A Court Affair (56 page)

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back as Tommy’s kisses blazed a hot trail down my throat. But when his hand rose up to cup my breast, my eyes snapped open wide. I came to my senses and remembered who and what I was—Lord Robert’s wife, always faithful, loyal, and loving, even when he was not, and a dying woman likely to have to face God’s judgment very soon.

I gently pulled away from him and got to my feet. He stayed where he was, half lying on the velvet cushions, leaning on his elbow, staring up at me with the sad and bewildered brown eyes of a spaniel who desires only to please but has instead in some way, mysterious and incomprehensible to him, disappointed his mistress.

I leaned down and gently stroked his face, letting my palm linger on his soft cheek, smooth like a baby’s flesh instead of prickly like a man’s.

“You’ve a good heart, Tommy,” I said, “and someday you’ll find someone worthy to share it with. But it
can’t
be me—I’m married, and I’m dying.”

“But …” He started to speak, but I silenced him with my fingertip pressed lightly against his lips. And even though it pained me—I had noticed lately the pain descending to encircle me like a corset, an invisible garment woven of pain that could never be unlaced—still I bent and brushed my lips against his brow. Then I rumpled his wild hair and, with a smile, said softly, “Good night, Tommy, and goodbye.” I knew he would be leaving in the morning, and I did not know if I would ever see him again.

“Tommy.” At the door to my room I impulsively turned back. “
Please,
if you ever look back and think of me someday, after I’m gone,
please,
remember me with kindness.”

“Always,”
he promised, “with
loving
kindness, Amy.”

His heart was in his voice as well as in his eyes when he said it, and I knew he meant it.

“Thank you.”
I nodded and closed the door behind me, leaning my back against it with my heart pounding like a drum within my breast, and some part of me—my head, my heart, my lust?—wanting to turn around, open that door, and call to Tommy. I wanted to take his hand and lead him to my bed and feel his lips and hands gliding over me and the warmth and weight of his body over mine, flesh to flesh, heart to heart; I wanted to feel like a woman who is loved and desired just one more time before I died.

But I didn’t do it, though many a time since I’ve wished I had. I didn’t dare; I was a coward. I was too afraid that the desire that leapt and danced like flames in his eyes when he looked at me would turn to disgust when he saw my cancer-ravaged breast, so I let the chance—my
last
chance—go by. And I was
always
a good, virtuous wife, even when Robert did not deserve my loyalty and love.

A few weeks after Tommy had gone, I received an unexpected visitor. Dr Dee, the Queen’s astrologer and my husband’s former tutor, presented himself at Cumnor and asked to see me. When I heard, I lost my head, I flew into a panic, and, I am ashamed to say, like a little child, I ran and hid, sitting on the floor, hugging my knees, cowering behind a curtain, wishing myself invisible.

Though he was esteemed as a brilliant scholar, and people said of him that what he did not know of mathematics, navigation, and the stars was not worth knowing, Dr Dee blackened his reputation by delving into more eccentric, esoteric subjects that flirted with deviltry. He dabbled in alchemy, trying to find the secret formula for turning base metals into gold, and was said to possess a magic mirror that revealed to him the future, and to be able to read one’s destiny written in the stars above or even in the palm of one’s own hand. And dark rumours of necromancy, magical rituals, dealings with the dead and devils, hung like a black cloak about his shoulders.

All my fears about Robert came flooding back the day Dr Dee knocked upon the door.

I was
terrified
that my husband had sent him to divine the hour of my death or work some terrible spell against me. Perhaps he was even the one who had sent the little wax dolls and other macabre and ghoulish tokens. I had not taken the hemlock pills, and surely Robert must know it, and Dr Bayly had written to Robert and refused to administer the potions Robert had sent, so perhaps he had turned to his old tutor for advice and decided to dispense with medicine and deal with the Devil instead.

Though the Forsters tried to shield me, there were rumours wafting down from London that Robert was sorely afraid that the Queen would get tired of waiting for me to die and set Robert free and would marry one of her many foreign suitors instead. They never ceased to woo her with gifts and pretty speeches, they showered her with jewels, sonnets, and sables, and all her Councillors pressed most urgently, for the good of England and the succession, for her to choose one of them to be her husband. No one—except Robert himself—wanted Robert to be King, and everyone knew that as long as I lived, he hadn’t a chance. Thus rumours abounded that he meant to speed the course of my illness to a faster end with doses of deadly poison disguised as healing drams. My life was nothing to what Robert stood to gain after I was gone. Now I understood all the better why he had pressed me to take the hemlock pills even if they made me feel as if I were lying on the edge of my grave, about to roll in. He
wanted
me in my grave; he wanted it enough to shove me in himself!

So when I heard Dr Dee had come to call, I fled screaming afore him. The breath caught in my throat; I panted and gasped and fell to my knees and crawled behind an arras. I cowered back against the wall even as a hand swept the velvet curtain aside and a kindly-faced man with long white-blond locks and a waist-length beard like gleaming ivory silk smiled down at me.

“Dear lady, you’ve
nothing
to fear from me!” he said. “Come.” He reached down his hand to me, upon which was a ring set with a great ruby that glowed as if lit from within by an ember. “Sit and talk with me.”

His hand drew mine like a magnet—there was
something
about him that made me want to trust him—but just as our fingers touched, I gasped, uncertain and afraid, and snatched my hand back.

“No!”
I sobbed. “Robert and his mistress, the Queen, have sent you! You will look at my hand and see that I will be cast down into darkness or some such thing! You will make them happy and foretell my doom and leave me even more afraid! Have you brought your black mirror? I will not look in it! I won’t, I won’t, and you cannot make me!” I cried, crazed with terror.

“My dear child,” Dr Dee said gently, “you are already cast down into darkness—the darkness of fear and despair—and I don’t need to see your palm or gaze into a black mirror to know it. I can see it on your face and hear it in your voice. Fear is your constant companion; it never leaves you, not even when you sleep.”

He looked like such a kind man, not at all the sort to consort with demons.

He chuckled softly, and it was as if he had read my mind. “You were expecting horns and a forked tail and cloven hoofs peeping out from beneath my robes, weren’t you? And these robes”—he touched a fold of his gown—“to be all encrusted with moons and stars and other strange symbols instead of this plain scholar’s black. I’m just a man, my dear,” he continued with a most reassuring smile, “a man with a boundless curiosity about
everything,
and an
insatiable
appetite for knowledge of all kinds. Just because I delve into strange mysteries does not mean I am in league with the Devil. I promise you I am not, and there shall be no horoscopes cast, no scrying into mirrors, or scrutinising of palms or tarot cards. I had some business in Oxford and knew you were in residence here and thought I would stop and see you. Robert was one of my favourite pupils, yet I never had the pleasure of meeting his bride. Come now.” He reached for my hand again, and this time I took it and let him raise me and lead me to sit beside him on the window seat overlooking the park.

“Y-You … You …” Fear still caused my tongue to stick. But Dr Dee just patted the back of my hand and smiled and nodded encouragingly. “I-I am …” I paused and in frustration pressed my hand to my brow and shut my eyes. I just couldn’t seem to get the words out!

“You are no fool, my dear.” Dr Dee very kindly spoke for me when he saw that I could not. “You know what they say in London, and you also know that I, being the Queen’s astrologer and well acquainted with your husband, know it too.”

I nodded gratefully and felt the knots in my tongue unfurl, allowing me to at last speak freely.

“I
am
dying,” I confided. “I have a cancer here.” I lightly touched my breast. “And they are
glad
of it, for only my life prevents their marrying. But I am not dying fast enough to suit them! Robert plans to poison me. He has tried before …”

I told him all about my stay at Compton Verney, the spices Robert sent that only made me sicker, and of the hemlock pills he had given me, prepared by the Queen’s own apothecary, and Dr Bayly’s refusal to administer these and the other potions Robert sent, trusting him to persuade me to take them. And I also told him of the little wax dolls with the thorn-impaled breasts, bloody skirts, and locks of yellow hair, and other macabre mementos that had been sent, or left for me to find, since I had been at Cumnor.

“Please.”
I gazed at him desperately. “Do not hurt me!”

“Never!”
Dr Dee promised me, taking my hand in both of his. “Poor lady, I know you no longer trust anyone, and with good reason, but I
swear
I would
never
harm a hair on your head. And I will tell you something else as well, and I pray that you will believe me—you’ve
nothing
at all to fear from the Queen. I
know
this to be true. But, with regret, I cannot say the same of your husband. You must be strong here”—he tapped his forehead—“and here”—he touched his own heart—“even though you are frightened and ill and your heart is breaking. Many think there is
great
power in evil curses and magical spells, but that is not
really
so. The
true
power is in the belief itself; those who believe themselves the victims of such things suffer as if they were indeed; by believing, they give those who would curse them the power to actually do so. There is
great
power in fear; you
must
loosen its hold on you, for your own sake.”

We sat and talked a little longer—I was
so
grateful to have someone listen to me who didn’t scoff or belittle and took seriously all I had to say—until the sun began to set, and Dr Dee had to take his leave.

I accompanied him downstairs, and at the door I touched his arm and earnestly implored that if he saw Robert that he would not tell him that I had behaved so badly and received him so ungraciously.

“My dear”—Dr Dee smiled at me—“you are a beautiful and charming young woman, and you deserve so much better! Rest assured, I shall say nothing at all to Robert; he did not send me, and I am not his servant. I do not answer to him, and he need never know that I have seen you unless you wish to tell him.”

“
Thank you,
Dr Dee,” I said most gratefully. “I … I am glad you came to see me. You have helped me more than any other physician.”

He reached out and cupped my cheek in his hand and leaned down to kiss my brow. “Though a cure for your malady is beyond the powers of medicine as we know it, someday, centuries after our bones have turned to dust, there
will
be survivors.” And from behind my ear, like a magician at a fair, he drew a pretty pink silk ribbon and looped it round my neck like half a figure eight with the ends left dangling.

“No demons, just a little sleight of hand, my dear.” He smiled and bade me farewell.

I stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. “Dr Dee,” I asked with a tremor in my voice, “do you know how long I have left? Have you seen my death in your magic mirror?”

He shook his head and with a sad little smile flitting across his lips softly quoted a bit of scripture to me:

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time of war, and a time of peace.”

And in his words I saw my whole life rush past in a series of vividly painted pictures blurring together on the rapidly turning pages of the book of my memory. My happy girlhood, and the unhappy years of waning health leading to my inevitable demise; the years when I had waded through fields of barley, watching the crops grow, helping with and celebrating each harvest, and the birthing of the lambs, the tending of the flocks, and the shearing of the sheep; the days when Robert and I were so deeply in love, when we danced and laughed and loved together; the day he made me his Buttercup Bride; and the joyous days when we frolicked on the beach at Hemsby; the few days we spent together and the many days we spent apart; the happy days when we laughed together, and those when I wept alone; the times we came together in love and parted in anger, the ever-widening gulf yawning between us, and the weeks and months of absence and indifference when I feared the love was lost forever and might even have turned to hate; the times when I kept silent out of fear and the times when I set my temper screaming free; the days I mourned and buried my parents and the dreams Robert and I once shared, dreams that never came true; the festering resentment I felt for the woman, the Queen, who took my husband away from me, the one he, on fire with ambition and lust, had cast me away for; my desperate attempts to sew us back together, only to be brutally torn and ripped apart at the seams; those days when I dyed my hair harlot red with henna and danced before him as a bare-breasted mermaid trying to lure him back to me but only succeeded in driving him even further away; the day he asked me for a divorce, and we went to war; the quarrels and long, angry silences; the poisonous days and nightmares that tormented me at Compton Verney; the wary peace and uneasy truce, the illusion of tenderness returned and renewed that came with the cancer. It was
all
there, flashing by in an instant.