The Virgin's Lover Read online

  “Well, at any rate, Mr. Forster wants you,” Lizzie said stoutly.

  “Did you write to him and ask if we could go?”

  Lizzie’s gaze dropped to the ground. “Yes,” she admitted. “I think it is either there, or Stanfield.”

  “We’ll go there then,” Amy said quietly. “Do you know, only a year ago he was honored by my company, and pressed me to stay longer than those few days. And now he will tolerate me for only a month.”

  Elizabeth, who had once snatched at every opportunity to see Robert alone, was now avoiding him, and finding ways to be with William Cecil. She cried off from a day’s hunting at the last moment, saying that her head ached too much to ride, and watched the court, led by Robert, ride out. Laetitia Knollys was at his side but Elizabeth let him go. Back in her rooms, Cecil was waiting for her.

  “He says he will wait,” she said, standing at the window of Windsor Castle to catch a last glimpse of him as the hunt wound down the steep hill to the town and the marshes beside the river. “He says it will make no difference if we do not announce our betrothal. We can wait until the time is right.”

  “You have to withdraw,” Cecil said.

  She turned toward him. “Spirit, I cannot. I dare not lose him. It would be worse than death to me, to lose him.”

  “Would you leave your throne for him?”

  “No!” she exclaimed passionately. “Not for any man. Not for anything. Never.”

  “Then you have to give him up,” he said.

  “I cannot break my word to him. I cannot have him think of me as faithless.”

  “Then he will have to release you,” Cecil said. “He must know that he should never have entered into such a promise. He was not free to enter into it. He was already married. He is a bigamist.”

  “He’ll never let me go,” she said.

  “Not if he thought there was any chance of winning you,” Cecil agreed. “But what if he thought it was hopeless? And if he thought he might lose his place at court? If it was a choice between never seeing you again and living disgraced in exile; or giving you up and being as he was before the promise?”

  “Then he might,” Elizabeth conceded reluctantly. “But I can’t threaten him with that, Spirit. I don’t even have the courage to ask him to release me. I can’t bear to hurt him. Don’t you know what love is? I cannot reject him. I would rather cut off my own right hand than hurt him.”

  “Yes,” he said, unimpressed. “I see that it has to be done by him, as if by his free choice.”

  “He feels the same about me!” she exclaimed. “He would never leave me.”

  “He would not cut off his right hand for you,” Cecil said knowingly.

  She paused. “Do you have a plan? Are you planning a way that I can be free?”

  “Of course,” he said simply. “You will lose your throne if any word of this mad betrothal gets out. I have to think of a way to save you, and then we have to do it, Elizabeth. Whatever it costs.”

  “I will not betray my love for him,” she said. “He must not hear it from me. Anything but that. I would rather die than he thought me faithless.”

  “I know,” Cecil said, worried. “I know. Somehow, it has to be his decision and his choice.”

  Amy and Lizzie Oddingsell rode across the broad, open Oxfordshire countryside from Denchworth to Cumnor. The high ground was wild and open, pretty on a summer’s day with flocks of sheep shepherded by absentminded children who shouted at the travelers and came leaping like goats themselves to see the ladies ride by.

  Amy did not smile and wave at them, nor scatter groats from her purse. She did not seem to see them. For the first time in her life she rode without an escort of liveried menservants around her, for the first time in many years she rode without the Dudley standard of the bear and ragged staff carried before her. She rode on a slack rein, looking around her, but seeing nothing. And her horse drooped its head and went along dully, as if Amy’s light weight was a heavy burden.

  “At least the fields look in good heart,” Lizzie said cheerfully.

  Amy looked blankly around her. “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Should be a good harvest?”

  “Yes.”

  Lizzie had written to Sir Robert to tell him that his wife was moving from Abingdon to Cumnor and received no reply. His steward sent no money for the settlement of their debts, nor for tipping the Abingdon staff, and did not tell Lizzie that an escort would be provided for her. In the end, they were attended by Lizzie’s brother’s men, and a small cart came behind them with their goods. When Amy had come out on the doorstep into the bright morning sunlight, pulling on her riding gloves, she saw the little cavalcade and realized that from now on she would travel as a private citizen. The Dudley standard would not proclaim her as a wife of a great lord, the Dudley livery would not warn people to clear the road, to doff their caps, to bend their knees. Amy had become no more than Miss Amy Robsart—less than Miss Amy Robsart, for she was not even a single woman who might marry anyone, a woman with prospects; now she was that lowest form of female life, a woman who had married the wrong man.

  Little Tom clung to her skirt and asked to be lifted up.

  “Me-me!” he reminded her.

  Amy looked down at him. “I have to say good-bye to you,” she said. “I don’t think they will let me see you again.”

  He did not understand the words but he felt her sadness like a shadow.

  “Me-me!”

  She bent down swiftly and kissed his warm, silky head, smelled the sweet little boy scent of him, and then she rose to her feet and went quickly out to her horse before he could cry.

  It was a beautiful summer day and a wonderful ride through the heart of England, but Amy did not see it. A lark went up from the cornfield on her right, higher and higher, its wings beating with each rippling note, and she did not hear. Slowly up the green slope of the sides of hills they labored, and then slipped down to the wooded valleys and the fertile fields on the valley floor and still Amy saw nothing, and remarked on nothing.

  “Are you in pain?” Lizzie asked, catching a glimpse of Amy’s white face as she lifted the veil from her riding hat for a sip of water when they stopped by a stream.

  “Yes,” Amy said shortly.

  “Are you ill? Can you ride?” Lizzie asked, alarmed.

  “No, it is just the same as always.” Amy said. “I shall have to grow accustomed to it.”

  Slowly, the little procession wound past the fields on the outskirts of Cumnor and then entered the village, scattering hens and setting the dogs barking. They went past the church with the handsome square stone tower standing tall on its own little hill, skirted by fat trees of dark yew. Amy rode by, without a glance at Elizabeth’s flag which fluttered from the pole at the head of the tower, through the muddy village streets which wound around the low-browed thatched cottages.

  Cumnor Place was set alongside the churchyard but the little cavalcade went around the high wall of pale limestone blocks to approach the house through the archway. The drive led them through an avenue of yew trees, and Amy shivered as their gloom fell over the sunlit path.

  “Nearly there,” Lizzie Oddingsell said cheerfully, thinking that Amy might be tired.

  “I know.”

  Another soaring archway set into the thick stone walls took them into the courtyard and the very heart of the house. Mrs. Forster, hearing the horses, came out from the great hall on the right-hand side to greet them.

  “Here you are!” she cried out. “And in what good time! You must have had a very easy ride.”

  “It was easy,” Lizzie said, when Amy did not reply, but merely sat on her horse. “But I am afraid Lady Dudley is very tired.”

  “Are you, your ladyship?” Mrs. Forster inquired with concern.

  Amy lifted the veil from her hat.

  “Oh! You do look pale. Come down and you shall rest,” Mrs. Forster said.

  A groom came forward and Amy slid down the horse’s side in a clumsy j