“I don’t want to be near London,” she insisted stubbornly. “Father always said that nothing came from London but trouble…”

“Your father loved Norfolk, and he was a great man in his own country,” Robert said, controlling his own irritation with an effort. “But we are not your father. I am not your father, Amy, my love. Norfolk is too small for me. I do not love it as your father did. I want you to find us a bigger house, somewhere more central, near Oxford. Yes? There is more to England than Norfolk you know, my dearest.”

He saw she was soothed by the endearments, and in her quietness he could broach the rest that he had to tell her. “But this is not what I wanted to tell you. I am to be honored by the queen.”

“An honor? Oh! She will give you a seat on the Privy Council?”

“Well, there are other honors,” he said, concealing his frustration that he still had no political power.

“She would never make you an earl!” she exclaimed.

“No, not that!” he corrected. “That would be ridiculous.”

“I don’t see why,” she said at once. “I don’t see why being an earl would be ridiculous. Everyone says that you are her favorite.”

He checked, wondering exactly what scandal might have come to her ears. “I’m not her favorite,” he said. “Her favorite is Sir William Cecil for counsel and Catherine Knollys for company. I assure you, my sister and I are only two of very many among her court.”

“But she made you Master of her Horse,” Amy objected reasonably. “You cannot expect me to believe that she does not like you above all others. You always said that she liked you when you were children together.”

“She likes her horses to be well managed,” he said hastily. “And of course she likes me, we are old friends, but that’s not what I meant …I…”

“She must like you a great deal,” she pursued. “Everyone says that she goes out with you every day.” She took care not to let a jealous note into her voice. “Someone even told me that she neglects her royal business for riding.”

“I take her riding, yes …but it is my work, not my preference. There is nothing between us, no especial warmth.”

“I should hope not,” she said sharply. “She had better remember that you are a married man. Not that such a fact has restrained her in the past. Everyone says that she…”

“Oh, for saints’ sake, stop!”

She gave a little gasp. “You may not like it, Robert, but it is no more than everyone says about her.”

He took a breath. “I beg your pardon, I did not mean to raise my voice.”

“It is not very pleasant for me, knowing that you are her favorite and that she has no good reputation for being chaste.” Amy finished her complaint in a breathless rush. “It is not very pleasant for me, knowing that your names are linked.”

He had to take a long deep breath. “Amy, this is ridiculous. I have told you I am not a particular favorite. I ride with her because I am her Master of Horse. I am a favored man at court because of my abilities, thank God for them, and because of my family. We should both be glad that she favors me as she should. As to her reputation, I am surprised you would lower yourself to gossip, Amy. I am indeed. She is your anointed queen. It is not for you to pass comment.”

She bit her lip. “Everyone knows what she’s like,” she said stubbornly. “And it is not very nice for me when your name is linked with hers.”

“I do not wish my wife to gossip,” he said flatly.

“I only repeated what everyone—”

“Everyone is wrong,” he said. “It is almost certain that she will marry the Earl of Arran and secure his claim to the Scottish throne. I tell you this in the deepest secrecy, Amy. So that you know that there is nothing between her and me.”

“Do you swear?”

Robert sighed as if he were weary, to make his lie more persuasive. “Of course, I swear there is nothing.”

“I trust you,” she said. “Of course I do. But I cannot trust her. Everyone knows that she—”

“Amy!” He raised his voice even louder, and she fell silent at last. Her sliding glance at the door told him that she was afraid her cousin would have heard his angry tone.

“Oh, for God’s sake. It doesn’t matter if anyone heard.”

“What will people think…”

“It doesn’t matter what they think,” he said with the simple arrogance of a Dudley.

“It does.”

“Not to me,” he said grandly.

“To me, it does.”

He bit his lip on his argument. “Well, it should not,” he said, trying to keep his temper with her. “You are Lady Dudley, and the opinion of some London merchant and his wife should be nothing to you.”

“My own mother’s cousin…” He could just hear a few words of her whispered defiance. “Our hosts. And always very civil to you.”

“Amy… please,” he said.

“I have to live with them, after all,” she said with a childish stubbornness. “It’s not as if you will be here next week…”

He rose to his feet and saw her flinch.

“Wife, I am sorry,” he said. “I have gone all wrong about this.”

At the first hint of retraction she was quick to meet him. Her head came up, a little smile on her face. “Oh, are you unwell?”

“No! I…”

“Are you overtired?”

“No!”

“Shall I get you a hot possett?” Already she was on her feet and wanting to serve him. He caught her hand and had to make himself hold her gently, and not shake her in his anger.

“Amy, please be still and let me talk to you. I have been trying to tell you one small thing since we came up, and you don’t let me speak.”

“How ever could I stop you?”

He answered her with silence, until obediently, she sank to her stool and waited.

“The queen is to honor me by awarding me the Order of the Garter. I am to have it with three other noblemen and there is to be a great celebration. I am honored indeed.”

She would have interrupted with congratulations but he pressed on to the more difficult topic. “And she is to give me land, and a house.”

“A house?”

“The Dairy House at Kew,” he said.

“A London house for us?” she asked.

He could imagine Elizabeth’s response if he tried to install a wife in the pretty little bachelor’s nest in the garden of the royal palace.

“No, no. It’s just a little place for me. But my idea was that you could stay with the Hydes and find a house for us? A house that we could make our own? A bigger house than Flitcham Hall, a grander place altogether? Somewhere near them in Oxfordshire.”

“Yes, but who will run your house at Kew?”

He dismissed it. “It is little more than a few rooms. Bowes will find me servants; it is nothing.”

“Why does she not want you to live at the palace anymore?”

“It’s just a gift,” he said. “I may not even use it.”

“So why give it to you?”

Robert tried to laugh it off. “It’s just a sign of her favor,” he said. “And my rooms in the palace are not of the best.” Already, he knew, the gossips were speculating that the queen had given him a place where the two of them could go to be alone together, hidden from the eyes of the court. He had to ensure that Amy would dismiss such rumors if they ever came to her ears. “In truth, I think Cecil wanted it, and she is teasing him by giving it to me.”

She looked disapproving. “And would Cecil have lived there with his wife?”

He was pleased to be on safe ground. “Cecil has not seen his wife since the queen’s accession,” he said. “She is overseeing the building of his new house, Burghley. He is in the same strait as I. He wants to get home but he is kept too busy. And I want you to be like his wife; I want you to build a house for us, that I can come to in summer. Will you do it for me? Will you find us a really lovely house or site, and make a home for us, a proper home at last?”

Her face lightened as he knew it would. “Oh, I would love to,” she said. “And we would live there and be together all the time?”

Gently he took both her hands. “I would have to be at court for much of the time,” he said. “As you know. But I would come home to you, as often as I could, and you would like to have a proper home of your own, wouldn’t you?”

“You would come home to me often?” she stipulated.

“My work is at court,” he pointed out. “But I never forget that I am married and that you are my wife. Of course I will come home to you.”

“Then yes,” Amy said. “Oh, my lord. I would like it so much.”

He drew her toward him and felt her warmth through the thin linen gown.

“But you will take care, won’t you?”

“Take care?” He was cautious. “Of what?”

“Of her trying…” She chose her words carefully so as not to irritate him. “Of her trying to draw you in.”

“She is the queen,” Robert said gently. “It flatters her vanity to be surrounded by men. I am a courtier; it is my work to be drawn in by her. It means nothing.”

“But if she favors you so much, you will make enemies.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I just know that anyone who is favored by the king or the queen makes enemies. I just want you to take care.”

He nodded, relieved that she had nothing more to go on. “You’re right, I have my enemies, but I know who they are and what they threaten. They envy me but they are powerless against me while I have her favor. But you are right to warn me, wife. And I thank you for your wise counsel.”


That night Robert Dudley and his wife slept in the same bed in some accord. He bedded her as gently and as warmly as he could, and Amy, desperate for his touch, accepted the false coin of his kindness as love. She had waited so long for his kiss, for the gentle press of his body against hers, that she whimpered and cried with joy within the first few minutes, and he, falling easily into the well-known rhythm of their lovemaking, with her familiar body surprising him with pleasure, found her easy to please and was glad of that, if for nothing more. He was used to whores, and the ladies of the court, and it was a rare pleasure for him to bed a woman whom he cared for; it was strange for him to hold back out of consideration. As he felt the sweet rush of Amy’s response, his mind wandered to what it would be like to have Elizabeth cling to him, as Amy was clinging now—and the fantasy was so powerful that his lust came like a storm and left him gasping with the thought of a white throat flung back, dark eyelashes fluttering with lust, and a mass of tumbled bronze hair.

Amy fell asleep at once, her head resting on his shoulder, and he leaned up on his elbow to look at her face in the moonlight which came, all pale and watery, through the glass of the leaded window pane. It gave her skin an odd, greenish pallor, like that of a drowned woman, and her hair spread out on the pillow was like that of a woman rocking on the deep water of a river and sinking down.

He looked at her with irritated compassion: this wife, whose happiness was so solely dependent upon him, whose desire revolved around him, who was lost without him and infuriating with him, the wife who could never now satisfy him. He knew too that, although she would deny it to her very death, in truth, he could never make her truly happy. They were two such different people, with such different lives, he could not see how they could ever now be joined as one.

He sighed and leaned back, his dark head resting on the crook of his arm. He thought of his father’s warning against marrying a pretty face for love, and his mother saying sourly to him that little Amy Robsart was as much use to an ambitious man as a primrose in his buttonhole. He had wanted then to show his parents that he was not a son like Guilford, who would marry a girl who hated him, at his father’s command. He had wanted to choose his own wife, and Amy had been so young and so sweet and so willing to agree to anything he proposed. He had thought then that she could learn to be a courtier’s wife, he had thought she could be an ally to him, a source of power and information—as his mother was to his father. He had thought that she could be a loyal and effective partner in the rise of his family to greatness. He did not realize that she would always be the contented daughter of Sir John Robsart, a big man in a small country, rather than an ambitious wife to Robert Dudley, a man who was finding greatness so unreliable, and so hard to win.


Robert woke early and felt the old familiar rush of irritation that the woman beside him in bed was Amy, and not some London whore whom he could dismiss before she had the temerity to speak. Instead, his wife stirred as he stirred, as if even in sleep every sense had been on the watch for him. She opened her eyes almost as soon as he did, and as soon as she saw him she smiled that familiar, vacuous smile, and said, as she always said, “Good morning, my lord. God be with you. Are you well?”