Chapter 7
In the years that followed, the affair that began as stolen conversations in palace corridors deepened into something neither Charles nor I could have contained even if we had tried harder than we did.
I told Robert I carried a child, and for a long moment he said nothing at all. Then he asked me, quietly, whether he was meant to believe it was his.
“Believe whatever lets you sleep,” I said, which was not the answer of a woman seeking forgiveness, and I knew it even as I said it.
“I could put you out for this.” He said it without heat, which frightened me more than anger would have.
“You could.” I did not look away from him. “And my brother would ask you why, and you would have to answer him.”
He said nothing further, then or ever, about that first child. In the silence that followed, I understood exactly what I had bought with my brother’s name.
My daughter with Charles was born in March of 1592, and I gave her my own name, Penelope. This was a small private vanity I allowed myself even as the rest of the world was permitted to believe her a Rich child like any other.
My husband was not a forgiving man. He was not inclined to swallow humiliation quietly.
But my brother stood between us. My brother was Queen Elizabeth’s favorite and powerful enough to make men far more important than Robert Rich reconsider whatever grievances they nursed.
My husband understood, as clearly as I did, that publicly disowning Essex’s sister carried consequences no ambitious man wanted to invite.
Whatever fury he felt toward me, he swallowed it.
And I watched him swallow it again and again with each child that followed.
His resentment sharpened even as his outward composure held.
He did not always stay to watch it happen, though.
In the summer of 1596, with my belly rounding again beneath my gowns, Robert accepted a place among my brother’s officers on the expedition against Cadiz.
He sailed for Spain within the month. He did not discuss the timing with me, and I did not ask him to explain it.
We both understood well enough what he was choosing not to be present for.
The following autumn, he left again, this time for France in the Earl of Shrewsbury’s embassy.
He returned only after that year’s child had already been christened without him.
I do not think that my husband lacked courage.
I think he simply could not stand in a room and watch what he could not prevent.
So he accepted the children, one after another.
He took them into his household and under his name.
I bore each pregnancy with a complicated mixture of joy and dread that never fully resolved itself.
The moment I held my children, I loved them entirely and without reservation.
But I also understood that they existed in a strange legal fiction, claimed by a father who despised the arrangement and lacked the standing to end it.
It was with the birth of my son in 1597 that I made a choice bold enough to alarm even those who already assumed the worst about my relationship with Charles.
I named my son Mountjoy.
I did not attempt subtlety with this choice.
I did not disguise the name behind some family precedent or convenient coincidence.
Everyone who heard it understood exactly what I was declaring.
This child belonged, in every sense that mattered beyond the law, to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy.
And I wanted his name attached to my son regardless of what convention demanded I pretend otherwise.
I understood precisely how far I was testing my husband’s restraint.
I was not simply confessing to an affair he already knew about.
I was daring him to respond to a provocation no husband should have been expected to absorb in silence.
And I was deliberately gambling that my brother’s shadow over our household still fell long enough to protect me.
My husband was in France again when the child was christened, and I have wondered since whether that, too, was a kind of answer.
I have pondered whether he arranged his absence rather than stand in name to a boy carrying his rival’s title.
He said nothing to me directly about the name when he returned.
I remember the look he gave me instead, a look that carried none of the indifference I might once have mistaken for his true feeling.
It was contempt. I had spent years mistaking his silence for weakness when it had never been anything but patience waiting for circumstances to change.
The court, predictably, could not maintain the same silence my husband offered.
Gossip about Charles and me had circulated for years by this point.
But the naming of my son seemed to give that gossip fresh fuel and fresh permission to speak more openly about what had previously been only discussed in careful, deniable terms. I heard the whispers wherever I went.
I could not ignore the conversations that stopped abruptly when I entered a room.
I saw the glances exchanged between women who now regarded me with something between fascination and judgment.
I had spent years cultivating a reputation built on wit and political competence.
I watched that reputation lose ground. Because I was now a woman no longer admired for her mind but pitied, or condemned, for failing to master her own desires.
Although I wondered what the queen thought of me beneath the practiced neutrality she wore at court, she never once compared me to my mother aloud.
She never called me my mother’s daughter the way half the court whispered behind my back.
But I could not quite believe the thought had never crossed her mind.
I was not sure that a woman who had spent two decades unable to forgive Lettice Knollys for choosing scandal over duty could watch that woman’s daughter do something not so very different, and feel nothing stir in recognition.
But if she thought it, she kept it to herself, and she never let it cost me my place at her court.
For that, whatever else I came to feel about Queen Elizabeth, I owed her gratitude.
I told myself that the whispers didn’t matter.
I told myself that whatever the court said, I had chosen a life that brought me genuine happiness and genuine partnership with a man who valued me in ways my marriage never had.
I told myself that this happiness was worth whatever judgment accompanied it.
Some days I believed this fully. Other days, lying awake in a house that had grown colder toward me with each child I bore, I wondered whether I was simply repeating my mother’s pattern.
I wondered whether I had inherited not just her beauty but her capacity for scandal, and whether that inheritance would eventually cost me as dearly as it had cost her.
For his part, Charles bore the gossip with more visible strain than he usually permitted himself to show.
He held a public position, military commands, and political responsibilities that required a reputation less clouded by scandal than mine had become.
I watched him navigate conversations at court with a careful neutrality that must have cost him considerable effort.
He deflected questions about our relationship without ever quite denying what everyone already assumed.
He never once suggested, in all those years, that we should end what we had built together.
He never once implied that the risk had grown too heavy to continue bearing.
But I saw, in the tightness around his eyes during particularly pointed moments of gossip, exactly how much this arrangement demanded from him.
More than once during those years, we spoke about what might happen if the truth ever moved from whispered speculation into something impossible to ignore.
Charles raised the possibility of marriage - hypothetically and carefully, always circling back to the impossible obstacle of my existing marriage to Robert Rich.
At that time, divorce remained almost impossible to obtain, particularly for a woman.
And even if I somehow secured one, remarriage afterward carried its own complications.
There were social and religious objections that made any future together feel more theoretical than achievable.
“We cannot go on like this forever,” Charles said to me once, during a quiet evening when the weight of our situation pressed more heavily than usual. “Something will have to change eventually.”
“What would you have me do?” I asked, genuinely uncertain as to what answer he wanted. “I cannot simply leave Robert,” I explained. “Not without cause the law would recognize. Not without destroying whatever remains of my children’s legitimate standing.”
He had no answer for this. Neither of us did. We continued as we had, loving each other in private while maintaining the public farce that grew increasingly unconvincing to anyone paying attention.
The precariousness of our arrangement became something I felt constantly.
It was a low hum of anxiety underneath even our happiest moments together.
We had built an entire life around each other.
We had created children, a shared history, and genuine devotion.
But all of it rested on a single fragile condition: that my brother remained powerful enough, and Queen Elizabeth’s favor toward him remained secure enough, to keep Robert Rich’s resentment contained behind silence rather than open retaliation.
I did not know what circumstance might eventually force the reckoning we had both avoided naming directly.
I suspected, without being able to articulate exactly why, that my brother’s ambitions carried more danger for all of us than the gossip about Charles and me ever had.
My brother’s relationship with the queen had grown increasingly strained.
His temper had steadily become more difficult to manage.
And his sense of his own importance was increasingly disconnected from the actual limits of Elizabeth’s patience.
If Robert’s favor with the queen ever collapsed, the shield it provided me would collapse alongside it.
Whatever restraint kept my husband’s contempt behind closed doors existed only because my brother remained too powerful to cross.
I had built my entire safe arrangement with Charles on that single, unstable foundation.
I did not allow myself to fully consider what would happen to me and my children the moment it gave way.