The Queen's Governess (39 page)

“Ah, better than I am faring, for I’ve lost my appetite as much else. Sit, please, both of you. I was told of your visit.”

“Can we not let in some light and air?” I asked.

“Let in the light—well, yes, that is what the jurors are doing even now, are they not?” He walked to the window behind his desk and yanked the brocade curtains apart. Sunlight flooded the room; we all blinked. John took a chair against the wall, though hardly out of earshot. Perhaps he thought the man was unbalanced or dangerous, but I thought he only looked beaten, a mere shadow of his exuberant, confident self. His hair was unkempt, his usually immaculately trimmed beard shaggy. He wore a plain white shirt under a worn black leather jerkin, no fine fig of fashion today.

“Her Grace sends you this—it’s a poem, my lord,” I said, taking a chair at the side of the desk while Robert dropped into the chair where he had been sitting. He reached for the paper not eagerly but warily and set it before him without opening it.

“Best read in private, I warrant,” he said. “Is she casting me to the dogs?”

“Only a guilty ruling can do that, I suppose,” I said.

“Yes—I suppose. So, she sends her dear friend Kat Ashley to tell me what?”

“To ask if you know anything about your wife’s demise or who might have wanted to harm her.”

“God as my judge,” he cried, slamming both fists into the desk top and leaping to his feet, “does she suspect me too? Then I am doomed indeed!”

John stood when Robert did, but then, when Robert slumped down again, I heard John sit. I was tempted to rephrase the question, to soften it somehow, but this man was the cause of much pain and sorrow, whether or not he was somehow guilty of his wife’s death.

“I had naught to do with Amy’s death, obviously not directly, since I was at court, but not indirectly either. Please assure Her Grace of that.”

“I will.”

“Actually, I think, if it is ruled a murder, that it was more likely set up by my or the queen’s enemies, who knew I—even she—might be blamed. My rivals at court who detest how far I have risen so fast in her goodwill, even the Catholics, who would like to have the queen dead in Amy’s place.”

“That is, I suppose, a possibility.”

“And, Kat Ashley, there is another possibility,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning forward across the desk on his elbows. “That someone who had been warning her, trying to turn her against me, someone with newfound possessions and power, might have hired someone to dispatch Amy so that I might be blamed—and make the queen back off from me. Perhaps someone who had a position to lose if Her Grace wedded me and made me her closest confidant. Perhaps someone who closely serves the queen but does truly not have her happiness at heart.”

My eyes widened. I feared my heart would pound out of my chest. I stammered, in a whisper so John would not pounce on the man, “You—you are accusing me?”

“Or Cecil—or both. I know you detest me and want me gone. But accusing? Only pondering the possibilities, since you asked.”

“You are demented! Blame yourself for this mess, maybe blame the queen, but not me.” I rose and John strode over.

“On the other hand,” Robert went on, slumping back in his chair as if he’d said naught amiss, “the fact that Amy insisted everyone else in the house go to the fair that day indicates she may have wanted to be alone to—to do the deed herself,” he said and his voice broke. “She was in pain from the tumor in her breast. And, obviously, distraught to be living away from me, though I explained to her my destiny to help this queen, to earn the Dudleys’ way back from my father’s and my treason against Queen Mary and . . . hell, for all I know, Amy found the only way she could to keep me from the woman I will always love and mayhap now can never have!”

To my amazement, after that outburst, he broke into sobs, though without tears. His shoulders heaved; like me a moment ago he could hardly catch his breath. Still, I feared, now that John must have realized what the man had said to me, that he might leap on his better and shake him until his teeth rattled. When John clenched his fists, I put one hand on his rock-hard arm to restrain him and told Robert, “You may leave Cecil and me out of this spider’s web you have slyly spun, or be damned to you!”

I tugged John away. We left Robert like that, bitter and shattered. I both pitied him and hated him. I did not mention to Elizabeth that he had insulted me, accused me and Cecil of so much as the possibility of arranging his wife’s murder and his demise.

The next day the jurors ruled that Amy Robsart Dudley’s death was
fatal mischance,
that is, accidental death. Robert would eventually be allowed back to court, but not, the queen vowed, as anyone but another adviser. I could only pray that my intelligent Elizabeth had learned her lesson. As a woman ruling alone, she could emulate neither her father nor her mother, but must tread her own, careful path through the pitfalls and snares of love.

WHITEHALL PALACE

 

 

 

P
erhaps from guilt for her previous behavior, perhaps to forget

Robert Dudley, the queen threw herself into hard work and a regimented daily routine, with me right behind her almost each step of the way. She seemed to need me differently now, as if she were young again and I were a comfort or security to her. It reminded me of the time she was just out of leading strings when she lost a small blue silk coverlet she fancied and was so sad until it was found.

Not only I but Cecil was hard-pressed to keep up with her energy. We were both relieved that Robert had not been welcomed back to court with open arms, though the queen had allowed him to return and still showed him every courtesy. Yet she avoided being alone with him as if he had the pox.

Each morning Elizabeth rose early and went for a fast walk that left her ladies stretching their strides and me breathless. Together, the two of us had a meager breakfast in her privy chamber, for she preferred not to eat in public unless there was a holiday or official banquet. Next, she tended to signing warrants and deeds, then oft presided over a meeting of her Privy Council. She was at odds with them and Parliament about marriage: even Cecil urged her to wed for the good of the kingdom.

“Look at this, Kat! Just look!” she cried one winter evening as she stormed into my withdrawing chamber, where I was resting and writing. She smacked down in front of me [right on top of a page of this very narrative of my life] a formal petition from Parliament, urging her to marry as soon as possible in order to safeguard the succession. “How dare they?” she demanded, jabbing her index finger so hard up and down on the document that the hinged lid of the ring from her mother flew open and flopped up and down before she snapped it closed.

“They dare,” I told her, “because they are to advise you, and they fear great upheaval if there is no legitimate Tudor heir.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” She began to pace, her skirts swishing and belling out. Since she was on her feet, I started to stand. “Oh, Kat, do sit when I invade your own privy chamber. Since you are not remonstrating, shall I think you are on their side in this?”

“In an objective way only. Subjectively, I understand your fears and feelings.”

“If so, you are the only one! Tell me then—tell me the reasons I shall never wed, no matter how many of these pleas and petitions they send me now or forevermore.”

I put my quill on the table, sat back in my chair and said, “Firstly, because you have seen women—queens, even—die in childbirth.”

“Granted. My kingdom needs me as much as I need it—my people. I shall remain a virgin in truth and in my people’s eyes. I shall be wedded only to them. Secondly,” she went on, as if I did not answer her quickly enough, “men conquer women when they couple. I vow, men like to be on top in all ways, and I cannot have that. Then, once they are sated, they move on. Can you deny it?”

“I cannot deny it with your own father, but . . .”

“But what? Did not you tell me your own father paid no heed that his second, younger wife could have done away with your mother?”

“Yes, but I was thinking about my husband. John—”

“Your lord is a rare man. Now, if I could find one like that, who is strong in his own right but lets me do what I must in the way of duty . . . one who coddles me and does not try to rein in or bridle me . . . Strange, is it not, that both John and Robin are so good with horses?”

My head jerked at that swift change of subjects. She had hardly breathed Robert Dudley’s name to me since he’d been back to court. She shook her head as if to clear it and, pacing again, plunged on. “Besides, I saw how painful marriage can be for reasons besides losing control of one’s self, one’s power. My sister loved King Philip with all her heart, and he could not wait to get her with child, only so he could leave her and return to his Spanish mistress. Mayhap all princes and kings are like that.”

She was flinging gestures now, walking in circles around me and the table. “You were right that my own brother-in-law Philip wanted to seduce me that day we met and he looked me over as if I were a filly to buy. Worse, poor Mary would scream from her grave if she knew he quickly sued for my hand when she was gone. A necessary business, political business for a king and queen, that is what marriage is.”

I finally got a word in: “My dearest, I do not like to hear you so bitter and jaded.”

“Realistic, more like. Kat, I want to rule alone. Only alone will I be safe. Robin thinks you speak against him and that’s why I am publicly warm but privily cold to him, but I have tried to tell him no, that I am acting on my own and will never wed. Well, indeed, enough said.”

She reached over my shoulder, picked up the parliamentary petition and tore it top to bottom.

 

 

 

As for the rest
of the queen’s hectic, exacting schedule, in the afternoon and evening she filled her time with receptions for foreign visitors, conversing in official Latin or in whatever was their foreign tongue. I saw more than one continental ambassador’s jaw drop in grudging admiration of the young, slender queen. Also, she spent extra hours, as she had not for years, practicing the lute or bending over the keys at her virginals. She drove herself hard, and I knew why. So it shocked me when she announced that she was going to elevate Robert Dudley to the peerage as Earl of Warwick, his father’s forfeited title, and that anyone who cared to see her sign the papers in her presence chamber was welcome to attend.

“What’s her game here?” Cecil asked John and me
sotto voce
as others filed in, whispering, where the queen was already seated at a desk she’d had carried into the center of the room. Robert, in elaborate peacock blue velvet doublet and hose, stood before her, preening as if he’d just inherited the entire kingdom.

“We are as taken aback as you,” I told Cecil.

“Has she hoodwinked us?” he muttered, almost to himself. “She pretends to blow cold toward him but yet intends to have him so she must elevate him first? As the old adage says, ‘Fickleness, thy name is wom
—’”

I frowned at him, but Mildred appeared and gave him a good elbow in the ribs which stopped him midword. “I’ll not hear such disparagement of strong women from you, my love,” she told him. “Kat, how heartened I am to see you again,” she cried, and hugged me, then John.

The four of us stood near the doorway as the queen began to read the petition aloud. The clusters of courtiers soon quieted. “Ah,” she declared in a dramatic fashion, lifting the parchment with the wax and ribboned seal as if to gaze close quarters at it, “papers for the earldom. And yet those in such lofty positions must be fully trustworthy and fully loyal. Were not your family once traitors against the Tudors, Lord Robert?”

Silence fell with a thud. Staring at her aghast, Robert cleared his throat. “Your Majesty, I—Can you not just sign without publicly punishing me for things far past?”

“And not so far past. I fear this might be premature or even reckless, so at least I admit publicly when I have misstepped.”

Just as she had pounced in private on the parliamentary petition, she shredded the warrant, but with a little penknife from the desk, stabbing it, ripping it. With John, I fell back toward the door to the hall with Mildred while Cecil pushed his way forward.

“You’ll not shame me so!” Robert roared at her.

“I’ll do as I will,” she shouted back. “Hell’s gates, there will be but one ruler here, and it is this queen!”

Robert spun away and made for the door. Some stepped back from his path, others bumped his shoulder. He said nothing else to anyone but glared at me and muttered in as menacing a voice as I have ever heard, “You put her up to this, and you will pay.”

 

 

 

Robert still hung
about the fringes of the court, but he was seething. I avoided him, though John said he’d had words with him twice, and once Elizabeth in a snit sent John briefly away again for disparaging words against Dudley. “I know how to calm all sorts of wild steeds but not Dudley or the queen,” John told me once.