His Last Letter Read online

  Summer 1585

  Nonsuch Palace

  More than thirty years had passed since he and Elizabeth had parted at his marriage to Amy. Their lives had changed completely in many ways. Bess had ascended to the throne on her sister Mary’s death, but she had never forgotten Robert Dudley. She had raised him with her to become the most powerful lord in England.

  One thing had not changed: She ruled alone, never willing for him to rule beside her as her husband, although he had clung to that dream for two decades until all hope flared and died in their last summer together at Kenilworth, the palace and garden of pleasures he had made for her.

  The afternoon of his return to the court after the death of his Imp, the Earl of Leicester attended the queen’s council, sitting in his usual place at the queen’s right hand, the nearest he would ever come to her now, though it had not always been so.

  He watched the Lord Treasurer, William Cecil, now Lord Burghley, seated down the table facing the queen. Was Cecil friend or foe today? Robert was certain that sober-faced Cecil was wary of war, often saying: “War is soon kindled, but peace very hardly procured.”

  In that Elizabeth and Cecil usually agreed. Would both finally realize this day that the Netherlands, if controlled completely by Spain with a large army across the narrow English Channel, would be a dire threat? Thanks be to God, at last Bess seemed to fully understand the Spanish menace and be willing to act, unless she had changed her mind again.

  Robert’s gaze shifted to Sir Christopher Hatton on the other side of the long council table. Although he tried to reject the thought, it was obvious to him that Hatton was the kind of faithful, unmarried man that Elizabeth had always found attractive. He was tall, graceful, fair as a Dane, with an immaculate curled beard and intelligent, adoring speech. Bess was not a woman to ignore such qualities.

  Hatton had been infatuated with her for years—whether as queen or woman, Robert could not guess. Most likely both. Had Bess seen this? Of course she had. She loved every moment of romantic attention. The whole world could court her and it wouldn’t make up for a father who’d kept her from him, largely ignored her when she was there and beheaded her mother and her cousin. Even Elizabeth’s shortsightedness and refusal to wear her gold-rimmed spectacles did not keep her from seeing a fine-looking man forever at her feet, and Kit was still handsome and slender. Did Elizabeth see that her Robin’s middle was thicker and his hair sparser? Was she comparing the two of them?

  Robert breathed in deeply, keeping his back very straight. Hatton stayed near the throne like Thomas Heneage, an even earlier favorite, still cheerfully hoping to receive a favorite’s rewards, although Bess’s eyes had lately turned to the adventurer Walter Raleigh. He had returned from the New World after naming it Virginia in honor of his virgin queen. He had added to the queen’s entertainment with a smoking plant and a rare bulb called a potato. Yet none of them could bring the queen victory in the Low Countries as could the Earl of Leicester. Although he believed that Bess loved him and that he was her paramount love, he wanted her to want him alone, and that she could never do. He wanted from her what he could never accomplish himself, though men were not meant for solitary love, as everyone knew . . . except, perhaps, Elizabeth.

  “Majesty,” Cecil intoned in his council voice, lifting the first document from the pile in front of him, “about the matter of troops for the Netherlands.”

  “My Lord Treasurer, we will discuss that another day,” the queen replied impatiently.

  Cecil cleared his throat and Robert could see he hardly knew how to proceed from that royal pronouncement. “As you wish, madam. Shall we move on to discuss the Earl of Leicester’s appointment as—”

  “Another day for all like matters, my lord.”

  Robert did not blink or frown in consternation. Elizabeth’s chronic inability to commit to war was not unexpected. Still, she was closer to a decision than she had ever been and he dared to raise a question: “Majesty, have you forgotten that the Duke of Parma’s troops are killing Protestant Dutch women and children every day?” Someone had to ask, and he was the only one who could question the queen without sending her into a rage, or, if enraging her, survive it.

  “We forget nothing, my lord, as you should know!”

  Robert slumped, then straightened himself again. Bess lost no opportunity to remind him of Lettice. For a moment, he thought the queen would rage, but she drew in a deep breath and spoke with only normal irritation. “Yes, yes, my lord Leicester, we know King Philip’s lack of tolerance for his Protestant subjects.” She frowned and slapped her hand angrily upon the table, scattering her papers. “We ask you, sirs, why can’t the king of Spain allow his Protestant subjects to go to the devil in their own way?”

  No one dared laugh, but Robert knew all of them thought that the queen herself did not allow her Catholic subjects to go to the devil except by her hand. Still, no one pointed out the inconsistency. Queens were never humored by a joke at their expense. In her own way, Elizabeth had given warning that the discussion was at an end until she was ready for it to begin once more.

  Robert hardly followed the rest of the business, keeping his disappointment from showing, swallowing it as he always had except in private, when he felt he owed her honesty, though she often did not want it even then. He was quite able to give his opinion when it was sought, and he knew she would come to him for his truth after she had considered further. As the council ended, he stood.

  Elizabeth put a hand on his arm. “Remain for a time, my lord Leicester.”

  “As it please you, Majesty.” Perhaps the queen played one game for her council and one for him.

  Hatton lingered near the door.

  “When I have need, Sir Christopher, I will send for you,” the queen said with her back to him.

  Robert smiled to himself. She could give in one minute and take away in the next, always controlling the men around her by fomenting uncertainty. When they were alone in the council chamber, Robert spoke first. “With your leave, madam, I would be off to my manor of Wanstead immediately. It is a good ride, but with a change of horses, I can arrive home before full dark.” He had given her notice that he would not be intimidated by her changeableness, or hang about Nonsuch like a love-struck boy.

  She was angry, but for once held her tongue. “Nay, Rob, I would have you here beside me at court. I cannot do without you in these grave times. I am not against the Hollander venture, but I must think on it longer. . . . Video et taceo.”

  Robert bowed to the inevitable. The queen’s motto, “I see all and speak nothing,” was as well chosen as any motto could be. He had almost made his old mistake of confusing what Elizabeth said with what she would do. Convincing her to act, to risk Spain’s anger and retribution, would take time. He would suffer through many such changes as the queen grasped at every chance to avoid war, thinking her superior wiles sufficient to avoid it.

  “Come, Rob, no more gloom,” she said, taking his arm as they returned to her privy chamber. Her ladies, trailing behind and seeing the intimacy, revived the old scandals in their minds, though they would never dare utter them in her hearing. “Let us talk no more of the Netherlands venture today, but visit as dear friends, met again.”

  “As you will it, Your Grace.” He had not really wanted to leave court, to return to his wife, Lettice, and to Wanstead, where the ghostly cries of his Imp still rang in every room. He had asked Bess’s permission to return home to discover whether Raleigh, her new favorite, had replaced him completely. Her answer had told him all he wanted to know. His place in her heart was yet secure. Raleigh had not taken it, as Christopher Hatton and Thomas Heneage before him had not. Bess still needed him at her side as she always had, and now that he was here with her, he found it impossible to leave. He was her prisoner for life, as much as he had been a prisoner under a death sentence in the Tower during her sister Bloody Mary’s reign.

  He drew in a deep breath at the awful memory. He and his father and brothers had tri
ed valiantly to keep Mary, Henry VIII’s oldest daughter, from succeeding after King Edward’s youthful death at not quite sixteen years. His father, advanced to Duke of Northumberland, had placed his only unmarried son, Guildford Dudley, and his Protestant wife, Jane Grey, on the throne, and it was his family’s duty and ambition to keep them there. Catholic Mary Tudor could not rule. But they were seen by many Englishmen as usurpers and had not been able to stop a popular uprising in Mary’s favor. The entire Dudley family, save only his mother, had been condemned.

  Elizabeth took his arm as they approached the royal apartments. “Come, Rob, we will have our supper and then walk together in my walled garden in the eventide.” She laughed softly. “Far better than marching along the leads at the Tower. Remember?”

  “There is no forgetting between us, Bess. It was in the Tower that I knew the years would change nothing between us.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “IS LADY JANE’S SCAFFOLD REMOVED?”

  ELIZABETH

  Late Winter 1554

  Tower of London

  The clang of armored feet and the clink of chain mail sounded on the stone stairs to her cell in the Bell Tower and Elizabeth’s body became rigid. This was a sound she feared to hear night or day. Were they coming for her as they had come for her mother, Anne Boleyn, eighteen years earlier; as they had come for Lady Jane Grey just days ago? Would she be as brave before the ax as her mother and her beautiful, virtuous cousin? She tensed herself not to tremble before the Tower guards.

  “My lady Elizabeth.” A yeoman guard opened her cell door and stepped inside while more guards crowded behind him. Her ladies looked up from their embroidery, but Elizabeth could not. She was determined to hide her terror at every guard’s appearance.

  Then she could not stop her words. “Is Lady Jane’s scaffold removed?”

  “My lady, I am not allowed to say.”

  Her gaze darted to his hands, looking for the vellum order signed by her sister, Queen Mary, a death warrant to take the traitorous prisoner Elizabeth to the block on Tower Green, the same green where her father, Henry VIII, had sent her mother. Every royal family has its troubles. She clamped her teeth together to suppress an almost hysterical desire to giggle. She had been so often near death, gallows humor was all the jest she could allow herself. But let no other defame a Tudor!

  She dreaded another questioning in the dungeon below with Mary’s Catholic bishops and her council, circling, threatening, reminding her of her mother’s fate amidst the screams of tortured prisoners, probably Protestant heretics. It had taken all of her will, her father’s courage . . . and yes, her mother’s . . . to act as princess royal and heir to the throne. She had not been broken, nor admitted to any slight knowledge of the recent Protestant uprising led by Sir Thomas Wyatt. They would not use her own words to damn her. Could she help it if Mary’s Protestant subjects rebelled against their queen’s harsh conversion measures, wishing to set Elizabeth on the throne? She’d refused to admit to the knowledge or commission of any traitorous acts, her blood running cold in her veins as screams from the rack’s victims reached her. Her questioners intended to frighten her, but her back remained straight and she kept all fear from her face until they were well and truly reminded of whom they questioned, and withdrew.

  Elizabeth kept her gaze on weaving her needle in and out of the thick material as though determined to catch the last slanting ray of late sun. They would not see her terror or her strange humor. When fully composed, she lifted her face to reply. “I remind you, sir, that I am the daughter of a king and therefore a princess. I refuse to answer to the title of Lady Elizabeth.”

  The yeoman sighed, having heard this response many times, and continued with his message. “The Lord Lieutenant of the Tower requests my lady’s presence at supper this day at five of the clock.”

  “How good of the Lord Lieutenant. I shall wear my best shackles.” Elizabeth dropped her gaze again to her embroidery before she said more that could be reported as insolence and not true contrition.

  “My lady, his other guests are Lords Ambrose and Robert Dudley.”

  She half stood at that, but with a creak of wood and a clang of iron hasps the yeoman withdrew. Her heart raced as the name leaped from her heart and imprinted on her brain. Robert Dudley. Robin! After all these years apart, we meet here, you condemned and me waiting for a traitor’s death, if the queen’s council dares put the heir to the throne on trial for treason or behead her without a trial. But Robin was tried and walked through London with the ax man before him, showing all the people that he was condemned to the block. Jesu Christo, this supper could be our last chance to meet outside of heaven. She laid a hand on her breasts to calm their heaving. Her tongue licked at her dry lips, where his kiss was the last she had known, perhaps the last she would ever know.

  S’blood, enough of gloom!

  “Quickly now, Kat,” she said, throwing aside her embroidery hoop, “my yellow gown, my red satin slippers and my best embroidered stomacher. And my hair must be brushed.” She paused at Kat’s raised eyebrow. “The Lord Lieutenant must know I honor his invitation.”

  “Wearing your ‘best shackles’ will hardly prove honor to him,” Kat, her nurse since childhood, said, reproving her as only she could. By the alarm in her face, Kat Ashley urged caution, but Elizabeth threw off her plain gown and the Spanish hood her sister, the queen, had demanded she wear.

  Kat came with a hairbrush, and Elizabeth calmed with the gently repeated strokes, loving the way her soft hair lay about her shoulders like a glowing cloak. “Tonight, I will wear no Spanish hood,” she announced. She would probably be reported by those set to keep watch over her every heretical and willful action, but she would wear her hair loose, as Robin had loved it.

  She had been born knowing that boldness erased fear, while cowardice invited it and earned her only more ill treatment. No matter how she shook with dread in private, she would never show fear before her questioners or her guards. In men’s minds fear was a certain mark of guilt.

  Four guards came for her as the bell in her tower rang out. One led the way, with another on either side and the last at her back, almost stepping on her gown. “Good yeomen,” she said in a mocking voice, “am I, a young maid, so fearsome a foe that you must bring an army to protect yourselves?” She laughed lightly to take away any sting, but she had made them feel ridiculous, which was her intention.

  The tall guard marching to her left spoke scarcely above a whisper. “Princess, I am John Carpenter, a good Protestant, who does an unpleasant duty for our anointed queen. When you are queen, as I pray God you will be in His good time, I will serve you as faithfully.”

  “When that day comes, John Carpenter, I will not forget you,” she said in her softest voice.

  “God preserve Your Grace,” he answered, his lips moving as if he had begun his evening prayers.

  Elizabeth walked through the garden in front of the Lord Lieutenant’s quarters. She tried not to notice the drift of gray ash an untimely easterly wind had carried from the Smithfield burnings. Protestants were being sent to hell as fast as they could be tried and condemned by Mary’s ecclesiastical court under the devilish Bishop Gardiner. Instead, she smiled on the early blooming snowdrops and crocus and, under a bare tree, yellow-centered aconites with their silver-trimmed leaves. She breathed in fresh air sweeping up the Thames from the channel, so deeply her chest hurt, and she realized how shallow her breathing had been in her crowded cell with its damp, moldy air. She was reminded with her every breath that she was locked away . . . and that her sister might want her to disappear into the Tower’s deep dungeons like the little Plantagenet princes in Richard III’s time. Elizabeth winced because her situation was so much the same; she was in the power of a ruler who feared and hated her claim to the throne. Half sister or no, Mary did hate her, was never willing to forgive the child for what her mother, Anne Boleyn, had done: taken the king away from Mary’s mother, Queen Catherine of Aragon, and exiling her to a
lonely death.

  Breathing deeply, Elizabeth caught the scent of a wood fire and roasting venison from the Lord Lieutenant’s dwelling. But it was the sound of marching boots and the sight of Ambrose and Robert Dudley being escorted from the Beauchamp Tower into the garden in flaring torchlight that stopped her.

  Robin. There was nothing left of the handsome boy she had loved so furiously and met so secretly to feel his arms about her and his lustful young lips on hers. That youth with a prince’s jeweled doublet and peacock-feathered cap she had last seen, or refused to see in some misery, at his wedding. Now, here came a man grown, taller than his older brother, his shoulders filled out to a man’s width, his legs beneath finely knit mauve hose carved with muscle, his Gypsy eyes and dark features compelling her not to turn away from him. There must have been something more than recognition in her face, though she had tried to keep it hidden, because he smiled at her and winked like some preening courtier before his mirror until she turned aside and marched into the Lord Lieutenant’s cottage.

  “My lady, welcome,” the Tower commander said with a deep bow, deep enough for a royal princess whether or not she could own her true rank. His wife curtsied with as much honor and welcomed her kindly. The Lord Lieutenant escorted her to a trestle table with benches. He seated her in his own high-backed chair at the head of the table.

  “Please be seated, all,” he said. “My lord Robert, I have good news for you. Your lady wife will be visiting you tomorrow. The queen has decided to allow it.”

  Robert bowed. “Good news, indeed, my Lord Lieutenant. Surely that means the queen has decided to pardon me.”

  The Lord Lieutenant did not comment. “You and Lord Ambrose may sit near the Lady Elizabeth, if it please her.”

  Elizabeth smiled, but said nothing, lest she bite the words in two. Amy Robsart to walk in and out of Robin’s cell as if she owned it . . . and him. She thought to let Robin wonder at her mood, although she had given him ample indication with her now-unsmiling face, yet she doubted she could keep from her gaze some of what she felt at seeing him again. “My Lord Lieutenant, I thank you and your good wife for this greeting.” She nodded to Robin formally and smiled at Ambrose. “My lord Ambrose, you are well?”