by Brandy Purdy
“Majesty,” he breathed, sweeping me a deep bow, “you honor me!”
Too stunned to speak, Robert stared first at me, then at Thomas Blount, then swept cursorily over the doctor, whom he had never even met and knew only by letter, then lighted upon his cousin again.
“You are my cousin, my man... .” he began in an accusing tone.
But Thomas Blount did not let him finish. “Aye, My Lord, I am, but I am the Queen’s man first. I serve none but God before her.”
“What nonsense is this?” Robert exclaimed. “Nothing can be proved against me. I am innocent! Innocent! The jury declared me so! They said it was an accident! An accident! Is that not enough to satisfy anyone? Am I to be blamed for Amy’s clumsiness and stupidity for the rest of my life?”
I sighed, shrugged my shoulders, and shook my head. “I am afraid we mere mortals are a fickle and suspicious lot! But I have a small gift for you to welcome you back; just a little trifle. When I was my sister Mary’s prisoner, confined under house arrest at Woodstock, I once took a diamond ring from my finger and carved these words upon a windowpane: Much suspected of me, nothing proved can be. You might take that as your new motto. I give it to you freely, Robin—may it stand you in good stead in the years to come. I think it shall most aptly define your existence from now on.”
Robert just stared at me. “Surely you—you who know me best, my beloved friend since we were eight years old—don’t believe ... You do!” He emitted a wounded gasp at the look on my face. “You do! You think I killed her!”
I shrugged lightly. “Not with your own hands perhaps.” I gazed down meaningfully at his strong, powerful fingers, adorned with several fine rings, including a large sapphire that had once belonged to my father that I had given him. They were rough and callous and long accustomed to gripping hard a horse’s reins, but I also knew them to be gentle and most skillful at caressing, yet I could well imagine them closing around a woman’s fragile neck and squeezing the life out of her. “But you may have paid someone else’s hands to stand proxy for yours, to keep the blood off your fine lace cuffs, fastidious creature that you are, and even if you did not ... there are many ways you can kill someone, as in a love affair or a marriage in which the love has died and the thoughts and affections have turned to another. So yes, Robert, I do think you killed her, though not in a blatantly obvious manner that can be legally defined as murder; so your neck is safe. But, I fear that, in the eyes of the world, you will ever be suspect, and you must accept and accustom yourself to that fact, make peace with it or go mad with frustration as you futilely rage against it, though you can never change it. As for myself”—I touched my breast—“I would be a fool to ever take such a man as my husband. I will not go to bed Queen Elizabeth and wake up plain Lady Elizabeth the next morning. You are not worth a kingdom to me, Robert, and the title of Lady Dudley is poor recompense for a lost crown. But I pray that you do not take my words as a personal slight, for no husband is worth England’s loss to me. And if, perchance, some obliging friend of yours, or one of those surly brutes you have follow you around, armed to the teeth with weapons, thought to do you a favor by ridding you of the encumbrance of your unwanted and ailing wife, well ... they have instead done you a grave disservice; no amount of polish can ever remove the tarnish from your reputation.”
“No!” Robert insisted. “No! I don’t believe that! You are mistaken; none of my men would ever harm me! She did this just to spite me, to ruin me! God damn her to Hell, as all suicides deserve, because she didn’t just destroy herself, she destroyed me also! She took me down with her!”
“May God bless and keep her!” I retorted. “For she saved me—and England—from you!”
I paused before one of the many fine, silver-framed Venetian looking glasses that adorned my wall and patted my hair, woven through with ropes of creamy pearls, with long ringlets cascading down over my shoulders to my waist.
“Observe my gown, Lord Robert,” I said, sweeping my hand down over the tightly laced bodice and full skirt billowing over a stiff, conical farthingale, the black satin adorned with jewel-encrusted serpents and ruby red apples representing knowledge and temptation, and a dense shower of pearlescent pink and white apple blossoms that wafted down over it from bodice to hem. “Mr. Edney!” I called, startling Robert with another familiar figure, a man whose bills he had been complaining about for ten years. “Would you bring my mantle please?” In the silvered glass I watched Robert’s face, almost laughing as Amy’s tailor reverently draped about my shoulders a black satin mantle embroidered with hundreds of staring, unblinking blue green eyes, the exact same color as Amy’s had been, and a number of delicate pink-flushed ears, each wearing diamonds and pearls, each one like a milky teardrop. “How beautiful!” I exclaimed. “You do fine work, Mr. Edney; we shall have another, in orange, perhaps, with eyes of many colors. You see, Lord Robert?” I met his gaze in the glass. “I am the eyes and ears of my kingdom; I know and see all.” From between my breasts, I lifted the golden pendant that had fallen there and laid it outside my bodice. It was a conjoined AB that had belonged to my mother, worn, just as she had worn it, suspended from a rope of pearls, but I didn’t tell anyone what it meant to me—that was my private secret. The A represented not only Anne but Amy, and the B stood for both Boleyn and Beware.
I turned from the glass. “Where is my fan?” I inquired.
“Here it is, Your Majesty.”
Robert started and nearly jumped out of his skin, wincing and uttering a sharp “Damn!” as he whipped his head around sharply, forgetting his sore neck, to behold the stooped and aged form of Amy’s maid, Mrs. Pirto, emerging from the adjoining room to reverently offer me my fan of dyed green ostrich plumes.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pirto.” I smiled and rested my hand on her arm for a moment as I accepted it. “I can see that your lady was well served.”
Robert did not know it—and there was no reason he should; he had already informed Mrs. Pirto that her services would no longer be required—but I had told Cecil to see that Mrs. Pirto’s service to Amy was well rewarded and that she was able to live out the rest of her life in comfort. Given her age, stiff knees, and gnarled hands—signs I knew all too well, having seen them creep up on my dear old nurse, Kat Ashley—she was likely to encounter great difficulty in finding another position, and also, given the infamy and notoriety attached to her last position, to be pestered and harassed by curiosity-seekers.
“Have you been reading your Chaucer while you were away, Robert?” I inquired of him, smiling as, bewildered by my question, he shook his head. “I know you are fond of him, particularly ‘The Clerk’s Tale.’ I know you had your lady wife copy out the tale of Patient Griselda many times for your pleasure and her private instruction. There is a passage that I recall and find most fitting to your present circumstances:
“ ‘Scandals kept spreading, and by these rumors,
he was defamed, until hate smote out love,
For murderer is not a pleasant name.
Still Robert—’
“I mean Walter!”—I smiled apologetically at my blunder—
‘pursued his shameful game,
Deeply cruel, just as he intended.
Never doubt his intentions; he did what he meant to. ’ ”
“Is it not amazing how words written so long ago can be so apt in the present day?” I mused aloud as I headed to the door, to make my way to the Presence Chamber. “Oh, and, Robert”—I paused upon the threshold—“one more thing. I said I loved you, but I lied. Opium,” I added pointedly, “plays strange tricks upon the mind.”
“You don’t mean that—” he began, but I did not wait to hear the rest of what he had to say; it would have made no difference anyway.
In the Presence Chamber, seated upon my throne, with my court assembled to see the much-despised Robert Dudley elevated to the peerage and invested with the title of Earl of Leicester, I had the patents of parchment brought to me and bade Robert come forward. But as he knelt before me,
I suddenly bent and took from the scabbard at his hip his own jewel-hilted dagger and used it to slash the fine, creamy parchment to ribbons, whilst Robert’s face, aghast and open-mouthed, his eyes wide and bulging with horror, went as white as the document I had just destroyed, and my courtiers, depending on their feelings for Robert, gasped, appalled or delighted, smirked, or endeavored to stifle their laughter. “I shall not have another Dudley in the House of Lords, since this family tree has sprouted traitors for three generations,” I announced. And then I leaned forward and patted Robert’s cheek consolingly. “No, no,” I said as though I were soothing a child, “the bear and ragged staff are not so soon overthrown!”
A verse then came into my mind, half-remembered from a dream, and, thinking it particularly apt, I shared it with my court as I sat back, well-contented, against the cushions of my throne and plied my fan:
O Bess, the knave is grown too proud,
Take him down, take him down,
Such twigs must needs be bound,
Take him down, take him down!
The chant was readily taken up, the men of my court, Englishmen born and bred and foreign visitors alike, stamping their feet or banging the ends of their staves upon the floor, and the women slapping their folded fans against their palms or clapping their hands as they recited it over and over again, the words rippling with malicious glee down the ranks as Robert, in a rage, too furious to speak—and what was there to say anyway?—stormed out. But he could not escape; the verse tauntingly followed him as he went, eagerly taken up by the servants and carried mouth by mouth through the corridors, formal rooms, and kitchens, then out the doors into the courtyard and on to the stables, where Lord Robert’s horse awaited.
“O Bess, the knave is grown too proud,
Take him down, take him down,
Such twigs must needs be bound,
Take him down, take him down!”
O Bess, the knave is grown too proud,
Take him down, take him down,
Such twigs must needs be bound,
Take him down, take him down!
As I watched him go, I wondered, did he do it? Did he kill her, by design or by an unwisely and impatiently uttered wish? I didn’t know, and I had to accept the fact that I would never really know. I only knew that I would never trust him again. My subjects’ fears were groundless, and they had been so all along; I would never marry him; I never meant to, not even in my dreams. And every time in the long years to come when I was tempted by loneliness or the human need to share, to confide and vouchsafe some small measure of trust to him, the pale specter of Amy would always rise like a ghost in my dreams to remind me not to give too much, lest I be betrayed.
He stayed with me for the rest of his life, and when he died, I locked myself in my room and wept over his last letter. I sat for days upon the floor, huddled in a corner, just like my poor, mad sister had done after Philip left her and the babies she thought growing inside her belly proved to be only phantoms born of desperate hope. After three days, I dried my tears, got up, and changed my gown and put on my pearls and a vivid, flaming red wig to hide my balding pate and the short-cropped, feathery gray orange wisps that were all that was left of my hair by then, and went on for England; my people needed me, their Gloriana, Good Queen Bess, and, the name most dear of all to me, the one my loving people were so proud to call me—“Our Elizabeth.” The passage of years had taught me, though it had never been an easy lesson, that that love truly was enough; it made every carnal passion pale in comparison. I was England’s Elizabeth, not Robert’s or any other man’s Bess; I never could be. I was not a marble statue, though I painted my aging face with a mask as stiff and white as one, but a woman of flesh and blood who lived and breathed, laughed, loved, raged, and wept, but I was also more, much more—I gave my people something to believe in; I gave them hope and courage; I fed and fueled their pride and determination; when they kissed my hands or hems, they were touching the true spirit, the pulsing, beating heart of England. I brought them a little closer to God, through me in my white gowns and pearls, my hair as red as flame; I was for them the beacon of hope that burned brightly through every trial and tribulation that troubled this small but proud nation; I blurred the lines between majesty and divinity, between the Holy Virgin and England’s Virgin Queen—Elizabeth—and that was enough. It was everything I ever truly wanted or meant to be.
EPILOGUE
Windsor Castle, London
November 27–28, 1560
Naked and soft as a velvet glove, her long-fingered, lily-white hand shed of its heavy burden of jeweled rings, caresses the great gilded bedpost, petting the life-sized carved lion with claws raised and mouth open as though emitting a mighty roar, ready to leap and tear her throat out. She lingers, just for a moment, to make certain that the purple velvet curtains fringed with Venetian gold are shut tightly. Then she draws up the hood of the dusky rose velvet cloak, her fingers plucking nervously at the satin bow at her throat, making sure the ribbons are secure; then, with her head held high, regal as a queen with Tudor blood coursing through her veins, she walks boldly to the adjoining door that leads into Robert Dudley’s chamber and enters without knocking.
Bare-chested and restless in his sleep, he lies bathed in blue white moonlight, tossing his dark head against the silken pillows and moaning softly, the coverlet kicked down around his legs, virile charms on full display, his bare limbs entangled in the silken sheet, as he lies upon his back.
This is the man she has always wanted, ever since the day she saw him, the man she wanted to marry, to ride like a stallion every night, and be mounted like a mare by, though he laughed gently at her coquettish ways and spurned and looked past her with eyes only for her cousin, Elizabeth, the frigid, icy bitch-queen who lacked the courage to face her own desires, who didn’t know how to submit to a man without being conquered by him—a secret Lettice knew all too well but was not prepared to share; instead, she would use it against her royal cousin to take the only man she truly desired. But there was another woman who stood in the way, his wife—that stupid-as-a-pumpkin country bumpkin, Amy. This was the man she had squatted naked before a roaring fire and black inverted cross for, pleading with Satan to “Make him mine!” when prayers to God failed her. For him, her delicate, soft, white fingers had touched the vilest objects, dead things she shuddered now to think about, and fashioned little wax dolls, filled with nail clippings, locks of hair bought from a servant with hair the same hue as Amy’s, and her own monthly blood, and impaled them with thorns and put them in tiny wooden coffins. For him, she had stolen a book of poisons from her cousin’s library and a single long strand of red hair from her brush, all to frighten a woman who was unworthy of him and did not deserve him, a woman who was taking too long to die but whose death might remove him from her reach forever if he attained the crown he so desired.
She stands at the foot of the bed and watches him for a long time; then she reaches up and slowly unties the satin ribbons and lets the velvet cloak fall down around her ankles. And a long white hand snakes out and pulls the sheet from him, letting it fall with a silken whisper to the floor as, stealthy, quiet, and nimble as a cat, she clambers up onto the bed, naked but for her white silk stockings and pink satin garters and slippers, and crawls up to straddle him.
His cock kindles to her touch, springing to life, and she slowly lowers herself, impaling herself upon the ardently upward-pointing arrow of flesh.
His eyes open wide. He smiles, eyes and lips radiating triumph. “Elizabeth!” he breathes, crying out her name in the utmost joy. “Oh, how I have waited, how I have longed and dreamed for this moment to come!”
She speaks not a word, merely smiles into the flaming curtain of hair that hangs down and caresses her cheeks as the ends trail down to tickle his chest.
Only when he explodes within her, grasping hard her slender hips as his seed gushes out, flooding and filling her, does she shake back her hair and bare her face.
With
a startled and outraged cry, he tries to push her from him, but she grips him tighter with her knees and plants her palms hard and flat upon his chest as she moves, rocking as she rides him, selfishly intent on her own pleasure, determined to have her way at long last, white and triumphant in the moonlight, sharp little white teeth bared in a wicked smile.
“I am the unrepentant Magdalene, not the Holy Virgin who must be venerated and adored,” Lettice Knollys says.
“Yes, you are, you little whore, you hot little bitch!” Robert Dudley says furiously as he savagely rolls her over onto her back with her legs high and straight in the air and thrusts hard inside her as if his cock were a dagger aiming straight for Elizabeth’s heart. This “hot little bitch,” her very own cousin, a woman unafraid of her own sensuality, is the perfect weapon to hurt her, and that is all he wants to do at this moment. Revenge really is sweet!
The next day Elizabeth sat by the fire and calmly played chess with Sir William Cecil, while Robert Dudley inspected the royal stables, and Lettice Knollys, in a low-cut emerald gown, sat and embroidered and exchanged gossip with the Queen’s other ladies.
“When I find out,” Elizabeth said softly as she scrutinized the board, “let it be a surprise; they think they are so clever, it seems a shame to disappoint them. Only when it is too late,” she said, as her long white fingers closed around the black knight, “will they discover how much they despise each other for what their ‘love’ has cost them. They deserve each other!”
POSTSCRIPT
Elizabeth endured, a living icon, a flame-haired, pearl-encrusted, white candle of hope, to inspire her people’s love and loyalty, the invincible and unobtainable “Virgin Queen” with the body of a woman but “the heart and stomach of a king,” wooed and courted by many, wife to none, but mother to many—every man, woman, and child of English blood. She reigned for forty-five years and died in 1603, the last, and greatest, Tudor.