Philippa Gregory - The Virgin's Lover

“What is this?” she asked.

“A report from a friend of mine in Antwerp that there has been a panic in the city,” Cecil said with quiet pleasure. “The respectable merchants and tradesmen are leaving in their hundreds; the poor people are barricading the streets and firing the slums. The Spanish authorities have been forced to issue a proclamation to the citizens and traders that there will be no expedition to Scotland or against England. There was a run on the currency, there were people leaving the town. There was absolute panic. They feared a rebellion would start that would flare into a civil war. They had to give their word that the ships in port are not headed for our shores. The Spanish have been forced to reassure the traders of the Spanish Netherlands that they will not intervene in Scotland against us, that they will stay our friend and ally, whatever takes place in Scotland. The risk to their commercial interest was too great. They have publicly declared their alliance to us, and that they will not invade.”

The color flooded into her cheeks. “Oh, Spirit! We are safe!”

“We still have to face the French,” he cautioned her. “But we need not fear the Spanish coming against us at the same time.”

“And I need not marry the archduke!” Elizabeth laughed merrily.

Cecil checked.

“Although I still expect to do so,” she corrected herself hastily. “I have given my word, Cecil.”

He nodded, knowing she was lying. “And so shall I write to Lord Grey to take Leith Castle at once?”

He caught her for once in a confident mood. “Yes!” she cried. “At last something is going well for us. Tell him to set the siege and win it at once!”

Elizabeth’s bright, confident mood did not last long. The attack on Leith Castle in May failed miserably. The scaling ladders were too short and more than two thousand men died scrabbling against the castle walls, unable to get up or down, or fell wounded into the blood and mire below.

The horror of the injury, illness, and death of her troops haunted Elizabeth as much as the humiliation of failing before the very windows of Mary of Guise. Some said that the stone-hearted Frenchwoman had looked out and laughed to see Englishmen spitted on lances at the top of their scaling ladders and falling down like shot doves.

“They must come home!” Elizabeth swore. “They are dying as they drown in the mud before her door. She is a witch; she has called down rain on them.”

“They cannot come home,” Cecil told her.

Her nails shone with the frantic polishing of her fingers, her cuticles were pushed back till they were red and raw. “They must come home; we are fated to lose Scotland,” she said. “How could the ladders be too short? Grey should be court-martialed. Norfolk should be recalled. My own uncle and a treacherous fool! A thousand men dead on the walls of Leith! They will call me a murderess, to send good men to their deaths for such folly.”

“War always means death,” Cecil said flatly. “We knew that before we started.”

He checked himself. This passionate, fearful girl had never seen a battlefield, had never walked past wounded men groaning for water. A woman could not know what men endured; she could not rule as a king would rule. A woman could never learn the determination of a man made in the image of God.

“You have to adopt the courage of a king,” he said to her firmly. “Now more than ever. I know you fear that we are failing, but the side that wins in a war is often the one which has the most confidence. When you are at your most fearful, that is when you have to appear your bravest. Say whatever comes into your head, put up your chin and swear that you have the stomach of a man. Your sister could do it. I saw her turn the City of London around in a moment. You can do it too.”

Elizabeth flared up. “Don’t name her to me! She had a husband to rule for her.”

“Not then,” he contradicted her. “Not when she faced the Wyatt rebels as they came right up to the City and camped at Lambeth. She was a woman alone then; she called herself the Virgin Queen and the London militia swore they would lay down their lives for her.”

“Well, I cannot do it.” She was wringing her hands. “I cannot find the courage. I cannot say such things and make men believe me.”

Cecil took her hands and held them tight. “You have to,” he said. “We have to go forward now because we cannot go back.”

She looked pitifully at him. “What must we do? What can we do now? Surely it is over?”

“Muster more troops, reinstate the siege,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“I would put my own life on it.”

Reluctantly, she nodded.

“I have your permission to send out the orders?” he pressed. “For more men, to put the siege back on Leith?”

“Very well.” She breathed the words like a coerced girl.

Only Robert Dudley could comfort Elizabeth. They rode out less and less, she was too exhausted by sleepless nights of worry. Day flowed into night in the queen’s private rooms when she paced the floor till four in the morning and then fell into an exhausted dream-filled doze in the early afternoon. They closed the door of her privy chamber, defiant of the gossips, and he sat with her beside the fire in the cold gray afternoons. She took off her heavy jewel-encrusted hood and let down her hair and laid her head in his lap, and he stroked her long bronze locks until the strained, anxious look melted from her face and she sometimes closed her eyes and slept.

Kat Ashley sat in the window seat for form’s sake but she kept her eyes fixed on her needlework or read a book; she never so much as glanced at the lovers as Robert nursed Elizabeth as tenderly as a mother. Kat knew that soon Elizabeth would collapse under the strain. She had watched Elizabeth through a dozen nervous illnesses. She was accustomed to examining Elizabeth’s slim fingers and wrists for any telltale signs of swelling which would show that her recurring disease of dropsy was about to exile her to bed. And Kat knew, as only Elizabeth’s closest friends knew, that nothing brought on her illness faster than fear.

Outside the door, seated in the presence chamber trying to look as if nothing was wrong, Catherine Knollys, sewing a shirt for her husband, was acutely aware of the empty throne and the waiting court, of the whispers that the queen and Sir Robert had been locked up for half the day and would not come out till dinner time. Catherine kept her head up and her face blank, refusing to reply to people asking what her cousin the queen was doing alone with Sir Robert, refusing to hear the muttered comments.

Mary Sidney, aghast at where her brother’s ambition was taking him, but unswerving in her family loyalty, dined with Catherine Knollys and walked with Kat Ashley, avoiding anyone who might question her as to what Robert Dudley thought he was doing.

The Privy Council, the Lords, any man who was not on Dudley’s payroll, swore that someone would soon run the man through for dishonoring the queen and bringing her name into the gossip of every alehouse in the land. Some said that Thomas Howard, desperately fortifying castles along the northern border and trying to persuade men to enlist, had still found time to send an assassin south to court to kill Dudley and have done with him once and for all. No one could deny that the world would be a better place if Dudley were to be gone. He endangered the realm more than the French. Locked up with the queen in her own rooms, whoever was in with them, whoever was on the door, was to bring the queen into fatal disrepute.

But no one could stop Dudley. When reproached by someone he trusted, like Sir Francis Knollys, he pointed out that the queen’s health would break under her anxiety if he did not comfort her. He reminded any loyal friends that the queen was a young woman all alone in the world. She had no father, no mother, no guardian. She had no one to love her and care for her but himself, her old and trusted friend.