A Pawn for a Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's (Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court)

by Buckley, Fiona

  “Aye, I’ve given it some thought and I canna believe it.” He dropped the histrionic air. “Or would be it be,” he inquired, “that you are a truly honest woman and would hold out for marriage? Well, now, I might be prepared to consider that. Do you no’ have property in the south? So you said, when we talked before, and I hear you have served at the court of Queen Elizabeth. We’re in the same level of society. A match between us would be fair and equal.”

  “But not a match I wish for, Sir Brian.” I seized on a possible means of repelling him. “Sir Brian, I think I should tell you that I have a dubious background. I was brought up by my mother’s family because, well, my mother wasn’t married. And she never told me or anyone else who my father was.”

  “But you were made welcome at the English court and have been made welcome here; you were wed to a man of position in France and you have a good house in England. And in yourself, you are . . . well, put it this way, lassie, I dinna care who your father was.” He looked at me with eyes suddenly narrowed and full of genuine and sympathetic inquiry. “Do you, though? Is it a trouble to you?”

  I shook my head. “I rarely think about it. I suppose I would like to know, but I suspect that the truth is commonplace enough. I think he was a court gallant, but a married one. If I knew who he was, I might well be disappointed in him. I have never inquired, though I suppose I could have done—I mean, I could have asked questions of older people at court, who might remember something useful. But I never have. And now,” I said, “if you will excuse me, I think I’ll take a bowl of that wholesome smelling pottage. If you could let me get near enough to it . . .”

  He was preventing me from moving along the table. He didn’t stir.

  “I wonder what would change your mind towards me?” he said softly.

  “Nothing, I assure you,” I said. I waited, looking pointedly at the pottage and avoiding his eyes. I was finding his physical nearness uncomfortable, not because it was unattractive but because it wasn’t. There was no doubt that Dormbois had it, that indefinable thing that calls to the opposite sex like a deep calling to a deep and will not listen to cries of protest from the rational mind or even the moral sense. It can be defied but it can’t be silenced. At a range of a mere six inches, it was deafening. I wanted to back away, and the only thing that stopped me was resentment. I knew very well that he was as conscious of his power as I was and was trading on it. I would have liked to kick him, hard.

  I would have liked to dissolve into his arms, too. I stood rigid.

  “Are you really interested in that pottage?” Dormbois was inquiring. “Dull stuff, I call it. And why no sauce for your chicken? There’s a fine hot sauce here that has a name for warming up other parts of a lad or a lass than just their tongues and their gizzards.”

  “Then I assuredly don’t want to put it on my chicken, and besides, it might not be good for me. I had a headache this afternoon.”

  “No, no, lassie,” said Dormbois insinuatingly. “Headaches are what a woman suffers after the honeymoon.”

  “Sir Brian, please let me pass.”

  He stepped back. “My time will come, lassie. You’ll see.”

  I edged by, warily, but he didn’t try to touch me or hinder me further. I filled my pottage bowl and withdrew, quickly, to Queen Mary’s side. I had discovered that even with a whole crowd of other people in the same room I didn’t after all feel safe anywhere near to Dormbois. I went to Queen Mary as to a refuge.

  After supper, Dormbois and Bothwell joined Lord John and Lady Janet at the card table, while Darnley, Henderson, and Riccio took turns at providing music and Mary beckoned me to sit beside her.

  “I have given my Maries some time off this evening. Will you take their place for a while and talk to me? I am surrounded by people here, as one always is at any court,” said Mary. “But sometimes I am lonely. Scotland is so wild a place, compared to France. Did you know, Ursula, that there were even schemes to abduct me when first I came here? Some of my nobles would like to make themselves king.”

  “I had heard that, ma’am. I was very shocked.”

  “Nowhere near as shocked as I was, I assure you,” said Mary sadly. “There was bloodshed and I was compelled, once, to attend an execution in person. Only thus, my brother James said, could I make it plain that I had no knowledge of or will toward the marriage which others would have forced on me, but the executioner was clumsy and . . . oh, I wept to see such butchery.”

  Her voice shook and so did her hands, as the memory came back. I opened my mouth to say something calming but she controlled herself without my help and said: “But this is no kind of talk for a happy supper party. Tell me, Ursula, how does my land of England fare? How were last year’s harvests and do the people flourish? I think of them as my people, you know.”

  I was practiced at dissembling but I found this difficult. My mother had served Anne Boleyn and loved her. To us she was as true a queen as any, and Elizabeth her lawful issue and our true queen as well, which meant that Mary had no business to think of the English as her people. With an effort, I said: “England is prospering, I think. Of course, the climate is milder, farther south.”

  “Oh yes. How I long to set foot there myself. I have many friends there and I keep in touch with them, but I often wonder—will I ever see them face-to-face as their acknowledged queen?”

  I sincerely hoped not, and for several reasons, some of them quite unconnected with religion or legitimacy. She was so very young and somehow so innocent. So unwary, I thought. Elizabeth, though still quite young in body, had a mind that I think was mature when she was born, and she was well aware of the world and its perils, and that makes for good government. She would never have talked as confidingly as this to anyone she had not known long enough and well enough to be sure she could trust them, and probably not even then.

  Instinctively, I tried to make use of Mary’s simplicity. “How do you keep in touch with your English supporters, ma’am?” I asked ingenuously.

  “Oh, Ursula, and you the widow of Matthew de la Roche, who toiled so long and honestly for me? There are priests, in my employ, who travel in England in other guises. They go from one Catholic house to another, holding mass, hearing confession, ministering to the faithful—and with them they carry, always, my kind good wishes and assurances that those who have honored me with their friendship are never forgotten and one day, if God wills, may be rewarded.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous for them?” I asked. “In England, they would be considered lawbreakers.”

  “You think I am sending good men into peril?” Mary’s smooth white brow wrinkled. “Perhaps. But I send no one against his will, and after all, in the end, to die for the faith is the noblest of deaths.”

  It was also apt to be one of the nastiest. I was about to suggest as much, but Mary’s golden brown eyes had begun to sparkle, and she had more to say. “One day, it will happen! One day, God will show the way, and I will ride to London, leading my army, sleeping in the fields as we journey, perhaps, as the men do, sharing their hardships, gathering my people to me. When God wills.”

  “What of Queen Elizabeth?” I asked. “If all this comes to pass, what of her? She is loved, you know.”

  “I would not harm her,” said Mary. “Oh, Ursula, of course not. If ever God leads me to the throne of England, she shall be my beloved sister. She shall live in dignity, privately, as King Henry’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves did when theirs was declared no marriage. Or I will find her some noble husband among the great men of Europe or, if she truly does not wish to marry, then a refuge in some French abbey.”

  I tried to envisage Elizabeth in any of these roles, and my mind reeled. A warning stab of pain struck above my left eye, as exasperation rose up in me. Here it was again, the rose-tinted innocence I had glimpsed in my own family at Faldene, and the thing that most of all had come between myself and Matthew. It was a malady of sentimental, blind faith which was simply unable to confront the horrors that would come about b
efore England could become a Catholic land ruled by Mary.

  I looked at my hostess’s charming young face and her bright eyes, and thought of Elizabeth’s face, that watchful shield that guarded her thoughts and her dreams—and, yes, her fears too—from the world around her. Elizabeth, I thought savagely, understood executions too and not merely as a weeping bystander. Her mother had died under the ax before Elizabeth was three, and her young stepmother had died under it when she was eight, as though King Henry actually wished his daughter to understand the matter thoroughly. Later, when her sister Mary Tudor was on the throne, Elizabeth had feared death on the scaffold for herself. A prisoner in the Tower, she had for a time not known when she woke each day whether she would see the evening.

  I had to keep my pretense up somehow. “I am sure, ma’am, that you would never harm a living soul if you could avoid it,” I said sweetly. I heard the false note in my voice, but Mary, innocent, devout Mary, didn’t.

  “Of course, I would not! But all this may well be far in the future. Again, we are being too serious. Davy! The music you are playing is too melancholy; you are sending our thoughts into solemn paths. Play us something merry! And then it will be time to end this gathering and all go to our beds.”

  I would be thankful, I thought, as my head began to throb in good earnest, when I got to mine.

  16

  Don’t Ask Who: Ask Why

  Scotland was indeed a wild place. Even at Holyrood, the queen’s principal home, things occurred that on the whole did not happen at Elizabeth’s court. When the supper was over and I took my leave, I was not even out of earshot of Queen Mary, who was still talking to Janet Hepburn in the supper chamber, indeed had only walked down one short flight of stairs, before a pair of hands stretched suddenly out of a dark doorway at the foot of the staircase and grabbed me.

  They jerked me out of the light of the flambeaux that lit the stairs and the hallway into which they led, dragged me through the doorway, and pushed me roughly up against a stretch of cold stone wall. I opened my mouth to cry out but a hand came down across it and the cry was muffled out of existence.

  “That manservant of yourn has been snooping at Furness’s Tavern and asking questions,” said Ericks’s voice furiously in my ear. “I went in there tonight and Furness told me. Just what do ye think ye’re about, my lass? Tell me that!”

  A lady leaving a private supper party held by Elizabeth could usually expect to get back to her own quarters without being attacked en route. I would have liked to say so but since Ericks’s hand was still over my mouth, I was in no position either to answer his question or tell him what I thought of the way he had asked it.

  I waited. The hand, cautiously, eased its pressure. “I want an answer,” Ericks whispered. “But no caterwauling, now, or God help ye . . .”

  I managed to grunt in an affirmative tone and the hand dropped to press against my left shoulder and keep me pinned against the wall, which ground into my back. His other hand had my right upper arm in a savage grip. “Verra well. Now, answer me. What’s that man o’ yours after?”

  He was strong and he was causing me considerable discomfort but at least he wasn’t threatening me with a blade. I was dealing with an angry man but not, I thought, a murderous one. I could almost have sympathy for Adam Ericks. He might be innocent, after all, and if so, he had something to complain about. After Mary’s cloying simplicity, the Ericks rudeness even had something refreshing about it.

  “Information,” I said quietly. “Anything that might lead me to the man who killed my cousin. Edward Faldene was my cousin. It is a matter of family feeling. Surely you can understand that?”

  “Ye ask that of a Scot? We’ll hunt down ony man that offends one of our clan, hunt him across the world and through the ages if need be.”

  “Then you do understand. I want to find out who killed my cousin. I have learned that Master Furness was fetched to the inquiry because someone laid anonymous information about the quarrel Edward had with you. I wanted to know who the informant was and I wondered if the tavern keeper knew—or could guess. I think it possible that whoever did the informing may also have done the murder and be looking for a scapegoat. I sent my man to talk to Master Furness. That’s all.”

  “Laid information . . . ? I didnae know that.” Ericks’s grip slackened a fraction. “A scapegoat, eh? So someone’s tryin’ to point a finger at me; is that it?”

  “It could be.” I tried to move but it was still impossible and the attempt made his grasp on me tighten again.

  “May the lord have maircy on them if ever I catch them, whoever they are. Layin’ snares for an innocent man. I’ve no time for papists, and that means you as well, my lady. Ye’re another of Faldene’s papist kin, are ye not?” The mere thought made him so angry that he shook me, like a dog with a rat, rattling my teeth and knocking the back of my head against the wall. Fortunately, due to Dale’s ministrations, my head was well protected by my piled and netted hair.

  “I said this at the inquiry and I’ll say to ye again now,” Ericks growled. “I might tak a drink or two and get angry and tear a papistical thing like a cross off a man’s throat or plant a fist in his face, but that’s one thing, and creepin’ in at a window in the middle o’ the night with a blade an’ doin’ murder on a man asleep is another. That’s an insult in itself, to be washed oot wi’ blood!”

  “If my cousin’s killer is ever found,” I said, “then as far as I’m concerned, you are welcome to fill a whole washtub with his blood. Please do. Now, will you let me go? Before someone comes through here—or comes to look for me?”

  The grasping hands relaxed and fell to his sides. “Aye. Verra well.” He paused. Then he said: “Ye keep askin’ who killed him. Strikes me, ye ought to be askin’ why.”

  • • •

  When I left the supper room, my headache had been trying to return, but the encounter with Ericks had the odd effect of dispersing it. Feeling enlivened once more, and patting my skirt to make sure that the documents Henderson had given me were still safely there, I went to see if Brockley had come back, found that he had, and summoned both him and Dale to my chamber so that we could all talk. “Did you learn anything, Brockley, and if so, what?”

  “The landlord, Master Furness, had little to tell me, madam, except one thing. He repeated what Lady Simone’s butler said. There were strangers in his tavern that night who egged the quarrel on. I can’t see how anyone could plan it in advance, but it seems to me more likely than ever that someone meaning harm to Master Faldene might just have snatched a chance to put the blame somewhere else.”

  “Yes. That is interesting,” I said thoughtfully. “Thank you, Brockley. Now, then. Listen. I have here a copy of a document which Master Henderson has with him. It is the original list of Queen Mary’s English supporters—a version supplied to her some years ago. I also have a copy of the list she now has. If my cousin ever did get his list to her, then the version now in her possession should differ from the original—it should contain up-to-date changes. It may even be the very document he gave her. I want to compare the two. If they’re not the same, then probably Edward did deliver his list. I want to know because . . .”

  “Because it’s possible that Master Faldene was killed for some reason connected with the list, madam?”

  “Yes. But if he delivered it safely, then that probably isn’t the reason.”

  “Everyone,” Brockley said slowly, “has kept asking who. But if we knew for certain why, we’d very likely know who, straightaway.”

  “Yes, exactly!” I said in surprise, because he had virtually repeated Ericks’s remark. And of course, they were both right. I saw it now. It was the moment for telling them of my encounter with Ericks. Brockley, of course, was scandalized and wanted to rush away then and there to teach Ericks some manners, but I peremptorily stopped him.

  “No, Brockley! He did me no harm, and if someone has tried to put false blame on him, he has every right to be angry. In fact, you and he
both think the same way and it is good sense. Why was Edward killed? That’s what we need to get at.”

  “It seems to me, madam,” Brockley said grimly, “that it’s a very pressing need, a great fear or a great hatred, that would cause a man to kill in such a fashion. The reason ought to be as big as a mountain.”

  “Yes. Yes, I agree.” I frowned. I was considering the matter from this angle for the first time. I had been so overwhelmed by the simple fact that Edward had been murdered that I hadn’t considered the extraordinarily vicious, stealthy, and elaborate manner of it as important. “But in that case . . .” I began slowly.

  I stopped, groping after an idea that refused to clarify. Brockley, his intelligent forehead wrinkling just like mine, said: “Are you thinking, madam, that he may have been killed and the list taken, just to stop it from being delivered? That could make sense. There are plenty of Protestants in Scotland who wouldn’t think the queen’s claim to England was lawful and wouldn’t want to encourage their queen to invade England.”

  The idea found its way into speech at last. “But she had a list already.” I rubbed my upper arm, where Ericks’s finger marks would soon be showing up as bruises. “How could it be worth killing Edward just for an amended version? Anyone who knew enough to know he was carrying it very likely knew about the first one as well. Anyway, how did anyone know he was carrying it? There are a lot of questions here that need answering. Well, the two lists I have here should tell us whether he delivered his message to the queen or not. Let’s settle that first. Sit down, both of you. Which of you is best at reading aloud?”

  They were both literate, but Dale said: “I can read receipts and put labels on pots of unguent and scent, and make shift to write a letter or read one, but Roger’s the one who had real schooling.”

  “Very well. Then, Brockley, I want you to read one of these lists out while I check it against the other. I’d like to do it now, before we go to bed. We’ll need to light some more candles.”