Philippa Gregory 3-Book Tudor Collection 2 Read online

  Dudley raised a dark eyebrow. ‘It does not take much strength to imprison a bishop, as it turns out. She has half of them under house arrest already.’

  ‘I mean strength of mind,’ William Hyde said. ‘She is only a woman, even though a queen. Does she have the courage to go against them?’

  Dudley hesitated. It was always everyone’s fear, since everyone knew that a woman could neither think nor do anything with any consistency. ‘She is well advised,’ he said. ‘And her advisors are good men. We know what has to be done, and we keep her to it.’

  Amy reined back her horse and joined them.

  ‘Did you tell Her Grace that you were coming to look at a house?’ she asked.

  ‘Indeed yes,’ he said cheerfully as they crested one of the rolling hills. ‘It’s been too long since the Dudleys had a family seat. I tried to buy Dudley Castle from my cousin, but he cannot bear to let it go. Ambrose, my brother, is looking for somewhere too. But perhaps he and his family could have a wing of this place. Is it big enough?’

  ‘There are buildings that could be extended,’ she said. ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘And was it a monastic house, or an abbey or something?’ he asked. ‘A good-sized place? You’ve told me nothing about it. I have been imagining a castle with a dozen pinnacles!’

  ‘It’s not a castle,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I think it is a very good size for us. The land is in good heart. They have farmed it in the old way, in strips, changing every Michaelmas, so it has not been exhausted. And the higher fields yield good grass for sheep, and there is a very pretty wood that I thought we might thin and cut some rides through. The water meadows are some of the richest I have ever seen, the milk from the cows must be almost solid cream. The house itself is a little too small, of course, but if we added a wing we could house any guests that we had …’

  She broke off as their party rounded the corner in the narrow lane and Robert saw the farmhouse before him. It was long and low, an animal barn at the west end built of worn red brick and thatched in straw like the house, only a thin wall separating the beasts from the inhabitants. A small tumbling-down stone wall divided the house from the lane and inside it, a flock of hens scratched at what had once been a herb garden but was now mostly weeds and dust. To the side of the ramshackle building, behind the steaming midden, was a thickly planted orchard, boughs leaning down to the ground and a few pigs rooting around. Ducks paddled in the weedy pond beyond the orchard, swallows swooped from pond to barn, building their nests with beakfuls of mud.

  The front door stood open, propped with a lump of rock. Robert could glimpse a low, stained ceiling and an uneven floor of stone slabs scattered with stale herbs but the rest of the interior was hidden in the gloom since there were almost no windows, and choked with smoke since there was no chimney but only a hole in the roof.

  He turned to Amy and stared at her as if she were a fool, brought to beg for his mercy. ‘You thought that I would want to live here?’ he asked incredulously.

  ‘Just as I predicted,’ William Hyde muttered quietly and pulled his horse gently away from the group, nodding to his wife for her to come with him, out of earshot.

  ‘Why, yes,’ Amy said, still smiling confidently. ‘I know the house is not big enough, but that barn could become another wing, it is high enough to build a floor in the eaves, just as they did at Hever, and then you have bedrooms above and a hall below.’

  ‘And what plans did you have for the midden?’ he demanded. ‘And the duckpond?’

  ‘We would clear the midden, of course,’ she said, laughing at him. ‘That would never do! It would be the first thing, of course. But we could spread it on the garden and plant some flowers.’

  ‘And the duckpond? Is that to become an ornamental lake?’

  At last she heard the biting sarcasm in his tone. She turned in genuine surprise. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  He closed his eyes and saw at once the doll’s-house prettiness of the Dairy House at Kew, and the breakfast served by shepherdesses in the orchard with the tame lambs dyed green and white, skipping around the table. He thought of the great houses of his boyhood, of the serene majesty of Syon House, of Hampton Court, one of his favourite homes and one of the great palaces of Europe, of the Nonsuch at Sheen, or the palace at Greenwich, of the walled solidity of Windsor, of Dudley Castle, his family seat. Then he opened his eyes and saw, once again, this place that his wife had chosen: a house built of mud on a plain of mud.

  ‘Of course I don’t like it. It is a hovel,’ he said flatly. ‘My father used to keep his sows in better sties than this.’

  For once, she did not crumple beneath his disapproval. He had touched her pride, her judgement in land and property.

  ‘It is not a hovel,’ she replied. ‘I have been all over it. It is soundly built from brick and lath and plaster. The thatch is only twenty years old. It needs more windows, for sure, but they are easily made. We would rebuild the barn, we would enclose a pleasure garden, the orchard could be lovely, the pond could be a boating lake, and the land is very good, two hundred acres of prime land. I thought it was just what we wanted, and we could make anything we want here.’

  ‘Two hundred acres?’ he demanded. ‘Where are the deer to run? Where is the court to ride?’

  She blinked.

  ‘And where will the queen stay?’ he demanded acerbically. ‘In the hen-house, out the back? And the court? Shall we knock up some hovels on the other side of the orchard? Where will the royal cooks prepare her dinner? On that open fire? And where will we stable her horses? Shall they come into the house with us, as clearly they do at present? We can expect about three hundred guests, where do you think they will sleep?’

  ‘Why should the queen come here?’ Amy asked, her mouth trembling. ‘Surely she will stay at Oxford. Why should she want to come here? Why would we ask her here?’

  ‘Because I am one of the greatest men at her court!’ he exclaimed, slamming his fist down on the saddle and making his horse jump and then sidle nervously. He held it on a hard rein, pulling on its mouth. ‘The queen herself will come and stay at my house to honour me! To honour you, Amy! I asked you to find us a house to buy. I wanted a place like Hatfield, like Theobalds, like Kenninghall. Cecil goes home to Theobalds Palace, a place as large as a village under one roof, he has a wife who rules it like a queen herself. He is building Burghley to show his wealth and his grandeur, he is shipping in stonemasons from all over Christendom. I am a better man than Cecil, God knows. I come from stock that makes him look like a sheep-shearer. I want a house to match his, stone for stone! I want the outward show that matches my achievements.

  ‘For God’s sake, Amy, you’ve stayed with my sister at Penshurst! You know what I expect! I didn’t want some dirty farmhouse that we could clean up so that at its best, it was fit for a peasant to breed dogs in!’

  She was trembling, hard-put to keep her grip on the reins. From a distance, Lizzie Oddingsell watched and wondered if she should intervene.

  Amy found her voice. She raised her drooping head. ‘Well, all very well, husband, but what you don’t know is that this farm has a yield of …’

  ‘Damn the yield!’ he shouted at her. His horse shied and he jabbed at it with a hard hand. It jibbed and pulled back, frightening Amy’s horse who stepped back, nearly unseating her. ‘I care nothing for the yield! My tenants can worry about the yield. Amy, I am going to be the richest man in England, the queen will pour the treasury of England upon me. I don’t care how many haystacks we can make from a field. I ask you to be my wife, to be my hostess at a house which is of a scale and of a grandeur …’

  ‘Grandeur!’ she flared up at him. ‘Are you still running after grandeur? Will you never learn your lesson? There was nothing very grand about you when you came out of the Tower, homeless and hungry, there was nothing very grand about your brother when he died of gaol fever like a common criminal. When will you learn that your place is at home, where we might be happy? Why will yo