Emily Purdy - A Court Affair

The black plumes crowning the staves carried by the men who walked before and aft the coffin hung limp and bedraggled, beaten down by the rain, like squiggles of black ink running down a wet page, like the tearstained letters Amy used to send her husband. The eight-and-twenty men—one for each year of Amy’s life—who walked in solemn procession, two by two, down that long and winding road, escorting Amy to her final rest, wore long, hooded black robes. I shivered, remembering the letter I had once found on Robert’s floor, crumpled into a ball on the hearth. He had flung it at the fire in a fit of annoyance but had missed. He hadn’t cared enough to disturb himself and rise from his chair and cross the room to pick it up and feed it to the flames. Instead, he had left it lying there, where any, whether they be servant, queen, or spy in the Spanish Ambassador’s pay, might pick it up and read those smeared, hysterical words scrawled frantically across tearstained pages about a phantom friar who haunted Cumnor Place in a grey robe with a cowl that hid his face —the face of Death! —in blackest shadows no human eye or light could pierce. I know I have seen Death, Amy had insisted. He is stalking me!

Now, as the church bells tolled mournfully, robed men with hoods that hid their faces in black shadows carried Amy to her tomb on a grey and gloomy day when even the sky wept. The coffin was leaden and heavy, and they took turns shouldering it, those who had borne the burden falling back to walk in seamless step whilst others took their places beneath its weight; it was all done as precisely as military manoeuvres, as perfectly choreographed as a court masque, with not a single stumble or misstep. What little family she had and the women and servants who had borne her company at Cumnor followed the casket, a few of them weeping copiously and volubly, the others enjoying the notoriety of being, however slightly and momentarily, at the centre of a maelstrom of raging scandal. Each of them was outfitted in new mourning clothes paid for by the absent widower, who remained closeted in his milk white mansion at Kew, feeling sorry for himself instead of grieving for the wife whose so-convenient death he now realised was a grave inconvenience. And a choir of solemn-faced little boys in white surplices brought up the rear, clutching their black-bound songbooks and singing dolefully.

At the black-draped, candlelit Church of Our Lady, as the boy choir sang, the coffin was opened and draped with black sarcenet fringed with gold and black silk, surrounded by candles and mounted escutcheons supporting the Dudleys’ bear and ragged staff, and Robert’s personal emblem of oak leaves and acorns, and Amy lay in state, to be entombed in the chancel on the morrow.

The Doctor of Divinity, Dr Babington, a round little man with a bald pate ringed by a fringe of grey, and lopsided spectacles slipping from his nose, then came forth to preach his sermon, “Blessed are they who die in the Lord,” but few bothered to listen and instead sat in the pews or stood in the back with their heads bent together, gossiping about how Lady Dudley had met her death, by villainy or mischance or, “God save her,” her own desperation, and the fact that her absent husband was rumoured to have spent the astounding sum of £2,000 on this splendid funeral, and that not counting the cost of his own mourning garb, which was said to be the very epitome of elegance. But there was a gasp and a lingering, horrified pause when Dr Babington misspoke and recommended to our memories “this virtuous lady so pitifully slain ”. He stood there for a moment with his mouth quivering and agape. “Oh, merciful Heaven, did I really say that ?” he gasped before he hastily continued and completed his sermon in a babbling rush, his face highly flushed as he stumbled and tripped over the rest of the words as though his own poor tongue were falling down a staircase, going from bad to worse with each bump and thump. Then the mourners came forward, in solemn procession, to pause for a moment by the coffin and pay their last respects to Lady Dudley. For those who needed more than a moment, Robert had thoughtfully provided a pair of impressive—and no doubt expensive—mourning stools fringed in Venice gold and black silk and upholstered in quilted black velvet, placed at the head and foot of the coffin, so that any who wished to might sit and mourn in comfort.

As the mourners filed out, to go and feast at the nearby college and honour Lady Dudley’s memory, a plump, greying woman—she reminded me of my own dear old governess, Kat Ashley—her round, wizened face red and swollen from crying, lingered to lovingly lay a bouquet of buttercups upon the coffin before she buried her face in her hands and, her shoulders shaking convulsively with loud, racking sobs, turned away and followed the others out. “Mrs Pirto,” I heard someone in the crowd say, identifying her as Amy’s maid, who had “loved her lady well and dearly and been with her her whole life long”.

When the church was quite deserted, I steeled myself, squared my shoulders, and approached the black-draped bier, supremely conscious of the sound of my booted footsteps upon the stone floor; no matter how softly I tried to tread, they rang like a tocsin in my ears, and more than once I glanced guiltily back over my shoulder as though I were committing some crime by coming here. I knew I was the last person Amy would have wanted or expected to come; she would have thought I came to gloat over her coffin, to bask in my triumph, now that she was dead and Robert was free to marry me.

Tall white tapers, arranged like a crescent moon, stood behind the coffin. Had someone known that Amy was always nervous of the dark, afraid of the encroaching shadows and what they might hide, and ordered the candles placed there as a comforting gesture just for her, or was this merely thought a becoming touch, or done for the simple sake of providing light?

Burnished golden curls, perfectly arranged, gleamed in the candlelight, framing her pale face, white as the candle wax. A wreath of silken buttercups crowned those perfect curls; real ones would have soon wilted and withered away within the coffin. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; so it is in the end for all that lives, from buttercups to beautiful girls too young to die. Who had fashioned that wreath of yellow silk flowers and her hair into those perfect curls? Surely it must have been the devoted Mrs Pirto. I could picture her, near-blinded by grief, sitting by the fire, tears dripping down onto the gnarled and thick-veined hands that laboriously cut and stitched silken semblances of the yellow flowers that had always been Amy’s favourite as a final act of love. Amy loved buttercups; I remembered that from her wedding day, when she had carried a great bouquet of them and worn a crown of them upon her head and had them embroidered in gold upon the creamy satin field of her gown, the very one she wore now. Amy was going to her grave in her wedding gown. Mayhap in death, I prayed, she would find a love better and more worthy of her than she ever found in life.

“Love,” I softly mused aloud, “so kind to some, so cruel to others.” That fickleness was one of Life’s harsh realities that blessed some and damned others.

She was much and sadly altered, though the times I had gazed upon her were scant—a mere three times, twice up close and once from afar—and the difference was startling to behold. The first time I saw her, on her wedding day, I thought this petite, plump, buxom blonde would soon be as round as she was tall with all the children she would bear. I thought surely to hear that she was pregnant every year. With her full breasts and round hips, she looked ripe for motherhood, born for breeding. But it was not to be. Amy Robsart had prospered neither as a wife nor as a woman; even the joys and consolations of motherhood had been denied her. And now she lay pale, wan, and wasted in her coffin, cancer had consumed her curves, and Life and Love’s cruelties had taken all the rest. This was a woman whose hopes and dreams had died long before she did.