Rival to the Queen Read online

  “Have you attempted going after boar with the crossbow? I have several, made for me by a master armorer, with special hunting bolts. You see, the main thing, in going after boar, is not to penetrate the flesh too deeply. Boar-spears are adequate, or even a plain woodknife if there is nothing else at hand—”

  “One of my men stabbed an Irishman with a boar-spear,” my father was saying. “It was—too great a success, if I may put it so.” He looked sour.

  “No doubt the man deserved it,” was Walter’s blunt reply. “But to get back to the hunt, you must let me take you to Framlingham Park, or better still, to Umberleigh, the game are plentiful there. I have had the finest venison—flavored with currants, of course, otherwise it would hardly be fit to eat—after my hunts at Umberleigh.”

  At last he smiled. Walter smiled, and then there was a bit of light in his eyes. It was something. It was enough to keep me from pleading illness and leaving the room.

  “Surely Master Devereux is not come among us solely to discuss hunting,” my mother was saying somewhat tactlessly, taking my arm on one side and Walter’s on the other and leading us toward a bench with soft cushions. “Unless it be hunting for a lady to share his future. Or is my speech too forward?”

  She paused, a charming smile on her face, and looked at my father, then at Walter’s mother, and last of all at me.

  “We must leave it to Walter to answer for himself,” my father said.

  And in time he did.

  But his proposal was a very long time coming, for Walter was nothing if not thorough, and he took his time and gave much thought to asking me to share his future.

  And in that space of time, over many months, my admiration for Lord Robert grew.

  Every time Walter came to visit me, or took me along on one of his country walks, or dined with my family, I could not help but compare him with Lord Robert, who was so much more handsome, more clever, more amusing—and, I must admit it, wealthier also. He not only had his wife’s fortune to spend, but from the start of her reign Queen Elizabeth had been enriching him with the salaries of official posts, the income from lands, and other perquisites of office. I hope I am not greedy but I have to confess that Lord Robert’s increasing wealth made him seem even more desirable—though had he lost every penny he would still have been the most desirable man at court.

  One afternoon I was told I would be riding out with the queen and Lord Robert and I hurried to put on my riding clothes. Three other maids of honor were to go along also, the four of us forming a sort of escort for the unmarried queen. It was the day before her twenty-seventh birthday, and the royal household was in a state of urgent preparation for the celebration. She would be twenty-seven, I was a bare nineteen. I remember thinking how old she seemed to me on that day, how mature. Twenty-seven might as well have been forty-seven to me then, except that, as I knew from long observation, women were old by forty-seven—if they lived that long—and starting to wither and turn inward with pains and illnesses.

  The day was overcast, the sun trying in vain to come out from behind a darkening bank of cloud. It had rained the day before, and the ground was muddy. A light wind was blowing the yellowing leaves off the trees.

  Lord Robert rode with ease on his costly mount, keeping his seat without fail despite the rough going, while the queen, a bold rider but not a skilled one, fell frequently, only to cry “No hurt! No hurt!” and get back on her horse with the aid of a patient groom, her skirts and shoes dark with sticky mud but her good humor unabated.

  I noticed that Lord Robert smiled whenever the queen fell and remounted, her grit and determination pleased him. He tempered the pace of his fine horse to hers, he joked with her as they rode along, he chased her when she challenged him to a race—always careful, I noted, not to catch her or overtake her. It must have taken skill to hold his fiery, impatient mount back, I thought. Skill and patience.

  We came to where a narrow bridge crossed a pool—too narrow a bridge to allow the horses to pass across it.

  “Wait for us,” the queen called out in a casual tone before dismounting and starting off on foot across the bridge. Lord Robert dismounted and accompanied her, taking her hand as they walked slowly along. The four of us attendants got down off our horses and sat on a thick cloth the groom spread out for us, glad for the wine and bread and fruit he had brought along for our refreshment and glad too for the glimmer of sunshine that began to warm us as we began to eat. We were poor chaperones just then, preoccupied as we were with our meal. But I did glance at the bridge, and the two figures who crossed it and disappeared, arms entwined, into the thick woods beyond. And I could not help thinking, as I attempted to peer into the dark of the forest, of the words I had read in the margins of the queen’s bedside book.

  “A year of mad delight,” she had written. “He hath my heart, and always shall . . .” They were lovers, how could they not be? I wished them all happiness (for who does not wish happiness for those who have joined their hearts?), and I envied the queen the devotion of the handsome and devoted Lord Robert. Yet her private words revealed a regret beneath her delight. “I can never be his wife,” she had written. It was her wish, her deepest wish, to be Lord Robert’s wife—or so it seemed to me then. And fate had denied her that wish. Her delight must ever be tinged with sorrow.

  A shadow fell across the grove as once again clouds veiled the sun. We ate and drank our fill, as we waited for the queen to take her pleasure in the woods, the other maids smirking and winking as the minutes lengthened into hours. Then it began to rain, and we sought what shelter we could, until at last Elizabeth and Lord Robert returned to us and we all trooped quietly and wetly home.

  TEN

  The startling news arrived on the day after the queen’s birthday. Lord Robert’s wife was dead. She died, it was said, from a fall down a staircase.

  “Pushed down a staircase,” was the universal whisper. “She didn’t fall. Somebody pushed her. And we all know who it was.”

  “King Robert’s Jig” was all the servants could whistle in the corridors. Jokes multiplied, most of them far too vulgar to repeat, though they made me laugh, and Cecelia too. It was nervous laughter, laughter born as much out of fear as out of ridicule.

  And besides, there were doubts.

  Amy Dudley had died in Oxfordshire, and Lord Robert had been far away at Greenwich, overseeing the elaborate birthday celebrations for the queen. We knew he had been there, at the palace, active and at the center of things, giving orders, spreading cheer. We had seen him with our own eyes. He could not have been in Oxfordshire, pushing his wife down the stairs.

  “Then he had one of his henchmen do it,” was the whispered response. “Or one of the servants.”

  “But the servants were all out for the day,” it was said in response. “Lady Amy sent them all away.”

  “So one of them sneaked back in, and pushed her. And Lord Robert paid him well to do it.”

  On and on the scandalous gossip went, spreading from the palace up to London and from there throughout the realm and to the realms beyond, where Lord Robert was spoken of as “King Robert” or “the king that is to be.” I heard no one contradict the presumption that Amy had died at her husband’s hands, either directly or through others he hired.

  “That man ought to be locked in the Tower,” my father announced solemnly at dinner. “Just like he was when he was a boy, with all his treasonous family.” Everyone at court knew Lord Robert’s dark history, how his father John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, and Robert himself and all four of his brothers had been imprisoned in the Tower of London following the duke’s attempt to dethrone Queen Mary and put Lady Jane Grey in her place. All the Dudleys bore the taint of treason; Lord Robert had worked hard to overcome it. Now he never would.

  Walter Devereux was dining with us, as he often did, and nodded when he heard my father’s remark, his dark eyes full of accusation. When he spoke I heard a new tone in his voice.

  “I have heard that Lord Rober
t is laying in a good stock of arms at Charney Bassett, and in the caves at Midvale Ridge. He has many men under arms. He is planning rebellion, just as his father did. He will marry the queen and take over the kingdom.”

  “With her encouragement,” I heard my mother say under her breath.

  My father looked straight ahead and said, very distinctly, “I hope I did not hear any treasonous words uttered at this table.”

  Mother looked down at her plate and said nothing more.

  Though I had never warmed to her, and did not look on her with any degree of fondness, I was concerned about Elizabeth for she appeared to be under great strain after learning that Lord Robert’s wife was dead. She was very pale, indeed alarmingly pale, and her long white fingers trembled when she suffered an attack of nerves—something that happened often in those gossip-filled days. Time and again she called for Mistress Clinkerte—whom she trusted above all others, except perhaps Lord Robert—and asked for a cordial, to steady herself. And Mistress Clinkerte, expressionless and close-mouthed, brought her what she asked for, making no comment, even when the queen drank several cordials in the course of an hour and became tipsy—or, as more often happened, quarrelsome.

  The queen was preoccupied just then with ordering a new bed. (“Large enough for two,” was my mother’s pointed comment, made when not in my father’s hearing. “And why not?” she added. “Lord Robert is in her bedchamber day and night, and sometimes very early in the morning, before she is even dressed, so that he has to hand her her shift!”)

  The bed the queen was having made was carved from aged cedarwood, painted and gilded in rich detail and with a heavy tester and valence sewn in cloth of silver. There was to be a headpiece of crimson satin, with tall fluffy ostrich feathers strewn with shining bits of gold foil. But she fretted over the bedcurtains for the new construction.

  “There are no finer bedcurtains than those at Cumnor Place,” she announced loudly in the midst of conferring with her seamstresses. “I will have no others. Lady Dudley no longer has need of them. I will have them here, to trim my new bed.” Her eyes rested on me. “You, Lettie, must go to Cumnor with Mistress Clinkerte and fetch them.”

  “Surely Your Majesty could send one of Lord Robert’s servants,” I suggested. “It would look more seemly.”

  The queen glared at me and did not reply. “You will leave for Cumnor on the morrow,” she said presently, and I did not demur, though I could sense the smiles and hear the titters the queen’s request for Amy Dudley’s bedcurtains brought forth from the others in the royal bedchamber.

  Eventually even I joined in the private laughter, to be sure. The queen’s brazen request was so daring, and so transparent, that it was very amusing. The curtains from the dead Amy Dudley’s bed, to be brought to the royal palace, and installed there along with Amy’s husband! It was an idea the queen’s fool might have suggested, to make us all laugh. Instead it was a genuine royal command.

  I thought, not for the first time, what a strange woman the queen was.

  And yet I resisted joining in the easy laughs and jibes, and dreaded going to Cumnor to fetch the bedcurtains. Deep down, I did not want all the scandalous gossip to be true. I had developed a strong partiality for Lord Robert. I did not want to believe that he was capable of having his wife killed. But rumor has a powerful voice, and I could hardly ignore all that was being said. I remembered the queen’s stolen rendezvous with Lord Robert in the forest, and all the nights he had been in her bedchamber until long after midnight, sometimes alone with her, sometimes joined there by William Cecil, Lord Robert’s strongest rival in the royal council and most cunning competitor.

  William Cecil, I thought, turning the situation over in my mind. William Cecil must surely have rejoiced at Amy Dudley’s death, for the suspicions surrounding it were doing great harm to his rival Lord Robert. Everyone I talked to at court was saying that Lord Robert would never recover from the suspicion of murdering his wife. His rising favorable repute was destroyed forever. Could it have been Cecil who connived to have Amy Dudley killed? It was not impossible, I thought.

  The queen knew the answer, surely she did. That was why she was so pale and nervous. She knew the truth. And there was one other, I suspected, who might know. The all-knowing Mistress Clinkerte.

  As my trunk was being packed for the trip to Cumnor Place, I vowed that I would ask her. And recalling how she liked to talk, and had told me things in confidence in the past, I hoped that she would tell me, in the course of our journey, what she knew of this greatest secret of all.

  ELEVEN

  “Do you think he was the one?” I asked Mistress Clinkerte after we had ridden along the Oxford Road in silence for some miles. Her broad, wrinkled face was hard, the small eyes unyielding of emotion. I had no doubt she knew the meaning of my question.

  Sighing, she looked away.

  “I read her book,” I went on. “The book she keeps by her bed. Where she writes her secrets.”

  Now her face showed alarm.

  “You should not have done that.”

  “She wrote in it that they loved each other. And that he had offered to free himself. Was that what he meant, that he was willing to free himself by removing his wife, so that they could marry?” After a time I added, “Was his wife’s death the queen’s birthday gift? She died on the queen’s birthday, didn’t she? Or the day after?”

  Mistress Clinkerte nodded. After a time she leaned closer to me and whispered, “You say too much.”

  I held my peace for the rest of the journey, except to remark on things of no consequence. I did not mention the queen, or Lord Robert, or the late Amy Dudley, again.

  Not until we had arrived at Cumnor Place, and had been shown by the steward of the household to the apartment provided for our use, did Mistress Clinkerte say anything further about the vital question I had raised. When we were alone, she led me to a window embrasure and said what she had to say.

  “People gossip about how the deed was Lord Robert’s doing. But whether it was or not, she will never marry him—or any other.”

  “But she must. No queen can rule alone. Lord Cecil, the royal council, my father—they all urge her to marry. And soon.”

  She nodded. “But the aim of marriage is to have sons. Sons to inherit her throne. She cannot bear sons. Or daughters either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she is not as other women.”

  I thought I knew what Mistress Clinkerte meant—that the queen had an illness, or was in some way flawed or deformed, or (heaven forbid!) was cursed. Yet we who lived alongside her, dressed her, supervised the gathering of her laundry, the making of her bed, the storing of her underclothes—we were surely in the best position to know her bodily conditions. Next to her physicians, that is.

  “You say she is not as other women, yet her monthly cloths are red with blood,” I said bluntly. “Surely she can bear children.”

  Mistress Clinkerte drew me closer to her face, so that I could smell the strong odor of the herbs she habitually chewed.

  “It is not her blood,” she whispered. “It is the blood of others.”

  “What others?”

  “That is for her tirewomen to know.”

  So the queen was only pretending to undergo her monthly courses, as all women do until they age and begin to wither. Or nearly all women.

  “Does Lord Robert know the truth?” I asked when I had pondered my informant’s startling words.

  Mistress Clinkerte raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

  “I know only this—that the queen does not want to be a wife who is ridiculed and despised for her barrenness. Knowing that she would be barren if she married, she will not marry.”

  “And yet—she must have an heir.”

  “She will have to choose one, in time.”

  Mistress Clinkerte’s revelations were disturbing, but equally disturbing was the scene spread out before us in the courtyard below the window where we stood, and the increasing nois
e that drowned out her low voice.

  Carts were rumbling into the courtyard, loaded with stacks of arms, heavy oak barrels, ropes and harness, boxes and baskets. Soldiers and servants were unloading them and taking the supplies into the storehouses and other buildings adjacent to the house. Armed men rode in and out through the arched gate of the manor, I saw soldiers lounging in the doorway of the saddlery and guardsmen playing dice against the stable walls. Cumnor Place was an armed camp, full of men of war, coming and going, many looking purposeful, as if on urgent errands or obeying urgent commands.

  There was much shouting and bustle, much confusion. Was anyone in command?

  I remembered what Walter Devereux had said about Lord Robert, that he was accumulating arms and plotting rebellion. Was this why the queen had been so pale and nervous in recent days? Was she afraid of Lord Robert and his men? Was she his pawn?

  I remembered what my father had told me before I left for Cumnor Place, standing before me and looking grave, as he so often did, putting his hands on my shoulders and looking into my eyes.

  “Letitia,” he had said, “whatever you may hear or see, and whatever Walter Devereux may say, know this: I do not believe the kingdom is tottering. There are too many of us holding it up! The throne is secure.”

  It was a relief to turn from such serious matters to the business we had been sent to the manor to accomplish, on the queen’s behalf. The steward escorted Mistress Clinkerte and me to Amy Dudley’s bedchamber. On the way we passed along several corridors and went up a short flight of stairs. On each of the steps, off to the side, was a small heap of wilted flowers. As soon as I glimpsed the flowers I knew this must be the fatal staircase, the scene of Amy’s accident or murder, and I could not help but catch my breath.

  The steward opened the bedchamber door and we stepped inside.

  The first thing we noticed was an old woman, cringing, as if to ward off a blow, standing against the far wall of the room.