The Virgin’s Lover

‘I know you would work,’ Robert acknowledged. ‘I know you would rise at dawn and be in the fields before the sun. But I don’t want my wife to work like a peasant on the land. I was born for greater things than that, and I promised your father greater things for you. I don’t want half a dozen acres and a cow, I want half of England.’

‘They will think you have left me because you are tired of me,’ she said reproachfully. ‘Anyone would think so. You have only just come home to me and you are leaving me again.’

‘I have been home with you for two years!’ he exclaimed. ‘Two years!’ Then he checked himself, trying to take the irritation from his voice. ‘Amy, forgive me, but it is no life for me. These months have been like a lifetime. With my name attainted by treason I can own nothing in my own right, I cannot trade or sell or buy. Everything my family had was seized by the Crown – I know! – and everything you had too: your father’s legacy, your mother’s fortune. Everything that you had has been lost by me. I have to get it back for you. I have to get it back for us.’

‘I don’t want it at this price,’ she said flatly. ‘You always say that you are doing this for us, but it is not what I want, it’s no good for me. I want you at home with me, I don’t care if we have nothing. I don’t care if we have to live with my stepmother and depend on her charity. I don’t care for anything but that we are together and you are safe at last.’

‘Amy, I cannot live on that woman’s charity. It is a shoe which pinches me every day. When you married me, I was the son of the greatest man in England. It was his plan, and mine, that my brother would be king and Jane Grey would be queen, and we came within inches of achieving that. I would have been of the royal family of England. I expected that, I rode out to fight for it. I would have laid down my life for it. And why not? We had as great a claim to the throne as the Tudors, who had done the self-same thing only three generations before. The Dudleys could have been the next royal family of England. Even though we failed and were defeated …’

‘And humbled,’ she supplemented.

‘And humbled to dust,’ he agreed. ‘Yet I am still a Dudley. I was born for greatness, and I have to claim it. I was born to serve my family and my country. You don’t want a little farmer on a hundred acres. You don’t want a man who sits at home all day in the cinders.’

‘But I do,’ she insisted. ‘What you don’t see, Robert, is that to be a little farmer on a hundred acres is to make a better England – and in a better way – than any courtier struggling for his own power at court.’

He almost laughed. ‘Perhaps to you. But I have never been such a man. Not even defeat, not even fear of death itself, could make me into such a man. I was born and bred to be one of the great men in the land, if not the greatest. I was brought up alongside the children of the king as their equal – I cannot moulder in a damp field in Norfolk. I have to clear my name, I have to be noticed by King Philip, I have to be restored by Queen Mary. I have to rise.’

‘You will be killed in battle, and then what?’

Robert blinked. ‘Sweetheart, this is to curse me, on our last night together. I will sail tomorrow, whatever you say. Don’t ill-wish me.’

‘You have had a dream!’ Amy climbed on the bed and took the empty mug from him, and put it down, holding his hands in hers, as if she were teaching a child. ‘My lord, it is a warning. I am warning you. You should not go.’

‘I have to go,’ he said flatly. ‘I would rather be dead and my name cleared by my death, than live like this, an undischarged traitor from a disgraced family, in Mary’s England.’

‘Why? Would you rather have Elizabeth’s England?’ She hissed the treasonous challenge in a whisper.

‘With all my heart,’ he answered truthfully.

Abruptly, she released his hands and, without another word, blew out the candle, pulled the covers over her shoulders and turned her back to him. The two of them lay sleepless, wide-eyed in the darkness.

‘It will never happen,’ Amy stated. ‘She will never have the throne. The queen could conceive another child tomorrow, Philip of Spain’s son, a boy who would be Emperor of Spain and King of England, and she will be a princess that no-one wants, married off to a foreign prince and forgotten.’

‘Or she might not,’ he replied. ‘Mary might die without issue and then my princess is Queen of England, and she will not forget me.’

In the morning, she would not speak to him. They breakfasted in the tap room in silence and then Amy went back upstairs to their room in the inn to pack the last of Robert’s clothes in his bag. Robert called up the stairs that he would see her down at the quayside, and went out into the noise and the bustle of the streets.

The village of Dover was in chaos as King Philip of Spain’s expedition made ready to set sail to the Netherlands. Produce-sellers with every sort of food and wares bawled their prices into the hubbub. Wise women screeched the value of charms and amulets for departing soldiers. Pedlars showed trays of trinkets for farewell gifts, barbers and tooth-drawers were working on the side of the street, men having their head shaved almost bare for fear of lice. A couple of priests had even set up makeshift confessionals to shrive men who feared going to their deaths with sins on their consciences, and dozens of whores mingled with the crowds of soldiers, screeching with laughter and promising all sorts of quick pleasures.

Women crowded to the quayside to say goodbye to their husbands and lovers, carts and cannon were hauled perilously up the sides and stowed in the little ships, horses jibbed and fought on the gangplanks, with swearing lumpers pushing them from behind, the grooms pulling them from before. As Robert came out of the door of his inn, his young brother caught him by the arm.

‘Henry! Well met!’ Robert cried, enveloping the nineteen-year-old youth in a great bear hug. ‘I was wondering how we would ever find each other. I expected you here last night.’

‘I was delayed. Ambrose would not let me go until he had my horse re-shod. You know what he’s like. He suddenly became a most authoritative older brother and I had to swear to keep safe, and to keep you out of danger as well.’

Robert laughed. ‘I wish you well with that.’

‘I got here this morning and I have been looking for you all over.’ Henry stepped back and scrutinised his older brother’s dark good looks. He was still only twenty-three and was strikingly handsome but the spoiled gloss of a rich youth had been burned off him by suffering. He was lean now, he had the look of a man to be reckoned with. He grinned at Henry and the hardness in his face melted in the warmth of his loving smile. ‘Good God! I am glad to see you, lad! What an adventure we shall have!’

‘The court has arrived already,’ Henry told him. ‘King Philip is on board his ship, and the queen is here, and the princess.’

‘Elizabeth? Is she here? Did you speak to her?’

‘They’re on the new ship, the Philip and Mary,’ Henry said. ‘The queen looking very sour.’

Dudley laughed. ‘Elizabeth will be merry then?’

‘Happy as a haymaker at her sister’s distress,’ Henry replied cheerfully. ‘Is it true, d’you know, that she is King Philip’s lover?’

‘Not her,’ Dudley said with the certainty of a childhood playmate. ‘But she’ll keep him dancing to her tune because he guarantees her safety. Half the Privy Council would have her beheaded tomorrow if it were not for the king’s favour. She’s no lovesick fool. She’ll use him, not be had by him. She’s a formidable girl. I’d so like to see her if we can.’

‘She always had a tender heart for you,’ Henry grinned. ‘Shall you eclipse the king himself?’

‘Not while I have nothing to offer her,’ Robert said. ‘She’s a calculating wench, God bless her. Are they ready to load us?’

‘My horse is already aboard,’ Henry said. ‘I was coming for yours.’

‘I’ll walk him down with you,’ Robert said. The two men went through the stone archway to where the horse was stabled in the yard at the back of the inn.

‘When did you last see her? The princess?’ Henry asked his brother.

‘When I was in my pomp and she in hers,’ Robert smiled ruefully. ‘It must have been the last Christmas at court. When King Edward was failing, and Father was king in everything but name alone. She was the Protestant princess and the favourite sister. We were twins in the smugness of our triumph and Mary was nowhere to be seen. D’you remember?’

Henry frowned. ‘Dimly. You know I was never very good at the shifts in favour.’

‘You would have learned,’ Robert said drily. ‘In a family such as ours was then, you would have had to.’

‘I remember she was imprisoned for treason in the Tower, while we were still in there,’ Henry recalled.

‘I was glad when I learned she was free,’ Robert said. ‘Elizabeth always had the luck of the devil.’

The big black horse whinnied at the sight of Robert and Robert went forward and stroked his soft nose. ‘Come on then, my lovely,’ he said softly. ‘Come on, First Step.’

‘What d’you call him?’ Henry inquired.

‘First Step,’ Robert said. ‘When we were released from the Tower and I came home to Amy and found myself a pauper in her stepmother’s house, the woman told me that I could neither buy nor borrow a horse to ride on.’

Henry gave a low whistle. ‘I thought they kept a good house at Stanfield?’

‘Not for a son-in-law who had just come home an undischarged traitor,’ Robert said ruefully. ‘I had no choice but to walk in my riding boots to a horse fair, and I won him in a bet. I called him First Step. He is my first step back to my rightful place.’

‘And this expedition will be our next step,’ Henry said gleefully.

Robert nodded. ‘If we can rise in King Philip’s favour we can be returned to court,’ he said. ‘Anything will be forgiven the man who holds the Netherlands for Spain.’

‘Dudley! A Dudley!’ Henry shouted the family battle cry, and opened the door to the loosebox.

The two of them led the nervous horse down the cobbled street to the quayside, and waited behind the other men leading their horses on board. The little waves lapped at the jetty and First Step flared his nostrils and shifted uneasily. When it was his turn to go up the gangplank he put his forefeet on the bridge and then froze in fear.