The Queen's Bastard Read online

  Elizabeth seized her lingering guilt with both hands and flung it away over the heads of the dancers. When the music ended she glided imperiously across the floor and came squarely to face Robin. He smiled at her then, as much with the tenderness of their many years together as with the fire of a brand-new lover. And she was smitten all over again. Wordlessly, she took his arm and as the drums and pipes swelled to their tune Elizabeth and Dudley, in perfect and joyful harmony, began to dance.

  The Queen’s hawking party sped through the open meadows behind Hampton Court, racing for the ground beneath which the great bird soared in silent pursuit of its prey. The red hawk had been a fine gift from her cousin Mary, delivered earlier that week by Melville, who now galloped beside her. Robin, his brother Ambrose, and Henry Sidney brought up the rear. The ground trembled under so many thundering hooves. Elizabeth rode in the new fashion for a lady, a practice begun by de Médicis, right knee hooked round the pommel. The cold morning air lashing her face, flanked by her favorites, Elizabeth knew herself as whole and well contented as she had been in many months.

  She had shared Robin’s bed this night past. Before he’d discreetly disappeared from Robin’s chamber, Tamworth had filled the room with braziers of red hot rocks against the winter chill, and the place had glowed with lovely warmth so that they could lie perfectly naked in each other’s sight. All sadness and fear had been banished, and the feel of his hands and lips upon her body had been exquisite. She had cried out as he’d entered her, and gripped his hard back and tensile flanks as they rode together, coupled in rhythm and pleasure.

  This morning, again the Queen, reins firmly in hand, she had renewed diplomatic intercourse with Melville on the subject of her cousin Mary and was, though no one but the ambassador knew, actually contemplating his audacious scheme to take Elizabeth across her northern border in disguise.

  Head angled to the sky, Elizabeth saw the swift in-flight kill. She ran her horse to a stop and waited, gloved arm outstretched, as a light rain of the prey’s feathers floated down from above. A moment later the hawk swooped down and, dagger-clawed feet first, massive wings outstretched, lit gracefully upon Elizabeth’s heavy leather gauntlet. She took the limp pigeon from its powerful beak and handed it to Melville. Searching the magnificent creature’s eyes for only a moment, the Queen pulled the tiny plumed hood over its head.

  “You may tell my cousin I like her gift almost as much as I like her choice of ambassadors,” said Elizabeth.

  But Melville was prevented from his courtly riposte by the sight of a lone man of the Queen’s royal guard galloping at breakneck speed toward the party. When he had reined to a halt, Elizabeth gave the breathless messenger leave to speak.

  “The Duke of Guise has reportedly ordered his troops to fire on a Protestant prayer meeting, Your Majesty. Four hundred are dead. The Huguenots are massing for retaliation. France is on the brink of civil war.”

  Elizabeth sat straight and still in her saddle. She was suddenly aware of the chill on her cheeks, and she felt in this moment as though, through the actions of a single murderous man on a continent so far from here, her whole life had suddenly, irrevocably changed.

  “Sir James,” she said finally to the Scotsman, who himself was clearly grappling with the dire implications of this news, “I deeply regret that I can no longer consider a meeting with a sovereign whose own uncle has handily murdered four hundred of his innocent countrymen.” She turned to Robin, Ambrose, and Henry Sidney. “Come, we have much business to attend to.” Then she kicked her horse and sped for Hampton Court.

  Not an hour had passed since Elizabeth had hooded the hawk in the meadow. She still wore her riding clothes as she and the Privy Council, together with the Dudley brothers, debated the intent and consequences of the Duke of Guise’s actions, and England’s response to the same. The Privy Councillors were wary of the presence of her casual companions, but Elizabeth had been adamant about their inclusion in the meeting.

  Despite his newness to the inner circle of policymaking, Robin spoke boldly. “The moment the French Huguenots are granted religious toleration by the House of Valois they are slaughtered like animals,” he said earnestly. “We have no choice but to throw support to our Protestant brothers when the Guise faction is clearly planning their extermination.”

  “Is that so?” Elizabeth asked, skewering Robin with her eyes. She might love him passionately, but he was not exempt from her scathing sarcasm. “’Tis curious in the extreme, my lord, that you not so long ago were prepared to sacrifice our country’s resources for the Catholic cause. I wonder if you are now treating with the Huguenots for their support in our marriage.”

  Elizabeth saw with satisfaction that Robin Dudley flushed red under his tan. Well, if he meant to be included in policymaking he must learn to bear the sharp sting of her lash, as all her Privy Councillors were forced to do.

  “What say you, Secretary Cecil?” Elizabeth inquired more mildly.

  “I am inclined to agree with your Horsemaster,” replied Cecil, placing emphasis on Robin’s lowly title. Cecil was deeply offended that Elizabeth should include the man in a decision of such import, for as sincerely as he tried, Cecil could not stomach the Queen’s lover. “If Guise feels free to murder Huguenots in France, and if he then consolidates his position, I fear England would be his next target. He will do everything in his power to put Mary Queen of Scots on your throne and marry her to one of Philip’s sons. Therefore, the French Protestants who oppose Guise must be supported by their English brethren.”

  “And how do you suppose we should aid them?” asked Elizabeth, throwing the question out to all of her councillors.

  “We must protect our northern borders against invasion from Scotland,” offered Lord Clinton. “After all, your cousin Mary is herself a Guise. I propose the Duke of Norfolk, perhaps Northampton and Rutland, with several battalions to ride to the Scottish border.”

  “Good,” said Elizabeth. “Have my cousins Hunsdon and Huntingdon ride with them. What else, my lords?” She looked round at her men.

  “May I suggest using this as an opportunity for Her Majesty to recover from the French our port city of Calais?” added Cecil, knowing the suggestion, though audacious, would heartily please the Queen. The loss of England’s last stronghold on the Continent by her half-sister Mary had always been a bone in Elizabeth’s throat.

  “As you know, I have never coveted nor fought for any territories not my own,” said Elizabeth. “But Calais belongs rightly to England, and regaining it would certainly protect our eastern coast from a French invasion.”

  Throckmorton spoke up. “Let us not behave too rashly, Your Majesty. I believe we should attempt mediation first.”

  “Military intervention is the clearest solution,” interrupted Robin insistently. “Meet force with force. Let them see we will allow no aggression to go unchecked.”

  “I must agree with Lord Dudley,” announced Elizabeth. Then as he smiled triumphantly, she added, “I therefore appoint his elder brother, Ambrose Lord Warwick, as captain general of the expedition.”

  There was a long moment of silence as the implications — the raising of Ambrose, the slight to Robin, and the magnitude of Elizabeth’s commitment of military force — framed and reframed themselves in her councillors’ heads.

  The silence from Robin, observed Elizabeth, was complete, and his restraint almost superhuman. She knew he was furious, hurt, bewildered. Yet she had acted of necessity. Of course he wished, as all men did, to distinguish himself on the battlefield — ’twas the surest way to elicit respect from one’s peers. But she needed Robin at home, by her side for good counsel. Too, if she were entirely honest with herself, she was reluctant to send him into battle. She could survive his ranting fury in private, but she could never bear the thought of him wounded. The thought of him dead.

  “So, my lords, ’tis decided. Speak amongst yourselves. Send for the Huguenot envoy and let me hear the details of your plans.” She moved to the door, the
n turned back to her councillors. “And see that Sir James Melville has safe conduct across the northern border. Cecil, will you send him my good wishes, and regrets that I shall not see him before his departure? ’Tis a pity to end our negotiations so abruptly,” said Elizabeth. “He was as toward a gentleman as I have ever known.”

  The doors of the Privy Chamber swung open and Elizabeth swept through them, disappearing in a great rustling of skirts.

  Ambrose Dudley broke the silence.

  “Calais,” he said with force and deliberation. “Let us speak of the return of Calais.”

  Robin Dudley strode down Hampton Court’s long corridors and bounded up the broad stone stairs to the upper floor. He was stiff from the sixteen hours in which the council had just met without cessation. Meals had been brought into the Privy Chamber from the basement kitchens as the greatest minds in England plotted the kingdom’s future. Plans for garrisoning English troops in the French port city of Le Havre with Lord Warwick at their head and sending three thousand soldiers to help defend the Huguenots were discussed and formulated.

  The moment the meeting concluded, Robin had exploded from the chamber, pent-up anger surging through his limbs, the necessity of confronting Elizabeth with her perfidy uppermost in his mind. When he had spoken so boldly about resisting the French, he had clearly envisaged himself leading the troops gallantly into the fray. It had been many years since he had seen battle, and it was the surest way for a man to attain greater glory.

  Robin barged past the guards of Elizabeth’s antechamber, but was stopped short at the sight of his sister, Mary Sidney, exiting the Queen’s bedchamber door looking pale and frightened. When she saw him, she at once began to cry.

  “What, sister? What is it?”

  Mary choked back her sobs. “The Queen …” She could not go on.

  “What about her? Mary, speak to me. Tell me what’s happened!”

  “When she came from the council meeting, she said she felt uneasy and asked for a hot bath. Afterwards she claimed to feel better, then insisted on dressing again and taking exercise in the yard. Kat begged her to stay and rest, but you know how the Queen is. She cannot abide being still for long. When she returned from the outdoors she was burning with fever.”

  “A fever …” Robin sagged with relief. “By Christ, you had me alarmed. Elizabeth has had many fevers.”

  “Robin!” She gripped his arm. “She has all the signs of smallpox!”

  “Smallpox?”

  “The rash has yet to appear,” Mary went on, “but it will come on soon. She is very, very ill.”

  “The council have not been informed,” he said, bewildered. “I have just come from them.”

  “She would not let us send word. She said you were all engaged in serious negotiations and must not be disturbed.”

  “Oh, Elizabeth!” He moved toward the bedchamber door.

  Mary blocked his way. “She does not wish to see you, Robin. Her orders were most specific. She loves you too dearly to risk your infection. You must go back, inform the council.”

  “They will be wild. She has never named her successor. Should she die …”

  “She will not die, Robin,” said Mary Sidney, her eyes set in steely resolve. “I will not let her die.”

  Robin pulled his sister to him. He held her in a fierce embrace and they trembled in shared fear and misery.

  “I must keep my head,” Robin told himself, “think what is best for England. The kingdom without a ruler … all the council’s fears come to pass … factions, fighting, civil war … utter disaster.” But as he strode from the anteroom and retraced his steps down the long corridors, there surged most relentlessly through Robert Dudley the instinct for self-preservation.

  The Privy Council had been meeting now for the better part of a week. The Queen’s condition had continued to deteriorate. She had slipped into unconsciousness the evening before, though there had been no showing of the angry red spots, the natural course of the disease. The mood was particularly grim this morning, for news that the Countess of Bedford had died of the pox earlier that day had reached them just as Cecil and the others were taking their places round the long council table. Elizabeth’s death seemed imminent, and they were no further along in their deliberations than when they’d begun.

  The claimants to the succession were dismal indeed. Lady Catherine Grey had been discussed most heatedly, as her claim was the clearest. She was sister of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, helpless fourteen-year-old pawn of ambitious courtiers, who had worn the crown for nine days and lost her head for their treachery. Jane and Catherine Grey had been included in Henry VIII’s will, and named successors to his own offspring were they to die childless. But Catherine had recently disgraced herself by marrying without the council’s consent and had borne a child by her husband whilst lacking legal proof of their marriage. She had been a prisoner in the Tower with this bogus husband and, unrepentant, had for a second time become pregnant by him.

  Elizabeth’s distant cousin Lord Huntingdon’s claim was thin, and the one thing the Council had unanimously agreed upon so far was that Mary Queen of Scots should under no circumstances succeed. Cecil’s only consolation in this terrible tangle was that Robin Dudley had been strangely absent. The Secretary has assumed that the Queen’s lover, included in the original war council, would have insinuated himself — though he was not a member of the Privy Council — into the delicate negotiations on the succession. The council would have hesitated to disbar the favorite for fear of incurring Elizabeth’s wrath should she live through her illness. Cecil’s fears had proven unfounded as day after day Dudley had failed to intrude.

  “We must come to some satisfactory conclusion today, my lords,” announced Cecil gravely, “though each choice is more disastrous than the one before. Certainly London is staunchly Protestant, but to the north Catholics are abundant, and might rise against us to place the Scots queen on the throne.”

  The Privy Chamber door opened and a man of Elizabeth’s personal guard moved briskly to Cecil’s side, handing him a sealed letter. There was silence as Cecil stared at the folded parchment, loath to open it, fearing the worst. He scanned the faces of the Privy Councillors before breaking it open and reading. His eyes widened with surprise, and the great lords of England knew from Cecil’s expression that the Queen had not yet expired, but that the news was in some way as terrible as it was encouraging.

  “Tell us what has happened,” demanded Lord Clinton. This nobleman had been, since the announcement of the Queen’s illness, in a state of great confusion, for during her stay at Fulham House the year before on her progress, she had claimed to be suffering then from smallpox. Once stricken by that disease, as all knew, a person did never succumb a second time. Though he and his wife had discussed the strangeness of these circumstances between themselves, Clinton had not yet revealed Elizabeth’s curious behavior to his fellow councillors. Cecil had still not spoken, his lips pursing and unpursing as he tried to make sense of what he was reading.

  “What does it say, Cecil!” urged Lord Clinton.

  “Robin Dudley,” he said slowly and uncomprehendingly, “has in the space of five days raised an army of six thousand fighting men to defend the Queen from all usurpers.”

  “God’s blood!” muttered Lord North. “Do we curse the man or praise him?”

  “I declare, there is no one in the kingdom like him. No one with an ambition greater,” said Lord Arundel.

  “No one,” added Cecil, who rankled with this admission, “who loves the Queen more.”

  “How did he manage such a thing?” Lord North demanded to know. “From where come six thousand armed men loyal to Robin Dudley?”

  “That, my lords,” replied Cecil, “is a question we would be wise to ponder.”

  “Thank Jesus he is on our side,” added Lord Clinton.

  William Cecil folded his hands to keep them from shaking as he intoned gravely, “Know you this and never forget it. The only side that Lord R
obert Dudley is or will ever be on … is his own.”

  ***

  Doctor Burcot had been pacing before the door of the Queen’s bedchamber for several hours waiting to be admitted. Both Kat Ashley and Lady Mary Sidney had come out to discuss with him the Queen’s condition, but Her Majesty, who had still not broken out in the rash of lesions accompanying smallpox, had in her semidelirium refused to see the physician. He wished fervently to be allowed to minister to her, for in recent months he had had good success with a new treatment, and the Queen was said to be near death.

  Finally the door opened and Mary Sidney beckoned him in. Picking up the large parcel at his feet, Burcot entered the Queen’s bedchamber. He could not help but be overawed by the magnificence of the place — the enormous carven canopy bed, the sumptuous tapestries, window coverings of cloth shot with silver thread, cupboards groaning with gold plate. But all his attention must now be directed to saving the life of his Queen. She lay ghostlike and stick thin under the bedclothes, the famous red-gold hair flared out round her head like a large halo. As he bent over her lips he could hear only the faintest of breath. He lifted her still unblemished white hand and put two fingers to the pulse at her wrist. Then he turned to Katherine Ashley, who, though rumored to be ever a tower of strength, now appeared small and shrunken with terror that the woman she had tended since the age of four was dying.

  “Mistress Ashley,” said Burcot, “please to place several logs on the fire and stoke it till it burns with a great heat.”

  The doctor’s confident demeanor spurred Kat to immediate compliance.

  “Lady Mary, will you assist me? I wish you to uncover the Queen’s body entirely.”

  Mary looked questioningly at the physician, but his expression compelled obedience. She pulled the bedcovers down to reveal the Queen’s motionless body in a simple white gown. Opening his parcel, Burcot removed a large bolt of bright red flannel and, with Mary’s help, proceeded to wrap the Queen’s body from head to toe in the cloth, leaving only her face and her lower arms unbound.