To Shield the Queen Read Online Free

(that meant Meg, and since she was legitimate, the sin in question was presumably the theft of Gerald from Cousin Mary). And to Faldene I would have had to go, with Meg, to face a life of unpaid servitude, except that Gerald’s work had brought him to the notice of the Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil. Sir Thomas had commended Gerald by name on occasion, it seemed, and thought of writing to Cecil to explain my plight. The ship which brought Faldene’s answer to Antwerp also brought an offer for me to follow in my mother’s tradition and come to court to wait on the queen.
There were drawbacks: that thirty pounds a year stipend for instance. The queen’s ladies usually had families behind them to support them. Nor could I have my daughter with me. It was better than going home to Faldene, though, and I agreed.
    I did go briefly to Sussex first, because I wanted to visit my mother’s grave, and while I was there, I wished to find a cottage to rent for Bridget and Meg. It would be easier to find one, I thought, in a place I knew.
    I stayed with John Wilton’s sister, whose husband had a small farm there. I did not need or want to call at Faldene House, although when I went to look at the grave, I was close to the house and it seemed odd to see it and not go there. After all, I had been reared there, however grudgingly. I did not altogether escape seeing my family, though. I was placing a bunch of bluebells on my mother’s sadly overgrown resting place, when Aunt Tabitha chose to walk through the churchyard. She saw me, stopped short, and then came briskly up to me.
    “Well, well. Ursula! What are you doing here? Are you intending to call on us?”
    “I thought you might prefer it if I didn’t,” I said quietly. “I am paying my respects to my mother’s memory, as you see.”
    She stared at me as if wondering whether she could still bully me and I stared back, determined that she should not. “This, I take it,” she said, “is the child.”
I was holding Meg by the hand. I told her to make her curtsy and presented her to my aunt, who looked at her disparagingly and said, “Are you taking her to court with you?”
    “No. I am making arrangements for her elsewhere.”
    “Better leave her with us. We can see she is reared in the true faith and taught to be useful.”
    “In the true faith?” I said, and then realised that a faint tang of incense was clinging to my aunt’s clothes. I knew the smell, for when I had lived at Faldene, Queen Mary was still on the throne and mass was not only legal but obligatory. “You still hear mass?” I asked sharply.
    Aunt Tabitha looked offended. “We attend church regularly as the law enjoins,” she said. “If, in private, we follow our own beliefs, it is no one’s business but ours.”
    The conflict between the old Catholic religion and the new Protestant one was something that no one, noble or humble, could ignore. In the days of Elizabeth’s predecessor Queen Mary, it had been, literally and hideously, a burning question.
    Even after Elizabeth came to the throne and brought with her some semblance of calm, it was still the stream that drove the mill wheel of international politics and the cause of half the family feuds in the land. Elizabeth had made the land Protestant but some of her councillors were sympathetic to the old religion; most of them men who had served as Queen Mary’s councillors. The queen could not afford to do without their experience and didn’t try, and no one was being sent to the stake for Catholic sympathies. However, you could be fined or even imprisoned for hearing mass, or celebrating it. If mass was being said at Faldene now, it was illegal.
“You will of course do what you think right,” I said, “but I most certainly will not burden you with Meg.”
    “You never did know the meaning of the word gratitude, Ursula. I can only hope you don’t go the way of your mother. There’ll be plenty of lusty, well-off gallants at that