Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  The men left ashore let out a pitiful cry. ‘A Dudley! A Dudley!’

  The sailor caught up Lord Robert in a great bear hug, holding him away from the rail of the ship, preventing him jumping ashore.

  ‘We’ll come back for them,’ he assured him. ‘They’ll get safe passage in other ships, and if the worst comes to the worst then the French will ransom them.’

  ‘I can’t leave them!’ Robert Dudley fought to be free. ‘Hey! You! Sailors! Turn for port. Get to the quayside again!’

  The wind was catching the sails, they flapped and then as they trimmed the ropes, the sails went taut and started to pull. Behind us in Calais there was a resounding crash as the doors of the citadel yielded and the French army spilled into the very centre of English power in France. Robert turned, anguished, towards the land. ‘We should regroup!’ he cried. ‘We are about to lose Calais if we go now. Think of it! Calais! We have to go back and regroup and fight.’

  Still the sailor did not release him, but now his hold was less to restrain the young lord and more to hold him in his grief. ‘We’ll come back,’ he said and rocked him from one foot to another. ‘We’ll come back for the rest of them and then we’ll retake Calais. Never doubt it, sir. Never doubt it.’

  Lord Robert went to the stern of the boat, scanning the harbour, seeing the disorderly retreat. We could smell the smoke drifting in a pall across the water from the burning buildings. We could hear people screaming, the French were avenging the insult of the starving burghers of Calais who had surrendered to the English all that long time ago. Lord Robert looked half-minded to throw himself in the water and swim back to take charge of the evacuation of the harbour, but even he, in his rage, could see that it was hopeless. We had lost, the English had lost. It was as simple and as brutal as that and the path of a true man was not to risk his life in some mummer’s piece of overacting, but to consider how to win the next battle.

  He spent the voyage gazing over the stern to the receding coast of France, long after the formidable profile of the fortress had sunk below the horizon. As the light drained early from the grey January sky he remained standing, looking back, and when the small cold moon came up he was still there, trying to discern some hope on the black horizon. I knew, because I was watching him, as I sat on a coil of rope at the mast, just behind him. His fool, his vassal, wakeful because he was wakeful, anxious because he was anxious, sick with fear for him, for myself, and for whatever the future would bring when we made land in England, an odd trio: a renegade Jew with a Gentile bastard on her hip, and a newly released traitor who had led his men to defeat.

  I had not expected his wife Amy at the quayside, but she was there, hand over her eyes, scanning the deck for him. I saw her before she saw him and said, ‘Your wife,’ in his ear.

  He went quickly down the gangplank to her, he did not take her in his arms nor greet her with any sign of affection, but he listened intently to her and then he turned to me.

  ‘I have to go to court, I have to explain to the queen what has happened at Calais,’ he said briefly. ‘Heads will have to roll for this, perhaps mine.’

  ‘My lord,’ I breathed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said savagely. ‘I don’t seem to have done much to advance my family. Hannah, you go with Amy, she is staying with friends in Sussex. I shall send for you there.’

  ‘My lord.’ I went a little closer. ‘I don’t want to live in the country,’ was all I could say.

  Robert Dudley grinned at me. ‘I am sure, sweetheart. I cannot stand it myself. But you must endure it for a month or two. If the queen beheads me for incompetence, then you can make your own way where you please. All right? But if I survive this, I will open my London house and you shall come back to my service. Whatever you wish. How old is the child?’

  I hesitated, realising I did not know. ‘He’s nearly two,’ I said.

  ‘You married his father?’ he asked.

  I looked him in the face. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And named him?’

  ‘Daniel, for his father.’

  He nodded. ‘Amy will take care of you,’ he said. ‘She likes children.’ A snap of his fingers summoned his wife to his side. I saw her shake her head in disagreement, and then lower her eyes when she was over-ruled. When she shot me a look of pure hatred I guessed that he had ordered her to care for me and my son, when she would rather have gone with him to the queen’s court.

  She had brought his horse. I watched him swing up into his saddle, his men mount up around him. ‘London,’ he said succinctly and rode his horse north towards whatever fate had for him.

  I could not get the measure of Amy Dudley as we rode through the icy countryside of England in those cold days of January 1558. She was a good rider but she seemed to take little pleasure in it, not even on the days when the sun rose like a red disc on the horizon and when a few robins hopped and hid in the leafless hedgerows, and the frost in the morning made the blood sing. I thought it was the absence of her husband that made her so sulky; but her companion, Mrs Oddingsell, did not try to cheer her, they did not even speak of him. They rode in silence, as women accustomed to it.

  I had to ride behind them, all the way from Gravesend to Chichester, with the baby strapped on my back and every evening I was aching from my buttocks to my neck with the strain. The extraordinary child had barely made a noise from the moment that his mother had half-flung him at me as the French cavalry rode her down. I had changed his clout with some linen lent to me on board ship, and wrapped him in a sailor’s woollen knitted vest and generally lugged him around as if he were a box that someone had insisted I carry against my will. He had not uttered one word of inquiry or protest. Sleeping, he had rested against me, nestled in as if he were my own; awake, he sat on my lap or on the floor at my feet, or stood, one hand holding firmly on to my breeches. He said not one word, not in French, the language of his mother, nor in English. He regarded me with solemn dark eyes and said nothing.

  He seemed to have a certainty that he should be with me. He would not fall asleep unless I was watching him, and if I tried to put him down and move away from him he would raise himself up and toddle after me, still silent, still uncomplaining, but with a little face which became more and more crumpled with distress as he got left behind.

  I was not a naturally maternal woman, I had not been a girl for dolls, and of course there had been no baby brother or sister for me to nurse. Yet I could not help but admire this small person’s tenacity. I had suddenly come into his life as his protector, and he would ensure that he stayed by my side. I started to like the feeling of his fat little hand stretching trustfully up for mine, I started to sleep well with him nestled against my side.

  Lady Amy Dudley did nothing to help me with him in the long cold ride. There was no reason that she should, she did not want me nor him. But it would have been kind of her to order one of the men to take me on a pillion saddle behind him, so that I might have held the child in my arms and eased my aching back. She must have seen that at the end of a long day in the saddle I was so exhausted that I could barely stand. It would have been kind of her to see me housed quickly, to have made sure that there was gruel for the baby. But she did nothing for me, nothing for him. She eyed us both with a glaring suspicion and said not one word to me, other than an order to be ready to leave at the appointed time.

  I felt the universal smugness of women with children and reminded myself that she was barren. I thought too that she suspected her husband of being the father of my child, and that she was punishing the two of us for her jealousy. I decided that I must make clear to her soon that I had not seen his lordship for years, and that I was now a married woman. But Amy Dudley gave me no chance to speak with her, she treated me as she treated the men who rode with her, as part of the cold landscape, as one of the ice-trimmed trees. She paid no attention to me at all.

  I had plenty of time to think as we went slowly south and west on the frozen roads, winding through villages and past fields where it was