His Last Letter Page 3

  She laughed, a true laugh, one that he’d often heard in days past as she’d ridden breakneck upon her favorite hunter beside him on the chase. As always, due to the same stars they’d been born under on the same day of the same year, she had read his worry and silently reassured him with a memory.

  Those minutes passed too swiftly, and she was queen again, putting the woman aside as she could do, as he had never learned to do with his manhood. “Lord Robert, you know that we are happy for your return, having great need of your service in this matter of Spain bringing the Inquisition to the Hollanders across the channel. Their parliament, the States-General, has offered me their crown again and has put their begging ambassadors in my presence chamber every day.”

  “Majesty, you have denied them your rule many times for at least a decade.”

  “And will continue to deny them,” she said sharply before standing and walking away, then back again. Pacing had always helped her to think. But he felt the loss of her warm hand and was happy when she came back to him, though not as near. He stood to face her, for she was obviously troubled.

  It was an old worry.

  “Since Spain claims the Hollanders’ northern provinces as their own, if we accept the Dutch throne, as you must know, my lord, that act would give Philip his perfect excuse to send his Spanish legions to invade England.”

  He missed the loss of his loving Bess, but royal duties had reclaimed her as they always did. He could best show his love by helping her think through the political problems that troubled her. “Majesty, King Philip needs no perfect excuse, nor any excuse.” He allowed her a moment to think on what they both knew was true, although she always tried to push such difficult truth away and think there must be a way to negotiate even with Philip. “Spain has not conquered the northern provinces yet, Majesty. These people are Protestant and look to a Protestant queen for help. They will fight popery until their last breath.”

  Elizabeth frowned, making an irritated pup, pup sound with her lips. “Or until our last gold mark, my lord! They always plead for English treasure and troops. They would bankrupt my purse.”

  He knelt. “My queen, I beg you to help them.” He knew her face flared pink under its mask.

  Angrily, she shouted, “We know you have long sought our men and money for their good.”

  He tried not to allow her frustration to hurt him, having felt it many times. “Majesty, I have always loyally counseled what I thought good for you and England.”

  “Yes, yes, we know.” She admitted the truth of his protest, though she did not like it when other truth differed from her own.

  She began to pace again. “My lord, we have given the matter much thought and we have listened to our good councilors. Cecil, Lord Burghley, and especially Walsingham repeat your warnings. Our own people along with most of the Commons in Parliament urge us to give aid to the Dutch Protestants.” She raised a hand in frustration, then let it fall. “Very well. If you all join together against me and would have us send an army, then you will be our lieutenant general, for we cannot trust any as we trust you . . . yet we need you here by our side.”

  The last words were tender and he thought she might embrace him again. Was he to her as she was to him, ever the same as when they’d first loved in youth, despite the years since then and the troubles they’d endured?

  CHAPTER 2

  WHEN THEY WERE YOUNG

  ELIZABETH

  Early June 1550

  Richmond Castle

  Princess Elizabeth ignored Lord Robert Dudley, young son of the Earl of Warwick, who bowed to her as she walked with her nurse and ladies. He gave her their private signal to meet later, but she turned away most pointedly, knowing her eyes were as dark as two thunderclouds and meaning them to be. Yet she heard the faint crackle of paper in the oversleeve of her gown, a poem she had begun for Robin that now he would never see.

  Jesu in chains! What did he want from her . . . a wedding gift? The news was everywhere spoken in the castle. He was to marry Amy Robsart in a week, a country gentleman’s pretty daughter with property. Did he think to keep such news secret in a royal palace? Not for the space of an hour.

  He hurried after her. Did he want to explain? There was never an explanation for betrayal. You were either a betrayer or you weren’t. She would not listen. Yet as she walked on, her head held high, she could not stop herself from urging her maids to hurry inside while lingering in the end gallery beside a window alcove.

  He approached her and bowed, but she turned away. Not this time. No! She would not be cozened by his proud, handsome face and blazing black eyes or his knightly carriage. Indeed, she would erase her memory of everything they had been and she had hoped would be. Short of marriage, that is.

  “Bess,” he pleaded. “Please.”

  “Please? No, Robin, you do not please me and never will again.” She pulled at her arm, but he held her until she pulled harder.

  He let her go, his face now suddenly pale, and she softened as much as she could allow.

  “Bess . . . what can I do?” he begged. “I am a younger son. I have little but what the king or my father grants me. Amy Robsart comes with property and is heiress to much more. And I am to have Hemsby Manor for my own. Our fathers have signed the contract. What choice—”

  “And she is pretty, I hear,” Elizabeth said, the words spit from between her lips. She was exhausted from the deepest disappointment she had ever known, deeper than her father’s dislike, deeper than Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour’s implying that he had compromised her, which had cost him his head and almost cost her the same had she not kept her wits when questioned. And she had known many other betrayals by men. Her father had killed her mother. There was no greater betrayal. But nothing else. She swore it! No one had taken her virginity. She would avow it on her deathbed.

  She sat down quickly on a window seat in the darkened alcove, the sun behind clouds. “Speak not of choice to me, Robin.” Her lips trembled beyond control, though she reached deep to gather more. “You are seventeen years old, as I am, and are a legal man grown. You have more choice than I, daughter of a king, who has none. The council will promise me to some foreign prince, or sweep me off to a German duchy, or anyone who will take a royal bastard and daughter of a witch and a great whore, the ‘little whore,’ as all Europe knows me to be.” She pressed her lips tight and regained her poise. She had been practicing that for her life long.

  “Never to see you again?” he asked, choking on the words. He wove his hand through her red-blond hair, brushed by her ladies until it shone without the need for sun or torchlight. “Never to touch this again.” He brought a glorious tress to his lips. “I could not bear that, Bess.”

  She had to pull back. She could not stand the touch she had always loved. “Robin, you are cruel to make me love you still. Make me hate you, if you care for me, or as your duty to a royal princess. I care not how. Just do it. . . . Help me.”

  “You ask the impossible, sweetheart. And you are not a bastard or a whore. Not so known to me, although . . . perhaps a witch . . . for you have bewitched me.” He grinned to take the sting out of that word, a word that could bring a woman to the stake for burning, a name her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been called, was still called. “You know that you have always been my beloved princess, and someday you will be my queen.”

  She jerked away from him and looked about fearfully. “Never call me so! Don’t you know that I have Catholic enemies in this court behind every pillar, followers of my sister, Mary, the next of my father’s children to inherit the throne? They will do anything to deny another Protestant the crown.”

  “But your brother will have children. . . .”

  Elizabeth stared at him. Never had she heard such wishful thinking, though she already knew passion was full of it.

  “I know, Bess,” he whispered. “Edward is sickly. It is whispered everywhere. . . .”

  “Do not say so to me. I am my brother’s loyal subject. I daily pray with my ch
aplain for his good health.”

  The sun edged behind a late-spring cloud and the alcove turned almost midnight after the torch on the nearest column went out. “Bess, dearest,” he whispered, and she felt her body move toward him, creeping into his warm arms.

  “Sweetheart, if it were possible . . .”

  His breath brushed her cheek and she thought, I cannot live without him. But this was impossible to say.

  “Robin, it is not likely that we can be together and I truly know it as you do, though I like it little. My nurse, Kat Ashley, says all young men and women want what is not promising for them and that I must let wiser heads guide me.” She watched his face. “Do you believe that, Robin?”

  “My father says the same,” he answered, his wide shoulders rising with an effort at his old swagger.

  “Your father, Warwick, may be high in my brother’s favor, but someday I will decide which wiser head pleases me most.”

  He grinned at her because she sounded like herself again. “You will, Bess, you will. I swear that I will pray for that day.”

  Elizabeth had to ask the question most in her heart. “Robin, do you love her, this Amy Robsart?”

  He hesitated and she knew that he liked her well enough. Faithless man!

  “There is a good settlement.”

  His caution wasn’t appreciated. Elizabeth pulled away from him, violently, and slapped his face. “That is commerce, not love!”

  His hand went to his cheek and she hoped he was stung by her fury, but he took her shoulders and drew her close, breathing near her ear, overheating her.

  “If you don’t know whom I love by now, you will—”

  “Tell me, Robin. Give me the memory of the sound of it.” Give me that!

  He breathed in deeply, looking a little dizzy, though he kept his body firm. Or, she wondered, was it firm without his command? “I love you, Elizabeth Tudor, my darling Bess, now and forever.”

  “Again,” she commanded, tossing her head back, knowing she looked every inch a queen.

  He repeated his words and added, “I have loved you since we were children and you knew your Latin verbs better than I in the Greenwich Palace schoolroom.”

  “Since I outrode you that day in the Windsor Great Park deer hunt!” she proclaimed, always loving to best him.

  “Since that day, before, after and still until the day I die. We were fated to love from our natal day. Dr. Dee tells me our stars foretold it. There is no help for love that is destined by heaven.”

  Elizabeth sat up as straight as a pikeman and shook herself. “Yes, but I must bear my fate alone. I will bear it. Watch me!” Her face was filled with pride and she knew it.

  “Lord God forgive me, Bess.”

  “He may, but I never shall.”

  “You cannot mean those words, Bess.”

  And when he put his cheek to hers, she retrieved her anger. “No, I cannot mean those words, although I will come to mean them with the help of Jesu and all the saints.”

  Though pledged to Amy, Robin kissed her until they were so close that she knew even the full appearing sun could not send its rays between them.

  A stern voice accomplished what the sun could not.

  “Princess, you forget your royal self! I’m happy to find you before someone else carries this tale to the king, your brother.” Sturdy Kat Ashley stood not a man’s length from them, speaking in her soft, cajoling Devon accent: “Come now, my sweet princess, before someone less eager for your good name sees you in Lord Robert’s betrothed arms.”

  Robin stood and kissed Elizabeth’s hand. She believed it a final caress. He bowed to Kat, who would never betray them.

  Elizabeth thrust a piece of paper into his hand and walked away from him, too proud to allow herself to send a last, yearning look back to him. She would not fall into her bed weeping, to be ill for days while doctors bled her until she could not rise. This was her life. Eventually, everyone she loved left her.

  CHAPTER 3

  “PROTECT HER OR I AM NOT YOUR SON”

  EARL OF LEICESTER

  June 1550

  Robin’s Wedding

  R obert Dudley, his chest tight, only his large codpiece keeping him safe from male jibes and women’s laughter, stopped behind a pillar to read Bess’s note:No means I find to rid him from my breast,

  Till by the end of things it be supprest.

  He placed it inside his doublet next to his heart, swearing that he would allow nothing to harm her. Never.

  He returned through the presence chamber to the king’s apartment to find him ailing again. Two of Robert’s brothers, Guildford and Ambrose Dudley, waited upon His Majesty.

  “Read to me, my lord Robert,” the king said, and pointed to his Book of Common Prayer always by his chair. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was revising the book, but the young king was overseeing it himself. Edward was far more solemn than his years, a miniature in appearance of his father, Henry VIII, and now, unfortunately, of his sickly mother, Jane Seymour, who had not survived her only son’s birth.

  Robert picked up the book, glad to read the new English translation and not the old Latin. He pronounced the morning prayer, needing God’s solace himself.

  When he started on the order of service, Edward soon dozed and Robert rose and looked out the window as gardeners below snipped at the spring growth in the knot garden and cleaned the fountains.

  The king’s voice followed a tap on his shoulder. Dudley turned and knelt at once.

  “Robert, my doctors have prescribed country air and I have decided to attend your wedding.”

  “Majesty, my family and I are honored beyond—”

  “Yes, yes. And my sister, the Princess Elizabeth, will be in my train.”

  Robert’s head remained low. A fool could have read what was in his face, and Edward, though not quite thirteen years old, was no fool.

  The murmurs of conversation in the room ceased. “Yes, Robert, it will quiet any foul gossip that my court is so fond of . . . for I will not abide my pious sister to be defamed.”

  Dudley swallowed to steady his words. “Most gracious Majesty. I am ever your good and obedient servant.” What talk could there be? He and Bess had been as cautious as a bear facing a pack of dogs at a baiting.

  The next morning, as he rode away from Richmond with his father and brothers, his mother in a curtained litter, he looked back, but Bess did not stand at her window. Kat would be keeping her at her embroidery with her ladies, or, if he knew his Bess, she would be at her lessons, losing herself in her Latin and Greek books, where she had always hidden her young sorrows. He well knew that he could find no comfort in any ancient language—it would take another woman’s arms—but he did not doubt that Bess would find her solace in Plutarch. From her childhood she had escaped all her many troubles in deep study.

  He spurred his horse to pull close to his father, the Earl of Warwick. “My lord father, I am most grateful for the property you have settled on me and my soon-to-be wife.”

  The duke nodded, his mind obviously full of his young sovereign’s business.

  “Father, there is one more gift I would beg of you, and if you give it, I will return the manor and property you have settled on me.”

  The duke turned to him. “What is this nonsense? What more could you wish?”

  “The life of the Princess Elizabeth. I think it is at risk.”

  The Earl of Warwick frowned and spurred his horse on down the cart road. Robert kicked his own mount into a canter. “Don’t meddle in state business, my son.”

  Robert lowered his voice, aware that to even speak of the king’s death was treason. “If the king dies young, I know you fear that the public will rise up to demand a Protestant queen.”

  “I will see that England gets the queen it needs and it won’t be Catholic Mary.”

  “Will it be Elizabeth?”

  “Elizabeth was declared illegitimate by the king, her father, and by Parliament.”

  “But her father also p
ut her in his will of succession. If you persuade the king to name another, she is in danger from the new queen . . . or from you.”

  His father’s reply was harsh. “You go very far into realms you do not know.”

  Robert’s answer was not timid. “Protect her, my lord father. If she dies, I am not your son.” He meant his voice to be angry and determined.

  His father raised a hand and Robert steeled himself for a blow. When the hand fell back to the reins, Robert was heartened. “I beg of you, Father. If you save her, I will be faithful to you in all else you ask of me forever.”

  The duke looked at him with some sympathy. “The king is already dissatisfied with the Duke of Suffolk and his Seymour family. They are sure to o’erreach, Robert. Then our family will rise higher than we ever hoped. How would you like to be son to the Duke of Northumberland?” He lowered his voice until he could just be heard. “Do you love Elizabeth so much that you would defy me, our family’s prospects and your own?” He spurred ahead without hearing Robert’s answer. He knew his stubborn son.

  Robert Dudley’s June wedding day dawned warm, and with a perfect, cool Norfolk breeze and the scents of opening lavender and roses in the air. Amy, with her dark hair loose about her back, the sign of a maid, was very pretty in a green satin gown newly finished by her seamstress. She stepped daintily through the lush new grass to his side. He bowed to the king, searching for Bess until he found her chatting gaily amongst her ladies, her face turned away from him.

  He took Amy’s hand and smiled into her upturned, trusting eyes, Bess’s poem in its place next to his beating heart.

  CHAPTER 4

  SEE ALL AND SPEAK NOTHING

  EARL OF LEICESTER