Rival to the Queen Page 7

  “I am more concerned than anyone about my late wife’s death,” Lord Robert said curtly.

  “Yet you were not aware that she was carrying your child.”

  “I do not believe it. Has her body been opened?”

  “No, your lordship, it has not. But we have heard testimony from the maid Pirto that a midwife from London was summoned on the afternoon of Lady Dudley’s death.”

  “Nonsense. Lady Dudley was barren.” He glowered at Pirto. “What was the name of this midwife from London?”

  “I was not told her name,” Pirto said defiantly.

  “Quick! Inquire of the grooms whether a woman was brought from London on the afternoon of my wife’s death!”

  Immediately several of the guardsmen were heard leaving the courtroom. But Pirto had already burst into tears, and put her head in her hands.

  “There was no midwife, was there, Pirto. You invented the entire incident. My lady wife was not happy. She had not been happy for a very long time. She spoke often of how she could no longer bear the pain of living. I could not find a way to aid her, or comfort her. I sent for priests, ministers, doctors—but no one could help her, or cure her gloom, least of all me. In fact I seemed to deepen it. She was wretched—and I was wretched, living alongside her. Her constant despair was one of the reasons I was glad to be detained at the royal court.”

  Lord Robert’s ringing words, words evidently wrenched from his heart, and spoken not in impatience, but from an anguished exasperation, hung in the air.

  “I see,” the coroner said quietly, and with finality. He paused, then continued. “And will you please tell the court, my lord, why you have come to Cumnor Place at this time? You were not summoned to appear at this inquest.”

  “I would have thought that obvious. I am here to take command of my men. The queen fears rebellion. Rebels are stirring, in the aftermath of my wife’s death. It is being said that I was responsible for her death. That I mean to marry the queen and take over the kingdom. The queen is also being falsely slandered and blamed. Rebellious forces—Catholic forces, loyal to the pope and encouraged by King Philip—are taking this opportunity to muster in secret. The queen commands me to raise a thousand men and provide weaponry from my stores here in Oxfordshire. I am doing so, in all haste, as our enemies are even now marching toward London.”

  “Then we must detain you no longer,” the coroner declared briskly. “I decree this inquest at an end, and order the jury to bring in a verdict of death by misadventure. The body of Lady Dudley will be laid to rest in the Church of Our Lady in Oxford a fortnight hence, with full honors due to her rank and that of her exalted lord.”

  FOURTEEN

  I left the inquest feeling very impressed with Lord Robert. I found him to be convincing when he described his late wife’s distraught state, and I believed him to be innocent of any involvement in her death, whatever the gossiping courtiers and servants might say.

  Amy Dudley fell down the stairs, it was an accident. That was all. The coroner had said so, and the impressive Rouge Puirsuivant agreed.

  I was even more convinced of Lord Robert’s innocence when I went back to Amy’s bedchamber to retrieve the bedcurtains, which had been placed in baskets for our journey back to the royal court.

  When I went into the room I was surprised to see Lord Robert kneeling beside the bed, tearful, his hands folded, murmuring his goodbyes (or so I assumed) to his late wife. He was not dressed as he had been in the courtroom; he had untied his stiff metal leggings, breastplate and pauldrons and laid them on the bed. Kneeling there in his white linen shirt, so thin it was almost transparent, and soft clinging hose, without his armor, without even the wide slashed sleeves and voluminous coat he always wore when at court, he looked vulnerable in his near nakedness.

  He looked vulnerable—yet strong. I could not help but admire his sinewy arms, broad back and muscular legs, though I stopped myself from admiring them for more than a brief moment. I wondered if he had noticed.

  For he looked up as I came in, and began wiping the tears from his cheeks. I could tell from his expression that he felt bereft, and genuinely sorrowful. I thought, even though he was not in any way to blame for what happened to his wife, and had in fact tried to comfort her and get help for her, he felt regret—and perhaps more than a little remorse.

  I was touched by the sight of him, and felt my heart go out to him.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, my lord,” I said. “I did not realize anyone would be here. I only came to get the bedcurtains the queen has asked for.”

  He got to his feet and sat on the bed. He seemed quite unconcerned to be wearing only his thin shirt and hose. Sitting there, he looked very young, with the lanky, slightly awkward appearance of a boy rather than a grown man.

  He looked at me.

  “I cannot attend the funeral service, so I must say my farewells now, as best I can. Better here, at the bedside where she died, than at the shabby grave behind the alehouse where they buried her.” We both knew why Lady Amy had been hastily interred in unconsecrated ground, but neither of us spoke of it. If she had deliberately thrown herself down the stairs, with the intent to take her own life, then she could have no grave in a churchyard. Suicides were not permitted to rest in consecrated ground. The vicar, aware of this delicate spiritual matter, had made the hasty decision to give her a temporary grave in an inconspicuous place on the manor grounds.

  Lord Robert looked more closely at me, and smiled—a small, tentative smile.

  “You are Francis Knollys’s daughter. You haunt the queen’s apartments, and flit in and out of her rooms, doing her bidding, with the other maids of honor.”

  “I am Letitia Knollys, your lordship.”

  “You are to be married to the Devereux heir, am I right?”

  “It may be so. We are not yet betrothed.”

  “And I sense you are not eager to be.”

  I could not help but smile at this, yet I felt uncertain whether I should be discussing my future with the great Lord Robert.

  He passed one large hand over his face, wiping away the last of his tears, and as he did so he let his muscles relax, and I saw the weariness that burdened him.

  “Talk to me, Letitia Knollys. Help take my thoughts away from this dreary sad place.”

  I sighed, wondering what I ought to say. While I gathered my thoughts I drew a bench toward the bed and sat down, wishing Mistress Clinkerte or the steward or even Pirto were with us. But that would never do, not with Lord Robert in a state of undress.

  I remembered something I had once been told, that Lord Robert had spent time in Italy in his youth. Surely that would be something we could speak about without awkwardness.

  I asked him about his Italian travels, and he seemed to brighten a little as he told me of the charming countryside and delicious food of Tuscany, of a centuries-old villa where he had stayed, of his happy tramps through the hills and the good shooting to be had in the marshes farther to the south, near Rome.

  I enjoyed listening to him, as we talked on; all my uncertainty fell away and it was as if I had known him a long time, as if our inequality in rank and position and his far wider experience of life did not matter very much.

  “No doubt you have heard the rumor that I brought a poisoner back with me from Italy,” he said at length, and all of a sudden a shadow fell between us, our pleasant conversation truncated. “They are said to be expert in poisons, the Italians,” he remarked.

  I started to reassure him, to say that I had heard nothing about any Italian poisoner in his household, but then I stopped myself. Of course I had heard the rumor. I had an urge to tell him only the truth.

  “Many terrible things are said about you,” I said, “but I assure you, in all candor, that I do not believe them. I do not believe you were at fault in your wife’s death.”

  “Thank you.”

  There passed between us then, I remember, a look such as I had never before shared with any boy or man. A look of frank
openness and trust, untainted by flirtation or calculation—at least on my part. Neither of us spoke. It was a comfortable silence.

  Eventually I said, “I must take the bedcurtains now.” I reached for the nearest of the baskets.

  “Yes, of course you must. We must all dance to the queen’s tune.” His wry tone surprised me. He surprised me further by putting one large, warm hand on mine, stopping me from lifting the basket. He leaned closer to me and spoke in low tones.

  “Pirto was lying about the midwife, you know. There was no child. There could not have been. My wife and I had not lain together for a long time. Amy suspected she could not bear a child and had no taste for sleeping with me. She was angry with me. She refused to allow me to share her bed. This bed, with the bedcurtains I brought from Italy.” Having delivered himself of this intense series of confidences, he sighed heavily, and released my hand.

  I hesitated. I had confidences of my own to share.

  “Lord Robert—”

  “Yes?”

  I paused again, unsure whether to follow my strong impulse or to hold back.

  “What is it, girl?”

  “Lord Robert, there is something I think you need to have. It rightly belongs to you. Pirto gave it to me after the inquest ended, and she made me promise never to show it to anyone. She wants so badly to be loyal to her mistress! But I think you need to have it.”

  I drew from my pocket the folded paper Pirto had taken from Lady Dudley’s locked box and handed it to Lord Robert.

  “I have not read this,” I said. “Your wife left it with Pirto, to give to you.”

  He reached out and took the paper, unfolded it, and read it aloud, in a strained voice. “To my husband Lord Robert Dudley, I can no longer bear to walk this earth in torment. I have decided to free myself. Farewell, sweet Robin.”

  He looked up at me, as if dazed, then cried out “Thank God!” and jumped up off the bed, hastily beginning to put on his armor.

  “Here,” he said, handing me the note. “Destroy this. Pirto was right to want it kept secret. Anyone reading this would believe Amy was mad. Only madwomen destroy themselves.”

  “Or women who are merely sunk in misery.”

  “No, not that. Don’t you see? Before you showed me this message I thought for certain it must have been an accident, her falling down those stairs, but now I see that she must have killed herself deliberately, not because she couldn’t bear to live, but because she wanted me to be blamed for her death. It was her revenge. Her revenge!”

  “But why?”

  “She was jealous of the queen. And of my ambition. Above all, of my ambition. She thought that Elizabeth and I were planning to annul our marriage, Amy’s and mine—and, I have to confess, Elizabeth did talk about it now and then. How we could get a church court to do it, to say that Amy was my distant cousin and that our marriage had never been a true one in the eyes of the church. But I never took that kind of talk seriously. Elizabeth is full of playful fancies of that sort, you know. Imaginings. None of it means anything.”

  “It did to Amy.”

  “Besides,” he said as he pulled on the last of his armor and did his best to tie it firmly in place, fumbling a good deal, no doubt because he was accustomed to having a groom dress him, “I want Amy to have a Christian burial. Otherwise she would bring shame on the family.”

  On you, I thought. To bury her as a suicide would bring shame on you, and harm your ambitions.

  At length he stood before me in his gleaming armor, restored to his impressive role as military captain.

  “Let this be our secret, Letitia. This mad confession, written by a madwoman. I will not tell the queen about it.”

  “And I will tell no one, if you wish it. Certainly not Mistress Clinkerte, who is the guardian of all secrets.”

  “You and I, Lettie,” he said, using the playful name my family gave me. Had he heard my father use it when addressing me? “You and I alone will know the truth, through all eternity,” he intoned with mock solemnity.

  His sudden levity made me frown. We were after all standing in the room of a woman who had killed herself, whether through an excess of despair or out of desire for revenge.

  “I will not forget, either,” I said, “what Pirto told me. That Amy did not die right away. That after her fall she lingered for hours, in agony, before she died. Whatever moved her to this terrible act, she suffered greatly for it.”

  “She paid for the sin of destroying herself,” Robert said quietly.

  And you paid too, I thought, and will go on paying. Amy had her revenge.

  Lord Robert left Cumnor Place, leading his thousand men southward to London, to defend the capital and the queen. The preparations for Amy’s funeral in Oxford went forward without hindrance, and Mistress Clinkerte and I returned to court.

  But I took with me the note Amy had written, instead of destroying it as Lord Robert had asked me to do, and hid it away for safekeeping. I knew it could prove his innocence, if the ugly accusations against him persisted. And I felt that I wanted to protect him—and to protect the truth.

  As I had promised, I told no one of the note’s contents, in fact I said little about what had happened during my few days at Cumnor Place. But I thought about those disturbing days a great deal, and about Lord Robert, as he had looked when he knelt weeping at his late wife’s bedside, his sun-browned skin visible beneath his thin shirt, his powerful calves outlined by his velvet hose. His fine dark blue eyes, now full of sorrow, now full of determination as he tied on his armor, now gravely and steadily watching me as we talked. And the sound of his voice, resonant and mellow and rich, saying “You and I, Lettie. You and I alone will know the truth, through all eternity.” The words went round and round in my head for a long time after we parted, until their meaning was lost in the deep ensorcelling web of their sound.

  FIFTEEN

  At first we thought she was merely tired, worn out from riding and hunting, and wearied, too, by all the agitation and unease surrounding Amy Dudley’s death.

  She was slow to get out of her great cedarwood bed in the morning, slow to draw the beautiful bedcurtains with their bright embroidered scenes of Leda and Apollo and Adonis. She complained of a headache and called weakly for Mistress Clinkerte to rub her sore back.

  It was unlike the queen to indulge herself in this way, it seemed to me. As a rule when she was ill her bad temper worsened and she became more demanding, but she forced herself to get out of bed and do what was necessary, reading and signing papers and meeting with Lord Cecil and her council and keeping us all in dread of her displeasure.

  This time, however, she seemed to give in to her ailment, to sink into lethargy under its weight, until by the third day we were very worried about her and prayers were being offered in all the churches for her recovery.

  On that day Mistress Clinkerte was bending over the bed, trying to persuade the queen to eat some soup and gruel, when I heard her cry out in horror.

  “Her mouth! Her mouth! Quick! Call the physicians!”

  “What is it?” I asked, going up toward the bed.

  “The spots! She has the spots! It is the pox!”

  Instinctively I drew back. Everyone knew the signs of the dreaded pox, the spots that broke out in the sufferer’s mouth and that soon spread in a loathsome tide all across the face and down the arms. I had seen the tiny red spots before, and had been warned to stay away, stay far away, lest I too become a victim of the deadly disease.

  “Quick! Bathe her!” the physicians urged, ordering the servants to bring boiling water to fill the queen’s big metal tub and insisting that she immerse herself in the hottest water she could stand—until she protested that she was being scalded alive. Once bathed, she was then led out into the palace garden, where a chilly autumnal wind was blowing the brilliant orange and yellow leaves off the trees. On her return she was coughing and sneezing, her face red and her breath coming in short gasps. Instead of curing the pox, the doctors had caused her to
be afflicted with a rheum.

  The physicians were sent away and the queen was put to bed, tended by Mistress Clinkerte and the gentle, soothing Mary Sidney, Lord Robert’s pretty sister who was one of the bedchamber women.

  “How is she?” Lord Robert asked me when he came to court. I was sitting in one of the outer chambers, trying to occupy myself with needlework but distracted by my worries. For my sister Cecelia had begun to complain of feeling ill and several of the other bedchamber women and maids of honor were showing signs of the pox, as was one of the physicians, Dr. Meadowcroft.

  “She never leaves her bed,” I told him, noting that he was wearing mourning garb, black cloak and doublet, hose and slippers. He was in mourning for his late wife, I thought—and then I wondered, was he also making sure to be properly dressed when the queen died? “Her thoughts are drifting,” I added. Mistress Clinkerte had confided to me that the queen was lost in semi-coherent reminiscence much of the time.

  Lord Robert shook his head.

  “Am I to be so afflicted,” he mused, half to himself, “as to be deprived of my wife and my beloved queen in so short a space of time? Who will reign once she is gone? Who will keep order?”

  “Lord Robert!” My father came in, wringing his hands as he often did, deep lines of worry on his brow. “Lord Robert, she has been asking for you.”

  “To say her goodbyes, no doubt,” was his response.

  “There is no need to assume the worst,” my father chided. “She has a toughness in her. She may well survive—but she must be encouraged, supported. She must not see you or anyone wearing mourning black. That would lower her spirits.”

  “Then I will not go in to her just yet,” was Lord Robert’s immediate reply. I detected relief in his tone. He was as much afraid of the pox as anyone. “I am concerned about the need to maintain order—if she should succumb.”

  “As is every man on the council. We have assembled the city militias. Their numbers will be sufficient.”