To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court Read Online Free PDF Page A

farewell as the barge slipped away downstream. I watched him grow smaller as the distance between us grew.
    A divided heart, divided loves, are a terrible burden to carry.
    It was a quick journey. We reached Nantes in a day and there we had good luck, for we found a ship in which Matthew had shares, about to sail for England with a cargo of wine. When the
Cygnet
left next day, we were aboard her. The winds were playful, but they drove us in the right direction. I had feared seasickness but none of us fell ill, although the tossing sea made Dale nervous. “I just wish the wind would drop a bit, ma’am,” she said miserably. “I can’t abide the sea. I wouldn’t do it for anyone but you and Roger and that’s a fact.”
    “You’ll soon be on dry land again,” I said comfortingly.
    “I hope so, ma’am. The way those timbers creak; they make me think the ship’s going to fall apart and drop us all in the water.”
    “Matthew de la Roche,” I said, “doesn’t buy shares in unseaworthy buckets. The
Cygnet
will get us to England; don’t worry.”
    The
Cygnet
did. We landed safely at Southamptonlate on a May evening and went to an inn where a good night’s sleep made Dale more cheerful and the sound of the English language was a delight to me. In the morning, Brockley found us some hired horses, and we set out for Thamesbank.
    The house where Meg had been living with Cecil’s friends, Rob and Mattie Henderson, was beside the Thames, near Hampton. I was in a furious hurry to get there and because posting inns couldn’t always provide proper sidesaddles—only pillion saddles, but riding pillion would have slowed us down—I rode as Dale always did, astride and in breeches, though over them, I put on one of the open-fronted skirts which I usually wore on top of an embroidered kirtle. In my impatience, I also shocked Brockley with my curses when the hired horses were less than ideal.
    They often are, of course, for they are ridden hard, in all weathers, by all kinds of riders. They nearly always have iron mouths and temperaments either phlegmatic or cussed. I remember that one of my mounts nearly drove me mad with its reluctance to go faster than a slow jog and with its big clumsy feet, which seemed to find every single pothole in the track. “This damned horse swerves out of the way on purpose to tread in a hole and stumble!” I raged, and thereafter named the animal Dogmeat. “Blast you, Dogmeat, pick your feet up!” “Get on with it, Dogmeat; we haven’t got forever!”
    Yet through it all, the beauty of England in early May reached and touched me. It was subtly different from France: the new young leaves a more delicate shade of green; the sunshine gentler. No golden orioles whistled in the woodland; thrushes and blackbirds sangunchallenged. Villages were quiet and mostly prosperous; there had been no civil war in England to take men from the land. France was now my home, but I would never cease to care for England. I was glad to see it once again.
    We had to spend one night on the road, but in the morning, we found ourselves with better horses and I made good use of them, pushing us on as fast as possible, deaf to Dale’s protests that it was surely dinnertime and when were we going to eat? By three in the afternoon, we were all very hungry, but the ornamental red-brick chimneys of Thamesbank House were in sight. “We’re there,” I said.
    The lodgekeeper sent his son Tom running ahead to announce our arrival and by the time we rode into the courtyard, Rob Henderson, tall, fair-haired, and handsome, jauntily clad in green with a feather in his cap, as though he were about to go a-hunting, was out there to meet us. Brockley made to dismount and help me down, but Henderson reached me first and I was out of my saddle before Brockley was out of his.
    “I knew you would come. I knew it!” Rob exclaimed. “Welcome!”
    “Of course I came. Is there any news of Meg? Have you found her? I’ve been