The Virgin's Lover Read online

  I will go no further until I have your instructions, but perhaps you will come and see the house and land very soon. Mr. and Mrs. Hyde send you their good wishes and this basket of early salad leaves. Lady Robsart tells me we have eighty lambs born this year at Stanfield, our best ever year. I hope you will come soon.

  Your devoted wife

  Amy Dudley

  PS I do hope you will come soon, husband

  Amy walked to church across the park with Mrs. Oddingsell, over the village green through the lych-gate into the churchyard and then into the cool, changeless gloom of the parish church.

  Yet, it was not changeless, it was strangely changed. Amy looked around and saw a new great brass lectern at the head of the aisle and the Bible spread out on it, wide open as if anyone could be allowed to read it. The altar, where it was usually kept, was conspicuously empty. Amy and Lizzie Oddingsell exchanged one silent look and shut them selves into the Hyde family pew. The service proceeded in English, not the more familiar Latin, following King Edward’s prayer book rather than the beloved Mass. Amy bowed her head over the new words and tried to feel the presence of God, even though his church was changed, and the language was changed, and the Host was hidden.

  It came to the moment for the priest to pray for the queen, and he did so, his voice shaking only a little, but when it came for him to pray for their beloved bishop, Thomas Goldwell, the tears in his voice stopped him from speaking altogether and he fell silent. The clerk finished the prayer for him and the service went on, ending with the usual bidding prayer and blessing.

  “You go on,” Amy whispered to her friend. “I want to pray for a moment.”

  She waited until the church was empty, and then she came from the Hyde pew. The priest was on his knees at the rood screen, Amy quietly went and knelt beside him.

  “Father?”

  He turned his head. “Daughter?”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  He nodded. His head bowed low as if he were ashamed. “They are saying that our Bishop Thomas is not our bishop at all.”

  “How is this?” she asked.

  “They are saying that the queen has not appointed him to Oxford, and yet he is no longer Bishop of St. Asaph. They are saying that he is betwixt and between, that he belongs nowhere, is bishop of nothing.”

  “Why would they say such a thing?” she demanded. “They must know he is a good and holy man, and he left St. Asaph to come to Oxford. He is appointed by the Pope.”

  “You should know as well as I,” he said wearily. “Your husband knows how this court works.”

  “He does not…confide in me,” she said, picking the right word carefully. “Not about court matters.”

  “They know our bishop is a man faithful till death,” the priest said sadly. “They know he was Cardinal Pole’s dearest friend, was at his deathbed, he gave him the last sacraments. They know he will not turn his coat to please this queen. He would not dishonor the Host as he is ordered to do. I think they will first strip him of his Holy Office, by this sleight of hand, and then murder him.”

  Amy gasped. “Not again,” she said. “Not more killing. Not another Thomas More!”

  “He has been ordered to appear before the queen. I am afraid it is to go to his death.”

  Amy nodded, white-faced.

  “Lady Robsart, your husband is spoken of as one of the greatest men at court. Can you ask him to intercede for our bishop? I swear Father Thomas has never spoken a word against the accession of the queen, never a word against her as queen. He has only spoken out, as God has commanded him to do, in defense of our Holy Church.”

  “I cannot,” she said simply. “Father, forgive me, God forgive me, but I cannot. I have no influence. My husband does not take my advice on court matters, on policy. He does not even know I think on such matters! I cannot advise him, and he would not listen to me.”

  “Then I will pray for you, that he turns to you,” the priest said gently. “And if God moves him to listen, then, daughter: you speak. This is the life of our bishop at stake.”

  Amy bowed her head. “I will do what I can,” she promised without much hope.

  “God bless you, child, and guide you.”

  Robert’s clerk handed him Amy’s letter on the afternoon after his investiture as a knight of the garter. Robert had just hung the blue silk of the garter over the back of a chair and stepped back to admire it. Then he pulled on a new doublet, scanned the letter swiftly, and handed it back.

  “Write her that I am busy now, but I will come as soon as I can,” he said as he opened the door. His hand on the latch, he realized that the ill-formed letters were Amy’s own hand, and that she must have dedicated hours to writing to him.

  “Tell her that I am very glad she wrote to me herself,” he said. “And send her a small purse of money to buy gloves or something she wants.”

  He paused, with a nagging sense that he should do more; but then he heard the herald’s trumpet sound get the jousting and there was no time. “Tell her I’ll come at once,” he said, and turned and ran lightly downstairs to the stable yard.

  The joust had all the pageantry and color that Elizabeth loved, with knights in disguise singing her praises, and composing extempore verses. The ladies gave out favors and the knights wore their ladies’ colors over their heart. The queen was wearing one glove of white silk and holding the other in her hand, when she leaned forward to wish Sir Robert the best of fortune as he came to the royal box to look up at her, high above him, and pay his respects.

  Accidentally, as she leaned forward, the glove slipped through her fingers, and it fell. At once, almost quicker than anyone could see, he had spurred his horse on, the great warhorse wheeled, responsive at once, and he caught the glove in mid-air before it fell to the ground.

  “Thank you!” Elizabeth called. She nodded to a page boy. “Fetch my glove from Sir Robert.”

  With one hand holding back the curvetting big horse, he raised his visor with his other hand and put the glove to his lips.

  Elizabeth, her color rising, watched him kiss her glove, did not demand its return, did not laugh away the gesture as part of the jousting courtesies.

  “May I not keep it?” he asked.

  She recovered herself a little. “Since you so cleverly caught it,” she said lightly.

  Robert brought his horse a little closer. “I thank you, my queen, for dropping it for me.”

  “I dropped it by accident,” she said.

  “I caught it by intent,” he replied, his dark eyes gleaming at her, and tucked it carefully inside his breastplate, wheeled his horse around, and rode down to the end of the lists.

  They jousted all afternoon in the hot April sunshine and when the evening came the queen invited all her special guests onto the river for an evening sail in the barges. Londoners, who had expected this end to the day, had begged and borrowed and hired boats in their thousands, and the river was as crowded as a marketplace with boats and barges flying gaily colored pennants and streamers, and every third craft with a singer or a lute player on board so that haunting tunes drifted across the water from one boat to another.

  Robert and Elizabeth were in the queen’s barge with Catherine and Sir Francis Knollys, Lady Mary Sidney and her husband, Sir Henry Sidney, a couple of the queen’s other ladies, Laetitia Knollys, and another maid of honor.

  A musicians’ barge rowed beside them and the lingering notes of love songs drifted across the water, as the rowers kept pace to the gentle beat of a drum. The sun, setting among clouds of rose and gold, laid a path across the darkening Thames as if it would lead them all the way inland to the very heart of England.

  Elizabeth leaned on the gold-leafed railing of the barge and looked out at the lapping waters of the river, and the panorama of the pleasure boats keeping pace with her own, at the bobbing lanterns which illuminated their own reflections in the water. Robert joined her and they stood side by side for a long while, watching the river in silence.