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  The next morning while I was still asleep, my husband rose early to hunt. I lay abed for a long time, lazily savoring the fact that I was now a married woman, a wife, and, God willing, soon to be a mother, caressing my little round belly and wondering if it had already become a warm nest for our baby to grow in. When I rose, I noticed that my husband had left our chamber in some disarray; clothing lay strewn about the floor and protruding from beneath the lid of his big oak traveling chest, carved with his initials and coat-of-arms, the Dudleys’ great bear and ragged staff, and beautifully bordered with acorns and oak leaves. I instantly set about tidying it, gathering up garments from the floor, and, observing the crumpled and wadded disarray inside, I scooped everything out of the chest, thinking to do my duty as a wife and put it all right, everything perfectly placed and folded, all pristine, perfect, and neat, and later amongst the folds I would put little bags of sweet-smelling herbs tied with blue silk ribbons, as that was my husband’s favorite color. As I lifted out the last linen shirt, something clattered against the bottom—a small rectangle-shaped portrait framed in black enamel and pearls.

  I instantly recognized the haughty and imperious young woman who stared back at me from beneath the feathered brim of her round, pearl-studded black velvet hat, with her hair caught up like a pair of plump, fresh-baked buns on each side of her head protruding from a caul of pearls. It was the Princess Elizabeth in a black velvet riding habit worked with gold embroidery all down the front and around the hems, with its tight, close-fitting sleeves studded with an elaborate lattice pattern of pearls. But what struck me most was her hand murderously clutching her gloves as if they were a neck she wished to break.

  I remembered the look that had passed between her and Robert last night as she stood at the foot of our marriage bed and began to tremble violently as tears overflowed my eyes. Feeling of a sudden ill, I dropped the portrait back into the chest as if it burned me and bunched up all the clothes my arms could hold and crammed them back inside the chest and slammed the lid shut. Perhaps I should have confronted Robert when he came back, asked or said something, but every time I tried, fear tied my tongue in knots, and the words just would not come out. I guess I was afraid that knowing would be even worse than not knowing. But every time I glanced at that chest, knowing that portrait was hidden away inside it, I felt a surge of blind terror that made the breath catch in my throat and my vision dim and at the same time dance with jewel-colored sparks like gems sewn on black velvet. I didn’t know then that that flame-haired princess would ignite such a blaze of passion and ambition in my husband’s soul that it would reduce all my hopes and dreams to ashes.

  6

  Amy Robsart Dudley

  Cumnor Place, Berkshire, near Oxford

  Sunday, September 8, 1560

  As hot tears roll down my face, I reach for the medicine bottle and take another calming sip. What a strange sensation it brings! As if I were floating above myself, above the pain, like the notes of a song hovering above just-plucked and still-vibrating lute strings. I have the most peculiar feeling of being outside myself, and behind myself, as if each time I move, I have to pause and wait a moment for my body to catch up with my soul. Or is it the other way around, and my mind that must rush to catch up with my body? What a curious notion! I am filled with the oddest fancies! I can’t help but laugh, even though it makes me feel as if Death were playing my ribs like the ivory keys of a virginal, but the medicine numbs it, and there is that strange delaying sensation; even though Death’s fingers strike the keys, the sound of the notes lags behind a moment or two. I take another sip, and the chords of pain are muted even more, as if I have run too far away to hear them as more than a distant, wind-borne melody. The pain is my fool now, and I am not the fool of my pain. I giggle and take another sip of that amber liquid, and now I don’t even mind the bitter taste that burns my throat as it courses down; I welcome it as if it were my savior. Salvation in a bottle, the nostrum peddlers should call this magic brew! And after another sip I lie back on my bed, close my eyes, and let my mind wander where it will... .

  When last I visited the crumbling, overgrown ruins of Syderstone, though they were no longer my own, I put on my wedding gown and went out, barefoot, with my hair all a-tumble down my back, and walked across the meadow, just as I had on my wedding day, picking myself a bouquet of buttercups as I went. What a strange sight the sheep must have thought me as they fled baa-ing before me, pausing oft to look back and stare before they fell to munching clover and thistles again. I know it sounds silly, but I wanted to see what it would be like, how it would feel, to see if by wearing my wedding gown again I could magically recapture even a little of the joy of that day, as if an echo of it might linger, hovering in the air like a butterfly, and I could run after it and catch it in my hands. I am a silly, fanciful creature, I know. And the dress made no difference at all. Wearing it again brought me only sorrow; it had become a symbol of tarnished hopes and dead and broken dreams that could never be revived or repaired. Nothing turned out the way I thought it would. I perched upon the old, moss-festooned stone where the shepherd sometimes sat and buried my face in my hands and wept. Both my parents were gone to their graves, and my stepbrothers and sisters all had their own busy lives, with homes and families of their own and no time or care to spare for me and my troubles. The adored darling, the spoiled beloved, now had nothing. There was no one to love and adore her anymore, not even a home to call her own, she had lost her highborn husband to the Queen, and cancer was slowly stealing her life away.

  The dress remained the same, but the woman who wore it had changed; it now hung loose upon my frame, and every dream that eager, smiling, happy, young bride had had that day when she walked across the meadow to serve milk to her guests in cups shaped like breasts had come to nothing or gone horribly, nightmarishly wrong. I wanted to run backward, racing, hurtling, across time, and catch hold of that hopeful young girl on the threshold of the church, draped with evergreen boughs and bows and ribbons of gold and cream, and beg her not to marry Robert Dudley. To slap and shake some sense into her if I must, and let her gaze fill upon me and know what her life would become if she persisted. I would even tear open my bodice and let her see the ravages of this disease, the ugly, seeping wound left by the worm of sorrow burrowing deeply into my breast, for I truly believe my sadness opened the door to let this disease into my life. But I knew that, even if I could, that confident, headstrong seventeen-year-old I used to be would merely laugh in my face, toss her blond curls, and shrug off my urgently grasping hands, along with my dire warnings of doom and gloom, and tell me that none but God would ever tear her and her beloved Robert apart. She would turn her back on me and, with her head held high, walk proudly up to the altar and take his hand in marriage, just as she did when her wise old father warned her just before she passed through the arched portal beneath the evergreen boughs, “First love is rarely evergreen love, my dear.” The Amy I used to be would never have listened to the Amy I am now. It’s folly to even think so.

  7

  Amy Robsart Dudley

  Hemsby-by-the-Sea, near Great Yarmouth

  June 1550

  We honeymooned at Hemsby Castle, by the sea. That quaint sandy-gold stone box hugged by ardent ivy, rugged, weathered yellow stones and green vines clinging together like lovers, was my new father-in-law’s gift to us, the deed presented on our wedding day in a pretty gold, enameled, and jeweled box fashioned to look exactly like the seaside castle. He also gave us lands that had once belonged to the priory of Coxford, where we might build a house someday, but these I would never see; at some point Robert sold them without telling me.

  Hemsby sat high on the cliffs near Great Yarmouth, overlooking the sea, with a long, spiraling, sandy lane lined with stones leading down to the beach, which Robert and I would race down nigh every day to splash and play and love each other in the chilly, salty surf. He loved to tickle me; his fingers would dance nimbly over my belly, roving down to my sex, maki
ng me gasp, giggle, and writhe in pure delight.

  I could see the gray sea, the rolling waves crested in frothy white, like feisty old dowagers in lacy caps, from our bedchamber window. I used to sit and watch it, lost in a dream, for hours, with Robert’s love like a shawl draped about my shoulders to keep me warm. There was even a seagull who learned to come to the window whenever he saw me there to be fed from my hand, and I always saved tidbits from our table for him. Robert laughed and said the gull was “clearly a woman’s bird,” as it struck a haughty stance and would not deign to accept even the most tempting morsels from Robert’s hand. Which was strange, as animals and children alike always adored Robert; he was a wonder with horses and seemed to know, as if he were one himself, what they were thinking and feeling and, when affrighted, what they were scared of and how best to soothe them. Yet my seagull turned up his beak and would have nothing to do with Robert.

  I remember the day we arrived, Robert bade the servants, who followed with our luggage in a cart, to see to everything and, with me in the saddle before him, nestled back against his chest, galloped down to the beach. He swung himself from the saddle, lifted me down, slapped the horse’s rump and left it free to run, and stripped off his clothes, letting them fall where they would, and plunged headfirst into the sea.

  I stood and watched him, my heart beating wild and fast, as if I lived only to love and be loved by him, and this was what I had been made for. Then he stood, laughing, as he shook the salty spray from his black curls, and, with water dripping down his hard, handsome, sun-bronzed body in salty rivulets, his erect cock bobbing against its nest of short, wiry black curls, he came toward me with a determined look in his dark eyes. In that moment he was a man who knew exactly what he wanted—me!

  I giggled and began to run, but he caught my sleeve, spun me ’round, quickly unfastened the gold-braid frogs, eased the russet velvet jacket from my shoulders, and let the wind snatch it from his fingers. And then, with salty kisses up and down my throat, he removed my shirt of fine white linen, laughing as the breeze caught it and sent it skipping and billowing down the beach. Had it been dark, any who chanced to see might have thought it a ghost and started a tale about a restless spirit roaming the shore in search of a lost love. As he led me down to the sea, Robert left my leather stays, russet velvet skirt, and petticoats lying where they fell, laughing as my sheer cobweb lawn shift was caught up and carried away by the wind like a dancing cloud.

  He laid me down where I could hear the sea in my ear—“like a pink seashell,” Robert whispered as his warm lips grazed and nibbled the lobe—and he made love to me, matching me smile for smile, laugh for laugh, as I squealed in surprised delight at the feel of the cool surf caressing my naked skin, and the mad, wanton feel of making love on a beach wearing nothing but my black wool stockings and brown leather riding boots. I laughed when I lifted my legs to wrap tightly around him and heard the golden buckles on my boots jingle as if they were also laughing from the wild and wanton thrill of it all. I loved this carefree, wild, raw, mad feeling of love and lust mingling on the sandy shore, the warmth of our passionately coupling bodies and the cold kiss of the sea, and the freedom to forget everything and just be us—Robert and Amy, a man and a woman, husband and wife, in love.

  Afterward, as we lay entwined in the wet sand, being caressed by the cold waves and salty breeze, with my wet hair clinging to us like golden seaweed, Robert told me that the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite, had been born from the surf, and, perhaps, he said, gently kissing my lips, our child would be too, born of the love we had just made, clinging together in the cold, salty surf.

  Those were such happy days, perhaps the happiest days of our marriage and my life. I remember us walking hand-in-hand upon the beach, the wind whipping and tugging my hair and skirts in such a frenzy that I feared I would be ripped bald and bare-skinned by those invisible grasping fingers, but I was so happy the whole time, I never stopped smiling, and I laughed more then than I ever did in my whole life.

  We collected pretty shells to adorn our mantel, and Robert promised he would order a cabinet of glass made to display them in. He even made a sketch of it, with notes alongside describing the pretty gilded woodwork with blue, green, and white enameled waves and pink enameled seashells, and bare-breasted mermaids with “harvest gold hair” just like mine. And someday, he said, we would sit together and tell our children about the shells we had collected. Every year, he promised, we would go back to Hemsby for another seaside honeymoon and collect more shells to put inside our cabinet. Oh, how I dreamed of those days to come, when we would sit with our children, the babies on our laps and the older ones clustered around us, and see their eager little hands carefully cradling the shells, their eyes bright and open wide with wonderment at the beauty of God’s gifts from the sea that would always serve as a reminder of the strange little creatures that had once made their home inside them.

  We pretended we were castaways, stranded on a deserted island, inhabited only by the two of us, and we swam and ran naked, wild and free, like savages, up and down the beach, and fell down and coupled where we pleased. And at night we cooked our meals of fish and oysters over a fire Robert built with driftwood while we huddled together, letting the fire and each other’s nakedness warm us against the deliciously cool sea air. He found a pearl in one of the oysters he gathered—a big, funny-shaped, silvery gray and white thing, like a thumb with a swollen tip. “Like a fellow who has cut his thumb with a knife while trying to pry open an oyster shell,” Robert quipped, sucking his own injured thumb. Despite its peculiar shape, I loved it, and Robert would later have it cunningly set so I could wear it either as a pendant or a ring.

  And every day, before we left the beach and made our way up the winding path back to the castle, meandering, watching the stars come out, first we stood on the golden sand, Robert behind me, his arms about me, and watched the sun set, like a ball of fire sinking slowly into the sea.

  Robert carved horses and mermaids out of driftwood, and even a baby and a cradle for it, and we argued playfully about whether the driftwood baby was a boy or a girl until Robert carved another with a prominent but petite phallus that made us both roll in the sand and howl with laughter until my husband silenced me by offering me his own member to suckle like a greedy infant, kneeling there stark naked in the sand with my hair whipping wild about me, tugged by the wind as if it too would be my lover and sought to woo me away from Robert, but he was everything I ever dreamed of or wanted, and the only one for me.

  One day when the tide left a special gift for us, a flat pebble, nigh heart-shaped and the deep brown red of dried blood, worn smooth by the sea’s caresses, he carved our names, encircled by a heart and bound by a lovers’ knot, upon it and swore that we would keep it always. We would use it as a paperweight, he decided, and keep it on our desk, and whenever one of us sat down to write letters or with the accounts ledger we would always have this memento right there to make us smile at the blissful memories it conjured of the two of us frolicking and loving on the beach at Hemsby.

  And once, to my delight, using a stick he found lying on the beach, Robert fought a duel with an irate blue green crab that did an angry dance, clacking its claws in the air like a Spanish dancer’s castanets. I laughed until tears rolled down my face and my sides ached as I clung to my beloved’s arm, the two of us leaping back as one as the crab advanced, snapping its pincers at our bare toes. Robert wanted to cook and eat it, but I implored him, “No, let it live,” and Robert kissed me and gave in. Back then, he still loved his “tenderhearted buttercup bride who pleads for the lives of geese and crabs.”

  8

  Amy Robsart Dudley

  Cumnor Place, Berkshire, near Oxford

  Sunday, September 8, 1560

  I have no illusions now that, if I were to do the same today, I wouldn’t end up alone, crying in the bedroom all night, and the crab would be flung into a pot of boiling water, then onto Robert’s plate. He would have no compassion, no ten
derness, no mercy for either of us.

  It seems a whole lifetime ago now, as if I am a withered and ancient crone looking back on the fond days of her girlhood, not a mere ten years. It breaks my heart all over again to look back over the years and see it all gone so wrong, all the honey sweetness of our love turned to vile and sour vinegar, and so soon; I often marvel at how little a time our love—the time when we were both in love—lasted.

  Hemsby seems little more than a dream now, a fairy tale, a magical time like King Arthur’s Camelot; all that is left of it now are memories and the ornamental box the deed was gifted to us in. All the pretty shells were packed away in a box; I’ve moved so often since, I don’t know where they are now—like our love, they got lost along the way. As for the castle itself, Robert sold it, to pay off his gambling debts, or buy gifts for Elizabeth, or help pay her expenses when she was in disfavor, or perhaps to pay his tailor when he declared he would not make another garment for Robert until the bill was settled, or buy yet more horses; the money came and went so fast, it was there and gone again, like a flash of silver white lightning, vivid and bright against the night sky. My mind was never quick enough to keep up with it and follow where it went. And that was the way Robert liked it; he preferred that on this subject my mind should always remain a darkened muddle, a dingy mud puddle rather than a crystal clear spring. “You have your pretties and a roof over your head, my angel,” he would say, kissing my cheek. “Best to leave it at that; I have men in my pay to balance the books and dole out the coins. No need for you to spend your days squinting and wrinkling your pretty brow over the ledgers when you could be embroidering roses on the hems of your petticoats instead. And you know how much I like that, knowing that I am the only man to see them, and these rosy buds,” he would add, then bend his head to nuzzle and kiss my nipples and fly all facts and figures right out of my head on passion’s wings.