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

by Buckley, Fiona

  “We might find the horses yet,” I said.

  “We’ve no time to worry about them now,” said Rob shortly. “What am I to do with Mortimer and those two cretinous oafs who so devotedly served his mother?’

  Eventually, he decided to leave the three of them confined to their rooms, except that Mortimer was to be allowed, under escort, to attend his mother’s funeral. Geoffrey Barker and two other men were to guard them. Mortimer’s men were warned of dire consequences if they attempted to interfere. Rob’s remaining two men came with us. We were carrying the deadly letters and felt the need for guards of our own.

  We took Gladys with us as far as Ledbury. Since half the people in Vetch still seemed to think she was a witch, she wouldn’t be safe in either the castle or the village and she had now decided not to go back to the hermitage after all. She had, in fact, attached herself to me and was demanding to go where I did. “Well, you can wait for me at the Feathers,” I told her.

  When we reached Ledbury, we found Dale still ailing. The cold had turned into a bad cough and she had become feverish again. I left Brockley there with her, but Rob would not let me stay there myself. He even made us ride straight past Tewkesbury without calling in on Mattie and Meg, so great was his haste to reach the court at Richmond.

  I understood the urgency. I also dreaded having to watch Elizabeth’s face when she read those letters. We made our first report to Cecil, and he took us to an audience with Elizabeth in a private room shut away beyond an antechamber. It was here that the letters were put into her hands. I can only say that if I hadn’t already been sure that Elizabeth was a true daughter of King Henry, I would have become sure of it then. I shrank back out of her way as she strode up and down, a lioness rampant, satin skirts swishing, golden-brown eyes hot with rage. It was the authentic Tudor fury, the kind for which King Henry was famed. Anger like this had sent men and women to the Tower, to the block. In Elizabeth at that moment, her father lived again.

  “I want Mortimer dead!” she shouted at us, brandishing the offending letters in Cecil’s face as she passed him. “I want him dismembered before my eyes!”

  Cecil had had leave to sit in the royal presence because his gout was troubling him. His left foot was propped on a stool and his face was lined with pain. “Ma’am,” he said patiently, “the less said about this in public, the better, even though the letters are not genuine, which is beyond question, thank God. Mortimer has confessed to forging them. It wasn’t his first foray into forgery! It seems, from what Mistress Ursula says, that when he left the court ten years ago, it was because of a forgery scandal.”

  Elizabeth had interrupted our report when she lost her temper and we hadn’t finished it. She slowed her furious pacing at the mention of a forgery scandal, and Rob now set about telling her the rest.

  “Before we left Vetch, I spent an hour questioning Mortimer. It wasn’t difficult. A graphic description of the death awaiting traitors, from someone with authority to set him on the road to it, had him almost pissing blood,” said Rob dispassionately. “And it unlocked his tongue like magic. I got everything out of him. He admitted forging the letters but assured me, on his knees, in tears, that he never, never meant to publish them—and didn’t really mean ever to threaten such a thing. It was all just a dream in his mind, he says. He swore he was innocent of everything but foolish imaginings. He got the idea from something that really was found in a piece of furniture, but it wasn’t the letters.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” observed Elizabeth.

  “It seems,” Rob said, “that Sir Philip’s father, Edward Mortimer, once bought a piece of furniture, some kind of desk, which had formerly belonged to Mark Smeaton, the minstrel. The name … will be known to you, I expect.”

  “Yes, what of it?” barked Elizabeth.

  “When I first began to question Mortimer,” Rob said, “he blustered and tried to pretend that the letters really were discovered in the desk, but once I’d got him past that, he told me that what Edward Mortimer found was nothing more than a harmless ballad about springtime and cuckoos, signed by Smeaton. But there was a note at the foot in a different handwriting. The note says: “A pretty song. Thank you, Mark.” It is signed with an A. Edward told his son about the ballad, and Sir Philip found it among his father’s things when Edward died, about eight years ago. He found it and gave it to me and I have it here. It would seem that he assumed the note signed A to be the writing of Queen Anne Boleyn. He imitated it for the purpose of the forgeries. He was so terrified of me by that time that I am sure he spoke the truth.”

  “Are you trying to convince me the damned things are forgeries?” Elizabeth spat. “What else can they be?” She brandished the letters again. “Show me this note!”

  Rob had it ready and handed it to her. She went to the window and stood in the light, comparing it with the letters. Watching her, I realized that although Rob and I were both sure that Mortimer’s confession was true, Elizabeth herself, for all her protestations, had secret doubts. I actually saw the moment when those doubts were dispelled, saw the relaxation of her muscles. I heard her faint sigh.

  Elizabeth never spoke of her mother. Well, almost never. I did once hear her break that private rule but she did not break it now. What she did do was go to the anteroom door and shout. A lady-in-waiting hurried to her and curtsied. “Fetch my oaken box from my bedchamber! Quickly!” Elizabeth snapped.

  She went back to the window and stood staring out of it, with her back to us, until the box was brought. I took it at the door and carried it to her. She put it down on the broad windowsill, took a couple of sheets of paper from it, and beckoned us to look. We gathered around her, Cecil included, leaning on a stick.

  “This is a list of clothes and toilet things to be packed for some journey or other,” she said, pointing. “And this, an old letter to my aunt Mary when she was still Mary Boleyn. Her daughter, Lady Katherine Knollys, gave it to me as … as a keepsake. A note that says: ‘A pretty song. Thank you, Mark,’ does not contain all the letters of the alphabet. Our clever Mortimer imitated the letters in the note well enough but he had to guess what the rest ought to look like, and he guessed wrong. There is no letter j in the note found in Smeaton’s desk, but here it is in one of these vile concoctions where it says ‘my heart’s joy’ and here it is in this list where it says ‘a jar of elder-flower ointment.’ Behold the difference.”

  We understood, without being told, that Anne Boleyn had written the list and the letter to her sister Mary.

  We understood too that we had been vouchsafed a glimpse into an unmentionable sorrow and a searing conflict. Elizabeth remembered her father well and often said that as a child she had admired him and sought his affection. Her throne depended on her claim to be his legitimate daughter. Yet he had had her mother beheaded and she might well have some faint recollection of Anne Boleyn: a presence, a scent, a voice. A memory of love.

  Surely she had, for though she never spoke of Anne, she had kept these little bits of her mother’s writing; these souvenirs.

  If she would not speak openly of Anne Boleyn, then we must not presume to do so. We must not offer sympathy. Our loyalty would have to do instead.

  Elizabeth swept on triumphantly: “There is no q in the note either, but here in the forgery are the words ‘queen of the realm’ and in the letter to my aunt Mary is the word ‘question’ and also many words such as ‘liking’ and ‘lovely’ with the letter l in them, and see how different it is from the way it is written in these abominable letters, in the words ‘wholly’ and ‘revels.’”

  “He was clever,” Cecil said. “He has used parchment already old and somehow faded the ink.”

  “In sunlight, perhaps,” I said.

  “Yes, very likely. A cunning knave.”

  Rob said: “There’s more. We haven’t yet told you about Rafe and Lady Thomasine.”

  We shared the telling as we recounted the sorry tale of murder and attempted murder, of suicide pretended and real.
Elizabeth listened with a cold countenance. At the end, she said: “Well, this Mortimer has played into our hands, it seems. Not content with plotting treason, he has soiled his soul with murder. We understand that it may be best if he is not brought to trial on a charge of forging these letters. But we could perhaps charge him with murdering Rafe. It would appear that Rafe took advantage of Sir Philip’s mother. That is right, is it not? Most juries would think he had a good motive. It is a stronger charge than that of simply concealing the murder to help his mother. It would be,” said Elizabeth, her lioness’s claws unsheathed and glinting, “a surer way of stretching his neck. Lady Thomasine cannot now protest and if Mortimer did not actually stab his ward, he concealed the murder and connived at trying to kill Mistress Blanchard and her servants.”

  There was a silence.

  “He has deserved the gallows,” said Elizabeth. “Does it matter what the charge is?”

  “Ma’am,” said Rob, “how I would like to agree with you. Believe me, I would!” His tone was heartfelt. Blithe, insouciant Rob Henderson, who had occasional cracks in his efficiency, also had a very ruthless streak. He was shaking his head now but with infinite regret.

  “What is the objection?” inquired Elizabeth, her thin eyebrows raised.

  Rob sighed. “When I questioned Mortimer before we left the castle, I deliberately set out to frighten him. But I may have overdone it. He is not a fool, even when terrified. He well understands the harm those letters could do—obviously he does! That potential harm was the foundation of his plot. He harbors the hope that he will not be tried for forging them for that very reason. Without making promises, I encouraged that hope in order to encourage him to talk. But when he had talked enough, I pointed out that there was still the matter of Rafe’s death. He might well hang for that, I told him. I even hinted that perhaps he might be charged with the murder outright. That occurred to me too. His answer was to look at me in a knowing fashion and say that if he were brought to trial for that, it would only be because we were afraid to charge him with forging the letters. ‘What if I say as much in open court?’ he asked me.”

  Cecil, who had made his way back to his seat and put his painful foot up again with obvious relief, said testily: “The man must be mad! He would be risking the knife instead of the rope!”

  “I told him that! But I think,” said Rob glumly, “that to quite an extent, he actually is mad. He says he will fight for his life by claiming that any charge connected with Rafe’s death was trumped up because we fear to accuse him of something else. He said to me that he would throw himself on the mercy of the court and declare the existence of the letters and swear that he believed them to be genuine and also that he never meant to show them to anyone.”

  “He would never get away with it. He must know that! He’d never take such a wild chance!” I spoke with conviction and a sound knowledge of the way Mortimer’s mind worked. “Any more than he would ever, I think, have really used the letters. Or stabbed Rafe, or killed us outright, either.”

  “I told him that I knew he’d never do it,” said Rob. “I laughed at him. I left him thinking that I was not impressed. But can we be quite sure?”

  “What does all this matter?” Elizabeth demanded. “Let him twist and turn and say what he likes! Bring him to trial for murdering his ward! We have proved that the letters are forgeries. We have no need of his confession. There is no doubt.”

  There was a silence. It went on for a long time. “Well?” Elizabeth demanded at last. “What is it? What are you all afraid to say to me?”

  “Ma’am,” said Cecil at last, looking intently toward her, “mud sticks.”

  They had a curious, complementary partnership, those two. Cecil, the middle-aged family man; Elizabeth, still comparatively young, who had never really been part of a family. His levelheadedness; her stormy, mercurial Tudor temper. Cecil’s core of warmth; Elizabeth’s core of ice.

  But both were logical, both knew the value of caution; they understood each other. She knew when to listen to him. The lioness now paused and with narrowed eyes considered the adhesive properties of mud.

  “If we conceal the fact of the letters,” she said slowly, “but try Mortimer for something else, he may blurt their existence out. And then the world will think Elizabeth was so afraid of them that perhaps there is truth in them. Is that it? We must arrest him now for forging them, or else not arrest him at all, for anything?”

  “Exactly,” Cecil said. “I think I understand now. It would seem that no one can be sure what a man like Mortimer is capable of doing, especially under the fear of death! My advice is that the best means of avoiding scandal is total silence. Let Mortimer—and his brother-in-law William Haggard—be terrified into lifelong discretion. Let them know that they will both find themselves in the depths of the Tower if ever they whisper one word of those letters, but let them be reassured that silence means safety. Let all events at Vetch be lost in oblivion; that is safest for us and above all for you. Rafe’s murderess is dead; there is no point in raking the muck heap. Let the lad Rafe lie in his suicide’s grave. He merits nothing better, after all. Let Lady Thomasine’s inquest declare that she killed herself out of grief for the sudden death of her son’s ward. Let it be said that she thought of him as an adopted grandson. Let it be said that as sometimes happens to women in later years, her mind was disturbed. Can you arrange that, Master Henderson?”

  Rob raged all the way back to Ledbury. “‘Can you arrange that, Master Henderson?’ Just stand on this beach like bloody Canute and tell the tide to go back! Just point at the sun and tell it to stop at noon! Just do a bloody miracle! How many people in the castle already know too much? I wonder.”

  “Probably not that many,” I said soothingly. “Not about the letters, anyway. I’m sure we can frighten Mortimer and Haggard into keeping quiet. As for Rafe’s murder, I think Pugh and Evans are the only ones in the castle who know, apart from Mortimer and ourselves. I don’t think they’ll have talked. Lady Thomasine wanted Rafe’s death to look like suicide and those two always accepted her orders. I have reason to know it.”

  “So all I have to do is make sure they go on not talking, and say whatever they’re told to say at the inquest. What I’ve got to do is conceal two completely different crimes. And paint Vetch Castle pure white from turrets to dungeons, while I’m about it, I suppose! Well, there’s one good thing. The letters no longer exist.”

  Elizabeth had burnt them. We had ourselves been witnesses as she cut them up, and ordered a brazier to be brought, and threw the pieces into it. I think I was as glad to see them vanish as Elizabeth was.

  On the way back, we did stop in Tewkesbury, but the Woodwards told us that Mattie had gone to Ledbury, taking Meg with her. There had been an urgent message from the Feathers, they said. We took some food with the Woodwards, but then rode on in haste to arrive at the Feathers late in the evening. Mattie and Meg were there to greet us, but even as I joyfully hugged my daughter, Mattie told me why they were there, instead of in Tewkesbury.

  “It’s Dale. She took a bad turn just after you left and Brockley sent for me. He needed help. Joan and Bridget are with us and we’ve been looking after her as best we can. Joan’s with her now and Bridget’s asleep. I’m thankful you’re here. Ursula, she’s very ill indeed.”

  I refused to go on to Vetch Castle. “I must stay here with Dale,” I said. “You don’t need me at the inquest anyway. I can’t leave Dale and I won’t.”

  Rob was huffy, but Mattie backed me up. “I know you must go to Vetch,” she said to him, “but Ursula’s duty is here now.”

  “Very well,” said Rob at last. “I’ll go and produce this … this masque on my own! Wish me luck!”

  He went. I forgot him before he was out of sight. Indeed, throughout the next few days, I never gave events at Vetch Castle a single thought. I concerned myself only with the fight for Dale’s life, and so did Brockley.

  The hardships of our adventure had nearly destroyed her. She h
ad endured rain and cold, long weary hours in the saddle, the terror of the shepherd’s hut, the squalor of the hermitage, and the bare, chilly misery of Isabel’s Tower and it had all been far too much. Her cold had gone to her lungs and at any moment, her fight for breath might cease.

  We all took turns, Gladys included. Mattie had made her clean herself up and borrowed some more of Joan’s spare clothes for her, turning her into a moderately respectable, if homely, woman servant. Meg helped too, running errands.

  We sent for a physician, but he could suggest only that we go on with the things we were already doing. It was day and night work, an endless business of clean sheets, damp cloths to wipe Dale’s sweating forehead, drinks of water, hot milk, warmed wine, herbal possets—the landlord’s wife had some recipes she swore by—inhalations of steam, reassurance, and desperate prayer. Two of us at least were always on duty at Dale’s bedside.

  On the fourth night, I found myself keeping watch with Brockley. Dale lay propped up to help her breathe better. She was unconscious—in the candlelight a thin glint of eyeball was visible, below half-closed lids. Her mouth was open and her waxen cheeks had fallen in. Except for the rasp and bubble of those difficult breaths, she might have been already dead.

  Earlier, we had been busy. We had had to clean her, while she groaned and murmured, only dimly aware of what we were doing; and then support her so that she could inhale steam, before somehow coaxing a posset into her. Now she was quiet, and it was deep in the night, when the sick are most at risk. I sat on one side of her, and Brockley on the other. I noticed that several times he looked at me across the bed and seemed about to speak but then appeared to change his mind. At last, he spoke my name. “Mistress Blanchard …”

  “Brockley?”

  “She’s weaker.” He spoke very softly, perhaps afraid that Dale might hear him and understand. “She can’t go on much longer like this. What will I do if I don’t have Fran?”