Queen's Ransom

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  I had known Luke Blanchard most of my life, for the Blanchards lived only ten miles from my own family, the Faldenes, and the two households were well acquainted. But as a girl, I was rather afraid of the tall man with the cold face and the bass voice. Later, when he broke off all relations with his Gerald because of our marriage, and then rejected his own granddaughter, fear had been augmented by sheer dislike. Now, I began to see that beneath it all was a timid streak. Cecil had undoubtedly recognized it. Cecil’s light blue eyes, with the permanent worry line between them, missed very little. No wonder he had let Blanchard have his way about the route. Pressed to travel by a route he thought wasn’t safe, my father-in-law might even have defied the queen, abandoned his ward, and refused to go, or—more likely—had a diplomatic illness so that he couldn’t.

  “The ship seems seaworthy,” I said reassuringly.

  At least we would have beds. The crew and most of our men had to make do with hammocks, but the little cabins each had two quite comfortable bunks in them. I was to share my cabin with Dale, and Blanchard’s personal man, Harvey, would occupy the second bunk in his. Captain Ross had the biggest cabin to himself, and the last and smallest, which was empty as yet, would if all went well, be used by Helene on the return journey. The Chaffinch would wait three weeks in Nantes for us, though she would sail without us if we hadn’t reappeared by then, or sent any message.

  There was a small saloon, and an inconvenient galley on deck, with a built-in brick fireplace. When welcoming us aboard, Captain Ross, clearly none too enthusiastic about having women aboard, had said that the food might not be what delicate ladies were accustomed to. But it shouldn’t be a long voyage, he added. The wind was in the right quarter for it, and brisk. We should be warned that if the sea did get rough, cooking would be impossible and food would be cold. Dale and I had said that we quite understood.

  I sniffed the air, like Blanchard, and wondered whether I would have much appetite anyway.

  I didn’t. It was an awful voyage. The sick headaches to which I was prone were usually due to worry or doubt, and I suppose I might well have had one anyway as the ship drew away from England. I had said good-bye to my daughter at her foster home near Hampton two days before that visit to the Tower treasury, and she had cried at parting. I had urged her to take heart, saying that I wouldn’t be away for long—that I was often at court and not able to visit her for weeks together and this would seem no different. But now as the sea widened between us, I realized that it was different. For the next few weeks we would be in different countries. It mattered, and I minded. The rough weather which seized us before we were two hours on our way made disaster certain for me. I lay for three days in my bunk, clutching my temples and a basin alternately, and fervently wishing I were dead.

  Oddly enough, Dale did not succumb. She was terrified by the heaving waves that marched greenly past our porthole and spattered it with foam, and by the scream of the wind in the rigging, but she wasn’t sick. Brockley was, however, and so was Master Blanchard, and so, in varying degrees, were all the eight men of our escort.

  On the two-day ride to Southampton, constantly changing horses in order to keep up a steady pace, I had got to know the escort, both Blanchard’s men and those Cecil had sent. They were all respectful, but Blanchard’s five were inclined to be distant. Their leader William Harvey, who acted as Blanchard’s personal servant, was of an age with his master and had been with Blanchard since before my marriage. I could see that to him, I was still the penniless wench who had run off with Gerald, stealing him from the better-dowered bride, who, incidentally, was my cousin Mary. I rather thought that he had passed on this attitude to most of the others. The red-headed Searle, whose Christian name I never learned, was very cold toward me, while Tom Clarkson and Hugh Arnold, though quiet-spoken and courteous when they had to speak to me, noticeably did so as little as possible.

  The pleasantest of the five was the youngest, a curly-haired fellow named Mark Sweetapple. When in health, he had a robust appetite for his food, and a friendly smile, which did come my way now and then. Perhaps having a surname like that sweetened one’s nature, too, I thought.

  Cecil’s three were all amiable, however, clearly regarding me as their charge. Their leader, John Ryder, middle-aged and brindle-bearded, had served as a captain in King Henry’s army during the war in France in 1544. Brockley had also fought in France and said that although he hadn’t served under Ryder, he was sure he remembered him, and they found that they recalled some of the same events, including one particularly unpleasant forced march in a downpour, when the supply wagons failed to catch up with them at nightfall. They had had to camp out in a wood, and make do with a few provisions carried on baggage mules, and some food commandeered from a small and indignant hamlet.

  “We all thought the French would come creeping to cut our throats in the night and I’m not sure I’d have blamed them,” I heard Brockley say once.

  For some extraordinary reason the memory made them laugh. But it acted as a bond, which was a good thing.

  The other two men from Cecil’s household were a pair of brothers called Dick and Walter Dodd. They were stolid and reliable, very alike to look at, since both were sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and stocky, but Dick was about ten years older than his brother. As a result, Dick preferred the company of Ryder and Brockley, while Walter sought out young Sweetapple. Again, it seemed a good thing, creating bonds between the two groups of men.

  But on the ship, old and young, Cecil’s men or Blanchard’s, they groaned in unison. It wasn’t until the Chaffinch entered the mouth of the Loire that they—and I—at last staggered wanly up on deck.

  “I believed I was going to die,” Luke Blanchard told me, when we went to the saloon to take our first square meal. “I commended my soul to God a dozen times over. I am amazed to find myself still on earth. You are pale, Ursula. You have been as ill as I have, I imagine.”

  I knew what I looked like. I had a hand mirror with me and I had glanced in it before emerging from my cabin. My hair was dark and although my eyes were actually hazel, they often looked dark as well, especially if I was unwell.

  Just now, they resembled black pits. The nausea and the racking headache had let go of me, but they had left me with a complexion that was nearer green than white, and I felt as shaky as though I had had fever for a month.

  However, the ship had anchored for a while in the mouth of the river, and someone had gone ashore for fresh bread. When it was brought aboard, it smelled wonderful. “I’ll be better when I’ve eaten,” I said. “So will you be, I’m sure.”

  The bread was served with the meal, and it was all that its aroma promised. The hot meat stew that was the main dish was good, too. Blanchard ate little, but the rest of us made up for the meals we had missed. I felt strength going into me after only a couple of mouthfuls. Mark Sweetapple didn’t so much spoon stew into his mouth as shovel it in, and Dale ate with such enthusiasm that Captain Ross noticed, and grinned. “Seems the ship’s food suits the ladies after all,” he said. “You ought to eat up, too, Master Blanchard. You need it.”

  “My belly muscles ache from retching,” Blanchard complained.

  “Ah well. Maybe we’ll have a good voyage home,” Ross said. “I’ll most likely have wine in the hold on the way back. Maybe you won’t mind that as much as the cheese, Master Blanchard.”

  “I wouldn’t mind anything as much as the cheese,” said Master Blanchard pallidly.

  We reached Nantes late the next day and slept on board overnight. In the morning, Ryder and Brockley went ashore to arrange for the hire of horses and pack mules. We dined on board, early and quickly, and disembarked shortly after noon to begin our land journey.

  As for the first time in my life I stepped onto the soil of France, I turned dizzy and almost fell. Mark Sweetapple was beside me and took my arm to steady me. “This is what comes of sea travel, Mistress Blanchard. You’ll get your land legs back in a moment.”

  I thanked
him, and managed a smile. I knew that the dizziness had had nothing to do with sea legs or land legs. I had had a shock. It had come home to me, as I stood on the quay, gazing back at the quietly flowing Loire, just how strong my second, hidden reason for wishing to make this journey had been, how strong and how misguided.

  I had told myself that I needed to rest from my work; that because I had stood face-to-face with a man about to die because of me and handed him a phial of poison to make his passing easier, I might have become warped, a source of contamination for Meg. I had pretended to myself that this was why I wanted to leave her, and England, for a while.

  The truth was that I had decided to say yes to Luke Blanchard the moment he told me the route he wanted to take. The moment he uttered that magical word, Loire.

  I looked again at the river and experienced an almost physical tug from upstream. Somewhere up there was the place where my estranged husband Matthew lived, or at least, I supposed he did. In these uneasy days, he might well be in Paris, but his house, the Château Blanchepierre, was on the Loire.

  I would never see Blanchepierre now, still less become its mistress. I knew that well enough. But I had come on this journey mainly for the bittersweet pleasure of being for a little while in the same country as Matthew, of being on the banks of the river beside which he lived.

  Of all the foolish, sentimental, utterly ridiculous things to do. I knew I still loved him, of course. That, it seemed, was something I could not tear out of me. But Matthew had plotted to bring back to England the terror of the heresy hunt, and among his associates was a man whom I regarded as a human nightmare. Dr. Ignatius Wilkins did not know what pity meant. Last year, Matthew had fled to France only just in time to save his life. I rejoiced in his escape, but his fellow conspirator Wilkins had fled with him. I was sorry that Wilkins had escaped, and sorrier still that Matthew was prepared to accept such a man as his friend.

  And yet, like a lovelorn milkmaid, I had come to France, simply in the hope of passing, secretly, near the place where Matthew might be. Oh my God, Ursula, I said to myself; what a fool you are.

  But I said nothing aloud. As far as I was aware, Luke Blanchard knew nothing of Matthew de la Roche or my second marriage, and I did not want him to know. I had been saddled with an errand for the queen and I must help my father-in-law bring his ward Helene out of France. I had better put my mind to these things. I shook the dizziness out of me, mounted my horse and turned my face to the northeast, toward Douceaix and ultimately, Paris.

  We had been three hours on the road when we found the bodies. The track passed a small grove of trees on the edge of some fields, and corpses were hanging from the boughs. We smelled them before we saw them. We halted to look, aware at once that this was not judicial business; these were not felons dangling from an official gibbet. We rode on warily. We came to a small hamlet that had once had a church. It was nothing now but a burnt-out ruin. The villagers were sullen and afraid, but from them we learned what we had already guessed and feared.

  The killings in Vassy had borne the expected fruit. These were revenge attacks. If civil war had not yet begun officially, it was perilously close. We went on for a little way, but once outside the village, we reined in by mutual consent to confer.

  “Do we go on?” I asked Blanchard. “Or give up our journey and return at once to the Chaffinch?”

  As I spoke, I fingered my skirt surreptitiously, feeling the queen’s letters. I had accepted the task of delivering them, and I knew I must carry it out if I could. I caught John Ryder’s eye, and he said: “Sir William Cecil gave us to understand that Mistress Blanchard has an errand to Paris on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, and to Paris, therefore, she must go. But that need not compel you to go on, Master Blanchard.”

  “I am still not feeling well,” Blanchard said, “and I wish to God we were all safe back in England. But I’m responsible for Helene, and we are, after all, English travelers, with documents that should protect us. I think we had better continue.”

  Dale sighed, but I nodded. “We’ve come so far already that it would seem absurd to turn back. But we should make haste, and waste no time,” I said.

  Once more, we rode on. We tried to hurry, but Master Blanchard really did seem ill at ease and we were relieved, presently, to come across an undisturbed hamlet where there was an inn. Here, however, my father-in-law made the mistake of announcing us too loudly, as though we were royalty and any French innkeeper ought to prostrate himself before Master Luke Blanchard and Mistress Ursula Blanchard and their entourage, and the landlord, bristling, at first said he had no room for so large a party. After some wrangling, however, he fitted us in by billeting Mark Sweetapple and the Dodd brothers in the village. He even found a decent-sized bedchamber for Blanchard, who went to bed at once.

  The inn itself was reasonably comfortable, but when we set out next morning, Sweetapple and the Dodds said that their overnight accommodations had been squalid. The Dodds had slept on a dirt floor beside a fire trench, amid a horde of children, and with nothing but a piece of sacking between them and the couple who were their parents.

  “We could hear everything those two did,” Walter said. “Everything! As if they hadn’t got enough children already.”

  We all gazed at him with interest. He had the fair skin that goes with sandy hair, and this now turned pink. “It was embarrassing,” he said defensively.

  “The poor don’t have many pleasures,” Ryder said dryly. “The seigneurs and the Church tax these French peasants until the pips fly out of them. Don’t grudge them their amusements.”

  Sweetapple had slept on straw, in the half-loft of another uncomfortable and dirty house, and been given an unsatisfying breakfast of pease pottage and rye bread, a major sin as far as he was concerned.

  “I was born on a farm and we treated our pigs better,” he said roundly.

  “Now that,” said Ryder, “is an exaggeration for sure.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Sweetapple crossly.

  Blanchard said he still felt unwell, but could ride and wished to do so. For my part, I was relieved to set off again. The sun shone warmly, and we saw fields and meadows, green with lush grass and young corn. One could sense that this was a much bigger country than England. I looked at the dense trees in a belt of forest, and knew that no English woodland would be so deep, and that this French one might even harbor wolves.

  It was the time of year when stags shed their antlers and Brockley, catching sight of an antler by the roadside, dismounted to pick it up. It had eight points, which meant that the stag that had dropped it would have carried sixteen points altogether. “I worked for a gentleman once who was knowledgeable about deer,” Brockley said to me. “You hardly ever get a sixteen-pointer in England, but here it’s quite common. Plenty of big, fat deer in these woods, it seems.”

  “And the seigneurs eat all the venison,” said Walter Dodd. “The peasants get pease pottage, evidently.” He grinned at Mark Sweetapple.

  “Plain folk don’t eat venison in England, either. When did you last taste deer steak?” inquired Ryder.

  “We don’t need it,” said Sweetapple. “My parents have chickens and geese and they kill a pig every year. There’s always ham and bacon in the house, and we can take rabbits on our own farm. These folk hardly seem to have meat at all.”

  He was right. With every mile we traveled, I grew more and more conscious of the poverty in the villages and on the small farmsteads. The people who came to their cottage doors or straightened up from their tasks in field or garden to watch us pass were thin for the most part, and poorly clad as well, many of them barefoot.

  By contrast, we were all well fleshed and well dressed. Even Dale, who always looked eccentric on horseback because she felt safer astride, and wore breeches, still had good-quality clothes and polished boots. My dignified sidesaddle and my russet riding dress with the dark green felt hat and matching cloak; Master Blanchard’s severe but costly black velvet, with gold embroidery and a coll
ar of cream voile; the stout buff jackets and gleaming helmets of the men, including Brockley, made us look like aristocrats compared to the people of the villages. Some of them stared, and not in a friendly way, and some of the women hurried their children indoors when they saw us coming.

  We saw more signs of violence as we rode on, as well. I commented on them to Luke Blanchard. I couldn’t like him, for I couldn’t forget his unkindness to me in the past. But I had agreed, for my own reasons, to come on this journey with him and the least I could do was be polite. That meant making conversation from time to time.

  “The people look as if they envy us and our clothes and horses,” I said, “but they’re very frightened, too. Did you see how those women ran indoors at the sight of us? And though we’ve seen corn growing, I doubt if these people eat much of the bread. I fancy the seigneurs are selling the grain away to buy arms and pay soldiers.”

  Blanchard, who being a tall man had hired a tall horse, looked down at me from his saddle.

  “You are a surprise to me, Ursula,” he said unexpectedly. “One would not expect a young woman to be so sharp. You are right, of course. I wish this journey were safely over.” He pulled a pained face and put his hand to his stomach. “But my belly still hurts me. We’d better find another inn soon and put up until tomorrow. It will waste time but I don’t think I can ride on much farther just now.”

  We found an inn, in a prosperous small town, named St. Marc after the massive Norman church on one side of its market square. The roofs of an abbey were visible behind the church, as well.

  There was a sense of tension in St. Marc, as there was everywhere. We saw groups of people gathered here and there and talking with much sad shaking of heads and some excited nodding. But on the whole business here seemed to be going on much as usual. Smoke trickled from the chimneys of the red-tiled houses and cottages, and from the nosebag spillings and broken bits of this and that in the square in front of the church, a market had recently been held there.