The Virgin's Lover Read online

  “The smaller coins are shaved and spoiled till they are almost worthless.”

  Cecil did not reply. This much was self-evident. Sir Thomas Gresham in his huge mercantile house at Antwerp had been studying the problem for years as his own business fluctuated catastrophically with the unreliable value of English coin, and as his loan business to the monarchs of England became more and more precarious. But now apparently, far superior to Gresham’s opinions, we are to be blessed with the insights of Sir Robert Dudley.

  “We have to call in the old coins and replace them with full-weight good coins.”

  The queen looked worried. “But the old coins have been so clipped and shaved that we will not get half our gold back.”

  “It has to be done,” Dudley declared. “No one knows the value of a penny, no one trusts the value of a groat. If you try to collect an old debt, as I have done, you find that you are repaid in coins that are half the value of your original loan. When our merchants go abroad to pay for their purchases, they have to stand by while the foreign traders bring out scales to weigh the coins and laugh at them. They don’t even bother to look at the value stamped on the face; they only buy by weight. No one trusts English coin anymore. And the greatest danger is that if we issue new coins, of full value gold, then they are just treated as bad, we gain nothing unless we call all the old ones in first. Otherwise we throw our wealth away.”

  Elizabeth turned to Cecil.

  “He is right,” he conceded unwillingly. “This is just as Sir Thomas Gresham believes.”

  “Bad coin drives out good,” Sir Robert ruled.

  There was something about the ring of his tone that attracted Cecil’s attention. “I did not know you had studied mercantile matters,” he remarked gently.

  Only Cecil could have seen the swiftly hidden amusement on the younger man’s face.

  But only Cecil was waiting for it.

  “A good servant of the queen must consider all her needs,” Sir Robert said calmly.

  Good God, he has intercepted Gresham’s letters to me, Cecil observed. For a moment he was so stunned by the younger man’s impertinence, to spy on the queen’s spymaster, that he could hardly speak. He must have got hold of the messenger, copied the letter, and resealed it. But how? And at what point on its journey from Antwerp? And if he can get hold of my letters from Gresham, what other information does he have of mine?

  “The base drives out the good?” the queen repeated.

  Robert Dudley turned to her. “In coinage as in life,” he said intimately, as if for her ears alone. “The lesser joys, the more ignoble pleasures, are those that take a man or a woman’s time, make demands. The finer things, true love or a spiritual life between a man and his God, these are the things that are driven out by the day to day. Don’t you think that is true?”

  For a moment she looked quite entranced. “It is so,” she said. “It is always harder to make time for the truly precious experiences; there is always the ordinary to do.”

  “To be an extraordinary queen, you have to choose,” he said quietly. “You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise, without listening to your advisors, guided by your own true heart and highest ambition.”

  She took a little breath and looked at him as if he could unfold the secrets of the universe, as if he were his tutor, John Dee, and could speak with angels and foretell the future.

  “I want to choose the best,” she said.

  Robert smiled. “I know you do. It is one of the many things that we share. We both want nothing but the best. And now we have a chance to achieve it.”

  “Good coin?” she whispered.

  “Good coin and true love.”

  With an effort she took her eyes from him. “What d’you think, Spirit?”

  “The troubles with the coinage are well known,” Cecil said dampeningly. “Every merchant in London would tell you the same. But the remedy is not so generally certain. I think we all agree that a pound coin is no longer worth a pound of gold, but how we restore it is going to be difficult. It’s not as if we have the gold to spare to mint new coins.”

  “Have you prepared a plan of how to revalue the coin?” Dudley demanded briskly of the Secretary of State.

  “I have been considering it with the queen’s advisors,” Cecil said stiffly. “Men who have been thinking on this problem for many years.”

  Dudley gave his irrepressible grin. “Better tell them to hurry up then,” he recommended cheerfully.

  “I am drawing up a plan.”

  “Well, while you are doing that we will walk in the garden,” Dudley offered, deliberately misunderstanding.

  “I can’t draw it up now!” Cecil exclaimed. “It will take weeks to plan properly.”

  But already the queen was on her feet; Dudley had offered his arm, the two of them fled from the presence chamber with the speed of scholars escaping a class. Cecil turned to her ladies-in-waiting who were scrambling to curtsy.

  “Go with the queen,” he said.

  “Did she ask for us?” one of the ladies queried.

  Cecil nodded. “Walk with them, and take her shawl, it is cold out today.”

  In the garden Dudley retained the queen’s hand, and tucked it under his elbow.

  “I can walk on my own, you know,” she said pertly.

  “I know,” he said. “But I like to hold your hand; I like to walk at your side. May I?”

  She said neither yes nor no, but she left her hand on his arm. As always with Elizabeth, it was one step forward and then one step back. As soon as she allowed him to keep her little hand warm on his arm she chose to raise the question of his wife.

  “You do not ask me if you may bring Lady Dudley to court,” she began provocatively. “Do you not wish her to attend? Do you not ask for her to have a place in my service? I am surprised that you have not mentioned her to me for one of my ladies-in-waiting. You were quick enough to recommend your sister.”

  “She prefers to live in the country,” Robert said smoothly.

  “You have a country house now?”

  He shook his head. “She has a house that she inherited from her father in Norfolk but it is too small and too inconvenient. She lives with her stepmother at Stanfield Hall, nearby; but she is going to stay with my cousins at Bury St. Edmunds this week.”

  “Shall you buy a house now? Or build a new one?”

  He shrugged. “I shall find some good land and build a good house, but I am going to spend most of my time at court.”

  “Oh, are you, indeed?” she asked flirtatiously.

  “Does a man walk away from sunlight to shadow? Does he leave gold for gilt? Does he taste good wine and then want bad?” His voice was deliberately seductive. “I shall stay at court forever, if I am allowed, basking in the sunshine, enriched by the gold, drunk on the perfume of the headiest wine I could imagine. What were we saying: that we would not let the base drive out the best? That we should have, both of us, the very best?”

  She absorbed the compliment for a long, delicious moment. “And your wife must surely be very old now?”

  Dudley smiled down at her, knowing that she was teasing him. “She is thirty, just five years older than me,” he said. “As I think you know. You were at my wedding.”

  Elizabeth made a little face. “It was years and years ago; I had quite forgotten it.”

  “Nearly ten years,” he said quietly.

  “And I thought even then that she was a very great age.”

  “She was only twenty-one.”

  “Well, a great age to me, I was only sixteen.” She gave an affected little start of surprise. “Oh! As were you. Were you not surprised to be marrying a woman so much older than you?”

  “I was not surprised,” he said levelly. “I knew her age and her position.”

  “And still no children?”

  “God has not blessed us as yet.”

  “I think that I heard a little whisper that you had married her for love, for a passionate l