The Fatal Fashione Read Online Free PDF

entertained Elizabeth munificently at his country home in Hampshire on her royal progress last summer. She’d jested it was too bad he was so elderly or she would put him on Parliament’s list of potential suitors. The wily old man seemed unwilling to retire or to depart this earth until he achieved his aims, several of which, she feared, ran counter to her interests. Politically, he was still helpful; personally, he was untrustworthy and Catholic to the core. Worse, some of his closest friends were the northern lords she feared might rise in rebellion and support of her cousin, Queen Mary of Scots.
    Of ruddy complexion, with thinning hair but thickening jowls, Will Paulet, as his friends called him, was hardly heeded these days by the monarch, and he knew it. Still, it did not keep him from lecturing her long and loud, for he was hard of hearing, too.
    As ever today, he was accompanied by Hugh Dauntsey, one of his minions, who at least had the sense to stand on the other side of the large fountain to give them some privacy. Dauntsey was the charming, staunch Catholic her sister, Queen Mary Tudor, had brought in to replace Gresham in foreign finance, before she’d seen to her surprise and shame that he was all slick surface but wretched at his work. He had been summarily dismissed, and Elizabeth refused to employ the man in any position.
    Though she hated to admit it, Hugh Dauntsey’s very gaze unsettled her. His eyes were so pale blue and rimless that from a distance he seemed to have only white eyeballs with no irises at all. Of a pasty complexion and sporting a thin goatee, part blond and part white, the man almost seemed an albino. He was short and thin as a rail, with deliberate movements. Dauntsey was always finely attired, almost above his station, and it annoyed her that Paulet insisted on treating the forty-year-old hanger-on, who had never wed, more as a son than as his secretary.
    “I observe, Your Majesty, the tasks of your government are overburdening the greatly reduced number of secretaries and comptrollers you keep on the rolls,” Paulet lectured her in a loud voice as they took another turn on the gravel path, littered with autumn leaves from the fruit trees. He always turned the better of his two bad ears toward her and cupped it with his hand, despite how his stiff ruff got in the way. “The more subjects directly employed by the crown, the better for the country. Your father said that more than once. Keep them busy, keep them close.”
    “I see you keep your man Dauntsey close, my lord. But the bureaucracy was quite bloated,” she told him, nearly shouting. She’d heard Paulet had a listening horn of some sort, but he never used it around her. “And feeding and feting so many people strained our finances. We’ve pared the government to a good level of efficiency. I expect my people not to cling to the past but to look toward new endeavors and enterprises.”
    “What surprises? You listen too much to Thomas Gresham, while he’s obsessed with building that foreign exchange. It will just draw in more wily foreigners, I tell you.”
    “The influx of foreigners does not distress me as much as the behavior of my own countrymen, those who covertly keep to their Catholic ways. Be sure to share that with your northern friends, for they are being closely watched.”
    Despite his years of practicing a courtier’s wiles, he looked momentarily like a fish out of water, gaping for air as she went on. “As for Sir Thomas Gresham’s mercantile exchange, however much its style is inspired by the bourse in Antwerp, it is to benefit our people. He, at least, is loyal and valuable to me, though I know you do not approve of him or get along.”
    “Alone—that’s exactly it. You listen to him alone these days. Why, I had advised the royal Tudors for years before Gresham was even born, Your Majesty.”
    As Elizabeth made the turn back toward the palace, she saw not only Hugh Dauntsey watching them—and