Philippa Gregory's Tudor Court 6-Book Boxed Set (333 page)

*  *  *

“Shall I write to Mr. Forster?” Lizzie Oddingsell suggested to Amy, trying to keep her tone light and impersonal. “We could go and stay at Cumnor Place for a few weeks.”

“Cumnor Place?” Amy looked surprised. She was seated in the window seat for the last of the light, sewing a little shirt for Tom Hyde.

“Yes,” Lizzie said steadily. “We went to them this time last year, toward the end of the summer, before we went on to Chislehurst.”

Amy’s head came up very slowly. “You have not heard from my lord?” she asked, quite certain that the reply would be negative. “Mr. Hyde has not had a letter from my lord about me?”

“No,” Lizzie said awkwardly. “I am sorry, Amy.”

Amy bent her head back to her work. “Has your brother spoken to you? Does he want us to leave?”

“No, no,” Lizzie said hastily. “I just thought that your other friends will be jealous if they do not see you. And then perhaps we could go on to the Scotts at Camberwell? You will want to shop in London, I suppose?”

“I thought he had been a little cool toward me,” Amy said. “I was afraid that he wanted me to leave.”

“Not at all!” Lizzie cried out, hearing her voice as overemphatic. “This is all my idea. I thought you might be tired of here and want to move on. That’s all.”

“Oh, no,” Amy said with vacant little smile. “I’m not tired of being here, and I like it here, Lizzie. Let’s stay for a while longer.”

*  *  *

“What have you been doing all afternoon?” Sir Robert asked Elizabeth intimately as they dined in the privacy of her chamber. “I came to the council room as soon as I had seen the horses but you had not waited for me. They said you were walking with Cecil in the garden. But when I got to the garden you were nowhere to be found, and when I came back to your rooms they said you were not to be disturbed.”

“I was tired,” she said shortly. “I rested.”

He scrutinized her pale face, taking in the shadows under her eyes, the pink eyelids. “He said something to upset you?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Were you angry with him about his failure in Scotland?”

“No. That’s finished with. We can get nothing more than he has got.”

“A great advantage thrown away,” he prompted her.

“Yes,” she said shortly. “Perhaps.”

His smile was quite inscrutable.
He has persuaded her back under his influence,
he thought.
She really is quite hopelessly malleable.
Aloud he said, “I can tell that something is wrong, Elizabeth. What is it?”

She turned her dark eyes on him. “I can’t talk now.” She did not have to gesture to the small circle of courtiers who were dining with them and, as ever, constantly alert to everything they said and did. “I’ll talk to you later, when we are alone.”

“Of course,” he said, smiling kindly at her. “Then let us set ourselves to amuse you. Shall we play cards? Or play a game? Or shall we dance?”

“Cards,” she said.
At least a game of cards would prevent a conversation,
she thought.

*  *  *

Robert waited in his room for Elizabeth, Tamworth his valet on guard outside, the wine poured, the fire freshly heaped with sweet-scented apple wood. The door from her room opened and she came in, not with her usual eager stride, not with desire illuminating her face. Tonight she was a little hesitant, almost as if she wished herself elsewhere.

So, she has reconciled with Cecil,
he thought.
And he has warned her off me. As I knew he would, once they were on good terms again. But we are as good as married. She is mine.
Aloud he said: “My dearest. This day has gone on forever,” and took her into his arms.

Robert felt the slightest check before she moved close to him, and he stroked her back and murmured kisses into her hair. “My love,” he said. “My one and only love.”

He released her before she withdrew, and handed her into a chair at the fireside. “And here we are,” he said. “Alone at last. Will you have a glass of wine, dearest?”

“Yes,” she said.

He poured her the wine and touched her fingers as she took the wineglass from him. He saw how she looked at the fire, and not at him.

“I am sure that there is something the matter,” he said. “Is it something between us? Something that I have done to offend you?”

Elizabeth looked up at once. “No! Never! You are always . . .”

“Then what is it, my love? Tell me, and let us face whatever difficulty there is together.”

She shook her head. “There is nothing. It is just that I love you so much; I have been thinking of how I could not bear to lose you.”

Robert put down his glass and knelt at her feet. “You won’t lose me,” he said simply. “I am yours, heart and soul. I am promised to you.”

“If we could not marry for a long time, you would still love me,” she said. “You would wait for me?”

“Why should we not publish our betrothal at once?” he asked, going to the heart of it.

“Oh.” She fluttered her hand. “You know, a thousand reasons. Perhaps none of them matter. But if we could not, would you wait for me? Would you be true to me? Would we always be like this?”

“I would wait for you. I would be true to you,” he promised her. “But we could not always be like this. Someone would find out; someone would talk. And I couldn’t go on always loving you and being at your side and yet never being able to help you when you are afraid or alone. I have to be able to take your hand before all the court and say that you are mine and I am yours, that your enemies are my enemies and that I will defeat them.”

“But if we had to wait, we could,” she pressed him.

“Why would we have to wait? Have we not earned our happiness? Both of us in the Tower, both of us thinking that we might face the block the next day? Have we not earned a little joy now?”

“Yes,” she agreed hastily. “But Cecil says that there are many who speak against you, and plot against me, even now. We have to get the country to accept you. It may take a little time, that is all.”

“Oh, what does Cecil know?” Robert demanded carelessly. “He’s only just come back from Edinburgh. My intelligencers tell me that the people love you, and they will come to accept me in time.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “In time. We will have to wait a little while.”

He thought it was too dangerous to argue. “Forever, if you wish,” he said, smiling. “For centuries if it is what you wish. You will tell me when you want to declare our betrothal, and it shall be our secret until then.”

“I don’t want to withdraw from it,” she said hastily. “I don’t want to break it.”

“You cannot break it,” he said simply. “And neither can I. It is indissoluble. It is a legally binding, sacred promise before God and witnesses. In the eyes of God we are man and wife and no one can part us.”

*  *  *

A letter came for Amy from Robert’s friend and client, Mr. Forster at Cumnor Place, inviting her to stay with him for the month of September. Lizzie Oddingsell read it aloud to Amy, who would not make the effort to puzzle it out herself.

“You had better reply and tell them that I shall be very pleased to stay with them,” Amy said coldly. “Shall you come with me? Or stay here?”

“Why would I not come with you?” Lizzie demanded, shocked.

“If you wanted to leave my service,” Amy said, looking away from her friend. “If you think, as your brother clearly does, that I am under a cloud, and that you would be better not associated with me.”

“My brother has said no such thing,” Lizzie lied firmly. “And I would never leave you.”

“I am not what I was,” Amy said, and the coldness went out of her voice in a rush and left only a thin thread of sound. “I do not enjoy my husband’s favor anymore. Your brother is not improved by my visit, Cumnor Place will not be honored by having me. I see I shall have to find people who will have me, despite my lord’s disfavor. I am no longer an asset.”

Lizzie said nothing. This letter from Anthony Forster was a begrudging reply to her request that Amy might stay with them for the whole of the autumn. The Scotts of Camberwell, Amy’s own cousins, had replied that they would unfortunately be away for all of November. It was clear that Amy’s hosts, even Amy’s own family, no longer wanted her in their houses.

“Anthony Forster has always admired you,” Lizzie said. “And my brother and Alice were saying only the other day what a pleasure it was to see you playing with Tom. You are like one of the family here.”

Amy wanted to believe her friend too much for skepticism. “Did they really?”

“Yes,” Lizzie said. “They said that he had taken to you like no one else.”

“Then can’t I stay here?” she asked simply. “I would rather stay here than go on. I would rather stay here than go home to Stanfield at Christmas. I could pay for our keep, you know, if your brother would let us stay here.”

Lizzie was silenced. “Surely, now that Mr. Forster has been so kind as to invite us we should go there,” she said feebly. “You would not want to offend him.”

“Oh, let’s just go for a week or so then,” Amy said. “And then come back here.”

“Surely not,” Lizzie hedged. “You would not want to seem ungracious. Let’s go for the full month to Cumnor Place.”

She thought for a moment that she had got away with the lie, but Amy paused, as if the whole conversation had been held in a foreign language, and she had suddenly understood it. “Oh. Your brother wants me to leave, doesn’t he?” she said slowly. “They won’t want me back here in October. They won’t want me back here for a while, indeed, perhaps never. It is as I thought at first, and all this has been a lie. Your brother does not want me to stay. Nobody will want me to stay.”

“Well, at any rate, Mr. Forster wants you,” Lizzie said stoutly.

“Did you write to him and ask if we could go?”

Lizzie’s gaze dropped to the ground. “Yes,” she admitted. “I think it is either there, or Stanfield.”

“We’ll go there then,” Amy said quietly. “Do you know, only a year ago he was honored by my company, and pressed me to stay longer than those few days. And now he will tolerate me for only a month.”

*  *  *

Elizabeth, who had once snatched at every opportunity to see Robert alone, was now avoiding him, and finding ways to be with William Cecil. She cried off from a day’s hunting at the last moment, saying that her head ached too much to ride, and watched the court, led by Robert, ride out. Laetitia Knollys was at his side but Elizabeth let him go. Back in her rooms, Cecil was waiting for her.

“He says he will wait,” she said, standing at the window of Windsor Castle to catch a last glimpse of him as the hunt wound down the steep hill to the town and the marshes beside the river. “He says it will make no difference if we do not announce our betrothal. We can wait until the time is right.”

“You have to withdraw,” Cecil said.

She turned toward him. “Spirit, I cannot. I dare not lose him. It would be worse than death to me, to lose him.”

“Would you leave your throne for him?”

“No!” she exclaimed passionately. “Not for any man. Not for anything. Never.”

“Then you have to give him up,” he said.

“I cannot break my word to him. I cannot have him think of me as faithless.”

“Then he will have to release you,” Cecil said. “He must know that he should never have entered into such a promise. He was not free to enter into it. He was already married. He is a bigamist.”

“He’ll never let me go,” she said.

“Not if he thought there was any chance of winning you,” Cecil agreed. “But what if he thought it was hopeless? And if he thought he might lose his place at court? If it was a choice between never seeing you again and living disgraced in exile; or giving you up and being as he was before the promise?”

“Then he might,” Elizabeth conceded reluctantly. “But I can’t threaten him with that, Spirit. I don’t even have the courage to ask him to release me. I can’t bear to hurt him. Don’t you know what love is? I cannot reject him. I would rather cut off my own right hand than hurt him.”

“Yes,” he said, unimpressed. “I see that it has to be done by him, as if by his free choice.”

“He feels the same about me!” she exclaimed. “He would never leave me.”

“He would not cut off his right hand for you,” Cecil said knowingly.

She paused. “Do you have a plan? Are you planning a way that I can be free?”

“Of course,” he said simply. “You will lose your throne if any word of this mad betrothal gets out. I have to think of a way to save you, and then we have to do it, Elizabeth. Whatever it costs.”

“I will not betray my love for him,” she said. “He must not hear it from me. Anything but that. I would rather die than he thought me faithless.”

“I know,” Cecil said, worried. “I know. Somehow, it has to be his decision and his choice.”

*  *  *

Amy and Lizzie Oddingsell rode across the broad, open Oxfordshire countryside from Denchworth to Cumnor. The high ground was wild and open, pretty on a summer’s day with flocks of sheep shepherded by absentminded children who shouted at the travelers and came leaping like goats themselves to see the ladies ride by.

Amy did not smile and wave at them, nor scatter groats from her purse. She did not seem to see them. For the first time in her life she rode without an escort of liveried menservants around her, for the first time in many years she rode without the Dudley standard of the bear and ragged staff carried before her. She rode on a slack rein, looking around her, but seeing nothing. And her horse drooped its head and went along dully, as if Amy’s light weight was a heavy burden.

“At least the fields look in good heart,” Lizzie said cheerfully.

Amy looked blankly around her. “Oh, yes,” she said.

“Should be a good harvest?”

“Yes.”

Lizzie had written to Sir Robert to tell him that his wife was moving from Abingdon to Cumnor and received no reply. His steward sent no money for the settlement of their debts, nor for tipping the Abingdon staff, and did not tell Lizzie that an escort would be provided for her. In the end, they were attended by Lizzie’s brother’s men, and a small cart came behind them with their goods. When Amy had come out on the doorstep into the bright morning sunlight, pulling on her riding gloves, she saw the little cavalcade and realized that from now on she would travel as a private citizen. The Dudley standard would not proclaim her as a wife of a great lord, the Dudley livery would not warn people to clear the road, to doff their caps, to bend their knees. Amy had become no more than Miss Amy Robsart—less than Miss Amy Robsart, for she was not even a single woman who might marry anyone, a woman with prospects; now she was that lowest form of female life, a woman who had married the wrong man.