by Susan Kay
Could it be that she was a little squeamish when it came to the axe that had already claimed her mother, her step-mother, and her first lover? Mulling over the possibility, Norfolk began to feel remarkably safe. She was only a woman after all, a weak and feeble vessel destined to be taken advantage of by men. And it was becoming increasingly obvious that she could not continue to hold the premier peer of the realm captive without hard evidence. He had no difficulty at all in signing the paper which reaffirmed his oath of loyalty to her and he swore publicly to have no further dealings with the Queen of Scots.
Leicester looked at the paper with undisguised disgust. He had been sure that he had heard the last of the man who would now be his most deadly enemy, but there he was riding off to liberty, cock-a-hoop at having escaped virtually scot free.
“I had to release him,” said Elizabeth quietly. “For his own good I would have preferred to keep him under guard, but they were growing restless down in Norfolk. I dared not provoke another rising.”
“And what now, madam?”
“Now I am afraid I shall have to give him enough rope to hang himself. Cecil’s spies will watch his every move—it can only be a question of time…”
* * *
Norfolk wrote hastily to Mary’s agent, the Bishop of Ross, explaining that his signature on Elizabeth’s deed meant nothing. He had signed it under duress and he hoped the Queen of Scots would understand that he was as ready to become her husband as he had ever been.
Within months, the perfect opportunity presented itself. The Pope, justifying Cecil’s worst nightmares, chose that moment to excommunicate Elizabeth officially, thus freeing all Catholic subjects from their allegiance to her and issuing an open invitation for someone to stick a dagger in her heart in God’s holy cause. From that moment on, everyone accepted that her ultimate assassination was a foregone conclusion and that sooner or later she would meet a violent and untimely end.
Elizabeth cursed the act which now made Cecil’s persecution inevitable, knowing its trumpet call to martyrs would shatter the compromise by which she had kept religious peace for over twelve years. But she shrugged her shoulders at her enemies at home and abroad and raised the arch-heretic Cecil to the peerage at last, as she had promised. In February 1571 he became Baron Burghley and his unassailable position was recognised by everyone of influence; Leicester was particularly ingratiating in his congratulations.
The inevitable intrigue between Norfolk and Mary was soon flourishing with the assistance of the Spanish Ambassador, de Spes, and the services of a Florentine banker, Ridolfi. The murder of Elizabeth was the spearhead of the plot and Norfolk requested ten thousand Spanish troops to effect the coup d’etat that was to follow. He did not receive them, for though Philip was bent on making as much trouble as possible for his sister-in-law, he was the last one to intervene actively merely to place Mary Stuart on the English throne. To the end of her life Mary was to believe blindly in Philip’s friendship for her and never see the naïvety of her request to the Spanish Ambassador: “Tell your Master that if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months and Mass shall be said all over the kingdom.” Philip had no doubt that once Mary had come into her own, her Guise relatives would rediscover their old affection for her; and he had no wish to see Mass said in England by French priests!
So there were no troops from Philip; instead, Cecil’s army of spies ferreted out every piece of information which illustrated the Duke’s guilt, the Scottish Queen’s acquiescence, and the half-hearted collusion of Spain. The Spanish Ambassador was sent packing to his homeland, while Norfolk found himself back in the Tower, this time under sentence of death.
Elizabeth calmly signed the warrant for his execution by the axe, the scaffold on Tower Hill which had rotted away from disuse was rebuilt, and everyone expected that would be the end of the matter. No one who had seen her at the time of the Northern Rebellion entertained the slightest hope of a reprieve and no one was more astonished than the new Lord Burghley to be summoned to the Queen’s bedchamber in the middle of the night and be told that Norfolk’s execution must not take place the following morning.
Looking absurd in his chamber robe and furred slippers, Cecil stared at her as she sat up in the state bed, sheet white, biting her lower lip.
“But why, madam?” he gasped. “Why?”
“I don’t know why!” she sobbed furiously. “Don’t ask me why—just do as I say, God damn you, and cancel it!”
For the next two months there was a raging battle between the Queen and her advisers to obtain her signature once more on Norfolk’s death warrant and to persuade her to have Mary’s drawn up. For more than eight weeks the lives of Mary and Norfolk hung on the balance of Elizabeth’s whim, while the clamour of the English Council for their deaths rose to a furious pitch. And then, on a cold March night, the disaster they had all feared for so long struck at last.
* * *
Leicester could not recall the last occasion on which he had taken a game of chess from the Queen, but he was going to win tonight, he knew it suddenly as she moved her knight. It was a rash move, careless, indifferent, curiously unlike her and it gave him his chance for a quick kill. He was so elated at the prospect of victory, so ruthlessly absorbed in his own strategy, that when she suddenly rose from the table and told him curtly to put the pieces away, his first impulse was to vent his bitter disappointment in a string of obscene oaths. One win, one little win, it was all he had wanted from her and she must even deny him that much satisfaction! In moody silence he began to throw the gold chessmen back into their box. When he had finished he sat in sullen silence, staring into the fire, waiting for dismissal. He never knew precisely what made him look up at that moment, sixth sense, intuition, but whatever it was it came just a second too late. She fell across the little table so heavily that it overturned and sent the chessmen scattering into the four corners of the room.
Elizabeth!
Sweat broke out all over his body, as he fell on his knees beside her and turned her over.
Spasms of pain convulsed her and she clutched at his sleeve, grey-lipped in her panic for breath. When he lifted her, hampered by the weight of the court gown, she went suddenly limp in his arms. He carried her into the bedchamber, through a wake of panic-stricken women, with her vast sweep of black satin skirts spilling over his arms and trailing to his feet like the magnificent plumage of a dead bird.
As he laid her on the bed he spat curt commands at the hovering women.
“Get her doctors—get Burghley—and help me to get her out of this damned gown before she suffocates.”
Glancing round, he saw them staring at him wildly, paralysed with fear, like rabbits caught in a bright glare.
“Move!” he roared, and they dispersed immediately, leaves in the fierce gale of his authority.
When Burghley came through the door of the bedchamber, Leicester went to meet him and their eyes locked in an agonised glance, the certain, grim knowledge that if the worst happened now, then their heads would be the first to roll under the revenge of Norfolk and Mary.
“How is she?” Cecil’s voice trembled as he scanned the Earl’s white face.
Leicester shook his head, chewing his lip, and Cecil stiffened in fearful anticipation.
“So bad?” he whispered hoarsely.
“I’ve never seen her like this before—never! She’s in such pain she can scarcely breathe. To me it looks like poison.”
Cecil felt his brain reel at the suggestion.
“Impossible,” he said woodenly. “We’ve been so careful, every precaution—”
“Don’t be a fool!” snapped Leicester. “Are you telling me you can answer for the loyalty of every woman in her service, every page and scullion with access to her comfit box?”
“No.” Cecil shook his head grimly. “It was always a hopeless task and I warned her—God knows, I warned her.
But she’s so careless and reckless—sometimes I swear she believes she’s immortal.”
“She’ll need to be immortal to come through this.” Leicester gave him a hard, searching look. “Are you squeamish?”
Cecil swallowed and spat out a lie.
“No more so than the next man, my lord.”
“Good.” Leicester glanced darkly towards the bed. “There’s only one path open to her now, and it takes its course straight through the centre of Hell. I’ve spoken to the doctors. And, believe me, what they intend to do I wouldn’t see done to my worst enemy let alone to my—” He broke off short. “She asked for you,” he continued brusquely. “So take that look off your face before we go to her. She doesn’t need our personal fears at the moment.”
Cecil nodded mutely and side by side, suddenly drawn close together in a brotherhood of mutual terror which suspended all their many differences, they approached the state bed. It was hung with cloth of silver and its four posts were topped with bunches of ostrich feathers, all spangled with gold, a magnificence in stark contrast to the crude treatment which took place within its hangings. Emetics and purges were administered in steady succession, accompanied by a savage letting of blood; but as the hours dragged slowly into days and still she tossed and turned, shivering with a raging fever and violent pains which nothing alleviated, they began to fear that their frantic efforts to rid her body of its toxin had failed. By the third evening she was so weak that Leicester sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to die in his arms, while the doctors squabbled and contradicted each other in a fierce huddle by the fireside. A little ring of black-robed professionals, pecking at each other’s opinions like a flock of frightened crows—he watched them with savage contempt.
“Useless bastards!” he muttered. “Not one of them fit to doctor cattle—what keeps them clacking all this time?”
“Arrangements—for the post-mortem—perhaps,” suggested the Queen wearily. “I would—I had the arranging—of theirs.”
“I know. All that suffering, my poor love—I should never have allowed it.” He stroked the wet tendrils of hair back off her forehead, and held her close, remembering with hot anguish all the pointless misery she had endured without a single tantrum or complaint.
“I’ll put my dagger through the next quack who lays a hand on you—I swear it!”
Elizabeth turned her head with difficulty to look up at him and slowly traced the wet tracks on his cheeks with one trembling finger. After a moment she gave him a tired little smile which tore at his heart.
“Robin?”
“It’s nothing.” Hastily he brushed his cheek against her hair. “Something in my eye, that’s all.”
“Both of them?”
He bent his head and kissed her for that, not caring who should see it. The doctors came back to stare down at her hopelessly, but beneath Leicester’s steely gaze they dared suggest nothing more, and retired once again to the hearth. She was beyond their aid now; it was in God’s hands.
Leicester never knew how he managed to live through the rest of that night. His hand was numb from the convulsive grip of her fingers, his arm aching as though it was broken, but he kept his lips closed on his agony. It seemed to him that her grip on his hand was her last link with this world and he had intense, almost superstitious, terror of her letting go. Life and vitality seemed to be draining slowly out of him through the touch of their fingertips, a physical fusion more intimate, more complete than copulation could ever be. The hours meant nothing to him. He was impervious to thirst, hunger, exhaustion, even to the calls of nature, impervious to everything and everyone except the intensely personal battle he felt himself to be fighting with the Queen’s restive soul.
Around the great room, her attendants drowsed from exhaustion, but Burghley still hovered on the other side of the bed, grey with fatigue, and at last the Queen turned her head from the pillow of Leicester’s arm, searching for him with sudden urgency.
“Cecil—”
He came forward hesitantly, as though aware that he intruded on something personal, vital—sacred. She held out her right hand to him and as he took it the three of them were once more linked in their unholy triangle. Cecil, too, experienced a curious sensation, as though the last vestige of strength had been sucked out of him. He swayed a little when she released his hand and had to steady himself against the bedpost.
Her pain-crazed eyes were smiling at him.
“You look ready to drop,” she said gently. “Go and sit down somewhere. You must not steal a march on me—by dying of exhaustion first.” He had to bend over the bed to catch her fading voice. “Robin will call you—if I should require—the last rites.”
Walking away from the bed in slow disbelief, it came to him suddenly that this might be the last time his narrow religious sensibilities were outraged by her irrepressible irreverence. He was shocked, but not surprised; even at her coronation in the most solemn sanctified moment of the Annointing, she had scandalised her women by complaining that “the holy oil was nasty grease and stank,” as though the moment which had been the supreme culmination of a lifetime’s desire meant nothing to her. She was teasing God, as she had once teased her dread father, careless of the consequences, and Cecil found he had begun to pray with feverish intensity, not for her life—he no longer hoped for that—but for her salvation. He could not be comfortable with the thought of her burning for all eternity; and he honestly did not see how it could be avoided.
Shortly after dawn he jerked awake in a panic to find Leicester bending over him, and he suffered himself to be led out of the room, half crippled with stiffness, leaning heavily on the Earl’s arm. The Queen was sleeping, colourless as a corpse against the high pillows, and the doctors were exchanging muted congratulations with each other. He received the news in silence and went with Leicester without argument or rancour; he knew it was a miracle.
The ante-room was as cold and cheerless when they entered it as only a room in a chill March dawn can be, and from the Privy Chamber beyond came the muted murmur of anxious councillors and courtiers, waiting for news.
Leicester flung himself wearily upon a wooden couch and reached for a flagon of wine. Burghley paused to lean on his staff and look at him curiously.
“Were we not commanded to retire, my lord?”
Leciester drained the goblet and filled it again without looking up.
“Commanded or not I stay until I know for certain she’s out of danger.” He filled another goblet and held it out to Burghley. “Here—since it looks as though you and I may be keeping our heads after all, you ought to join me. We’ll drink a toast to the Queen, the most remarkable woman who ever lived. My God, I thought we’d lost her this time.”
The goblets fell to the floor, spilling wine everywhere, as he suddenly buried his face in his hands and his great shoulders shook with the racking sobs that were welling up inside him.
Burghley watched him weep and was aware of pity and shame. Oh, he had seen so much these past three nights, things which had made him learn a new respect for the man he had always so contemptuously dismissed as a self-seeking adventurer. For Leicester loved the Queen; Burghley, having witnessed the man’s tireless tenderness, now had no doubt of that.
And that knowledge altered everything. Over the years a steady conviction had grown that his early fears had been groundless. There would have been room for them both—had she not shown it over and over again? But he could still look back on the disposal of Amy with a clear conscience and reassure himself that his act had saved the Queen from the clutch of a greedy, selfish predator.
Now it was no longer possible to deceive himself and he suddenly saw how his perfectly executed device had backfired upon him. They were all of them balanced precariously on the tightrope of Elizabeth’s life and he, the brilliant, the dedicated chief minister, was to blame for it!
He went stiffly to retriev
e the goblets and refill them with wine; then he eased himself on to the couch and offered one of them to Leicester.
“To the Queen’s health,” he said softly, “and to our own increasing understanding. I pray it may serve Her Majesty better than our enmity.”
Leicester lifted his head and through a blurred haze saw Burghley’s gnarled hand extended towards him. After a moment’s puzzled hesitation he met it with his own.
“All the Queen’s men in the last resort, eh?” he said shakily.
Burghley shrugged his rounded shoulders.
“Our service is our vocation and vocation has its own reward, my lord. The time draws near when men of loyalty and the true religion can no longer afford private quarrels.”
Leicester inclined his head in brooding silence. He too sensed the gathering of clouds above England and feared that even Elizabeth could not trade on the devil’s luck for ever. And if she was in danger, he was ready to stand by anyone, even Burghley, in her defence. It marked the end of the tense, armed truce between the two of them, for they were both bound body and soul to the Queen and now each recognised the true value of the other in her eyes. Within the security of their eternal triangle they must muster their forces against attack from without, defending the apex, the mutual pivot of their existence.
Cecil laid down his goblet at last and stared at the door of the silent bedchamber.
“She’s cheated death twice—a third time would be too much to ask. There’s a limit to God’s favour.”
“And the Devil’s!” muttered Leicester darkly.
Cecil ignored him. “You realise, of course, that it is now more urgent than ever that Norfolk should meet his fate. I simply cannot understand it. She was swift and terrible enough after the northern rising, why in God’s name does she hesitate over Norfolk?”
“Perhaps, my friend, because he must die by the axe.”