The Virgin's Lover Read online

  “You can call me Jane,” she said. “As ever. How are you, Will?”

  “Amusing,” he said. “This is a court ready to be amused, but I fear for my post.”

  “Oh?” she asked.

  The lady-in-waiting who was escorting Jane to the queen paused for the jest.

  “In a court in which every man is played for a fool, why should anyone pay me?” he asked.

  Jane laughed out loud. The lady-in-waiting giggled. “Give you good day, Will,” Jane said fondly.

  “Aye, you will miss me when you are in Spain,” he said. “But not miss much else, I would guess?”

  Jane shook her head. “The best of England left it in November.”

  “God rest her soul,” Will said. “She was a most unlucky queen.”

  “And this one?” Jane asked him.

  Will cracked a laugh. “She has all the luck of her sire,” he said with wonderful ambiguity, since Jane’s conviction would always be that Elizabeth was the child of Mark Smeaton, the lute player, and his luck was stretched to breaking point on the rack before he danced on air from the gallows.

  Jane gleamed at the private, treasonous joke, and then followed the lady-in-waiting toward the queen’s presence chamber.

  “You’re to wait here, Countess,” the lady said abruptly, and showed Jane into an anteroom. Jane rested one hand in the small of her back and leaned against the windowsill.

  There was no chair in the room, no stool, no window seat, not even a table that she might lean on.

  Minutes passed. A wasp, stumbling out of its winter sleep, struggled against the leaded window pane and fell silent on the sill. Jane shifted her weight from one foot to another, feeling the ache in her back.

  It was stuffy in the room, the ache in the small of her back traveled down to the calves of her legs. Jane flexed her feet, going up and down on her toes, trying to relieve the pain. In her belly, the child shifted and kicked. She put her hand on her stomacher and stepped to the window embrasure. She looked out of the window to the inner garden. Whitehall Palace was a warren of buildings and inner courts; this one had a small walnut tree growing in the center with a circular bench around it. As Jane watched, a pageboy and a serving maid loitered for five precious minutes whispering secrets and then scampered off in opposite directions.

  Jane smiled. This palace had been her home as the favorite lady-in-waiting of the queen, and she thought that she and the Spanish ambassador had met by that very seat themselves. There had been a brief, joyful time, one summer, between the queen’s wedding and her triumphant announcement that she was with child, when this had been a happy court, the center of world power, united with Spain, confident of an heir, and ruled by a woman who had come to her own at last.

  Jane shrugged. Queen Mary’s disappointment and death had been the end of it all, and now her bright, deceitful little half-sister was sitting in her place, and using that place to insult Jane by this discourteous delay. It was, Jane thought, a petty revenge on a dead woman, not worthy of a queen.

  Jane heard a clock strike from somewhere in the palace. She had planned to visit the queen before her dinner and already she had been kept waiting for half an hour. She felt a little light-headed from lack of food and hoped she would not be such a fool as to faint when she was finally admitted to the presence chamber.

  She waited. More long minutes passed. Jane wondered if she could just slip away; but that would be such an insult to the queen from the wife of the Spanish ambassador that it would be enough to cause an international incident. But this long waiting was, in itself, an insult to Spain. Jane sighed. Elizabeth must still be a filled with spite, if she would take such a risk for the small benefit of insulting such a very unimportant person as herself.

  At last the door opened. The lady-in-waiting looked miserably embarrassed. “Do forgive me. Will you come this way, Countess?” she asked politely.

  Jane stepped forward and felt her head swim. She clenched her fists and her nails dug into the palms of her hands so the pain of it distracted her from her dizziness and from the ache in her back. Not long now, she said to herself. She can’t keep me on my feet for much longer.

  Elizabeth’s presence chamber was hot and crowded, the lady-in-waiting threaded through the many people and a few of them smiled and acknowledged Jane, who had been well liked when she had served Queen Mary. Elizabeth, standing in blazing sunlight in the center of a window bay, deep in conversation with one of her Privy Councillors, seemed not to see her. The lady-in-waiting led Jane right up to her mistress. Still there was no acknowledgment. Jane stood and waited.

  At last Elizabeth concluded the animated conversation and looked around. “Ah, Countess Feria!” she exclaimed. “I hope you have not been kept waiting?”

  Jane’s smile was queenly. “Not at all,” she said smoothly. Her head was thudding now and her mouth was dry. She was very afraid of fainting at Elizabeth’s feet; there was little more than determination holding her up.

  She could not see Elizabeth’s face, the window was a blaze of white light behind her, but she knew the taunting smile and the dancing black eyes.

  “And you are expecting a child,” Elizabeth said sweetly. “Within a few months?”

  There was a suppressed gasp from the court. A birth within a few months would mean that the child had been conceived before the wedding.

  Jane’s calm expression never wavered. “In the autumn, Your Grace,” she said steadily.

  Elizabeth fell silent.

  “I have come to bid you farewell, Queen Elizabeth,” Jane said with glacial courtesy. “My husband is returning to Spain and I am going with him.”

  “Ah yes, you are a Spaniard now,” Elizabeth said, as if it were a disease that Jane had caught.

  “A Spanish countess,” Jane replied smoothly. “Yes, we have both changed our places in the world since we last met, Your Grace.”

  It was a shrewd reminder. Jane had seen Elizabeth on her knees and weeping with pretended penitence before her sister, had seen Elizabeth bloated with illness, under house arrest, under charge of treason, sick with terror, begging for a hearing.

  “Well, I wish you a good journey anyway,” Elizabeth said carelessly.

  Jane sank to the ground in a perfect courtly curtsy; no one could have known that she was on the very edge of losing consciousness. She rose up and saw the room swim before her eyes, and then she walked backward from the throne, one smooth step after another, her rich gown held out of the way of her scarlet high heels, her head up, her lips smiling. She did not turn until she reached the door. Then she flicked her skirt around and left, without a backward glance.

  “She did what?” Cecil demanded incredulously of an excitable Laetitia Knollys, reporting, as she was paid to do, on the doings of the queen’s private rooms.

  “Kept her waiting for a full half hour, and then suggested that she had the baby in her belly before marriage,” Laetitia whispered breathlessly.

  They were in Cecil’s dark paneled study, the shutters closed although it was full day, a trusted man on the door and Cecil’s other rooms barred to visitors.

  He frowned slightly. “And Jane Dormer?”

  “She was like a queen,” Laetitia said. “She spoke graciously, she curtsyed—you should have seen her curtsy—she went out as if she despised us all, but gave said not one word of protest. She made Elizabeth look like a fool.”

  Cecil frowned slightly. “Watch your speech, little madam,” he said firmly. “I would have been whipped if I had called my king a fool.”

  Laetitia bowed her bronze head.

  “Did Elizabeth say anything when she had gone?”

  “She said that Jane reminded her of her sour-faced old sister and thank God those days were past.”

  He nodded. “Anyone reply?”

  “No!” Laetitia was bubbling with gossip. “Everyone was so shocked that Elizabeth should be so …so…” She had no words for it.

  “So what?”

  “So nasty! So rude