‘My sweet Robin, I hope your own players went better clad on the road north!’
‘My players,’ Robert said, ‘are respectable!’
A band of Egyptians, with their dark faces and barbarian jewellery, caught the Queen’s eye. One of them touched the bridle of Lord Robert’s horse. She had a scarlet scarf tied round her head with tiny gold coins sewn round the edge.
‘There’s a lucky face!’ She was grinning up at Robert, toothless, monkey-eyed.
‘Too lucky to live long,’ Robert thought he heard a mutter nearby, but turning quickly, he could not tell who it was.
‘Has the face a lucky future?’ he laughed.
‘Hail, King that is to be!’ hissed the voice of this woman of Ptolemy’s tribe. Then she cackled and slid away before he could strike her for her insolence. Robert’s eyes shot round again — words like that should not be spoken, he had too many enemies. No sign, only the Queen, high colour spotting her checks, staring straight ahead over the heath towards Kent. She had seen and heard, and was silent. Robert refrained even from looking at her.
Behind him, he heard the Earl of Sussex, who was not his friend, snort, ‘Talking to vagabonds! Kith and kin, I’d say. Look at him, Devil Dudley’s son, dark as the gipsy! He roves far on a high road to God knows where, and I hope I see him prevented from reaching his destination!’
Robert wanted to slit Sussex’s throat from ear to ear. But he gave no sign of having heard this lordly aside; he did as the Queen had done. He had learned how to pocket his Dudley temper, to an extent that would indeed have amazed his father. He rode beside his Queen, that was enough. His temper would stay in his pocket now and be taken out only in private.
VI
Et In Arcadia Ego
1550 – 1560
The palace of Nonsuch was environed by a wall of rosy, blushing brick. Behind the wall, rising like a galleon in full sail from the sighing green sea of great elms, beech and oak, the towers and pinnacles of King Henry VIII’s palace of dreams took on substance. Who had ever dreamed before that a palace might be built in the English countryside of glistening white and gold, with a facade of windows and gilded statuary to outshine the noonday sun? Nonsuch, for it was unrivalled. The Queen’s beasts lorded it over all, sitting up proudly upon the topmost towers, the shields of royal arms in their paws. Around them gilded weather vanes made strange music when the wind blew, to accompany the sighing of the trees.
It would have served as an illustration in some old Book of Hours. A French castle, a fairy dwelling of sugar-white in a strange forest where nymphs, satyrs and centaurs frolicked and panpipes could be heard. Virgo, their birthsign. The Queen and Lord Robert came riding like lovers. Virgo wore a golden garment as she trod the hills of that Surrey Arcadia, where it was eternal summer, where for lovers Time halted his inexorable steps, laid up his scythe, and took a nap, just as the shepherd snoozed among field poppies, leaving his flock to the efforts of his panting dog.
The court emerged from the woods like a cloud of gaudy butterflies and settled on their host. The Earl of Arundel, who owned Nonsuch, had in this first August of her reign devised an entertainment for the Queen to be as nonpareil as its setting. To do so, he had encumbered himself with heavy debts and fallen prey to the foolish fallacy that the Queen might be persuaded to marry him. Out of this situation Elizabeth derived perhaps more entertainment than Arundel had bargained for. His nose was put out of joint from the first. The Queen insisted that Lord Robert Dudley should be given rooms in the house itself, instead of being assigned to one of the tents in the park set up to house the court who were not persons of high rank. Arundel might not like what took place under his nose, but would have liked even less what took place out of his sight.
On their first morning at Nonsuch, the Queen rode out with Lord Robert before six o’clock, alone. They rode past the cows of the home dairy standing under the trees in the park, waiting to be milked, past the milkmaid with her stool, who did not know she saw the Queen ride by. There were huge horse mushrooms springing in the meadows, and everywhere birds sang.
It was only a couple of miles ride to reach open downland, where the turf grew short and sweet, mile upon mile of it, ideal for trying the paces of a horse, which was the excuse for this escapade. They left the parkland of Nonsuch behind, by the wall of the hare warren. The ground was rising gently all the time, the empty road bordered by long grasses, gone to seed and almost wheat-coloured, bent by the wind like a field in a bad harvest. Larks rose abruptly out of the tufts to shoot up into the sky like small fireworks, showering the earth-bound world with golden sparks of song. The sky was blue as the butterflies who flitted over the grass; it would be hot by noon.
Along one of the chalky paths crossing the downs like white scars plodded a shepherd and his pattering flock, urged on by a busy dog. He had a little bagpipe slung over his shoulder that he might play when he sat down to a bite of breakfast. The sound of sheep bells faded with them into the distance.
‘Once I envied the lot of the milkmaid and the shepherd,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Whom do you envy now?’ Robert was curious to know if the Queen, who possessed everything, could still envy the pastoral life, or those idyllic glimpses of it she chose to see. She rode along at his side, the Queen, in his sole charge. He had not yet got used to being out alone with her and felt a heavy responsibility. She was adroit at avoiding escorting parties in order to gain a brief solitude.
‘I envy the happy families snug in their homes at breakfast. I envy the milkmaid, who is free to be happy at sixteen.’
‘Is Your Majesty not happy?’
‘Happy? Why, of course, Robin, riding out here, with you, an hour’s escape — of course I’m happy!’ She laughed, suddenly as gleeful and frivolous as she had been pensive and serious. She urged her horse into a canter, and Robert kept pace with her until the canter became a gallop, and they went on at full stretch for about a mile, drumming along the turf, the horses nose to nose until they were outrun by a startled hare. Across the highest part of the downs, into a dip, and up the other side. Here, on the sunlit, deserted slope, the Queen halted. Robert hobbled their horses and hitched up the reins, to let them graze.
Elizabeth sat herself down, found a small flat thistle hiding there, and moved aside to a clearer spot, avoiding the hummock of a rabbit burrow, with its entrance all scattered with pills. The grass was short, as if it had been sheared. Robert, in some amazement, sat down beside her. There was wild thyme under her fingers and she held them out under his nose for him to sniff. A grasshopper went tzzk, tzzk, tzzk, over in the longer grass. Elizabeth picked a pretty, delicate, fronded grass, like a spray of tiny brown beads, each a-wobble on a scarcely visible, gossamer stalk. With it she tickled Robert’s nose. From somewhere, she produced sweets of marzipan and popped one in his mouth.
Robert lay back, arms behind his head, and the sun soothed his feelings of unease at having this time alone with the Queen with only the grasshoppers to tell tales. A most improper situation, though he laughed often enough at convention and propriety. No situation, surely, was improper, unless… But he did not lie for long, because Elizabeth sent him off to pick flowers for her, soft lilac scabious, oxeye daisies, purple hardheads and meadowsweet.
When he brought her the flowers, she was lying flat on the ground, oblivious of crushing her fine clothes, her nose almost touching the grass. She was watching something.
‘Look,’ she said.
Robert lay beside her and brought his face close to hers, though he did not have to be quite so close to see what she was watching, because he was not short-sighted. A tiny green beetle crawled among the mighty pillars of grass stems, the labyrinth of wild thyme. One moment his wings had a ruby sheen, another a sapphire overlying the emerald.
‘If only,’ Elizabeth said, ‘there might be a gem which had all his colours.’ She had always been entranced by nature’s things, insects and worms, butterflies and flowers.
Then she looked aside
from the beetle, into Robert’s face. Her sandy lashes hid her eyes. ‘Robin, do you envy the shepherd’s life?’
‘No,’ said Robert, in his most matter-of-fact way.
There was no immediate reply. Robert noticed that when talking to him, the Queen used less words than usual. Elizabeth loved words; often Robert thought she had turned an English sentence into Latin, and back, before finding it fit for use.
‘Robin…’ she said again, as if calling him from a long distance, instead of a couple of inches. Yet her voice was soft, scarcely more than a whisper. He laid one hand behind her head, turning it so that his face came between hers and the sky, cupping it so that he might drink. He began to kiss her, and she seemed to want very much to be kissed. Her hat fell off, and her hair fell down, with a small shower of pins.
For once she was robbed of speech. She had the sweetest female mouth that he had ever kissed; it tasted of marzipan. Why had he never thought that she would be like this, as soft and pliant as she was sharp and diamond-brittle at other times. Robert wondered whether he dared to hope for the unattainable, out there on the thyme-scented turf, scattered by crushed flowers. With her, it would be a scaling of Mount Olympus, as opposed to those petty conquests hitherto his lot.
He caressed her white skin, working towards the neckline of her gown. She did not resist or swat him like a fly, as she had done once before. She had the most perfect, translucent skin. At nearly twenty-six she had preserved her youth better than those women worn by childbirth. Her body was as virginal as it had been ten years ago, though her mind, well, he was not too sure about that.
She began dressing his beard with bits of fragrant thyme, and giggled. The grasshopper tzzked in his ear. The beetle was still valiantly crawling, this time amid a red cobweb of hair. Elizabeth’s pretty, sweet mouth was curled into a smile of pure amusement. One moment she invited kisses, another, he could swear, she was laughing at him. First one elusive Elizabeth peeped in her eyes, then hid, to be replaced by another. She looked like the daughter of Pan. Robert put the heel of his hand hard on the thistle and swore.
‘Robin sat on a thistle, that made him whistle!’ Elizabeth giggled more, gasping and hilarious. He stopped her mouth with a kiss, and her delighted squirming with his arms, and she became pliant again. This did not last long.
‘Can you see the lark?’ she asked, between kisses, for its song poured over them. He had to sit up, and narrow his eyes, staring into the blue.
‘No. Wait — yes, there she is,’ he pointed, distracted, though wishing the distraction further.
‘I can’t.’ Her eyes gazed fixedly upwards, unavailingly, their pupils shrunk to needlepricks, like a cat’s in the sunshine. Here one moment, gone the next, as if she wished herself up there on lark’s wings, above the mortal world. He stayed sitting. It was no use forcing the issue. For one thing, there was plenty of time. She was enjoying his company too much. For another, he did not dare. One could not force Queens.
Elizabeth sat up also. ‘What can you see in the far distance?’ she asked.
‘The Weald of Surrey and Kent. Forests. Green pastures. A church tower. Blue haze.’
‘I cannot see as well as you. Robin, you shall be my eyes. My first bodily sense. Your eyes will always tell me what you see — spot treason lurking on the horizon!’ She put out a long, delicate, white finger and touched each of his eyelids in turn. It was like a baptism.
‘As long as I live,’ he said soberly, ‘I shall be Your Majesty’s eyes.’
Elizabeth switched to the practical. ‘Help me to pin up my hair,’ she said. ‘Henry Arundel will have a fit if I am found to have fled Nonsuch with my handsome Master of Horse. We must go back, Robin.’
Robert handed pins. Little plaits were coiled on the crown of her head. She looked wonderful without her hat, Pan’s daughter. He made her pause a second, while the beetle, swept up in her hair, climbed off onto his finger. He restored it to the ground. He unhobbled the horses, gave the Queen his cupped hands to use as a mounting block. Then they were off. She rode at demented speed along the ridge of downs until they reached the bounds of Nonsuch. Robert kept pace and they laughed like lunatics escaped from custody.
Their arrival at Nonsuch did not go unnoticed. Neither had their absence.
‘New horses must be tried,’ coolly explained Her Majesty. The first person she encountered was Kat Ashley. ‘Frowning Kat!’ she admonished, still in frivolous mood, and executed a complex dance step, there in the courtyard. Mrs Ashley knew better than to comment until later when the royal mood had changed. She noticed that on her shoulder, the Queen had pinned a posy of limp-stalked, common wild scabious. Downland flowers. She also noticed that bits of dry grass stuck to her dress.
‘Hmm,’ was Mrs Ashley’s only remark. She knew defiance when she saw it. Elizabeth was ready to defend her right to conduct herself with Lord Robert in whatever way she chose. For the first time since she was three years old, she was in a position to deny herself nothing. The first summer of her life to enjoy without inhibition, the world at her feet, and forbidden fruit dropping into her hands. Like a child who has been allowed nothing, let loose among heaps of toys, she played, with men, with clothes, with jewels and gifts, to her heart’s content, and her heart had waited twenty-three years to be contented. Mrs Ashley was afraid.
That night, the court was entertained in the Banqueting House in Nonsuch Park, and the Queen danced three galliards with Lord Robert. Her host, the Earl of Arundel, watched sourly, having claimed the first dance, and saved face, but being too old and overweight for three galliards. The Queen wore white, and the other ladies had been warned not to, so that she stood out alone, like the crescent moon in the sky. Indeed, she wore a sliver of new moon made of seed pearls, in her hair; she liked to see herself as Diana, the chaste huntress, here at Nonsuch where the hunting was to her liking, even if the company watching her dance were not impressed with the myth of her chastity.
Elizabeth was an energetic, high-leaping, agile dancer, and liked a tall partner who could hoist her higher and leap with her. She liked to look up at tall men, and liked equally to see them fold their long lengths to kneel before her. Lord Robert was very tall.
After she had exhibited her brilliance and staying power on the dance floor, the Queen retired to one of the balconies set at each corner of the Banqueting House, to breathe the delicious night air and to review the shadowy black armies of the trees and the stars sprinkling the sky. There was a crescent moon, a little larger than new, with light enough to cast deep shadows. The Queen called on Lord Robert to tell her where the constellations were in the August night sky — his eyesight was so good, she said.
On the parapet of the balcony, the Queen’s beasts held up her arms on shields.
‘I remember King Henry, my father, riding into Hampton Court between the rows of King’s beasts, over the moat. The trumpets sounded and his great horse’s hooves clashed like cymbals.’ That was how she had come to Nonsuch, as King Henry had in splendour.
‘I liked the dragon best, who was painted green.’ She looked up at Robert, and patted the flank of the nearest dragon whose gilded scales gleamed under a torch. Gnats were getting caught in its flame. A moth fell singed into the black void below where they stood.
It was three o’clock when the Queen led her court back to the palace. The pearl of morning shimmered in the sky and birds were cheeping as a preliminary to the frenzied twittering at dawn. They walked like a band of glow-worms, torches and lanterns weaving and nodding like tired heads and drunken footsteps. Through the park and across the Wilderness they went, noisy and subdued by turns. The Queen seemed to float over the ground like a silvery Diana passing among the trees under the setting moon. When they entered the gardens Robert caught up with her, just as she came to the entrance of the maze. Suddenly she slipped inside, round the corner, like Diana tracking a stag. He followed, and they disappeared in an instant between the high black hedges. The huntress and the hunter, not sure who was chasing wh
om. Robert discovered his Queen in a bower cut deep into the yew hedge, with a stone seat and a little statue of Diana and Actaeon. Here he seized her and kissed her, as a woman who ran into dark mazes at three in the morning should be kissed. They stood, damp shoes on dry yew needles. She astonished him by thrusting her tongue in his mouth like a snake, then wrenching herself from his arms, whipping away through the maze again and out by the way she had come. As he blundered after, he heard her call, high and fluting: ‘Robin! Hey, jolly Robin!’
***
‘Farewell, fair false-hearted, plaints end with my breath,
O willow, willow, willow;
Thou dost loathe me, I love thee, though cause of my death.
O willow, willow, willow,
O willow, willow, willow,
Sing O the green willow shall be my garland.’
The lute player sang to silence. The notes of his lute fell softly from his fingers, half muffled, as if stealing through interconnecting rooms. Amy Dudley cried silently. Lord Robert yawned hugely, cavernously, but silently, like a cat. Shuffle, shuffle, plop — cut — deal. The deck of cards unfurled and slithered between his practised hands. Flip — flop, the cards tossed like leaves. How excruciatingly dull to play primero here at Hayes in the company of his wife, a game which was so exciting played at court with the odds of high bets and the tricks of the sharpers to keep him awake, alert to enjoyment. Nobody at dull Hayes marked the cards with a pinprick to be felt for surreptitiously with fingertips. Nobody played for high stakes. Amy was afraid to bet. She had been brought up in a puritanical household, and was frightened the devil would be sitting opposite her. Instead, it was her husband, and she looked at him as if he were a changeling. Not jolly Robin any more.
None But Elizabeth Page 16