The Virgin's Lover Read online

  He was pleased to be on safe ground. “Cecil has not seen his wife since the queen’s accession,” he said. “She is overseeing the building of his new house, Burghley. He is in the same strait as I. He wants to get home but he is kept too busy. And I want you to be like his wife; I want you to build a house for us, that I can come to in summer. Will you do it for me? Will you find us a really lovely house or site, and make a home for us, a proper home at last?”

  Her face lightened as he knew it would. “Oh, I would love to,” she said. “And we would live there and be together all the time?”

  Gently he took both her hands. “I would have to be at court for much of the time,” he said. “As you know. But I would come home to you, as often as I could, and you would like to have a proper home of your own, wouldn’t you?”

  “You would come home to me often?” she stipulated.

  “My work is at court,” he pointed out. “But I never forget that I am married and that you are my wife. Of course I will come home to you.”

  “Then yes,” Amy said. “Oh, my lord. I would like it so much.”

  He drew her toward him and felt her warmth through the thin linen gown.

  “But you will take care, won’t you?”

  “Take care?” He was cautious. “Of what?”

  “Of her trying…” She chose her words carefully so as not to irritate him. “Of her trying to draw you in.”

  “She is the queen,” Robert said gently. “It flatters her vanity to be surrounded by men. I am a courtier; it is my work to be drawn in by her. It means nothing.”

  “But if she favors you so much, you will make enemies.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I just know that anyone who is favored by the king or the queen makes enemies. I just want you to take care.”

  He nodded, relieved that she had nothing more to go on. “You’re right, I have my enemies, but I know who they are and what they threaten. They envy me but they are powerless against me while I have her favor. But you are right to warn me, wife. And I thank you for your wise counsel.”

  That night Robert Dudley and his wife slept in the same bed in some accord. He bedded her as gently and as warmly as he could, and Amy, desperate for his touch, accepted the false coin of his kindness as love. She had waited so long for his kiss, for the gentle press of his body against hers, that she whimpered and cried with joy within the first few minutes, and he, falling easily into the well-known rhythm of their lovemaking, with her familiar body surprising him with pleasure, found her easy to please and was glad of that, if for nothing more. He was used to whores, and the ladies of the court, and it was a rare pleasure for him to bed a woman whom he cared for; it was strange for him to hold back out of consideration. As he felt the sweet rush of Amy’s response, his mind wandered to what it would be like to have Elizabeth cling to him, as Amy was clinging now—and the fantasy was so powerful that his lust came like a storm and left him gasping with the thought of a white throat flung back, dark eyelashes fluttering with lust, and a mass of tumbled bronze hair.

  Amy fell asleep at once, her head resting on his shoulder, and he leaned up on his elbow to look at her face in the moonlight which came, all pale and watery, through the glass of the leaded window pane. It gave her skin an odd, greenish pallor, like that of a drowned woman, and her hair spread out on the pillow was like that of a woman rocking on the deep water of a river and sinking down.

  He looked at her with irritated compassion: this wife, whose happiness was so solely dependent upon him, whose desire revolved around him, who was lost without him and infuriating with him, the wife who could never now satisfy him. He knew too that, although she would deny it to her very death, in truth, he could never make her truly happy. They were two such different people, with such different lives, he could not see how they could ever now be joined as one.

  He sighed and leaned back, his dark head resting on the crook of his arm. He thought of his father’s warning against marrying a pretty face for love, and his mother saying sourly to him that little Amy Robsart was as much use to an ambitious man as a primrose in his buttonhole. He had wanted then to show his parents that he was not a son like Guilford, who would marry a girl who hated him, at his father’s command. He had wanted to choose his own wife, and Amy had been so young and so sweet and so willing to agree to anything he proposed. He had thought then that she could learn to be a courtier’s wife, he had thought she could be an ally to him, a source of power and information—as his mother was to his father. He had thought that she could be a loyal and effective partner in the rise of his family to greatness. He did not realize that she would always be the contented daughter of Sir John Robsart, a big man in a small country, rather than an ambitious wife to Robert Dudley, a man who was finding greatness so unreliable, and so hard to win.

  Robert woke early and felt the old familiar rush of irritation that the woman beside him in bed was Amy, and not some London whore whom he could dismiss before she had the temerity to speak. Instead, his wife stirred as he stirred, as if even in sleep every sense had been on the watch for him. She opened her eyes almost as soon as he did, and as soon as she saw him she smiled that familiar, vacuous smile, and said, as she always said, “Good morning, my lord. God be with you. Are you well?”

  He hated too that when he replied brusquely, a shadow passed across her face as if he had slapped her in her very first moments of waking, which forced him to smile in his turn and ask her if she had slept well, with extra concern in his voice in an attempt to make amends.

  The repetitive dullness of it made him grit his teeth and spring out of bed as if he were urgently needed elsewhere, though in fact, he had told everyone at court that he would spend some days with his wife in Camberwell. The predictable interplay of his irritation and her hurt was unbearable.

  “Oh, are you getting up?” she asked, as if she could not see him swing his cloak around his naked shoulders.

  “Yes,” he said shortly. “I have remembered something I should have done at court; I shall have to go back early.”

  “Early?” She could not keep the disappointment from her voice.

  “Yes, early,” he said abruptly, and went quickly from the room.

  He had hoped to break his fast alone and be on his horse and away before the household was stirring, but Amy flung herself from their bed and wakened everyone. Mr. and Mrs. Scott came tumbling down the stairs, Mrs. Scott pinning her hair as she trotted in her husband’s wake, Mrs. Oddingsell behind them; he could hear the heels of Amy’s expensive shoes rattling along the wooden floorboards as she hurried down too. He forced a smile on his face and prepared himself to repeat his lies of urgent business overlooked.

  A more sophisticated family would have guessed at once the simple truth: their noble guest could not endure another minute. But for the Scotts, and for their cousin Amy, it was a surprise and a disappointment, and Amy in particular was worried that he was overburdened by the business at court.

  “Can they not get someone else to do it for you?” she asked, hovering over him with maternal concern and watching him drink ale and eat bread.

  “No,” he said, his mouth full.

  “They ask you to do so much,” she said proudly. She glanced at Mrs. Scott, at Mrs. Oddingsell. “Can they not manage without you? They should not put so much on your shoulders.”

  “I am Master of Horse,” he said. “It is my duty to do the task she has given me.”

  “Can’t William Cecil do it for you?” Amy asked at random. “You could send him a note.”

  Dudley would have laughed if he had not been so irritated. “No,” he said. “Cecil has his own work, and the last thing I want is him interfering in mine.”

  “Or your brother then? Surely you could trust him? And then you could stay here another night.”

  Dudley shook his head. “I am sorry to leave you all,” he said, including the Scotts in the charm of his apology. “And if I could stay, I would do so. But I woke myself i