style="font-size:15px;"> ‘But you have everything ahead of you,’ she said wryly. ‘You have your youth, and good health, and good looks, and you will believe that Elizabeth will have the throne after me, and restore your fortunes. But you must love your wife, Robert Dudley. It is very hard for a woman if her husband neglects her.’
He rose to his feet. ‘I will do,’ he promised easily.
She nodded. ‘And do not plot against me, or my throne.’
This was an oath he took more seriously. He met her eyes without flinching. ‘Those days are gone,’ he said. ‘I know you are my rightful queen. I bend the knee, Queen Mary, I have repented of my pride.’
‘So,’ she said wearily. ‘I grant you the lifting of your attainder for treason. You can have your wife’s lands back, and your own title. You shall have rooms at court. And I wish you well.’
He had to hide the leap of his delight. ‘Thank you,’ he said, bowing low. ‘I shall pray for you.’
‘Then come with me to my chapel now,’ she said.
Without hesitation, Robert Dudley, the man whose father had powered the Protestant Reformation in England, followed the queen into the Catholic Mass and bent his knee to the blaze of icons behind the altar. A moment’s hesitation, even a sideways glance, and he would have been questioned for heresy. But Robert did not glance sideways nor hesitate. He crossed himself and bobbed to the altar, up and down like a puppet, knowing that he was betraying his own faith, and betraying the faith of his father. But bad judgement and bad luck had brought Robert Dudley to his knees at last; and he knew it.
All the bells in Hertfordshire, all the bells in England were ringing for Elizabeth, pounding the peal into her head, first the treble bell screaming out like a mad woman, and then the whole agonising, jangling sob till the great bell boomed a warning that the whole discordant carillon was about to shriek out again. Elizabeth threw open the shutters of Hatfield Palace, flung open the window, wanting to be drowned in the noise, deafened by her own triumph; and yet still it went on, until the rooks abandoned their nests and went streaming into the dawn skies, tossing and turning in the wind like a banner of ill omen, and the bats left the belfry like a plume of black smoke as if to say that the world was upside down now, and day should be forever night.
Elizabeth laughed out loud at the racket which hammered out the news to the unresponsive grey skies: poor sick Queen Mary was dead at last, and Princess Elizabeth was the uncontested heir.
‘Thank God,’ she shouted up at the whirling clouds. ‘For now I can be the queen that my mother intended me to be, the queen that Mary could not be, the queen I was born to be.’
‘And what are you thinking?’ Elizabeth asked archly.
Amy’s husband smiled down at the provocative young face at his shoulder as they walked in the cold garden of Hatfield Palace.
‘I was thinking that you should never marry.’
The princess blinked in surprise. ‘Indeed? Everyone else seems to think I should marry at once.’
‘You should only marry a very, very old man, then,’ he amended.
A delighted giggle escaped her. ‘Why ever?’
‘So that he would die at once. Because you look so enchanting in black velvet. You should really never wear anything else.’
It was the rounding off of the jest, it was the turning of a pretty compliment. It was what Robert Dudley did best in the world, along with horse-riding, politics, and merciless ambition.
Elizabeth was wrapped from her pink nose to her leather boots in mourning black, blowing on the tips of her leather-gloved fingers for warmth, a black velvet hat at a rakish angle on her mass of red-gold hair. A train of chilled petitioners trailed away behind the two. Only William Cecil, her longtime advisor, was sure enough of his welcome to interrupt the intimate talk between the two childhood friends.
‘Ah, Spirit,’ she said fondly to the older man who came towards them, dressed in clerkly black. ‘What news d’you have for me?’
‘Good news, Your Grace,’ he said to the queen, with a nod to Robert Dudley. ‘I have heard from Sir Francis Knollys. I knew you would want to be told at once. He and his wife and family have left Germany and should be with us by the New Year.’
‘She won’t be here in time for my coronation?’ Elizabeth asked. She was missing her cousin Catherine, in self-imposed exile for her fierce Protestant faith.
‘I am sorry,’ Cecil said. ‘They cannot possibly get here in time. And we cannot possibly wait.’
‘But she has agreed to be my lady in waiting? And her daughter – what’s her name? – Laetitia, a maid of honour?’
‘She will be delighted,’ Cecil said. ‘Sir Francis wrote me a note to accept, and Lady Knollys’s letter to you is following. Sir Francis told me that she had so many things that she wanted to say, that she could not finish her letter before my messenger had to leave.’
Elizabeth’s radiant smile warmed her face. ‘We’ll have so much to talk about when I see her!’
‘We will have to clear the court so that you two can chatter,’ Dudley said. ‘I remember Catherine when we had “Be Silent” tournaments. D’you remember? She always lost.’
‘And she always blinked first when we had a staring joust.’
‘Except for that time when Ambrose put his mouse in her sewing bag. Then she screamed the house down.’
‘I miss her,’ Elizabeth said simply. ‘She is almost all the family I have.’
Neither of the men reminded her of her flint-hearted Howard relations who had all but disowned her when she was disgraced, and now were swarming around her emerging court claiming her as their own once more.
‘You have me,’ Robert said gently. ‘And my sister could not love you more if she were your own.’
‘But Catherine will scold me for my crucifix and the candles in the Royal Chapel,’ Elizabeth said sulkily, returning in her roundabout way to the uppermost difficulty.
‘How you choose to worship in the Royal Chapel is not her choice,’ Cecil reminded her. ‘It is yours.’
‘No, but she chose to leave England rather than live under the Pope, and now that she and all the other Protestants are coming home, they will be expecting a reformed country.’
‘As do we all, I am sure.’
Robert Dudley threw a quizzical look at him as if to suggest that not everyone shared Cecil’s clarity of vision. Blandly, the older man ignored him. Cecil had been a faithful Protestant
