The Virgin’s Lover. Philippa Gregory

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      In the garden Dudley retained the queen’s hand, and tucked it under his elbow.

      ‘I can walk on my own, you know,’ she said pertly.

      ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But I like to hold your hand, I like to walk at your side. May I?’

      She said neither yes nor no, but she left her hand on his arm. As always with Elizabeth, it was one step forward and then one step back. As soon as she allowed him to keep her little hand warm on his arm she chose to raise the question of his wife.

      ‘You do not ask me if you may bring Lady Dudley to court,’ she began provocatively. ‘Do you not wish her to attend? Do you not ask for her to have a place in my service? I am surprised that you have not mentioned her to me for one of my ladies in waiting. You were quick enough to recommend your sister.’

      ‘She prefers to live in the country,’ Robert said smoothly.

      ‘You have a country house now?’

      He shook his head. ‘She has a house that she inherited from her father in Norfolk but it is too small and too inconvenient. She lives with her stepmother at Stanfield Hall, nearby; but she is going to stay with my cousins at Bury St Edmunds this week.’

      ‘Shall you buy a house now? Or build a new one?’

      He shrugged. ‘I shall find some good land and build a good house, but I am going to spend most of my time at court.’

      ‘Oh, are you, indeed?’ she asked flirtatiously.

      ‘Does a man walk away from sunlight to shadow? Does he leave gold for gilt? Does he taste good wine and then want bad?’ His voice was deliberately seductive. ‘I shall stay at court for ever, if I am allowed, basking in the sunshine, enriched by the gold, drunk on the perfume of the headiest wine I could imagine. What were we saying: that we would not let the base drive out the best? That we should have, both of us, the very best?’

      She absorbed the compliment for a long, delicious moment. ‘And your wife must surely be very old now?’

      Dudley smiled down at her, knowing that she was teasing him. ‘She is thirty, just five years older than me,’ he said. ‘As I think you know. You were at my wedding.’

      Elizabeth made a little face. ‘It was years and years ago, I had quite forgotten it.’

      ‘Nearly ten years,’ he said quietly.

      ‘And I thought even then that she was a very great age.’

      ‘She was only twenty-one.’

      ‘Well, a great age to me, I was only sixteen.’ She gave an affected little start of surprise. ‘Oh! As were you. Were you not surprised to be marrying a woman so much older than you?’

      ‘I was not surprised,’ he said levelly. ‘I knew her age and her position.’

      ‘And still no children?’

      ‘God has not blessed us as yet.’

      ‘I think that I heard a little whisper that you had married her for love, for a passionate love, and against the wishes of your father,’ she prompted him.

      He shook his head. ‘He was opposed only because I was so young, I was not yet seventeen and she just twenty-one. And I imagine he would have picked a better match for me if I had given him the chance. But he did not refuse his permission once I asked, and Amy brought a good dowry. They had good lands in Norfolk laid down to sheep, and in those days, my father needed to increase our friends and influence in the east of the country. She was her father’s only heir, and he was happy enough with the match.’

      ‘I should think he was!’ she exclaimed. ‘The Duke of Northumberland’s son for a girl who had never been to court, who could barely write her own name and who did nothing but stay home and weep the moment that her husband encountered trouble?’

      ‘It must have been a fairly detailed little whisper that came to your ears,’ Robert remarked. ‘You seem to know my entire marital history.’

      Elizabeth’s gurgle of guilty laughter was checked when the lady in waiting appeared behind them. ‘Your Grace, I have brought your shawl.’

      ‘I didn’t ask for one,’ Elizabeth said, surprised. She turned back to Robert. ‘Yes, of course, I heard talk of your marriage. And what sort of woman your wife was. But I forgot it until now.’

      He bowed, his smile lurking around his mouth. ‘Can I assist your memory any further?’

      ‘Well,’ she said engagingly. ‘What I still don’t know for sure is why you married her in the first place, and, if it was love, as I heard, whether you still love her.’

      ‘I married her because I was sixteen, a young man with hot blood and she had a pretty face and she was willing,’ he said, careful not to let it sound too romantic to this most critical audience, though he remembered well enough how it had been, and that he had been mad for Amy, defying his father and insisting on having her as his wife. ‘I was eager to be a married man and grown up, as I thought. We had a few years when we were contented together but she was her father’s favourite child and in the habit of being spoiled. In fairness, I suppose I was a favoured son and I had been richly blessed. A pair of spoilt brats together, in fact. We did not deal very well together after the newness had worn off. I was at court in my father’s train, as you know, and she stayed in the country. She СКАЧАТЬ