The Doublet Affair (Ursula Blanchard Mysteries) (2 page)

“I wish you luck,” I said, ignoring the fact that he was still gazing longingly at my purse. If I had any more spare coins, I preferred to spend them on my little daughter.

“I’ll be away to see the feathers fly, then,” said Bone, accepting defeat. “I’m leaving my shop shut for the whole day, to come here and then attend the cockfight, so I hope I do a bit of good.”

And that, I thought, as Master Bone took his leave, no doubt explained why a qualified craftsman had needed to get involved in crime. Gambling debts, for sure. Well, Cecil was making good use of the outcome. If Bone had stayed respectable, his skills with pieces of wire might not have been so polished.

I liked Cecil as a man, but he had his ruthless side. He did indeed collect people to use as tools. In the service of Elizabeth, he would use any tool that came to hand.

And that included me.

• • •

When Master Bone had gone, I made haste to return through Whitehall Palace to the small chamber which I shared with Dale five nights a week. On the other two nights I sent her to be with her husband, my
manservant Roger Brockley. My quarters were not in the same building as Cecil’s office, and Brockley, my stocky, reliable, dignified Brockley, was waiting in the porch to escort us back. He was well wrapped, with a stout felt hat pulled down over his ears, and a thick cloak drawn round him, but he looked cold. I wasn’t sure of his age, but from what he had told me of his past life, and from the silver hairs mixed with the brown at his temples, he must be in his forties. Today, his high, intelligent forehead, with its sprinkling of pale gold freckles, was a little puckered as if with the discomfort of the weather.

“Brockley, you should have come inside and found a fire to stand beside. There’s one in the servants’ room downstairs.”

“I might have missed you if I left the porch, madam.” Brockley spoke good, almost prim, English in a country accent. “And you should have an escort in this warren of a palace,” he said. “Palace! It’s more like a town!”

This was true enough. Whitehall, Her Majesty was wont to inform us proudly, was the biggest royal palace in the whole of Europe. It was a maze of halls and galleries, staircases and courtyards, lodgings, guardrooms, outbuildings and gardens, with a road going through the middle as though it were indeed a small town instead of a residence. In wet weather, people who hadn’t set foot beyond the palace precincts often arrived drenched for meals or meetings.

To reach my quarters, we had to cross two courtyards, climb two staircases and go down one, and then cross a public thoroughfare, where Brockley stepped in
front of me and grabbed Dale’s arm just in time to keep us out of the way as a couple of satin-clad horsemen with feathers in their hats and huge rowelled spurs on their boots, clattered by, riding far too fast.

“A fine sort of house,” said Brockley disparagingly, “where folk can be ridden down
inside
the gates! By the way, madam, did your—er—lesson today go well? I understand from Fran that you are learning to open locks.”

His voice was carefully bland. I smiled. Brockley did not approve of the means by which I kept myself dressed and jewelled as befitted a Lady of the Queen’s Presence Chamber, provided extras for my small daughter, paid Brockley’s salary and that of his wife, and maintained the two horses which I kept for us.

“The lesson was most successful, thank you, Brockley. I need practice now, that’s all, and the gear for that is in the sack that Dale is carrying.”

Blue-grey eyes as expressionless as his voice, Brockley said, “And what’s it all for, madam? May we know?”

“I wish I knew the answer to that myself,” I said, “but I shan’t find out until I take dinner with Sir William Cecil and his wife tomorrow. Meanwhile, both of you, I am due to attend on the Queen. I must hurry!”

Brockley left us at the foot of my staircase and Dale followed me up to my tiny room. Sprawling Whitehall had enough little cubbyholes, hollowed out of the thickness of old walls or created by partitioning bigger chambers, for many of the Queen’s ladies to have their own rooms, or at least cubicles. I had a patch of floor
in what had once been a big anteroom, now divided by faded tapestries which had been retired from the royal apartments. I had just space enough for my bed, Dale’s truckle bed, a clothes press and a toilet stand. I hurried in ahead of Dale and then stopped short in surprise, for awaiting me, seated on my bedside stool, was the plump, beruffed and brocaded figure of the Queen’s principal lady.

“Mistress Ashley!”

“I will not ask where you have been,” said Kat Ashley severely. “I understand from Her Majesty that you undertook an errand for her today and that I need not question you. However, you are supposed to be on duty and it will cause talk if you don’t present yourself promptly. Her Majesty’s errands shouldn’t become subjects of curiosity and gossip.”

“No, quite. Of course not.” I thought with amusement that Kat Ashley would know all about curiosity and gossip. She kept the Queen’s secrets, or anyone else’s if Elizabeth so ordered it, but the fat little paws now hidden in the folds of her plum and silver brocade nevertheless belonged to a woman who loved to dabble her fingers in other people’s business. Her protuberant blue eyes were at this moment avid to know what I had been doing and why. For all her dignity and her exalted position, there was something incurably blowsy about Kat. Not that I disliked her: I had a fair share of curiosity in my own nature. She and I understood each other.

“I didn’t realise I was so tardy,” I said, while Dale put the sack she was carrying quietly out of sight. “I am sorry that you had to come in search of me.”

“Oh, I didn’t come on account of your lateness,” Kat Ashley said, “but while you were—wherever it is you’ve been—somebody came looking for you, from outside. A ship’s boy, sent by a Captain Sutton—a sea captain, apparently.”

“A sea captain? Sutton?” I said in bewilderment.

“Just docked in the Thames, over from Calais, according to the boy who came asking for you at the river gate. The gatekeeper sent for me. The lad had a letter for you,” said Kat Ashley. Her right hand had been hidden in her costly skirts, and now she withdrew it and held out to me a doubled sheet of paper, sealed.

“The reason the gatekeeper didn’t know at once who you were, was that the boy didn’t ask for Mistress Blanchard,” she said. “He asked for Mistress de la Roche, one of the Queen’s ladies. You would do better,” said Kat, “to let your French correspondent, whoever he is . . . ?” She waited to see if I would tell her, but although I knew she had seen how my eyes were shining, I said nothing. “. . . Better tell him,” said Kat disappointedly, “that here, you still go by the name of your first husband. Here you are.”

Kat was among the few people who knew of my second marriage. It was one of the secrets she had been allowed to know because of her position in authority over me, but had been ordered to keep to herself.

Taking the letter, I saw my name, my legal name, Mistress de la Roche, written on it in strong black ink. The writing was masculine and elegant, a little ornate; the seal showed the letter M within a circle. I knew the hand and I knew the seal, from notes sent to me in the
past, millenia ago—was it really only last year?—when Matthew de la Roche paid court to me.

“You bade me make haste,” I said. “Please leave me now. I will be with the Queen in a few minutes.”

Kat Ashley sighed, and heaved herself to her feet with a grunt. “Too many stairs for my liking, to get to these rooms. You’re spryer than I am, and just as well. You have ten minutes at most, Mistress Blanchard.”

I sat down at my toilet table. “Do my hair, Dale. Quickly. While you’re doing it, I’ll read this.”

“Oh, ma’am! Is it from your husband? I know you said you’d written to him. And quite right too, in my view. A woman should be with her husband. Even if she doesn’t agree with everything he says or does, she still ought to be with him. I’d be lost without Brockley, now that we’re wed.”

I met her eyes in the mirror, and smiled affectionately. Dale, like Brockley himself, was over forty, and she was not beautiful, any more than he was conventionally handsome, but she had regular features which were pleasant in their own way. If she had a few pockmarks from a childhood attack of smallpox, this was a common misfortune, and Dale’s pocks were not so very obvious. They had somehow grown less noticeable, and her features softer since she and Brockley married. Her correct name now, of course, was Mistress Brockley, but I was used to calling her Dale and she was used to being thus addressed, so we had gone on with it.

Brockley had done well by her, I thought. If not an Adonis, he was still well looking, with the co-ordinated movements and air of strength which can be more
impressive than facial planes. He was resourceful, the kind of man whose wife can rely on him. He had been a groom before I took him on, but he had also been a soldier, in the days of King Henry, and had been to war in Scotland and France. He knew the world.

Dale, when I first knew her, had been inclined to complain too much, but she had improved since her marriage, although I had never been easy to work for, and this had certainly
not
improved.

For one thing, I was often short tempered out of sheer envy, because Dale had the company of her husband whereas I had parted from mine. My reasons at the time seemed good and honourable, but I had learned, through lonely nights and long days of empty busy-ness, that virtue is not only its own, but its only reward. No matter how often I told myself that I had been right to put the welfare of the Queen and the safety of the realm before my own private happiness, it could not comfort my longing or heal my grief. I wanted Matthew.

In the end, after much secret crying in the darkness, I had put my need into words and found a messenger—a merchant travelling to the Loire valley where I believed that Matthew now was. I hoped to God that my letter would reach him, that it would bridge the chasm between us and that he would answer.

Until now, my only answer had been silence. I had tried to tell myself that my letter hadn’t reached him, but it was all too probable that he didn’t want me any more, and who could blame him? I had vacillated over writing to him again. Now, after all, the reply was here.

Though I did not yet know what was in it. As Dale took my hair, which was long and thick and very
dark, out of its silver net and set about brushing it, I sat turning the letter over in my hands. When I first recognised Matthew’s handwriting, I had been filled with joy, but it had now occurred to me that it was as likely to contain bitter rejection as impassioned invitation.

As I broke the seal, I was afraid.

A
s I unfolded the letter, I wondered just where and when he had written it. At what time of day? Morning, noon, evening? Looking out, perhaps, on the Loire? He had described the river to me: its beauty, its moods. Had it been sunlit or pocked with rain? Or had he sat down late at night to write by the light of lamp or candle? Had he been pensive, or unhappy, or angry? Had his pen raced swiftly, the words pouring from his heart, or had it travelled slowly, while he weighed every word before inscribing it?

What had he said? Well, Ursula: read it. Then you’ll know.

The letter was in French. It began brusquely, without endearments.

Ursula. I have received your letter, asking if I still care for you and if I will take you back as my wife. What am I to say? Half of me rejoices to hear from you, and wants to call you my beloved Ursula and summon you to me. The other half, to say the least of it, feels otherwise. That half wants to fling your
letter in the fire and forget you. How could you abandon me like that? You write saying that you had honourable reasons to do what you did. You say you had a duty to the Queen. What of your duty to your husband who had promised to love and protect you always? What of the love you said you felt for me? Do you remember how we lay in each other’s arms? Do you remember how I said I loved your salty tongue, and how I nicknamed you my Saltspoon? You wish to come to me if I will have you, and if I will give a home also to your daughter Meg. Meg I would receive gladly, for she is a child who has done me no harm. But you? No, I do not know what I should say.

Yes, I do, for there is only one thing I can say. I still love you, although, God knows, there was a time when I could have killed you. If you mean what you say, then come to me and bring Meg. I live in a house called Château Blanchepierre, a few miles west of Saumur, beside the River Loire. I am sometimes away in Paris but my household would make you welcome while they sent word to me. You need not be afraid of them, although they know what you have done. Madame Montaigle was very shocked, but if I command it, she will put the past behind, as will I. Send me an answer, if you can find a messenger. Or simply come. Yes—after all, I send my love to you, my Saltspoon.

Matthew.

Tears burned my eyes. Dale was urging me to stand, so that she could brush down my clothes—a bodice of cream satin criss-crossed with tawny embroidery, a
small farthingale and a tawny damask overdress open in front to reveal a kirtle which matched the bodice. I rose to my feet, blinking the tears away. As Dale began to brush, I folded the letter and pushed it into a pocket just inside the open skirt.

“Hurry, Dale. I must go. Oh, Dale!”

“Ma’am?” said Dale.

“Dale, if I go to France, will you and Brockley come with me?”

“You’ll have to ask Brockley yourself, ma’am, but . . . well, I wouldn’t say no.” In the mirror I met Dale’s eyes again and saw that hers, a lighter blue than Kat’s, were bright with pleasure for me. She finished brushing and stepped back.

“Oh,
Dale!
” I said again. I wanted to run, then and there, to the Queen to tell her that I wished to leave her service and go to join my husband, but of course I could not. Such an interview would have to be formal, set up through Mistress Ashley. For the moment, I must wait, clasping my precious secret to me.

“Matthew had a nickname for me,” I said huskily to Dale. “Because of my sharp tongue. He called me Saltspoon. He reminds me of it in the letter. It brings him back so. I can hear him saying it!”