Chapter 10
He had never fully recovered his strength after years of campaigning in Ireland, where damp encampments and military demands had worn down a constitution that even his discipline could not fully protect.
I had noticed the toll gradually over the preceding years.
There were small signs I attributed to ordinary fatigue rather than genuine decline.
A cough that lingered longer than it should have.
A weariness that settled into him earlier each evening.
I told myself these were the ordinary costs of a soldier’s life.
I tried to convince myself they were temporary burdens that rest and our new marriage would eventually ease.
I was wrong, and I understood just how wrong within weeks of the new year.
By February, Charles could no longer disguise how severely his health had deteriorated.
His cough worsened, his breath grew shorter, and the physicians who attended him spoke in the careful, hedging language doctors use when they suspect an outcome they cannot yet bring themselves to admit.
I sat with him through those weeks with a growing dread I recognized from years of watching people I loved slip toward endings I could not prevent.
Now I watched the husband I had finally, properly married fade in front of me after we had sacrificed everything to reach this point together.
He remained lucid through most of his decline.
Not once did he speak of regret, not even as his strength continued failing him.
He asked, one evening when he still had breath enough for it, whether I thought our children would remember him kindly, or only as a scandal attached to their names.
I told him they would remember exactly what I remembered.
They would remember a man who had never once made us feel like less than we were.
He closed his eyes at that and did not answer.
I could not tell, in the candlelight, whether he was satisfied or simply too tired to debate.
“We had this,” he told me, near the end, when speaking itself had grown difficult. “Whatever else, we had this.”
I held his hand and agreed, though, even in that moment, some part of me was already calculating how brief “this” would turn out to be.
The answer was barely four months. We had waited well over a decade and had sacrificed our reputations and the goodwill of a king.
Then we finally claimed a marriage that would last only four months before illness claimed him entirely.
Charles Blount, Earl of Devonshire, died in April 1606.
Even now, I do not have adequate language for the emptiness that followed.
I had grieved before. For my father, my brother, my step-fathers, and the slow loss of a marriage that had never provided real companionship in the first place.
But this grief carried a different pain, because Charles had been the one certainty I had built my entire adult life around.
He was the man whose steady presence had justified every scandal, every sacrifice, and every risk I had taken since the moment I first admitted what I felt for him in that dim corridor at Essex House.
He was gone, and I was left to face what remained without him.
The practical consequences arrived almost immediately.
As considerable as Charles’s estate was, it became entangled in inheritance disputes that our irregular marriage only complicated further.
Our children, born before our wedding and only partially legitimized by the ceremony that followed, faced uncertain claims on their father’s title and property.
Lawyers and rival relations seemed eager to contest their claims now that the man who might have defended them was no longer present to do so.
One of his cousins, a man who had never once visited our household while Charles lived, wrote to me within weeks of the funeral to inquire what portion of the estate I intended to relinquish without a fight.
I answered him myself, in my own hand, and made it clear that I would not relinquish anything without a fight.
In the months following Charles’s death, I found myself managing negotiations I had never anticipated needing to conduct alone.
I fought for whatever provision I could secure for our children, understanding that their futures depended entirely on arrangements I could negotiate now, before memory of their father’s wishes faded and rival claims grew stronger through simple persistence.
I do not know that I succeeded as fully as I wanted.
I know that I tried. I exhausted myself in the effort long after grief alone might have justified withdrawing from the fight entirely.
My reputation, meanwhile, offered no comfort whatsoever during this difficult period.
Whatever standing I had once enjoyed at court, whatever admiration my beauty and wit had once commanded, none of it remained accessible to me now.
I was the king’s banished subject. I was a woman whose marriage had defied royal authority.
My widowhood had left me without even the flawed protection that my marriage, however scandalous, had provided.
I lived quietly. My days were consumed by grief and practical necessity rather than the entertainments and political maneuvering that had once filled them.
I saw very few visitors during those months.
Some old friends maintained correspondence.
I received careful letters that offered sympathy without risking too much public association with a woman still viewed as a source of scandal.
Other “friends” simply disappeared entirely, their earlier friendship apparently contingent on advantages I could no longer offer.
I did not fight this withdrawal as forcefully as I might once have.
After Charles’s death, something in me lost any appetite for the intrigue that had once come so naturally.
I had spent decades calculating risk, weighing reputation against desire, and negotiating the treacherous currents of a court that judged women like me far more harshly than it judged men.
In my grief, I found that I simply no longer possessed the energy for any of it.
My mother did not disappear like some of the others.
She came to me herself, unannounced, some weeks after the funeral.
She sat with me in a room I had not troubled to keep warm properly.
She did not ask how I was bearing it. She did not offer the kind of comfort people offer when they want grief to resolve itself quickly for their own sake.
She simply sat. After a long while, she said, “I do not regret Robert Dudley. Whatever it cost me and whatever it is still costing you, I would do it again.”
“Even now?” I asked her. “Knowing everything since?”
“Even now.” She took my hand, the way she had not done since I was a girl small enough to need it. “I did not raise you to be careful, Penelope. I could not have, even if I had wanted to. You were always going to choose exactly as you did.”
I did not tell her whether I believed choosing Charles was worth what the choice had taken from me.
I am not certain, even now, that I fully know the answer.
But I understood, sitting with her in that cold room, that for the first time since Charles’s death, I could sit with my own grief without needing to defend it to anyone, including myself.
She did not stay long. She had her own life to return to. And I understood that the grief was mine to carry, not hers to solve. But something in me settled slightly after she left, the way a room settles after a door has been opened and closed again.
The settling did not last. My own health began declining within months of Charles’s death, though I could never say with certainty whether illness or grief bore greater responsibility for my decline.
I grew tired more easily and found less pleasure in activities that had once occupied me happily.
I felt the accumulated weight of everything I had survived pressing more heavily than it ever had while Charles remained alive to share the burden.
Some mornings, I woke rested and almost myself again, certain the worst had passed.
Other mornings, I could not manage the stairs without stopping twice to catch my breath.
On those mornings, I understood exactly what my own body was telling me, whether or not I was prepared to listen.
In the last months I can clearly account for, I thought less about the scandal and more about whether my children would remember any part of me the way I remembered myself.
I worried they would simplify me down to a single word before they were old enough to argue otherwise.
I found I could not decide which fate frightened me more.
I do not know exactly what those who sat with me in my final days believed about the life I had lived.
I do not know whether they saw a woman who had squandered extraordinary advantages on scandal and disgrace or a woman who had simply insisted on always choosing her own heart.
I suspect both interpretations found adherents among those who spoke of me afterward, just as both interpretations had followed me throughout my adult life.
I was Lady Rich, Countess of Devonshire.
I was the sister of an executed traitor, and lover turned wife to a man the king had refused to forgive.
I was a mother to children whose legitimacy remained forever complicated by the irregular circumstances of their birth.
Whatever else I had been - whatever competence, intelligence, and genuine love I had brought to every relationship that mattered to me, I knew that history would likely remember the scandal first, and everything else as only a footnote.
I did not have much time left to decide how I felt about that. But I found, in what remained of my strength, that I wanted to set down what I had learned, before it was too late to say it in my own words.