Remembrance

“He is of no use to you,” Alida shouted. “He is untutored. He has no social graces, no table manners. He cannot sing or even play a lute.”

Gilbert looked at her as though she had lost her mind. “What do these things matter to a man?” he bellowed at her. “A man needs none of these things.”

“A man at court does,” she shouted back, sure that he was the stupidest man ever created. He seemed to have made up his mind about life on the day he was born and nothing or no one had ever made him think differently.

“Court?” he asked, as though he’d never heard of the place.

“Listen to me,” she said, doing all she could to refrain herself from calling him all the names she wanted to. “Do you forget that you are related to the queen? It is a distant relationship, I know, but it is there.” When his witless face registered no hint of understanding, she continued.

“The queen is fifty-four years old. She has yet to name her successor. Do you recall that she has a cousin who has some claim to the throne? Bess of Hardwick’s niece, Arabella Stuart. The girl is ten years old now and it is said that Bess keeps her prisoner, always looking for the proper husband for her.”

Alida leaned toward the old man with his gray, grizzled whiskers, his greasy hair, his food-stained clothes. “Bess wants her niece to marry a man who could be king.”

“King?”

Alida was so tired of ignorant men. Could they not see the simplest things? Taking a breath, she tried to calm herself, but she was going to be brutally honest with this man. His mind was not up to subtlety.

“Gilbert Rasher, you breed beautiful sons. Big, intelligent sons, quite gorgeous actually, but then they are exposed to your lack of morals, to your primitive ideas of discipline, to your crude ideas of education, and they become animals like you. You ruin what could be a valuable product.”

While she said this, he sat there staring at her with a curled upper lip, looking at her as though she were something to be put on a plate and served to him, his for the taking. But he said nothing, as he was at last beginning to realize that she had a reason for coming to see him.

“This son,” she continued, “had the good fortune to be taken away from you at birth.” She did not say so but she also thought it was good fortune that Talis had been raised away from John also.

Alida gave Gilbert a little smile, knowing she was still a handsome woman, faded perhaps, but not unpleasant looking. “You should see this boy: tall, proud, excellent at his studies, kind, polite. He is a beauty in every way.”

At this Gilbert raised one eyebrow, his mind, as always, in the gutter.

“Do not look at me so. I am not after the boy. But there is another woman who likes beautiful young men very much.”

When Gilbert looked blank at this she silently cursed his ignorance. “The queen! Now the Earl of Leicester’s stepson, that Robert Devereux, is at court, a young man of only twenty-one and I hear he charms the queen night and day. Talis, your son, is better-looking than Devereux, and more charming. Furthermore, Talis has not a dishonorable bone in his body. I hear that that Devereux is as ambitious as his mother.”

There was still no enlightenment shining in Gilbert’s drink-dulled eyes, so Alida simplified her explanation. “You and I have the same purposes in mind. I want your son out of my life. I do not want my husband to give everything that he has and that came to him on our marriage to a boy who is not mine.”

At that, Gilbert’s eyes did light up.

“Do not think he will inherit and then you will take everything from him,” she said, accurately guessing what was in his mind. “From the look of you, you will not live the year out, while my husband is the picture of health. You must leave your son with us for two more years, then you must come to take him. By then he will be trained for court; he will please the queen greatly, and you must petition her to make a great marriage for him. If I were you, I would ask for Lady Arabella Stuart. Who knows? With your connections to the throne and his, perhaps when she dies she will leave England to him.”

“I will take him now,” Gilbert said, starting to rise. “I will make him king now.”

“No!” she half shouted. “He is not ready. I told you this. If your purpose is for him to go to court and shoe horses then he is ready.” She calmed herself. “Shoeing horses is not what the queen likes. Before he goes to court he must first learn the finer things of life, to play and sing, to dance, to court a woman.”

“Is he good on a horse?” Gilbert growled. “Can he hold a lance? That is all he needs.”

“All he needs if he is to live with you and spend his life terrorizing the peasants,” she spat at him. “If you were to present him as he is now, in his present raw state, the queen would laugh at you…” She looked at him. “Again.”

Gilbert sat back down. He had never said so, but it had hurt his pride when the queen had laughed at him when so many people had declared that they had wanted his son dead. For all his crudity, in a way, Gilbert loved his sons and he missed the boy. The boy had been a great drinking companion.

“What do you get out of this?” he asked her.

“The happiness of my husband,” she said.

At that Gilbert laughed. “If you do not tell me the truth, I will do nothing that you want.”

Alida took a moment to breathe deeply and in that time she decided to tell him the truth. “Perhaps I want revenge.” She looked at him. Gilbert Rasher was not the person one would have chosen for a confidant, but then perhaps he was the best sort. Nothing on earth, not any motive, would shock him. He understood and indulged himself in any vice he wanted. And Alida knew he would not waste time on sympathy.

“I married my husband for love. Not for money, but because I loved him. I was very young, very naive, and I thought he loved me too. He did not. For all of my youth I tried to make him love me, but all he cared about was that I produced a perfect son for him. I did not.”

She paused. “Perhaps he never would have loved me, I do not know. I do know that I have lived in hell most of my life because I did once love him. I have watched my daughters go without husbands and turn into fussy old maids because he would not part with the gold needed for a dowry. I have seen him ignore all that was around him in his foolish attempt to get something that he thought was all he wanted in life.”