52

Elizabeth

It was a crisp November day, and I awoke thinking, strangely, of apples, their crispness and tart-sweet taste, longing for that crisp, juicy first bite all the time I was dressing in a simple white gown. I could not get them out of my mind. I felt so strange; I was unaccountably restless, I simply could not settle. For the life of me, I could not stand or sit still. Finally, without bothering to put up my hair or don a hood, I snatched up an old gray shawl and a book and went out into the park, heedless of Kat’s concerns about the chill that nipped the air and the possibility of rain.

I walked aimlessly over the grounds and eventually settled myself on a bench beneath a great oak tree and tried to read. At the sound of hoofbeats my head shot up, and squinting into the distance, I beheld two horsemen hastening toward me.

Dismounting from their horses, the Earls of Arundel and Throckmorton came and knelt before me, the latter holding out his hand and opening it to display upon his leather-gloved palm a gleaming gold and ink-black onyx ring. It was Mary’s coronation ring. I recognized it at once, and it could only mean one thing—my sister was dead.

“The Queen is dead, long live the Queen!” they said.

I turned my eyes heavenward, and clasped my hands in prayer and turned away from them. “Godspeed, Mary,” I whispered. “May you find in Heaven what you never found in life!”

Then I turned around to face my destiny.

“This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes!” I announced as I took the ring and slipped it onto my left hand as solemnly and lovingly as if it were a wedding ring, which it was, for me, a sacred and eternal bond forged between myself and England.

Then a third horseman, this one leading a second horse alongside his, was approaching. Robert Dudley, his head a riot of unruly, windblown black curls, dressed in jewel-toned velvets, somber yet gay, edged with a burnished gold braid. He was riding a black stallion, and leading alongside it a pure white horse caparisoned and saddled in silver and ermine. His hands made some sort of motion with the reins, and his lips moved in some soft, encouraging clucking sound perhaps, I was too far away to hear, and his ebony steed dipped its head low and bowed to me, then that magnificent virgin-white horse did the same, as Robin doffed his feathered cap, held it over his heart, and bowed to me from the saddle.

I clapped my hands in pure delight, as happy as a young girl beholding the wondrous tricks of the gypsies’ performing horses at a country fair.

“God save the Queen!” my own dear gypsy cried out, putting his heart in every word. “Good Queen Bess; long may she reign!”

I smiled and went to him. My hand reached out to stroke the nose of that beautiful virgin-white horse, but then I was distracted by the sunlight catching the gold and black ring. The way the gold flashed around the onyx made it seem to be winking at me, conspiratorially and knowingly, like a secret lover discreetly from across a crowded room. I held my hand out before me, gazing at the ring, and thinking of all it stood symbol for, solid gold proof that I was wedded to England now, and, softly and solemnly, as if I were speaking my wedding vows, I began to recite:

Here is my hand,
My dear lover England.
I am thine with both mind and heart;
Forever to endure,
Thou maiest be sure,
Until death us two do depart.

I knew in that moment that the future was ours—mine and England’s, our destinies irrevocably entwined—and everything would be golden.

The white horse nuzzled the side of my head, startling me out of my solemn reverie, and I laughed and reached up to disentangle my hair from her nose. I glanced up at Robin, and our eyes met, and we smiled at each other, then Robin held out his hand to me.