Queen of Ambition (2 page)

“Horses can stumble,” Rob said mildly.

I shook my head. “You and I haven’t spoken together for some time, Rob. There is something you don’t know. I was going to meet Thomas at three o’clock this afternoon; about now, in fact. He couldn’t get away from his tutor and I couldn’t get away from the pie shop any sooner. Thomas was worried and he wanted to talk to me about it. And now he never will.”

My voice was grim. From the beginning, Sir William Cecil, the Secretary of State, had sensed that there was something amiss in Cambridge. He had known it in the marrow of his bones and now I knew that he was right.

“For someone,” I said, “though I’m not sure who—I think this was a long way from being an untimely accident. For someone, it may have been very timely indeed.”

Thomas Shawe rode out to his death through a pearly daybreak in July 1564. Only a month before, in early June, I was living quietly at Withysham manor house in Sussex and I had never heard of Master Shawe. For a young woman of thirty I had had an unconventional, not to say eventful, life but if anyone had told me then that within four weeks I would be dressed like a servant and working in a pie shop, rolling pastry, waiting on undergraduates, and putting up with it when the proprietor shouted at me or even clouted me around the head, I would have been skeptical to say the least.

I was expecting to be called away from home, yes, but to court, not to a pie shop, and indeed, a summons to court was what the royal courier brought to me on that beautiful June morning. Which was, ironically, the first morning at Withysham on which I had said to myself:
Yes, I do miss Matthew, but all the same, I’m happy here
.

Withysham, which was a former nuns’ abbey converted to a manor house, with a home farm, a village, and a couple of smallholdings attached, had been given to me only a couple of months before by Queen Elizabeth in return for a service I had rendered to her. When I went there, with my eight-year-old daughter Meg, I found it sadly neglected. It had been in the hands of an aging caretaker steward for over three years, with depressing results. The hall roof leaked, there was an old wasps’ nest in a corner of a disused bedchamber, and there were tapestries so moth-eaten that they were fit only for a rubbish heap. The floors looked as if they hadn’t been swept for a century, and two of the home farm cows were so old that they could hardly stand up, let alone produce calves or milk.

Fortunately, I had some money and there were rents due that provided more. I set to work forthwith, pensioning the old steward off, promoting my excellent manservant, Roger Brockley, to take his place, and seizing the chance to instruct Meg in housewifery. I had never before been in charge of her education. She was the child of my first husband, Gerald Blanchard, and for many years, force of circumstances had compelled me to leave her with foster parents while I earned us a living. Now that we were reunited, there was much that I wanted to teach her.

Yet Withysham was not truly my home. Home was the French château of Blanchepierre in the Loire Valley, where my second husband, Matthew de la Roche, was living. During a visit I had made to England earlier in the year, plague had broken out at Blanchepierre
and Matthew had written bidding me stay where I was until the summer ended. The plague always subsided when the weather cooled. Making the best of it, I decided to pass the time putting my new property at Withysham to rights, before joining the court and accompanying the queen on her Summer Progress. I had once been a Lady of Queen Elizabeth’s Presence Chamber and during my stay in England I had found that in her eyes, I still was.

On that June morning, I had begun as usual by taking Meg with me to the kitchen to listen while I gave the orders for the day’s meals. While we were there, our spit boy, who was sharpening knives, cut himself and Meg helped me to dress the wound, using an ointment prepared from herbs by Gladys Morgan, an aged woman from South Wales. Gladys had attached herself to me in a way that was often an embarrassment, for she was, to be candid, a dreadful old woman. I could insist that she washed and wore respectable clothes, but her few remaining teeth still resembled fangs and her laughter was a demonic cackle.

Roger Brockley, who had a kindness for the aged, had once rescued her from a charge of witchcraft and now I lived in dread that one day someone would bring the charge again. True, the Withysham people didn’t dislike her as her former village had done. She had a gift for brewing medicines and ointments and had helped quite a few of them with her lotions for rheumatism and her potions for fevers. The old steward suffered from breathlessness and palpitations, and for him she had made a concoction of foxglove that had relieved him a good deal. I had cause to be grateful
to her myself, for she had once saved the life of my woman, Fran Dale, and she had lately invented a brew that eased my occasional attacks of sick headaches better than the chamomile infusion I had used before.

She had, however, irritated the local physician quite a lot by her ministrations and I had had to be firm with both of them, telling Gladys to be more discreet and recommending the physician to mind his own business, attend the patients who called him in, and leave the rest alone (I felt no compunction about this; I was fairly sure that he killed as many as he cured and Gladys was better than he was about warning people of the difference between a healing dose and an overdose).

Gladys, in fact, was useful, but she was also a responsibility. After attending to the spit boy, I seized the chance of explaining all this to Meg, for I hoped that one day my daughter would marry well and have her own home and then she too would have to keep the peace among her servants.

Having finished with the kitchen, I had time for more intellectual pursuits. Meg and I were reading books of history and travel together, and I had bought a Latin grammar so that we could work on Latin, in which she already had a grounding.

It was an excellent mental exercise for me, too. I had lately become aware of how miserable women could be when their beauty began to fade, unless they had other interests. I had also discovered that such studies could be a defense against the languorous persuasions of summer weather, the scent of roses, the sound of grasshoppers, the voices of dove and cuckoo,
and the eventide song of the blackbird. When I was concentrating on a Latin translation, I did not daydream about Matthew.

At court, I had often been impressed by Queen Elizabeth’s own interest in learning and her gift for languages. Sometimes I wondered whether Elizabeth, determinedly unmarried and still only thirty, also found her intellectual pursuits a refuge from importunate desires.

I did not intend to give up my own studies once we were settled back in France, however. On the contrary, I hoped to find a tutor who could instruct both Meg and myself not only in advanced Latin but also in Greek. My education had been a matter of sharing my cousins’ tutor, and although we had gone a fair way with Latin, my cousins had pleaded to give up Greek almost as soon as they began it, on the grounds that it was too difficult. We had learned the alphabet and not much else.

For the moment, though, Meg was only at the stage of basic Latin and that was occupation enough for us. I settled down with her in the small room that I had chosen as a study, which looked out toward Withysham’s neatly thatched gatehouse, and to the home farm fields on the hillside beyond our encircling wall.

As she often did, my woman, Fran Dale—I still called her Dale although she was actually Mistress Brockley—joined us, to sit by the windows with some mending. Because the day was warm, two of the casements were open, letting in the sound of skylarks and the smell of new-mown hay from the fields. Meg sat
with her head bent earnestly over an exercise concerned with the fourth declension, while I tried to puzzle out a grammatical point that had always confused me, involving the construction of the gerund. Though I remember, on that morning, I wasn’t concentrating as earnestly as Meg. There were occasions when intellectual tasks didn’t quite succeed in blocking out emotional ones. I kept on raising my head to look with affection at my daughter, who was becoming so very pretty.

She took after her father, Gerald, who had been a handsome man. Her glossy hair was dark just as his had been, and she had his brown eyes. I had dark hair too, but not quite of the same shade, and my eyes were hazel. I had dressed her in a lightweight crimson brocade, which suited her to perfection, and her little white linen cap was clean on that morning. Sitting there so studiously, she was such an enchanting picture that she distracted me from my books and from the sights and sounds of the outside world alike. I did not want to stop looking at her.

And I was realizing that despite the empty place beside me, which must always be there until I was reunited with my present husband, Matthew, here at Withysham in the company of my daughter, living this quiet life of domestic duties and peaceful study, I was surprisingly content.

It was Fran Dale who heard the distant clatter of hooves on the gatehouse cobbles, looked out of the window, and exclaimed: “Mistress Blanchard, ma’am, there’s a royal messenger just ridden in, or my name isn’t Dale.”

“Well, it isn’t, is it? It’s Brockley!” said Meg with a giggle.

“Meg, don’t be pert,” I said absently. “Dale is sometimes known as Dale and sometimes as Mistress Brockley. In France, when we go there, I shall be Madame de la Roche, but in England I prefer still to be Mistress Blanchard. People aren’t always called by the same name all the time.” I rose and went to the window. The horseman was walking his mount toward the stableyard and he was near enough for me to see from his livery that Fran was right.

Well, I was expecting him. This was my summons to join the queen and prepare for the Progress to Cambridge. But it had come well before I looked for it, and I not only wished it hadn’t, because it felt like an intrusion, I also wondered
why
it had come so soon.

It was my first intimation that something out of the ordinary was afoot.

When the time came for me to go to France, I intended to leave Brockley and Dale to run Withysham for me. I would have plenty of servants at Blanchepierre. But in England, I only had Brockley and Dale as personal attendants, so they would have to come to Cambridge with me. Therefore, I recalled the old steward, Malton, from his retirement cottage and put him back in charge with a lengthy list of instructions, which included taking the utmost care of Gladys. “I won’t be here and Brockley won’t be here, but if anyone harms Gladys while we’re gone, you’ll answer for it. I’ll slash your pension.”

“I’ll do my best, Mistress Blanchard,” said Malton bleakly. He had never known what to make of me but he was more than a little afraid of me, which just now was all to the good.

“You’ll do more than your best,” I said. “Call on the vicar for help if necessary.” The vicar’s living was in the gift of Withysham and he was afraid of me, too. I was young to be a husbandless lady of the manor and sometimes I had to put on fierce airs in order to get my authority respected. I sometimes feared that I was turning into a fair facsimile of a battle-ax.

Meg, along with her nurse, Bridget, would have to return to her foster mother, Mattie Henderson. Rob and Mattie were the owners of a big house near Hampton and Rob was a courtier, and a friend of Sir William Cecil, the Secretary of State. Rob was to join the Progress and Mattie had written to me that he was already at court. Mattie herself, however, was expecting a child and was to stay behind at their home, Thames-bank. Meg was well used to both Mattie and Thames-bank and would be contented enough there until I came back.

“Though I don’t envy Mistress Henderson, having to stay at home while her husband goes off gallivanting among all the court ladies,” Fran Dale said in sour tones. “And her nearly forty, at that. If I was her, I couldn’t abide to see Roger going off like that and leaving me behind.”

“No one’s asking you to,” I pointed out, somewhat brusquely, since I was extremely busy just then with the choice of gowns to pack and a further list of last-minute instructions for the harassed Master Malton.

The day before I set out, I had an unexpected visitor. Five miles from Withysham was Faldene, the house where I had been brought up, mainly by my uncle Herbert and my aunt Tabitha. My mother had been a court lady who was sent home in disgrace, with child by a man she would not name. I had been that child. Her parents and later on her brother Herbert and sister-in-law Tabitha had sheltered us, had clothed and fed us, and had even educated me, but they had not been kind. We had disgraced them, and they let us know it.

Later on, when my mother was dead and I was a young woman confronted with a life as Aunt Tabitha’s unpaid maidservant and Uncle Herbert’s unpaid clerk, I succeeded in stealing the affections of their daughter Mary’s betrothed. I ran off with Gerald and married him. Finally, when Uncle Herbert became involved in treason, I was the one who got him sent to the Tower. He had been released long since, as an act of mercy, because he was a heavily built man who suffered from shortness of breath and attacks of gout, but understandably, he didn’t feel inclined to forgive me.

In fact, for excellent reasons, I didn’t like my uncle and aunt and they didn’t like me and although I lived so near them, we had not seen each other during my sojourn at Withysham. I was very surprised when Brockley came to my chamber, where Dale and I were folding clothes into hampers, and announced that Mistress Tabitha Faldene was below, and wished to speak to me.

“Aunt Tabitha? Here?”

“Yes, madam.” Brockley knew the situation and his
calm high forehead with its dusting of pale gold freckles was faintly wrinkled with surprise. “I have asked her to wait in the main hall.”

I went downstairs and there, indeed, she was, thin, vinegary Aunt Tabitha, neat and prim in a stiff, narrow ruff, her housewifely dress of dark blue tidily draped over a modest farthingale. Aunt Tabitha did not care for showy garments.

“So there you are, Ursula. I won’t ask you why you haven’t called on us. Tact, no doubt, and in fact, you were right. Your uncle does not wish to see you and of course I respect his views. All the same, families should maintain the proprieties. I hear you are bound for the court again and I felt it was only proper that I should speak with you before you left. If you wish to visit your mother’s grave in Faldene churchyard, you may do so.”