‘Would your new scheme provide an heir?’ demanded Sussex, glaring at Dudley. ‘It’s an heir that England desperately needs. And the queen is not so opposed to the idea of marriage as you imagine. I have talked with her several times on the subject. As for her age, she is healthy, and many women bear a first child when they are past forty, with perfect success. In some matters, we must trust in God.’
‘I would prefer to trust in building up our navy – and raising an army – as soon as possible and making sure that no one passes any more secret information to unfriendly powers!’ Dudley blazed, and Walsingham remarked: ‘England will be in serious straits if she ends up with neither a queen nor an heir. Or no queen and an heir in a cradle. Her majesty’s well-being is the well-being of us all.’
Pacifically, Lord Burghley said: ‘Pending the result of my correspondence with France, I think we should set about smoking out our hidden spy. I am conscious of his existence and intended to speak of it today, except that Sir Francis did so first. I urge every one of us to consider how the spy might be discovered and I recommend an extraordinary meeting in a few days’ time to discuss our ideas. We should now turn to the rest of the agenda. There have been too many complaints lately about counterfeit coins and it also seems that the gang of Algerine corsairs that two years ago made a stronghold for themselves on the island of Lundy, in the Bristol Channel, are still defying all our efforts to remove them. We need to pursue coiners with more energy and sanction a further plan for an attack on Lundy …’
Our journey to Withysham could not be hurried, since we had a baggage cart with us, and we also needed to take the coach that Hugh had once used. Neither Sybil nor Dale were good horsewomen, while Gladys was too old to ride at all and of course we had Harry with us, and his young nursemaid, Tessie, and also Netta, a maidservant who was married to Simon, one of the grooms I wanted to take, and who was expecting their first and much longed-for baby. All six were packed into the coach. I preferred to ride my black mare, Jewel, but those of us who were on horseback had to limit ourselves to the speed of the wheeled transport. All the same, by making an early start and taking regular breaks to rest ourselves and our horses, we reached Withysham in one day. We arrived just as dusk was falling but I had sent Simon on ahead and we came through the short tunnel of the gatehouse arch to be greeted by eager barking from the Withysham dogs, candlelit windows and a smell of cooking and on the doorstep, a dignified figure dressed in a smart black suit and wearing a gold chain of office, waiting to greet us.
‘Master Robert Hanley, at your service,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Withysham.’
Once within, we found bright fires, hot water and good food, and beds ready prepared. Adam Wilder (who had stayed behind at Hawkswood to look after it in my absence) had made no mistake when he hired Master Hanley.
My Sussex home is very different from Hawkswood, which is a big, gracious house built of light grey stone, with ample windows, a great hall, two charming parlours, and beautiful grounds including not only an orchard and the usual kitchen and herb gardens, but also a lake, a patch of woodland, a formal flower garden and the rose garden which had been the joy of Hugh’s heart. Withysham, however, had once been a women’s abbey, until the queen’s father King Henry put an end to the monasteries. It had ample stabling and a good many spare rooms but it was smaller than Hawkswood and less well lit, with narrow, lance-shaped windows. It too was built of grey stone but it was darker and the walls were thicker than at Hawkswood and where the rooms were panelled, the panels were of dark oak.
At Hawkswood, the panelling was all of a light golden brown, matching its wide and beautiful main staircase – though the stairs could not be polished. They would have looked even more beautiful if they had been, but Hugh said that they were polished when he was a boy, and his mother had once slipped on them, and fallen so badly that she lost a child she was then expecting. They had been left alone since then.
Withysham also had very modest grounds. There was one little flower garden; otherwise, there was a kitchen garden, a group of fruit trees – too small to be called an orchard – and four paddocks. In one of them, Roundel, the dappled mare I had had before Jewel, and her last year’s foal, together with a couple of trotting mares, also with foals, were at this time of year taken out for exercise each day by a groom. When spring came, they would be turned out in it to graze and be company for each other. All of them would have further progeny in the summer, and their growing colts from previous years lived out in two of the other paddocks, though they had shelters and in winter they were provided with better fodder than winter grass.
By law, Hugh as a landowner, albeit a modest one, was supposed to keep trotters as they are well-bred, stylish animals and King Henry had been determined to improve the standard of horseflesh in his realm. Because Hugh wasn’t a major landowner, he didn’t have to maintain a stallion, but he kept a couple of breeding mares instead, and when on our marriage I brought Withysham to him, he promptly transferred them thither because he didn’t like them. As his joints worsened, he found them uncomfortable to ride, and he disliked driving them as well. Between the shafts, he said, they were show-offs.
‘Why did the old king have to inflict trotters on everyone?’ he would say, and did say, quite often. ‘Give me a nice easy ambler for the saddle and a solid workhorse for pulling things. He should have simply ordered us to keep tall horses and left it at that!’
As we rode in, I saw that a groom was leading the trotting mares patiently round the paddock. He was running while they, with their high-stepping action, looked as if they were about to take off into the sky. Hugh would have groaned at the sight of them.
And suddenly, I was missing him, aching for him, and the years since his death seemed to vanish. It was though I had only lost him yesterday. And people had been at me to marry again! Never, I thought, feeling the tears prick my eyes. Never, never.
After being used to Hawkswood, I usually felt somewhat confined when I visited Withysham, but I did like its serene atmosphere. Perhaps the centuries of prayer and contemplation it had known before King Henry intervened had left their memory in the stone of its walls. This time, it began to soothe me as soon as I stepped over the threshold.
I must not wallow in the past, I told myself. I spent most of the next two days playing with Harry, noticing that he was surely going to grow up looking like his father, my second husband, Matthew de la Roche, but hoping he would not grow up to think like Matthew. I had once loved Matthew de la Roche to desperation point but I had never known any peace with him, for he was an enemy to Queen Elizabeth.
After our marriage, we lived in France, but I left my little daughter Meg, the child of my first husband, Gerald Blanchard, whom I had lost to smallpox, in England. I returned to England when Meg needed my help. While there, I heard that Matthew was dead and later I married Hugh. When I learned that the report of Matthew’s death was a lie, Hugh and I were settled together and I chose to stay with him.
Only after Hugh himself was gone did Matthew and I come briefly together once more. Harry was the result of that. But there was nothing now between Matthew and me. I was glad to have Harry but I rarely thought of his father. It was Hugh I mourned, and always would, when anything such as the sight of the trotters reminded me of him.
But it was time, I said to myself, to let Hugh go. I should let the tranquillity of Withysham gently bury the past. I should not let the sight of the trotters continue to be painful reminders. Trotting foals always sold well and I decided to adopt the sensible attitude that they were assets.
I had things to do. I had already sent word to Meg and her husband to let them know that for the time being I would be in Sussex. Meg, herself the mother of a small son, must always know where I was to be found. I had sent a message also to Sybil’s daughter, Ambrosia, who was married to a schoolmaster in Cambridge. Sybil too considered it essential that Ambrosia should know her whereabouts.
Now, however, I must send word of my arrival to the uncl
e and aunt who had brought me up and who lived at the big house in Faldene, a village not far away. Anyone else who wanted to see me would have to go to the trouble of tracking me down.
I found myself very pleased with the move and decided to prolong my stay, perhaps through the spring and summer. For nearly a week, I enjoyed Withysham undisturbed. And then, on the sixth day, towards nightfall, an outbreak of barking from the dogs and the echoing rattle of wheels and iron-shod hooves from the gate arch drew me to a window. From which, to my astonishment and dismay, I watched a crowd of horsemen followed by two big coaches, each drawn by four horses and each with an all too familiar coat of arms painted on its doors, arrive on my premises. A baggage wagon followed them, creaking.
The coaches were so big that the gatehouse tunnel was only just wide enough for them. One belonged to Sir William Cecil. The other belonged to Sir Francis Walsingham. They both travelled by coach if they needed to make journeys, for Cecil suffered from gout and Walsingham from attacks of diarrhoea. In addition, at the head of the riders who had led the way in was a figure I recognized instantly. He had no trouble with his health and loved to be in the saddle. He was mounted on a spectacular, snorting, head-tossing blue roan stallion, and he was the queen’s Master of Horse, the Earl of Leicester, Sir Robert Dudley.
If these weighty men were calling on me in person and en masse, it was ominous. It would – it must – have something to do with Elizabeth and most probably was linked to the fact that she and I were related.
King Henry had not been a faithful husband. During his marriage to Queen Anne Boleyn, he had had an affair with one of her ladies in waiting. With my mother, in fact. I was not legitimate, but Elizabeth and I were half-sisters.
TWO
A Suitable Alliance
Cecil, Walsingham, Dudley and their respective entourages amounted to a considerable crowd to inflict on a modest manor house like Withysham, but to be fair to them, they knew that quite well. Our stabling was adequate, but food could have been a problem and accordingly, they had brought two cooks with them, and a good supply of provisions.
I was thankful, for although I had brought my own chief cook, John Hawthorn, with me to Withysham, travelling in the baggage cart along with our own supplies of viands, he would have been hard put to it to deal with such an influx of guests without more help than the junior cook and the two kitchen maids who worked at Withysham permanently. Since he was autocratic and temperamental, this didn’t stop him from being resentful when his kitchen was taken over and I was faintly amused to see that he somehow managed to look relieved at the same time, which was quite a feat. My amusement was faint, however. I was too worried about the purpose of this intimidating invasion.
It was not discussed that evening. Sybil and I supped with our guests and conversation was general. Cecil told me that, as I must have realized, they were there on the queen’s business but did not propose to explain it until the next morning, and the others nodded agreement. Sir Francis Walsingham, tall, dark and cadaverous as ever, added that the matter concerned would take time to discuss, while Dudley, also tall and gipsy dark but with a sparkle about him that made him quite different from Walsingham, entertained us all over supper, with amusing anecdotes of his work as the queen’s Master of Horse. Some of them concerned the difficulties of running a stud and his problems with a recalcitrant mare who didn’t approve of the stallion presented to her and made her opinion clear in several unpleasant ways. Walsingham, who had puritanical attitudes, looked disapproving but the rest of us laughed. Walsingham was one of the queen’s most trustworthy men but I never really liked him.
After that, the conversation shifted to more general matters, such as the prospects for next season’s harvest, some alterations being made to part of Hampton Court Palace and the shocking fact that the nest of pirates which had established itself on Lundy Island and regularly raided the Cornish coast to attack shipping and capture slaves was still there.
‘They have cannon on the cliffs,’ said Walsingham angrily. ‘They sank two of our ships when we last tried to attack them, with much loss of life as well as the ships! We can’t spare either!’
In the morning, however, we would talk business and I lay awake for a while that night, considering how to dress. That I was the queen’s sister might have something to do with all this and from that point of view, since I was already sure that whatever they had come to say, I didn’t want to hear it, I might do best to appear simply as the lady of an ordinary manor house. On the other hand, to dress in royal style was like putting on a suit of armour.
In the end I compromised. I discarded the hood edged with genuine oyster pearls that Hugh had given me one Christmas, and instead put on a pretty but less costly hood edged with fresh-water pearls, and asked Dale to arrange my hair so that the hood concealed nearly all of it, though I did this with some regret, for it was dark and glossy, with no trace yet of grey, and I was rather proud of it.
I also dressed in my favourite colours of cream and tawny, which were not spectacular, but my tawny overdress was of the finest wool and my cream kirtle was a silky damask. When in the past I had gone on risky assignments for the queen, I had had hidden pouches stitched inside my open overskirts, where I could carry such thing as picklocks, money and a small dagger. But I did not need such things today and my skirts were weighted only by heavy embroidery. Gold embroidery in this case.
For jewellery, I just had a pendant consisting of a big yellow topaz encircled by fresh-water pearls, set in gold and hung on a plain gold chain. I had three pairs of earrings to match the pendant, and I put on the smallest. My ruff was elegantly edged with the same tawny as my overdress but it was smaller than the latest fashion. In any case, I disliked the big ruffs which were then in vogue. Dale held up a mirror so that I could examine the total effect. I was walking my sartorial tightrope with some success, I decided. Except that my eyes, which were hazel, looked dark and had small lines round them. They looked like that when I was wary – or afraid.
But whatever awaited me downstairs must be faced. A dab of lavender perfume and I was ready. With Sybil, discreetly dressed in dark blue, as my attendant, I went down to join my visitors in Withysham’s small hall.
It was an austere place, with its stone walls and narrow windows. I had tried to soften this monastic air by hanging up a lively tapestry of a hunting party, riding out against a millefleurs background of green leaves, and by spreading a small Turkey carpet, with a red and blue pattern, over the table, where I kept a set of silver branched candlesticks. The candles had been lit in readiness, for the morning was dull. But the place still seemed austere, as though it retained a memory of the days when it had been the nuns’ chapterhouse. I rarely used it from choice.
My visitors were there ahead of me, all three of them, plus a secretary with a notepad. Sybil and I joined them at the table, and then Walsingham began to speak.
I listened in silence, feeling my mind harden as I did so, as though a wall were being built within me, that I was supposed to scale, or jump. I felt, in fact, very much like a horse confronted with an obstacle it knows it can’t surmount.
When Walsingham had finished, I opened my mouth and said one word.
Hugh had once told me that he had heard that somewhere in the world there was a language that had no word for no. I wondered how on earth people could live without that most useful little word. I couldn’t have dealt with this situation without it; that was for sure.
‘No,’ I said. There was a silence, so after a while I said it again, more strongly. ‘No!’
After a further pause, Dudley said in a conciliating tone: ‘There is no disparagement, you know. Gilbert Renard is royal by blood. His father was King Henri the Second of France – though he was not yet king at the time. In fact, Renard is the result of an adventure when his father was only seventeen. He was recognized as Henri’s son and was granted the rank of Compte, and has an estate of some size. At least, he had. His lands were confiscated in 1572 at the
time of the St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre of the Huguenots, when Renard revealed considerable sympathy for them, tried to help survivors and quarrelled with his half-brother King Henri the Third, and with the French queen mother, Catherine de’ Medici.’
He paused, and Walsingham took up the tale. ‘That was when he came to England and was made welcome at our court. On my recommendation, because of his support for the French Protestants. He had managed to save some money from the wreck of his fortunes and has bought a small house in Kew.’
‘Not far from my own house,’ Dudley put in. ‘I know him quite well as a neighbour.’
‘Lately,’ Walsingham continued, ‘he has corresponded with the French king and has indeed made two brief journeys back to France to talk to him and to the queen mother, and it seems that he has been forgiven. He is to have his lands returned to him, or most of them, anyway. The queen mother is apparently holding on to a couple of productive vineyards!’
‘She would!’ remarked Dudley.
‘But his chateau and his farms and two other vineyards are to be his again,’ said Walsingham. ‘Mistress Stannard, it really is a suitable alliance.’
Beside me, Sybil stirred restlessly. I knew what she was thinking because it was what I was thinking too. I drew a deep breath. ‘I have said, time and again, that I don’t wish to remarry. I have refused offers!’ It seemed only a day or two since, with such difficulty, I had shooed the Yarrows out of Hawkswood. I felt tired.
‘But those offers were not as politically important as this,’ said Cecil. The line between his eyes had become a deep furrow. ‘Ursula, this is for the queen. And it is true – we are not offering you anyone unsuitable. He is about three years younger than you but that, surely, is not important. He is pleasant-looking and seems amiable; he says he is willing for you to spend part of each year in England – indeed, he will wish to visit his own English home sometimes. He has been married before but his first wife died in 1570, of a summer fever. Where his chateau is, the summers can be very hot. He suggests that you and he should make your visits to England during the summer.’
A Perilous Alliance Page 2