Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (22 page)

to cry or faint at her feet; the last thing she could afford, in her tenuous

position, was to draw the hostile attention of the bride’s father-in-law.

“Kat, fetch Lady Dudley some wine. I’m afraid the excitement has

been too much for her.”

Kat departed with a hard, accusing look at her mistress and returned

with a goblet of malmsey. Amy accepted it with a trembling hand and

took a few gulping draughts. Slowly the colour crept back into her face

and her lips set themselves into a thin, sulky line.

“Amy.” Elizabeth leaned forward a little to touch a ruffle at the girl’s

wrist. “Don’t look for kindness at court or anywhere else. The world is

a hard place.”

“Certainly,” said Amy pointedly, “it is full of cruel people.”

Elizabeth smiled faintly.

“I have found treason in trust and learnt to strike before I am stricken.

Let us dispense with pretence—there can be no friendship between us. I

fear neither of us desires it.”

“Robert shall know how unkind you have been, madam.”

“Only if you are fool enough to speak of it. What I told you was the

truth and if you have any sense you will learn from it. Open your mind

to his world and study the things that interest him. Be prepared to grow

with him, Amy, because if you don’t you’ll wake up one day and find

him gone. And believe me—the woman who takes him from you won’t

be prepared to give him back without a fight.”

Amy sat still with her hands clenched in her lap. She was no longer

shocked or offended; she was simply sick with terror in the face of a

declared enemy. She fixed wild eyes on the figures before the throne,

until at last Robin turned, intercepted her distress signals, and hurried

back, vaguely irritated by her obvious inability to hold her own for less

than five minutes without him.

Side by side they still sat; Amy agitated, almost dishevelled, as after

some physical encounter of which she had plainly got the worst; and

Elizabeth, with her finely chiselled poise, looking very—very as he had

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never seen her look before. Was it beautiful or merely mysterious? He

could not have said, but on impulse he bowed over her hand and begged

her to dance with him. Amy drew in her breath sharply but he ignored it.

Elizabeth glanced at Amy, laughed and shook her head.

“My lord, you should ask your wife.”

“I have the rest of my life to dance with my wife.” He was annoyed,

a little drunk, inclined to be heartless and belligerent. “And you owe me

this measure, madam. Listen.” The musicians were striking up a haunting

refrain. “Remember the day we learnt this at Hampton Court?”

“Greenwich.”

“Well—wherever! ‘
Andante andante
,’ you said and pinched me because

I went too fast.”

“You’ll always go too fast, Robin Dudley—”

They were out of Amy’s hearing by now, but not out of sight. Her

jealous eyes followed them, two bodies joined by the perfect harmony of

rhythm. They laughed rather more than was in keeping with the sombre

stateliness of the measure and when it was over they stood for an endless

moment talking.
Saying what?
screamed a voice in Amy’s head.

There was no opportunity to ask. Even as Robin raised Elizabeth’s

hand to his lips, his eyes resting all the time on hers, a crowd of laughing

women descended on Amy and bore her away to the bridal chamber.

There she was undressed, teased mercilessly, and put naked into the big

bed to wait for Robin.

“Don’t worry,” someone said kindly. “After the first time it’s not

so bad.”

“Oh, don’t cozen her with nonsense, you know very well that it takes

months—you take my advice, my dear, and give him a son quickly. Once

you’ve done your duty they take their pleasures elsewhere and leave you

in peace.”

The matrons drew off, arguing good-naturedly and Amy lay very still,

trying not to overhear snippets of their dreadful tales.

“…it’s the last thing a man does before they put him in a box, you know.”

“Aye—they’re all the same there—well,
most
of them, hey?”

The conversation became muted, laced with sly laughter.
Oh, Robert,

why don’t you come and send them all away
?…

He came at length, wrapped in a long satin robe, and it seemed to

Amy as though he had brought the entire court on his heels, a host of

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vulgar, drunken wedding guests who milled around the bed, laughing

and shrieking like grotesque devils from the mouth of hell.

But there was one who did not prance or shriek or sing rude innuen-

does, one who was stone-cold sober and whose slender presence terrified

her more than all the rest.

She shut her eyes and did not open them again until the noisy multi-

tude had jostled itself out of the room. What she saw then made her

shrink into the shelter of Robin’s warm nakedness.

Elizabeth was standing alone beside the bed. One hand rested lightly

on the bedpost and the other on the curtain, so that her sweeping Boleyn

sleeves unfurled like an angel’s wings. Candlelight made a red-gold halo of

her hair and softened the sharp contours of her face to a gleam of extraor-

dinary beauty. Beneath her hand, Amy felt Robin’s body stir and stiffen.

No one spoke. Elizabeth laughed suddenly and swept the curtain across

the bed, shutting them together in the little brocaded prison. They did

not hear her leave the room, but they knew instinctively the moment she

was gone; it was as though something beyond this world had withdrawn

to its own sphere.

The room was very quiet after the noisy crowd. Robin lay rigid

beneath the sheet, staring at the dividing curtain, and Amy sensed some

fierce emotion had him in its grip. Before she could speak, he had

wrenched the curtain aside with a violent jerk and strode naked into the

room. By the hearth he paused to pour a goblet of wine and she watched

him throw it down his throat as though it were water.

“Robert.”

“Be quiet!” he snapped.

“But I don’t understand—what’s wrong?”

“I said be silent, God damn you! Didn’t you promise to obey?”

He flung the empty goblet across the room. It bounced off the wall

and he stood staring at it for a long time. At length he returned to bed and

made love to her in the rough, selfish fashion she had been led to expect.

Afterwards he was moderately kind and wiped away her tears, reassuring

her until she fell asleep beneath his arm.

He lay awake, with her hair streaming across his bare chest and watched

the room grow steadily lighter. He thought of Elizabeth, wondering what

it would be like to lie beside her in the half light: and suddenly he was

filled with a hollow sense of loss.

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All through the next day, as he followed the hunt, he was dogged by

a curious depression which spoilt his pleasure in a good kill. He lingered

over cards in the Great Hall and Amy was asleep when he came up; so

he went back downstairs to find Guildford and the pair of them got

roisteringly drunk.

It was a curious relief to have been spared that nagging disappointment

two nights in a row.

t t t

Once installed in Norfolk, it was less easy to avoid his wife; and when

nothing in the length and breadth of that whole country gave him any

satisfaction, he began to escape to court as often as he could without

exciting comment. Discreet inquiries from his mother over the state of

Amy’s health, coupled with puerile jests from Guildford (“Not got that

mare of yours in foal yet, Robin?”) suddenly focused a new light on his

nebulous dissatisfaction. How could a man be content, burdened with

a barren cow who showed no sign of giving him a son and heir? After

eighteen months he had at last succeeded in convincing himself that

the sole cause of his bitter frustration was this persistent inability to be

presented with a miniature replica of himself. And one dull, rainy evening

at Syderstone saw them quarrelling peevishly on the subject.

“Perhaps if you came a little more often to my bed—” she said on a

sudden sob.

He turned away impatiently.

“For Christ’s sake, Amy—I’ve sown seed enough in you to father a

dozen sons by now.”

“That makes it my fault, of course.”

“I suggested you should see a doctor. I never
said
it was your fault.”

“But it’s what you meant.” Amy bit her lip. “And you were right.

There’ll be no child. How could there be, when a witch overlooked me

on my marriage bed?”

His irritable stride up and down the room halted abruptly; he swung

round to look at her with the curious, cautious look that people reserve

for the mentally deranged.

“Of all the brain-sick gibberish—” He stopped and his tone changed

sharply as understanding dawned. “God’s blood—you mean Elizabeth,

don’t you?”

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The casual use of that Christian name stung Amy like a pebble from a

sling and made her reckless.

“Everyone knows her mother was a witch—the King himself accused

her. And it’s passed on in the blood to the next generation, like the

French Pox. Father says that every witch—”

He took a step towards her and slapped her silent; his face beneath its

tan was quite white.

“If you say just one more word,” he spat, “I’ll take my whip to you.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she whispered, holding her flaming cheek.

He gave her a tight smile, glacial, contemptuous, and turned away

in silence.

“I’ll tell Father,” she flung after him, suddenly desperate.

“Please do,” he said evenly, from the door, “and when you do you

might also ask him to send you a lawyer.”

She began to tremble then. “A lawyer?”

“You know on what business,” he announced curtly, and went out

of the room.

She knew. It was not the first time, he had clubbed her into silence

with that hefty cudgel labelled “divorce.” She couldn’t afford to provoke

him any further by giving free rein to her jealous tongue.

She would not speak of the Lady Elizabeth again.

t t t

Robin stood alone in the half-lit hall, marshalling his resentments like a

man inspecting a regiment.

He had been a fool to marry the first pretty heiress to cross his path—just

how great a fool was being revealed more clearly to him with every day that

passed. Events were moving fast at court. As the King’s health failed, Warwick

had said it might be necessary to alter the line of succession and Guildford

was being schooled for marriage with Lady Jane Grey. Guildford—timorous

and effete, always so afraid that life might have something nasty up its sleeve.

Guildford Dudley to be King of England, for no better reason than that it

had
to be Guildford; while Robin rotted in Norfolk, married to a snivel ing

little country bitch who couldn’t even give him a son!

And Elizabeth—

He broke off there, as though faced with a grievance too painful even

to acknowledge.

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Oh, yes. She was the catalyst in his simmering cauldron of discontent.

But he would die before he admitted it to anyone. Least of all to himself.

t t t

What remained of Edward Tudor’s reign ticked relentlessly away in a

welter of petty storms. Elizabeth lived like a nun at Hatfield, impeccably

Protestant and beyond the reach of Warwick’s hand; she was not, in any

case, his primary target. If Edward died, it was Mary who stood next in

line to the throne, and it was Mary he persecuted mercilessly for her stub-

born adherence to the Catholic faith, hoping to drive the sickly woman

into exile, or better still, into the grave.

When the King created him Duke of Northumberland he was at the

zenith of his power, great soldier, wily diplomat, the most feared and

hated man in all of England. The time had come when he could afford to

rid himself of liabilities and secure his position as undisputed ruler. And

first and foremost on his list was the Duke of Somerset.

As the net of intrigue tightened inexorably around him, Somerset

confided in Mr. Secretary Cecil that he suspected some ill.

Cecil’s bland face had the look of one who has stepped straight from

boyhood into middle age. Loyalty to the Duke was a damp cloak around

his bowed shoulders, uncomfortable to wear, easy to shake off.

And Cecil said coldly, “If Your Grace is innocent you may be of good

courage. If you are guilty I have nothing to say but to lament you.”

After this rank desertion, the Duke appeared to slip into apathy, making

little effort to escape the fate that was closing in upon him so relentlessly.

They came to arrest him at Hampton Court shortly afterwards and he

accepted the charge of treason with curious indifference.

Alone in his stone chamber in the Tower, he looked back down the

inevitable path of his failure to that night of Edward’s christening. Life