Rescue for a Queen

  Table of Contents

  The Ursula Blanchard Mysteries from Fiona Buckley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  One: The Straight and Empty Road

  Two: The First Bend in the Road

  Three: Just a Simple Farmer

  Four: Committment

  Five: Luxury and Dread

  Six: Other People’s Conversations

  Seven: Messengers

  Eight: The Reluctant Ferret

  Nine: Sudden Death

  Ten: Heart Failure

  Eleven: Calculations by Candlelight

  Twelve: Encounter with a Ghost

  Thirteen: A Cry for Help

  Fourteen: The Third Wine Cellar

  Fifteen: An Air of Disturbance

  Sixteen: Vortex

  Seventeen: Matters of Loyalty

  Eighteen: The Velvet Gauntlet

  Nineteen: The Long Way Round

  Twenty: Conversation in a Courtyard

  Twenty-One: Keeping Out of Sight

  Twenty-Two: The Shortest Route

  Twenty-Three: Thunder in the Night

  Twenty-Four: Harvest Home

  Twenty-Five: The Lofty Cache

  Twenty-Six: Not All Bad

  The Ursula Blanchard Mysteries from Fiona Buckley

  THE ROBSART MYSTERY

  THE DOUBLET AFFAIR

  QUEEN’S RANSOM

  TO RUIN A QUEEN

  QUEEN OF AMBITION

  A PAWN FOR THE QUEEN

  THE FUGITIVE QUEEN

  THE SIREN QUEEN

  QUEEN WITHOUT A CROWN *

  QUEEN’S BOUNTY *

  A RESCUE FOR A QUEEN *

  * available from Severn House

  A RESCUE FOR A QUEEN

  Fiona Buckley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in Great Britain and the USA 2013 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9 – 15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.

  Copyright © 2013 by Fiona Buckley.

  The right of Fiona Buckley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Buckley, Fiona.

  A rescue for a queen.

  1. Blanchard, Ursula (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Great Britain–History–Elizabeth, 1558-1603–

  Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title

  823.9'14-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-040-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-537-4 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-390-7 (epub)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Hope Muntz

  and

  Kate Morton

  To both of whom I owe so much

  ONE

  The Straight and Empty Road

  The funeral was over. Hugh Stannard, my dear husband, to whom I had been married for six of the happiest years of my life, had been buried in the graveyard of Hawkswood parish church. It was early in February, 1571, and the day was as raw as February usually is. Mercifully it wasn’t raining, but it had rained for several days beforehand, and the grave was a muddy wound in the grass of the churchyard. To see Hugh’s coffin lowered into that, had been a horror to me.

  I wanted to cry out loud but I didn’t because I shouldn’t, really, have been there. It isn’t customary for bereaved spouses to attend the burials of their husbands or wives, because they might become hysterical and mar the solemn dignity that such occasions should have. I broke with custom because I wanted to be with Hugh until the very end. I had watched beside him as he died in our bedchamber at Hawkswood House; I was determined to go with him on his final journey, to stay until the moment when he was laid in his grave. But I would have to behave, so I did.

  By evening, it was all done with. Food and drink had been served in our great hall, which was one of the features of Hawkswood House and now, most of the guests had gone. The hall looked forlorn. The white damask tablecloth was littered with crumbs, empty wine glasses and used platters; the rushes underfoot were scuffed and trampled. Chairs and benches had been pushed carelessly about. I thought of Hugh’s belongings, his clothes and his chess set and his gardening tools. He had loved his rose garden and often tended it himself. When he was alive, those things had had meaning, been part of him. Now, like the scattered objects in the hall, they were unconnected bits and pieces, mere debris, their meaning lost.

  I was not, of course, all alone in the hall. I was standing near the hearth with my gentlewoman Sybil Jester and Margaret Emory, who was more or less my ward. That is, she had taken refuge with me some months before, when her father Paul Emory rejected her because she would not marry the man he and his wife Cathy had chosen for her. Since then, they had left her entirely to me.

  In addition to our little group, Gladys Morgan, the elderly – and frankly unprepossessing – Welshwoman who had long ago attached herself to me and did small jobs about the house, was crouched close by, engaged in mending the fire, while my manservant Roger Brockley and his wife, my tirewoman Fran (out of habit, I still called her by her former name of Dale) were busy lighting extra candles now that the daylight was fading.

  My married daughter Meg, the child of my first husband, Gerald Blanchard, and her husband George Hillman were still with us, too. They had a long journey to their home in Buckinghamshire and as they had used a coach, they wouldn’t travel fast. Meg was expecting their first child, and riding was unwise for her. She and George would not start for home until the morrow and for the moment were at the far end of the hall with the steward, Adam Wilder, talking to the most illustrious guest of the many who had come to say farewell to Hugh: Sir William Cecil, Secretary of State, and shortly to be raised to the baronage.

  It had been kind of him to attend the funeral, though I had been hard put to it to accommodate his entourage as well. They too were present, talking among themselves: a physician, a clerk, several liveried retainers, two grooms and a coachman. I had been a little disconcerted too, during the graveside ceremony, during which Cecil stood opposite to me, to notice that he was watching me in a curiously intent way. He knew me too well to fear a hysterical scene. I suspected something else.

  He was here, I knew, to represent Queen Elizabeth as well as himself. No one talked of it much, but Elizabeth was my half-sister. Her father King Henry had had a roving eye. Also, I had in the past undertaken certain missions on behalf of the queen, and it was Cecil who had given me my instructions. That intent gaze worried me, for I was determined that my last mission should really be my last, for ever. It had nearly killed me and Brockley and actually had killed one of our companions.

  I had only let myse
lf be drawn into it to help Hugh out of a financial crisis and later I and also my dear Sybil nearly became the victims of a revenge plot spawned by an angry woman whose treasonous scheme I had thwarted. No, I would not dip my toe into the waters of intrigue again. I would not.

  I knew nothing, then, of a tragedy which had occurred two months previously, before Christmas, when, on a still grey December morning, Captain Benjamin Danby, skipper of the Trusty, a coastal trading ship then sailing up the Thames, leant over the rail to swear at the steersman of a barge that had swung too close while overtaking the Trusty, and received a nasty surprise.

  Danby’s annoyance was justified. The Trusty was bringing sea coal from Newcastle in the north-east of England, and she was heavy laden. She was slow and anything but manoeuvrable. The barge, under sail, had come dangerously near, throwing up a wash that splashed the Trusty’s deck. Danby’s curses were loud and imaginative, but they suddenly stopped short, for the wash had not only thrown a wave against the Trusty. It had also flung a horrid, pale thing with a human face and human hands that for a moment had brushed the deck rail as if seeking a hold.

  ‘Christ almighty, there’s a bloody corpse trying to get aboard!’ bawled Captain Danby.

  Within moments, the quarrel was forgotten. Bargemen peered over the side of their vessel and began to shout and point, as shocked by the corpse as Danby. The barge was past by now, but it changed course towards a mooring on the north bank, and a dinghy was lowered. Two bargemen rowed quickly back towards the Trusty, where the sails were coming down and crewmen with grappling gear were leaning over the side, reaching for the poor thing in the water.

  A crowd, summoned by the mysterious forces that draw people to the scene of a disaster, was already gathering on the bank. Somehow, the body was caught and raised aboard the Trusty. It was the corpse of a man, perhaps in his thirties. He lay on the deck, streaming. He still had some clothing, a torn shirt and hose but his boots had gone. His feet were bare, white and oddly pathetic. And round his right ankle, there was a red, rasped line.

  Danby, staring down at him, pointed at it and said: ‘He’s had a rope round that.’

  ‘Poor sod,’ someone else said. No one spoke the word murder but everyone was thinking it.

  The body was transferred into the dinghy, and Danby went with it. By the time it reached the bank, someone in the crowd had found a makeshift bier in the form of a disused door found propped against the wall in a nearby watchman’s hut, and someone else had summoned a constable, who had taken charge. The body was borne ashore and set down on its wooden bed. The constable looked round at the throng, most of whom were watermen of one kind or another, and asked if anyone knew him.

  One man stepped forward. ‘Reckon I do! Leastways, he looks like a man that came over from Antwerp on my ship the Saint Catherine. Same big nose, anyway, and those ears – they’re a bit pointed. Put him ashore when we docked upstream, just beyond London Bridge. Ebb tide carried him down, maybe.’

  ‘His name!’ said the constable irritably. ‘If he was your passenger, you surely know that!’

  ‘He wasn’t a passenger. I don’t carry no passengers, just cargo. Silk cloth, tapestries, spices, German wine – they’re what my owner deals in. This fellow signed on as a deckhand. Said he wanted to get home quickly – family matters, he said. He was English and I needed an extra hand, so I took him. He was good, a proper seaman. No complaints about him. His name was Jacky Wickes.’

  ‘You must be very tired,’ Sybil said to me. ‘You have borne up so well but it must have been exhausting, presenting such a calm face to all those people.’

  ‘Hugh had so many friends,’ I said. ‘I was touched to see such a crowd.’

  ‘You could have done without Jane Cobbold,’ Sybil said.

  I sighed. ‘That’s true enough.’

  Anthony Cobbold and his wife Jane were old friends of Hugh’s, and had known him long before I did. With Anthony Cobbold I got on well, but Jane did not like me. For one thing, she knew a good deal about my past adventures, and disapproved of them. She considered me unwomanly and she didn’t hide her opinion. Just as the Cobbolds were about to leave, Jane had managed to annoy me considerably.

  She had been standing with us at the fireside while Anthony Cobbold went to see if their horses were ready. We were exchanging small talk; about the weather as it happened, which ought to have been harmless enough, but . . .

  ‘At least today was dry,’ Jane said. ‘Funerals are always worse when it’s raining. Muddy graves are so depressing, I always think.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking that I had never met anyone more tactless than Mistress Cobbold. Due to the recent rain, poor Hugh’s grave had been quite muddy enough. I did not want to be reminded of that wound in the grass.

  Jane didn’t notice my tone. ‘How do you intend to pass the days now?’ she enquired. ‘Will you keep the rose garden up? I expect Hugh would have liked you to do that.’

  ‘Yes. I shall look after the roses,’ I said. ‘I expect I shall do some of the pruning myself, as Hugh used to do.’

  ‘And we’ll practise music and study Latin and Greek,’ said Margaret. ‘I began both languages as a child and Mistress Stannard has studied them too and is instructing me. We are reading Homer, and Virgil’s Aeneid.’

  Margaret was small, freckled and sandy-haired, and her best claim to good looks lay in her big grey-green eyes. But she was intelligent and enjoyed studies. Her eyes sparkled now, thinking about them. Jane’s carefully plucked eyebrows rose. She took trouble with her hair and eyebrows even though she was not at all an elegant woman, being large, with a soft, fleshy face and big blue eyes which were too earnest for beauty.

  ‘Do you feel that such things are truly suitable for ladies?’ she said. ‘We never encouraged our daughters to study Latin and Greek. Music, yes, but not too much book learning. Needlework and household management are what I consider important for girls.’

  ‘The queen takes pleasure in the study of languages, including classical tongues,’ said Sybil mildly.

  ‘Ah. The queen. Well, her position is different from that of most women. Though even so,’ said Jane, ‘many feel that she might have done better to concentrate less on ancient tongues and more on finding a husband and providing the realm with a prince to follow her. Even a baby princess would be better than no heir at all.’

  I longed for Hugh to help me deal with this tricky conversation. To discuss daughters with Jane was perilous, since the younger Cobbold girl had married a man her father Anthony did not like, though he had allowed the match. I was relieved when Anthony reappeared at that moment, to announce that the horses were standing at the door.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ I said now, ‘that I shall see much of the Cobbolds in the future.’ I turned as Meg came over to me. She looked at me with concern and then, like Sybil, told me I looked tired.

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I think I’ll go to bed. You and Margaret and Sybil can do whatever entertaining is still to be done. Look after Sir William. I just want . . . to retire. Tell Dale I won’t need her tonight.’

  Yes, I would retire. To the big bed where Hugh and I had made love, where he had died, where I must now sleep alone. I wanted to be alone. In private, behind the closed curtains of that bed, with no one to see or hear, I would be free to cry.

  Before I lay down, I looked at myself in the silver mirror which was part of the bedroom furniture, a costly item that Hugh’s father had bought in the previous century. It gave flattering reflections but I still looked terrible, older by far than my thirty-six years. My hair, dark like Meg’s, had no gloss and my eyes, which were actually hazel, looked dark as well, with weariness. My black mourning gown turned my complexion sallow.

  Not that it mattered. How I looked would never matter again.

  I went to bed. And lay awake, wondering about the future. It seemed like a road, stretching across an empty plain and vanishing over the horizon into the unknown. A straight and empty road, leading nowhere.


  In the morning I still felt weary and jaded and I was not pleased to learn that Cecil had woken with an attack of gout and couldn’t leave that day, after all. He and his companions would have to be looked after. Another worry, I thought unhappily.

  I said farewell to Meg and George, promising to be with them in August when the child was due, and begging Meg to take care of herself. Meg would be sixteen by the time the child was born and she was sturdily built, taking after her father in that respect, but I had always had trouble with childbirth. I had conceived three times, but Meg was the only child I had brought living into the world and I had had a dangerous time even with her. Oh, please God, don’t let anything happen to Meg! I couldn’t bear it; not after losing Hugh. Let her come through safely and give me a healthy grandchild, to lead my thoughts to the future, so that the past won’t hurt so much.

  But I must not say any of this. Meg and George were laughing at me and Meg told me that she was feeling very well.

  ‘Travel safely,’ I said, and stayed in the courtyard to watch the coach disappear through the arch of the gatehouse before I went back indoors. My next task was to enquire after Sir William Cecil. That was how my days were going to be, I supposed: a series of tasks, duties to be done, from now until my own life ended.

  Cecil’s attack was sharp. His physician gave me details of the diet that his employer should follow, which meant no red meat and no wine or even ale but well water and fresh milk to drink, chicken, rabbit and also fish if obtainable. I visited him in his room and he said that if Gladys knew of any good potions that might relieve his discomfort, he’d willingly take them.

  ‘But for the love of heaven, don’t tell my physician,’ he added dryly.

  In the past Gladys had annoyed local physicians by concocting remedies – some of which were better than theirs – for anyone who asked her and she had outraged more than one vicar with her unfortunate habit of cursing people who annoyed her. It had brought her within inches of being hanged for witchcraft.