by Susan Kay
“Bide your time,” he snapped, snubbing the man for no accountable reason. “We’re not here to do murder.” Not yet. Not unless she won’t listen to reason and there’s no other way. Oh Elizabeth, my Queen, my goddess—let it not come to that.
The horses plunged on madly, trampling a carpet of red gold leaves into the soft mud, until at last the fantastic towers crowned with onion-shaped domes were clearly glimpsed between the leafless branches of the surrounding trees. Ahead lay Nonsuch Palace, gleaming in the early morning sunshine, its walls curiously patterned, like a sugar cake, unique, eccentric, whimsical—as strange and fascinating as the woman within who ruled it.
Essex tumbled from his horse in the courtyard and dragged his mud-splattered sleeve across his sweating face. There was no sign of Lord Grey or his horse as he burst into the outer precincts of the palace.
* * *
Grey stood in Cecil’s narrow panelled closet and wiped his own face with a fine lace handkerchief.
“You are sure he comes alone?” inquired the Secretary quietly. “No army at his back?”
“Alone as far as I could tell.” Grey was breathing quick and shallow. “But riding like the devil and half out of his mind by all accounts. He’s making for the Queen, I tell you. For the love of God, rouse the guard before it’s too late.”
“I think not,” said Cecil smoothly, studying his short nails with great interest.
“But she’s defenceless—and God only knows what he intends in such a mood!”
“Oh, I don’t imagine he intends violence.” Cecil glanced at his clock and smiled unpleasantly. It was ten o’clock in the morning. “It was after dawn again when she retired last night—she might just be awake at this hour. I believe she finds she’s too old now to manage on two or three hours’ rest. I expect she’s with her women—dressing—painting on the mask of majesty. It seems rather a shame to spoil her surprise—don’t you agree, my friend?”
Grey stared at him in amazed silence.
* * *
Essex had fought his way through the token guard and the fluttering women who clustered around the royal apartments. On through the Presence Chamber, the Privy Chamber, the ante-room to the Bedchamber he strode, with one hand on his sword hilt, leaving behind a trail of confusion and chaos. The sound of his own boots clanking on the wooden floors beat her name in his mind. Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Elizabeth! No one else mattered, no one else existed. He would have fought his way through Hell itself to throw his weary body at her feet.
The door of the bedchamber was shut. Without pausing to knock, he flung it violently open and rushed in like a madman. Then he stopped, like one turned to stone at the sight of Medusa’s head, the breath he had drawn to cry her name dying to a gasp of shock in his dry throat.
Elizabeth!
Even the face of Medusa could not have dealt him a more deadly shock than that of the astounded, wrinkled, white-haired creature who sat at the dressing-table in a plain, shapeless robe and turned her ravaged features towards his horrified gaze. The brilliant jewelled wig, the carefully painted mask, the fantastic gown and monstrous ruff were gone; and with them the woman he knew and acknowledged as his Queen. In their place he saw an old woman, who might have been anyone’s grandmother—withered, frail, almost— insignificant! Never in his wildest, most treacherous outrage had he ever guessed how much she owed to clever artifice. He was shocked, dismayed—disgusted! It was as though a false mirror had suddenly smashed in his mind, and his hand tightened on his sword as he restrained the sudden, instinctive urge to vomit at a sight so repugnant to his inner imagination. Once, not much more than a decade before, he had hoped to conquer her in bed, as well as in the council chamber; but now his flesh crawled with revulsion at the thought. He had loved her! How could she—how dared she be this shrivelled hag?
Elizabeth sat stock still, one hand in a convulsive grip around a vial of perfume. Somewhere at the back of her mind that part of her which was vain and eternally eighteen screamed and wept with humiliated rage against the wicked injustice of this dreadful moment. To be seen thus, by the one person in this world who must never see, was unendurable. The old, fugitive desire to crawl away into a dark place for all eternity had never been stronger in her; yet she gave no glimpse of the mental turmoil she experienced.
Her eyes went to his hand clenched on the hilt of his sword. Had he come to kill her at last? Certainly he looked wild enough to do it, his eyes deep, burning sockets in a pallid face. She had no way of knowing if his Irish army surrounded the palace at this very moment. She knew only one thing—if he meant to run her through with his sword, her women would be powerless to stop him.
She held out her hand in a gesture of easy regality and smiled at him.
“Why are you here, Robin?” she inquired, as casually as if he had returned unexpectedly from a hunting expedition.
One flicker of weakness, the smallest gesture suggesting fear or panic on her part, was all it would have taken in that moment for him to kill her where she sat. But that inherent gallantry conquered him, showed him again a timeless image of the woman he had worshipped on the fields of Tilbury, wiped out the last of his outraged disappointment. A woman who could look death squarely in the face and smile was beyond the plane of physical ruin. His love for her, stripped, as by an acid bath, of all its layers of greed and ambition, flared suddenly incandescent. He fell on his knees at her feet and wept as he pressed her hand savagely against his lips.
A babble of words tumbled from him incoherently—indignation, recrimination—remorse.
“—you wrote so coldly—I had to see you, to make you understand—I knew how it would be behind my back—everyone speaking against me.”
“You believe the worst of me too easily, Robin,” she said softly and released one hand long enough to touch his mud-splashed cheek. “You are chilled, my dear—soaked to the skin—you must change into dry clothes or you will be ill—and I—” She shrugged her shoulders, half humorously. “Well—I hardly look my best to receive you, do I?”
He looked up wonderingly into her merry eyes. How could he ever have doubted her, and she so kind, so understanding, in spite of being caught at such a wounding disadvantage? For him she had conquered her petulant vanity; together, they might still conquer the world. He felt safe, sheltered, as he had not felt since he was a very small boy at his mother’s knee; and suddenly, overwhelmed with emotion, he buried his face in her hands, kissing them over and over again.
“I have suffered trouble and storms abroad,” he whispered. “Madam—dearest madam—I thank God I find such sweet calm at home.”
For a moment her hand rested on his wildly dishevelled red head and he felt it trembling violently against his skull.
“Go now, Robin.” Her voice was hoarse and suddenly shaken, as though tears were massing in her throat. “Go now—and rest. I will receive you later and hear all your news.”
He stumbled out of her room, weak with triumph, and began to boast of her kindness to anyone who would listen. He had been right to come—by God’s precious soul, how right he had been to put his faith in her love!
Summoned to her presence later, he went jauntily, full of self-confidence, to find her sitting in a high-backed chair, attired with even more than her customary splendour in cloth of gold—transformed almost miraculously by the exquisite wig, dressed with diamonds, which seemed to snatch away at least twenty years from the raddled creature he had seen this morning. She looked magnificent sitting there with her glittering skirts spilling over the carved arms of her chair. And though her smile was a shade less warm as she gave him her hand and waved him to be seated, he still had no fear of her—no glimmer of suspicion. She offered him wine and inquired graciously after his health; he thanked her for her kind interest and assured her that he felt greatly improved simply for setting foot on English soil once more; and for the sight of her incomparable face.
At that her expression flickered momentarily and seemed about to change into something else; but then she smiled and filled his goblet again. Warming beneath her calm and pleasant demeanour, he began to relax and drink freely, pouring out his troubles.
“—and your army,” she murmured at length, casually, as though it was a matter of minor significance, “where is the main body now?”
He looked mildly surprised at the question. “Why, in Ireland, madam—most of them laid low with fever or dysentery—it’s worse than the plague over there, I went down with both myself, more than once.”
She nodded sympathetically. “I suggest arrowroot and the lightest of diets—but tell me, with so many sick, who then was fit to come with you?”
“Oh, Southampton—St. Lawrence—just a handful of close friends. We had to travel quickly, you see, to reach you in time.”
“In time for what?” she inquired, deceptively quiet.
He looked up at her, startled, and then laughed.
“Why—in time to explain, that’s all—you surely did not imagine—”
She filled his goblet once more.
“I did not know what to think then, my dearest. But I know now.”
He reached out and grasped her hand gratefully.
“Then—you understand my position?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, ominously calm, “I think you could say that I understand it perfectly at last.”
She had discovered all that she needed to know. The palace was not surrounded, his men were not swaggering in London. At ten o’clock that evening, he was under guard in his own lodging, awaiting his punishment for desertion and disobedience.
Chapter 5
The next day, disgraced, disillusioned, and despairing, he was removed to the custody of the Lord Keeper at York House in the Strand, forbidden to see the Queen, or his mother, or his wife. Even his body turned traitor on him as vicious bouts of dysentery and fever wracked him, each attack leaving him a little weaker than the last, until he was barely able to crawl from his bed to the close-stool. Each day he waited for some sign of the Queen’s forgiveness, but none came; and he collapsed into apathy, eating nothing, caring for nothing. Exactly one month from the day he had stormed her bedchamber at Nonsuch, Elizabeth received the news that his death was expected at any hour.
She sat with her hands clenched in her lap in the withdrawing chamber and glanced up at Leicester’s little ruby clock which stood on the chimney-piece, carelessly ticking away the last minutes of Essex’s life. He had cried wolf so many times before, subjected her to so much emotional blackmail—how did she know it was not just another of his clever devices, a trick to win her sympathy? She dared not give in to him again. This time she must make her final stand and show him that there was in this land but one mistress and no master. He must be shorn of his insane ambitions, stripped of his influence—broken and cast out of her court for ever.
I will not go to him. I will not!
But what if he died surrounded only by servants and guards, alone and in agony, because she had refused him the company of his wife or his mother? Never to look upon his face one last time—never to forgive! She began to pace stiffly up and down her room, leaning heavily on the stick she used when she believed herself to be unobserved. It was almost four o’clock on a cold November afternoon and the day was dying steadily beyond her window—like him.
Suddenly she stopped abruptly in her pacing, snatched up a handbell and rang it vigorously. The Countess of Warwick appeared from the bedchamber and curtsied in the doorway.
“Is the barge still waiting at the privy landing stairs?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Then fetch my cloak—I shall take boat for York House and see for myself what condition he is in. I want you to come with me, Anne.”
It was pitch black when the royal barge moored before the gardens which ran down to the river at York House, and Lord Worcester, with a torch in one hand, lit her path to the silent house. She went alone into the Earl’s bedchamber and his body servants, awed at the sight of her, bowed themselves out at an imperious wave of her hand.
“Robin,” she said quietly.
He moaned and stirred at the sound of his name, but made no reply, and she went silently across the room. He lay hunched at the extreme edge of the curtained bed, his great body shaking with ague and the red hair clinging to his forehead in damp tendrils. He looked up at her blankly, without recognition, and she felt her eyes fill with tears because he looked so ill and vulnerable, with death on his face. The room stank of sweat and worse, but though her fastidious senses recoiled, she sat on the bed beside him and pushed the hair back out of his eyes. Whimpering, he pushed her hand away and rolled on his side, his arms and legs jerking convulsively in spasms, sobbing and cursing in the ravings of delirium. She sat frozen with horror, listening to her own name, spoken now as a curse, now as a caress, a horrible, twisted mingling of love and hate.
The enormity of what she had done appalled her, revealing to her clearly, for the first time, the extent of her blame for his crimes. At length he quietened and sank into the deeper sleep of unconsciousness, leaving her to look down on him hopelessly with tears streaming down her face.
She knew instinctively that she was looking at him for the last time; he could not last long like this, no one could. And though her heart was squeezed, as though in a vice, by that realisation, there was a measure of relief in the thought. It was inconceivably better for him to die of natural causes in his bed, rather than by her command. And he had no choice but to die, for there was nothing left for him to live for, no way that she could ever hope to take him back after all he had done.
She stood a moment more by the bed, her quivering hand suspended just above his hair, aching to touch him; and then drew back. One caress, however brief, would crumble her composure and her resolve; it was better to hold aloof.
She turned and left the house and made her way back through the darkness to the waiting barge. Beneath the windswept canopy she sat like a graven image, so still and silent that Anne Warwick never dared to attempt conversation.
But, as the barge drew into the water steps of the palace, the Queen turned her head and found Lady Warwick’s eyes upon her.
“I shall send his wife to him,” she said dully.
Lady Warwick looked at her steadily.
“Only his wife, madam? What of his mother?”
The Queen clenched her fingers, so that the rings bit into her flesh.
“Only his wife!” she said and looked away.
The barge bumped gently against the landing steps and the barge-men drew up their oars, but the Queen still sat in the darkness and the water lapped around her.
Essex was dying and she was to be spared the tragedy she feared—the tragedy she deserved. His death would not stain her hands, for God would take him in His infinite mercy—that innocent soul corrupted in its bright youth by the Devil’s Daughter.
Who had called her that—Feria? It hardly seemed to matter. Over the years it had been said many times, by many different people. A spirit full of incantation had been granted to her and paid for in Hell’s debased currency; but now she had nothing left with which to make payment. Now at last the price was too high.
When he was gone, she would look on no man with love again.
She swore it.
* * *
They gave Essex the last Communion, but he did not die—sheer perversity, opined his enemies. The physical crisis passed and he slowly recovered to face the unbearable knowledge that his fallen star would never shine again. He suffered over a year’s quasi-imprisonment, while his misdemeanours were published for the edification of the people; and the year dragged for him in steadily mounting resentment against the woman whose affection he had misread so drastically.
In August of 1600 he was summoned to see Cecil and informed
coldly that the Queen intended to release him to a life of retirement. He might have his liberty on condition that he faded unobtrusively from public life and came no more to court. In the depths of the countryside his name would be forgotten and would cease to be the parrot cry on the lips of malcontents. There was no communication from the Queen. She had made it perfectly clear that they had nothing more to say to each other and she would not see him again. She dared not, fearing her own weakness, the deadly, brooding sense of isolation and loneliness that had driven her to soften towards him again and again against her better judgement.
He sat at Essex House, surveying his mountain of debts, stewing in a cauldron of indignation and fear. His one lucrative source of income, a monopoly of the farm of sweet wines, was nearing the end of its tenure and his whole future depended on its renewal. He wrote frantic, begging letters, he prayed, he hoped against hope, and finally he received word from court; the Queen refused to renew his licence.
It was the final blow and it snapped the perilously thin thread of his sanity. He went berserk, raging about his house like a madman, cursing Cecil—cursing the Queen herself, screaming out that “her mind is as crooked as her carcase.” When he had calmed sufficiently to take stock of his position, he realised she had left him no choice. He put out tentative feelers to King James in Scotland and gathered a growing knot of discontented friends around him in London.
By January of 1601 Essex House was a rival court, unashamedly harbouring the seeds of revolution.
* * *
Saturday, the 7th of February, was a cold, drizzling night, and the flickering lights of Essex House shimmered eerily behind the misty windows.
Secretary Herbert, hunching his cloak around his shoulders, stormed down the steps into the courtyard, leapt on his wretched, shivering horse, and rode back to inform the Queen and the Council that the Earl of Essex refused to answer their summons to present himself at court and explain his dubious activities in person. He left the steaming room behind him in a hubbub of confusion, wreathed with the blue-grey smoke of tobacco.
