Queen of Ambition

by Buckley, Fiona

  “We will do our best, ma’am,” I said.

  * * *

  The dancing ended. I had asked permission to withdraw afterward, as far as the other ladies were concerned because I was preparing to leave the court and return to Withysham, by way of Thamesbank so that I could collect Meg. I would have to ride with Rob. I hoped that on the way, I might yet put right the coldness that had fallen between us. It had saddened me, but so far Rob had not softened.

  Elizabeth, however, knew well enough that I was not really going to spend the afternoon in helping Dale to shake out dresses and fold them into hampers for the journey. Instead, I was going to the Tower with Sir William Cecil, though Rob had asked to be excused because: “Ursula did most of the investigating; it should be solely her privilege.” The words were gracious; his eyes were not. I was sorry.

  It was an odd sort of privilege. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I had visited a Tower dungeon once before and I would never forget it. I was relieved when, on the way there, Cecil told me that we were not going into the dungeons. “Eavesdropping isn’t so very easy down there but it’s been deliberately provided for in other places. It’s often useful to overhear what prisoners imagine to be private conversations with their visitors. Lady Lennox and Giles Woodforde will meet in a Tower room. It’s not very large, partly because the timber partition at one end is a thin false wall. There’s a narrow space behind it with just room for two or three people, and anyone placed there can hear everything that is said. There’s a door into the hidden space from an adjoining chamber and it has a small window.”

  “Secret rooms everywhere I turn,” I remarked, somewhat sourly.

  The eavesdroppers were even provided, I found, with a couple of stools, and there were holes in the partition through which it was possible to peer into the chamber beyond. Cecil’s gout was better but he still preferred to sit, although I remained standing. Lady Lennox appeared first, escorted by the Lord Lieutenant and superbly dressed as usual, in an elaborate blue and silver ensemble. The Tower chamber was indeed small and when Lady Lennox was standing regally in the middle of it, her vast farthingale almost seemed to fill it. It was not in Lady Lennox, I thought, to tone down her apparel out of respect for the plight of a prisoner.

  She waited, hands linked before her, while the Lord Lieutenant went out again and called down the stairs. Then came the sound of guards ordering someone to get a move on, there, hurry up, we ain’t got all day, and Giles Woodforde was hustled in. The door slammed behind him and was locked, leaving the two of them, as far as they knew, alone together.

  They had tidied Woodforde up, or so I supposed. His straggly dust-colored hair had been trimmed and he was wearing a clean brown jerkin and hose. His face had been washed and so had his bare feet. But he was gaunt from two weeks of prison fare and constant dread, and his bony wrists were crimson-circled from the gyves. He stood trembling, just inside the door until Lady Lennox, after staring at him coldly for all of half a minute, said acidly: “I am here at the queen’s bidding because a prrrisoner had asked to speak with me. Now I find that the prrrisoner is you. You!” The disgust in the last word would have curdled milk and Lady Lennox’s Scottish R’s fairly rolled with fury.

  Giles Woodforde threw himself at her feet. She stepped hastily back but he scrambled after her, clutching at her ankles, pulling at her silver-embroidered hem, kissing her shoes. “Oh, my lady, my lady, you’re my last hope! I did it all for you … at least I tried to do it … I’m sorry I failed; I’m so sorry. Please forgive me. Speak for me! You’re a great lady. If you speak … if you plead … if you say you’ll take me into your house and be surety for me, surely, surely …”

  “What in the name of God,” said Lady Lennox, “are you talking about, you atrrrocious little worrm? Get up! Get up, I say! Ugh! Leave me alone!” She jerked her skirts out of his fingers, and stooping, administered a violent smack on the side of his head. “What is all this? What have you done, or tried to do? Get up!”

  “I was going to kill Dudley!” Woodforde babbled. He came to his feet, not so much from choice as because Lady Lennox had seized his hair and literally hauled him up by it. “So that he would be out of your way, so that he would be out of your son’s way! I know you were angry because you heard that the queen had offered Dudley to Mary of Scotland. You said so in front of me, more than once! You said the queen was scheming to make sure that your son could never marry her. I thought …”

  “You vile little toad of a man! Dudley will never leave Elizabeth. I’ve always known that! And what is Dudley, by birth, comparrred to my son with his rrroyal blood? Elizabeth’s schemes made me angry but I always knew they’d fail! I don’t need a dirrty little assassin to clear the way for my son! He can do his wooing for himself. If he chooses, he will make me queen mother of Scotland without your assistance!”

  “But I did it for you! Oh, my lady, think what they will do to me if you won’t help me! My lady, my lady!”

  “I know exactly what they’ll do to you,” said Lady Lennox disdainfully. “Of courrrse I do. I’ll be there to watch. Guard!”

  When Woodforde was taken away, screaming and howling as though the knife were in his guts already, I sank onto the other stool and would have liked to block my ears but didn’t because this was the world in which I worked—partly by choice, at least—and I would not shield myself from its horrors. But when Lady Lennox had been collected by the Lord Lieutenant and had also gone away, I said to Cecil: “I don’t think I shall ever forget that—the sounds he made. Like … like an animal bellowing in terror.”

  “No, you won’t forget,” Cecil said. “Nor should you.”

  “I know. But—I will not witness his death, or Jester’s.”

  “I too,” said Cecil, “avoid such things. The burden is heavy enough as it is.”

  We sat on for a moment, in silent concurrence, until we were sure that Lady Lennox was well out of the way. Then we emerged, to join our waiting escort, mount our horses, and set out for Whitehall.

  On the way, Cecil said: “She is not implicated. But she is a queen of ambition if ever I met one. I shall warn Her Majesty that Lady Lennox had better be watched and should be clapped into the Tower if she as much as breathes a wrong word in time to come. We may grant Darnley permission to go to Scotland—his father has already asked to go and I think Her Majesty will agree. But we shan’t let Lady Lennox go. As I think I once said to you before, she will be our surety. While we have her, Darnley may become king consort of Scotland, but he won’t conspire with Philip of Spain for an army to make him king consort of England!”

  I didn’t envy Cecil. His was a hard task in a hard world. I was glad I would be away from all this soon. I would be in France, at Blanchepierre, with Matthew, settled at last in a permanent way of life and in time, my days at the court of England, in the service of Elizabeth and Cecil, would be no more than a dream.

  When I arrived back at Whitehall, I met Rob on my way through the garden. Calmly and politely, but still without a sign of his old friendliness, he told me that he had had news from Thamesbank. Mattie had had a baby daughter two weeks early, but safely. She and the child were well. “Mattie would have liked to call the baby Ursula,” Rob said. “A pretty compliment to you. But if you will forgive me, Mistress Blanchard, I would prefer to call her Elizabeth. I am writing to tell Mattie so.”

  “A wise choice,” I said mildly. I went on to my apartment, and found that I too had letters awaiting me, two of them, though the messengers who brought them had already gone. Both were from Blanchepierre.

  One was in Matthew’s hand; the other in a writing unfamiliar to me. I opened Matthew’s first. It was dated early in August and spoke of a waning both of the summer heat and of the plague epidemic. Soon, darling Saltspoon, he said, he hoped to be sending me word that I could come home in safety, bringing Meg with me. All was in readiness for us and every day would seem like a year, until we were together again….

  Then I opened the second letter. It was
from Armand, Matthew’s uncle, who was also a priest and lived at Blanchepierre with us. It seemed that the very day after Matthew’s letter had been sent, the heat had been renewed and so had the plague. It thrived in hot weather. People from outside had to come to the château sometimes, to bring in food. A drover bringing cattle in had collapsed in the courtyard. He had been carried to a hayloft and had died there, and two men at Blanchepierre had taken the disease as well. One of them was a groom who had helped to carry him to the loft. This groom, before he sickened, had spoken to Matthew about a lame horse. The second Blanche-pierre victim was Matthew himself.

  Within four days after his letter had been dispatched to me, Matthew de la Roche, my dearly loved second husband, was dead.

  I did not sleep that night. A little to my surprise, I didn’t develop a sick headache, which was my usual response to violent emotion, but I sat up all night, by the window, listening to the hoot of passing owls and the murmur of the soft summer breeze, and thinking, thinking, of all that Matthew and I had been to each other; of our passion and our quarreling, of our days together in Blanchepierre; of the stillborn child that had nearly killed me; of my love for him, and the love of England and Elizabeth from which he had never weaned me; of what my future now would be.

  It was hard to believe that I would never again see his dark, narrow eyes sparkle with laughter; never again hear him call me by his special pet name of Salt-spoon.

  I would not consider the other thoughts, deep in my mind: the fact that I need not, now, face another pregnancy and risk my life in childbed. At this, I would not look. I would not admit that for me Matthew’s death was anything but unrelieved calamity.

  I would never now go back to France. Matthew had not left Blanchepierre to me but to a cousin of his, evidently assuming that if I lost him, I would not want to live in France but would wish to stay at Withysham, and that Withysham was adequate provision for me, which indeed it was.

  I will not speak of the next week or two; indeed, my memory of that time is vague. People were very kind, including the queen. I was allowed to keep to my chamber as much as I wished; prayers were said for me in chapel, asking God to comfort me and heal my grief.

  The grief was the worse because Matthew was already buried before I even knew he was dead. I had had no means of saying farewell. I had had no opportunity to place the kiss for the dead on his forehead; no chance to shed tears by his grave. The queen, when I asked, refused to give me a passport for France.

  “It is better not,” she said. “The place you need now is your own home, Withysham. You should go there as soon as you feel well enough to travel.” She regarded me with those remarkable golden brown eyes of hers, which could be both kind and implacable at the same time. “When you were here so briefly before you set off for Cambridge, I think you told some of my ladies that at home in Withysham, you had been studying Latin with your daughter. I urge you to resume that. There is healing in such occupations. I speak from experience.”

  I had been right when I wondered whether Elizabeth, to whom the worlds of marriage and motherhood were closed, had sought and found a refuge in the life of the mind. I think she did. I could only hope that I would, too.

  And so to Withysham I came, in the late September of 1564. Behind me in London, I left two men who were doomed soon to die, and I had brought them to the scaffold. Though my conscience about Woodforde and Jester was not too troubled. One memory that kept on recurring was that of Dr. Barley’s book-crammed study with the flask of dark red Rhône wine on the corner shelf, and his housekeeper, the spry, loquacious Mistress Cottrell saying that Woodforde had been there on the day before Dr. Barley died.

  He had brought wine with him and shared it with Barley. He could have had little chance of bringing poison to put in it, or so I thought at first. Unless …

  I found at Withysham that my aged protégée, the Welshwoman Gladys, had behaved circumspectly while I was away and had caused no trouble. She greeted me cheerfully, with her fanged smile, and showed me some new medicinal plants that she had grown in the garden, which would be good for coughs and colds in winter. On impulse, I picked her brains.

  “Gladys,” I said, “are you still making infusions of foxglove for the steward, Master Malton?”

  “Yes, I am. And it works, indeed it does, as well as anything could!” Gladys bridled slightly, fearing censure.

  “I heard of a physician in Cambridge who uses it, too. But I wanted to know—what happens if you take too much of it? Would it make you ill?”

  “’Course it would,” said Gladys. “Lots of things do, if you take too much. You take foxglove for a toiling heart and it’ll ease it, in the right amount. Take too much and you start throwing up and likely you’ll die.”

  I never reported my suspicions. There was no need. Woodforde was as good as dead already. Besides, I couldn’t be sure. But the pictures kept coming into my mind: of Woodforde arriving with his wine, talking to Dr. Barley, poor ailing Barley who found the stairs such a trial, and saying, perhaps, I’d like a look at such and such a book … you keep it upstairs, don’t you? No, no, I’ll find it. I know the stairs are hard for you….

  If he knew the house, he might know of the medicine on the windowsill in Dr. Barley’s bedroom. As an educated man, he might know little about the practical work of brewing potions, but still have some knowledge of medicines in general. I could see him, in my mind, climbing the stairs, perhaps taking a little empty vial from his belt pouch, filling it from the medicine flask. And coming down, and sharing the Rhône wine with his friend, and finding an opportunity to slip the contents of the vial into Barley’s glass of deep red wine, whose color would mask it. I didn’t know what the medicine tasted like but a few pinches of spice might have solved the problem of taste. And then Woodforde went away and Dr. Barley …

  Became sick and the next day, died.

  The idea wouldn’t leave me. I believed that Woodforde was capable of it and he certainly had his reasons. As for Jester, he had killed Thomas Shawe and had confessed to it. They were as murderous as each other, those two. Jester was more apt to murder from fear while Woodforde was content to kill for expediency, that was the only difference.

  If I could not quite forget Woodforde’s cries as he was dragged away from Lady Lennox, well, I still need not lie awake and think about them. On the day of his execution, which was also Jester’s, I did have a sick headache, but it passed.

  Hitherto, I had only known Withysham in summer. Autumn that year was beautiful for a while, with the trees turning to gold and red, and lively winds to tear at the leaves and fill the air with a dancing largesse of bright leaves. But when the trees were bare, the days turned gray and hushed. Underfoot, the earth was muddy and the evenings darkened early, filling the old house with shadows. In this house, I had been married to Matthew; in this house I had lain my first night with him. Here, too, I had schemed to flee from him, and done so, because Elizabeth needed me. But I had torn my heart from my body when I did it and I had been glad, at last, when we came together again. I would have been happy, in time, at Blanchepierre, I told myself, and surely, I would have had children for Matthew, and survived it.

  Well, the dream was gone. I tried my hardest to fill my days well. My aunt Tabitha and uncle Herbert paid me a formal visit of condolence and we sat in the hall exchanging correct sentiments. Aunt Tabitha never omitted the social proprieties. I was glad, however, when they went away.

  I had not after all ridden with Rob to collect Meg from Thamesbank. The news of Matthew’s death had thrown all arrangements into confusion. In the end, I had gone to Withysham first and then sent for Meg. Rob dispatched her to me with an escort but neither he nor Mattie came themselves. But Meg was well, and glad to see me. Together, she and I resumed our studies.

  As I had once planned to do in France, I began to look for a tutor so that we could take up Greek. I took an interest in the house and the kitchen and began teaching my daughter to cook. I also introduced her to advanced
embroidery stitches. I did write once or twice to Mattie, giving her news of Meg, and Mattie wrote back, but I knew our friendship was withering, because Rob would not forgive me for being a more successful agent than he was.

  Which was absurd, for my days as an agent were over, just as my days as a wife were over. I had Meg and I had the company of Brockley and Dale, who would have to remain with me now, although I was careful, very careful, to keep my distance from Brockley. I must make a new life and it must be the life of a widowed matron, a dignified chatelaine, the lady of the manor of Withysham, of whom no scandalous word was ever spoken, for I must not hurt Dale, and one day Meg would grow up and perhaps go to court, and I wanted her to have every chance of a good marriage.

  In December, although I was wearing black, Yuletide still had to be celebrated in some fashion and with a huge effort, I arranged for the usual green branches to be brought indoors and for the usual feast to be served. I think Meg enjoyed it. I can’t say that I did. I was aware, all the time, of Dale and Brockley watching me anxiously, as though I might suddenly collapse. I felt sometimes as though I might, but came through it all without drama.

  January was gray and bitter. I tried to take an interest in plans for changes to the garden when the springtime came. About the middle of the month, I was walking one morning in the grounds with Dale and Meg, pointing out the places where I thought this or that might be planted, when Brockley came out of the house to tell me that, just as she had done before I went to Cambridge, Aunt Tabitha had called on me. She was waiting in my parlor, where there was a fire. Would I come?

  When I entered the parlor, I stopped short, startled. This was not the Aunt Tabitha to whom I was accustomed. This was a version of my aunt that I had never seen before, with an old cloak thrown on anyhow, and graying hair looped untidily under a cap that did not look entirely clean. And a look in her eyes that was quite new to me—of desperation and appeal.