Elizabeth was lying under an oak tree on Dudley’s hunting cape, their horses were hitched to a nearby tree, Dudley was leaning against the tree behind her, her head in his lap, twisting her ringlets around his fingers.

“How long have we been gone?” she asked him.

“An hour perhaps, no more.”

“And do you always pull your mistresses off their horses and bed them on the ground?”

“D’you know,” he said confidingly, “I have never done such a thing in my life before. I have never felt such desire before, I have always been a man who could wait for the right time, plan his time. But with you…” He broke off.

She twisted round so she could see his face and he kissed her on the mouth: a long, warm kiss.

“I am full of desire again,” she said wonderingly. “I am becoming a glutton for you.”

“I too,” he said softly and pulled her up so that she was lying like a sinuous snake along him. “It’s a satisfaction that brings with it only more appetite.”

A long, low whistle alerted them. “That’s Tamworth’s signal,” Robert said. “Someone must be coming near.”

At once Elizabeth was up and on her feet, brushing the leaves off her hunting gown, looking around for her hat. Robert snatched up his cloak and shook it out. She turned to him. “How do I look?”

“Uncannily virtuous,” he said, and was rewarded by the flash of her smile.

She went to her horse and was standing at its head when Catherine Knollys and her groom rode into the little glade followed by Tamworth, Dudley’s valet.

“There you are! I thought I had lost you!”

“Where did you get to?” Elizabeth demanded. “I thought you were behind me.”

“I pulled him up for a moment and then you were all gone. Where is Sir Peter?”

“His horse went lame,” Robert said. “He is walking home in the sourest of moods. His boots are pinching. Are you hungry? Shall we dine?”

“I am starving,” Catherine said. “Where are your ladies?”

“Gone ahead to the picnic,” Elizabeth said easily. “I wanted to wait for you, and Sir Robert stayed to keep me safe. Sir Robert, your hand if you please.”

He threw her up into the saddle without meeting her eyes and then he mounted his own hunter. “This way,” he said, and rode ahead of the two women to where the ride crossed a small river. On the far side, a pavilion hung with green and white had been erected and they could smell venison roasting on the fire and see the servants unpacking pastries and sweetmeats.

“I am so hungry,” Elizabeth exclaimed with pleasure. “I have never had such an appetite before.”

“You are becoming a glutton,” Robert remarked to Catherine’s surprise. She caught the quick, complicit look that passed between her friend and Sir Robert.

“A glutton?” she exclaimed. “The queen eats like a bird.”

“A gluttonous peacock then,” he said, quite unreproved. “Greed and vanity in one,” and Elizabeth giggled.


On Wednesday evening Denchworth church seemed to be deserted, the door unlocked but shut. Tentatively, Amy turned the big iron handle and felt the door yield under her touch. An old lady in the pew at the back looked up and pointed silently toward the lady chapel at the side of the church. Amy nodded and went toward it.

The curtains were drawn across the stone tracery separating the chapel from the main body of the church. Amy drew them aside and slipped in. Two or three people were praying at the altar rail. Amy paused for a moment and then slipped into the rear pew near to the priest, who was in close-headed conference with a young man. After a few moments the youth, head bowed, took his place at the altar rail. Amy went beside Father Wilson and knelt on the worn cushion.

“Heavenly Father, I have sinned,” she said quietly.

“What is your sin, my daughter?”

“I have failed in my love of my husband. I have set my judgment above his.” She hesitated. “I thought I knew better than him how we should live. I see now that it was the sin of pride, my pride. Also, I thought I could win him from the court and bring him back to me and that we could live in a small way, a mean way. But he is a great man, born to be a great man. I am afraid that I have been envious of his greatness, and I think even my beloved father…” She strained her voice to speak the disloyal criticism. “Even my father was envious.” She paused. “They were so far above our station… And I fear that in our hearts we both reveled in his fall. I think that secretly we were glad to see him humbled, and I have not been generous about his rise to power ever since. I have not been truly glad for him, as a wife and helpmeet should be.”

She paused. The priest was silent.

“I have been envious of his greatness and the excitement of his life and his importance at court,” she said softly. “And worse. I have been jealous of the love that he bears the queen and suspicious of that. I have poisoned my love for him with envy and jealousy. I have poisoned myself. I have made myself sick with sin and I have to be cured of this sickness and forgiven this sin.”

The priest hesitated. In every alehouse in the land there were men who swore that Robert Dudley was the queen’s lover and they were giving odds on that he would put his wife aside on some excuse, or poison her, or drown her in the river. There was little doubt in the priest’s mind that Amy’s worst fears were near to the truth. “He is your husband, set above you by God,” he said slowly.

She lowered her head. “I know it. I shall be obedient to him, not just in my acts but in my thoughts too. I shall be obedient to him in my heart and not set myself up to judge him or to try to turn him from his great destiny. I shall try to teach myself to be glad for him in his fame, and not to hold him back.”

The priest thought for a moment, wondering how to advise this woman.

“I am cursed by a picture in my head,” Amy said, her voice very low. “I overheard someone say something about my husband, and now I see it all the time, in my head, in my dreams. I have to free myself from this …torment.”

He wondered what she might have heard. Certainly, some of the talk that had come to his ears had been vile.

“God will free you,” he said with more certainty than he felt. “Take this picture to God and lay it at his feet and he will free you.”

“It’s very…lewd,” Amy said.

“You have lewd thoughts, daughter?”

“Not that give me any pleasure! They give me nothing but pain.”

“You must take them to God and free your mind of them,” he said firmly. “You must seek your own path to God. However your husband chooses to live his life, whatever his choices are, it is your duty to God and to him to bear it gladly and to draw nearer to God.”

She nodded. “And what am I to do?” she asked humbly.

The priest considered for a moment. There were many stories in the Bible that described the sacred slavery that was the state of marriage, and he had exhorted many an independent-minded woman to obedience with them. But he did not have the heart to coerce Amy, whose face was so white and whose eyes were so pleading.

“You are to read the story of Mary Magdalene,” he said. “And you are to consider the text “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.” We are not ordered by God to judge each other. We are not even ordered by him to consider another person’s sin. We are ordered by God to let Him consider it, to let Him be judge. Wait until God’s will is clear to you and obey it, my child.”

“And a penance?” she prompted.

“Five decades of the rosary,” he said. “But pray on your own and in secret, my child; these are troubled times and devotion to the church is not justly respected.”

Amy bowed her head for his whispered blessing and then joined the other five people at the altar rail. They heard the priest moving about behind them, followed by silence. Then, in his vestments, and carrying the bread and wine, he walked slowly up the aisle and went through the rood screen.

Amy watched through the network of her fingers, through the fret- work of the rood screen, as he turned his back to them and said the prayers in the timeless Latin, facing the altar. She felt an ache in her breast which she thought was heartbreak. The priest had not told her that her sorrows were imaginary, and that she should put them out of her mind. He had not recoiled from the suggestion and denied the gossip of the kitchenmaid, of the spitboy. He had not reproached her with the vanity of wicked suspicions against an honest husband. Instead, he had counseled her in her duty and in courage as if he thought she might have something to endure.

So he knows too, she thought to herself. The whole country knows, from the Denchworth cook to the Denchworth priest. I must have been the last person in England to learn of it. Oh God, how deeply, how very deeply I am shamed.

She watched him raise the bread and drew her breath at the miraculous moment of change, when the bread became the body of Christ and the wine became his blood. Every bishop in the land had defied Elizabeth to insist that this was the truth; every priest in the land still believed it, and hundreds continued secretly to celebrate Mass like this, in the old way, in hiding.

Amy, dazzled by the candles and comforted by the presence of the Living God, too sacred a being to be shown to the congregation, too sacred to be taken every Sunday, so sacred that He could only be watched through the lacing of her fingers, through the tracery of stone, prayed again that Robert might choose to come home to her, and that when he came, she should find some way to hold up her head, rinse those pictures from her mind, be free of sin and glad to see him.