I said nothing. The word was that Cecil had felt himself abused to the point where he’d tendered his resignation to the Queen. But then Amy Robsart, who had become Amy Dudley, had died and something had snapped like an overwound crossbow.
Cecil went to sit down behind his trestle. The great window’s lower frames were barricaded from outside by the builders’ scaffold, but when he leaned back, tilting his oaken chair on two legs against the sill, at least half the spires of London were, once again, at his elbows, blurred by rain.
‘John, would you happen to know why Mistress Blanche wanted to see you?’
‘Would you?’
‘I might.’
‘However,’ I said, ‘when she – and, presumably the Queen – find out that you physically prevented the meeting taking place, as arranged—’
‘She’ll simply realise that you didn’t receive the letter. I gather it was left with your mother, you being absent at the time.’
How the hell did he know all this?
‘Having gone off on one of your… expeditions in search of the Hidden.’ Cecil leaned forward until the front legs of his chair met the floor. ‘Do you want to know what this visit may have been about, John?’
And what was I supposed to say to that? Cecil half stood to pull off his bulky black robe, revealing a doublet in what was, for him, the somewhat frivolous colour of charcoal. He tossed the robe across the wide trestle in front of him.
‘Now sit down,’ he said.
The people of the Welsh border take a long path to the point. My father loved to explain that this was because, in an area ever riven by conflict between the Welsh and the English, they would need to know precisely where a visitor’s allegiances lay before entrusting him with even the most trivial intelligence.
I’d oft-times marked this approach in the manners of Blanche Parry, who retained her accent, but was inclined to forget that the family of William Cecil – from whose tones all trace of Welshness had long ago been smoothed – had once spelled its name Seisyllt.
‘Did you know Amy Robsart, John?’
‘I wouldn’t say I knew her. She tended not to come very much to town.’
An understatement. The Queen was not exactly approving of wives brought to court, or even to London. Especially Dudley’s wife, obviously. In the absence of a Dudley country mansion, Amy had spent most of her married life as a guest of various friends of her husband. A dismal existence.
‘Met her once,’ I said. ‘On one of her rare visits to Dudley’s house at Kew.’
‘And what thought you of her?’
At last I sat down. Truth was I’d thought Amy quite beautiful. Also intelligent, lively and warm. In my view – was this treason? – as a wife, the Queen would not quite compare. God help me, I’d even caught myself, wishing that circumstances had been such that I might have met her before Dudley.
‘You’re blushing,’ Cecil said.
‘Heat of the fire.’
Cecil laughed.
‘What a waste, eh, John? As I oft-times think about a carnal marriage—’
‘Starts in joy, ends in tears?’
Cecil frowned. I’d gone too far.
‘A perceptive saying of yours oft-times retold,’ I said, in placation.
He made a steeple of his fingers. His own first marriage may even have been a carnal union, but his second one, to the severe Mildred, could only have been founded on a need for reliability and circumspection. Cecil was a man long wed to his career.
‘Do you know when he last saw her alive?’
I did but said nothing, remembering something else I’d noticed at my one meeting with Amy. While she was – of necessity, no doubt – fairly compliant, there was a certain equality in her union with Dudley. She was not nobility, merely the daughter of a country squire, yet seemed in no awe of the son of the Duke of Northumberland. To his credit, he seemed to like that about her.
‘It was over a year ago,’ Cecil said. ‘Over a year before she died.’
‘A long time.’
Too bloody long.
‘Distance,’ Cecil said, ‘can bring about a cooling.’
‘Sometimes.’
I’d never have left Amy for even a week. When I was called to Europe, I’d have taken her with me.
‘Let’s not walk around the houses, John.’ Cecil let his hands fall flat to the trestle. ‘I was ever fond of Robert Dudley, but never deluded about the extent of his ambition. He wants the highest role possible for a man not born to it. His whole life has been a play performed for the Queen. Whose side he’s scarce ever left.’
‘And she wished him away?’
Cecil was silent. Poor Amy’s fate, in these circumstances, saddened me more than I could say. The inquest had been opened three days after her body was found at the foot of a short stairway. And then adjourned sine die. Nobody knew how long before the jury would reach its verdict but when it came it seemed likely to be one of Accidental Death.
Nobody to blame. I pointed out to Cecil that Dudley had gone to great pains not to be seen as having or attempting to have an influence on the jury, calling for men who were unknown to him to serve on it.
‘Unknown? Is that what you think?’
I said nothing. Dudley had sworn to me his wife’s death from a fall had been a bitter shock to him, and I’d very much wanted to believe that. Although he’d said, on an earlier occasion, that she’d shown signs of unhealth and once had told him she might not have long to live, I’d refused to accept the dark stories, dating back some months before her death, that attempts had been made to poison her.
‘Not that it matters.’ Cecil half turned away from me to peer out over the shiny roofs of London. ‘The Queen herself is young, impulsive and will remain’ – Cecil swung round of a sudden to turn his mastiff’s gaze on me – ‘conspicuously besotted with a man now infamed and likely to remain so for the rest of his life.’
‘But if the inquest verdict clears him of blame—’
‘It doesn’t matter what the inquest verdict is. Enough men hated him before this to make even his return to court a slight against all decency. As for the thought of a Queen of England wed to a murderer… how does that play across the capitals of Europe? And if the Queen thinks everyone here will forget, in time, then she’s not as close to the mind of her country as she likes to believe.’
‘I don’t…’ I was shaking my head, ‘I can’t believe that Dudley’s a murderer.’
‘Well, not directly, no.’ Cecil spread his hands. ‘No one’s suggesting he planted his foot in her spine and kicked her down the bloody stairs. But whether he ordered it to be done, in his absence, is another matter entirely. Never be proven, but what’s that worth in Europe? Especially if, after however length of time, the Queen does something blindly foolish. She’s had suitors of her own standing in France, Spain, Sweden… and keeps them at arm’s length. At home, she has the Earl of Arundel waiting with his tongue hanging out…’
‘No hope for him, surely?’
‘I know there’s no hope, you know there’s no hope, but the old bladder peers blearily into the looking glass, sees a face twenty years younger and tells himself it’s only a matter of time before the Queen sees the sense of it.’
I nodded in wry agreement. It was well-enough known that Cecil’s own choice as a husband for the Queen was the Earl of Arran. A resident of France from a Scottish family with no love of Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, the Queen of Scotland, who was also, since her marriage, Queen of France. In terms of a lasting peace in the north, Arran had much in his favour and would be a satisfyingly severe blow to French hopes of putting Mary on the throne of England.