by Brandy Purdy
Why was everyone, including Robert, so quick to forget that he had come a-courting me, that he had sought me out? We were in love when we married, at least I believed we were—we, not just me!—and though I can in the end only speak for myself, I know that with all my heart I loved Robert Dudley. How was I, at only seventeen, and in love for the first and only time in my life, supposed to know that it wasn’t real? And why was all the blame heaped upon my shoulders to bear and all the pity and sympathy given Robert? Why? Why?
He was not with me when my father died. There was no one there to hold me, except Pirto, when, with a cheery smile and a song on my lips, I went in to bring him his breakfast tray. It was my birthday, and even though I knew he would not remember it, I had prepared a special breakfast for us with a small apple and raisin cake sprinkled with cinnamon for us to share. And I wore the pretty pink dress he always smiled at the sight of, taking it for new each time and telling me how pretty I was, teasingly asking if I was wearing it for my sweetheart. “Indeed I am!” I would always say, and I would hug and kiss him. “I am wearing it for my best sweetheart!” When I found his life had fled, my knees collapsed, and I fell down by his bed, shaking my head, quaking and sobbing “No!” over and over again. I bathed his cold, lifeless hand with the warmth of my tears, begging him to come back to me, willing the warmth of my tears to restore life to that cold, dead flesh, wishing with all my heart to feel him stir and his other hand to reach out to caress my hair and to hear his voice, just one more time, speaking kind and comforting words, full of a love that was still there, rooted deep, even though he had forgotten it. Pirto found me thus, and when she tried to tell me he was gone and I must come away, I clung to him and wept all the more, begging and sobbing, “Don’t say it, Pirto! Don’t say it, and then it won’t be true!” I don’t know how she ever managed to lead me away.
The next thing I remember is being gowned and veiled in black, hugging his prayer book tightly against my heart and walking at the head of the long, solemn procession, leading the mourners and Ned Flowerdew and the other seven men who bore the big leaded coffin to the church. My eyes were so swollen and bleary from crying, I half feared I would stray from the road and fall into a ditch. I remember laying a bouquet of buttercups and a lock of my hair tied with one of my blue silk hair ribbons on Father’s chest and bending to kiss him good-bye before the lid was shut. And then, it was like a coffin lid was being closed upon me, and I fainted dead away. Ned Flowerdew, I was afterward told, carried me in his arms all the way back to Stanfield Hall and upstairs to lay me on my bed.
Robert wrote that it was all for the best. It was, he said, “a mercy,” that my father’s last years were like having a baby perpetually trapped in an old man’s body, and instead of weeping I should rejoice that he had been “set free from this undignified and demeaning existence.” He said that it was one of life’s great tragedies when a man’s body outlived his mind.
Though I saw the truth in my husband’s words, I found little comfort in them, and I wept and mourned my father without my husband’s arms to hold me. My father’s love had been the only pure, true, and lasting love I had known in my life, and, even though his memory was gone, I remembered. And while he lived, Father was my living reminder of that love, but now that he was gone ... that love was also dead and buried, and there was no one left to love me.
Nor was Robert with me the following spring when my mother died. The doctor said there had never been anything really wrong with her, that other women suffered the same dislodgement of the womb that had accompanied my birth and went on to live happy and normal lives with only minimal discomfort, but she had taken with great zeal to the role of a pampered invalid and had indulged herself to death. “Lying in bed eating sweets and wondering ‘What will I wear next?’ can hardly be termed healthy living,” the doctor declared without a drop of sympathy.
As I had no claim to Stanfield Hall—it was, along with my mother’s other property from her first marriage, my stepbrother John’s rightful inheritance—I withdrew to dear, decrepit old Syderstone.
To my surprise, Robert arrived soon afterward, leading a lively but nervous snow white filly prancing along willfully, tossing her silky mane, behind him. I thought she was the prettiest horse I had ever seen, but when I reached out to pet her, Robert slapped my hand down with his riding crop, raising a stinging welt on the back of my hand, and ordered me to never again come within ten paces of her. He said she was being schooled for a very special owner, and he would brook no interference from me. “You will not spoil this, Amy,” he said firmly, slapping his riding crop down onto the flat of his leather-gloved palm. “By Christ and all His saints, you will not ruin this!” So I kept my distance, though every day from my bedchamber window I watched Robert putting the pretty white horse through her paces. He took greater pains with her than I had ever seen him take over any other horse, he put her through her paces with a gentle but masterful hand, he petted and pampered her, feeding her apples and carrots and bits of sugar, and making sure her white coat shone like glossy satin and her mane and tail like the purest white silk. And he would go out and spend the whole night in the stable with her if that nervous beauty gave the least sign of feeling sickly.
Later, he lined up all the dairymaids and servant girls and, walking up and down before them several times, like a general reviewing his troops, eyed each one slowly up and down before he finally chose one—a tall and slender-as-a-river-reed, auburn-haired girl named Mollie—to assist him in turning the white horse into the perfect lady’s mount.
I confess, I was hurt by his choice. Why did he not choose me, his own wife? I knew how to ride. Many a time he had ridden out with me keeping pace with him on my sweet brown mare Nut-Brown Maid, and he well knew, having seen for himself, that I was a competent horsewoman who had never taken a serious tumble and could hold my own in the saddle. And if it was a matter of breeding, I was more of a lady than Mollie, I was Sir John Robsart’s daughter, and though I was not as polished and grand as the diamond-bright ladies of the court, I was not a milkmaid born of peasant stock or on the wrong side of the blanket either.
Many a time I disobeyed Robert’s edict and crept too near, anxiously wondering if there was a more carnal reason behind his choice. And if, perchance, he caught a glimpse of me, he would fly into a rage and chase me off, brandishing his whip, causing Mollie and the stableboys to smirk and titter as I fled from the barrage of insults my husband hurled after me.
One night in our bedchamber I confronted him, with accusations and tears, accusing him of being unfaithful, of betraying me with Mollie.
I had seen the way he held her close and they pressed their bodies together as he lifted her down from the saddle. The way her arms stayed about his neck and he clasped her tiny waist. If it had been all business, surely he would have kept his distance and set her feet on the ground much sooner; there was no reason at all for them to linger in a lovers’ embrace. And there was no rational reason to do with riding lessons that would excuse her burrowing her bosom against his chest, or Robert’s pressing his loins against hers like that. Nor could I see any need for him to reach under her skirts whilst she was in the saddle. None had ever dared such when I was learning to ride, and I, like many a maid, had had a handsome riding master who made my girlish heart flutter. I might be jealous—aye, that’s true—but I was not a fool!
But Robert merely laughed in my face. “If I want to tumble an ignorant country bumpkin who is as stupid as a pumpkin, why should I look elsewhere when I am already married to one? Why should I set my sights even lower? That would be like fucking a halfpenny whore with no teeth and the pox on top of a dung heap!”
I flinched away from him; I hated it when he talked like that, using such ugly, vulgar words. When they came out of his mouth, so sharp and angry like arrows, they made him ugly too.
“Then why did you choose Mollie?” I demanded, still smarting from the words that stung my heart like a lash.
His words real
ly could be as cruel as a whip. In my heart, I still clung stubbornly to the memory of the boy he had been, so exuberant and kind, even as I wept for the man he had become. Yet the hope never died that the sweet boy would triumph over the cruel man and emerge from this hard shell with its elegant enamel and fashionable veneer he had created for himself and glossed with the varnish of ambition. Even I knew that softness and vulnerability were fatal if one aspired to rise high at court. Time and again I implored him to “forget it all when you’re with me,” to break the shell and let his true self roam free, to give himself, and us, a respite from that hard pretense. But Robert would always shrug me off and claim not to know what I was talking about. “You talk nonsense,” he would tell me. “Unfortunately it is the only language you are fluent in.”
Robert blew like a bull, clearly annoyed at having to explain something to someone he considered a simpleton. “If you really must know, she best resembles in build the one I am preparing the horse for. She is tall, not short, and her hips are as slender as a boy’s, not full and round.” He put his hands on mine, clasping their curves through my skirts, digging in hard. “And her breasts don’t jiggle like a pudding when she walks and rides.” As he spoke, he glanced down at my bosom. “So don’t carry on like it’s a slight against you, because it isn’t, Amy. I know you are more of a lady than Mollie is. But you cannot understand how important this is! Everything must be perfect!”
Then he bent his head, kissed the creamy mounds of my breasts above my bodice, and hoisted my skirts, making me forget the cruel words with the nimble ministrations of his fingers, nuzzling my neck and laughing softly as I squirmed and sighed in his arms, and then he bent me, facedown across our bed, and loved me hard, like a stallion mounting a mare.
Yet when next Robert stayed the night in the stables, I crept out with a platter and tankard and an extra blanket, thinking only to be kind and see to my husband’s comfort and perhaps tempt him into inviting me to stay the night with him. My knees were trembling a little at the thought of making merry with him in the hay of a horse stall, when I heard Mollie’s high, shrill giggling and, mingling with it, my husband’s low, throaty laughter, followed by a series of cries, sighs, grunts, and groans that betrayed exactly what they were about, and it had nothing to do with nursing a colicky horse.
Softly, I sat the platter and tankard down outside the door, and, feeling suddenly chilled to the marrow, I wrapped the blanket ’round my shoulders and returned to the house. Though we both knew that I knew, when I next saw my husband, he said nothing of it beyond thanking me for the refreshments I had so thoughtfully left outside the stable door, and neither, to my shame, did I; I meekly accepted his thanks and left it at that. I screamed and wept and raged inside my soul, when I should have done so aloud. I should have banged my fists upon his chest and confronted him, but, like a coward, I kept silent and tried to ignore it and pretend it wasn’t true. All men strayed and dallied—it was “the way of the world,” I had heard my mother and stepsisters say many a time when they talked amongst themselves—so why should I expect Robert to be any different?
So I said nothing. Instead, the next night when he sat by the fire, seeming so morose and gloomy as he watched the flames, I came and knelt before him with a tray upon which sat two small bowls of custard and a plate of apple tarts with a generous helping of cinnamon baked in and great dollops of cream on top. I was hoping he would remember. The last time I had knelt before my husband with such a repast, he had laid me bare upon the bed and upended the bowls of custard over my breasts and licked them clean, until my nipples were revealed, glistening like cherries, and after we loved, we lay together and fed each other the apple tarts.
Robert merely glanced at the tray and then at me and shook his head before he turned his eyes back to the flames.
“You overindulge yourself with sweets, Amy. You should learn to control yourself; you are getting fat,” he said.
I gave a wounded cry and sat back on my heels, crestfallen, still clutching the tray. Robert had always loved my curves, the fullness of my breasts, bum, and hips. Was he now comparing me and finding me wanting beside the tall and slender Elizabeth?
“Once upon a time never comes again, does it, Robert?” I asked softly, sadly.
“What?” He turned and stared hard at me, his annoyance unveiled.
“I was just remembering the way we were, how happy we used to be. Don’t you remember the last time I brought us custard and apple tarts?” I asked hopefully.
“Of course I do,” Robert said in a voice sharp and crisp. “I am unlikely to forget a night I spent crouching over a chamber pot with a torturous, griping bellyache when I would much rather have been in bed asleep.”
“Liar!” I cried out impetuously, forgetting myself, for what he was saying wasn’t true at all, I remembered; it had been one of the happiest nights of my life! “We made love, and you—”
Before I could finish, Robert’s booted foot flew out and kicked the tray from underneath, and I found myself sprawling flat on the floor with custard, crumbled tarts, and broken pottery all over my face and chest.
“I am your husband!” Robert roared as he towered over me. “Don’t you dare call me a liar!” he added as he stormed out the door.
Where he slept that night I never knew for certain, but I could easily guess.
Although it is pointless and does no good, sometimes we can’t help looking back upon our lives and trying to pinpoint the precise moment when it all went wrong. For me it happened on November 17, 1558, a day when frost still lay upon the ground, and the trees stretched their branches up to the sky in naked supplication, begging for new green leaves to clothe them.
While Robert and I lay together, warm in our bed, naked skin to naked skin, nestled tightly and bundled beneath the blankets to ward off the nip of November, Queen Mary was breathing her last, wasting away for want of her Spanish prince. Poor Queen, I sometimes thought to myself, how it must hurt her to know that the people who had once loved her were now praying for her to die to make way for another, the one they saw as the flame-haired beacon of hope, her very own sister—Elizabeth.
We bolted awake to the ringing of church bells. I snatched up my night shift from the floor where Robert had thrown it the night before.
“Praise God, Bloody Mary is no more!” Robert crowed as he sprang out of bed and ripped off his nightshirt and flung it high in the air. “She’s dead! Dead at last! God has answered our prayers and sent us our Elizabeth! Elizabeth is now Queen! I must go to her! Help me dress!”
I tried to do as he asked, but I only got in the way.
Fear flooded my heart as I watched him running about, snatching up and just as quickly throwing down various garments. Once, he turned to me holding up two doublets and asked whether the forest green velvet was too somber or the mulberry velvet too gay, but before I could answer, he had flung them both away, pronouncing me useless as he did so, and snatched up a multihued velvet one that looked like a somber version of a fool’s motley, a patchwork of deep red, gold, green, and blue.
I reached out and caught hold of his arm, but Robert slapped my hand away. “Little fool, let go of me; I go to make my fortune!”
All haste and frantic jubilation, his face aglow with the most radiant smile I had ever seen on him, Robert was so anxious to be off that he didn’t even sit down to pull on his boots but tugged them on by hopping first on one foot and then the other. I had never seen him so happy before. Without a backward glance at me, he raced downstairs, taking the steps two and three at a time in great, leaping strides.
I ran after him, calling out to him, begging him to wait, and making quite a pitiful spectacle of myself before the servants’ startled eyes. The pease-porridge kersey gown I had hastily thrown on gaped open in back and drooped from my shoulders so that I had to constantly pull it back up, and I had thrust my bare feet into the first shoes I could find—a pair of fancy raspberry satin slippers with diamond-encrusted berries on the toes—and my
hair was a wild, sleep-rumpled mess flying every which way like a storm-swept haystack.
But Robert ignored me, hell-bent on reaching Elizabeth at Hatfield, to remind her who her real friends were, and he was deaf to my cries. My importance had been diminishing for quite some time, and now, with a plunging sensation in my stomach, I felt it hit rock bottom. Henceforth, Elizabeth would always be first, and I would always be last.
Out in the courtyard, even as I slipped on the ice and fell, skinning my hands and knees, Robert leapt nimbly into the saddle of a black stallion, to which the proud white beauty was tethered by a lead.
As he galloped off along the road, I ran after him, shouting his name, waving my arms, blood trickling from my scraped palms, but he never once looked back.