He was very ill indeed. I could see it in the physicians’ faces, and in the way the bonesetter, who I had come to trust as a friend, gently took my hand and simply said, “Say your prayers, Lady Leicester. And I will add mine.”
I scented Robert’s bedclothes with cloves and citron, and scattered lavender on his pillow to help him rest. His long face was pinched and sad, the eyes sunk deeply in their sockets. He licked his lips and I helped him to drink, but his lips remained dry and cracked and he was having trouble swallowing.
His first words to me were, “Why hasn’t she come?” He had been at Wanstead for nearly three days by then, three days of pain and a slow wasting away.
“I’m sure she will, if you should need her.”
Robert’s dry lips turned upward slightly. I bent closer to hear his soft words. “What do you mean, if?”
He was quiet for a while. I sat beside him, holding his thin cool hand. He watched me, with the same ghostly smile playing at the corners of his lips. At length he spoke again. His words were more like croaks than words, but I understood him.
“Death came to the king, and the king said, ‘cut off his head!’ Death came to the maiden, and the maiden said, ‘come into my chamber, and dally here awhile.’ Death came to the poet, and the poet said, ‘I have long been expecting you, old friend.’ Then death came to the philosopher, who nodded in greeting, but said nothing. Death said, ‘I have come, O master, to learn from you.’ ”
He reached out to touch my arm. “Help me to be a philosopher, Lettie. I only ask that you be with me when the portal opens, and I lay this wretched flesh aside, and step through.”
I agreed, weeping.
He slept for hours, then woke suddenly.
“Did you know he has gout, just like me?”
“Who?”
“King Philip of course. I hope his is worse.” He laughed and dropped off to sleep again.
By the fourth day he was tossing uneasily in his sleep, crying out, delirious at times. He murmured the words “white eagle” again and again, and talked about the second eclipse of the moon, and waved away the physicians who tried to bleed him, knocking the cups from their hands as they tried to cut his arm and open a vein.
Chris stood by me through the long hours, and my children were sent for and also Robert’s base son, though he sent no message in response and never arrived.
One by one our servants came in, many of them in tears; each knelt by his bedside, and he stretched out his hand in a sort of benediction. The gentleman ushers, the almoner, the steward of our household, the chaplain, the grooms and maids, the stable boys, even the scullery maids came to speak a few words to the Great Lord, whom they regarded with a mixture of veneration and fear. It was all he could do, at the end, to muster the strength to reach out his hand to each of them. I sent them out of the room so that he could rest. Many reached out to me as they passed, and murmured a word or two. I thanked each one, though like Robert I was weary and longed to sleep.
The vigil seemed long. Every few hours Robert would wake and murmur “Where is she? Why won’t she come?” It was no good my telling him that I was right beside him, for it wasn’t me he wanted. It was her.
Once in his delirium he called out, “The horses, Lettie! The horses! Oh, the beautiful horses! They threw them all overboard! The Spanish! They drowned the fine horses!” Deep sobs rose from his thin body. Then, “My dear ones, my Bay Gentle, my Persimmon, my Roan Gallant, my Great Savoy—good gallopers from Ireland—yes—such a good pace—”
I had Robert’s elderly dog Boy brought in, and laid gently down on the bed beside him. He reached out to stroke the old dog’s head, and smiled. A little later he reached out to me.
“It will be well, Lettie,” he said, his mind suddenly clear. Then, “I thought I heard her coach.”
Lord forgive me, I lied then, knowing he could have no peace otherwise.
“But you did hear it, beloved,” I said. “She was here. We tried to wake you but you were sleeping too soundly. She couldn’t stay. She said to tell you how much she loves you. How much she has always loved you.”
Hearing this, he nodded, and laid his head back against the soft pillow, and sighed. “The portal—” he whispered. For a brief moment a light came into his tired eyes. He stroked the old dog’s head, he looked over at me, but then the light was gone, and he took his last breath, and quietly left us.
I bent my head. My dearest, my love, my heart of hearts—
My Robert!
FORTY-FIVE
It was nearly a year after Robert died that I married Chris. Frank and Marianna were married in the same ceremony, and family and servants gathered to hear us recite our vows and afterward, to join in the exuberant dancing and eat wedding cake and wish us well with shouts and toasts.
We had a simple wedding, in the chapel at Wanstead. We did not care for pomp or show; I could not afford it, Robert having left me nothing but debts and Frank, who had once prided himself on his treasure in stolen Spanish gold, having spent nearly everything he had buying ships and arms and paying soldiers at the time of the dreaded invasion by the Spanish fleet the year before.
A quiet wedding was best, for the last thing I wanted was to draw attention to my marrying Chris. There had been malicious gossip—some said it was gossip started by the queen—about me and my much younger husband. Chris was many years my junior, and looked even younger than his true age, with his splendid strong muscular body and unlined handsome face and athletic agility. It was said that he and I had been lovers while Robert was in Flanders, and that on Robert’s return, I had poisoned him so that I could become Chris’s wife. One of Robert’s chamber gentlemen swore that he had seen me giving Robert a cup of wine poisoned with ratsbane, and when I heard this (it was utterly absurd, of course) I could not help but be reminded of the ugly stories that circulated after Amy Dudley’s death.
There was another rumor as well, and this one, I confess, was partly true. It was said that I married Chris for his inheritance.
Perhaps I would have married him anyway, I will never know. But in fact, as I have said, Robert left me heavily in debt, indeed hopelessly in debt, and by a great stroke of good luck Chris’s uncle Timothy died not long after Robert did and left Chris his fortune.
No one had expected this, least of all Chris, whose lineage was honorable but his means small. Uncle Timothy had quarreled bitterly with his only son, and shortly before he died, he altered his will to disinherit his son and make Chris his heir.
To me it seemed providential, as Chris had been saying for a long time that he loved me but was reluctant to even suggest that we might marry. He often said that he had nothing to offer me but his heart—a beautiful sentiment which was, alas! quite true. But when I found myself in difficulties and he became a man of some wealth, a marriage seemed appropriate—indeed, for me, it could hardly have been more timely, for I was in dire need, and mounting distress.
Robert had been in his tomb only a matter of days when Robert Cecil, the queen’s young private secretary and the son of her venerable councilor Lord Burghley, came riding into the courtyard of Wanstead with several dozen brawny laborers and a score of large carts. Once admitted to the house—he could hardly be refused entrance, being an officer high in the queen’s service—he began directing the men to remove the furnishings.
“And what do you imagine you are doing?” I demanded.
Cecil went on with his self-appointed task. “Lord Leicester owes Her Majesty twenty-five thousand pounds. The furnishings of this house will be sold to recover a portion of that debt.”
“But my husband left this house to me.”
“That may be, but the queen—or rather the royal treasury—is confiscating the contents. If they are found to be of too small worth to satisfy the debt, the house and lands may be seized as well.”
It was no good my railing at Cecil, as I watched piece after piece of my beloved hangings and screens and tables and plate being carried out by the workmen
and taken to be strapped into the waiting carts in the courtyard. In vain I complained indignantly that the queen was heartless. That she had caused my husband pain on his deathbed by refusing to send him any word of consolation or coming to see him.
“She has been much occupied by affairs of state,” was Cecil’s curt reply as he lifted a small table beautifully adorned with inlaid woods, a particular favorite of mine, and tossed it to one of the laborers. He lifted it with difficulty, for he had little strength, being dwarfishly short and cursed with a hunchback.
“Robert served her all his life. He deserved better.”
Cecil raised his small head and gave me a calculating look.
“He was well compensated for his—services.” A low chuckle escaped his narrow lips, though his eyes held no mirth.
This slur made me furious.
“My father will hear of what you are doing this day,” I said at length. “He will not tolerate such treatment of me.”
“Your father,” said Cecil, huffing with effort as he helped to roll a magnificent Turkish carpet into a long pale cylinder, “was among those on the council voting to recover the funds Lord Leicester owes to the treasury—or rather, the funds his estate owes.” The carpet having been taken away, Cecil spat on his hands and wiped them on his hose. “Apparently you are unaware of how depleted the treasury is.”
“Or how rapacious the queen’s councilors are.”
It took a full two days for the contents of Wanstead to be unceremoniously swept out from under me, though I was not left in want or without a place to lay my head. Cecelia provided me with temporary furnishings and linens from her well equipped house, and our servants, who treated me with particular kindness in those sad days after I lost Robert, offered their own possessions, some very modest, to make me comfortable until the empty, echoing mansion could be restored to something like its former condition.
But the queen’s demands did not stop at Wanstead. She also insisted that the contents of Robert’s magnificent London house be seized as well, along with the wondrous interior glories of Kenilworth (which Robert had left in his will to his ailing brother Ambrose), and all the fine horses from our stables and other stock on our grazing lands. It was as if, instead of grieving Robert’s loss and honoring his memory, she was determined to snatch away everything he had ever owned.
To take it all from me, and leave me nothing of him except his tomb, and the memory of his love.
In the end I could do little but acquiesce, and the queen’s depredations were not all I had to face as Robert’s widow. His vast debts led to lawsuits, demands from creditors, angry quarrels with people who claimed he had wronged them or injured them in some way. Chris came to my defense, as did Frank and Rob, I had attorneys to plead my cause and when all else failed, there was Chris’s bountiful inheritance to pay at least some of the debts and appease those who harassed me.
And there was Marianna, my gentle, affectionate new sister-in-law who was tough as granite beneath the surface of her kindness and good nature, and who stood by me almost like a true sister at every turn.
Frank’s chance rediscovery of Marianna had reaffirmed my faith in the mercies of a loving Providence. How, decades after losing her and believing her to be dead, had he come across her at the very time she was in despair and in need of rescue? I thought about that strange coincidence often—though in truth it was no stranger than the timely arrival of Chris’s inheritance, and his offer of marriage to me. There was much talk, in those days, of the hand of God having delivered England from the Spanish menace. Certainly, I thought, the hand of God has been prodigal; certainly that all-merciful hand has been stretched out to Frank and to me—and certainly to Marianna.
She was no longer the slim, lithe, beautiful girl Frank had known and loved in his youth. But in her forties she was still slim, could walk briskly and for miles, and her features were pleasing. Her black hair, like Frank’s, was streaked with grey and her eyes were no longer the trusting, innocent eyes of a virginal preacher’s daughter but the knowing, somewhat world-weary eyes of a woman who had endured and survived years of poverty and pain, largely on her own.
When she and Frank had been in love, she had been living with her family in the abandoned hulk of an old ship. Then, Frank was told, the ship had been washed away in a storm and the entire family—so it was thought—had perished.
“But we had moved out of the ship before the storm came,” she confided to me one afternoon as we sat in my bedchamber at Wanstead with the warm autumn sun pouring through the tall windows. “We found shelter in an old farmhouse with a leaking roof. Oh, I was glad for that farmhouse! It was abandoned. No one ever came to turn us out, so we stayed. My father was ill and could no longer preach. My mother and I and my sister planted a garden for food and raised chickens. We had just enough. We didn’t starve.”
She looked down, and a shadow passed across her pleasant features. “It was a very hard time. One of my little brothers caught a fever and died. My oldest brother left to go to sea and never came back to us. I prayed for Frank to return but he never did. I married—though it was always Frank I loved, deep down—but after a few years I discovered that my husband already had a wife. And a cruel temper as well.”
“And you never had children?”
She did not reply right away, but took her time.
“I had a little boy,” she said, her voice very low. “He only lived for a few days. My husband—”
I raised my hand. “No, Marianna. I don’t want to hear it.”
She nodded. “No. You don’t.”
“My dear,” was all I could say. “I’m sorry, my dear Marianna.”
Clearly she had suffered much, but her manner and bearing were calm and graceful, her voice steady as she continued.
“There is more,” she said. “When you saw me on the beach below Rundle Head, and came down the hill toward me, I was living alone, hidden away, in fear that my vengeful husband might find me. I had no family left. I did not know where to go or what to do. Everyone said the world was about to end, and then I saw the Spanish ships, and I thought they would land and kill us all. I was in despair—”
“And so you jumped into the water.”
She nodded.
I reached out my hand, and she took it, smiling.
“But the world hasn’t ended, and the Spanish are gone—for now—and you and I are sisters. Isn’t it amazing?”
FORTY-SIX
“Mother! Where are you, mother? I want to talk to you!”
It was Rob’s loud, importunate voice. The voice that made people jump in alarm, or run to do his bidding. Now that he was twenty-six, and married (he had married the insipid daughter of Francis Walsingham, shortly after I married Chris), and a father, his sturdy body was beginning to have the weight of maturity. His strong voice was low and commanding.
“What is it dear?”
My tall, broad-shouldered, overbearing son burst into the room, the look on his arrestingly handsome face somewhere between a grin and a teasing leer. He had gained a reputation for roistering and bluster; I knew that he and Chris went out at night in search of the disorderly pleasures all healthy young men were drawn to. Had I been younger I might have minded. As it was I tended to ignore what my husband and son did, never doubting their love for me—though I did doubt their judgment, and at times told them so.
“There you are mother!”
Rob, for all his loud and importunate ways, was irresistible. People were drawn to him. He brought excitement with him wherever he went. He stirred things up. His strength of will, his refusal to be restrained, were a tonic, a refreshing change from the old times and the old ways. For like it or not, the queen and her aged councilors—all but young Robert Cecil—were seen more and more as decrepit relics from a previous era. Visitors to Elizabeth’s court, Rob told me, went there to admire the carefully preserved artifacts of her early reign: her old-fashioned gowns, cut in styles that made young woman laugh at their quaintness; her
caps—such caps as no woman would dream of wearing in the up-to-date l590s—her first throne, so starkly plain compared with her present throne upholstered in soft brown velvet and sparkling with diamonds and sapphires, enormous pearls and emeralds that shone in the firelight.
More and more, Elizabeth was seen as the past, Rob as the future. Though past and future had become staunch companions, and the queen had taken Rob into her inner circle as her favorite attendant, her preferred opponent at cards, her strong arm to lean on when she appeared before her subjects. Occasionally she even turned to him for advice, though he did not rise to prominence in her royal council, a fact that increasingly irked him.
Indeed the queen herself irked him more and more, the higher he rose in her favor. She was after all an old woman, with an old woman’s impatience and demands, while Rob, whom she called her Wild Horse, was a young man in his prime, answering to no demands but those of his own views and needs, and chafing at any restraints or shackles Elizabeth placed upon him.
Theirs was clearly a close relationship, but one cankered by constant strain.
“There you are!” Rob kissed me on both cheeks. I could smell his strong odor of musk and perspiration. His face was red with exertion. I ordered one of the servants to bring him a tankard of small beer and asked him whether he wanted anything to eat.
“No, mother. I have not come about food, but about you! You and the queen, that is.”
“You know she wants nothing to do with me.”
He waved my comment away with impatience.
“I am determined to bring you back to court! It is where you belong.”
“The queen would not agree.”
“God’s bones! She is cantankerous and old. She never agrees to anything! She must be cajoled—or forced.”
My son’s words made me uneasy. Why was it suddenly so important that I return to the royal court? I had never expressed any interest in returning, quite the contrary. I had no desire to be near Elizabeth, with her deepgoing resentment of me and her well-known capacity for seeking revenge and doing harm.
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