John opened his eyes and got into bed. Still Elizabeth kneeled at the bedside, her head bowed, her lips moving. In sudden irritation, John leaned over and blew out his bedside candle. Darkness invaded the room. In the darkness and the quietness he felt, rather than saw, Elizabeth rise from her knees, pull her nightdress over her head, lift the sheets and slip in beside him, naked.
For a moment he was stunned at the frank sensuality of the gesture. That a woman could arise from prayer and strip herself naked confounded his simple division of women into good or bad, saintly or sexual. But she was his newly married wife and she had a right to lie beside him. John’s desire rose at the glimpse of the moonlit body and he was sorry he had no light for the candle that he had blown out in a moment of temper and left himself in the dark.
They lay side by side on their backs.
“Like effigies on a tomb,” John thought, awkwardly.
It was for him to make the first move, but anxiety locked him into place. After years of avoiding sin and living in mortal terror of sexual temptation which would lead to pregnancy and disgrace, John was unprepared for the free embrace of a willing partner.
His hand strayed toward her side of the bed and encountered the unmistakable solidity of her thigh. The skin was as smooth as the fruit of an apple, but yielding, like a ripe plum. Elizabeth said nothing. John stroked her thigh with the back of his hand like a man brushing the soft foliage of a scented plant. He rather feared she might be praying again.
Cautiously he moved his hand up her thigh to the round warm mound of her belly, the navel set in the flesh like a little duckpond in a hill. Up these new mysterious byways John’s hand slowly went, one breast – and he heard her little indrawn breath as his hand moved across the soft rolling crest of her breast and took into its keeping the tender warm nipple which immediately hardened under his touch. He moved toward her, and heard that little gasp once more which was not quite alarm, and yet not quite welcoming. He raised himself up so that he was above her. In the moonlight he could see her face, her eyes resolutely shut, her mouth expressionless, as she had looked when she was praying. He bent his head and kissed her on the lips. She was warm and soft; but she lay completely still, as if she were asleep.
John stroked gently down her belly and beyond and found the downy softness of the hair between her legs. As he touched her she turned her head to one side, but still she did not open her eyes or stir. Gently he pressed his knee against her thigh and slowly, she opened her legs to him. Feeling like a king coming in to his kingdom, John moved across in the bed and lay between the legs of his wife, started to ease forward, started to know the power of his desire.
There was a sudden rush and a clatter of mud and stones against the window.
“God’s wounds! What’s that?” John exclaimed in alarm. “Fire?”
In one swift sinuous movement Elizabeth was out of bed, her gown clutched to her heavy swinging breasts, peering out of the window into the darkness of the village street.
“Are you done, John?” came a jovial beery yell. “Sowed your seeds, have you?”
“God’s blood, I shall murder them!” John exclaimed, dashing his nightcap to the floor.
Slowly Elizabeth put her nightgown to one side and came back to bed beside him. At last she spoke to him, the first words she spoke in their bedroom, the first words she said naked before him: “Never take the Lord’s name in vain, husband. It is His own commandment. I want our house to walk in His ways.”
John flung himself back on the bed, deserted by desire, as soft as a gelding. “I shall sleep,” he declared sulkily. “And then I shall avoid offending you.” He humped all the bedclothes around him, turned his back on her and closed his eyes. “You can pray again if you like,” he added spitefully.
Elizabeth, robbed of the blankets, lay in silence on the cool sheet, humiliatingly naked, her new nightgown spread across her breasts and belly. Only when she heard his breathing deepen and she was certain that he was asleep did she move close to his broad back and wind her arms around his sleeping body, pressing her cold nakedness against him. She wept a little before she finally fell asleep. But she did not wish her words unsaid.
June 1607
Next day, before Elizabeth had done more than stir the fire in the new grate and set the morning porridge on to heat, there was a knock on the door and a messenger from the earl.
“His Grace wants you in London,” the man said shortly.
Elizabeth glanced at her new husband, half-expecting him to refuse, but John was already seated in his chair at the fireside pulling on his riding boots.
The man doffed his hat to her but looked beyond her to John. “At the docks,” he said. “You’re to meet him at Gravesend.”
Another swift bow and he was gone. Cecil’s servants were not encouraged to linger and gossip. The common belief was that Cecil had ears everywhere and an indiscreet servant would not last long.
Elizabeth took John’s traveling cloak from the press where she had laid it in lavender. She had thought then that it was worth protecting it against moths for months of storage.
“When will you be back?” she asked quietly.
“I can’t say,” John replied briskly.
Elizabeth flinched at the coldness of his tone. “Am I to join you at Hatfield?” she asked. “Or come to Theobalds?”
He looked at her and saw the coat she was holding for him. “I thank you,” he said courteously. “I’ll send you word. I don’t know what is happening, I don’t know what he wants me for. These are dangerous times for him. I must go at once.”
Elizabeth felt her village-based view of the world shudder under the weight of great events which would now impinge on her life. “I didn’t think these were dangerous times. How are they dangerous?”
He glanced at her quickly, as if her ignorance surprised him. “All times are dangerous to men with great power,” he explained. “My lord is the greatest in the land. Every day he faces one danger or another. If he sends for me I go without question and I make no plans other than his will.”
Elizabeth nodded. There was no arguing with a man’s duty to follow his lord.
“I’ll wait till I hear from you then,” she said.
John kissed her forehead in that passionless meaningless gesture which seemed to have started with their betrothal and hung over them still. Elizabeth curbed her impulse to turn up her face and kiss him on the lips. If he did not want to kiss her, if he did not want to lie with her, then it was not the part of a good wife to complain. She would have to wait. She would have to do her duty by him, as he did his by his lord.
“Thank you,” John said, as if she had obliged him in some little courtesy, and went out to saddle his horse, mounted the animal and rode him from the back of the cottage to the village street. Elizabeth was at the doorway, her head high; none of the village gossips would know that her husband was leaving her as virginal as she had been on her wedding day.
John doffed his hat to her, conscious also of the dozens of watching windows. He did not lean down to kiss her, nor did he offer one word of assurance or comfort. Seated high on his horse he looked down on the pale face of the wife he was leaving without bedding and knew himself to be behaving badly, with his duty as an excuse as well as an obligation. “Farewell,” he said shortly, and turned his horse and rode briskly out at a trot. The knowledge of his unkindness to a woman who, wedding night or no, mother-naked or clothed, had said no more than she had every right to say, and who, before that accursed interruption, had lain warm and pleasant to his touch, galled him all the way along the lanes going north to Gravesend.