Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (67 page)

seeing the utter futility of arguing with a man who had been drinking

heavily on exhaustion and an empty stomach.

“That’s a highly dangerous allegation, Leicester,” he said at last very

drily. “I trust you won’t repeat it to anyone else. Some people might

think it constituted an act of treason.”

He went out of the room, determined to forget the incident, for it

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brought back an uncomfortable picture. Try as he might he could not

dismiss the memory of her light, laughing voice, promising to give him a

month’s advance notice of her death. In spite of all the laws of nature, she

had not yet broken that promise.

Was it possible? Was he really serving a witch?

He was unnerved by the intense disloyalty of the thought.

t t t

It was almost ten o’clock before Elizabeth stirred. She opened her eyes

briefly to find Leicester sitting by her side, and her fever-cracked lips

parted in a dazed smile.

“I told you to go to bed.”

“Did you, madam?” He kissed her hand playfully. “Then I’m afraid I

must have misunderstood your meaning.”

She drowsed again and woke shortly before midday; he was still there.

She made no comment this time but allowed him to place extra pillows

behind her head and swallowed a mouthful of milk to humour him. Then

she asked for her mirror.

He handed it over with some reluctance and when she looked at her

reflection she saw why.

“Hell’s teeth—I look like a corpse!”

“How would you expect to look,” he inquired gently, “after an

attempt on your life so damn near successful as this was?”

She laid the mirror face down on the coverlet and sighed a little.

“Must we play Hunt-the-Traitor every time I have a stomach ache?”

He stared at her in disbelieving silence for a full minute, incredulous,

outraged.

“God’s death,” he swore softly at last, “surely even you can’t believe

this illness had a natural cause. All the doctors agree it was something

taken by mouth at supper.”

She gave him a maddening smile.

“Almost the Last Supper, then—but I’ve yet to see them hang a fish

for treason. Norfolk’s arm may be long, but it certainly doesn’t stretch

from the Tower to my plate.”

“Don’t jest,” he said testily. “The Tower has its shortcomings—you

and I had good cause once to know just how short they can be!”

“That was a long time ago, Robin.”

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“Long or not, it makes no difference. The Tower never changes.

You know that money buys virtually anything there and to a man of

Norfolk’s means and desperation poison would be cheap at any price. He

had everything to gain from your death and precious little to lose—you

must see that.”

“You really hate him, don’t you?”

“I hate anyone and anything that threatens you. But it’s not just my

opinion—the rumour is all over the court.”

“Is it?” She bit her lip angrily. “And what else does Madam Rumour

have to say?”

“That Norfolk must die swiftly, before he gets the chance to try again.

There is no way you can hope to save him after this.”

Elizabeth lay back on her pillows in silence, her face closed suddenly

against him into a mask of secrecy.

“What are you thinking?” he asked anxiously, sensing that devious

brain fiercely at work.

“As a matter of fact I was thinking that I am far too ill to hear of

business,” she said demurely, stealing a glance at him from beneath her

heavy lids. “I shall probably be too ill to hear of it for a long, long time—”

“You invite assassination,” he said darkly, “and next time you may not

be so fortunate.”

“But I am always fortunate—isn’t that so?”

He shook his head gravely. “You really don’t care, do you? You play

with kingdoms and men’s lives like pieces on a chessboard—you won’t

be satisfied until you’ve put both me and Burghley in the same grave.”

“Poor prisoners,” she said quietly. “The two of you should have let

me go when you had the chance.”

Her eyes, like bottomless wells of black water, held him frozen in the

bright stillness of their gaze. So—he had not imagined that physical link;

and in the deepest recess of his mind he acknowledged that his bondage

to her was now complete.

Later, in his apartments which still adjoined the Queen’s, he paused

to look into his own mirror, encrusted with ivory figurines, and there

saw his face, handsome still, yet blurred and indistinct, his jet black hair

touched at the temples with silver grey. Once, in fun, he had called her a

vampire, and that jest had assumed a strange form of truth—she took her

strength, not from blood, but from the love of men.

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He looked at his reflection sadly—the signs of age were unmistak-

able. Slowly the flame of her life was consuming him, eating away

his manhood, almost his identity; he had sunk his life in hers, lost

himself so deeply in her shadow that it seemed without her he would

no longer exist.

He wondered briefly if Burghley felt the same.

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Chapter 5

E
lizabeth signed five warrants for norfolk’s execution and

rescinded four of them. For five months she ran a gauntlet of oppo-

sition from her Council and her Parliament, maddened wolves howling

for the two lives she held just beyond reach of their snapping teeth. She

whetted their appetite with frustration and then, at the very point when

they were blind with blood lust, she tossed Norfolk to them like a choice

bone. Immediately the pursuit was thrown into confusion. They fell

upon her chosen sacrifice in a frenzy of delight, never noticing that they

had given her the time to escape with the real prise; and for a little longer

Mary Stuart clung to a perilously thin ledge of security, just beyond their

reach. So, in the panting pause between the plots and counterplots which

now formed the basis of her life, Elizabeth found she had achieved her

object. But she had not enjoyed playing shuttlecock with a man’s head,

and Norfolk’s humble letter, begging forgiveness and mercy for his poor

children so soon to be orphans, distressed her deeply. She told Burghley

to see to it that the brats were cared for; she had been an orphan herself…

At dusk on the first day of June 1572, the eve of Norfolk’s execution,

she found herself pacing up and down the Privy Chamber, unable to

eat or settle to any of the pursuits with which she normally passed the

evenings. Her first execution by the axe—the first of many, no doubt! So

what ailed her? Why this unlooked-for guilt and squeamishness so alien

to her nature?

On a sudden whim she ordered her barge and had herself conveyed to

the Tower, throwing the unfortunate constable into a fidget of agitated

Susan Kay

unease by her unheralded arrival. He asked her with great delicacy if she

desired to visit the condemned Duke and watched her walk up and down

his narrow room, twisting a pair of silk gloves between her long fingers.

It was, after all, what she had come for, to see him, to explain and excuse

the tortured suspense she had kept him in for the last five months. But now

she shied away from it, reluctant to raise his hopes falsely yet again, afraid

that her resolution would crumble at the sight of his broken penitence.

Instead she wandered aimlessly out to the site of the Green where her

mother and Katherine Howard had lost their heads, where little Jane Grey

had died and they had told her,
“the torrent of blood was quite extraordinary
”

as she waited in the Bell Tower to follow in Jane’s footsteps. Through

the falling light she saw the Chapel of St. Peter-ad-Vincula that held the

remains of her mother and that tomorrow would receive yet another

mutilated body. And she shivered in the hot twilight, drawing the heavy

cloak more closely round herself as she swept past the hovering constable

with a curt salutation and returned to the barge. They sailed away over

the black river and she watched the mighty fortress dwindling in the

distance to the toy she had once imagined.

She could not sleep that night. She sat in a window-seat and watched

the darkness recede into a bright orange dawn, while her lady-in-waiting

snored in careless oblivion on a pallet at the foot of the state bed.

This, then, was what it meant to be Queen, the murder of relatives

who had sought first to murder you. Strike or be stricken was the simple

rule of every ruler. Her father had followed it with sublime indifference

to the end of his days—why then could she not do the same?

But she would never be able to do it. And when at last the roar of the

Tower cannon announced the death of a traitor, she stood alone in her

room, pressing her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to shut it out.

t t t

The years of Philip’s reluctant and deluded friendship with England were

now at an undisputed end. England and Spain had slowly and inevitably

drawn apart over a long series of mutual grievances and Philip comforted

himself now with the certain knowledge that one day he would settle

with England’s Jezebel. But for the moment his hands were firmly tied,

by the defensive Treaty of Blois which Elizabeth had just wrung from

his old enemy, France, by the ever present risk of her marriage with a

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French prince, and by the unrest of his own Protestant subjects in the

Netherlands. As long as Elizabeth held the Queen of Scots hostage, she

was safe from any overt aggression on his part. His ostensible champion-

ship of Mary masked a very hearty desire to see the woman dead and he

believed that sooner or later, as the plots in her favour grew in magnitude,

Elizabeth’s advisers would force their Queen to dispose of her. He could

afford to wait until that stumbling-block in his path to England had been

removed and, while he waited, he steadily noted each English outrage,

from the seizure by Elizabeth’s ships of Spanish treasure galleons, to her

disgraceful treatment of his ambassadors. He sheltered her Catholic exiles,

while her ports were always open to his Protestant refugees. It seemed

inevitable that they would end as deadly enemies, that in his attempt to

dominate Europe, he would be forced to subjugate England and destroy

the Queen whose very existence was a threat to his kingship and an insult

to his manhood. He watched anxiously from afar as she began to toy with

fresh marriage negotiations, first with the French heir, Anjou, then with

his brother, the Duke of Alençon. France was fawning round Elizabeth

like a spaniel and Philip did not care for the way things looked—he did

not care for it at all.

Leicester, too, was ill at ease with this new marriage project. Initially,

he had regarded the negotiations as yet another of Elizabeth’s brilliant

diplomatic farces. Anjou was an overt homosexual; Alençon was a rake

and an ugly pock-marked dwarf to boot. She could not be serious—the

match was impossible! And yet, as she approached her thirty-seventh

birthday, he sensed a subtle change in her attitude. She had always been

happy to stand as sponsor—had indeed collected a veritable army of

godchildren—yet now weddings and christenings seemed to depress her

equally. She watched the children of her friends with increasing wistful-

ness, and Leicester, watching her with anxiety, recognised a quality his

mother had once described as “broodiness.”

One evening, goaded beyond the boundaries of common sense by

fear, he remarked that if she had really set her heart on taking a stunted,

pock-marked imbecile to her bed, there were plenty in England to oblige

her without looking to France.

The backgammon board swept to the floor between them as she

stood up.

“Get out!” she said; and he went with some alacrity.

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In the Privy Chamber, where the more favoured courtiers hovered,

the Queen’s women were engaged in various quiet pursuits. Leicester

paused for a casual word here and there, with forced civility, as he edged

his way towards the window-seat where Lettice Knollys, Countess of

Essex, sat reading.

The Queen’s cousin raised her almond eyes and smiled impudently

at him.

“Good evening, my lord.”

As he bent to kiss her hand with cool formality, he whispered curtly,

“The usual place. Don’t keep me waiting,” and was gone before she had

time to reply.

Ten minutes later, having pleaded a headache to the Queen, Lettice

slipped away from the gossiping maids and matrons and followed the

torch-lit corridors that led to a small room on the other side of the palace.

As soon as she stepped inside, he locked the door and tore the cloak

from her shoulders.

“Get your clothes off,” he said roughly. “I want you now.”

The incipient violence of his mood excited her. He was always like