The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (2 page)

“Robin, love …” She stroked his hot, damp cheek.

“Don’t call me love,” he said with a sullen gaze.

“I’ll call you what I will,” she said in tart response. The light was fading fast and they both knew their precious private time would soon be ending. Elizabeth sat up, pulled her bodice back together, and fumbled with the many closings. “Come, help me with this now.” She teased him with a coquettish grin and despite his pique he was, as ever, completely charmed by this frail girl. His clumsy fingers pushed the tiny pearl buttons through their satin eyes. Once his fingers slipped purposely, brushing her now corseted breast with his hand.

“Your councillors are wild with fear,” he said. “They think you mean to marry me and make me king.” He sat up, pulling closed his shirt and vest, not looking her in the eye.

“And what, pray, would they have us do with your good wife?”

“Wife? Have I a wife?” he joked.

She stood before him, forcing their eyes to meet. “If you and I were wed, would you forget me so easily?”

He saw that he had blundered, not simply making light of his own loveless marriage but recalling the coldbloodedness with which her father had discarded his wives, including Elizabeth’s mother. But this girl, his queen, his love Elizabeth, drove him mad with her changeability. At times she opened to him like a flower to sunlight, laughing, teasing, making wicked plans in much the way they had done as children. In those times they were as if intoxicated, crazed with delight in each other’s company. She had even contemplated marriage to him. Sometimes she pushed him to be strong with her, to dominate and be her master. Then with the swiftness of a summer storm she turned dark and harsh, playing upon his insignificance, toying with him as she would a chess piece.

“I have too many suitors, Robin — princes, kings, and emperors — to think of you to marry.” She said this flippantly, but he sensed a softening in her. He watched her move as she put on her velvet jacket, saw the shoulders droop just so, the eyes unfocused, the forehead tight and strained. Wishing to bring her back to mildness, he pulled himself erect and made his stand, looming tall above her. His voice a mellow purr, he tilted up her head to his.

“Do you not think you have some loyal subjects of your own to make an heir for the English throne?”

“An heir?” Her eyes flashed and seemed almost to snap. “An heir, Robin? Is this the issue here? Not love but royal offspring? ‘King Robert, father to many sons, high ruler of England and, oh yes, I’d forgotten, husband of Elizabeth.’”

“You twist my words, you take me wrong!” he cried.

He’d chosen ill and blundered yet again. Elizabeth crossed the rough-hewn floor and made for the cottage door, her face flushed crimson. Her succession to the throne had been a ghasdy road littered with the dead. Robin Dudley was her love, not her lord. To talk of heirs now in moments sweet as these was a noxious thing. She pulled open the door but Dudley slammed it shut.

“Let me by.”

“No, Elizabeth.”

“I command you!” she roared.

Dudley saw the purple pulsing veins beneath the parchment skin of Elizabeth’s hollow temples. He saw that she was about to cry. He dropped to his knees before her.

“Your Majesty …” He could not go on for a moment, terrible emotions overwhelming his reasonable mind. He raised his arms a supplicant and encircled her waist. Despite the many layers of cloth and corset bones he felt her trembling. “Oh, forgive me, please.”

“Robin, rise. … I did not mean for you —”

“No, no, let me speak.” Though his head was bowed he spoke with such intensity that every word was sharp and clear. “I knew you as a child, Elizabeth. Born a royal princess, then cast aside as bastard by a father who wanted only sons. Sent from court to live in obscurity and in poverty. You suffered without his care. But in that nursery schoolroom where my father sent me, I found a jewel. A brilliant mind, a glowing soul, a lovely face as pale as a Yorkshire rose. I loved you even then. We were brother and sister, friends, schoolmates. We laughed, we wept, we helped each other through some times, did we not?”

Dudley did not raise his head to receive the answer, but he knew his words were being heard. The talk of older days and childhood had stopped her trembling, and her breathing eased and slowed.

“This frail, sweet girl survived a tender brother’s reign and death, a bloody sister’s rule and demise … to become Elizabeth the Queen. The girl is gone, but in my mind not the playmate, not the sister, not the friend. They remain. But now I feel a greedy passion for the woman’s body. This creates a deep and terrible bond, each to the other. True, I am married to Amy Dudley by the law. But to you I am married by my heart and soul and mind.”

“Robin …” Elizabeth’s voice was soft now, but he commanded her to silence with his eyes, holding her gaze with steady intensity.

“Let me say this. I am yours completely — subject, vassal, obedient servant. If you would have me as your husband, you will still command me and I will have attained a heaven on earth. If you choose a consort not myself, for reasons of alliance, I will understand and serve you. If you choose another man for love … part of me will wither and pass away. But hear this, Majesty. No matter what you choose to make of me, I will always love you as I did when first I saw your lovely self, and I shall fight and die, be torn asunder limb from limb, to save this land and your own right to govern as you will.”

Without warning Dudley tore his shirt and vest open and laid bare his chest. With a flash of gleaming metal he had slashed it with his dagger.

“God, Robin!” Crying now, Elizabeth fell to her knees, pressing her fingers over the wound to stanch the crimson flow. “I would not have you die for me. I want you to live for me … make love to me. Make love to me, now.”

Robin Dudley had nothing to do but obey his queen.

It was already dark when they clattered through the Whitehall Palace gates and brought their steaming horses to a halt at the torchlit front portico. Guards and footmen snapped to attention but lowered their eyes as Dudley helped Elizabeth down off her mount, their bodies sliding together before her feet touched the ground. She wore his long cloak which he now wrapped protectively around her. She knew her men were watching them from under lowered lids, and with a sudden care for propriety she formally offered her Master of the Horse her hand. With one knee dropped to the ground, he took her fingers and kissed them.

“Majesty, I am ever at your service.”

She reached down and touched his shoulder, then turned and swept past the guards who flanked the massive palace entrance. She strode past the tiltyard and through the Privy Gallery leading to the state apartments. Though the hall was torchlit and eerie, Elizabeth felt not at all alone, for the eyes of her York and Tudor ancestors watched her proud passage. She always sensed the weight of lineage and authority, which seemed at times to pass direcdy through her thin alabaster skin, adding potency to her claim to the English throne.

Before ascending the back stair to her apartments Elizabeth took into one hand a torch from the wall to light her way, and with her other hand lifted the skirts above her ankles, for the rough stone steps could be treacherous even in the daytime. The going was narrow and gloomy and the torch cast weird shadows on the walls. With the smell of damp in her nostrils and the feel of Robin still about her, Elizabeth suddenly found herself transported to another time not five years before, stealing down another dank, gloomy stair late at night, hand gripping not a torch but a single candle for fear of being caught in a dangerous and clandestine act.

She was a prisoner in the dread Tower of London, accused by her half sister Mary, now queen, of conspiracy against the crown. Terrified and weak, for she was not long out of her sickbed, Elizabeth had been passing her long days of incarceration studying and translating her beloved Greek texts. But if truth be told, the self-imposed tasks had done little to distract her mind from the cruel fear of her own untimely death. This terrible place had seen far too many executions. Seventeen years past her own mother had died here, and in recent times her father’s fifth wife, her cousin Catherine Howard, had lost her life. Only months before, another cousin, the sixteen-year-old Jane Grey, queen for nine short days, had had her head hacked off on Tower Green and it had been remarked, Elizabeth remembered with a shudder, that the neck had spurted more blood than any imagined could be contained in so petite a body.

Elizabeth stole carefully down the narrow stair of Beauchamp Tower, cupping the candle with her other hand to make the light as dim as she was able. She knew that things would go hard with her if she were caught, and worse still with the kindly warder who had taken pity on the fragile girl who was his charge. Or perhaps he saw her not as a traitor, thought Elizabeth cynically, but as good King Harry’s daughter and a future queen who, when she sat on the throne of England, would long remember the kindness of her old gaoler. In any case he had conveniently looked the other way, and now Elizabeth was blissfully free from the eyes of her keepers for the first time in more than two months.

Halfway down the tower stair she froze in her footsteps as she heard a piteous low moan, distant and hollow. For a moment she thought she had imagined it — nay, hoped she had imagined it — for it was the terrible sound of a man whose existence was an extended agony. Many prisoners were not as lucky as herself, but shut up in windowless cells, dark and cold with only mouldy straw for a bed, racked joints aching, skin raw and pustulent with vermin bites.

“Dear God,” uttered Elizabeth over and over, trying to shut the sound from her ears.

Just as she reached the second landing a hand suddenly shot out of the shadows and clamped around her wrist. She gasped, turning to see Robin Dudley, his bold handsome face lighting up the gloom of the tower stair.

“Elizabeth, thank God!”

With a great heaving sigh, for there were no words to express the profound relief or the terrible rush of love she felt for her old friend, she sank heavily against Robin’s broad chest, and his strong arms enfolded her trembling frame. Hot tears spilled from her eyes to dampen his cloak and she was racked with sobs. He held her fast and spoke in hushed and hurried whispers, for they both knew this stolen time would all too soon be ending.

“Are you being well treated?” he demanded.

“Well enough.” She sniffled and finally found her composure. “And you?” She peered at him in the flickering candlelight. “Robin, you’re so thin.” She touched his hollow cheek.

“The food they bring is decent, but I’ve suffered from a flux these last weeks.” He did not say, but Elizabeth guessed the recent execution of his father and elder brother had sickened him.

“I’m so sorry about your father and John. How are the others?”

“My brothers are all right. Prison is not so foul a time when spent in the company of your family. I’m kept a solitary prisoner, though, in a cell of my own on the floor below them.”

The Dudleys had been imprisoned for their role in their father’s arrogantly self-serving and ill-fated plot to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne so that his own son Guildford, Jane’s husband, could be crowned king.

“Perhaps,” mused Elizabeth aloud, “that you alone of all your brothers proclaimed Jane queen, there in the marketplace of King’s Lynn, angered Mary sufficiently to make your confinement solitary.”

“No matter,” said Dudley, reluctantly releasing Elizabeth from his embrace and holding her at arm’s length. “Tell me how
you
are. If ever there was an unjustly confined prisoner ‘tis you.”

It was true. Her own imprisonment was the result of young Thomas Wyatt’s rebellion which, riding swiftly on the heels of Dudley’s uprising, stood in defiance of Mary’s betrothal to a foreigner, Spain’s Prince Philip.

“But is it not easy to see how Mary might believe my complicity, Robin? The plot’s express purpose was to depose her and place
me
on the throne.”

“Will she not listen to reason from her reasonable sister?”

“I have written letters, I have begged audiences, and none of them have been answered or granted. That wretched Spaniard de Quandra has always hated me. He poisons her mind against me. But they will never find honest proof of my involvement in poor Wyatt’s scheme.”

“Who needs honest proof?” muttered Robin morosely. “We are more like to die on the falsely uttered word of an enemy than from any truthful accusation.”

That dreadful low moan rose again from the bowels of the stone prison, echoing up the dark stairwell as if to remind the two young prisoners of their own fate. And the rapid scuttering of rats at their feet made them shiver with cold disgust.

Elizabeth was suddenly gripped by a not unreasonable terror. “Should we put out the light? If they catch us meeting like this, it will be the end of us.”

Dudley leveled a sharp, desperate look at her and then blew out the candle. They were plunged into a darkness like a curtain of black velvet that, paradoxically, did not muffle but rather magnified every sound. Even their breathing seemed loud enough to bring about detection, and so they drew close once again.