Midnight Never Come

Epilogue

RICHMOND PALACE, RICHMOND: February 8, 1603

The coughing never went entirely away anymore. They sent doctors to pester her; she mustered the energy to drive them out again, but every time it was harder. The rain beat ceaselessly against the windows, a long, dreary winter storm, and it was easy to believe that all the world had turned against her. She sat upon cushions before the fire, and spent many long hours staring into its depths.

Her mind drifted constantly now, forgetting what it was she had been doing. Cecil came occasionally with papers for her to sign; half the time she was surprised to see it was Robert, William’s hunchbacked little son. The wrong Cecil. Burghley, her old, familiar Cecil, had died… how long ago now?

Too long. She had outlived them all, it seemed. Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester. Her old enemy Philip of Spain. Essex, executed on Tower Hill — oh, how he had gone wrong. She could have handled him differently, perhaps, but when all was said and done he would never forgive her for being an old woman, too proud to give in, too stubborn to die. She was approaching seventy. How many could boast reaching such a great age?

She could think of some, but her mind flinched away. Those thoughts were too painful, now that illness and the infirmity of old age were defeating her at last.

“But I have done well, have I not?” she whispered to the fire. “I have done well. ’Twas not all because of her.”

She glanced behind her, half-expecting to see a tall figure in the shadows, but no one was there. Just two of her closest maids, keeping weary vigil over their crabbed old queen, periodically trying and failing to convince her to go to bed. She looked away again, quickly, before they could raise their incessant refrain again.

Sometimes she could almost believe she had imagined it all, from her visitor in the Tower onward. But no — it had been real. Invidiana, and all the rest.

So many regrets. So many questions: What would have been different, had she never formed that pact? Would the Armada have reached the shores of England, bearing Parma’s great army to overrun and subjugate them beneath the yoke of Spain? Or would she never have gotten that far? Perhaps she would have died in the Tower, executed for her Protestant heresy, or simply permitted to perish from the damp cold there, as she was perishing now. Mary Stewart might have had her throne, one Catholic Mary to follow another.

Or not. She had survived thirteen years without Invidiana, through her own wits and will, and the aid of those who served her. She was the Queen of England, blessed by God, beloved of her people, and she could stand on her own.

“And I have,” she whispered, her lips moving near-soundlessly. “I have been a good queen.”

The rain drumming against the windows made no reply. But she heard in it the cheers of her subjects, the songs in her honor, the praise of her courtiers. She had not been perfect. But she had done her best, for as long as she could. Now the time had come to pass her burden to another, and pray he did well by her people.

Pray they remembered her, and fondly.

Gazing into the fire, Elizabeth of England sank into dreams of her glorious past, an old woman, wrinkled and ill, but in her mind’s eye, now and forever the radiant Virgin Queen.