The Virgin's Lover

  “Just let me be at your side until then,” he said simply. “Neither of us can bear our lives when we are apart.”

  That night at dinner the queen laughed at her fool for the first time in many weeks, and Sir Robert sat at her side once more and poured her wine.

  “This wet weather has got into the very timbers of the roof,” he remarked as the servants took the meats and the puddings off the table and brought the sweetmeats and the sugared fruits. “My room is so damp, you can see the steam coming off my linen when Tamworth holds it before the fire in the morning.”

  “Tell them to change your rooms,” she said lightly. “Tell the groom of the household to put you back in your old rooms beside mine.”

  He waited. He knew the way forward with Elizabeth was not to press her. He decided that he would do nothing more than wait for her.

  At midnight, the door between the two rooms slid open and she came quietly in. She was wearing a dark blue robe over her white shift, her red hair was brushed and shining over her shoulders.

  “My Robert?”

  The table before the fire was laid with supper for two, the fire was lit, the bed was turned down, the door was locked, and Tamworth, Sir Robert’s valet, was on guard outside.

  “My love,” he said and took her in his arms.

  She nestled close. “I cannot live without you,” she said. “We have to keep this secret, a most deep secret. But I cannot be queen without you, Robert.”

  “I know,” he said. “I cannot live without you.”

  She looked up at him. “What will we do?”

  He shrugged his shoulders, his smile was almost rueful. “I think we have gone beyond choice. We will have to marry, Elizabeth.”

  She glanced toward the window where one of the shutters stood open. “Close the shutters,” the queen said in sudden superstitious fear. “I don’t want even the moon to see us.”

  In her old bedroom at Stanfield Hall Amy woke with a start and found that the covers had slid from her bed and that she was freezing cold. She reached down to her feet and grabbed the linen sheets, the woolen rugs, and pulled them up to her shivering shoulders. She had left one of the shutters open, and the moon, a big, bold, creamy moon, was laying a path of light on her pillow. She lay down and looked out of the window to the moon.

  “The same moon that is shining on me is shining on my lord,” she whispered. “Perhaps it will wake him too, and make him think of me. Perhaps God will waken his love for me in his heart once more. Even now, perhaps he is thinking of me.”

  “You played me as a fool!” Mary Sidney raged at her brother, striding up to him in the Whitehall Palace stable yard. He and half a dozen other men were practicing for a joust, his horse was already armed, his squire standing by with his beautifully polished breastplate, his helmet, his lance.

  Robert was distracted. He snapped his fingers for his pageboy with his gauntlets. “What is it, Mary? What have I done?”

  “You sent me on a fool’s errand to tell the ambassador that the queen would marry the archduke. You sent me knowing that since I believed you, since I was deeply, deeply grieved for you, that I would tell a convincing tale. I was the best person in court to send to him. D’you know I wept as I told him that you had given her up? And so of course, he believed me, and yet all along it was just a plot to throw dust in the eyes of the court.”

  “What dust?” Robert was all innocence.

  “You and the queen are lovers,” she spat at him. “You probably have been from the first day. You probably were lovers when I thought you were grieving for the loss of her. And you made me play pander to you.”

  “The queen and I agreed to part for her safety,” he said steadily. “That was true. As I told you. But she needs friends, Mary, you know that. I have come back to her side to be her friend. And we are friends, as I said we would be.”

  She pulled away from his outstretched hand. “Oh, no, not another pack of lies, Robert; I won’t hear them. You are faithless to Amy, and you are dishonest with me. I told the ambassador that I knew for a fact that the queen and you were true friends and that she was a virgin, free to marry and a chaste princess. I swore on my immortal soul that there was nothing between you but friendship and a few kisses.”

  “And there is not!”

  “Don’t speak to me!” she cried passionately. “Don’t lie to me. I won’t hear another word.”

  “Come with me to the tilt yard….”

  “I shan’t watch you, I shan’t talk with you. I don’t even want to see you, Robert. There is nothing to you but ambition. God help your wife, and God help the queen.”

  “Amen,” he said, smiling. “Amen to both, for they are both good women and innocent of any wrongdoing, and indeed God bless me and all Dudleys as we rise in the world.”

  “And what has Amy done that she should be shamed before the world?” she demanded of him. “What sin has she ever done, for everyone in England to know that you have no liking for her? That you prefer another woman instead of her, your own true wife?”

  “She has done nothing,” he said. “And I have done nothing. Really, Mary, you shouldn’t throw such accusations around.”

  “Don’t you dare speak to me!” she swore again, quite beyond herself with rage. “I have nothing to say to you, and I will never have another word to say to you on this. You have played me as a fool and played the Spanish as fools and played your poor wife as a fool, and all along you have been lovers with the queen and you stay as lovers with the queen.”

  In one swift stride Robert was at her side with her wrist in a hard grip. “Now that is enough,” he said. “You have said quite enough, and I have heard more than enough. The queen’s reputation is beyond comment. She is going to marry the right suitor as soon as he comes along. We all know that. Amy is my wife and I will hear nothing against her. I visited her in October, and I shall visit her again shortly. Cecil himself gets home no more frequently than that.”

  “Cecil loves his wife and no one doubts his honor!” she flared up.

  “And no one questions mine,” he said sharply. “You can keep your poisonous little tongue off my affairs or you will spoil more than you understand. Be warned, Mary.”

  She was unafraid. “Are you mad, Robert?” she demanded. “Do you think you can fool the best spies in Europe as you fool your sister and your wife? In Madrid, in Paris, in Vienna, they know that you and the queen have adjoining rooms once more. What do you think they make of it? The Hapsburg archduke won’t come to England while you and the queen sleep behind locked doors, one panel of wood between you. Everyone but your poor wife believes that you are lovers; the whole country knows it. You have ruined the queen’s prospects with your lusts; you have ruined Amy’s love for you. Pray God you do not ruin the kingdom too.”

  Mary’s warning came too late, and could not prevent the scandalous intimacy between the queen and her Master of Horse. With Robert at her side once more, Elizabeth’s color came back into her cheeks, her fingernails were buffed and shining and the cuticles smooth. She glowed in his company, her constant nervousness was quieted when he was near. It did not matter what anyone might say, they were clearly born for each other, and they could not conceal it. They rode together every day, they danced together every night, and Elizabeth had the courage to open her letters and listen to petitions once more.

  In the absence of Cecil, Robert was her only trusted advisor. No one was seen by the queen except by Dudley’s introduction; she never spoke to anyone without him standing, discreetly, in the background. He was her only friend and her ally. She took no decision without him; they were inseparable. Duke John of Sweden danced around the court but hardly pressed his suit, William Pickering retired quietly to the country to try to economize on his massive debts, Caspar von Breuner came only rarely to court and everyone had forgotten the Earl of Arran.

  Cecil, staying firmly on the outskirts of the young couple and their courtiers, remarked to Throckmorton that this was no way to rule a countr
y on the brink of war and learned that she had just appointed Dudley as Lord Lieutenant and Constable of Windsor Castle, with fees to match.

  “He will be the richest man in England if this goes on,” Cecil observed.

  “Rich: nothing. He means to be king,” Sir Nicholas replied, saying the unsayable. “And then how d’you think the country will be run?”

  Cecil said nothing. Only the evening before a man whose face was hidden by his hat pulled down low on his brow had tapped at Cecil’s door and in a gruff voice asked him if he would join with three others in an attack on Dudley.

  “Why come to me?” Cecil asked. “I take it you can bludgeon him to death on your own account without my permission.”

  “Because the queen’s guards protect him and they follow your rule,” the stranger said. Cecil moved a branch of candles on his desk and caught a glimpse of the angry face of Thomas Howard half hidden under the concealing cap. “And when he is dead, she will ask you to discover his murderers. We don’t want your spies on us. We don’t want to hang for him any more than we would hang for killing vermin.”

  “You must do as you think best,” Cecil said, choosing his words with care. “But I will not protect you after the murder.”

  “Would you prevent us from doing it?”

  “I am responsible for the safety of the queen. I daresay, sadly, I cannot prevent you.”

  The man laughed. “In short you wouldn’t mind him dead but you won’t take a risk,” he taunted.

  Cecil had nodded equably. “I think no one in England but the queen and his wife would mind at all,” he said frankly. “But I will not be party to a plot against him.”

  “What’s amusing you?” Throckmorton asked, glancing round the court for the reason for Cecil’s smile.

  “Thomas Howard,” Cecil answered. “He’s not exactly a master of subtlety, is he?”

  Throckmorton glanced over. Thomas Howard had managed to enter the double open doors to the presence chamber just as Dudley was coming out. Everyone gave way to Dudley now, with the exception perhaps of Cecil, and Cecil would never have timed his entrance so that he was head to head with the royal favorite. Howard was standing his ground like an angry heifer.

  In a moment, Cecil thought, he will paw the floor and bellow.

  Dudley eyed him with the coolest of contempt, and then went to pass him.

  At once Howard sidestepped and jostled him. “I beg your pardon but I am coming in,” he said loudly enough for everyone to hear. “I! A Howard! And the Queen’s uncle.”

  “Oh, please, do not beg my pardon for I am leaving,” Dudley said, the laughter warm in his voice. “It is those hapless men that you are about to join who deserve your apology.”

  Howard choked on his words. “You are offensive!” he spluttered.

  Dudley went quietly by him, serene in his power.

  “You are a damned upstart, from nowhere!” Thomas Howard shouted at his back.

  “Will he let that go, d’you think?” Throckmorton asked Cecil, quite fascinated at the little drama before them. “Is he as cool as he seems? Will he ignore Thomas Howard?”

  “Not him,” Cecil said. “And he probably knows that he is in real danger.”

  “A plot?”

  “One of dozens. I think we can expect to see young Thomas Howard as the next ambassador to the Turkish court. I think it will be the Ottoman empire for the Howards, and a long posting.”

  Cecil was wrong only in the destination.

  “I think Thomas Howard should strengthen our defenses in the north,” Dudley remarked to the queen that night when they were alone, a slight smile warming his glance. “He is so fierce and warlike.”

  At once Elizabeth was alert, fearful for him. “Is he threatening you?”

  “That puppy? Hardly,” Robert said proudly. “But you do need someone you can trust in the north, and since he is spoiling for a fight, let him fight the French rather than me.”

  The queen laughed, as though Robert’s words were meant as a joke, but the next day she awarded her uncle a new title: he was to be Lieutenant General of the Scottish border.

  He bowed as he accepted the commission. “I know why I am sent away, Your Grace,” he said with the prickly dignity of a young man. “But I will serve you faithfully. And I think you may find I am a better servant to you in Newcastle than some who hide behind your petticoats in London, far from danger.”

  Elizabeth had the grace to look abashed. “I need someone I can trust,” she said. “We must hold the French north of Berwick. They cannot come into the heart of England.”

  “I am honored with your trust,” he said sarcastically, and took his leave, ignoring the rumors that swirled around his departure, the gossip that said that Elizabeth had put her own family in the very front of the line, rather than embarrass her lover.

  “Why not just behead him and get it over with?” Catherine Knollys asked.

  Elizabeth giggled to her cousin, but faced a reprimand from her old governess as soon as they were alone together.

  “Princess!” Kat Ashley exclaimed despairingly. “This is as bad as it ever was. What will everyone think? Everyone believes that you are as much in love with Sir Robert as ever. The archduke will never come to England now. No man would risk being so insulted.”

  “If he had come for me when he had promised, I would have married him. I gave my word,” Elizabeth said lightly, secure in the knowledge that he would not come now, and that if he did, Robert would think of some way out of it.

  But Kat Ashley, Mary Sidney, and all the court were right: he would not come now. The ambassador, deeply offended, asked to be recalled, and wrote to his master that he thought the whole episode of Lady Sidney coming to him and begging him to propose once more to the queen had been nothing more than a plot to take the attention from the clandestine love affair which was notorious once more throughout England and throughout Europe. He wrote that the queen had become a young woman inured to shame, corrupted without hope, and that he could recommend no honorable man to marry her, let alone a prince. She was living as a whore to a married man and their only way out was a semi-legal divorce, or the death of his wife: which was hardly likely.

  Cecil, reading the first draft of this letter, retrieved by Cecil’s agent from the ambassador’s kindling paper basket, thought that his foreign policy lay in ruins, that England’s safety could not be guaranteed, and that the Queen of England had run mad for lust and would lose the war in Scotland and then her head, and all for a smile from a dark- eyed man.

  But when Elizabeth summoned Cecil by name he came to her at once.

  “You were right, I am sure of it now,” she said quietly. “I have found the courage you wanted me to find. I am quite decided on war.”

  Cecil glanced past her to where Sir Robert leaned against the shutters of the window, apparently absorbed in a game of bowls taking place in the cold garden below.

  So we have the benefit of your advice, do we? And you, in your wisdom, have decided to adopt a policy I have been begging her to deploy for months. Aloud, Cecil asked: “What has Your Grace decided?”

  “We shall invade Scotland and defeat the French,” she said calmly.

  Cecil bowed, hiding his sense of intense relief. “I shall see that the moneys are raised and the army mustered,” he said. “You will want to meet with the Privy Council and issue a proclamation of war.”

  Elizabeth glanced toward Robert. Minutely, he nodded his head. “Yes,” she said.

  Cecil, too wise to object to advice that agreed with his own, merely bowed again.

  “And Cecil, you will be my Lord Secretary again, won’t you? Now that I have taken your advice?”

  “What of the archduke?” he asked.

  Robert, at the window, recognized at once that the question was not as irrelevant as it seemed, striking as it did at the very heart of what he was doing there, within earshot of the queen and her most trusted advisor, nodding through her decisions as if he were her husband and king-c
onsort. But this time, the queen did not even look at Robert.

  “I shall be betrothed to the archduke as soon as he comes to England,” she said. “I know that the alliance with Spain is more vital than ever.”

  “You know very well that he will not come,” Cecil said flatly. “You know that his ambassador is leaving London.”

  Robert levered himself up from the shutter. “Doesn’t matter,” he said briefly to Cecil. “King Philip of Spain will stand her ally against France, marriage or no marriage. He cannot risk the French creating a kingdom in England. Their borders would run from Perth to the Mediterranean; they would destroy Spain after they had enslaved us.”

  You think so, do you? Cecil demanded silently. And I am to save this kingdom for your bastards to inherit, am I?

  “What matters now,” Dudley ruled, “is that we call up the men and arm them. The survival of the kingdom and the queen herself depends on swift action. We are looking to you, Cecil.”

  That night Cecil worked furiously, sending out the hundreds of instructions that were needed to recruit, arm, and supply the army that must march north at once. He wrote to Lord Clinton, the High Admiral, to say that the navy must intercept the French fleet in the North Sea, they must prevent at all costs the French reinforcements landing in Scotland, but they must destroy his letter and seemingly attack on their own initiative. He wrote to his spies with the Scots, and to his men positioned at Berwick and to his most secret correspondents at the court of the queen regent, Mary of Guise, to say that at last the Queen of England had found a warlike resolution, and that England was to defend the Lords Protestant of Scotland, and her own borders, and that he needed the fullest information and at once.

  Cecil worked so speedily and so efficiently that when the Privy Council met, a few days later, in the last days of February, and the queen announced that, on reflection, she had changed her mind, and that since the risk was too great, there would be no venture in Scotland, he apologized but said it was too late.