Philippa Gregory: The Virgin's Lover

“D’you think he’s worth it?” Laetitia asked him suddenly. “She is risking her throne to be with him, and she is the most cold-hearted woman I know. Don’t you think he must be the most extraordinary lover for her to risk so much?”

“I don’t know,” Cecil said dampeningly. “Neither I nor any man in England seems to find him very irresistible. On the contrary.”

“Just us silly girls then.” She smiled.

Elizabeth feigned illness in the afternoon; she could not tolerate being in private with Robert, whose exultation was hard to conceal, and she was waiting all the time for a message from Cumnor Place which would bring the news of Amy’s death to court. She gave out that she would dine alone in her room and go early to bed. “You can sleep in my room, Kat,” she said. “I want your company.”

Kat Ashley looked at her mistress’s pallor and at the redness of the skin where she was picking at her nails. “What’s happened now?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” Elizabeth said abruptly. “Nothing. I just want to rest.”

But she could not rest. She was awake by dawn, seated at her desk with her Latin grammar before her, translating an essay on the vanity of fame. “What are you doing that for?” Kat asked sleepily, rising from her bed.

“To stop myself thinking of anything else,” Elizabeth said grimly.

“What is the matter?” asked Kat. “What has happened?”

“I can’t say,” Elizabeth replied. “It’s so bad that I can’t tell even you.”

She went to chapel in the morning and then back to her rooms. Robert walked beside her as they came back from her chapel. “My servant has written me a long letter to tell me what happened,” he said quietly. “It seems that Amy fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck.”

Elizabeth went white for a moment, then she recovered. “At least it was quick,” she said.

A man bowed before her and Elizabeth paused and gave him her hand; Robert stepped back and she went on alone.

In her dressing room, Elizabeth changed into her riding clothes, wondering if they would indeed all be going hunting. The ladies of her court were waiting with her when, at last, Kat came into the room and said, “Sir Robert Dudley is outside in the presence chamber. He says he has something to tell you.”

Elizabeth rose to her feet. “We will go out to him.” The court was mostly dressed to go hunting; there was a murmur of surprise as people noticed that Robert Dudley was not in riding clothes but in the most somber black. As the queen came in with her ladies he bowed to her, raised himself up, and said, perfectly composed, “Your Grace, I have to report the death of my wife. She died on Sunday at Cumnor Place, God rest her soul.”

“Good God!” the Spanish ambassador exclaimed.

Elizabeth glanced toward him with eyes that were as blank as polished jet. She raised her hand. At once, the room quietened as everyone crowded closer to hear what she would say.

“I am very sorry to announce the death of Lady Amy Dudley, on Sunday, at Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire,” Elizabeth said steadily, as if the matter were not much to do with her.

She waited. The court was stunned into silence, everyone waiting to see if she would say more. “We will go into mourning for Lady Dudley,” Elizabeth said abruptly, and turned to one side to speak to Kat Ashley.

Irresistibly, the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, found himself moving toward her. “What tragic news,” he said, bowing over her hand. “And so sudden.”

“An accident,” Elizabeth said, trying to remain serene. “Tragic. Most regrettable. She must have fallen down the stairs. She had a broken neck.”

“Indeed,” he said. “What a strange mischance.”

It was afternoon before Robert came to Elizabeth again. He found her in the garden, walking with her ladies before dinner.

“I shall have to withdraw from court for mourning,” he said, his face grave. “I thought I should go to the Dairy House at Kew. You can come and see me easily there, and I can come to see you.”

She slid her hand on his arm. “Very well. Why do you look so odd, Robert? You are not sad, are you? You don’t mind, do you?”

He looked down at her pretty face as if she were suddenly a stranger to him. “Elizabeth, she was my wife of eleven years. Of course I grieve for her.”

She made a little pout. “But you were desperate to put her aside. You would have divorced her for me.”

“Yes, indeed, I would have done, and this is better for us than the scandal of a divorce. But I would never have wished her dead.”

“The country has thought her half dead any time in the last two years,” she said. “Everyone said she was terribly ill.”

He shrugged. “People talk. I don’t know why they all thought she was ill. She traveled; she rode out. She was not ill, but in the last two years she was very unhappy; and that was all my fault.”

She was irritated and let him see it. “Saints’ sake, Robert! You will never choose to fall in love with her now that she is dead!” she teased him. “You will never now find great virtues in her that you didn’t appreciate before?”

“I loved her when she was a young woman and I was a boy,” he said passionately. “She was my first love. And she stood by me through all the years of my troubles and she never once complained of the danger and difficulty I led her into. And when you came to the throne and I came into my own again she never said one word of complaint about you.”

“Why would she complain of me?” Elizabeth exclaimed. “How would she dare complain?”

“She was jealous,” he said fairly. “And she knew she had cause. And she did not receive very fair or generous treatment from me. I wanted her to grant me a divorce and I was unkind to her.”

“And now she is dead you are sorry, though you would have gone on being unkind to her in life,” she taunted him.

“Yes,” he said honestly. “I suppose all poor husbands would say the same: that they know they should be better than they are. But I feel wretched for her, today. I am glad to be a single man, of course. But I would not have wanted her dead. Poor innocent! No one would have wanted her dead.”

“You do not recommend yourself very well,” Elizabeth said archly, turning his attention to their courtship once more. “You do not sound like a good husband at all!”

For once Robert did not respond to her. He looked away, upriver to Cumnor, and his gaze was somber. “No,” he said. “I was not a good husband to her, and God knows, she was the sweetest and best wife a man could have had.”

There was a little stir among the waiting court, a messenger in the Dudley livery had entered the garden and paused at the fringe of the court. Dudley turned and saw the man and went toward him, his hand out for the proffered letter.

The watching courtiers saw Dudley take the letter, break the seal, open it, and saw him pale as he read the words.

Elizabeth went swiftly toward him and they parted to let her through. “What is it?” she demanded urgently. “Have a care! Everyone is watching you!”

“There is to be an inquest,” he said, his lips hardly moving, his voice no more than a breath. “Everyone is saying that it was no accident. They all think that Amy was murdered.”

Thomas Blount, Robert Dudley’s man, arrived at Cumnor Place the very day after Amy’s death, and examined all the servants one by one. Meticulously, he reported back to Robert Dudley that Amy had been known as a woman of erratic temper, sending everyone off to the fair on Sunday morning, though her companion Mrs. Oddingsell and Mrs. Forster had been unwilling to go.

“No need to mention that again,” Robert Dudley wrote back to him, thinking that he did not want his wife’s sanity questioned, when he knew he had driven her to despair.