Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (15 page)

“I wish it had been like that in my lifetime!” Douglas said, and I could tell that she meant it.

“Can’t have been easy for a man in your day to be called Douglas among all the Henrys, Edwards, Jameses, Johns, and Roberts. To be a girl called Douglas must have been even more difficult—like the song, “A Boy Named Sue.”

“Tell me about it, Dolly!”

The best thing to do seemed to be to sing it, so I did the song as much justice as I could. When I got to the last line, of course, I sang, “‘And if I ever have a son, I think I’m gonna name him…’”

“Douglas!” said the third of the ladies, giving said Douglas a friendly little shoulder massage as we all had a good laugh. “You are quite the songstress, Dolly, at least when it comes to talking blues rather than actually singing them.”

“And you are clever, Amy,” I said to her, “at least when it comes to jokes you can see coming from a mile away.”

I was addressing, I was sure, the subject of one of the Renaissance era’s great unsolved mysteries: Amy Robsart.

“You sound surprised that I might be clever, Dolly.”

“I am, Amy; you see, history has painted you otherwise,” I said, hoping that I wasn’t being too brutally honest.

“History,” Amy said, “can go and hang!”

“You aren’t nearly as execution-sensitive as most are around here, are you, Amy? Interesting, considering the circumstances of your—umm—demise,” I said.

“Good lord! History hasn’t decided that I was hanged, has it?”

“No,” I said to Amy, as gently as I could. “It has not.”

Mind you, hanging is about the only means of extinction that has not been posited about Amy Robsart down through the ages.

Chapter Forty

A Little Mystery in the History

I call her Amy Robsart, but of course her married name was Amy Dudley. She was the mysterious first wife of Queen Elizabeth I’s true love, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Amy has been largely portrayed as a country bumpkin, a mistake of Dudley’s youth—a downright inconvenience as his love affair with the queen developed. Amy languished in the country all her life, reportedly with ailments both mental and physical. Theories as to the cause of her untimely death continue to emerge; given the bizarre circumstances of it, this is not surprising. Amy’s end could be said to be the original empty house mystery; she was found in said empty house dead, at the bottom of a staircase.

I took a moment to consider Amy’s dress and demeanor. For all the soulfulness of those eyes, the overwhelming impression, on closer look, was one of a down-home mix of horse sense, sass, and sweetness. Amy apparently had never strayed far from her farmer’s daughter roots among the Norfolk gentry.

Her outfit, while very flattering to her, was simpler and more flowing than those of her companions. It was, in fact, of an earlier Tudor vintage, looking more like Henrician than Elizabethan fashion. She wore a French hood and caul over her dark hair, and her dress featured the exaggerated bell sleeves I’d seen so much of on my last visit here. Her neck was innocent of any type of ruff whatsoever.

“I love the vintage look of your outfit, Amy,” I said. “It brings back fond memories of my time here with the earlier Tudor generation. I suppose fashion changes came and went a bit more
slowly where you were, in the country, than they did at court.” As I spoke, Douglas adjusted her décolletage a bit, and Lettice primped her gilding.

“Life in the country is not all that behindhand, Dolly,” Amy said, standing up for the virtues of the simple life. “My outfit was quite stylish during my lifetime. You seem to forget that death took me out of the fashion picture, so to speak, a mere two years into the reign of Elizabeth I.”

I admired the aplomb with which the probable victim of one of history’s notorious murders could discuss her own death, which occurred well before she was thirty. I got a bit teary-eyed as I thought about it.

“You’re awfully emotional, aren’t you, Dolly?” Amy asked. “It certainly isn’t what we expected of you. Based on your behavior during your last visit here, we were told that you were not the sensitive type at all.”

“I don’t usually cry so easily, it’s true,” I said. “It’s just that I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately, and things will erupt, you know.”

“You mean Blanche and Kat got carried away and laced your corset too tight?” the curvaceous Douglas asked, no doubt from the perspective of plenty of personal experience with girdle overflow.

“I shouldn’t think so!” Lettice said, looking at my midsection and then back to her own waspish Boleyn waistline.

Douglas proceeded to massage my shoulders sympathetically. There was no doubt that she had a soothing, comforting way about her.

“I was referring to pressures back in the real world,” I said sheepishly.

I was more than a little bit embarrassed at being unable to cope as well with day-to-day career and family stressors as Amy did with abandonment, adultery, and a violent death. However, Douglas’s minimassage did me good, and after a few moments, I was closer to my usual form.

“I must say, Amy, that I admire your—what should I call it—sangfroid?”

“That’s exactly what I’d call it,” said Lettice.

“Why so impressed, Dolly?” Amy asked with what looked to me like genuine humility. “Facing life, up to and including its end, on life’s own terms; surely, there is nothing so exceptional about that.”

“I guess you are right, Amy, since you lived life down on the farm and out in the country. Close contact with the visceral life must have been inevitable. Animals husbanded, hunted, and butchered; one’s pet rabbit eventually out of the hutch and into the hasenpfeffer; chickens running around with their heads cut off. Maybe that’s why it’s not so difficult for you to talk so handily about your own murder.”

“Dolly,” said Amy gently, coming to my chair, “I know how emotional you are right now, and I know that a blow to your scholarly cred is going to sting. But you see, dear,” Amy went on, taking my hand, “I wasn’t murdered at all.”

Chapter Forty-One

More than One None-Too-Cheery Theory

“Your husband didn’t put a hit out on you, Amy, to get you out of the way so that he could marry the queen?”

“No.”

“The queen didn’t put a hit out on you so that she could marry your husband?”

“No.”

“Cecil—Lord Burghley—didn’t put a contract out on you to frame your husband for your murder, thus making him too hot to handle as a possible king consort for Elizabeth I?”

“No.”

There was my pet theory, pounded into the dirt.

“The French royal family did not assassinate you to allow Elizabeth I to discredit herself so fully by marrying your widower that she would lose her crown to Mary, Queen of Scots?”

“No.”

I was out of theories and shrugged, holding my hands outward to indicate as much to Amy.

“I was not murdered. I can’t put it any more simply than that, Dolly.”

My scholarly cred had taken a minor body blow but certainly not a TKO. I was aware of the other, less accepted theories on Amy’s death. I tackled the toughest one first, with all the tact I could muster.

“There are those who theorize, Amy, that you ended your own life in despair. Some say that depression over your husband’s
affair with the queen caused you to throw yourself down that now-famous staircase in your country home.”

“Wrong again, Dolly.”

“Others say you despaired because of a major clinical depression; severe melancholia, it might have been called in your day.”

“Not so, Dolly. I had the odd sad moment, of course—especially when Auntie Flo was due to come around—but nothing out of the ordinary in terms of melancholia.”

“Well, personally, Amy, I always thought the final theory that remains about your death was the weakest.”

“What is the final theory, Dolly?”

“It is that your death was because of a malignant illness. That perhaps your fatal fall had to do with a cancer that started in your breast and traveled to your bones. That a bone in your spine, weakened from tumors, may have broken, causing you to fall and then tumble down the staircase.”

“You are right about that theory being weak, Dolly. It is not just weak; it is incorrect. My death was not accidental.”

“Well, if it wasn’t assassination, a despairing suicide, or disease or accident that landed you at the foot of that staircase with a broken neck—what was it?”

I settled back into my chair as Amy Robsart proceeded to “murder impossibility, and to make what could not be, slight work.”

Chapter Forty-Two

The Rustic and the Prick

“Really, Amy, in deference to Dolly’s scholarly feelings, perhaps you should begin your story with the fact that some of Dolly’s surmising has an element of truth to it,” Lettice said kindly.

“It couldn’t hurt to throw Dolly a bone,” Douglas agreed.

“What part of my surmising was the most accurate?” I inquired.

“Well, Dolly dear—the part of the story that you found the least likely was really at the beginning of it all. I did suffer breast cancer, and I knew, in the weeks before my death, that my days were numbered. Cancerous lumps were appearing in other parts of my body. I knew that painful and certain death awaited me.”

“What an enormous reality to have faced when you were so young! And of course, you had to face it more or less alone, didn’t you?”

“Yes. My husband had the queen’s eye and, I was certain, her heart. I was the only thing that stood between him and the achievement of his ambition and dearest wish—marriage to the queen—and I knew it.”

“It must have been dreadful for you, Amy, being abandoned that way. Stuck in the country, denied the glory and the hurlyburly of the court, because your husband was in hot pursuit of another woman—one who just happened to be the queen.”

“Dolly, my dear, sorry to cause you embarrassment, but I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong again.”

“I’m getting used to it,” I said humbly. “Don’t try to spare my feelings. Just tell on, please, Amy.”

“I loved the country life, Dolly; the simple pleasures, the dignity of honest folk living honest lives, the neighborliness, all that was familiar to me. I loved it far too much to wish to give it up for the cutthroat atmosphere of the court. My companions will forgive me—I know they both thrived on the intrigue of it—but such was not for me. I’d have felt like a slave in the arena at the Coliseum if I went to court, wondering who or what was going to come after me next.”

“And the loss of your husband’s affections, Amy—how did you feel about that?”

“Early in the marriage, Robert and I were fond enough of each other in our own way, it is true. But it never evolved further than that. He was away in London, which he loved, far too much of the time, and I resisted his importuning me to join him back at the beginning. You see, I loved the country life far more than I loved Robert.”

“Well, you know what Shakespeare said: ‘God made the country, and man made the town.’”

“I think you will find that that was Cowper, Dolly,” Lettice pointed out.

“Of course, once things really took off between Robert and the queen,” Amy resumed, “his importuning for me to join him at court ceased. Once I was able to let go of the minor blow that it was to my pride, it was a relief, if truth be told. My husband was so happy at court, so very in his element. I was happy in the country, in my own element. My husband was able to pick daisies with the queen, so to speak, but not able to take it much further than that because of his marriage to me.”

“You sound quite satisfied with the whole arrangement.”

“I was! I had the life I enjoyed and was accustomed to. And I considered that I was doing a duty to queen and country just by my existence. My slender self was a like a bulwark between Elizabeth and my husband. As long as I was alive, and as long as I was Robert’s wife, he could not marry her.”

“He could have divorced or annulled you, couldn’t he?”

“He could have. But with the experience Elizabeth had had with being a child born into a marriage that was dissolved controversially, do you really think she’d set herself up to re-create the same situation for a child of her own? You know how different things were in our day, Dolly, when it came to divorce and the legitimacy of children, especially royal children. And even a simple country girl like me knew that the queen marrying my husband would have meant loss of prestige and political embarrassment for both her and our nation. With every day that came and went, I felt that I was doing a solemn duty as subject and patriot just by being Robert’s loving wife and biggest obstacle.”

“Let me get my ducks in a row here, Amy.”

“Dolly! Are you a country girl too?”

“No, Amy; I mention the poultry strictly metaphorically. To recap, you were totally copasetic with your position as a betrayed wife.”

“Totally, as you say, copasetic, in spite of the weight of responsibility that I bore, being the life that stood between my queen and the ruin of her reputation and her reign.”

“Did you not fear for your life, Amy? You know the kind of thing—‘will no one rid us of this cumbersome first wife?’ People stepping up to the plate to do a bit of assassination to further their rulers’ ends was certainly not unheard of in English royal
history. And you know what they say: ‘Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.’”

“My husband hadn’t the goolies to order my assassination,” Amy said simply.

At this, Lettice nodded knowingly, as she adjusted the ruffles at the end of her sleeves.

“Robert was all mouth and trousers, when you came right down to it,” Douglas added.

“Surely mouth and stockings, in your day?” I said, doing what I could to repair my scholarly reputation.

“I had no fear of attack on my husband’s part,” Amy said. “And I trusted my queen, even if she was besotted with my husband, not to shed innocent blood by having me killed or by inciting others to do so. My fears began once I became ill. As the cancer spread through my body, I became weaker and weaker and suffered pain. The mental anguish was even worse. I knew that with my death imminent, my ability to be the bulwark between the queen and my husband was coming to an end. Then I knew fear. Fear for my queen and for her glorious future. Fear for my country and its future. So I did the only thing I could think of to do under the circumstances.”