A Court Affair - Emily Purdy

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a moment by the coffin and pay their last respects to Lady Dudley. For those who needed more than a moment, Robert had thoughtfully provided a pair of impressive—and no doubt expensive—mourning stools fringed in Venice gold and black silk and upholstered in quilted black velvet, placed at the head and foot of the coffin, so that any who wished to might sit and mourn in comfort.

      As the mourners filed out, to go and feast at the nearby college and honour Lady Dudley’s memory, a plump, greying woman—she reminded me of my own dear old governess, Kat Ashley—her round, wizened face red and swollen from crying, lingered to lovingly lay a bouquet of buttercups upon the coffin before she buried her face in her hands and, her shoulders shaking convulsively with loud, racking sobs, turned away and followed the others out. “Mrs Pirto,” I heard someone in the crowd say, identifying her as Amy’s maid, who had “loved her lady well and dearly and been with her her whole life long”.

      When the church was quite deserted, I steeled myself, squared my shoulders, and approached the black-draped bier, supremely conscious of the sound of my booted footsteps upon the stone floor; no matter how softly I tried to tread, they rang like a tocsin in my ears, and more than once I glanced guiltily back over my shoulder as though I were committing some crime by coming here. I knew I was the last person Amy would have wanted or expected to come; she would have thought I came to gloat over her coffin, to bask in my triumph, now that she was dead and Robert was free to marry me.

      Tall white tapers, arranged like a crescent moon, stood behind the coffin. Had someone known that Amy was always nervous of the dark, afraid of the encroaching shadows and what they might hide, and ordered the candles placed there as a comforting gesture just for her, or was this merely thought a becoming touch, or done for the simple sake of providing light?

      Burnished golden curls, perfectly arranged, gleamed in the candlelight, framing her pale face, white as the candle wax. A wreath of silken buttercups crowned those perfect curls; real ones would have soon wilted and withered away within the coffin. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; so it is in the end for all that lives, from buttercups to beautiful girls too young to die. Who had fashioned that wreath of yellow silk flowers and her hair into those perfect curls? Surely it must have been the devoted Mrs Pirto. I could picture her, near-blinded by grief, sitting by the fire, tears dripping down onto the gnarled and thick-veined hands that laboriously cut and stitched silken semblances of the yellow flowers that had always been Amy’s favourite as a final act of love. Amy loved buttercups; I remembered that from her wedding day, when she had carried a great bouquet of them and worn a crown of them upon her head and had them embroidered in gold upon the creamy satin field of her gown, the very one she wore now. Amy was going to her grave in her wedding gown. Mayhap in death, I prayed, she would find a love better and more worthy of her than she ever found in life.

      “Love,” I softly mused aloud, “so kind to some, so cruel to others.” That fickleness was one of Life’s harsh realities that blessed some and damned others.

      She was much and sadly altered, though the times I had gazed upon her were scant—a mere three times, twice up close and once from afar—and the difference was startling to behold. The first time I saw her, on her wedding day, I thought this petite, plump, buxom blonde would soon be as round as she was tall with all the children she would bear. I thought surely to hear that she was pregnant every year. With her full breasts and round hips, she looked ripe for motherhood, born for breeding. But it was not to be. Amy Robsart had prospered neither as a wife nor as a woman; even the joys and consolations of motherhood had been denied her. And now she lay pale, wan, and wasted in her coffin, cancer had consumed her curves, and Life and Love’s cruelties had taken all the rest. This was a woman whose hopes and dreams had died long before she did.

      Her wedding day—that beautiful June day—had been the happiest day of Amy’s life. And I had been there to bear witness to it. I had seen the joy alive and sparkling in her blue green eyes, and the radiant smile of pure delight that lit up her face, the love and trust that shone from her, like a sunbeam, every time she looked at Robert. It had felt like an intrusion, almost, to witness it, and I had felt something else: the hard emerald bite of envy when I looked at the bridal couple, resenting them—resenting Amy, to be more honest and precise—for something I could never have and wasn’t sure I even wanted. Watching her, I had felt a tug-o’-war within my soul; part of me wanted to be her, yet another part of me obstinately pulled back, remembering my mother’s warning, urgently spoken the last time I saw her, “Never surrender!” and in my memory’s eye at the foot of my bed the ghost of Tom Seymour, winking and grinning lasciviously, his cock pointing adamantly out at me from between the folds of his brocade dressing gown, before he leapt and pounced on me, the giggling, giddy girl I used to be, writhing and revelling in my newly awakened sensuality.

      Now Amy lay in her coffin. The future that had seemed so golden had turned out to be as false as the trinkets the peddlers at the country fairs sold to the gullible, touting them as genuine gold and gems, though they were in truth but glass and tin from which the gold paint would all too soon flake to reveal the base metal beneath. All that glitters is not gold.

      Her hands were folded across the bodice of her gold-lace-garnished wedding gown. The vast golden profusion of buttercups embroidered all over the cream-coloured satin seemed to sway as if caressed by a gentle breeze, an illusion wrought by the play of the candles’ flickering flames upon the gilded threads, tricking out their shimmer, causing them to appear to dance. How sad that the flowers on Amy’s gown seemed to live when she herself lay dead.

      Someone—Mrs Pirto’s loving hands?—had filled in the low, square bodice with a high-collared yoke of rich, creamy lace veined with gold and topped by a tiny gold frilled ruff to support her broken neck and hold it properly in place. If I looked closely, I could just discern the white bandages beneath, wound tightly—too tightly for life—lending further support to that frail, shattered neck. And, as another remembrance of the happiest day of her life, someone had tied around her waist the frilly lace-, pearl-, and ribbon-festooned apron she had worn over her brocaded satin gown. I could picture Mrs Pirto leaning down as she dressed her lady for the last time, stroking that pale face, tenderly kissing the cold brow, and whispering in a tear-choked voice, “Take only the happy memories with you, my sweet, and leave all the rest behind.”

      Amy’s hands, I noticed then, were nude and nail-bitten, gnawed painfully down to the quick; they must have throbbed and bled. Robert would not want to waste jewels upon the dead; to him that would be the same as throwing them into the Thames. Even the golden oak leaf and amber acorn betrothal ring had vanished, just like the love it had once symbolised. Where had it gone? I shuddered and hoped fervently never to find it on my pillow or presented to me in a velvet box.

      It wasn’t right; Amy, who so loved pretty things and delighted in the latest fashions—Robert complained that she ordered as many as fourteen new gowns a year—should have something more than lace and flowers, even if they were silken and embroidered.

      I took off my gloves and stared down at my hands, perfect, gleaming nails on long white fingers sparkling with diamonds her husband had given me. In my haste, I had forgotten to remove my rings. All save the gold and onyx coronation ring that had wedded me to England were gifts from Robert; he stroked my vanity like a cat and loved to cover my hands with cold jewels and hot kisses.

      She really should have something! I started to remove my rings, but then I remembered that Amy didn’t like diamonds. I could hear Robert’s voice cruelly mocking her, calling her a fool, insisting that every woman loves diamonds and would sell her soul for them, adopting a high-pitched, timorous, quavering parody of a woman’s voice, parroting words Amy had once spoken, likening diamonds to “tears frozen in time”. Yet somehow now it seemed most apt; Amy herself, at only eight-and-twenty, had become a tear frozen in time.

      I took the rings from my hands and, one by one, put them onto the thin, cold, death-stiffened fingers, knowing all the while that not all the diamonds in the world could make up for all the tears that Robert and I had caused this woman to shed. And she had shed tears aplenty—oceans and oceans of tears. She had been drowning in tears for two years at least, perhaps even longer. Robert’s love had died long before Amy did. Love is cruel; it kills its victims slowly.

      I

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