The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's (3 page)

This too had got around, but although Thomas Howard of Norfolk was a member of the royal council and knew of my parentage, I don’t think he knew of my work as an agent. If he had, I’m sure he would never have invited me to stay at his London home in 1569, no matter how much he wished to please a relative of the queen, or find a suitable marriage prospect for his young undersecretary Edmund Dean.

 • • • 

The visit meant an upheaval for us. It interrupted the quiet life that Hugh and I both liked so much. At Hawkswood and Withy-sham alike, Hugh enjoyed his favorite pastimes of growing roses and playing chess, and I, while sharing these pleasant interests, could also attend to Meg’s education, work at my embroidery, and go hawking, and forget that in the past I had rejoiced in the heady air of court intrigue and had hazarded my life in it, more than once—and the lives of my good servants Dale and Brockley, too. Going to London to stay with a member of the council no longer had much attraction for me.

The journey also meant problems for Hugh. Like Brockley, my husband was in his fifties, but while Brockley was fit for his age, Hugh suffered from stiff joints. To ride from Withysham to Faldene and back was his limit now and at that we went at a walking pace.

However, Hugh had recently bought a small coach, drawn by two sturdy horses, and hired a coachman—a rubicund, whiskered fellow called John Argent—to drive them and look
after them. The track to Faldene was too rough for it, but we could use it on the road to London. Hugh would ride in the coach while the rest of us could go on horseback. We were quite a big party, since in addition to Brockley, we meant to take a couple of other men as escort. As Sybil was a poor horsewoman, she rode pillion with one of them. The other had to take Gladys up behind him. Hugh refused to share his coach with her. “I know you make her wash, my dear Ursula, but to me, she still smells,” he said.

Meg herself was intrigued by the idea of a betrothal. Hugh and I assured her that if when she met the young man, she didn’t like him, she had only to tell us, and that would be the end of the matter, and that there was in any case no question of marriage for years yet, but she showed no reluctance. In fact, she displayed rather more enthusiasm than I thought desirable in a girl so young.

However, having agreed that she should meet this young man, Edmund Dean, I must make the right preparations. As it chanced, I had lately had some new formal gowns in damask and satin stitched for her, in the clear, vigorous colors—crimson, orange-tawny, apple-green—that suited her dark hair and her intelligent brown eyes. There was a shortage of good fabrics just then and I wasn’t altogether satisfied with the quality of the materials, but at least the dresses were new, and in addition, I lent her some of my jewelry.

“But I can take my little silver pendant, can’t I?” she said anxiously, revealing that she was still very much a child. The pendant was a simple affair consisting of a very slim chain with a little heart dangling from it. The Hendersons, the people who were looking after her at the time, had had it made for her when she was six and it was her very first piece of jewelry. She was fond of it, though it was not nearly fine enough for a ducal dining chamber.

“Bring it if you like!” Hugh told her, laughing. “You’ll find you won’t want to wear it in front of the Duke of Norfolk!”

The visit to London would also mean a hiatus in her Latin and Greek studies. “Her tutor can have a holiday, but I can go on with teaching her French,” I said to Hugh. “That could be useful
if this betrothal idea comes to anything and the young man has a future in diplomacy. If he’s in the duke’s household, he might well have, even if his immediate background is merchanting.”

The duke’s letter had described Edmund Dean’s background in some detail. He came of a good family with land in Hertfordshire. His father, however, had been a younger son, who had to make his own way in the world and, unusually for a man born into a landed family, had chosen to do so as a merchant. He had done well, and Edmund, though he too was a younger son, had had every hope of setting up in business for himself, with some help from his father until . . .

You will of course be aware of the current trade embargo with Antwerp,
the duke’s letter had said.
Edmund’s father has suffered great damage to his business, as have many such men. Edmund has therefore felt obliged to take employment outside the world of merchanting. However, he hopes that his father’s circumstances will recover and that he himself will prosper in my household, and that by the time your daughter reaches the age of, perhaps, seventeen, he will be in a position to wed.

I certainly knew about the embargo, which was the reason for the shortage of some silken fabrics, not to mention furs, dyestuffs, lamp oil, sugar, and spices, which had hitherto come to England via Antwerp. It all went back to what—I must be honest—had been a piece of frankly sharp financial practice on the part of Queen Elizabeth and her Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil.

They were always anxious to improve England’s solvency while doing anything they possibly could to damage that of Philip of Spain and they had combined the two, most successfully, the previous December, when four Spanish ships unwisely took refuge from pirates by scattering and then putting into Plymouth and Southampton. They were carrying between them £85,000 for the Netherlands, where Spanish troops were waiting for their pay. The money had been advanced to Spain by Genoese bankers but still belonged to the Genoese until it reached the Low Countries. Elizabeth and Cecil had had the happy thought of borrowing it instead.

Well, that was one way of putting it. I still maintained an
occasional correspondence with some of the ladies I had known at court as fellow attendants on the queen, or as wives of courtiers. According to one of them, my old friend Mattie Henderson, Guerau de Spes, the new Spanish ambassador, said roundly that she had snatched it, and been put under house arrest as a result.

My husband says that de Spes is an outspoken man, often amusing, for he has a whimsical manner of speech, but he is not much liked,
said Mattie’s letter.
He is blatant in his Catholic observances and my Rob thinks he sees himself as a kind of crusader, bound by oath to bring poor benighted England back to the one true faith. Rob says it is useless to argue with him—he lives in a world of heroic fancy and all arguments just run off him like water off a duck’s plumage.

I had come across that sort of thing before. My second husband, Matthew, had been a little like that. He, though, had had more tact than this man de Spes had, by the sound of it.

The Genoese agents in London, who didn’t care who borrowed their money as long as they could rely on getting it back, said that Elizabeth’s credit was better than Philip’s and agreed to the deal. The result was that the indignant Spanish administration in the Low Countries closed Antwerp to English vessels and put several English merchants in the Netherlands under arrest. In England, a number of Spanish traders were locked up in retaliation. Relations between Spain and England were now strained, to put it mildly, and many formerly prosperous merchants were suffering lean times or had even gone bankrupt. Master Dean Senior had been among the victims.

“If we do reach an agreement,” I said, “I’ll be firm about one thing. No marriage until this man
is
in a position to look after Meg properly.”

We sent a messenger back ahead of us, accepting the invitation, and were on our way three days after that calamitous visit to Faldene.

 • • • 

We spent a night on the way, dined next day at an inn just outside London, and then went on toward the City, passing Whitehall,
where the court was in residence, and traveling along the Strand, with its fine mansions, where a number of ambassadors had their residences and where Cecil also lived.

We were held up in the Strand by a minor procession, going toward Whitehall, which obliged us to move to the side of the road and wait for it to pass. For the most part, it consisted of gentlemen on foot, but in the center of it was a man on a gray horse.

He passed close enough for us to see that his dark velvet cloak and cap had a thick trimming of fur, as though England’s spring sunshine hadn’t warmth enough for him, and for a moment, I saw his face clearly. It was pale, high in the cheekbone, so that his eyes seemed to look at the world over ramparts, and his mouth was folded into what looked like a permanent and contented smile. It was a curious face, a mixture of cold and warm, wary and self-assured. I didn’t like it.

“Who in the world is that?” Hugh wondered aloud, popping his head out of his coach, but he was answered immediately as one of the gentlemen on foot, irritated by some passersby who hadn’t got out of the way fast enough, raised his voice in a shout of “Make way for the Spanish ambassador.”

“I thought he was under house arrest,” said Hugh.

“By the look of it, he’s been let out,” I said. “And very pleased about it he seems, too!”

We reached the duke’s house, which was within the City proper, close to the busy thoroughfare of Bishopsgate, in the afternoon. The last stage of the journey was through crowded, noisy streets where our coachman, John Argent, in accordance with the law, dismounted from his box and led the horses, a wise precaution, for the shouts of the street vendors manning roadside stalls or pushing handcarts through the throng, declaring at the tops of their voices that theirs were the finest gloves, cheeses, hot meat pies, and mousetraps in the land, were an assault on one’s hearing. Our horses laid back indignant ears and Argent had to soothe them, in the intervals of exchanging ruderies with devil-may-care coachmen, who were breaking the law and were still driving their charges, clattering along to the peril of anyone who got in their way.

Our animals snorted, too, at the stench from the drainage ditches that ran down the middles or sides of the streets, sidestepping away from them as daintily as the elegant ladies who walked along holding their skirts clear of the dirty cobbles and sniffing at scented pomanders. Argent had his hands full.

The elegant ladies were very elegant indeed. I was realizing how long I had been away from the center of things. Clothes I had thought fashionable were far behind the times. The simple, round French hood had been replaced, apparently, by a hood that dipped above the center of the forehead, into a heart-shape, often edged with pearls or lace, and the latest ruffs were very big indeed. Too big, I thought, for beauty. The new starch had made them possible, but I didn’t like them and said so to Hugh, when, at last, we reached the courtyard of Howard House, Norfolk’s London residence, and my husband climbed out of the coach.

“You’d better invest in some up-to-date fashions, all the same,” he remarked with a chuckle. “Whether you like them or not, or you’ll look provincial. His Grace is a widower, so the woman coming down the steps must be his housekeeper, but if that ruff standing out behind her head is under a foot wide, I’m the King of Cathay.”

“I’d estimate eight or nine inches but I still think I’d better address you as Your Majesty of Cathay. There’s gold thread in that embroidered stomacher and
look
at the pearl edging on her hood. She
can’t
be just his housekeeper. He must have got married again.”

We smiled at each other in friendly amusement and once again, as so many times before, I was thankful for Hugh. I liked everything about him: his spare body, which always smelled clean; his intelligent blue eyes, his maturity, the peace of our life together. With Gerald life had been happy and exciting, but I only enjoyed it because I was young. I didn’t long for it now. With Matthew I had known the wildest passion, but he often made me unhappy, for he was an enemy to the queen I served and had loved even before I knew she was my sister.

By the time I met Hugh, dear Hugh, on whose goodwill and good judgment I had learned to rely, I only wanted serenity and
he had given it to me. The Brockleys, who had shaken their heads at first when I said I meant to marry him, had long since agreed that I had chosen wisely.

Even in such matters as the difference between a duchess and a ducal housekeeper, Hugh was right, and the fact that the housekeeper was dressed like royalty was hardly surprising in Thomas Howard’s house, which was virtually a small palace full of servants who mostly thought themselves superior in status to anyone else’s servants—or even, in some cases, to their employer’s guests.

The housekeeper was merely the vanguard of an army. Pages came, maids and grooms, and a terrifyingly dignified butler who stepped in front of them all to bow to us, wish us good afternoon, and snap his fingers at his underlings by way of telling them to see to our horses and luggage. Then he led the way inside. Even Brockley, who usually insisted on making sure that our horses were properly looked after, was overborne by assurances that the ducal stables were an equine paradise and was swept indoors with the rest of us.

Howard House was in the City, but it was a different world from that of the raucous London streets. We were shown to rooms overlooking peaceful gardens, and there provided with every possible comfort: ewers of hot and cold water, basins, soap, warm towels, capacious clothespresses; and for me and Hugh, an immense four-poster bed. Even our two extra men were assured of good pallets in the grooms’ dormitory above the stable, while Gladys was given a similar pallet in the maids’ quarters on the floor above the guest chambers. Sybil and Meg had a room to themselves with a tester bed in it, and since, in my letter of acceptance, I had asked to have Brockley and Dale accommodated near me, they were given a small chamber adjoining ours.

Later, while they attended to our unpacking and Gladys helped them, Hugh and I, accompanied by Sybil and Meg, were collected by a page, shown downstairs, handed to the care of the butler, and led to a parlor in the style of a small-scale hall, where the walls were adorned by stags’ antlers, costly tapestries, and two
fine Turkish carpets. Two clerkly individuals were seated at a table, examining some documents, and perched casually on the window seat, reading what I saw from the cover was an English language copy of the Bible, was a man whom I recognized from my days at court as Thomas Howard of Norfolk.