A Court Affair (68 page)

As I watched him go, I wondered, did he do it? Did he kill her, by design or by an unwisely and impatiently uttered wish? I didn’t know, and I had to accept the fact that I would never really know. I only knew that I would never trust him again. My subjects’ fears were groundless, and they had been so all along; I would never marry him; I never meant to, not even in my dreams. And every time in the long years to come when I was tempted by loneliness or the human need to share, to confide and vouchsafe some small measure of trust to him, the pale spectre of Amy would always rise like a ghost in my dreams to remind me not to give too much, lest I be betrayed.

He stayed with me for the rest of his life, and when he died, I locked myself in my room and wept over his last letter. I sat for days upon the floor, huddled in a corner, just like my poor, mad sister had done after Philip left her and the babies she thought growing inside her belly proved to be only phantoms born of desperate hope. After three days, I dried my tears, got up, and changed my gown and put on my pearls and a vivid, flaming red wig to hide my balding pate and the short-cropped, feathery grey orange wisps that were all that was left of my hair by then, and went on for England; my people needed me, their Gloriana, Good Queen Bess, and, the name most dear of all to me, the one my loving people were so proud to call me—“Our Elizabeth”. The passage of years had taught me, though it had never been an easy lesson, that that love
truly
was enough; it made every carnal passion pale in comparison. I was
England’s
Elizabeth,
not
Robert’s or any other man’s Bess; I never could be. I was not a marble statue, though I painted my ageing face with a mask as stiff and white as one, but a woman of flesh and blood who lived and breathed, laughed, loved, raged, and wept, but I was also more,
much
more—I gave my people something to believe in; I gave them hope and courage; I fed and fuelled their pride and determination; when they kissed my hands or hems, they were touching the true spirit, the pulsing, beating heart of England. I brought them a little closer to God, through me in my white gowns and pearls, my hair as red as flame; I was for them the beacon of hope that burned brightly through every trial and tribulation that troubled this small but proud nation; I blurred the lines between majesty and divinity, between the Holy Virgin and England’s Virgin Queen—Elizabeth—and that was enough. It was everything I ever truly wanted or meant to be.

Windsor Castle, London

November 27–28, 1560

N
aked and soft as a velvet glove, her long-fingered, lily-white hand shed of its heavy burden of jewelled rings, caresses the great gilded bedpost, petting the life-sized carved lion with claws raised and mouth open as though emitting a mighty roar, ready to leap and tear her throat out. She lingers, just for a moment, to make certain that the purple velvet curtains fringed with Venetian gold are shut tightly. Then she draws up the hood of the dusky rose velvet cloak, her fingers plucking nervously at the satin bow at her throat, making sure the ribbons are secure; then, with her head held high, regal as a queen with Tudor blood coursing through her veins, she walks boldly to the adjoining door that leads into Robert Dudley’s chamber and enters without knocking.

Bare-chested and restless in his sleep, he lies bathed in blue white moonlight, tossing his dark head against the silken pillows and moaning softly, the coverlet kicked down around his legs, virile charms on full display, his bare limbs entangled in the silken sheet, as he lies upon his back.

This is the man she has always wanted, ever since the day she saw him, the man she wanted to marry, to ride like a stallion every night, and be mounted like a mare by, though he laughed gently at her coquettish ways and spurned and looked past her with eyes only for her cousin, Elizabeth, the frigid, icy bitch-queen who lacked the courage to face her own desires, who didn’t know how to submit to a man without being conquered by him—a secret Lettice knew all too well but was not prepared to share; instead, she would use it against her royal cousin to take the only man she truly desired. But there was another woman who stood in the way, his wife—that stupid-as-a-pumpkin country bumpkin, Amy. This was the man she had squatted naked before a roaring fire and black inverted cross for, pleading with Satan to
“Make him mine!”
when prayers to God failed her. For him, her delicate, soft, white fingers had touched the vilest objects, dead things she shuddered now to think about, and fashioned little wax dolls, filled with nail clippings, locks of hair bought from a servant with hair the same hue as Amy’s, and her own monthly blood, and impaled them with thorns and put them in tiny wooden coffins. For him, she had stolen a book of poisons from her cousin’s library and a single long strand of red hair from her brush, all to frighten a woman who was unworthy of him and did not deserve him, a woman who was taking too long to die but whose death might remove him from her reach forever if he attained the crown he so desired.

She stands at the foot of the bed and watches him for a long time; then she reaches up and slowly unties the satin ribbons and lets the velvet cloak fall down around her ankles. And a long white hand snakes out and pulls the sheet from him, letting it fall with a silken whisper to the floor as, stealthy, quiet, and nimble as a cat, she clambers up onto the bed, naked but for her white silk stockings and pink satin garters and slippers, and crawls up to straddle him.

His cock kindles to her touch, springing to life, and she slowly lowers herself, impaling herself upon the ardently upward-pointing arrow of flesh.

His eyes open wide. He smiles, eyes and lips radiating triumph.
“Elizabeth!”
he breathes, crying out her name in the utmost joy. “Oh, how I have waited, how I have longed and dreamed for this moment to come!”

She speaks not a word, merely smiles into the flaming curtain of hair that hangs down and caresses her cheeks as the ends trail down to tickle his chest.

Only when he explodes within her, grasping hard her slender hips as his seed gushes out, flooding and filling her, does she shake back her hair and bare her face.

With a startled and outraged cry, he tries to push her from him, but she grips him tighter with her knees and plants her palms hard and flat upon his chest as she moves, rocking as she rides him, selfishly intent on her own pleasure, determined to have
her
way at long last, white and triumphant in the moonlight, sharp little white teeth bared in a wicked smile.

“I am the unrepentant Magdalene, not the Holy Virgin who must be venerated and adored,” Lettice Knollys says.

“Yes, you are, you little whore, you hot little bitch!” Robert Dudley says furiously as he savagely rolls her over onto her back with her legs high and straight in the air and thrusts hard inside her as if his cock were a dagger aiming straight for Elizabeth’s heart. This “hot little bitch”, her very own cousin, a woman unafraid of her own sensuality, is the
perfect
weapon to hurt her, and that is all he wants to do at this moment. Revenge really
is
sweet!

The next day Elizabeth sat by the fire and calmly played chess with Sir William Cecil, while Robert Dudley inspected the royal stables, and Lettice Knollys, in a low-cut emerald gown, sat and embroidered and exchanged gossip with the Queen’s other ladies.

“When I find out,” Elizabeth said softly as she scrutinised the board, “let it be a surprise; they think they are
so
clever, it seems a shame to disappoint them. Only when it is too late,” she said, as her long white fingers closed around the black knight, “will they discover how much they despise each other for what their ‘love’ has cost them. They
deserve
each other!”

E
lizabeth endured, a living icon, a flame-haired, pearl-encrusted, white candle of hope, to inspire her people’s love and loyalty, the invincible and unobtainable “Virgin Queen” with the body of a woman but “the heart and stomach of a king”, wooed and courted by many, wife to none, but mother to many—every man, woman, and child of English blood. She reigned for forty-five years and died in 1603, the last, and greatest, Tudor.

The mystery, scandal, and speculation surrounding Amy’s death never really died. From time to time it would rear its ugly head, to the extreme dismay of Robert Dudley. Try as he might, he could never put it behind him.

Seven years after Amy’s death, her stepbrother John Appleyard attempted to blackmail Robert, who had finally obtained the earldom of Leicester in 1564, his ennoblement being a prerequisite to Elizabeth’s scheme to offer her “cast-off lover, the horse master who had murdered his wife to make room for her”, as a prospective bridegroom to her cousin and rival for her throne, Mary, Queen of Scots. It was a choice calculated to offend Mary and drive her straight into the arms of the dissipated pretty boy Lord Darnley, just as Elizabeth had intended all along. John Appleyard claimed that he “had for the Earl’s sake covered the murder of his sister”. He was speedily imprisoned in Fleet Prison and ordered to produce any evidence he had, whereupon he hastily recanted and announced that he was fully satisfied with the coroner’s verdict concerning his sister’s death.

In 1584 an anonymously authored and widely circulated book, a best seller in its day, known as
Leicester’s Commonwealth:
A Discourse on the Abominable Life, Plots, Treasons, Murders, Falsehoods, Poisonings, Lusts, Incitements, and Evil Stratagems Employed by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,
revived the scandal and accused Robert of a whole catalogue of nefarious deeds, including paying one of his retainers, the staunchly loyal Sir Richard Verney, to go to Cumnor Place and murder Amy.

To this day, Amy’s death, and what, if any, role her husband played in it, remains shrouded in mystery. Murder, mishap, suicide, and an underlying medical cause, sudden as an aneurysm or chronic like cancer metastasised to the bones, leaving them brittle and vulnerable to sudden, spontaneous fracture, all remain much-discussed and debated theories. An attempt in 1947 to examine her body for clues proved unsuccessful, as renovations to the church in the centuries following her death had disturbed previous burials and made locating her remains impossible.

In December 1560 Lettice Knollys married Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex, after Robert Dudley refused to marry her. The morning light brought a harsh dose of reason to dispel the hot, angry lust of their night together, and a resurgence of Robert’s confidence that he could in time overcome Elizabeth’s timidity and that the scandal over Amy’s death would eventually fade and be forgotten. “If I were to marry you,” he bluntly told the naked and raging Lettice, “it would utterly ruin me. The Queen’s favour would be lost forever, and she would never forgive me!”

But Lettice had her revenge. After her first rendezvous with Robert—which she managed to coax him into repeating on several succeeding nights, when she crept into his room, dropped her cloak, and crawled naked into his bed—she adopted a rather lackadaisical approach to contraception and often forgot, or just did not bother, to drink her pennyroyal tea, rise from her lover’s bed and piss hard or jump vigorously up and down immediately after coitus, or to insert a small sponge soaked in lemon juice or vinegar prior to the act, and when she married Walter Devereux, with her smiling parents and her cousin the Queen looking on as witnesses, a child was already growing inside her. For the rest of his days Robert Dudley had to live with the knowledge that his firstborn son and namesake—Lettice named the boy Robert—the handsome, dark-haired lad who loved horses and should have been his own legitimate heir would grow up in the eyes of the world as another man’s son.

For several years following Amy’s death, Robert endeavoured in vain to persuade Elizabeth to marry him, insisting that it was only fear and timidity that stayed her. In 1575 he hosted a series of spectacular entertainments for her at Kenilworth Castle during her annual Summer Progress. The grand finale was his last marriage proposal. As fireworks exploded in the midnight sky above them, Elizabeth sat on the rim of a great marble fountain, and a bare-breasted woman with pearl- and gilt-shell-bedecked golden hair clad in a shimmering green mermaid’s tail swam across and presented Elizabeth with a silver oyster shell in which an opulent ring rested on a bed of pink velvet. Robert Dudley took it and knelt at Elizabeth’s feet, offering her the ring, and his heart, as he asked, one last time, for her hand in marriage. Elizabeth rejected him. For Robert, it was the death blow to his most deeply cherished dream.

After indulging in a lengthy secret affair—and rumoured secret marriage—with another of Elizabeth’s ladies, the beautiful and vulnerable Lady Douglass Sheffield, who bore him the boy he referred to as his “baseborn son”, Robert Dudley succumbed to the seductive charms of the widowed Lettice Knollys, and the couple were secretly married at Kenilworth in 1579, with the bride wearing a loose silken gown to conceal her swollen belly. They managed to keep their marriage a secret from the Queen for a year. Gossips laid another death at the newlywed couple’s door when rumours attributed the sudden demise of Lettice’s first husband to poison administered in the guise of medicine. Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex, died in Ireland, officially of dysentery, insisting that there was “something evil in his drink” and cursing his wife with his dying breath; his last wish was that their five children be removed from her custody and be raised by his kinsman, the Earl of Huntington, to save them from being corrupted by their mother.

Robert Dudley soon found himself in the uncomfortable position of being an accused bigamist when the much-wronged Lady Sheffield insisted that he had married her in a secret, late-night ceremony with three of his retainers as witnesses. But she was dissuaded from pressing her claims when all letters and proof of their marriage disappeared—stolen, she insisted, by Lord Robert’s henchmen. Fearing for her life and that of her son, when she began to suffer stomach pains, vomiting, and her beautiful blond hair began to fall out in clumps, Douglass became convinced that she was being poisoned and accepted a £700 bribe from Dudley in exchange for her silence and denial of their marriage to prevent his being persecuted for bigamy by the vengeful Queen.