A Pawn for a Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's (Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court) (16 page)

“Stay there,” I said to Brockley. “Don’t leave my side.”

“Has that man been offering you impertinence, madam?”

“You could say that, yes. And when he first proposed this outing and I said I’d have my groom with me, he said we could always lose a groom. Don’t you dare let yourself get lost!”

“Don’t worry, madam,” said Brockley grimly.

But of course, there was still the matter of finding out more about Adam Ericks. Throughout the rest of the outing I kept my distance from Dormbois as far as I could, but I several times caught glimpses of that disconcerting smile, and when we all bunched up together to ride back through Edinburgh, he once more edged
alongside me to say: “If I have news of Ericks, madam, I will tell you at the wedding.”

“Thank you,” I said wearily, wishing I hadn’t tried to make him my deputy for my inquiries about Ericks. I wanted no more to do with him. He hadn’t seen Edward. He hadn’t got the list. There was no point in pursuing this acquaintance and some very good reasons for ending it.

The image of Edward in death was still savagely vivid, crying out for justice. But for that, I thought, I would leave Holyrood the very next day and set out for home.

As it was, I knew I could not. I must consult with Brockley and see what new ways there were by which we might make inquiries. I could not give up searching for Edward’s killer until all possibilities had been tried and had failed. Even if it meant giving Dormbois a chance to obtain some information.

When I returned to my quarters, I found that I could not have left Holyrood on the morrow in any case, for to my distress, I was confronted with a tottering Dale, whose face was very white, except for an ominous, orange-tinged patch of color on each cheekbone, and whose first attempt to speak to me was lost in a volley of sneezes. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said huskily when the sneezing was over, “but I seem to have a fever. I think I may have caught cold.”

In this crisis, even the pursuit of Edward’s slayers had to wait. Dale needed care. Except for my occasional attacks of migraine, I had the sound Faldene health, and Brockley was as tough as a ship’s timber, but Dale was vulnerable. With Dale, even a cold could never be disregarded as trivial, and this was more than a cold. Like Sir Brian Dormbois’s hapless second wife, and the unknown guest at present being cosseted at Holyrood, she had fallen victim to the northern climate, probably exacerbated by the exhaustion of our long journey (not to mention the horror at the end of it).

In the few days before the Livingstone marriage, Brockley and I had our hands full with her.

However, the warmth and comfort of our suite and the nursing we gave her did their work, aided (which touched me) by a kindly message from Queen Mary, who had heard of Dale’s illness and sent along a page not
only with her good wishes but also with a draft to encourage sleep.

“Her Majesty says to tell you it is made of some foreign poppy and will help a sick person to sleep if sore throat or headache are keeping them awake. Good sleep is part of healing, she says,” the page repeated.

Whether the sleep that the poppy draft did indeed induce made any difference, I don’t know. But after three days of fever and sneezing, Dale began slowly to recover, and our own efforts with balsam inhalations and doses of horehound stopped the cold from attacking her lungs. By the day of the wedding, she was still pale and visibly weak, but she said in firm if nasal tones that she couldn’t abide the thought of asking anyone else to help me dress for the occasion. Valiantly, and oblivious to my assurances that she need not, she got onto her feet, saw to my hair, and fastened me into my silver-gray and violet gown.

I thanked her sincerely and went to the wedding in a cheerful mood, looking forward to it as a treat after the worry of Dale’s illness, and a day’s holiday from the matter of Edward. Mary Livingstone was marrying for love, and the celebrations should therefore be full of happy potential, like the launching of a ship or the laying of a foundation stone.

I was more at home in Holyrood by then. It can be lonely, attending a function when you know hardly anybody there, but although, while looking after Dale, I had never left the palace, I had still had a few brief intervals in which to learn more about the court and make some new acquaintances, and I had seized my opportunities. The more I knew about this Scottish
world, the better my chances of tracking down Edward’s killer, and as an extra, I could now expect friendly greetings at the wedding and partners for the dancing.

Admittedly, my efforts to learn more about the touchy and much-intermarried Scottish nobility hadn’t all been successful. Their pedigrees were so entangled that they resembled knitting that has been got at by a playful kitten, and their feuds were nearly as bad. It would be a long time before I had all that off by heart.

On the other hand though, I had now met Mary Livingstone’s bridegroom, John Sempill, a well-born young Englishman who was one of the best dancers at the court, and I had learned that one of the other Maries, Mary Fleming, was being courted by the queen’s Secretary for English Correspondence, a middle-aged man called William Maitland, whom I had also met.

I had had conversations too with the little Italian David Riccio, and with a somewhat curious individual called Christopher Rokeby, who was part of the English ambassador’s permanent staff in Scotland but seemed to be more often about the court than attending to his ambassador, making himself useful and, I suspected, prying.

He was a round-shouldered man of goodness knows what age, with dull clothes and a grayish face and a knack of being unobtrusive. I saw him sometimes hovering where he could overhear conversations between people who had clearly failed to notice him. I suspected that he was in the same line of business as myself, by which I mean one of Cecil’s agents. He got into conversation with me several times, and I thought gloomily that if my presence in Scotland wasn’t reported to Cecil
by anyone else, it probably would be by means of Christopher Rokeby.

I did once or twice think of asking his help, but he also had a knack of fading away just as I had almost worked around to asking him, as though he had sensed my intention and wished to avoid it.

In addition, I had been approached, when taking a short turn in the formal garden, by the queen’s uncle Rene of Elboeuf, who insisted on walking with me for a while. Since he was Dormbois’s employer, I decided that I could at least ask a few questions about Dormbois and did so, to be told that he was a most trustworthy and valiant soldier, willing to do anything his lord commanded.

I tried to probe further into this intriguing testimonial but Elboeuf, a gallant Frenchman to his very bone marrow, changed the subject and started paying me compliments, obliging me to remember that Dale was due for another dose of horehound, which I must hurry off and give to her.

I had done my best with the week, I said to myself. Dale had recovered her health and I had learned a little, though it didn’t include anything that pointed to Edward’s killers or the fate of his list. I wondered whether Dormbois really would appear at the wedding and whether, if he did, he would have any news for me. I would have to be glad, now, of help from anyone, for the scent was growing colder every day.

• • •

It was done. Amid wafts of incense and much feminine cooing, and sumptuously dressed at Queen
Mary’s expense, Mary Livingstone had become Mary Sempill, and no one had tried to burst in and disrupt the nuptial mass, either. Largesse had been distributed to the beggars of Edinburgh. With the three remaining Maries and a number of other ladies, I had gone to the bridal chamber to strew dried rosemary and other sweet herbs and little fresh flowers across the coverlet of the bed, so that the couple could be bedded amid fragrant scents and the symbols of spring and fertility.

Before that, however, came the banquet and the dancing.

There were two top tables on the dais at the banquet, one for the couple and their families; the other for Queen Mary and her immediate circle: her uncle Elboeuf, her half brothers, their wives, her honored guest Darnley (very fashionable in black velvet, which set off his fair hair), and two of her Maries, Seton and Beaton.

I saw the Earl of Bothwell sitting just below the dais with some other men and women of rank, including one exquisitely dressed lady with strong, dark good looks, whom someone pointed out to me as Bothwell’s sister, Lady Janet Hepburn. Also at the Bothwell table, with an air of having been squeezed in because no one knew quite where to put him, was the ugly little secretary, David Riccio. I was a little lower down, at a parallel table, my wide silvery-gray farthingale bumping the even wider one of Mary Fleming’s splendid blue velvet. She was off-duty, and opposite to her sat her would-be lover, the middle-aged William Maitland.

The room was big, with a gloriously painted ceiling and tall, mullioned windows, but it was also crammed
and extremely noisy. The Earl of Bothwell had been drinking deep and was arguing with someone, thumping his goblet on the board for emphasis and declaring his point of view in a resounding bass voice. At my table, a trio of noblemen whom I didn’t know, all with arm muscles bulging through their embroidered sleeves and red, drunken faces, were exchanging coarse jokes and guffawing loudly, and somewhere behind me someone kept emitting loud, hoarse belches, like a raven with indigestion.

Looking about me, I could not see whether Dormbois was present or not, but Maitland had noticed that I kept on turning my head to gaze about me and put his own interpretation on it.

“Amusing, is it not?” He was a Scotsman, but he was both educated and traveled and could look on his fellow countrymen with an objective eye. He was also a trifle pedantic and enjoyed instructing people. “Two cultures in collision. Queen Mary brought France with her when she came here, and now you see it laid over our rough ways like very thin gold leaf over a slab of Hibernian rock.”

“Really?” I turned to him in surprise.

“Were ye not thinking the same thing?”

“I expect Madame de la Roche would not have put it so poetically,” said Mary Fleming, smiling warmly into his eyes.

Not wanting to reveal an interest in Dormbois, I flinched at the sound of another frightful belch from behind me and said: “Yes, you mean
that,
I suppose. And that,” I added, as renewed guffaws burst out a few feet away. “I hadn’t thought of it quite as you put it, but of
course, you’re right. And there are plaids and fur edgings all mixed up with the brocades and satins . . .”

“And offerings of blood pudding amid the confections of spun sugar,” said Maitland. “Scotland and France will never mix, any more than our whiskey mixes with good wine and God knows there are some men mixing those as well.” He looked around disapprovingly as one of the guffaws turned into a retch and one of the red faces turned a delicate shade of green. Two of the ribald trio quickly got up, hoisted their friend’s arms around their shoulders, and steered him out of the room, at speed.

“I observe,” said Maitland dryly, “that the Earl of Bothwell and that golden-haired English lad Darnley have already been overcome.”

I hadn’t noticed when it happened, but Bothwell’s argumentative voice had stopped. I looked around and saw that he was missing and that Darnley, too, had quitted his place. Queen Mary was looking at his empty seat quite regretfully, evidently sorry that he had gone.

“And there goes Elboeuf as well,” said Maitland as the queen’s uncle got to his feet. “Provision will have been made,” he added reassuringly. “Just outside. At these affairs, there are always a great many such disasters, and many beautiful garments ruined beyond hope. It all means profits for the merchants and tailors, not to mention the laundresses. Some more wine, Madame de la Roche?”

“Thank you, no, I have had enough.” The wine was very strong and I didn’t wish to be among those needing the facilities so helpfully arranged. There was no
sign that Bothwell or any of the others were returning. But as I scanned the room in a casual search for them, I saw the face I had looked for earlier. Dormbois was there after all. As my gaze lit on him, he looked my way and raised a goblet in salute to me. I would speak to him, I thought, when the dancing began.

The ball was held in an adjacent room. Streamers embroidered with words of well-wishing and garlands of evergreens and paper flowers spanned the room; crossed banners bearing the devices of Sempill and Livingstone adorned the wall above the canopied throne provided for the new-wed pair. Not that they occupied it for long, for when we all crowded into the room on the heels of the principals, the musicians were already in their place in the gallery overlooking the floor. Within moments, they had begun a galliard melody, and John Sempill was on his feet, holding out his hand to his bride and leading her out to open the dance.

They had the floor to themselves for a short while, and then Queen Mary herself, partnered by Moray, rose to join in, and that was the signal for everyone to follow her example. At that moment, Dormbois appeared at my side, offering me his arm. “Will you partner me, madam? Your mourning state does not prevent you?”

“Not today. I note that the queen is dancing too, and I have no wish to be a death’s-head at the feast,” I said, and went with him onto the floor.

As well as not wishing to cast a blight over the merriment, of course, I also wished to speak to him in something like privacy. At the edge of the floor, I had been standing in a crowd of others. Now, as Dormbois
and I faced each other to exchange bow and curtsy before beginning to dance, I said in a low voice: “You have news for me?”

“Iphm,” said Dormbois irritatingly. “Maybe. But you are too businesslike too soon. First, let us dance.”

We did. He was an excellent performer, I must say: surefooted, agile, with an air of having a perfectly fit body under complete control. He was wearing mulberry again, which suited him, and a number of very fine rings, which flashed in the light from the tall windows as he held my hand aloft. The days were lengthening and it was not yet time for candles.