Elizabeth I (15 page)

My arrival caused a stir. I brushed the niceties aside. Then I brushed the objections aside.

He is not fit to receive you.

He does not want you to see him in this state.

You must not expose yourself to what afflicts him.

“I am here to minister to my friend, yea, to feed him with my own hand if need be,” I told them.

Inside the house it was very dark; the late afternoon sun barely stabbed through the windows. Most were east facing, looking out toward the river. I smelled the unmistakable odor of illness, which grew stronger as I mounted the stairs to his sickroom.

Frances met me. “Your Majesty, it is not meet that you enter,” she said. “My father has sunk very low.”

“Should not those who love him be with him?” I answered. “When do we need them most?”

She looked surprised, as if she expected me to shrink from ugliness. “Now,” she admitted, opening the door for me.

I could make out a large bed deep inside the room. One window did face west, providing rosy-tinted sunset light. Walsingham was lying motionless, barely discernible under the blankets and bedding. He did not waken when I approached.

Even in this flattering light, his face was yellow. All his features were shrunk and shriveled, as if his flesh had burned away. He had sunk fast since his last council meeting. The illness was swift and merciless.

“Francis,” I whispered, finding his hand and taking it in mine, “how do you do?”

A foolish question. How could he answer it? But it was merely to arouse his attention.

“Not well,” he groaned. “They will be here soon for me.”

The angels? “Yes, to take you home to that spot in heaven you have earned.”

“No one earns it,” he croaked. Good Protestant to the end.

“Francis,” I said, “you leave a mighty space gaping. No one can fill it. But I thank God for having had you all these years. You have saved me, and the throne, on more than one occasion.” Oh, what would I do without him, his vigilance and his genius?

“Guard it well,” he said. “And other forces will arise. Trust not the French. Oh, that I were here to wrestle with them!” He gave a weak cough. “But I must not question the wisdom of God in calling me now.” Again, the good Protestant. Yet I questioned; I questioned all the time.

“Here, try to take some broth.” There was a bowl of it by his bed, still warm, with the spoon beside it. I tried to give him some. But it could not pass between his clenched lips. His time had come, then.

“When they stop eating, that is the signal,” a physician had once told me. “Everything begins to fail, and they no longer need earthly nourishment.”

I would not weep. Not in his presence. It made it harder for them. Another wise person had told me that.

I settled myself by his side. I was prepared to wait, to wait with him. Frances crept into the room and took her place on the other side. We flanked him like church candles beside an altar.

Walsingham had served me twenty years, through the time of Alençon's wooing, through the tortuous journey the Queen of Scots made from luxurious imprisonment until she stood on the scaffold, caught by Walsingham's trap, through the supreme test of the Spanish Armada. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had served me longer, but Walsingham had been my ultimate protection and the guardian of the realm. How could we survive without him?

It is a test, I thought wearily. Yet another test, to see how I can survive. There have been so many.

Frances was writing in a book. In the silence I could hear her pen scraping across the paper. What could be so important that she must write it at this moment? If it concerned her father's death, it was impertinent, invasive, now. If other, lesser, then insulting. When she left the room to order some fresh sweet herbs to be burned—to mask the choking odor of death—I picked it up.

It concerned her service with me. I quickly turned the pages. I had no wish to read how she regarded me. I knew I would brood upon it. Then there were pages and pages about the Earl of Essex. She noted what he wore on various days!

I clapped the book shut. She was in love with him! She was swooning like a green girl in the country. But he was far above her. She was sure to be disappointed. And she was no milkmaid but a widow with a child. I must warn her. What a fool she was to leave it there. I replaced it quickly on her chair.

I stood up, as if by so doing I could keep better guard over Walsingham. Fuzzy light was coming through the windows; the setting sun made the surface of the Thames gleam out the east window and enveloped the western, land, side in a golden haze. We were very near to Mortlake, where Dr. Dee, my astrologer, lived. Smoke from the burning herbs, curling up through the air, stung my nostrils and made my head swim. I swayed, felt unsteady. So I walked slowly to the east window and opened it a crack, hoping for fresh air.

Below me the river slid past, a sleek, winding snake. My head was spinning, and the blurry light made me feel I had entered a dream.

Sailing on the Thames, long ago ... going to Mortlake ... Trust not the French....

The French ... I remembered how foolish I had acted—as foolish as Frances about Essex—over the little Frenchman I had almost married. The little French prince who had so recently, and insistently, haunted me near the staircase at Whitehall sprang back to life again, as if I had opened a magical casement that transported me over time. So many things had ended then, with the Frenchman.

François had been my last, and in many ways my only, serious marriage possibility. I had been wooed by twenty-five foreign suitors over the years. I never intended to marry any of them, but it was my best tool of diplomacy. I had never met any of these men, never laid eyes on them. So they were suitors on paper only, not real, as I would never marry anyone I hadn't seen with my own eyes. (My father's example with Anne of Cleves was warning enough.) In any case I knew time was running out for this ploy. I was in my midforties and could not play this hand much longer. So when another round was started, this time with François Valois, Duc d'Alençon, the younger brother of King Henri III, I thought, why not? Even though he was seventeen years younger than I, reputedly ugly, and very short—what difference did it make? It was all a diplomatic sham. And so it might have remained, if my people had been more amenable even to the idea that I might at last marry.

But they hated the French and attacked François's envoy, saying he represented “an unmanlike, unprincelike, French kind of wooing.” Someone even took a shot at him, frightening him mightily. And that shot changed my world. The French envoy blamed it on Robert Dudley, saying that he knew he was in back of it—since he had murdered once, why not again?

I was aghast. He accused my dearest friend and companion, the man I trusted so much that when I lay ill with smallpox I had named him Protector of the Realm, of being a murderer! I cried out that this was vile slander.

“Ma'am, there have been poisoning attempts as well,” Simier, the envoy, said, “which I did not see fit to mention. It is well known that Leicester is a poisoner. He poisoned Walter Devereux, the Earl of Essex. He dosed him when he was on leave from Ireland, and it took effect once he was back in Dublin.”

“This is not true! The earl died of natural causes! And why would he wish to poison the earl, in any case?”

Simier looked at me pityingly.

“I demand to know what you mean about the Earl of Essex!” I cried.

“Why, Ma'am, he poisoned him so that he could have his wife.” He waited to see if I had heard him. “Lettice. They were lovers, and the earl was inconvenient. So Leicester poisoned him, just as he was about to open an investigation.”

“Evil whispers!” I said. God knew they swirled around anyone of note.

He drew himself up, as if readying himself, reluctantly, for a coup de grâce. “It's no whisper, Your Majesty, that he and Lettice are married, and have been for a year.” He paused. “Everyone knows this but you. While Leicester opposes your own marriage—even attacking me!—he is enjoying his own. He has a wife but begrudges you a husband.”

I heard the words, but at first they were only that—words. But then I was forced to put them together, absorb them without letting Simier see how they rocked my world.

“I see,” I said. “So the wayward shot has brought many things to light. I am thankful, sir, that you were not harmed, although other things have been.”

A year. For a year Dudley had been lying to me, hiding the truth. And his wife still served me in my chambers, pretending to be a widow. It was impossible to say which hurt more: the betrayal, the loss, or feeling an absolute fool.

How she must have laughed at me, Lettice, my wayward cousin. With every step she took in my chambers, she mocked me. So she had had her way at last, triumphed over me, taken Dudley away? The merry widow, I had called her. No wonder she had been so merry. Man-hungry and aggressive, she had bagged her prey.

I dismissed her from my service, told her she was banished from court. I told her why. Instead of cringing or even being embarrassed, the hussy said, “You know now. And I am glad of it.” The smug satisfaction on her face infuriated me. “It was a strain, keeping it from you.”

When I am most angry, I am rigid. I was stone, clenching my fists, as I watched her leave my chambers, where she was never to set foot again.

So when Simier whispered to me that his master the prince, known affectionately in France as “Monsieur,” had come secretly to England and was waiting in a hidden place to meet me, it was balm to my wounded vanity. No one had ever come courting in person before. Leicester had duped me, but here was another—a
prince
—who had come across the Channel to seek my hand.

I studied his miniature carefully in its oval frame. It showed a person with a pleasing enough face, dark, searching eyes, a wisp of a mustache, a pointed and weak chin. I wished I could say it was the portrait of a man, but it showed a boy. Of course, it had been painted some time ago. It also did not show the pockmarks that everyone mentioned, and it could not depict his height. People said, too, that his nose was bulbous, but it did not appear to be so here. Well, portraits say what we wish them to, or we do not pay the painter.

He was waiting, hidden in the summer pavilion where I had housed the French contingent away from the main palace buildings at Greenwich. I had joked to Simier that he must indeed be a frog, to have swum the Channel to come to me. I wondered how François would take the jest—that was my first test of him.

I was ready for the meeting. I wanted so much to like him. I wanted to seriously consider him; I needed to. For the first time there was no more Dudley in my landscape, blocking my view. Did I see more clearly because of that, or was my vision distorted?

I entered the summer house.

“Oh!” There was a French-accented gasp, and someone was clasping my hands and kneeling before me. Then my hands were being kissed, and the man was murmuring, “To clasp these hands at last. It is enough for me to touch them; but they are beautiful as ivory, slender and graceful as the Virgin in heaven. You, our Virgin on earth!”

I could not discount it as clumsy flattery, for I knew my hands were my finest feature. They
were
the color of ivory, and my fingers were long and smooth. I displayed them whenever I could, especially against dark gowns.

The person rose slowly, standing to his full height—which was not very high. My eyes, now growing accustomed to the dim light, looked down on a head of dark, thick hair. The top of his head only came up to my eyes.