The Virgin’s Lover. Philippa Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ of England. The brief flurry of snow in January had melted, leaving the lane to Norwich impassable by cart and disagreeable on horseback, and besides, there was nothing at Norwich to be seen except the cathedral; and now that was a place of anxious silences, not peace. The candles had been extinguished under the statue of the Madonna, the crucifix was on the altar still but the tapestries and the paintings had been taken down. The little messages and prayers which had been pinned to the Virgin’s gown had disappeared. No-one knew if they were allowed to pray to Her any more.

      Amy did not want to see the church she had loved stripped bare of everything she knew was holy. Other churches in the city had been de-sanctified and were being used as stables, or converted into handsome town houses. Amy could not imagine how anyone could dare to put his bed where the altar had once stood; but the new men of this reign were bold in their own interests. The shrine at Walsingham had not yet been destroyed, but Amy knew that the iconoclasts would come against it some day soon, and then where would a woman pray who wanted to conceive a child? Who wanted to win back her husband from the sin of ambition? Who wanted to win him home once more?

      Amy Dudley practised her writing, but there seemed little point. Even if she could have managed a letter to her husband there was no news to give him, except what he would know already: that she missed him, that the weather was bad and the company dull, the evenings dark and the mornings cold.

      On days such as this, and Amy had many days such as this, she wondered if she would have been better never to have married him. Her father, who adored her, had been against it from the start. The very week before her wedding he had gone down on his knee before her in the hall of Syderstone farmhouse, his big, round face flushed scarlet with emotion, and begged her with a quaver in his voice to think again. ‘I know he’s handsome, my bird,’ he had said tenderly. ‘And I know he’ll be a great man, and his father is a great man, and the royal court itself is coming to see you wed at Sheen next week, an honour I never dreamed of, not even for my girl. But are you certain sure you want a great man when you could marry a nice lad from Norfolk and live near me, in a pretty little house I would build for you, and have my grandsons brought up as my own, and stay as my girl?’

      Amy had put her little hands on his shoulders and raised him up, she had cried with her face tucked against his warm homespun jacket, and then she had looked up, all smiles, and said: ‘But I love him, Father, and you said that I should marry him if I was sure; and before God, I am sure.’

      He had not pressed her – she was his only child from his first marriage, his beloved daughter, and he could never gainsay her. And she had been used to getting her own way. She had never thought that her judgement could be wrong.

      She had been sure then that she loved Robert Dudley; indeed, she was sure now. It was not lack of love that made her cry at night as if she would never stop. It was excess of it. She loved him, and every day without him was a long, empty day. She had endured many days without him when he had been a prisoner and could not come to her. Now, bitterly, at the very moment of his freedom and his rise to power, it was a thousand times worse, because now he could come to her; but he chose not to.

      Her stepmother asked her, would she join him at court when the roads were fit for travel? Amy stammered in her reply, and felt like a fool, not knowing what was to happen next, nor where she was supposed to go.

      ‘You must write to him for me,’ she said to Lady Robsart. ‘He will tell me what I am to do.’

      ‘Do you not want to write yourself?’ her stepmother prompted. ‘I could write it out for you and you could copy it.’

      Amy turned her head away. ‘What’s the use?’ she asked. ‘He has a clerk read it to him anyway.’

      Lady Robsart, seeing that Amy was not to be tempted out of bad temper, took a pen and a piece of paper, and waited.

      ‘My lord,’ Amy started, the smallest quaver in her voice.

      ‘We can’t write “my lord”,’ her stepmother expostulated. ‘Not when he lost the title for treason, and it has not been restored him.’

      ‘I call him my lord!’ Amy flared up. ‘He was Lord Robert when he came to me, and he has always been Lord Robert to me, whatever anyone else calls him.’

      Lady Robsart raised her eyebrows as if to say that he was a poor job when he came to her, and was a poor job still, but she wrote the words, and then paused, while the ink dried on the sharpened quill.

      ‘I do not know where you would wish me to stay. Shall I come to London?’ Amy said in a voice as small as a child’s. ‘Shall I join you in London, my lord?’

      All day Elizabeth had been on tenterhooks, sending her ladies to see if her cousin had entered the great hall, sending pageboys to freeze in the stable yard so that her cousin could be greeted and brought to her presence chamber at once. Catherine Knollys was the daughter of Elizabeth’s aunt, Mary Boleyn, and had spent much time with her young cousin Elizabeth. The girls had formed a faithful bond through the uncertain years of Elizabeth’s childhood. Catherine, nine years Elizabeth’s senior, an occasional member of the informal court of children and young people who had gathered around the nursery of the young royals at Hatfield, had been a kindly and generous playmate when the lonely little girl had sought her out, and as Elizabeth became older, they found they had much in common. Catherine was a highly educated girl, a Protestant by utter conviction. Elizabeth, less convinced and with much more to lose, had always had a sneaking admiration for her cousin’s uncompromising clarity.

      Catherine had been with Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, in the last dreadful days in the Tower. She held, from that day on, an utter conviction of her aunt’s innocence. Her quiet assertion that Elizabeth’s mother was neither whore, nor witch, but the victim of a court plot, was a secret comfort to the little girl whose childhood had been haunted by slanders against her mother. The day that Catherine and her family had left England, driven out by Queen Mary’s anti-heresy laws, Elizabeth had declared that her heart was broken.

      ‘Peace. She will be here soon,’ Dudley assured her, finding Elizabeth pacing from one window in Whitehall Palace to another.

      ‘I know. But I thought she would be here yesterday, and now I am worrying that it will not be till tomorrow.’

      ‘The roads are bad; but she will surely come today.’

      Elizabeth twisted the fringe of the curtain in her fingers and did not notice that she was shredding the hem of the old fabric. Dudley went beside her and gently took her hand. There was a swiftly silenced intake of breath from the watching court at his temerity. To take the queen’s hand without invitation, to disentangle her fingers, to take both her hands firmly in his own, and give her a little shake!

      ‘Now, calm down,’ Dudley said. ‘Either today or tomorrow, she will be here. D’you want to ride out on the chance of meeting her?’

      Elizabeth looked at the iron-grey sky that was darkening with the early twilight of winter. ‘Not really,’ she admitted unwillingly. ‘If I miss her on the way then it will only make the wait longer. I want to be here to greet her.’

      ‘Then sit down,’ he commanded. ‘And call for some cards and we can play until she gets here. And if she does not get here today we can play until you have won fifty pounds off me.’

      ‘Fifty!’ she exclaimed, instantly diverted.

      ‘And you need stake nothing more than a dance after dinner,’ he said agreeably.

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