Queen's Ransom (33 page)

Klara said something. “She says the girl is hysterical,” said Jenkinson. “That she is. No more screeching, Helene, or I’ll empty that beaker over you myself.” He spoke to Klara in her own language, and Klara, after muttering some further angry remarks, gave Helene a bitter look and once more withdrew.

“I repeat,” said Jenkinson, “have you something to tell us, Helene? If you have, do so. But in calm and reasonable words, please.”

Helene regarded us all with hatred. She clasped her hands on her lap and raised her chin.

“If I am called to be a martyr, then so be it. I am alone here in the midst of heretics and can do nothing to defend myself but I will not let you harm Jeanne. She has done nothing wrong.”

“Neither has Fran Dale!” I snapped.

“The woman Dale is a heretic like the rest of you.” Helene’s high voice had never sounded more exasperating. “I’m not ashamed of anything that I have done. I’m proud of it! As for Jeanne, whatever she may have guessed, she knows very little. She spoke the truth when she said she did not see me meet anyone in the churches.”

“That is so,” said Jeanne. “Once, I thought I heard you speak to someone, but I did not see who it was.”

“I made her leave me at the chapel and come back for me,” said Helene, “and at the cathedral, I asked her to wait outside. That way she would see nothing and need never be burdened either with knowledge or with lies. Thank you for your faithfulness, Jeanne.” She stared at me. “Dr. Wilkins told me what you are, madame; how you have twice betrayed your husband because of his adherence to our Catholic cause, and how you led men here to capture him—”

“That is a slander,” I told her. “You have already heard me say that it is not true. Never would I do such a thing.”

“Dr. Wilkins says otherwise. When we went to St. Marc, and I saw him there, he said he was sorry to see me in your company, but that I could help him and the Catholic cause if I would. He told me that when you married Matthew de la Roche, you were offered salvation, but you threw it back in the teeth of God and deserted your husband. Dr. Wilkins said that this time you were trying to have him seized by English agents.”

“You know nothing about it!” I told her angrily.

Helene’s chin went up still higher. “I trust what my confessor told me. He asked me to search your things, yours and Dale’s, and see if I could find proof of your plans—something in writing, perhaps; orders that you were carrying out. He wanted to convince your husband that you were worthless! He said that while Matthew de la Roche was still besotted with you, he would never be safe from you.”

“What is between me and my husband,” I said through my teeth, “is nothing to do with you, or with Dr. Wilkins.”

“It is to do with God, however,” said Helene. The knuckles of her clasped hands were white. She was frightened of us. But she kept her head high. “I found no useful writings,” she said. “But I did find the poison. I told him and he was pleased. At least, you could be made to suffer for your intransigence. He said he knew how to arrange that, but that you were clever, madame, more than a woman should be. He said you had the cunning of a snake, and that he wished to know of any schemes you laid to outwit him. He wished me to tell him everything that you were doing or planning to do.”

“I can’t believe my ears,” said Blanchard, flabbergasted.

Helene ignored him. “Dr. Wilkins told me I would hear from him again, and at St. Germain I received a note saying that at certain times each day, he would be at the chapel if I had anything to tell him. I met him there. I told him of the treasure and how you meant to go to Antwerp. I said at first that you were going by ship, but when Jeanne came for me and called me from the chapel door, she told me that we were all to go to Antwerp, and by land. I asked her to wait a moment, that I had a last prayer to make, and I went back into the chapel. Dr. Wilkins was still there, though Jeanne did not see him. I told him of the altered plans.”

“And you set him on our tracks!” Blanchard said angrily. He looked ready to burst.

“Yes, of course! When Dale was arrested,” said Helene, “I guessed at once that he was behind it, but when I met him in the chapel, he told me himself. And he told me that she was on no account to be ransomed and that he meant to follow us to Antwerp and make sure that you did not bring the treasure back.”

I felt too sickened to speak. Helene, however, was going on with her appalling narrative. “When we set out,” she said, “you made us go so fast, madam, that I feared we would outdistance him. I tried to slow us down—”

“Oh,
did
you!” I said, finding my tongue after all. “So your weakness was all pretense!”

“Jeanne’s wasn’t pretense. You were making her ill. Tell them, Jeanne!”

“Yes. I am past the age for such fast riding,” Jeanne said wearily.

“During that delay,” Jenkinson remarked, “the Levantine Lions caught up as well. They were in Antwerp almost as soon as we were. They can only have been a few miles behind us. You may have done more harm than you know, Helene.”

“I did what I thought was right,” Helene said defiantly. “Dr. Wilkins told me that I was greatly privileged to be in a position to serve my faith so well. He told me to look out for him everywhere. I used to slip out when I could, and that day when Jeanne had to rest, I went out early and found him walking round the inn. He’d arrived late the night before and lodged with the village priest.”

“I heard his voice,” I said suddenly. “I thought it was a dream, but—”

“I met him again, later, by appointment,” Helene said. “Whatever I could glean of your plans, I told him. There were trees near the inn and we tried to keep in their shadow but Master Blanchard saw us. By good fortune, he thought Dr. Wilkins was Longman, because it seems they are not unalike, at a distance. I thought it best to pretend he was right. As if,” said Helene shrilly,“I would have anything to do with a retainer!”

“Thank you, mistress,” said Longman, undisturbed.

“And you have seen Dr. Wilkins since? Communicated with him here?” I said. “In the cathedral?”

“Yes, I have. When I met him under the trees, he told me that in Antwerp I could leave notes at the cathedral deanery, but that he would often be in the cathedral himself. And so he was, for when I went there, I found him. I kept him informed of what you were doing as best I could, although I never learned quite enough, it seems,” said Helene bitterly, and with no sign of contrition.

“You told him more than enough!” said Jenkinson. “Where we were lodging, presumably, and precisely when we intended to fetch the treasure. You must have been very disappointed that we wouldn’t let you come with us to find out exactly where the warehouse was! But no doubt the information that it was in Hoekstraat, overlooking the water, was good enough. Wilkins and his unpleasant friends were hovering about in a boat when we got there, watching to see which building we went into. Luckily, they kept back a little, so that they didn’t see us taking the false treasure inside. We were fortunate, Mistress Blanchard!”

“I knew nothing of your imitation treasure,” Helene said. “You kept it a secret.” She actually sounded aggrieved.

“We did,” I told her. “If you had come shopping with us yesterday, Master Jenkinson would have bought it alone while I took you elsewhere to look at clothes and materials.”

“Let me understand this clearly.” Blanchard was seething. “My ward—my own ward—my own niece—has tried to prevent my daughter-in-law from carrying out her errand of mercy? Ursula, whatever has happened between us in the past—and despite the task that I reluctantly—most reluctantly, I assure you—undertook for Cecil while we were in France, concerning your husband—despite all this, I respect your very proper care for your maidservant. That this girl—this chit—should attempt to ruin your efforts—I can’t believe it. Tell me I’m dreaming!”

“You’re not dreaming, Father-in-law,” I said. I turned to Helene. “Dale is in a cell at St. Germain,” I said. “She is there because of a false accusation. Wilkins somehow induced De Clairpont to bring that charge. De Clairpont knows it’s false; if he really believed it, he would surely have arrested me and Brockley, too, and perhaps Master Blanchard here—”

“Dr. Wilkins told De Clairpont he would persuade the abbess of St. Marc to contribute some of the gold ornaments from the church to the Catholic cause,” Helene said. “They are valuable.”

And De Clairpont would probably sell his own mother, let alone someone else’s heretic tirewoman, to support the cause. Another case, I thought savagely, of money talking with a golden voice. Aloud, I said: “Dale has no chance of a fair trial, no chance of acquittal. Only the ransom can save her. If we fail to get it to France, she will die a horrible death. You know Dale, Helene. And yet you are willing to destroy her one chance of escape!”

“Fran Dale is a
heretic.
And so are you, madame. That means that you are damned. Only the fire on earth can save the souls of heretics in the hereafter. And you are damned again for betraying your husband and for refusing the chance he offered you to turn from your unbelieving ways—”

“You self-righteous bitch!” I shouted. “How dare you sit there preaching? How dare you regret that Dale, who never harmed you or anyone else, may be saved from dying in terror and agony! Have you any
idea
what she is facing? Have you ever seen it? Do you
know
?”

“Dr. Wilkins says that whatever the suffering at the stake, it is better than suffering throughout eternity.”

“I’m tired of hearing about Dr. Wilkins,” remarked Blanchard.

“So am I,” I said. “But Helene is now going to hear about something else. With your leave, Master Jenkinson, I intend to tell her about reality.”

“By all means,” said Jenkinson. “I am not actually in charge here, even if I’ve given that impression. Proceed, Mistress Blanchard.”

Uncle Herbert and Aunt Tabitha, who largely brought me up, were still adherents of the old religion. My mother, who had died when I was sixteen, had preferred Lutheran beliefs and taught them to me. I was twenty when Queen Mary of England, Elizabeth’s elder sister, began her policy of burning heretics. My aunt and uncle witnessed one of the earliest. That was the execution that they described to me so graphically, forcing me to listen.

I had never forgotten. I never would. My uncle had stood with his back to the door to keep me from running out of the room, and when I put my hands over my ears, Aunt Tabitha seized my wrists and dragged them down. Then, turn by turn, they described what they had seen. One of the worst things had been the fierce pleasure in their faces. I had recoiled from it although I was then too young to know what it meant. Later, recalling those eager, glittering eyes and bared teeth, I knew it for the sexual excitement that it was.

I had never thought I would repeat their words to anyone, least of all another young girl. But now, for Helene’s benefit, I repeated every hideous detail and when Helene, lips quivering, also tried to put her hands over her ears, I did to her what Aunt Tabitha had done to me, seized her wrists and dragged her hands down so that she would be forced to hear.

She struggled against me and tried to drown me by praying aloud that she might not have to listen to the deceits of the enemy but suddenly, Longman was there, taking her thin wrists in one hand and putting the other over her mouth, pressing her head against the high back of the settle on which she was sitting. “Go on, mistress,” he said to me.

I went on. My uncle and aunt had spared me nothing and I spared Helene nothing. I spewed it all out: sight, sound, stench. Her eyes beseeched me to stop but I wouldn’t. Not until I had quite finished did I nod to Longman to let her go. She at once burst into frantic weeping. Through the tears and the hiccups, she wailed that Dr. Wilkins said she would be blessed in heaven; that she had done right, she had done right, and she hated the sight of me and I would burn in hell for this.

Klara, poppy-red with rage, reappeared in the doorway. “Master Jenkinson,” said my father-in-law, “you can talk to Klara. Please apologize to her and tell her that the noise will now stop, and ask her for linen and rugs to make up a bed in an empty room for Mistress Blanchard here. She has been sharing with Helene and Jeanne but I propose to lock them up in their bedchamber and move Ursula elsewhere.

“Helene, stop that bawling or by God I’ll knock you on the head. Listen to me. I am appalled at what you have done. I can hardly bear the sight of you; I feel ill at the thought of sleeping under the same roof with you. I shall not now come with you to England. Jeanne will go with you, and Clarkson here will escort you both. He will carry a letter to my son Ambrose, saying that you are to be married as quickly as possible, for I don’t want to find you in my house when I finally come home. I shall return to France with Ursula. I trust we shall be safe. We shall go up the Seine to St. Germain and as soon as possible, return down it. There will be no traveling within France.”

Listening to that, I almost smiled. My dear father-in law; ever mindful of his safety! Not that I blamed him. I wasn’t myself eager to go back to France. But Dale and Brockley were waiting for me. I had no choice.

Jenkinson was speaking quietly to Klara, who was nodding approval. “Harvey,” said Blanchard, “accompany Helene and her tirewoman upstairs and keep them under guard. Ursula, you can go and remove your things from their room. Then Harvey can lock their door and bring me the key.”

Jeanne led her mistress away, followed by Harvey and Klara. I watched them go, feeling, just for a moment, too exhausted to get up and follow them. Jenkinson echoed my thoughts.

“What a night!” he said. “Well, daylight’s broken, but I think we had all better go to bed. Ursula, will you have the treasure stowed under your bed? You should be its custodian.”

“I want to say something to Ursula,” said my father-in-law. To my surprise, he was looking at me quite shyly. “On this journey, Ursula, I have got to know you for the first time. I think you already understand that my opinion of you has changed. Once, I thought that you did harm to Gerald when you ran off with him but for quite a long time now, I have thought that he chose better than I at first believed. I just want to say that now—I think he chose very well. And I am glad that, after all, your husband has escaped Cecil’s pursuit. And now, Master Jenkinson is right. We had better all retire. Thank heaven we still have three days to rest before our ship sails for St. Germain on Tuesday.”