The Virgin's Lover Read online

  I have found a form of words which they can agree: it is that the French king and queen will grant freedom to the Scots as a gift, as a result of your intercession as a sister monarch, and remove their troops. So we have won everything we wanted at the very last moment and by the merciful intercession of God.

  This will be the greatest victory of your reign and the foundation of the peace and strength of the united kingdoms of this island. It has broken the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland forever. It has identified you as the protector of Protestantism. I am more relieved and happy than I have ever been in my life.

  God bless you and your seed, for neither peace nor war without this will profit us long, William Cecil, dated this day, the fourth of July, in Edinburgh Castle, 1560.

  Cecil, having averted war, broken the alliance of the French with the Scots, and identified Elizabeth as Europe’s newest and most daring power player, was walking in the cool of the evening in the little garden of Edinburgh castle and admiring the planting of the small bay trees and the intricate patterns of the colored stones.

  His servant hesitated at the top of the steps, trying to see his master in the dusk. Cecil raised his hand and the man came toward him.

  “A letter from Her Majesty.”

  Cecil nodded and took it, but did not open it at once. She knew he was near to settlement, this would be a letter thanking him for his services, promising him her love and his reward. She knew, as no one else knew, that England had been on a knife edge of disaster with this war in Scotland. She knew, as no one else knew, that no one could have won them a peace but Cecil.

  Cecil sat on the garden bench and looked up at the great gray walls of the castle, at the swooping bats, at the early stars coming out, and knew himself to be content. Then he opened his letter from the queen.

  For a moment he sat quite still, reading the letter, and then rereading it over and over again. She has run mad, was his first thought. She has run mad with the worry and distress of this war and now she has gone as war-hungry as she was fearful before. Good God, how can a man make any sense of his life when he is working for a woman who can blow hot and cold in a second, never mind in a day.

  Good God, how can a man make a lasting peace, an honorable peace, when the monarch can suddenly call for extra settlement after the treaty has been signed? The return of Calais? The coat of arms? And now a fine? Why not ask for the stars in the sky? Why not ask for the moon?

  And what is this, at the end of the letter? To break off negotiations if these objects cannot be achieved? And, in God’s name: do what? Make war with a bankrupt army, with the heat of summer coming? Let the French recall their troops to battle stations, who are even now packing to leave?

  Cecil scrunched the queen’s letter into a ball, dropped it to the ground, and kicked it as hard as he could, over the tiny ornamental hedge into the center of the knot garden.

  Madwoman! he swore at it, though still he did not say a word out loud. Feckless, vain, extravagant, willful woman. God help me that I ever thought you the savior of your country. God help me that I ever put my skills at your crazed service when I would have been better off planting my own garden at Burghley and never dancing attendance at your mad, vain court.

  He raged for a few moments more, walking backward and forward before the balled-up letter, discarded in the knot garden, then, because documents were both a treasure and a danger, he stepped over the little hedge and retrieved it, smoothed it out, and reread it.

  Then he saw two things that he had missed at the first reading. Firstly the date. She had dated it the third of July but it had arrived five days after the treaty had been signed and peace proclaimed. It had taken far too long to arrive. It had taken double the journey time. It had come too late to influence events. Cecil turned for his messenger.

  “Ho! Lud!”

  “Yes, Sir William?”

  “Why did this take six days to reach me? It is dated the third. It should have been here three days ago.”

  “It was the queen’s own wish, sir. She said she did not want you troubled with the letter until your business had been done. She told me to leave London and go into hiding for three days, to give the impression to the court that I had set out at once. It was her order, sir. I hope I did right.”

  “Of course you did right in obeying the queen,” Cecil growled.

  “She said she did not want you distracted by this letter,” the man volunteered. “She said she wanted it to arrive when your work was completed.”

  Thoughtfully, Cecil nodded the man away.

  What? he demanded of the night sky. What, in the devil’s name, what?

  The night sky made no reply, a small cloud drifted by like a gray veil.

  Think, Cecil commanded himself. In the afternoon, say; in the evening, say; in a temper, she makes a great demand of me. She has done that before, God knows. She wants everything: Calais, her arms restored to her sole use, peace, and five hundred thousand crowns. Badly advised (by that idiot Dudley for example) she could think all that possible, all that her due. But she is no fool, she has a second thought, she knows she is in the wrong. But she has sworn before witnesses that she will ask for all these things. So she writes the letter she promises them, signs and seals it before them but secretly she delays it on the road, she makes sure that I do the business, that peace is achieved, before she lays an impossible demand upon me.

  So she has made an unreasonable demand, and I have done a great piece of work and we have both done what we should do. Queen and servant, madam and man. And then, to make sure that her interfering gesture is nothing more than an interfering gesture, without issue: she says that if her letter arrives too late (and she has ensured that it will arrive too late) I may disregard her instructions.

  He sighed. Well and good. And I have done my duty, and she has done her pleasure, and no harm is done to the peace except my joy in it, and my anticipation that she would be most glad, most grateful to me, is quite gone.

  Cecil tucked her letter into the pocket inside his jacket. Not a generous mistress, he said quietly to himself. Or at any rate not to me, though clearly she will write a letter and delay it and lie about it to please another. There is not a king in Christendom or in the infidel lands who has a better servant than I have been to her, and she rewards me with this… This trap.

  Not really like her, he grumbled quietly to himself, walking toward the steps to the castle doorway. An ungenerous spirit, to distress me so at the moment of my triumph, and she is not usually ungenerous. He paused. But perhaps badly advised.

  He paused again. Robert Dudley, he remarked confidentially to the steps as he set his well-shined shoe on the first paving stone. Robert Dudley, I would wager my life on it. Begrudging my success, and wishing to diminish it in her eyes. Wanting more, always more than can reasonably be granted. Ordering her to write a letter filled with impossible demand and then she writing it to please him but delaying it so as to save the peace. He paused once more. A foolish woman to take such a risk to please a man, he concluded.

  Then he paused in his progress again as the worst thought came to him. But why would she let him go so far as to dictate her letters to me, on the greatest matter of policy we have ever faced? When he is not even a member of the Privy Council? When he is nothing but her Master of Horse? While I have been so far away, what advantages has he taken? What progress has he made? Dear God, what power does he have over her now?

  Cecil’s letter proclaiming the peace of Scotland was greeted by Elizabeth’s court, led by Robert, with sour thanksgiving. It was good, but it was not good enough, Robert implied; and the court, with one eye on the queen and the other on her favorite, concurred.

  The leading members of the Privy Council grumbled among themselves that Cecil had done a remarkable job and looked to have small thanks for it. “A month ago and she would have fallen on his neck if he could have got peace after only three months’ war,” Throckmorton said sourly. “She would have made him an earl for