The Queen's Bastard

by Robin Maxwell

  Now naught was left but desperate measures. Every citizen turned out to watch by torchlight as Kanau Hasselaeer and her army of three hundred women said their goodbyes to family and friends. I saw Moeder Hoogendorp gripping Jacqueline to her skeletal self with such tender ferocity I could not stanch my own tears. We all watched as those brave Dutchwomen marched out to do battle under a full moon with the Spanish fiends. We did never expect a one to return alive, but many times that terrible night as we stood on the city wall staring out at the Spanish camp, it was whispered in hushed and reverent tones that there were fewer screams of pain and dying than on a similar field of warring men. And we did never mention what fate we knew awaited those not killed but captured.

  By the morning light, the unequalled courage of those women had fomented such a common mind of general rebellion that it was decided by citizens, one and all, that they would form a great legion — very compact, with women and children in the centre, armed men surrounding them. This mass of humanity would rush out the gate all at once, trying to force their way thro the enemy camp. Lord Holcomb, in all his foolish puffery, forbade them to go. No one, of course, listened.

  But then, from Spanish camp a message arrived tied to a scrawny dog — for they knew with all that had taken place, any Spaniard come knocking at the gate would be instantly and horribly dispatched. Twas a full pardon for the inhabitants of Haarlem from Don Frederick, and it would be honored if the town surrendered without delay. Lord Holcomb spoke up quickly and passionately. This, he cried, fairly tearing at his shirt, was the citys only hope of saving itself. Haarlem must be given over to the Spanish. The survivors would at least have their lives, if not their freedom. Some muttered that Don Frederick could not be trusted, that he would betray them in the end, but everyone was already half dead with starvation and disease. After a final meeting and a prayer together, twas resolved to surrender. The council adjured the townsfolk to go to their houses, saying that by morning supplies would be coming into the city, and the horror of these six months past would be ended.

  But when the gates were swung open and the vanquishing army marched thro, twas not with food that their arms were loaded, but muskets and unsheathed swords. They rained down upon the good citizens of Haarlem who had trusted them, the most horrible punishment and death. They swarmed the residential streets and smashed down doors, dragging people from their homes. The first thousand men, women and children they found they beheaded. Two hundred others they tied together in pairs and threw into Haarlem Lake and drowned.

  A subsequent attack on the garrison had every Englishman fighting for his life. I and twenty soldiers defended the armory in a blazing firefight. Men were felled all round me. I too would have died there, had it not been for Dirk Hoogendorp who had made his way thro back alleys to find me. His eyes were wild. Moeder was dead, his Father battling somewhere a losing battle. But he and his friends knew a way out of the city thro the sewers. They intended to escape and find their way to the Dutch army of resistance and fight with William of Orange to the death or to freedom. Did I wish to join them? My answer was a resounding “Ja!” I said I wished only to find my friend Partridge, if he were still alive, and bring him with us.

  Making from the armory to headquarters, we dodged a hail of bullets and defied death by a hairs breadth again and again. We climbed in thro the back window. The Spaniards had already come and gone, leaving a scene of carnage. Piles of English corpses, thick gore under our boots. Twas still and quiet as only death can be. I scanned the place, but Dirk was tugging at my arm.

  “Arthur, come! Your friend is dead. We have no time, we must go now.”

  “Arthur?”

  Twas barely audible, literally a voice from the dead. Dirk and I fell on the gruesome pile, digging like madmen, Partridges muffled calls leading us to him. We pulled three bodies off his. He was covered head to foot in blood. Suddenly he sat bolt upright, altogether intact.

  “Ughh!” he cried. “The blood is not mine. I played dead. Come, get me up!”

  We did, and started out the back window. Suddenly Partridge grabbed my arm and I turned to see his face, the whites of his eyes clear and yet perplexed amidst the clotted red features.

  “You came back for me,” he said.

  “As you would have done for me,” said I.

  “Quickly, if you are coming!” cried Dirk, already half out the window.

  We followed, and with that I began the second phase of my life as a soldier.

  Twenty-seven

  Elizabeth had meant to surprise Robin as he took the waters at Buxton Spa, and to her delight she had succeeded. In the midst of her summer progress in Derbyshire she had found herself missing the company of her favorite, who had been sent by his physicians to bathe and drink the healing waters of St. Ann’s Spring. Ensconced with her Court not far from that place, this morning she had set her household atwitter, suddenly ordering the smallest of retinues to accompany her on a journey — two ladies, her dwarf fool Mrs. Tomison, and four royal guards. She had ridden out with little pomp on her new chestnut gelding, arriving in Buxton in the late afternoon, and now gazed out over the buildings Lord Shrewsbury had cleverly erected round the spring. There was the bath house itself, all of warm pink marble, after the Roman style with columns and walkways and hanging gardens, and a row of houses that Shrewsbury rented to lodgers come for the bathing. One of these had been hastily vacated for the Queen, and now she was allowing her women to slowly unbutton and uncorset her.

  Mrs. Tomison, more elegant and well spoken than a lady three feet tall had a right to be, sat on a pillow at Elizabeth’s feet. She was certainly improved by the gowns she wore, the Queen’s castoffs cut down to fit her diminutive proportions, but she had also managed her own education, so that her conversation was at once erudite and bitingly witty. “A droll troll” is what she would call herself. Elizabeth had, after reading in her mother’s diary of Anne’s beloved fool Niniane, sought out a woman jester for her own pleasure. She felt she could keep one of her own sex nearer her more of the time, and as the years wore on the Queen found a bawdy tale or a raucous laugh an ever more frequent necessity.

  Her women helped Elizabeth into a red brocaded robe lined with many layers of fine lawn, and she made her way alone down the marble walkway to the columned building. All other bathers had very quietly been summoned from the pool and, when they emerged, been told that the Queen had recently arrived and wished for privacy. Lord Leicester was therefore, when she entered, the solitary bather in the mist-filled bath house, sitting neck deep and eyes closed in the tiled pool, his loose lawn shirt floating bubblelike about him.

  Making no sound above the lapping water and hissing air, Elizabeth removed her bath robe and, clad only in a thin sleeveless shift, slipped into the warm water. She glided slowly across the pool toward Robin, challenging herself to keep such silence and stealth that she would be face to face with him before he could open his eyes. The feel of the water on her skin was delicious, with fine bubbles which tickled her throat and the soft underpart of her arms. The sensual delight was almost unbearable. A gleam of vapor coalesced on Elizabeth’s face, which had been cleansed by her ladies of all cosmetics. She felt young again and perfect.

  Robin’s face became clearer as she floated closer. He was beginning to show his age, but he was still beautiful, she thought. Red-brown hair and beard were streaked with grey, the wide-set eyes radiated fine wrinkles from each side, and the slightly arched nose was a bit sharper than in youth. Still, there was no man she desired more, who knew better how to please her, soothe her fears, make her smile. No one was more devoted and tender. And no one, she thought with a shiver of excitement, was as dangerous. There lurked an animal beneath the fair skin, a ravening beast of ambition, and she knew she could never take her eyes off him for long — never completely trust him. In some perverse way this made her love him more.

  Elizabeth was pleased. Robin’s eyes were shut, he still unaware of her presence. She made her movements so subtl
e that he never stirred, and for a moment she wondered if he were dozing. Now she was inches from him, crouched between his parted knees, so close she could feel his slow breath on her face. He licked his lips. He was not asleep.

  “Lord Leicester,” she whispered in her softest and most comfortable voice. So comfortable indeed that he did not even open his eyes.

  “I am not ready to come out. I have only just come in. Leave me be.”

  “I cannot leave you be,” she said, almost crooning. “I have never been able to leave you be.”

  His eyes fluttered open. Though there was no perceptible start in his body, she felt his whole person, his very soul, illuminated suddenly with the sight of her. He did not smile but fixed her with a familiar, penetrating gaze. She wondered if he would reach out for her, pull her the last few inches toward him. But he did not. And she was not surprised.

  According to her wishes, Elizabeth and Leicester were no longer lovers in the most intimate sense, had not been for more than a year. She was too proud to share him in that way with another woman. With Douglas Sheffield.

  Something changed in his eyes. “Why are you here, Elizabeth? You’re not ill.” He said this more as a command than a question.

  “No, not ill. My cheek is still slightly sore to the touch with neuralgia, but the ulcer on my shin has healed. No, I have come asking after yourself, my lord. I understand the malaria has gripped you again, and it worries me.” She put her hand to his face. “You do look feverish.”

  Now he smiled slowly and, with an amused look, took her hand to his lips and kissed it. “’Tis no wonder, Elizabeth. This is a hot pool. Believe me, I am already much improved after two days here. But if you are come offering to nurse me, I shall gladly become ill again.”

  The intimacy of his words made Elizabeth suddenly uneasy. She pushed her back against the water, then turned and sat side by side with him on the tile ledge so she would not have to meet his eye.

  “How does your son?” she asked evenly. It took all of her strength and composure to speak to him on this most sensitive of all topics.

  “Well. I’ve taken him from his mother to be brought up in my uncle’s house.”

  His son with another woman, thought Elizabeth bitterly. Their beautiful son, lying dead between them.

  They shared this painful image in silence as Leicester sought words to soothe her aching heart.

  “Lady Sheffield still presses me for marriage” — his tone foretold his next words — “but I continue to explain that I cannot. Can never marry her.”

  Elizabeth could not suppress a wry smile. “My lovely cousin Douglas. Is she very angry?”

  “You should not gloat, Elizabeth. It ill becomes a Queen. If I were less a gentleman, I would harry you about Christopher Hatton. He seems to please you a little too well these days, on and off the dance floor.”

  “’Tis not my young Mutton who should be troubling you, my lord … ,” teased Elizabeth.

  “And who should, Your Majesty?”

  “I have had recent correspondence from de Médicis. She has asked if I could fantasy a marriage with her youngest son, the Duc d’Alençon.”

  Dudley laughed aloud. “Alençon! I think he would please you not at all, Elizabeth. He is twenty years your junior, barely a man. He’s puny and pitted with the pox and wears a large swollen nose on his face. ‘Ugly’ is the word that’s commonly used to describe him.”

  “A marriage with him would solidify the Treaty of Blois,” she insisted.

  “You know very well France will keep that treaty without any marriage. You just pretend to consider Alençon to annoy me.”

  Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to laugh. The sound echoed over the water and through the steam-shrouded bath house. Leicester was right, of course, though he and all the world should never know it. She alone knew that she would never marry the French prince. Still, in the coming years she must pretend to take this proposal seriously. Very seriously indeed. The matter was not yet clear in Elizabeth’s mind, but the alliance with France — even if it were an illusion only — would prove to be of some great import in the political maneuverings with Spain, and the Netherlands war. But she did not wish to think of that now, the ghastly stories of mayhem and slaughter leaking from Flanders like an unstanchable wound. Nor did she wish to contemplate her Scottish cousin Mary, still locked away in the north of England, and her endless plots to steal Elizabeth’s throne. No, she was here for her Robin, to soothe him, prove that their love and friendship still flourished despite that one intimacy lost. She would speak of cheerful matters.

  “One of your Oxford boys was in Greenwich before I left, taking advantage of your lodgings at Court. With or without you there, it has become a great place of meeting for men of letters, poets, students, players. Philip Sidney’s literary circle, too. They all speak of you with such fondness — the Great Patron. There is talk that you take your chancellorship at Oxford overseriously, but they forgive you that as well.”

  He was amused. “I’ve decided that receiving the love of artists and thinkers is sufficient balm for the hatred of politicians and princes, which I continue to incessantly attract.” He smiled. “Lady Shrewsbury showed me the letter you wrote her about my prudent diet that you wish me to follow. No more than two ounces of meat, and the twentieth part of a pint of wine at dinner?”

  Elizabeth chuckled. “And as much of St. Ann’s sacred water as you wish to drink.”

  “But on festival days,” he said, quoting the letter, “I might have the shoulder of a wren, and for supper a leg of the same.”

  “That is besides your ordinary ounces, my love.”

  “Oh, thank you, Your Majesty.”

  “This is for your own good, Robin, and mine too. When we stand together we should not want others to whisper behind our backs, ‘Ah, there they go, Fat and Skinny.’ We should become a laughingstock.”

  “Ah …” Leicester suddenly leaned his head back and closed his eyes. His forehead wrinkled in pain.

  Elizabeth grew alarmed. “Robin, love. You did not eat before you came to bathe?”

  “I am fine, Elizabeth,” he said weakly.

  She placed a hand on his forehead. “You’re burning, Robin!”

  She called out and two female attendants hurried in at once.

  “Take Lord Leicester to his house and call my physician.”

  The attendants began pulling him, weak-kneed, out of the pool.

  “Gentle with him!” she commanded, her panic rising. “I’ll join you presently.”

  She watched as they bundled him into his robe and helped him away. Left alone, she allowed herself only a moment to consider the world without this man. Then she rose from the water and, unattended, pulled on her own robe.

  She would let nothing in the world happen to her Robin, she vowed silently. Nothing. Nothing.

  Twenty-eight

  More than four years had I been a soldier when one summers night, a bright starstrewn sky our only cover, I lay naked in the softness of the dunes with Marje Bleiden cupped within the warm crescent of my body. We had been lovers for many months, and I had happily learnt under her expert tutelage the sweet dark secrets of female flesh. My sister Alice would have been proud, I thought as I grazed Marjes nipple with the lightest touch of my outstretched fingers, causing her to push her curved buttocks back against me. For I had finally become accomplished in the art of pleasing a woman several times over before I myself experienced release.

  I nuzzled her neck with my face more playfully than passionately. We were both entirely satiated, but wished the closeness to continue a few moments more. She turned on her back then, and I propped my self on one elbow. Her full breasts spread pendulous at her sides. Marje was no longer a young woman, and even in the moonlight I could see the deepening lines of her careworn tho still pretty face.

  “Why do we fight?” she asked suddenly. “Tell me the reason men are constantly at war.”

  I had never known the woman to be self pitying, but s
he was deeply saddened by the hand the Fates had dealt to her and the man with whom she was in love. She was not my woman, you see, but the long time companion of an officer of Prince Williams army — a general named Roost. Most of this brave soldiers male parts had been blown away in battle, and he had no longer been able to properly please her. Whilst she was not his wife, merely a camp follower and nurse, they had grown too fond of one another to part after his injury. He insisted, however, she find satisfaction elsewhere. In this she had complied, but she vowed to remain his woman in heart and spirit until one or the other of them died. All of our fellow soldiers knew that I was the one she bedded with, even Roost, and I wondered at his courage, and the courtesy which he ever extended to my self. I decided to oblige Marje by answering her question if it might soothe her mind.

  “There are soldiers who fight for money. You yourself know how full most armies are of mercenaries. Tis never a fine living, but a better one than many can find in their home parishes. I know that some come to the military believing they will find advancement in their station. Perhaps here in Holland a mans efforts on the battlefield are rewarded, but in England tis only a dream. Nobility rules above all,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. I had never forgotten the waste of mens lives — at the whim of highborn Lord Holcomb.

  Marje was still restless, her eyes seeming to search the heavens for answers.

  “I have fought with men who simply like to kill. They are few and far between, those men,” I said, wishing I believed my own words. I had meant to soothe Marje, but this subject excited an unhealthy passion in her. So I continued. “There are men like myself who enter the military service seeking a manly life. A life of excitement and adventure.” I laughed ruefully. “I have certainly had my fill of both.”