The Wild Irish - Robin Maxwell (4 page)

Thereafter she had heaped honors on Essex, favored him above all her other men. She showered him with affection, openly caressing and embracing him. She made him many rich gifts and continued even to call him her “Robin.” All the Court knew of their tryst and she had not disabused them of her change of heart. As far as her ladies and gentlemen were concerned, she and Essex were, in the truest sense, still lovers. But never once after that night did she allow him into her bed.

The depth of his hurt had surprised him. He ’d not realized the precise nature of his affection until her rejection of him, and he was faced with the truth: Elizabeth was not a trophy. He took no pride in the accomplishment of bedding the Queen of England. He had loved her as a woman. Worshiped her body. Joined his mind and spirit with hers. He had never felt so deeply for anyone. Ever.

She had refused to allow him to leave Court, even to privately lick his wounds. He had desperately needed time to think, to ponder his heartbreak. His grief was therefore protracted, his understanding delayed.

It came to him one afternoon when his mother had summoned him to attend her on a matter of finance. They’d sat side by side poring over the household ledger. Lettice had been haranguing him for several minutes regarding some gambling debts, though he knew her recent bitterness was in large measure caused by his love affair with the queen, one that recalled her second husband ’s obsession with the same woman. As her tirade had continued, he refused to meet her eye. Now as he turned to face her the sound of his mother’s voice faded and her lips moved in silence. The strangeness of the event rattled him, but he was suddenly aware that he was seeing Lettice clearly for the first time.

She was a bitch and a whore, and she had never loved him. Had never even seen him. She ’d neither rejoiced in his brilliance nor accepted his shortcomings.

Elizabeth had.

He was forced to turn quickly before the tears overflowed his eyes and his mother think him hurt by her ranting. Risking her fury he excused himself, claiming one of his sick headaches, and locked himself in his rooms.

He lay motionless on his bed. His thoughts were jumbled, memories flooding his mind. A severe childhood fever, cared for by his nurse, Lettice never once coming to his bedside . . . his father raging before the fire at his cold, faithless wife . . . the queen’s face softening as she silently read the small verse he ’d written in her honor . . . at a New Year’s feast, Elizabeth’s long white fingers affectionately tickling his neck . . . those same fingers lightly grasping the hardness between his legs. Elizabeth . . .

He knew enough to realize that the rejection from her bed was a matter of personal vanity. She was too proud to ever again be seen in her imperfect nakedness by any man. But she loved him nevertheless.

Would keep him near her, forward his career . . . forgive him his tantrums and indiscretions. He was, he realized in that moment, to be the last man to whom Elizabeth would ever give herself.

“Robin . . .”

Essex was wrenched from his reveries. He turned to see the queen standing behind him in her white, brocaded gown. Gheerhaerts had involved himself in cleaning his brushes, and the solid orange robe on which the artist had imagined embroidered eyes, ears, and mouths now hung in careful folds over the top of a tall screen.

“Majesty.” Essex bowed low and, taking Elizabeth’s hand, kissed it with delicate passion.

“You’re very pale,” she said. “Are you ill?”

“I could be if it would make you fawn over me this evening,” he teased.

She smiled indulgently, a self-conscious, closed-mouth smile. Her ivory teeth had recently begun to turn brown. “What do you think of the portrait?” she said.

“I’ve already told you,” he replied, loud enough for the artist to hear, “that I do not think Master Gheerhaerts is doing justice to your beauty.”

The queen was used to indiscriminate flattery, knew most of it to be false, but demanded it all the same. It had become a ritualized form of greeting that was necessary before genuine conversation could begin.

“How are Frances and little Robert?”

“Excellent, Your Majesty. She sends you her love . . . as does my mother,” he added, quite surprising himself, as he had not expected to raise the subject of Lettice this day.

“Is she still yearning for an audience?” Elizabeth asked, taking his arm and indicating that he should escort her from the room. With a tap on the door, it flew open and the two of them exited into the corridor.

“You know she is,” said Essex.

“Then she shall have one.”

He was bemused by Elizabeth’s sudden acquiescence on so prickly a matter.

“Arrange it for next week.”

“I’m most grateful, and so will my mother be.” He felt his heart suddenly thumping in his chest. This was a great coup. Lettice would be overwhelmed. But he must carefully steer her from any ostentatious displays in either her dress or mode of transport to the meeting. It would not do for her to arrive for the long awaited occasion arrayed in one of her expensive French gowns, riding like royalty in a gilded carriage pulled by six plumed, white stallions. His mind raced. The queen’s mood was more than affable today. Should he broach the Farm of Sweet Wines, or Bacon’s appointment? Or should he perhaps consider mentioning neither of them? He pondered the question as they moved with stately grandeur down the long corridor. Every man who passed stopped and bowed. Ladies ceased their tittering and gossip and dropped into deep, solemn curtsies.

“So,” said Essex, “shall we play at cards this evening? Or dice?”

“Neither,” said the queen. “You already owe me far too much money.

You, my lord, cannot afford to lose another shilling. In fact,” she added, “I am wondering when I shall see my three thousand pounds repaid to me.” He had his opening!

“I was thinking just now, Your Majesty, that if I were granted the Farm of Sweet Wines, I could easily repay the debt. Within a year. Two at the most.”

“The Farm of Sweet Wines?”

Elizabeth appeared surprised by the request, but he knew she was playing with him. Like the Mastership of the Horse, the Farm had been one of Leicester’s grants—indeed his predecessor’s principal source of income.

“That is a very rich gift you are suggesting I make you, my lord.” Her voice and mood were suddenly unreadable. Essex knew he was on dangerous ground.

“Perhaps if you made your queen a gift . . .” she began but didn’t finish, as her attention was drawn to the figure now approaching them. “Ah, Robert.” She extended her hand to be kissed by the graceless Robert Cecil.

Essex seethed quietly. The Gnome had destroyed his moment.

“Your Majesty. My lord Essex.” Cecil’s voice was urgent. “I’ve just learned that an enemy of England has had the temerity to sail upriver and dock at the castle quay.”

“An enemy of England?” said Elizabeth. “Who?”

“The Irish rebel, Your Majesty. The woman . . . the pirate . . . Grace O’Malley. She is”—Cecil was flustered and could barely say the words—“demanding an audience.”

Elizabeth began to move down the hallway flanked on either side by Essex and Cecil, in long strides with which the Gnome could hardly keep abreast. The queen seemed altogether undisturbed by the strange news.

On the contrary, she seemed delighted.

“So,” she said, “ ‘the Mother of the Irish Rebellion’ wishes to answer our interrogatory in person.”

“So it seems, Your Majesty,” Cecil answered.

Essex was annoyed. Whilst he certainly knew who Grace O’Malley was, he had no knowledge of an “interrogatory,” and neither Elizabeth nor the Gnome seemed inclined to apprise him of its mysterious contents.

Neither would he give them the pleasure of begging to be informed.

Elizabeth was silent as they followed her toward the Privy Council Chamber. Essex sensed that her mind was working at a most acceler-ated rate.

“Robert, bring me a copy of her answers,” she snapped at Cecil.

“Yes, madam.” Without another word the Gnome peeled away from them and disappeared back the way he had come.

Essex and Elizabeth reached the Privy Council Chamber and the guards flung open the double doors.

“Will you see her, Your Majesty, or have her arrested?” Essex finally asked. He was becoming more and more irritated.
An “interrogatory.”
Her “answers.”

Elizabeth did not deign to reply. He persisted. “Grace O’Malley has the distinction of having transported more shiploads of Scots mercenaries to Ireland to fight the English than anyone else in history.” “Sometimes the Scottish Gallowglass fight on
our
side,” Elizabeth argued with infuriating calm.

“The woman is a traitor many times over, Your Majesty. A known cutthroat!”

“She is indeed. But our Philip Sidney thought enough of her to continue a long correspondence, from the time of their meeting in Ireland till his death. And her answers to my questionnaire have piqued my curiosity. Despite her reputation I believe she has something in her character to recommend her. I wish to see such a woman with my own two eyes. See what she is made of.”

Elizabeth saw Essex’s frustration growing, and obliged him. “She recently asked me for several favors.”

“Favors? From a known rebel?”

“I replied with an interrogatory of eighteen items. She responded in early July.”

“But—”

“You will have the Presence Chamber readied for an audience,” Elizabeth interrupted, irritation growing in her voice. “And see if my Irish cousin, Tom Ormond, is about. I know he ’ll wish to be present.” Essex stood unmoving, entirely bemused. The queen’s temper was rising.

“Robin, listen to me now,” she said, fixing him with a look of grave intensity. “You have been so preoccupied with your military obsessions and your Bacons and your Farm of Sweet Wines that you have not been paying attention.”

“Your Majesty, I object! I have been paying very close attention to your business
and
the business of state.”

“Yes, you have. My
domestic
agenda. But what of my foreign policy?

What of Ireland? You know nothing about the rebellion there. You shy away from the subject, as most men do, because the very thought of that savage country makes your blood run cold. When you do think of Ireland, you’re reminded of all the Englishmen who’ve died there. Were ruined there. Your father, for one. Your brother-in-law, Perrot, for another. But you don’t think about
my
Ireland.
My
problem.

“Did you know, Robin, that the last act of my mother’s betrayer, Cromwell, was to talk my father into taking control of the Irish nobility?

His “Surrender and Regrant” policy was either the most brilliant idea he ’d ever conceived, or the most boneheaded. Who knows, perhaps Thomas Cromwell was the first of Ireland’s victims. He died by the ax not three years after the program’s conception. My father paid it halfhearted attention. It was a distant problem in my brother’s reign, and even in my sister Mary’s.

“But distances have shrunk, my sweet man, ever since the Spaniards began their bloody conquest of the world, and Ireland is suddenly
at my
back door!
Philip has dangerous papist allies there—confounded Irish aristocracy! There ’s one and only one amongst them—Tom Ormond—

who knows the true meaning of loyalty. The lords of that unfortunate land blithely swear their fealty to my governors one day, then slaughter my troops the next. I send colonists there, soldiers and horses, and they die of disease or battle or go insane. The Irish are an unfathomable people,” she said, looking away, then added, almost to herself, “I worry they’ll be the death of me.

“My treasury is hemorrhaging money. If I continue raising taxes, my people will come to hate me. I cannot afford this war, Robin! And I cannot afford your ignoring it any longer. If you wish to be my most trusted adviser—and I know you do—then you will henceforth educate yourself on this matter,
interest
yourself in it, because it means very much to me, and will in the future mean even more.”

“Yes, Majesty.” Essex was humbled, knowing her altogether right, and grateful that she understood him so well. She tutored and directed him in the affairs of state, was so forgiving.

“Go along now,” she said, as if he were a mere page and not a New Man of the Privy Council. “See to the audience. And pay attention in this lady’s presence. She may be a traitor to England, but she has much to teach us both.”

Essex exited as Robert Cecil returned bustling with importance. He had a rolled parchment tucked beneath his arm. As the doors closed behind him, Essex could see him spreading on the long table what must have been the pirate O’Malley’s answers to Elizabeth’s interrogatory. He chided himself for allowing the Gnome to best him on Elizabeth’s most pressing foreign affairs. He ’d kept abreast of the war in the Netherlands, of Scotland and France, and Spain’s continuing crusade to convert to Catholicism every man, woman, and child who lived. But he had dismissed Ireland. The queen’s attempts to colonize it, and the great rebellion it had spawned, had escaped him. But no longer. He would make it his business to understand that strange hellhole of a country.

And he would begin with Grace O’Malley.

THE GOWN WAS long out of fashion, Grace thought, staring at herself in the glass that hung on her tiny cabin wall. It was English in cut, a fine lady’s dress. She ’d plucked it from its owner’s shipboard cupboard whilst the woman, cowering and bug-eyed with amazement, gaped at the female pirate brandishing a pistol and looting her room. Sweet Jesus, how long ago had that been? Ten years? Fifteen?

’Twas surprising that the garment was not chewed up by moths or mold—a pretty thing, the blue velvet, trimmed with green and with a low square-cut bodice that the English had favored for so many years.

’Twas equally surprising, thought Grace, turning to view herself from the side, that it fit her much the same as it did when she ’d lifted it from the bug-eyed captain’s wife. She was fit at sixty-three, the same as all Irish women who managed to survive to that ripe old age. If you weren’t hardy, she thought, you were dead, and that was that. She ’d taken more time with her hair today than she had in years, braiding the dark tresses, now streaked with silver, into long, thick plaits, and pinned them up in a style she had once admired on a Turkish girl.