Philippa Gregory: The Virgin's Lover

The tears welled up in her brown eyes. “Oh, Robert, please don’t go,” she breathed.

“Now, Amy,” he said firmly. “You know that I have to go. And when I am gone I shall send you all my pay and I expect you to invest it wisely, and look about for a farm for us to buy. We must rise, my wife, and I am counting on you to mind our fortune and help us rise.”

She tried to smile. “You know I’ll never fail you. But it’s just…”

“The royal barge!” Henry exclaimed as every man along the quay-side pulled off his hat and bowed his head.

“Excuse us,” Robert said swiftly to Amy, and he and Henry went up to the deck of the King of Spain’s ship so that he could look down on the royal barge as it came by. The queen was seated in the stern of the barge, under the canopy of state, but the twenty-two-year-old Princess Elizabeth, radiant in the Tudor colors of green and white, was standing in the prow like a bold figurehead where everyone could see her, smiling and waving her hand at the people.

The oarsmen held the barge steady, the ships were side by side, the two brothers looked down from the waist of the warship to the barge that rode lower in the water beside them.

Elizabeth looked up. “A Dudley!” Her voice rang out clearly and her smile gleamed up at Robert.

He bowed his head. “Princess!” He looked toward the queen, who did not acknowledge him. “Your Majesty.”

Coldly, she raised her hand. She was draped in ropes of pearls, she had diamonds in her ears and a hood encrusted with emeralds, but her eyes were dull with grief, and the lines around her mouth made her look as if she had forgotten how to smile.

Elizabeth stepped forward to the side rail of the royal barge. “Are you off to war, Robert?” she called up to the ship. “Are you to be a hero?”

“I hope so!” he shouted back clearly. “I hope to serve the queen in her husband’s dominions and win her gracious favor again.”

Elizabeth’s eyes danced. “I am sure she has no more loyal soldier than you!” She was nearly laughing aloud.

“And no sweeter subject than you!” he returned.

She gritted her teeth so that she did not burst out. He could see her struggling to control herself.

“And are you well, Princess?” he called more softly. She knew what he meant: Are you in good health? For he knew that when she was frightened she contracted a dropsy that swelled her fingers and ankles and forced her to her bed. And are you safe? For there she was, beside the queen in the royal barge, when proximity to the throne always meant proximity to the block, and her only ally on the Privy Council, King Philip, was sailing away to war. And most of all: Are you waiting, as I am waiting, for better times, and praying they come soon?

“I am well,” she shouted back. “As ever. Constant. And you?”

He grinned down at her. “Constant too.”

They needed to say no more. “God bless you and keep you, Robert Dudley,” she said.

“And you, Princess.” And God speed you to your own again that I may come to mine, was his unspoken reply. By the cheeky gleam in her eyes he knew that she knew what he was thinking. They had always known exactly what the other was thinking.

Winter 1558

ONLY SIX MONTHS LATER, Amy, accompanied by her friend, Lizzie Oddingsell, stood on the quay at Gravesend, watching the ships limp into harbor, wounded men laid out with the dead on their decks, deckrails scorched, mainsails holed, all the survivors with their heads bowed, shamefaced in defeat.

Robert’s ship was the very last to come in. Amy had been waiting for three hours, increasingly certain that she would never see him again. But slowly, the little vessel approached was taken into tow, and drawn up at the quayside as if it were unwilling to come back to England in disgrace.

Amy shaded her eyes and looked up at the rail. At this moment, which she had feared so intensely, at this moment, which she had been so sure would come, she did not whimper or cry out, she looked steadily and carefully at the crowded deck for Robert, knowing that if she could not see him he had either been taken prisoner, or was dead.

Then she saw him. He was standing beside the mast, as if he were in no hurry to be at the rail for the first sight of England, in no rush to get to the gangplank to disembark, with no urgent need. There were a couple of civilians beside him, and a woman with a dark-haired baby on her hip; but his brother Henry was not there.

They rattled up the gangplank to the deck and she started to go to ward it, to run up it and fold him in her arms, but Lizzie Oddingsell held her back. “Wait,” she advised the younger woman. “See how he is first.”

Amy pushed the woman’s restraining hand aside; but she waited as he came down the gangplank so slowly that she thought he was wounded.

“Robert?”

“Amy.”

“Thank God you are safe!” she burst out. “We heard there was a terrible siege, and that Calais is lost. We knew it couldn’t be true, but…”

“It is true.”

“Calais is lost?”

It was unimaginable. Calais was the jewel of England overseas. They spoke English in the streets, they paid English taxes and traded the valuable wool and finished cloth to and from England. Calais was the reason that English kings styled themselves “King of England and France.” Calais was the outward show that England was a world power, on French soil, it was as much an English port as Bristol. It was impossible to imagine it had fallen to the French.

“It is lost.”

“And where is your brother?” Amy asked fearfully. “Robert? Where is Henry?”

“Dead,” he said shortly. “He took a shot to the leg in St. Quentin, and died later, in my arms.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “I was noticed by Philip of Spain at St. Quentin,” he said. “I had an honorable mention in despatches to the queen. It was my first step, as I hoped it would be; but it cost me my brother: the one thing in life I could least afford to lose. And now I am at the head of a defeated army and I doubt that the queen will remember that I did rather well at St. Quentin, given that I did rather badly at Calais.”

“Oh, what does it matter?” she exclaimed. “As long as you are safe, and we can be together again? Come home with me, Robert, and who cares about the queen or even about Calais? You don’t need Calais, we can buy Syderstone back now. Come home with me and see how happy we will be!”

He shook his head. “I have to take despatches to the queen,” he said stubbornly.

“You’re a fool!” she flared at him. “Let someone else tell her the bad news.”

His dark eyes went very bright at the public insult from his wife. “I am sorry you think me a fool,” he said levelly. “But King Philip ordered me by name and I must do my duty. You can go and stay with the Philipses at Chichester till I come for you. You will oblige me by taking this woman and her baby to stay with them too. She has lost her home in Calais and she needs a refuge in England for a while.”

“I will not,” Amy said, instantly resentful. “What is she to me? What is she to you?”

“She was once the Queen’s Fool,” he said. “Hannah Green. And she was a loyal and obedient servant to me, and a friend when I had few friends. Be kind, Amy. Take her with you to Chichester. In the meantime I shall have to commandeer a horse and go to court.”

“Oh, have you lost your horse as well as your plan?” Amy taunted him bitterly. “You have come home without your brother, without your horse, you have come home no richer, you have come home poorer in every way, as my stepmother Lady Robsart warned me that you would?”

“Yes,” he said steadily. “My beautiful horse was shot out from under me by a cannon ball. I fell under him as he went down, and his body shielded me and saved my life. He died in my service. I promised him that I’d be a kind master to him, and yet I took him to his death. I called him First Step, but I have stumbled and fallen on my first step. I have lost my horse, and lost my campaign money, and lost my brother, and lost all hope. You will be pleased to hear that this is the end of the Dudleys. I cannot see that we will ever rise again.”