Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her (66 page)

answer for the loyalty of every woman in her service, every page and

scullion with access to her comfit box?”

“No.” Cecil shook his head grimly. “It was always a hopeless task

and I warned her—God knows, I warned her. But she’s so careless and

reckless—sometimes I swear she believes she’s immortal.”

“She’ll need to be immortal to come through this.” Leicester gave him

a hard, searching look. “Are you squeamish?”

Cecil swallowed and spat out a lie.

“No more so than the next man, my lord.”

“Good.” Leicester glanced darkly towards the bed. “There’s only one

path open to her now, and it takes its course straight through the centre

of Hell. I’ve spoken to the doctors. And, believe me, what they intend

to do I wouldn’t see done to my worst enemy let alone to my—” He

broke off short. “She asked for you,” he continued brusquely. “So take

that look off your face before we go to her. She doesn’t need our personal

fears at the moment.”

Cecil nodded mutely and side by side, suddenly drawn close together

in a brotherhood of mutual terror which suspended all their many differ-

ences, they approached the state bed. It was hung with cloth of silver and

its four posts were topped with bunches of ostrich feathers, all spangled

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with gold, a magnificence in stark contrast to the crude treatment which

took place within its hangings. Emetics and purges were administered in

steady succession, accompanied by a savage letting of blood; but as the

hours dragged slowly into days and still she tossed and turned, shivering

with a raging fever and violent pains which nothing alleviated, they began

to fear that their frantic efforts to rid her body of its toxin had failed. By

the third evening she was so weak that Leicester sat on the edge of the

bed, waiting for her to die in his arms, while the doctors squabbled and

contradicted each other in a fierce huddle by the fireside. A little ring of

black-robed professionals, pecking at each other’s opinions like a flock of

frightened crows—he watched them with savage contempt.

“Useless bastards!” he muttered. “Not one of them fit to doctor

cattle—what keeps them clacking all this time?”

“Arrangements—for the post-mortem—perhaps,” suggested the

Queen wearily. “I would—I had the arranging—of
theirs
.”

“I know. All that suffering, my poor love
—
I should never have

allowed it.” He stroked the wet tendrils of hair back off her forehead, and

held her close, remembering with hot anguish all the pointless misery she

had endured without a single tantrum or complaint.

“I’ll put my dagger through the next quack who lays a hand on you—I

swear it!”

Elizabeth turned her head with difficulty to look up at him and slowly

traced the wet tracks on his cheeks with one trembling finger. After a

moment she gave him a tired little smile which tore at his heart.

“Robin?”

“It’s nothing.” Hastily he brushed his cheek against her hair.

“Something in my eye, that’s all.”

“
Both of them
?”

He bent his head and kissed her for that, not caring who should see

it. The doctors came back to stare down at her hopelessly, but beneath

Leicester’s steely gaze they dared suggest nothing more, and retired once

again to the hearth. She was beyond their aid now; it was in God’s hands.

Leicester never knew how he managed to live through the rest of

that night. His hand was numb from the convulsive grip of her fingers,

his arm aching as though it was broken, but he kept his lips closed on his

agony. It seemed to him that her grip on his hand was her last link with

this world and he had intense, almost superstitious, terror of her letting

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go. Life and vitality seemed to be draining slowly out of him through the

touch of their fingertips, a physical fusion more intimate, more complete

than copulation could ever be. The hours meant nothing to him. He

was impervious to thirst, hunger, exhaustion, even to the calls of nature,

impervious to everything and everyone except the intensely personal

battle he felt himself to be fighting with the Queen’s restive soul.

Around the great room, her attendants drowsed from exhaustion, but

Burghley still hovered on the other side of the bed, grey with fatigue,

and at last the Queen turned her head from the pillow of Leicester’s arm,

searching for him with sudden urgency.

“Cecil—”

He came forward hesitantly, as though aware that he intruded on

something personal, vital—sacred. She held out her right hand to him

and as he took it the three of them were once more linked in their unholy

triangle. Cecil, too, experienced a curious sensation, as though the last

vestige of strength had been sucked out of him. He swayed a little when

she released his hand and had to steady himself against the bedpost.

Her pain-crazed eyes were smiling at him.

“You look ready to drop,” she said gently. “Go and sit down some-

where. You must not steal a march on me—by dying of exhaustion first.”

He had to bend over the bed to catch her fading voice. “Robin will call

you—if I should require—the last rites.”

Walking away from the bed in slow disbelief, it came to him suddenly

that this might be the last time his narrow religious sensibilities were

outraged by her irrepressible irreverence. He was shocked, but not

surprised; even at her coronation in the most solemn sanctified moment

of the Annointing, she had scandalised her women by complaining that

“the holy oil was nasty grease and stank,” as though the moment which

had been the supreme culmination of a lifetime’s desire meant nothing to

her. She was teasing God, as she had once teased her dread father, careless

of the consequences, and Cecil found he had begun to pray with feverish

intensity, not for her life—he no longer hoped for that—but for her

salvation. He could not be comfortable with the thought of her burning

for all eternity; and he honestly did not see how it could be avoided.

Shortly after dawn he jerked awake in a panic to find Leicester bending

over him, and he suffered himself to be led out of the room, half crip-

pled with stiffness, leaning heavily on the Earl’s arm. The Queen was

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sleeping, colourless as a corpse against the high pillows, and the doctors

were exchanging muted congratulations with each other. He received the

news in silence and went with Leicester without argument or rancour; he

knew it was a miracle.

The ante-room was as cold and cheerless when they entered it as only

a room in a chill March dawn can be, and from the Privy Chamber

beyond came the muted murmur of anxious councillors and courtiers,

waiting for news.

Leicester flung himself wearily upon a wooden couch and reached

for a flagon of wine. Burghley paused to lean on his staff and look at

him curiously.

“Were we not commanded to retire, my lord?”

Leciester drained the goblet and filled it again without looking up.

“Commanded or not I stay until I know for certain she’s out of

danger.” He filled another goblet and held it out to Burghley. “Here—

since it looks as though you and I may be keeping our heads after all, you

ought to join me. We’ll drink a toast to the Queen, the most remarkable

woman who ever lived. My God, I thought we’d lost her this time.”

The goblets fell to the floor, spilling wine everywhere, as he suddenly

buried his face in his hands and his great shoulders shook with the racking

sobs that were welling up inside him.

Burghley watched him weep and was aware of pity and shame. Oh,

he had seen so much these past three nights, things which had made

him learn a new respect for the man he had always so contemptuously

dismissed as a self-seeking adventurer. For Leicester loved the Queen;

Burghley, having witnessed the man’s tireless tenderness, now had no

doubt of that.

And that knowledge altered everything. Over the years a steady

conviction had grown that his early fears had been groundless. There

would have been room for them both—had she not shown it over and

over again? But he could still look back on the disposal of Amy with a

clear conscience and reassure himself that his act had saved the Queen

from the clutch of a greedy, selfish predator.

Now it was no longer possible to deceive himself and he suddenly saw

how his perfectly executed device had backfired upon him. They were all

of them balanced precariously on the tightrope of Elizabeth’s life and he,

the brilliant, the dedicated chief minister, was to blame for it!

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He went stiffly to retrieve the goblets and refill them with wine; then

he eased himself on to the couch and offered one of them to Leicester.

“To the Queen’s health,” he said softly, “and to our own increasing

understanding. I pray it may serve Her Majesty better than our enmity.”

Leicester lifted his head and through a blurred haze saw Burghley’s

gnarled hand extended towards him. After a moment’s puzzled hesitation

he met it with his own.

“All the Queen’s men in the last resort, eh?” he said shakily.

Burghley shrugged his rounded shoulders.

“Our service is our vocation and vocation has its own reward, my

lord. The time draws near when men of loyalty and the true religion can

no longer afford private quarrels.”

Leicester inclined his head in brooding silence. He too sensed the

gathering of clouds above England and feared that even Elizabeth could

not trade on the devil’s luck for ever. And if she was in danger, he was

ready to stand by anyone, even Burghley, in her defence. It marked the

end of the tense, armed truce between the two of them, for they were

both bound body and soul to the Queen and now each recognised the true

value of the other in her eyes. Within the security of their eternal triangle

they must muster their forces against attack from without, defending the

apex, the mutual pivot of their existence.

Cecil laid down his goblet at last and stared at the door of the silent

bedchamber.

“She’s cheated death twice—a third time would be too much to ask.

There’s a limit to God’s favour.”

“And the Devil’s!” muttered Leicester darkly.

Cecil ignored him. “You realise, of course, that it is now more urgent

than ever that Norfolk should meet his fate. I simply cannot understand

it. She was swift and terrible enough after the northern rising, why in

God’s name does she hesitate over Norfolk?”

“Perhaps, my friend, because he must die by the axe.”

Cecil looked round at him in surprise.

“Now what difference could that make? She’s not squeamish.”

Leicester smiled faintly beneath three days’ growth of thick black

beard and leaned forward to fill his own goblet again.

“You really don’t know her very well, do you, even after all this time?

Is it mere coincidence that no head has fallen in England in fourteen

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years? I lost my father, my brother, and my grandfather to the axe, but

perhaps you who have lost no one in such a manner cannot be expected

to understand. I have sat with her at night more than once, calming her

nightmares when no one else can soothe her, because I know her, you

see, better than anyone else alive. And I can tell you now that if you want

Norfolk’s head, it will take Parliament to force her hand.”

“And the Queen of Scots?”

“Forget the Queen of Scots,” advised Leicester seriously. “She has

friends in high places—the highest of all barring one, did the stupid bitch

only know it. You’ll never get Elizabeth’s signature on her warrant.”

Burghley shook his head. “It has to come to that sooner or later,

Leicester. Nothing in this world will induce Mary Stuart to live quietly

in an English prison. I tell you this much, the poor fool will never cease

until she loses her head.”

He got unsteadily to his feet, looking old and harassed in the cruel

daylight.

“Get to bed, man,” said Leicester, not unkindly. “The Queen won’t

be best pleased if she has to bury you after all this.”

A wan smile touched Burghley’s lips.

“There was a time when I thought my nerve was quite unshakeable,

Leicester, but God knows I’ve never seen anyone sail so close to the wind

as Her Majesty, without sinking.”

“Witches never drown,” remarked Leicester thoughtfully. “Surely

you know that.”

A glimmer of the old hostility suddenly narrowed Burghley’s steely

blue eyes. “I don’t know what you mean by that, my lord, I’m sure.”

“Don’t you?” Leicester’s smile was cynical; the wine had hit his tired

brain and loosened his tongue. “King Henry said her mother was a

witch. Surely you must have wondered about her before now. I know

I have—”

Burghley opened his mouth to protest heatedly, then closed it again,