Free The Queen's Secret by Victoria Lamb Page B

dug into her palms, cutting tiny half-moons in her skin. The memory poisoned her thoughts, left her struggling against the strong desire to scream at him like a common fishwife, to demand the truth about him and Lettice.
    ‘My people are permitted to hear the scriptures in English now. Why should my own Bible be in Latin?’
    Robert bowed deep from the waist, seemingly obedient, though his gaze returned rather too swiftly to her face.
    ‘Indeed, Your Majesty.’
    Was she a fool to keep refusing his offers of marriage? She had never met a foreign prince she liked better than Robert, however handsome and assiduous in their courtship her various suitors had been, and God knew she had tried hard enough to like some of them. Even gone so far as to allow them to kiss and touch her more privately than she cared to remember. Yet Robert would not be ideal as a husband, a royal consort. He was an ambitious man, and ambitious men made dangerous bedpartners for a queen. Had not her cousin Mary proved that beyond any legitimate doubt?
    Even a homely marriage to an English nobleman might silence the doubters though, and perhaps even put a new scion of the house of Tudor into the royal nursery.
    The possibility of a child made Elizabeth draw breath. To be married at last, to be a mother!
    But to allow a man so close to her throne, and a Dudley no less, that could never be safe.
    ‘Take that Papist book with you when you go,’ she instructed him coldly, once more facing the window and the dark countryside beyond.
    He came up behind her, a shadow on the glass. His hands were on her shoulders before she realized what he was planning, and she spun, a quick oath on her lips that died at the look in his face. She shook her head, put her hands on his chest. But he would not be stopped, his strength easily superior to her own.
    ‘No,’ she insisted.
    His arms clasped her tight, pulled her against the rich stuff of his doublet, and Elizabeth felt the old familiar weakening of her limbs, the odd delirious tingling that always seemed to presage a fainting fit yet meant nothing but desire, as she knew now.
    ‘Don’t you recall what the common people are saying of me?’ she demanded, trying to make him see sense. ‘That I am no longer a virgin. That you and I are lovers.’
    ‘And are these things not true?’
    ‘Robin, for God’s sake!’
    His hands stroked her shoulders through the white ermine-trimmed silk of her night robe. ‘The people adore you, Elizabeth, whatever we may do in the privacy of your chamber. Did you not see the men and women kneeling in the road as you left London, begging for your blessing on their heads as you passed? And here tonight, entering Kenilworth … Didn’t you hear the people cheering, or see the flowers they threw in your path?’
    ‘Such things will mean nothing once my reputation is lost.’ She shook her head. ‘This is not Richmond or Whitehall. We are too public here. If you stay tonight, they will call me a whore.’
    His hands seized hers, pressing them urgently against the swell of his body. ‘Then marry me, Elizabeth. Make the bastards swallow their words.’
    ‘I cannot.’ Her stomach tightened with apprehension. ‘England is not yet secure, and many in the Council still wait to see me married off to some stout Protestant prince. No, the times are too dangerous for such a marriage. The country would descend into civil war and tear itself apart, just as it did before my grandfather took the throne.’
    ‘I do not believe it. The people would be happy to see me by your side.’
    ‘Which people?’
    ‘Those who still believe in stability for England.’
    ‘They must be few indeed,’ she said drily. ‘Besides, if we were wed, you would try to master me. I shall not be mastered by any man, Robert. I have sworn it.’
    ‘And to whom have you sworn this fierce oath?’
    ‘To myself.’
    He smiled. ‘Bess, my beautiful Bess.’
    ‘Don’t call me that. I’m no longer that girl.’ Yet