Queen of Ambition Read Free

other interests. I had also discovered that such studies could be a defense against the languorous persuasions of summer weather, the scent of roses, the sound of grasshoppers, the voices of dove and cuckoo,and the eventide song of the blackbird. When I was concentrating on a Latin translation, I did not daydream about Matthew.
    At court, I had often been impressed by Queen Elizabeth’s own interest in learning and her gift for languages. Sometimes I wondered whether Elizabeth, determinedly unmarried and still only thirty, also found her intellectual pursuits a refuge from importunate desires.
    I did not intend to give up my own studies once we were settled back in France, however. On the contrary, I hoped to find a tutor who could instruct both Meg and myself not only in advanced Latin but also in Greek. My education had been a matter of sharing my cousins’ tutor, and although we had gone a fair way with Latin, my cousins had pleaded to give up Greek almost as soon as they began it, on the grounds that it was too difficult. We had learned the alphabet and not much else.
    For the moment, though, Meg was only at the stage of basic Latin and that was occupation enough for us. I settled down with her in the small room that I had chosen as a study, which looked out toward Withysham’s neatly thatched gatehouse, and to the home farm fields on the hillside beyond our encircling wall.
    As she often did, my woman, Fran Dale—I still called her Dale although she was actually Mistress Brockley—joined us, to sit by the windows with some mending. Because the day was warm, two of the casements were open, letting in the sound of skylarks and the smell of new-mown hay from the fields. Meg satwith her head bent earnestly over an exercise concerned with the fourth declension, while I tried to puzzle out a grammatical point that had always confused me, involving the construction of the gerund. Though I remember, on that morning, I wasn’t concentrating as earnestly as Meg. There were occasions when intellectual tasks didn’t quite succeed in blocking out emotional ones. I kept on raising my head to look with affection at my daughter, who was becoming so very pretty.
    She took after her father, Gerald, who had been a handsome man. Her glossy hair was dark just as his had been, and she had his brown eyes. I had dark hair too, but not quite of the same shade, and my eyes were hazel. I had dressed her in a lightweight crimson brocade, which suited her to perfection, and her little white linen cap was clean on that morning. Sitting there so studiously, she was such an enchanting picture that she distracted me from my books and from the sights and sounds of the outside world alike. I did not want to stop looking at her.
    And I was realizing that despite the empty place beside me, which must always be there until I was reunited with my present husband, Matthew, here at Withysham in the company of my daughter, living this quiet life of domestic duties and peaceful study, I was surprisingly content.
    It was Fran Dale who heard the distant clatter of hooves on the gatehouse cobbles, looked out of the window, and exclaimed: “Mistress Blanchard, ma’am, there’s a royal messenger just ridden in, or my name isn’t Dale.”
    “Well, it isn’t, is it? It’s Brockley!” said Meg with a giggle.
    “Meg, don’t be pert,” I said absently. “Dale is sometimes known as Dale and sometimes as Mistress Brockley. In France, when we go there, I shall be Madame de la Roche, but in England I prefer still to be Mistress Blanchard. People aren’t always called by the same name all the time.” I rose and went to the window. The horseman was walking his mount toward the stableyard and he was near enough for me to see from his livery that Fran was right.
    Well, I was expecting him. This was my summons to join the queen and prepare for the Progress to Cambridge. But it had come well before I looked for it, and I not only wished it hadn’t, because it