Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (17 page)

Douglas Sheffield assumed center stage masterfully, metaphorically speaking. She pulled her chair over near the fire and settled herself into it so that the glow of its flames did the kindest of things to her already lovely features. I rose from my chair, walked over to the large bed, patted out a spot for myself, and perched on it comfortably, able to look Douglas right in the eye. Amy and Lettice, allowing for Douglas’s histrionic tendency, remained in the background sans any apparent resentment.

“Let me guess, Douglas,” I said. “History is well aware of your affair with Robert Dudley and the son you bore him. The two of you may or may not have surreptitiously married. The truth about that has never been definitively established because of your inability to furnish evidence of the marriage during proceedings to establish your son’s legitimacy. Surely you did what any desperate woman who was anyone did back then; you summoned Cecil.”

“Wrong on both counts, Dolly. I was never desperate, and I never had occasion to summon Cecil.”

“So Cecil plays no part in your story, Douglas.”

“Wrong again, Dolly! I may never have summoned William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to my assistance, but recognizing my resourcefulness, he most certainly summoned
me
to
his
!”

The idea of a man of William Cecil’s gravitas summoning someone such as Douglas to his aid did not exactly “follow, as the night the day.” You’d think I’d have been used to such
disclosures at that point, but I have to confess I was surprised by what I’d just been told. Douglas had always seemed to me, based on her history, to be a lightweight. Of easy virtue, she was used by Robert Dudley, the queen’s at-arm’s-length lover, to fill a base need. She was then handily rejected for the next thing to come along. It was one of the oldest stories in the book, even as far back as the sixteenth century. And yet a man of Cecil’s standing had sought the woman’s assistance. I was not at all sure what to make of it, and I guess my quandary showed on my face.

“You look perplexed, Dolly,” Douglas said, a bit saucily, I thought.

I did not want to betray to her my initial estimation of her being nothing but, shall we say, unstinting generosity.

“You must be a woman of unsuspected depth, Douglas, to have had the great William Cecil as a supplicant for your time and talents.” I assumed I knew what talents Cecil might have had reason to tap her for, but did not let her know this, knowing how she felt about what happens when people assume.

“I knew what men wanted, and I knew how to deliver it,” Douglas said, looking more like her relative, the lubricous Catherine Howard, every minute.

“Surely there were plenty of other women at the court with that kind of aptitude, Douglas. What was it that made Cecil draft
you
for a mission?”

“I was a Howard before my marriage, Dolly, and the Howards were connected to the Boleyn family and therefore to the queen. A good patriot and loyal subject uses her talents without reserve in the service of the greater good of the nation and the queen.
And when said patriot is a relative of the reigning monarch, the streak of loyalty goes even deeper. Cecil knew that when he first contacted me in the early 1570s.”

“That is around the time that Gilbert Talbot went on record saying you and your sister Frances set your caps for Robert Dudley, isn’t it?”

“Talbot made that statement in 1573, I think. I started my job before that, though. I don’t believe in lollygagging around, you see; I went straight to work on the task Cecil had given me.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Of Climacterics and Tricks

“So Cecil set you loose on an unsuspecting Robert Dudley, Douglas?”

“Correct at last, Dolly!”

“Were you to seduce him?”

“I already had, Dolly.”

“Were you to marry him, then?”

“Sort of.”

“How do you ‘sort of’ marry someone, Douglas? Isn’t that like being a little bit pregnant?”

“I suppose you could put it that way, Dolly. But whatever way you put it, I succeeded at my goal. You are not the only one around here who knows how to accomplish a mission, you know.”

“But Douglas—your escapade with Robert Dudley was like a train wreck in slow motion. The affair; the letter, telling you in humiliating terms that he will not marry you because of the queen; the money offered to you to back off of your claim that actually, the two of you
were
married; your failure to prove the marriage; the birth of a son of unconfirmed legitimacy; the humiliation of Dudley sodding off and marrying someone else. None of that has the mark of the dignified, puritanical, and practical William Cecil about it.”

“It had the mark of the
desperate
William Cecil about it, though.”

“Desperate? Why was Cecil desperate?”

“He was desperate for the same reason everyone else at court was; the queen’s time of life.”

I considered the combination of Elizabeth I’s well-known volatility and the trepidations of perimenopause. Surely having hot flashes in full Renaissance kit, complete with farthingale, ruff, and floor length garments, would make the edgy Elizabeth even edgier.

“No wonder Cecil was desperate; a climacteric Elizabeth I!” I said.

“The queen was around forty by that time. It was now or never for her, if she was to ever marry and pop out an heir to the throne. You know how hell-bent on unquestionable, direct-line heirs the Tudors could be.”

“I do, indeed! Elizabeth of York dying in a last-ditch effort to produce the desirable ‘spare heir’ for Henry VII; Henry VIII’s high jinks when it came to siring a male child; poor Bloody Mary Tudor, with her late-in-life false pregnancies. They put the ‘hell’ in hell-bent; that is for sure.”

“Well, Elizabeth was not immune from the pressure that kind of precedent creates, and the strain of it was starting to tell on her. And when something told on the queen, it goes without saying that it told on everyone around her.”

“Considering the stakes in the dynastic game of the time, the ticking of Elizabeth’s biological clock must have been downright audible at court. Of course, her vanity would make it unmentionable—like the proverbial elephant in the room that no one talks about. That can’t have been easy for the folks at court.”

“I don’t know anything about elephants in rooms,” Douglas said, “but you’ve got the ticking part spot-on, Dolly. A clock ticking its way down to the inescapable end was exactly what the queen’s biological clock, as you call it, was like.”

“Issues around Elizabeth’s fertility were Cecil’s nightmare for pretty much all his career. What made him so especially desperate about it at this particular juncture?” I asked.

“No one knew the queen like Cecil did, not even Robert Dudley. Cecil had picked up on a statement or two the queen had let drop. He had reason to fear she might resurrect the idea of marrying Dudley in the hopes of popping out an heir at the eleventh hour of her youth, so to speak. And a Dudley marriage and heir were the last things Cecil wanted.”

“Then surely Cecil would have wanted you to undisputedly marry Robert Dudley rather than just have a baby by him! That would remove him from the marriage market, plain and simple!”

“My marrying him would have been nothing a divorce wouldn’t remedy. And Cecil had reason to believe that the queen, with that ticking clock of hers, had become less concerned than was her previous wont regarding the niceties, or otherwise, of marrying a divorced man.”

“Well, the illegitimate child you gave him shouldn’t have been a barrier to Dudley’s marrying the queen! Almost any man who was anybody had illegitimate children about in the Tudor courts.”

“True, Dolly. And that is why a shadow marriage was the only solution. Cecil and I orchestrated it very carefully, and, if I may say so, successfully.”

I was beginning to feel even sorrier than I already did for Robert Dudley. He and Cecil went down in history as male frenemies of sorts, but I’d had no idea of the circles the crafty Cecil had apparently run around the man. I settled in and listened attentively as Douglas, like a very pretty spider, spun her tale.

“Cecil got part of his plan from his escapade with Amy, although, of course, I had no way of knowing so at the time. You see, this plan, too, hinged on a potion.”

“Cecil’s apothecary must have been one busy man.”

“He didn’t use just any apothecary, you know. He knew that the man for the job would have to be able, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to keep the whole affair hush-hush. A man merely bribable with filthy lucre would not do at all. It needed a man of patriotic principles, a man who would go to the wall for the queen. And there was really only one such man with the requisite qualifications.”

“And he was?”

“Doctor Dee.”

“Of course! Who would he be but Doctor Dee?” I said, wondering why it had not occurred to me immediately that it must have been him. My mind went back to my last visit here and to some information I had received from Ann Boleyn. Cecil’s doings and his calling upon Doctor Dee to assist him with them made all the sense in the world.

Doctor Dee was one of the most fascinating men of the Elizabethan era, a diarist whose “almanac,” as he called it, put Pepys’s diary in the shade. At least it did if you have a taste for the strange and wonderful. Dee was Queen Elizabeth’s astrological adviser, selecting for her the most propitious of coronation days—given the way the reign turned out, a job well done, for sure. He also advised the queen as physician, scientist, and magician. Mathematics, hermetics, alchemy, and navigation were among Dee’s strong suits. And lest you think Dee was one of
those boring, nerdy, scientists, think again—he was not above a little wife swapping, at least when he thought that the angels had ordained it.

“What sort of potion did Dee concoct for you, Douglas?”

“The potion was not for me, Dolly. It was for Dudley.”

“An aphrodisiac, perhaps, to facilitate your plan?” I cringed a little as I recollected some of the things the Elizabethans considered to have aphrodisiac qualities: sparrow brains, prunes, chicken tongue, ruff starch. And of course, the ubiquitous lizard, which might have been known as skinks for skanks.

“The potion was part aphrodisiac, although I thought that was just overkill, myself. I had complete confidence in my abilities on that score. Cecil said he didn’t want to take any chances, though.”

I admired Douglas’s aplomb and faith in her charms and in fact agreed with her regarding the unlikelihood of her needing chemical assistance in the seduction department.

“So if the potion was only part unnecessary aphrodisiac—what was in the rest of it?”

“A sedative and an amnesiac,” Douglas answered, “and a little something to dim the wits.”

I looked at Douglas; she was making some clothing adjustments. She shrugged her shoulders, making the neckline of her gown go even farther off the shoulder than it had started out. She tugged at the waistline of her dress, ostensibly to straighten the girdle at her waist but effectually tugging her plunging neckline a little lower while taking a deep breath in and holding it for a bit.

I felt even sorrier now for the horned up and stupefied Robert Dudley; he must have been putty in Douglas’s able hands once he’d quaffed that potion.

Chapter Forty-Eight

A Team on the Same Beam

“Let me see if I have this straight, Douglas. Cecil was all for capitalizing on your relationship with Robert Dudley. When you had made sufficient inroads in that direction to facilitate Cecil’s plan, he provided you with a no-fail potion. How, when, and why, exactly, did you make use of it?”

“In the winter of 1573, my liaison with Dudley was moving along nicely. I pressured him to marry me, as directed by Cecil. Dudley, of course, refused to do so.”

“A very lengthy letter Dudley wrote to you to that effect has gone down in history, Douglas. It is as pusillanimous as it is long, in my humble opinion. The letter states—eventually—that you can expect no more from him than the on-the-side affection you had thus far enjoyed. ‘And therefore ye first, I must this conclude, that ye same I was at ye beginning the same I am still toward you, and to no other or further end can it be looked for.’ And then he suggests that you marry elsewhere. Not the most sensitive of men, was he; veritably ‘a flesh-monger, a fool, and a coward’!”

“He wasn’t the most concise of men, either. Has that marathon epistle of his really survived the ages?”

I assured Douglas that it had. “Don’t feel bad about it, Douglas. It makes him look at least as much a wanker as it makes you look a pitiful reject.”

“I told you that he was all mouth and trousers, Dolly! I was pressuring him to marry me, but he had no way of knowing that marriage with him was actually the last thing I wanted. I
wanted
him to think me a pitiful reject. I wanted him to think that I had taken the slap in the face of that letter meekly, accepting it for what it was. That lulled him into a false sense of security and set the scene for my implementation of the plan. In terms of the drama, Dolly, that letter provided me with motive, in Dudley’s eyes, for what followed.”

“What did follow, Douglas?”

“I arranged a tryst with Dudley—yet another in a long line of them. He had no reason to believe that this one would be any different than the others. Once I’d arranged the tryst, I got word to Cecil to send along the potion he had procured from Dr. Dee. He sent the potion to me, along with five able-bodied assistants.”

“Five able-bodied assistants? Really?”

“Well, four were able-bodied, and one was rather elderly and frail, but who’s counting, Dolly?”

“I’d have thought you’d want to keep the number of participants in a plan such as this as low as possible. You know—to reduce the possibility of word leaking out. I’d have thought the fewer involved in it, the better.”

“Well, four of the assistants were already well tried in such doings and found to be sterling and entirely dependable about keeping their tongues.”

“Were they high-level members of Cecil’s coterie? Or perhaps members of Walsingham’s world-class espionage machine?”

“I don’t know how high-level the two strongmen were, but they were definitely henchmen of Cecil’s. Cecil trusted them to assist me with my undertaking, and I trusted his judgment. I later learned that they were the same two he had entrusted to do the
hatchet work on the Amy Dudley crime scene. They’d let nary a peep about that escape their lips.”