Read Online To Shield the Queen by Fiona Buckley - Free Book Online

them ready made.
    We had chosen to sit out in a walled garden, a favourite place of ours because it was so pretty, with its rose arbour in one corner and the fruit trees trained round its mellow brick walls. It had a scythed lawn with a yew tree in the middle, and neat, geometrical flowerbeds aglow with phlox and gillyflowers and here and there the tall spikes of lupins, and delphiniums like blue flames. The flowerbeds were edged not with lavender, as in the big entrance garden, but with box, which had its own, more subtle fragrance. It was a charming place.
    We were sorted out according to rank. The exalted Ladies of the Privy Chamber occupied the rose arbour, while the humbler Ladies of the Presence Chamber had the square of grass round the yew tree. To my regret, I was seated next to Lady Catherine Grey, who had admired my work, but added that such meticulous stitching was tiring; would I like the name of her own gown-maker? The woman was expensive, of course, but so skilled . . .
Lady Catherine Grey had a real talent for the acid-in-honey kind of remark. It put my much simpler form of sharpness to shame. I was a frequent target because I was hard up and I had rebuked her for gossiping about Sir Thomas Gresham; and at the hawking party I had admitted in her hearing that I was illegitimate. But I was learning how to retaliate. Smiling at her, I said I enjoyed the satisfaction of doing good work and then added, “Of course, it requires concentration.”
    Lady Catherine was quite a skilled embroidress but she was incapable of concentrating for long at a time and sometimes abandoned projects halfway through. Lady Jane quite often finished them for her. I saw some of the others glance at us with covert amusement.
    It was said that Lady Jane Seymour’s brother, Lord Hertford, was sweet on Catherine and she on him, and it was true that they often danced together, and that she always watched him, and looked resentful when he danced with anyone else. She was pretty in a way and might have been nicer if she had met with more kindness, but her parents, dead now, had been noted more for their ferocious ambition than for their loving natures, and Elizabeth candidly disliked her. Most of the people close to Lady Catherine seemed either to value her or detest her because of her royal birth, and none of them, except for Lady Jane and her brother, were at all interested in her as herself. Perhaps Hertford, if her sulkiness didn’t discourage him too much, would one day make her happy and soften her edges.
    They certainly needed softening. Lady Jane did try but without noticeable success. When a page came into the garden, spoke to Lady Katherine Knollys, and then came across to me to say that the queen wished to see me in her private apartments, I was glad of the excuse to get away. I gave my needlework to one of the others to look after and followed the page indoors. The summons was a surprise and I was afraid I had inadvertently done something wrong, or else was about to face another inquisition about the state of affairs between myself and Matthew de la Roche. He was off somewhere with Arundel just then and I was relieved because his constant presence worried me. I was not yet finished with Gerald. I needed, still, to remember and to mourn and I did not want to be distracted.
Elizabeth was waiting for me in one of her private chambers, a long, narrow room, with a window at the far end, overlooking the river. The sunlit water threw ripples of light on the white-painted ceiling. The queen was in a chair by the window, with her back to the light. She was not alone. Dudley was there too, standing beside her chair, and Kat Ashley was seated on a stool near the door, engaged on a piece of sewing.
    The page withdrew, closing the door. I curtsied and rose, and Elizabeth beckoned me to come forward. She was in informal dress, a long, open-fronted gown, peach-coloured and patterned with silver, over a loose white undergown, free of stays and