The Virgin's Lover Read online

  “Yes,” Cecil said. “It will hurt the people with treasuries, but not the common people. The people with treasuries will squeak but the common people will love us. And the people with treasuries are also merchants and sheep farmers and venturers, they will get good value for the new coins when they trade abroad. They won’t squeak too loud.”

  “What about the royal treasury?” she asked, alert at once to her own diminished fortune.

  “Your councillor Armagil Waad is dealing with it,” he said. “You have been converting to gold since you came to the throne. We will make the coinage of this country solid once more, and they will call this a golden age.”

  Elizabeth smiled at that, as he knew she would.

  “But it has to be an utter secret,” he said. “If you tell one person,” and we both know which person it would be “then he would speculate in coins and it would alert everyone who watches him. All his friends would speculate too, they would copy him, even if he did not warn them, and his rivals would want to know why and speculate also. This has to be an utter secret or we cannot do it.”

  She nodded.

  “If you tell him you will be ruined.”

  She did not glance back up the steps at Dudley; she kept her eyes fixed on Cecil.

  “Can you keep such a secret?” he asked.

  Her dark Boleyn eyes gleamed up at him with all the bright cynicism of her merchant forebears. “Oh, Spirit, you of all people know that I can.”

  He bowed, kissed her hand, and turned to mount his horse. “When shall we do it?” she asked him.

  “September,” he said. “This year. Pray God we have peace then as well.”

  Summer 1560

  IT TOOK CECIL and his entourage a week to reach Newcastle from London, riding most of the way on the Great North Road though fine early summer weather. He spent one night at Burghley, his new, beautiful half-built palace. His wife, Mildred, greeted him with her usual steady good humor, and his two children were well.

  “Do we have much coin?” he asked her over dinner.

  “No,” she said. “When the queen came to the throne you told me that we should not save coin and since then it’s easy to see that matters have got even worse. I keep as little as possible. I take rent in kind or in goods wherever I can, the coin is so bad.”

  “That’s good,” he said. He knew that he need say no more. Mildred might live in a remote area but there was not much happening in the country and in the city that she did not know of. Her kin were the greatest Protestants in the land; she came from the formidably intelligent Protestant Cheke family, and constant letters of news, opinion, and theology passed from one great house to another.

  “Is everything well here?” he asked. “I would give a king’s ransom to stay and see the builders.”

  “Would it cost a royal ransom for you to be late in Scotland?” she asked shrewdly.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am on grave business, wife.”

  “Will we win?” she asked bluntly.

  Cecil paused before replying. “I wish I could be sure,” he said. “But there are too many players and I cannot know the cards they hold. We have good men on the border now; Lord Grey is reliable and Thomas Howard is as fiery as ever. But the Protestant lords are a mixed bunch and John Knox is a liability.”

  “A man of God,” she said sharply.

  “Certainly he acts as if divinely inspired,” he said mischieviously, and saw her smile.

  “You have to stop the French?”

  “Or we are lost,” he concurred. “I’d take any ally.”

  Mildred poured him a glass of wine and said no more. “It’s good to have you here,” she remarked. “When all this is over perhaps you can come home?”

  “Perhaps,” he said. “Hers is not a light service.”

  The next morning, Cecil had broken his fast and was ready to leave at dawn. His wife was up to see him off.

  “You take care in Scotland,” she said as she kissed him farewell. “I know that there are Protestant rogues as well as Papist ones.”

  They made good time to Newcastle, arriving in the first week in June, and Cecil found Thomas Howard in good spirits, confident of the strength of the border castles, and determined that there should be no peace negotiations to cede what a battle might win.

  “We are here with an army,” he complained to Cecil. “Why would we bring an army if we are just going to make peace?”

  “She thinks that Leith will never fall,” Cecil said shrewdly. “She thinks this is a battle that the French will win.”

  “We can defeat them!” Norfolk exclaimed. “We can defeat them and then open negotiations for peace. They can ask us for terms when they are beaten.”

  Cecil settled down to the long process of negotiating with the French commissioner for peace, Monsieur Randan. At once Thomas Howard drew Cecil to one side to object to the French entourage.

  “Cecil, half the so-called courtiers in his train are engineers,” he said. “I don’t want them looking over our dispositions and checking out the walls of the castle here and at Edinburgh. If you give them free rein they will see everything I have done here. The other half are spies. As they travel to Edinburgh and Leith, they will meet with their agents and their news will go straight back to France. Randan has to negotiate on his own word; he can’t go galloping up to the queen regent at Leith and back every other day, seeing God knows what and talking to God knows who.”

  But Monsieur Randan was obdurate. He had to take instructions from Mary of Guise herself, and he could offer no peace proposals, nor answer the English proposals, without speaking with her. He had to go to Edinburgh, and he had to have safe conduct through the siege lines into Leith Castle.

  “Might as well draw him a map,” Thomas Howard said irritably. “Invite him to call in at every damned Papist house on the way.”

  “He has to see his master,” Cecil remarked reasonably. “He has to put our proposals to her.”

  “Aye, and she is the one who is our greatest danger,” Thomas Howard declared. “He is nothing more than her mouthpiece. She is a great politician. She will stay holed up in that castle forever if she can and prevent us from talking with the French. She will get between us and them. If we let Randan speak with her she will order him to ask for one thing and then another; she will agree and then withdraw, she will hold us here until the autumn, and then the weather will destroy us.”

  “Do you think so?” Cecil asked anxiously.

  “I am sure of it. Already the Scots are slipping away, and every day we lose men to disease. When the hot weather comes we can expect the plague and when the cold weather comes we will be destroyed by the ague. We have to move now, Cecil, we cannot let them delay us with false offers of peace.”

  “Move how?”

  “Move the siege. We have to break in. No matter what it costs. We have to shock them to the treaty.”

  Cecil nodded. Yes, but I have seen your plans for the siege, he said to himself. It calls for phenomenal luck, extraordinary courage, and meticulous generalship, and the English army has none of these. You are right only in your fear: if Mary of Guise sits tight within Leith Castle we will be destroyed by time, and the French can occupy Scotland and the north of England at their leisure. You are right that the French have to be frightened into peace.

  Elizabeth was too weary to dress properly. Robert was admitted to her privy chamber as she sat with her women wearing a robe over her nightgown, with her hair in a careless plait down her back.

  Kat Ashley, normally an anxious guardian of Elizabeth’s reputation, admitted Robert without a word of complaint. Elizabeth’s longstanding friend and advisor Thomas Parry was in the room already. Elizabeth settled herself in the window seat and gestured to Robert to sit beside her.

  “Are you ill, my love?” he asked tenderly.

  Her eyes were shadowed so darkly that she looked like a defeated bare-knuckle fighter. “Just tired,” she said. Even her lips were pale.

  “Here, drink