Philippa Gregory - The Virgin's Lover

Now what are they doing, that he should look so sour and she so concerned for him? Cecil felt his heart plunge with apprehension. What are they planning now?

As soon as the song was ended Elizabeth nodded Robert to a window bay and the two of them stepped to one side, out of earshot of the attentive courtiers.

“What did she say?” Elizabeth demanded, without a word of greeting. “Did she agree?”

“She went quite mad,” he said simply. “She said she would die rather than agree to a divorce. I left her after a night of weeping herself sick, praying for death.”

Her hand flew out to his cheek, she stopped herself before she embraced him before the whole court.

“Oh, my poor Robin.”

“She spat in my face,” he said, darkening at the memory. “She kicked out at me. We were all but brawling.”

“No!” Despite the seriousness of their situation Elizabeth could not help but be diverted at the thought of Lady Dudley fighting like a fishwife. “Has she run mad?”

“Worse than that,” he said shortly. He glanced around to make sure that no one could hear them. “She is full of treasonous thoughts and heretical opinions. Her jealousy of you has driven her to the most extreme ideas. God knows what she will say or do.”

“So we will have to send her away,” Elizabeth said simply.

Robert bowed his head. “My love, it will make such a scandal, I doubt we can do it at once. You can’t risk it. She will fight me, she will raise a storm against me, and I have many enemies who would support her.”

She looked at him directly, all the passion of a new love affair apparent in her flushed face.

“Robert, I cannot live without you. I cannot rule England without you at my side. Even now Lord Grey is marching my army into Scotland, and the English fleet, God help them, are trying to prevent three times their number of French ships getting to Leith Castle where that wicked woman has raised a siege again. I am on a knife edge, Robert. Amy is a traitor to make things worse for me. We should just arrest her for treason, put her in the Tower, and forget about her.”

“Forget her now,” he said swiftly, his first desire to soothe the anxious young woman he loved. “Forget her. I’ll stay at court with you, I’ll be at your side night and day. We will be husband and wife in everything but name, and when we have won in Scotland and the country is safe and at peace, we will deal with Amy and we will be married.”

She nodded. “You won’t see her again?.”

He had a sudden unbidden memory of Amy’s hand caressing him, and her sleepy unfolding of herself beneath him, of the way her hand had stroked his back and of his own whispered words in the darkness which might have been “Oh, I love you,” speaking from desire, not calculation.

“I won’t see her,” he assured her. “I am yours, Elizabeth, heart and soul.”

Elizabeth smiled, and Dudley tried to smile reassuringly back at her, but for a moment it was Amy’s dreamy, desirous face that he saw.

“She is a fool,” Elizabeth said harshly. “She should have seen my stepmother Anne of Cleves when my father asked for a divorce. Her first thought was to oblige him and her second to obtain a reasonable settlement for herself. Amy is a fool, and a wicked fool to try to stand in our way. And she is doubly a fool not to ask you for a good settlement.”

“Yes,” he assented, thinking that Anne of Cleves had not married for love, and longed for her husband every night for eleven years, nor had she been in his arms making passionate love the very night before he asked her to release him.

The court waited for news of the queen’s uncle, Thomas Howard, who had been sent away to suit the convenience of the lovers, but was now a key player on the sensitive border. He was to negotiate and to sign an alliance with the Scots lords in his headquarters in Newcastle, but they waited and waited and heard nothing from him.

“What is keeping him so long?” Elizabeth demanded of Cecil. “Surely he would not play me false? Not because of Sir Robert?”

“Never,” Cecil averred steadily. “These things take time.”

“We have no time,” she snapped. “Thanks to you we have rushed into war and we are not prepared.”

The English army, led by Lord Grey, was supposed to have assembled in Newcastle by January, and to have advanced on Scotland by the end of the month. But January had come and gone and the army had not stirred from their barracks.

“Why does it take so long?” Elizabeth demanded of Cecil. “Did you not tell him he was to march on Edinburgh at once?”

“Yes,” Cecil said. “He knows what he is to do.”

“Then why does he not do it?” she cried out in her frustration. “Why does no one press forward; or if they cannot, why do they not retreat? Why do we have to wait and wait and all I hear is excuses?”

She was rubbing at her fingernails, pushing the cuticles back from the nails in a nervous parody of her daily manicure. Cecil stopped himself from taking her hands.

“News will come,” he maintained. “We have to be patient. And they were ordered not to retreat.”

“We must proclaim our friendship with the French,” she decided.

Cecil glanced at Dudley. “We are at war with the French,” he reminded her.

“We should write a declaration that if their soldiers go home, we have no quarrel with France,” Elizabeth said, her fingers working furiously. “Then they know that we are ready for peace, even at this late stage.”

Dudley stepped forward. “Now that is an excellent idea,” he said soothingly. “You write it. Nobody can marshal an argument like you.”

An argument that is pure self-contradiction, Cecil thought to himself, and saw from the flash of Robert’s smile toward him that Dudley knew it too.

“When do I have time to write?” Elizabeth demanded. “I can’t even think; I am so anxious.”

“In the afternoon,” Dudley said soothingly to her. “And nobody can write like you can.”

He gentles her like one of his Barbary mares, Cecil thought wonderingly. He manages her in a way that no one else can do.

“You shall compose it and I shall take your dictation,” Robert said. “I shall be your clerk. And we shall publish it, so that everyone knows that you are not the war maker. If it comes to war they will know that your intentions were always peaceful. You will show that it is all the fault of the French.”

“Yes,” she said, encouraged. “And perhaps it will avert war.”

“Perhaps,” the men reassured her.

The only piece of good news that came in March was that the French preparations for war had been thrown into disarray by an uprising of French Protestants against the French royal family.

“This doesn’t help us at all,” Elizabeth miserably predicted. “Now Philip of Spain will turn against all Protestants; he will be in terror of it spreading, and refuse to be my friend.”

But Philip was too clever to do anything that would help the French in Europe. Instead he offered to mediate between the French and the English, and the Seigneur de Glajon arrived with great pomp to meet with Elizabeth in April.

“Tell him I am ill,” she whispered to Cecil, eyeing the powerful Spanish diplomat through a crack in the door from her private apartments to the audience chamber. “Keep him off me for a while. I can’t stand to see him, I really can’t, and my hands are bleeding.”

Cecil stalled the Spanish don for several days until the news came from Scotland that Lord Grey had finally crossed the border with the English army. The soldiers of England were marching on Scottish soil. There was no denying it any longer: the two nations were finally at war.