To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court

by Buckley, Fiona

  Rave reviews for Fiona Buckley

  and her Ursula Blanchard mysteries

  “Buckley writes a learned historical mystery. Ursula, too, is a smart lass, one whose degrees must include a B.A. (for bedchamber assignations) and an M.S.W. (for mighty spirited wench).”

  —USA Today

  “Queen Elizabeth maintains a surprisingly vital presence … although it is Ursula who best appreciates the beauties—and understands the dangers—of their splendid age.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Tantalizing.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Ursula is the essence of iron cloaked in velvet—a heroine to reckon with.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Fantastic historical fiction filled with royal intrigue. … Fiona Buckley … makes the Elizabethan era fun to read about.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Fine writing and deft plotting … vividly [bring] the past to life. … [Buckley] effortlessly integrate[s] fact and fiction.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  Other Ursula Blanchard mysteries

  Available from Pocket Books

  The Siren Queen

  To Shield the Queen

  The Doublet Affair

  Queen’s Ransom

  And coming soon

  Queen of Ambition

  To

  Ruin a Queen

  An Ursula Blanchard Mystery

  at Queen Elizabeth I’s Court

  FIONA BUCKLEY

  Pocket Books

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Fiona Buckley

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Pocket Books trade paperback edition November 2008

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-7353-1

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-7353-4

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1365-3

  This book is for John and Kerry,

  without whom it would never have been written.

  MORTIMER FAMILY TREE

  1

  The Power of Life and Death

  The journey that took me from the Château Blanchepierre, on the banks of the Loire, to Vetch Castle on the Welsh March began, I think, on April 4, 1564, when I snatched up a triple-branched silver candlestick and hurled it the length of the Blanchepierre dinner table at my husband, Matthew de la Roche.

  I threw it in an outburst of fury and unhappiness, which had had its beginnings three and a half weeks before, in the fetid, overheated lying-in chamber in the west tower of the château, where our first child should have come into the world, had God or providence been kinder.

  I had begged for air but no one would open the shutters for fear of letting in a cold wind. Instead, there was a fire in the hearth, piled too high and giving off a sickly perfume from the herbs which my woman, Fran Dale, had thrown onto it in an effort to please me by sweetening the atmosphere.

  The lying-in chamber was pervaded too by a continual murmur of prayers from Matthew’s uncle Armand, who was a priest and lived in the château as its chaplain. It was he who had married us, three and a half years ago, in England. To my fevered mind, the drone of his elderly voice sounded like a prayer for the dying. Possibly, it was. Madame Montaigle had fetched him after using pepper to make me sneeze in the hope that it would shoot the child out, and then attempting in vain to pull him out of me by hand, which had caused me to scream wildly. She told me afterward that she had despaired of my life.

  Madame Montaigle was my husband’s former housekeeper. She had been living in a retirement cottage but she had skill as a midwife and Matthew had fetched her back to the château to help me. I wished he hadn’t for she didn’t like me. To her, I was Matthew’s heretic wife, the stranger from England, who had let him down in the past and would probably let him down again if given the ghost of a chance. I did not think she would care if I died. I would have felt the same in her place, but I could have done without either Madame Montaigle or Uncle Armand as I lay sweating and cursing and crying, growing more exhausted and feverish with every passing hour, fighting to bring forth Matthew’s child, and failing.

  During the second day, I drifted toward delirium. Matthew had gone to fetch the physician from the village below the château but I kept on forgetting this and asking for him. When at last I heard his voice at the door, telling the physician that this was the room and for the love of God, man, do what you can, it pulled me back into the real world. I cried Matthew’s name and stretched out my hand.

  But Madame Montaigle barred his way, exclaiming in outraged tones that he could not enter, that this was women’s business except for priest and doctor, and instead of pushing past her as I wanted him to do, he merely called to me that he had brought help and that he was praying to God that all would soon be well. It was the physician, not Matthew, who came to my side.

  The physician was out of breath, for he was a plump man and Matthew had no doubt propelled him up the tower steps at speed. “I agree,” he puffed to Dale and Madame Montaigle, “that this is rightly women’s business. It is not my custom to attend lying-in chambers. However, for you, seigneur,” he added over his shoulder, addressing Matthew and changing to a note of respect, “I will do what I can.” He turned back to my attendants. “What has been done already?”

  Madame Montaigle explained, about the pepper and her own manual efforts. Dale spoke little French and her principal task was to lave my forehead with cool water, smooth my straggling hair back from my perspiring face, and offer me milk and broth. The shutters made the room dim and the physician asked for more lights. I heard Matthew shouting for lamps. When they were brought, the physician, without speaking to me, went to the foot of the bed and began doing something to me; I couldn’t tell exactly what. I only knew that the pain I was in grew suddenly worse and I twisted, struggling. The physician drew back.

  “The child is lying wrong and it is growing weak. Seigneur …”

  Matthew must still have been hovering just outside the room, for the physician was speaking to him from the end of my bed. He moved away to the door to finish what he was saying out of my hearing, and I heard my husband answer though I could not hear the words that either of them said. I called Matthew’s name again but still he wouldn’t defy convention and enter. I was left forlorn, bereft of any anchor to the world. I was dying. I knew it now. Here in this shadowed, stinking room, tangled up in sweaty sheets and with Uncle Armand practically reciting the burial service over me; before I was thirty years old; I was going to slip out of the world into eternity.

  “I don’t want to die!” I screamed. “Matthew, I don’t want to die! I want to see Meg again!”

  My daughter, Meg, was in England
. I hadn’t seen her for two years and this summer, she would be nine. Now, a vision of her, as vivid as though she were actually there, filled my overheated mind. I saw her, playing with a ball on the grass outside Thamesbank House, where she lived with her foster parents. Her dark hair was escaping from its cap, and her little square face, so like the face of her father, Gerald, my first husband, was rosy with exercise. I could see the gracious outlines of the house, and the ripple of the Thames flowing past. For a moment, it was all so real that I called her name aloud, but the vision faded. She receded from me and was gone.

  “If I die now I’ll never see Meg again and I’ll never see England again!” I wailed. “Somebody help me!”

  “Hush.” Dale was in tears. “Don’t waste your strength, ma’am. Take a little warm milk.”

  “I don’t want milk!” I flung out an arm in a frantic gesture of rejection and sent the cup flying out of Dale’s hand, spilling the milk on the trampled rushes and also on Uncle Armand. “I want to give birth and get this over and I wish I’d never married again!”

  Uncle Armand, brushing white spatters from his black clerical gown, said reprovingly: “Hush, madame. All things are according to the will of God. Women who die in childbirth may, I think, receive martyrs’ crowns in heaven.”

  “I don’t want to be a bloody martyr!” I shouted at him. “I want to live!”

  Peering through the lamplight and the red fog of my pain and fever, I saw the physician and Matthew anxiously conferring in the doorway. The fever seemed to have sharpened my senses for although the physician’s voice was still pitched low, this time I heard what he was saying.

  “It is a son, seigneur, but there is little chance of saving him, I fear, and if I try, we shall almost certainly lose the mother. If we try instead to save her, the chance of success is better, but it will surely mean the child’s death. I cannot hope to save them both; that much is sure. It is for you to decide.”

  I cried out, begging for my life. I had wanted Matthew’s child but in that moment it ceased to be real to me. Nothing was real except the threat, the terrible threat of extinction. Everything became confused. As delirium finally took over, I saw the physician come back to me but after that I remember very little. The pain became a sea in which I was drowning. Then came darkness.

  When I became conscious again, I was still in pain but in a new, localized way. My body was no longer struggling. Its burden was gone. Dale and Matthew, very pale, were beside me and the physician stood watchfully by. Uncle Armand and Madame Montaigle had left the room.

  “You’re alive,” Matthew said. “But there is no child. It was one or the other and I chose you.”

  I smiled. I thanked him. I held his hand.

  I had rarely been so angry in my life.

  The anger wouldn’t go away and mingled with it was a bleak misery that refused to lift and which did not even seem to have much to do with my grief for the lost baby, although I did indeed grieve. I was glad when Matthew told me that Uncle Armand had managed to baptize him, and that he had been laid in consecrated ground. He had been called Pierre, after Matthew’s father. Physically, I got better, and I let Matthew think that my silences, my inability to smile, were all on account of grief. I knew I was hurting him but I could not help myself. My mind was sick and would not heal.

  But by the fourth of April, Matthew was growing worried because I was so remote from him, and over that momentous dinner table, he said so.

  We were not alone. Uncle Armand was dining with us as he usually did, and the butler, Doriot, was waiting on us. So was Roger Brockley, my English manservant. Fran Dale was actually married to Brockley although I still called her Dale, because she had been in my service before Brockley joined me.

  They were both well into their forties, solid people, very English—Dale a little too given to complaining and slightly marked by childhood smallpox, but handsome in her way and very much attached to me; Brockley, stocky and dignified, with a high, polished forehead, a dusting of pale gold freckles, a slight country accent, a gift for expressionless jokes, and a knack of combining respect with criticism which over the years had inspired me with trust and exasperation in roughly equal proportions.

  Brockley had originally been my groom, but when we came to Blanchepierre, the stables were full of grooms, and he had carved out a highly individual niche for himself, acting as my personal messenger and serving me at meals. Doriot didn’t like it, though Brockley tried to be generally helpful and not usurp the butler’s authority.

  Brockley was at the sideboard, spooning wine sauce over my fish steaks, when Matthew said: “I have asked the physician to call tomorrow, Ursula. You are not recovering your strength or your spirits as you should. We’ve had a sad loss, but it’s not the end of the world, you know.”

  I gazed down the table, past the silver dishes and the very beautiful silver salt and the matching candlesticks. The day was bright and the candles weren’t lit, but they were there as decoration. We always dined in this formal fashion, with the length of the table between us. Blanchepierre was a very formal place.

  There he sat, my husband, Matthew, whose dark, diamond-shaped eyes and dramatic black eyebrows, whose tall, loose-jointed frame and graceful movements, had captivated me long ago. He was good-hearted, too; essentially kind. In the end, after a long struggle, I had chosen him and Blanchpierre over a life as a lady of Queen Elizabeth’s Presence Chamber and an agent in the employ of her Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil. I had been willing to live with Matthew as a Catholic, here in France, even though I remembered all too well the cruelties wrought in England by Mary Tudor in the name of that same religion.

  Matthew loved me, and I had thought I loved him, but at this moment, he looked like a stranger.

  “I don’t like the physician,” I said. “I’d rather not see him.”

  “That’s a little ungrateful, isn’t it? He saved your life, after all. I’m sure he can prescribe something for you—a tonic, perhaps.”

  “Dale can make a tonic up for me,” I said. “She is quite skilled in such things. Even I have a little knowledge of herb lore.”

  “The physician surely knows more than either you or Dale. Why don’t you like him?”

  Doriot and Brockley brought the fish steaks to the table and began to serve them. I tried to think of a way to answer Matthew, but couldn’t.

  “Well?” he said. “Ursula, I’m worried about you and these silences of yours are one of the reasons. What is the matter with you? If I ask you a question, why can’t you reply?”

  Sometimes, I knew, it was because I was too lost in depression to hear him. But at other times, and this was one of them, it was because I knew he wouldn’t like the answer. I stared at him and then, without speaking, started to eat.

  “What is wrong with the physician? Ursula, I mean to have an answer. So will you say something, please?”

  He had never pressed so hard before, and in any case, the answer was festering in me. I set down the piece of bread with which I was mopping up the sauce.

  “Very well,” I said. “The last time he came here was to my lying-in chamber. He said there was a chance of saving me or the child, but not both, and he asked you which he should try to save. He asked you. But I was conscious. I was crying out that I didn’t want to die. Why didn’t he ask me instead? He never even spoke to me. I might have been just a log of wood.”

  “Ursula, for the love of God! A physician would always ask the husband in such a case. Naturally.”

  “I’ve just said, I was crying out that I didn’t want to die. Why didn’t he just set about saving my life without further ado?”

  “And leave me with no say in the matter?”

  “It was my life! I was terrified of dying—terrified!”

  “That was needless,” said Uncle Armand. “You had heard Mass and been shriven only an hour or two before your pains began. You had nothing to fear.”

  “Yes, I had!” I snapped at him. “I wanted to live!”


  “I know,” said Matthew. “And I wanted you to live too. I told him to save you. You know that. The child was a son but believe me, I cared nothing for that, if only I could have you back, safe.”

  “But where would I be now if you had chosen otherwise?”

  “Ursula, what is all this? I saved your life!” Matthew thundered. “You’re completely unreasonable.”

  “And unwomanly, I fear.” Uncle Armand shook a reproving head. “What you should have done, my child, was declare that you wished your infant to be saved. Your husband would still have chosen your life instead, of that I feel sure. The very purpose behind asking the husband is to free the woman from the burden of choosing between her child and herself. But …”

  “I didn’t ask to be freed of it!”

  “The last time you saw the physician,” said Matthew, “you were delirious. I think, Uncle Armand, that Ursula cannot be blamed for anything she said at that time.”

  “Blamed!” I shouted.

  “Calm yourself. I also think,” said Matthew, “that you spent too long dancing attendance on that redhaired heretic queen in England. She used to raise her voice quite often, if I remember aright, and you are talking the kind of nonsense that she might very well talk.”

  “It isn’t nonsense.” I tried to speak more quietly. “I still greatly admire Elizabeth,” I added.

  “But you left her service because she and Cecil between them had betrayed you.”

  “It felt like that at the time. But since then, I’ve come to understand them better. I’ve had time to think.”

  “I would have expected,” said Matthew, “that now you are here in my home, you could have left the thinking to your husband, as other women do. It is not a feminine occupation. But since you have been thinking—to what conclusions have you come? Do you regret staying with me?”