A Court Affair (66 page)

And when he lingered, daring me to do so, I clapped my hands, and instantly my guards appeared from where they stood always stationed outside my door, halberds in hand, ready to obey my command. But before I could give the necessary orders to escort Lord Robert from the palace, he barged past them, roughly shouldering his way between them, banging his elbows against their gleaming silver breastplates, and stormed out.

As I knew he would, Robert immediately sent Thomas Blount riding hard and fast to Cumnor, his first concern being not his wife’s fate but “how this evil should light upon me. Considering what the malicious world shall bruit, I can take no rest. I have no way to purge myself of the malicious talk that I know the wicked world will use”—thus he bewailed his misfortune in a letter he sent a courier chasing after Mr Blount to deliver. Then he sent for his tailor, commanding him to come at once to Kew and fit him for an elegant new wardrobe of mourning black velvets, satins, and silks with discreet gold and silver embellishments. And his glover, hatter, furrier, cobbler, and goldsmith were summoned too. As a rule, Robert would rather go
too
far than not far enough.

Cecil had all his letters, coming and going, intercepted and copied, so we were well aware when, through Thomas Blount, the “grieving” widower reached out to the jury. “I pray you say from me,” he instructed, “that I require them, as ever I shall think well of them, that they will, according to their duties, earnestly, carefully, and truly deal in this matter and find it as they shall see it fall out. So shall it well appear to the world my innocency by my dealings in the matter.” And I also knew when he sent a gift of fine cloth to the foreman, one Richard Smythe, and asked to be remembered to him, as he had once served briefly in my household during my girlhood, though I had scant memory of him and could not conjure the man’s face in my memory. We also learned that Robert purchased a plough horse for another jury man.

Every night, after the business of the day was done, and I put on my nightgown and Kat had brushed out my hair, I lingered long at my desk, reading Mr Blount’s many assurances to his cousin that the jury was well disposed towards him, and the local gossip he recounted, including some petty spite directed at Amy’s host, Mr Forster, and speculation about Amy’s despondent state of mind, which led many to believe that her death might have indeed been a suicide. Most disturbingly, he mentioned that her maid, Mrs Pirto, had confided that her lady had often prayed, asking God to deliver her from her desperation, and she was widely thought to be a woman of a strange mind.

One night, Cecil showed me a letter Robert had written after he paid him a visit.

“And what is this ‘humble sacrifice’ he beseeches you not to forget to offer up?” I asked when I finished reading it.

“Lord Robert is most anxious to return to court, Your Majesty,” Cecil replied, “and, if he cannot yet, he bade me most earnestly to inform you, as if my words came from his own heart and lips, that he keeps the candles burning in every window the whole night through at Kew, hoping that they will lead you to his door.”

“Only in his dreams, Cecil,” I sighed, “the same dreams wherein upon his head rests a jewelled crown, and a cloak of velvet and ermine falls about his shoulders, and his hand wields a sceptre as mighty as a sword.”

Cecil could not suppress a smile. “Indeed, though I warrant it shall be a very hard dream for him to give up.”

“There comes a time in all our lives, Cecil,” I said thoughtfully, leaning my chin on my hand and staring into the fire, “when truth stares us, or even slaps us, in the face, and we must say farewell to our dreams, even our most dearly cherished ones of many years’ keeping, hoping, and treasuring; we must accept that they will never come true and that continuing to dream them will only bring us pain.”

“Madame”—Cecil turned earnestly to me—“you are young still, and many of us are disappointed and hurt by love in our youth, but there are better,
far better,
dreams for you to dream than Robert Dudley.”

I smiled and, nodding, reached out my hand to Cecil, the ring that wed me to England glittering black and gold in the firelight. “There is England, Cecil—that is my dream, to build a greater England than this world has ever known.”

“That is a dream that I believe shall come true”—Cecil smiled—“God willing, as I believe He is.”

When it arrived, I sat up far into the night, leaning over my silver-topped writing desk, intently poring over the coroner’s report, pondering and weighing each word, hoping to find some clue that would serve as the key to unlock the mystery and set the truth free.

Inquisition as indenture held at Cumnor on September 9 in the second year of the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, before John Pudsey, gentleman, coroner of the said lady Queen, on inspection of the body of Lady Amy Dudley, late wife of Robert Dudley, knight of the most noble Order of the Garter, there lying dead, which certain jurors, sworn to tell the truth at our request, were adjourned on the aforesaid ninth day by the selfsame coroner to appear both before the justices of the aforesaid lady Queen at the assizes before the same coroner, in order there to return their verdict truthfully and speedily on which same day the jurors say under oath that the aforesaid Lady Amy on September 8 in the aforesaid second year of the reign of the aforesaid Queen Elizabeth, being alone in a certain chamber within the home of a certain Anthony Forster Esq., in Cumnor Place, and intending to descend the aforesaid chamber by way of certain steps of the aforesaid chamber there and then accidentally fell precipitously down the aforesaid steps to the very bottom of the same steps, through which the same Lady Amy there and then sustained not only two injuries to her head—one of which was a quarter of a thumb deep and the other two thumbs deep—but truly also, by reason of the accidental injury or of that fall and of the Lady Amy’s own body weight falling down the aforesaid stairs, the same Lady Amy there and then broke her own neck, on account of which certain fracture of the neck the same Lady Amy there and then died instantly; and the aforesaid Lady Amy was found there and then without any other mark or wound on her body; and thus the jurors say on their oath that the aforesaid Lady Amy in the manner and form aforesaid by misfortune came to her death and not otherwise, in so far as it is possible at present for them to agree; in testimony of which fact for this inquest both the coroner and also the jurors have in turn affixed their seals this day.

When I raised my head, instead of Cecil standing beside me, waiting patiently for me to finish perusing the document, I saw in my memory’s eye that radiant young woman on her wedding day, her golden curls crowned with buttercups, in a wedding gown as frothy as milk with lace and gilt-embroidered flowers, looking up at her husband with eyes full of trust and love, never even imagining that Robert would fail to keep every single promise he ever made to her.

With a wrenching sigh, I shook my head and let the coroner’s report fall onto my desk.

“What do you make of it all, Cecil?” I asked.

“Madame, in truth, I do not know,” he confessed. “Like you, I have weighed each word and questioned my informants at length, yet it remains a puzzle. The jury seems satisfied that it was an accident. And though her maid stoutly maintains that her mistress was a good Christian lady who would never take her own life, I think loyalty more than true conviction compels Mrs Pirto’s words. She paints a most vivid picture of a woman most heavily laden with sorrows, to such an extent that we
cannot
rule out the possibility of suicide. She has reported that Lady Dudley oftentimes fell to her knees and beseeched God to deliver her from her desperation. And many of the household were of the opinion that she was a woman of a strange mind.”

“A mind can buckle under fear, Cecil,” I said softly, looking back to my own past. “I know—I lived my life under the shadow of the axe and the assassin’s nefarious tools from the day I was born and all through my sister’s reign—the poisoned cup, the dagger in the back or in the breast, the pillow pressed over the face in slumber, the silken noose. I know the fear only too well, and even now, there are many who deem me a heretic and a bastard, who doubt my right to reign and would prefer another in my place or a return to the Catholic fold, and desire me dead, so I know those fears only too well.”

“Majesty …” Cecil hesitated. “There is yet another possibility …” He paused and looked at me, and I knew he was about to speak one of those truths I had insisted he never keep from me.

“Go on, Cecil.” I nodded.

“We cannot discount the possibility that Lord Robert acted the beast and fulfilled the expectations of the world by sending assassins to rid him of the frail obstacle that stood in the way of his ambitions.”

I nodded sadly. “In the end, the only clear and certain truth is that we shall never know for certain.”

“I fear so, Your Majesty,” Cecil agreed.

After he left me, I went softly into the deserted chamber adjoining my own where Robert was accustomed to lodge. I opened the chest at the foot of his bed, usually filled with shirts and other linens, and found it empty except for a copybook and a dark circle lying at the bottom. I lifted them both out. When I turned the circle over, I gasped, startled to find Amy’s face staring back at me. My portrait was everywhere, on every wall; even little statues, marble, gold, and silver figurines of classical goddesses sculpted with my features adorned the mantel and tables and even formed the bases of the candlesticks, making me the eternal bearer of flame. There were also portraits of Robert’s father and brothers, his mother and sisters, even vain Guildford and the luckless Lady Jane Grey, looking utterly unlike herself in a gown of regal purple velvet, but of Robert’s wife, there was no sign. There was no place on Robert’s walls for the shy and melancholy girl of the once-radiant smile and trusting eyes whose love for her husband had shone like a sunbeam. Instead, she was banished to a chest, usually buried beneath a mound of linens. There, like one smothered in her slumber, the lawfully wedded wife of Lord Robert Dudley, the lady who had been so pitifully slain, was laid to rest in the same anonymity and obscurity as she had lived.

I stood and stared hard at that sad, melancholy visage Lavinia Teerlinc’s dainty and skilful brushes had captured, comparing it to the happy, radiant bride glowing with happiness I remembered from that joyous June day ten years ago.

“Love, so kind to some, so cruel to others,” I mused aloud. “Oh, Amy!” I sighed. “Did you do this to yourself, or did he order it, directly or indirectly, merely by speaking aloud his impatient wishes? Did someone, one of his lackeys, take the hint, or else discern his wishes, and take it upon themself to act on them, hoping to please him and share the glory and riches they thought it would bring? How else to explain so opportune a death?”

I opened the copybook. An awkward and childish hand that gradually improved covered every one of the tearstained and blotted pages from start to end, laboriously and repeatedly copying out “The Clerk’s Tale” of Patient Griselda from Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales
until every page was filled. Like a schoolmaster, he must have set her this task. And at the end of each recounting I watched her signature grow from a sprawling scrawl to a more hesitant, but tighter and neater, more elegantly formed script more befitting a lady—
Amy Dudley.

As I scanned one page my eyes lighted upon the lines:

Sickened and appalled, I snapped the book shut and flung it hard across the room. I heard its spine snap and break against the wall, and I thought of Amy’s fragile neck. And, cradling her miniature on my lap, just as I had her arrow-pierced body in my dream, I sank down onto the floor by Robert’s cold and empty hearth and wept for all that was and never would be again, and for all three of us and the dreams we had had to bid farewell to. Amy to her loving husband and happy marriage, the future that seemed to unfurl, shining like a golden road before them; Robert to the crown he coveted as King Robert I of England, founder of a great royal dynasty; and myself to the dream that I might someday be at once a woman and a queen who could know Love’s passion without having to relinquish my power into the hands of the man who stroked and caressed me.
Farewell, farewell, farewell!