The court hardly notices when Ned bids farewell to the queen, everyone is so busy with amusement. This is Elizabeth’s favorite time of year, and every day there are balls and hunts and picnics. We ride out of Greenwich Palace down to hunt the water meadows that run beside the river. We walk in the gardens in the evenings and watch the early swifts and swallows fly round and around the high turrets and swoop over the waters. They dip into their own reflections, making a little splash as they part from their mirrored selves.
Elizabeth is as much in love with Robert Dudley as ever, quite unable to resist his outstretched hand to dance or to walk beside him, quite unable to resist his bullying when he threatens to go and live in Spain if she does not consult him as if he were her husband. He has regained all the ground he lost on the death of his wife with the queen, though he never will with the court. The country will never accept him as her husband, and the great game of Elizabeth’s life is to promise him enough to keep him close to her, without revealing to anyone else what she swears to him. I think her deception is far more disloyal and far worse than mine. At least I don’t lie to Ned, though I have to lie to everyone else.
William Cecil is kinder and more attentive to me than he has ever been, as if he fears that Robert Dudley will persuade the queen to marry him, and the country will turn to me as her successor. People would far rather have me as queen than any woman married to a Dudley.
“You look very pale,” William Cecil says to me gently. “Are you missing your beloved friend so much?”
I have to swallow my little gasp as I think he is speaking of Ned, but he has Janey in mind. “I miss her very much,” I manage to say.
“You must pray for her,” he says. “There’s no doubt in my mind that she will have gone straight to heaven. There is no such thing as purgatory and no souls can be prayed out of it—but it is still a comfort to pray for the happiness of our friends in heaven, and God hears every prayer.”
I don’t tell him how fervently I pray that Ned will come home soon. I just lower my eyes to the ground and hope that he will let me go away from him to the queen’s rooms. Nobody cares how I look there. Actually, Elizabeth prefers it when I am pale and quiet.
“And do you miss her brother, the Earl of Hertford, too?” Cecil asks archly.
It is such an odd tone for such a serious man that I risk a quick upward glance. He is smiling down at me, his dark eyes searching my face. I can feel that I am blushing, I know that he will see it, and he will make up his own mind.
“Of course,” I say. “I miss them both.”
“Nothing that you should tell the queen . . . or me?” William Cecil hints gently.
I flash a glance at him; I will not be teased about this. “You told me I should wait for the right time to speak to her.”
“I did,” he says judicially. “And now would not be the time.”
I press my lips together. “Then I will speak to her when you tell me that I may,” I say.
I will find the courage to speak to the queen, and summon Ned home so that we can face her together, as soon as William Cecil says the time is right. Until then, I am dumb with fear of her. I dare not tell William Cecil how far we have gone without either his permission or the support of Robert Dudley. Of course, Ned was sure that both William Cecil and Robert Dudley have a pretty good guess what we are about, and anyone would wager that a handsome young man like Ned and a beautiful princess like me would fall in love if they are allowed to spend every day together. So perhaps I should speak out soon, with the hope that William Cecil will take my part.
But what if William Cecil is not inviting my confidences but, on the contrary, warning me off marriage to Ned with this teasing tone? I wish he had been clearer before we were wedded and bedded and Ned gone away.
Worse still, I find that I am a little queasy in the morning and I cannot eat meat, especially meat with fat, until the evening. It turns my stomach and that is odd, as I have always been hungry at breakfast time, coming to it ravenous after chapel and fasting. My sister Jane used to say that I was gluttonous, and I would laugh and say . . . but it doesn’t matter now what I used to say, since I will never say it to her again, and now I can only face bread and milk and sometimes not even that. Jo the pug sits on my lap at breakfast and eats most of my portion. I believe that my breasts are warmer and a little tender, too. I don’t know for sure, and still there is no one that I can ask, but I think these are signs that I might be with child. And then what will I do?
Lady Clinton, my lady aunt Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a kinswoman of mine who loved my sister Jane, stops me in the gallery and remarks that I am less merry without my friends the Seymours. She waits as if I should say something in reply. Lady Northampton, who comes behind her, says openly to my face that if I am in love with Ned Seymour, then I would do better to tell the queen and have her order him to make an honest woman out of me. They stand side by side, Elizabeth’s friends, Elizabeth’s confidantes, a pair of harpies, as if they know everything, as if my precious secret is anything like their horrible old flirtations in the reign before this one, in the years before that, long ago when they were young and pretty and tenderhearted.
My cheeks blaze with shame that they should speak of Ned and me as if we were an ordinary couple, a pair of fools holding hands at the back of the court. They cannot know, they cannot understand, that we are deeply in love and, in any case, married.
“If he promised you marriage and left you, we should tell the queen,” Lady Clinton whispers. “Everyone saw that you were inseparable, and then he suddenly goes away. I will speak out for you.”
I am horrified that they should think that I should have been a loose woman. I am furious that they think that I should be such a fool as to be abandoned by a faithless lover. I am heir to the throne of England! I am sister to Jane Grey! Is it likely that I would lower myself to lie with a man not my husband and have to rely on my aunts to bring him home to me? But I cannot tell them that we are married and that he went away with my permission. And I cannot bring myself to confide in either of the two old harpies (who are at least thirty) that I am a married woman with child. I choke back my rage and I just smile prettily, and say that I am missing Janey very badly indeed. They take the tears of rage for grief and they both say that she was a lovely girl and it is a terrible loss, and so we none of us say anything more about Ned.
It seems that everyone is in full summer happiness but me. Everyone is courting but me. Elizabeth and Robert Dudley are open lovers: they go everywhere together, sometimes they even hold hands where everyone can see. She treats him like a husband and an equal, and everyone knows that if they want an allowance, a pension, or forgiveness for some crime, then a word from Robert Dudley is as good as the word of the queen since the one follows the other as if she had no choice in the matter, and no tongue of her own for anything but for licking his amorous lips.
He is lordly with his favor. She has given him huge sums of money, and licenses to tax profitable trades. She has stopped short of giving him a dukedom, but she pats his cheek and swears his family will rise again. Nobody now remarks that his wife died in the most suspicious of circumstances less than a year ago and that everyone blamed him. Nobody remembers that his father was executed for treason and his father before him. I remember it—but then it was my sister that Robert Dudley’s father forced onto the throne and so on to the scaffold. Everyone else at court chooses to behave as if Dudley comes from the greatest of families and has always been trusted and beloved.
It’s not so in the country, of course. I get secret messages from people assuring me that if there is an uprising against Elizabeth and her adulterous lover, then they will support me. I barely even read them. I give them at once to William Cecil, who says quietly: “Her Majesty is blessed in so loyal an heir. She loves you for this.”