Elizabeth I (17 page)

He looked so earnest, standing there: straight and keen eyed.

“You are no longer Galahad, that purest of knights,” I told him. “There was a time when I saw you as such.”

“That was Sir Philip Sidney,” he said.

“Bah!” Before I could stop myself, it was out. “His death was a waste!”

Essex went white. I had uttered a sacrilege. “It was noble! ‘My need is greater than thine’—when he gave his water to another suffering knight!”

“Oh, you’re a fool, Essex!” That came out, too, before I could stop it. “He had no business being there at all. The entire campaign to help the Dutch was mismanaged. He should never have left his leg armor off. He should not have given his water to another. It was all posturing!” There, I had said it.

“You strike at the foundation of my values,” he said. “All that I believe in, you lay the ax to its roots.”

“So you married Frances in order to feel noble? Very well then, feel noble. That will be your reward. Do not expect any other.”

He bowed his head again. I could see that he was shocked. He had expected applause and reward for his chivalric duty. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Absent yourself from court for a while,” I said.

He opened his mouth to complain but shut it again.

He was gone. The foolish boy—his head all aswim with the flattery of having Frances swoon over his shirts, no doubt, and his perceived death duty to his dead friend. I shook my head; this jolt had certainly awakened me. But the lingering miasma of memories of Leicester now intertwined themselves, like smoke, around the living Robert Devereux, his stepson. Why did I care what he did? My own motives became suspect to me.

I needed to leave this stuffy chamber. A ride out in the countryside promised to be just the thing. No one could talk to me while I was galloping across fields.

Marjorie rode with me, as did my guards, but in essence I was alone. We left the environs of London behind swiftly once we had passed beyond Moorfields, those open fields lying outside the Moor Gate where laundresses stretched out their drying sheets on hooks and mischievous boys practiced archery.

This May the plowed fields were already springing with wheat. In wild meadows, the bluebells were in bloom, waving bravely. The air was clear and fresh, scented with flowering hawthorn from the hedgerows.

Robert Devereux’s face as he pleaded his case floated before me as I galloped along. His big brown eyes, his newly sprung beard, his bluster and bravado all made him seem younger rather than the mature man he would claim to be. He was—how old? Twenty-two this past autumn. At twenty-two I had still been playing the dutiful subject of my tyrannical sister, subject to house arrest and constant vigilance that my slightest word might not be misinterpreted. By God! What luxury young Essex had. He did not have to worry that he would lose his life for a wrong answer!

We rushed under a low-hanging oak branch, and I ducked. Out on the other side, open fields beckoned. We emerged out of the shadows and into the bright sunshine.

Essex, Essex—what drove him? He was the last of an old breed of man—feudal, noble, seeking glory for its own sake. It stirred me in some ways, for I, too, was of an older time. My father had sought battlefield recognition on the fields of France, even when he was near to death, so incapacitated and swollen with his mortal illness he had to be lifted onto his horse with a hoist.

But the truth was that military commands, and heroes, had not held much political sway in a century in England. Essex had come too late. His time had passed him by.

My horse tired, and I felt his pace slackening. I would not urge him past his capacity, and so I pulled him up. I had finished thinking, in any case. What else was there to consider? Only what place I would give Essex. I would await his actions before deciding.

Marjorie reached me and halted by my side. She was panting, and her horse was lathered. “No one can keep up with you!” she said. Then our grooms pulled up as well, and we all rested.

The fields spread out around us. In the stillness of midday, only butterflies were stirring—small white ones flitting from row to row. In the distance a village nestled in a hollow, shaded by trees planted long ago. I could see a maypole sticking up like a finger on its outskirts. The old ways, the old customs. I felt a great pang at the rate at which they were disappearing.

“Come,” I said to Marjorie and my companions. “A maypole. Let us go see!”

15

LETTICE

May 1590

T
he rain kept falling, as it had for the past two days. Farmers were glad of it after our dry spell, I was sure, but their concerns were far from pressing to me. I wanted juicy pears and cherries as much as anyone else, but without the money to pay for them, I could not have them grace my table, for all that they grew in the orchards. Money. Money. What did my dear father like to quote from Proverbs? “The wealth of the rich is their fortified city.” Puritans knew how to keep one eye on the practicalities of life, while keeping the other on the Scriptures.

Frances started to enter the room, then saw me and backed out. I could barely stand the sight of her, she who had wrecked the ship of our possible fortune. I was trying to master my feelings, but they must still show. It was not her fault, and I should not resent her. No, it was my son’s!

He was, wisely, hiding from me. Ever since he had slunk back here with his bride, he had avoided being alone with me. A week now. They had been here a week, and then this wretched rain started. Turning away from the doorway, so Frances would not know I had seen her, I stared out at the dripping trees and the misty fields. The oak leaves had lost their bright new color and were halfway to their summer size; water ran off their scalloped edges and splattered on the ground.

Robert had made a gross misstep in marrying Frances Walsingham. Elizabeth was furious, sending them both from court. It was hideously like what had happened eleven years ago when I married Leicester. I thought all that would be put behind us, that Robert would work patiently to restore our fortunes. What if Elizabeth banished him forever? But no, that could not be. If he had betrayed her by marrying without her consent, I, his mother, was doubly betrayed. For he was meant to be our deliverance.

A particularly big gust of wind hit the trees, swaying them and slapping their branches against the window. Just then I saw Robert dashing between them, ducking down to protect himself. A moment later he stumbled into the hall, soaked. Thinking himself alone, he stamped the water off and shook out his hat.

“Don’t spray water all over the chest!” I barked.

Startled, he dropped his hat to the floor.

“And not on the carpet, either!”

Sheepishly, he bent down to retrieve it. “I beg pardon,” he said.

“And well you should,” I replied. “When you have changed your clothes, you shall come to me in the solar.”

He was caught at last.

Now he stood before me in the warmest room in the house, while the rain lashed outside. I stood looking at him for a moment, trying to see him not as a mother but as a stranger would. His physical presence was so commanding. He also had a sweetness of nature that revealed itself only after one had been in his presence for a while. On first and second impressions he won hearts. Oh, he had been gifted in all things, my son. The gods must be laughing at us.

“Mother?” he asked as I stood silently with my thoughts.

All my sharpness drained away. I had no rapier to thrust into him. I was overwhelmed with sadness and disappointment, with, yes—defeat. “Oh, Robert,” I said. “Why?”

“That was
her
question,” he said.

“Not for the first time, then, we think alike,” I said. “And what answer did you give Her Majesty?”

“I could not give the true one,” he said. “That having made her pregnant, I must now marry her.”

“Must history always repeat itself in our family?”

“Your father looked after your virtue when you were in Frances’s condition, and Walsingham, on his deathbed, glanced balefully at me—what was I to do? His widowed daughter was expecting—would be disgraced.”

“Yes, we widows have a difficult time of it when our bellies swell, after our husbands have been in heaven a good long time already.” I looked at my handsome son once again. “I am sure his looks were baleful, since his whole skin was yellow. But without belaboring the point, I must ask—why? Why did you seek her bed at all?”

“Do you mean, without belaboring the point that you were—are—beautiful and Frances is not? Your modesty was always one of your most becoming traits, Mother.”

“Never mind my looks, that isn’t what I meant—I meant her prospects, what she brings to the marriage.”

“Her dowry, as it were?”

“If you must put it that way, yes. Everyone has a dowry, unspoken or not, invisible or not. And mine was not my face—there are girls here in Drayton Bassett with prettier faces, but you’ll never see an earl pursuing them to the altar. In fairy fantasies, yes, but not in the world of the Tudor court.”

“So it wasn’t your face. Are you going to tell me what it was? Or would that be unseemly, to describe the lure of a courtesan to her son?”

What a naïf he was! I laughed. “First your line of sight is on the face, then it descends to the seat of Venus. Neither one is much of a dowry. Look elsewhere, to the practical—to lineage and fortune.”

But of course a noble knight was not supposed to do that. He was supposed to think only of love, and of beauty. After that, of duty. Robert looked puzzled.

“I speak of bloodlines, power, and money. What else is there in a dowry?”

“I fail to see how you provided any of those in your own dowry.”

“Then your education is faulty, for which I blame myself. Let me rectify that.” I took a deep breath. Where common sense is present, this should not need explaining. “Bloodlines: I am at the very least the Queen’s near cousin.... Some say more than a cousin; some say my mother was the Queen’s half-sister. But that is gossip, impossible to prove. Power: My father is a trusted Privy Councillor, high in the Queen’s esteem, and has been for almost her entire reign—over thirty years. My first husband, your father, was an earl, and his family had risen to prominence under the Tudors. The only thing I lacked was money. But court entrée or position can be used as earnest for money.”

Was he following this? Did I have to draw it for him? He was jutting his chin out in the way he did when he wanted to be stubborn.

“Whereas Frances”—I hoped she was not listening anywhere—“has no notable family. Her father, rest his soul, achieved his position all by himself, by remarkable industry and cleverness. Admirable. But he came from nowhere and his family is back in nowhere. With his death, all power at court ended for them. And money! He was so in debt you know he had to be buried at night, for fear his creditors would swoop down upon his funeral procession if it were held in the daylight. So he could not even afford a simple funeral. In marrying his daughter, you have married only obligations and no future benefits. She’s sweet and will be loyal. Had you had no money worries, that would be enough. A rich earl could afford her. The poorest earl in England—for that’s what you are—cannot. And now you have thrown away your chance to improve your fortunes by that time-honored method, an advantageous marriage!”

“It seems to me that you are at least as disappointed that your own fortunes will not rise as you are that mine are stranded.”

“We are a family, and our fortunes are one. But you are wrong. I am more distraught about you, because your life is just starting, and to start with angering the Queen makes for a poor prognosis. You could have risen high, higher than anyone else at court. Now—?”

“Then I’ll content myself with the quiet life,” he said. “Many virtuous men recommend it highly. As Henry Howard wrote,