“Then I must tell you: you have made a very grave mistake, my lord. A mistake in my nature, and in what insults I will tolerate, a mistake in yourself and how you should live. You must be mad indeed if you make such a confession to me, hoping that I might sympathize. Me, of all women: who am most hurt by this, I, who know what it is to love without return. I, who know what it is to waste a life in loving.

“You are a fool, Robert, and she is a whore indeed, as half the country thinks. She will have to invent another new religion entirely to justify the hurt that she has done to me, and the peril she has led you to. She has brought you to sin and danger; she has brought this country to the brink of ruin, to heartbreak and poverty; and she is only in the first year of her reign. What wickedness will she undertake before she is done?”

Then she drew her skirts back from him as if she would not have him touch even the hem of her gown, and walked out of the room they had shared.


The November mist was cold on the river. The queen, looking down on the shrouded Thames from the high windows of Whitehall, shivered and drew her furred gown a little closer around her.

“Still a lot better than Woodstock.” Kat Ashley smiled at her.

Elizabeth made a face. “Better than arrest in the Tower,” she said. “Better than a lot of places. But not better than midsummer. It’s freezing cold and deadly dull. Where is Sir Robert?”

Kat did not smile. “Visiting his wife still, Princess.”

Elizabeth hunched her shoulder. “There’s no need to look like that, Kat. I have a right to know where my Master of Horse is. And I have a right to expect him to attend court.”

“And he has a right to see his wife,” Kat said stoutly. “Letting him go was the best day’s work you ever did, Princess. I know it is painful for you, but…”

Elizabeth’s face was peaked with the loss of him. “It’s not a good day’s work done; your congratulations are too early,” she said sulkily. “It is a sacrifice I have to make fresh, every day. It was not the work of one day, Kat, every single day of my life I have to live without him and to know that he is living without me. Every morning I wake and know that I may not smile at him and see him look at me with love. Every night I lie down to sleep aching for him. I don’t see how to bear it. It has been forty-one days since I sent him from me, and still I am sick with love for him. It does not ease at all.”

Kat Ashley looked at the young woman whom she had known from girlhood. “He can be your friend,” she said consolingly. “You don’t have to lose him altogether.”

“It’s not his friendship I miss,” Elizabeth said bluntly. “It’s him. The very person of him. His presence. I want his shadow on my wall, I want the smell of him. I can’t eat without him, I can’t do the business of the realm. I can’t read a book without wanting his opinion, I can’t hear a tune without wanting to sing it to him. It’s like all the life and color and warmth has bled out of the world when he is not with me. I am not missing my friend, Kat. I am missing my eyes. I can’t see without him. Without him I am a blind woman.”

The doors opened and Cecil came in, his face grave. “Sir William,” Elizabeth said without much warmth. “And bringing bad news, if I judge you rightly.”

“Just news,” he said neutrally, until Kat Ashley stepped away from the two of them.

“It’s Ralph Sadler,” he said shortly, naming their agent in Berwick. “He sent our money, a thousand crowns of it, to the Lords Protestant; and Lord Bothwell, a turncoat Protestant serving the regent Mary of Guise, intercepted him and stole it. We can’t get it back.”

“A thousand crowns!” She was appalled. “That’s nearly half of all the money we raised for them.”

“And we were right to do so. The Lords Protestant are selling their very knives and plates to arm their forces. And who would have thought that Bothwell would dare betray his fellow lords? But we have lost the money, and, worse than the loss, the queen regent will know now that we are arming her enemies.”

“It was French crowns, not English coins,” she said rapidly, rushing to a lie. “We can deny everything.”

“It came from our man, Sadler at Berwick. They can hardly doubt it was our money.”

Elizabeth was appalled. “Cecil, what are we going to do?”

“It is sufficient reason for the French to declare war against us. With this, we have given them just cause.”

She turned and walked away from him, her fingers rubbing at the cuticles on her nails. “They won’t declare war on me,” she said. “Not while they think I will marry a Hapsburg. They wouldn’t dare.”

“Then you will have to marry him,” he pressed her. “They will have to know that it is going ahead. You will have to announce your betrothal and name the date of your marriage: Christmas.”

Her look was bleak. “I have no choice?”

“You know you have not. He is making ready to come to England right now.”

She tried to smile. “I shall have to marry him.”

“You will.”


Robert Dudley came back to find the court in feverish mood. Duke John of Finland had arrived to represent his master, Prince Erik of Sweden, and was scattering money and promising favors to anyone who would support his proposal of marriage to the queen.

Elizabeth, sparkling with counterfeit gaiety, danced with him, walked and talked with the archduke’s ambassador, and mystified them both as to her real intentions. When Cecil drew her to one side the smiles fell from her face like a dropped mask. The news from Scotland was grim. The Lords Protestant were encamped before Leith Castle, hoping to starve out the regent before reinforcements arrived from France; but the castle was impregnable, the queen regent inside was well supplied, and the French would be coming soon. No one trusted the Scots to hold the siege. They were an army for a speedy at tack and victory; they had no discipline for a long war. And now everyone knew that it was a war, not some petty rebellion. It was a full-blown, perilous war and none of the court’s brittle gaiety could conceal its anxiety.

Elizabeth greeted Robert pleasantly but coolly, and never invited him to be alone with her. In return, he gave her a slow, sweet smile and kept his distance.

“Is it all over between you forever?” Mary Sidney asked him, glancing from the queen seated very straight on her chair, watching the dancing, to her brother’s dark gaze, watching Elizabeth.

“Doesn’t it look like that?” he asked.

“It’s obvious that you no longer seek each other out. You are never alone with her anymore,” she said. “I wondered what you were feeling.”

“Like death,” he said simply. “Every day I wake and know that I will see her and yet I cannot whisper in her ear, or touch her hand. I cannot tempt her away from her meetings, I cannot steal her away from others. Every day I greet her like a stranger and I see the pain in her eyes. Every day I hurt her with my coldness and she destroys me with hers. It is as bad being away from court as it is being near her. The coldness between us is killing us both and I cannot even tell her that I pity her.”

He glanced briefly at his sister’s aghast face and then he looked back at the queen. “She is so alone,” he said. “I see her holding herself together by a thread. She is so afraid. And I know that, and I cannot help her.”

“Afraid?” Mary repeated.

“She is afraid for her own life, she is afraid for her country, and I imagine she is utterly terrified that she is going to have to take us into war with the French. The old Queen Mary fought the French and they defeated her and destroyed her reputation. And they are stronger now than they were then. And this time the war will be on English soil in England.”

“What will she do?”

“Delay as long as she can,” Robert predicted. “But the siege has to break one way or another, and then what?”

“And what will you do?”

“Watch her from a distance, pray for her, miss her like a mortal ache.”


In the middle of November Robert’s question was answered. The worst news came: the French queen regent’s forces had stormed out of the trap of Leith Castle and thrown their Protestant tormentors back to Stirling. The regent, for her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, held Edinburgh once more, and the Protestant cause in Scotland was utterly defeated.


Winter 1559-60

AMY TRAVELED on the cold, wet roads back to Stanfield Hall, her girlhood home in Norfolk, for the winter season. The skies arching above the flat landscape were gray with rain clouds, the land beneath was brown speckled with gray flints, as drab as homespun and as poor. Amy rode through the cold with her hood up and her head down.

She did not expect to see Robert again before Christmas; she did not expect to see him at any time during the twelve days of the Christmas feast. She knew that he would be engaged at court, planning the festivities, organizing the masques, the players, the parties, and the hunting, for the court was determined to celebrate the winter feast, thinking, but not saying aloud, that it might be their last with Elizabeth as queen. She knew that her husband would be constantly at the side of the young queen: her lover, her friend, her intimate companion. She knew that whether they were lovers or whether they were estranged there was no one in the world for Robert but Elizabeth.

“I don’t blame him,” she whispered on her knees in Syderstone parish church, looking toward the blank space on the altar where the crucifix had once stood, looking to the plinth where a statue of the Virgin Mary had once raised her kindly stone hand to bless the faithful. “I won’t blame him,” she whispered to the empty spaces that were all that Elizabeth’s new priest had left for the faithful to turn to in prayer. “And I won’t blame her. I don’t want to blame either of them, anyone. I have to be free from my own rage and my own grief. I have to say that he can walk away from me, he can go to another woman, he can love her more than he ever loved me, and I have to release my jealousy and my pain and my grief from my heart. I have to let it all go, or it will destroy me.”