The Spymaster's Daughter (54 page)

“Your Grace, only God sees all. I see only the little he allows me to see in my magical glass.”

His face was somber, but Elizabeth's voice nearly shook with anger. “Jesu, good doctor, tell me what is the little that you
do
see.”

She had her answer in the next moment, though it was an answer that came not from Dr. Dee, or from an angel in heaven, but from hell.

A gentleman pensioner walked toward her holding up a dusty lad, his thin legs unsteady, nearly staggering from fatigue.

A message from Robin at last. Elizabeth sighed with relief, eagerly motioning the boy forward. “Young Tracey,” she called aloud down the length of the hall, “what news from my lord Leicester?”

Cecil took the lad's arm and led him to the throne, where the boy dropped to his knees in both exhaustion and courtesy, breathing hard.

“What news of my lord Leicester's health, lad?” The words crowded past a full throat, her heart beginning to beat faster.

“Majesty, I am sent to tell you that—”

He took a shuddering breath and, Jesu help her, she yelled at the used-up boy. “Tell us what!”

“The Earl of Leicester is dead, Majesty, these two days gone.”

She opened her mouth to shout down his lie, but at that moment came a great boom of cannon from the Tower and what the queen howled was neither heard nor understood by anyone in the presence chamber, least by herself. It was a cry of denial from the deepest well of her heart.

Cecil hastened forward and offered his arm. “Majesty, please you, come at once out of this crowd into a private place.”

She said something, but it was lost in a swift-moving red pain that filled her and became a sound…a name….
Robin…my long love.
How could I have forgotten you for a moment, even in my greatest triumph,
our
greatest triumph?

“Majesty, you should come away to your chambers. I would not have the court see you thus. A queen does not—”

“Does not!” she shrieked at her faithful advisor of thirty years and more. “Does not feel agony, does not…” She lost the words spilling from her heart, if she had ever had words instead of shrieks of disbelief. It could not be. Not Robin. He had promised never to leave her.

Cecil took her arm and spoke on determinedly: “A queen does not allow her subjects to see her shaken so.”

She had no more strength to dispute him; she could scarcely lift her legs, though she stumbled into the hall from the presence chamber, her gown weighted with heavy embroidery and pearls suddenly pressing her down, her arms almost too weak to hold on to Cecil's arm so that, with the aid of his cane, he must hold them both upright. Her body was empty as death.

“And yet,” she croaked, “my people know I am a woman born with a woman's heart.”

“You are a queen first, Majesty. That is what you have always been from the cradle and must remain until…”

“I die. Oh, God above, let me go to Robin.” It was a howl that rang
through the hall, bringing her yeoman guards to greater attention, their pikes trembling, for what they did not know.

“Majesty,” Cecil said as they reached the privy chamber doors, “you must go on. Lord Leicester would hav—”

She turned to rage at him. “What do you know of what Robin wanted? He wanted life…life with me, beside me. I could not give him more than a little…what I could, but never enough….” Now she shook and sagged once more toward the floor.

“Majesty,” Cecil urged, his tone reminding her of herself just enough to keep her from a faint.

Once inside the anterooms, Cecil beat on the doors to the royal apartment, loudly calling for her ladies of the bedchamber.

The doors opened on the large privy bedchamber and she could see the flashing victory explosions from London City through her mullioned windows and the fire in her fireplace that burned day and night in this damp old palace beside the Thames. She saw the arras tapestries that covered her walls and the intricate Flemish lace on her bed bolsters. She feared madness.
I can see only things
.
I have no sense of myself. I can't think. I can no more believe
.

She croaked a question as her ladies helped her to her bed and bent to her. “Did you know, my lord Cecil?” she cried.

“No, Majesty. Not for a certainty. I have this for you from young Tracey.”

He held a letter in front of her eyes so that she could read. It was Robin's handwriting, shaky, scrawled in his illness with fading strength.

His last letter.