The Virgin's Lover ttc-4

by Philippa Gregory

  “Why? Would you rather have Elizabeth’s England?” She hissed the treasonous challenge in a whisper.

  “With all my heart,” he answered truthfully.

  Abruptly, she released his hands and, without another word, blew out the candle, pulled the covers over her shoulders, and turned her back to him. The two of them lay sleepless, wide-eyed in the darkness.

  “It will never happen,” Amy stared. “She will never have the throne. The queen could conceive another child tomorrow, Philip of Spain’s son, a boy who would be Emperor of Spain and King of England, and she will be a princess that no one wants, married off to a foreign prince and forgotten.”

  “Or she might not,” he replied. “Mary might die without issue and then my princess is Queen of England, and she will not forget me.”

  In the morning, she would not speak to him. They breakfasted in the tap room in silence and then Amy went back upstairs to their room in the inn to pack the last of Robert’s clothes in his bag. Robert called up the stairs that he would see her down at the quayside, and went out into the noise and the bustle of the streets.

  The village of Dover was in chaos as King Philip of Spain’s expedition made ready to set sail to the Netherlands. Produce sellers with every sort of food and wares bawled their prices into the hubbub. Wise women screeched the value of charms and amulets for departing soldiers. Pedlars showed trays of trinkets for farewell gifts, barbers and tooth-drawers were working on the side of the street, men having their head shaved almost bare for fear of lice. A couple of priests had even set up makeshift confessionals to shrive men who feared going to their deaths with sins on their consciences, and dozens of whores mingled with the crowds of soldiers, screeching with laughter and promising all sorts of quick pleasures.

  Women crowded to the quayside to say good-bye to their husbands and lovers; carts and cannon were hauled perilously up the sides and stowed in the little ships; horses jibbed and fought on the gangplanks, with swearing lumpers pushing them from behind, the grooms pulling them from before. As Robert came out of the door of his inn, his young brother caught him by the arm.

  “Henry! Well met!” Robert cried, enveloping the nineteen-year-old youth in a great bear hug. “I was wondering how we would ever find each other. I expected you here last night.”

  “I was delayed. Ambrose would not let me go until he had my horse reshod. You know what he’s like. He suddenly became a most authoritative older brother and I had to swear to keep safe, and to keep you out of danger as well.”

  Robert laughed. “I wish you well with that.”

  “I got here this morning and I have been looking for you all over.” Henry stepped back and scrutinized his older brother’s dark good looks. He was still only twenty-three and was strikingly handsome, but the spoiled gloss of a rich youth had been burned off him by suffering. He was lean now; he had the look of a man to be reckoned with. He grinned at Henry and the hardness in his face melted in the warmth of his loving smile. “Good God! I am glad to see you, lad! What an adventure we shall have!”

  “The court has arrived already,” Henry told him. “King Philip is on board his ship, and the queen is here, and the princess.”

  “Elizabeth? Is she here? Did you speak to her?”

  “They’re on the new ship, the Philip and Mary,” Henry said. “The queen looking very sour.”

  Robert laughed. “Elizabeth will be merry then?”

  “Happy as a haymaker at her sister’s distress,” Henry replied cheerfully. “Is it true, d’you know, that she is King Philip’s lover?”

  “Not her,” Robert said with the certainty of a childhood playmate. “But she’ll keep him dancing to her tune because he guarantees her safety. Half the Privy Council would have her beheaded tomorrow if it were not for the king’s favor. She’s no lovesick fool. She’ll use him, not be had by him. She’s a formidable girl. I’d so like to see her if we can.”

  “She always had a tender heart for you.” Henry grinned. “Shall you eclipse the king himself?”

  “Not while I have nothing to offer her,” Robert said. “She’s a calculating wench, God bless her. Are they ready to load us?”

  “My horse is already aboard,” Henry said. “I was coming for yours.”

  “I’ll walk him down with you,” Robert said. The two men went through the stone archway to where the horse was stabled in the yard at the back of the inn.

  “When did you last see her? The princess?” Henry asked his brother.

  “When I was in my pomp and she in hers.” Robert smiled ruefully. “It must have been the last Christmas at court. When King Edward was failing, and Father was king in everything but name alone. She was the Protestant princess and the favorite sister. We were twins in the smugness of our triumph and Mary was nowhere to be seen. D’you remember?”

  Henry frowned. “Dimly. You know I was never very good at the shifts in favor.”

  “You would have learned,” Robert said drily. “In a family such as ours was then, you would have had to.”

  “I remember she was imprisoned for treason in the Tower, while we were still in there,” Henry recalled.

  “I was glad when I learned she was free,” Robert said. “Elizabeth always had the luck of the devil.”

  The big black horse whinnied at the sight of Robert and Robert went forward and stroked his soft nose. “Come on then, my lovely,” he said softly. “Come on, First Step.”

  “What d’you call him?” Henry inquired.

  “First Step,” Robert said. “When we were released from the Tower and I came home to Amy and found myself a pauper in her stepmother’s house, the woman told me that I could neither buy nor borrow a horse to ride on.”

  Henry gave a low whistle. “I thought they kept a good house at Stanfield?”

  “Not for a son-in-law who had just come home an undischarged traitor,” Robert said ruefully. “I had no choice but to walk in my riding boots to a horse fair, and I won him in a bet. I called him First Step. He is my first step back to my rightful place.”

  “And this expedition will be our next step,” Henry said gleefully.

  Robert nodded. “If we can rise in King Philip’s favor we can be returned to court,” he said. “Anything will be forgiven the man who holds the Netherlands for Spain.”

  “Dudley! A Dudley!” Henry sung out the family battle cry, and opened the door to the loosebox.

  The two of them led the nervous horse down the cobbled street to the quayside, and waited behind the other men leading their horses on board. The little waves lapped at the jetty and First Step flared his nostrils and shifted uneasily. When it was his turn to go up the gangplank he put his forefeet on the bridge and then froze in fear.

  One of the lumpers came behind with a whip raised to strike.

  “Stay your hand!” Robert rapped out, loud above the noise.

  “I tell you, he won’t go on without,” the man swore.

  Robert turned his back on the horse, dropped the reins, and went ahead of him, into the darkness of the hold. The horse fretted, shifting from one foot to another, his ears flickering forward and back, his head up, looking for Robert. From the belly of the ship came Robert’s whistle, and the horse turned his ears forward and went trustingly in.

  Robert came out, having petted and tethered his horse, and saw Amy with his bags on the quayside. “All loaded and shipshape,” he said cheerfully to her. He took her cold little hand and pressed it to his lips. “Forgive me,” he said quietly. “I was disturbed by my dream last night, and it made me short-tempered. Let us have no more wrangling, but part as friends.”

  The tears welled up in her brown eyes. “Oh, Robert, please don’t go,” she breathed.

  “Now, Amy,” he said firmly. “You know that I have to go. And when I am gone I shall send you all my pay and I expect you to invest it wisely, and look about for a farm for us to buy. We must rise, my wife, and I am counting on you to mind our fortune and help us rise.”

  She tried to
smile. “You know I’ll never fail you. But it’s just…”

  “The royal barge!” Henry exclaimed as every man along the quay-side pulled off his hat and bowed his head.

  “Excuse us,” Robert said swiftly to Amy, and he and Henry went up to the deck of the King of Spain’s ship so that he could look down on the royal barge as it came by. The queen was seated in the stern of the barge, under the canopy of state, but the twenty-two-year-old Princess Elizabeth, radiant in the Tudor colors of green and white, was standing in the prow like a bold figurehead where everyone could see her, smiling and waving her hand at the people.

  The oarsmen held the barge steady, the ships were side by side, the two brothers looked down from the waist of the warship to the barge that rode lower in the water beside them.

  Elizabeth looked up. “A Dudley!” Her voice rang out clearly and her smile gleamed up at Robert.

  He bowed his head. “Princess!” He looked toward the queen, who did not acknowledge him. “Your Majesty.”

  Coldly, she raised her hand. She was draped in ropes of pearls, she had diamonds in her ears and a hood encrusted with emeralds, but her eyes were dull with grief, and the lines around her mouth made her look as if she had forgotten how to smile.

  Elizabeth stepped forward to the side rail of the royal barge. “Are you off to war, Robert?” she called up to the ship. “Are you to be a hero?”

  “I hope so!” he shouted back clearly. “I hope to serve the queen in her husband’s dominions and win her gracious favor again.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes danced. “I am sure she has no more loyal soldier than you!” She was nearly laughing aloud.

  “And no sweeter subject than you!” he returned.

  She gritted her teeth so that she did not burst out. He could see her struggling to control herself.

  “And are you well, Princess?” he called more softly. She knew what he meant: Are you in good health? For he knew that when she was frightened she contracted a dropsy that swelled her fingers and ankles and forced her to her bed. And are you safe? For there she was, beside the queen in the royal barge, when proximity to the throne always meant proximity to the block, and her only ally on the Privy Council, King Philip, was sailing away to war. And most of all: Are you waiting, as I am waiting, for better times, and praying they come soon?

  “I am well,” she shouted back. “As ever. Constant. And you?”

  He grinned down at her. “Constant too.”

  They needed to say no more. “God bless you and keep you, Robert Dudley,” she said.

  “And you, Princess.” And God speed you to your own again that I may come to mine, was his unspoken reply. By the cheeky gleam in her eyes he knew that she knew what he was thinking. They had always known exactly what the other was thinking.

  Winter 1558

  ONLY SIX MONTHS LATER, Amy, accompanied by her friend, Lizzie Oddingsell, stood on the quay at Gravesend, watching the ships limp into harbor, wounded men laid out with the dead on their decks, deckrails scorched, mainsails holed, all the survivors with their heads bowed, shamefaced in defeat.

  Robert’s ship was the very last to come in. Amy had been waiting for three hours, increasingly certain that she would never see him again. But slowly, the little vessel approached was taken into tow, and drawn up at the quayside as if it were unwilling to come back to England in disgrace.

  Amy shaded her eyes and looked up at the rail. At this moment, which she had feared so intensely, at this moment, which she had been so sure would come, she did not whimper or cry out, she looked steadily and carefully at the crowded deck for Robert, knowing that if she could not see him he had either been taken prisoner, or was dead.

  Then she saw him. He was standing beside the mast, as if he were in no hurry to be at the rail for the first sight of England, in no rush to get to the gangplank to disembark, with no urgent need. There were a couple of civilians beside him, and a woman with a dark-haired baby on her hip; but his brother Henry was not there.

  They rattled up the gangplank to the deck and she started to go to ward it, to run up it and fold him in her arms, but Lizzie Oddingsell held her back. “Wait,” she advised the younger woman. “See how he is first.”

  Amy pushed the woman’s restraining hand aside; but she waited as he came down the gangplank so slowly that she thought he was wounded.

  “Robert?”

  “Amy.”

  “Thank God you are safe!” she burst out. “We heard there was a terrible siege, and that Calais is lost. We knew it couldn’t be true, but…”

  “It is true.”

  “Calais is lost?”

  It was unimaginable. Calais was the jewel of England overseas. They spoke English in the streets, they paid English taxes and traded the valuable wool and finished cloth to and from England. Calais was the reason that English kings styled themselves “King of England and France.” Calais was the outward show that England was a world power, on French soil, it was as much an English port as Bristol. It was impossible to imagine it had fallen to the French.

  “It is lost.”

  “And where is your brother?” Amy asked fearfully. “Robert? Where is Henry?”

  “Dead,” he said shortly. “He took a shot to the leg in St. Quentin, and died later, in my arms.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “I was noticed by Philip of Spain at St. Quentin,” he said. “I had an honorable mention in despatches to the queen. It was my first step, as I hoped it would be; but it cost me my brother: the one thing in life I could least afford to lose. And now I am at the head of a defeated army and I doubt that the queen will remember that I did rather well at St. Quentin, given that I did rather badly at Calais.”

  “Oh, what does it matter?” she exclaimed. “As long as you are safe, and we can be together again? Come home with me, Robert, and who cares about the queen or even about Calais? You don’t need Calais, we can buy Syderstone back now. Come home with me and see how happy we will be!”

  He shook his head. “I have to take despatches to the queen,” he said stubbornly.

  “You’re a fool!” she flared at him. “Let someone else tell her the bad news.”

  His dark eyes went very bright at the public insult from his wife. “I am sorry you think me a fool,” he said levelly. “But King Philip ordered me by name and I must do my duty. You can go and stay with the Philipses at Chichester till I come for you. You will oblige me by taking this woman and her baby to stay with them too. She has lost her home in Calais and she needs a refuge in England for a while.”

  “I will not,” Amy said, instantly resentful. “What is she to me? What is she to you?”

  “She was once the Queen’s Fool,” he said. “Hannah Green. And she was a loyal and obedient servant to me, and a friend when I had few friends. Be kind, Amy. Take her with you to Chichester. In the meantime I shall have to commandeer a horse and go to court.”

  “Oh, have you lost your horse as well as your plan?” Amy taunted him bitterly. “You have come home without your brother, without your horse, you have come home no richer, you have come home poorer in every way, as my stepmother Lady Robsart warned me that you would?”

  “Yes,” he said steadily. “My beautiful horse was shot out from under me by a cannon ball. I fell under him as he went down, and his body shielded me and saved my life. He died in my service. I promised him that I’d be a kind master to him, and yet I took him to his death. I called him First Step, but I have stumbled and fallen on my first step. I have lost my horse, and lost my campaign money, and lost my brother, and lost all hope. You will be pleased to hear that this is the end of the Dudleys. I cannot see that we will ever rise again.”

  Robert and Amy went their separate ways—him to court, where he was sourly greeted as the bringer of bad news, and her to their friends at Chichester for a long visit; but then they returned unwillingly to her stepmother’s house of Stanfield Hall. There was nowhere else for them to go.

  “We’re shorthanded on the farm,” Lady Robsart declared
bluntly on his first evening.

  Robert raised his head from the contemplation of his empty bowl and said: “What?”

  “We’re plowing up the meadow,” she said. “For what little hay it gives us, it’s no use. And we are shorthanded. You can help out in the field tomorrow.”

  He looked at her as if she were speaking Greek. “You want me to work in the fields?”

  “I am sure that Stepmother means that you should supervise the men,” Amy interposed. “Don’t you?”

  “How can he supervise plowing? I doubt he knows how it is done. I thought he could drive the cart; he’s good with horses, at least.”

  Amy turned to her husband. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

  Robert could not speak, he was so appalled. “You want me to labor in the field? Like some peasant?”

  “What else can you do for your keep?” Lady Robsart asked. “You are a lily of the field, man. You neither sow nor reap.”

  The color was draining from his face till he was as pale as the lily she called him. “I cannot work in the field like a common man,” he said quietly.

  “Why should I keep you like a lord?” she demanded crudely. “Your title, your fortune, and your luck have all gone.”

  He stammered slightly. “Because even if I never rise again, I cannot sink to the dunghill, I cannot demean myself.”

  “You are as low as a man can get,” she declared. “King Philip will never come home; the queen, God save her, has turned against you. Your name is blackened, your credit has gone, and all you have in your favor is Amy’s love and my patronage.”

  “Your patronage!” he exclaimed.

  “I keep you. For nothing. And it has come to my mind that you might as well work your passage here. Everyone else works. Amy has her hens and her sewing, and her work in the house. I run the place, my sons care for the livestock and the crops.”

  “They order the shepherd and the plowman,” he burst out.

  “Because they know what orders to give. You know nothing so you will have to take orders.”