48

Elizabeth

He stayed only long enough to get what he wanted—money and men to fight his war with France—then Mary was left alone again standing on the crumbling precipice of a country she had brought to the brink of ruin.

To provide the money he demanded, coins had to be newly minted, which caused a panic as the value of the currency dropped alarmingly. With threats to take away their titles, lands, and estates, or even sentence them to death, she bullied the Council into doing Philip’s bidding, and seven thousand English men were sent to fight a war that was not of their making. And when Philip wrote to her demanding even more money, Mary sold Crown lands and her jewels to raise funds for Philip.

I was of the party that accompanied them to Dover and watched in sad and pitying silence as Mary, dressed in dramatic black and trailing veils, extravagant mourning for the imminent departure of her love, stood on the icy quay and declared, “My heart is already in mourning for your absence,” as she made her passionate and tearful farewells to the husband who, I knew in my bones, would strike her if she asked of him one more time, “You will come back to me?”

I could see the impatience and irritation twitching his cruel little mouth and simmering in his cold blue eyes, dangerous as a shark-infested sea. I watched her cling to him, anxious for reassurance, her voice and chin all aquiver and her face swollen and red beneath the ceaseless cascade of her tears. But even she, in her besotted blindness, I think, could see that he would never return to her no matter what words his lips spoke.

Before he boarded his ship, he took her aside, reminding her that, since she had failed to give him a son, I remained her lawful successor, and as such I deserved to be treated with respect, and if he should hear otherwise . . . He left the rest unsaid, a threat hanging like a sword on a frayed rope above her head.

Mary stood on the docks of Dover and waved until his ship was not even a speck on the horizon that even the most sharp-eyed amongst us could discern, and then I went to her.

For once, she did not push me away. She looked at me with such sadness in her face, before she burst into tears and fell into my arms, weeping on my shoulder and clinging tight to me as if she were a brokenhearted child, which, I realized then, in a way, for all her forty-one years, she was.

I stroked my sister’s sob-shuddering back and held her close, but I said nothing, for there was really nothing that I, or anyone except Philip, could say, and he was gone forever.

We returned to London and I watched my sister go through the motions of life like the Shadow of Death. She would sit at the head of the Council table without hearing a word. She would just sit there, lost in thought, and stare at Philip’s portrait on the wall, or else sign death warrants by the score to send yet more Protestants to the stake.

She wore black mourning and her eyes were always swollen and red-rimmed from weeping. She did not sleep but sat up the whole night through writing passionate letters to Philip, pouring out her heart and soul to him; letters I daresay he didn’t even bother to read and hardly ever answered. When he did deign to write it was always requests for more money, men, and arms, and reminders that he should have the crown. She kept messengers standing by at all hours, stationed all along the roads, and ships at the ready in the harbor, to carry forth her letters. She even kept the kitchens busy baking batches of Philip’s favorite meat pies, then rushed these culinary offerings of her love out to him on our navy’s fastest ships.

Whenever word reached her of Philip’s adulteries—as it invariably did—she would lash out like a madwoman, seizing a dagger and attacking his portrait, or else tearing it from the wall and ordering her servants to take it out, kicking and screaming at it as they dutifully carried it away to the attic. Later in the night, holding a candle aloft, clad in only her white nightgown and bare feet, with her red-gray hair hanging down her back in a frightfully thin, wispy braid, she would emerge from her bedchamber like a ghost and go in search of the banished portrait and kneel down before it, reverently, as if it were an altar, or Philip himself, and tearfully apologize and worship it with tears and kisses until, exhausted and in sore need of rest, sleep mercifully overwhelmed her. Many a time the morning light found her thus, curled up like a puppy at the foot of Philip’s portrait.

I could not bear to see her in such a state and, as soon as I could, I left for Hatfield. Listless and distracted as she pined and dreamed of Philip, Mary let me go, either forgetting or choosing to ignore the Spanish Ambassador’s sage injunction that one should keep their friends close and their enemies even closer. She was so tired by then, I don’t think she cared anymore, though I wish I could say instead that she had learned to trust me again, and knew that I was not, and never had been, her enemy.

Before I left, I went to her to say good-bye, dressed in my wine-dark velvets for travel. I found her sitting listlessly upon the floor in her nightgown and robe with her knees drawn up to her chin and her ivory rosary clasped in her clawlike hand. I was horrified to see her face close up, so heavily lined and wrinkled, more like a woman of seventy than a year past forty, her bleary gray eyes so red and swollen and with such a vacant, lost look in them I thought even her own soul had fled and abandoned her.

Kat and Blanche had told me that Mary now avoided sleep as much as possible, for when she did sleep she was tormented by such vividly real dreams of Philip’s lovemaking that she, to use her own words, “disgraced herself in her dreams.” Thus she chose to spend her nights either writing to her absent husband or kneeling in her private chapel imploring the Blessed Virgin to help rid her of these unclean distractions and deliriums, this “incubus sent by Satan” in the guise of Philip, and begging her to send a swarm of angels to surround her bed and guard her so she could sleep in blessed peace.

“Mary”—compassion and worry flooded my heart as I knelt beside her and took her hand in mine—“you must take heart! You must try to get well!”

With a long, heart-heavy sigh, Mary shook her head. “Only his return can cure me.” After that she would say no more except to absently murmur, “Safe journey,” before she turned her face away from me and went back to staring longingly at the portrait on the wall, that devilishly handsome likeness of the haughty Spanish prince that had first made her fall in love with him.

There was nothing more I could do, so with a heavy heart I left my sister and went home to Hatfield, wondering if I would ever see her alive again.