The Virgin's Lover Read online

  Elizabeth could not make herself move from his touch, but she did not melt into him, as she usually did. “De Quadra should have come to me,” she insisted.

  “Oh, why?” Robert demanded. “Don’t you think he knows that I shall be your declared husband within the year? Don’t you think everyone knows that we are betrothed and will soon announce it? Don’t you think he already deals with me as if I were your husband?”

  “He should speak with me or Cecil,” she persisted. She rubbed at the cuticles of her fingernails, to push them back from the polished nails.

  Dudley took her hand. “Of course,” he said. “When it is something that I cannot deal with for you.”

  “And when would that be?” she demanded sharply.

  He chuckled in his self-confidence. “D’you know, I cannot think of a single thing that you or Cecil could do better than me,” he admitted.

  Cecil was seated next to Elizabeth at the tennis tournament but neither of them followed the play.

  “He only met with de Quadra to spare me trouble,” she whispered to him in a rapid monotone.

  “He has no authority, unless you give it to him,” Cecil said steadily.

  “Cecil, he says that everyone knows that we are betrothed, that de Quadra thinks of him as my husband and so my representative.”

  “This has to stop,” Cecil said. “You have to stop this …usurpation.”

  “He is not disloyal,” she said fiercely. “Everything he does is for love of me.”

  Yes, he is the most loyal traitor who ever threw down a queen for love of her, Cecil thought bitterly. Aloud he said: “Your Grace, it may be for your good, but don’t you know that his power over you will be reported to the Spanish emperor and be seen as weakness? Don’t you think the English Catholics will know that you plan to marry a divorced man? You, of all women: the daughter of a divorced queen, a queen executed for adultery?”

  Nobody ever spoke to the queen of her mother, except in tones of the most unctuous deference. Elizabeth went white with shock. “I beg your pardon,” she said icily.

  Cecil was not frightened into silence. “Your reputation has to be of the purest,” he said adamantly. “Because your mother, God rest her soul, died with her reputation most foully slandered. Your father divorced a good woman to marry her and then blamed his decision on witchcraft and lust. No one must revive that libel and apply it to you.”

  “Be very careful, Cecil,” she said coldly. “You are repeating treasonous slander.”

  “You be careful,” he said roundly, and rose from his seat. “Tell de Quadra to meet with us both tomorrow morning to make his formal complaint. Sir Robert does not transact business for the Crown.”

  Elizabeth looked up at him and then, very slightly, she shook her head. “I cannot,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I cannot undermine Sir Robert. The business is done, and he has said only what we would have said. We’ll leave it.”

  “He is indeed king-consort then, in everything but name? You are content to give him your power?”

  When she said nothing, Cecil bowed. “I will leave you,” he said quietly. “I have no humor to watch the match. I think the Gypsy’s Men are certain to win.”

  Anthony Forster, returning home with a new scroll of madrigals under his arm, was in merry mood and not best pleased to be greeted by his wife with a domestic crisis before he had even entered the great hall.

  “Lady Dudley is here and is very ill,” she said urgently. “They arrived this morning, and she has been sick since then. She cannot keep down food, the poor thing cannot even keep down drink, and she complains of a pain in her breast which she says is heartbreak, but I think may be a canker. She won’t let anyone see it.”

  “Let me in, wife,” he said, and walked past her into his hall. “I’ll take a glass of ale,” he said sternly. “It was hot work riding home in this heat.”

  “I am sorry,” she said briefly. She poured him the ale and bit her tongue while he settled himself in his own chair and took a long draught.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Is dinner ready?”

  “Of course,” she said respectfully. “We were just awaiting your return.”

  She made herself stand in silence until he took another swig of ale and then turned and looked at her.

  “Now then,” he said. “What’s all this?”

  “It’s Lady Dudley,” she said. “Very ill. Sick, and with a pain in her breast.”

  “Better send for a physician,” he said. “Dr. Bayly.”

  Mrs. Forster nodded. “I’ll send someone for him at once.”

  He rose from his seat. “I’ll wash my hands before dinner.” He paused. “Is she fit to see me? Will she come down for dinner?”

  “No,” she said. “I think not.”

  He nodded. “This is very inconvenient, wife,” he said. “To have her in our house at all is to share in her disgrace. She cannot enjoy a long illness here.”

  “I don’t think she’s enjoying anything,” she said acidly.

  “I daresay not,” he said with brief sympathy. “But she cannot stay here for longer than the appointed time, sick or not.”

  “Has his lordship forbidden you to offer hospitality to her?”

  Mr. Forster shook his head. “He doesn’t have to,” he said. “You don’t have to get wet to learn it’s raining. I know which way the wind is blowing, and it’s not me that will catch cold.”

  “I’ll send for the doctor,” his wife said. “Perhaps he will say it was just riding in the heat that made her sick.”

  The Cumnor stable lad made good time and reached Oxford as Dr. Bayly, the queen’s Professor of Physic at Oxford, was sitting down to his dinner. “I can come at once,” he said, rising to his feet and reaching for his hat and his cape. “Who is ill at Cumnor Place? Not Mr. Forster, I trust?”

  “No,” the lad said, proffering his letter. “A visitor, just arrived from Abingdon. Lady Dudley.”

  The doctor froze, hat halfway to his head, his cape, arrested in midswing, flapping to fall at one shoulder like a broken wing. “Lady Dudley,” he repeated. “Wife of Sir Robert Dudley?”

  “The same,” said the lad.

  “Sir Robert that is the queen’s Master of Horse?”

  “The queen’s Master of Horse is what they call him,” repeated the lad with a broad wink, since he had heard the rumors as well as everyone else.

  Dr. Bayly slowly put his hat back down on the wooden settle. “I think I cannot come,” he said. He swung his cape from his shoulder and draped it on the high back of the bench. “I think I dare not come, indeed.”

  “It’s not said to be the plague, nor the sweat, sir,” the boy said. “She’s the only one sick in the house, and there’s no plague in Abingdon that I’ve heard of.”

  “No, lad, no,” the doctor said thoughtfully. “There are things more dangerous than the plague. I don’t think I should be engaged.”

  “She’s said to be in pain,” the lad went on. “One of the housemaids said she was crying, heard her through the door. Said she heard her ask God to release her.”

  “I dare not,” the doctor told him frankly. “I dare not see her. I could not prescribe physic for her, even if I knew what was wrong with her.”

  “Why not? If the lady is ill?”

  “Because if she dies they will think she has been poisoned and they will accuse me of doing it,” the physician said flatly. “And if, in her despair, she has taken a poison already and it is working its way through her body, then they will blame the physic that I give her. If she dies I will get the blame and perhaps have to face trial for her murder. And if someone has poisoned her already, or someone is glad to know that she is sick, then they will not thank me for saving her.”

  The lad gaped. “I was sent to fetch you to help her. What am I to tell Mrs. Forster?”

  The doctor dropped his hand on the lad’s shoulder. “Tell them that it was more than my license is worth to meddle in such a ca