too, born of the love we had just made, clinging together in the cold, salty surf.
Those were such happy days, perhaps the happiest days of our marriage and my life. I remember us walking hand-in-hand upon the beach, the wind whipping and tugging my hair and skirts in such a frenzy that I feared I would be ripped bald and bare-skinned by those invisible grasping fingers, but I was so happy the whole time, I never stopped smiling, and I laughed more then than I ever did in my whole life.
We collected pretty shells to adorn our mantel, and Robert promised he would order a cabinet of glass made to display them in. He even made a sketch of it, with notes alongside describing the pretty gilded woodwork with blue, green, and white enamelled waves and pink enamelled seashells, and bare-breasted mermaids with “harvest gold hair” just like mine. And someday, he said, we would sit together and tell our children about the shells we had collected. Every year, he promised, we would go back to Hemsby for another seaside honeymoon and collect more shells to put inside our cabinet. Oh, how I dreamed of those days to come, when we would sit with our children, the babies on our laps and the older ones clustered around us, and see their eager little hands carefully cradling the shells, their eyes bright and open wide with wonderment at the beauty of God’s gifts from the sea that would always serve as a reminder of the strange little creatures that had once made their home inside them.
We pretended we were castaways, stranded on a deserted island, inhabited only by the two of us, and we swam and ran naked, wild and free, like savages, up and down the beach, and fell down and coupled where we pleased. And at night we cooked our meals of fish and oysters over a fire Robert built with driftwood while we huddled together, letting the fire and each other’s nakedness warm us against the deliciously cool sea air. He found a pearl in one of the oysters he gathered—a big, funny-shaped, silvery grey and white thing, like a thumb with a swollen tip. “Like a fellow who has cut his thumb with a knife while trying to pry open an oyster shell,” Robert quipped, sucking his own injured thumb. Despite its peculiar shape, I loved it, and Robert would later have it cunningly set so I could wear it either as a pendant or a ring.
And every day, before we left the beach and made our way up the winding path back to the castle, meandering, watching the stars come out, first we stood on the golden sand, Robert behind me, his arms about me, and watched the sun set, like a ball of fire sinking slowly into the sea.
Robert carved horses and mermaids out of driftwood, and even a baby and a cradle for it, and we argued playfully about whether the driftwood baby was a boy or a girl until Robert carved another with a prominent but petite phallus that made us both roll in the sand and howl with laughter until my husband silenced me by offering me his own member to suckle like a greedy infant, kneeling there stark naked in the sand with my hair whipping wild about me, tugged by the wind as if it too would be my lover and sought to woo me away from Robert, but he was everything I ever dreamed of or wanted, and the only one for me.
One day when the tide left a special gift for us, a flat pebble, nigh heart-shaped and the deep brown red of dried blood, worn smooth by the sea’s caresses, he carved our names, encircled by a heart and bound by a lovers’ knot, upon it and swore that we would keep it always. We would use it as a paperweight, he decided, and keep it on our desk, and whenever one of us sat down to write letters or with the accounts ledger we would always have this memento right there to make us smile at the blissful memories it conjured of the two of us frolicking and loving on the beach at Hemsby.
And once, to my delight, using a stick he found lying on the beach, Robert fought a duel with an irate blue green crab that did an angry dance, clacking its claws in the air like a Spanish dancer’s castanets. I laughed until tears rolled down my face and my sides ached as I clung to my beloved’s arm, the two of us leaping back as one as the crab advanced, snapping its pincers at our bare toes. Robert wanted to cook and eat it, but I implored him, “No, let it live,” and Robert kissed me and gave in. Back then, he still loved his “tenderhearted buttercup bride who pleads for the lives of geese and crabs”.
8
Amy Robsart Dudley
Cumnor Place, Berkshire, near Oxford Sunday, September 8, 1560
I have no illusions now that, if I were to do the same today, I wouldn’t end up alone, crying in the bedroom all night, and the crab would be flung into a pot of boiling water, then onto Robert’s plate. He would have no compassion, no tenderness, no mercy for either of us.
It seems a whole lifetime ago now, as if I am a withered and ancient crone looking back on the fond days of her girlhood, not a mere ten years. It breaks my heart all over again to look back over the years and see it all gone so wrong, all the honey sweetness of our love turned to vile and sour vinegar, and so soon; I often marvel at how little a time our love—the time when we were both in love—lasted.
Hemsby seems little more than a dream now, a fairy tale, a magical time like King Arthur’s Camelot; all that is left of it now are memories and the ornamental box the deed was gifted to us in. All the pretty shells were packed away in a box; I’ve moved so often since, I don’t know where they are now—like our love, they got lost along the way. As for the castle itself, Robert sold it, to pay off his gambling debts, or buy gifts for Elizabeth, or help pay her expenses when she was in disfavour, or perhaps to pay his tailor when he declared he would not make another garment for Robert until the bill was settled, or buy yet more horses; the money came and went so fast, it was there and gone again, like a flash of silver white lightning, vivid and bright against the night sky. My mind was never quick enough to keep up with it and follow where it went. And that was the way Robert liked it; he preferred that on this subject my mind should always remain a darkened muddle, a dingy mud puddle rather than a crystal clear spring. “You have your pretties and a roof over your head, my angel,” he would say, kissing my cheek. “Best to leave it at that; I have men in my pay to balance the books and dole out the coins. No need for you to spend your days squinting and wrinkling your pretty brow over the ledgers when you could be embroidering roses on the hems of your petticoats instead. And you know how much I like that, knowing that I am the only man to see them, and these rosy buds,” he would add, then bend his head to nuzzle and kiss my nipples and fly all facts and figures right out of my head on passion’s wings.
9
Amy Robsart Dudley
Hemsby-by-the-Sea, near Great Yarmouth Summer’s End, 1550
And then the day came—as I knew it must—when he had to go, back to London and the court, and leave me. I begged him on my knees to take me with him, even though the thought of it scared me sick. I clung to him and trembled and wept. But Robert said that since the King was still in his minority and too young for marriage, the presence of women was frowned upon. Men were not encouraged to bring their wives and daughters to court except to celebrate holidays and other festive occasions; not even the King’s sisters were allowed to lodge there except for during their brief and rare visits. But he promised he would send for me soon, for a brief visit, to have me presented, and I must see to having a new gown made, so that when he summoned me, there would be no delay over feminine fripperies. And this would give me something to do, Robert said, something fun and diverting, for he knew how I delighted in pretty clothes. It would give me something to look forward to and would help ease my loneliness and the sharp pain of missing him.
I didn’t know it then, but it was a sign of things to come, the first stitch in a pattern, and the first of many such absences when I would be left alone with only servants or strangers to keep me company. It would be my fate to spend most of my marriage parted from and pining for my husband, to wait and want in vain.
Before he left me, he bade an artist come and capture my likeness. Robert wanted a miniature to wear over his heart and lay on the table beside his bed every night so that my face would be the first thing he saw upon awaking and the last he gazed upon when he put out the candle and closed his eyes at night. He would order the frame set with a bail at the top so he could wear it on a ribbon or a chain about his neck while he went about