Читать книгу A Court Affair - Emily Purdy - Страница 9

Cumnor Place, Berkshire, near Oxford Sunday, September 8, 1560

“What is it, love?” Pirto, her face all concern, asks, tugging gently at my sleeve as she kneels beside me. “You look so sad! Is it the pain again?”

“I’m all right, Pirto,” I sigh with a wan, halfhearted little smile, “but I shall not go to the fair today. No, no”—I stop the protests forming on her lips—“you and the others go, and have a good time today. I insist, I will hear no argument. Take my purse, and bring me back some cakes and cider and hair ribbons—a whole rainbow of hair ribbons. Spend whatever you like, and tell me all about it when you come back tonight. Do this for me as you love me, Pirto. I have a sudden craving for solitude. I can’t really explain it, but I want to be all by myself in a quiet house, where I can truly hear myself think and listen to what my mind is saying. Please!” I take both her hands in mine. “There is so little anyone can do for me now, but you can do this.”

“My Lady, I like not to leave you alone …” Pirto frowns, and the lines on her face seem to bite a little deeper.

“It is just for one day, Pirto, one peaceful day, and I shall be fine,” I promise her. “Please, do this one thing for me! And tell the others to go—make them go if you must—but just give me this one quiet Sunday all to myself.”

Pirto sighs and gives in, as I know she will. “Very well, My Lady!” Then, with a creak of her aged knees, she stands and begins bustling about, sending down to the kitchen for a platter of food, covered so that the sight and smell of it will not sicken me, just to be there in the event my appetite should awake and stir its sluggish self, and bringing medicines, water, wine, a basin, and ginger suckets to combat the nausea, and putting them all on the table beside my chair so that I will have anything I might need within ready reach. And also, at my request, she brings the pretty red and gold enamelled comfit box filled with sweet and sour cherry suckets Tommy Blount brought me last time he rode out from London. Though I cannot bring myself to eat them—my stomach raises a sword of threatening protest each time I think to try one—I love looking at them, the candied cherries glowing in neat rows like a jeweller’s tray of round, perfect cabochon rubies, waiting for me to make a selection.

Voices raised in argument outside my door suddenly penetrate my reverie, and, even though Pirto hastens out to try to quiet them, I lever myself up and follow her out into the Long Gallery, where watery sun pours in through the gabled windows to pool upon the cold stone floor, trying vainly to warm it, like an ardent lover wooing an icy maid.

“But what nonsense is this?” Mrs Oddingsells demands, fluttering the note I had sent late the night before to be given to her upon arising. Her bosom heaves in such a mighty and zealous show of hypocritical outrage that I fear her breasts will burst like two cannonballs from her too-tightly-laced mulberry silk bodice, and I step back lest I suffer a blackened eye. “Sunday is the Lord’s Day, Lady Dudley, and all God-fearing people should be at home and at their prayers and reading their Bibles, not gallivanting at the fair! And certainly it is no day for gentlefolk like us to mingle with the sort of low, common people who are likely to frequent a fair upon a Sunday; no doubt they will be very loud and vulgar and given to drunken and lewd disport and excess!” She wrinkles her nose as if the very thought of such folk conjures up a stink as powerful as a cart heaped high with rotten eggs.

Her false façade of morality makes me so mad, I want to tell her that if she is so worried about offending the Lord, she shouldn’t be wearing her bodices cut so low, but I’m too tired, and it’s more trouble than it’s worth to stand there bickering like hens who all want the only cock in the henhouse, so I let it go.

“Humph!” Mrs Forster sniffs, and she gives a smart tug to her new goose-turd green and yellow bodice and tucks a stray wisp of hair back beneath her lace-bordered white linen cap. “Put on airs and play pious as you will, Lizzy Oddingsells, but I have been going to country fairs all my life, many upon a Sunday, and enjoyed them every one, and my blood is just as good as yours is, if not better, and you’ll burn in Hell just the same whether you go to the fair or stay home with a whole stack of Bibles—for being my husband’s whore!” And with those words and a flounce of her green and yellow skirts, she’s off with her nose in the air to gather her children and prepare them for a day at the fair, determined to enjoy herself all the more to spite Mrs Oddingsells, and I know that for many days to come she will bubble like a pot boiling over every chance she gets about what a fine time she had at the fair while some falsely pious hypocrites with jumped-up notions about themselves stayed at home.

“Mrs Oddingsells is right. Sunday is the Lord’s Day”—like a judge, the grey-haired and grey-clad Mrs Owen solemnly weighs in, gravely intoning the words as if each one were as heavy as a granite boulder—“and a day meant for contemplation and prayer. After church I shall return to my chamber and spend the day quietly with my Bible.”

“But you must go!” I insist, turning first to one and then to the other, fighting the urge to fall on my knees and actually beg them. Mrs Owen, I could bear—I know she would not bother me—but I do not want Mrs Oddingsells about. I want peace and quiet and privacy, not prying eyes and forced companionship when I would have none. And I know that if she stays home, forced to make do with her own company, Mrs Oddingsells will soon be so bored that she will gladly suffer any company, even mine; that woman would sit down and drink a tankard with Satan himself if it would save her from being alone half an hour. “I promise, you will have a good time, and there is no harm in it! I have been to many a fair on Sunday, and my soul has suffered no harm from it! And it is not nearly so rough and rowdy as you imagine; the common folk are jolly and good, and most are well-behaved.”

Mrs Owen turns and sweeps her glacial grey eyes over me in a glance so cold, it makes me shiver. Her voice drips with disdain when she begins to speak to me. “You are mortally ill and abandoned by your husband, Lady Dudley, a man who leaves you alone to die of an incurable and agonisingly painful disease while he goes to court to dance and fornicate with the Queen. And, when last I looked, my fine lady, your name was not on the lease to Cumnor, nor is your lord’s. You have no home of your own and are merely a guest in this house, so what makes you think that you can give orders here, or to presume that God is not punishing you with your suffering for some transgression you have committed, mayhap even all those fairs you have attended on Sundays?”

I gasp and reel back as if she had just struck me. If Pirto had not caught me, I surely would have fallen flat. I stare back at her, aghast, with tears of anger and surprise welling in my eyes. My chin quivers, but, as is often the case with me, I feel myself helpless and tongue-tied in the face of such bluntness and cruelty.

Ignoring me, Mrs Oddingsells turns to Mrs Owen and asks if perchance she would like to dine with her.

“Perhaps you would like to dine with me instead, Lizzy?” Mrs Owen counters with an invitation of her own. “My cook is preparing a fine suckling pig stuffed with apples and pears and raisins. The dear woman spoils me so; but it is far too rich and full a repast for a lonely old woman like me.”

“Gladly!” Mrs Oddingsells beams. “Many thanks, Mrs Owen; you are an angel in disguise who has come down to earth to shower blessings upon me!”

“And perhaps later we might have a game of cards?” Mrs Owen suggests as, arm-in-arm, they turn and start to walk away, down the Long Gallery, heading for the stairs. “Though since it is Sunday, all the winnings must go into the church’s poor box, of course.”

“Of course!” Mrs Oddingsells readily agrees. “I would not have it any other way! I would not feel right even touching a deck of cards on a Sunday unless some poor soul were to reap some benefit from it. Win or lose, I know I shall have helped some poor soul in need.”

“You are welcome to join us, of course, Lady Dudley,” Mrs Owen calls back over her shoulder. “If you find solitude weighs too heavily upon you, you will know where to find us. You know, Lizzy, I am not the superstitious sort,” I hear her say in a confiding tone as, arm-in-arm like the oldest, dearest friends, they walk away from me, “but my maid is, and she told me that Tom, the miller’s son, saw the Black Man.” At her words my skin crawls, and I can’t help but think of my husband’s sinister henchman, Sir Richard Verney. “Yes”—Mrs Owen nods as she continues her tale—“the Devil himself, in human form, by moonlight at the crossroads last night, out looking for desperate souls to sign their name in blood inside his big black book; it’s all ignorant country folderol of course, but just the same, I should not like to tempt fate by going to the fair today …”

I pale at her words, and my knees buckle and shake, and Pirto has to put her arm around my waist to steady me.

“I don’t think it was the Devil at all,” I say after Mrs Owen and Mrs Oddingsells have gone, as I sag weakly against her. “I think the Black Man is Death, and He is coming for me, mayhap even in the guise of Sir Richard Verney.”

“Now, now, pet,” Pirto gently chides, “’tis no such thing at all, merely superstitious nonsense, just like Mrs Owen said. But are you sure you would not like me to stay with you? I don’t like to leave you alone when you’re so distressed,” she adds as, rubbing my back, she shepherds me back into my room and helps settle me in my chair again. “I’ve been to enough fairs in my lifetime, so ’tis no sacrifice at all.”

“Dear Pirto.” I reach out and stroke her wizened cheek, so like the faces of the poppets we used to make from dried apples when I was a little girl. “Thank you, but I want you to go; I want you to enjoy this fair for me. I want one more fair before Death closes my eyes forever, but I have not the strength to go myself, so you go, for me, for both of us. Let your eyes drink in every detail, and bring me apple cider and cinnamon cakes, and ribbons for my hair, and sit here with me tonight when you come back and tell me all about it.”

“Aye, that I will, though I hate to leave you even for a day, love,” Pirto says, stroking my hair and pressing a kiss onto my brow before she leaves me.

“I’ll bring you a bit o’ gingerbread back as well, love,” she says brightly, just before she closes the door. “That’ll tempt your appetite—you always did love it so—and the ginger’ll settle your stomach and keep the nausea down.”

I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear the heavy front door close behind them all, followed by the clatter of hooves and wheels in the courtyard. With a deep, shuddering sigh, I let the pretence fall away from me as I lean back in my chair, holding tightly to the arms, digging my fingers into the embroidered flowers, gasping, with tears rolling freely down my face, as a pain, like a lance driven all the way through me, pierces my breast and rings like a shrill, echoing bell up and down my spine and across my ribs, and Death gives my heart a little warning squeeze, toying with me, teasing me, like a braggart showing me what he can do. I wait until it has passed; then slowly, carefully, I raise myself from my chair and go to the shelf where the medicines are kept, all except the ones my husband sends.

A pain shoots along the length of my arm as I reach up for the bottle I want. A sunbeam streaming in through the window catches it as I lift it down, causing the dark liquid to glow like the richest amber, agleam with honey and crimson lights. When he sent his last letter to me, Dr Biancospino also sent this. If I choose to let my illness take its natural course, he wrote, when the end is nigh and the pain at its most excruciating, this will ease me into the arms of Death, and I will think Him merciful then, not cruel to take my life away when I am only eight years past twenty, with my hair still gold instead of silver. I should never have doubted Dr Biancospino; he was, I think, the only one who ever told me the truth laid bare, ugly and naked, not falsely painted to make it look pretty. And what if this bottle does contain one or more of those deadly ingredients described in his book of poisons? It was not given me out of malice, and it was meant to be saved, to be used only to drive pain away from my deathbed; it is not a tonic to sip every day like the lime and orange water Mrs Owen recommended.

Boldly, defiantly, I uncork the bottle and take a sip, grimacing at the bitter, burning taste. It should be mixed with wine, or have sugar added, to make it more palatable and sweet, the pasted paper label says, written in Dr Biancospino’s elegant script, but, yet again, I am deaf to reason and ignore good and sound advice, acting again as if I alone know better. Mayhap I do, and mayhap I don’t. Today I’m too tired to care and quibble about it. Just a sip to ease my pain and prove my trust; what harm can it do? If I fall down dead, it is just the inevitable come sooner rather than later.

I turn to my altar, thinking I would like to pray; it is Sunday after all, and it seems only right that even though I am not in church that I should talk to God just the same. Every day I pray for Him to deliver me from my desperation. I jump and nearly drop the bottle, my heart beats fast, and the familiar pain impales my breast, for there is the grey friar who haunts Cumnor Place, kneeling before my little altar, his head solemnly bowed, hidden deep in the dark shadows of his cowl so that I cannot see his face, his hands clasped tightly, wrapped with a dangling rosary of polished wooden beads and a swaying silver crucifix upon which Jesus Christ hangs in perpetual mute agony, nailed to the cross and crowned with thorns.

Slowly—I am in a defiant mood today—like one warily approaching a dangerous beast, like a wounded lion or slumbering tiger, I go to the phantom friar and carefully ease myself down to kneel beside him. The air about him is icy and pierces through my many layers of clothes, making me feel as if I were wandering naked and lost in a world made entirely out of snow. But I defy the icy blast. I have been afraid of him for far too long. I accept his presence now and no longer scream or try to evade and hide from him.

“Have I drunk Death?” For the first time I speak to him, my voice faint and all aquiver, like lute strings plucked by nervous fingers, as I set the bottle down upon the altar, like an offering. It glows and gleams in the candlelight as if it were lit from within by a fiery ember that, defying all reason, continues to emit a red glow even though, submerged in liquid, it should have gone right out. But the friar gives no answer and goes on with his prayers as if he has not even heard or noticed me kneeling beside him.

“Who were you in life?” I persist, though he continues to ignore me. “What was your name? Did you struggle with the desires of the flesh that bedevil most men? Or did you embrace the cloistered life? Was it something you came to willingly? Did it bring you peace? Were you happy? Or was it a struggle to honour your vows? Did you rebel and fight against yourself your whole life long or meekly accept and resign yourself to your fate? Was your life a success, or a failure like mine? There must be a reason your ghost still walks! Were you walled up alive for some grievous sin? Did you love a nun, or a great lady, or a peasant girl perhaps and plant your seed inside her? Were you caught trying to abscond to France to start a new life with her? Or did you take your own life? The servants tell such wild and lurid stories; I don’t know which, if any, to believe. Did you do something so terrible, so unforgivable, that the gates of Heaven are barred to you, and your spirit is damned to walk the earth forever? Is there no absolution, no atonement, that will bring you rest?”

But the ghostly grey friar is not inclined to divulge his secrets to me, and, intent upon his prayers, he ignores me, but I am used to that.

“The Queen wants my husband, and my husband wants the Queen, and to wear a golden crown and call himself King Robert I of England, and only my life stands between the fulfilment of all their desires,” I confess to him. This is no lurid fancy; this is fact all England knows, and only those who wish to be kind and comfort me lie and say it isn’t so.

Our lives—Elizabeth’s and mine—are a strange reversal of Fate. Usually it is the mistress’s lot to live hidden away in the shadows of a man’s life, while the wife walks proudly in the sun in a place of honour at his side. But Robert’s mistress rules the realm and basks always in the glorious, bright sun of pride and adoration, while I, his wife, languish forgotten and ignored in rustic obscurity, consigned and banished to oblivion, in one country house or another owned by those who wish to ingratiate themselves to Robert and the Queen.

Housing Lord Robert’s ailing and unwanted wife has become a coin to barter for and pay back favours. Sometimes I wonder which one of these “gentlemen” who house me will be the one to betray me, to ensure my death beneath their roof, that this inconvenient guest does not survive their hospitality, and bravely bear the stigma and the scandal and suspicion that will darken their character, and their doorstep, forever after, like Judas for thirty pieces of silver, with the Queen’s profile minted on each coin and doled out from Robert’s coffers. Sir William Hyde? Sir Richard Verney? Sir Anthony Forster? Just lately Robert has written to say that the Hydes have agreed to have me back again. They were so glad, so relieved, to see me go before; I wonder what he has promised them. I’m to leave Cumnor and go back to lodge with them for a spell, then back to Compton Verney, before I return to Cumnor again. Thus has Robert ordered my life. I’m to go back and forth like a shuttlecock between these three houses. Whose doorstep will be stained with my blood? Whose threshold will be forever shadowed by that black, funereal pall? Which one will the Judas be?

If not one of them, there is always Robert’s minion, his poor country cousin, sweet young Tommy Blount, with his freckled face, mass of ginger curls, and shy but ready, endearing smile, always so eager to please and bursting with a young man’s zest for life and tireless, unflagging vigour. He seems to spend all his time on the road as Robert’s courier, galloping hither and yon, back and forth between the court and wherever Robert sends him on one errand or another. He reminds me so much of the boy my husband used to be, only without Robert’s cocksure confidence, elegance, and bold sophistication. But I dare not trust even Tommy, a young man who looks at me with desire obvious in his eyes and words poised on his lips that he dare not say. Time has taught me that a sweet nature can be false or fade, especially when a man bows down to the golden goddess of Ambition. And Tommy, honoured to be favoured by such a great lord, is my husband’s loyal and trusted servant and kinsman, so I dare not trust him; succumbing to that temptation could very well be fatal for me.

How will my husband set the deed down in his accounts ledger, I wonder. What innocuous expense will disguise my death? Will my blood be covered up with fluffy white wool, or will my corpse be hidden in a barrel of apples?

The candlelight catches my betrothal ring, causing the golden oak leaf to glitter, and the amber acorn glows like a dollop of honey flecked with shifting glints of rich red, fiery orange, and shimmering gold, just like the memory of a beautiful sunset we once shared standing under the mighty old oak overlooking Syderstone, imprisoned inside this amber acorn. Sometimes nowadays it feels too heavy for my hand, like my end of the shackles and chains of the wedlock that hold Robert and me together. Sometimes I want to just undo the lock and let the chains fall and set us both free. I’m so tired of it all, the pain and misery and living in fear. Pride goeth before a fall, the Scriptures say; now I want to let that obstinate pride in being Lady Amy Dudley, Lord Robert’s wife, fall from me before I myself fall, pulled down by a weight I can no longer bear. I just want to let go of it all, even though I’m afraid of falling, but I’m also tired of holding on, and tired of being afraid.

“O My Father,” I pray, “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou will.”

What a strange toy my mind has become! Even as I desire death, I long for life! It is as if these two contrary desires are locked in perpetual battle within me. One moment the desire for death gains and holds a sword to the throat of life; then the next the longing for life pushes back, parries the sword, and seems poised to be the victor; but within an instant it all changes, again and again and again, so that I, who used to be so certain, now never know what I really want any more. I am losing my mind; it is becoming a stranger to me! I am so afraid I am going mad!

I rise and leave the phantom friar to his prayers. But first I reach out my hand—though I don’t quite dare to touch him—and feel the icy prickle on my trembling fingertips as they hover just above his diaphanous grey sleeve. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I was wrong to be afraid of you. I have far more cause to fear the living than I do the dead.” Then I cross myself—there is no one here to see, and the old Catholic ways bring me comfort, and I’m not sure which is the right religion any more, may God forgive me. As I rise, I utter a silent prayer that God will grant the ghostly friar absolution for whatever denies him his eternal rest and keeps his soul trapped and earthbound within the clammy walls of Cumnor.

Across the room my husband’s proud and insolent face stares out at me with piercing dark eyes that smoulder with impatience and freeze my soul from within a gilded picture frame ornately carved with acorns and oak leaves and the Dudley coat-of-arms with the bear and ragged staff at each corner, as though once was not enough and it must be pounded into the beholder’s brain that he is looking at an illustrious scion from the House of Dudley.

This is how I know my husband now—from his portraits.

Handsome and haughty, as proud as Lucifer, he strikes a princely pose, like a king-in-waiting. Arrogant and condescending, in his gold-and-pearl-embellished amber brocade doublet, with an oval, diamond-framed enamelled miniature of the Queen hanging from a jewelled chain about his neck, showing the world where his heart lies. But to my eyes that chain is a very short, jewelled leash that tethers him to Her Majesty just like what he has become—her pampered and petted, much favoured lapdog, one who just might turn and bite the hand that feeds him someday or else strangle himself with his own leash.

Remembering what he was like when I first knew and loved him, I cannot help but hate what he has become, and my heart mourns and weeps without cease for that lost love and the soul he has gambled, lost, and damned with his vainglorious ambition. He stands there so proud and lofty with his hands upon his hips, one of them lightly caressing the jewelled hilt of his sword in a subtle warning that he would not hesitate to fight anyone who dared provoke or challenge him. The wild, rumpled black curls have been cropped and tamed beneath a plumed black velvet cap. Gone is the wild, untamable Gypsy; he has donned the vestments of respectability and left a staid and proper gentleman behind in his stead. And gone also is the easy grace I remember; he looks so stiff, so uncomfortable and rigid, as he stands there so erect, head high, shoulders back, his neck encased, like a broken limb, in a high collar that holds it like a splint, his cheeks cushioned by a small white ruff. His eyes and mouth are so hard now, I no longer recognise them. Even his hands, which used to be so gentle and tender with me, seem more likely to strike a blow or strangle than caress me now.

This is a portrait of a vain and cruel, self-consumed man with no regard for anyone else, a far cry from the kind, eager, passionate boy I fell in love with ten years ago. Had the man in this portrait come courting me, I would have shrunk from him; he would have roused only fear and uneasiness in me, not captured my heart and lit a fire inside me that made me feel as if I were melting every time his dark eyes turned my way. If this man had come to Stanfield Hall instead of the charming, winsome boy he used to be, I am sure I would have kept to my room until this insolent and disdainful creature—with the cold, hard, dark eyes that seem to freeze and burn me at the same time, and the forked, Devil-dark beard hanging from his chin—had gone away again, and I would have breathed a deep sigh of relief to see the back and, hopefully, the last of him.

I miss the Robert I fell in love with. Sometimes I dream I rise from my bed and slit the portrait down the middle, and he, the clean-shaven boy with the dark, tousled curls and ready, winning smile comes bounding out to take me in his arms, cover my face with kisses, and sweep me up and carry me out to make love in a bed of buttercups again. But I know if I were to slit the canvas, my dagger would find only the hard stone wall beneath. The Robert I loved so much, and who I thought loved me, is gone forever; instead, within his skin resides a stranger, a cold, imperious, commanding man who shuns and disdains the sweet simplicity of a country buttercup for the regal red and white Tudor rose instead.

I wanted so much for him to love me and be proud of me, but, I know now, I was doomed to failure from the start.

I know I should, but somehow I can’t let go of the dream—I just can’t! My dream came true, I lived a love all girls dream about but rarely find, and then I lost it. I’m not even sure how or when it died; it just slipped away from me. I tried so hard to bring it back, as if I were digging in my heels and pulling with all my might upon its coat tails, but the Robert I loved and the life we led together simply slipped the sleeves and left me holding an empty coat, to spend the rest of my lonely life trying to deny and run away from the truth that they were gone forever, and desperately seeking a way to woo and win them back.

Gazing upon Robert’s portrait only saddens me, so I turn away from it and go and gently ease myself down onto my bed, taking another sip from the medicine bottle before placing it carefully on the table beside me. At times I am of a mind to have Robert’s portrait taken down and moved elsewhere. Sometimes I even yearn for the fleeting, momentary satisfaction of seeing it burned or chopped into kindling. Only the knowledge that the servants would surely gossip, and, when word reached London, as it inevitably would, an angry letter from Robert would soon follow—only that stays my tongue from giving the necessary orders.

I hate the way his eyes seem to follow me, so impatient, hard, and hateful, as if he were wishing that I would hurry up and die. The man in that portrait I do not think would hesitate a moment to send an assassin to hasten me to my grave. That is a man who would freely spend his gold to buy poisons to send to me or persuade a physician to undertake my cure but bring about my death instead. This is a portrait of a man who loves only himself; even the woman whose likeness hangs about his neck is only a means to an end.

Sometimes I wonder if Robert has fooled her too. Does he make her feel like a weak-kneed woman of wax melting under the hot sun of gaze, burning lips, and the ardent, skilful hands that know exactly how and where to touch, the deft fingers that seek out and stroke the most intimate and sensitive places? I was Love’s blind fool; I trusted and believed and gave him my heart, body, and soul, and all the best of me; I married him. Will Elizabeth Tudor do the same? Or does my own bitterness cast a shadow and unjust suspicion on both of them? Is it true love betwixt Robert and the Queen? Am I, after all, just a youthful error, a foolish mistake that with my death will be remedied, undone and erased, to give true love the chance it lost through rash, young, and lusty folly?

Robert has become very much his father’s son. John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Duke of Northumberland, would be proud to see his son standing so near the throne, and the woman who sits upon it head over bum in love with him. It was always his ambition to play kingmaker and become the founder of a great royal dynasty. But with Robert, I thought that, as a fifth son, the hardness had been buffed smooth, the sharp edges rounded and softened, and the ambition that coursed through his veins diluted. I thought happiness was enough for Robert, that he had turned his back on fame and glory and wanted only a simple life with me, breeding horses and filling our nursery with as many children as we could have, and presiding over our flocks, fields, and apple orchards. I thought Robert was different.

I remember the day Robert’s father, the Earl of Warwick as he was then, sought me out …