Queen of Ambition (35 page)

I watched him go upstairs, his back rigid, and felt myself grow cold and tired. I had looked on him, for so long, as a friend but the friendship was over and with it, I supposed, my friendship with Mattie.

Well, when all this was finished, I would collect
Meg from them and soon, soon, Meg and I would be on our way to France, to Blanchepierre and to Matthew. I would leave Brockley and Dale behind at Withysham. No one, ever again, would suspect me of being too friendly with my manservant; nor would anyone resent me for being too successful an agent of inquiry. I would become Madame de la Roche, wholly and completely. For the rest of my life.

“We’ve questioned Woodforde and Jester,” Cecil said in a quiet voice, as together with Dudley, Rob Henderson, and myself, in private audience with Elizabeth, he told her all that had passed in Cambridge. “They have talked. They might well have got away with it. According to their original plan, Jester would have been out in the street in front of his shop, in full, innocent view of everybody, and Woodforde would have fired his musket from the attic, and then, while everyone was still wondering exactly what had happened, he’d have been away through the secret room and into the tower and wouldn’t have emerged until he felt safe. The houses nearby would all have been searched but I don’t suppose we’d have found him. As things were, they meant to rush down the stairs and get into the room behind the larder. Oh yes, it could have worked!”

“When I became involved in that playlet,” said Dudley
grimly, “I allowed myself to be fooled.” The expression on his haughty face was that of an offended falcon. “And I am not in the habit of being fooled. I would prefer that this should not be bruited about too widely.”

“There we agree,” said Elizabeth seriously. “But there is one thing we badly need to learn. Just how far was Lady Lennox involved in this?”

“That,” said Cecil, “we intend to find out before long.”

It was not in Elizabeth’s nature to say in so many words:
I was wrong;
still less to apologize for even the most disastrous misjudgments, at least not in public—though it may be that she and Dudley, in private, said something of the kind to each other. After all, they had both encouraged the playlet and refused to see its dangers, and because of that, the queen’s sweet Robin had come close to being shot dead in a Cambridge street.

A few days after that private interview, however, she did make an opportunity to thank me for my work in Cambridge, without referring to the details. She chose a casual moment, while leaning back in her chair to watch some of her ladies practice the figures of a complex new dance. The heat wave was over, and under the windows of the gallery in Whitehall Palace, where the court was now ensconced, the Thames was rippled by a brisk wind. Elizabeth had a fine wool shawl over her loose gown of ash-gray satin.

“I am grateful, Ursula, for all you did in Cambridge,” she said softly. “I am touched that you were
willing to put up with such ill-usage for my sake. I have to thank you, but I have waited to do so when Master Henderson is not present. He feels, I think, that your exploits somewhat outdid his.”

“That was only chance. He fell ill. As for me, I am always glad to serve you, ma’am,” I said conventionally, although it was in fact the truth. There was that about Elizabeth that made people unable to be neutral about her. They loathed or loved her, feared her or defended her, and either way acknowledged her magnetism.

She was not beautiful in the ordinary sense of the word. Women who were called beautiful mostly shared certain features: a glossiness of lip, and a softness of mouth and chin; a come-hither shimmer in the eyes. A latent willingness to surrender.

Elizabeth’s lips were dry and her eyes always wary. Her pale, pearly face was sharp-pointed like a shield, and in many ways a shield was exactly what it was. Behind its protective facade, she thought her own thoughts and hid her emotions. I sometimes thought that the secret of her magnetism lay in precisely that; one could sense that the thoughts were deep and the emotions strong, yet she rarely let anyone know what they were. She drew people to her, or frightened them into angry retreat, because she was a mystery.

“I believe,” she said now, “that Lady Lennox is shortly to be brought face-to-face with the man Woodforde. I wish I could be there to overhear, although I have no doubt, Ursula, that Cecil and you will ably represent me.”

“We will do our best, ma’am,” I said.

* * *

The dancing ended. I had asked permission to withdraw afterward, as far as the other ladies were concerned because I was preparing to leave the court and return to Withysham, by way of Thamesbank so that I could collect Meg. I would have to ride with Rob. I hoped that on the way, I might yet put right the coldness that had fallen between us. It had saddened me, but so far Rob had not softened.

Elizabeth, however, knew well enough that I was not really going to spend the afternoon in helping Dale to shake out dresses and fold them into hampers for the journey. Instead, I was going to the Tower with Sir William Cecil, though Rob had asked to be excused because: “Ursula did most of the investigating; it should be solely her privilege.” The words were gracious; his eyes were not. I was sorry.

It was an odd sort of privilege. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had visited a Tower dungeon once before and I would never forget it. I was relieved when, on the way there, Cecil told me that we were not going into the dungeons. “Eavesdropping isn’t so very easy down there but it’s been deliberately provided for in other places. It’s often useful to overhear what prisoners imagine to be private conversations with their visitors. Lady Lennox and Giles Woodforde will meet in a Tower room. It’s not very large, partly because the timber partition at one end is a thin false wall. There’s a narrow space behind it with just room for two or three people, and anyone placed there can hear everything that is said. There’s a door into the hidden space from an adjoining chamber and it has a small window.”

“Secret rooms everywhere I turn,” I remarked, somewhat sourly.

The eavesdroppers were even provided, I found, with a couple of stools, and there were holes in the partition through which it was possible to peer into the chamber beyond. Cecil’s gout was better but he still preferred to sit, although I remained standing. Lady Lennox appeared first, escorted by the Lord Lieutenant and superbly dressed as usual, in an elaborate blue and silver ensemble. The Tower chamber was indeed small and when Lady Lennox was standing regally in the middle of it, her vast farthingale almost seemed to fill it. It was not in Lady Lennox, I thought, to tone down her apparel out of respect for the plight of a prisoner.

She waited, hands linked before her, while the Lord Lieutenant went out again and called down the stairs. Then came the sound of guards ordering someone to get a move on, there, hurry up, we ain’t got all day, and Giles Woodforde was hustled in. The door slammed behind him and was locked, leaving the two of them, as far as they knew, alone together.

They had tidied Woodforde up, or so I supposed. His straggly dust-colored hair had been trimmed and he was wearing a clean brown jerkin and hose. His face had been washed and so had his bare feet. But he was gaunt from two weeks of prison fare and constant dread, and his bony wrists were crimson-circled from the gyves. He stood trembling, just inside the door until Lady Lennox, after staring at him coldly for all of half a minute, said acidly: “I am here at the queen’s bidding because a prrrisoner had asked to speak with me. Now I find that the prrrisoner is you.
You!
” The
disgust in the last word would have curdled milk and Lady Lennox’s Scottish
R
’s fairly rolled with fury.

Giles Woodforde threw himself at her feet. She stepped hastily back but he scrambled after her, clutching at her ankles, pulling at her silver-embroidered hem, kissing her shoes. “Oh, my lady, my lady, you’re my last hope! I did it all for you … at least I tried to do it … I’m sorry I failed; I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Speak for me! You’re a great lady. If you speak … if you plead … if you say you’ll take me into your house and be surety for me, surely, surely …”

“What in the name of God,” said Lady Lennox, “are you talking about, you atrrrocious little worrm? Get up! Get up, I say! Ugh! Leave me alone!” She jerked her skirts out of his fingers, and stooping, administered a violent smack on the side of his head. “What is all this? What have you done, or tried to do? Get
up
!”

“I was going to kill Dudley!” Woodforde babbled. He came to his feet, not so much from choice as because Lady Lennox had seized his hair and literally hauled him up by it. “So that he would be out of your way, so that he would be out of your son’s way! I know you were angry because you heard that the queen had offered Dudley to Mary of Scotland. You said so in front of me, more than once! You said the queen was scheming to make sure that your son could never marry her. I thought …”

“You vile little toad of a man! Dudley will never leave Elizabeth. I’ve always known that! And what is Dudley, by birth, comparrred to my son with his rrroyal blood? Elizabeth’s schemes made me angry but I always knew they’d fail! I don’t need a dirrty little
assassin to clear the way for my son! He can do his wooing for himself. If he chooses, he will make me queen mother of Scotland without
your
assistance!”

“But I did it for
you
! Oh, my lady, think what they will do to me if you won’t help me! My lady, my lady!”

“I know exactly what they’ll do to you,” said Lady Lennox disdainfully. “Of courrrse I do. I’ll be there to watch.
Guard!
”

When Woodforde was taken away, screaming and howling as though the knife were in his guts already, I sank onto the other stool and would have liked to block my ears but didn’t because this was the world in which I worked—partly by choice, at least—and I would not shield myself from its horrors. But when Lady Lennox had been collected by the Lord Lieutenant and had also gone away, I said to Cecil: “I don’t think I shall ever forget that—the
sounds
he made. Like … like an animal bellowing in terror.”

“No, you won’t forget,” Cecil said. “Nor should you.”

“I know. But—I will not witness his death, or Jester’s.”

“I too,” said Cecil, “avoid such things. The burden is heavy enough as it is.”

We sat on for a moment, in silent concurrence, until we were sure that Lady Lennox was well out of the way. Then we emerged, to join our waiting escort, mount our horses, and set out for Whitehall.

On the way, Cecil said: “She is not implicated. But she is a queen of ambition if ever I met one. I shall
warn Her Majesty that Lady Lennox had better be watched and should be clapped into the Tower if she as much as breathes a wrong word in time to come. We may grant Darnley permission to go to Scotland—his father has already asked to go and I think Her Majesty will agree. But we shan’t let Lady Lennox go. As I think I once said to you before, she will be our surety. While we have her, Darnley may become king consort of Scotland, but he won’t conspire with Philip of Spain for an army to make him king consort of England!”

I didn’t envy Cecil. His was a hard task in a hard world. I was glad I would be away from all this soon. I would be in France, at Blanchepierre, with Matthew, settled at last in a permanent way of life and in time, my days at the court of England, in the service of Elizabeth and Cecil, would be no more than a dream.

When I arrived back at Whitehall, I met Rob on my way through the garden. Calmly and politely, but still without a sign of his old friendliness, he told me that he had had news from Thamesbank. Mattie had had a baby daughter two weeks early, but safely. She and the child were well. “Mattie would have liked to call the baby Ursula,” Rob said. “A pretty compliment to you. But if you will forgive me, Mistress Blanchard, I would prefer to call her Elizabeth. I am writing to tell Mattie so.”

“A wise choice,” I said mildly. I went on to my apartment, and found that I too had letters awaiting me, two of them, though the messengers who brought them had already gone. Both were from Blanchepierre.

One was in Matthew’s hand; the other in a writing unfamiliar to me. I opened Matthew’s first. It was
dated early in August and spoke of a waning both of the summer heat and of the plague epidemic. Soon, darling Saltspoon, he said, he hoped to be sending me word that I could come home in safety, bringing Meg with me. All was in readiness for us and every day would seem like a year, until we were together again….

Then I opened the second letter. It was from Armand, Matthew’s uncle, who was also a priest and lived at Blanchepierre with us. It seemed that the very day after Matthew’s letter had been sent, the heat had been renewed and so had the plague. It thrived in hot weather. People from outside had to come to the château sometimes, to bring in food. A drover bringing cattle in had collapsed in the courtyard. He had been carried to a hayloft and had died there, and two men at Blanchepierre had taken the disease as well. One of them was a groom who had helped to carry him to the loft. This groom, before he sickened, had spoken to Matthew about a lame horse. The second Blanche-pierre victim was Matthew himself.

Within four days after his letter had been dispatched to me, Matthew de la Roche, my dearly loved second husband, was dead.

I did not sleep that night. A little to my surprise, I didn’t develop a sick headache, which was my usual response to violent emotion, but I sat up all night, by the window, listening to the hoot of passing owls and the murmur of the soft summer breeze, and thinking, thinking, of all that Matthew and I had been to each
other; of our passion and our quarreling, of our days together in Blanchepierre; of the stillborn child that had nearly killed me; of my love for him, and the love of England and Elizabeth from which he had never weaned me; of what my future now would be.

It was hard to believe that I would never again see his dark, narrow eyes sparkle with laughter; never again hear him call me by his special pet name of Salt-spoon.