The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Page 11

  “Yes, he has two brothers. The eldest works with his father, and the second boy’s in Spain. He has a business there, importing carpets from the Levant. He considered entering a monastery but decided that he had no vocation.”

  “A monastery? He follows the old faith?” Hugh said.

  “We all do,” said Mistress Dean. “We pay the fine regularly and thereby buy ourselves out of the need to attend Anglican services. It comes expensive at times, but there, one should be ready to make sacrifices for one’s beliefs. The duke has a preference for the old faith himself—which is why he found Edmund so acceptable as an extra secretary. I believe you yourself were brought up in a Catholic family, Mistress Stannard? So the duke told us.”

  “Yes, that is true,” I said. “I was born a Faldene and they are Catholic.” I added diplomatically: “But I conform to the law.”

  “Still, you no doubt have an affinity for the faith of our forefathers. My son will not, of course, interfere with your daughter’s choice of worship, though naturally he hopes that in time she will come round to his way of thinking. I wish we could have seen her, for Edmund wrote to us that she was charming and intelligent. I certainly hope . . . ”

  Will not interfere . . . hopes that in time . . . will come round . . . What happened to that little word would? The Deans, like Norfolk, seemed to think the betrothal was assured. I hid my irritation but I was glad of the distraction when Harry Scrivener reappeared beside me.

  “If I may intrude for a moment. I am sorry, Mistress Dean. But if I could have a private word with Mistress Stannard . . . ?”

  I caught Hugh’s eye and he gave me a tiny nod. I rose to my feet. “I will only be a moment.” I moved away with Scrivener. “What is it?” I asked softly.

  “You’ll have to invent a suitable excuse for being called away by a virtual stranger. I shall leave that to you. But I’ve noticed something which may interest you.”

  “Yes?”

  “I passed close to where Norfolk was talking with one of his secretaries. Edmund Dean, I fancy, the lad who has been suggested as your future son-in-law. He looked remarkably like Mistress Dean, anyway.”

  “That would be Edmund, yes.”

  “Our good host came up to them and Edmund handed him a small bag. I think it was a bag of coin—I should say it was quite heavy, anyway. The way it swung . . . ”

  “Quite. And . . . ”

  “I heard him say that it was from his father.”

  I was puzzled. “The return of a loan, perhaps. Master Dean isn’t in easy circumstances just now, since the closure of Antwerp. Perhaps he borrowed some money from Ridolfi.”

  “Maybe,” said Scrivener. “But I went on roaming about and keeping my eyes open.” The eyes in question had a decided glint of enjoyment in them. “The duke apparently has two secretaries with him—the other’s called Higford, I think. I heard him introducing himself to someone. A merchant like Dean Senior, I fancy. One learns to recognize types. The merchant handed over a purse, which Higford then took straight to Ridolfi. Do people usually return bankers’ loans to them at private dinners? It seems nearly as odd as Ridolfi and the Spanish ambassador putting their heads together so closely in that very peculiar garden. I was sorry to interrupt your conversation just now, but people come and go at these affairs and you might have taken your leave and vanished before I could speak to you again.”

  He nodded, turned away, and in a moment was absorbed into another group of people. I went slowly back to Hugh and the Deans. They looked at me inquiringly.

  “Just a triviality,” I said. “A . . . a message from a mutual friend.”

  “I have been telling your husband,” said Mistress Dean, “that Edmund believes your daughter, Meg—Margaret, as he prefers to call her—has taken a liking to him, just as he has taken a liking to her. That is encouraging—though I admit I set little store by such things. Young people are adaptable and should be prepared to adapt according to their elders’ wishes. I did so, and so did my husband.”

  “Very true. Very true,” said Master Dean. I wondered if his wife could hear the mournful note in his voice.

  “I married of my own free will, every time,” I said. I was tired of playing games with the Deans. “I recommend it, personally. Well. This has been a most interesting meeting. I think we all know much more about each other now. Hugh and I will be on our way home soon, and we shall give careful thought to all we have learned. Shall we not, Hugh?”

  “We shall indeed. I think we are all united in wishing both Edmund and Meg the happiest possible futures, whether in each other’s company or otherwise. Master Dean, Mistress Dean, it has been a great pleasure to meet you personally. Just by doing so, I think we now know Edmund that much better . . . ”

  With a gracious exchange of further insincere compliments, we parted from the Deans.

  “I wonder,” murmured Hugh as we moved out onto the terrace, where no one else could hear us, “what it’s like, making love to an icicle?”

  “I trust you’ll never find out.”

  “I never have so far, thank God. What was all that about, Ursula? What did that fellow Scrivener really want with you?”

  I told him.

  “Odd,” said Hugh. “Very odd. Money being stealthily slipped into Ridolfi’s hands . . . has he got all the merchants in London in debt to him somehow?”

  “They could be donations,” I said slowly. “But if so—for what?”

  11

  Assignment

  “If you were anyone but yourselves,” said Sir William Cecil, Secretary of State and a member (just now exceedingly harassed) of Elizabeth’s royal council, “I would have had you thrown out by force. I don’t usually admit callers who argue with my doorkeeper when he says I’m not seeing visitors, and then sit down in my entrance hall and refuse to move until he agrees to tell me they’re here. Not even my fellow councilors would behave like that. They would send in notes, or . . . ”

  “We’re not councilors,” said Hugh mildly, “and the doorkeeper refused to take in a note.”

  “He’s new since I was last here,” I said. “He didn’t recognize me.”

  “My apologies for that. He was doing what he thought was his duty. Is it true, Ursula, as he says, that when the two of you sat down in my entrance hall and declined to move, you sat down on the floor?”

  “Yes, Sir William. There was only one spare seat, a single stool, and I wanted Hugh to have that, because of his stiff knees. So I sat on the floor. It was difficult,” I said in aggrieved tones. “I am wearing a farthingale, as you see, and a large, fashionable open ruff. I felt ridiculous and the farthingale was frankly inconvenient.”

  A very faint smile creased the Secretary of State’s grim lips. “I can imagine. I’m glad I’m not a woman. If you had not been you, my dear Ursula—because I have some confidence in you and when I heard that a Mistress Stannard was sitting on the floor in my entrance hall, I knew you wouldn’t behave in such an extraordinary way without a good reason—you would have had rough handling. Now, kindly tell me what it’s all about.”

  “It’s a long story,” said Hugh.

  “Then the sooner you begin to tell it, the better. Proceed.”

  The study that Cecil used in his house in the Strand was smaller than the ones he was usually allocated in Elizabeth’s various palaces, and the desk at which he was seated was strewn with so many papers that we literally could not see the surface of it. When his despairing doorkeeper had finally sought and received permission to have us shown in, he had been consulting documents and writing busily with a quill, which, from the way it spluttered and threw ink flecks all over his fingers, badly needed renewing. It looked as though he had no time to trouble with it, or else was too worried to notice.

  I felt concerned. From what Norfolk had said, the business of the sequestered Spanish money had brought him under very serious attack from his fellow councilors. He was beleaguered and it showed. In the years I had known him, he had always looked tired. Work
ing for Elizabeth was tiring. I knew that too. But I had never seen him look this exhausted.

  I was angry with Elizabeth. She ought to be giving him better support. Norfolk had said that she had backed him at first, but if she were still doing so, he wouldn’t be in this anxious state. I could guess what was going on in her mind. She had a trick of seizing credit for policies that worked and unloading the blame for failures onto someone else. But she had no right to do that to anyone who had served her as long and as well as Cecil.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “We can’t be sure that the bits and pieces we’ve come across really are linked. There is a man called Master Harry Scrivener. I met him once in Antwerp and he says he used to work for you . . . ”

  “Indeed he did,” said Cecil. “He’s retired now but he was a lawyer and also gifted with ciphers—both at creating and decoding them. He’s staying in London at the moment and he visited me a few weeks ago. You’ve come across him, have you?”

  “We met him at the house of an Italian banker called Roberto Ridolfi. It seems that you’ve told him about my secret work,” I said. “He clearly thinks that something is going on that ought not to be.”

  “And the fact that he has suspicions too has convinced us that we aren’t imagining ours,” Hugh said.

  “Quite possibly,” I said, “what we observed when we dined with the Ridolfis has nothing to do with the deaths concerned with Howard House but . . . ”

  “The best place to begin, Ursula, is at the beginning. Take things in order and I’ll decide for myself what is connected to what.”

  “I’m sorry. Well, it starts,” I said, putting it as succinctly as possible and omitting Gladys’s shocking performance in the churchyard at Faldene, “with the Duke of Norfolk taking an interest in one of his young secretaries and writing to us, saying that we might like to consider the fellow, at some point in the future, as a husband for my daughter, Meg . . . ”

  I told the story as briefly and clearly as I could, with interjections now and then from Hugh, tracing the links in what, as I admitted more than once, was a tenuous chain. The letters Sybil and I had seen during Gale’s illness, and the oddity of the cipher. Norfolk’s unconcealed interest in Mary Stuart (Cecil’s gaze sharpened at this point). The puzzle of Gale’s murder and worse, the extremely horrible death of young Walt. The passing of money to Ridolfi after the dinner and his curiously intent—and private—conversation with the Spanish ambassador.

  “We apologize for our intrusion here today,” said Hugh. “We did it only because we felt that we must tell you what we’ve observed.”

  “Yes. Yes, I see.” Cecil rose and roamed to the window, his long gown swishing. He came back and sat down again. “And Scrivener has scented a mystery too, has he? He was always a shrewd man. He comes of an interesting family. His grandfather, as a young man, back in the days of the wars between York and Lancaster, was the younger son of a fairly prosperous Hampshire yeoman farmer. He was a bright lad, and his family had him educated in an abbey, from the age of about ten, with the idea that he might become a monk. He never took vows, though, because at the age of nineteen, he was thrown out for wenching.”

  As was his way, Cecil said this in a solemn voice, signaling that it was not a laughing matter, but there was a spark of laughter in his eyes, all the same. “According to Harry,” he said, “his grandfather was caught slipping back over the wall after an assignation in the nearby village. Well, he had to find a way of supporting himself out in the world and since the monks had taught him to read and write, he decided to make a living at it. He copied manuscripts, wrote letters on behalf of people who couldn’t write their own, and so on. He did well. That’s how the family acquired their surname—Scrivener. He married, and his son followed in his footsteps, and so did his grandson—Harry. Harry’s father could afford a really good education for him and thus he was able to qualify as a lawyer and get himself into my employment. He’s a good man, trustworthy and talented. I found his skills with ciphers very useful at times.”

  “You trusted him to the point of telling him about me,” I said.

  “Oh yes. I had occasion, now and then, to mention you in memoranda to the queen. He was one of the chosen few who made copies of confidential documents for me. He is completely reliable.”

  “He seemed to think,” I said, “that I might actually be on an assignment. He offered to help me if necessary.”

  “He would. Well, well. Now, I did know that Norfolk was still interested in marrying Mary. I take it you’re aware that de Spes was under house arrest for a while. Did you wonder why that didn’t last longer?”

  “Well, yes,” I said.

  “The queen and I decided that we might learn more of his activities by letting him loose—or seeming to do so. He was freed, but he has been watched and his correspondence has been opened. In his letters to Philip of Spain, he has mentioned Norfolk’s interest in Mary. Norfolk’s housekeeper, Mistress Dalton,” Cecil added, “is in my pay. One of my clerks is her nephew. His parents are dead and his kind aunt visits him when Norfolk’s household is in London, and writes to him when it’s elsewhere. She reports on Norfolk’s affairs through him. She confirms what we have learned from de Spes.”

  “No wonder she can afford to dress like a duchess,” I said, marveling, not for the first time, at Cecil’s information network.

  Though it now transpired that even so, there were limitations.

  “We’ve never found out how Norfolk and Mary hope to get over the fact that she’s still married to Bothwell. I suppose she’ll try to get it annuled. She’ll plead duress, I daresay.” His lip curled. “I think the scheme is to put Mary back on the Scottish throne, with Norfolk as her consort, and then try to have her made heir to Elizabeth. In which case Norfolk might one day be king consort here. Efforts would be made to turn her into an Anglican, of course.”

  “Isn’t Norfolk Catholic, more or less?” I asked, though doubtfully, remembering that English Bible. “He has Popish images in his chapel.”

  “Norfolk will attach himself to whatever faith promises the best rewards,” said Cecil sourly. “Mary’s half brother, the Earl of Moray, the Scottish regent, was in England early this year and Norfolk discussed Mary’s restoration with him. There was a plot among the northern earls—they’re mostly Catholic—to assassinate him on his way home, to leave the way clearer for Mary’s return.”

  “Was there?” This was new to Hugh as well as to me.

  “Yes, but Norfolk stopped it. He gave Moray armed protection, in return for a promise that Moray would support Mary’s restoration. Given, of course, that Elizabeth consents. As yet, no one has ventured to ask her! I suspect that a number of the council members rather like the scheme, mainly because they know I don’t! If they can convince Elizabeth that Mary should be restored and that her marriage to Norfolk is a good idea . . . ”

  “But surely, the queen would never agree to such a marriage!” I said. “Norfolk would be aiming at the throne, or as good as.”

  “Elizabeth feels, on principle, that princes should not be ejected from their thrones. If it can happen to one, it could happen to another. And at least Norfolk isn’t a foreign, Catholic prince with an army behind him! That was the argument in favor of Mary’s marriage to Darnley, if you remember. It’s possible that the queen might be brought to consent. Whereas I would not. In all honesty I could never recommend it.” He looked at us and once more we saw that grim smile. “You have been staying with Norfolk. What is your opinion of him as a future king—of either Scotland or England?”

  We thought of Thomas Howard, of his pale eyes and beaky nose, his overfastidiousness, his occasional petulance, his good heart and his sentimentality. His too visible ambition. His obtuse streak. Our silence was answer enough.

  “Quite,” said Cecil. “And most of my fellow council members must feel the same, but some of them are so eager to lever me and Her Majesty apart that they are simply indifferent to his drawbacks. But if she once loses co
nfidence in me . . . ”

  He looked at me. There was no laughter now in his tired blue eyes. I had never seen them so weary and so unhappy. It was wrong, I thought, very wrong indeed that a man so conscientious should be made to look like that.

  “Who will guide and steady her if I’m not there?” Cecil said. “We have worked in partnership for years. In giving her my advice, I have always—always—put England’s interests, and Elizabeth’s interests, which I regard as the same thing, first. I promised her I would, at the time of her accession. And she told me that she expected such advice from me. She asked me always to speak according to my conscience and my judgment, and not simply to please her. But time brings changes. A young, untried princess, new to power, is one thing. A woman in her thirties, who has been queen for a decade is another. If she were to turn or be turned against me, and look for advice to someone who was more self-seeking . . . ”

  “Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,” said Hugh.

  “Quite,” said Cecil wearily. “She loves him, though not as the world understands that word when applied to a man and a woman. But he is not the man to guide England safely. I am afraid, for myself, for her, for England. And now, we have these killings: Gale and the boy.”

  “Did you already know about them?” Hugh asked.

  “Oh yes. Via Mistress Dalton at first. In fact, I sent for a copy of the inquest records, and I’ve read them. Later, though, Norfolk himself told me about the business. Despite our dispute earlier this year, we are still on speaking terms. There are matters on which he wants my advice. He puts his own interpretation on it all. Julius Gale was no doubt killed by some private enemy of his own. The letters he was carrying were found in his room, perfectly safe, and probably had nothing to do with the matter. The boy Walt perhaps knew something dangerous to the killer and was therefore disposed of as well. So many people have secrets in their lives, Norfolk says, questionable acquaintances or interests which they conceal from their employers and their more respectable friends.”