Philippa Gregory - The Virgin's Lover

Blount was waiting by the window. Robert threw his gloves and whip on the table and dropped into the chair before his desk.

“All done?” he asked.

“All done quite correctly,” Blount said. “A small slip in the sermon.”

“What was it?”

“The stupid rector said that she was a lady ‘tragically slain’ instead of ‘tragically died.’ He corrected himself, but it jarred.”

Sir Robert raised one dark eyebrow. “A slip?”

Blount shrugged. “I think so. A nuisance, but it’s not strong enough to be an accusation.”

“It adds grist to the mill,” Robert observed.

Blount nodded.

“And you dismissed her staff, and you have her things?” Deliberately Robert kept his voice light and cold.

“Mrs. Oddingsell had gone already. Apparently she had taken it very hard,” Blount said. “Mrs. Pirto I sent back to Stanfield with the goods and she will be paid there. I sent a note. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Forster; they have a sense that a great scandal has been brought to their door.” He smiled wryly.

“They will be compensated for their trouble,” Dudley said shortly. “Any gossip in the village?”

“No more than you would expect,” Blount said. “Half the village accept the verdict of accidental death. Half think she was murdered. They’ll talk about it forever. But it makes no difference to you.”

“Nor to her,” Robert said quietly.

Blount fell silent.

“So,” Robert said, rousing himself. “Your work is done. She is dead and buried and whatever anyone thinks, no one can say anything that can hurt me more.”

“It’s finished,” Blount agreed.

Robert gestured for him to put the boxes on the table. Blount put down the keepsake box and then the little box of jewels with the key beside it. He bowed and waited.

“You can go,” Robert said.

He had forgotten the box. It was his gift to Amy when they had been courting; he had bought it for her at a fair in Norfolk. She had never had many jewels for the small box. He felt the familiar irritation that even when she had been Lady Dudley, and commanded his fortune, still she had nothing more than a small jewel box, a couple of silver-gilt necklaces, some earrings and a ring or two.

He turned the key in the box and opened it up. On the very top lay Amy’s wedding ring, and his signet ring with his crest, the bear and ragged staff.

For a moment, he could not believe what he was seeing. Slowly, he put his hand into the box and lifted out the two gold circles. Mrs. Pirto had taken them from Amy’s cold fingers and put them in her jewel box and locked it up, as a good servant should do.

Robert looked at them both. The wedding ring he had slipped on Amy’s finger that summer day eleven years ago, and the signet ring had never left his own hand until he had put it on Elizabeth’s finger to seal their betrothal, just four months ago.

Robert slipped his signet ring back on his finger, and sat at his desk while the room grew dark and cold, wondering how his ring had got from the chain around his mistress’s neck to the finger of his dead wife.

He walked by the river, a question beating at his brain. Who killed Amy? He sat on the pier like a boy, boots dangling over the water, looking down into the green depths where little fishes nibbled at the weed on the beams of the jetty, and heard in his head the second question: Who gave Amy my ring?

He rose up as he grew chilled, and strolled along the tow path, westward toward the sun which slowly dropped in the sky and went from burning gold to embers as Robert walked, looking at the river but not seeing it, looking at the sky but not seeing it.

Who killed Amy?

Who gave her my ring?

The sun set and the sky grew palely gray; still Robert walked onward as if he did not own a stable full of horses, a stud of Barbary courses, a training program of young stallions, he walked like a poor man, like a man whose wife would give him a horse to ride.

Who killed Amy?

Who gave her my ring?

He tried not to remember the last time he had seen her, when he had left her with a curse, and turned her family against her. He tried not to remember that he had taken her in his arms and she in her folly had heard, and he in his folly had said: “I love you.”

He tried not to remember her at all because it seemed to him that if he remembered her he would sit down on the riverbank and weep like a child for the loss of her.

Who killed Amy?

Who gave her my ring?

If he thought, rather than remembered, he could avoid the wave of pain which was towering over him, ready to break. If he treated her death as a puzzle rather than a tragedy he could ask a question rather than accuse himself.

Two questions: Who killed Amy? Who gave her my ring?

When he stumbled and slipped and jolted himself to consciousness he realized that it had grown dark and he was walking blindly beside the steep bank of the deep, fast-flowing river. He turned then, a survivor from a family of survivors who had been wrong to marry a woman who did not share his inveterate lust for life.

Who killed Amy?

Who gave her my ring?

He started to walk back. It was only when he opened the iron gate to the walled garden that the coldness of his hand on the latch made him pause, made him realize that there were two questions: Who killed Amy? Who gave her my ring? but only one answer.

Whoever had the ring owned the symbol that Amy would trust. Amy would clear the house for a messenger who showed her that ring. Whoever had the ring was the person who killed her. There was only one person who could have done it, only one person who would have done it:

Elizabeth.

Robert’s first instinct was to go to her at once, to rage at her for the madness of her power. He could not blame her for wishing Amy gone; but the thought that his mistress could murder his wife, the girl he had married for love, filled him with anger. He wanted to take Elizabeth and shake the arrogance, the wicked, power-sated confidence out of her. That she should use her power as queen, her spy network, her remorseless will, against a target as vulnerable and as innocent as Amy, made him tremble like an angry boy at the strength of his feelings.

Robert did not sleep that night. He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling but over and over again he saw in his mind’s eye Amy receiving his ring, and running out to meet him, with his signet ring clenched in her little fist as her passport to the happiness she deserved. And then some man, one of Cecil’s hired killers no doubt, greeting her in his place, breaking her neck with one blow, a clenched fist to her ear, a rabbit chop to her neck, and catching her as she fell, carrying her back into the house.

Robert tortured himself with the thought of her suffering, of her moment of fear, perhaps of a moment of horror when she thought the killer came from him and the queen. That thought made him groan and turn over, burying his face in the pillow. If Amy had died thinking that he had sent an assassin against her then he did not see how he could bear to live.

The bedroom window lightened at last; it was dawn. Robert, as haggard as a man ten years his senior, rose to the window and looked out, his linen sheet wrapped around his naked body. It was going to be a beautiful day. The mist was curling slowly off the river and somewhere a woodpecker was drilling. Slowly the liquid melody of a song thrush started up like a benediction, like a reminder that life goes on.

I suppose I can forgive her, Robert thought. In her place, I might have done the same thing. I might have thought that our love came first, that our desire must be satisfied, come what may. If I had been her, I might have thought that we have to have a child, that the throne has to have an heir, and we dare not delay. If I had absolute power as she does I would probably have used it, as she has.