A Web of Silk Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Fiona Buckley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One: The Deceptive Calm

  Chapter Two: Queen’s Messenger

  Chapter Three: The Shadow Falls

  Chapter Four: Misinformation

  Chapter Five: Broken Glass

  Chapter Six: Gold and Silver Embroidery

  Chapter Seven: Bridal Chest

  Chapter Eight: Unwanted Assignment

  Chapter Nine: Knoll House

  Chapter Ten: The Search Begins

  Chapter Eleven: Eighty Ships by Christmas

  Chapter Twelve: Noises in the Night

  Chapter Thirteen: Unromantic Interlude

  Chapter Fourteen: A Puzzled Spaniel

  Chapter Fifteen: The Call of the Wild Geese

  Chapter Sixteen: Drinking After Dark

  Chapter Seventeen: Mystery Unlocked

  Chapter Eighteen: Unknown Quantity

  Chapter Nineteen: Bringing Up the Artillery

  Chapter Twenty: The Face of a Damned Soul

  Chapter Twenty-One: Unanswered Questions

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Value of a Merchant Ship

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Fiona Buckley

  The Ursula Blanchard mysteries

  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 *

  A TRAITOR’S TEARS *

  A PERILOUS ALLIANCE *

  THE HERETIC’S CREED *

  A DEADLY BETROTHAL *

  THE RELUCTANT ASSASSIN *

  A WEB OF SILK *

  * available from Severn House

  A WEB OF SILK

  An Ursula Blanchard mystery

  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 2019 by

  Crème de la Crime an imprint of

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.

  This eBook edition first published in 2019 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2019 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 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

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-113-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-593-0 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0205-5 (e-book)

  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

  ONE

  The Deceptive Calm

  In Hawkswood village, a mile or so from my home at Hawkswood House in the county of Surrey, stands the parish church, St Mary’s. It is a beautiful building. Its stone walls keep it cool in summer and shut out the bitter winds of winter, and it has the serene atmosphere that churches acquire when people have prayed in them for generations.

  My late husband Hugh always took an interest in the church, and although neither he nor his father were legally required to pay for repairs and innovations, they very often did. I kept up the custom and in the year 1582, at the request of the current vicar, Dr Joynings, I arranged for a hitching rail outside, to discourage those worshippers who come from a distance from tying their mounts to the vicarage fence. But the hitching rail was not my only innovation that year. I had one of the stained-glass windows replaced, as well.

  Its stained-glass windows are one of St Mary’s great beauties. They are of a good size but are set higher than in most churches, because the medieval founder wanted wall space below for frescoes. During the fiercely anti-Papist reign of the boy-king Edward, the stained glass escaped harm but the frescoes were condemned and limewashed out. What remains are white inner walls with stained-glass windows looking down from a height. In my opinion, and also that of Dr Joynings, in the case of one of them this was just as well because it was a Judgement Window and it was a remarkably lurid, not to say gruesome, depiction of Doomsday. Even so, people did look up at the windows at times. Indeed some well-meaning parents drew their children’s attention to the Judgement Window, and some of the children had been upset by it. So eventually I got rid of it. But how that came about is a grim story.

  Grim events have often featured in my life. Those of 1582 are a typical example. Whenever I seemed to have settled into the quiet life I wanted, it always dissolved into catastrophe, usually because of the orders that I now and then received from Queen Elizabeth or her ministers, which were apt to precipitate me into hair-raising situations.

  Long ago, when I was a young and almost penniless widow with few advantages beyond some good connections, I had joined Elizabeth’s court as one of her ladies, and in order to earn a little extra money I undertook a secret mission. Then another. And another. And so on. Now, in later life and no longer short of money, I would have liked to stop undertaking them. But it didn’t work out like that.

  For one thing, I had discovered who my father was. Until well into my adult life I simply knew that my mother, who had been one of Queen Anne Boleyn’s ladies, had been sent home from court in disgrace when she was found to be with child. Only long after my mother’s death did I learn from other sources that my father was King Henry the Eighth. I was Elizabeth’s half-sister. And from then on, there was a special bond between us.

  Now, when she or her chief counsellors – Sir William Cecil (otherwise Lord Burghley) and Sir Francis Walsingham, her spymaster – asked me to carry out secret tasks for them, I could not bring myself to refuse.

  On that lazy August afternoon in 1582, everything seemed calm. Hawkswood House was basking in warm sunshine. In the courtyard, which was also the stable yard, doves were happily pecking up the scattering of oats that one of the grooms had spilled when carrying feed to the horses. My two half-mastiff dogs, Freya and Prince, were snoozing outside their kennels and my tabby cat, Whiskers, was lolling in the sun on the tack-room roof. To the south, in the distance, I could see a range of low hills draped with fields of grass and corn and deep-green woodland. The world was all green and gold, and I could almost believe I could hear it purring.

  My household were somewhere about. A thin column of smoke from the kitchen chimney suggested that, although supper time was still far away, my cook, John Hawthorn, and his chief assistant, Ben Flood, were making plans for it, and from an open upper window came the sound of a lute. Master Peter Dickson, the elderly but scho
larly man who was now tutor to my ten-year-old son Harry, was a proficient musician and Harry had lately shown quite a talent for music himself. Master Dickson was encouraging him.

  Of my closest associates in the house, my manservant Roger Brockley and his wife, Fran Dale, who was my maid, had retired to their own quarters for an afternoon sleep, and my friend and companion Sybil Jester was in the great hall, busy with another of the embroidery designs she was so skilled at creating. I was very fond of Sybil. She was older than me, a widow who for her own good reasons had no wish to remarry. Sybil had an unusual face, a little compressed between brow and chin, so that her eyebrows and mouth were long and her nostrils a little splayed. These features were not unduly marked and in fact were oddly attractive, as were her dark eyes and her plentiful hair, pure white now at the temples but apart from that a warm, dark brown.

  I was much less fond of Gladys Morgan, who was my other close associate. Gladys was an aged and sometimes maddening hanger-on of mine, whom I had acquired by mistake when, during a visit to Wales, Brockley and I rescued her from a charge of witchcraft. I thought that, like the Brockleys, she was probably asleep.

  I had no idea where the maidservants were, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that they were taking a brief afternoon rest as well. I had no objection, there was little for them to do just now and my steward, Adam Wilder, who I knew was in his office, his grey head bent over his ever-meticulous accounts, would rouse them in due course.

  As for me, I was sitting by the window of my favourite parlour, trying to read a book of verse. But I was too much at ease and too contented to concentrate, and was gazing at the hills instead.

  Then, suddenly, Freya and Prince were awake, up on their feet and barking, and Whiskers was sitting up to see why. Hooves were clattering through the arched gate of the courtyard and there, on a splendid blue roan gelding, with a groom riding on a bay mare behind him, was a tall, familiar figure. Magically, my senior groom, Arthur Watts, appeared to greet him, eagerly pursued by my youngest groom, Eddie, who had seen the blue roan before and thought it was wonderful, and hoped for the honour of unsaddling and grooming it. There, too, came Adam Wilder, also hurrying out to meet the new arrivals, bearing himself with his usual dignity, although I could see that he was hastily wiping ink off his fingers with a handkerchief.

  I got to my feet and took myself into the great hall, knowing that Wilder would bring my visitor there first. I found Sybil looking out of the window that faced the courtyard. ‘It’s the Earl of Leicester!’ she said.

  The Earl of Leicester – Sir Robert Dudley, the queen’s Sweet Robin and her Master of Horse – known to a good many of her jealous and competitive courtiers as ‘the Gipsy’, because of his dark hair and eyes, his swarthy countenance and his persuasive manners. He had at times been the subject of slanderous gossip, including a rumour that he had murdered his first wife, Amy, in the hope of thereby becoming free to marry Elizabeth herself; and a further rumour that he and Elizabeth were lovers, anyway. I had good reason to know that neither of these rumours was true, but for many years I had nevertheless disliked and distrusted him. He was handsome and highly attractive, but I was aware of these things without being moved by them (it is possible to notice when someone is attractive without actually wanting to respond to it).

  Initially, I saw him as a man of too much ambition whose father had been executed for treason and who was too close to the queen emotionally to be good for her. Only lately had I grown to realize that he was her friend, a bulwark against the shifting sands and dangerous tides of her political world, who understood her as few others did, and that she would be broken-hearted if anything were to befall him.

  I knew how she felt, because I had much the same relationship with my manservant Roger Brockley. Dear, steady Brockley, with his level blue-grey gaze and his gold-freckled forehead, his silent regret over the unwomanly tasks I undertook, and his amazing adventurousness as soon as we were embarked on them. He had once come near to being my lover, but it didn’t actually happen and never would. There was nevertheless a link between us that meant a great deal to both of us. In this sense, I was my sister’s echo.

  Now, I was quite pleased to welcome Leicester to my home, to call Harry from his lute practice to greet our noble visitor as the man of the house should and then, having sent Harry back to his tutor, to sit beside Leicester on the terrace overlooking the rose garden that had once been my husband’s delight and enjoy the late-afternoon sunshine.

  ‘When I arrived here this afternoon,’ Leicester remarked, ‘I felt as if I had disturbed something that was peacefully drowsing in the sun. I have only seen this house once or twice before, but I liked it from my very first visit, especially the soft colour of that light-grey stone and the dormer windows in the roof. How old is it?’

  ‘It was Hugh’s family home,’ I said. ‘Built several generations ago, though I don’t know exactly when. I don’t think even Hugh did. He did once say that it had been altered and added to at times, which is why it’s a slightly unusual shape.’

  ‘It is indeed.’ Leicester turned on his bench to look. ‘Not many houses have a great hall opening straight on to the stable yard!’

  ‘It was a smaller house once, I believe,’ I said. ‘Just a farmhouse to begin with. But as Hugh’s family prospered the place was gradually enlarged. Although no one ever did anything about the courtyard also being the stable yard, with the hall door opening straight into it, which is convenient in some ways.’

  ‘And yet, despite being altered and added to, the whole thing is harmonious,’ said Leicester. ‘It struck me like that from the beginning. Or perhaps it was the atmosphere that you and Hugh created. Despite the interruptions.’

  ‘There were certainly interruptions,’ I agreed. Then a sudden twinge of unease made me add: ‘You haven’t said what brings you here so unexpectedly, and not in your coach but on horseback with just one attendant. Your groom is being looked after by my own grooms, of course. Simon and Netta have probably taken him in charge. Netta’s one of my maids, and she’ll have made sure that the kitchen can produce something for him to eat.’

  ‘I’m Her Majesty’s Master of Horse,’ said Leicester, ‘and a Master of Horse ought to enjoy horseback travel. I do. I would rather be astride my beautiful Blue Leicester than jolting along in a coach. As for what brings me here, because I am the Master of Horse I went to visit a stud on the far side of Guildford, where there are some colts I am interested in, and as Hawkswood is more or less on my way back – I am based at Hampton Court just now – I thought to call and see if the trotting stallion I recommended you to buy last year is doing well. What did you do about the unsatisfactory one you had before him?’

  ‘He wasn’t unsatisfactory as a stallion,’ I said. I looked ahead, across the rose garden towards the kitchen garden that lay beyond, and the roof of the stud groom’s cottage just visible on the far side of that. I was developing a stud of the popular trotters that were so much in demand as showy and fast-paced harness horses. It was to be part of Harry’s future inheritance. Its stable and the chief groom’s cottage were separate from those belonging to the house.

  ‘That animal was too temperamental,’ I explained. ‘Thunder sent him wild with panic, and twice he broke out of his stall and caused havoc. He was a fine high-stepping trotter, so we had him altered and found a buyer who wanted a high-stepper to pull a one-horse carriage. His first and only crop of foals were born this year. I just hope they don’t inherit his fear of thunder. Maybe a thunderstorm frightened him when he was a foal! I hoped that altering him would calm him down and I warned his buyer, who said he could deal with it. The replacement you found for me seems to be all he should be. My stud groom is pleased with him.’

  ‘I’ve glanced round your stable,’ Leicester said. ‘Where’s that handsome black mare of yours, Jewel?’

  ‘Last summer,’ I said, ‘while we were in Warwick Castle, waiting for that trial to begin …’

  I stopped,
not wanting to remember the previous summer and the trial of the conspirators who had kidnapped Harry and tried, by threatening him, to force me into a most terrible act. Indeed, 1581 had been one of the most terrifying years of my eventful life.

  ‘Go on,’ said Leicester. ‘Harry is safe now. Those who were a danger to him are either in prison or dead. The ringleader – that innkeeper, Simeon Wilmot – was hanged. Tell me about Jewel.’

  ‘I bought a new horse, Jaunty, so that Brockley could have a really good mount to ride round the country on when he was searching for Harry. He’d had to leave his Firefly behind and get remounts in order to gallop from Hawkswood to Warwickshire. But when it was all over, we didn’t want to sell Jaunty – he’s a fine animal. And Jewel is such a beauty I thought I’d like a foal from her. The Earl of Warwick advised me about finding a suitable sire and I had her mated. She’s out at grass now, with a delightful filly foal beside her, and she’s in foal again.’

  ‘You don’t like talking about what happened last year, I can see that,’ Leicester said. ‘Small blame to you. But it has reminded me of something. Have you met your new neighbour, Giles Frost, yet?’

  ‘Giles Frost? Who is he?’

  ‘Do you know Knoll House, a few miles south of Guildford?’

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘It’s a striking house, up on that hilltop. I’ve only seen it from a distance, though. I asked Wilder about it once – he was born in this locality and knows every house for miles. He told me its name, but I don’t know who lives there now.’

  ‘Giles Frost has just bought it – from me, actually. It was left to me by a distant cousin. Frost used to live in the Midlands. But he was enquiring about properties in Surrey, and the Council were pleased as it would put him in a handier position. I managed to encourage him into becoming my tenant. I wasn’t sure if I’d succeed as Knoll House isn’t particularly attractive – it’s creaky, ill-lit and draughty. But I offered him appealing terms and he agreed. He’s a widower but has daughters, and he said they could sharpen their housekeeping skills on improving the place.’