Elizabeth stole carefully down the narrow stair of Beauchamp Tower, cupping the candle with her other hand to make the light as dim as she was able. She knew that things would go hard with her if she were caught, and worse still with the kindly warder who had taken pity on the fragile girl who was his charge. Or perhaps he saw her not as a traitor, thought Elizabeth cynically, but as good King Harry’s daughter and a future queen who, when she sat on the throne of England, would long remember the kindness of her old gaoler. In any case he had conveniently looked the other way, and now Elizabeth was blissfully free from the eyes of her keepers for the first time in more than two months.
Halfway down the tower stair she froze in her footsteps as she heard a piteous low moan, distant and hollow. For a moment she thought she had imagined it — nay, hoped she had imagined it — for it was the terrible sound of a man whose existence was an extended agony. Many prisoners were not as lucky as herself, but shut up in windowless cells, dark and cold with only mouldy straw for a bed, racked joints aching, skin raw and pustulent with vermin bites.
“Dear God,” uttered Elizabeth over and over, trying to shut the sound from her ears.
Just as she reached the second landing a hand suddenly shot out of the shadows and clamped around her wrist. She gasped, turning to see Robin Dudley, his bold handsome face lighting up the gloom of the tower stair.
“Elizabeth, thank God!”
With a great heaving sigh, for there were no words to express the profound relief or the terrible rush of love she felt for her old friend, she sank heavily against Robin’s broad chest, and his strong arms enfolded her trembling frame. Hot tears spilled from her eyes to dampen his cloak and she was racked with sobs. He held her fast and spoke in hushed and hurried whispers, for they both knew this stolen time would all too soon be ending.
“Are you being well treated?” he demanded.
“Well enough.” She sniffled and finally found her composure. “And you?” She peered at him in the flickering candlelight. “Robin, you’re so thin.” She touched his hollow cheek.
“The food they bring is decent, but I’ve suffered from a flux these last weeks.” He did not say, but Elizabeth guessed the recent execution of his father and elder brother had sickened him.
“I’m so sorry about your father and John. How are the others?”
“My brothers are all right. Prison is not so foul a time when spent in the company of your family. I’m kept a solitary prisoner, though, in a cell of my own on the floor below them.”
The Dudleys had been imprisoned for their role in their father’s arrogantly self-serving and ill-fated plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne so that his own son Guildford, Jane’s husband, could be crowned king.
“Perhaps,” mused Elizabeth aloud, “that you alone of all your brothers proclaimed Jane queen, there in the marketplace of King’s Lynn, angered Mary sufficiently to make your confinement solitary.”
“No matter,” said Dudley, reluctantly releasing Elizabeth from his embrace and holding her at arm’s length. “Tell me how you are. If ever there was an unjustly confined prisoner ‘tis you.”
It was true. Her own imprisonment was the result of young Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion which, riding swiftly on the heels of Dudley’s uprising, stood in defiance of Mary’s betrothal to a foreigner, Spain’s Prince Philip.
“But is it not easy to see how Mary might believe my complicity, Robin? The plot’s express purpose was to depose her and place me on the throne.”
“Will she not listen to reason from her reasonable sister?”
“I have written letters, I have begged audiences, and none of them have been answered or granted. That wretched Spaniard de Quandra has always hated me. He poisons her mind against me. But they will never find honest proof of my involvement in poor Wyatt’s scheme.”
“Who needs honest proof?” muttered Robin morosely. “We are more like to die on the falsely uttered word of an enemy than from any truthful accusation.”
That dreadful low moan rose again from the bowels of the stone prison, echoing up the dark stairwell as if to remind the two young prisoners of their own fate. And the rapid scuttering of rats at their feet made them shiver with cold disgust.
Elizabeth was suddenly gripped by a not unreasonable terror. “Should we put out the light? If they catch us meeting like this, it will be the end of us.”
Dudley leveled a sharp, desperate look at her and then blew out the candle. They were plunged into a darkness like a curtain of black velvet that, paradoxically, did not muffle but rather magnified every sound. Even their breathing seemed loud enough to bring about detection, and so they drew close once again.
Elizabeth was all at once acutely aware of the nearness of Robin’s body, the humid warmth of his breath on her cheek, the hand that snaked around her waist, joining them like flowers along the same vine. But it was the sharp tingling between her thighs that startled her most fiercely, causing her face to flush so hot that she imagined Robin could see her glowing in the dark. This brought an instant rush of shame and guilt. Elizabeth blurted, “How is it with Amy?”
She imagined she felt Robin’s grip of her waist loosen momentarily, as if the question about his young wife had stirred guilt in him as well. But his voice was steady when he answered.
“They allowed her and my brothers’ wives to visit us a fortnight ago. She fears for my life, and” — he paused as though he had begun a thought he did not wish to finish — “she misses me very much.”
Again Elizabeth was thankful for the utter darkness, so that her friend should not see the lines of emotion that must certainly be etched upon her face. Jealous, she said to herself incredulously. I am jealous of Amy Dudley!
“Elizabeth,” she heard Robin whisper. “Elizabeth, I feel such a traitor to say this, but aside from relief at seeing a friendly face and a gratefulness for the food and gifts Amy brought, I was not much moved by her presence. I dared not admit that I rarely thought of her or pined for her, and I could hardly bring myself… to make love to her.”
Elizabeth could not immediately find a reply to Dudley’s startling admission, for it was relief she felt and a strange joy at his miserable confusion. She remembered how, only three years before, she had stood witness at Robin and Amy’s spring wedding. How adoring the couple had been each to the other, and how well matched they seemed. At the time Elizabeth had felt only happiness for her childhood companion, though she now remembered a brief but sharp pang when she saw Robin kissing his pretty young bride. Had the emotion been jealousy, she wondered now, still groping for the right words to comfort Robin.
“Perhaps your lack of desire was the unhealthy effect that captivity had wrought upon your body and your mind,” Elizabeth offered, feigning confidence in the idea.
“Then why,” asked Robin, tightening his grip of Elizabeth’s waist and pulling her so close that their bodies melded together all along their trembling lengths, “why do I dream incessandy of you, see your face in my mind’s eye, long for nothing more than the sound of your sweet voice that might soothe my soul? And why, Elizabeth, do I want your body lying next to mine in the dark?”
As he spoke Elizabeth felt that she had stopped breathing altogether, afraid that the faint hiss of her breath might cover the sound of even one of Robin’s precious words. She had lifted her face to his and despite the deep darkness had no trouble finding his hungry lips with her own. And there they had stayed, all pain and fear and guilt forgotten, locked in each other’s arms until the frantic whispered voice of her gaoler had come from above with the first thin light of the morning.
Now, in her own palace of Whitehall, Elizabeth reached the dark warren of private rooms and anterooms where the doors of her Great and Privy and Withdrawing Chambers stood guarded each by two armed yeomen. She came like a whirlwind through her bedchamber door, scattering her waiting ladies like so many brittle leaves. “Go, go now. All of you.” She kept the cloak pulled tight around her, hoping her brusque manner co
ncealed her fluttering heart and shaking legs. With a great perfumed commotion of rustling skirts and petticoats, the ladies one by one curtsied and filed out.
It was thankfully quiet but Elizabeth was not alone. Katherine Ashley stood very still near the fire, her arms crossed below her breasts, a grim look upon her careworn face.
Elizabeth was queen, but she did not yet dare order Mistress Ashley to leave her. Instead she moved across to the fire, trying to ease her nervous smile, and turned her back on Kat. Wordlessly the older woman reached up and removed Dudley’s woolen cloak from Elizabeth’s back and hung it over her arm. As Elizabeth turned to face her lady of the bedchamber she said quietly, “Have no worry, Kat, the blood is not mine.”
Despite the warning Kat’s eyes widened at the sight of the dark brown smears that streaked Elizabeth’s velvet riding jacket. Wordlessly the older woman covered her eyes with a creased hand and tried to calm herself. Her worst fears were coming to pass. The young princess, her charge from earliest childhood, was now a defiant queen. In that one brilliant moment, ten thousand candles illuminating Westminster Abbey, when the crown of England first rested heavy on that beloved child’s head, everything that Kat and Elizabeth had between them changed irrevocably. And yet, she thought as she lowered her trembling hand from her face and looked into Her Royal Majesty’s eyes, nothing had changed. Nothing at all. She reached across and began unbuttoning the velvet jacket.
Elizabeth’s rigid posture relaxed, her limbs went flaccid with Kat’s familiar ministrations. She knew her servant could smell Dudley’s scent rising off her clothing, her body. She knew Kat was straining now, searching her mind for the proper words to convey her worry, her anger, without breaching the new etiquette between them. When Elizabeth was a young girl, a princess sent from court with little chance of reaching the throne, Kat had shown a loving but strict discipline. Her protective instincts were almost feline with their necessary fierceness and loyalty. She’d always spoken plainly, even harshly if the situation demanded. For the girl whose own blood relatives had all but abandoned her, Kat Ashley and her husband William were the only safe ports in the terrible storm of her young life. And now Kat was wretched with anguish.
“Will you bathe?” she asked with quiet restraint.
“Not tonight,” replied Elizabeth. She wanted desperately to keep the last vestiges of Robin Dudley with her for as long as she was able. Kat was folding the Queen’s clothing carefully as she helped her out of each piece. Elizabeth, now in only her French lace undergarments, shivered and moved closer to the fire.
“May I speak?” asked Kat in a stony voice.
“When have I ever been able to stop you, Kat?”
The older woman held out a yellow satin dressing gown. Elizabeth slipped her arms through the voluminous sleeves and pulled the soft fur lining around her. Suddenly she felt weak. She slumped into the highbacked chair and looked up at Kat, who was looking down at her own hands.
“Madame,” she began, “you are my life and I love you as if you were my own flesh. That is why I say you must put a stop to the terrible things that are being said. They are saying that you and Robert Dudley are as good as married. And tonight” — she looked away, unable to meet Elizabeth’s burning eyes — “I know that this is so. I have known this man since he was a boy in your nursery and I know his family. All of them have been executed for treason to the crown.”
“Robin Dudley is loyal to this crown!” cried Elizabeth.
“He is a man with ambition in his blood. I cannot say he does not love you, Elizabeth, but like all the rest of them he loves the dream of power more. I do not trust him. He is a married man!”
Elizabeth looked away. For a time this afternoon she’d been able to forget this truth, or maybe in the flush of her newfound strength believed it did not matter. But with the coronation just three months behind her, there were already scandalous rumors simmering about herself and Robin. Still, she thought to herself, she had no worry of pregnancy, as she did not bleed with the moon’s cycle as other women did. And she was the reigning monarch. She could do as she pleased.
“Do you not see what is plain?” said Kat. “Are you so blinded by lust that you do not comprehend the future of this action? You are losing respect, Elizabeth, from your councillors, your court, your subjects too. If they withdraw their affection, alliances will crumble. You know as well as I there are other rivals to this throne and if your claim should weaken, do not doubt that blood will spill. Innocent blood, and it will be on your head. I swear to you if I had known it would come to this I would have strangled Her Majesty in the cradle!”
Elizabeth trembled with the fervor of Kat’s terrible oath. But the older woman was not yet finished. She knelt and took the Queen’s hands in her own. “Marry, Elizabeth. I beg of you, commit yourself to a worthy suitor befitting your rank — foreign, English, it matters not. Marry. Bear Tudor heirs or chaos will prevail!”
Elizabeth smoothed the spotted skin of Kat Ashley’s hand. “I know, Kat, that these are the outpourings of a good heart and true fidelity. But listen now. In this life of mine I’ve had so much of sorrow, tribulation. So little joy. I have earned what happiness this dear man gives to me.” Kat started to object, but Elizabeth placed a finger on the woman’s lips as if to seal them. “Say no more. I am queen and I do as I will. If indeed I have found pleasure in such a dishonorable life, then there is no one in this land, this wide world, that can forbid it.”
Thoroughly defeated, Kat pulled herself to her feet and looked down upon this willful woman who confounded and constantly amazed her. She had done her best and had failed to move Elizabeth’s mind.
This mysterious girl, her pale red hair framing a face of pure ephemeral innocence, was going to be the death of her.
“My lords.” The Queen exploded into her Privy Chamber with the force of a catapulted arrow, skewering each of her councillors with a piercing stare. None of them, save William Cecil who had dealt with Elizabeth for several years before her accession to the throne, could yet make sense of this formidable and beguiling monarch.
“The news from the Continent is good, Your Majesty,” spoke Cecil, opening their morning council. “The French have come to an agreement with us on Calais.”
“Excellent. Then they are returning our port city, the one my illustrious sister Mary lost, that which has always been ours, to us?” demanded Elizabeth.
“Not precisely, Madame.”
“Well then, how imprecisely do they propose to handle this?”
“They will hold Calais for at least eight further years,” explained her principal defense advisor Lord Clinton.
“Eight,” mused the Queen. “A lovely round number. Turned on its side, infiniti. Mayhaps that is how long they propose to keep Calais.”
“At the end of eight years, if they do choose to keep the city, they will pay five hundred thousand crowns to us.”
“A goodly sum,” said Elizabeth. “Though it is now that we need the money in our pitiful treasury.”
“Majesty, chance exists that Calais may be returned to us in the future,” added Lord North.
“More important,” interjected Lord Clinton, “the threat of invasion from the French through Scotland is no more. And for now your young Scottish cousin Queen Mary does not press her claim to your throne. And that is excellent news.”
“Indeed it is,” said Elizabeth with a tight smile. “A realm gains more in one year’s peace than by ten years of war. So says my lord Cecil.”
The councillors relaxed and smiled amongst themselves.
“So we have peace,” said the Queen. “But in the meanwhile we have, by your counsel, unnecessarily bankrupted our treasury in preparation for war.”
“Not so, Your Majesty,” retorted her uncle Lord Howard, the greatest soldier amongst her advisors. “The fortification of the northern border castles and the munitions from Flanders were worthy expenditures nevertheless. We will be prepared for unforeseen future hostilities.”
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bsp; “Si vispacem, para helium” interjected Lord North. “If you wish peace, prepare for war,” echoed Elizabeth. “Precisely, Your Majesty.”
She turned back to Lord Howard. “However, it still seems to me that my uncle does not trust his own treaty.”
“I have little trust that such zealous Catholics as Mary of Scots and her French mother-in-law will scarce abandon for long all ideas of overpowering Protestant England and overthrowing its heretic queen. But for now, the treaty pleases me, as I hope it pleases you, Majesty.”
Elizabeth scanned the faces of her privy councillors and sensed that they were in sore need of approbation. She was hard on them, she knew — volatile, unpredictable, exasperating. She reveled in chaos and it amused her to use their foibles and weaknesses to lay little traps for them, playing them one against the other.
“Yes, I am pleased, my lords,” she said and graced them with one of her warmest smiles. “Even if only for the present we are spared the ruinous cost of war, we should all be grateful.” She turned to Cecil. This was the one man she trusted completely. He was honest where she was devious. He was clear and dispassionate while she flew into fits of pique and created hugely dramatic episodes simply to enliven an afternoon. “You will furnish me with the details of those negotiations in our private council, William.”
The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn Page 2
