The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's (12 page)

Gladys had invented an herbal drink that could relieve these migraine attacks, and she had left a supply of the dried herbs with me. Dale made the infusion and I drank it. The attack wasn’t one of the most violent, and the pain receded without nausea.

“I’ve won my battle,” I said to Hugh, when he came to see how I was and found me getting unsteadily out of bed.

“I’m sorry it was so much of a battle,” he said gently. Hugh
knew, without being told, what had brought this on. “But we’re doing the right thing, Ursula.”

 • • • 

Roberto Ridolfi had leased a house in the Strand. From Howard House, we went on horseback, except for Hugh, who once more used our coach. It was but a short distance out of the City, through a fine spring morning. Norfolk had six attendants including Higford and Dean (“Barker has little taste for what he calls junketing,” said Norfolk) and we had the Brockleys and John Argent.

At the house, Brockley and Argent and two of Norfolk’s men went to see the horses cared for, but the rest of us were greeted by a butler as stately as Conley but much larger, carrying a mighty midriff before him as though it were a badge of office. He showed us up a flight of steps into a light, airy vestibule with a mosaic floor in a pattern that had unmistakable echoes of Ancient Rome.

Here we found a short, dark man in a deep green gown of velvet as rich as anything I had ever seen at court, and a shy young lady dressed in russet. She was no more than twenty, with brown eyes and a wave of rich brown hair rolling abundantly from under an elaborate hood.

“Thank you, Greaves,” Norfolk said to the butler. “Ah. Roberto.” He greeted Ridolfi breezily, as an old friend would. “These are my guests, Master Hugh Stannard and Mistress Stannard. Mistress Stannard has court connections, as I think I told you. My secretaries you already know.”

“I am overjoyed once more to meet you, Your Grace.” Ridolfi’s English was idiomatic, though his accent was marked. “But I was desolated to hear of the sad death of my good Julius Gale—and the other tragedy in your house. A serving boy only, I believe, but we are all equal in God’s eyes and if he was not among the faithful, who knows what takes place in the privacy of the mind at the last? Mistress Stannard, I see you are intrigued by the pattern on the floor.”

I was looking at it mainly to distract myself from the memory
of Walt’s insulted corpse. However, I raised my head and said politely that the design was interesting and that I liked the blue and green colors.

Ridolfi smiled. “I had it laid when I arrived. It is a pattern taken from a house I know in Rome, which stands on the site of a Roman villa and still has part of an original floor. My lease here allows me to do such things. I have had more difficulty in other respects,” he added. “I didn’t examine the grounds carefully enough before signing the lease and I fear I am now the proprietor of a topiary garden which . . . well! I have forbidden it to the maidservants. I blame you, Your Grace. You recommended your topiary gardener—Johnson’s his name, is it not?—to my predecessor.”

“Arthur Johnson works here too,” Norfolk said to us. “The previous tenant of this house encouraged him to give rein to—an unusual sense of humor. However, we are all men and women of the world. You should go and see it. It may amuse you.”

Ridolfi at this point recalled that he wasn’t welcoming us on his own and turned to the young woman, who was standing quietly half a pace behind him. “Allow me to present my wife, who has just arrived in England. I was in Dover to meet her. Donna speaks little English, but she has the French.”

We all exchanged greetings in French with Madame Ridolfi. “At home we call her signora but in England, for some reason, everyone addresses her as madame,” Ridolfi said.

“It’s of no consequence,” Donna said. She had a soft, timid voice, as if she feared that unfriendly ears might be listening, and a very sweet face with a carefully tended olive complexion. Her mouth was small and shapely, her nose prettily turned up at the tip, and her brown eyes were wide and wondering.

Norfolk inquired if Dean’s parents had yet arrived. “My friends here are hoping to make their acquaintance.”

“Not as yet,” Ridolfi said. “But with the sun so warm—or what in England is called warm!—those guests who are already here have roamed into the grounds and my servants have had to follow them with their trays of refreshments. I am, as it were, on duty here until my guest of honor, His Excellency Don Guerau
de Spes, the Spanish ambassador, arrives. But if you would care to stroll out as well and enjoy the sunshine, my page will show you the way. Boy!”

At the mention of de Spes, Hugh and I exchanged very small nudges, undetectable by Ridolfi, but we could hardly insist on staying to observe His Excellency’s arrival and overhear his conversation. Norfolk could, and did, make it clear that he didn’t care to stroll but wished to talk to Ridolfi and His Excellency, whenever the latter should appear, but we had no option other than to follow the page. With the Brockleys behind us, we let ourselves be led through a passage and out of a rear door onto a terrace with a view of the grounds.

These were extensive, stretching to the banks of the Thames. At the left-hand end of the terrace, steps led down to a knot garden. To the right, another flight descended to a gravel path between the terrace and a tall yew hedge. An archway in this gave a glimpse of the topiary which our host and Norfolk had mentioned in such surprising terms.

For the moment, we chose the knot garden instead. More gravel paths threaded this way and that among geometric beds, enclosed by low hedges of lavender. A few flowers were showing: primrose and daffodil, bluebell and heartsease. Some of the beds, however, contained deft arrangements of vegetables and herbs, medicinal and culinary, which made decorative capital out of foliage of different shades and shapes.

There were other guests about, as Ridolfi had said, sauntering in pairs and groups, and being offered refreshments from liveried servants carrying trays. We saw no one whom we recognized, but we accepted wine and sweet cakes for ourselves, and made our way on through the garden to a gate in the low wall beyond. With a squeak of slightly rusted hinges, it let us out onto a slope of scythed turf, going gently down to the river. We strolled to the water’s edge. The topiary garden to our right didn’t stretch so far but a path emerged from it through another arch of close-clipped yew, leading to a wooden landing stage, where a dinghy and a small barge were moored. Close by was a cluster of alders at the base of a small, flat promontory, not much more than a tongue of
grassy land, that jutted into the stream, and at its tip was an untidy heap of vegetation, probably the nest belonging to a pair of swans, which were swimming close by. Soon, no doubt, it would contain this year’s eggs.

There was shipping on the river, as usual, but none of it was near at hand. There was a pleasant air of peace and privacy all around.

“He does himself well, this Ridolfi,” Hugh said. “These grounds are impressive.”

We surveyed this peaceful scene in silence for a few moments, finishing our wine and cakes. We were interrupted, however, by Brockley, who suddenly emerged from the topiary garden and came striding purposefully toward us. I turned to him with a smile, but didn’t receive one in return. Brockley’s normally calm countenance was, for once, expressing a strong emotion—that of indignation. “Master Stannard! Madam! Fran!”

“What is it, Brockley?” I asked.

“When we’d finished in the stable,” said Brockley, “one of Ridolfi’s grooms, with a look on his face that I can only call a leer, said that visiting servants would find refreshments in the kitchen but it would be worth my while to peep into the topiary garden first. John Argent preferred the refreshments but I was curious about the topiary. I can only say . . . well, I hardly know
what
to say!”

“Ah, yes,” said Hugh. “Norfolk said it might amuse us. Let’s take a look.”

“Not you, Fran,” said Brockley. “I really would rather that you didn’t.”

“Go off and join Argent, both of you,” said Hugh. “And here, take our cups and dishes with you. Come, Ursula. Let’s inspect the mysterious horrors among the yew trees.”

Abandoning Brockley and Dale, we went through the yew arch, and then stopped short. Hugh started to laugh. “Oh,
really
!” he said.

The topiary was outrageous and it became worse, the more one looked at it. At first sight, the yew trees immediately in front of us seemed to be clipped into nothing more than vaguely conical
shapes. Then you looked again and, according to whether you were a very modest person or one with a broad sense of humor, you either recoiled in shock or began to chortle.

“The proportions don’t seem quite right, though,” said Hugh, between chuckles. “I would say that most men, on average . . . ”

“Hugh!”
But I was laughing too. My amusement was echoed by a chuckle from somewhere nearby, and looking about me, I saw a ladder leaning against a yew tree, and then, as my gaze traveled upward, I beheld two ancient-looking legs with calf muscles as gnarled as tree roots, a pair of patched and baggy breeches, a bit of grubby shirt, a sleeveless leather jerkin, and finally, the gnomelike face of an elderly man whom I now recognized as the gardener Arthur Johnson, whom I had seen working on Norfolk’s topiary. Once more, he was busy with shears, improving, if that is quite the right term, one of the shapes. He had overheard us and grinned down, waving the shears.

“Call myself the best in London for this but even I find that a tree sometimes has a mind of its own. Can’t always get
exactly
what you want out of ’em!” he called.

“Oh, I think you’ve made a fair shot at the target,” Hugh told him dryly, causing the old man to emit an evil chuckle. The path led on from the archway, and leaving Johnson behind, we followed it. Farther in, the trees were carved into complete bird and animal shapes in interesting attitudes, and in the very heart of the garden, where another path crossed the first, we found a wooden bench.

“Very thoughtful,” said Hugh, sitting down on it. “Somewhere to rest while contemplating all this sculptured vegetation. Johnson’s a craftsman. It looks as though that rearing horse is about to come down on the back of the horse next to it, and those geese are superb. If they are geese—they’re something of that kind, anyway, whatever they are. I’d say they were geese, wouldn’t you? It must have been difficult to get the foliage into those long-necked shapes. They seem to be—er . . . ”

“I think they have goslings in mind,” I said solemnly. “Ultimately.”

We looked at each other and began laughing all over again.
We were echoed by an outbreak of tittering on the far side of the garden. Others besides ourselves were roaming amid the topiary. A movement near at hand caught our attention and as we turned, an elderly gentleman strolled out from behind the romantically inclined geese.

“Ah! A seat. I’ve been gazing about me, thunderstruck. One could call this place a glimpse of the underside of the human imagination,” he remarked gravely, though his eyes were twinkling.

He was surely over seventy, with iron gray hair, thick though tidily trimmed, and an intellectual air. His forehead was high and he had a thoughtful, somewhat furrowed face with heavy brows and a small pointed beard. He was dressed as a scholar might be, in a long, dark robe and he wore no ruff, only a voile collar. He bowed politely.

“Master Harry Scrivener, at your service,” he said. “You are also guests of Signor Ridolfi, I take it?”

We introduced ourselves, explaining that we had been generously included in the invitation to Norfolk, though Ridolfi had never met us before and—because we regarded ourselves as here to gather whatever information we could, of any kind—we inquired politely about Master Scrivener’s acquaintance with Ridolfi.

We tried not to sound inquisitive, but Scrivener looked as though he could recognize curiosity when he met it. Ours seemed to amuse him, however.

“I met Signor Ridolfi two years ago in Florence, when I traveled there,” he said, “accompanying a nephew round Italy. I had just retired from the secretariat of Sir William Cecil and while I was working for him, I made the acquaintance of some Florentines who were visiting London. They offered their hospitality when I went to their country. They knew Ridolfi. I must have made an impression on him. When he came to London, he discovered by chance that I was making a stay in the City, took the trouble to seek me out, and graciously invited me to dine. But let me see—surely . . . ?”

Alert gray eyes, deep-set under heavy eyebrows, were studying
me thoughtfully. He then seemed to connect me with an item from some private filing system in his head.

“Mistress Ursula Stannard? Formerly Mistress Blanchard, I believe? Were you not once wed to Gerald Blanchard? I met both of you, I am sure, in Antwerp, ten years ago, in the house of Sir Thomas Gresham, one of Queen Elizabeth’s financiers. I was seconded to Gresham for a short time, in 1558. Some of my skills were useful to him.”

“We were indeed in Antwerp with Gresham at that time,” I agreed. I studied him in return and a memory stirred. An image came into my mind, of Gresham’s courtyard, on a summer day. I had been showing three-year-old Meg how to feed the fish in the pool, and Gerald had been in conversation with a man who had the air of a scholar, just as this man had, except that . . .

“I think I recall you,” I said. “Though you didn’t look quite . . . ”

“I probably still had dark hair at the time,” said Scrivener, again visibly amused. “Yes. I talked with your husband, Gerald Blanchard, on several occasions. He picked my brains.”

I was going to ask him what Gerald had picked his brains about and what the skills were that were so useful to Gresham, but Signor Ridolfi chose that moment to saunter into view along the path from the house. He was with another man, and even before I saw his face, I knew from the richness of his long, fur-trimmed gown who the second man must be. They saw me look at them, and came over to us.

“May I introduce Don Guerau de Spes, the present ambassador from Spain? Your Excellency, this is . . . ”