by Susan Kay
“Help me, Robin,” she begged him suddenly, wild with despair. “Help me to free myself while there’s still time. I can’t bear to be shut away again—”
It was Mary she feared, and not her mother. He had gathered enough from her rambling to deduce that, and now he thought desperately, praying for inspiration—finding it suddenly and quite unexpectedly in her own words.
“A state funeral,” he said firmly. “She will rest when you have buried her decently, with all the ceremony due to a reigning monarch. You will be at peace when it’s done, I swear it.”
Elizabeth gazed at him doubtfully. “Westminster Abbey?”
He blinked—Oh God, not that, not so close—and led her cautiously away from the idea.
“Not Westminster, the London mob would never stand for it. There might be desecration of her tomb.”
The Queen shivered. “Where then?”
“Peterborough,” he said decidedly. Peterborough was far enough away. She nodded dumbly and turned away; he saw that she was not convinced.
“Let me sit with you tonight,” he said quickly, “and every night—until it is done.”
She smiled absently, lifting one hand to touch his cheek.
“And put you in a coffin, too? The day I do that, my love, my own must be ready.”
After all these years, it was the closest she had ever come to saying that she loved him, and he heard it with a curious sensation, as though his heart had contracted into a ball of hot, heavy lead inside his chest, a burning in the throat which made him swallow with difficulty.
Her restless wandering had taken her to her bedside table, where in a large golden casket, she kept her most precious possessions under lock and key; the casket of which he had once spoken so bitterly to Burghley. It contained his own miniature; he knew, because she had once told him—he had never been permitted to look inside for himself.
The casket was open for once and she was toying with something unseen in its depths. He came up behind her so silently that, in her taut preoccupation, she did not hear him.
And so it was that he saw it.
“Oh God,” he said hollowly. “Dear God.”
She gasped, a frightened, guilty hiss of her breath, as he lifted out the little doll. It was nearly forty-six years since he had seen it, on that night at Hampton Court when she had first told him that she would never marry.
It was just as he remembered it; dressed in black satin; and headless.
His face was white as he turned his eyes slowly to meet hers.
“I shall burn this evil thing,” he said.
“No!” Elizabeth snatched it from him wildly. “Oh no, not yet. Not yet! She does not wish it!”
She was suddenly so deeply agitated that he was afraid to pursue the matter. Reluctantly he surrendered the dreadful little object and watched her lock it back in the casket with feverish desperation. He knew then that she had been sick for a long time, far, far longer than he could ever have imagined. Much that had puzzled and frustrated him over the years was suddenly clear and strangely unimportant, for nothing mattered to him now, except the need to shield her from discovery and the fate of brain-sick monarchs. Degrading imprisonment, stealthy death—he would not allow it. There must be a way to ignite the ashes of her vanity and make her rise again like the glorious phoenix he remembered.
He could not do it; he lacked the youth and vitality. But there was one other who just might. And without pausing to consider all the possible consequences of his suggestion, he remarked casually that it was over long since she had received his stepson, the Earl of Essex.
She reacted so sharply, angrily, to his suggestion, saying she had no wish to see that rude, headstrong boy, that Leicester was immediately convinced he was on the right track; it was the first time in weeks that anything had interested her enough to make her angry.
“And why not Essex?” he remarked, artfully provoking her. “Is it fair to damn the boy for being his mother’s son—the she-wolf’s cub?”
That stung home, the only time he had ever dared to taunt her with Lettice, to whom she never referred by name, but only by that insulting soubriquet—and never to him. Until now it had been an unspoken understanding that Lettice did not exist. When she swung round to face him, he saw he had achieved his object; for the moment, at least, she had forgotten Mary Stuart.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to imply,” she said sharply. “I have been perfectly fair to all her children—I gave the girls a place at court.”
“But it’s the boy who really counts—and what have you done to advance him? Nothing! The lad has no means by which to support his title and he’s beginning to resent me for his dependent state—Lettice says you’ll always bear a grudge against him for her sake.”
“I do not bear grudges,” she insisted furiously. “How dare she measure me against her own petty emotions! By God’s precious soul, I’ll make her eat those words—”
“Then you’ll give him a post?” Leicester considered a moment and smiled. “Of course, you could always make him Master of the Horse.”
Elizabeth stared at him. “That post is not vacant.”
“It could be—if I resigned—and you know I ought to. I’ve hung on to it for years out of sentimental attachment—the first gift you ever made me as Queen. But I’ve so many other offices to fulfil now and it’s a young man’s job. Let him have it—believe me, he could use the £1,500 a year.”
At the mention of money she was immediately alert and suspicious.
“That’s a great deal to pay out on an untried lad, even on your recommendation, Robin.”
“Then satisfy yourself on his suitability—see him tonight. He won’t think it odd if you choose to talk and play cards till dawn. No shadow will trouble you in his company, I promise you.”
The spark of animation faded from her eyes; she pulled her hands free from his, and he knew a moment of bitter disappointment as she resumed her aimless pacing. It was no good—nothing worked! Nothing held her interest long enough to break that vicious circle of guilty despair.
He thought dully: They shall not take her to the Tower. If it comes to it, I shall keep her close at Kenilworth. And if I find reason to distrust King James, I shall take her abroad…
As he watched, she passed a wall mirror of rare Venetian glass and halted abruptly in front of it. In the mirror, he saw her frown at her reflection and pull angrily at a crumpled curl.
A moment later, she looked over her shoulder at him.
“So what shall I wear tonight to receive him? What would be suitable?”
Leicester smiled with relief as he went to take the hand she held out to him.
Whatever she wore for Essex, he would make damn certain it was not black!
Chapter 4
Stark and solitary amid the barren desolation in the foothills of the Guadarrama, the raw stone palace of the Escurial stood silent beneath a fierce midday sun.
Within the maze of cool corridors, hidden in his Spartan little room, the mighty ruler of half the world pored shortsightedly over the documents which lay in neat stacks on a gold inlaid table. He did not look like a mighty ruler. In his eternal black, crouched over his papers, scribbling notes in margins and writing his interminable despatches and memoranda, he more closely resembled an elderly, underfed clerk. Yet half-blind, bent double with rheumatism, Philip of Spain, at sixty-one, was still the same model of patience he had been in his lost youth. He never laughed, never lost his temper—no, not even with the exhausted secretary who had once poured ink instead of sand all over his King’s newly finished letter.
“It would have been better to have used the sand,” Philip had remarked flatly and began to write the letter all over again. There ought to have been something endearing about such saintly equanimity, yet Philip excited little warmth either among his people or his close servants. It was li
ke serving a living statue.
Restraint was the governing principle of life, and self-restraint was the only thing that had enabled him to wait thirty years before taking his revenge on England, that miserable little half-isle of heretics, which prospered and mocked him steadily. Thirty years she had held him off with an unheard-of series of shameless prevarications. She had laughed at his holy crusade against heretics:
“Can’t he let his subjects go to the Devil their own way?”
She had laughed at his hostility, as though he were an imbecile child, for ever playing with model ships, never to be taken seriously:
“Good morning, Mendoza. Come to declare war again?”
And she had laughed at the chink in his armour, the one weakness she had tricked him into exposing to a tittering world:
“My enmity and his having begun with love, you must not think we could not get along together whenever I choose.”
Oh, to be avenged on her for all those cruel sallies at his expense! He had loved her once, a little—perhaps more than he would ever be prepared to admit, except on his deathbed, to his confessor. A lifetime ago it seemed now, that first brief spring when she had cut across the darkness of his accursed marriage like a knife of brilliant sunlight, an insolent, infuriating chit of twenty-one. Even now, after all his marriages and mistresses, after all his countless hours of penance, he could still catch his breath at the memory of her laugh and the elusive, come-on look in her eyes.
But of course, she would not look like that now. She was old! His foolish infatuation had long since transmuted itself into undying hatred and soon she would laugh at him no more.
The “Enterprise of England” was a personal vendetta against the woman he now honestly believed to be the Devil incarnate. It was appropriate, when he thought about it, that the Anti-Christ should be a woman—had not a woman been responsible for Man’s first fall from grace? Strange tales were afloat of her, faithfully carried to him by her arch enemy, Mendoza. How she had fainted and remained unconscious for four hours, in spite of every attempt to revive her, “an indisposition,” reported Mendoza meaningfully, “to which she is occasionally liable.” Oh, he knew quite well what Mendoza had meant to imply. Sometimes a witch’s spirit could be called forth from her body to commune in the nether world, leaving the host in a senseless state which curiously resembled Elizabeth’s. From time to time she appeared to see sights invisible to the human eye. Only the previous year, on her way to chapel, she had stopped dead, staring at something unseen, so overcome with fear that she could not continue on her way to church and had to be taken back to her apartments. Where was she during those lost four hours? And what terrified her so badly that she could not enter the House of God?
Renard had warned him long ago that she was of the Devil. He had chosen to ignore it for a long time, hoping to win her for himself and his Church. But now he knew it was true. She was a witch and she must be burnt at the stake.
He liked to imagine that burning. It was so exactly what she deserved for the way she had treated him all those years ago. No matter what she said, it was he who had put the crown of England on her head, and kept it there just long enough for her to gain the strength to hold it without his aid. What a fool he had been, gulled by a woman’s wiles like any lovesick stable-hand. The sense of degradation had never left him; it was a sore that festered slowly. Now he would make war on her and it was God’s obvious design that his enterprise would prosper.
After years of anxiety and indecision, he was unshakeably set on action in the face of every conceivable setback. Francis Drake had delayed the expedition for more than a year by his lightning raid on Cadiz and Corunna. Done quite against her express order, Elizabeth had insisted blithely. She really must hang that damnable knave one of these days—he appeared to think he ruled the seven seas. And all that shipping destroyed—such a shame!
Oh yes, she had spread her hands with mock horror and said a lot of conciliatory things—but she had quietly welcomed Drake back and pocketed the lion’s share of plunder from the San Felipe, Philip’s personal treasure ship. That knave had captured it as a casual afterthought on his way home.
The raid had been a severe blow to Spain. Thousands of tons of shipping and vast quantities of stores had been lost in Drake’s devastating onslaught. The damage had taken twelve months to repair and had fully alerted the enemy to their intentions. So-called allies had begun to snigger and backslide—even the Pope looked down his long nose to sneer:
“We are sorry to have to say it, but we have a poor opinion of this Spanish Armada and fear some disaster.”
Sometimes it was difficult to be entirely sure whose side the Pope was on. From Sixtus V, his hard paymaster, Philip received a steady stream of sarcasm, and the continual reminder that their mutual enemy was “a great woman—were she only a Catholic she would be our beloved.”
All over Europe it was the same, from friends and enemies alike. Nothing but reverence for her name, admiration for her achievements, outright delight at her audacity; while Philip was placed with a yawn in the category of also ran. He could not compete with her glossy brilliance, her vulgar show; he was the unsung spider to her gaudy butterfly, the tortoise to her hare.
But the tortoise would triumph, the fable said so, and no calamity could cloud Philip’s faith in this endeavour. Even the death of his great admiral, Santa Cruz, had not disheartened him. He refused to believe, as others did, that there was no one capable of taking Santa Cruz’s place at such short notice, and devolved the responsibility on the Duke of Medina Sidonia. Certainly the Duke had begged to be excused, for he had rarely been to sea before, let alone in a fight, and insisted piteously that he was always seasick and caught cold. Assuredly, oh assuredly, he was not the man for the job!
Philip appeared not to hear. He had made the appointment and would not reconsider his decision, and in truth the man’s self-effacing attitude had pleased him. He approved of humility in his subjects, and he had a fine sense of what was fitting. His enterprise would not be led by a vulgar pirate, like Drake, but by the highest-ranking nobleman at the court of Spain.
And let the Duke not fear the inadequacies of his own judgement—he would not, at any stage, be called upon to use it! A weighty dossier containing the King’s personal and meticulously detailed instructions upon how to proceed at every point would accompany the Spanish Admiral. And with God at his right hand, guiding the whole enterprise, there would be nothing—could be nothing—but victory ahead.
With all the calm serenity of a fanatic, Philip considered the order of procedure, the plan which could not fail. One hundred and fifty armed ships would sail up the Channel, embark the Duke of Parma’s army at Dunkirk, and land in England. The landing was all with which Medina Sidonia need concern himself—Parma’s army would do the rest. Thirty thousand of the most highly trained troops in the world would make a butcher’s shop out of any battlefield the English chose to make a stand upon; England was notorious for the poverty of her military defences.
Frowning slightly, Philip took a magnifying glass to Parma’s letter that lay before him on the desk.
“…when we talked of taking England by surprise, we never thought of less than thirty thousand. Now she is alert and ready for us and it is certain that we must fight by sea and land, fifty thousand would be too few!”
Even Parma! Everywhere the doubting Thomases, nowhere the encouraging word for what he knew in his heart to be so unquestionably right. Was there no one in Europe who shared his faith in God’s obvious design?
And yet—he dabbed absently at the watery discharge which obscured the vision of his inflamed eyes—and yet there might be something in what Parma said.
A parrot cry of peace might induce England to abandon her defensive preparations. In God’s actions there was no such thing as an underhand trick.
Philip’s conscience was at peace as he wrote out orders to that effect.
* * *
“These negotiations are a smoke screen to blind us,” said Leicester furiously. “Parma doesn’t want peace!”
“He doesn’t want war either,” remarked Elizabeth steadily, looking up from the maps and muster sheets which crowded her table. “Not after the wretched winter he’s just spent under canvas on short rations. He’s lost fifty per cent of his army through disease and desertion. Would you want war in his place?”
“No.” Leicester flushed and looked away suddenly. “But then I’m not half the commander Parma is, nor shall I ever be. The man’s a military genius.”
“Even a military genius can have his bellyful of delays and contradictory instructions. Naturally I don’t trust the man’s real intentions. But if I were dear brother Philip, I’d trust Parma’s loyalty even less. The peace talks will continue until the last possible moment. If they fail—”
“When they fail!”
“Then we will fight.”
“With what may I ask, madam—an army full of raw recruits who scarcely know one end of a pike from another?”
“They’ll have to land before it comes to that. I might ask you to remember that the French call me the Queen of the Sea with good reason.”
“And I might ask you to remember that the Queen of the Sea decommissioned her fleet last July—why, God alone knows.”
Elizabeth tapped her pen ominously on the table top, frowning a little.
“Are you suggesting that I should have kept idle seamen on full pay for over a year, waiting for a fleet which is still in harbour? Do you know what it costs to keep the fleet-in-being?” She made an impatient gesture as he seemed about to reply. “No, you damn well don’t! Lord knows, you can’t even keep your own household solvent. Twelve thousand pounds a month those wooden sea-dragons devour—if I’d taken the advice of panic-mongers like you, we’d be bankrupt by now.”
He stood his ground doggedly; he still insisted it was a suicidal risk to take.