The Last Tudor

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

NOVEMBER 1560

And then we have to wait, and it is delicious timeless pleasure and pain together. Every morning I hope that perhaps today Elizabeth will say that she is going to Hampton Court, or to Windsor for the hunting, or to New Hall or to Beaulieu or anywhere—I don’t care where her ridiculous fancy takes her if she would just go! But day after day Ned is on one side of the presence chamber and I am the other, and we have to nod politely as if we were friends, and we dare not speak to each other until the evening dancing throws us together, and now, though we have so much more desire, we have more fear, and we dare not go to the corners of the room and whisper.

It is an exquisite joy to see him, to snatch a moment with him. It is agonizingly wonderful to wake in the morning and see that it is a good day for hunting: sharp and bright and cold, and surely Elizabeth will go today? And then, when she says nothing, it is a delightful torment to dance with Ned, and steal away with him for a kiss and dare to do no more. It is a passionate courtship and now I know the joy that his touch brings to me. It is lust deferred, it is love delayed, there is nothing in the world more delightful than being in his arms, unless it is knowing that I will be in his arms later . . . but not now.

William Cecil, the queen’s advisor, comes over to sit beside me before dinner one evening, as we are waiting in the presence chamber for the queen to finish the lengthy process of dressing in her inner rooms.

“You are in your finest beauty,” he tells me. “We shall have the Spanish proposing marriage to you again. I have never seen you look so well.”

I look down. I am no fool. I know that he is my friend, but I also know that he is first for his faith and then for England, and then for the queen, and everyone else comes after that. I have seen him triumph over the French in Edinburgh, and I have seen him triumph over Robert Dudley at court, and I swear I shall never make the mistake of underrating William Cecil. Only God and William Cecil know what he will do to keep a Protestant queen on the throne of England.

“Ah, my lord, you know I have no wish to go to Spain or anywhere,” I say. “My heart is in England.”

“Is it safe in your keeping, though?” he teases me gently, as a favored uncle will joke with a pretty niece.

“Certainly I would never throw it away,” I reply.

“Well, he’s a handsome young man and you’re very well suited,” he says with a knowing smile.

I stifle a gasp. The quiet advisor, who apparently goes around the court ignoring the foolish young people, thinking of nothing but statecraft, has spotted what no one else but Janey and Mary know.

“I may be old but I’m not quite blind,” he says gently. “But as her heir, you must have the queen’s permission to marry, remember.”

Too late for that! I think gleefully. “I know,” I say obediently. “Will you speak up for me, Sir William? Should I ask her now?”

“All in good time,” he says, as if he has forgotten the urgency of young desire. “Now, at last, she understands that she has to marry for the good of the country, now at last she sees that it has to be a marriage and an alliance—not a private matter. When she is betrothed, she will be more tolerant of marriage for you, and for the other ladies of her court.”

“It is hard for us all to wait until she is ready, when she is so slow,” I remark.

He gives me a discreet smile. “It is hard for us all to serve a queen who is slow to do her duty,” he says. “But she will do her duty and marry the right man, and you will do yours.”

“She can never marry Robert Dudley now.”

I can tell nothing of what he is thinking by the gentle smile on his face. “Indeed no,” he says almost regretfully. “And now, thanks be to God, he knows it as well as all the rest of us. And so she will marry a prince of Spain or France or even Sweden or Germany, and you, and I, and all of England will sleep better at nights.”

“Is the court going hunting?” I ask, thinking of the nights.

“Oh, yes, to Eltham Palace, tomorrow.”

“I think I may ask to be excused,” I say. “I have toothache.”

He nods. For all that he sees so much, he has forgotten that a young woman does not give up a day out for a toothache. He is too old to see that I am aching not with my tooth but with lust.

“I shall tell Her Majesty,” he says kindly. “Keep out of cold drafts.”