must tell the truth, when I was in the Tower and in terror for my life, I fell out of the way of thinking of her at all. She visited me once or twice when my brothers’ wives visited them; but she brought no comfort to me. It was like hearing of another world: her telling me of the hay crop and the sheep, and arguments with the housemaids. I just felt, wrongly, I am sure, as if she was taunting me with the world going on without me. She sounded to me as if she was happier without me. She had returned to her father’s house, she was free of the stain of my family’s disgrace, she had taken up her childhood life again and I almost felt that she preferred me to be locked up, safely out of the way of trouble. She would rather I was a prisoner, than a great man at court and son of the greatest.’
He paused for a moment. ‘You know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘When you are a prisoner, after a while your world shrinks to the stone walls of your chamber, your walk is to the window and back again. Your life is only memories. And then you start longing for your dinner. You know then that you are a prisoner indeed. You are thinking of nothing but what is inside. You have forgotten to desire the outside world.’
Instantly Elizabeth squeezed her hand on his arm. ‘Yes,’ she said, for once without coquetry. ‘God knows that I know what it is like. And it spoils your love for anything on the outside.’
He nodded. ‘Aye. We two know.
‘Then, when I was released I came out of the Tower a ruined man. All our family’s wealth and property had been forfeited. I was a pauper.’
‘A sturdy beggar?’ she suggested with a little smile.
‘Not even very sturdy,’ he said. ‘I was broken down low, Elizabeth; I was as low as a man could go. My mother had died begging for our freedom. My father had recanted before us all, had said that our faith had been a plague upon the realm. It bit into my soul; I was so ashamed. Then, even though he had knelt before them to make his peace, they still executed him for a traitor, and, God keep him, he made a bad death that shamed us all.
‘My dearest brother John took sick in the Tower with me and I could not save him, I could not even nurse him, I didn’t know what to do. They let him go to my sister Mary but he died of his sickness. He was only twenty-four, but I couldn’t save him. I had been a poor son and a poor brother and I followed a poor father. There was not much to be proud of, when I came out of the Tower.’
She waited.
‘There was nowhere for me to go but to her stepmother’s house at Stanfield Hall, Norfolk,’ he said, the bitterness in his voice still sharp. ‘Everything we owned: the London house, the great estates, the house at Syon, were all gone. Poor Amy had even lost her own inheritance, her father’s farm at Syderstone.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Queen Mary had put the nuns back into Syon. Imagine it! My home was a nunnery once more and they were singing the Te Deum in our great hall.’
‘Did her family treat you kindly?’ she asked, guessing the answer.
‘As anyone would treat a son-in-law who had presented himself as the greatest man in the kingdom, and then came home as a penniless prisoner with a touch of gaol fever,’ he said wryly. ‘Her stepmother never forgave me for the seduction of John Robsart’s daughter and the collapse of his hopes. She swore that he had died of heartbreak because of what I had done to his daughter, and she never forgave me for that either. She never gave me more than a few pence to have in my pocket. And when they learned I had been in London to a meeting, they threatened to throw me out of the house in my boots.’
‘What meeting?’ she asked, a conspirator from long habit.
He shrugged. ‘Oh, to put you on the throne,’ he said, his voice very low. ‘I never stopped plotting. My great terror was that your sister would have a son and we would be undone. But God was good to us.’
‘You risked your life in plotting for me?’ she asked, her dark eyes wide. ‘Even then? When you had just been released?’
He smiled at her. ‘Of course,’ he said easily. ‘Who else for me, but England’s Elizabeth?’
She took a little breath. ‘And after that you were forced to stay quiet at home?’
‘Not I. When the war came my brother Henry and I volunteered to serve under Philip against the French in the Low Countries.’ He smiled. ‘I saw you before I sailed. D’you remember?’
Her look was warm. ‘Of course. I was there to bid farewell to Philip and to taunt poor Mary, and there were you, as handsome an adventurer who ever went away to war, smiling down at me from the royal ship.’
‘I had to find a way to raise myself up again,’ he said. ‘I had to get away from Amy’s family.’ He paused. ‘And from Amy,’ he confessed.
‘You had fallen out of love with her?’ she asked, finally getting to the part of the story that she had wanted all along.
Robert smiled. ‘What pleases a young man who knows nothing at sixteen cannot hold a man who has been forced to look at his life, to study what he holds dear, and to start from the bottom once again. My marriage was over by the time I came out of the Tower. Her stepmother’s humiliation of me as she stood by and watched only completed the end. Lady Robsart brought me as low as I could go. I could not forgive Amy for witnessing it. I could not forgive her for not taking my side. I would have loved her better if we had walked out of that house together into disaster. But she sat by the fireside on her little stool and reminded me from time to time, when she looked up from hemming shirts, that God orders us to honour our father and our mother, and that we were utterly dependent on the Robsarts.’
He broke off, his face darkened with remembered anger. Elizabeth listened, hiding her relish.
‘So … I went to fight in the Low Countries, and thought I would make my name and my fortune in that war.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘That was my last moment of vanity,’ he said. ‘I lost my brother and I lost most of my troop and I lost Calais. I came home a very humbled man.’
‘And did she care for you?’
‘That was when she thought I should be a teamster,’ he said bitterly. ‘Lady Robsart ordered me to labour in the fields.’
‘She never did!’
‘She would have had me on my knees. I walked out of the house that night and stayed at court or with what friends would have me. My marriage was over. In my heart, I was a free man.’
‘A free man?’ she asked in a very quiet voice. ‘You would call yourself a free man?’
‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘I am free to love once more, and this time I will have nothing but the best. I will not allow base coin to drive out gold.’
‘Indeed,’ said Elizabeth, suddenly cool, withdrawing rapidly from dangerous intimacy. She turned and beckoned forward the lady in waiting. ‘I will have that shawl now,’ she said. ‘You may walk with us.’
They walked in silence, Elizabeth taking in what he had told her, sifting the evidenced truth from the gloss. She was not such a fool as to believe the word of a married man. At her side Dudley reviewed what he had said, determinedly ignoring an uncomfortable feeling of disloyalty to Amy whose love, he knew, had been more faithful, and continued more strongly than he chose to portray. Of course his remaining love for her he had completely denied.
