by Susan Kay
“Melville! What news?”
“It’s a son, Sir William—a fine, bonny prince.”
“And your Queen?” Cecil’s voice was sharp with anxiety.
“A hard and difficult labour—but, God be thanked, the doctors say she will recover.”
Cecil gave him his cold hand.
“You bring us wonderful tidings,” he said stonily, his sombre face as fixed and unsmiling as a death’s-head. “I know Her Majesty will be overjoyed when I inform her.”
Melville made a quick step towards the door of the Great Hall.
“But surely I should deliver news of such moment in person.”
Cecil’s cool eyes looked him up and down, from dust encrusted beard to muddy riding boots.
“You could not possibly appear before Her Majesty in such a state, Melville. You are familiar with Her Majesty’s fastidious taste and if I may say so without giving offence, sir—you do stink of horse and sweat. Go to your chamber and rest and I will see food is brought to you. Her Majesty will receive you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!” Melville opened his mouth to protest further, but the resolute little figure had already turned away and begun to thread his way through the swirling mass of silks and satins. Melville crept close to the door to watch.
The Queen was dancing with Leicester, but at the Secretary’s approach they swung out of the measure and stood waiting for him to reach them. Leicester murmured something in her ear. She laughed, tapped his cheek playfully, and stepped forward alone to hear what Cecil had to say.
Even from that distance Melville saw the colour leave her complexion. She staggered back a step and fell into the chair behind her, turning her face away from the company and covering it with one long white hand. The music died in mid-beat, the dancers froze and stared as a cry of savage anguish tore through the summer air and splintered the gay, informal atmosphere into a deathly hush.
“The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son and I am but a barren stock!”
For a dreadful moment no one moved, then Cecil made a quick commanding gesture. A clutch of women rushed around her, closed her from sight, and a moment later hurried her from the crowded room. Melville drew into the shadows as they swept past, but Cecil, limping slowly in their wake, caught a glimpse of his triumphant face, and his own lips set in an angry line.
He went at once to her private apartments expecting to be refused admittance, but, to his surprise, he was shown into her bedchamber almost immediately. He found her alone, standing with her back to him and with one hand resting against a carved bedpost. She did not look round, but with her free hand she made a quick, furtive gesture and he guessed that she was hastily wiping away tears.
“You’ve come to scold I take it. ‘An appalling loss of self-control in public, madam!’ So what do you propose as punishment? Shall I go to bed with no supper?”
Standing there, listening to her petulant defiance, he suddenly saw her as she must have been as a child and he forgot to be angry.
“It’s not my place to criticise you, madam,” he said gently. “I came merely to tell you that Melville saw and heard it all.”
“And will tell his mistress, who will gloat!” She clenched her fist. “Well, I’ll give him the lie tomorrow. I’ll dance with joy for him—I’ll even be godmother to the infernal brat! Will that suffice?”
“For Melville, no doubt,” he said grimly, “but not for the rest of your countrymen, I fear. Madam, you described yourself as barren—have you any idea what uproar that will cause among those who fear for the Protestant succession?”
“Oh, the succession—good God, I’m not dead yet!”
“Not yet—pray God not for many years—but the birth of a Scottish prince will cause a public outcry for your own marriage from Parliament and people alike.”
She swore softly and swung away from him.
“Cecil, I rule this country and I rule it well—is that not so?”
“You know it is, madam.”
“Then why can’t they be content? Why must they try to force me in to something that I cannot—”
She broke off and he stared at her in silence. After a moment he went over and put his hand on her arm.
“Is it still Leicester?” he asked quietly. “Is it?” She did not answer and he shook his head.
“If I had known it was going to mean this—” He stopped as he saw her look and continued hastily, to cover his slip, “I sometimes think Your Majesty does not mean to marry at all.”
She turned away from him impatiently.
“Is it a crime then, not to marry?”
“Madam,” he was suddenly aghast at the implication behind her truculence,” in your case it would be a crime against the state—aye, and an unnatural crime at that. No woman can be happy in your position, alone and childless.”
She looked over her shoulder with a sudden, mocking smile.
“You speak very knowledgeably on the pleasure of womanhood, Cecil—when did you last climb out of childbed?”
He refused to be baited or side-tracked. He had come here tonight to know the answer to one question and he did not intend to be gainsaid by any of those “answers answerless” with which she placated the Commons. And because the empathy between them was now so sound, she knew the question in his mind, and held up her hand to stay him.
“Don’t ask it, my friend—believe me, you don’t want to know the answer. I have reasons against marriage that I would not divulge to a twin soul. All I will tell you now is that I do not mean to marry—ever!”
He went out of her presence like a man in a trance.
* * *
Among the first to make capital out of the birth of Mary’s son was the new Earl of Leicester. Still flushed with the triumph of his title, he brooded long and hard over Elizabeth’s curious outburst and managed to convince himself that their marriage was its only natural corollary. Nothing would induce him to abandon his dream and he was ready to bully or grovel to anyone who might help him attain his object. Less than a year since, he had even approached Cecil openly, begging him to give up his plans for a foreign marriage and to support his own suit, promising that he would see Cecil handsomely advanced in return.
It had been rather worse than just a waste of effort. Cecil had smiled, thanked him warmly for his confidence, and then repeated the whole conversation to the French Ambassador, carefully accentuating Leicester’s presumption in a manner which was calculated to infuriate the Queen when she heard of it. Leicester had not dared to approach the Secretary again on the subject.
His tentative overtures of marriage to Elizabeth resulted in some of the bitterest quarrels they had ever had. There was a succession of ugly, public scenes between them and once they were both seen to be in tears. He simply could not understand her attitude. Since the sudden death of Kat Ashley the previous June she had been very difficult to live with. After the first day when she had been utterly silent and bewildered by the shock, she had thrown herself into the pursuits which filled her life, working, hunting, and dancing like one driven by the devil, until everyone around her was on their knees with exhaustion. Leicester had waited patiently for the passionate breakdown which he sensed lurking beneath the surface of her indecent gaiety and insatiable restlessness, waited to take her in his arms and comfort her. But it never came. If she wept, he didn’t know about it; and whatever comfort she craved she appeared to find in the attentions of another man.
When she transferred her favours to Thomas Heneage, Leicester was devastated. She announced publicly that she was sorry for the time she had wasted on him—“and so is every good subject…” wrote Cecil with acid triumph in his diary.
The court turned cool to Leicester and Cecil gloated quietly, watching him panic and resort to desperate means. An ostentatious flirtation with Lettice Knollys brought him nothing but a long exile from court and the knowl
edge that there was little to be gained by provoking the Queen’s jealousy.
Exile was costly and showed him great glaring gaps in his own defences. His enemies closed in gleefully, reviving the scandal of Amy’s death by persuading her half-brother, John Appleyard, to intimate that he knew more than he had said at the time. There was loud talk of payments to Appleyard by his brother-in-law and a strong implication that they had bought his silence. Leicester’s recall to court came only just in time to warn his enemies off. John Appleyard faded back into the limbo from which he had been bribed to emerge, and for the time Leicester was spared the indignity and the danger of answering these libellous accusations.
The incident had unnerved him and shown him the depth of his dependence on the Queen’s protection; he was less the man for the experience. He dropped Lettice hastily and rushed back to court in a hopeful mood, expecting to find the Queen waiting tearfully for him with open arms, as all his women waited for him after a quarrel. Instead he found her so surrounded by younger men—Heneage, Christopher Hatton, the Earl of Ormond—that he could hardly get near her, and he was aghast at the apparent ease with which she seemed to have replaced him. It was hard, very hard, to admit that he might not be indispensable to her happiness. And she played her part so well that only a man as perceptive as Cecil could have gauged the depth of her suffering.
Jealous, frightened, tormented beyond endurance, Leicester cursed the cruel fate that had made him want the one woman who did not want him. Savage desire had begun to eat into his nature, making him ruthless and haughty and aggressively virile. He snapped his fingers about the court and a woman was his—any woman, except the one who mattered. He took them all wherever he found the opportunity, without love or gratitude or inner satisfaction, and indulged in violent fantasies. He wanted to drag Elizabeth from her exalted pedestal and rape her in full view of the court; he wanted to beat her into abject submission and cover that alabaster body with bruises. He suspected that she had a taste for rough handling, but he lacked the basic courage to follow that conviction to its logical conclusion. For he just might be mistaken; and, if he was, he knew that raping Elizabeth would be the last mistake he ever made.
So he was forced to stand by and watch while she behaved like a goddess promising favours to a fawning group of humiliated men. None of them could resist the oblique suggestion that at any moment she might indeed be prepared to take a lover—or a husband—from their midst and so they hovered like moths around a candle. She had a cruel genius for stalking men’s hearts.
When she could bear the game no longer, she softened at last, agreed to see him alone, and laughed at his jealousy, telling him that all her friends were men and he need read no more than that into it. He was unconvinced, but so grateful to be taken back into her affections that he returned meekly to the place she had allotted him, like the lap-dog she had once called him. Her attendants tiptoed discreetly from the room and he sat at her feet in the bright firelight. There was a relaxed and comfortable silence between them and neither of them spoke, as if they feared to disturb some magic spell.
It was as though they both felt it was the only way to avoid another quarrel.
* * *
It was a bad year for lovers. While Robin was struggling to cement his return to favour, the Queen of Scots began to eclipse all lesser events with the scandal of her own private life. With a sudden, shocking pace her life was circling in a downward spiral to disaster beyond her control, and Elizabeth watched with genuine horror as her rival fell helplessly into the trap of personal relations, which she herself had eluded so successfully eight years before. No one shed any tears when the villainous Darnley met his deserved end in an explosion at Kirk-o’-fields, but everyone knew—or at least believed they knew—that Mary’s lover, the Earl of Bothwell, was responsible for it.
Mary now stood on the edge of the very same disaster which had once threatened her royal cousin. Her only hope of escaping the consequences of Darnley’s murder was to abandon her lover to his fate and a public execution. It was a plain choice between her lover and her crown, and Elizabeth, who had already made that painful choice, was filled with a terrible foreboding, a sharp, anxious sense of watching her own younger reflection in a mirror, rushing relentlessly towards self-destruction.
For the first time, acting a little out of self-interest, but a great deal more from a wealth of sympathetic understanding, she stretched out her hand to Mary in a gesture of real friendship with a frantic, scolding letter that begged her to come to her senses before it was too late.
“Oh, madam, I should not fulfil the office of a faithful cousin or an affectionate friend if I studied rather to please your ears than to endeavour to preserve your honour; therefore I will not conceal from you what most persons say about the matter, namely that you will look through your fingers at taking vengeance for this deed and have no intention to touch those who have done you this kindness, as if the act would not have been perpetuated unless the murderers had received assurance of their impunity.
“…I exhort you, I advise and beseech you to take this thing to heart and let no persuasion hinder you from manifesting to the world that you are a noble princess and also a loyal wife.”
She sanded the letter and stared down at it, gnawing the paint on her lower lip. After a moment she pushed it across the ivory inlaid table to Leicester, who read it in silence, arched his fine dark eyebrows, and handed it back.
“Well?”
“A remarkable achievement, madam—anyone who didn’t know you better would say that was written from the heart.”
His tone made her look up a trifle sharply. “When I ask your opinion on a matter of state I expect to hear a Privy Councillor reply—not a petulant lover.”
“I’m not your lover,” he reminded her.
“Be glad of it. One of us must maintain a little common sense. Or would you prefer to stand in Bothwell’s shoes?”
“Poised to marry his queen—is that so far from my desire?”
“When lovers play for kingdoms desire is not enough. A marriage between Mary and Bothwell will cost her the crown, and that, as I believe I have told you before, is the last thing I want. So”—she tapped the letter with a brisk forefinger—“is that strong enough to make any difference?”
Leicester raised his broad shoulders in a noncommital shrug.
“That rather depends on how much he means to her. Not all women abandon their lovers when the going gets rough.”
Elizabeth tucked her bottom lip under her teeth and let her mocking gaze travel slowly over his extravagant suit, from rich doublet slashed with gold-thread embroidery to soft leather boots studded with pearl buttons.
“You look singularly unabandoned to me, Robin.”
He followed her gaze and smiled faintly…
“The well-kept lap-dog! I sit on a jewelled cushion chewing whatever bones you choose to throw to me, and come to heel when I’m called. I know damned well what I can expect if I don’t.”
She laughed outright.
“You know where the door is, Robin—I shall not lack for company if you go.”
“And you know I couldn’t stay away from you if I tried.”
“I know you couldn’t afford to stay away,” she said softly. “I’m afraid it’s not quite the same thing.”
He was silent a moment, staring at her.
“Take any man at court,” he said at last, “use him as you have used me all these years, and see if pillage alone will hold him.”
She left her desk and went over to him, stroking one long finger over his taut cheekbone.
“Why do you treat me as you do?” he asked seriously. “If you love me, why does it give you pleasure to give me pain?”
“I don’t drink and I don’t whore,” she countered lightly. “Surely I’m entitled to one unfortunate habit.”
“It’s not a habit,” he said quietl
y. “It’s an obsession.”
Her soul quivered like a plucked lute string and she stepped back from him, unnerved.
“I know,” she said uneasily, “that I am not always—kind. I try to make it up to you.”
“Oh yes,” he conceded wearily, “with lands and money and fine titles. I can’t complain you’re not generous. You give me everything I want—except yourself.”
“And my crown.”
“Keep your precious crown,” he snapped suddenly. “God only knows how much I’ve grown to hate it.”
“And me,” she whispered, looking away from him. “You hate me too, don’t you?”
He put up his hands to cup her chin between his fingers.
“Sometimes,” he said slowly, as though each word gave him pain, “there are hours, even whole days, when I think I’m quit of you for good. I can tell myself that I despise you, that I’ll never care for you again, and for those few hours I’m a free and happy man, gloating over my possessions and ogling your women. But you are a fever in my blood. Each time I think my manhood restored you strike me down again. You fall ill and I am sick with terror; you smile and melt away all my resentments. If I could find a doctor to cure me of my love for you, believe me, madam—I would make him a wealthy man!”
She laid her head on his shoulder and his arms stole around her, holding her very close.
Don’t stop loving me, Robin—don’t ever stop. Because the day you do, my dearest, my beloved—God help me—I know I shall kill you for it.
* * *
Mary paced her ill-lit chamber with Elizabeth’s letter in her hand. It was more than an hour since it had been delivered and still she could not dismiss its urgent wording form her mind.
I exhort you, I advise and beseeeh you—
It was not the sort of letter she had ever expected to receive from the woman she regarded as her worst enemy, and the naked warmth of its friendship had shocked and shamed her. Was this woman really a contemptible whore, a bastard bitch devoid of all Christian feeling? How easy it would have been for Elizabeth to stand by and laugh, to make the sort of cruel and tasteless comment that she herself had made in similar circumstances: The Queen of England is going to marry her horsemaster, who has killed his wife to make room for her.