The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Read Online Free

satisfied with the quality of the materials, but at least the dresses were new, and in addition, I lent her some of my jewelry.
    “But I can take my little silver pendant, can’t I?” she said anxiously, revealing that she was still very much a child. The pendant was a simple affair consisting of a very slim chain with a little heart dangling from it. The Hendersons, the people who were looking after her at the time, had had it made for her when she was six and it was her very first piece of jewelry. She was fond of it, though it was not nearly fine enough for a ducal dining chamber.
    “Bring it if you like!” Hugh told her, laughing. “You’ll find you won’t want to wear it in front of the Duke of Norfolk!”
    The visit to London would also mean a hiatus in her Latin and Greek studies. “Her tutor can have a holiday, but I can go on with teaching her French,” I said to Hugh. “That could be usefulif this betrothal idea comes to anything and the young man has a future in diplomacy. If he’s in the duke’s household, he might well have, even if his immediate background is merchanting.”
    The duke’s letter had described Edmund Dean’s background in some detail. He came of a good family with land in Hertfordshire. His father, however, had been a younger son, who had to make his own way in the world and, unusually for a man born into a landed family, had chosen to do so as a merchant. He had done well, and Edmund, though he too was a younger son, had had every hope of setting up in business for himself, with some help from his father until . . .
    You will of course be aware of the current trade embargo with Antwerp, the duke’s letter had said. Edmund’s father has suffered great damage to his business, as have many such men. Edmund has therefore felt obliged to take employment outside the world of merchanting. However, he hopes that his father’s circumstances will recover and that he himself will prosper in my household, and that by the time your daughter reaches the age of, perhaps, seventeen, he will be in a position to wed.
    I certainly knew about the embargo, which was the reason for the shortage of some silken fabrics, not to mention furs, dyestuffs, lamp oil, sugar, and spices, which had hitherto come to England via Antwerp. It all went back to what—I must be honest—had been a piece of frankly sharp financial practice on the part of Queen Elizabeth and her Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil.
    They were always anxious to improve England’s solvency while doing anything they possibly could to damage that of Philip of Spain and they had combined the two, most successfully, the previous December, when four Spanish ships unwisely took refuge from pirates by scattering and then putting into Plymouth and Southampton. They were carrying between them £85,000 for the Netherlands, where Spanish troops were waiting for their pay. The money had been advanced to Spain by Genoese bankers but still belonged to the Genoese until it reached the Low Countries. Elizabeth and Cecil had had the happy thought of borrowing it instead.
    Well, that was one way of putting it. I still maintained anoccasional correspondence with some of the ladies I had known at court as fellow attendants on the queen, or as wives of courtiers. According to one of them, my old friend Mattie Henderson, Guerau de Spes, the new Spanish ambassador, said roundly that she had snatched it, and been put under house arrest as a result.
    My husband says that de Spes is an outspoken man, often amusing, for he has a whimsical manner of speech, but he is not much liked, said Mattie’s letter. He is blatant in his Catholic observances and my Rob thinks he sees himself as a kind of crusader, bound by oath to bring poor benighted England back to the one true faith. Rob says it is useless to argue with him—he lives in a world of heroic fancy and all arguments just run off him like water off a duck’s plumage.
    I had come across that sort of thing