Queen's Ransom Read online

  “Really?” said Sir Henry. “I knew you had lived in Antwerp, Mistress Blanchard. Gerald Blanchard was in the service of Sir Thomas Gresham at the time, was he not? But surely you didn’t spend your time there stealing gunpowder and corselets.”

  “I didn’t steal them myself,” I said. “But Gerald did.”

  Gerald and I had lived in Antwerp for a nearly a year, as part of Sir Thomas Gresham’s entourage. Gresham was a financier employed by Elizabeth to improve her credit and raise loans for her abroad. He had interpreted this brief somewhat liberally.

  “Gerald helped Gresham to—er—obtain weapons and armor and other valuables from the Netherlands and get them to England,” I said. “Not always—not even usually—with their owners’ knowledge or consent.” No, we had better not let De Quadra realize where they came from.

  “You must have had an exciting time in Antwerp,” said Sir Henry, amused.

  He was quite right. Gerald’s work had included finding people who could be bribed or blackmailed into lending keys and forging requisitions in order to get valuables—ingots, plate, armor, all manner of things—out of storage. Sometimes, Gerald took temporary charge of the filched goods. More than once, we had had consignments hidden under the bed in our lodgings, awaiting a ship or a better hiding place until a suitable ship was in port. It had indeed been exciting.

  I glanced around the display. The queen was now examining a sword with a spectacular hilt, encrusted with cabochon emeralds and rubies, and the French ambassador, in conversation with the lieutenant, had strolled back across the room to look once more at the gold and silver plate. With Sackville and Sir Henry still at my side, I followed them, wanting a second look myself. Sackville had jolted my memory. Yes, of course. That fine set of gold plate was one I had seen before. Gerald had taken me to see it aboard the ship that was to carry it illicitly away from Antwerp. And just before the smallpox struck, there had been another splendid consignment . . . I scanned the table and moved along it. But none of those items seemed to be on view.

  “That isn’t all the plate from Antwerp, is it?” I asked. “I take it that the rest is stored somewhere, like the corselets?”

  “Oh no. We keep all the plate together, here,” Sackville said. “It is so very beauteous. As you see, we have had stands made on which to set it out. Why do you ask?”

  It had been two years ago. That particular consignment had rested, briefly, in our lodgings while Gerald checked it over. I had helped him, writing down a list of items as he dictated them, before he and the manservant we had then took them away to be stowed, not under anyone’s bed, not that time, but under the floor of a rented warehouse. The rent had been paid for five years in advance and the agreement contained a clause forbidding the owner to enter the property until those years were up.

  I could still hear Gerald’s voice in my head, dictating that list. As a child, I had shared my cousins’ tutor, and he had made a great point of training his pupils’ memories. I could recite verse by the furlong, and carry a shopping list of thirty or more items in my head with ease, after hearing them told over just once. I could remember almost word for word what Gerald had said, and besides, I had seen most of the items myself.

  Slowly, as near as I could, I repeated the inventory.

  “Item, one full set of gold plate, value approximately ten thousand pounds, including twenty-four drinking goblets, marked with the badge of a noble Spanish house, set in cabochon rubies and emeralds.

  “Item, a golden salt, two feet high, shaped as a square castle tower, with a salt container under each turret and spice drawers below. Decorated with the same badge, set in rubies. Value approximately twelve thousand pounds.

  “Item, a silver salt, with a fluted pattern and a chased pattern of birds and leaves around the rim. There is a hinged lid in the likeness of a scallop shell, beneath which are four salt containers that may be lifted out. Value approximately three thousand pounds.

  “Item, sundry small costly ornaments, total value approximately seven hundred pounds.

  “They’re not here,” I said. “But they were among the things which Gresham, well, sequestered, with my husband’s help. Was some of the treasure from the Netherlands broken up—or melted down? Or sold?”

  “One would hope not. Such exquisite artifacts should never be destroyed.” Sir Henry was quite shocked.

  Sackville, however, was nonplussed. “Mistress Blanchard, I have never seen the items you describe, nor found them on any list. When were they sent to England? On what ship?”

  “Gerald was arranging for a ship at the time when he fell ill,” I said. “Come to think of it . . .”

  His illness had struck suddenly and from the moment when I first knew what it was, I had thought of nothing except him and Meg and how best to care for them. I had had smallpox as a child, without my complexion being much harmed, but I would take no risks with Meg. In frantic haste, I had arranged other lodgings for her and her nurse; and, thank God, neither of them caught it. I myself had stayed with Gerald, to nurse him and worry about him and at last to grieve for him. From then until now I had not thought, even once, about that hidden treasure. I hadn’t even thought about it when I transferred Gerald’s keys from his key ring to my own and noticed, vaguely, that the warehouse key, a distinctive affair in ornamental ironwork, was with them. I had meant to return it, but in the exhaustion and preoccupation of bereavement, I forgot. I was in England when I noticed the key again, and then trying to return it seemed like pointless effort.

  It was only a key, after all. No one reminded me that it might unlock a treasure. Our manservant, John Wilton, had probably assumed that all arrangements for transporting the valuables were in hand. At least he had never mentioned it to me and I could not now ask him, for he, too, was dead.

  The key was still on my ring; a souvenir of past happiness and nothing more.

  “Come to think of it,” I said again, “I doubt if those items ever left Antwerp. I expect they’re still there.”

  I knew precisely where, too. When Gerald first rented the warehouse, he had shown it to me, and shown me the hiding place under the boards of the ground floor where, he hoped, not just one but a succession of consignments would rest. The first consignment had been the last, but I knew he had got it safely as far as the warehouse. It must still be where he hid it.

  Well, it could stay there as far as I was concerned. I wanted no part of it. It was just another symbol of the intrigue of which I was growing so tired that even though France was now a country on the edge of civil war, and even though March was a terrible month for voyaging, I was prepared to travel there on family business just to get away for a while from plots and politics.

  And to pass, perhaps, within a few miles of where Matthew de la Roche, my current husband, was probably living. Back it came, my longing for him, persistent and absurd.

  I pushed it away. I would not try to see him and I didn’t imagine he would want to see me. Matthew was gone forever and the sooner I accepted that the better.

  2

  Jeweled Manacles

  I returned to Greenwich with the queen, by river, and found my two servants busy packing for our journey.

  Fran and Roger Brockley were a married couple, although they hadn’t married until they had joined my service, and I still called Fran by her maiden name of Dale. They were in their forties, both of them—a solid and reliable pair, though Dale did have a tendency to grumble and I had never been able to stop Brockley from hinting that my way of earning a living was unsuitable for a lady and he wished I would settle down to a more becoming (and safer) way of life.

  At least, if not precisely safe, the journey for which we were preparing was quite private. It was an errand of mercy, connected with my first husband’s family. This was Blanchard business.

  Gerald and I had married against the wishes of our respective families and when I was first widowed, and applied for financial help to his father, I was coldly refused. But that was before I joined
the court and rose in the favor of the queen. My former father-in-law, Luke Blanchard, somehow got to hear that his son’s despised widow was prinking around the court in expensive damask dresses, had been seen in friendly conversation with Elizabeth, was on visiting terms with the Secretary of State and his wife, and that Meg, my daughter, was being fostered by a family who were friends of the Cecils. At that, his attitude abruptly changed.

  The next thing I knew was that he and Ambrose, Gerald’s older brother, were presenting themselves at court, dressed in their best doublets, asking to see me, and, in a piquant reversal of the previous state of affairs, appealing for my assistance.

  “We feel,” said Luke Blanchard, as persuasively as a man can who is six feet tall with an arrogant aquiline profile, is austerely dressed in black velvet, and has glacial blue eyes and a voice so deep that he sounds portentous even when he is only remarking on the weather, “that although France is a perilous place just now, someone like yourself, my dear Ursula, highly regarded by our queen, could visit it with a degree of safety. Your presence in my party would amount to protection for me.”

  I never thought the day would come when I would hear Gerald’s father call me his dear Ursula. I gazed at him in astonishment.

  “A well-equipped escort and the countenance of Queen Elizabeth, who is maintaining normal diplomatic relations with the court of France, should work wonders,” Ambrose agreed. His tawny doublet and hose were more attractive than Luke’s black velvet, but physically he was just a younger version of his father and his attempt at an ingratiating smile met with only limited success.

  Gerald had been short and dark and friendly, and had told me that he resembled his long-dead mother. I was sure that this was true. Certainly he was nothing like his father or his brother. Gerald was also in the habit of coming to the point. These two seemed to prefer rigmaroles. I had been allowed to see them in a private room, and to offer refreshments. I poured wine for them and cut the preamble short by saying: “But what do you want to go to France for, precisely?”

  It was simple enough. Luke Blanchard’s mother had been the sole heiress of her father’s Sussex manor of Beechtrees, and she had married a Frenchman. “That was when the name Blanchard came into the family, as no doubt you know,” Luke said. “Before that, the name was Fitzhubert.”

  Luke had had a sister who married back into France, taking as husband a distant cousin, another Blanchard. He had died young, leaving his wife to bring up their daughter, Helene, and now his wife had died as well.

  “Under my sister’s will,” my father-in-law said, “I am appointed as Helene’s guardian. She is about sixteen. She is with her father’s relatives at the moment, perfectly respectable people, and I would be happy to leave her there but for the state of affairs in France. Civil war between the Catholics and the Huguenots could break out at any moment.”

  “Quite,” I said, amused. As one of the queen’s ladies, often present when she received messengers and ambassadors, I knew more about the shaky state of law and order in France than he did.

  “Helene,” said Luke Blanchard, “is living at a place called the Château Douceaix—the name is said to mean Sweet Waters—which is not far from Le Mans. Not that it matters where she is; if trouble breaks out, all France could be equally dangerous. As a responsible guardian, I am bound to feel concerned. I wish to fetch her home. But I think she should have the company of a gentlewoman on the way—and I am very nervous about the risk to myself . . .”

  His voice tailed off at this point. Then, shamefacedly, he said: “I’m not so young anymore. Ambrose is willing to go, of course . . .”

  “Yes, I am,” said Ambrose, quite pugnaciously.

  “. . . but I have lost one son and I can’t spare the one I have left.” It was the only reference he had so far made to Gerald. There was the faintest note of accusation in his voice, as though marriage to me had somehow made Gerald vulnerable to smallpox. But he went on without pausing.

  “Also, I am the one who is Helene’s guardian. And you, Ambrose, have a wife and young children. I prefer you to stay in England. If we can get Helene safely out, I have a good marriage in view for her. Now, Ursula, will you, if you can obtain permission, come with me to fetch her? I don’t think the danger will be nearly as great if you are there.”

  I didn’t like either Luke or Ambrose very much but it would get me away from the court, and carry me to France, and it was true that for me, a member of Elizabeth’s household, the risk would be much reduced. And so I decided to set out for France in March, equinoctial gales notwithstanding, and help my father-in-law, even though he had no shadow of a right to expect it.

  I had hoped to come back from the Tower to find all the packing done, but although, when I entered my quarters, Brockley was on his knees beside a hamper, grunting with effort as he tightened the straps, the lid of the biggest hamper was still open and the contents were in confusion because Dale had just pulled a gown out of it and was busy erasing creases with a damp cloth and a hot iron.

  “Dale, what on earth are you doing? That rose damask was packed yesterday!”

  “There’s word that you’re to go to the queen after she’s supped. I expect she wants to say a formal good-bye,” Dale said. “Just let me finish this, and then sit you down, and I’ll put your hair right. That wind on the river’s pulled half of it out of your cap. Then I’ll get you dressed for an audience.”

  “Dale, I’ve been with the queen all afternoon. She never mentioned this.”

  “Well, those were the orders, ma’am. It was Mistress Ashley told me.”

  Kat Ashley was the queen’s principal lady, though she hadn’t come with us to the Tower. If the orders came from her, then there was no mistake. “Very well,” I said.

  I worried, though, as Dale got me ready. What if Elizabeth had changed her mind and decided to forbid me to go? In due course, a page came to fetch me and I followed him to Elizabeth’s study. Evening had fallen and the room was lit by lamps and candles, plenty of them, for Elizabeth, though in many ways careful about expense, would not stint on light when she wanted to read. She had more respect for her eyesight. She was reading now, seated at her desk, with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, that fanciful description of an ideal state, open in front of her. When the page brought me in, she said: “Welcome, Ursula,” but she finished the paragraph she was studying and a few seconds passed before she looked up.

  For a moment, therefore, I stood by the door, looking at her bent head, with the delicately curved profile outlined against the paneled wall beyond. The candlelight glinted on the silver threads in her loose cream gown, on the rings that encircled her slender fingers, and on the crimped waves of light red hair in front of her pearl-edged cap. She had grown older, even in the two years that I had known her. A crown is a heavy weight. But one thing was unchanged, and that was the curious mingling of power and fragility that was essentially Elizabeth, like a snowflake made of steel.

  I was a little afraid of her, like nearly everyone else at the court, but I had affection for her, too, and I knew that she had affection for me. Not just because of the secret work I did for her, although that perhaps was part of it, but also because, long ago, my mother had served her mother, poor Anne Boleyn, who had been beheaded.

  She slipped a marker into her book and turned, signing to me to move to where she could see me clearly. “Come in, Ursula. I will not keep you long. You leave early tomorrow, I believe?”

  She hadn’t called me here to withdraw her permission, then. I made my curtsy and said: “Yes, ma’am. We set out for Southampton at first light. We shall be quite a large party. Master Blanchard is taking five manservants with him.”

  “He’s nervous?” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes, ma’am. He has worried over how many men he should take. He said that too many would attract attention and look provocative, but to travel with too few felt unsafe. In the end, he settled on five.”

  “He will have eight,” Elizabeth said crisply. “Cecil
is providing you with an additional escort of three of his own men, wearing his livery. They will present themselves in the morning and will ride with you to Southampton.”

  “Three of Cecil’s men?” I said. “Master Blanchard will surely be pleased. But . . . is there any particular reason?”

  “Oh yes. Ursula, do you know what a white night is?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Seeing her now, at close quarters, I noticed what she had managed to conceal during our visit to the Tower: how very tired she looked. “A white night,” I said,“is a night without sleep, no matter how you may long for rest.”

  “Yes. You sound as though you speak from experience,” Elizabeth said. “Last night, I had no sleep. I have just received news that has made me very anxious. We have, I think, demonstrated to De Quadra that England is not to be trifled with but Spain is not the only cloud on the horizon. France is in an alarming condition. In Normandy, at a place called Vassy, there has been a massacre. Five hundred Protestants at worship—in France they call them Lutherans or Huguenots—were recently attacked by Catholic forces. The news reached us yesterday. About forty people were butchered. Civil war has come several steps closer. I was wakeful last night, Ursula, because I was wondering if I should let you go to France. I would forbid it, except that there is an extra errand I wish you to carry out for me—an important one—and this dreadful news makes it more important than ever. But it will keep you in France for at least an extra week, since it involves traveling on to Paris before you return home. Both Cecil and I felt that his men should go with you as an added safeguard—just in case.”

  There was silence. This was the very last thing I had expected. As the seconds slid by, I realized how very badly I needed to escape, for a while, from the tasks set me by Elizabeth and Cecil. Above all, I wanted to recover from certain changes that the work had wrought in me. I had relished it once and part of me still did. But I could not forget the day I had tricked my way into a prisoner’s cell and given him a phial of yew poison, so that he could evade the disemboweling knife.