To Shield the Queen

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  I thought it possible that he simply didn’t have a high opinion of Lady Catherine. “Tell me,” I said.

  “Did you talk all this out in an anteroom? With other people about?”

  “No. After . . . after I’d seen that they were serious and they’d seen that I was, Derby said we must talk privately and he settled a time for us to meet in the walled garden. Sir Thomas objected but Derby overrode him. I was rather frightened,” said Lady Catherine, as if expecting me to sympathise, “but I went, anyway, and Sir Thomas said all right, we’d got to have Holme; we needed him. A few days later, we managed to walk together for a while when we were strolling in the park with the queen, and I was able to tell them that Holme had agreed.”

  “They never thought of doing the job themselves, I see!”

  “They couldn’t,” said Lady Catherine, quite scornfully. “They’re well-known men; they couldn’t risk being seen in the district at the crucial time. Besides . . . well, I don’t know about Derby, but Sir Thomas said, at that meeting in the garden, that he could never do such a thing personally; that, in fact, he’d been considering urging us to give up the whole idea. He’d only changed his mind again because Sir William Cecil came back from Scotland just then and the queen hardly even noticed Cecil, because she was so taken up with Dudley. Sir Thomas said that when he saw that, he knew we’d have to go on with it, because something had to be done; sheer loyalty to the queen demanded it.”

  “God help us all!” I said wanly.

  “Verney and Holme made a good partnership,” Lady Catherine said. “Verney is Dudley’s man. He could visit Cumnor quite freely, and Holme could go as his servant. They went a couple of times, to talk over ways and means with Forster.”

  I stood there, as upright of body as I wished Lady Catherine to think I was upright of mind, and longed to sit down and put my head between my knees. The court, which I had found so exciting, where I had felt so at home, was suddenly full of evil, populated by ugly creatures who spun webs for each other and baited them with jewelled lies about the good of the realm and the demands of loyalty and a merciful release for a sick woman.

  These creatures danced and dined, laughed and made music, and entered into bloody alliances, and wallowed in hatreds so intense that if it happened that they all hated the same person, the fact that their reasons were utterly different, even in opposition, could not keep them from combining to destroy him. The worst of it was . . .

  Lady Catherine said it for me. She had some Tudor shrewdness after all. She had seen the one thing which might save her.

  “If this ever becomes public,” she said, “if it is ever put about that Lady Dudley was murdered after all, no one will believe that the queen and Dudley were not in the plot. And if we’re all put in the Tower or . . . or . . . ”

  “Beheaded?” I said helpfully. I had never detested even William Johnson and his friends as much as I detested this female worm. She gasped when I said “beheaded,” and then began to cry again but I was unmoved. “You were saying? Even if you and presumably Smith, Derby, Verney, Holme and Forster are all arrested and possibly executed . . . ”

  “Don’t say that!” Lady Catherine almost shrieked. “Don’t you see? If we’re all . . . all accused, then the tale will be out. Everyone will say we’re just scapegoats and that will just make the scandal worse!”

  I remembered again what Amy Dudley had said. Ordinary people, in alehouses and round wellheads and dinner tables, were not good at working things out. Those ordinary people would look at once for the simplest, most obvious explanation—and, yes, for the dirtiest.

  Amy had been quite right, and so was Catherine.

  I saw no reason to let her take comfort in it, though. Like someone pulling a blanket off a slugabed on a very cold morning, I said, primly, “I can’t keep all this to myself. I think I must speak to Cecil, and the queen will certainly have to know.” Then I walked out.

  As I closed the door I heard her burst into tears of terror, although I could not pity her. But for the wicked scheme in which this silly moppet had been involved, John Wilton might still have been alive.

  Whenever I thought of Matthew, I too wanted to cry, even louder than Catherine. I, too, needed sympathy, and I had not plotted murder.

  18

  An Instinct for Conspiracy

  It was rare for anyone to be alone with the queen, but she had summoned me to this small room at Windsor, at the end of a gallery in her private quarters. There was little furniture beyond a chest, a chair and a few cushions on the deep window seat. If Elizabeth wanted to see anyone alone, she had, in every palace, places like this in which to do so. People were within call, outside the door, but we could not be heard unless we shouted.

  I had gone back to Cecil and told him of my remarkable interview with Lady Catherine and we had made our report to Elizabeth together. I had been surprised, a few days later, to be bidden to this private audience. Soon, she would be giving a public one and I would be among her attendants there and we were both formally dressed, though in contrasting fashion. I was in black velvet, not as mourning, not nowadays, but as a foil for the white silk, silver-embroidered sleeves which had taken me all summer to make. Elizabeth was in thickly embroidered peach silk, her narrow waist clasped by a wide Spanish farthingale, her pointed chin framed, like my own, in a linen ruff, although her ruff was bigger.

  We were a contrast in another way, too, for while I stood quietly, hands clasped at my waist, Elizabeth, despite the weight of her gown, was pacing stormily back and forth across the little room. The window looked out on to the Berkshire countryside, green and rolling and peaceful. The queen could hardly have been less in tune with the view.

  “The wretched girl was right, of course! Everyone would believe the worst. The three killers of your John Wilton have been apprehended, and your uncle is repenting his stupidity in the Tower, but the murderers of Amy Dudley can never be brought to justice. Or not officially!”

  She swung round with a hiss of silken skirts, and her pale face was ablaze with a rage which frightened me even though it was not directed at me. She and I were about the same height, but so forceful was Elizabeth’s nature that she always seemed at least a foot taller than myself.

  “Catherine Grey!” she spat. “She is worse than any of the men. She was after my throne! Smith swears that he and Derby were acting in my best interests, out of loyalty to me, and that the life they took was forfeit to God in any case. Feeble logic but I think they meant it. Derby has left the court and gone home; he will be advised to stay there. I hear that Cecil has already had high words with Smith. Well, well. One day, no doubt, I will find ways to channel their loyalty in better directions. I can’t afford to throw any kind of loyalty away, and that’s the truth. But Catherine! I would like to see her head upon a block!”

  There was a silence, the kind of silence which fills a room, the kind in which appalling images are spawned, like fungi in some lightless dungeon.

  “I didn’t quite mean that,” she said. “No, not the block. But she will never be named my heir; nor will I allow her to marry. I know her temper now. As for the smaller men, Verney and Holme; they obeyed their masters. They will be watched in future, that’s all. Their characters, too, are now known. We have much to thank you for, Ursula. Cecil has attended to your reward?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He has also made an excellent payment to my servants Brockley and Dale, for the good service they have given me.”

  “And your daughter? What of your daughter? He mentioned the matter to me. A cottage is not a fitting place for the daughters of my personal gentlewomen. I gave him orders.”

  “You did indeed, ma’am, and I am grateful. Meg and her nurse are to be installed with friends of Lady Cecil in a household near Richmond. Meg will be reared as a lady and given a dowry, but she will always have her nurse with her, and I will see her regularly.”

  “Good. One day we will dance at her wedding, perhaps.”

  There was a silence. Elizabeth
paused in her pacing. “I called you here to thank you, and halfway through my thanks I let my temper overtake me. I am sorry, Ursula. You made a great sacrifice, all out of the love you bear to your queen, it seems. You cast your marriage away for me. I will not enquire into your feelings. They are beyond my imagining. Cecil says you are glad that Master de la Roche has escaped. Oh, don’t be afraid to admit it! We shan’t bite off your head—or cut it off, either!”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am glad.”

  I had put him in such danger. Perhaps my notions of loyalty to Elizabeth could be called twisted, too. He was probably in the Loire valley by now. If I had stayed with him, we would have gone there together. In the privacy of those few married nights, he had talked to me of the Loire, lazily flowing among its pleasant hills, and had painted for me the life he meant us to have in France. Could I have been happy there after all? I would never know.

  “There is something else for which I must thank you, Ursula. You have uncovered two unpleasant plots and while you were about it, you have also cleared Dudley’s name, at least as far as I am concerned. The truth must remain confidential, but we are pleased to know that he had no part in the death of his wife.”

  I said nothing. It was plain enough to the whole court that he still had hopes of Elizabeth but I prayed that she wouldn’t take him. A man who could fall in love with one woman and take her to bed, and then dismiss her from his affections as completely as Dudley had dismissed Amy, might do the same to another. What did Elizabeth feel? She was glad he was innocent, but when she spoke of him, her voice was cool and she had used the royal plural. She was enigmatic.

  She gave me a sharp-edged smile. “You look puzzled, Ursula. I will tell you something. It’s in confidence—but you have already demonstrated that I can put trust in you. You were—and are—in love with de la Roche, but you gave him up. I admire you for it. I too know what it is to love, and what it is to turn away from love. I have known all along that I would never take Robin Dudley, even if Amy had never existed.”

  I was very puzzled indeed and my face must have shown it.

  Elizabeth, regardless of the risk to her farthingale, threw herself carelessly on to the window seat. “It will be a long time before he realises it,” she said, “and when he does he will fight it, but he will lose. I can take only his friendship and his support; never his love. And now you are thinking that I am an heroine. Like a lady in a troubadour’s romance, or like you, my gallant little Ursula. You think I have set him aside because the realm would never accept him and my duty is to the realm. Is that what you believe?”

  “Well—er . . . ”

  Elizabeth at last gave the view a little consideration, turning away from me to look at it. Then she faced me again and said, “Have Lady Katherine Knollys and Kat Ashley told you that I never speak of my mother?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “No more I do. I shall say very little now, either. However, your mother served her and so I will speak of her to you, just this once, as far as to say that although I keep such silence on the subject of my mother, Queen Anne Boleyn, I think of her. Often. Especially of the way she died, at her husband’s order. And I also think, often, of my young stepmother, my father’s fifth wife, Kate Howard. She couldn’t say no to the men, poor silly creature, but she was kind to me, and she paid a high price for her weakness. One moment, she had an adoring husband. The next, he was signing her death warrant. I pitied her. Have you understood me, Ursula?”

  “I . . . don’t know, ma’am.”

  It was too oblique; too much of a message in cipher. Elizabeth gave me another razor-sharp smile.

  “Can you imagine, Ursula, what it is like to have memories which are like devoted but insane retainers, who cannot tell friend from foe, and drive away all comers?”

  I understood then. I saw, at last, the reason for the strange impression Elizabeth had always made on me, of a young woman forever shut away behind a shield, or a fortress wall.

  I didn’t altogether believe in it. I thought of Matthew. I had fled from him, but I knew that if I had to live at close quarters with him, seeing him often, I would never be able to hold myself aloof. If Dudley were to remain at court, and apparently this was to happen, how long would the queen resist him? He would conquer in the end, I thought. He would scale the wall, even this one.

  And perhaps it was best that he should. Elizabeth needed a husband, and the realm needed an heir.

  “Ma’am,” I said. “You are the queen! Surely you can overcome even the most obstinate retainers.”

  “I am the queen, and therefore I stand in the place of my father, who was a king, rather than in the place of my mother and stepmother, who were only consorts?”

  “Well . . . something like that, ma’am.”

  Slowly she shook her head, and I had the odd impression that she was saying no not to me but to some importunate voice within herself.

  “One thing a queen need never fear,” she said, “is a lonely old age. Your own future may be more solitary than mine. You have been told that now?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I was relieved to get away from the delicate subject of Elizabeth’s love-life. “It seems that the circumstances of my marriage may not amount to quite enough duress to justify an annulment. I was agreeable to the gentleman’s addresses here at court and I was not dragged to the chapel by force, or actually threatened with bodily harm.”

  “I am sorry,” said Elizabeth seriously, “but perhaps we can distract you, in time, from this second bereavement, for Cecil tells me that, for you, it amounts to that. There is work for you here at court, in our service; work which may use the surprising talents you have lately revealed. Have you been told? And are you willing?”

  “I have,” I said. “And I am.”

  Even with Meg now placed safely, I would still find it hard to make ends meet. I would want to buy gifts for my daughter and I must still pay Bridget’s wages; that was the agreement. I also wished to go on employing Brockley and Dale. I had grown to depend on Brockley, and as for dear, staunch Dale; for all her fits of complaining, in her own favourite phrase, I couldn’t abide to be without her now.

  Indeed, it seemed very likely that it would soon be a case, if I wished to keep either, of keeping both. Any day now, I expected them to ask my consent to marry each other. All the signs were there. Once, I had even glimpsed them exchanging kisses.

  However, employing them meant paying them, and I must also maintain myself in a manner befitting a lady of the court. I now realised that Dudley’s money wouldn’t last for ever, generous though he had been. He really was generous—when he didn’t have too much to lose. He had waved away my offer to pay for or replace the White Snail, the horse I had virtually stolen and abandoned at Withysham.

  “It wasn’t much of a horse. Forget it!” he said.

  I was relieved of that anxiety but my financial future still worried me and when Cecil said he had work for me, I was happy enough to undertake it. It would not involve hunting people down across the southern counties this time, fortunately. I would only have to be eyes and ears, at court. I need not again be an implacable huntress. As I knew all too well, there was a bitter side to that.

  True, I was grimly glad that John’s killers would hang. The description proclaimed in so many market places by Cecil’s messengers had included a description of Will Johnson’s piebald horse, and it was the horse which within hours had caused the trio to be recognised.

  But I was anxious for the Masons and the Westleys, whose fate I did not yet know, and unexpectedly troubled over Uncle Herbert. My uncle and aunt had not fled with Matthew, but had stayed put at Faldene and tried to brazen it out. Aunt Tabitha had been spared arrest, but even though he had assuredly been ready to let me be murdered, I still felt uncomfortable at the thought of my gouty uncle in a Tower cell. However, I trusted I would not have to suffer such inner turmoil again, and Cecil was offering good money.

  • • •

  I very much wanted, on my ow
n account, to have a few quiet words with the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra. It was not easy, since I did not want to approach him officially, but the resourceful Brockley dropped a hint to one of the ambassador’s serving men, and de Quadra himself sought me out, quietly, in the antechamber to the dining hall when we were waiting to go in for our dinner.

  “You desire to speak to me, Mistress . . . Blanchard or de la Roche?”

  “Blanchard, if you will. Yes. Do you remember, my lord, how before I left for Oxfordshire, you walked beside me in Richmond Park and pointed out three men to me? One was the Earl of Derby, one was Sir Thomas Smith and one was a third man whose name, then, I didn’t know.”

  Because he was a short man, our faces were on a level. I studied him intently, but that quiet, olive-skinned countenance gave me no information. He said nothing.

  “I know the man’s name now,” I said. “Peter Holme.” We were speaking French, but so did many at the court. I kept my voice pitched low so that although we were in a crowded room, there was no risk of being overheard. “Those three,” I said, “were hatching a scheme together.”

  A page wandered close to us and stood nearby, looking towards a group of courtiers as though expecting one of them to beckon him over and give him an errand. I fell silent and de Quadra edged us both further away.

  “That, Mistress Blanchard, is one of the methods by which I myself find out things of which I am not officially informed.”

  I didn’t pretend to be shocked. Anyone who has indulged in eavesdropping from behind the wall-hangings, has forfeited the right to such delicacy. I smiled.

  “For once,” he said, “I will avoid subtlety. I am not supposed to know what happened to Lady Dudley and who arranged it, but I do. Does this concern her?”