Philippa Gregory - The Virgin's Lover

“You do not ask me if you may bring Lady Dudley to court,” she began provocatively. “Do you not wish her to attend? Do you not ask for her to have a place in my service? I am surprised that you have not mentioned her to me for one of my ladies-in-waiting. You were quick enough to recommend your sister.”

“She prefers to live in the country,” Robert said smoothly.

“You have a country house now?”

He shook his head. “She has a house that she inherited from her father in Norfolk but it is too small and too inconvenient. She lives with her stepmother at Stanfield Hall, nearby; but she is going to stay with my cousins at Bury St. Edmunds this week.”

“Shall you buy a house now? Or build a new one?”

He shrugged. “I shall find some good land and build a good house, but I am going to spend most of my time at court.”

“Oh, are you, indeed?” she asked flirtatiously.

“Does a man walk away from sunlight to shadow? Does he leave gold for gilt? Does he taste good wine and then want bad?” His voice was deliberately seductive. “I shall stay at court forever, if I am allowed, basking in the sunshine, enriched by the gold, drunk on the perfume of the headiest wine I could imagine. What were we saying: that we would not let the base drive out the best? That we should have, both of us, the very best?”

She absorbed the compliment for a long, delicious moment. “And your wife must surely be very old now?”

Dudley smiled down at her, knowing that she was teasing him. “She is thirty, just five years older than me,” he said. “As I think you know. You were at my wedding.”

Elizabeth made a little face. “It was years and years ago; I had quite forgotten it.”

“Nearly ten years,” he said quietly.

“And I thought even then that she was a very great age.”

“She was only twenty-one.”

“Well, a great age to me, I was only sixteen.” She gave an affected little start of surprise. “Oh! As were you. Were you not surprised to be marrying a woman so much older than you?”

“I was not surprised,” he said levelly. “I knew her age and her position.”

“And still no children?”

“God has not blessed us as yet.”

“I think that I heard a little whisper that you had married her for love, for a passionate love, and against the wishes of your father,” she prompted him.

He shook his head. “He was opposed only because I was so young; I was not yet seventeen and she just twenty-one. And I imagine he would have picked a better match for me if I had given him the chance. But he did not refuse his permission once I asked, and Amy brought a good dowry. They had good lands in Norfolk laid down to sheep, and in those days, my father needed to increase our friends and influence in the east of the country. She was her father’s only heir, and he was happy enough with the match.”

“I should think he was!” she exclaimed. “The Duke of Northumberland’s son for a girl who had never been to court, who could barely write her own name, and who did nothing but stay home and weep the moment that her husband encountered trouble?”

“It must have been a fairly detailed little whisper that came to your ears,” Robert remarked. “You seem to know my entire marital history.”

Elizabeth’s gurgle of guilty laughter was checked when the lady-in-waiting appeared behind them. “Your Grace, I have brought your shawl.”

“I didn’t ask for one,” Elizabeth said, surprised. She turned back to Robert. “Yes, of course, I heard talk of your marriage. And what sort of woman your wife was. But I forgot it until now.”

He bowed, his smile lurking around his mouth. “Can I assist your memory any further?”

“Well,” she said engagingly. “What I still don’t know for sure is why you married her in the first place, and, if it was love, as I heard, whether you still love her.”

“I married her because I was sixteen, a young man with hot blood and she had a pretty face and she was willing,” he said, careful not to let it sound too romantic to this most critical audience, though he remembered well enough how it had been, and that he had been mad for Amy, defying his father and insisting on having her as his wife. “I was eager to be a married man and grown up, as I thought. We had a few years when we were contented together, but she was her father’s favorite child and in the habit of being spoiled. In fairness, I suppose I was a favored son and I had been richly blessed. A pair of spoiled brats together, in fact. We did not deal very well together after the newness had worn off. I was at court in my father’s train, as you know, and she stayed in the country. She had no desire for court life and— God bless her—she has no airs and graces. She has no courtly skills and no wish to learn them.

“Then, if I must tell the truth, when I was in the Tower and in terror for my life, I fell out of the way of thinking of her at all. She visited me once or twice when my brothers’ wives visited them; but she brought no comfort to me. It was like hearing of another world: her telling me of the hay crop and the sheep, and arguments with the housemaids. I just felt, wrongly, I am sure, as if she was taunting me with the world going on without me. She sounded to me as if she was happier without me. She had returned to her father’s house, she was free of the stain of my family’s disgrace, she had taken up her childhood life again and I almost felt that she preferred me to be locked up, safely out of the way of trouble. She would rather I was a prisoner, than a great man at court and son of the greatest.”

He paused for a moment. “You know what it’s like,” he said. “When you are a prisoner, after a while your world shrinks to the stone walls of your chamber, your walk is to the window and back again. Your life is only memories. And then you start longing for your dinner. You know then that you are a prisoner indeed. You are thinking of nothing but what is inside. You have forgotten to desire the outside world.”

Instantly Elizabeth squeezed her hand on his arm. “Yes,” she said, for once without coquetry. “God knows that I know what it is like. And it spoils your love for anything on the outside.”

He nodded. “Aye. We two know.

“Then, when I was released I came out of the Tower a ruined man. All our family’s wealth and property had been forfeited. I was a pauper.”

“A sturdy beggar?” she suggested with a little smile.

“Not even very sturdy,” he said. “I was broken down low, Elizabeth; I was as low as a man could go. My mother had died begging for our freedom. My father had recanted before us all, had said that our faith had been a plague upon the realm. It bit into my soul; I was so ashamed. Then, even though he had knelt before them to make his peace, they still executed him for a traitor, and, God keep him, he made a bad death that shamed us all.

“My dearest brother John took sick in the Tower with me and I could not save him; I could not even nurse him; I didn’t know what to do. They let him go to my sister Mary but he died of his sickness. He was only twenty-four, but I couldn’t save him. I had been a poor son and a poor brother and I followed a poor father. There was not much to be proud of, when I came out of the Tower.”

She waited.

“There was nowhere for me to go but to her stepmother’s house at Stanfield Hall, Norfolk,” he said, the bitterness in his voice still sharp. “Everything we owned: the London house, the great estates, the house at Syon, were all gone. Poor Amy had even lost her own inheritance, her father’s farm at Syderstone.” He gave a short laugh. “Queen Mary had put the nuns back into Syon. Imagine it! My home was a nunnery once more and they were singing the Te Deum in our great hall.”