Philippa Gregory: The Virgin's Lover

He was crawling in the straw, one hand outstretched before him, trying to find the block, the other hand plucking at the tight bandage over his head. “Don’t touch me! She will pardon me! I’m not ready!” he screamed, and was still screaming, as the axeman swung his blade and the axe thudded into the exposed neck. A gout of blood spurted upward, and the man was thrown to one side with the blow.

“Father!” Robert shouted. “My father!”

The blood was pumping from the wound but the man still scrabbled like a dying pig in the straw, still trying to get to his feet with boots that could get no purchase, still searching blindly for the block, with hands that were growing numb. The executioner, cursing his own inaccuracy, raised the great axe again.

“Father!” Robert cried out in agony as the axe came down. “Father!”

“Robert? My lord?” A hand was gently shaking him. He opened his eyes and there was Amy before him, her brown hair plaited for sleep, her brown eyes wide, solidly real in the candlelight of the bedroom.

“Good God! What a nightmare! What a dream. God keep me from it. God keep me from it!”

“Was it the same dream?” she asked. “The dream of your father’s death?”

He could not even bear that she should mention it. “Just a dream,” he said shortly, trying to recover his wits. “Just a terrible dream.”

“But the same dream?” she persisted.

He shrugged. “It’s hardly surprising that it should come back to me. Do we have some ale?”

Amy threw back the covers and rose from the bed, pulling her nightgown around her shoulders. But she was not to be diverted. “It’s an omen,” she said flatly, as she poured him a mug of ale. “Shall I heat this up?”

“I’ll take it cold,” he said.

She passed him the mug and he drank it down, feeling his night sweat cooling on his naked back, ashamed of his own terror.

“It’s a warning,” she said.

He tried to find a careless smile, but the horror of his father’s death, and all the failure and sadness that had ridden at his heels since that black day, was too much for him. “Don’t,” he said simply.

“You should not go tomorrow.”

Robert took a draught of ale, burying his face in the mug to avoid her accusing gaze.

“A bad dream like that is a warning. You should not sail with King Philip.”

“We’ve been through this a thousand times. You know I have to go.”

“Not now! Not after you dreamed of your father’s death. What else could it mean but a warning to you: not to overreach yourself? He died a traitor’s death after trying to put his son on the throne of England. Now you ride out in your pride once more.”

He tried to smile. “Not much pride,” he said. “All I have is my horse and my brother. I could not even raise my own battalion.”

“Your father himself is warning you from beyond the grave.”

Wearily, he shook his head. “Amy, this is too painful. Don’t cite him to me. You don’t know what he was like. He would have wanted me to restore the Dudleys. He would never have discouraged me in anything I wanted to do. He always wanted us to rise. Be a good wife to me, Amy-love. Don’t you discourage me—he would not.”

“You be a good husband,” she retorted. “And don’t leave me. Where am I to go when you have sailed for the Netherlands? What is to become of me?”

“You will go to the Philipses, at Chichester, as we agreed,” he said steadily. “And if the campaign goes on, and I don’t come home soon—you will go home, to your stepmother’s at Stanfield Hall.”

“I want to go home to my own house at Syderstone,” she said. “I want us to make a house together. I want to live with you as your wife.”

Even after two years of shame he still had to grit his teeth to refuse her. “You know the Crown has taken Syderstone. You know there’s no money. You know we can’t.”

“We could ask my stepmother to rent Syderstone from the Crown for us,” she said stubbornly. “We could work the land. You know I would work. I’m not afraid of working hard. You know we could rise by hard work, not by some gamble for a foreign king. Not by going into danger for no certain reward!”

“I know you would work,” Robert acknowledged. “I know you would rise at dawn and be in the fields before the sun. But I don’t want my wife to work like a peasant on the land. I was born for greater things than that, and I promised your father greater things for you. I don’t want half a dozen acres and a cow, I want half of England.”

“They will think you have left me because you are tired of me,” she said reproachfully. “Anyone would think so. You have only just come home to me and you are leaving me again.”

“I have been home with you for two years!” he exclaimed. “Two years!” Then he checked himself, trying to take the irritation from his voice. “Amy, forgive me, but it is no life for me. These months have been like a lifetime. With my name attainted by treason I can own nothing in my own right, I cannot trade or sell or buy. Everything my family had was seized by the Crown—I know!—and everything you had too: your father’s legacy, your mother’s fortune. Everything that you had has been lost by me. I have to get it back for you. I have to get it back for us.”

“I don’t want it at this price,” she said flatly. “You always say that you are doing this for us, but it is not what I want, it’s no good for me. I want you at home with me, I don’t care if we have nothing. I don’t care if we have to live with my stepmother and depend on her charity. I don’t care for anything but that we are together and you are safe at last.”

“Amy, I cannot live on that woman’s charity. It is a shoe which pinches me every day. When you married me, I was the son of the greatest man in England. It was his plan, and mine, that my brother would be king and Jane Grey would be queen, and we came within inches of achieving that. I would have been of the royal family of England. I expected that, I rode out to fight for it. I would have laid down my life for it. And why not? We had as great a claim to the throne as the Tudors, who had done the self-same thing only three generations before. The Dudleys could have been the next royal family of England. Even though we failed and were defeated…”

“And humbled,” she supplemented.

“And humbled to dust,” he agreed. “Yet I am still a Dudley. I was born for greatness, and I have to claim it. I was born to serve my family and my country. You don’t want a little farmer on a hundred acres. You don’t want a man who sits at home all day in the cinders.”

“But I do,” she said in a strangled voice. “What you don’t see, Robert, is that to be a little farmer in a hundred acres is to make a better England—and in a better way—than any courtier struggling for his own power at court.”

He almost laughed. “Perhaps to you. But I have never been such a man. Not even defeat, not even fear of death itself, could make me into such a man. I was born and bred to be one of the great men in the land, if not the greatest. I was brought up alongside the children of the king as their equal—I cannot molder in a damp field in Norfolk. I have to clear my name, I have to be noticed by King Philip, I have to be restored by Queen Mary. I have to rise.”

“You will be killed in battle, and then what?”

Robert blinked. “Sweetheart, this is to curse me, on our last night together. I will sail tomorrow, whatever you say. Don’t ill wish me.”

“You have had a dream!” Amy climbed on the bed and took the empty mug from him, and put it down, holding his hands in hers, as if she were teaching a child. “My lord, it is a warning. I am warning you. You should not go.”