The Enterprise of England (38 page)

We were not so different, this great monarch and I.

She was speaking now, thanking me for exposing the treason of Parker and van Leyden.

‘And we understand,’ the Queen said, and there was a faint tremor in her voice, though she strove valiantly to conceal it, ‘we understand that it was you who saved a dear friend from an evil plan to poison him. We shall not forget that you gave him a few more weeks of life.’

‘Your Majesty,’ I said, bowing again and moving backwards toward the door.

I raised my eyes a final time and something flashed between us, across that jewel casket of a room.

Her eyes widened. And I thought:
She knows.

More by This Author

The Anniversary

The Travellers

A Running Tide

The Testament of Mariam

Flood

The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels

‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’

Victoria Glendinning

‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’

Penelope Fitzgerald

‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’

Jessica Mann
,
Sunday Telegraph

'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.'

Publishing News

‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’

Helen Brown
,
Courier and Advertiser

‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’

Peter
Rhodes
,
Express and Star

The Author

Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.

Her first three novels,
The Anniversary
,
The Travellers
, and
A Running Tide
, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German.
The Testament of Mariam
marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her second historical novel,
Flood
, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators.

Currently she is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is
The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez
and the second is
The Enterprise of England
.

She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and two Maine coon cats.

http://www.annswinfen.com