The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell (3 page)

It was late afternoon, and Elizabeth would have done with her dozens of audiences, he reasoned. She would be finished with the endless pile of paperwork that she ’d attended to, sitting straight backed at her desk as the secretaries Walsingham and Cecil laid the documents before her. He could picture them waiting patiently as she marked them with her studied and flourished signature, to be set carefully with a vellum roller and the finest perfumed powder from France. She would already have taken her exercise, perhaps a brisk walk upon the castle ’s battlement—she had ridden out with him yesterday—and would have completed her daily translations and double translations of Greek classics, her favorite hobby, she claimed. Today was Monday, and there was very little planned for the evening. A light meal taken in her rooms. Perhaps some music, but no dancing. Perhaps a night of gambling. Essex hoped this was the case, as the pleasure of dice and cards always cheered Elizabeth . . . made her more receptive, even to his “incessant nagging,” as she ’d come to call his more and more frequent requests for favors.

So, he reasoned, if it were not to be a formal evening, her late-afternoon toilette would be abbreviated, perhaps she might even forego changing her gown. If this were the case, where might the queen be just now? A fitting with her seamstress was possible, or a meeting with her Master of Revels in preparation for her birthday celebration.

No! None of those places.
Essex was suddenly sure he knew her whereabouts. All at once three of Elizabeth’s ladies burst from around a corner into the wide corridor, gorgeous in their varicolored silks, fluttering and chattering like a trio of tropical birds. He breathed easier to see that Katherine Bridges was not among them. His latest mistress was entirely delightful and, a married woman, never demanding, but Essex was at this moment seething with single-minded purpose and wished for no distrac-tions. He nodded with graceful exaggeration to the ladies, fixing each of them in that moment with a private, hungry glance. It was prudent, he had discovered, to keep the women of the Court in a state of mild but constant desire for him. Favors of every sort were far easier to extract that way.

Without bothering to confirm his guess at the queen’s present location, he turned into the corridor of the castle ’s north wing; Essex strode past the now deserted Privy Council Chamber, nodding to the two guards, both of whom sported the squared-off beards, standing at attention at the heavy wooden doors. He took great but secret pleasure from the fact that the place was now one of his official destinations. The Privy Council table was the very heart of government, and he was at home there. Indeed, the other Privy councilors, all older and, they believed, wiser, were forced to begrudgingly admit that Essex was a faithful and hardworking cohort. No one, in fact, spent more time at Council business. No one demonstrated more raw enthusiasm for the job. He was young and wild and too well loved by the queen for his own good, but the older men were, in the end, forced to agree that he was a brilliant logician, a clever tactician, and regularly spouted unique solutions to previously insoluble problems.

A final turn down a short hall found Essex at a doorway undistinguished other than by the two armed soldiers who guarded it. At sight of the men, he silently congratulated himself, recognizing them as Elizabeth’s personal guard of this hour, who protected whichever room in which the queen was present. He greeted them, warmed by their obvious admiration for him. They were common men, brave soldiers who had seen battle, and they respected him. The public, he knew, perceived him, despite his title and standing with the queen, as a man of the people. He liked that, liked that he was welcome in the company of low- or highborn men.

When Essex entered, the guards uncrossed their halberds and opened the door.

As ever, the sight of Elizabeth amazed him, paralyzed him. Bathed in orange afternoon light, she stood for her portrait wearing a low-bodiced, brocaded gown, draped round in a robe the color of fire. Her eyes were fixed on the young Flemish artist, and though she had not turned when the door opened, Essex was sure she knew it was
he
who had entered.

Quietly he shut the door behind him and, moving behind Marcus Gheerhaerts, settled himself on a bench, the better to gaze at the queen and the nearly completed portrait.

There was a fabulous quality to the painting, undoubtedly the most sumptuous and beautifully wrought that he had ever seen. In ways, it re-created Elizabeth in shocking, lifelike reality, yet it imagined much. It sang with allegory, Gheerhaerts having planted dreamlike, mythical ele-ments at every turn, allowing one to stare endlessly at the portrait and continue discovering its mysterious details.

Despite the pale gray that shadowed Elizabeth’s temples and cheeks, the artist had chosen to depict the queen’s angular features with a lush roundness, a fullness of the lips and breasts, the soft, sloe-eyed gaze of a lover. ’Twas as though the painter had chosen to see the woman at her life ’s ripest moment. The way, thought Essex, that Leicester had described Elizabeth in her thirties, when they still shared a bed.

The gown’s high, rounded ruffs were such fine gauze as to be transparent, only noticeable by their jeweled borders, and the tips of the proud, feathered headdress that evoked Diana, goddess of the hunt, were lost beyond the top of the canvas. Her wig, hung with huge, teardrop-shaped pearls, was the color of fresh carrots, its long, curled tendrils hanging down along her bosom. Pearls hung as ear bobs, ropes of fat pearls encircled her neck as well as a necklace dangling in the cleft of her pale raised breasts. On her puffed left sleeve, a jeweled snake symbolizing fidelity was made all of pearls and twisted into a love knot, whilst the serpent grasped in its mouth a red ruby heart.

Clearly Gheerhaerts had reworked the fire-colored cloak draped round Elizabeth’s left shoulder and right hip since Essex had seen it last, for now it was dotted—most extraordinarily, he thought—with eyes, ears, and mouths! This young Netherlander, thought Essex, must indeed have studied the queen’s life in some detail before beginning his portrait.

How else would he have known to symbolize in his rendition of her the three most important men in her life? From the earliest days of her reign, Elizabeth had literally called Leicester “My Eyes.” Walsingham, her master of espionage, was “My Ears” abroad. Old Burleigh, bottomless well of wise counsel that he was, who most often spoke the words the queen herself was thinking, would, had she given him a pet name, surely have been “My Mouth.”

But by far the most disturbing new object in the painting was a long, arched tube of some vaguely transparent material, perhaps frosted glass, that Elizabeth grasped with the thumb and four fingers of her right hand.

Whilst posing she had been instructed to hold the doweled back of a tall chair, and since Essex’s last viewing—through strange turns of the artist’s mind—the dowel had transmogrified into this surprising element. Parts of her dress could be glimpsed through the tube, very peculiarly, and it seemed to dissolve into her cloak at the level of her groin, disappearing to become part of the yellow-orange fabric. But now, on closer observation of the arched tube, Essex could see along its front curve a rounded ridge. It was most astonishing. For at the very place where Elizabeth grasped it lightly with her long delicate fingers, the object most resembled in size and shape a man’s erect member.

Surely the queen had viewed the portrait’s progress. She must have observed the object and the erotic nature of its appearance. Had it disturbed her—as it now did Essex—she would certainly have had it painted out. Why did it unsettle him so? he wondered.

In that moment Elizabeth, looking past the artist, met Essex’s gaze.

Nothing in the calm repose of her features changed except the deep brown, almost black eyes, which bid him warm welcome into her world.

She was pleased to see him. But in that moment of connecting their souls, 

Essex realized the nature of his discomfort at the painting’s raw sexuality.

He began to blush like a schoolboy, turned from Elizabeth’s gaze, and walked across the room pretending to see something of interest out the mullioned windows.

“Careful, my lord Essex,” Gheerhaerts warned, “you block the last of my precious daylight.”

“Sorry.” Essex moved again, refusing to acknowledge Elizabeth’s amused expression.

“And you, Majesty,” the painter commanded, “please do not smile.” Essex willed himself to a state of calm, but all at once he was lost, four years in the past, remembering.

1589. Leicester was not long in his grave, but he had died on the heels of England ’s stupendous victory over the Spanish Armada, and so whilst all celebrated, Elizabeth grieved. The queen had been forced by circumstance to publicly rejoice in her navy’s triumph, but so much of her soul had died with Robin Dudley, her suffering so private and terrible, that it was only with the greatest of effort that she managed every day to place one foot before the other and continue to rule.

Essex, only recently installed as Elizabeth’s newest favorite, was—

aside from herself—perhaps the only individual in England with any reason to mourn the widely despised Earl of Leicester.

Leicester was the one man who had taken great pains with the young Earl of Essex’s grooming and advancement at court. Sensitive and observant, Essex had emulated Leicester’s best qualities—a cutting wit and a fine intelligence, riding impeccably, excelling in the martial arts, dancing superbly. And, Leicester had pointed out, his stepson had been blessed with the physical traits that all her life the queen had found irresistible in a man. He was tall—taller than she—

broad shouldered, with thick red wavy hair and beard. Both of the queen’s true loves—Thomas Seymour and Leicester—had shared those very qualities with the first man Elizabeth had ever adored—

her father, Henry VIII. Even at eighteen, Leicester had insisted, his protégé had the bearing of a king—a man his queen could admire, could advance. Could love.

There had never been a conscious plan to seduce Elizabeth. After Leicester’s death Essex was, however, the one courtier whose company the queen constantly craved. Though they never spoke of it, she understood that the young man sincerely missed his stepfather, and his sympathy for her loss was genuine. They’d spent more and more time together, riding, dancing, gambling. It was not long before she began to call him Robin, which at first he believed had been a mere slip of the tongue, but later realized had been a conscious, if uncharacteristically sentimental, decision. He had, surprisingly, found her physically attractive at fifty-five and always exciting, but never discovered how much of her allure was genuinely erotic and how much was owed to her status as the most powerful woman in the world.

He engaged her in spirited debates on the finer points of Greek literature, enjoyed long, loud arguments over a word or phrase whose translation was questionable. She adored gambling and he matched her, bet for bet. She knew he played his best at dice and cards, and she beat him roughly half the time. He had learned how to make her laugh and begun to crave hearing the bawdy bellowing from such an otherwise dignified personage. Their evenings together began extending all through the nights, he not leaving her rooms until the sun had begun to rise.

He was nevertheless unprepared when, as he was helping her down from the saddle after a hard ride, Elizabeth had slid effortlessly into his arms and returned, with as much fervor as it had been delivered, a kiss he had not consciously intended to bestow. He never knew who had been the more surprised of the two, for the queen knew better than anyone that she was quite old enough to be his mother, indeed his grandmother. But that night she had led him more than willingly into her bed and he, suffering from a blinding enchant-ment of the moment, had followed.

Hardly a virgin, he ’d endeavored to dazzle the queen with his manly prowess and he was sure—from the abandon with which she touched him and moved, and how in the end she had cried out ecstatically—that Elizabeth had been fulfilled in her womanly pleasures.

Afterward, when they lay side by side, she had held his still erect manhood in her delicate white fingers and wondered at the tireless-ness of youthful passion.

Then she had risen quite suddenly from the great Bed of State, pulling her robe around her. Essex had watched as she ’d moved to the silver-framed looking glass and commenced staring at her own reflection. He had spoken very little in their tryst, and when he ’d found enough voice to call her name, she raised her first finger to him as if to silence him, as if she were too heavily engaged in a discovery of great import to be bothered. So he had lain quietly, watching her.

Shortly, he felt the air changing in the room, growing cold where moments before it had glowed with red heat. He became alarmed as her self-observation in the glass continued on and on. With dawning horror he realized she must be seeing the web of fine wrinkles, the pockmarked cheeks and forehead where the face paint had been kissed away by the boy still lying in her bed. Then he saw Elizabeth stiffen, saw her raise herself up to her full height, and never meeting his eyes said, in the gentlest voice he had ever heard her use, that he should go. She was very pleased with him, she was careful to say, but when she ’d tried to continue, her voice had cracked and thereafter she had stood motionless, still staring into the looking glass.

He ’d risen and quickly dressed himself. When he moved toward her, she lifted her finger once again to stop him from approaching, but he would not be stopped. He had been her lover this night, not a boy she could hold back with a gesture or even a queenly command.

He took her shoulders and turned her full to face him and saw tears of sheer misery shimmering in her eyes.

“I am yours, Elizabeth, always yours,” he said simply, then kissed her. He had prayed in that moment that she might melt into his arms, cling to him again, forgive herself her age and ugliness so that she could let herself love him as she had Robin Dudley. But she did not soften, did not speak. Only silently bade him go.