and it took all her charm and cunning to wriggle through their grip and emerge at the end of the session with her financial grant and their affection still intact. Parliament was dissolved before the members truly appreciated that the royal fish had slipped their line again, but she was angered by the intolerable pressure to which she had been subjected. And when she was angry with those it would never do to punish, it was Robin who suffered for it.
Their relationship had become a permanent source of curiosity to the court. At the height of her fever, she had begged the Council to make Robin Lord Protector of England in the event of her death, swearing, with God as her witness, that though she loved him well, nothing improper had ever passed between them. Robin had been first amazed, then deeply moved by the news; but later, when she had recovered consciousness and he dared to question her about it, she had merely blushed furiously, then laughed and said she must have been delirious at the time. It was the first time he had ever seen her at a loss for words, and, however light she tried to make of the incident, it marked a change in his anomalous position. She raised him almost immediately to the Privy Council, giving him for the first time an active say in the government of the realm. Cecil maintained an ominous silence on the subject, but he was past panicking now. And when she raised the Duke of Norfolk to the Council, he was duly reassured that a balance would be maintained. There was bitter rancour between Dudley and the premier peer of the realm; whatever ambition Robin still entertained would be amply restrained by Norfolk’s influence at the council table.
Robin’s seat on the Privy Council turned out to be no more than one further step in an unheard of series of ups and downs in the royal favour which left him in a permanent state of uncertainty.
“He is like my little dog,” Elizabeth was heard to remark in public. “Whenever people see him they know I am near by.”
And a dog’s life was precisely what she gave him. She showered him with favours; she slapped his face. She drew up the letters patent to create him Earl of Leicester; she publicly slashed it to pieces with a penknife in front of his eyes, saying that Dudleys had been traitors for three generations and she did not choose to raise another above his station to threaten her. In March 1563 she stunned the court by offering him to the Scottish envoy as a suitable husband for Mary Stuart.
When Robin appeared in the doorway of the Privy Chamber unannounced, Elizabeth could see he was in the grips of a murderous rage. She had anticipated a scene and dismissed her women hastily.
When the door had closed behind them, Robin snatched the silks out of her hand and threw the tapestry frame across the room. His expression suggested that for two pins she would follow it and she was suddenly breathless with excitement.
“Am I a toy, to be given away when I no longer please?” he shouted. “Or is this some low trick of Cecil’s to be rid of me for good?”
“I see you’ve heard,” she said calmly.
“It seems everyone’s damn well heard from here to Scotland—everyone, that is, except me! Don’t you even owe me the courtesy of an explanation?”
She laid her silks back in their basket and smiled faintly.
“I don’t owe you anything, Robin—you’d better remember that before you start shouting at me. Now—sit down and hear me out or you’ll cool your temper in the Tower tonight.”
As he sank down beside her in the window-seat, she was conscious of an irrational sense of disappointment.
“Then you are tired of me,” he said wretchedly.
“Oh, don’t be a fool!” She touched his cheek gently. “If I really wanted to be rid of you I could take a considerably cheaper course than this.”
“Cheaper?”
“It will cost me your earld
om at least.”
His face was suddenly stony and he released her hand abruptly.
“Like the last time? Are you about to make a public fool of me again for your perverted amusement?”
“No,” she countered evenly. “I told you then that the Bear and Ragged Staff was not so easily overthrown. And this time I shall sign it. A place in the nobility to complement your place on the Council—it’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Well, now you can have it, under such circumstances that not even Cecil can complain. I shall offer the Earl of Leicester to the Scottish Queen with my personal recommendation of his prowess.”
“In bed?”
“It will be convenient to let her think so. I have already suggested that the three of us should form one household—at my expense.”
Robin laughed shortly.
“What do you expect in return—an open declaration of war?”
“The only war she will declare is on her own judgement—this will blow her self-restraint to pieces. You need not worry, Robin—you’re not going to Scotland. You’re merely the bait in my trap, a stalking horse—a red herring if you like.”
“Worms make the best bait, don’t they?” he remarked bitterly. “Yet even worms can turn. Perhaps you’d care to explain a little further. I’m afraid it’s all too deep for my humble powers of perception.”
“It has to be deep,” said Elizabeth slowly. “She’s cunning and she’s been well trained in France. Given time she could control all the division I’ve fostered in Scotland—already she’s too strong and confident for safety. She’s waited patiently for two years for me to drop dead of my own accord, but, being mighty unneighbourly, I haven’t obliged her. I think she’s beginning to suspect that I may not be so frail as she hoped and all the signs are that she’s not going to wait much longer. One strong foreign marriage will put an end to all this pretty pretence of friendship between us and the first thing she’ll do is to march against me. I can’t allow her to make a good match—I dare not! The man she marries must bring her trouble. And by the time she’s finished chewing over her resentment at your suit, she might just be ready to choose the one I really have in mind for her.”
