by Jeane Westin
“You are that, Bess. I know it even when you look at other men . . . like Kit Hatton.”
Wrenching herself more upright, she said: “And I know it when you look at other women. Do not think that I am not watching every time, that my heart—” She stopped her mouth with her hand, knowing her words gave him too much power.
“You must go now,” he said, smiling up at her.
She saw the first hint of dawn creep around the drawn tapestries on the windows. “Yes, I must leave,” she agreed, and slid from the bed, arranging her gown and hair, fluffing her flattened neck ruff.
His voice was low and breaking. “What if you did not have to leave . . . never had to leave?”
“I must wait for that in heaven, Rob.”
She turned in the doorway for one last look.
“Perhaps my sinful ways will keep me from heaven,” he said, his brilliant smile wavering.
She drew herself up straight with the help of the doorposts. “Then, my lord of Leicester, you must mend your ways, for I refuse to be without you.”
It was a hot September day that year of 1574 when the widow Baroness Douglass Sheffield arrived at Richmond Palace to answer the queen’s summons, the mullioned windows of the royal antechamber casting diamond patterns on the marble floor.
The baroness, pale and with faltering steps, as if she walked to her scaffold, knelt three times as she approached Elizabeth, seated on a small dais with the royal cloth of gold raised above her head. Only one of the queen’s ladies, Anne, Countess of Warwick, stood behind her, ready to serve.
“My lady Douglass.” Elizabeth greeted her heartily and noticed with admitted delight that Douglass had not quite regained her slender figure.
“Majesty,” Douglass said, kneeling again in a too-tight gown.
“We give you belated commiseration on the death of your husband, Lord John. How cruel he did not live to find joy in his son.”
“Yes . . . most cruel, Majesty, in a lonely inn where I could not nurse him,” Douglass said, at last gathering her courage to raise her face to the queen.
“And you named the boy John, after his father?” Elizabeth watched her as she would watch a chained young bear being baited by a larger bear many times champion in the arena, watched her eyes dart to every corner, but nowhere finding any escape.
“No, Majesty.”
“Not John? What name, then?”
“Robert.” She bowed her head and the name was almost buried between her ample milky breasts.
Robert! How dare she be so forward, so barefaced?
“It is an old family name, Your Grace.”
Oh, no . . . a new name, I’ll wager.
“I wish you delight in young . . . Robert, is it? . . . my lady, and I will not stay you at court. You may return north to your brother Lord Howard of Effingham’s manor as soon as your carriage is readied.”
“My dutiful thanks to Your Majesty.”
She was almost at the doors and moving fast.
“Oh, my lady,” Elizabeth said, fixing her nearsighted stare on Douglass’s face. “Tell me, is there any truth to the report that you have married the Earl of Leicester?”
The woman’s knees began to buckle before she could straighten them. “None, Majesty . . . I . . . I am a widow in mourning for . . . for my dear husband.”
“We are certain that my lord of Leicester will say the same, will he not?”
“Yes, Majesty, exactly the same.”
“We must send young Robert a christening gift. It will follow soon, my lady.”
“My humble thanks, Your—”
“Yes, yes . . . Douglass, you may retire.”
Lady Douglass backed the last two steps to the antechamber doors, almost stumbling in her haste to leave her queen.
“Anne,” Elizabeth said softly after the doors had been closed.
“Yes, Majesty, I am here.”
“See that she is sent a basin for her babe.”
“Silver or gold, Majesty?”
“Neither, we think.”
“Neither?”
“Pewter. It is fine enough.”
Anne hesitated. “Aye, Your Grace. I will make it happen.” She started for the door.
“You think me cruel, Anne?”
Anne turned and curtsied. “It is not for me to think anything . . . but to obey my queen.”
Elizabeth sighed. Not even Anne could understand, for she did not know what a queen must endure in silence. “We will be alone until the supper hour.”
Anne closed the doors quietly.
Elizabeth removed a vanilla comfit from her pocket and nibbled on it to sweeten the acid taste of treachery in her mouth. Walking to the fireplace, which had burned low, she pulled a letter from underneath a pile of warrants to be signed.
The letter was addressed to Douglass in Rob’s familiar hand. All letters sent from the palace passed through Walsingham’s office, and a clerk eager to gain his queen’s good opinion and perhaps special favor had carried it to her in secret. He had gained a gold pistole, but not her good opinion. Who could trust him?
Elizabeth had read the letter once, silently. Now she read it aloud so that her ears would believe what her eyes saw.
“‘My dear Douglass.’” Then there were salutations and other greetings. Get on with it, Rob.
We are not legally married. There are no witnesses, no priest to be found. Thus you must put aside any idea that you will be the Countess of Leicester and cease from calling yourself by that title and demanding its privileges. Yet know that I will always care for you and in time acknowledge my son.
You must think it a marvelous thing that forces me thus to the ruin of my own house to refuse a legitimate heir when I have none and am not like to have one. It is simply for the queen’s favor and love that I do this, for as I have assured you, I would utterly lose both if I were to marry. Nor will I shirk my duty to you and young Robert, but I offer you seven hundred pounds per annum if you would marry one of the suitors you have so far declined for my sake. It would not be honest for me to forbid you marriage with another. If you marry, you shall find me a most willing and ready friend to you and your husband.
Robert, Earl of Leicester
At that moment the door opened and Kit Hatton announced: “My lord of Leicester, Your Majesty.”
“Ah, yes, my lord of Leicester, come in. I have something of yours.”
Rob walked quickly to her and knelt, his head bowed. “You have my heart, Majesty.”
Worry was written in his face. He had surely heard that Douglass had been called to the queen and he feared to wait for a summons, wondering every moment what the queen knew. He need wait no longer. She held the letter out to him.
“We believe this belongs to you, my generous lord. We suggest you send it by a safer courier.” She was satisfied that he paled. “If all my earls had to pay so much for their bastards, they would soon have to mortgage all their lands.”
“Bess . . .”
“No, Rob . . . not this time.”
“You are ordering me from court?”
She felt her throat closing and feared that she might give way to tears like some ordinary woman. “No, my lord, stay and be witness to the consequences of the disloyalty you have wrought. We wonder, my lord, how many furrows you plow in our court.”
Robert moved closer, bent and kissed her slipper.
She trembled to remember other times when he had done so. “Leave me,” she ordered.
“I can never leave you.”
Elizabeth walked from the room into her privy bedchamber, leaving him before she tasted mixed salt tears, some sad, but some of joy, finding their slow way down her cheeks to her lips. He truly does not love her.
CHAPTER 16
HOME TO WANSTEAD AND LETTICE
EARL OF LEICESTER
Christmastide 1586
Wanstead
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, rode at the head of a small entourage of twenty men through the thick carpet of
fallen leaves on the edge of Epping Forest and came out onto the sweeping lawn of Wanstead, his country manor.
The formal knot gardens were sharply outlined in a dusting of white snow to show their careful patterns, and the gardeners had diligently cleared the wide carriage road leading to the entrance, which he had recently made grander with marble columns.
The sight of Wanstead for the first time since his return from Holland did not bring him the happiness it once had. Since his Noble Imp was taken from him, he had dreaded Wanstead’s empty, echoing halls and rooms once filled with the laughter and play of his boy, now gone from this earth.
Yet he was as pleased as any landed lord to see his country manor well tended and must remember to compliment Lettice, who was strict about the servants’ duties, as she was with everyone . . . except her young son, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, who had grown to young manhood instilled with his mother’s sense of frustrated privilege. The boy was a secret credit to his own blood in every other way. Yet he feared for him under the influence of Lettice, who was determined he get the recognition that she lacked.
Had the love he bore his queen forced his wife to become so grasping and now firmly intending to achieve everything through this impressive older son that her husband could not give her? He sucked in a deep, steadying breath; he could see no way to give her what she truly wanted, since he had never had a choice but to love Bess.
Lettice had never forgiven him for not marrying her when she had first become pregnant by him. Had that cost him his young Imp’s life? It was a suspicion he did not often allow himself, but he could not always escape creeping doubts or the words of Dr. Dee’s angel. He tightened his knees against his horse’s flanks to speed the animal. The sooner there, the sooner away again and back to court, back to his queen.
He accepted that he would have no legitimate heir now, one that he could own before the queen, court and country. He had two living sons who carried his first name, though not his last. One Robert from his liaison with Lady Douglass Sheffield and another Robert, now a young man of almost twenty, his earlier son with Lettice, the pregnancy that had forced her marriage to Lord Devereux, Earl of Essex. Both sons carried other men’s surnames. They were fine boys, but he could not claim base sons and give them his name and title, hoping eventually for a legitimate heir. Now, his youngest Robert, his beloved Imp and rightful son, was gone and the Dudley name had died with him. Since his brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, had no children, Robert would bequeath his title, Earl of Leicester, to young Essex, as Lettice wanted. He would give her that.
To avoid the great hall from which he could hear the sounds of rollicking music and shouts of young laughter from Essex and his friends, he walked to a side door and took the back servants’ stairs to his chambers off the grand gallery. Then he threw off his fur-lined seal coat that kept rain but not cold from his body. He sat at once in front of the fire, hoping to warm his bones, which ached from hours in the saddle. He closed his eyes and waited for Tamworth to remove his boots, though he often looked to his door as if expecting to see his Imp run through it to clutch his knees. Would he never escape this mourning?
“My lord, if you are weary, I will send to tell your lady that you will not attend her. The continued and late sessions of the council—”
“Nay, say nothing. I would greet our guests . . . later. Bring me spiced rum and I will change into better clothes and go down.” He would have to make a pleasant appearance before telling Lettice that the queen had commanded his return the next day. That Bess spared him from the court for one day of Christmastide she considered generosity enough. He laughed aloud. The queen would never change and in his heart he thanked God for that. At her side in a royal palace was his natural place, and he knew it, as did Bess. Though Lettice would never accept it in her great jealousy of the queen’s ability to command the Earl of Leicester and bring him running.
He drew a large diamond ring from the pocket tied about his waist and looked at it again. It had value enough for the queen. Lettice demanded equality in his gifts to her, or she tossed them aside. Would he ever be able to appease her anger at being second-best in his life?
He turned the ring this way and that, catching the glow from the fire and watching its lights dance against the walls. His wife would love this stone so great in size that she would have difficulty bending her finger. She would be forced to leave it extended for all to see and for a time she would be at peace with him. As he grew older, he longed for a house of tranquillity.
Tamworth returned with his rum and knelt to heat it over the fire, while Robert thought of Lettice’s finger extended to draw all admiring eyes to her diamond and laughed aloud.
Tamworth turned a puzzled face to him. “Are you so happy to be away from court, my lord?”
“Always the country air refreshes my spirit. The queen would not have her aching heads and lung miseries if she were not breathing the noisome air of London and Westminster.” Robert frowned. There were times when Tamworth became a bit too knowing. “And why would I not be happy to be home and away from my heavy duties?”
“No reason, my lord,” his servant muttered, offering him the heated rum. “Though I would wish you had more rest from your cares.”
“The council will meet at Whitehall again tomorrow afternoon and I will be there in my place, as always.”
Tamworth dressed him with freshly sponged, perfumed and brushed clothes.
Robert liked the new, longer, tighter trunks and beribboned garters now all the fashion, much warmer against the wintry breezes sweeping through the halls of Wanstead, despite a chimney in most rooms.
Escaping Tamworth’s brush, he descended the staircase toward the great room below. He heard Lettice’s laughter. . . . The other one, he thought, remembering Uriel’s words, although they were never far from his mind. He had tried to push what had been said in the scrying mirror out of his mind. Yet those words came back to him whenever he was with his wife. He had tried not to divine what the angel had meant, thrusting doubt from his mind. He could not live with the suspicion that his wife had killed their only legitimate son. She was ambitious for her older son, the Earl of Essex, and wanted him to have Leicester’s earldom, too, but only a monster could . . .
After their young son’s death, Robert had named his nephew Philip Sidney as his heir, but he had been lost in Holland. Now, Lettice plagued him to name Essex, so he would give her that.
His stomach gripped again, and not from his old ailment, but from the awful suspicion that he tried to push away, though it returned like one of the bouncing Spanish balls from the New World. The black-beard explorers said the natives’ ball game had ended with a human sacrifice. The gripping came again, harder this time.
God’s bones! He must guard his wandering mind, lest it drive him out of his wits.
He was so deep in such dark thoughts that for the first time he did not stop on the stairs to admire his paintings, everywhere hung on the walls in elaborate gilt frames. His last inventory counted sixty paintings here at Wanstead, with many more at Leicester House on the Strand and even more at his manor of Kenilworth. Only the queen owned more paintings, a balance he carefully maintained. Bess didn’t like her lords rising above her in any way and was quick to show her stinging disfavor if they did, and her disfavor, once shown, could last a lifetime, as Lettice had learned to her sorrow.
He smiled, remembering the young attendant who had worn a gown better than Elizabeth’s. The next day the queen had donned the dress and paraded about. “Is this not a fine gown?” she asked the lady.
“It is too short for you, Majesty.”
“Too short for me and much too fine for you,” the queen snapped.
The young lady never had worn the dress again.
The sound of happy young voices and music, feet pounding out a country dance on the polished oaken floors of his great hall, greeted Robert at the turn of the stairs. He moved forward quickly and gracefully, showing them that his knees were s
till young. The musicians saw him first and halted their lutes, harps, drums and citterns to offer him a trumpet fanfare. He walked down the line of bowing dancers toward Lettice, warmly acknowledging his stepson Essex and Christopher Blount, his blond young friend, then row on row of handsome and wealthy mischief makers not yet in their majority. His countess delighted in their youthful company and attention. Had she bedded any of these young fools, as rumor suggested? At first, he had dismissed such foul gossip, knowing all beautiful women were suspected of wantonness. Though her daughters did not carry his name, their connection had been close enough for the always-eager gossips.
Lettice smiled at him, flanked by her beautiful Devereux daughters. Both were married and beyond her control, beyond even the control of their husbands. Penelope was wed to Lord Rich, but lived openly with the aptly named Lord Mountjoy. Dorothy was said to be a party to raucous evenings at the Cardinal’s Hat, a brothel in Southwark. They had achieved the station in life that Lettice wanted for them and then had thrown it away in riotous behavior. No wonder his wife wanted better for her son, Essex.
An enormous blackamoor servant dressed in new gold-trimmed finery stood behind Lettice’s chair holding a bowl of apricots, considered the most efficient aphrodisiac next to asparagus. Robin was dismayed at such a wanton display.
“Welcome, my lord husband,” Lettice said.
He must change his disquiet into a handsome gesture, lest he face her wearying anger when he announced his intention to stay but the night. Though there was no real attraction left between them, Lettice wanted everyone to think Leicester was still dazzled by her.
She held her hand out for his kiss, which he dutifully gave, slipping his gift onto her finger, where its sparkle put to shame all the candles and torches in the great hall.
For once, she was speechless, and he was pleased. Perhaps he would escape her usual harangue against the queen’s exclusive use of her husband’s time.