Finally, my uncle and I send the finished petition to Robert Dudley as our friend and the queen’s principal advisor. Oddly, his own fate hangs in the balance, just like mine. He may find himself in the extraordinary position of being the lover of the Queen of England and the husband of the Queen of Scotland; he could be a king consort as his brother nearly was. Only a Dudley could hope for such an outcome to ambition and desire: only an Elizabeth could imagine it.
What we don’t know is what Queen Mary can imagine. We all have to wait to see if the shame of taking her cousin’s cast-off lover is a price worth paying for being named as heir to the throne of England. We are all waiting to see if Elizabeth can bear to raise Dudley to the position of Earl of Leicester so that he can plausibly marry a royal, and then send him away. We are all waiting to see if the Privy Council will demand that Elizabeth names me as heir, as she promised them she would follow their advice. Robert Dudley promises to put our petition when the time is right, when she is ready to listen. We all know that only Robert Dudley can summon the queen’s agreeable mood, only Robert Dudley can seduce her into happiness; but is he so potent that he can prevail upon her to be generous? Can he make Elizabeth—the Supreme Governor of the Church—forgive like a Christian?
He cannot. This is perhaps the first thing that she has ever refused him. We all thought that she could not resist him, that she could refuse him nothing. But this small thing, this sensible, kindly, commonsense act of pardon, is beyond her. She knows that I am breaking my heart, parted from my husband and my son, kept in isolation in my uncle’s house, forced to depend on him to pay for my food and for my clothes. My baby is imprisoned with me for no fault of his own, my little son torn from me, and my husband held prisoner by his own mother. Elizabeth knows that this is cruelty to two noble families, and an offense against the laws of the land and justice. She should release us—we are no threat to her and want nothing but to love each other and be together—and she will not do it.
It seems that I will live and die in prison for the crime of marrying my lover, because Elizabeth Tudor could not marry hers. This is jealousy taken to an extraordinary degree. This is fatal malice, and when I receive her refusal, I fear that only death will release me. Like all Tudors she invokes death. Her sister killed my sister. She will kill me. This can only end in death: mine or hers.
BOOK III
MARY
WINDSOR CASTLE,
AUTUMN 1563
Elizabeth, merry as a blackbird in a rose hip hedge, rides early in the morning, and all her ladies have to go with her, merry or not, like it or not. I am high on a big hunter and I ride without fear as I have done since I was a tiny child at Bradgate. My father always put me on a full-sized horse and told me that if I held the reins firmly, and made sure that the horse knew who was in command, it would not matter if I sat a little askew in the saddle because of the twist in my spine, and if I spoke clearly and firmly, then it would not matter that I am light and small. He told me that I can have a great presence even though I am of little height.
While Jane, my oldest sister, wanted to stay indoors with her books, and Katherine always wanted to play with her menagerie of little animals in the garden or in her room, I was always in the stables, standing on an upturned pail to groom the big horses, or clambering up the mounting block to sit bareback on their warm broad backs.
“You can’t let something like being born small and a bit twisty stand in your way,” my father would say to me. “We’re none of us perfect, and you’re marred no worse than King Richard III, and he rode out in half a dozen battles and was killed in a cavalry charge—nobody ever told him he couldn’t ride.”
“But he was a very bad man,” I observe with the stern judgment of a seven-year-old.
“Very bad,” my father agrees. “But that was his soul, not his body. You can be a good woman with a body that is a little short and a spine that is out of true. You can learn to stand straight as a yeoman of the guard, and you can be a beautiful little woman. If you never marry, then you can be a good sister to Jane and Katherine, and a good aunt to their children. But I don’t see why you shouldn’t marry and make a good marriage when your time comes. Your birth is as good as any woman in the kingdom, better than everyone but the king’s children. Truth be told, it doesn’t matter if your spine is out of true, if your heart is not.”
I am glad of his faith in me, and that he taught me to ride as well as anyone. He was the first to set me the task of standing straight and tall, and I have trained myself to do so. I have long days in the saddle behind Elizabeth and her ridiculous master of horse, and nobody ever thinks to see if I am keeping up or if I am tired. I ride as far and as fast as any lady of the court, and I am braver than most of them. I never slump in the saddle or grimace when my back is aching at the end of a long day. I never look to Robert Dudley as a hint that he might turn Her Majesty for home. I never expect any help from either of them, and so I am never disappointed.
It is not the riding that wearies me, but God knows I am tired to death of Elizabeth, and when we clatter over the cobbles at the great gate of Windsor Castle and the sergeant porter, Thomas Keyes, looks up at me with his concerned brown gaze, I nod to him with a little smile to tell him that I am exhausted only by this queen, not saddlesore but heartsore.
For all this happy time as the heat of summer goes on into autumn, while Elizabeth is spending her mornings at the hunt, and her middays at picnics and boating on the river, her evenings with plays and dancings and disguisings, my sister is imprisoned by our uncle, confined to three rooms with her baby, torn from her beloved son, and stolen from her husband.
Nothing troubles our royal cousin! Everything gives Elizabeth pleasure. She revels in the warm weather while London swelters and the plague spreads across the kingdom. Every village on every road out of London has a cottage with a cross on the door and people dying inside. Every riverside house along the Thames has its watergate locked and barred so that no barges from London can enter. Every city in the kingdom is digging a plague pit for the bodies, and every church praying that the plague passes over their congregation. Every healthy house bars its doors to travelers, everyone is fearfully hard-hearted. But none of this troubles Elizabeth. She flirts with Dudley in the heat of the day and slips through to his bedroom any night that she pleases, while my sister cries herself to sleep and dreams of freedom.
Thomas Keyes has to stay on duty at the gate of the castle and may not help me from the saddle, but there is always one of the young men of court quick to my side to lift me down. They know that my sister and her two boys are the next heirs to the throne; they know that my rank is acknowledged by the queen. None of them knows how great is my influence, and what I might do for them if they please me. I hardly notice them. My only smile is for Thomas Keyes, the queen’s sergeant porter; he is the only man that I would trust in this rivalrous pit of two-faced serpents. Thomas gives me a private nod as I go by, and I know that I will see him later in the day when Elizabeth is entertained by someone else and forgets to look for me.