Queen's Ransom: A Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court Featuring Ursula Blanchard: A Mystery at Queen Elizabeth's Court : Featuring Ursula Blanchard - Hardcover

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Praised for her precise research and finely crafted writing, author Fiona Buckley proves once more that both as an interpreter of history and as a mystery novelist, she is a powerful new voice in historical crime fiction. Fiona Buckley is also the author of To Shield the Queen and The Doublet Affair. She lives in England.

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Chapter One: Treasured Memories

Sir Robin Dudley, Master of the Queen's Horse, had broad shoulders and swarthy good looks, a dashing taste in doublets, and a great deal of personal charm. I was a young woman of only twenty-seven and I ought to have found him attractive.

Instead, I detested him.

He wasn't a kindly man, for one thing, and I appreciated kindness. The uncle and aunt who saw to most of my upbringing had so conspicuously lacked it.

And for another thing, Dudley came of a family so fiercely ambitious that his father and one of his brothers had lost their heads for plotting against their sovereign, and Robin once came near to plotting against her himself.

Queen Elizabeth knew this perfectly well, but remarkable individual though she was, in this respect she was the one who was conventional, while I was not. Dudley's masculine beauty entranced her and at twenty-eight, not much older than I was myself, she was not yet hard enough to have that handsome head and that muscular set of shoulders separated by the executioner's ax. She and Robin were not lovers, but he was still her favorite.

There were those who looked on her liking for him with a sentimental eye; for instance, Sir Henry Sidney, who had married Dudley's sister. Well, Sidney had the virtue of kindness but in him it sometimes went too far. As Sir William Cecil, the Secretary of State, once said to me in a private fit of exasperation, Sidney was too sweet-natured for his own good and every now and then his intelligence drowned in the sweetness like a wasp in a jam pot. "On this business of the queen and Dudley," Sir William said furiously, "Sidney is a simpleton."

The majority of the council members were not simpletons and they were anxious. My immunity to Robin's attractions was useful to them. For although I was outwardly just a Lady of the Presence Chamber, I also took a wage from Cecil for (among other tasks) keeping an eye on Sir Robin Dudley and reading his correspondence whenever I got the chance. As a way of earning a living, it sometimes hurt my finer feelings, but somebody had to do it, for Elizabeth's sake.

I should be honest, though. I owe Robin something. In 1560, eighteen months after Elizabeth took the throne, I came to her court as a widow with next to no money. My husband was dead of the smallpox, and I had a small daughter to rear. I entered the risky but remunerative world of spying through an errand that Dudley asked me to do, and because of that, I was thereafter able to pay for the clothes and education that would give my little Meg a chance in the world.

Then, in 1562, quite by chance, and without ever knowing it, he could be said to have saved a life that was dear to me. But for Dudley and his ambitious skulduggery, there would have been no royal inspection of the Tower treasury that March, and the result could well have been tragedy.

Elizabeth was no fool. She had forgiven Dudley for his scheming, but it had disturbed her deeply, all the same. What Dudley had done was to tell the Spanish ambassador that he wanted to marry the queen, but feared this would be such an unpopular move that there might be a rising. If so, would Philip of Spain oblige the lovebirds with an army, if in return they promised to bring England back to the Catholic Church?

We learned, much later, that good-hearted Sir Henry Sidney, anxious for his queen's happiness, had actually encouraged Dudley in this lunacy. It was the Spanish ambassador, Bishop de Quadra, who refused to take it seriously. It came to nothing. But it was not forgotten.

Sometimes, walking with her ladies, Elizabeth was more candid than she was even with her councillors, perhaps because we were women like herself. On that afternoon near the end of February, when she was strolling in the garden of Greenwich with me and Lady Katherine Knollys, she suddenly spoke of the matter. "My father would have had Robin's head for it," she said frankly. She rubbed a hand across her brow. Elizabeth was occasionally subject to violent headaches, and she had woken with one that morning. It had only just subsided. I sympathized, for I was sometimes a victim of the same malady. "But I was loath to lose my sweet Robin," she said, and then sighed.

I had never told Elizabeth what I thought of her sweet Robin but she knew, all the same. There was still a line between her golden-brown eyes, left there by the pain of the headache, but she gave me a challenging look.

"He is devoted to me," she said, "and devotion can make fools even of strong men. He will not be so foolish again, nor will Sidney. Though Sidney meant no harm; he was only trying to help, however misguidedly. Whereas Robin -- is ambitious."

Ambition could have much the same effect as devotion. Dudley was probably drawn to her as much by her royal power and the dream of sharing it, as by her slender, enigmatic person. Elizabeth, I thought, probably knew that, too.

Sir Henry came into the garden at that moment, as though Elizabeth had conjured him up by mentioning his name. She raised a hand in greeting and he stepped across the grass to join us, a neatly made man, not tall, but athletic in his movements. He had red-brown hair and a tidily trimmed auburn beard, and a liking for russet-colored clothes, which went with his coloring. He made his bow with grace, sweeping his tall hat from his head.

"Ma'am. Are you recovered, then? I heard that this morning you were unwell."

"I was. But yes, I am better now. I have been worried, however."

"Indeed? Can I help at all, ma'am?"

"Perhaps," said Elizabeth, but walked on for a while in silence, her long skirt, blue silk with little yellow fleur-de-lis embroidered on it, swishing gently on the scythed grass. Sir Henry fell in on one side of her while Lady Katherine and I walked on the other. Lady Katherine was there because she was Elizabeth's cousin and one of her closest friends and I was there because I was soon to leave the court for a while and Elizabeth said she would claim the company of her dear Ursula while she could.

A chilly wind blew up and died away before Elizabeth at length said: "I am worried because of that sorry business last year when Robin thought of asking Spain to further his matrimonial aspirations by force of arms."

Sir Henry went slightly pink with embarrassment.

"I much regret what he did," she said, "not least because he may have planted a seed that could one day grow. It has been much on my mind. De Quadra did not respond this time but nevertheless, would it not be wise to find a way of making sure that Spain thinks of England as a place too strong ever to attack?"

"There could never be any harm in showing England to be a strong and well-ordered realm," Sidney said carefully.

"Or a solvent one," said Elizabeth. "But we need subtlety. A parade of men and weapons could impress, but it's too obvious. De Quadra must not think we fear his master. We want a graceful hint, perhaps disguised as a pleasant occasion."

We were being invited to offer ideas. "A state banquet?" suggested Lady Katherine. "With costly entertainments and perfumed candles, and a full array of gold plate?"

"The good bishop has attended several of those already," said Elizabeth dryly. "On one occasion, I actually saw him weighing a gold dish in his hand, obviously wondering how pure the metal was. I half-expected him to wrap it in a napkin and steal it away to be assayed. Well, I have heard that Philip of Spain has had some of his gold plate melted down to keep himself out of debt..."

"Really?" said Sir Henry. "The council has not been told of that."

"It was a rumor," said Elizabeth. "Hearsay. But I suspect it's true, all the same. My own position is happier than Philip's and my gold plate is all it should be. Yet a sovereign could keep gold plate for show and still have an empty treasury..."

"But,...