God blast her looks, and thin her hair, and rot her teeth, and let her die lonely and alone. 'God strike her down in her youth and her pride and her beauty. 'God strike her dead,' she swore into her pillow as her head rang with the pound of Elizabeth's bells. The chimes did not even sound on key, they sounded like the beat of jealousy, the scream of rage, the sobbing shout of a deserted woman. Amy, alone in all of England, could not celebrate Elizabeth's upward leap to the throne. The peals, pounding Amy into wakefulness, did not bring her to joy. The English had their Elizabeth at last, and the fear-filled days of Mary Tudor could be forgotten. All over the country people would be ringing bells for joy, striking kegs of ale, dancing in the streets, and throwing open prison doors. The Protestant princess had come to the throne and would be England's queen. At last, poor sick Queen Mary had died, and Princess Elizabeth was the uncontested heir. She pulled the pillow over her head to shut out the sound, and yet still it went on, until the rooks abandoned their nests and went streaming into the skies, tossing and turning in the wind like a banner of ill omen, and the bats left the belfry like a plume of black smoke as if to say that the world was upside down now, and day should be forever night.Īmy did not need to ask what the racket was for she already knew.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.Īll the bells in Norfolk were ringing for Elizabeth, pounding the peal into Amy's head, first the treble bell screaming out like a mad woman, and then the whole agonizing, jangling sob till the great bell boomed a warning that the whole discordant carillon was about to shriek out again. As the young couple falls back in love, a question hangs in the air: can he really set aside his wife and marry the queen? When Amy is found dead, Elizabeth and Dudley are suddenly plunged into a struggle for survival. Her faithful advisors warns her that she will survive only if she marries a strong prince to govern the rebellious country, but the one man Elizabeth desires is her childhood friend, the ambitious Robert Dudley. She has inherited a bankrupt country where treason is rampant and foreign war a certainty. She is Amy Dudley, wife of Sir Robert, and she knows that Elizabeth’s ambitious leap to the throne will draw her husband back to the center of the glamorous Tudor court, where he was born to be.Įlizabeth’s excited triumph is short-lived. In the autumn of 1558, church bells across England ring out the joyous news that Elizabeth I is the new queen, yet one woman hears the tidings with utter dread. From #1 New York Times bestselling author and “queen of royal fiction” ( USA TODAY) comes a riveting and scandalous love triangle between a young woman on the brink of greatness, a young man whose ambition far exceeds his means, and the wife who cannot forgive them.

The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory