None But Elizabeth

by Rhoda Edwards

  ‘An admirable subject,’ he said smoothly. ‘The invader perishes at the hand of Judith the Israelite patriot.’

  Elizabeth, who had been thinking of Philip of Spain, nodded gravely. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  The Great Hall at Hatfield was a court in miniature. The Princess’s household was swollen by guests allowed in at the discretion of Sir Thomas. His discretion was flexible.

  Holofernes the Assyrian general wore armour that Elizabeth suspected did duty for Julius Caesar also, but he did have an un-Roman black beard and long ringletted wig, which owed more allegiance to Herod. The bloodcurdling rant of the Assyrian King sent Holofernes against the Jews to his fate. ‘I will go forth in my wrath against them, and will cover the whole face of the earth with the feet of mine army…so that their slain shall fill their valleys and brooks, and the river shall be filled with their dead till it overflows.’ So it had been when the Spaniards conquered the Americas. Did the Assyrians burn the Jews for their faith?

  By a curious coincidence, Judith, the beautiful Israelite widow, had long red hair. When the band of Holofernes’ soldiers had laid siege to the cardboard walls of Bethulia and captured the cardboard well with the town’s water supply, the citizens wanted to surrender rather than die of thirst. ‘Trust in the Lord,’ Judith said, and went forth to do battle in a woman’s way. ‘I will smite by the deceit of my lips the servant with the prince, and the prince with the servant; break down their stateliness by the hand of a woman.’

  Elizabeth smiled a woman’s smile.

  In his general’s tent, Holofernes rested on a bed under a canopy of purple and gold. Judith came to him pretending to be a traitor to her people, offering to lead him through Judea to take Jerusalem. Silky as a cat, she dined with Holofernes, who demonstrated obvious lecherous intent. Elizabeth modestly lowered her eyes.

  But Holofernes drank too much wine and collapsed tipsily on his bed, where Judith took his sword and cut off his head. Sir Thomas Pope watched Elizabeth’s face as Judith stood in triumph, the dripping hairy head held aloft. She had gone from ivory pale to the greenish, washy colourlessness of a cabbage butterfly. Her eyes were as expressionless as lumps of coal.

  Two strokes of Holofernes’ sword, each with a most savage slash… Judith put the head into the bag she had brought for the purpose, and set off back to Bethulia to bring news that it was saved. Elizabeth began to look alive again.

  Philip of Spain was coming over to England again in March because he wanted English soldiers for a war with France, and English money to finance it. Let him come. She did not want to see him. Elizabeth had what she had wanted from him, immunity from her sister’s persecutions. She would stay at Hatfield, unless summoned to court. Like Judith, she would trust in the Lord.

  *

  Lord Robert Dudley watched the goddess Flora come at midsummer to Richmond. The barge touching in at the landing stage was a mass of flowers, from its canopy of green silk, embroidered with the eglantine in gold thread to the gorgeous garlands of fat, pink, damask roses decking it — he could smell their perfume from where he stood. The floor of the barge looked ankle deep in meadowsweet and sheaves of dame’s violet, sweet william and gillyflowers lay about the cushions.

  The Princess Elizabeth stepped ashore. She was holding a clove pink in long fingers more delicate than any quilled petals, and a nosegay of them was pinned to her shoulder. She too was embroidered with flowers, on her maiden’s-blush satin and ash-coloured silk; sprays of more pinks, carnations, wallflowers, violets, cowslips, eglantine and roses. It was all pale, subtle and stylish, nothing overstated. The frame of red hair allowed to peep from her cap was the brightest colour on her. Jewels were permissible now, Robert noted, but restricted to many pearls and aiglets of gold. The nun of Hatfield was no longer a useful person to portray. Neither was she a young girl. Nearly twenty-four, but no old maid yet. An exceedingly elegant woman, not beautiful, but radiating beauty as the stars shimmer their mysterious light. No woman could be beautiful with a profile cut by a diamond in the image of King Henry VIII! That profile spelled out the facts of her formidable personality, acute, learned, ruled by will not want. What a Queen she will make, Robert thought.

  Then she turned her head, and he saw her full face, the sunlight illumining her, as if from within. Skin, hair, bright dark eyes, mouth pink as gillyflowers — did it smell of cloves too? Robert changed his mind. Ruled by whim and wit, eager to command, yet also to obey, as a woman should.

  Robert stepped forward, and bowed.

  ‘Highness, since we last met, the world has turned about.’

  ‘It’s a happy day to see you back at court, Lord Robert. A change from hoeing Norfolk turnips?’

  ‘I’m off to France, to the war, to seek my fortune in the King’s service.’

  ‘I hope you find good fortune. Will you be successful as well as handsome?’

  If he had not known her multitudinous talents, and looked first at her profile, he would have thought her the most flirtatious, flighty piece he had ever had the good fortune to meet. Her eyes danced a jig and her pale oyster features shimmered in the sunshine. She had a pretty mouth, but a sharp tongue in it.

  ‘If I’m not,’ he laughed, ‘it won’t be for lack of trying!’ Then, in a lowered voice, he came to the business he had hoped to be able to mention to her in person. ‘I am not a rich man, but I have sufficient means to raise a few men to serve the King. And I should like to make Your Highness a gift as a token of my regard. A pledge for the future.’

  Looking down at her, Robert found himself gazing directly into the Princess’s eyes. In them he saw reflected himself, his own face. Her white lids blinked twice, like a lizard’s, the light too strong.

  ‘I have not forgotten the message that you sent me in the Tower,’ she said. ‘It helped me to believe that there might be a future when I had given up hope. Though I cursed your rashness, Robin Dudley, for sending it. Your cuckoo buds were more to me than the bag of gold you tempt me with now!’ He could have sworn he saw tiny needles of secret laughter prickle in those eyes.

  ‘However, I succumb to temptation,’ she said archly, ‘and accept your bag of gold, with thanks. I never look a gift horse in the mouth — too few of them come my way.’ She probably knew that Amy’s father had died earlier in the year and that Robert had sold off some parcels of land to pay his way out of Norfolk and obscurity.

  ‘I will not forget,’ she said, and the laughter had died. When I am Queen, was the unspoken line.

  He knelt and kissed her hand as if she were so already.

  ‘You shall be rewarded!’ The naughty sparkle was back. Elizabeth took a clove pink from her nosegay, a blood-red one, and tucked it behind a button on his doublet, reaching up so that her fingers managed to brush his beard. ‘Caesar’s mantle!’ she said, mocking.

  ‘I’d rather the Gallant Fair Lady!’

  Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. ‘Sops-in-Wine!’ she countered, tartly, playing on the names of the pinks. But she gave him his Gallant Fair Lady, with its gaudy striped petals, and smiled upon him approvingly.

  Robert watched her passing between bowing gentlemen, towards the Palace gardens. At a discreet distance, he contrived to follow. He had to be discreet, as it would be unwise to show himself under the Queen’s nose, though he had an understanding with King Philip that good service abroad would be rewarded by the lifting of his attainder. The war on France had been declared three weeks ago, and the King was preparing to leave England.

  A banqueting pavilion had been set up in the gardens. Elizabeth sat in a place next in rank to the King and Queen. It was a banquet in the King’s honour, a farewell. Elizabeth watched her sister. Mary had aged. She looked strained, ill and woebegone. She kept bending her head, and Elizabeth knew from that, and from her surreptitious dabbing at her nose, that she was crying, quietly and continuously, inside herself. The King looked wooden. Philip was good at looking wooden.

  The climax of the feast was the entry of a fantastic subtlety, a Sp
anish pomegranate tree, made of pastry and marzipan with viridian green leaves and goldleaf-coated fruits, with the arms of Spain in coloured, foil-trimmed sweetmeats. Mary lavished such compliments on her husband as if by so doing she might hold him in England. How much longer must the arms of Spain be flaunted in England? Elizabeth applied herself to the patriotic task of eating as much of them as she could. She gobbled up marzipan as greedily as a starling, pecking viciously at Spain. Delicious. She pecked in rhythm with the song which danced through her head, a song popular in England just now:

  Madame d’Angloise me tell you very true,

  Me be very much enamoured with you,

  Me love you much bettro than I can well say,

  Me teach you parlere the fine Spaniolaye!

  Well, he never had taught her. Neither was he going to get a chance to carry her off to marry Philibert of Savoy. The English and the Queen’s Council would never allow it. Neither would they allow him to be crowned King of England.

  Elizabeth wished him gone. Then she would go back to Hatfield, to wait. How long she would have to wait she could not tell. But now that her life was out of danger she could afford to be patient.

  *

  Lord Robert Dudley, Master of Ordnance to the Earl of Pembroke, the King’s general in France, came home to England in the first week of March. He rode to the Queen at Greenwich, carrying a bag of dispatches from Philip, and a commendation of his own part in the action at St Quentin. Robert had achieved what he had set out to achieve — putting his knowledge of gunnery to good use, he had made himself King Philip’s man, and knew that his attainder would now be lifted. He had paid a price for a taste of military glory, though — his youngest brother, Harry, had been killed. It left only himself and Ambrose. He had come home knowing Amy to be unwell also. She had a lump in her breast. He alternated between hoping it was not what he suspected, and she feared it might be, and wishing that she was out of the way. He did not wish her a painful death, however.

  But Robert whistled as he rode towards Greenwich; he could not help himself. The dance tune ‘Lusty Gallant’; he would soon be dancing again. Flanders was a loathsome place for a war. The green fields of Kent, tenanted by cavorting lambs and March hares, never fought over and famished by war, gladdened his eyes.

  At Greenwich, he was received at court for the first time since the death of Edward VI. He found the Queen in such a state that he was certain that she would not last the year. The loss of Calais, following so closely after the victory at St Quentin, had stamped Mary’s face with death. Robert would count the months, and days.

  The next day, he took advantage of fine, bracing March weather to go out hawking on the marshes behind Greenwich, riding along the banks of the dykes intersecting the fields, between the leaning, wind-stunted willows. Yellow kingcups and marsh marigolds were out among the long grass and reeds beside the dykes.

  Someone else had been attracted outdoors by the March sun and brisk wind. They met at a field gate at the junction of one dyke and another. The Princess Elizabeth looked in better health than when he had last seen her. She did not show any surprise at seeing Lord Robert. Probably she had been told that he was back; she would be kept well informed of all events.

  ‘Lord Robert! Back safe from the war. I see you have a heron or two. Why didn’t I think of bringing out a hawk?’ Her voice carried well, out there in the marshes.

  ‘Madam, I will give them to you as a present. There are plenty more wildfowl here.’

  Elizabeth liked being given presents, and never refused them. Her groom took charge of Robert’s birds.

  ‘Since you are here, we will ride along together,’ Elizabeth announced. He was delighted to obey.

  The Princess was wearing pale straw colour, all embroidered with yellow and green posies like the cuckoo buds of May. Very charming, Robert thought.

  ‘When I last saw you out riding, Princess, you were all black and white. I envied your horse, a fine black.’

  Elizabeth’s eyebrows lifted. He had observed her without her knowledge; it gave her satisfaction to know that he had been looking. ‘When did you see me?’

  ‘At Hampton, in the river meadows. You were talking to the Prince of Spain. The Swan Uppers were on the river.’

  Elizabeth’s eyebrows lifted even higher. ‘The Prince of Spain, my brother-in-law, is in Brussels.’

  ‘And likely to stay there.’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  In this way, Elizabeth declared her interest in Philip finished, endorsed Robert’s views by also calling him Prince of Spain, instead of King (of England), and conveyed that if reports were correct and the Queen had not long to live, he would never set foot in England again. They understood each other’s meaning very easily.

  The ghost of the small black mole, the grave, dignified little fellow, pondering the conquest of the Americas, the war with France, the Flemish, and the state of his bowels with equal weight, was thus well and truly laid.

  ‘At Christmas,’ Elizabeth said, ‘the Queen told him she was six months pregnant. That she had not told him before, in case it turned out as last time.’

  Robert whistled.

  ‘It turned out to be the same as last time, only of shorter duration.’

  ‘That was just as well.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They cantered along the bank and onto a road, lined on either side with poplars. Like Flanders, Robert thought. The dyke ran beside the road.

  ‘Look!’ Elizabeth reined in her horse and pointed. A duck paddled determinedly along the dyke, followed by four puffball chicks. Their little feet were working furiously through the water. A V-shape of ripples spread in their wake. Robert’s hawk shifted on his glove, blind in its hood of red leather. It would have no chance to bother the duck.

  Violets nestled in the shelter of the poplars. The Princess dismounted and Robert did the same. He was going to pick violets for her.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, restraining him by touching his hand. ‘They wilt.’

  She was watching the ducklings. They had ridden on ahead of their respective attendants, were half hidden among the trees. The poplars were trying to break into leaf. It was early for leaves.

  Elizabeth looked up. ‘I’m sure you have grown since I last saw you, Robin Dudley, or that I have shrunk!’

  Last time she had flirted with words, now she used her looks and eyes also.

  ‘At twenty-six?’ He laughed. ‘You have not shrunk.’

  She laughed her ring-of-bells laugh.

  ‘Not your hands, or your feet, or your whole delightful person!’

  She was still looking up at him.

  ‘You have a pretty mouth,’ he said.

  ‘Sweet Robin!’ Her look enticed.

  Greatly daring, he bent and lightly kissed her lips, then straightened up and stepped back, as if he had presumed. She did not move, as if she had been charmed motionless by his kiss.

  ‘The ducklings are gone,’ she said.

  They rode back together to the palace, conversed as if nothing had happened. But something had — they both knew it, though whether it would prove to have a future, or to be as ephemeral as the wild violets, only time would reveal.

  *

  The oaks in Hatfield park had lost almost all their leaves. The stragglers were dropping off one at a time, drifting down on the still, mild air. One at a time, minute by minute. So time passed quietly on. Elizabeth waited. Sometimes she held her breath and listened, poised like a hart listening for the distant hunter. But there was no sound, no drumming of hooves approaching along the long, dipping ride from the road and up the last slope to the palace. The only sounds were the sharp tweet of the birds, the flutter of their wings as they flew near. Far off, sometimes, the sound of a voice, the bark of a dog, or the shriek of a peacock in the gardens. Over there a plume of bonfire smoke dispersed itself into the pale-blue morning sky, the faded sky of the fading year. At Martinmas, the sun slept early and rose late. The bark on the oaks was dry, gnarled
and greyish. A long dry autumn.

  Elizabeth recalled the Welsh bardic poems, read to her in childhood by Blanche Parry, of how her grandfather had come at the end of summer to claim his crown. ‘When the long yellow summer comes, and victory is ours.’ The long yellow summer of 1485, the year the Tudors came.

  This long russet autumn of 1558, Elizabeth waited to claim her crown. She had waited all summer, watching the leaves on the oaks turn from the intense young green of May, to the slumberous, heavy maturity of August, to green-gold lacing, to orange, gold and red, as red as her hair, and then to russet, dying. The oaks’ clothing had been cast off, lying like a rustling russet petticoat around their feet. At Hatfield one was constantly aware of the changing pattern of the enclosing trees, their different shades of green, bright beech and oak, glossy dark holly and yew. No dyer or tapestry weaver could reproduce their variety.

  Elizabeth turned her face to the sun, a thing she did not usually do, because it spoilt her skin, but it could not possibly be strong enough to produce freckles midway through November. She was wearing her walking dress, with a short cloak of russet wool, fine and smooth, her milkmaid dress as she called it, though any milkmaid who owned a dress like that would no longer be a milkmaid. On her head she wore her milkmaid hat, a wide-brimmed country hat of delicately woven straw lace, worn over a small, close cap. She strolled through the park, small and solitary among the great oaks, apparently at ease and at leisure. But her mind had no time for leisure.

  Hard to believe that it would soon be Christmas, and the beginning of another year, of dark days, snow and rain. Would the Queen live to see 1559? Elizabeth’s informants said no. Poor Mary would never see her forty-second year; she had some internal growth, it was said. But she had held out on Elizabeth for as long as she could, as she had for the last twenty-five years. Only ten days ago, she had at last named her successor — Elizabeth. It meant that she must, in her extremity of illness, acknowledge to herself that Elizabeth was indeed her sister and their father’s daughter. The Tudor heir. Such a capitulation could only mean that death was near. Mary was in a sense dead already, but not buried, for her people had turned from her, looking to Hatfield for the next Queen.