Queen's Ransom

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  “Just let me pass!” I snapped at Matthew, and after a second’s hesitation, he did so. Heart pounding with wrath, I stepped past him and made at once for the back of the inn where there was a door out into the stableyard. I threw it open and strode out. Darkness had long fallen, but it was a clear night, with a nearly full moon, and anyway, there were three lamp poles to light the yard. I could see very well. They were there, all three of them, standing together by the stable and apparently scanning the windows of the inn. I went straight across to them.

  “What in the world are you doing here? You should be at the abbey. Searle, I thought you were still in Douceaix.”

  “Mr. Blanchard felt that one at least of his men should be in your escort, ma’am. He sent me after you. But when I got to the abbey, I learned that you had gone out with your man Brockley, and that the Dodds here had gone after you.”

  “He followed and caught us up just as we reached here,” Dick Dodd said. “Ma’am, what are you doing here? You say that we should be still at the abbey—but so should you. This is not a safe place for you.”

  “It is a perfectly safe place. I have cleared up all the misunderstanding between myself and Charpentier,” I said in ringing tones, which I hoped would carry to the window behind which Brockley and Matthew must be listening. “I have taken a room here for the night and I have excellent reasons for doing so. I can’t sleep at the abbey. I learned, just after we got there, that a man called Ignatius Wilkins is there. He is the resident priest. He was once in England where I came across him. I will not go into details but he is a man I loathe so much that I will not spend a night under the same roof with him.”

  My voice echoed passionately around the stableyard. It was easy to supply the passion because I genuinely felt it. The thought of sharing a roof with the unspeakable Wilkins really was hateful to me.

  “Brockley will guard me,” I informed the three of them loftily. “I have no need of you. You may go back to the abbey. I will return there myself in the morning.”

  They looked as though they didn’t know what to do. I stared at them fixedly and after a moment, Dick Dodd, who seemed to be the one in charge, shrugged his shoulders. “If you are sure, ma’am . . .”

  “I am perfectly sure. The inn is full and you will have poor accommodation here if you stay. You will be better off in the abbey.”

  “We will come to collect you in the morning, ma’am. At nine of the clock, say?”

  “By all means,” I said. “I shall see you then.”

  Shuffling and reluctant, murmuring among themselves and glancing back over their shoulders, they went. I watched them go out through the archway to the road before returning swiftly indoors. I found Matthew and Brockley startled and near to laughter.

  “We heard every word,” Matthew told me as soon as I had shut the door after me. “I never would have thought of that, I must say. You really do loathe Wilkins, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Matthew, I do. Brockley . . .”

  Brockley gave me a thoughtful look, but accepted the hint and left the room. I turned to Matthew. “I have to stay the night now,” I said frankly. “I’ve said I would. Have you bespoken a room here?”

  “Yes. On the first floor.”

  I said directly: “May I share it?”

  Matthew considered me thoughtfully. His amusement had faded out, to be replaced by a kind of tiredness. “You may share my room,” he said, “but on what terms? Will you share my bed, too? There is a truckle bed where I can—and will—sleep if you prefer. I ask you again, Ursula: Why did you come to meet me?”

  I thought of Helene, who didn’t like me and wouldn’t miss me if I deserted her, but to whom, nevertheless, I had a responsibility. I thought of the letter I had undertaken to deliver for Queen Elizabeth.

  I thought of Cecil’s betrayal (I was less concerned with Blanchard’s. I had never liked him anyway).

  “When I set out to come here,” I said, “I had it in mind to—say farewell finally, formally. And then I meant to go home and try, once more, for an annulment that would set us both free.”

  I had thought of it once before, on the grounds that my marriage to Matthew had been forced. I had been advised that this might be difficult to prove.

  But Elizabeth had set aside Catherine Grey’s marriage on the grounds that Catherine couldn’t prove it had ever taken place. My marriage had been conducted secretly, by Matthew’s uncle, who was a Catholic priest, and was presumably now back here in France, where he couldn’t easily be questioned by the English authorities. Also, it was doubtful whether in England he was licensed to perform weddings. Perhaps what Elizabeth had ruthlessly forced upon Catherine, she might grant as a favor to me. If I wanted it.

  “Is that what you want?” Matthew asked of me now. “I notice,” he added, “that you are not wearing my wedding ring.”

  “In England, few people know of our marriage,” I said. “Dear heaven, I don’t know what I want.” Then I told him what I thought Cecil had done to me. He listened without comment. At the end, I said: “Since I must spend the night here, it would be simplest if I shared your room. I will share your bed if you ask me. That’s for you to say.”

  “And then?” His voice was tired, like his face. I thought of Brockley, asking me if I thought men had no feelings. “What of the morning?” he asked. “I ask you again, Ursula: What are your intentions? Will it be just, thank you, sweeting, for the memory of a happy night and farewell forever? Or will you come home with me to Blanchepierre, where you always should have been?”

  “I can’t answer that now. But in the morning I will answer it. I will only keep you waiting one more night.”

  “You said once before that you would come to France. You backed out at the last moment—”

  “I had a reason!” I said. I thought of that reason, and shuddered.

  “You say you had a reason.” Matthew was relentless. “But have you any idea at all what it did to me when you refused at the last moment to come with me? What it was like, riding for my life, making for the coast and France, without you? After you had given your promise and broken it?”

  No, I could not do that again. He had asked if I knew what I had done to him and I could see the answer in his drawn face.

  “If I give my word tomorrow, I shall keep it. But I must have a night to think. Matthew, I have so much to lose. A whole life, friends, people who trust me . . . I would never be able to go back. Don’t hope for too much. I love you but—it’s all so complicated.”

  “I think that if you really loved me, there would be no complications. You would come to me as a wife to her husband and make my land, my beliefs, your own. Where is the complication in that?”

  We had been through it all before, and in vain. I didn’t even try to go through it again. I said: “I’ll sleep in the truckle bed if you wish.”

  “I don’t wish. I was leaving it to you to decide. For my part, if I share a room with my wife, then I would most certainly prefer it if we slept together!”

  “So would I.”

  “Very well, then. Go and tell Brockley. He and Charpentier must make sure that we can slip upstairs unnoticed. We’ll have supper up there. There’s a small anteroom outside the bedchamber. Brockley can sleep there and guard us through the night.”

  The bedchamber was comfortable, with a curtained bed and a washstand and a triple candlestick with new candles in it. Charpentier lit them for us. The three narrow windows had shutters but they were open and the moon shone in. “I like the moon,” Matthew said. “If I leave the shutters and the bed curtains open tonight, will it worry you?”

  “No,” I said. “I like the moonlight, too.”

  There was a pause. Then Matthew said: “We have been married for a year and a half, and only now do we learn that we share a liking for moonlight.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” There was nothing else to say.

  Supper was brought. We ate it and Brockley removed the tray. Then we went to bed.

  It
was not like any other night that we had spent together. In the past we had made love either with passion and tenderness; or else—on one occasion—with bruising, violent fury. Never before had it seemed beyond us to make love at all. But so it was.

  To begin with, we turned to each other and caressed and kissed, and I sensed that what Matthew wanted was to take possession of me with such finality that in the morning I would be unable to do anything but go with him. Neither of us referred to it, but the possibility that this encounter, too, might result in a child must have been in his mind, as it was in mine. Perhaps he hoped for it. But his desire failed at the crucial moment and he turned away from me, lying down again with his back to me. And now he was the one who said: “I’m sorry.”

  “Let me help.”

  “I have never needed help in my life.”

  “This is different from any other time in either of our lives. Please, Matthew.”

  In the end, he let me do as I wished, and we came together successfully, but I did most of the work, sitting astride him in the slanting moonbeams, leaning down to him. I remember how dark his eyes were, looking up at me, and how the reflected moonlight came and went in them as my hair, swinging loose like a curtain, sent its shadow swaying back and forth.

  It was not the kind of love we had known before. It was as though that had come from the heart and this came only from the body. But it brought us a release. I had not known until now how badly I needed this and although I did not ask him, I thought that his feelings mirrored mine.

  At last, we lay down again side by side and our arms slid around each other. I made some light comment about the supper Brockley had fetched. It had included a meat pie.

  “They won’t do so well at the abbey. The guest house is comfortable enough, but the abbey will keep to the Lenten rules. There won’t be any meat. I don’t think Charpentier troubles too much about Lent,” I said sleepily.

  “Saltspoon! Still that edge on your tongue. Charpentier keeps Lent as he should. It was beaver in that pie.”

  “Beaver? Well, that’s meat.”

  “No, it isn’t. Beavers have wide splayed tails like fish, and they live in water. They count as fish. Didn’t you know?”

  “No,” I said, although it occurred to me that the taste had been familiar and that I had probably eaten it at Elizabeth’s court. I didn’t care, anyway. What now filled my mind was that Matthew, once more, had called me Saltspoon, and in that dear, loving tone of voice. I snuggled more closely against him. “Go to sleep, now,” he said. “You must need rest, after so much traveling. Last time we spent a night together, if I remember rightly, we were interrupted in the middle of it by an uproar. Let us pray we have peace and quiet tonight.”

  “Yes, indeed,” I said.

  It was a prayer not destined to be answered. When I look back, I feel that some sportive demon was watching over the fractured marriage of Matthew de la Roche and Ursula Blanchard. I fell asleep but deep in the night, I woke abruptly. The moon still shone through the window, though it had moved from the left-most window to the far right, and cloud was coming up and drifting darkly across it. It was low cloud, swirling and thick and . . .

  Then my nostrils twitched to a frightening smell and I saw the flicker of a light that was not the cool silver of the moon, but wavering and ominously red. The cloud across the face of the moon was smoke. At the same moment, a confused racket broke out. I heard shouts and running feet. Doors slammed. A horse whinnied in terror and hooves clattered wildly on the cobbles of the stableyard. Matthew and I shot upright at the same moment.

  “Dear Christ, Ursula! It’s a conspiracy. Someone’s following us about to ruin our nights of passion! Last time, we had Dale taken ill at midnight and the whole household turned upside down. And now, the damned inn’s on fire!”

  We scrambled from the bed, dragging clothes on and making for the window. We gasped. Flames were leaping from somewhere at the far end of the building, but even as we looked, they sprang out of a window nearer to us.

  “Wake Brockley!” Matthew shouted, half in and half out of his hose.

  Brockley was awake already. As I dragged on kirtle and bodice, he began to hammer on the door. “We’re coming!” I shouted. “Go on—get out of the inn!” The uproar was increasing. Somewhere below, a woman was screaming hysterically that it was the Huguenots, it must be the Huguenots. “They’ve fired the inn; they want to burn us all. Mother of God preserve us!” I could hear Charpentier outside, yelling orders about water from the well. Matthew, donning a shirt and snatching up his sword belt, threw my cloak around my shoulders and said: “No time for an overdress. Come on!”

  We dashed out through the anteroom, where Brockley, in shirt and breeches and also gripping his sword belt, had waited for us against my orders. Together, we made for the stairs. People in various states of dress or undress were jostling past, some holding candles up to light what would otherwise have been choking darkness, for smoke was drifting up from below. People were coughing, spluttering out questions that nobody could answer; a young man was steadying a girl, who was in tears. But someone downstairs was shouting that it was all right down there as yet, come down quickly, and then someone else started to pound on a gong, presumably to make sure that no one was left still asleep. With the rest of the crowd, we stumbled down, braving the smoke and trying to hold our breath.

  The public room seemed to be on fire; at least, the smoke and a waft of heat came from that direction, barring our way to the front porch. We turned the other way and blundered out through the back door, into the stableyard and into a new chaos. The fire was in the kitchens, too. The flames we had seen from our bedchamber window were coming from there. They were licking upward from its windows like the tongues of greedy cats, searching their whiskers for vestiges of cream, and finding, instead, a creeper that grew on the back wall of the inn. Fire was darting along it and catching eagerly at window frames.

  Charpentier had a bucket chain going from the well and a score of men were hard at work, hurling water through the kitchen windows, and passing buckets out under the arch to attack the fire in the public room at the front, a safer means of getting at it than going through the house. The fire was nowhere near the stable, but grooms were getting the horses out as a precaution, taking them through a rear gate to a paddock. The horses were frightened, plunging against their halters, their flailing hooves endangering those who were fighting the fire.

  They weren’t all people from the inn; half St. Marc’s seemed to have come rushing to the scene. Glancing through the arch to the street, I saw a crowd there, their faces lit with red. The hysterical woman who had been accusing the Huguenots was in their midst, still screaming out her fears and prayers and they were listening to her.

  Then, beyond the roar of the flames and all the coughing and shouting immediately around me, I heard a menacing growl begin from the midst of the crowd and I saw them all turn together and surge concertedly off into the square. I heard the word Huguenot taken up like a chant.

  “There’s a couple of Lutheran families living in the square.” I turned and found the so-called Netherlander, Van Weede, at my side, along with his two companions. Even in the weird mixture of moonlight and firelight, I could see that all three faces were very grim. “I know them slightly,” Van Weede said. “I dined at one of their houses yesterday. The man’s a master potter. I placed an order with him. I doubt I’ll ever see that order now. God pity him and his, for there’s nothing we can do. There’s maybe fifty in that mob.”

  “But—what has happened? Did someone fire the inn? Was it Huguenot troops?” I couldn’t see any. If Huguenot soldiers had smoked us out to massacre us, where were they now? No murderous soldiers had rushed from the shadows brandishing swords. Brockley and Matthew, who had by now got their sword belts properly on, leaving their hands free, had joined the bucket chain, and nobody was interfering with the firefighters.

  “I think not,” said Van Weede grimly. “But that crowd doesn’t agree. Th
ey’ve lost their heads. That bloody screeching woman started them off. It’s that black-haired bitch from the kitchens here. Their Protestant neighbors are harmless crafts-folk but . . .”

  From somewhere outside the inn, but not very far away, an appalling babble broke out: a bestial roar and then a series of long, drawn-out, terrified, gibbering screams. “Oh, my God,” I said stupidly and uselessly, and then I said it again, more loudly, because helmeted men with naked swords were erupting from the darkness after all, their intentions most certainly murderous.

  A split second later, I saw that although they were Protestants, they were not Huguenots; on the contrary, they were Dick Dodd, Walter Dodd, and the redheaded Searle. Then I heard Dick Dodd shouting: “That’s him! That’s De la Roche!” and all three threw themselves toward Matthew, who was standing in the bucket line with his back to them. Terrified and furious, I lost my temper for the second time that night. I ran toward him screaming, and regardless of either safety or modesty, I tore off my cloak and threw it over Searle’s head just as he was about to seize hold of my husband. “Leave him alone! How dare you? How dare you?”

  “Orders, mistress. Out of my way!”

  That was Dick Dodd. Searle’s protests had been muffled by the cloak. “Orders! I’ll give you orders!” I shouted and seizing a bucket of water from the grasp of a startled firefighter, I threw it over Dick.

  “What in hell’s name are you doing? Damnation on you; we’re trying to put this fire out!” somebody yelled in my ear, in French, and the bucket was snatched away again. Matthew had sprung around, drawing his sword. Beside him, Brockley had done the same. Searle, struggling out from under the cloak, shouted: “Remember we’ve to take him alive!” and was then fiercely attacked by Brockley. The Dodds, Dick cursing and dripping, went for Matthew, apparently trying to disarm him. Van Weede ran to my side, grabbed the cloak and threw it around me again, and then, remarking in conversational tones that he loved a good fight, he, too, whisked out a sword and waded obligingly in to support Brockley.