The Virgin's Lover Read online

  Elizabeth rose to her feet. “We will go out to him.” The court was mostly dressed to go hunting; there was a murmur of surprise as people noticed that Robert Dudley was not in riding clothes but in the most somber black. As the queen came in with her ladies he bowed to her, raised himself up, and said, perfectly composed, “Your Grace, I have to report the death of my wife. She died on Sunday at Cumnor Place, God rest her soul.”

  “Good God!” the Spanish ambassador exclaimed.

  Elizabeth glanced toward him with eyes that were as blank as polished jet. She raised her hand. At once, the room quietened as everyone crowded closer to hear what she would say.

  “I am very sorry to announce the death of Lady Amy Dudley, on Sunday, at Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire,” Elizabeth said steadily, as if the matter were not much to do with her.

  She waited. The court was stunned into silence, everyone waiting to see if she would say more. “We will go into mourning for Lady Dudley,” Elizabeth said abruptly, and turned to one side to speak to Kat Ashley.

  Irresistibly, the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra, found himself moving toward her. “What tragic news,” he said, bowing over her hand. “And so sudden.”

  “An accident,” Elizabeth said, trying to remain serene. “Tragic. Most regrettable. She must have fallen down the stairs. She had a broken neck.”

  “Indeed,” he said. “What a strange mischance.”

  It was afternoon before Robert came to Elizabeth again. He found her in the garden, walking with her ladies before dinner.

  “I shall have to withdraw from court for mourning,” he said, his face grave. “I thought I should go to the Dairy House at Kew. You can come and see me easily there, and I can come to see you.”

  She slid her hand on his arm. “Very well. Why do you look so odd, Robert? You are not sad, are you? You don’t mind, do you?”

  He looked down at her pretty face as if she were suddenly a stranger to him. “Elizabeth, she was my wife of eleven years. Of course I grieve for her.”

  She made a little pout. “But you were desperate to put her aside. You would have divorced her for me.”

  “Yes, indeed, I would have done, and this is better for us than the scandal of a divorce. But I would never have wished her dead.”

  “The country has thought her half dead any time in the last two years,” she said. “Everyone said she was terribly ill.”

  He shrugged. “People talk. I don’t know why they all thought she was ill. She traveled; she rode out. She was not ill, but in the last two years she was very unhappy; and that was all my fault.”

  She was irritated and let him see it. “Saints’ sake, Robert! You will never choose to fall in love with her now that she is dead!” she teased him. “You will never now find great virtues in her that you didn’t appreciate before?”

  “I loved her when she was a young woman and I was a boy,” he said passionately. “She was my first love. And she stood by me through all the years of my troubles and she never once complained of the danger and difficulty I led her into. And when you came to the throne and I came into my own again she never said one word of complaint about you.”

  “Why would she complain of me?” Elizabeth exclaimed. “How would she dare complain?”

  “She was jealous,” he said fairly. “And she knew she had cause. And she did not receive very fair or generous treatment from me. I wanted her to grant me a divorce and I was unkind to her.”

  “And now she is dead you are sorry, though you would have gone on being unkind to her in life,” she taunted him.

  “Yes,” he said honestly. “I suppose all poor husbands would say the same: that they know they should be better than they are. But I feel wretched for her, today. I am glad to be a single man, of course. But I would not have wanted her dead. Poor innocent! No one would have wanted her dead.”

  “You do not recommend yourself very well,” Elizabeth said archly, turning his attention to their courtship once more. “You do not sound like a good husband at all!”

  For once Robert did not respond to her. He looked away, upriver to Cumnor, and his gaze was somber. “No,” he said. “I was not a good husband to her, and God knows, she was the sweetest and best wife a man could have had.”

  There was a little stir among the waiting court, a messenger in the Dudley livery had entered the garden and paused at the fringe of the court. Dudley turned and saw the man and went toward him, his hand out for the proffered letter.

  The watching courtiers saw Dudley take the letter, break the seal, open it, and saw him pale as he read the words.

  Elizabeth went swiftly toward him and they parted to let her through. “What is it?” she demanded urgently. “Have a care! Everyone is watching you!”

  “There is to be an inquest,” he said, his lips hardly moving, his voice no more than a breath. “Everyone is saying that it was no accident. They all think that Amy was murdered.”

  Thomas Blount, Robert Dudley’s man, arrived at Cumnor Place the very day after Amy’s death, and examined all the servants one by one. Meticulously, he reported back to Robert Dudley that Amy had been known as a woman of erratic temper, sending everyone off to the fair on Sunday morning, though her companion Mrs. Oddingsell and Mrs. Forster had been unwilling to go.

  “No need to mention that again,” Robert Dudley wrote back to him, thinking that he did not want his wife’s sanity questioned, when he knew he had driven her to despair.

  Obediently, Thomas Blount never mentioned the matter of Amy’s odd behavior again. But he did say that Amy’s maid Mrs. Pirto had remarked that Amy had been in very great despair, praying for her own death on some occasions.

  “No need to mention this, either,” Robert Dudley wrote back. “Is there to be an inquest? Can the men of Abingdon be trusted with such a sensitive matter?”

  Thomas Blount, reading his master’s anxious scrawl well enough, replied that they were not prejudiced against the Dudleys in this part of the world, and that Mr. Forster’s reputation was good. There would be no jumping to any conclusion of murder; but of course, it must be what everyone thought. A woman does not die by falling down six stone steps, she does not die from a fall which does not disturb her hood or ruffle her skirts. Everyone thought that someone had broken her neck and left her on the floor. The facts pointed to murder.

  “I am innocent,” Dudley said flatly to the queen in the Privy Council chamber at Windsor Castle, a daunting place to speak of such private things. “Good God, would I be such a sinner as to do such a deed to a virtuous wife? And if I did, would I be such a fool as to do it so clumsily? There must be a thousand better ways to kill a woman and make it appear an accident than break her neck and leave her at the foot of half a dozen stairs. I know those stairs; there is nothing to them. No one could break their neck falling down them. You could not even break your ankle. You would barely bruise. Would I tidy the skirts of a murdered woman? Would I pin her hood back on her head? Am I supposed to be an idiot as well as a criminal?”

  Cecil was standing beside the queen. The two of them looked in silence at Dudley like unfriendly judges.

  “I am sure the inquest will find out who did it,” Elizabeth said. “And your name will be cleared. But in the meantime, you will have to withdraw from court.”

  “I will be ruined,” Dudley said blankly. “If you make me go, it looks as if you suspect me.”

  “Of course I do not,” Elizabeth said. She glanced at Cecil. He nodded sympathetically. “We do not. But it is tradition that anyone accused of a crime has to withdraw from court. You know that as well as I.”

  “I am not accused!” he said fiercely. “They are holding an inquest; they have not returned a verdict of murder. No one suggests that I murdered her!”

  “Actually, everyone suggests that you murdered her,” Cecil helpfully pointed out.

  “But if you send me from court you are showing that you think me guilty too!” Dudley spoke directly to Elizabeth. “I must stay at court, at your side, a