Authors: Susan Kay
Tags: #Nonfiction, #History
a fine lace handkerchief.
“You are sure he comes alone?” inquired the Secretary quietly. “No
army at his back?”
“Alone as far as I could tell.” Grey was breathing quick and shallow.
“But riding like the devil and half out of his mind by all accounts. He’s
making for the Queen, I tell you. For the love of God, rouse the guard
before it’s too late.”
“I think not,” said Cecil smoothly, studying his short nails with great
interest.
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“But she’s defenceless—and God only knows what he intends in such
a mood!”
“Oh, I don’t imagine he intends violence.” Cecil glanced at his clock
and smiled unpleasantly. It was ten o’clock in the morning. “It was after
dawn again when she retired last night—she might just be awake at this
hour. I believe she finds she’s too old now to manage on two or three
hours’ rest. I expect she’s with her women—dressing—painting on the
mask of majesty. It seems rather a shame to spoil her surprise—don’t you
agree, my friend?”
Grey stared at him in amazed silence.
t t t
Essex had fought his way through the token guard and the fluttering
women who clustered around the royal apartments. On through
the Presence Chamber, the Privy Chamber, the ante-room to the
Bedchamber he strode, with one hand on his sword hilt, leaving behind a
trail of confusion and chaos. The sound of his own boots clanking on the
wooden floors beat her name in his mind. Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Elizabeth!
No one else mattered, no one else existed. He would have fought his way
through Hell itself to throw his weary body at her feet.
The door of the bedchamber was shut. Without pausing to knock, he
flung it violently open and rushed in like a madman. Then he stopped,
like one turned to stone at the sight of Medusa’s head, the breath he had
drawn to cry her name dying to a gasp of shock in his dry throat.
Elizabeth!
Even the face of Medusa could not have dealt him a more deadly
shock than that of the astounded, wrinkled, white-haired creature who
sat at the dressing-table in a plain, shapeless robe and turned her ravaged
features towards his horrified gaze. The brilliant jewelled wig, the care-
fully painted mask, the fantastic gown and monstrous ruff were gone;
and with them the woman he knew and acknowledged as his Queen. In
their place he saw an old woman, who might have been anyone’s grand-
mother—withered, frail, almost—
insignificant!
Never in his wildest, most
treacherous outrage had he ever guessed how much she owed to clever
artifice. He was shocked, dismayed—disgusted! It was as though a false
mirror had suddenly smashed in his mind, and his hand tightened on his
sword as he restrained the sudden, instinctive urge to vomit at a sight so
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repugnant to his inner imagination. Once, not much more than a decade
before, he had hoped to conquer her in bed, as well as in the council
chamber; but now his flesh crawled with revulsion at the thought. He had
loved her! How could she—how
dared
she be this shrivelled hag?
Elizabeth sat stock still, one hand in a convulsive grip around a vial
of perfume. Somewhere at the back of her mind that part of her which
was vain and eternally eighteen screamed and wept with humiliated rage
against the wicked injustice of this dreadful moment. To be seen thus, by
the one person in this world who must never see, was unendurable. The
old, fugitive desire to crawl away into a dark place for all eternity had
never been stronger in her; yet she gave no glimpse of the mental turmoil
she experienced.
Her eyes went to his hand clenched on the hilt of his sword. Had he
come to kill her at last? Certainly he looked wild enough to do it, his eyes
deep, burning sockets in a pallid face. She had no way of knowing if his
Irish army surrounded the palace at this very moment. She knew only
one thing—if he meant to run her through with his sword, her women
would be powerless to stop him.
She held out her hand in a gesture of easy regality and smiled at him.
“Why are you here, Robin?” she inquired, as casually as if he had
returned unexpectedly from a hunting expedition.
One flicker of weakness, the smallest gesture suggesting fear or panic
on her part, was all it would have taken in that moment for him to kill
her where she sat. But that inherent gallantry conquered him, showed
him again a timeless image of the woman he had worshipped on the fields
of Tilbury, wiped out the last of his outraged disappointment. A woman
who could look death squarely in the face and smile was beyond the plane
of physical ruin. His love for her, stripped, as by an acid bath, of all its
layers of greed and ambition, flared suddenly incandescent. He fell on his
knees at her feet and wept as he pressed her hand savagely against his lips.
A babble of words tumbled from him incoherently—indignation,
recrimination—remorse.
“—you wrote so coldly—I had to see you, to make you understand—I
knew how it would be behind my back—everyone speaking against me.”
“You believe the worst of me too easily, Robin,” she said softly and
released one hand long enough to touch his mud-splashed cheek. “You
are chilled, my dear—soaked to the skin—you must change into dry
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clothes or you will be ill—and I—” She shrugged her shoulders, half
humorously. “Well—I hardly look my best to receive you, do I?”
He looked up wonderingly into her merry eyes. How could he ever
have doubted her, and she so kind, so understanding, in spite of being
caught at such a wounding disadvantage? For him she had conquered her
petulant vanity; together, they might still conquer the world. He felt safe,
sheltered, as he had not felt since he was a very small boy at his mother’s
knee; and suddenly, overwhelmed with emotion, he buried his face in
her hands, kissing them over and over again.
“I have suffered trouble and storms abroad,” he whispered. “Madam—
dearest madam—I thank God I find such sweet calm at home.”
For a moment her hand rested on his wildly dishevelled red head and
he felt it trembling violently against his skull.
“Go now, Robin.” Her voice was hoarse and suddenly shaken, as
though tears were massing in her throat. “Go now—and rest. I will
receive you later and hear all your news.”
He stumbled out of her room, weak with triumph, and began to
boast of her kindness to anyone who would listen. He had been right to
come—by God’s precious soul, how right he had been to put his faith
in her love!
Summoned to her presence later, he went jauntily, full of self-
confidence, to find her sitting in a high-backed chair, attired with even
more than her customary splendour in cloth of gold—transformed
almost miraculously by the exquisite wig, dressed with diamonds, which
seemed to snatch away at least twenty years from the raddled creature
he had seen this morning. She looked magnificent sitting there with her
glittering skirts spilling over the carved arms of her chair. And though
her smile was a shade less warm as she gave him her hand and waved him
to be seated, he still had no fear of her—no glimmer of suspicion. She
offered him wine and inquired graciously after his health; he thanked
her for her kind interest and assured her that he felt greatly improved
simply for setting foot on English soil once more; and for the sight of her
incomparable face.
At that her expression flickered momentarily and seemed about to
change into something else; but then she smiled and filled his goblet
again. Warming beneath her calm and pleasant demeanour, he began to
relax and drink freely, pouring out his troubles.
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“—and your army,” she murmured at length, casually, as though it
was a matter of minor significance, “where is the main body now?”
He looked mildly surprised at the question. “Why, in Ireland,
madam—most of them laid low with fever or dysentery—it’s worse than
the plague over there, I went down with both myself, more than once.”
She nodded sympathetically. “I suggest arrowroot and the lightest
of diets—but tell me, with so many sick, who then was fit to come
with you?”
“Oh, Southampton—St. Lawrence—just a handful of close friends.
We had to travel quickly, you see, to reach you in time.”
“In time for what?” she inquired, deceptively quiet.
He looked up at her, startled, and then laughed.
“Why—in time to explain, that’s all—you surely did not imagine—”
She filled his goblet once more.
“I did not know what to think then, my dearest. But I know now.”
He reached out and grasped her hand gratefully.
“Then—you understand my position?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, ominously calm, “I think you could say that I
understand it perfectly at last.”
She had discovered all that she needed to know. The palace was not
surrounded, his men were not swaggering in London. At ten o’clock that
evening, he was under guard in his own lodging, awaiting his punishment
for desertion and disobedience.
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Chapter 5
T
he next day, disgraced, disillusioned, and despairing, he was
removed to the custody of the Lord Keeper at York House in the
Strand, forbidden to see the Queen, or his mother, or his wife. Even
his body turned traitor on him as vicious bouts of dysentery and fever
wracked him, each attack leaving him a little weaker than the last, until
he was barely able to crawl from his bed to the close-stool. Each day he
waited for some sign of the Queen’s forgiveness, but none came; and
he collapsed into apathy, eating nothing, caring for nothing. Exactly
one month from the day he had stormed her bedchamber at Nonsuch,
Elizabeth received the news that his death was expected at any hour.
She sat with her hands clenched in her lap in the withdrawing
chamber and glanced up at Leicester’s little ruby clock which stood on
the chimney-piece, carelessly ticking away the last minutes of Essex’s
life. He had cried wolf so many times before, subjected her to so much
emotional blackmail—how did she know it was not just another of his
clever devices, a trick to win her sympathy? She dared not give in to him
again. This time she must make her final stand and show him that there
was in this land but one mistress and no master. He must be shorn of his
insane ambitions, stripped of his influence—broken and cast out of her
court for ever.
I will not go to him. I will not!
But what if he died surrounded only by servants and guards, alone and
in agony, because she had refused him the company of his wife or his
mother? Never to look upon his face one last time—never to forgive! She
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began to pace stiffly up and down her room, leaning heavily on the stick
she used when she believed herself to be unobserved. It was almost four
o’clock on a cold November afternoon and the day was dying steadily
beyond her window—like him.
Suddenly she stopped abruptly in her pacing, snatched up a handbell
and rang it vigorously. The Countess of Warwick appeared from the
bedchamber and curtsied in the doorway.
“Is the barge still waiting at the privy landing stairs?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Then fetch my cloak—I shall take boat for York House and see for
myself what condition he is in. I want you to come with me, Anne.”
It was pitch black when the royal barge moored before the gardens
which ran down to the river at York House, and Lord Worcester, with a
torch in one hand, lit her path to the silent house. She went alone into the
Earl’s bedchamber and his body servants, awed at the sight of her, bowed
themselves out at an imperious wave of her hand.
“Robin,” she said quietly.
He moaned and stirred at the sound of his name, but made no reply,
and she went silently across the room. He lay hunched at the extreme
edge of the curtained bed, his great body shaking with ague and the
red hair clinging to his forehead in damp tendrils. He looked up at her
blankly, without recognition, and she felt her eyes fill with tears because
he looked so ill and vulnerable, with death on his face. The room stank of
sweat and worse, but though her fastidious senses recoiled, she sat on the
bed beside him and pushed the hair back out of his eyes. Whimpering,
he pushed her hand away and rolled on his side, his arms and legs jerking
convulsively in spasms, sobbing and cursing in the ravings of delirium.
She sat frozen with horror, listening to her own name, spoken now as a
curse, now as a caress, a horrible, twisted mingling of love and hate.
The enormity of what she had done appalled her, revealing to her
clearly, for the first time, the extent of her blame for his crimes. At length