“To bid you be of some cheer, for it is a dreary day,” he returned lightly.
Elizabeth’s eyes went to the grating.
“It is wet-”
“Aye, in the eyes of England, to find you here.”
“You think there are those who would weep for me?”
“Many,” he asserted stoutly. “Both outside and within these walls. I am one.”
Elizabeth’s strained face relaxed, softened, and lit.
“I do remember you, Rob Dudley! Your tongue has grown softer.”
“The better to do service to a lady grown lovely, out of a sharp girl,” he said easily, and smiled.
“You were jealous of me because I could ride better than you!” she threw at him.
For a brief moment of respite the shadows and the haunting terrors were receding. She was back—oh, back again—in a safe, warm world of winter sunshine, arguing with a ruffled boy under Katherine’s laughing eyes…
“As well, perhaps,” Dudley admitted loftily, “but 1 will never grant you better.”
“No, better I” Elizabeth maintained, her sunken eyes alight with something of their old sparkle.
“That we will one day put to the test,” he remarked.
“Where? On the stairs of the Tower? Do they keep horses here too? …” The bitterness welled back into her voice.
“Only men and women are fools enough to be caught by bad luck.” Robert Dudley smiled, but his voice was serious. “The horses are without, on the free roads of England, and there you will ride one day, and I pray God I’ll ride with you.”
“How do you think to unlock these doors?”
“I think you will unlock yours by your wit.”
“What?” she said, and laughed harshly. “When I stand for all my sister fears?”
“You kept the whole of England baffled, once, by a degree of wit I never thought possible in any woman… Lose not your heart, and you will do it again! ”
“That,” said Elizabeth unsteadily, “is the sweetest word I’ve heard in more months than I can count, Rob.”
Dudley strolled to the wall beneath the grating and leaned there, his arms folded.
“You say the Queen fears what you stand for,” he observed in a casual, conversational tone. “Well, love is stronger than fear… Your sister has a husband whom she loves… Philip of Spain is a pretty man, they say—” Dudley’s handsome mouth curled sarcastically and he cocked an impudent eyebrow— “and all her thoughts are now on him.” He broke into a laugh. “Bess, would one had seen her dancing with him on her wedding day!”
“I danced here alone in the Tower,” she said somberly.
“So keep you from Mary’s sight, you will dance again, often enough.”
Elizabeth struck the table with her hand.
“But I will not dance for a Spanish heir born to our throne.” “A Spanish heir?” Dudley chuckled. “Lady! she must get Philip to bed first! …”
“It is no jest,” Elizabeth said with anger.
“I think it is,” he persisted lightly. “If you fear for the fruit of her womb, fear not.”
Elizabeth moved restlessly.
“It is not she alone. Her ministers, her priests, her Bishop— they mean to have my life. And if they cannot do it by proclamation of the Council, they’ll do it by other means more subtle and near at hand — and more quick. …”
“If you should die, there would be many die thereafter because of it.”
“Think you my dead heart would take comfort in that?” she asked him with a despairing sarcasm.
“There are those who’ve gone to France,” Dudley said. “Carew escaped from Weymouth, leading them.”
“For me?” Elizabeth said on a cry. “They’ll fight for me?” Dudley’s indifferent pose dropped. He spoke with serious earnestness and conviction: “As never men have fought in all the years that England has been England. They’ll fight for you, Bess. And put down these Papist pimps that would give back our freedom to the Pope.”
Elizabeth said in an odd, level voice, “And what will that make me?”
Dudley gazed at her.
“God’s life! ’Twill make you Queen.”
In the same controlled voice she said, “You’ll put me on the throne. You’ll fight in the streets and kill your brothers, and burn down your towns, and lay your country waste … to put me on the throne.”
“If need be,” Dudley assented, frowning a little at her strange manner of speaking.
“And how long, think you, would such a Queen be Queen? No! If I am Queen—” she rose from the hard chair and stood, staring before her across the bare room— “I’ll be a Queen as does belong to me, forever, while I live a long and natural life, not sitting on a throne that rocks with civil strife so I can’t keep my seat on it. I’ll sit in it when I am rightfully put in it. But I must live to do so.”
It was the old, furious Bess whom Rob Dudley knew who raged at him.
“I wonder that you do no more than blow hot words that have no meaning. Look at you! Prisoner in the Tower like myself! Stripped of your lands and money by attainder! Look at your hands, Rob Dudley—they’re bare of your rings, as bare as these walls. You sold your rings for a handful of coin to slide into the sweating palms of the jailers here… I do owe you a ring, belike, that you passed this door of mine… Why don’t you go now—while the one friendly boy in all the Tower is at that door?”
Dudley’s face had changed expression as he listened, had stiffened with resentment, then cleared to understanding… He said quietly, “Abel Cousins! A boy! A guard in the Tower! And he loves you. … I wonder if you know how many Abels England has. Thank God for him, Elizabeth. For he has let me to you, and now will let me out.”
“Robert-”
He had gone to the door, now he turned round.
“Oh Robert, Robert, what’s become of me?” she cried. “I have no mind to measure my words any more. I am a fool.”
“I would not call you fool,” Dudley drawled with distinctness.
Elizabeth put her hands against her hollowed cheeks.
“Why could I not have been born in another time? What is this age of ours? I know not whom to trust nor whom to fear. Since Kate died, and they killed Tom, I know men only to know enemies.”
He walked to her, took her by the elbows, looking down into her face.
“Do you call me your enemy?”
“Will you throw away your life too?” she asked piteously.
“For you—Elizabeth.”
She strained back from him, pushing him from her with her hands against his breast.
“Oh Robert, get you gone, and keep you from me. I am for no man—I can never be.”
But his arms were about her, firm, unyielding and strong.
“No man but me. You are Elizabeth; and, death or life, or prisoner, or Queen, Elizabeth is all I know and want. …”
They were lost in each other’s arms, welded into a single being. They did not even hear the deepening clamor of the bells until a crescendo peal burst on them as though it would shatter the enclosing walls. Elizabeth raised her head, broke from him.
“What may this be?” Her lips shaped the words but he could only read them, not hear them. Suddenly he saw panic leap into her face.
“Rob—someone’s coming. … Oh God! Quick, quick— hide you there—my chamber …”
He vanished into the inner room. The air was a vast sea of bells rolling in waves, drowning every small sound. No bolt or key could be heard: but William Cecil was suddenly in the room and the door shut behind him.
Elizabeth dropped to the chair, a hand at her throat.
“Cecil! ”
He came close, and swiftly knelt, then rose to speak in her ear as she had spoken to Dudley a moment since, an eternal moment of life and death in the trembling balance…
“Madam, I have come here at great risk but there is such news, that—”
“What news?” she gasped.
“You know that today Cardinal Pole was seated here in the Pope’s name?”
“Yes, yes. What are those bells?”