A Court Affair. Emily Purdy

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СКАЧАТЬ Where had it gone? I shuddered and hoped fervently never to find it on my pillow or presented to me in a velvet box.

      It wasn’t right; Amy, who so loved pretty things and delighted in the latest fashions—Robert complained that she ordered as many as fourteen new gowns a year—should have something more than lace and flowers, even if they were silken and embroidered.

      I took off my gloves and stared down at my hands, perfect, gleaming nails on long white fingers sparkling with diamonds her husband had given me. In my haste, I had forgotten to remove my rings. All save the gold and onyx coronation ring that had wedded me to England were gifts from Robert; he stroked my vanity like a cat and loved to cover my hands with cold jewels and hot kisses.

      She really should have something! I started to remove my rings, but then I remembered that Amy didn’t like diamonds. I could hear Robert’s voice cruelly mocking her, calling her a fool, insisting that every woman loves diamonds and would sell her soul for them, adopting a high-pitched, timorous, quavering parody of a woman’s voice, parroting words Amy had once spoken, likening diamonds to “tears frozen in time”. Yet somehow now it seemed most apt; Amy herself, at only eight-and-twenty, had become a tear frozen in time.

      I took the rings from my hands and, one by one, put them onto the thin, cold, death-stiffened fingers, knowing all the while that not all the diamonds in the world could make up for all the tears that Robert and I had caused this woman to shed. And she had shed tears aplenty—oceans and oceans of tears. She had been drowning in tears for two years at least, perhaps even longer. Robert’s love had died long before Amy did. Love is cruel; it kills its victims slowly.

      I gave a dead woman a fortune in diamonds, but not even I, the all-powerful Elizabeth of England, could give her back her life or undo the hurt I had caused her. Robert had married her in a flight of youthful fancy fuelled by hot-blooded young lust, a fit of impulsive passion for a pretty country lass of rustic, pure, unvarnished, fresh-faced charm, lacking the hard, sophisticated polish and rapier-sharp or flippant wit of the bejewelled silk-, satin-, and velvet-clad ladies of the court with all their exotic perfumes, ostrich plumes, intricate coiffures of coils, curls, and braids, artfully plucked brows, rouged lips, and painted faces, a woman he went to bed in love with and woke up to find he had nothing in common with. Robert came to resent and blame her for the rash act that had bound him to her. Though he was quite a prize for a squire’s daughter, as a duke’s son he could have found himself a far better dowered and pedigreed bride, as his father, brothers, and friends had all tried to tell the deaf-to-reason, love-struck lad of seventeen who was determined to listen to the bulging and throbbing need inside his codpiece rather than good common sense. Robert had married in haste and repented at leisure. And his kindness, often doled out as a careless afterthought, eventually turned cruel as, more and more, he repented his youthful folly, and because of me, a woman he wanted but could not have, a woman who could, if she would, make him king but wanted him only in her own way and would not wear the ring of a subservient wife or bow to any man as her master. Robert thought he could change my mind, and others feared he would, and Amy, like an innocent child wandering into the midst of a raging battlefield, got caught in the cross fire.

      I had wanted to protect Amy, though I doubt any would believe that if they knew. And for that I cannot fault them; if I weren’t me, I wouldn’t believe it either. My failure was a secret I kept locked up inside my heart in my private lockbox of regrets. I could not save Amy from a marriage where love was only in one heart, not in two, and I could not save Amy from cancer, her husband’s ambition, or my own cruel, coquettish caprice that kept me dangling myself before Robert as a prize almost within his grasp, which he could even at times hold in his arms and kiss and caress but could never truly win. I played with him like a cat does with dead things, the way I toyed with all my suitors; Robert was unique only in that I loved him. But even though I loved him, I had no illusions about him. My love for Robert, in spite of what others thought, was never blind; I always saw him as sharply and clearly as if I were blessed with a hawk’s keen and piercing sight. Life long ago taught me not to idealise Love; I leave that to the poets and ballad singers. I learned the hard lessons taught by Love’s illusions long ago; I was scarcely out of my cradle before the lessons began. My father and his six wives, amongst them my mother and cousin, whose lives ended upon the scaffold; my stepfather, Tom Seymour, that handsome and foolhardy rogue who bounded into my bedchamber each morning to tickle and play and teach me anatomy in an infinitely more intimate way than is printed in books; my poor, mad, deluded, love-starved sister, pining her life away for want of Spanish Philip; and my cold and imperious Spanish brother-in-law, who courted and caressed me behind his wife’s back, hung my neck with jewels, and even had a tiny peep-hole drilled so he could watch me in my bath and as I dressed and undressed and availed myself of my chamber pot—they were all excellent teachers, and all my life I have been an apt pupil, and education doesn’t begin and end in the schoolroom.

      I will always love Robert Dudley; he has been my best friend since I was eight years old, and would be—if I let him—my ardent lover and husband; but there is something he worships and adores more than England’s Virgin Queen—Ambition is his guiding star. I’ve seen men ruined before by this elusive, tantalising, sparkling star that they spend their whole lives chasing after, leaping and grasping for, sometimes snaring a little stardust but more often crashing empty-handed back down to earth. And Robert, for all his fine qualities—his smouldering dark eyes, his heart-melting, knee-weakening smile, towering height, handsome horseman’s legs, and hands both gentle and firm, callous and soft, his intelligence, charm, wit, and passion, his showmanship and debonair flair on the tennis court, dance floor, and tiltyard, his supreme confidence and courage riding to the hunt or charging into battle, his feats of daring at the gambling tables—is still Ambition’s catamite and fool.

      My eyes are not starry-blind with love for him; romance doesn’t soften and tint everything all rosy pink and beautiful for me. I love Robert, but I see him for what he is, and, though I love, I often do not like. There is ice beneath the fire, steel beneath the softness, and the hard armour of cruelty beneath the plush velvet cloak of kindness. I have often wondered if I were a mere woman—a squire’s daughter perhaps, just like Amy, instead of England’s Queen—would his passion for me have ever flared so high or burned so brightly and constantly? I think not. Or perhaps it is merely that I have lost the ability to believe in anyone’s sincerity. I trust no one; I cannot afford to. I am a queen before I am a woman, England always comes before Elizabeth, and though there are times when my passions flame high and I resent and rage against Fate, I will not bankrupt my soul or my realm by giving too much of myself to the wrong people. My subjects as a whole always come before any individual, and that includes myself. Though I am the Virgin Queen, I regard myself as the mother of many.

      There’s something in Robert’s blood he inherited from his father and grandfather that makes him willing to do anything, and risk everything, to rise the highest and shine the brightest, to eclipse even Ambition’s own lustre and luminescence. But all that glitters is not gold. My mother once spoke those very words to my father when he asked why she preferred the doltish Harry Percy, who was, I have heard, as clumsy as a newborn foal, to the more elegant, polished, and cocksure men of the court.

      Robert and I, we are the scandal of the civilised world. There are many who would wager all that they possess that I would have him for my husband and no other. I have at times indeed spoken such words myself to confound and cloud the issue of my refusal to marry; the more perplexed and puzzled my suitors are, the better I like it. Even my cousin, the Queen of Scots, has been heard to quip that the Queen’s Master of the Horse murdered his wife to make room for her in his bed. Well, let the gaggles of gossipmongers wager all they wish—they will lose! I let them think that, but it was all part of the merry dance and mad whirl that always kept them guessing and wondering as so many men vied for my hand; but though the dance must of necessity go on, it must slow now to a stately pavane from a galloping galliard. I am Elizabeth of England, mistress with no master; I call the tunes, and my musicians play them, and my courtiers dance to them; and so it has ever been СКАЧАТЬ