Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (108 page)

of the Guard, it had been his duty to stand and watch while Essex’s

blood was spilt on the scaffold. Essex had been his enemy, but Raleigh

had a heart beneath his cold mask of pride and he, more than any

other, guessed what the Queen must feel. He looked at her with silent

Legacy

sympathy, white-faced beneath a red wig which seemed harsh and garish

in comparison. He had never seen her look so old, nor her dark eyes so

desolate; he wondered how much longer she would be able to maintain

that rigorous self-control.

When she rose stiffly, he offered his arm and she laid her hand on the

white ruffle at his wrist with a look that might mean gratitude. They

moved apart to the fireplace, where he threw some more logs into the

fire; her hand on his had been chill as ice.

“Shall I send for wine, madam—aqua vitae?” he said, very low, but she

shook her head slowly. She was staring at him, with haunted eyes.

“You saw him die?” she asked at last, still quiet and controlled,

betraying nothing.

“Yes, madam—he met his death with calm and courage, repenting his

error and his treatment of you.”

“Was it—” There was tremor in her voice now. “Was it clean and

quick?”

He hesitated. It was useless to lie. She would only find out later and be

enraged that he had deceived her.

He shook his head faintly. “Three blows of the axe, madam.”

Three blows! Three blows to kill the Scottish Queen and the Admiral,

a man of much wit and very little judgement. Like Essex!

She said, very low, for his ears only, “It should have been a sword.”

“Madam—” He laid a hand on her arm in concern. She had the grey,

glazed look of shock, a look he remembered seeing before now on the

faces of men who had lost a limb in battle and only afterwards begun to

register the pain.

“My thoughts are not for sharing,” she said dully. “You may leave me

to them.”

He bowed reluctantly, leaving her sitting alone by the hearth, staring

into the fire with fixed eyes.

The flames were leaping and dancing on the spitting logs, making a

strange shifting landscape of light and dark.

She felt as though she was staring into the deepest pit in Hell.

t t t

In his dull little study Sir Robert Cecil sat and dealt with the vast corre-

spondence on his cluttered desk. When the door opened to admit the

629

Susan Kay

Captain of the Guard, he unobtrusively slid a letter into the darkest recess

of an open drawer and pushed it closed. He had no desire for Raleigh to

catch a glimpse of his secret correspondence with the King of Scotland,

England’s obvious, but unnamed, heir presumptive. It was littered with

one or two darkly subtle hints that the notorious Sir Walter Raleigh, wit,

poet, and adventurer
par excellence
, was unlikely to prove King James’s

loyalest subject in the future. Cecil had no intention of sharing power

in the next reign with the flamboyant adventurer who had once been

his best friend. He was obsessed with the future and his own part in it;

and the future, as Cecil saw it, was King James. With Elizabeth he was

merely marking time, waiting with carefully concealed impatience for the

moment when that remarkable old bitch would drop dead.

He looked up now and smiled as Raleigh lowered himself stiffly into

a chair, easing the old wound in his thigh which was his personal legacy

of Essex’s exploits at Cadiz. Cecil’s physical disabilities had ruled out

any possibility of vigorous military activity when he was no more than a

boy, dreaming of conquering the world by himself. Now he saw Raleigh

bite his lip at a stab of pain and felt a faint throb of malicious pleasure

to see this magnificently-built man at the mercy of a physical weakness

which would cause him to limp for the rest of his life—however long

that life should be. He had not rid himself of Essex simply to put a more

dangerous and able man in his place and, sooner or later, Cecil mused

quietly, cold-bloodedly, it might be necessary to dispose of Raleigh too.

King James had a most unhealthy preference for strong, virile men and

Raleigh would always bear watching. Certainly he stood high in favour

with Elizabeth once more, his marriage forgotten if not forgiven, the last

of the men who remembered her with passionate friendship from the

autumn days when she had still been a handsome woman.

“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?” Cecil inquired at last,

turning to cast an eye over his papers in a desultory fashion. “I thought

this hour would have seen you with the Queen.”

Raleigh frowned and began to peel the feathers of a freshly cut

quill from the neatly tied stack which stood in a pewter holder on the

Secretary’s desk. “Lady Warwick tells me she has shut herself up in a

darkened room where she weeps alone and calls on Essex’s name.”

“Oh?” Cecil glanced at the ivory clock on his chimney-piece and

compressed his lips in a tight, humourless little smile. “Now, let me see—”

630

Legacy

He studied his papers thoughtfully and patted the stack in front of him.

“If that runs true to form we can expect her to emerge from her room

some time this afternoon, reduce her women to tears, and then settle to

state affairs shortly before dusk. I don’t suppose I’ll see my bed before

dawn in that case—thank heaven there’s nothing here that can’t wait till

this evening. It would be so much more convenient if she confined these

morbid frenzies to the hours of darkness.” He saw Raleigh raise his dark

eyebrows and he shrugged his hunched shoulders indifferently. “There’s

a great deal that requires her attention—the show must go on, you know,

even if the principal actor is no longer up to the role. Have you noticed

how violent her moods are growing? I can tell you I don’t much care for

the way she keeps that sword beside her all the time, as though she expects

an assassin behind every curtain. She gave me a nasty fright the other day,

leaping out of her chair and plunging it into the arras, then coming back

to the table and taking up our conversation just where it had left off. I

scarcely knew where to put myself. Not the first time it’s happened either,

I understand. If she keeps on like this, there’ll be no tapestries left in the

Privy Chamber. It will cost the devil to replace them—”

Raleigh looked at him steadily, with a flicker of dislike and disgust.

“It doesn’t trouble you at all does it, Cecil—witnessing the slow

disintegration of the finest mind in Europe? For my own part I find it

remarkably painful to watch.”

“Her Majesty’s mind has always been beyond a mere mortal like

myself,” said Cecil calmly. “I have never presumed to understand her.

As long as she remains capable of transacting state business that is all that

concerns me. I’m surprised it concerns you so much—I never marked

you as a sentimental man for all your poetry. And you’ve felt her injustice

more than once—look at your marriage.”

Raleigh lifted his elegant shoulders.

“I knew the price, I chose to pay it, that’s all. I could never complain

she didn’t make the risks quite clear.

“Fain would I climb but that I fear to fall…”

Cecil sighed. Everyone knew how Raleigh had once scratched that on

a window with a diamond ring to test the Queen’s affection. And how

the Queen had written below it:

631

Susan Kay

“If thy heart fail thee, then climb not at all.”

He considered it vain and ostentatious of Raleigh to draw attention

to the occasion and now said coldly, “I see you did not take her advice.

You climbed and you fell. Was it truly worth the effort to climb again?”

Raleigh smiled absently into the fire.

“My wife’s question—almost, my wife’s tone. You are surprisingly

like her and half the wives in England—jealous of the Queen.”

“Jealous—
I
, jealous?”

Raleigh turned in his chair to look at Cecil shrewdly.

“You hold no place in her heart. Do you suppose no one has ever

guessed what eats you from within, Robert?”

Cecil’s hand clenched on the desk in front of him. Raleigh would

never know it, but in that quiet, unguarded moment, he had uttered

words which would lead him relentlessly to the block in the next reign.

“She cared for
you,”
Cecil said at last, controlling his cold outrage.

“And little enough you have to show for it, apart from Sherbourne and

a justly bitter wife.”

Raleigh shrugged, twirled the quill between his fine fingers.

“‘
She gave, she took, she wounded, she appeased
,’” he quoted softly.

“Aye,” snapped Cecil. “To all her lovers.”

“England was her lover,” murmured Raleigh, suddenly lost in

thought. “The rest of us were shadows—mirror images—even Leicester!

She spurned us like spaniels and made us all fawn upon her. And then

Essex broke the mirror, shattered her world. To see her mourn, one

would think she had killed her own child—”

He fell silent, his dark face etched with lines of grief which goaded

Cecil into real rage. That a man as hard and intelligent as Raleigh should

still sit there immortalising his cruel goddess in verse was beyond bearing.

She is old, he wanted to shout, old,
old
! Can’t you see it?

But Cecil had never been admitted to the magic circle of her intimacy

and the knowledge was a poisonous awareness of inferiority in his galled

heart. He was forever on the outside looking in, of insufficient personal

stature to gain entry to her heart.
Little man
, she called him—and now he

would never know, never understand the secret of her charm, so envied

by all, so fatal to some.

“What was she to you?” he burst out unexpectedly in a tone of bitter

632

Legacy

frustration that made Raleigh glance at him with quick surprise. There

was a moment’s uneasy silence while Raleigh chewed the feathers of the

quill, considering the question.

“She was my friend,” he said at last, softly, looking inward, “the only

woman who has ever been that to me. She struck sparks from my mind.

Even my wife, dear as she is to me—and dearly bought—even she could

never do that. A whole era dies with her, my friend—an era, the like of

which will not be seen in England again.”

“So”—a light lit suddenly in Cecil’s eyes—“you also think the end

is near.”

Raleigh sighed.

“She puts me in mind of a candle flickering in a draught. She may go

out at any moment or burn on indefinitely.”

“God forbid,” muttered Cecil to that last, and hastily covered it with a

cough. He picked up the ragged quill that Raleigh had carelessly dropped

on his desk, disposed of it methodically in the paper-basket at his side. He

could not bear things out of place.

“I only hope your candle can produce one more flare,” he continued

with a wry smile. “The writs for Parliament go out next week and given

the present mood in London I’d say it’s likely to be the most mutinous

session she’s ever been driven to hold. She’ll need to play an ace this time

and no mistake. I pray she can rouse herself sufficiently to do it.”

Raleigh was silent and his wordly eyes were sad; like Cecil, he had

very little hope of seeing such a miracle take place.

t t t

She had killed his body, but the martyred memory of Essex lingered

on, almost more powerful in death than it had been in life. The wind

on the streets whispered his name with sad and reverent sighs, while in

the taverns new songs sprang up to mourn him in the maudlin clink of

tankards and the acrid haze of tobacco smoke.

“Sweet England’s pride is gone…” sang the men who had not troubled

to join his rebellion, yet viciously condemned those who had brought

him down: Cecil, Raleigh—and the Queen. The death of Essex had

cast a shadow over the crown and a slow, moody questioning of the

sovereign’s rights had begun to gather momentum.

Elizabeth was acutely aware of it and the knowledge weighed heavy

633

Susan Kay

on her heart at a time when there was much to cause her anxiety. Tyrone

had received his Spanish troops and she was in desperate straits to finance

Mountjoy, her new Lord Deputy in Ireland. She had sold land and jewels

and forced loans from niggardly allies in France and the Netherlands. But

it was not enough. She was forced to turn reluctantly to the one source

of income she had instinctively sought to avoid throughout her reign.

And so it was that in October, Parliament gathered to consider her

request for the extraordinary measure of taxation.

t t t

She thought of this Parliament as Pandora’s box; she did not want to

open it for fear of what she would release. But autocracy would not

serve her now, nor would age and increasing infirmity excuse her the

ordeal of a public appearance, a slow, jolting journey past sullen crowds,