The Tudor Secret - C. W. Gortner [62]
“Do you want to know from whom?” Elizabeth added. “It was your father. Yes, my sweet Robin—your father offered me much the same this afternoon. He even used the same arguments, offered the same enticement.”
Robert stood petrified to his spot.
“You can ask Mistress Stafford if you don’t believe me,” said Elizabeth. “She saw him leave my rooms. He barged in—while I was abed—to declare he would make me queen if I consented to marry him. He promised to get rid of his wife, your mother, for me—or rather, for my crown. For of course I would have to make him king. Not king-consort, but king in his own right, so that should I die before him, say in childbed, as so many do, he could continue to rule after me and bequeath the throne to his heirs, regardless of whether they are my issue or not.”
She smiled, graceful and unforgiving. “So you must excuse me if I don’t react with the enthusiasm you hoped for. I’m fresh out of enthusiasm where Dudleys are concerned.”
Her performance was mesmerizing. She hadn’t breathed a word of this, though it explained why Northumberland had chosen to set Jane Grey on the throne. An experienced courtier, he had a contingency plan, in case his first choice fell through. His declaration at Whitehall on the night of Elizabeth’s arrival—it had been his warning that he was willing to proceed against her if she stood in his way. And she had done just that, refusing him and everything he contrived to obtain for her and in return issuing her own declaration of war.
As Cecil surmised, the duke had underestimated her.
The disbelief on Robert’s face drained his sun-bronzed skin to a chalky hue. I actually felt sorry for him as he said in a faltering voice, “My father … he offered … to marry you?”
“You sound surprised. I don’t see why. The seed is the same as the apple it came from, or so they tell me.”
He stepped to her with such fury that without thinking, I started to lunge. Barnaby’s viselike grasp on my shoulder detained me, coupled with a lightning warning glance from the otherwise motionless Kate. I closed my fist about my dagger hilt. As I did, I saw Kate slip a hand into her cloak, for something no doubt equally sharp. It reassured me that in this instance, at least, she demonstrated her loyalty.
Robert gripped Elizabeth by the arm with such brutality her hair unraveled and cascaded like flame over her shoulders, pearls scattering across the pavilion floor.
“You lie! You lie and play with me, like a bitch in heat—and still, God help me, I want you.” He crushed her mouth against his. She reared back; with a stinging retort that echoed in the electrified air, she raised her hand and struck him hard across the face. Her rings cut into his skin, lacerating his lip.
“Unhand me this instant,” she said, “or by God I’ll never let you near me again.”
Her words were more blistering than her blow. Robert stood stunned, his cut lip bleeding, before he backed away. They faced each other like combatants, their breath audible, heavy. Then the aggression crumbled from his face and he gazed at her with something akin to grief.
“You’re not considering it? You’d not wed him to spite me?”
“If you think that, you are more deluded than he is,” she said, but her voice was trembling now, as though she fought back uncertainty that threatened to undo her. “As if I, a princess born and bred, would ever let some lowborn Dudley rut in my bed. I’d die first.”
He flinched. His face set like stone. It was a terrible moment, sounding the death knell on years of childhood trust. No woman had humiliated Robert Dudley; any woman he’d wanted, he’d had. But despite all his guile, all his vanity and pretense, he desired only one woman, and she had just rejected him with a callous resolve aimed like a spear at his heart.
He drew himself erect. “Is that your final word?”
“It is my only word. King or commoner, I will be no man’s victim.”
“What if that man should declare his love for you?”
She let out a chuckle. “If this is a man’s love, I pray God to spare me any more of it.”
He exploded. “So be it! You will