by Susan Kay
“The fool,” he heard her mutter, “the blundering dolt!”
She swung round upon Cecil suddenly.
“So! Where is he now, the bereaved husband, the merry widower?”
“I believe he is waiting for audience with Your Majesty.”
“Send him in to me.”
She dug her nails savagely into the carved wood of the chimney-piece until more than half a dozen of her scarlet talons were smashed and ragged. The sound set his teeth on edge. He stood by discreetly while she examined the wanton damage with an angry glance.
“Cecil.”
“Your Majesty?”
“There will be an inquest.”
“Naturally, madam, under the circumstances.”
“The matter will be tried in open court. Nothing is to be hidden, do you understand? If he’s responsible I want to know.”
Cecil bowed to hide the smile which hovered at the corner of his lips.
“It shall be exactly as Your Majesty instructs. I commend your wisdom, madam.”
She nodded absently and wandered away to the window, taut as the string of a bow, chewing at a broken finger-nail. After a moment she turned to look at him hesitantly over her shoulder.
“Is your wife expecting you home tonight?”
He bowed. “If Your Majesty has need of me I can easily send a message.”
She smiled distractedly and held out her hand to him.
“You’re very kind, Cecil—more kind than I deserve, perhaps. Remain at court then and I will send for you later. I would be grateful for your advice.”
He kissed her hand, dizzy with elation. The lilt in her voice, the charming grace of her diffident gesture, they were things he would have sold his soul to win back. She needed him. I will send for you later. Had it been a lover’s invitation, it could not have pleased him more.
He walked slowly into the ante-room and inclined his head in ironical greeting to the impatient young man who paced the small floor like a frantic tiger.
“The Queen will see you now, Lord Robert,” he said in his even voice and passed on with a slow, limping step.
When Robin came through the heavy double doors and closed them angrily behind him he looked so genuinely pale and shaken that momentarily she was taken aback. For a long, horrible minute they stared at each other in bleak silence and then at last he made a faltering move to kiss her hand.
She struck his arm away and her voice was harsh and ugly with suspicion.
“Don’t touch me with your bloody hands—you!—you are no better than my father was. Did you honestly think you could murder your way into my bed?”
The last vestige of colour drained out of his face; his voice was a thin, reedy gasp.
“You can’t seriously believe that I had anything to do with this?”
“What else am I to think? I forbade you to seek a divorce—now, conveniently, you no longer need one! But are you such a clod, such an imbecile, as to think I could ever marry you now? You bury your wife, and your hope of the crown, in the same coffin!”
He shook his head and looked at her with bitter disillusion.
“Cecil digs the grave and the world fills it in,” he said slowly. “How pleased he will be to know that yours is the first hand to lift a spade.”
She came a step towards him and her eyes glittered dangerously. He was suddenly acutely aware, like Feria before him, that this was no longer the Elizabeth he had known.
“Cecil?” Her voice was ominously quiet. “What the devil has Cecil to do with this?—he’s been in Scotland for weeks!”
“He has agents,” said Robin shortly. “And he’s been back at court long enough to see how the land lies. He’s a frightened man, madam—and a frightened man will stoop to anything.”
“Repeat that accusation outside this room,” she said steadily, “and you will join your wife. Indeed, you may join her anyway, for if this crime is proved against you, I shall execute you.”
He laughed unsteadily. “For murder?”
“No,” she said icily, “for rank stupidity! For insufferable vanity!”
He caught her arm violently, goaded by her heartless injustice.
“And what will you say when they bring you the news of my execution—today died another man of much wit and very little judgement? You had best take care, madam. They will say you have a most unhealthy preference for fools in your bed!”
Without warning, her right hand swung up and struck him full in the face. He staggered back a step from the violence of her blow and lifted his own hand to his cheek, feeling the trickle of blood where a diamond ring had split the soft skin at the corner of his mouth. The rage left him as suddenly as it had come, purged by a stark terror greater than he had felt even in his worst moments in the Tower under Mary. She had threatened to kill him and with cold, incredulous horror he realised now that she had meant it. In the last resort nothing mattered to Elizabeth Tudor but her crown; if it was necessary, she would abandon him to his fate in order to save it.
“I have many enemies,” he said dully, suddenly quiet and despairing. “They stand outside that door ready to rejoice at my downfall, waiting to tear me to pieces like a pack of wolves! Will you desert me now when I need your help most—is that all our love is worth, Elizabeth?”
She stared at him in an agony of doubting silence, then slowly, deliberately, turned her back on him in a cruelly symbolic gesture. He fell to his knees at her feet in a blind panic and his voice was edged with tears.
“Don’t turn away from me—oh God, why won’t you see it?—You with the sharpest mind in Europe! For months now they’ve been talking of murder. My worst enemy could not have found a better time for Amy to die mysteriously and Cecil is my worst enemy—not Sussex or Norfolk who so plainly hate me and don’t trouble to disguise it—but Cecil! He’s made you choose between me and the crown.” Robin smiled bleakly. “Only I could have spared him the trouble. There never was any choice, was there—I see that now. And seeing that, all I ask of you now is the opportunity to clear my name. Let me go down to Cumnor and find out what really happened.”
She turned to look at him and the hand he had stretched out to her in desperate appeal dropped to his side hopelessly as he saw her face. It was pale and cold, entirely without a flicker of emotion. In her glittering gown, she stood in judgement upon him like a stone effigy; she looked unreal and terrifying and her voice seemed to come from a great distance.
“You may send your own men, but not yourself. You will go to Kew under house arrest and stay there until the inquest is over. You will make no attempt to communicate with me.”
He looked at her with disbelief. “Not even a letter?”
“Nothing. You may leave me now.”
He lowered his eyes wearily. After a moment he got off his knees and turned to go.
“Robin.”
He looked back with wild hope, but her expression was unchanged.
“Guard your tongue in captivity, for I meant what I said. If you breathe a word against Cecil, I’ll hang you like a felon at Tyburn.”
Across the sunlit room, he thought he heard the echo of an anguished cry.
Her eyes are like ice and you won’t melt them…no man could. There’s something cruel and twisted deep inside her. Keep away from her, Robert…I know she’s dangerous…
Now, at last, he knew it too, and wondered why he had never seen it before. Gone was the teasing playmate who had shared his childhood, and the tortured, vulnerable woman he had glimpsed in the preceding weeks. In their place he saw the Queen and saw her for the first time with the mask of friendship removed, a figure suddenly as ruthless and terrible as ever her father had been. He knew now that in any personal crisis it would be the Queen who ruled and not the woman. All their dazzling intimacy was an illusion, a mere straw in the wind, for in the last resort he was but a subje
ct, as her mother had been. What a fool he had been to forget it, even for a moment!
He bowed formally to that icy and unbending figure.
“I understand you, Your Majesty,” he said at last. “And I thank you for your plainness.”
* * *
The scandal ran through the length and breadth of Europe, reverberating like a single gunshot in an empty canyon. English ambassadors were too humiliated to show their faces once the Queen of Scots, with schoolgirl wit, had put the world’s opinion in a neat nutshell: “The Queen of England is going to marry her horsemaster who had killed his wife to make room for her.”
Everyone expected it and everyone knew it would be the end of her. It was patently obvious that the Protestant bastard would “lie down Queen Elizabeth and wake in the Tower plain Madam Dudley.” Even the Spaniards said so, and they had more cause to fear it than most.
Philip was in agony, for the scandal touched him on an old wound. She had refused his hand to play the harlot with that handsome, penniless nobody, and had the matter been on a purely personal level, he would gladly have stood by and applauded while her people burnt her for a whore and a murderess.
Trust my love, Philip…
He was on fire with rage at the memory of her cool caress, for cool it had been, he knew it now. Cool and calculating and filled with mockery. Did she laugh at him with Dudley behind the curtains of the state bed? Did she? Oh, how he longed to see her dead—but he must stand by her yet again, because he had no alternative. To see England fall to France was just too high a price to pay for the removal of his eternal embarrassment—the woman who had publicly rejected him.
* * *
During the inquiry, Robin sweated a Kew in a fever of anxiety. He had sent his servant, Thomas Blount, to Cumnor Palace with strict instructions to get to the bottom of the matter without “respect to any living person.” It was the nearest he dared get to any open accusation.
Reports from Cumnor were complicated by descriptions of Amy’s curious behaviour on the day of her death. She had sent her whole household to the fair—to their considerable annoyance for it was a Sunday and only the lowest of the low attended the fair on the Sabbath—and had grown quite hysterical when one of her companions had refused to comply with her request. There had been something close to a quarrel and the offended woman had stalked off to her own apartments. Robin puzzled over that for many hours. Amy was terrified of solitude—why should she suddenly wish to be left entirely alone? Had she been led to expect a secret visit from a very influential man, a man offering to do all in his power to keep her husband and the Queen apart? Was it a condition of that visit that it must not be witnessed by gossiping servants, that the Queen must never hear of it? What had happened during those last, lost hours of Amy’s life?
He would never know for sure. Amy’s maid, Pinto, described her as being in “strange mind” and praying daily for deliverance from despair. The implication of suicide was a straw that Robin clutched hopefully, for Blount could find no evidence of foul play, though he sifted the household from top to bottom. Cecil’s arrangements had been made with his usual masterly care, a clockwork precision which left no trail.
Housed in luxury, surrounded by servants, Robin lived out his lonely nightmare as the Queen’s prisoner, cut off from the world and all he held dear. Every day he rose with new hope, expecting some message from Elizabeth; and every night he went to bed, disappointed and despairing. After all there had been between them, how could she abandon him like this? Was it possible she did not care—had never cared? Did he mean nothing to her? Hour after hour he combed his memory, seeking crumbs of her affection, balancing the gifts with which he had been showered since her accession—this Dairy House at Kew was one—against the memory of her face that day at Windsor. She had looked and spoken as though she hated him and whatever the verdict of the inquest, he feared he had lost her. He tried to visualise a life without her; and ended most nights by drinking himself into a stupor of forgetfulness.
The great and the influential stayed clear of Kew as though it were infested by plague, for disgrace is a highly infectious disease. He expected no one and the day his nervous valet bobbed into his room to announce, “Sir William Cecil, my lord,” he stood and stared at the door as though he had been pole-axed.
It was Cecil at his most benign—mild mannered, courteous and understanding, very apologetic for any inconvenience his unexpected visit might have caused. And it was Cecil also at his most ostentatious, for this was not a visit he intended to go unnoticed. The scandal was sufficient now to finish Dudley’s hopes for good and Cecil felt he could safely afford to give the lie to his own conversation with the Spanish Ambassador. He could afford to show the world his belief in the young man’s innocence and intimate at the same time that the way back to court could only be opened up by his own unassailable influence with the Queen.
Cecil’s visit spelled out Robin’s position in no uncertain terms and the unmistakable air of patronage was difficult for the angry young man to bear. He wanted to take Cecil by the throat and shake him like the rat he believed him to be, but Robin was no fool. He knew when he was beaten, and when it paid to be humble.
He went to meet the grey-clad figure with guarded civility and extended his hand coldly.
“I shall never forget your kindness in coming to see me, Sir William—it’s all been like a bad dream.”
Cecil’s thin fingers, discoloured with years of paperwork, administered a sympathetic squeeze to his companion’s arm.
“At such a time, Lord Robert, a man is fortunate when his friends will stand up and be counted. The whole court is with you in your tragic bereavement and we are in mourning at Her Majesty’s personal request.”
At the mention of the Queen, a desperate light shone in Robin’s eyes.
“I had hoped to have some message from her by now, but there’s been nothing. Not a word, not a gesture, just a silence that—that I find very hard to bear. She’s not ill, I hope.”
Cecil looked at him gravely.
“The Queen is not as well as I could wish to see her, my lord. This sorry business has exposed her to considerable stress.”
Robin stiffened. “If she’s ill, then for Christ’s sake let me go to her.”
“I regret, my lord, that under the circumstances, that would be most inadvisable. I myself have often chosen to bear my personal anxieties with patient silence sooner than overtax Her Majesty’s uncertain health. I know you will be happy to do the same.”
Robin stared at him aghast.
“You have advised her not to receive me?”
“For the time being.” Cecil smiled slowly. “A little forbearance, if I might counsel it, would be in order now, my lord. I shall of course be very happy to speak on your behalf to Her Majesty—if I judge her to be well enough to hear what I have to say.”
Robin met the Secretary’s steady gaze and knew very well what he intended to convey: You are in no position now to make demands!
He took a deep breath and managed to say with impeccable restraint, “I repeat, Sir William, I shall never be able to thank you enough for the service you have done me.”
An hour later the distinguished visitor took his leave and Robin watched the neat little figure ride slowly out of the courtyard on an elderly nag with loathing in his heart. The audacity and cunning of the man took his breath away, for he knew no shadow of suspicion would ever touch that ruthless little worm, so quiet, so eminently respectable!
Robin turned from the window at last and took stock of his position. It was patently obvious he could no longer afford the luxury of Cecil’s enmity. If there was still any remote possibility of uniting himself with the Queen it could now only be done through Cecil’s good offices—and he would have to grovel for that friendship. Cecil’s cool gaze had made that very clear.
A certain grim philosophy came to Robin as he reached for
pen and ink; if he had to grovel he might as well begin now.
“Sir, I thank you for your being here and the great friendship you have shown towards me I shall not forget…I pray you let me hear from you what you think it best for me to do…
Cecil, receiving that humble letter, folded it quietly and indulged in a satisfied smile.
* * *
“The jury returned an open verdict, madam.”
Cecil watched, without appearing to do so, as the Queen’s hands tensed on the arms of her chair.
“An open verdict condemns no one,” she said cautiously.
“Nor does it clear any man’s good name, madam. It merely records the fact that no one knows what happened and leaves the world to speculate as it will.”
Cecil was well pleased with the verdict—in many ways it could not have suited him better. Delighted as he had been with her behaviour in these last difficult weeks, he was uncertain that he could have pushed to the extent of persuading her to sign Dudley’s death warrant. It was better the way it was, a sensible compromise of the kind he had built his life upon.
He admired the steely grip she had kept over her own emotions. Whatever she felt, she gave no sign as she went about her daily business. She was once more the heartless, dispassionate entity that he delighted to serve and already in his heart he was offering himself excuses for her unbecoming conduct. What was more natural than that, after years of dancing on the whims of others, she should suddenly run wild with the freedom to indulge whims of her own? All her youth had been stolen from her, corroded by fear and suspicion. It was a great pity her heart didn’t seem to match her brain, but he was certain that after this fiasco he would have no more need to concern himself with her wayward affections.
Beneath heavy lids he stole a glance at her and was suddenly touched with pity. She looked thin and pale, as though all the bright life had gone out of her. Even her brilliant hair seemed muted to a dull copper. He felt like a guilty father who has locked a dangerous toy away in a cupboard.
When you are sensible enough to use it properly you shall have it back, but not until…