Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (7 page)

turned his brain.

She will never be Queen, he told his restless conscience. Edward will

marry and sire many sons. And after Edward there is Mary. Should I

replace her in the succession she will never rule. You waste your soul in

vain, Anne. She will never be Queen. Your day is done—

Defiance eased his spirit and the grey mood lifted a little; he lowered

himself stiffly into a chair and beckoned the living forward. They sat

on cushions at his feet and he smiled at them smugly, for it gave him a

perverted pleasure to see them together, Anne’s cousin and Anne’s child,

both his, to use as he pleased.

He was doubly blessed in Katherine, his Rose without Thorns; she

was his jewel of womanhood, lusty but pure. “No other will but his” she

had chosen as her motto, and every man at court knew what it meant.

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Susan Kay

None had loved his Rose as he did and none would ever dare. By God,

they knew the price!

Elizabeth leaned against his knee and her flaming hair spread like a

silk cloak across his thigh. Beautiful hair! He liked to stroke and twine

it round his fingers while he lolled sleepily in the great chair and his

thoughts, like little imps, danced him back to Hever Castle, to the first

wild days of his pursuit of Anne. He had never loved that way before and

he never would again. No man would. Anne was a unique experience.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind
.

Wyatt had written that of her, Thomas Wyatt her cousin, who had

made no secret of his love for her. Bitter and public had been the rivalry

between himself and the King for her favours, until at last Wyatt bowed

to defeat, not through fear of Henry but because he saw at last he had

nothing to offer Anne that could compete with a crown.

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I, may spend his time in vain;

And graven with diamonds in letters plain

There is written her fair neck round about,

“
Noli me tangere,
for Caesar’s I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”

Wyatt had relinquished her, written his famous poem of farewell, and

Anne had shown it to Henry as proof of the man’s integrity, to quiet

his jealousy. But he had never been sure after that, never quite sure,

whether she had come to him unsoiled as she swore. And he was jealous

of Wyatt, jealous of all those stolen moments of her extreme youth, of

every moment in her life which he had been unable to share. Jealous,

jealous, murderously jealous. Sometimes, in painful moments of honesty,

he wondered if that were not the reason he had insisted on her death, a

grim determination, after she had agreed to all his terms, that no one else

should enjoy her. He had wanted to kill her and only regretted that, in

common decency, he could not wield the axe himself.

At the time of her arrest, he had sent Wyatt to the Tower, along with

those five other men; it had seemed the perfect moment to be revenged for

al those years of uncertainty and anguish. And he would have sent Wyatt to

his death, along with the rest, if it were not for those wretched lines of verse.

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Legacy

“Nole me tangere,
for Caesar’s I am—
”

No, he knew Wyatt had not committed adultery with her, no matter

what they had done together before the marriage. He knew Wyatt too

well, the stubborn courage which had made him challenge his monarch

on man-to-man terms, the honest integrity which had made him keep his

distance once he retired from the field of honour. He could not square

Wyatt’s death with his conscience and so the man had been released.

Whenever he woke now from guilty, terrified dreams he could point to

Wyatt’s existence and assure himself that he was a just and honourable

man who had killed his wife in good faith.

He still read those verses and others that Wyatt had written for Anne, all

dominated by images of hunting and passionate entreaty to:
Forget not yet.

Yet Anne had forgotten Wyatt, as she forgot young Harry Percy and

many others, trivial, insignificant conquests along her road to power.

She had loved none of them, loved no one at all except herself and her

daughter; and even Elizabeth she had abandoned at the end. Katherine of

Aragon had gone to her death refusing to sign annulment papers; Anne had

hoped to save that precious little neck of hers. Yet she had gone laughing

to the block and the knowledge troubled him, for what in this world or

the next could have given her amusement at such a time? Sometimes

when he looked at Elizabeth, he was afraid he knew the answer to that.

Wyatt’s words still mocked him across the years.
Forget not yet.
For he

could not forget, that was the bitter irony, he remembered every detail

of his miserable enslavement to that witch. The tears he had shed for her,

the abject grovelling letters he had written in desperation each time she

flounced away from court to sulk at the endless delay of the Divorce.

“
My heart and I surrender themselves into your hands—absence has placed

distance between us, nevertheless fervour increases, at least on my part
.”

Even now, four years after the axe had fallen, he was still a prisoner in

a cage of memories and as his glance fell upon Elizabeth he knew why.

Exchange those red-gold tresses for a raven crown and it might have

been Anne kneeling at his feet, the same quick turn of her head, the

same sudden spurt of mocking laughter. In certain moods or a certain

light he could have sworn her amber eyes were black; and then he must

dismiss her abruptly, wherever they were, whatever they were doing and

it would be days, weeks—once even a whole year—before he could bear

to look at her again.

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Susan Kay

But now there was Katherine to dam the flood of his destructive desire

and channel it to safer waters. Under Katherine’s gentle tuition he was

learning to love his daughter as a child, and the nerve-jerking moments of

conflicting hate and indecent interest came less often to shake his compo-

sure. His hand wandered from Elizabeth’s bright head to Katherine’s

thigh, plump and soft beneath her stiff gown. He squeezed it with obscene

gratitude, welcoming the healthy tide of desire rising steadily in his veins.

Katherine cut him free from the shackles of past horrors—horrors of his

own making, it was true, but none the less horrible for that. And it was

always the same. An innocent hour with Elizabeth—then that sudden,

savage need which Katherine so sweetly slaked, enabling him to emerge

from his chamber at peace with the world, and at peace with Anne’s child.

Hastily he sent Elizabeth away with a coin. For all his lechery he had

a curious narrow-minded primness where the morality of the young was

concerned. He desired to keep his younger daughter in the same state of

cloistered innocence which had shrouded his eldest into her early teens.

He would have died a thousand deaths rather than allow her to watch as

he fondled Katherine.

Elizabeth curtsied and ran to the other end of the gallery, where her

governess stood staring discreetly out of a window, feigning great indif-

ference, but watching everything avidly from the corner of a roving eye.

“Your Grace’s coif !” scolded the young woman, as they hurried away.

“How many times have I told you not to take it off ?”

The King took it off,” said Her Grace pertly, “because Queen

Katherine said my hair is like spun silk and too beautiful to stay hidden.”

The governess repressed a sigh of irritation. Privately she considered

Queen Katherine to be an interfering little busybody who ought to know

better than to make other people’s jobs more difficult than they need be.

It would take at least a week of coaxing to get a coif back on Elizabeth’s

head. All this spoiling, following hard on years of virtual neglect, was

making the child quite insufferable.

“Look, Kat.” Elizabeth held out the palm of her hand to display the single

gold coin. “The King gave me this to buy ribbons. What wil Jane say?”

“Now, madam,” said the governess severely, “you’re not to tease your

cousin with it. The lord knows that poor child never receives anything

from her parents except a beating.”

Elizabeth frowned. She was weary of considering the feelings of

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Legacy

Lady Jane Grey and wished she would go home to Bradgate, where she

belonged. But at least she could make her little brother Edward jealous—

“Just give that coin to me and don’t be a little troublemaker,” said Kat,

reading her expression accurately.

Elizabeth ducked out of her grasp and ran. Nothing in the world was

going to deprive her of this singular triumph. She pushed open the door

to the schoolroom and stopped, immediately aware from the discrete,

childish hush which reigned, that intruders were present.

In front of the hearth an arrogantly handsome man stood with fine legs

astride and hands clasped behind his back in the masterful stance favoured

by the King himself. She knew him vaguely as Sir John Dudley, one of

the up and coming men about the court, but the two sulky little boys,

one dark and one fair, she had never seen before.

“…in addition to the inestimable honour of his Royal Highness’s

company,” continued the gentleman in the cold manner of one who

considers himself rudely interrupted, “you will both make acquaintance

of the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace.”

The slight, ironic emphasis on the final word was not wasted on the

girl, or the flustered governess, who came forward with the missing

head-dress and fastened it with mortified haste. The taller boy—the dark

one—suppressed a snigger of amusement and received a sharp poke in the

small of the back from his father.

“Manners, Robin! Bow to Her Grace—you also, Guildford.”

The two boys did as they were told and Elizabeth responded with the

most perfunctory curtsey they had ever seen.

When Dudley had gone, Guildford went to sit in the window-seat

with Lady Jane Grey and the little Prince, whose timid smiles suggested

friendly overtures. But neither Robin nor Elizabeth moved a muscle. In

the centre of the room they stood and stared at each other, as wary and

suspicious as two young cubs from alien packs. Instant antagonism and

reluctant interest pulsed in the air between them.

Sudden and violent, like sheet lightning, it lit the flame of a long, long

candle, a candle that was to burn for nearly half a century.

37

Chapter 3

N
o one who knew John dudley well had ever doubted he

was a man who would go far, in spite of formidable obstacles in

his path. And they were right, for by 1541 he had overcome most of them

and was cutting a fine figure at court.

Men called him a traitor’s son, but the insult was largely academic. His

father, the hated tax collector of Henry VII, had been executed at the

beginning of the present King’s reign in a cheap bid for popular acclaim,

and the bereaved son, a practical man, would have been the first to admit

the astonishing success of the ploy. A man was a fool who made a personal

affront out of pure political expediency. Whenever Henry, surveying a

shrinking treasury with regret, sighed and made some wistful reference to

Edmund Dudley’s sound head for business, John Dudley neither winced

nor felt anger at the memory of that sound head decorating the ramparts

of London Bridge. There was no place for pride or sentiment in the

serving of a Tudor prince.

Positively cordial relations now existed between King and courtier

and Dudley was quick to milk Henry’s guilty conscience, seizing the first

opportunity to manoeuvre two of his sons into the company of the royal

children. The possibilities accruing from a politic cultivation of childhood

acquaintance were endless and when Dudley closed that nursery door he

did so with quiet satisfaction, convinced that he had made yet another

shrewd move. But the first meeting was not a success and he knew it the

moment the two boys sidled into his closet an hour later.

“May we go to the stables now, Father?” asked Robin stiffly.

Legacy

Dudley turned in his chair, and Guildford leaned on his shoulder

confidingly.

“We don’t have to go back do we, Father? She doesn’t like us.”

It was not necessary for a man as astute as Dudley to inquire who she

might be.

“Surely the little Prince made you welcome?” he insisted irritably. He

turned to Robin for confirmation and suddenly noticed a blazing, swollen

patch on his forehead. Getting up to take a closer look he demanded to

know how it came to be there.

“She hit him with a book,” piped Guildford solemnly. “She hit him

ever so hard.”

“What’s that?” roared Dudley, glaring at them both. “Is it true?”