The Queen's Secret (9 page)

‘Or her nose to spite her face,’ Lettice muttered.

Silently, he moved to step round her, and she caught at his arm.
‘Don’t
bother with her tonight, Robert. She won’t let you past the door.’

‘I have a prior arrangement. The Queen will honour it.’

‘I do not believe she will. Stay with me instead,’ she insisted. The sound of carousing drifted up the stairs from the open courtyard below. ‘You are master here. We are in your own castle of Kenilworth, not at court where we are constantly watched.’

‘Court is where the Queen is.’

She shook her head at his blind submission. ‘Find us a place where we can bolt the door and be private together. The Queen won’t expect my return tonight. We will not be discovered.’

‘Lettice, sweetest, I can’t do that.’ He kissed her again, once on each cheek and once on her parted lips, then put her gently aside, as no doubt he had once put aside his wife. ‘The Queen will be expecting me, and I can’t fail to be there. To serve the Queen is what I most desire, even beyond my love for you. It is what keeps a courtier safe and in her good graces. I advise you to cultivate the same desire yourself, unless you wish to find yourself far from court – and me.’

In silence, Lettice watched him step up towards the brightly lit chambers of the royal apartments, leaving her bereft against the cold stone. Was no man ever to show her true love and affection?

She turned and guided herself down into darkness, blinking back angry tears once again.
To serve the Queen is what I most desire, even beyond my love for you
. What further sign did she need of Robert’s intentions?

It was July now. If Elizabeth changed her mind and chose to accept him, Robert could be on the throne before the first leaves began to turn.

Nine

THE TINY SCRATCHING
at her door sounded more like a mouse behind the wainscot than someone requesting entry to the Royal Bedchamber. Nonetheless, Elizabeth recognized the sound and halted her restless pacing, turning to the leaded windows of the state apartments. Her ladies stirred but she held them back with a gesture, and they sat back on the floor, attending once more to their embroidery.

Slowly, she tidied her nightgown and robe, then waited another good minute before giving him permission to enter.

‘
Veni
!’

The castle grounds had fallen into inky darkness now, all trace of fireworks gone, their burning lights submerged beneath the lake like the village which had once stood there, its people driven out of their homes to make way for the castle’s watery defences. High walls, deep water, watchtowers, inner and outer courts, the iron clang of the portcullis being lowered behind her soldiers. She was living in a fortress. Yet such precautions were necessary, it would appear. At their last meeting Walsingham had mentioned another plot against her life, though for once his intelligence was scanty.

Yet she felt safe here at Kenilworth. Her personal bodyguards stood at arms only a few feet away in the Presence Chamber, with orders to admit none but her ladies-in-waiting and her most trusted courtiers, and Robert had posted men at all possible points of entry to the royal apartments.

The door had opened quietly in response to her command. It was her own Robin, of course. She did not need to turn her head to assure herself of that as she followed his reflection across the room in the leaded diamonds of the window. With all the candles in the great chamber, flecks of light swimming in the thick glass, it was like a vision in a cathedral with Elizabeth at the altar, waiting for her prayers to be answered.

Several of her ladies rose in a rustling flurry of skirts and curtseyed low at his entrance. Demurely, they offered him wine and sweetmeats, both of which Robert declined in a smiling voice.

Too impatient to concern herself with the need for discretion, Elizabeth waved the women away.

‘Leave us, all of you.’

Nevertheless, she waited until the door had closed behind the last of her attendants before turning to him. He was kneeling with uncharacteristic humility, head bowed. She suspected that someone must have informed him of her mood on his way upstairs. Who else but the faithless Countess of Essex?

Straight-backed in her white nightgown and ermine-trimmed robe, she raised him with an impatient gesture. ‘You cannot stay, Robin. Not tonight.’

‘As you wish, Your Majesty.’

Elizabeth noticed that Robert’s gaze was on the heavy gilt Bible at her bedside, and knew that she was right. Lettice must have spoken to him before he reached her presence.

‘I have sent Lady Essex to fetch my own English Bible. That one was not to my taste.’

‘Pardon my presumption in providing it, Your Majesty.’ He seemed to hesitate, and she knew a moment of curiosity as she wondered how he would deal with his fear of antagonizing her. ‘With your love of languages, I thought the Latin would please you.’

She remembered the dancing shadows outside the tent at Long Itchington, and her nails dug into her palms, cutting tiny half-moons in her skin. The memory poisoned her thoughts, left her struggling against the strong desire to scream at him like a common fishwife, to demand the truth about him and Lettice.

‘My people are permitted to hear the scriptures in English now. Why should my own Bible be in Latin?’

Robert bowed deep from the waist, seemingly obedient, though his gaze returned rather too swiftly to her face.

‘Indeed, Your Majesty.’

Was she a fool to keep refusing his offers of marriage? She had never met a foreign prince she liked better than Robert, however handsome and assiduous in their courtship her various suitors had been, and God knew she had tried hard enough to like some of them. Even gone so far as to allow them to kiss and touch her more privately than she cared to remember. Yet Robert would not be ideal as a husband, a royal consort. He was an ambitious man, and ambitious men made dangerous bedpartners for a queen. Had not her cousin Mary proved that beyond any legitimate doubt?

Even a homely marriage to an English nobleman might silence the doubters though, and perhaps even put a new scion of the house of Tudor into the royal nursery.

The possibility of a child made Elizabeth draw breath. To be married at last, to be a mother!

But to allow a man so close to her throne, and a Dudley no less, that could never be safe.

‘Take that Papist book with you when you go,’ she instructed him coldly, once more facing the window and the dark countryside beyond.

He came up behind her, a shadow on the glass. His hands were on her shoulders before she realized what he was planning, and she spun, a quick oath on her lips that died at the look in his face. She shook her head, put her hands on his chest. But he would not be stopped, his strength easily superior to her own.

‘No,’ she insisted.

His arms clasped her tight, pulled her against the rich stuff of his doublet, and Elizabeth felt the old familiar weakening of her limbs, the odd delirious tingling that always seemed to presage a fainting fit yet meant nothing but desire, as she knew now.

‘Don’t you recall what the common people are saying of me?’ she demanded, trying to make him see sense. ‘That I am no longer a virgin. That you and I are lovers.’

‘And are these things not true?’

‘Robin, for God’s sake!’

His hands stroked her shoulders through the white ermine-trimmed silk of her night robe. ‘The people adore you, Elizabeth, whatever we may do in the privacy of your chamber. Did you not see the men and women kneeling in the road as you left London, begging for your blessing on their heads as you passed? And here tonight, entering Kenilworth … Didn’t you hear the people cheering, or see the flowers they threw in your path?’

‘Such things will mean nothing once my reputation is lost.’ She shook her head. ‘This is not Richmond or Whitehall. We are too public here. If you stay tonight, they will call me a whore.’

His hands seized hers, pressing them urgently against the swell of his body. ‘Then marry me, Elizabeth. Make the bastards swallow their words.’

‘I cannot.’ Her stomach tightened with apprehension. ‘England is not yet secure, and many in the Council still wait to see me married off to some stout Protestant prince. No, the times are too dangerous for such a marriage. The country would descend into civil war and tear itself apart, just as it did before my grandfather took the throne.’

‘I do not believe it. The people would be happy to see me by your side.’

‘Which people?’

‘Those who still believe in stability for England.’

‘They must be few indeed,’ she said drily. ‘Besides, if we were wed, you would try to master me. I shall not be mastered by any man, Robert. I have sworn it.’

‘And to whom have you sworn this fierce oath?’

‘To myself.’

He smiled. ‘Bess, my beautiful Bess.’

‘Don’t call me that. I’m no longer that girl.’ Yet the affection behind his childish address pleased her. She found herself turning in to the warmth of his body, her earlier anger almost forgotten. How good it was between them when they were not arguing. ‘Robert …’

His mouth was at her throat. ‘My queen, my lovely beauty.’

Exulting in the heat that sprang between them, the desire still
as
fervent as when they had been young and nobody had been watching, she let him kiss her, tilting her head back until their mouths met. He spoke against her lips, and she almost pulled back to ask, teasingly, ‘What did you say?’ Then memory tugged at her again, conjuring two whispering shadows, half glimpsed in sleep, seen through the pale billowing sails of the royal tent, their heads close together. The vision slid back under her ribs with a shock, sharp and demanding.

She wanted to shout the hated name at him, throw it at him in a furious riot of accusation.

Lettice. What is she to you? How dare you come to me tonight when your eyes would prefer her face to mine
?

But such an outburst could only weaken her position. Besides, to admit jealousy would be to mark her out as her father’s daughter, driven beyond reason and diplomacy by the urges of her body.

‘Tomorrow,’ she said instead, quickly extricating herself with a smile. ‘Tomorrow we will celebrate Mass in the village church. Is that the plan?’

Robert straightened. As his arms dropped away from her, he seemed to understand that the moment for embracing was over, that she would not go any further tonight. That was something she had always admired about him. With his innate intelligence and quick grasp of any political situation, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was the man she turned to first in a crisis. Or when she needed a little wit and light relief. Life at court could be so dull and restrictive that she was constantly in need of distraction. Robert had always made her laugh when no one else could. Surely that must be worth something?

‘Tomorrow, everything will be just as you requested.’

Elizabeth managed another smile, but took the precaution of moving swiftly away before he could distract her again with his gaze and his clever hands.

Her ladies already whispered enough behind their idle hands whenever she and Robert danced or walked together or rode out hunting. The court was a stifling prison, its corridors full of watchful shadows. There could be little hope of privacy even at Kenilworth, though knowing that Robert’s sleeping quarters were
so
close at hand was both a comfort and a temptation she could do without.

‘Then you may leave me.’ She nodded towards the closed door. ‘I have other business yet tonight.’

Robert was curious, and not a little irritated; this was clear from the way his dark eyes narrowed on her face. But he swept another extravagant bow, his smile following swiftly. Rather too swiftly, she thought, and held herself aloof, at her most distant, barely acknowledging his departure.

‘I bid you goodnight, Your Majesty, and I humbly pray you enjoy better sleep than I expect to.’

As soon as the door had closed behind him, Elizabeth staggered to the bed, no longer able to hold herself erect. The old pain had returned, gripping her belly, her womb. The desire to call him back, to shut her door to the world as she welcomed him into her bed, was powerful. Yet the overriding need to remain silent was like an armoured glove clamped about her heart, its vast metal fingers squeezing her half to death.

Must she never conceive a son to honour and preserve the royal house of Tudor?

She did not have to wait long for her last visitor of the night. The secret knock came a few moments later, as though the old spymaster had been waiting his turn in the shadows while Robert was in her bedchamber.

Elizabeth opened the door herself. ‘It’s late.’

Francis Walsingham bowed stiffly at her tone, austere as ever in his stern black doublet and hose. His neat white ruff was as high as those of any of the young bucks at court, yet his ornaments were sparing – just one golden link-chain about his neck to proclaim his wealth.

‘I would have come earlier but you were otherwise engaged,’ he commented without emphasis, his glance searching every corner of her bedchamber with his usual caution. Apparently satisfied, he turned back, observing her ermine-trimmed robe, the silk folds of her nightwear. ‘Perhaps I should return tomorrow, Your Majesty, when you are rested?’