Robert Dudley, for his part, is desperate not to be banished to Scotland and married off to a woman who must despise him as an adulterer and a wife murderer. He knows that, whatever she says now, Elizabeth would never forgive him marrying another woman. He is gambling everything on her inability to let him go. He urges her to send Henry Stuart to take his place, as a diversion in Mary’s court—nothing more.
Nobody suggests that pretty Henry Stuart Lord Darnley might be a suitable husband and advisor for Queen Mary, that he might hold her loyal to England and serve as an English ambassador and wise advisor. He’s not yet twenty years old and he has spent his life under the heavy hoof of his papist mother, alternately indulged and scolded by her. He has been raised as a courtier; he is charming and pleasing and amusing and good company. But nobody thinks he can act like a skilled diplomat with his first loyalty to England. Everyone believes he is nothing more than a time-wasting folly.
I think that they underrate him. I believe his sweet face hides an avaricious heart, and his fair looks might charm the lonely French queen, surrounded as she is with hearty loud men of action, insisting on their rights. We are not all Elizabeths: desiring a man who looks more like a horse thief than a nobleman. But neither Cecil (though he has studied her likes and dislikes since she was a girl) nor the dark Robert (who has been her preference for as long) can make the flight of fancy to imagine that another woman might find a different sort of man far superior. I think young Henry has great charm, if you like a pretty doll—but as something of a pretty doll myself, that is not surprising.
Even I cannot say I am an admirer of Lord Darnley, and I see him leave court without regret. He is so excited by his freedom that he forgets his mother’s rivalry with mine, and smiles at me for the first time ever. “As my star rises, I will remember your sister,” he says sweetly enough. “Who can doubt the favor that the queen is showing our side of the family? You and your sister will become unimportant and I will speak for you.”
“She is sorely in need of friends,” I say steadily. “But all our trust is in Her Majesty.”
He waves to the court that has gathered to see him leave. He bows as gracefully as a dancer and turns and leaps from the ground into the saddle. His horse curvets; he holds it on a hard rein and sits well as it rears. He doffs his hat and kisses his hand to Elizabeth, and she smiles graciously on him. He really does look as handsome as a mounted angel. I wonder how long after he is out of sight she will regret letting him go.
Less than a month is the answer! I could laugh if I were not standing, straight as a poker, tall as a broadsword, as she rages up and down her room. Sir William Maitland, the Scots queen’s advisor, arrives from Edinburgh, carrying the extraordinary request from Queen Mary to marry Elizabeth’s noble subject—Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Elizabeth goes white with anger and retreats to her privy chamber. Cecil and Dudley go in and out like anxious jacks-in-the-box. In: to listen to Elizabeth shouting in rage that Henry Stuart is false as his mother, Margaret Douglas, as his father, Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, and that Mary is a fool and he will break her heart and ruin her chance of ever being named as heir to England. Out: to meet with the lords of the Privy Council and see if there is any legal contrivance, any forbidden relationship, any device by which they can refuse permission for the marriage or—if it has already taken place—declare it void.
It is as good as a play for me—a savagely comical play—to see how these great men set to work to destroy a woman’s innocent desire. They think of nothing but the advantage of their own course, the victory of their own policy. They think nothing of a woman in love, a young woman, without advisors, a lonely young woman who has a handsome young man thrown at her in a court riven with anger, and has nowhere else to turn.
“It’s not even as if he were a very admirable young man,” I say to Thomas Keyes. It is a cold afternoon, and we are seated either side of the fire in his private room, over the watergate. One of his officers is on duty at the main gate. The winding mechanism for the portcullis of the watergate is on the other side of the wall and nobody can raise it without Thomas’s permission. He has some wine in a pot and, as I watch, he gently takes the poker from the red-hot embers and seethes it in the wine. The hiss of the boiling liquid and the scent of mulled wine fills the room. He pours me a cup and takes one for himself.
“A dainty little nobleman,” he says. “But, I fear, not one that walks in the ways of the Lord.”
This is an extreme condemnation for Thomas to make—my Thomas, who never speaks ill of anyone. I look at him over the top of my cup. “Why, what do you know of him?”
He smiles at me. “I keep the gate,” he reminds me. “Nobody comes in without me seeing them. I know who visits him—and they’re not the best sort of men. And I often see him. He comes down to visit my soldiers,” he says shortly. “To drink with them—when they are off duty. I won’t say more than that; it is not fitting.”
I am agape at the scandal he is hinting. “You never told me anything like this before.”
“It’s not fitting that I should speak of it,” he says. “Nor that you should hear. My betrothed does not deal in gossip.”
I beam at him. “You have a very high opinion of me, Thomas. The court’s principal currency is gossip. You have just given me a fortune of scandal if I chose to sell it.”
He nods. “Oh, I am rich in scandal. Don’t you think I let people in and out at all hours? I hear everything, but I don’t repeat it.”
“I am glad of it,” I say. “For I could not be here if I thought you would ever tell.”
He shakes his head. “Not me.”
“Have you taken any messages from Sir William Petre? Or heard any news of my sister?” I ask him.
“I know only what you do: that she is low in spirits, that he is a poor host, a tired and sick old man. He is ordered to keep her close and not spend money on her. It is an unhappy household.”
The thought of Katherine, who was always so lighthearted and playful, sunk under grief in a poor house, makes me lower my head and gaze into the red embers as if I would see a happier future for her there. I feel her sadness like a weight on my own shoulders, the pang of her hunger in my own belly.
“Good times must come,” Thomas says encouragingly. “And as for us . . . can we not marry, even in secret, and be together? We cannot make matters worse for your poor sister or her bairns, surely? And the queen is absorbed in the affairs of the other queen: she will not trouble herself about us?”
I look at his broad honest face, warm in the firelight. I am so tired of refusing him, I am so tired of caution and unhappiness. I am so tired of being the despised little sister to the saint in the Tower and the martyr of Ingatestone that I put out my hand to him.
“Yes,” I say. “Let the two of us be happy at least.”
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,
SUMMER 1565
I am encouraged to be bold because my stock at court is rising as Elizabeth becomes more and more resentful of her other cousin, the papist cousin, the false-faith cousin, the two-faced cousin, the old cousin, the irritating cousin, the ambitious cousin, the hypocrite cousin Margaret Douglas, who has earned all these epithets for sending her husband to Scotland with Elizabeth’s permission and her pretty son after him, and, between the two of them, rising up to the throne of Scotland and looking set to take it.