one, in this case the relationship between Elizabeth and Dudley. Last year on a particularly wet and windy autumn afternoon, I made the trip to Cumnor to the site of the lost manor house, and from there to Oxford, to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin where Amy had been buried. Her tomb has also been lost.
This book is a very personal one for me, springing as it does from a love of Tudor history engendered in me by my beloved grandmother and I am as always immensely grateful to my family for their enduring love and support for my writing. For this book I am particularly indebted to my wonderful editor Emily Kitchin, whose ideas and suggestions inspired me to bring out the best in this story, and to Jon Appleton for his insightful copy-editing. A huge thank you too, to the teams at HQ in the UK and Graydon House in the US for all that they do to bring my stories to readers.
As always, I am most grateful to my readers. Thank you!
Read on for an extract from
Nicola Cornick’s stunning historical
mystery, The Woman in the Golden Dress
Prologue
Eustace
April 1765
I know what they will say of me when I am dead. I will be cast as a madman and a fool. They will blame the divorce, so scandalous for a peer of the realm, and claim that it drove me to misery and delusion, that it turned my mind. They will rake up all the old gossip and call my wife a whore.
It pleases me that society will slander Isabella over again. I will gladly tolerate being painted a cuckold and a weakling if it hurts her. I wish I could hurt her more but she is beyond my reach now, more is the pity.
There are those who call me a wicked man. They are wrong. True evil requires intent and I never had the will or the cunning to be truly wicked. Only once was I tempted to commit murder and even then it was not my fault, for I swear I was possessed. It was the golden gown that moved me to evil and the gown that led to that most terrible mistake.
I remember the horror of it to this day. I still see the scene so clear before my eyes. She was walking ahead of me, through the dappled moonlight, and I recognised the gown and hastened my step. I swear I had no fixed intention, no thought of murder, not at that moment. I wanted to talk, to reason with her. Then, on the path by the mill, she seemed to stumble and fall and all of a sudden I was seized by the thought that this was my chance to be rid of the threat for ever. I could not bring myself to touch her directly so I nudged her body with my boot and she rolled gently, so gently, over the edge and into the pool.
I see it all again: the silver moon swimming beneath the water and the golden gown billowing out about her like a shroud slowly unfurling. I needed to claim that gown but my fear made me clumsy and I ripped it from her body when it would not yield to my hands. And then…
I break out into a cold sweat whenever I remember. Everything is so vivid. The sweet scent of lime blossom mingled with the stink of dank weed from the millpond, the endless roar of the water over the sluice like the rush to bedlam.
And then… The body rolled over in the water and I saw her properly for the first time in the moon’s reflected glow. It was not the face of my nemesis. I stood there with the gown dripping in my hands and then I was sick; sick with revulsion, sick with fear, sick with disappointment.
Binks came upon me as I knelt there, retching up my guts.
‘I will attend to this, Lord Gerard,’ he said, as though he were my butler tidying away a glass of spilt wine. ‘You should have left it with me, as we agreed.’
Binks was a damned impertinent fellow but a useful one and I was not going to argue with him. I took my carriage back to Lydiard House and I sat here in my study and drank more than I had ever taken before. I was out cold for three days.
When I came to my senses the first thing I saw was the golden gown