The Other Countess (5 page)

‘I beg you, sir, not to hold your breath for such an event. It may prove detrimental to your well-being.’ She piled a cheese tart on her plate, not because she was hungry but for something to distract from her shaking hands, and mashed it to pieces with her spoon.

Charles gripped her wrist, stilling her motion. ‘Lady Eleanor, my case is urgent. My father will hear no reason since yours seduced him with his promises of gold. He’s like a sick man throwing off all covers, unable to see that the fever burns inside him and not in the room. You must take your father away before it’s too late.’

He was right – Ellie knew it. But if she had had any influence over her own parent, she would have long since exercised it. He’d had the fever first; Lord Mountjoy was merely unfortunate to have caught it from him.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she whispered, tears starting in her eyes.

Bully that he was, Blount didn’t let go. ‘Will you do as I ask?’

‘How, pray, may I achieve this thing? I am only his daughter, not his master. He’ll not leave until your father tells him to go.’

Blount released his grip with a snort of disgust. ‘You like your comfortable life here too much to try.’

Ellie rubbed her wrist. ‘I pray you pardon me,’ she whispered.

‘Pardon is not enough. There will be a reckoning. Pray God that he’ll have more mercy on you than you have shown to my family.’

‘Excuse me, sir.’ She rose from her seat, leaving her plate full. She would not be able to force down a mouthful under his disapproving gaze.

‘Go, go.’ He waved her off. ‘Unlike my father, I do not wish for your company.’

Ellie bolted from the hall, cursing the day when Sir Arthur had first styled himself an alchemist.

Will watched the little black-haired lady depart in haste, wondering what had upset her. From the expression on the face of the gentleman she had been sitting opposite, they did not part as friends. A lovers’ tiff? He hoped not. He’d prefer her to be without attachments.

‘So, my lord, are you intending to try your skill at the joust?’ asked Robert Cecil.

‘For my sins, sir, that is my intention.’

‘Then I hope you may win. There are some in this hall that royally deserve to be knocked off their perch.’ Cecil glared across the table at Ralegh, who, catching the look raised his goblet mockingly in his direction.

‘Why does he bait you?’ Will wondered, not really meaning to speak the thought aloud.

‘Because he’s a foolish coxcomb drunk on the Queen’s favour. His kind are two-a-penny at court.’

‘Then I hope I can pluck his plumage on the morrow.’

‘Amen to that.’

‘I wonder, would you be so kind as to enlighten me as to the name of that gentleman sitting at the lower table?’ Will gestured discreetly to the Lady Eleanor’s dining companion.

Cecil took a quick survey of the room. ‘That’s Charles Blount. A fine fellow saddled with a foolish father. But you would know all about that.’

Will’s eyes wandered up the table to Lord Mountjoy – and then to his neighbour. ‘Good God, what is he doing here?’

Cecil perked up at the earl’s scandalized tone. ‘Who?’

‘That charlatan, Sir Arthur Hutton.’

‘The scholar?’

‘The bloodsucking flea that drained my estate of all its value. I hoped he’d be dead in a ditch by now.’

‘Far from it. He’s with Mountjoy.’

Will looked back at Blount. ‘Poor bugger.’

Cecil hid his smile at the uncivil language. ‘I see you understand all too well.’

‘I must find out what I can do to help him. The scales never fell from my father’s eyes. He died still believing he would get gold from nothing.’

‘
Ex nihilo nihil fit
– nothing comes from nothing.’

‘Indeed. I wish my father had paid attention to his Lucretius.’

Cecil waved the serving man away, refusing to dull his wits further with more wine. ‘Speaking of Latin wisdom, there is one remarkable benefit in having Sir Arthur in your household.’

‘I can’t imagine what that might be.’

‘He has a very scholarly daughter. An Amazon of learning. She corrected my Latin the other day.’ He lowered his voice. ‘I suspect she has knowledge of Greek.’

Will had forgotten Hutton had a daughter. The scruffy urchin must by now have grown into a dry stick of a maid hunched over her parchment, boring everyone with her cleverness. He wondered if that was the reason why the dark-haired lady he’d met in the garden had ink on her fingers; he could well imagine the alchemist’s daughter forcing the girls in Mountjoy’s household to follow her pursuits in the same way her father trapped the master. Will decided he would be doing the lady a favour saving her from all that by getting rid of the alchemist. Girls no more needed learning than a
fish a pair of boots. ‘I’m not sure I’d call that a benefit. The daughter must be terrifying.’

Cecil smiled at the mismatch between this description and the reality. ‘Oh yes, she’s terrifying.’

4

Too dispirited to sleep, Ellie begged a candle off a friendly serving man and finished her translation in the small hours. It was an act of desperation: she didn’t really believe it would influence the Queen in her favour but she had to do something to try to get out of this hole in which her father had dropped them both. He showed no sign he cared about the humiliating dependence he forced on them; happy playing with his scientific instruments on the floor of this deep well-shaft of lost opportunities. Ellie felt she stood at the bottom, staring up at the patch of sky. She could see the stars, so far above her, but no rope to climb.

‘
Ding dong bell

Ellie’s in the well
,’ she hummed.

‘
Who put her in?
’ She paused.

The answers were many. Her father. Herself – perhaps she should have left him long ago – it might have shaken him out of his dream-world. But to go where? Since her mother’s death, all contact had been broken with her Spanish relatives – the distance and religious differences throwing up too many obstacles to continue the relationship. All she had left were a few Spanish phrases of her mother’s; her jewels had long since been sold. Her
father’s English family had disowned him when they saw that his passion for alchemy had reached unmanageable proportions. If she had gone to them, would they have taken her in? She had felt too much love for her father and, to be honest, too much fear of rejection by her kin, to risk it.

‘
Alchemy put her in
,’ she hummed.

‘
Who pulled her out?
’ That would be no one. Her father was like a child, relying more on her than she dared trust in him. There was no knight in shining armour coming to her rescue.

The sleeper in the nearest bed shifted on to her back and began snoring, nose peeping out of the covers. Outside two stable cats struck up a lively argument, screeching like out-of-tune viols played by the musically inept.

Wonderful: just when she was ready to turn in herself, the night-time chorus began. Ellie wrapped her blanket more closely about her shoulders, blew out the candle and placed her head on her arms resting on her desk. She lay listening to the noises until she fell into an uncomfortable doze.

The movements of her friends woke her. Ellie sat up slowly, rubbing sleep from her eyes and gingerly revolving her neck on her shoulders, conscious of a painful ache across her back.

‘Ellie, you lackbrain!’ laughed Margaret Villiers, a cousin of Lord Mountjoy. She was a rosy-faced girl with tightly curled red hair, and also happened to be one of Ellie’s favourite people. She was always cheerful, bearing her lack of good looks with good humour; as a result she was one of the most attractive ladies of Ellie’s acquaintance, much sought out by the gentleman for her lively company. ‘Why did you not come to bed?’

Ellie yawned.

‘You’ve ink on your face.’

Ellie rubbed her cheek. ‘Not again.’ Worried that she had smeared her manuscript overnight, she quickly checked her work. It was unharmed. She had merely lain on the blotter.

‘I declare it says something!’ said Margaret in amusement. She tilted Ellie’s chin to the light. ‘I think it says G, O, L, D – gold.’

‘Can you get it off me, please?’ asked Ellie. If she were superstitious, she would see it as a sign. Her father’s madness was now staining her skin as well as eating at her heart. She surreptitiously crossed herself, whispering a prayer to be free of it.

Margaret rinsed out a cloth and wiped the ink away. ‘Did you finish your work?’

All the girls knew about Ellie’s great enterprise.

‘Yes, I did. At about two in the morning.’

‘Oh, Ellie.’ Perceptive to the feelings of others, Margaret well understood what Sir Arthur was costing his daughter. ‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’

‘For what use it will be, then yes.’

Margaret gave her a brief hug. ‘At least you’ll be free to enjoy the jousting.’

‘True.’

‘And watch the Queen arrive.’

‘Yes, I’m looking forward to that.’

Margaret picked up her camlet skirt and slipped it over her farthingale, then tugged on her bodice attaching the two together with ties. ‘Good. Now help me with my points at the back and I’ll do yours.’

Ellie deftly tied the metal-ended tags, closing the gap. The other two girls were doing the same over on the other side of
the chamber, none of them rich enough to afford the attention of a personal maid.

‘Good morning, Isabel, Katharine,’ said Margaret brightly, grinning her gap-toothed smile.

Isabel, Margaret’s freckle-faced younger sister, groaned. ‘Maggie, how can you be so cheerful so early?’

‘It’s in my nature. You either laugh or cry at our absurd world and I long ago chose what I would do.’

Ellie decided she could learn a lot from her friend.

‘And besides, there’s the prospect of ogling scores of handsome men today. Why would any maiden at court be unhappy?’ Margaret sighed. ‘Praise God for his wonderful creation.’

‘Amen to that,’ chorused Isabel, making the others giggle.

‘Talking of the wonders of God’s creation, did you see Master Walter Ralegh?’ asked Katharine, a thin girl with long fair hair, which she was expertly braiding. ‘Isn’t he perfect?’

Margaret snorted. ‘And knows it too. He’s been strutting about like he owns the world since his soldiering in Munster. Eyes down, Katharine, he has his sights set on higher things than us.’ Margaret chose a set of sleeves from her trunk to match her petticoat. ‘My personal favourite was that new earl, Dorset.’

‘And his brothers,’ added Isabel, waggling her eyebrows suggestively as she fastened a garter round her silk hose. ‘I wouldn’t mind a ride with one of them.’

‘Isabel Mary Villiers!’ scolded Margaret without much rancour as the others hooted at her sister’s bawdry.

‘Don’t worry, Maggie, I’ll behave,’ Isabel promised. ‘But I fear we’ll all be outshone by Lady Jane Perceval. Did you see her dress?’

‘I could have fed the poor of London with what it cost to
make that gown,’ said Margaret who was always slightly disgusted by the flaunting of wealth that went on in court circles.

‘Beware of the brother, girls,’ warned Katharine, settling her headdress on her blonde coronet of braids. ‘He likes exercising his powers of persuasion on the ladies.’

‘In that case, I am insulted. I spent several minutes in his company yesterday morning,’ joked Margaret, ‘and he did not once try to seduce me. Remember, Ellie, you were there?’

‘He was too busy flattering Lord Mountjoy to bother with us.’ Ellie straightened her friend’s tangled laces. ‘He’s too shallow to have the good sense to notice you.’

Margaret laughed. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment, though I know what you’re implying.’

‘He is a magpie, going for the flash and glitter rather than the things of value.’

‘My, my, aren’t you the wise one. But I rather think him a wolf and I should be happy he let this ill-favoured lamb escape.’ Taking down her ruff, which she’d pinned to the curtain for safe keeping overnight, she passed Ellie the pin cushion. ‘Fix this in place for me?’

Ellie spun her round to start the laborious process of attaching it from the back.

‘You’ll be careful won’t you, Ellie?’ said Margaret. ‘He’s less likely to ignore you and he did give you a rather ravenous look.’

Grateful for her friend’s concern, Ellie took a pin out of her mouth to reply. ‘Don’t worry, Maggie. I know what to do with wolves.’

‘Oh yes? What’s that?’

Ellie stabbed the starched cambric, anchoring it to the wire support attached to Margaret’s collar. ‘Simple: shove Latin
declensions down their throats till they snap their teeth shut and go off in search of less learned prey.’

Laughter rang round the chamber again. After submitting to having her own more modest ruff pinned to her collar, Ellie hurried the last few steps of her dressing, tucking wayward strands of hair under her velvet cap, then gathered up her papers.

‘I’ll take this to my father and meet you later at the joust,’ she promised Margaret.

‘Very well, Ellie. But if I find you dragging your heels in some dusty corner of the castle, poring over another book, I’ll have serious words with you.’

‘Maggie, you have me all wrong.’ She tapped a finger on her chin. ‘Handsome young men or books? Hmm. The handsome men win every time.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it. And, Ellie,’ Margaret lowered her voice so the other two would not hear, ‘do not treat it as a jest. We both know that marriage is the only answer for us. You should be taking a serious look at the young men at court.’

Ellie knew her friend spoke the truth. She was in danger of slipping out of respectable company entirely if she did not find a husband to save her from her father before too long. Her foreign blood was nothing but a drawback in a court that hovered on the brink of war with Spain.

Ellie sighed. What had she to offer? With a dowry of abstruse learning and an empty title, she thought she would be very lucky indeed to attract the attention of even a minor figure at court. ‘I’ll be there, Maggie.’

Ellie knew exactly where to look for her father. Lord Mountjoy travelled with all that was necessary to set up a laboratory
in every location in which he spent any time. As she guessed, Sir Arthur and he were cloistered in his private chambers, hovering over their latest experiment. Neither of them had bothered to change from their evening wear, which suggested they had been up all night.