Elizabeth (43 page)

The hangings were drawn and she had ordered a fire to be lit in her rooms in spite of the warm August weather. It was nearly a week since the Thanksgiving Service, and Leicester seemed to be suffering still from fatigue and from the obstinate low fever he had caught while he was at Tilbury. The Queen had recovered after a few days' rest and sleep, but she spent her evenings quietly with him, dining and sometimes playing cards or sitting talking about the past. She looked across at him and saw him watching her; his eyes were dull and tired and he had eaten very little.

“What are you thinking, Robert?”

“I was thinking of the first time I saw you at Hatfield.”

Elizabeth smiled. “We were both young then; who could have imagined us now, sitting together like this, with half a lifetime behind us.… We didn't marry after all, but we haven't fared too badly.”

“You were right to refuse me. I was never worthy of you; I was a poor husband to both my wives.”

“You made a poor choice—twice,” Elizabeth retorted. “And the second was the worst. Where is she now?”

“At Wanstead,” he answered. He could talk about Lettice with indifference now; he was no longer hurt by her infidelity. He felt too ill to care. And Elizabeth, with her jealousy and acid tongue, had never taunted him with the failure of his marriage or even mentioned it until she knew he could discuss it with composure.

He had been very grateful to her and very touched by her forbearance.

“I hear news of her from my stepson,” he said. “She's in the best of health and spirits and I imagine she is too busy entertaining Sir Charles Blount to concern herself with me.”

“Forget her. I'm surprised she's produced such a fine specimen as Robert Essex, he must owe it all to his father! I've liked what I've seen of him, quite apart from his kinship to you.”

“He's clever and he's ambitious,” Leicester said. “But he has a loyal heart. He's never borne me any malice and I've done what I could to advance him. He should be useful to you, Madam. In a year or two you might find a place for him.”

“I might,” Elizabeth said gently. “I will, if it pleases you.” She had already noticed Robert's stepson, and she had been favourably impressed. There was no harm in liking a handsome face and a pleasing manner, and the young Earl of Essex was one of the handsomest men she had seen in years. Better looking than Robert in his prime, she thought suddenly, with his mother's dark red hair and his father's bold, confident smile.

And by contrast with her memory of someone in the first splendour of health and virility she noticed how drawn and sick Leicester looked and how he sat so close to the heat of the fire. She left her chair and to his surprise she knelt beside him.

“I don't think you're well,” she said quickly. “I'm going to make you see my own physician. And you'll take what he prescribes if I have to feed it you myself!”

He held on to her hand; his own were very cold. He looked into her face and saw the anxiety and the tenderness in it, and he yielded to a sudden impulse and leant his head against her shoulder.

“Madam,” he said slowly, “I tell you that I feel tired and feverish and sick to death. Whatever is wrong with me, it won't cure in this air. I saw my own doctor for the second time today, and he says I ought to leave you for a while.”

He felt the Queen stiffen, and he added hastily, dreading a refusal, “A very little while; just long enough to go to Buxton; they say the waters there have marvellous properties. If I go, I shall come back to you restored instead of moping around like a sick dog until you become tired of the sight of me.”

“That danger passed a good ten years ago. I can't spare you. Robert, you know that?”

“Then we won't mention it again. I'll probably do well enough without taking the waters.” Her need came first; he felt too low and weary to argue for himself.

“I can't spare you,” she continued, “but you are going just the same. You are going to Buxton, and my only condition is that you should write to me every day, as I shall write to you. I want you to be well, my Robert, my poor beloved Robert, because I am so selfish and I could not do without you.” She turned his face towards her, and for a moment they looked at each other, then he felt her kiss him gently on the cheek.

“Thirty years after, now that I'm an old and creaking woman, I can say it to you, if it is not too late: I love you, Robert, and I need you. I know now that I always did.”

Elizabeth Throckmorton was standing in the shadows at the back of the room. She had been waiting for nearly ten minutes, her eyes fixed on the back of the Queen who had been sitting in front of her dressing mirror, staring into the looking glass without speaking or moving.

The lady-in-waiting held three of the Queen's dresses over her arm which was aching with their weight, but she had not dared to speak. There were other women in the room and they were waiting silently: the wig-maker, the two ladies who helped the Queen into her corselette, another lady with several pairs of shoes, and the personal servant who mixed the cosmetics she used on her face.

It had always taken two or three hours to dress the Queen; in the last few weeks since she had emerged from her rooms and appeared in public, it was an interminable ordeal for everyone who waited on her. She would look at clothes and throw them on the floor one by one if they didn't satisfy her; she had smacked Elizabeth Throckmorton across the face for suggesting that the metal corset was too tight, and while the tire-woman fitted her with different wigs, she watched herself in the glass and made a bitter grimace. Nothing pleased her; nothing even interested or aroused her unless it was to convulse her with temper. Her women lived in terror and spoke in whispers; when she was not raging at them and filling the rooms with obscenities, she was weeping and reading the letters she kept in a casket by the side of her bed.

The Earl of Leicester had been dead for two months; he had set out for Buxton and died on the journey, and when Elizabeth heard the news she fainted outright. She had gone to her bed and remained there with her doors locked, refusing to come out or to see anyone, until the Chief Minister, Lord Burleigh, took the responsibility for having her door broken down and went in to see her. There were no witnesses to that scene; no one knew what he said or how he persuaded her to return to her duties and master her grief. If he had failed, it was quite possible that the Queen would have fretted herself to death.

As she sat before the glass she looked as thin and bloodless as if she were dead; only her eyes were bright and alive, alive with torment and despair.

“What the devil are you doing? What are you staring at?” Mistress Throckmorton jumped and hurried over to her.

“Your dresses, Madam. Will you look at them and make a choice?” Slowly the Queen turned round.

“Red,” she said, “and gold, and green.… Are you mocking me, Mistress, that you bring me such colours?” The younger woman shrank and passed the dresses to her friend, Margaret Knollys.

“I beg your pardon, Madam. I shall fetch some more for you.”

“Fetch what you please and be damned,” the Queen's voice snapped at her. “Fetch something in mourning colours, for I am in mourning. Where's that fool with the wigs?”

There were three heads of hair, curled and scented and made from fine silk in different shades of red, from auburn to pale gold.

Her own white hair was short and drawn back. She looked at the effect of the darkest first and then flung it aside. Nothing looked right; nothing disguised the pallor of her face and the savage hollows under her eyes; even the cleverly distorted glass showed her that she was old and ravaged and mocked her with fleeting reflections of younger faces as they bent over her.

And there was no one to look at her with an admiration she could believe in any longer; she was surrounded by young eyes, by men and women who went on their knees to the dreaded Queen of England and felt no stirring of emotion towards Elizabeth Tudor. It did not matter what she wore, for Robert would not see her tonight. Robert would not stand by her chair and make her laugh and escort her back to her rooms, and sit with her for an hour or so before she went to bed.

He was dead. He had died out of her sight on the road to Buxton, and she had nothing left to comfort her but his letters; the last of all was written only two days before the end. The shaky writing was blotted by her tears. He had died without her; cruelly died, unfairly died, leaving her to this lonely, empty existence of pitiless State, having her own way for twenty-four hours of every day, governing and conferring with Burleigh, who was so enfeebled in body that he could hardly walk, looking at the ageing faces of men who had once been young when she was young, and the young faces of men who had never known her as anything but tyrannical and old.

Now, with the years making their steady conquest of her, she was in mortal need of human comfort, of the warmth of human love. And now she was truly alone.

Every evening she dined in state with her stewards and her cup bearer, sitting on a dais under a velvet canopy. She came to the table preceded by trumpeters and picked at her food, attended by four ladies who served her and dined off her leavings. She lived in unrelieved magnificence and when she retired to her apartments, she either sat alone or was driven out among her courtiers to sit and listen while someone else played and sang, and to watch while others danced. Burleigh should have let her die, instead of forcing her out into the world and her responsibilities. He could not supply her lack, for by the evening he was nodding in her presence, worn out with his endless work during the day, a tired old man with only enough energy left for his duties, and a wife and a home of his own to go to when those duties were over.

She had grieved and wept for Robert, but now she was beginning to envy him.

She stood up and, leaning on Lady Knollys, held her breath while the corset was pulled in round her waist, and then stepped into a dress of black and silver. She chose the pale red wig, and wound a long rope of pearls round her neck, before her ladies fastened a wide ruff of beautifully worked lace under her chin. The reflection stared back at her moodily; pale and angular and sad.

“Your Majesty looks beautiful,” Lady Knollys said. Elizabeth glared at her.

“Don't lie to me.”

Knollys was the most docile of her ladies, possibly because she was the kinswoman of Leicester's widow. And now that he was dead, the Queen had shown Lettice no pity; she had remarried with such indecent haste that even her own cynical friends were shocked. She was now Lady Blount, but she was paying every penny owed by her late husband to the Crown, and when that debt was settled she would never be rich or even comfortable again.

“I'm not lying, Madam, I assure you. I heard Lord Essex say the same thing only yesterday when he saw your Majesty in the Long Gallery.”

Elizabeth snapped her fingers irritably for her white plumed fan.

“What does that boy know about beauty—he's young enough to be my son!”

She turned again to the mirror; from a distance her reflection was deceptive. She had always been short-sighted and now the woman standing there, very slim and upright in the glittering sombre dress might have shed twenty years. After a moment Lady Knollys coughed. She had been told what to say by her relatives; Essex himself had rehearsed her for days, but she had not found the courage to repeat all she had been taught. He was mad with ambition and mad with impatience to step into the place Leicester had occupied for thirty years. No one could convince him that the Queen was not a lonely, feeble woman so desperate for the illusion of youth and love that she would submit to the unthinkable degradation of accepting it from him. It was hopeless, but at least she had promised to try.

“Madam … he is in the ante-room now; hoping to see you.”

Elizabeth did not answer; she opened the fan and closed it again. Her first impulse was to laugh with contempt and send the simpering woman out to him with a caustic dismissal.

Essex was waiting to see her. Essex, at twenty-two and in the prime of his splendid manhood, handsome and virile and horribly young.… It was ridiculous. It was not only ridiculous, it was an insult. For a moment she was angry, and then suddenly she hesitated. Except for Ministers and petitioners, the ante-room had been empty for two months; as empty as her life and her leisure. If he came they could talk for a few minutes, talk about Robert, talk about anything before the loneliness enclosed her and left her at the mercy of her own thoughts. The temptation came to her, and for yet another moment she resisted. But it was such a small weakness, such a harmless indulgence to see Robert's stepson and exchange a few words.

Lady Knollys was watching her and afterwards she swore that she saw the Queen shrug.

Elizabeth turned back and sat down in her chair.

“Go outside, and tell the Earl of Essex that he may come in.”

About the Author

Evelyn Anthony is the pen name of Evelyn Ward-Thomas, a female British author who began writing in 1949. She gained considerable success with her historical novels—two of which were selected for the American Literary Guild—before winning huge acclaim for her espionage thrillers. Her book,
The Occupying Power
, won the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize, and her 1971 novel,
The Tamarind Seed
, was made into a film starring Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. Anthony's books have been translated into nineteen languages. She lives in Essex, England.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.