A Court Affair (2 page)

As the mourners filed out, to go and feast at the nearby college and honour Lady Dudley’s memory, a plump, greying woman—she reminded me of my own dear old governess, Kat Ashley—her round, wizened face red and swollen from crying, lingered to lovingly lay a bouquet of buttercups upon the coffin before she buried her face in her hands and, her shoulders shaking convulsively with loud, racking sobs, turned away and followed the others out. “Mrs Pirto,” I heard someone in the crowd say, identifying her as Amy’s maid, who had “loved her lady well and dearly and been with her her whole life long”.

When the church was quite deserted, I steeled myself, squared my shoulders, and approached the black-draped bier, supremely conscious of the sound of my booted footsteps upon the stone floor; no matter how softly I tried to tread, they rang like a tocsin in my ears, and more than once I glanced guiltily back over my shoulder as though I were committing some crime by coming here. I knew I was the
last
person Amy would have wanted or expected to come; she would have thought I came to gloat over her coffin, to bask in my triumph, now that she was dead and Robert was free to marry me.

Tall white tapers, arranged like a crescent moon, stood behind the coffin. Had someone known that Amy was always nervous of the dark, afraid of the encroaching shadows and what they might hide, and ordered the candles placed there as a comforting gesture just for her, or was this merely thought a becoming touch, or done for the simple sake of providing light?

Burnished golden curls, perfectly arranged, gleamed in the candlelight, framing her pale face, white as the candle wax. A wreath of silken buttercups crowned those perfect curls; real ones would have soon wilted and withered away within the coffin. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; so it is in the end for all that lives, from buttercups to beautiful girls too young to die. Who had fashioned that wreath of yellow silk flowers and her hair into those perfect curls? Surely it must have been the devoted Mrs Pirto. I could picture her, near-blinded by grief, sitting by the fire, tears dripping down onto the gnarled and thick-veined hands that laboriously cut and stitched silken semblances of the yellow flowers that had always been Amy’s favourite as a final act of love. Amy loved buttercups; I remembered that from her wedding day, when she had carried a great bouquet of them and worn a crown of them upon her head and had them embroidered in gold upon the creamy satin field of her gown, the very one she wore now. Amy was going to her grave in her wedding gown. Mayhap in death, I prayed, she would find a love better and more worthy of her than she ever found in life.

“Love,” I softly mused aloud, “so kind to some, so cruel to others.” That fickleness was one of Life’s harsh realities that blessed some and damned others.

She was much and sadly altered, though the times I had gazed upon her were scant—a mere three times, twice up close and once from afar—and the difference was startling to behold. The first time I saw her, on her wedding day, I thought this petite, plump, buxom blonde would soon be as round as she was tall with all the children she would bear. I thought surely to hear that she was pregnant every year. With her full breasts and round hips, she looked ripe for motherhood, born for breeding. But it was not to be. Amy Robsart had prospered neither as a wife nor as a woman; even the joys and consolations of motherhood had been denied her. And now she lay pale, wan, and wasted in her coffin, cancer had consumed her curves, and Life and Love’s cruelties had taken all the rest. This was a woman whose hopes and dreams had died long before she did.

Her wedding day—that beautiful June day—had been the happiest day of Amy’s life. And I had been there to bear witness to it. I had seen the joy alive and sparkling in her blue green eyes, and the radiant smile of pure delight that lit up her face, the love and trust that shone from her, like a sunbeam, every time she looked at Robert. It had felt like an intrusion, almost, to witness it, and I had felt something else: the hard emerald bite of envy when I looked at the bridal couple, resenting them—resenting Amy, to be more honest and precise—for something I could never have and wasn’t sure I even wanted. Watching her, I had felt a tug-o’-war within my soul; part of me wanted to be her, yet another part of me obstinately pulled back, remembering my mother’s warning, urgently spoken the last time I saw her,
“Never surrender!”
and in my memory’s eye at the foot of my bed the ghost of Tom Seymour, winking and grinning lasciviously, his cock pointing adamantly out at me from between the folds of his brocade dressing gown, before he leapt and pounced on me, the giggling, giddy girl I used to be, writhing and revelling in my newly awakened sensuality.

Now Amy lay in her coffin. The future that had seemed so golden had turned out to be as false as the trinkets the peddlers at the country fairs sold to the gullible, touting them as genuine gold and gems, though they were in truth but glass and tin from which the gold paint would all too soon flake to reveal the base metal beneath. All that glitters is not gold.

Her hands were folded across the bodice of her gold-lace-garnished wedding gown. The vast golden profusion of buttercups embroidered all over the cream-coloured satin seemed to sway as if caressed by a gentle breeze, an illusion wrought by the play of the candles’ flickering flames upon the gilded threads, tricking out their shimmer, causing them to appear to dance. How sad that the flowers on Amy’s gown seemed to live when she herself lay dead.

Someone—Mrs Pirto’s loving hands?—had filled in the low, square bodice with a high-collared yoke of rich, creamy lace veined with gold and topped by a tiny gold frilled ruff to support her broken neck and hold it properly in place. If I looked closely, I could just discern the white bandages beneath, wound tightly—too tightly for life—lending further support to that frail, shattered neck. And, as another remembrance of the happiest day of her life, someone had tied around her waist the frilly lace-, pearl-, and ribbon-festooned apron she had worn over her brocaded satin gown. I could picture Mrs Pirto leaning down as she dressed her lady for the last time, stroking that pale face, tenderly kissing the cold brow, and whispering in a tear-choked voice, “Take only the happy memories with you, my sweet, and leave all the rest behind.”

Amy’s hands, I noticed then, were nude and nail-bitten, gnawed painfully down to the quick; they must have throbbed and bled. Robert would not want to waste jewels upon the dead; to him that would be the same as throwing them into the Thames. Even the golden oak leaf and amber acorn betrothal ring had vanished, just like the love it had once symbolised. Where had it gone? I shuddered and hoped fervently never to find it on my pillow or presented to me in a velvet box.

It wasn’t right; Amy, who so loved pretty things and delighted in the latest fashions—Robert complained that she ordered as many as fourteen new gowns a year—
should
have something more than lace and flowers, even if they were silken and embroidered.

I took off my gloves and stared down at my hands, perfect, gleaming nails on long white fingers sparkling with diamonds her husband had given me. In my haste, I had forgotten to remove my rings. All save the gold and onyx coronation ring that had wedded me to England were gifts from Robert; he stroked my vanity like a cat and loved to cover my hands with cold jewels and hot kisses.

She really
should
have something! I started to remove my rings, but then I remembered that Amy didn’t like diamonds. I could hear Robert’s voice cruelly mocking her, calling her a fool, insisting that
every
woman
loves
diamonds and would sell her soul for them, adopting a high-pitched, timorous, quavering parody of a woman’s voice, parroting words Amy had once spoken, likening diamonds to “tears frozen in time”. Yet somehow now it seemed most apt; Amy herself, at only eight-and-twenty, had become a tear frozen in time.

I took the rings from my hands and, one by one, put them onto the thin, cold, death-stiffened fingers, knowing all the while that not all the diamonds in the world could make up for all the tears that Robert and I had caused this woman to shed. And she had shed tears aplenty—oceans and oceans of tears. She had been drowning in tears for two years at least, perhaps even longer. Robert’s love had died long before Amy did. Love is cruel; it kills its victims slowly.

I gave a dead woman a fortune in diamonds, but not even I, the all-powerful Elizabeth of England, could give her back her life or undo the hurt I had caused her. Robert had married her in a flight of youthful fancy fuelled by hot-blooded young lust, a fit of impulsive passion for a pretty country lass of rustic, pure, unvarnished, fresh-faced charm, lacking the hard, sophisticated polish and rapier-sharp or flippant wit of the bejewelled silk-, satin-, and velvet-clad ladies of the court with all their exotic perfumes, ostrich plumes, intricate coiffures of coils, curls, and braids, artfully plucked brows, rouged lips, and painted faces, a woman he went to bed in love with and woke up to find he had nothing in common with. Robert came to resent and blame her for the rash act that had bound him to her. Though he was quite a prize for a squire’s daughter, as a duke’s son he could have found himself a far better dowered and pedigreed bride, as his father, brothers, and friends had all tried to tell the deaf-to-reason, love-struck lad of seventeen who was determined to listen to the bulging and throbbing need inside his codpiece rather than good common sense. Robert had married in haste and repented at leisure. And his kindness, often doled out as a careless afterthought, eventually turned cruel as, more and more, he repented his youthful folly, and because of me, a woman he wanted but could not have, a woman who could, if she would, make him king but wanted him only in her own way and would not wear the ring of a subservient wife or bow to any man as her master. Robert thought he could change my mind, and others feared he would, and Amy, like an innocent child wandering into the midst of a raging battlefield, got caught in the cross fire.

I had wanted to protect Amy, though I doubt any would believe that if they knew. And for that I cannot fault them; if I weren’t me, I wouldn’t believe it either. My failure was a secret I kept locked up inside my heart in my private lockbox of regrets. I could not save Amy from a marriage where love was only in one heart, not in two, and I could not save Amy from cancer, her husband’s ambition, or my own cruel, coquettish caprice that kept me dangling myself before Robert as a prize almost within his grasp, which he could even at times hold in his arms and kiss and caress but could never truly win. I played with him like a cat does with dead things, the way I toyed with all my suitors; Robert was unique only in that I loved him. But even though I loved him, I had no illusions about him. My love for Robert, in spite of what others thought, was
never
blind; I always saw him as sharply and clearly as if I were blessed with a hawk’s keen and piercing sight. Life long ago taught me not to idealise Love; I leave that to the poets and ballad singers. I learned the hard lessons taught by Love’s illusions long ago; I was scarcely out of my cradle before the lessons began. My father and his six wives, amongst them my mother and cousin, whose lives ended upon the scaffold; my stepfather, Tom Seymour, that handsome and foolhardy rogue who bounded into my bedchamber each morning to tickle and play and teach me anatomy in an infinitely more intimate way than is printed in books; my poor, mad, deluded, love-starved sister, pining her life away for want of Spanish Philip; and my cold and imperious Spanish brother-in-law, who courted and caressed me behind his wife’s back, hung my neck with jewels, and even had a tiny peep-hole drilled so he could watch me in my bath and as I dressed and undressed and availed myself of my chamber pot—they were all
excellent
teachers, and all my life I have been an apt pupil, and education doesn’t begin and end in the schoolroom.

I will always love Robert Dudley; he has been my best friend since I was eight years old, and would be—if I let him—my ardent lover and husband; but there is something he worships and adores more than England’s Virgin Queen—Ambition is his guiding star. I’ve seen men ruined before by this elusive, tantalising, sparkling star that they spend their whole lives chasing after, leaping and grasping for, sometimes snaring a little stardust but more often crashing empty-handed back down to earth. And Robert, for all his fine qualities—his smouldering dark eyes, his heart-melting, knee-weakening smile, towering height, handsome horseman’s legs, and hands both gentle and firm, callous and soft, his intelligence, charm, wit, and passion, his showmanship and debonair flair on the tennis court, dance floor, and tiltyard, his supreme confidence and courage riding to the hunt or charging into battle, his feats of daring at the gambling tables—is still Ambition’s catamite and fool.

My eyes are not starry-blind with love for him; romance doesn’t soften and tint everything all rosy pink and beautiful for me. I love Robert, but I see him for what he is, and, though I love, I often do not like. There is ice beneath the fire, steel beneath the softness, and the hard armour of cruelty beneath the plush velvet cloak of kindness. I have often wondered if I were a mere woman—a squire’s daughter perhaps, just like Amy, instead of England’s Queen—would his passion for me have ever flared so high or burned so brightly and constantly? I think not. Or perhaps it is merely that I have lost the ability to believe in anyone’s sincerity. I trust no one; I cannot afford to. I am a queen before I am a woman, England
always
comes before Elizabeth, and though there are times when my passions flame high and I resent and rage against Fate, I will
not
bankrupt my soul or my realm by giving too much of myself to the
wrong
people. My subjects as a whole always come before any individual, and that includes myself. Though I am the Virgin Queen, I regard myself as the mother of many.

There’s something in Robert’s blood he inherited from his father and grandfather that makes him willing to do
anything,
and risk
everything,
to rise the highest and shine the brightest, to eclipse even Ambition’s own lustre and luminescence. But all that glitters is not gold. My mother once spoke those very words to my father when he asked why she preferred the doltish Harry Percy, who was, I have heard, as clumsy as a newborn foal, to the more elegant, polished, and cocksure men of the court.