by Susan Kay
Cecil looked round at him in surprise.
“Now what difference could that make? She’s not squeamish.”
Leicester smiled faintly beneath three days’ growth of thick black beard and leaned forward to fill his own goblet again.
“You really don’t know her very well, do you, even after all this time? Is it mere coincidence that no head has fallen in England in fourteen years? I lost my father, my brother, and my grandfather to the axe, but perhaps you who have lost no one in such a manner cannot be expected to understand. I have sat with her at night more than once, calming her nightmares when no one else can soothe her, because I know her, you see, better than anyone else alive. And I can tell you now that if you want Norfolk’s head, it will take Parliament to force her hand.”
“And the Queen of Scots?”
“Forget the Queen of Scots,” advised Leicester seriously. “She has friends in high places—the highest of all barring one, did the stupid bitch only know it. You’ll never get Elizabeth’s signature on her warrant.”
Burghley shook his head. “It has to come to that sooner or later, Leicester. Nothing in this world will induce Mary Stuart to live quietly in an English prison. I tell you this much, the poor fool will never cease until she loses her head.”
He got unsteadily to his feet, looking old and harassed in the cruel daylight.
“Get to bed, man,” said Leicester, not unkindly. “The Queen won’t be best pleased if she has to bury you after all this.”
A wan smile touched Burghley’s lips.
“There was a time when I thought my nerve was quite unshakeable, Leicester, but God knows I’ve never seen anyone sail so close to the wind as Her Majesty, without sinking.”
“Witches never drown,” remarked Leicester thoughtfully. “Surely you know that.”
A glimmer of the old hostility suddenly narrowed Burghley’s steely blue eyes. “I don’t know what you mean by that, my lord, I’m sure.”
“Don’t you?” Leicester’s smile was cynical; the wine had hit his tired brain and loosened his tongue. “King Henry said her mother was a witch. Surely you must have wondered about her before now. I know I have—”
Burghley opened his mouth to protest heatedly, then closed it again, seeing the utter futility of arguing with a man who had been drinking heavily on exhaustion and an empty stomach.
“That’s a highly dangerous allegation, Leicester,” he said at last very drily. “I trust you won’t repeat it to anyone else. Some people might think it constituted an act of treason.”
He went out of the room, determined to forget the incident, for it brought back an uncomfortable picture. Try as he might he could not dismiss the memory of her light, laughing voice, promising to give him a month’s advance notice of her death. In spite of all the laws of nature, she had not yet broken that promise.
Was it possible? Was he really serving a witch?
He was unnerved by the intense disloyalty of the thought.
* * *
It was almost ten o’clock before Elizabeth stirred. She opened her eyes briefly to find Leicester sitting by her side, and her fever-cracked lips parted in a dazed smile.
“I told you to go to bed.”
“Did you, madam?” He kissed her hand playfully. “Then I’m afraid I must have misunderstood your meaning.”
She drowsed again and woke shortly before midday; he was still there. She made no comment this time but allowed him to place extra pillows behind her head and swallowed a mouthful of milk to humour him. Then she asked for her mirror.
He handed it over with some reluctance and when she looked at her reflection she saw why.
“Hell’s teeth—I look like a corpse!”
“How would you expect to look,” he inquired gently, “after an attempt on your life so damn near successful as this was?”
She laid the mirror face down on the coverlet and sighed a little.
“Must we play Hunt-the-Traitor every time I have a stomach ache?”
He stared at her in disbelieving silence for a full minute, incredulous, outraged.
“God’s death,” he swore softly at last, “surely even you can’t believe this illness had a natural cause. All the doctors agree it was something taken by mouth at supper.”
She gave him a maddening smile.
“Almost the Last Supper, then—but I’ve yet to see them hang a fish for treason. Norfolk’s arm may be long, but it certainly doesn’t stretch from the Tower to my plate.”
“Don’t jest,” he said testily. “The Tower has its shortcomings—you and I had good cause once to know just how short they can be!”
“That was a long time ago, Robin.”
“Long or not, it makes no difference. The Tower never changes. You know that money buys virtually anything there and to a man of Norfolk’s means and desperation poison would be cheap at any price. He had everything to gain from your death and precious little to lose—you must see that.”
“You really hate him, don’t you?”
“I hate anyone and anything that threatens you. But it’s not just my opinion—the rumour is all over the court.”
“Is it?” She bit her lip angrily. “And what else does Madam Rumour have to say?”
“That Norfolk must die swiftly, before he gets the chance to try again. There is no way you can hope to save him after this.”
Elizabeth lay back on her pillows in silence, her face closed suddenly against him into a mask of secrecy.
“What are you thinking?” he asked anxiously, sensing that devious brain fiercely at work.
“As a matter of fact I was thinking that I am far too ill to hear of business,” she said demurely, stealing a glance at him from beneath her heavy lids. “I shall probably be too ill to hear of it for a long, long time—”
“You invite assassination,” he said darkly, “and next time you may not be so fortunate.”
“But I am always fortunate—isn’t that so?”
He shook his head gravely. “You really don’t care, do you? You play with kingdoms and men’s lives like pieces on a chessboard—you won’t be satisfied until you’ve put both me and Burghley in the same grave.”
“Poor prisoners,” she said quietly. “The two of you should have let me go when you had the chance.”
Her eyes, like bottomless wells of black water, held him frozen in the bright stillness of their gaze. So—he had not imagined that physical link; and in the deepest recess of his mind he acknowledged that his bondage to her was now complete.
Later, in his apartments which still adjoined the Queen’s, he paused to look into his own mirror, encrusted with ivory figurines, and there saw his face, handsome still, yet blurred and indistinct, his jet black hair touched at the temples with silver grey. Once, in fun, he had called her a vampire, and that jest had assumed a strange form of truth—she took her strength, not from blood, but from the love of men.
He looked at his reflection sadly—the signs of age were unmistakable. Slowly the flame of her life was consuming him, eating away his manhood, almost his identity; he had sunk his life in hers, lost himself so deeply in her shadow that it seemed without her he would no longer exist.
He wondered briefly if Burghley felt the same.
Chapter 5
Elizabeth signed five warrants for Norfolk’s execution and rescinded four of them. For five months she ran a gauntlet of opposition from her Council and her Parliament, maddened wolves howling for the two lives she held just beyond reach of their snapping teeth. She whetted their appetite with frustration and then, at the very point when they were blind with blood lust, she tossed Norfolk to them like a choice bone. Immediately the pursuit was thrown into confusion. They fell upon her chosen sacrifice in a frenzy of delight, never noticing that they had given her the time to escape with the real prise; and for a little longer M
ary Stuart clung to a perilously thin ledge of security, just beyond their reach. So, in the panting pause between the plots and counterplots which now formed the basis of her life, Elizabeth found she had achieved her object. But she had not enjoyed playing shuttlecock with a man’s head, and Norfolk’s humble letter, begging forgiveness and mercy for his poor children so soon to be orphans, distressed her deeply. She told Burghley to see to it that the brats were cared for; she had been an orphan herself…
At dusk on the first day of June 1572, the eve of Norfolk’s execution, she found herself pacing up and down the Privy Chamber, unable to eat or settle to any of the pursuits with which she normally passed the evenings. Her first execution by the axe—the first of many, no doubt! So what ailed her? Why this unlooked-for guilt and squeamishness so alien to her nature?
On a sudden whim she ordered her barge and had herself conveyed to the Tower, throwing the unfortunate constable into a fidget of agitated unease by her unheralded arrival. He asked her with great delicacy if she desired to visit the condemned Duke and watched her walk up and down his narrow room, twisting a pair of silk gloves between her long fingers.
It was, after all, what she had come for, to see him, to explain and excuse the tortured suspense she had kept him in for the last five months. But now she shied away from it, reluctant to raise his hopes falsely yet again, afraid that her resolution would crumble at the sight of his broken penitence.
Instead she wandered aimlessly out to the site of the Green where her mother and Katherine Howard had lost their heads, where little Jane Grey had died and they had told her, “the torrent of blood was quite extraordinary” as she waited in the Bell Tower to follow in Jane’s footsteps. Through the falling light she saw the Chapel of St. Peter-ad-Vincula that held the remains of her mother and that tomorrow would receive yet another mutilated body. And she shivered in the hot twilight, drawing the heavy cloak more closely round herself as she swept past the hovering constable with a curt salutation and returned to the barge. They sailed away over the black river and she watched the mighty fortress dwindling in the distance to the toy she had once imagined.
She could not sleep that night. She sat in a window-seat and watched the darkness recede into a bright orange dawn, while her lady-in-waiting snored in careless oblivion on a pallet at the foot of the state bed.
This, then, was what it meant to be Queen, the murder of relatives who had sought first to murder you. Strike or be stricken was the simple rule of every ruler. Her father had followed it with sublime indifference to the end of his days—why then could she not do the same?
But she would never be able to do it. And when at last the roar of the Tower cannon announced the death of a traitor, she stood alone in her room, pressing her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to shut it out.
* * *
The years of Philip’s reluctant and deluded friendship with England were now at an undisputed end. England and Spain had slowly and inevitably drawn apart over a long series of mutual grievances and Philip comforted himself now with the certain knowledge that one day he would settle with England’s Jezebel. But for the moment his hands were firmly tied, by the defensive Treaty of Blois which Elizabeth had just wrung from his old enemy, France, by the ever present risk of her marriage with a French prince, and by the unrest of his own Protestant subjects in the Netherlands. As long as Elizabeth held the Queen of Scots hostage, she was safe from any overt aggression on his part. His ostensible championship of Mary masked a very hearty desire to see the woman dead and he believed that sooner or later, as the plots in her favour grew in magnitude, Elizabeth’s advisers would force their Queen to dispose of her. He could afford to wait until that stumbling-block in his path to England had been removed and, while he waited, he steadily noted each English outrage, from the seizure by Elizabeth’s ships of Spanish treasure galleons, to her disgraceful treatment of his ambassadors. He sheltered her Catholic exiles, while her ports were always open to his Protestant refugees. It seemed inevitable that they would end as deadly enemies, that in his attempt to dominate Europe, he would be forced to subjugate England and destroy the Queen whose very existence was a threat to his kingship and an insult to his manhood. He watched anxiously from afar as she began to toy with fresh marriage negotiations, first with the French heir, Anjou, then with his brother, the Duke of Alençon. France was fawning round Elizabeth like a spaniel and Philip did not care for the way things looked—he did not care for it at all.
Leicester, too, was ill at ease with this new marriage project. Initially, he had regarded the negotiations as yet another of Elizabeth’s brilliant diplomatic farces. Anjou was an overt homosexual; Alençon was a rake and an ugly pock-marked dwarf to boot. She could not be serious—the match was impossible! And yet, as she approached her thirty-seventh birthday, he sensed a subtle change in her attitude. She had always been happy to stand as sponsor—had indeed collected a veritable army of godchildren—yet now weddings and christenings seemed to depress her equally. She watched the children of her friends with increasing wistfulness, and Leicester, watching her with anxiety, recognised a quality his mother had once described as “broodiness.”
One evening, goaded beyond the boundaries of common sense by fear, he remarked that if she had really set her heart on taking a stunted, pock-marked imbecile to her bed, there were plenty in England to oblige her without looking to France.
The backgammon board swept to the floor between them as she stood up.
“Get out!” she said; and he went with some alacrity.
In the Privy Chamber, where the more favoured courtiers hovered, the Queen’s women were engaged in various quiet pursuits. Leicester paused for a casual word here and there, with forced civility, as he edged his way towards the window-seat where Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex, sat reading.
The Queen’s cousin raised her almond eyes and smiled impudently at him.
“Good evening, my lord.”
As he bent to kiss her hand with cool formality, he whispered curtly, “The usual place. Don’t keep me waiting,” and was gone before she had time to reply.
Ten minutes later, having pleaded a headache to the Queen, Lettice slipped away from the gossiping maids and matrons and followed the torch-lit corridors that led to a small room on the other side of the palace.
As soon as she stepped inside, he locked the door and tore the cloak from her shoulders.
“Get your clothes off,” he said roughly. “I want you now.”
The incipient violence of his mood excited her. He was always like this after a quarrel with the Queen and she was a woman who appreciated crude emotions in a man. Not for Lettice the well-mannered lover. She had married one, for the sake of a title, and wished him dead within a month. When Leicester flung her across the narrow Indian couch and took her with a bruising violence that was little short of rape, she writhed with ecstasy beneath the savage beating of his body in hers.
The arrangement had been in existence for some time now. There had been other women, of course, over the years, even a bastard son to Douglass Sheffield, but somehow it had been inevitable for him to drift back into this old liaison with Lettice. He needed Lettice; she preserved his sanity, slaking the fire which the Queen delighted to raise.
When at length he lay beside her, with one arm across her breast, relieved of his fierce tension and desire, staring at nothing, Lettice wanted to laugh out loud. Oh, how he loved to be the master, to remind himself that he was truly a man; and how well their mutual need of each other suited them both; he chained to a frigid mistress, and she to a mild, meek bore of a husband. If she knew whenever he took her in this angry manner that his thoughts were not really of her, it made no difference to the intensity of her pleasure. She lived for his moods of naked savagery and revelled in the animal-like quality of their fierce lovemaking. Leicester satisfied her as no man had ever done before and when at last he rose in moody silence, dressed,
and left her, she lay alone on the old couch, treasuring her bruises and thinking smugly of Elizabeth.
Danger enhanced the quality of this stolen pleasure. Lettice knew she risked her position at court, possibly even her life, every time she accommodated Leicester’s frustrated manhood. There was only one step more perilous and already her perverse, possessive nature had begun to set itself on the idea of secret marriage. It was impossible, of course, while her husband lived, but he was a weakling and his service in Ireland was taking a heavy toll of his health. Ireland had hounded better men than Walter Devereux to their dispirited deaths. And if she should ever be fortunate enough to find herself a lusty young widow, there was only one man who would do now for her next husband.
Her throat was dry with excitement at the thought. To goad Leicester into a permanent, legal relationship, to make him relinquish his vain pursuit of that royal butterfly—it was madness, sheer insanity, almost a death wish for the pair of them. He would never do anything so grossly suicidal—or would he? She remembered a night not long ago when he had drunk deep and given free rein to his resentment in a burst of inebriated self-pity.
“I was full of hope after her last illness, Lettice. We were so close that I truly began to think—” He had turned away angrily. “But I was wrong, of course—I’m always wrong about her. And now it’s all just as it was before—Hatton, Ormond, Oxford—Tom, Dick and Harry for all I know—I must take my place in line again and wait until she remembers to throw me a smile. I can’t bear it, Lettice, it’s destroying me. I never know for sure just how far she goes with them, but one day she’ll goad me too far. There’ll be one laugh and one slap too many—and I’ll kill her, I swear it. I’ll put my hands round that beautiful white neck and squeeze every last mocking breath out of her body. And when she’s dead in my arms, she’ll be mine at last—mine only!”
“Treason,” said Lettice softly. “You know that’s treason.”
He went to stand at the window, staring bleakly at the swaying trees, and for once she was moved by pity for the depth of his despair.