The Virgin's Lover

“He’ll have got dreadfully scrawny then,” Catherine Knollys said robustly. “He was always too thin; he had legs like a pigeon.”

Lady Mary Sidney, Robert Dudley’s sister, giggled.

“Hush!” Elizabeth reprimanded them primly; she was always sensitive to the status of a fellow monarch. “He is very distinguished. And anyway, I daresay he is eating. It is just poetry, Catherine. He is just saying it to please me.”

“Just nonsense,” Catherine said under her breath. “And Papist nonsense, at that.”

“He says he has struggled with his conscience, and struggled with his respect for my faith and my learning, and that he is sure that we can somehow find a way that allows us both to continue in our faith, and yet bring our hearts together.”

“He will bring a dozen cardinals in his train,” Catherine predicted. “And the Inquisition behind them. He has no affection for you at all, this is just politics.”

Elizabeth looked up. “Catherine, he does have an affection for me. You were not here, or you would have seen it for yourself. Everybody remarked it at the time, it was an utter scandal. I swear that I would have been left in the Tower or under house arrest for the rest of my life if he had not intervened for me against the queen’s ill wishes. He insisted that I be treated as a princess and as heir…” She broke off and smoothed down the golden brocade skirt of her gown…“And he was very tender to me.” Her voice took on its typical, narcissistic lilt. Elizabeth was always ready to fall in love with herself. “He admired me, to tell the truth; he adored me. A real prince, a real king, and desperately in love with me. While my sister was confined we spent much time together, and he was…”

“A fine husband he will make,” Catherine interrupted. “One who flirts with his sister-in-law while his wife is in confinement.”

“She was not really confined,” Elizabeth said with magnificent irrel evance. “She only thought she was with child because she was so swollen and sick…”

“All the kinder of him then,” Catherine triumphed. “So he flirted with his sister-in-law when his wife was ill and breaking her heart over something she could not help. Your Grace, in all seriousness, you cannot have him. The people of England won’t have the Spanish king back again. He was hated here the first time; they would go mad if he came back again. He emptied the treasury, he broke your sister’s heart, he did not give her a son, he lost us Calais, and he has spent the last few months in the most disgraceful affairs with the ladies of Brussels.”

“No!” Elizabeth said, instantly diverted from her love-letter. “So is that what he means when he says he neither eats nor sleeps?”

“Because he is always bedding the fat burghers’ wives. He is as lecherous as a sparrow!” Catherine beamed at her cousin’s irresistible giggle. “You must be able to do better than your sister’s leftovers, surely! You are not such an old maid that you have to settle for cold meats, a secondhand husband. There are better choices.”

“Oh! And who would you want me to have?” Elizabeth asked.

“The Earl of Arran,” Catherine said promptly. “He’s young, he’s Protestant, he’s handsome, he’s very very charming—I met him briefly and I lost my heart to him at once—and when he inherits the throne, you join England and Scotland into one kingdom.”

“Only if Mary of Guise were to helpfully drop dead, followed by her daughter,” Elizabeth pointed out. “And Mary of Guise is in good health and her daughter is younger than me.”

“Stranger things happen to further God’s will,” Catherine said confidently. “And if the regent Mary lives, why should she not be pushed off her throne by a handsome Protestant heir?”

Elizabeth frowned and glanced around the room to see who was listening. “Enough, Catherine, matchmaking doesn’t suit you.”

“It is both matchmaking and the safety of our nation and our faith,” Catherine said, unrepentant. “And you have the chance to secure Scotland for your son, and save it from the Antichrist of Popery by marrying a handsome young man. It sounds to me as if there is no decision to take. Who would not want the Earl of Arran, fighting on the side of the Scottish lords for God’s kingdom on earth, and the kingdom of Scotland as his dowry?”

Catherine Knollys might be certain in her preference for the young Earl of Arran, but at the end of February another suitor appeared at Elizabeth’s court: the Austrian ambassador, Count von Helfenstein, pressing the claims of the Hapsburg archdukes, Charles and Ferdinand.

“You are a flower pestered by butterflies.” Robert Dudley smiled as they walked in the cold gardens of Whitehall Palace, two of Elizabeth’s new guards following them at a discreet distance.

“Indeed, I must be, for I do nothing to attract.”

“Nothing?” he asked her, one dark eyebrow raised.

She paused to peep up at him from under the brim of her hat. “I invite no attention,” she claimed.

“Not the way that you walk?”

“For sure, I go from one place to another.”

“The way you dance?”

“In the Italian manner, as most ladies do.”

“Oh, Elizabeth!”

“You may not call me Elizabeth.”

“Well, you may not lie to me.”

“What rule is this?”

“One for your benefit. Now, to return to the subject. You attract suitors in the way that you speak.”

“I am bound to be polite to visiting diplomats.”

“You are more than polite, you are…”

“What?” she asked with a giggle of laughter in her voice.

“Promising.”

“Ah, I promise nothing!” she said at once. “I never promise.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That is the very snare of you. You sound promising, but you promise nothing.”

She laughed aloud in her happiness. “It’s true,” she confessed. “But to be honest, sweet Robin, I have to play this game, it is not just my own pleasure.”

“You would never marry a Frenchman for the safety of England?”

“I would never turn one down,” she said. “Any suitor of mine is an ally for England. It is more like playing chess than a courtship.”

“And does no man make your heart beat a little faster?” he asked, in a sudden swoop to intimacy.

Elizabeth looked up at him, her gaze straight, her expression devoid of coquetry, absolutely honest. “Not a one,” she said simply.

For a moment he was utterly taken aback.

She crowed with laughter. “Got you!” She pointed at him. “You vain dog! And you thought you had caught me!”

He caught the hand and carried it to his mouth. “I think I will never catch you,” he said. “But I should be a happy man to spend my life in trying.”

She tried to laugh, but at his drawing closer, the laugh was caught in her throat. “Ah, Robert…”

“Elizabeth?”

She would have pulled her hand away, but he held it close.

“I will have to marry a prince,” she said unsteadily. “It is a game to see where the dice best falls, but I know that I cannot rule alone and I must have a son to come after me.”

“You have to marry a man who can serve your interests, and serve the interests of the country,” he said steadily. “And you would be wise to choose a man that you would like to bed.”

She gave a little gasp of shock. “You’re very free, Sir Robert.”

His confidence was quite unshaken, he still held her hand in his warm grip. “I am very sure,” he said softly. “You are a young woman as well as a queen. You have a heart as well as a crown. And you should choose a man for your desires as well as for your country. You’re not a woman for a cold bed, Elizabeth. You’re not a woman that can marry for policy alone. You want a man you can love and trust. I know this. I know you.”

Spring 1559

THE LENT LILIES were out in Cambridgeshire in a sprawl of cream and gold in the fields by the river, and the blackbirds were singing in the hedges. Amy Dudley went out riding with Mrs. Woods every morning and proved to be a charming house guest, admiring their fields of sheep and knowledgeable about the hay crop which was starting to green up through the dry blandness of the winter grass.

“You must long for an estate of your own,” Mrs. Woods remarked as they rode through a spinney of young oaks.

“I hope that we will buy one,” Amy said happily. “Flitcham Hall, near my old home. My stepmother writes to me that squire Symes is ready to sell and I have always liked it. My father said he would give his fortune for it. He hoped to buy it a few years ago for Robert and me but then…” She broke off. “Anyway, I hope that we can have it now. It has three good stands of woodland, and two fresh rivers. It has some good wet meadows where the rivers join, and on the higher land the earth can support a good crop, mostly barley. The higher fields are for sheep of course, and I know the flock, I have ridden there since childhood. My lord liked the look of the place and I think he would have bought it, but when our troubles came…” She broke off again. “Anyway,” she said more happily, “I have asked Lizzie Oddingsell to write to tell him that it is for sale, and I am waiting for his reply.”

“And have you not seen him since the queen inherited?” Mrs. Woods asked incredulously.

Amy laughed it off. “No! Is it not a scandal? I thought he would come home for Twelfth Night, indeed, he promised that he would; but since he is Master of Horse, he was in charge of all the festivities at court, and he had so much to do. The queen rides or hunts every day, you know. He has to manage her stables and all the entertainments of the court as well, masques and balls and parties and everything.”

“Don’t you want to join him?”

“Oh, no,” Amy said decidedly. “I went to London with him when his father was alive and the whole family was at court and it was dreadful!”

Mrs. Woods laughed at her. “Why, what was so terrible about it?”

“Most of the day there is nothing to do but to stand about and talk of nothing,” Amy said frankly. “For men of course there is the business of the Privy Council and parliament to discuss, and endless seeking of pensions and places and favors. But for women there is only service in the queen’s rooms and nothing more, really. Very few ladies take an interest in the business of the realm, and no man would want my opinion anyway. I had to sit with my mother-in-law for days and days at a time, and she had no interest in anyone but the duke, her husband, and her sons. My husband’s four brothers were all brilliant and very loyal to each other, and he has two sisters, Lady Catherine and Mary…”

“That is Lady Sidney now?”

“Yes, her. They all think that Sir Robert is a very god, and so no one would ever have been good enough for him. Least of all me. They all thought I was a fool and by the time I was allowed to leave, I absolutely agreed with them.”

Mrs. Woods laughed with Amy. “What a nightmare! But you must have had opinions; you were in a family at the very heart of power.”

Amy made a little face. “You learned very quickly in that family that if you had opinions that did not agree with the duke, then you had better not voice them,” she said. “Although my husband rode out against her, I always knew that Queen Mary was the true queen, and I always knew that her faith would triumph. But it was better for me, and better for Robert, if I kept my thoughts and my faith to myself.”

“But such a test of fortitude! Never to argue when they were so overbearing!”

Amy giggled. “I cannot begin to tell you,” she said. “And the worst of it is that Sir Robert is not like that. When I first met him at my father’s house he was such a boy, so sweet and loving. We were going to take a little manor house and keep sheep and he was going to breed horses. And here I am, still waiting for him to come home.”

“I always longed to go to court,” Mrs. Woods remarked into the wistful pause. “Mr. Woods took me once to see the old queen at her dinner and it was very grand.”

“It takes forever,” Amy said flatly. “And the food is always cold, and half the time it is so badly cooked that everyone goes back to their own rooms and has their own food cooked for them there, so they can have something good to eat. You aren’t allowed to keep your own hunting dogs, and you cannot have more servants than the Lord Chamberlain allows, and you have to keep court hours… up late and to bed late till you are so tired you could die.”

“But that life pleases Sir Robert?” Mrs. Woods observed acutely.

Amy nodded and turned her horse for home. “It does for now. He was born in the palaces with the royal family. He lived like a prince. But in his heart I know that he is still the young man that I fell in love with who wanted nothing more than some good pastureland to breed beautiful horses. I know I must be true to that—whatever it costs me.”

“But what about you?” Mrs. Woods asked gently, bringing her horse alongside the younger woman.

“I keep faith,” Amy said staunchly. “I wait for him, and I trust that he will come home to me. I married him because I loved him just as he is. And he married me because he loved me, just as I am. And when the newness of this queen and the reign has worn off, when all the pensions and the places have been snapped up and the privileges all dispensed, then, when he has the time, he will come home to me, and there I will be, in our lovely house, with his beautiful foals at foot by the mares in the field, and everything just as it should be.”

Elizabeth’s flirtation by private letter with Philip of Spain went far enough to alarm William Cecil, went far enough to alarm Catherine Knollys. But Mary Sidney, in low-voiced consultation with her beloved brother Robert Dudley, was reassuring.

“I am certain she is only securing him as an ally,” she said quietly. “And amusing herself, of course. She has to have constant admiration.”

He nodded. They were riding together, ambling home from hunting on a long rein, both horses sweaty and blowing. Ahead, the queen was riding with Catherine Knollys on one side and a new, sweet-faced young man on the other. Robert Dudley had taken a good look at him and was not concerned. Elizabeth would never fall for a pretty face; she needed a man who would make her catch her breath.

“As an ally against France?” he suggested.

“It’s the pattern,” she said. “Philip stood with us against France when they took Calais; we stood with him when they threatened the Netherlands.”

“Does she want him to stand her friend so that she can go against the Scottish regent?” he asked. “Does she like Cecil’s plan to support the Scottish Protestants? Does she say anything when she is quiet and alone with you women? Is she planning for war, as Cecil says she must?”

Mary shook her head. “She is like a horse with flies. She cannot be at peace. Sometimes she seems to think that she should help them, she shares their faith, and of course the French are the greatest threat to our peace. But other times she is too afraid to make the first move against an anointed monarch. She worries what enemies she might unleash here. And she is in living terror of someone coming against her secretly, with a knife. She dare not do anything to increase the number of her enemies.”

He frowned. “Cecil is very sure that France is our greatest danger and that we must fight them now, while the Scots themselves are turning against their masters. This is our moment while they are calling on us for help.”

“Cecil would have her marry Arran,” Mary guessed. “Not Philip. Cecil hates the Spanish and Popery more than anyone, though he always speaks so calmly and so measured.”

“Have you ever seen Arran?”

“No, but Catherine Knollys speaks very highly of him. She says he is handsome and clever, and of course his claim to the throne of Scotland is second only to Mary, Queen of Scots. If the queen marries him and he defeats the regent and takes the throne, then their son would unite the kingdoms.”

She saw Dudley’s face darken. “He is our greatest danger,” he said, and she knew he was not speaking of the danger to England but the danger to themselves.

“She likes you better than any other man at court,” she said, smiling. “She is always saying how skilled you are and how handsome. She is always remarking on it, and even the youngest maids-in-waiting know that if they want to please her they only have to say how well you ride, or how well the horses are managed, or what wonderful taste you have in clothes. Laetitia Knollys is positively unmaidenly in the way she talks about you, and the queen laughs.”

She had thought he would laugh, but his face was still sullen. “What good is that to me, since I have a wife?” he asked. “And besides, Elizabeth would not marry to disoblige the throne.”

He shocked her into complete silence.

“What?” she asked.

He met her astounded gaze frankly. “Elizabeth would not marry against policy, whatever her desires,” he said flatly. “And I am not free.”

“But of course not!” she stumbled. “Robert, brother, I knew you were her favorite—all the world can see that! We all tease the queen that she has eyes only for you. Half the men at court hate you for it. But I never dreamed that you thought of anything more.”

He shrugged. “Of course I think of it,” he said simply. “But I cannot imagine how it might come to me. I am a married man and my wife is not strong; but she is not likely to die within the next twenty years, and I would not wish it on her. Elizabeth is a Tudor through and through. She will want to marry both for power and for desire, just as her sister did, just as her father always did. Arran would be a brilliant match for her; he could unite the Scots against the French and defeat them in Scotland, then he could marry her and make England and Scotland into one unbeatable kingdom. Then he would dismiss me.”

Mary Sidney shot an anxious sideways glance at her brother. “But if it is best for England?” she suggested shyly. “Then we should side with Arran? Even if it might be against our own personal desires? If it is best for England?”

“There is no England,” he said brutally. “Not as you mean. There is no entity that knows itself as England. There is just a neighborhood of great families: us, the Howards, the Parrs, the Cecils, up-and-coming, the Percys, the Nevilles, the Seymours, and the greatest bandit-tribe of them all: the Tudors. What is good for England is good for the greatest family of them all, and the greatest family of them all is the one that manages its own business the best. That is what our father knew; that is the plan he had for us. Now, the greatest family in the land is the Tudors, not so long ago it was us. It will be us again. You watch for the good of our family as I do, sister, and England will benefit.”

“But however you plan for our family, you cannot hope to marry the queen,” she said, her voice very low. “You know you cannot. There is Amy… and the queen herself would not.”

“There is no point in being the favorite unless you raise yourself to the first man in the land,” Robert said. “Whatever title you take.”

Just as suddenly as she had arrived at the Woods’ house, in mid-March Amy told them that she must leave them.

“I am so sorry you are going,” Mrs. Woods said warmly. “I had hoped you would be here in time to see the May in.”

Amy was distracted by happiness. “I will come another year, if I can,” she said rapidly. “But Sir Robert has just sent for me to go to meet him at Camberwell. My mother’s cousins the Scotts have a house there. And of course, I have to go at once.”

Mrs. Woods gasped. “To Camberwell? Does he mean you to go to the City? Will he take you to court? Shall you see the queen?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said, laughing with pleasure. “I think he may want to buy a London house for us, so that he can entertain his friends. His family had Syon House before; perhaps she will give him that again.”

Mrs. Woods put her hands to her cheeks. “That enormous palace! Amy! How grand he is becoming. How grand you will be. You must not forget us. Write and tell me all about it when you go to court.”

“I will! I will write and tell you all. Everything! What the queen is wearing, and who is with her, and everything.”

“Perhaps she will take you as one of her ladies-in-waiting,” Mrs. Woods said, visions of Amy’s importance unfolding before her. “His sister is at court in her service, is she not?”

At once Amy shook her head. “Oh no! I couldn’t do it. He would not ask it of me. He knows I cannot bear court life. But if we had Flitcham Hall for all the summer, I could live with him in London in the winter.”

“I should think you could!” Mrs. Woods giggled. “But what about your gowns? Do you have everything you need? Can I lend you anything? I know I’m probably terribly out of fashion…”

“I shall order everything new in London,” Amy declared with quiet joy. “My lord always liked me to spend a small fortune on clothes, when he was at the height of his glory. And if I see some stuff that would make you a riding cloak like mine, I shall be sure to send it to you.”

“Oh, please do,” Mrs. Woods said, visions of her friendship with Amy introducing her to the glamorous circle of court. “And I shall send you the strawberries, as soon as they come out. I promise.”

Mrs. Oddingsell put her head around the door; already she was wearing her traveling cloak with her hood up against the cold morning air. “My lady?” she asked. “The horses are waiting.”

Mrs. Woods gave a little cry. “Such a hurry!”

But Amy was halfway out of the door. “I cannot delay; my lord wants me. If I have forgotten anything I will send a man back to fetch it.”

Mrs. Woods saw her out to the waiting horses. “And do come again,” she said. “Perhaps I may call on you in London. Perhaps I shall call on you in your new London house.”

The waiting groom lifted Amy into the saddle and she gathered up the reins. She beamed down at Mrs. Woods. “Thank you,” she said. “I have had such a merry visit. And when my lord and I are settled in our new house you shall come and stay with me.”

Cecil wrote Elizabeth one of his memoranda, in his own hand, for her eyes only.

Whitehall Palace

The twenty-fourth day of March.

Reference your constant correspondence with Philip of Spain.

1. Philip of Spain is a committed Catholic and will expect his wife to follow his religious practice. If he tells you any different he is lying.

2. He may protect us from France in this present peril with Scotland, but he will also lead us into war with France on his terms and for his cause. I remind you that they would not have attacked Calais but for him. And he will not help us win it back.

3. If you were to marry him we would lose the support of the Protestant English who hate him.

4. And not gain the support of the Catholic English who hate him too.

5. He cannot marry you since he was married to your half-sister, unless he has Papal dispensation.

If you acknowledge the power of Pope to rule then you have to accept his ruling that your father and Katherine of Aragon were truly married, in which case your own mother was no more than the king’s mistress and you would be regarded as a bastard. And so, not the rightful heir to the throne. So why would he then marry you?

6. Any child born to King Philip of Spain would be brought up as a Catholic.

7. This would be your child. You would have put a Catholic prince on the throne of England.

8. Clearly you will not marry him, so at some point you will have to jilt King Philip.

9. If you leave it too long you will make the most powerful man in Europe look a great fool.

10. That would not be a wise move.

“I am so sorry,” Elizabeth said sweetly to Count Feria, the Spanish ambassador. “But it is impossible. I admire your master more than I can say.”

Count Feria, after months of uneasy marriage negotiations with a woman he had always disliked and mistrusted, bowed low, and hoped to keep the conversation within the bounds of reason and in diplomatically acceptable language.

“As he admires you, Your Grace,” he said. “He will be saddened by your decision, but he will always be your friend, and a friend to your country.”

“I am a heretic, you see,” Elizabeth said hastily. “I absolutely deny the authority of the Pope. Everybody knows that I do. The king cannot possibly marry me. I would embarrass him.”

“He will be your brother, then,” the count said. “Your loving brother, as he always has been.”

“It would have been quite, quite impossible,” Elizabeth repeated, even more earnestly than before. “Please convey to him my sorrow and my regret.”

The count, bowing low, was getting himself out of the presence chamber as speedily as he could, before this volatile young queen embarrassed them both. Already he could see tears gathering in her eyes, and her mouth was trembling.

“I will write to him at once,” he said soothingly. “He will understand. He will understand completely.”

“I am so sorry!” Elizabeth cried as the ambassador backed away swiftly the double doors. “Pray tell him that I am so filled with regret!”

He raised his head from his bow. “Your Grace, think no more of it,” he said. “There was no offense given and no offense taken. It is a matter of regret for both parties, that is all. You remain the warmest friend and ally that Spain could desire.”

“Allies always?” Elizabeth begged, her handkerchief to her eyes. “Can you promise me that, from your master? That we will be allies always?”

“Always,” he said breathlessly.

“And if I need his help I can count on him?” She was near to breaking down, as at last the doors opened behind him. “Whatever happens in the future?”

“Always. I guarantee it for my master.” He bowed his way through to the safety of the gallery outside.

As the doors closed on his hasty retreat, Elizabeth dropped the handkerchief and gave Cecil a triumphant wink.

Elizabeth’s Privy Council was meeting in her presence chamber. The queen, who should have been sitting in state at the head of the table, was pacing between the windows like an imprisoned lioness. Cecil looked up from his neat pages of memoranda and hoped that it was not going to be an impossibly difficult meeting.

“The treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis puts us in a far stronger position than ever before,” he began. “It ensures peace between Spain, France, and ourselves. We can count ourselves as safe from invasion for the time being.”

There was a chorus of self-satisfied assent. The treaty which guaranteed peace between the three great countries had been a long time in negotiation but was a first triumph for Cecil’s diplomacy. At last England could be sure of peace.

Cecil glanced nervously at his mistress, who was always irritable with the smug male style of the Privy Council. “This is almost entirely thanks to Her Grace’s skill with the Spanish,” he said quickly.

Elizabeth paused in her tracks to listen.

“She has kept them as our friends and allies for long enough to frighten France into agreement, and when she released Philip of Spain from his promises to her, she did it with such skill that Spain stays our friend.”

Elizabeth, soothed by flattery, came to the head of the table and perched on the arm of her great wooden chair, head and shoulders above the rest of them. “That’s true. You may go on.”

“The treaty, and the security it brings us, gives us the safety to make the reforms that we need,” he went on. “We can leave the question of Scotland for the moment, since the treaty assures us that the French will not invade. And so we are free to turn to the urgent business of the country.”

Elizabeth nodded, waiting.

“The first should be to make Her Grace supreme governor of the church. As soon as we have got that passed, we will adjourn parliament.”

Elizabeth sprang up and stalked to the window once more. “Is this our first business indeed?” she demanded.

“Good idea,” said Norfolk, ignoring his niece, the queen. “Send them back to their fields before they start getting ideas in their thick heads. And get the church bolted down.”

“All our troubles over,” said one idiot.

It was the spark to the tinder of Elizabeth’s temper. “Over?” she spat, erupting from the window like an enraged kitten. “Over? With Calais still in French hands and small chance of buying it back? With Mary still quartering English arms on her shield? How are our troubles over? Am I Queen of France or am I not?”

There was a stunned silence.

“You are,” said Cecil quietly, when no one else dared to speak. In theory she was. The English monarchs had always called themselves King of France even when the English holdings in France had shrunk to the pale of Calais. Now it seemed that Elizabeth would continue the tradition even though Calais was gone.

“Then where are my French forts, and my French territories? I will tell you. In the hands of an illegal force. Where are my guns and my walls and my fortifications? I will tell you. Pulled down or turned on England. And when my ambassador goes to dine at the French court, what does he see on the plates of the French princess?”

They were all looking down at the table, willing the storm to pass them by.

“My coat of arms!” Elizabeth shouted. “On French plate. Has that been resolved in this treaty which you are all so thrilled with? No! Has anyone even addressed it? No! And you think that the most important business of the kingdom is the leadership of the church. Not so! My lords! Not so! The most important business is to get me back my Calais, and get that woman to stop using my coat of arms on her damned plates!”

“It will be resolved,” Cecil said soothingly. He glanced around the table. They were all thinking as one man: that these council meetings would be so much easier if only she would marry a reasonable man and let him do the business of kingship.

To his horror, he saw that her dark eyes were filling with tears. “And Philip of Spain.” Her voice was husky. “Now, I hear that he is to marry.”

Cecil looked at her aghast. The last thing he had imagined was that she had actually felt anything for the man she had tormented during his wife’s lifetime and then had strung along for months after.

“A marriage to seal the treaty,” he said hesitantly. “I don’t believe there is any courtship, any preference. There is no attraction, no rival attraction involved. He does not prefer her to …to…”

“You urged me to marry him,” she said, her voice throbbing with emotion, looking along the bowed heads of her Privy Council. “Still you continually persuade me to one man or another, and see? The man of your choice, your preferred suitor, has no fidelity. He swore that he loved me; but see? He will marry another. You would have had me marry a faithless flirt.”

“None could suit her better,” Norfolk said, so low that nobody could hear but his neighbor, who snorted with suppressed laughter.

It was pointless even to attempt reason with her, Cecil knew. “Yes,” he said simply. “We were most mistaken in his nature. Thank God that Your Grace is so young and so very beautiful that there will always be suitors for your hand. It is for you to choose, Your Grace. There will always be men who long to marry you. All we can do is advise your own wise preference.”

A sigh like a passing breeze passed through the beleagured council. Once again, Cecil had hit exactly the right note. Sir Francis Knollys rose to his feet and guided his cousin to her chair at the head of the table. “Now,” he said. “Although they are less important indeed, we do have to talk about the bishops, Your Grace. We cannot go on like this. We have to make a settlement with the church.”

Amy’s cousin and her husband, a prosperous merchant with an interest in the Antwerp trade, greeted her on the doorstep on their large square-built house in Camberwell.

“Amy! You’ll never guess! We heard from Sir Robert this very morning!” Frances Scott said breathlessly. “He is coming to dine this very day, and staying at least one night!”

Amy flushed scarlet. “He is?” She turned to her maid. “Mrs. Pirto, unpack my best gown, and you’ll need to press my ruff.” She turned back to her cousin. “Is your hairdresser coming?”

“I told him to come an hour early for you!” her cousin laughed. “I knew you would want to look your best. I have had my cook at work ever since I heard the news. And they are making his favorite: march-pane.”

Amy laughed aloud, catching her cousin’s excitement.

“He has become a great man again,” Ralph Scott said, coming forward to kiss his cousin-in-law. “We hear nothing but good reports of him. The queen honors him and seeks his company daily.”

Amy nodded and slid from his embrace to the open front door. “Am I to have my usual room?” she asked impatiently. “And can you ask them to hurry to bring my chest with my gowns up?”

But after all the rush of preparations, the pressing of the gowns, the sending the maid out in a panic to buy new stockings, Sir Robert sent his apologies and said that he would be delayed. Amy had to wait for two hours, sitting by the window in the Scotts’ elegant modern parlor, watching the road for her husband’s entourage.

It was nearly five in the afternoon when they came trotting down Camberwell High Street, six men abreast mounted on the most superb matched bay horses, wearing the Dudley livery, scattering chickens and pedestrians and shouting children ahead of them. In the middle of them rode Robert Dudley, one hand on the reins, one hand on his hip, his gaze abstracted, his smile charming: his normal response to public cheers.

They pulled up before the handsome new house and Dudley’s groom came running to hold the horse while Dudley leapt lightly down.

Amy, in the bay window, had been on her feet at the first sound of the rattle of hoofs on cobblestones. Her cousin, running in to warn her that Sir Robert was at the door, found her, quite entranced, watching him through the window. Frances Scott dropped back, saying nothing, and stood in the hall beside her husband as their two best menservants flung open the door and Sir Robert strode in.

“Cousin Scott,” he said pleasantly, gripping the man’s hand. Ralph Scott blushed slightly with pleasure at the recognition.

“And my cousin Frances,” Sir Robert said, recovering her name from his memory just in time to kiss her on both cheeks and see her color rise under his touch, which was always the case with women, and then her eyes darkened with desire, which was also a frequent occurrence.

“My dearest cousin Frances,” Dudley said more warmly, watching her more closely.

“Oh, Sir Robert,” she breathed and rested her hand on his arm.

Oho, thought Robert. A plum ripe and ready for the picking, but hardly worth the uproar when we were discovered, which we undoubtedly would be.

The door behind her opened, and Amy stood, framed in the doorway. “My lord,” she said quietly. “I am so glad to see you.”

Gently, Dudley released Frances Scott and stepped to his wife. He took her hand in his and bent his dark head to kiss her fingers, and then he drew her closer to him and kissed her cheek, first one and then the other, and then her warm ready lips.

At the sight of him, at his touch, at the scent of him, Amy felt herself melt with desire. “My lord,” she whispered. “My lord, it has been so long. I have waited to see you for so long.”

“I’m here now,” he said, as quick as any man to deflect reproach. He slid his arm around her waist and turned back to their host. “But I am damnably late, cousins, I hope you will forgive me. I was playing bowls with the queen and I could not get away until Her Grace had won. I had to feint and cheat and dissemble until you would have thought I was half blind and half-witted in order to lose to her.”

The nonchalance of this was almost too much for Frances Scott but Ralph rose to the occasion. “Of course, of course, the ladies must have their entertainments,” he said. “But did you bring an appetite?”

“I am as hungry as a hunter,” Dudley assured him.

“Then come to dinner!” Ralph said and gestured that Sir Robert should walk with him, down the hall to the dining room at the rear of the house.

“What a pretty place you have here,” Sir Robert said.

“Very small compared with a country house, of course,” Frances said, deferentially following them with Amy.

“But new-built,” Dudley remarked with pleasure.

“I planned much of it myself,” Ralph said smugly. “I knew I had to build a new house for us and I thought—why try to make a great palace on the river and employ an army to keep it warm and clean? Then you have to build a great hall to feed them all, then you have to house them and keep them. So I thought, why not a snugger, tighter house which can be more easily run and still have room for a dozen friends for dinner?”

“Oh, I agree with you,” Dudley replied insincerely. “What reasonable man would want more?”

Mr. Scott threw open the double door to the dining hall which, though tiny by the standards of Whitehall or Westminster, could still seat a dozen guests and their followers, and led the way, through the other diners, half a dozen dependents and a dozen upper servants, to the top table. Amy and Frances followed. Mrs. Oddingsell and Frances’s companion came in as well and the Scotts’ oldest children, a girl and a boy of ten and eleven, very stiffly dressed in adult clothes, eyes down, awed into complete silence by the grandeur of the occasion. Dudley greeted them all with pleasure, and sat down at his host’s right hand, with Amy on his other side. Concealed by the table and the great sweep of the banqueting cloth, Amy moved her stool so that she could be close to him. He felt her little slipper press against his riding boot and he leaned toward her so that she could feel the warmth and strength of his shoulder.

Only he heard her little sigh of desire and felt her shiver, and he reached down his hand and touched her waiting fingers.

“My sweetheart,” he said.

Dudley and Amy could not be alone together until bedtime, but when the house was quiet they sat either side of their bedroom fire and Robert heated two mugs of ale.

“I have some news,” he said quietly. “Something I need to tell you. You should hear it first from me, and not from some corner gossip.”

“What is it?” Amy asked, looking up and smiling at him. “Good news?”

He thought for a moment what a young smile hers still was: the smile of a girl whose hopes are always ready to rise, the open gaze of a girl who has reason to think that the world is filled with promise for her.

“Yes, it is good news.” He thought it would be a hard-hearted man who could bear to tell this childish woman that anything had gone wrong, especially when he had already brought her so much grief.

She clapped her hands together. “You have bought Flitcham Hall! I didn’t dare hope you would! I knew it! I absolutely knew it!”

He was thrown from his course. “Flitcham? No. I sent Bowes to look at it and to tell the owner that we were not interested.”

“Not interested? But I told Lady Robsart to tell the owner that we would take it.”

“It’s impossible, Amy. I thought I told you before I left Chichester, when you first mentioned it?”

“No, never. I thought you liked it? You always said you liked it. You said to Father…”

“No. Anyway, it’s not about Flitcham. I want to tell you…”

“But what did Mr. Bowes tell Mr. Symes? I had promised him we would almost certainly take it.”

He realized that he had to answer her before she could listen to him. “Bowes told Mr. Symes that we did not want Flitcham after all. He was not upset, he understood.”

“But I don’t understand!” she said plaintively. “I don’t understand. I thought you wanted to make Flitcham our home. I thought you loved it like I do. And it is so near to Syderstone, and to all my family, and Father always liked it…”

“No.” He took her hands in his and saw her wounded indignation dissolve at once under his touch. He caressed the palms of her hands with his gentle fingertips. “Now, Amy, you must see, Flitcham Hall is not close enough to London. I would never see you if you buried yourself in Norfolk. And we could never be able to make it a big enough place for the visitors we will have.”

“I don’t want to be near London,” she insisted stubbornly. “Father always said that nothing came from London but trouble…”

“Your father loved Norfolk, and he was a great man in his own country,” Robert said, controlling his own irritation with an effort. “But we are not your father. I am not your father, Amy, my love. Norfolk is too small for me. I do not love it as your father did. I want you to find us a bigger house, somewhere more central, near Oxford. Yes? There is more to England than Norfolk you know, my dearest.”

He saw she was soothed by the endearments, and in her quietness he could broach the rest that he had to tell her. “But this is not what I wanted to tell you. I am to be honored by the queen.”

“An honor? Oh! She will give you a seat on the Privy Council?”

“Well, there are other honors,” he said, concealing his frustration that he still had no political power.

“She would never make you an earl!” she exclaimed.

“No, not that!” he corrected. “That would be ridiculous.”

“I don’t see why,” she said at once. “I don’t see why being an earl would be ridiculous. Everyone says that you are her favorite.”

He checked, wondering exactly what scandal might have come to her ears. “I’m not her favorite,” he said. “Her favorite is Sir William Cecil for counsel and Catherine Knollys for company. I assure you, my sister and I are only two of very many among her court.”

“But she made you Master of her Horse,” Amy objected reasonably. “You cannot expect me to believe that she does not like you above all others. You always said that she liked you when you were children together.”

“She likes her horses to be well managed,” he said hastily. “And of course she likes me, we are old friends, but that’s not what I meant …I…”

“She must like you a great deal,” she pursued. “Everyone says that she goes out with you every day.” She took care not to let a jealous note into her voice. “Someone even told me that she neglects her royal business for riding.”

“I take her riding, yes …but it is my work, not my preference. There is nothing between us, no especial warmth.”

“I should hope not,” she said sharply. “She had better remember that you are a married man. Not that such a fact has restrained her in the past. Everyone says that she…”

“Oh, for saints’ sake, stop!”

She gave a little gasp. “You may not like it, Robert, but it is no more than everyone says about her.”

He took a breath. “I beg your pardon, I did not mean to raise my voice.”

“It is not very pleasant for me, knowing that you are her favorite and that she has no good reputation for being chaste.” Amy finished her complaint in a breathless rush. “It is not very pleasant for me, knowing that your names are linked.”

He had to take a long deep breath. “Amy, this is ridiculous. I have told you I am not a particular favorite. I ride with her because I am her Master of Horse. I am a favored man at court because of my abilities, thank God for them, and because of my family. We should both be glad that she favors me as she should. As to her reputation, I am surprised you would lower yourself to gossip, Amy. I am indeed. She is your anointed queen. It is not for you to pass comment.”

She bit her lip. “Everyone knows what she’s like,” she said stubbornly. “And it is not very nice for me when your name is linked with hers.”

“I do not wish my wife to gossip,” he said flatly.

“I only repeated what everyone—”

“Everyone is wrong,” he said. “It is almost certain that she will marry the Earl of Arran and secure his claim to the Scottish throne. I tell you this in the deepest secrecy, Amy. So that you know that there is nothing between her and me.”

“Do you swear?”

Robert sighed as if he were weary, to make his lie more persuasive. “Of course, I swear there is nothing.”

“I trust you,” she said. “Of course I do. But I cannot trust her. Everyone knows that she—”

“Amy!” He raised his voice even louder, and she fell silent at last. Her sliding glance at the door told him that she was afraid her cousin would have heard his angry tone.

“Oh, for God’s sake. It doesn’t matter if anyone heard.”

“What will people think…”

“It doesn’t matter what they think,” he said with the simple arrogance of a Dudley.

“It does.”

“Not to me,” he said grandly.

“To me, it does.”

He bit his lip on his argument. “Well, it should not,” he said, trying to keep his temper with her. “You are Lady Dudley, and the opinion of some London merchant and his wife should be nothing to you.”

“My own mother’s cousin…” He could just hear a few words of her whispered defiance. “Our hosts. And always very civil to you.”

“Amy… please,” he said.

“I have to live with them, after all,” she said with a childish stubbornness. “It’s not as if you will be here next week…”

He rose to his feet and saw her flinch.

“Wife, I am sorry,” he said. “I have gone all wrong about this.”

At the first hint of retraction she was quick to meet him. Her head came up, a little smile on her face. “Oh, are you unwell?”

“No! I…”

“Are you overtired?”

“No!”

“Shall I get you a hot possett?” Already she was on her feet and wanting to serve him. He caught her hand and had to make himself hold her gently, and not shake her in his anger.

“Amy, please be still and let me talk to you. I have been trying to tell you one small thing since we came up, and you don’t let me speak.”

“How ever could I stop you?”

He answered her with silence, until obediently, she sank to her stool and waited.

“The queen is to honor me by awarding me the Order of the Garter. I am to have it with three other noblemen and there is to be a great celebration. I am honored indeed.”

She would have interrupted with congratulations but he pressed on to the more difficult topic. “And she is to give me land, and a house.”

“A house?”

“The Dairy House at Kew,” he said.

“A London house for us?” she asked.

He could imagine Elizabeth’s response if he tried to install a wife in the pretty little bachelor’s nest in the garden of the royal palace.

“No, no. It’s just a little place for me. But my idea was that you could stay with the Hydes and find a house for us? A house that we could make our own? A bigger house than Flitcham Hall, a grander place altogether? Somewhere near them in Oxfordshire.”

“Yes, but who will run your house at Kew?”

He dismissed it. “It is little more than a few rooms. Bowes will find me servants; it is nothing.”

“Why does she not want you to live at the palace anymore?”

“It’s just a gift,” he said. “I may not even use it.”

“So why give it to you?”

Robert tried to laugh it off. “It’s just a sign of her favor,” he said. “And my rooms in the palace are not of the best.” Already, he knew, the gossips were speculating that the queen had given him a place where the two of them could go to be alone together, hidden from the eyes of the court. He had to ensure that Amy would dismiss such rumors if they ever came to her ears. “In truth, I think Cecil wanted it, and she is teasing him by giving it to me.”

She looked disapproving. “And would Cecil have lived there with his wife?”

He was pleased to be on safe ground. “Cecil has not seen his wife since the queen’s accession,” he said. “She is overseeing the building of his new house, Burghley. He is in the same strait as I. He wants to get home but he is kept too busy. And I want you to be like his wife; I want you to build a house for us, that I can come to in summer. Will you do it for me? Will you find us a really lovely house or site, and make a home for us, a proper home at last?”

Her face lightened as he knew it would. “Oh, I would love to,” she said. “And we would live there and be together all the time?”

Gently he took both her hands. “I would have to be at court for much of the time,” he said. “As you know. But I would come home to you, as often as I could, and you would like to have a proper home of your own, wouldn’t you?”

“You would come home to me often?” she stipulated.

“My work is at court,” he pointed out. “But I never forget that I am married and that you are my wife. Of course I will come home to you.”

“Then yes,” Amy said. “Oh, my lord. I would like it so much.”

He drew her toward him and felt her warmth through the thin linen gown.

“But you will take care, won’t you?”

“Take care?” He was cautious. “Of what?”

“Of her trying…” She chose her words carefully so as not to irritate him. “Of her trying to draw you in.”

“She is the queen,” Robert said gently. “It flatters her vanity to be surrounded by men. I am a courtier; it is my work to be drawn in by her. It means nothing.”

“But if she favors you so much, you will make enemies.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I just know that anyone who is favored by the king or the queen makes enemies. I just want you to take care.”

He nodded, relieved that she had nothing more to go on. “You’re right, I have my enemies, but I know who they are and what they threaten. They envy me but they are powerless against me while I have her favor. But you are right to warn me, wife. And I thank you for your wise counsel.”

That night Robert Dudley and his wife slept in the same bed in some accord. He bedded her as gently and as warmly as he could, and Amy, desperate for his touch, accepted the false coin of his kindness as love. She had waited so long for his kiss, for the gentle press of his body against hers, that she whimpered and cried with joy within the first few minutes, and he, falling easily into the well-known rhythm of their lovemaking, with her familiar body surprising him with pleasure, found her easy to please and was glad of that, if for nothing more. He was used to whores, and the ladies of the court, and it was a rare pleasure for him to bed a woman whom he cared for; it was strange for him to hold back out of consideration. As he felt the sweet rush of Amy’s response, his mind wandered to what it would be like to have Elizabeth cling to him, as Amy was clinging now—and the fantasy was so powerful that his lust came like a storm and left him gasping with the thought of a white throat flung back, dark eyelashes fluttering with lust, and a mass of tumbled bronze hair.

Amy fell asleep at once, her head resting on his shoulder, and he leaned up on his elbow to look at her face in the moonlight which came, all pale and watery, through the glass of the leaded window pane. It gave her skin an odd, greenish pallor, like that of a drowned woman, and her hair spread out on the pillow was like that of a woman rocking on the deep water of a river and sinking down.

He looked at her with irritated compassion: this wife, whose happiness was so solely dependent upon him, whose desire revolved around him, who was lost without him and infuriating with him, the wife who could never now satisfy him. He knew too that, although she would deny it to her very death, in truth, he could never make her truly happy. They were two such different people, with such different lives, he could not see how they could ever now be joined as one.

He sighed and leaned back, his dark head resting on the crook of his arm. He thought of his father’s warning against marrying a pretty face for love, and his mother saying sourly to him that little Amy Robsart was as much use to an ambitious man as a primrose in his buttonhole. He had wanted then to show his parents that he was not a son like Guilford, who would marry a girl who hated him, at his father’s command. He had wanted to choose his own wife, and Amy had been so young and so sweet and so willing to agree to anything he proposed. He had thought then that she could learn to be a courtier’s wife, he had thought she could be an ally to him, a source of power and information—as his mother was to his father. He had thought that she could be a loyal and effective partner in the rise of his family to greatness. He did not realize that she would always be the contented daughter of Sir John Robsart, a big man in a small country, rather than an ambitious wife to Robert Dudley, a man who was finding greatness so unreliable, and so hard to win.

Robert woke early and felt the old familiar rush of irritation that the woman beside him in bed was Amy, and not some London whore whom he could dismiss before she had the temerity to speak. Instead, his wife stirred as he stirred, as if even in sleep every sense had been on the watch for him. She opened her eyes almost as soon as he did, and as soon as she saw him she smiled that familiar, vacuous smile, and said, as she always said, “Good morning, my lord. God be with you. Are you well?”

He hated too that when he replied brusquely, a shadow passed across her face as if he had slapped her in her very first moments of waking, which forced him to smile in his turn and ask her if she had slept well, with extra concern in his voice in an attempt to make amends.

The repetitive dullness of it made him grit his teeth and spring out of bed as if he were urgently needed elsewhere, though in fact, he had told everyone at court that he would spend some days with his wife in Camberwell. The predictable interplay of his irritation and her hurt was unbearable.

“Oh, are you getting up?” she asked, as if she could not see him swing his cloak around his naked shoulders.

“Yes,” he said shortly. “I have remembered something I should have done at court; I shall have to go back early.”

“Early?” She could not keep the disappointment from her voice.

“Yes, early,” he said abruptly, and went quickly from the room.

He had hoped to break his fast alone and be on his horse and away before the household was stirring, but Amy flung herself from their bed and wakened everyone. Mr. and Mrs. Scott came tumbling down the stairs, Mrs. Scott pinning her hair as she trotted in her husband’s wake, Mrs. Oddingsell behind them; he could hear the heels of Amy’s expensive shoes rattling along the wooden floorboards as she hurried down too. He forced a smile on his face and prepared himself to repeat his lies of urgent business overlooked.

A more sophisticated family would have guessed at once the simple truth: their noble guest could not endure another minute. But for the Scotts, and for their cousin Amy, it was a surprise and a disappointment, and Amy in particular was worried that he was overburdened by the business at court.

“Can they not get someone else to do it for you?” she asked, hovering over him with maternal concern and watching him drink ale and eat bread.

“No,” he said, his mouth full.

“They ask you to do so much,” she said proudly. She glanced at Mrs. Scott, at Mrs. Oddingsell. “Can they not manage without you? They should not put so much on your shoulders.”

“I am Master of Horse,” he said. “It is my duty to do the task she has given me.”

“Can’t William Cecil do it for you?” Amy asked at random. “You could send him a note.”

Dudley would have laughed if he had not been so irritated. “No,” he said. “Cecil has his own work, and the last thing I want is him interfering in mine.”

“Or your brother then? Surely you could trust him? And then you could stay here another night.”

Dudley shook his head. “I am sorry to leave you all,” he said, including the Scotts in the charm of his apology. “And if I could stay, I would do so. But I woke myself in the night with the sudden realization that there is to be a great outing on barges after the ceremony of the Order of the Garter and I have not ordered the barges. I have to get back to court and put it all in hand.”

“Oh, if it is just ordering some boats you can do it by letter,” Amy reassured him. “And one of the pages can take it at once.”

“No,” he repeated. “I have to be there. The boats have to be checked and the rowers allotted. I have to prepare a water pageant and get a boat for the musicians; there’s a lot to do. It’s not just a matter of ordering the boats. I cannot think how I could have overlooked it.”

“If I came too, I could help you, perhaps.”

Robert rose from the table. He could not bear the wistfulness in her face. “How I wish you could!” he said warmly. “But I have another job for you, a far more important task. Don’t you remember? And you have promised to undertake it for me, for us.”

The smile came back to her face. “Oh, yes!”

“I want that done as soon as possible. I will leave you now, and you can tell our friends all about it.”

He was out of the door before she could again ask him to stay. His men in the stable yard were saddling up, ready to leave. He ran an expert eye over them. Dudley was famous for having his escort as smart as outbound soldiers. He nodded and took the reins of his big hunter and led him round to the front of the house.

“I must thank you for your hospitality to me,” he said to Mr. Scott. “I know that you require no thanks for my wife’s stay; I know how dear she is to you.”

“It is always a pleasure to have my cousin here,” the man said smoothly. “And a great honor to see you. But I was hoping to have time for a little word.”

“Oh?”

Mr. Scott drew Robert Dudley to one side. “I have some difficulty in reclaiming a debt from a merchant in Antwerp; I have his bond but I cannot make him honor it. I would rather not present it to the magistrates; there are some clauses in it which are rather complicated for their simple minds, and my debtor knows this, and is taking advantage of it and will not pay.”

Robert decoded this at his usual speed as meaning that Mr. Scott had lent some money to an Antwerp merchant at an illegally high rate of interest and that now the man was reneging on the debt, secure in the knowledge that no reputable London merchant would want it known that he was lending money to the vulnerable at twenty-five percent.

“What’s the total sum?” Robert asked cautiously.

“Nothing, to such a great man as you. A mere three hundred pounds. But a worry for me.”

Robert nodded. “You can write to Sir Thomas Gresham at Antwerp, and say you are my wife’s cousin and I am asking him to act in this matter,” he said easily. “He will oblige me by looking into it for you, and then you can tell me what he concludes.”

“I am most grateful, cousin,” Mr. Scott said warmly.

“It is my pleasure to be of service to you.” Robert bowed gracefully, and turned to kiss Mrs. Scott and then to Amy.

At the moment of his leaving her, she could not hide her distress. Her face drained of color and her fingers trembled in the confident clasp of his warm hands. She tried to smile but her eyes filled with tears.

He bent his head and kissed her on the lips, and felt the sad downward curve under his mouth. Last night, underneath him, she had been smiling as he kissed her, she had wrapped her arms and legs around him and whispered his name, and the taste of her had been very sweet.

“Be happy, Amy,” he urged her, whispering quietly in her ear. “I hate it when you are sad.”

“I see you so seldom,” she breathed urgently. “Can’t you stay? Oh, please stay, just till dinner time…”

“I have to go,” he said, holding her close.

“You’re hurrying away to see another woman?” she accused, suddenly filled with rage, her voice a hiss in his ear like a serpent.

He pulled away from her grasp. “Of course not. It is as I have told you. Be happy! Our family is on the rise. Be happy for me, please, send me away with your smile.”

“As long as you swear to me on your mother’s honor that there is no one else.”

He grimaced at the exaggerated language. “Of course, I promise,” he said simply. “Now you be happy for me.”

Amy tried to smile, though her lips trembled. “I am happy,” she lied at once. “I am happy for you in your success and I am so happy that we are to have a house at last.” Her voice dropped. “If you swear you have kept faith with me.”

“Of course. Why else would I want you to make a home for us? And I will meet you at the Hydes’ at Denchworth, within a fortnight or so. I will let you know by a note to Mrs. Oddingsell.”

“Write to me,” she urged him. “I like it when they bring your letters to me.”

Robert gave her a little hug. “Very well then,” he said, thinking it was like pacifying a child. “I will write to you and seal it, and it can come to you and you can break the seal yourself.”

“Oh, I never break them. I lift them off the page and I keep them. I have a whole collection of them in my jewel-box drawer, from all the letters you have ever sent me.”

He turned away from the thought of her treasuring something as trivial as his sealing wax, and ran down the steps and vaulted into the high saddle of his horse.

Robert swept his hat from his head. “I’ll say farewell for now,” he said pleasantly. “And look to our next meeting.” He could not bear to meet her eyes. He glanced at Mrs. Oddingsell and saw that she was nearby, ready to support Amy once he had gone. There was no point in prolonging the farewell. He nodded to his company of horse and they fell in behind him, his standard-bearer ahead, and they trotted off, the noise of the horses very loud as the street narrowed toward the end of the road.

Amy watched them go until they turned the corner and were out of sight. Still she waited on the steps until she could no longer hear the clatter of the hooves and the jingle of the bits. Even then she waited in case he miraculously changed his mind and came riding back, wanting a last kiss, or wanting her to go with him. For half an hour after he had gone, Amy lingered near the front door in case he would come back. But he never did.

Robert rode the long way back to court in a circuitous route at breakneck pace that tested the horsemanship of his escort, and the stamina of their mounts. When they finally rattled into the stable yard of Whitehall Palace the horses were blowing, their necks darkened with sweat, and the standard-bearer was gritting his teeth on the pain in his arms from riding one-handed at a half gallop for almost an hour.

“Good God, what is burning the man?” he asked as he fell from the saddle into the arms of one of his companions.

“Lust,” said the other crudely. “Lust or ambition or a guilty conscience. That’s our lord in a nutshell. And today, seeing that he is riding hell for leather from his wife to the queen, it’s guilty conscience, then ambition, then lust.”

As Robert dismounted, one of his household, Thomas Blount, stood up from where he had been lounging in the shadows and came forward to hold the horse’s reins.

“Some news,” he said quietly.

Robert waited.

“At the Privy Council meeting, the queen tore into them over the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis failing to return Calais to England, and not forcing the French princess to surrender the English coat of arms. They agreed to build two new warships, by subscription. You’ll be asked for money, as well as everyone else.”

“Anything else?” Dudley asked, his face a mask.

“About the church. Cecil to draw up a bill to go through parliament to decide what the services are to be. Agreed that they should base it on King Edward’s prayer book with some small changes.”

Dudley narrowed his eyes, thinking. “Did they not press her to go further?”

“Aye, but Cecil said that anything more would provoke a rebellion from the bishops and the lords. He couldn’t promise to get it through as it is. And some of the councillors said they were opposed anyway. It’s to go before parliament by Easter; Cecil hopes to work on the opposition by then.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing of matter. Some outburst of jealousy from the queen about Philip of Spain’s marriage. And some discussion among themselves when she was gone that she would do best to marry Arran. Cecil in favor of Arran. Most of the council in agreement, especially if Arran can deliver Scotland. Some harsh words against you.”

“Against me?”

“For distracting her from marriage plans, turning her head, flirtation, that sort of thing.”

“Just hard words?”

“Norfolk said you should be sent back to the Tower or he’d run you through himself and think it a job well done.”

“Norfolk is a puppy; but watch him for me,” Robert said. “You’ve done very well. Come and see me later today; I have some other business for you.”

The man bowed and faded into the background of the stable yard as if he had never been there. Robert turned for the palace and took the steps up to the hall two at a time.

“And how was your wife?” Elizabeth asked sweetly, the demure tone quite contradicted by the sharp glance she threw at him.

Robert was too experienced a philanderer to hesitate for a moment. “Well indeed,” he said. “Blooming in health and beauty. Every time I see her she is prettier.”

Elizabeth, who was ready to crow over any admission of Amy’s imperfections, was caught unawares. “She is well?”

“In the best of health,” he assured her. “And very happy. She is staying with her cousin, a very prosperous lady, married to Mr. Ralph Scott, a London merchant, a very successful man. I had to drag myself away from them; they were a merry party indeed.”

Her dark eyes snapped. “You need not have put yourself to any trouble, Sir Robert. You could have stayed as long as you wished in— where was it?—Kendal?”

“Camberwell, Your Grace,” he replied. “Just down the road from London. A pretty little village. You would like it. I’m surprised you have never heard of it. Amy adores it there and she has wonderful taste.”

“Well, you were not missed here. There has been nothing here but courtships and suitors and romancing.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said, smiling down at her. “For you missed me so little that you thought me in Kendal.”

She pouted. “How am I to know where you are, or what you do? Aren’t you supposed to be at court all the time? Is it not your duty to be here?”

“Not my duty,” Sir Robert said. “For I would never neglect my duty.”

“So you admit that you neglect me?”

“Neglect? No. Flee? Yes.”

“You flee from me?” Her ladies saw her face alight with laughter as she leaned forward to hear him. “Why would you flee from me? Am I so fearsome?”

“You are not, but the threat you pose is dreadful, worse than any Medusa.”

“I have never threatened you in my whole life.”

“You threaten me with every breath that you take. Elizabeth, if I let myself love you, as I could do, what would become of me?”

She leaned back and shrugged. “Oh, you would pine and weep for a sennight and then you would visit your wife again in Camberwell and forget to come back to court.”

Robert shook his head. “If I let myself love you, as I want to love you, then everything would change for me, forever. And for you…”

“For me what?”

“You would never be the same again,” he promised her, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Your life would never be the same again. You would be a woman transformed; everything would be …revalued.”

Elizabeth wanted to shrug and laugh but his dark gaze was utterly hypnotic, far too serious for the flirtatious tradition of courtly love. “Robert…” She put her hand to the base of her throat where her pulse was hammering, her face flushed pink with desire. But experienced philanderer as he was, he did not attend to the color in her cheeks but to the slow, revealing stain that spread from the base of her neck to the tips of her earlobes where two priceless pearls danced. It was the rose-red stain of lust and Robert Dudley had to bite his lip not to laugh aloud to see the virgin Queen of England as red as any slut with lust for him.

In the house at Camberwell Amy went into the parlor with the Scotts and Mrs. Oddingsell, swore them to the strictest of confidence, and announced that her husband was to be given the very highest order of chivalry, the Order of the Garter, a pretty little house at Kew, a grant of lands, a profitable office, and that best of all he had asked her to find them a suitable house in Oxfordshire.

“Well, what did Mrs. Woods tell you?” Mrs. Oddingsell demanded of her radiant charge. “And what did I say? You will have a beautiful house and he will come home every summer, and perhaps even the court will visit on progress, and you will entertain the queen in your own house and he will be so proud of you.”

Amy’s little face glowed at the thought of it.

“This is to rise high indeed,” Ralph Scott said delightedly. “It’s no knowing how far he may go on the queen’s favor like this.”

“And then he will need a London house, he will not be satisfied with a little place at Kew, you will have Dudley House or Dudley Palace, and you will live in London every winter, and give such grand feasts and entertainments that everyone will want to be your friend, everyone will want to know the beautiful Lady Dudley.”

“Oh, really,” Amy said, blushing. “I don’t seek it…”

“Yes, indeed. And think of the clothes you will order!”

“When did he say he would join you at Denchworth?” Ralph Scott asked, thinking that he might call on his cousin in Oxfordshire and promote his relationship with her husband.

“Within a fortnight, he said. But he is always late.”

“Well, by the time he comes, you will have had time to ride all around the country and to find a house he might like,” Mrs. Oddingsell said. “You know Denchworth already, but there are many old houses that you have never seen. I know it is my home, and so I am partial; but I think Oxfordshire is the most beautiful country in England. And my brother and sister-in-law will be so pleased to help us look. We can all go out together. And then, when Sir Robert finally comes, you will be able to ride out with him and show him the best land. Master of the Queen’s Horse! Order of the Garter! I would think he could buy up half of the country.”

“We must pack!” Amy cried, seized with urgency. “He says he wants me to go at once! We must leave at once.”

She dragged her friend to her feet, Mrs. Oddingsell laughing at her. “Amy! It will take us only two or three days to get there. We don’t have to rush!”

Amy danced to the door, her face as bright as a girl’s. “He’s going to meet me there!” she beamed. “He wants me there now. Of course we have to go at once.”

William Cecil was in low-voiced conference with the queen in the window embrasure at Whitehall Palace, a March shower pelting the thick glass of the window behind them. In various states of alertness the queen’s court waited for her to break from her advisor and turn, looking for entertainment. Robert Dudley was not among them; he was in his great chambers organizing river barges with the head boatmen. Only Catherine Knollys stood within earshot, and Cecil trusted Catherine’s loyalty to the queen.

“I cannot marry a man I have never seen.” She repeated the answer she was using to everyone to delay the courtship of the Archduke Ferdinand.

“He is not some shepherd swain that can come piping and singing to court you,” Cecil pointed out. “He cannot come halfway across Europe for you to look him over like a heifer. If the marriage is arranged then he could come for a visit and you could be married at the end of it. He could come this spring and you could be married in the autumn.”

Elizabeth shook her head, instantly retreating from the threat of decisive action, at the very mention of a date on the calendar. “Oh, not so soon, Spirit. Don’t press me.”

He took her hand. “I don’t mean to,” he said earnestly. “But your safety lies this way. If you were betrothed to a Hapsburg archduke, then you have an alliance for life, unbreakable.”

“They say Charles is very ugly, and madly Catholic,” she reminded him.

“They do,” he agreed patiently. “But it is his brother Ferdinand that we are considering. And they say he is handsome and moderate.”

“And the emperor would support the match? And we would have a treaty of mutual support if I married him?”

“Count Feria indicated to me that Philip would see this as a guarantee of mutual goodwill.”

She looked impressed.

“Last week, when I advised you in favor of the Arran match, you said you thought this match the better one,” he reminded her. “Which is why I speak of it now.”

“I did think so then,” she concurred.

“It would rob the French of their friendship with Spain, and reassure our own Papists,” he added.

She nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

Cecil sighed and caught Catherine Knollys’s amused sidelong smile. She knew exactly how frustrating Elizabeth could be to her advisors. He smiled back. Suddenly there was a shout and a challenge from the doorway and a bang against the closed door of the presence chamber. Elizabeth blanched and started to turn, not knowing where she could go for safety. Cecil’s two secret bodyguards stepped quickly toward her; everyone looked at the door. Cecil, his pulse hammering, took two steps forward. Good God, it has happened. They have come for her, he thought. In her own palace.

Slowly the door opened. “Beg pardon, Your Grace,” the sentry said. “It’s nothing. A drunk apprentice. Just stumbled and fell. Nothing to alarm you.”

Elizabeth’s color flowed back into her cheeks, and her eyes filled with tears. She turned into the window bay to hide her stricken face from the court. Catherine Knollys came forward and put her arm around her cousin’s waist.

“Very well,” Cecil said to the soldier. He nodded to his men to step back against the walls again. There was a buzz of concern and interest from the courtiers; only a few of them had seen the sudden leap of Elizabeth’s fear. Cecil loudly asked Nicholas Bacon a question and tried to fill the silence with talk. He glanced back. Catherine was talking steadily and quietly to the queen, reassuring her that she was safe, that there was nothing to fear. Elizabeth managed to smile, Catherine patted her hand, and the two women turned back to the court.

Elizabeth glanced around. Count von Helfenstein, the Austrian ambassador representing the Archduke Ferdinand, was just coming into the long gallery. Elizabeth went toward him with her hands outstretched.

“Ah, Count,” she said warmly. “I was just complaining that there was no one to divert me on this cold day, and praise be! here you are like a swallow in springtime!”

He bowed over her hands and kissed them.

“Now,” she said, drawing him to walk beside her through the court. “You must tell me all about Vienna and the ladies’ fashions. How do they wear their hoods, and what sort of ladies does the Archduke Ferdinand admire?”

Amy’s energy and determination to meet her husband meant that she had packed her goods and clothes, organized her escort, and said farewell to her cousins within days. Her spirits did not flag on the long journey from Camberwell to Abingdon, though they spent three nights on the road and one of them in a very inferior inn where there was nothing to eat at dinner but a thin mutton broth and only gruel for breakfast. Sometimes she rode ahead of Mrs. Oddingsell, cantering her horse on the lush spring grass verges, and the rest of the time she kept the hunter to a brisk walk. In the warm, fertile countryside with the grass greening, the pasture and the crops starting to fill the fields, the escort felt safe to drop behind the two women; there was no threat from any beggars or other travelers as the empty road wound over an empty plain, unmarked by hedges or fields.

Now and again Robert’s armed escort closed up as the way led the party through a wood of old oak trees, where some danger might be waiting, but the countryside was so open and empty, except for the solitary man plowing behind a pair of oxen, or a lad watching sheep, that it was not likely that anything could threaten Lady Dudley as she rode, merrily from one friendly house to another, secure of her welcome and hopeful of a happier future at last.

Mrs. Oddingsell, accustomed to Amy’s mercurial changes of mood which depended so much on the absence or promise of Sir Robert, let the young woman ride ahead, and smiled indulgently when she heard the snatches of song that drifted back to her.

Clearly, Sir Robert, with his candidate on the throne, with a massive income flowing into his coffers, would look around for a great house, would look around for a handsome estate, and in very short order would want to see his wife at the foot of his table and a son and heir in the nursery.

What was the value of influence at court and a fortune in the making without a son to pass it on to? What was the use of an adoring wife if not to run the estate in the country and to organize the house in London?

Amy loved Robert very deeply and would do anything to please him. She wanted him to come home to her and she had all the knowledge and skills to run a successful country estate. Mrs. Oddingsell thought that the years of Amy’s neglect and Robert’s years under the shadow of treason were over at last, and the couple could start again. They would be partners in a venture typical of their time, furthering the fortunes of a family: the man wheeling and dealing at court, while his wife managed his land and fortune in the country.

Many a good marriage had started on nothing more tender than this, and forged itself into a strong good partnership. And—who could tell?—they might even fall in love again.

Mr. Hyde’s house was a handsome place, set back a little from the village green, with a good sweep of a drive up to it and high walls built in the local stone. It had once been a farmhouse and successive additions had given it a charming higgledy-piggledy roof line, and extra wings branching from the old medieval hall. Amy had always enjoyed staying with the Hydes; Mrs. Oddingsell was sister to Mr. Hyde and there was always a warm sense of a family visit which hid the awkwardness that Amy sometimes felt when she arrived at one of Robert Dudley’s dependents. Sometimes it seemed as if she were Robert’s burden which had to be shared equally among his adherents; but with the Hydes she was among friends. The rambling farmhouse set in the wide open fields reminded her of her girlhood home in Norfolk, and the small worries of Mr. Hyde, the dampness of the hay, the yield of the barley crop, the failure of the river to flood the water meadows since a neighbor had put in an overly deep carp pond, were the trivial but fascinating business of running a country estate that Amy knew and loved.

The children were on the watch for their Aunt Lizzie and Lady Dudley; when the little cavalcade came up the drive the front door opened and they came tumbling out, waving and dancing around.

Lizzie Oddingsell tumbled off her horse and hugged them indiscriminately, and then straightened up to kiss her sister-in-law, Alice, and her brother, William.

They all three turned and hurried to help Amy down from her horse.

“My dear Lady Dudley, you are most welcome to Denchworth,” William Hyde said warmly. “And are we to expect Sir Robert?”

Her blaze of a smile warmed them all. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Within a fortnight, and I am to look for a house for us and we are going to have an estate here!”

Robert, walking around the Whitehall Palace stable yard on one of his weekly inspections, turned his head to hear a horse trotting rapidly on the cobbled road and then saw Thomas Blount jump from his hard-ridden mare, throw the reins at a stable lad, and march toward the pump as if urgently needing to sluice his head with water. Obligingly, Robert worked the pump handle.

“News from Westminster,” Thomas said quickly. “And I think I am ahead of anyone else. Perhaps of interest to you.”

“Always of interest. Information is the only true currency.”

“I have just come from parliament. Cecil has done it. They are going to pass the bill to change the church.”

“He’s done it?”

“Two bishops imprisoned, two said to be ill, and one missing. Even so, he did it by only three votes. I came away as soon as I had counted the heads and I am sure of it.”

“A new church,” Dudley said thoughtfully.

“And a new head of the church. She’s to be supreme governor.”

“Supreme governor?” Dudley demanded, querying the curious name. “Not head?”

“That’s what they said.”

“That’s an odd thing,” Dudley said, more to himself than to Blount.

“Sir?”

“Makes you think.”

“Does it?”

“Makes you wonder what she might do.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing, Blount.” Dudley nodded to the man. “My thanks.” He walked on, shouted for a stable lad to move a halter rope, finished his inspection in a state of quiet elation, then turned and went slowly up the steps toward the palace.

On the threshold he met William Cecil, dressed for the journey to his home at Theobalds.

“Oh, Lord Secretary, good day. I was just thinking about you.” Dudley greeted him jovially and patted him on the shoulder.

Cecil bowed. “I am honored to occupy your thoughts,” he said with the ironic courtesy that he often used to keep Dudley at a safe distance, and to remind them both that the old relationship of master and servant no longer applied.

“I hear you have triumphed and remade the church?” Dudley inquired.

How the devil does he know that? Cecil demanded of himself. And why can’t he just dance with her and ride with her and keep her happy till I can get her safely married to the Earl of Arran?

“Yes, a pity in many ways. But at last we have agreement,” Cecil said, gently detaching his sleeve from the younger man’s detaining hand.

“She is to be governor of the church?”

“No more and no less than her father, or her brother.”

“Surely they were called head of the church?”

“St. Paul was thought to have ruled against a woman’s ministry,” Cecil volunteered. “So she could not be called head. Governor was deemed to be acceptable. But if you are troubled in your conscience, Sir Robert, there are spiritual leaders who can guide you better than I.”

Robert gave a quick laugh at Cecil’s wonderful sarcasm. “Thank you, my lord. But my soul can generally be trusted to look after itself in these matters. Will the clergy thank you for such a thing?”

“They will not thank us,” Cecil said carefully. “But they may be coerced and slid and argued and threatened into agreement. I expect a struggle. It will not be easy.”

“And how will you coerce and slide them and argue with them and threaten them?”

Cecil raised an eyebrow. “By administering an oath, the Oath of Supremacy. It’s been done before.”

“Not to a church that was wholly opposed,” Dudley suggested.

“We have to hope that they will not be wholly opposed when it comes to a choice between swearing an oath or losing their livelihood and their freedom,” Cecil said pleasantly.

“You don’t propose to burn?” Dudley asked baldly.

“I trust it will not come to that, though her father would have done so.”

Robert nodded. “Does all the power come to her, despite the different name? Does it give her all the powers of her father? Of her brother? Is she to be Pope in England?”

Cecil gave a little dignified bow, preparatory to making his leave. “Yes indeed, and if you will excuse me…”

To his surprise the younger man no longer detained him but swept him a graceful bow and came up smiling. “Of course! I should not have delayed you, Lord Secretary. Forgive me. Are you on your way home?”

“Yes,” Cecil said. “Just for a couple of days. I shall be back in plenty of time for your investiture. I must congratulate you on the honor.”

So how does he know about that? Dudley demanded of himself. She swore to me that she would tell no one till nearer the time. Did he get it by his spies, or did she tell him herself? Does she indeed tell him everything? Aloud he said, “I thank you. I am too much honored.”

You are indeed, Cecil said to himself, returning the bow and making his way down the steps to where his short-backed horse was waiting for him, and his entourage was assembling. But why should you be so delighted that she is head of the church? What is it to you, you sly, unreliable, handsome coxcomb?

She is to be the English Pope, Robert whispered to himself, strolling like a prince at leisure in the opposite direction. The soldiers at the end of the gallery threw open the double doors for him and Robert passed through. The intense charm of his smile made them duck their heads and shuffle their feet, but his smile was not for them. He was smiling at the exquisite irony of Cecil serving Robert, all unknowing. Cecil, the great fox, had fetched home a game bird, and laid it at Robert’s feet, as obedient as a Dudley spaniel.

He has made her Pope in everything but name. She can grant a dispensation for a marriage, she can grant an annulment of a marriage, she can rule in favor of a divorce, Robert whispered to himself. He has no idea what he has done for me. By persuading those dull squires to make her supreme governor of the Church of England he has given her the power to grant a divorce. And who do we know who might benefit from that?

Elizabeth was not thinking of her handsome Master of Horse. Elizabeth was in her presence chamber, admiring a portrait of Archduke Ferdinand, her ladies around her. From the ripple of approval as they noted the Hapsburg darkness of his eyes and the high fashion of his clothes Robert, entering the room at a leisurely stroll, understood that Elizabeth was continuing her public courtship of this latest suitor.

“A handsome man,” he said, earning a smile from her. “And a good stance.”

She took a step toward him, Robert, alert as a choreographer to every move of a dance, stood stock still and let her come to him.

“You admire the archduke, Sir Robert?”

“Certainly, I admire the portrait.”

“It is a very good likeness,” the ambassador Count von Helfenstein said defensively. “The archduke has no vanity, he would not want a portrait to flatter or deceive.”

Robert shrugged, smiling. “Of course not,” he said. He turned to Elizabeth. “But how could one choose a man from canvas and paint? You would never choose a horse like that.”

“Yes; but an archduke is not a horse.”

“Well, I would want to know how my horse would move, before I gave myself up to desire for him,” he said. “I would want to put him through his paces. I would want to know how he felt when I gentled him under my hand, smoothed his neck, touched him everywhere, behind the ears, on the lips, behind the legs. I would want to know how responsive he was when I was on him, when I had him between my legs. You know, I would even want to know the smell of him, the very scent of his sweat.”

She gave a little gasp at the picture he was drawing for her, so much more vivid, so much more intimate, than the dull oil on canvas before them.

“If I were you, I would choose a husband I knew,” he said quietly to her. “A man I had tested with my own eyes, with my own fingers, whose scent I liked. I would only marry a man I knew I could desire. A man I already desired.”

“I am a maid,” she said, her voice a breath. “I desire no man.”

“Oh, Elizabeth, you lie,” he whispered with a smile.

Her eyes widened at his impertinence, but she did not check him. He took silence for encouragement, as he always would. “You lie: you do desire a man.”

“Not one who is free to marry,” she shot back.

He hesitated. “Would you want me to be free?”

At once she half turned her head away from him and he saw that he had lost her to her habitual coquetry. “Oh, were we speaking of you?”

Immediately, he let her go. “No. We are speaking of the archduke. And he is a handsome young man indeed.”

“And agreeable,” the ambassador interposed, hearing only the tail of their low-voiced conversation. “A fine scholar. His English is all but perfect.”

“I am sure,” Sir Robert replied. “Mine is remarkably good too.”

Amy was blooming in the April weather. Every day she rode out with Lizzie Oddingsell or with Alice or William Hyde to look at land that might be bought, woods that might be felled to clear a space for a house, or farmhouses that might be rebuilt.

“Will he not want something much grander than this?” William Hyde asked her one day as they were riding around an estate of two hundred acres with a pretty red-tiled farmhouse in the center.

“We would rebuild the house, of course,” Amy said. “But we don’t need a great palace. He was very taken with my cousin’s house at Camberwell.”

“Oh, a merchant’s house in the town, yes,” Mr. Hyde agreed. “But will he not want somewhere that he can entertain the queen when the court is on progress? A house where he can entertain the whole court? A big house, more like Hampton Court, or Richmond?”

She looked quite shocked for a moment. “Oh, no,” she said. “He wants something that we would have as our home, that would feel like a proper home. Not a great big palace of a place. And surely the queen would stay at Oxford if she came to this part of the country?”

“If she wanted to hunt?” Alice suggested. “He is her Master of Horse. Would he not want enough land for a great deer park?”

Amy’s confident laugh rang out. “Ah, you would have me buy the New Forest!” she exclaimed. “No. What we want is a place like my home in Norfolk, but just a little bigger. Somewhere like Flitcham Hall that we nearly bought, just a little grander and bigger than that. Somewhere that we can add a wing and a gateway, so that it is a handsome house, he would not want anything mean, and with pleasure gardens and an orchard and fish ponds of course, and some pretty woods and some good rides, and the rest would be farmland and he will breed horses for the court. He spends all his time in palaces; he will want to come home to a house which feels like a home and not a great cathedral filled by a band of mummers, which is what the royal palaces are like.”

“If you are sure it is what he wants, then we can ask them the price for this place,” William Hyde said cautiously, still unconvinced. “But perhaps we should write to him to make sure he does not want something more imposing, with more chambers, and more land.”

“There is no need,” Amy said confidently. “I know what my husband wants. We have been waiting to make a home like this for years.”

Robert Dudley was deep in planning the greatest court feast since the high point of the queen’s coronation. Ostensibly it was to honor St. George’s Day, the great day of English celebration that the Tudors had introduced to the court calendar. It would be the day that he and three other great noblemen accepted the Order of the Garter, the highest award of chivalry, from the queen’s hand. The order was given only to men who had excelled themselves in defense of the crown. The queen was awarding it to Robert Dudley; to her young kinsman Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk; to Sir William Parr, her late stepmother’s brother; and to the Earl of Rutland.

There were those who suggested that Robert Dudley was an odd addition to this array of family, or senior councillors, and perhaps, since he had been part of the expedition that had lost Calais for England, he had not made a particularly dazzling defense of the realm.

Also, said the gossips, planning a few processions could hardly qualify a man for the highest order of English chivalry, especially since his grandfather and father had been condemned traitors. How could a man like Robert Dudley have earned such exceptional honor? But no one said it very loud. And no one said it anywhere near the queen.

There would be jousting all the afternoon, the knights would come into the jousting ring in costume and in disguises, they would recite witty and beautiful verses to explain their role. The theme of the feast was to be Arthurian.

“Is it Camelot?” Sir Francis Knollys asked Robert with gentle irony, in the tilt yard, where he was supervising the flying of the flags with medieval crests. “Are we enchanted?”

“I hope you will be enchanted,” Robert said pleasantly.

“Why Camelot, exactly?” Sir Francis was determinedly uncomprehending.

Dudley dragged his eyes from the tilt yard which was being swatched in gold cloth, economically saved and reused from the coronation pageants. “Obvious.”

“Not to me. Tell me,” Sir Francis pleaded.

“Beautiful queen,” Robert said shortly, ticking off the elements on his long, slim fingers. “Perfect England. Unified under one magical monarch. No religious issues, no marriage issues, no bloody Scots. Camelot. Harmony. And the adoration of the Lady.”

“The Lady?” Sir Francis queried, thinking of the shrines all around England to the Lady Mary, mother of Jesus, now slowly falling into disuse, as the country people were persuaded that what had been the core of their honest faith was error, even heresy.

“The Lady. The queen. Elizabeth,” Robert replied. “The Queen of Our Hearts, the Queen of the Joust, in her summertime court, ruling forever. Hurrah.”

“Hurrah,” Sir Francis chorused obediently. “But hurrah to what exactly? Unless to celebrate your ascent to the Order of the Garter, for which greatest congratulations.”

Robert flushed slightly. “I thank you,” he said with simple dignity. “But it is not to celebrate my honor. It goes further, far beyond someone as humble as me, far beyond the noble lords, even.”

“Goes?”

“Out to the country. To the people. Every time we have a pageant or a day of festivities, it is copied, in every town and every village up and down the country. Don’t you think that giving them all the idea that the queen is a ruler as wonderful as Arthur reminds them that they should love and revere and defend her? Reminding them that she is young and beautiful and that her court is the most handsome of all of Europe doesn’t just play well in England; the word goes everywhere: to Paris, to Madrid, to Brussels. They have to admire her, so they have to recognize her power. It makes her as safe as Cecil’s treaty.”

“I see you are a politician,” Sir Francis said. “And it is as we agreed. That she should be seen to be loveable so that she is beloved, so that they will keep her safe.”

“Please God,” Robert assented, and then made a little irritated tut as a clumsy pageboy dropped his end of a bolt of cloth and it trailed on the tilt yard’s sandy floor. “Pick it up, lad! It’s getting dirty!”

“And have you thought of her safety at this day?” Sir Francis confirmed. “Most of the people have heard now that the Pope has blessed an attack on her.”

Dudley faced him. “I think of nothing but her safety,” he said flatly. “Night and day. I think of nothing but her. You will find no more faithful man in her service. I think of her as if my life depended on it. Indeed, my life does depend on it.”

Sir Francis nodded. “I don’t doubt you,” he said honestly. “But these are anxious times. I know that Cecil has a spy network across all of Europe to catch anyone who might come to England to threaten her. But what of Englishmen? Men and women that have passed as our friends? People who might even now be thinking that it is their duty, their sacred duty, to assassinate her?”

Robert squatted down and drew with his finger on the sandy floor of the jousting arena. “Royal entrance here. Only members of the court allowed in. Merchants, citizens of London, general gentry here: kept from her by the gentlemen pensioners. Apprentices here, farther back: since they are always the worst troublemakers. Country people, anyone who has come here without invitation, farther back still. At each corner an armed man. Cecil’s men to go among the crowds, watching. I have a few trusted men of my own who will pass around and keep their eyes open.”

“But what about the threat from her friends? Gentry and nobility?” Sir Francis asked softly.

Robert rose up and brushed off his hands. “Pray God that they all now understand that their loyalty is first to her, however they like to celebrate Mass.” He paused. “And, to tell you the truth, most of those that you would doubt are already being watched,” he volunteered.

Sir Francis gave a sharp crack of laughter. “By your men?”

“Mostly Cecil’s,” Robert said. “He has hundreds in his secret employ.”

“Now there is a man I would not want for my enemy,” Sir Francis remarked cheerfully.

“Only if you were certain you could win,” Robert replied smoothly. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a pageboy unrolling a pennant and hauling it up a pole. “You! Look at what you’re doing! That’s upside down!”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Sir Francis said, retreating as if in fear that he would be sent up a ladder.

Robert grinned at him. “Aye. I’ll call you when the work is over,” he said cheekily, and strode to the center stage. “I imagine you will return in good time for the feast once all the hard work is done. Are you jousting?”

“Good God, yes! I shall be a very noble gentil parfit knight! I shall be the very flower of chivalry. I am off now to polish my shield and my couplets,” Sir Francis called mockingly from the stand. “Sing hey nonny nonny, sweet Robin!”

“Hey nonny nonny!” Robert shouted back, laughing.

He returned to his work, smiling at the exchange, and then he had a sense of being watched. It was Elizabeth, standing alone on the platform that would be decked out as the royal box, looking down at the empty jousting rails and the sandy arena.

Robert scrutinized her for a moment, noted her stillness, and the slight droop of her head. Then he picked up a flagpole as if still at work, and strolled past the royal box.

“Oh!” he exclaimed, as if he suddenly saw her. “Your Grace!”

She smiled at him and came to the front of the box. “Hello, Robert.”

“Thoughtful?”

“Yes.”

He wondered if she had overheard their conversation about the danger she walked through every day, if she had heard them name the dangers from every sort of person, from the lowest apprentices to her closest friends. How could a young woman bear to know that she was hated by her own people? That the greatest spiritual power in Christendom had declared her fit to die?

He stuck the flagpole in its stand and came before the box and looked up. “Anything I can help you with, my princess?”

Elizabeth gave him a shy little smile. “I don’t know what to do.”

He did not understand her. “Do? Do about what?”

She leaned over the rail of the box so that she could speak softly. “I don’t know what to do at a tournament.”

“You must have been to hundreds of tournaments.”

“No, very few. I was not that often at court during my father’s reign, and Mary’s court was not merry and I was imprisoned for most of the time.”

Again Robert was reminded that she had been in exile for most of her girlhood. She had educated herself with the passion of a scholar, but she had not prepared herself for the trivial entertainments of court life. She could not do so; there was no way to be at ease in the palaces or at the great events except through familiarity. He might relish the wit of thinking of a new theme to flavor a traditional event, but he knew the traditional event as one who had attended every joust since first coming to court, and indeed, had won most of them.

Robert’s desire was to outdo the tournaments and entertainments that he knew only too well; Elizabeth’s desire was to get through them without betraying her lack of ease.

“But you like jousting?” he confirmed.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “And I understand the rules but not how I should behave, and when to clap, and when to show favor, and all the rest of it.”

He thought for a moment. “Shall I make you out a plan?” he asked gently. “Like I did for your coronation procession? So that it shows you where you should be and what you should do and say at each point?”

At once she looked happier. “Yes. That would be good. Then I could enjoy the day instead of worrying about it.”

He smiled. “And shall I make you a plan for the ceremony of the Order of the Garter?”

“Yes,” she said eagerly. “Thomas Howard told me what I should do but I couldn’t remember it all.”

“How would he know?” Dudley said dismissively. “He was hardly uppermost at court in the last three reigns.”

She smiled at his habitual rivalry with the duke, her uncle, their contemporary in age, and Robert’s lifelong rival.

“Well, I will write it out for you,” Robert said. “May I come to your room before dinner and go through it with you?”

“Yes,” she said. Impulsively she reached down her hand to him. He stretched up and could reach only her fingertips with his own, he kissed his hand and reached up to touch hers.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly, her fingertips lingering against his.

“I’ll always tell you, I’ll always help you,” he promised her. “Now that I know, I will draw you a table to show you where to go and what to do for every event. So that you always know. And when you have been to a dozen jousts you can tell me that you want it done differently, and you shall be the one that draws it up for me and shows me how you want everything changed.”

Elizabeth smiled at that and then she turned and went from the royal box, leaving him with an odd sensation of tenderness toward her. Sometimes she was not like a queen come by luck and cunning to greatness. Sometimes she was more like a young girl with a task too difficult to manage alone. He was accustomed to desiring women; he was accustomed to using them. But for a moment in the half-prepared tilt yard he felt a new sensation for him—tenderness, of wanting her happiness more than his own.

Lizzie Oddingsell wrote a letter to Amy’s dictation, and then Amy copied it herself, laboriously making the letters march straight along the ruled lines.Dear Husband,

I hope this finds you in good health. I am happy and well, staying with our dear friends the Hydes. I think I have found us a house and land, as you asked me to do. I think you will be very pleased with it. Mr. Hyde has spoken to the squire who is selling up owing to ill health and has no son to come after him, and he says that he is asking a fair price.

I will go no further until I have your instructions, but perhaps you will come and see the house and land very soon. Mr. and Mrs. Hyde send you their good wishes and this basket of early salad leaves. Lady Robsart tells me we have eighty lambs born this year at Stanfield, our best ever year. I hope you will come soon.

Your devoted wife

Amy Dudley

PS I do hope you will come soon, husband

Amy walked to church across the park with Mrs. Oddingsell, over the village green through the lych-gate into the churchyard and then into the cool, changeless gloom of the parish church.

Yet, it was not changeless, it was strangely changed. Amy looked around and saw a new great brass lectern at the head of the aisle and the Bible spread out on it, wide open as if anyone could be allowed to read it. The altar, where it was usually kept, was conspicuously empty. Amy and Lizzie Oddingsell exchanged one silent look and shut them selves into the Hyde family pew. The service proceeded in English, not the more familiar Latin, following King Edward’s prayer book rather than the beloved Mass. Amy bowed her head over the new words and tried to feel the presence of God, even though his church was changed, and the language was changed, and the Host was hidden.

It came to the moment for the priest to pray for the queen, and he did so, his voice shaking only a little, but when it came for him to pray for their beloved bishop, Thomas Goldwell, the tears in his voice stopped him from speaking altogether and he fell silent. The clerk finished the prayer for him and the service went on, ending with the usual bidding prayer and blessing.

“You go on,” Amy whispered to her friend. “I want to pray for a moment.”

She waited until the church was empty, and then she came from the Hyde pew. The priest was on his knees at the rood screen, Amy quietly went and knelt beside him.

“Father?”

He turned his head. “Daughter?”

“Is there something wrong?”

He nodded. His head bowed low as if he were ashamed. “They are saying that our Bishop Thomas is not our bishop at all.”

“How is this?” she asked.

“They are saying that the queen has not appointed him to Oxford, and yet he is no longer Bishop of St. Asaph. They are saying that he is betwixt and between, that he belongs nowhere, is bishop of nothing.”

“Why would they say such a thing?” she demanded. “They must know he is a good and holy man, and he left St. Asaph to come to Oxford. He is appointed by the Pope.”

“You should know as well as I,” he said wearily. “Your husband knows how this court works.”

“He does not…confide in me,” she said, picking the right word carefully. “Not about court matters.”

“They know our bishop is a man faithful till death,” the priest said sadly. “They know he was Cardinal Pole’s dearest friend, was at his deathbed, he gave him the last sacraments. They know he will not turn his coat to please this queen. He would not dishonor the Host as he is ordered to do. I think they will first strip him of his Holy Office, by this sleight of hand, and then murder him.”

Amy gasped. “Not again,” she said. “Not more killing. Not another Thomas More!”

“He has been ordered to appear before the queen. I am afraid it is to go to his death.”

Amy nodded, white-faced.

“Lady Robsart, your husband is spoken of as one of the greatest men at court. Can you ask him to intercede for our bishop? I swear Father Thomas has never spoken a word against the accession of the queen, never a word against her as queen. He has only spoken out, as God has commanded him to do, in defense of our Holy Church.”

“I cannot,” she said simply. “Father, forgive me, God forgive me, but I cannot. I have no influence. My husband does not take my advice on court matters, on policy. He does not even know I think on such matters! I cannot advise him, and he would not listen to me.”

“Then I will pray for you, that he turns to you,” the priest said gently. “And if God moves him to listen, then, daughter: you speak. This is the life of our bishop at stake.”

Amy bowed her head. “I will do what I can,” she promised without much hope.

“God bless you, child, and guide you.”

Robert’s clerk handed him Amy’s letter on the afternoon after his investiture as a knight of the garter. Robert had just hung the blue silk of the garter over the back of a chair and stepped back to admire it. Then he pulled on a new doublet, scanned the letter swiftly, and handed it back.

“Write her that I am busy now, but I will come as soon as I can,” he said as he opened the door. His hand on the latch, he realized that the ill-formed letters were Amy’s own hand, and that she must have dedicated hours to writing to him.

“Tell her that I am very glad she wrote to me herself,” he said. “And send her a small purse of money to buy gloves or something she wants.”

He paused, with a nagging sense that he should do more; but then he heard the herald’s trumpet sound get the jousting and there was no time. “Tell her I’ll come at once,” he said, and turned and ran lightly downstairs to the stable yard.

The joust had all the pageantry and color that Elizabeth loved, with knights in disguise singing her praises, and composing extempore verses. The ladies gave out favors and the knights wore their ladies’ colors over their heart. The queen was wearing one glove of white silk and holding the other in her hand, when she leaned forward to wish Sir Robert the best of fortune as he came to the royal box to look up at her, high above him, and pay his respects.

Accidentally, as she leaned forward, the glove slipped through her fingers, and it fell. At once, almost quicker than anyone could see, he had spurred his horse on, the great warhorse wheeled, responsive at once, and he caught the glove in mid-air before it fell to the ground.

“Thank you!” Elizabeth called. She nodded to a page boy. “Fetch my glove from Sir Robert.”

With one hand holding back the curvetting big horse, he raised his visor with his other hand and put the glove to his lips.

Elizabeth, her color rising, watched him kiss her glove, did not demand its return, did not laugh away the gesture as part of the jousting courtesies.

“May I not keep it?” he asked.

She recovered herself a little. “Since you so cleverly caught it,” she said lightly.

Robert brought his horse a little closer. “I thank you, my queen, for dropping it for me.”

“I dropped it by accident,” she said.

“I caught it by intent,” he replied, his dark eyes gleaming at her, and tucked it carefully inside his breastplate, wheeled his horse around, and rode down to the end of the lists.

They jousted all afternoon in the hot April sunshine and when the evening came the queen invited all her special guests onto the river for an evening sail in the barges. Londoners, who had expected this end to the day, had begged and borrowed and hired boats in their thousands, and the river was as crowded as a marketplace with boats and barges flying gaily colored pennants and streamers, and every third craft with a singer or a lute player on board so that haunting tunes drifted across the water from one boat to another.

Robert and Elizabeth were in the queen’s barge with Catherine and Sir Francis Knollys, Lady Mary Sidney and her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, a couple of the queen’s other ladies, Laetitia Knollys, and another maid of honor.

A musicians’ barge rowed beside them and the lingering notes of love songs drifted across the water, as the rowers kept pace to the gentle beat of a drum. The sun, setting among clouds of rose and gold, laid a path across the darkening Thames as if it would lead them all the way inland to the very heart of England.

Elizabeth leaned on the gold-leafed railing of the barge and looked out at the lapping waters of the river, and the panorama of the pleasure boats keeping pace with her own, at the bobbing lanterns which illuminated their own reflections in the water. Robert joined her and they stood side by side for a long while, watching the river in silence.

“You know, this has been the most perfect day of my life,” Elizabeth said quietly to Robert.

For a moment the constant erotic tension between them was eased. Robert smiled at her, the affectionate smile of an old friend. “I am glad,” he said simply. “I would wish you many more such days, Elizabeth. You have been generous to me and I thank you.”

She turned and smiled at him, their faces so close that his breath stirred a strand of hair that had escaped from her hood.

“You still have my glove,” she whispered.

“You have my heart.”

Generous indeed, William Cecil said drily to himself, as the court rode out on May Day morning to visit Robert Dudley in his new home of the Dairy House at Kew, an enchantingly pretty place built at the very edge of the park, just ten minute’s walk from the palace. A flight of grand white stone steps led to a double-height arched double door, framed by two windows. Inside, a great hall gave way to small, intimate retiring rooms that overlooked the gardens on each side. A hedge bordered the front of the house with two perfectly pruned trees as round as plums, on sentinel each side.

Robert Dudley greeted the small party at the front door and led them straight through the house to the pretty walled garden at the back. It was planted partly with flowers and partly as an orchard, very much in the new fashion of making a garden appear as much as possible like a flowery mead. A table was spread with a white linen cloth and a breakfast was ready for the queen. In a typical Dudley conceit, all the servants were dressed as milkmaids or shepherds, and there was a little flock of lambs, absurdly dyed the Tudor colors of green and white, gamboling under the blossom in the apple orchard.

Elizabeth clapped her hands in delight at the sight of it all.

“Oh, Robert, this is exquisite!”

“I thought you would like to be a simple country girl for the day,” he said quietly into her ear.

She turned to him. “Did you? Why?”

He shrugged. “A crown is a weight as well as an honor. The people who flock about you all the time always take from you; they never give. I wanted you to have a day that was filled with pleasure and laughter, a day for a pretty girl, not an overburdened queen.”

She nodded. “You understand. They want so much of me,” she said resentfully.

“And these new suitors the worst,” he said. “The two Hapsburg dukes, who want your glory to hitch them up from poor dukes in Austria to King of England in one great leap! Or the Earl of Arran, who wants to drag you into war with Scotland! They offer you nothing, and expect everything in return.”

Elizabeth frowned, and for a moment he was afraid he had gone too far. Then she said, “All they offer me is trouble, but what they want from me is everything that I am.”

“They want nothing of you,” he corrected her. “Not the real you. They want the crown or the throne or the heir that you might give them. But they are counterfeit suitors, false gold, they do not know you, or love you as I…” He broke off.

She leaned forward, she could feel his warm breath on her face and he saw her breathe in with him.

“You?” she prompted.

“As I do,” he whispered very low.

“Are we going to eat?” Cecil demanded plaintively, from the group waiting behind them. “I am weak with hunger. Sir Robert, you are a very Tantalus to spread a feast before us but never to bid us to dine.”

Robert laughed and turned away from the queen, who took a moment to recover her sense of the others, of the eyes upon them, of the tables laid with the snowy cloths in the sunshine-filled orchard. “Please…” he said, gesturing like a grand lord that they should take their places.

They sat down to a breakfast that was as sophisticated as an Italian banquet but served with the stylish insouciance that was Dudley’s signature, and then, when the meal was ended and the sugared plums were on the table, the shepherds and the milkmaids performed a country dance, and sang a song in praise of the shepherdess queen. A small boy, blond and cherubic, stepped forward and recited a poem to Elizabeth, Queen of all the Shepherds and Shepherdesses, and presented her with a crown of may, and a peeled wand of willow, and then a band of musicians, uncomfortably hidden in the branches of the apple trees, played an opening chord and Robert offered Elizabeth his hand and led her out in a country dance, a May Day dance on this very day for courtship, when tradition had it that even the birds were marrying.

Pretty enough, William Cecil said to himself, glancing at the sun which was now almost overhead. Half the day wasted and a mountain of letters for me to read when I get back to court. Bad news from Scot land, no doubt, and still no money forthcoming from the queen to support our coreligionists, though they beg us for our help and demand, with reason, what we think we are doing: abandoning them when they are on the very brink of victory?

He looked a little closer. Robert Dudley’s hand was not where it should be, on the queen’s back as he guided her forward in the steps of the dance, but around her waist. And she, far from standing upright as she always did, was most definitely leaning toward him. One might almost say yearning, he thought.

Cecil’s first thought was for her reputation, and the marriage plans. He glanced around. Praise God, they were among friends: the Knollys, the Sidneys, the Percys. The queen’s irritable young uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, would not like to see his kinswoman in the arms of a man as if she were some serving wench at a roadside inn, but he would hardly report her to the Hapsburg ambassador. There might be spying servants in the party, but their words would carry little weight. Everyone knew that Elizabeth and Dudley were intimate friends. There was no harm done by the evident affection between the young couple.

And yet, Cecil said quietly to himself. And yet, we should get her married. If she lets him caress her, we’re safe enough, he is married and can do no more but light a fire which will have to burn out. But what if a single man took her fancy? If Dudley arouses her desires, what if some clever young buck presents himself, and happens to be both handsome and free? What if she thought to marry for love and undo England’s policy for a girl’s whim? Better get her married and soon.

Amy was waiting for Robert’s arrival.

The whole household was waiting for Robert’s arrival.

“Are you sure that he said he was coming at once?” David Hyde asked his sister, Elizabeth Oddingsell, the second week in May.

“You saw the letter as well as I,” she said. “First his clerk wrote he was busy but that he would come as soon as he could, then in the second sentence he corrects the first and says that he will come at once.”

“My cousin in London, who is kin to the Seymour family, says that he is all day every day with the queen,” Alice Hyde observed. “She went to the St. George’s Day joust and she heard someone say that he carried the queen’s glove in his breastplate.”

Lizzie shrugged. “He is her Master of Horse; of course she favors him.”

“Mr. Hyde’s cousin says that in the evening he sailed with her in the royal barge.”

“As he should be, honored among others,” Lizzie maintained stoutly.

“She visited him for a May Day breakfast at his new house at Kew and stayed all the day.”

“Of course,” Lizzie said patiently. “A court breakfast might well last for most of the day.”

“Well, my cousin says that the word is that she never lets him out of her sight. He is at her side all day and they dance together every night. She says that the queen’s own kinsman the Duke of Norfolk has sworn that if he dishonors her, he is a dead man, and he would not make such a threat lightly or for no reason.”

Lizzie’s look at her sister-in-law was neither sisterly nor warm. “Your cousin is obviously well informed,” she said irritably. “But you can remind her that Sir Robert is a married man about to buy land and build his first house with his wife and that this will happen at any day now. Remind her that he married his wife for love, and that they are planning their life together. And you can tell her that there is a world of difference between courtly love, which is all show and fol-derol and poetry and singing, done by every man at court to please the queen, and real life. And your cousin should bite her tongue before she gossips about her betters.”

The Spanish ambassador, Count Feria, deeply weary of the dance of Elizabeth’s courtship which he had gone through once on account of his master, Philip of Spain, did not think he could bear to watch it played out all over again with a fellow ambassador and another suitor: the Hapsburg archduke. At last, King Philip responded to his pleas and agreed to replace him with another ambassador: the astute Bishop de Quadra. Count Feria, barely able to hide his relief, asked Cecil for permission to take his leave of Elizabeth.

The experienced ambassador and the young queen were old adversaries. He had been the most loyal advisor to Queen Mary Tudor and had recommended consistently and publicly that she execute her troublesome heir and half-sister, Elizabeth. They were his spies who over and over again brought evidence of Elizabeth plotting with English rebels, plotting with French spies, plotting with the magician Dr. Dee, plotting with anyone who would offer to overthrow her sister by treason, by foreign armies, or by magic.

He had been Mary’s truest and steadiest friend and he had fallen in love and married her most constant lady-in-waiting, Jane Dormer. Queen Mary would have released her beloved friend to no one but the Spanish ambassador, and she gave them her blessing on her deathbed.

Obeying tradition, the count brought his wife to court to say her farewell to her queen, and Jane Dormer, holding her head very high, walked into Whitehall Palace once more, having walked out of it in disgust the day that Elizabeth became queen. Now a Spanish countess, her belly curved with pregnancy, Jane Dormer returned, pleased to be saying good-bye. As luck would have it, the first person she met was a face from the old court: the royal fool, Will Somers.

“How now, Jane Dormer,” he said warmly. “Or do I call you my lady countess?”

“You can call me Jane,” she said. “As ever. How are you, Will?”

“Amusing,” he said. “This is a court ready to be amused, but I fear for my post.”

“Oh?” she asked.

The lady-in-waiting who was escorting Jane to the queen paused for the jest.

“In a court in which every man is played for a fool, why should anyone pay me?” he asked.

Jane laughed out loud. The lady-in-waiting giggled. “Give you good day, Will,” Jane said fondly.

“Aye, you will miss me when you are in Spain,” he said. “But not miss much else, I would guess?”

Jane shook her head. “The best of England left it in November.”

“God rest her soul,” Will said. “She was a most unlucky queen.”

“And this one?” Jane asked him.

Will cracked a laugh. “She has all the luck of her sire,” he said with wonderful ambiguity, since Jane’s conviction would always be that Elizabeth was the child of Mark Smeaton, the lute player, and his luck was stretched to breaking point on the rack before he danced on air from the gallows.

Jane gleamed at the private, treasonous joke, and then followed the lady-in-waiting toward the queen’s presence chamber.

“You’re to wait here, Countess,” the lady said abruptly, and showed Jane into an anteroom. Jane rested one hand in the small of her back and leaned against the windowsill.

There was no chair in the room, no stool, no window seat, not even a table that she might lean on.

Minutes passed. A wasp, stumbling out of its winter sleep, struggled against the leaded window pane and fell silent on the sill. Jane shifted her weight from one foot to another, feeling the ache in her back.

It was stuffy in the room, the ache in the small of her back traveled down to the calves of her legs. Jane flexed her feet, going up and down on her toes, trying to relieve the pain. In her belly, the child shifted and kicked. She put her hand on her stomacher and stepped to the window embrasure. She looked out of the window to the inner garden. Whitehall Palace was a warren of buildings and inner courts; this one had a small walnut tree growing in the center with a circular bench around it. As Jane watched, a pageboy and a serving maid loitered for five precious minutes whispering secrets and then scampered off in opposite directions.

Jane smiled. This palace had been her home as the favorite lady-in-waiting of the queen, and she thought that she and the Spanish ambassador had met by that very seat themselves. There had been a brief, joyful time, one summer, between the queen’s wedding and her triumphant announcement that she was with child, when this had been a happy court, the center of world power, united with Spain, confident of an heir, and ruled by a woman who had come to her own at last.

Jane shrugged. Queen Mary’s disappointment and death had been the end of it all, and now her bright, deceitful little half-sister was sitting in her place, and using that place to insult Jane by this discourteous delay. It was, Jane thought, a petty revenge on a dead woman, not worthy of a queen.

Jane heard a clock strike from somewhere in the palace. She had planned to visit the queen before her dinner and already she had been kept waiting for half an hour. She felt a little light-headed from lack of food and hoped she would not be such a fool as to faint when she was finally admitted to the presence chamber.

She waited. More long minutes passed. Jane wondered if she could just slip away; but that would be such an insult to the queen from the wife of the Spanish ambassador that it would be enough to cause an international incident. But this long waiting was, in itself, an insult to Spain. Jane sighed. Elizabeth must still be a filled with spite, if she would take such a risk for the small benefit of insulting such a very unimportant person as herself.

At last the door opened. The lady-in-waiting looked miserably embarrassed. “Do forgive me. Will you come this way, Countess?” she asked politely.

Jane stepped forward and felt her head swim. She clenched her fists and her nails dug into the palms of her hands so the pain of it distracted her from her dizziness and from the ache in her back. Not long now, she said to herself. She can’t keep me on my feet for much longer.

Elizabeth’s presence chamber was hot and crowded, the lady-in-waiting threaded through the many people and a few of them smiled and acknowledged Jane, who had been well liked when she had served Queen Mary. Elizabeth, standing in blazing sunlight in the center of a window bay, deep in conversation with one of her Privy Councillors, seemed not to see her. The lady-in-waiting led Jane right up to her mistress. Still there was no acknowledgment. Jane stood and waited.

At last Elizabeth concluded the animated conversation and looked around. “Ah, Countess Feria!” she exclaimed. “I hope you have not been kept waiting?”

Jane’s smile was queenly. “Not at all,” she said smoothly. Her head was thudding now and her mouth was dry. She was very afraid of fainting at Elizabeth’s feet; there was little more than determination holding her up.

She could not see Elizabeth’s face, the window was a blaze of white light behind her, but she knew the taunting smile and the dancing black eyes.

“And you are expecting a child,” Elizabeth said sweetly. “Within a few months?”

There was a suppressed gasp from the court. A birth within a few months would mean that the child had been conceived before the wedding.

Jane’s calm expression never wavered. “In the autumn, Your Grace,” she said steadily.

Elizabeth fell silent.

“I have come to bid you farewell, Queen Elizabeth,” Jane said with glacial courtesy. “My husband is returning to Spain and I am going with him.”

“Ah yes, you are a Spaniard now,” Elizabeth said, as if it were a disease that Jane had caught.

“A Spanish countess,” Jane replied smoothly. “Yes, we have both changed our places in the world since we last met, Your Grace.”

It was a shrewd reminder. Jane had seen Elizabeth on her knees and weeping with pretended penitence before her sister, had seen Elizabeth bloated with illness, under house arrest, under charge of treason, sick with terror, begging for a hearing.

“Well, I wish you a good journey anyway,” Elizabeth said carelessly.

Jane sank to the ground in a perfect courtly curtsy; no one could have known that she was on the very edge of losing consciousness. She rose up and saw the room swim before her eyes, and then she walked backward from the throne, one smooth step after another, her rich gown held out of the way of her scarlet high heels, her head up, her lips smiling. She did not turn until she reached the door. Then she flicked her skirt around and left, without a backward glance.

“She did what?” Cecil demanded incredulously of an excitable Laetitia Knollys, reporting, as she was paid to do, on the doings of the queen’s private rooms.

“Kept her waiting for a full half hour, and then suggested that she had the baby in her belly before marriage,” Laetitia whispered breathlessly.

They were in Cecil’s dark paneled study, the shutters closed although it was full day, a trusted man on the door and Cecil’s other rooms barred to visitors.

He frowned slightly. “And Jane Dormer?”

“She was like a queen,” Laetitia said. “She spoke graciously, she curtsyed—you should have seen her curtsy—she went out as if she despised us all, but gave said not one word of protest. She made Elizabeth look like a fool.”

Cecil frowned slightly. “Watch your speech, little madam,” he said firmly. “I would have been whipped if I had called my king a fool.”

Laetitia bowed her bronze head.

“Did Elizabeth say anything when she had gone?”

“She said that Jane reminded her of her sour-faced old sister and thank God those days were past.”

He nodded. “Anyone reply?”

“No!” Laetitia was bubbling with gossip. “Everyone was so shocked that Elizabeth should be so …so…” She had no words for it.

“So what?”

“So nasty! So rude! She was so unkind! And to such a nice woman! And her with child! And the wife of the Spanish ambassador! Such an insult to Spain!”

Cecil nodded. It was a surprising indiscretion for such a controlled young woman, he thought. Probably the relic of some foolish women’s quarrel that had rumbled on for years. But it was unlike Elizabeth to show her hand with quite such vulgarity. “I think you will find that she can be very nasty,” was all he said to the girl. “You had better make sure you never give her cause.”

Her head came up at that, her dark eyes, Boleyn eyes, looked at him frankly. She smoothed her bronze hair under her cap. She smiled, that bewitching, sexually aware Boleyn smile. “How can I help it?” she asked him limpidly. “She only has to look at me to hate me.”

Later that night Cecil called for fresh candles and another log for the fire. He was writing to Sir James Croft, an old fellow-plotter. Sir James was at Berwick but Cecil had decided that the time had come for him to visit Perth.

Scotland is a tinderbox, he wrote in the code that he and Sir James had used to each other since Mary Tudor’s spy service had intercepted their letters, and John Knox is the spark that will set it alight. My commission for you is to go to Perth and do nothing more than observe. You should get there before the forces of the queen regent arrive. My guess is that you will see John Knox preaching the freedom of Scotland to an enthusiastic crowd. I should like to know how enthusiastic and how effective. You will have to make haste because the queen regent’s men may arrest him. He and the Scottish Protestant lords have asked for our help but I would know what sort of men they are before I commit the queen. Talk to them, take their measure. If they would celebrate their victory by turning the country against the French, and in alliance with us, they can be encouraged. And let me know at once. Information is a better coin than gold here.

Summer 1559

ROBERT FINALLY ARRIVED at Denchworth in the early days of June, all smiles and apologies for his absence. He told Amy that he could be excused from court for a few days since the queen, having formally refused the Archduke Ferdinand, was now inseparable from his ambassador, talking all the time about his master, and showing every sign of wishing to change her mind and marry him.

“She is driving Cecil mad,” he said, smiling. “No one knows what she intends or wants at all. She has refused him but now she talks about him all the time. She has no time for hunting, and no interest for riding. All she wants to do is to walk with the ambassador or practice her Spanish.”

Amy, with no interest in the flirtations of the queen or of her court, merely nodded at the news and tried to turn Robert’s attention to the property that she had found. She ordered horses from the stables for Robert, the Hydes, Lizzie Oddingsell, and for herself, and led the way on the pretty cross-country drover’s track to the house.

William Hyde found his way to Robert’s side. “What news of the realm?” he asked. “I hear that the bishops won’t support her.”

“They say they won’t take the oath confirming her as supreme governor,” Robert said briefly. “It is treason, as I tell her. But she is merciful.”

“What will she …er…mercifully do?” Mr. Hyde asked nervously, the burning days of Mary Tudor still very fresh in his memory.

“She’ll imprison them,” Robert said bluntly. “And replace them with Protestant clergy if she cannot find any Catholics to see reason. They have missed their chance. If they had called in the French before she was crowned they might have turned the country against her, but they have left it too late.” He grinned. “Cecil’s advice,” he said. “He had their measure. One after another of them will cave in or be replaced. They did not have the courage to rise against her with arms; they only stand against her on theological grounds, and Cecil will pick them off.”

“But she will destroy the church,” William Hyde said, shocked.

“She will break it down and make it new,” Dudley, the Protestant, said with pleasure. “She has been forced into a place where it is either the Catholic bishops or her own authority. She will have to destroy them.”

“Does she have the strength?”

Dudley raised a dark eyebrow. “It does not take much strength to imprison a bishop, as it turns out. She has half of them under house arrest already.”

“I mean strength of mind,” William Hyde said. “She is only a woman, even though a queen. Does she have the courage to go against them?”

Dudley hesitated. It was always everyone’s fear, since everyone knew that a woman could neither think nor do anything with any consistency. “She is well advised,” he said. “And her advisors are good men. We know what has to be done, and we keep her to it.”

Amy reined back her horse and joined them.

“Did you tell Her Grace that you were coming to look at a house?” she asked.

“Indeed yes,” he said cheerfully as they crested one of the rolling hills. “It’s been too long since the Dudleys had a family seat. I tried to buy Dudley Castle from my cousin, but he cannot bear to let it go. Ambrose, my brother, is looking for somewhere too. But perhaps he and his family could have a wing of this place. Is it big enough?”

“There are buildings that could be extended,” she said. “I don’t see why not.”

“And was it a monastic house, or an abbey or something?” he asked. “A good-sized place? You’ve told me nothing about it. I have been imagining a castle with a dozen pinnacles!”

“It’s not a castle,” she said, smiling. “But I think it is a very good size for us. The land is in good heart. They have farmed it in the old way, in strips, changing every Michaelmas, so it has not been exhausted. And the higher fields yield good grass for sheep, and there is a very pretty wood that I thought we might thin and cut some rides through. The water meadows are some of the richest I have ever seen, the milk from the cows must be almost solid cream. The house itself is a little too small, of course, but if we added a wing we could house any guests that we had…”

She broke off as their party rounded the corner in the narrow lane and Robert saw the farmhouse before him. It was long and low, an animal barn at the west end built of worn red brick and thatched in straw like the house, only a thin wall separating the beasts from the inhabitants. A small tumbling-down stone wall divided the house from the lane and inside it, a flock of hens scratched at what had once been a herb garden but was now mostly weeds and dust. To the side of the ramshackle building, behind the steaming midden, was a thickly planted orchard, boughs leaning down to the ground and a few pigs rooting around. Ducks paddled in the weedy pond beyond the orchard; swallows swooped from pond to barn, building their nests with beakfuls of mud.

The front door stood open, propped with a lump of rock. Robert could glimpse a low, stained ceiling and an uneven floor of stone slabs scattered with stale herbs but the rest of the interior was hidden in the gloom since there were almost no windows, and choked with smoke since there was no chimney but only a hole in the roof.

He turned to Amy and stared at her as if she were a fool, brought to beg for his mercy. “You thought that I would want to live here?” he asked incredulously.

“Just as I predicted,” William Hyde muttered quietly and pulled his horse gently away from the group, nodding to his wife for her to come with him, out of earshot.

“Why, yes,” Amy said, still smiling confidently. “I know the house is not big enough, but that barn could become another wing, it is high enough to build a floor in the eaves, just as they did at Hever, and then you have bedrooms above and a hall below.”

“And what plans did you have for the midden?” he demanded. “And the duck pond?”

“We would clear the midden, of course,” she said, laughing at him. “That would never do! It would be the first thing, of course. But we could spread it on the garden and plant some flowers.”

“And the duck pond? Is that to become an ornamental lake?”

At last she heard the biting sarcasm in his tone. She turned in genuine surprise. “Don’t you like it?”

He closed his eyes and saw at once the doll’s-house prettiness of the Dairy House at Kew, and the breakfast served by shepherdesses in the orchard with the tame lambs dyed green and white, skipping around the table. He thought of the great houses of his boyhood, of the serene majesty of Syon House, of Hampton Court, one of his favorite homes and one of the great palaces of Europe, of the Nonsuch at Sheen, or the Palace at Greenwich, of the walled solidity of Windsor, of Dudley Castle, his family seat. Then he opened his eyes and saw, once again, this place that his wife had chosen: a house built of mud on a plain of mud.

“Of course I don’t like it. It is a hovel,” he said flatly. “My father used to keep his sows in better sties than this.”

For once, she did not crumple beneath his disapproval. He had touched her pride, her judgment in land and property.

“It is not a hovel,” she replied. “I have been all over it. It is soundly built from brick and lathe and plaster. The thatch is only twenty years old. It needs more windows, for sure, but they are easily made. We would rebuild the barn, we would enclose a pleasure garden, the orchard could be lovely, the pond could be a boating lake, and the land is very good, two hundred acres of prime land. I thought it was just what we wanted, and we could make anything we want here.”

“Two hundred acres?” he demanded. “Where are the deer to run? Where is the court to ride?”

She blinked.

“And where will the queen stay?” he demanded acerbically. “In the henhouse, out the back? And the court? Shall we knock up some hovels on the other side of the orchard? Where will the royal cooks prepare her dinner? On that open fire? And where will we stable her horses? Shall they come into the house with us, as clearly they do at present? We can expect about three hundred guests; where do you think they will sleep?”

“Why should the queen come here?” Amy asked, her mouth trembling. “Surely she will stay at Oxford. Why should she want to come here? Why would we ask her here?”

“Because I am one of the greatest men at her court!” he exclaimed, slamming his fist down on the saddle and making his horse jump and then sidle nervously. He held it on a hard rein, pulling on its mouth. “The queen herself will come and stay at my house to honor me! To honor you, Amy! I asked you to find us a house to buy. I wanted a place like Hatfield, like Theobalds, like Kenninghall. Cecil goes home to Theobalds Palace, a place as large as a village under one roof; he has a wife who rules it like a queen herself. He is building Burghley to show his wealth and his grandeur; he is shipping in stonemasons from all over Christendom. I am a better man than Cecil, God knows. I come from stock that makes him look like a sheepshearer. I want a house to match his, stone for stone! I want the outward show that matches my achievements.

“For God’s sake, Amy, you’ve stayed with my sister at Penshurst! You know what I expect! I didn’t want some dirty farmhouse that we could clean up so that at its best, it was fit for a peasant to breed dogs in!”

She was trembling, hard put to keep her grip on the reins. From a distance, Lizzie Oddingsell watched and wondered if she should intervene.

Amy found her voice. She raised her drooping head. “Well, all very well, husband, but what you don’t know is that this farm has a yield of—”

“Damn the yield!” he shouted at her. His horse shied and he jabbed at it with a hard hand. It jibbed and pulled back, frightening Amy’s horse who stepped back, nearly unseating her. “I care nothing for the yield! My tenants can worry about the yield. Amy, I am going to be the richest man in England; the queen will pour the treasury of England upon me. I don’t care how many haystacks we can make from a field. I ask you to be my wife, to be my hostess at a house which is of a scale and of a grandeur—”

“Grandeur!” she flared up at him. “Are you still running after grandeur? Will you never learn your lesson? There was nothing very grand about you when you came out of the Tower, homeless and hungry; there was nothing very grand about your brother when he died of jail fever like a common criminal. When will you learn that your place is at home, where we might be happy? Why will you insist on running after disaster? You and your father lost the battle for Jane Grey, and it cost him his son and his own life. You lost Calais and came home without your brother and disgraced again! How low do you need to go before you learn your lesson? How base do you have to sink before you Dudleys learn your limits?”

He wheeled his horse and dug his spurs into its sides, wrenching it back with the reins. The horse stood up on its hind legs in a high rear, pawing the air. Robert sat in the saddle like a statue, reining back his rage and his horse with one hard hand. Amy’s horse shield away, frightened by the flailing hooves, and she had to cling to the saddle not to fall.

His horse dropped down. “Fling it in my face every day if you please,” he hissed at her, leaning forward, his voice filled with hatred. “But I am no longer Sir John Robsart’s stupid young son-in-law, out of the Tower and still attainted. I am Sir Robert Dudley once more; I wear the Order of the Garter, the highest order of chivalry there is. I am the queen’s Master of Horse, and if you cannot take a pride in being Lady Dudley then you can go back to being Amy Robsart, Sir John Robsart’s stupid daughter, once more. But for me: those days are gone.”

Fearful of falling from her frightened horse, Amy kicked her feet free and jumped from the saddle. On the safety of the ground she turned and glared up at him as he towered over her, his big horse curvetting to be away. Her temper rose up, flared into her cheeks, burned in her mouth.

“Don’t you dare to insult my father,” she swore at him. “Don’t you dare! He was a better man than you will ever be, and he won his lands by honest work and not by dancing at some heretic bastard’s bidding. And don’t say yields don’t matter! Who are you to say that yields don’t matter? You would have starved if my father had not kept his land in good heart, to put food on your plate when you had no way of earning it. You were glad enough of the wool crop then! And don’t call me stupid. The only stupid thing I ever did was to believe you and your braggart father when you came riding into Stanfield Hall, and not long after, you were riding into the Tower on a cart as traitors.” She was almost gibbering in her rage. “And don’t you dare threaten me. I shall be Lady Dudley to the day of my death! I have been through the worst with you when my name was a shame to me. But now neither you nor your heretic pretender can take it away from me.”

“She can take it away,” he said bitingly. “Fool that you are. She can take it away tomorrow, if she wants it. She’s supreme governor of the church of England. She can take away your marriage if she wants it and better women than you have been divorced for less than this… this… shite-house pipe dream.”

His big horse reared, Amy ducked away, and Sir Robert let the horse go, tearing up the earth with its big hooves, thundering away along the lane, leaving them in a sudden silence.

When they got home there was a man in the stable yard waiting for Robert Dudley. “Urgent message,” he said to William Hyde. “Can you send a groom to guide me to where I might find him?”

William Hyde’s square face creased with concern. “I don’t know where he might be,” he said. “He went for a ride. Will you come into the house and take a cup of ale while you’re waiting?”

“I’ll follow him,” the man said. “His lordship likes his messages delivered at once.”

“I don’t know which direction he took,” William said tactfully. “You’d better come inside to wait.”

The man shook his head. “I’d be obliged to you for a drink out here, but I’ll wait here for him.”

He sat on the mounting block and did not shift until the sun dropped lower in the sky, until finally he heard the clip-clop of hooves and Robert rode up the lane and into the stable yard and tossed the reins of his weary horse to a waiting groom.

“Blount?”

“Sir Robert.”

Robert drew him to one side, his rage with Amy all forgotten. “Must be important?”

“Sir William Pickering is back in England.”

“Pickering? The queen’s old flirt?”

“He was not sure if he would be welcomed, not sure how long her memory would be. There were rumors that he had served her sister. He did not know what she might have heard.”

“She would have heard everything,” Dudley said dourly. “You can trust to me and Cecil for that. Anyway, did she welcome him?”

“She saw him alone.”

“What? A private audience? She saw him in private? Dear God, he’s honored.”

“No, I mean alone. Completely alone. For all the afternoon, five hours he was locked up with her.”

“With her women in attendance,” Robert stated.

The spy shook his head. “Completely alone, sir. Just the two of them. Five hours behind a closed door, before they came out.”

Robert was staggered at a privilege that he had never had. “Cecil allowed this?” he demanded incredulously.

Thomas Blount shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. He must have done, for the next day she saw Sir William again.”

“Alone?”

“All the afternoon. From noon till dinner time. They are taking bets on him being her husband. He’s the favorite; he’s overtaken the archduke. They are saying that they’ve wedded and bedded in private, all that is lacking is an announcement.”

Robert exclaimed and whirled away, and then turned back. “And what does he do now? Is he to stay at court?”

“He is the favorite. She has given him a suite of rooms near to hers in Greenwich Palace.”

“How near?”

“They say there is a passageway that he can go to her at any time of the night or day. She has only to unlock the door and he can walk into her bedchamber.”

Robert suddenly became very still and calm. He glanced at his horse as the groom walked it up and down the yard, noting the sweat on its neck and the foam at its mouth, as if he were contemplating starting his journey at once.

“No,” he said softly to himself. “Better tomorrow, rested with a clear head. With a rested horse. Any other news?”

“That the Protestants are rioting against the French regent in Scotland, and she is massing her soldiers, calling for more men from France.”

“I knew that before I left court,” Robert said. “Does Cecil work on the queen to send support?”

“Still,” the man said. “But she says nothing either one way or the other.”

“Too busy with Pickering, I suppose,” Robert said sourly, and turned to go into the house. “You can wait here and ride back with me tomorrow,” he said shortly. “I obviously cannot risk being away for even a moment. We leave for Greenwich at first light. Tell my people that we leave at dawn and that we will ride hard.”

Amy, sick with tears, was waiting, as humble as any petitioner, outside the door of Robert’s privy chamber. She had seen him ride in on his lathered horse, and had hovered on the stairs hoping to speak to him. He had gone past her with a brief, courteous word of apology. He had washed and changed his clothes; she had heard the clink of jug against bowl. Then he had gone into his privy chamber, closed the door, and was clearly packing his books and his papers. Amy guessed that he was leaving, and she did not dare to knock on his door and beg him to stay.

Instead she waited outside, perched on the plain wooden window seat, like an apologetic child waiting to see an angry father.

When he opened the door she leapt to her feet and he saw her in the shadows. For a moment he had quite forgotten the quarrel, then his dark, thick eyebrows snapped together in a scowl. “Amy.”

“My lord!” she said; the tears flooded into her eyes and she could not speak. She could only stand dumbly before him.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said impatiently and kicked open the door of his room with his booted foot. “You had better come in before the whole world thinks that I beat you.”

She went before him into his room. As she had feared, it was stripped of all the papers and books that he had brought. Clearly, he was packed and ready to leave.

“You’re not going?” she said, her voice tremulous.

“I have to,” he said. “I had a message from court; there is some business which demands my attention, at once.”

“You are going because you are angry with me,” she whispered.

“No, I am going because I had a message from court. Ask William Hyde, he saw the messenger and told him to wait for me.”

“But you are angry with me,” she persisted.

“I was,” he said honestly. “But now I am sorry for my temper. I am not leaving because of the house, nor what I said. There are things at court that I have to attend to.”

“My lord…”

“You shall stay here for another month, perhaps two, and when I write to you, you can move to the Hayes’ at Chislehurst. I will come and see you there.”

“Am I not to find us a house here?”

“No,” he said shortly. “Clearly, we have very different ideas as to what a house should be like. We will have to have a long conversation about how you wish to live and what I need. But I cannot discuss this now. Right now I have to go to the stables. I will see you at dinner. I shall leave at dawn tomorrow; there is no need for you to rise to see me off. I am in a hurry.”

“I should not have said what I said. I am most sorry, Robert.”

His face tightened. “It is forgotten.”

“I can’t forget it,” she said earnestly, pressing him with her contrition. “I am sorry, Robert. I should not have mentioned your disgrace and your father’s shame.”

He took a breath, trying to hold back his sense of outrage. “It would be better if we forgot that quarrel, and did not repeat it,” he cautioned her, but she would not be cautioned.

“Please, Robert, I should not have said what I did about you chasing after grandeur and not knowing your place—”

“Amy, I do remember what you said!” he broke in. “There is no need for you to remind me. There is no need to repeat the insult. I do remember every word and that you spoke loud enough for William Hyde, his wife, and your companion to hear it too. I don’t doubt that they all heard you abuse me, and my father. I don’t forget you named him as a failed traitor and blamed me for the loss of Calais. You blamed him for the death of my brother Guilford and me for the death of my brother Henry. If you were one of my servants I would have you whipped and turned away for saying half of that. I’d have your tongue slit for scandal. You would do better not to remind me, Amy. I have spent most of this day trying to forget your opinion of me. I have been trying to forget that I live with a wife who despises me as an unsuccessful traitor.”

“It’s not my opinion,” she gasped. She was on the floor kneeling at his feet in one smooth movement, hammered down by his anger. “I do not despise you. It is not my opinion; I love you, Robert, and I trust you—”

“You taunted me with the death of my brother,” he said coldly. “Amy, I do not want to quarrel with you. Indeed, I will not. You must excuse me now; I have to see about something in the stables before I go to dinner.”

He swept her a shallow bow and went from the room. Amy scrambled up from her subservient crouch on the floor and ran to the door. She would have torn it open and gone after him but when she heard the brisk stride of his boots on the wooden floor she did not dare. Instead she pressed her hot forehead to the cool paneling of the door and wrapped her hands around the handle, where his hand had been.

Dinner was a meal where good manners overlaid discomfort. Amy sat in stunned silence, eating nothing; William Hyde and Robert maintained a pleasant flow of conversation about horses and hunting and the prospect of war with the French. Alice Hyde kept her head down, and Lizzie watched Amy as if she feared she would faint at the table. The ladies withdrew as soon as they could after dinner and Robert, pleading an early start, left soon after. William Hyde took himself into his privy chamber, poured himself a generous tumbler of wine, turned his big wooden chair to the fire, put his feet up on the chimney breast, and fell to considering the day.

His wife, Alice, put her head round the door and came quietly into the room, followed by her sister-in-law. “Has he gone?” she asked, determined not to meet with Sir Robert again, if she could avoid him.

“Aye. You can take a chair, Alice, Sister, and pour yourselves your wine if you please.”

They served themselves and drew up their chairs beside his, in a conspiratorial semicircle around the fire.

“Is that the end of his plans to build here?” William asked Lizzie Oddingsell.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “All she told me was that he is very angry with her, and that we’re to stay here another month.”

A quick glance between William and Alice showed that this had been a matter of some discussion. “I think he won’t build,” he said. “I think all she showed him today was how far apart they have become. Poor, silly woman. I think she has dug her own grave.”

Lizzie quickly crossed herself. “God’s sake, brother! What do you mean? They had a quarrel. You show me a man and wife who have not had cross words.”

“This is not an ordinary man,” he said emphatically. “You heard him, just as she heard him, but neither of you have the wit to learn. He told her to her face: he is the greatest man in the kingdom. He stands to be the wealthiest man in the kingdom. He has the full attention of the queen; she is always in his company. He is indispensable to the first spinster queen this country has ever known. What d’you think that might mean? Think it out for yourself.”

“It means he will want a country estate,” Lizzie Oddingsell pursued. “As he rises at court. He will want a great estate for his wife and for his children, when they come, please God.”

“Not for this wife,” Alice said shrewdly. “What has she ever done but be a burden to him? She does not want what he wants: not the house, not the life. She accuses him of ambition when that is his very nature, his blood and his bone.”

Lizzie would have argued to defend Amy, but William hawked and spat into the fire. “It does not matter if she pleases him or fails him,” he said flatly. “He has other plans now.”

“Do you think he means to put her aside?” Alice asked her husband.

Lizzie looked from the one grave face to the other. “What?”

“You heard him,” William said to her patiently. “Like her, you hear him; but you don’t attend. He is a man rising far from her.”

“But they are married,” she insisted uncomprehendingly. “Married in the sight of God. He cannot put her aside. He has no reason.”

“The king put two wives aside for no reason,” William Hyde said grimly. “And half the nobility have divorced their wives. Every Roman Catholic priest in England who married during the Protestant years had to put his wife aside when Queen Mary came to the throne, and now perhaps the Protestant clergy will have to do the same. The old laws do not stand. Everything can be remade. Marriage does not mean marriage now.”

“The church…”

“The head of the church is the queen. Act of parliament. No denying it. What if the head of the church wants Sir Robert to be a single man once more?”

Lizzie Oddingsell’s face was bleached with shock. “Why ever would she?” She dared him to name the reason.

“To marry him herself.” Mr. Hyde’s voice dropped to a low whisper.

Lizzie put down her wineglass, very slowly, and clasped her hands in her lap to stop them shaking. When she looked up she saw that her brother’s face was not drawn like hers, but bright with suppressed excitement.

“What if our lord were to be the King of England?” he whispered. “Forget Amy for a moment, she has signed the warrant for her own exile, he will give up on her now, she is no use to him. But think about Sir Robert! Think about us! What if he were to be King of England! What would that mean for us? What of that, Sister?”

Amy waited in the porch of the church in the early hours of the morning for Father Wilson to come and unlock the great wooden doors. When he came up the churchyard path and saw her, pale in her white dress against the silvery wood door, he said nothing but gave her a slow, sweet smile and opened the door to her in silence.

“Father?” she said softly.

“Tell it to God and then to me,” he said gently, and let her go in before him.

He waited at the back of the church, busying himself quietly until she rose from her knees and sat in the pew seat, and only then did he go to her. “Trouble?” he asked.

“I have angered my husband on another matter,” she said simply. “And so I failed to plead for our bishop.”

He nodded. “Don’t reproach yourself for that,” he said. “I think there is nothing any of us can do. The queen is to be called supreme governor of the church. All the bishops have to bow down to her.”

“Supreme governor?” Amy repeated. “But how can she?”

“They say that she does no more than claim the title of her brother and her father,” he said. “They don’t say that she is a woman and filled with a woman’s frailties. They don’t say how a woman, bound by God to be the handmaiden to her husband, cursed by God for the first sin, can be supreme governor.”

“What will happen?” Amy asked in a little thread of sound.

“I am afraid she will burn the bishops,” he said steadily. “Already Bishop Bonner is arrested, and one by one, as they refuse to kneel to her, the others will be taken.”

“And our bishop? Bishop Thomas?”

“He will go like the others, like a lamb to the slaughter,” the priest said. “A great darkness is going to come over this country and you and I, daughter, can do nothing more than pray.”

“If I can speak to Robert, I will,” she promised. She hesitated, remembering his rapid departure, and the rage in his voice. “He is a great man now, but he knows what it is to be a prisoner, in fear of your life. He is merciful. He will not advise the queen to destroy these holy men.”

“God bless you,” the priest said. “There will be few who dare to speak.”

“And what about you?” she asked. “Will you have to take an oath as well?”

“Once they have finished with the bishops they will come for men like me,” he said certainly. “And I shall have to be ready. If I can stay, I will. I am sworn to serve these people, this is my parish, this is my flock. The good shepherd does not leave his sheep. But if they want me to take an oath which says that she is Pope then I don’t see how I can do it. The words would choke me. I will have to take my punishment as better men than me are doing now.”

“They will murder you for your faith?”

He spread out his hands. “If they must.” “Father, what will become of us all?” Amy asked. He shook his head. “I wish I knew.”

Robert Dudley, storming into court in no very sweet temper, found the place strangely quiet. The presence chamber held only a sprinkling of ladies and gentlemen of the court, and a handful of lesser gentry.

“Where is everyone?” he demanded of Laetitia Knollys, who was seated in a window bay ostentatiously reading a book of sermons.

“I am here,” she said helpfully.

He scowled at her. “I meant anyone of any importance.”

“Still me,” she said, not at all dashed. “Still here.”

Reluctantly, he laughed. “Mistress Knollys, do not try my patience, I have had a long hard ride from one damnably stubborn and stupid woman to another. Do not you make a third.”

“Oh?” she said, opening her dark eyes very wide. “Who has been so unfortunate as to offend you, Sir Robert? Not your wife?”

“No one that need concern you. Where is the queen?”

“Out with Sir William Pickering. He has returned to England, did you know?”

“Of course I knew. We are old friends.”

“Don’t you adore him? I think he is the most handsome man I have ever seen in my life.”

“Absolutely,” Dudley said. “Are they riding?”

“No, walking. It’s more intimate, don’t you think?”

“Why aren’t you with them?”

“Nobody is with them.”

“Her other ladies?”

“No. Really, nobody. She and Sir William are quite alone today as they have been for the last three days. We all think it’s a certainty.”

“It?”

“Their betrothal. She cannot keep her eyes off him. He cannot keep his hands off her. It’s such a love story. Like a ballad. It is Guinevere and Arthur, it truly is!”

“She will never marry him,” Dudley said, with more certainty than he was feeling.

“Why should she not? He’s the best-looking man in Europe, he’s as rich as an emperor, he has no interest in politics or power so she can rule as she wants, and he has neither enemies in England nor a wife. I would have thought he was perfect.”

Robert turned from her, unable to speak for rage, and almost collided with Sir William Cecil. “Your pardon, Lord Secretary. I was just leaving.”

“I thought you had just arrived.”

“Leaving to go to my rooms,” Robert said, biting the inside of his mouth to contain his temper.

“I am glad you are back,” Cecil said, walking beside him. “We have needed your counsel.”

“I thought no work had been done at all.”

“Your counsel with the queen,” Cecil said flatly. “This whirlwind courtship may suit Her Grace, but I am not sure if it is beneficial for the country.”

“Have you told her that?”

“Not I!” Cecil said with a little chuckle. “She is a young woman in love. I rather thought you might tell her.”

“Why me?”

“Well, not tell her. I thought you might distract her. Divert her. Remind her that there are many handsome men in the world. She does not have to marry the first one that comes free.”

“I’m a married man,” Robert said bleakly. “In case you forgot. I can hardly compete with a bachelor dripping in gold.”

“You are right to remind me,” Cecil said blandly, charging tack. “Because if he marries her both of us will be able to go home to our wives. He won’t want us advising her. He will put in his own favorites. Our work at court will be over. I can go home to Burghley at last, and you can go home to…” He broke off, if surprised to remember that Robert had no great family estate. “Wherever you choose, I suppose.”

“I will hardly build a Burghley with my present savings,” Dudley said furiously.

“No. Perhaps it would be better for both of us if Pickering were to have a rival. If he were to be troubled. If he were not to have everything quite his own way. Easy for him to be smiling and pleasant when he rides a straight road without competition.”

Dudley sighed, as a man weary of nonsense. “I am going to my rooms.”

“Shall I see you at dinner?”

“Of course I shall come to dinner.”

Cecil smiled. “I am very glad to see you back at court,” he said sweetly.

The queen sent a dish of venison down the hall to Sir William Pickering’s table, and, even-handed, sent a very good game pie to Robert Dudley’s table. When the boards had been cleared and the musicians struck up she danced with one man and then the other. Sir William sulked after a little of this treatment; but Robert Dudley was at his most debonair, and the queen was radiant. Robert Dudley stood up for a dance with Laetitia Knollys and had the pleasure of hearing the Spanish ambassador remark to the queen what a handsome couple they were together. He watched the queen pale with anger. Shortly after, she called for a pack of cards and Dudley bet her the pearl in his hat that he would have won on points by midnight. The two went head to head as if there were no one else in the room, no one else in the world; and Sir William Pickering retired early to bed.

July 1st 1559 Dear William,

Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, ambassador to Paris, addressed Cecil in a coded letter, freshly delivered by a hard-pressed messenger. Incredible news. The king has, this very day, been wounded in a jousting tournament and the surgeons are with him now. The word I hear is that they are not hopeful; the blow may be fatal. If he dies, there is no doubt that the kingdom of France will be ruled in everything but name by the Guise family, and no doubt but that they will immediately send forces to strengthen their kinswoman Mary of Guise in Scotland, and move on to conquer England for her daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. Given their wealth, power, and determination (and the justice of their claim in the eyes of all Roman Catholics), given the weakness, division, and uncertainty of our poor country, ruled by a young woman not long on the throne, with a debatable legitimacy, and without an heir, I think there can be no doubt of the outcome.

For God’s sake, for all of our sakes, beg the queen to muster our troops and prepare to defend the borders or we are lost. If she does not fight this battle she will lose her kingdom without a struggle. As it is, I doubt that she can win. I shall send to you the moment that the king dies. Pray God that he rallies, for without him we are lost. I warn you that I do not expect it.

Nicholas.

William Cecil read the letter through twice and then pushed it gently into the hottest part of the fire in his privy chamber. Then he sat with his head in his hands for a long time. It seemed to him that England’s future lay in the hands of the surgeons who were, at this very moment, struggling to keep King Henry II of France’s breath in his failing body. The safety of England had been guaranteed at the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis by this king. Without him, there was no guarantor, there was no guarantee, there was no safety. If he died then the avaricious ruling family of France would ride their merciless cavalry through Scotland and then through all of England.

There was a knock at the door. “Yes?” Cecil said calmly, no trace of his fear in his voice.

It was his steward. “A messenger,” he said shortly.

“Send him in.”

The man came in, travel-stained, and walking with the stiff bow-legged stride of a rider who has spent days in the saddle. Cecil recognized Sir James Croft’s most trusted servant and spy.

“William! I am glad to see you. Take a seat.”

The man nodded at the courtesy and lowered himself gingerly into the chair. “Blisters,” he said by way of an explanation. “Burst and bleeding. My lord said it was important.”

Cecil nodded, waited.

“He said to tell you that all hell broke lose at Perth, that the French queen regent could not overcome the spirit of the Protestant lords. He said his bet is that she will never be able to get her troops to stand against them. They don’t have the heart for it and the Protestant Scots are wild for a fight.”

Cecil nodded.

“The Protestants are tearing the abbeys down all the way on the road to Edinburgh. Word is that the captain of Edinburgh Castle won’t take sides; he’ll bar the castle gates against them both until law is returned. My lord’s own belief is that the queen regent will have to fall back on Leith Castle. He said if you are minded to take a gamble, he would put his fortune on Knox’s men; that they are unbeatable while their blood is up.”

Cecil waited in case there was any more.

“That’s all.”

“I thank you,” Cecil said. “And what did you think of them yourself? Did you see much fighting?”

“I thought they were savage beasts,” the man said bluntly. “And I would want them neither as allies nor as enemies.”

Cecil smiled at him. “These are our noble allies,” he said firmly. “And we shall pray every day for their success in their noble battle.”

“They are wanton destroyers; they are a plague of locusts,” the man said stoutly.

“They will defeat the French for us,” Cecil prompted him, with more confidence than any sensible man would own. “If anyone asks you, they are on the side of the angels. Don’t forget it.”

That night, with Cecil’s grave news beating a rhythm of fear into her very temples, Elizabeth refused to dance with either Sir William Pickering or Sir Robert Dudley, who eyed each other like two cats on a stable roof. What use was William Pickering or Robert Dudley when the French king was dying and his heirs were mustering an expedition to England, with the excuse of a war with the Scots to hand? What use was any Englishman, however charming, however desirable?

Robert Dudley smiled at her; she could hardly see him through the haze of pain behind her eyes. Simply, she shook her head at him and turned away. She beckoned the Austrian ambassador to take a chair beside her throne and to talk to her of Archduke Ferdinand, who would come with all the power of Spain at his back and who was the only man who might bring with him a big enough army to keep England safe for her.

“You know, I have no liking for the single state,” Elizabeth said softly to the ambassador, ignoring Sir William’s goggle-eyed glare at her. “I have only waited, as any sensible maid would do, for the right man.”

Robert was planning a great tournament for when they returned to Greenwich, the last celebration before the court went on its summer progress. On his long refectory table in his pretty house at Kew, he had a scroll of paper unrolled, and his clerk was pairing the knights who would joust against each other. It was to be a tournament of roses, Robert had decided. There would be a bower of roses for the queen to sit in, with the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York and the Galicia rose which combined both colors and resolved the ancient enmity between England’s greatest counties, as the Tudors themselves had done. There would be rose petals, scattered by children dressed in rose pink before the queen when she walked from the palace door at Greenwich down to the tilt yard. The yard itself was to be blazoned with roses and all the contenders had been told that they were to incorporate roses into their poetry, or into their arms, or armor.

There would be a tableau greeting Elizabeth as the Queen of the Roses and she would be crowned with a chaplet of rosebuds. They would eat sugared rose comfits and there would be a water fight with rose water; the very air would be scented with the amorous perfume; the tilt yard would be carpeted with petals.

The joust was to be the central event of the day. Dudley was painfully aware that Sir William Pickering was a powerful rival for the queen’s affections, a blond, well-made, rich bachelor, widely read, well traveled, and well educated. He had intense charm; a smile from his dark blue eyes sent most women into a flutter, and the queen was always vulnerable to a commanding man. He had all the confidence of a man wealthy from boyhood, who came from wealthy and powerful parents. He had never been as low as Robert; he did not even know that a man could sink so low, and his whole bearing, his easy charm, his sunny disposition all showed a man to whom life had been kind and who believed that the future would be as blessed as the past.

Worst of all, from Dudley’s point of view, there was nothing to stop the queen marrying him tomorrow. She could drink a glass of wine too many, she could be teased a little too hard, she could be aroused and engaged and provoked—and Pickering was a master of subtle seduction—then he could offer her a priceless diamond ring, and his fortune, and the job would be done. The gambling men were putting odds on Sir William marrying the queen by autumn and her constant ripple of laughter in his presence, and her amused tolerance of his rising pride, gave everyone reason to believe that his big blond style was more to her taste than Dudley’s dark good looks.

Robert had suffered many rivals for her attention since she had come to the throne. Elizabeth was a flirt and anyone with a valuable gift or a handsome smile could have her evanescent attention. But Sir William was a greater risk than these passing fancies. He was phenomenally rich and Elizabeth, with a purse full of lightweight coins and an empty treasury, found his wealth very attractive. He had been a friend of hers from the earliest days and she treasured fidelity, especially in men who had plotted to put her on the throne, however incompetent they had been. But more than anything else, he was handsome and new-come to court, and an English Protestant bachelor, so when she danced with him and they were the center of gossip and speculation, it was good-natured. The court smiled on the two of them. There was no one reminding her that he was a married man or a convicted traitor, or muttering that she must be mad to favor him. And although Dudley’s rapid return to court had disturbed Sir William’s smooth rise to favor and power, it had not prevented it. The queen was shamelessly delighted to have the two most desirable men in England competing for her attention.

Dudley was hoping to use the joust to unseat Sir William with one hard blow, preferably to his handsome face or thick head, and was drawing up the jousting list to ensure that Pickering and he would meet in the final round. He was absorbed in the work when suddenly his door banged open without a knock. Robert leapt up, his hand reaching for his dagger, heart thudding, knowing that at last the worst thing had happened: an uprising, an assassin.

It was the queen, quite alone, without a single attendant, white as a rose herself, who flung herself into the room toward him and said three words: “Robert! Save me!”

At once he snatched her to him and held her close. He could feel her gasping for breath; she had run all the way from the palace to the Dairy House, and run up the steps to his front door.

“What is it, my love?” he asked urgently. “What is it?”

“A man,” she gasped. “Following me.”

With his arm still around her waist he took his sword from where it hung on the hook, and threw open the door. Two of his men were outside, aghast at the queen’s dashing past them.

“Seen anyone?” Robert asked tersely.

“No one, sir.”

“Go and search.” He turned to the fainting woman. “What did he look like?”

“Well dressed, brown suit, like a London merchant, but he dogged my feet while I was walking in my garden down to the river and when I went faster he came on, and when I ran he ran behind me, and I thought that he was a Papist, come to kill me…” She lost her breath for fear.

Robert turned to his stunned clerk. “Go with them, call out the guard and the Queen’s Pensioners. Tell them to look for a man in a brown suit. Check the river first. If he is away in a boat, take a boat and follow him. I want him alive. I want him now.” Robert sent the men off, and then drew Elizabeth back into the house, into his drawing room, and slammed the door and bolted it.

Gently, he put her into a chair and closed the shutters and bolted them. He unsheathed his sword and laid it to hand, on the table.

“Robert, I thought he had come for me. I thought he would murder me, where I walked in my own garden.”

“You’re safe now, my love,” he said gently. He knelt beside her chair and took her hand. She was icy cold. “You are safe with me.”

“I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know where to run. I could only think of you.”

“Quite right. You did quite right, and you were very brave to run.”

“I wasn’t!” she wailed suddenly, like a child.

Robert lifted her from the chair and drew her onto his knees. She buried her face in his neck and he felt her sweaty face and the wetness of her tears. “Robert, I wasn’t brave at all. I wasn’t like a queen at all; I was like a nothing. I was as full of fear as a market girl. I couldn’t call for my guards, I couldn’t scream. I didn’t even think to turn and challenge him. I just went faster, and when he went faster, I went faster.

“I could hear his footsteps coming behind me faster and faster and all I could do…” She burst into another wail. “I feel such a child! I feel like I am such a fool! Anyone would think that I was the daughter of a lute player…”

The enormity of that shocked her into silence, and she raised her tearstained face from his shoulder. “Oh, God,” she said brokenly.

Steadily, lovingly, he met her eyes, smiled at her. “No one will think anything of you, for no one will know,” he said softly. “This is between us two and no one else will ever know.”

She caught her breath on a sob and nodded.

“And no one, even if they knew, could blame you for being afraid, if a man comes after you. You know the danger that you are in, every day. Any woman would be afraid, and you are a woman, and a beautiful woman as well as a queen.”

Instinctively, she twisted a tendril of hair and tucked it back behind her ear. “I should have turned on him and challenged him.”

Robert shook his head. “You did exactly the right thing. He could have been a madman; he could have been anyone. The wisest thing to do was to come and find me, and here you are, safe. Safe with me.”

She nestled a little closer to him and he tightened his arms around her. “And no one could ever doubt your fathering,” he said into her red hair. “You are a Tudor from your clever copper head down to your swift little feet. You are my Tudor princess and you always will be. I knew your father, remember, I remember how he used to look at you and call you his best girl Bessie. I was there. I can hear his voice now. He loved you as his true-born daughter and heir, and he knew you were his, and now you are mine.”

Elizabeth tipped her head back at him, her dark eyes trusting, her mouth starting to curve upward in a smile. “Yours?”

“Mine,” he said certainly and his mouth came down on hers and he kissed her deeply.

She did not resist for one moment. Her terror and then the feel of safety with him were as potent as a love potion. He could smell the sweat of her fear and the new scent of her arousal, and he went from her lips to her neck and down to the top of her gown, where her breasts pressed tight against the laced bodice as she panted lightly. He rubbed his face against her neck, and she felt the roughness of his chin and the eager licking of his tongue and she laughed and caught her breath all at once.

Then his hands were in her hair, slipping out the pins, and taking a handful of the great tumbling locks and pulling her head back so that he could have her mouth once more and this time he tasted of her own sweat, salty on his mouth. He bit her, licked her, filled her with the heat of his desire and with the very taste of him as he salivated as if she were a dish he would devour.

He rose up from the chair with her in his arms and she clung to his neck as he swept the scroll from the table and laid her on it, and then climbed up, like a stallion covering a mare, onto her. His thigh was pushing between her legs, his hands pulling up her gown so that he could touch her, and Elizabeth melted under his touch, pulled him closer to her, opened his mouth for his kisses, ravenous for the feel of him everywhere.

“My gown!” she cried in frustration.

“Sit up,” he commanded. She did as he obeyed and twisted around, offering the laces on the back of the tight stomacher. He struggled with the threaded laces and then pulled it off her and threw it aside. With a groan of utter desire he buried his hands, and then his face, in her linen shift to feel the heat of her belly through the thin fabric, and the rounded firm curves of her breasts.

He threw off his own doublet and tore off his shirt and pressed down on her once more, his chest against her face as if he would smother her with his body, and he felt her sharp little teeth graze his nipple as her tongue lapped at the hairs on his chest and she rubbed her face against him, like a wanton cat.

His fingers fumbled at the ties of her skirt, and then, losing patience, he took the laces and with one swift tug, broke them and pushed her skirt down from her waist so that he could get his hand on her.

At his first touch she moaned and arched her back, pushing herself against his palm. Robert pulled back, unlaced his breeches, pulled them down, and heard her gasp as she saw the strength and power of him, and then her sigh of longing as he came toward her.

There was a loud hammering on the front door. “Your Grace!” came an urgent shout. “Are you safe?”

“Knock down the door!” someone commanded.

With a whimper, Elizabeth rolled away from him and flew across the room, snatching up her stomacher. “Lace me!” she whispered urgently, pressing the tight garment against her throbbing breasts, and turning her back to him.

Robert was pulling up his breeches and tying the ties. “The queen is here, and safe with me, Robert Dudley,” he called, his voice unnaturally loud. “Who is there?”

“Thank God. I’m the commander of the watch, Sir Robert. I will take the queen back to her rooms.”

“She is…” Dudley fumbled with the lacing of Elizabeth’s gown and then thrust the laces into any holes he could manage and tied it up. From the front she looked quite presentable. “She is coming. Wait there. How many men have you?”

“Ten, sir.”

“Leave eight to guard the door and go and fetch ten more,” Robert said, buying time. “I will take no risks with Her Grace.”

“Yes, sir.”

They ran off. Elizabeth bent her head and tied what was left of the strings at the waistband of her skirt. Robert snatched up his doublet and pulled it on.

“Your hair,” he whispered.

“Can you find my pins?”

She was twisting it into bronze ringlets and tucking it under the ebony combs that had survived his embrace. Robert dropped to his knees on the floor and hunted for pins under the bench and under the table and came up with four or five. Swiftly, she speared them into her hair, and pinned her hood on top.

“How do I look?”

He moved toward her. “Irresistible.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth so that the men waiting outside should not hear her laugh. “Would you know what I had been doing?”

“At once.”

“For shame! Would anyone else know?”

“No. They will expect you to look as though you have been running.”

She put out her hand to him. “Don’t come any closer,” she said unsteadily when he stepped forward. “Just hold my hand.”

“My love, I must have you.”

“And I you,” she breathed as they heard the tramp of the guard coming to the door.

“Sir Robert?”

“Aye?”

“I am here with twenty men.”

“Stand back from the door,” Robert said. He took up his sword and opened the drawing-room door, and then unbolted the front door. Carefully, he opened it a crack. The queen’s men were outside, he recognized them, he threw open the door. “She is safe,” he said, letting them see her. “I have her safe.”

To a man they dropped to their knees.

“Thank God,” said the commander. “Shall I escort you to your chambers, Your Grace?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Sir Robert, you will dine with me in my privy chamber tonight.”

He bowed politely. “As you command, Your Grace.”

“He was upset, because he was disappointed,” Amy said suddenly at dinner to her hosts, as if she were continuing a conversation, though they had been eating in silence. William Hyde glanced at his wife; this was not the first time that Amy had tried to convince them that what they had seen was a small tiff between a comfortably married couple. As if she were trying to convince herself.

“I had been so foolish as to make him think that the place was finished, ready for us to move into this summer. Now he will have to stay at court, and go on progress with the queen. Of course he was disappointed.”

“Oh yes,” said Lizzie Oddingsell in loyal support.

“I misunderstood him,” Amy continued. She gave an awkward little laugh. “You will think me a fool but I was still thinking of the plans we made when we were first married, when we were little more than children. I was thinking of a little manor house, and some rich meadows around it. And of course, now he needs more than that.”

“Will you look for a bigger estate?” Alice Hyde asked curiously.

Lizzie glanced up from her place and gave her sister-in-law a sharp look.

“Of course,” Amy said with simple dignity. “Our plans are unchanged. It was my mistake that I did not understand quite what my lord had in mind. But now that I know, I shall set about finding it for us. He needs a grand house set in beautiful parkland with good tenant farms. I shall find it for him, and I shall commission builders, and I shall see it built for him.”

“You’ll be busy,” William Hyde said pleasantly.

“I shall do my duty as his wife,” she said seriously, “as God has called me to do, and I shall not fail him.”

Elizabeth and Dudley sat opposite each other at a table laid for two and ate breakfast in her privy chamber at Greenwich Palace, as they had done every morning since their return from Kew. Something had changed between them that everyone could see but no one could understand. Elizabeth did not even understand it herself. It had not been the sudden leaping up of her passion for Dudley; she had wanted him before, she wanted other men before, she was used to curbing her desires with a heavy hand. It was that she had run to him for safety. Instinctively, with a court of men bound to serve her, with Cecil’s spies somewhere in her chamber, she had taken to her heels at the first sign of threat and run to Dudley as the only man she could trust.

Then she had wept in her terror like a child, and he had comforted her like a childhood friend. She would not speak of it to him, nor to anyone. She would not even think of it herself. But she knew that something had changed. She had showed herself and she had showed him that he was her only friend.

They were far from alone. Three servers waited on them, the server of the ewery stood behind the queen’s chair, a page stood at each end of the table, four ladies-in-waiting sat in a little cluster in the window embrasure, a trio of musicians played, and a chorister from the queen’s chapel sang love songs. Robert had to quell his desire, his frustration, and his anger as he saw that his royal mistress had walled herself in against him once more.