Rival to the Queen Read online

  “Bog fever,” the tirewomen remarked to one another, nodding their heads and giving each other ominous looks. “It never fails. They go to Ireland, and come home with bog fever.”

  I had little time, in those crowded early days of my service to the queen, to think of my own future, or even to sit by my ill father’s bedside while he recovered. As a maid of honor I was expected to wake at dawn and dress quickly in the grey gown that was the indicator of my office, then attend chapel, consume a bit of bread and a bowl of ale in the queen’s chamber and then attend Her Majesty and carry out my assigned tasks, which occupied me for the rest of the morning. After midday dinner we maids spent our afternoons among the gentlewomen of the court, standing by while the queen touched those of her subjects afflicted with “the king’s evil,” the malady that only the royal touch could cure, or met with ambassadors, or stitched at embroidery or sewed silk edging on ruffs or sleeves. When the weather was fine and the queen’s temper favorable we went riding, or played at shuttlecock, or the most frivolous of the maids invented frolics and we carried them out—sometimes to the queen’s amusement, sometimes arousing her ire.

  After supper the gentlemen came to join us, and then came the hour of “eyes and sighs” when heart spoke to heart across the room or across the chessboard, the musicians striking up a coranto or a galliard and the men choosing partners from among us to skip and slide, leap and hop until we were dripping from our exertions and had to call for a tankard of small beer to ease our thirsty throats.

  Often it was after midnight when we went wearily to our final task, that of making certain the ushers and grooms had prepared the queen’s bed for her nightly rest, that great high bed with its many coverlets and hangings, the whole topped with a gilded coronet and seven plumes of eagles’ feathers.

  Once the queen had gone to her rest, we too sought our shared lumpy beds, our bare feet freezing on the cold wooden floors with nothing but the rushes to warm them, the stink of the rushes lightened by a scattering of wormwood (which helped to kill the fleas) and by the infusions of rose and orange-flowers that sweetened the air.

  Cecelia, only too aware that the queen had taken a dislike to her, and that my father was putting most of his efforts into finding a husband for me, her own future union a secondary concern, was burning as usual with suppressed rage. She took vengeance in small ways, putting camphor in the queen’s scent bottles, setting the queen’s treasured Nuremberg watch with its delicate crystal case on the very edge of a table (I saw her place it there carefully) so that it would be certain to be swept to the floor by the next gown that passed by, and broken. She left one of the aviary doors open, so that all the songbirds would have escaped had I not been watching, to close it securely.

  I thought that these vengeful pranks had gone unnoticed until, one morning, we were dressing the queen, and she was having her many wigs brought in, as she often did, to choose one to match her gown. She couldn’t make up her mind among them, and became irritated.

  Her irritation grew, as the French wigmaker brought forth one wig after another and offered them to her. She shook her head and stamped her feet. In the end her anger came to rest on one of the younger tirewomen, a mere girl, who had not been long in her service.

  “Stupid child! Not the chestnut, the tawny one! Not that tawny one, the darker one, the one with the bone lace!”

  The girl reached for the wig, fumbled, dropping it, leaving a heap of untidy curls.

  Elizabeth stood and slapped her. She shrieked, at which Cecelia swore, and reached for the heavy silver-backed mirror that lay on the royal dressing-table. The queen grabbed Cecelia’s hand, wrenched the mirror from it and flung it at the girl. It struck her on the forehead. Blood dripped from her temple. Almost at once, an usher stepped forward and, taking the girl by the arm, hurried her out of the room. The wigmaker remained.

  “There!” the queen shouted. “There is just the color I want!” She pointed to Cecelia’s mousy waves, and tore off her headdress so that her hair fell down her back untidily. Cecelia was gasping, shaking her head, still reeling from what she had just witnessed.

  Cecelia’s hair was far from being the dark tawny shade of the wig the queen had chosen and the girl had dropped. It was not a shade that matched Elizabeth’s gown, it was not thick or shiny, it had no beauty whatever. My hair was much closer to the shade she seemed to want—and would have been more flattering.

  But no one, I’m sure, thought of that at the time, and in fact all was happening very quickly. Cecelia swore, but her oath was drowned out by the queen’s shouting.

  “I will have that hair. Shave it off at once! Make me a wig of it!”

  There was a shocked silence in the room.

  “Surely Your Majesty—” my mother began timidly, but at a look from Elizabeth she broke off.

  “I said, I will have that hair. And immediately!”

  “But Your Majesty,” the Frenchman objected, “it will take me some time to make a wig. Even if I had the hair removed and before me now, combed and ready, it would take me several days—”

  “Then I will wait several days. And when it is finished, it had better be the most beautiful wig ever made!”

  Cecelia, broken, was crying. She started to run from the room, but mother caught her and held her.

  “Be brave!” she said. “Submit! It is the bravest thing you can do!”

  And she did.

  That night, as she lay beside me, her shorn head covered in swathes of cloth, her eyes swollen and her breathing ragged, I forgave her everything from the past, because she had done what I never would have had the courage to do. She had submitted to the queen’s vengeance, not for any noble purpose, but because it was the best and most practical course to take. And because mother, who had a great deal of common sense, told her to do it. She followed her mind, not her feelings. She followed good advice.

  So this is what it means to grow up, I thought. To lay childhood and girlhood aside, and become a wise maid. A wise maid, prepared to accept whatever life offers—or forces upon me. To go through the narrow portal that separates the world of hopes and dreams from the grim world of real life, and to know, with sorrow, that that portal is closed forever.

  EIGHT

  The first time I saw Robert Dudley he was laughing very loudly and joyfully and carrying a squealing, squirming piglet into the queen’s large, sumptuously decorated throne room.

  Everyone watched Elizabeth, to see what her reaction would be—and then she burst into laughter and the rest of us joined in.

  Lord Robert took his place to the right of the queen, a magnificent, tall figure, handsome and debonair, seeming not to care a whit that his costly blue velvet doublet with its gleaming golden stars was being scratched and dirtied by the little pig or that my father, who scorned trivial jests in the throne room, was shaking his head in disapproval.

  I could not look at anyone else.

  He was smiling, I remember, not only with his bow-shaped lips but with his deep blue, expressive eyes, and it was not the practiced, artificial smile of the seasoned courtier but the genuine smile of a man pleased with himself and his life. A man at ease with himself, who had subdued his demons and his fears and was master of his situation.

  And a man only too aware of how potent an effect he had on others, especially women, and most especially the queen.

  His jest having run its course, he handed the squirming piglet to a groom and proceeded to talk in a low conversational voice to Elizabeth. I watched as they conversed. The looks that passed between them were eloquent. I could plainly see that they were the most intimate of friends.

  At one point he bent down to whisper something in Elizabeth’s ear, making her smile and glance up at him with a look that was almost trusting—and the queen, I believed, trusted no one completely.

  It was said that they were lovers, though as everyone at court knew, Lord Robert was married, and had been since he was eighteen, to the daughter of Sir John Robsart.

 
; “She never comes to court,” I was told by the shrewd, rotund Mistress Clinkerte, who quickly became my most reliable informant at court. The all-knowing Mistress Clinkerte had been one of Elizabeth’s rockers, or nursemaids, when she was a baby, and had served her ever since, through all the many changes in her status and circumstances. She had even served the Princess Elizabeth when she was imprisoned in the Tower during her half-sister’s reign, and had stories to tell about that tense and dangerous time. When I became a maid of honor Mistress Clinkerte was the queen’s principal tirewoman, surprisingly spry despite her girth—and her age, which was near to fifty summers.

  “Lord Robert’s wife never comes to court,” she told me. “She knows better. They say she bides her time, at one country house or another, just waiting for the queen to marry. Like as not she will marry, though she swears she won’t. She’ll have to, won’t she? No woman can be queen on her own. Look what happened with her sister! She tried to reign without a husband, and was an unhappy failure.”

  “And then she married, and things got a lot worse,” I put in. “They say everyone hated King Philip, and he was cruel to her.”

  “That was her punishment for burning all those poor people,” Mistress Clinkerte insisted. “She went wrong, and she got her comeuppance.”

  “Tell me about Lord Robert’s wife,” I said, bringing the tirewoman back to the subject that interested me. “Is she beautiful? Is she rich? Does she have lovers?”

  Mistress Clinkerte lowered her voice. “Amy Dudley, Amy Robsart that was, is an heiress, her father has lands and a fortune, and heaven knows Lord Robert needed to marry an heiress, for his family—you know they were all in terrible disgrace, and went to prison and had all their lands and money taken away—left him with nothing of his own. He does like money! He spends and spends, and when he has spent it all, he borrows.

  “Is she beautiful?” Mistress Clinkerte went on. “No. Her face is quite ordinary, and one shoulder is higher than the other, and her bosom is not raised nor her waist reed-slim like the queen’s. She knows her value, I’ll say that for her. Lord Robert was not the only one hoping to win her hand. But she would never come to court, and the queen would never invite her. As to whether she has lovers, I’ve never heard of any. Then again, no one really cares what she does.”

  Lord Robert was everywhere, it seemed, fulfilling his highly public duties as Master of the Horse, riding beside the queen when she went out hunting, leading the dancing when she called the musicians into her chamber, ordering the Yule-games at Christmastide, entertaining us all at banquets with merry tales and jests and darker stories of his time in battle (he had fought valorously, it was said, at the Battle of St. Quentin, alongside King Philip’s Spaniards).

  Lord Robert rode out, adorned splendidly in a velvet coat and chains of gold, at the head of his large troop of yeomen, when the queen went through the streets to be received by the Lord Mayor. He gave receptions at his grand house in the Strand, Leicester House, and entertained the queen at his country houses as well, though I never heard of his wife being present at any of those entertainments.

  When Elizabeth boasted that all the men of the court were dyeing their beards to match her hair, Lord Robert was one of the first to display his newly dyed, curling beard, and when she remarked that her favorite scent was musk, he ordered all his gloves perfumed with musk (and, it was rumored, his codpieces as well). He talked at length and knowledgeably about many things, from the latest voyages of exploration in the distant waters and lands of the New World to the price of pigeon pie to the latest reports of the queen’s envoys in Scotland and France. Many men talked endlessly and were endlessly dull; Lord Robert was endlessly entertaining.

  I could not look at, or listen to, anyone else.

  And I discovered, by chance, that the queen shared my fascination.

  Late one afternoon, when Elizabeth and most of the maids of honor were taking their ease on the terrace, watching a lazy game of croquet, I was sent back to the royal bedchamber to get a shawl, which had been left lying on the bed. I found it, and then noticed, with great interest, that on a low bench beside the bed was one of the queen’s beautifully printed books, open to a page where she had been writing in the wide margin before being interrupted. A quill and inkpot and other writing implements had been laid aside, evidently in haste. No doubt she had meant to close the book but had been called away by something urgent. Or perhaps she had left it open so that the ink might dry.

  I knew her script, spidery and large, the letters well formed and easy to read.

  I was tempted. I could not resist the temptation. I read.

  “A year since he became mine, and I his. A year of mad delight. No one can know, though many guess. He has offered to free himself—”

  There the words stopped. What could they mean? They certainly seemed revealing enough, to one who had been at court even the short few months that I had been there.

  Gently I touched the ink. It was dry.

  Hearing footsteps in the passage, I busied myself opening cupboards, pretending to look for something. The footsteps passed on.

  I returned to the bedside and hovered over the open book. I turned back the pages and found that there were many entries in the margins, all in the same spidery hand. Four lines of verse caught my eye:

  He hath my heart, and always shall

  In memory perpetual.

  One soul are we, one mind, one life

  But I can never be his wife.

  Lord Robert and the queen, the queen and Lord Robert. She loved him, just as I thought. And he, for his part, had at least “offered to free himself.”

  Did Mistress Clinkerte know about the book, and its secrets, I wondered. Or had I stumbled upon something so very private, so very close to the queen’s heart, that not even the all-knowing tirewoman was aware of it? Words so secret that no one but Elizabeth herself—and now me, a maid of honor and her kinswoman—knew of them?

  I took up the shawl and began to walk toward the doorway, intent on returning to where the court was gathered. But then I turned back, and went to where the book lay open by the bed. Gently I closed it, leaving the writing things undisturbed, and hoping that no other inquisitive eyes would be drawn to its revealing pages.

  NINE

  By far the most disconcerting thing about the boy my father brought to meet me in my second year at the royal court was that he was not very intelligent. He was manly enough, to be sure, and not bad-looking, though his dark hair was already beginning to recede from his low forehead, but his eyes! His dark eyes had almost nothing behind them, no spark of mental life, no glint of humor, no indication at all that when he looked out at the world, he saw anything in it but things. Not ideas, not forces, not absurdities or even dangers. Just things, heavy and lifeless, most of them, to be moved or hoarded, stored or polished or kicked or knocked into shape.

  I am one of those things, I thought as I watched him. In me he sees flesh—ripe, young female flesh—to be used and enjoyed. To breed sons upon. To decorate his halls and run his household. To wait for him when he goes off on the queen’s business, and welcome him back on his return.

  I saw it all, there in his lusterless dark brown eyes.

  And in my father’s much more lively eyes I saw satisfaction, for in this boy, this Walter Devereux, he believed he had found me a husband.

  What gave him even more satisfaction was that he believed he had found a husband for Cecelia as well. Walter had a second cousin, Sir Roger Wilbraham, a widower in need of a wife to care for his children and look after him as he aged. Sir Roger was not a young man, and Cecelia would be his third wife. But at least he was willing to consider her—especially if father was able to use his influence to make Sir Roger a Justice of the Peace, with all the income that important office brought with it.

  Father was rubbing his hands together when I entered the room on that memorable afternoon—always a sign that he was pleased. Then I took one look at the boy standing next to him, the b
oy who could only be Walter Devereux. And I saw his eyes, and I thought, no. Please no.

  I glanced at mother, sitting demurely off to one side, chatting with another woman who I took to be Walter’s mother. She would not meet my glance. A bad sign. My brother Frank was not present, I looked around in vain for someone—anyone—to share my initial impression of the vapid Walter. But there was no one.

  He came closer to me and stared. Father introduced us. Walter bowed and I bent my knee in a curtseyed acknowledgment. He was silent. What a dullard, I was thinking. Where did father find this boy? His next words answered my unspoken question.

  “Young Walter went along with me to Ireland, Lettie. He was of the greatest help to me there.”

  “And how did you enjoy Ireland?” I asked the boy, more out of politeness than curiosity.

  “It looked a lot like Wales,” was his succinct reply. “Lots of greenery.”

  What could I say to a boy who reduced Ireland to “lots of greenery”? To be sure, I had never been to Ireland, but I had heard a lot about it from my father. And I had the impression it was a grand, sweeping land, boggy in parts, quite magnificent if one overlooked the hostile natives.

  I tried another subject.

  “Are you drawn to greenery then? Do you enjoy cultivating your gardens?”

  But Walter only shrugged. “The gardeners do that. It’s what my father employs them for.”

  I was ready to plead illness and leave—I could think of no other plausible reason to avoid further talk with this dolt—when I heard my mother’s soothing voice. She had gotten up and come over to us, and was speaking to Walter.

  “Your mother was just telling me that hunting is your passion. Especially boar-hunting.”

  At once Walter’s face lit up. “Yes, indeed it is. I have taken many boars, and red deer and fallow, and foxes, and hares, though coursing is not really to my taste—”

  He turned to my father and continued his sudden spate of words.