Rival to the Queen

by Carolly Erickson

  I loved to take the girls into the orchards in the fall when the earliest pinkish-green apples, sweet-smelling and juicy, could be knocked down out of the trees with long sticks. One of the old farmers kept a fire going in the open air and we baked bruised apples in the embers, sprinkling them with sugar and cinnamon. Of such lovely simple pleasures was our country life made, and I relished it greatly—sitting in the swing between the great yew trees on the lawn, watching the shadow creep across the sundial, sucking the honey out of the blue salvia flowers, visiting the great black sow with her new pigs.

  I relished it all, especially sharing it with my children—but I did not relish Walter. In fact I felt a growing aversion to him.

  I grew to hate the hairy knuckles on his right hand, the way the hair stood out on his thick fingers when he counted out the coins from his strongbox in front of the fire. I hated the folds of pink skin at the back of his neck, the way he had of lifting his head like an alert predator scenting prey, the scrape of his voice, and the dull, thudding things that he said. His lack of humor. The way he looked at me with his small shrewd eyes, with a disgruntled, sulky look that said, you are an inadequate wife.

  For I had no doubt that he found me so. I had failed at a wife’s principal task—providing her husband with healthy sons.

  I had failed, and so had Cecelia, but for a quite different reason. Her husband, Walter’s second cousin Roger Wilbraham, never came near her. Unlike Walter, he had no need of more sons, his first two wives having provided him with four sons already. And, as Cecelia discovered, he also had a beautiful Spanish mistress, whom he kept tucked away in a village near his estate.

  Oh, how she cried when she found out about that woman! She complained to our father, who threatened to have all Wilbraham’s offices and incomes revoked if he did not rid himself of the other woman. But his threats were without force, because the queen refused to take the matter seriously. In her perverse way she shrugged off the entire problem, merely remarking that all men had mistresses and that Cecelia should learn not to complain about things she could not control.

  “She’s lucky to have a husband at all,” was Elizabeth’s callous rejoinder when our father approached her. “Let her bear with her lot, as the rest of us do, and not make demands.”

  Poor Cecelia was furious, and eaten up with envy. I don’t believe she really wanted children—or Roger either, if it came to that; he had a terrible temper and it was hard to see anything in him that would appeal to a woman. Certainly Cecelia was neither wifely nor motherly. She did not have an affectionate nature, rather the reverse, and she lacked the forbearance to deal with a difficult man, or the patience to nurture babies and raise boisterous boys and girls into strong, courageous adults. Yet she craved the status that being the wife of a well-to-do man and the mother of a large family conferred. She did not like being called neglected and barren. For although she was certainly neglected, it was by no means certain that she was barren, merely untouched by her callous husband, who hardly even spoke to her.

  Though I never said it in so many words, I came to believe that Cecelia was cursed with bad luck in life. I wished it were not so.

  My own share of luck came soon enough. My girls were still very small when once more I found myself with a swelling belly and became hopeful that this time I would give Walter the son he wanted. Cecelia was envious of me and stayed away, even though she lived only a few days’ ride from Chartley. My dear mother came to see me and stayed nearly a month, cheering me and encouraging me in her softspoken way, and telling me with a smile that she was sure my baby would be a boy.

  My pains came on in the fall season and I felt that this was a good omen. The fruit was ripe for harvest, the old farmer had begun cooking the fallen apples in the embers of his orchard fire and Walter, full of qualms and misgivings yet hoping for a boy, forbore to hunt even though the season was well advanced and many fine does and stags were abroad for the taking.

  I heard Walter pacing in the antechamber while the midwife stroked my belly and chanted the words of an old prayer.

  I was delivered just before dawn, and as soon as Walter was told I heard him bellow his joy. We were the parents of a son at last. He was tiny and weak, his cry was faint and he did not nurse as lustily as Penelope and Dorothy had. But he was a boy, and that was all that mattered. “Young Walter” had come to Chartley Castle, the heir to the family lands and fortune, and I, his mother, was no longer a failure in my husband’s eyes.

  TWENTY

  It was a chilly evening, with a smell of rain in the wind, and the thick gilded curtains were being drawn in the queen’s antechamber. There were only a few of us in the royal apartments, for Elizabeth was away from court for a few days, visiting her favorite Christopher Hatton at his estate of Grevemere, and she had taken all the tirewomen and most of the maids and ladies of the bedchamber with her.

  The chill in the dim rooms persisted, even after the curtains were drawn and the fires fed and we had drunk a warming posset brought to us from the kitchens. For before she left, the queen had quarreled with Lord Robert, a bitter quarrel, a lovers’ spat; both had talked in tense, angry tones and the cold, unsettling aftermath of their anger could still be felt.

  Lord Robert had been upset over Elizabeth’s ongoing flirtation with Hatton, whose dark good looks and clever jests amused and excited her, and who was younger and in much better repute than Lord Robert himself and was not burdened with a shadowed past. Elizabeth enjoyed making Lord Robert jealous, it was as if she dangled other eligible men in front of him as if to say, see here, I can marry any man I choose, I don’t have to pick you!

  To be sure, she had shown the depth of her love (for I had no doubt she loved him, in her way) for Lord Robert by creating him Earl of Leicester and giving him the magnificent castle of Kenilworth in Warwickshire along with other rich estates and lands. She had even proposed him as a husband for her close relative and rival Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, which would have made him “King Robert” in fact, just as in the title of the song the grooms like to whistle. But he still hoped to gain the chief prize, that of becoming Elizabeth’s husband. No lesser reward would do. And as she continued to frustrate him and taunt him and deny him that chief prize, they quarreled.

  They quarreled more often, it seemed to me, as the queen’s reign went on. On that chilly evening, an evening I will always remember, their voices had been harsh and assaultive and after Elizabeth left for Hatton’s estate I could hear Lord Robert stomping through her outer chambers, sputtering with fury.

  When he came into the room where I sat by myself, reading, and saw me there he paused, momentarily confused. I looked up at him, expecting to see wrath. Instead his features were distorted in anguish. He tried to disguise it, but failed.

  “Botheration!”

  He sank down onto a pile of pillows beside the fire and drew his hand across his face. It was a large, strong hand, a man’s strong hand, but it was not like Walter’s, with thick fingers and hairy knuckles. Lord Robert’s fingers were beautifully shaped, the knuckles smooth, the nails trimmed. I had always thought him a beautiful man, with a face and body worthy of a fine painter’s brush. The portraits of him that I had seen, including the miniature the queen wore around her neck, failed to capture the rarity of his looks.

  Even at his worst, as he was now, he was sublimely good-looking.

  “Botheration, Lettie!” he said again. “What gets into that accursed woman anyway?”

  I closed my book. He did not really want an answer to his question. He wanted sympathy—and relief. I felt an urge to go to him, to sink down beside him into the thick pillows, which I knew would be warm from the fire. His arms, too, would be warm. . . . But I stayed where I was.

  “You know her! Tell me! Help me understand.”

  I shook my head with a smile. “You men are always saying how impossible it is to understand a woman—any woman. You dismiss us as mad creatures, ruled by whim—or by the devil. But for what little my opinion i
s worth, I would simply say that she is spoiled, and she enjoys taunting you, and she would probably be frightened if you ever turned away from her, or became cold and distant. As long as you pursue her, she can do as she likes with you.”

  I could tell that my words intrigued yet puzzled him. He let his hands fall.

  “She would send me to the Tower if I abandoned my pursuit,” he said, but his voice was less sure than his words. He paused, then continued in lower tones. “Or if I pursued another.”

  A silence hung between us. Then he held out his arms, and without hesitation, without thought, I was in them.

  “Lettie, Lettie,” he said again and again as I snuggled against him, lost in the breathless sweetness of being pressed so close, his warm breath on my cheek, the feel of his hands on my body, the rich scent of him, a scent of sage and rosemary and wine, with a faint whiff of the stables and of leather.

  It was exhilarating, intoxicating, the feeling that ran through me as we embraced. It was as if he were taking me into his warmth as into the warmth of a burning fire, shutting out all the chill of the world outside. In the dim firelit room we were alone, inviolate, wrapped in our desire, fallen into a deep unfathomable place apart. A unique place where no one else could ever intrude.

  He caressed me with such fervor that one of the pillows fell into the flames. Smoke rose in a black pall. I began coughing.

  “The groom will come in!” I managed to say, struggling to free myself from his embrace and get up.

  “Then we shall throw him out again!”

  “But what if he should tell the queen . . .”

  Lord Robert, laughing, had jumped up and was dousing the fire with water from a pitcher. Servants did arrive, alarmed by the smoke, and Lord Robert took my hand and led me into another room. Hearing the voices of Cecelia and several of the other bedchamber ladies, and knowing they would soon be with us, I tried to adjust my disarranged clothing and bedraggled hair, knowing it was hopeless. Lord Robert stood at the window, drawing the curtains aside and looking out into the windy night.

  “Lettie! Something is burning! Don’t you smell the smoke?” Cecelia said as she burst in, taking in at a glance my disarranged clothing and disordered curls. She looked quickly around the room, seeing Lord Robert’s back as he stood at the window. She looked once again at me, with a look of mistrust.

  “Your clothing! Your hair! Were you abed? Did the smoke awaken you?”

  “A pillow seems to have fallen into the fire,” Lord Robert replied coolly, without turning around. “It is of no account.” And without glancing at any of us he walked with studied nonchalance from the room.

  I admired his ability to disguise what must have been a tumult of feeling behind a mask of unconcern. For surely he had been as lost in fervor as I was only moments earlier. Surely he had sensed, as I did—a flush rising to my cheeks at the thought—that we had crossed together into another realm entirely, a higher realm of ardor so splendid, so rich in emotion, that we would never be the same again.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Somehow the queen sensed a change in my relationship to Lord Robert, and she lost no time in punishing me for it.

  I never discovered how she found out; perhaps there was something in his behavior that betrayed us, or possibly Cecelia did or said something to give us away. We were discreet. And in truth we met rarely as lovers, our moments of secret happiness were very few, though the exquisite thrill of our meetings, the anticipation of them, the glowing aftermath of each one, brought a sparkle to my eyes and a bloom to my cheeks that no one could fail to notice.

  I told the queen that the cause of my happiness was that I had given my husband a son at last—but that excuse was soon blighted because my little Walter, never very strong, failed to gain weight and grow and before he was three months old, was in his tiny grave.

  I cannot say I mourned him. I had not really known him, as I had been summoned back to court shortly after his birth and his wetnurse and rockers had taken charge of him.

  My sorrow at his death was in any case eclipsed by my loss of my dear beautiful mother, who died at about the same time. She had been ill, her weakness for wine and ale had drained her strength and left her faint and fragile. My father, putting faith in his prayers and not in the court physicians, had not told the rest of us in the family just how ill she had become and so her death came as a shock. I did not weather it well.

  Meanwhile I was having difficulty coping with Walter, who when told of our son’s passing was very low—and then very angry. He blamed me, overlooking the sad fact that many babies did not long survive their births and many mothers as well. I was at fault, he insisted, for having created in my womb healthy daughters but only a weak son. Walter openly and wrathfully lamented having married me, and knowing my attachment to Penelope and Dorothy, turned aside from them and ignored them—or worse, derided them, calling Dorothy “young Walter” and Penelope “my disappointment.”

  His anger did nothing to impede his lust. He seemed determined to have another son as quickly as possible, and to this end he energetically took his pleasure with me callously and often. When I did not become pregnant right away he had another cause to blame me. I was unyielding, he said. I thwarted his passion. I did not love him as a dutiful wife should. He grumped on endlessly about my shortcomings, actually making things worse because I became self-conscious and tense, bracing myself against his expected assaults, both physical and verbal.

  I was sorry that our son had died, but unlike Walter, I did not yearn for another, or to be the mother of many children. Or, at least, to be the mother of many of Walter’s children. For all my thoughts, now, were of Robert. What would it be like, I wondered, to bear his sons? His daughters? The idea was delightful, but of course I told myself it could never happen. Robert would never marry any woman but the queen. And I would be Walter’s wife until the day he died—or I did.

  Much to my relief, Walter was often away, sent to Ireland or elsewhere on the queen’s business, or off in the country overseeing the planning and buying of supplies for her royal progresses. He took much pride in these tasks, and smug satisfaction in performing them in a way that pleased her. I, on the other hand, often found myself the object of Elizabeth’s displeasure, and I felt certain it was because she knew, or very strongly suspected, that Lord Robert and I were lovers.

  She slapped me when I handled her gowns clumsily. She shouted at me when I failed to keep up with her athletic dancing—she liked to dance galliards every morning, kicking and jumping vigorously in time to the quick, lively music and, when each dance ended, calling for the musicians to play another, sometimes six or seven tunes at a time. She shouted at me for having a whiny voice. She struck me and accused me of dalliance with her favorite Christopher Hatton and with Thomas Heneage, whom she had just created a gentleman of the privy chamber and who was at that time high in her praise because he pleased her by bringing green boughs and flowers into the council chamber and ordering the maids and grooms to fasten them to the walls. Elizabeth loved greenery, just as she loved the sound of birdsong and was soothed by the chirping and soft twittering of the caged birds in her bedchamber and audience chamber.

  She loved the birds—yet once, when in a fit of angry vexation, she threw open one of the aviaries and let them all fly free, flapping her skirts at them and shouting.

  How capricious she was! I thought it often, and told myself that rulers behaved in ways that baffled less exalted beings—or so my father was always saying. I knew from talking to others in the royal service that Queen Mary and King Henry had both been savagely capricious, and even young King Edward was prone to doing and saying crotchety, sour, unpredictable things at odd times and to doing cruel things to his falcons.

  I began to worry about how extreme the queen’s arbitrary, odd behavior might become, especially if she indulged, as she sometimes did, in too many cordials and became recklessly angry. If I allowed myself to dwell on this disturbing train of thought, especially at night when
I was tired and could not sleep for worrying, I imagined that Elizabeth might blame me for seducing Robert and have me thrown into the Tower, or even executed.

  I told myself that my fears were exaggerated, that I was in danger of becoming like Amy Dudley’s elderly maid Pirto, fearing dire things that would never happen. But Pirto was dead. Mistress Clinkerte had brought me the news. She had died of old age, it appeared, and a broken heart, her body found slumped over Amy Dudley’s memorial by the verger in the church in Oxford where Amy’s remains had been placed.

  Pirto! I was nothing like her, was I? Except that we both had secrets—and I worried that my greatest secret, my love affair with Robert, was already known to the queen.

  There was one way I could find out. I could look in the book she kept by her bedside. The book whose margins served as her diary. Had she written there about Robert and me? Or how she intended to punish me?

  I vowed to find out, just as soon as I could muster my courage.

  TWENTY-TWO

  It took me awhile, I dithered and held back, but eventually I went into the queen’s bedchamber—choosing a time when I was certain no one would disturb me there—and I cautiously opened the large old book she kept beside her bed.

  There was no inkwell nearby, no writing implements on the table, and the book was closed—though the clasp, when I tried it, opened easily under my fingers. For a moment I wondered whether possibly she had stopped writing in it. But as I opened the book and began to turn the thin pages I saw the familiar spidery handwriting in the wide margins. She was still recording her thoughts, the events that made up her days.