His Dark Lady

by Victoria Lamb

  ‘Master Twist,’ she whispered.

  ‘And then Goodluck took you away. I tried to visit you at the house in Cheapside, but it was empty.’

  Lucy nodded. ‘The Queen allowed me to return to court.’

  ‘And now?’ He gazed at her in silence a moment, unable to believe she could not feel the same overwhelming desire that pricked his body just at the sight of her. ‘You are more beautiful than I remembered, Lucy. My heart and soul are broken in the mere act of looking at you. I thought you were gone for ever, stolen away in the night by that pirate Goodluck. But now you are here before me, solid flesh a man may touch and kiss. I must have dreamt you back into being, for I cannot imagine waking so lucky.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘If it is madness to be in love, then yes. Most likely, yes,’ he agreed, and saw Cathy hide her smile behind her hand.

  Will became aware of other presences in the shadowy lane, men who stared at their little group as they passed. Their faces seemed to mock him. He seized Lucy’s hand again. She was a woman. Perhaps she could not understand desire, or not until she was caught within its maelstrom. Yet there was no time to woo her with words. The smoky autumn afternoon was drawing in, a chill in the air. Soon night would fall and Lucy Morgan would melt back into his past as though they had never found each other again.

  ‘Come apart with me a moment,’ he said tightly. ‘I need to speak to you privately.’

  Lucy hesitated, then threw a pleading look at the other women. They drew aside, talking among themselves but still watching her. ‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘There are too many eyes …’

  ‘Then come to me, Lucy. Tomorrow at midday. I must rehearse a play in the morning, but then I can be yours until about three in the afternoon. I am still at my old lodgings, though the door has been painted blue now. You remember the way?’

  She was watching him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Beg time from court,’ he urged her. Would she come? Doubt hit him again, euphoria fading as she hurried back to the other women. ‘Do not fail me. Tomorrow, midday.’

  Lucy came late to his lodgings the next day, though she knew the way well enough. Indeed she had passed the end of this street many times and thought of his little room, the bed with the red coverlet where they had lain so often. But it had been hard to slip away from court unnoticed, and in the end it had been Cathy, disapproving but willing to help, who had distracted the guards on the gate while Lucy disappeared into the crowds beyond. It was utter madness to be here again, standing at his door like a faithful dog. Would she never learn? Yet part of her had hungered for Will Shakespeare as soon as she had seen him again in the street, that flame still burning as violently despite everything.

  So she knocked at the battered door with its coat of blue paint and stood waiting, her hood pulled forward, averting her face from passers-by.

  He answered the door bare-chested, his skin damp, drying his hands on a rag. ‘Lucy!’

  She stared. This had been a mistake. ‘I should not be here. I cannot be seen with you, Will. Nor with any man. If the Queen should hear of it—’

  ‘What does the Virgin Queen know of love?’ Will stood back and reluctantly she entered his lodgings, though half wanting to run away down the street and never see him again. That would be the wise thing to do.

  The door closed behind her and they stood alone together in the silence. He took her gloved hands and held them fiercely, looking into her eyes. ‘I cannot let you disappear again, Lucy. Do you not see that we must be lovers? It was written in the stars before time began that we should be together, and it was Venus rising that led me back to you tonight. If you refuse me, I swear that I shall haunt you like a ghost at court. I shall come to your window every night, I shall never let you go.’

  ‘Have you forgotten that you have a wife?’

  ‘Anne does not love me,’ he told her. The bitterness in his voice had the ring of truth. ‘She has betrayed me with another man. Not once but many times. She admits it freely.’

  Lucy could not resist pointing out the irony of this. ‘Then you have been justly served.’

  ‘It’s true, I betrayed Anne first. Nor can I blame my wife for loving where she should not. That would make me a fool and a hypocrite. But I do blame Anne for not waiting for me to return. As you have waited.’

  She loved his eyes. His mouth. The timbre of his voice. ‘Waited? For you?’

  ‘Yes, for me.’

  Will put his arm about her shoulder and kissed her, his mouth soon reminding her of how it had been when they had lain together as lovers. She did not pull away. Nor, though, did she invite him on. She had a choice, and she was not yet sure what it would be.

  ‘I need you by my side, Lucy,’ he whispered, then stripped off her gloves and began to kiss her fingers one by one. ‘Do not reject me again, or you will ruin me. You are my muse. I have so many stories in my head, they burn me from the inside out. Yet I can write none of them without you, Lucy. Your body drives the fever from my blood.’ His lips dwelt on her skin. ‘Do you not love me?’

  Lucy studied his bent head. Did she love him? It could be love, but not as he understood it. To him, love was a physical passion that drove two people together and locked them there in chains of fire. To her, love was the decision to be with someone for ever. And how could she be with Will for ever?

  ‘I cannot love you. We are too different.’

  ‘No more different than two sides of the same coin. If you will not love me, then let me love you. I have a plan. A great plan. But I need you to join me in this new venture, Lucy. Last night I saw the future. It is this,’ Will muttered. He dropped her hands and kissed her throat. She arched against him, seduced by the lure of physical love. It had been so long since she had been touched, she thought. Yet she had not realized until that moment how much she had missed it. ‘And Tamburlaine.’

  ‘Tamburlaine?’ she repeated blankly.

  ‘Yes.’ For a moment he stared at nothing, as though seeing the playhouse before him. ‘Very like Tamburlaine, but not as Ned plays him, with so much strutting and declaiming. Rather as a man might say the words to himself, alone in a dark room. That is the future.’

  Was this what he had meant when he had called her his muse? Over his shoulder she could see his torn mattress, thrown carelessly before the hearth, and the pooled remains of candle stumps from where he must have been working last night. Writing, she corrected herself.

  She ran a finger down his cheek, loving the far-away look in his eyes. Perhaps it would be enough to share Shakespeare’s bed simply to free his imagination. Cautiously, she considered the Queen’s wrath. But she had defied the Queen before, and the sky had not fallen. She thought of her promise to Goodluck. He had not wanted to see her hurt again by falling back in with Shakespeare. Yet where was Master Goodluck now? Off on his travels abroad, spying for Sir Francis, and she felt so alone some nights …

  Was it such a terrible thing to snatch at love in passing and enjoy what could be got without promises, rather than endlessly hankering after the settled life she would never have?

  ‘I shall give the groundlings their “pampered jades of Asia”,’ Will exclaimed, quoting from Marlowe’s play as he drew her closer, his hands busy with the lacing of her gown, ‘but on an English battlefield, with plain-speaking soldiers and kings of common clay. And that is how I’ll outKit Kit, master Marlowe with my own scenes of violent destruction.’

  ‘War,’ she whispered, yet could think of nothing but love.

  Will led her towards the bed, an answering passion in his face. ‘Stay with me, Lucy, and you will see. When I am done with Rome’s bloody past, I shall bring England’s lost glories back, and the crowd will love me for it.’

  Author’s Note

  The clandestine wedding of Lettice Knollys, the widowed Countess of Essex, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, took place in April 1578, nearly three years after the events in The Queen’s Secret, the first novel in this trilogy. It may be that Let
tice was pregnant – or thought she was at the time – and this lent a sense of urgency and secrecy to the ceremony. Despite knowing how vehemently Queen Elizabeth would oppose their match, Leicester’s dearest wish had always been for a legitimate son and heir. However, if Lettice was pregnant when they married, it came to nothing. Their son Robert, Lord Denbigh, affectionately nicknamed the ‘Noble Impe’, was not born until 1581. This unfortunate child, who may have suffered from some kind of congenital defect, died only a few years later in July 1584, to the utter despair of his now middle-aged parents. Whatever else may be said of Lettice and Robert, they were doting and attentive parents to this last hope for the Dudley dynasty.

  To suggest that Queen Elizabeth was furious when she heard of their marriage would be an understatement. However many times she might have turned down Robert’s offers of marriage, he was still her court favourite, viewed by her in much the same way as a treasured possession, and to lose Robert to her cousin Lettice – especially after all the Queen’s heavy-handed attempts to prevent their match – must have been a bitter blow.

  Nonetheless, even this act of disobedience by Leicester – one of the worst personal betrayals of Elizabeth’s life, I have little doubt – could not destroy the deep and abiding affection the Queen felt for him. Within a few months of his wedding, Robert is reported to have been back at court and presumably back in favour, too, admitted to the Queen’s private chambers to tend to her during an agonizing bout of toothache – a problem with which she was to struggle for much of her reign. In my book, for structural purposes, this bridge-mending episode takes place several years on. In the same way, the French Duke Alençon’s courtship of Elizabeth does not feature in this book, since it largely took place during the years between my Prologue and Chapter One. Because of this necessary gap, it would have been impractical to introduce Alençon as an actual character, so the little Frenchman’s flamboyant courtship is discussed ‘off stage’ when relevant to the main storyline.

  Moving on to the Babington plot, this is a complex story with many different characters and threads, difficult to untangle into a straight narrative. To simplify matters, I have conflated a larger number of plotters into those featured here. Master Goodluck is a character entirely of my own invention, but he represents a number of spies with whom Elizabeth’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, had very carefully infiltrated this plot. Each spy would leave the conspiracy as his identity was unmasked, with another discreetly taking his place. The fact that the conspirators continued unabashed by the discovery of such traitors in their midst indicates the high levels of confusion and naivety that surrounded this rather inept plot – though if it had succeeded, England would be a very different country today. Maude was one such spy, Pooley another, and Goodluck is there as a fictitious third to bring us the narrative of the plotters’ last days, which we would otherwise miss.

  The return of the priest and conspirator Ballard to England and his secret visit to Anthony Babington are not invented, though I alter some of the facts. Ballard had been led to believe, by one of Walsingham’s men posing as a sympathizer, that the Spanish King and the Pope supported their plans to topple Elizabeth. Ballard was persuaded that a great European army had been raised and awaited only his signal to invade. He duly passed this wonderful news on to young Babington and their enthusiastic co-conspirators. From correspondence skilfully intercepted by Walsingham’s network of spies, it is clear that they were a little squeamish about the idea of executing the Queen, yet were prepared to do the deed nonetheless. To their minds, they were heroes, champions of the old faith, who would be serving God by ridding England of the heretic Elizabeth.

  The last conspirators were captured much as I describe, at the home of Catholic sympathizers, and the details of their excessively cruel executions are taken from contemporaneous accounts. It was vital to Elizabeth, who must have been quite terrified of assassination by this stage, that Catholic plotters should understand, once and for all, what agonies awaited them on the scaffold. Walsingham had it put about – no doubt as an exercise in propaganda – that the Queen herself had asked for greater clemency to be shown when the second group were executed the following day. But in fact the decision appears to have been made without Elizabeth’s consent, in direct response to the sickened cries of the crowd.

  In the same way, the details of Mary Stuart’s execution are so well known they have passed into legend: the less than accurate Bull – chosen by Walsingham to be the Scottish queen’s executioner – her scarlet petticoat denoting martyrdom, the lips which continued to move after the head had finally been severed, and the little bloodstained dog shivering under her skirts. What I do invent here is Goodluck’s presence at the execution – though I have no doubt that Walsingham would have planted a spy or two at Fotheringay that day – and the grisly trophy he collects later. There is a possibility that Walsingham may have asked for items to be brought to him from the castle – certain papers, for instance, to be studied or destroyed – but here I speculate that Walsingham might have required physical proof of Mary’s death, a woman who had frustrated him for many years.

  Gilbert Gifford – surely a name worthy of a character from light opera – really existed, though his torture-chamber interview with Queen Elizabeth in my account is an elaboration of the truth. Tracked early on in his dealings with Mary, Queen of Scots, Gifford was indeed arrested and taken to Walsingham. There, he was persuaded – possibly by means of torture – to become a double agent. Gifford then continued to carry coded messages between Mary and her Catholic sympathizers, but discreetly brought them to Walsingham and his codebreakers first. Walsingham must have been overjoyed by the success of this intervention. He was now one step ahead of the conspirators. What he wanted, of course, was irrefutable proof that Mary condoned an attack on the Queen herself, for he knew Elizabeth would never otherwise agree to her cousin’s execution. But once Walsingham felt he had such proof, his men moved in, arresting the ringleaders – Anthony Babington was not arrested in this first raid, possibly in order for him to lead them to further conspirators – and thus setting the wheels in motion for Mary’s trial.

  One of his spies, Pooley, was also arrested around this time, though later released – no doubt at a nod from Walsingham. I have Goodluck go through much the same process, but without the all-important nod. For as Shakespeare would later put it, ‘Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.’ At this point in the conspiracy, it must have been desperately hard to tell conspirator from spy and to ensure secret orders were passed to the right men. So my invented spy Master Goodluck is mistakenly brought before the psychopathic torturer Richard Topcliffe as a conspirator, and is lucky to escape with his life. Topcliffe was the Queen’s chief torturer and Catholic priest-hunter for many years, operating in darkened rooms and using the cruellest implements of the age. He was proud of his work, and although the earlier scene between Topcliffe, Elizabeth, Walsingham and Gilbert Gifford is fictitious, Topcliffe often claimed to be intimate with Queen Elizabeth. Indeed, he was clearly a deviant, raping at least one of his victims and taking a perverse pleasure in inflicting pain.1

  Where William Shakespeare is concerned, I have written with a somewhat freer hand. Few historians agree on what Shakespeare was doing in what are popularly known as ‘the lost years’ between his early marriage and his first noted presence in London. Consequently, in this book I place him in London early on, while his wife Anne nurses their baby daughter in Stratford, and suggest an informal apprenticeship during those years, Shakespeare learning his trade as a jobbing actor and nascent playwright. He may have been with the Queen’s Men in its early days, or with Lord Strange’s company. Nobody seems very sure which company he joined first, nor what he did there. Consequently, I am careful not to pin Shakespeare down to one company during these uncertain years, but to have him work ‘freelance’, following the money from job to job. However, I put him together in several scenes with rival playwright – and possible government spy – Christophe
r Marlowe, but of course we have no evidence for that friendship either. London was a small city in those days though, and they would certainly have met, if not known each other fairly well.

  I take greater liberties with Shakespeare’s writings, and here the reader must forgive me. Since I have William Shakespeare meet his ‘Dark Lady’ early in the 1580s, I needed to show him musing about her at this time too, and also developing as a writer. To this end, I mention various sonnets and plays whose dates are almost certainly later, possibly even early Jacobean. Equally, I wished to show the young Shakespeare tinkering with older, extant plays – British histories in particular, which I consider an obsession of his from early on – in an attempt to restructure and rewrite these theatrical templates so he could create something entirely his own. An early King Leir was already being performed by the late 1580s; it is not impossible to imagine that the play had existed as a folk piece long before that, and that Shakespeare may have seen something worth developing in its repetitive, folk-tale structure. I do not mean to suggest that the King Leir in my story is the same play commonly considered to be among his later and most accomplished works. But I think we can expect that a natural storyteller like Shakespeare would have been automatically rewriting its scenes in his head, even as a tyro, as he watched or played the earlier piece on stage.

  As for his wife Anne Hathaway and her possible dalliance with one of his glover father’s apprentices, I have no evidence to support such an infamous scenario. Many men in those times were forced to work away from home – as indeed they are today – and might not have seen their wives from one year to the next. It does strike me as odd though that the young William Shakespeare, having married a much older bride in what seems like a whirlwind of romantic fervour, should then absent himself for years when he could have – at the very least – brought Anne and the children to live with him in London once the money was good enough. That he suspected Anne of adultery is merely one possibility among many to explain why he did not. And the woman under suspicion is a common theme in his plays, though she tends to be proved innocent in the end. My explanation for Shakespeare’s lengthy absence from the marriage bed – and his courtship of the elusive ‘Dark Lady’ – is not based on anything more substantial than gut feeling, in other words.