Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  Amy Dudley was accustomed to his absence, of course. But when she had slept alone for all those years he had been in the Tower, she had known why she was alone in her marital bed. To everyone – to her father, to his adherents and kin – she was a martyr to her love for him, and they had all prayed for his return and her happiness. But now, it slowly must dawn on her, on everyone, that Lord Robert did not come home to his wife because he did not choose to do so. For some reason, he was in no hurry to be in her bed, in her company. Freedom from the Tower did not mean a return to the tiny scale of his wife’s existence. Freedom for Lord Robert meant the court, meant the queen, meant battlefields, politics, power: a wider world of which Lady Dudley had no knowledge. Worse than ignorance, she felt dread. She thought of the wider world with nothing but fear.

  The greater world which was Lord Robert’s natural element was to her a place of continuous threat and danger. She saw his ambition, his natural God-given ambition, as a danger, she saw his opportunities all as risk. She was, in every sense of the word, a hopeless wife to him.

  Finally, in the second week in February, she sent for him. One of his men was told to ride to the court at Richmond where the queen had entered her confinement chamber to have her child. Her ladyship told the servant to tell his lordship that she needed him at Chichester, and to wait to accompany him home.

  ‘Why would she not write to him?’ I asked Mrs Oddingsell, surprised that Lady Dudley would broadcast to the world her desire that he should come home.

  She hesitated. ‘She can do as she chooses, I suppose,’ she said rudely.

  It was her discomfiture that revealed the truth to me. ‘Can she not write?’ I asked.

  Mrs Oddingsell scowled at me. ‘Not well,’ she conceded reluctantly.

  ‘Why not?’ I demanded, a bookseller’s daughter to whom reading and writing was a skill like eating and walking.

  ‘When would she learn?’ Mrs Oddingsell countered. ‘She was just a girl when she married him, and nothing more than a bride when he was in the Tower. Her father did not think a woman needed to know more than to sign her name, and her husband never spared the time to teach her. She can write, but slowly, and she can read if she has to.’

  ‘You don’t need a man to teach you to read and write,’ I said. ‘It is a skill a woman can get on her own. I could teach her, if she wanted it.’

  Mrs Oddingsell turned her head. ‘She wouldn’t demean herself to learn from you,’ she said rudely. ‘She would only ever learn for him. And he does not trouble himself.’

  The messenger did not wait, but came home straight away, and told her that his lordship had said he would come to us for a visit shortly and in the meantime to assure her ladyship that all was well with him.

  ‘I told you to wait for an answer,’ she said irritably.

  ‘My lady, he said he would see you soon. And the princess …’

  Her head snapped up. ‘The princess? Which princess? Elizabeth?’

  ‘Yes, the Princess Elizabeth swore that he could not go while they were all waiting for the queen’s child to be born. She said they could not endure another confinement which might go on for years. She could not abide it without him. And my lord said yes, he would leave, even a lady such as her, for he had not seen you since he came to England, and you had bidden him to come to you.’

  She blushed a little at that, her vanity kindled like a flame. ‘And what more?’ she asked.

  The messenger looked a little awkward. ‘Just some jesting between my lord and the princess,’ he said.

  ‘What jesting?’

  ‘The princess was witty about him liking court better than the country,’ he said, fumbling for words. ‘Witty about the charms of the court. Said he would not bury himself in the fields with wife.’

  The smile was quite wiped from her face. ‘And he said?’

  ‘More jests,’ he said. ‘I cannot remember them, my lady. His lordship is a witty man, and he and the princess …’ He broke off at the look on her face.

  ‘He and the princess: what?’ she spat at him.

  The messenger shuffled his feet and turned his hat in his hands. ‘She is a witty woman,’ he said doltishly. ‘The words flew so fast between them I could not make out what they said. Something about the country, something about promises. Some of the time they spoke another language so it was secret between themselves … Certainly, she likes him well. He is a very gallant man.’

  Amy Dudley jumped from her chair and strode to the bay window. ‘He is a very faithless man,’ she said, very low. Then she turned to the messenger. ‘Very well, you can go. But next time when I order you to wait for him, I don’t want to see you back here without him.’

  He threw a look at me which said very plainly that a servant could hardly command his master to return to his wife in the middle of a flirtation with the Princess of England. I waited till he had left the room and then excused myself and hared down the gallery after him, Danny bouncing along on my hip, clinging to my shoulder, his little legs gripped around my waist, as I ran.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ I called. ‘Tell me about the court. Are all the physicians there for the queen? And the midwives? Is everything ready?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘She is expected to have the child in the middle of March, next month, God willing.’

  ‘And do they say that she is well?’

  He shook his head. ‘They say she is sick to her heart at the loss of Calais and the absence of her husband,’ he said. ‘The king has not said he will come to England for the birth of his son, so she has to face the travail of childbed all alone. And she is poorly served. All her fortune has been thrown away on her army and her servants have not even been paid and cannot buy food in the market. It is like a ghost court, and now she has gone into confinement there is no-one to watch over the courtiers at all.’

  I felt a dreadful pang at the thought of her ill-served and me kicking my heels with Lady Amy Dudley, and doing nothing. ‘Who is with her?’

  ‘Only a handful of her ladies. No-one wants to be at court now.’

  ‘And the Princess Elizabeth?’

  ‘She rode in looking very grand,’ the messenger said. ‘Very taken with my lord.’

  ‘Who says so?’

  ‘Nobody needs to say so. It is known to everyone. She does not trouble to hide it. She shows it.’

  ‘How does she show it?’

  ‘Rides with him every morning, dines at his right hand, dances with him, her eyes fixed on his face, reads his letters at his elbow, smiles at him as if they had a secret jest, walks with him in the gallery and talks low, walks away from him, but always looks back over her shoulder, so that any man would want to chase her and catch her. You know.’

  I nodded. I had seen Elizabeth when she had someone’s husband marked down for her own. ‘I know well enough. And he?’

  ‘Very taken with her.’

  ‘Will he come here, d’you think?’

  The messenger chuckled. ‘Not until the princess lets him. He was at her beck and call. I don’t think he could force himself away from her.’

  ‘He’s not a greensick boy,’ I said with sudden irritation. ‘He could decide for himself, I should hope.’

  ‘And she is not a greensick girl,’ he said. ‘This is the next Queen of England and she cannot take her eyes from our lord. So what d’you think might come of that?’

  In the absence of any work to do in the household, I found that I spent all my time with the child, Danny, and all my thoughts were with his father. I decided to write to Daniel and address the letter to my father’s old shop in London. If Daniel came looking for me, or sent anyone to seek me, that would be one of the places he would visit first. I would send a copy of it to my lord and ask him to forward it to Calais. Surely there must be emissaries going to the city?

  Dear husband,

  It is strange that after all we have been through we should once more be separated, and once again I am in England and you in Calais, but this time I think you