A Court Affair (67 page)

Windsor Castle
November 27, 1560

I
prepared with great care on the day I was to welcome Robert back to court; every lock of hair, every garment, every pearl,
must
be
perfect
. I knew all eyes would be watching us and wondering what would happen next. Many thought this ceremony of ennoblement, meant to invest him with the title of Earl of Leicester, was a prelude to the crown Robert had always coveted, and that a marriage service would follow shortly after. Well, let them wait and see! Already rumours were spreading abroad that we had, like my own parents, been married secretly in a late-night ceremony with unseemly haste, before Amy was even laid to rest, with Robert’s brother Ambrose and his wife, Anne, and his sister, Mary, and her husband, Philip Sidney, acting as our witnesses. It was pure nonsense of course, but the truth never stood a chance against a good story.

I found him in his bedchamber, staring at the new mural I had ordered as a gift to welcome him back. It depicted Icarus with Robert’s own dark hair and fine features and handsome, sweat-slick, sun-bronzed body, his wings melting, dripping wax, and bursting into flames, raising his hands as if they could ward off the fiery red ball of the sun he had flown far too near to. And if one squinted and peered carefully at the sun, they might just discern my own fiery locks and features.

“You wear false mourning, Robert,” I observed, my eyes taking in the elegant sable-bordered black velvet doublet embroidered with rich golden scrollwork and black silken hose. “You mourn your lost reputation, not your wife, and what you think her death has cost you, though that was ever a fool’s dream that would never have come true.”

Robert stiffened and frowned. “Have you come here only to mock and insult me and be unkind?”

“A man of your age and experience should have learned long ago that the truth is seldom kind,” I said as I turned to go back into my own apartment.

He followed me, as I knew he would. “And you must not attribute such … perceived slights—shall we say?—as mine alone,” I continued, “for I’ve heard that you are rather a merry widower. And a rather boastful fellow too, bursting with confidence that you can, in time, infect me with your own boldness and temerity, as though it were the smallpox, and persuade me to give you my hand in marriage, and with it, of course, my crown, and my throne, and all the power that goes with it. I believe those were your words? Your Mr Blount—Ah, here he is now!” I smiled and held out my hand for Thomas Blount to kiss as he followed Cecil in through the opposite door. “As I was saying, your Mr Blount, who is
my
Mr Blount
first
”—I smiled upon seeing Robert’s face blanch as white as an egg before me—“is an Englishman whose
first
loyalty is to his Queen, and he has told me in
great
detail of the celebrations in your rooms at Kew that have taken place almost every night, even before Lady Dudley was entombed. Indeed this modest young man blushed to inform me of the drinking and other wild and wanton doings of the man who would be King and his guests; I hope you have not been promising your Southwark whores positions as my waiting women when you are King.” I turned and stared at him intently, narrowing my eyes. “You do look rather tired this morning, My Lord, perhaps due to the few hours you slept upon a hard floor beneath a table, though you had two buxom wenches whose bosoms you took turns resting your head upon, though I daresay a goosedown pillow would have served you better. I detect a certain stiffness in your neck, in the way you move it and wince each time you do. Shall we ask Dr Bayly to take a look at it?”

At the mention of his name, Dr Bayly himself came in and bowed low before me.

“Ah, Dr Bayly.” I held out my hand to him. “I fear I have misjudged you. When I first heard of your refusal to treat Lady Dudley, I was most upset, but once I became fully aware of your reasons and the circumstances, I understood. I commend you for your wisdom; a less honourable man would willingly have dived into Lord Robert’s purse. Dr Dee has given me a copy of your treatise on diseases of the eye, which I read with great interest. I trust you will do us, and our realm, great credit in the years to come. When next we visit Oxford, we shall attend one of your lectures.”

“Majesty,” he breathed, sweeping me a deep bow, “you honour me!”

Too stunned to speak, Robert stared first at me, then at Thomas Blount, then swept cursorily over the doctor, whom he had never even met and knew only by letter, then lighted upon his cousin again.

“You are my cousin, my man …” he began in an accusing tone.

But Thomas Blount did not let him finish. “Aye, My Lord, I am, but I am the Queen’s man first. I serve none but God before her.”

“What nonsense is this?” Robert exclaimed. “
Nothing
can be proved against me. I am innocent! Innocent! The jury declared me so! They said it was an accident! An accident! Is that not enough to satisfy anyone? Am I to be blamed for Amy’s clumsiness and stupidity for the rest of my life?”

I sighed, shrugged my shoulders, and shook my head. “I am afraid we mere mortals are a fickle and suspicious lot! But I have a small gift for you to welcome you back; just a little trifle. When I was my sister Mary’s prisoner, confined under house arrest at Woodstock, I once took a diamond ring from my finger and carved these words upon a windowpane:
Much suspected of me, nothing proved can be
. You might take that as your new motto. I give it to you freely, Robin—may it stand you in good stead in the years to come. I think it shall most aptly define your existence from now on.”

Robert just stared at me. “Surely
you—
you who know me best, my beloved friend since we were eight years old
—
don’t believe … You
do
!” He emitted a wounded gasp at the look on my face. “You do! You think I killed her!”

I shrugged lightly. “Not with your own hands perhaps.” I gazed down meaningfully at his strong, powerful fingers, adorned with several fine rings, including a large sapphire that had once belonged to my father that I had given him. They were rough and callous and long accustomed to gripping hard a horse’s reins, but I also knew them to be gentle and most skilful at caressing, yet I could well imagine them closing around a woman’s fragile neck and squeezing the life out of her. “But you may have paid someone else’s hands to stand proxy for yours, to keep the blood off your fine lace cuffs, fastidious creature that you are, and even if you did not … there are
many
ways you can kill someone, as in a love affair or a marriage in which the love has died and the thoughts and affections have turned to another. So yes, Robert,
I do
think you killed her, though not in a blatantly obvious manner that can be legally defined as murder; so your neck is safe. But, I fear that, in the eyes of the world, you will ever be suspect, and you must accept and accustom yourself to that fact, make peace with it or go mad with frustration as you futilely rage against it, though you can never change it. As for myself”—I touched my breast—“I would be a
fool
to ever take such a man as my husband. I will not go to bed Queen Elizabeth and wake up plain Lady Elizabeth the next morning. You are not worth a kingdom to me, Robert, and the title of Lady Dudley is poor recompense for a lost crown. But I pray that you do not take my words as a
personal
slight, for no husband is worth England’s loss to me. And if, perchance, some obliging friend of yours, or one of those surly brutes you have follow you around, armed to the teeth with weapons, thought to do you a favour by ridding you of the encumbrance of your unwanted and ailing wife, well … they have instead done you a
grave
disservice; no amount of polish can ever remove the tarnish from your reputation.”

“No!” Robert insisted. “No! I don’t believe that! You are mistaken; none of my men would ever harm me!
She
did this just to spite me, to ruin me! God damn her to Hell, as all suicides deserve, because she didn’t just destroy herself, she destroyed
me
also! She took me down with her!”

“May God bless and keep her!” I retorted. “For she saved me—and England—from
you
!”

I paused before one of the many fine, silver-framed Venetian looking glasses that adorned my wall and patted my hair, woven through with ropes of creamy pearls, with long ringlets cascading down over my shoulders to my waist.

“Observe my gown, Lord Robert,” I said, sweeping my hand down over the tightly laced bodice and full skirt billowing over a stiff, conical farthingale, the black satin adorned with jewel-encrusted serpents and ruby red apples representing knowledge and temptation, and a dense shower of pearlescent pink and white apple blossoms that wafted down over it from bodice to hem. “Mr Edney!” I called, startling Robert with another familiar figure, a man whose bills he had been complaining about for ten years. “Would you bring my mantle please?” In the silvered glass I watched Robert’s face, almost laughing as Amy’s tailor reverently draped about my shoulders a black satin mantle embroidered with hundreds of staring, unblinking blue green eyes, the
exact
same colour as Amy’s had been, and a number of delicate pink-flushed ears, each wearing diamonds and pearls, each one like a milky teardrop.
“How beautiful!”
I exclaimed. “You do fine work, Mr Edney; we shall have another, in orange, perhaps, with eyes of many colours. You see, Lord Robert?” I met his gaze in the glass. “I am the eyes and ears of my kingdom; I know and see all.” From between my breasts, I lifted the golden pendant that had fallen there and laid it outside my bodice. It was a conjoined
AB
that had belonged to my mother, worn, just as she had worn it, suspended from a rope of pearls, but I didn’t tell anyone what it meant to me—that was my private secret. The
A
represented not only
Anne
but
Amy,
and the
B
stood for both
Boleyn
and
Beware
.

I turned from the glass. “Where is my fan?” I inquired.

“Here it is, Your Majesty.”

Robert started and nearly jumped out of his skin, wincing and uttering a sharp “Damn!” as he whipped his head around sharply, forgetting his sore neck, to behold the stooped and aged form of Amy’s maid, Mrs Pirto, emerging from the adjoining room to reverently offer me my fan of dyed green ostrich plumes.

“Thank you, Mrs Pirto.” I smiled and rested my hand on her arm for a moment as I accepted it. “I can see that your lady was well served.”

Robert did not know it—and there was no reason he should; he had already informed Mrs Pirto that her services would no longer be required—but I had told Cecil to see that Mrs Pirto’s service to Amy was well rewarded and that she was able to live out the rest of her life in comfort. Given her age, stiff knees, and gnarled hands—signs I knew all too well, having seen them creep up on my dear old nurse, Kat Ashley—she was likely to encounter great difficulty in finding another position, and also, given the infamy and notoriety attached to her last position, to be pestered and harassed by curiosity-seekers.

“Have you been reading your Chaucer while you were away, Robert?” I inquired of him, smiling as, bewildered by my question, he shook his head. “I know you are fond of him, particularly ‘The Clerk’s Tale’. I know you had your lady wife copy out the tale of Patient Griselda
many
times for your pleasure and her private instruction. There is a passage that I recall and find
most
fitting to your present circumstances:

“I mean
Walter
!
”—
I smiled apologetically at my blunder
—

“Is it not amazing how words written so long ago can be so apt in the present day?” I mused aloud as I headed to the door, to make my way to the Presence Chamber. “Oh, and, Robert”—I paused upon the threshold—“one more thing. I said I loved you, but I lied. Opium,” I added pointedly, “plays strange tricks upon the mind.”

“You don’t mean that—” he began, but I did not wait to hear the rest of what he had to say; it would have made no difference anyway.

In the Presence Chamber, seated upon my throne, with my court assembled to see the much-despised Robert Dudley elevated to the peerage and invested with the title of Earl of Leicester, I had the patents of parchment brought to me and bade Robert come forward. But as he knelt before me, I suddenly bent and took from the scabbard at his hip his own jewel-hilted dagger and used it to slash the fine, creamy parchment to ribbons, whilst Robert’s face, aghast and open-mouthed, his eyes wide and bulging with horror, went as white as the document I had just destroyed, and my courtiers, depending on their feelings for Robert, gasped, appalled or delighted, smirked, or endeavoured to stifle their laughter. “I shall not have another Dudley in the House of Lords, since this family tree has sprouted traitors for three generations,” I announced. And then I leaned forward and patted Robert’s cheek consolingly. “No, no,” I said as though I were soothing a child, “the bear and ragged staff are not so soon overthrown!”

A verse then came into my mind, half-remembered from a dream, and, thinking it particularly apt, I shared it with my court as I sat back, well-contented, against the cushions of my throne and plied my fan:

The chant was readily taken up, the men of my court, Englishmen born and bred and foreign visitors alike, stamping their feet or banging the ends of their staves upon the floor, and the women slapping their folded fans against their palms or clapping their hands as they recited it over and over again, the words rippling with malicious glee down the ranks as Robert, in a rage, too furious to speak—and what was there to say anyway?—stormed out. But he could not escape; the verse tauntingly followed him as he went, eagerly taken up by the servants and carried mouth by mouth through the corridors, formal rooms, and kitchens, then out the doors into the courtyard and on to the stables, where Lord Robert’s horse awaited.