‘Do not be alarmed, Kit,’ Sir Francis said kindly. Clearly he could read my appalled expression as easily as a schoolboy’s primer. ‘She is well disposed towards you. There is nothing to be afraid of.’
That was all very well for a man to say who dealt daily with our great monarch, but it did nothing to steady my knocking knees as he led me toward the innermost of the royal apartments. I was glad I had worn my gown, which concealed much of my trembling.
The double doors were opened by liveried servants. I heard Walsingham presenting me as if his voice came from a long way away. My eyes were cast humbly down. I was aware of rustling gowns, silk upon silk, a heavy scent of many perfumes – too many perfumes – billowing and mingling in a great wave across the room. I bowed deeply, in the courtly fashion I had learned from Simon and the other players. I hoped my hat would not fall off.
‘You may stand, Doctor Alvarez.’ A voice filled with a certain wry humour spoke from somewhere above my head. ‘Let us see you face.’
I straightened and raised my eyes. At first I was aware only of a living tapestry of colour, a flower-garden of velvets and silks and brocades, where rubies and emeralds and pearls nestled instead of bees or butterflies, and dyed plumes of exotic birds nodded instead of fresh green branches. Then this overpowering riot of colour resolved itself into a group of ladies and gentlemen clustered about one central figure, poised as if in some theatrical tableau. And that central figure was far more splendid than the rest, attired in cloth of gold, with a ruff of lace so fragile it seemed impossible that human hands could have wrought it. The hair was the colour of a fox’s pelt, piled high and laced with pearls.
Yet for all that splendour, it was the eyes which held you. Her face, no. It was painted and powdered till it became a mask. And I realised now that her whole body was encased, wired and boned and caged within those magnificent garments, until the only parts free to move were the long fine hands gripping the arms of her throne and those remarkable eyes. Suddenly a terrible sense of pity overwhelmed me. This woman had been trapped from childhood into a role she must play or die. And she had played it magnificently. A woman, ruling England better than any monarch before her, yet a woman declared a heretic and a bastard by the ruler of the all-powerful Catholic Church. A woman dressed in gowns and jewels worth a city’s ransom, yet a woman playing a man’s part. A woman who had loved a man, but could not marry him, and his loss gleamed in those eyes which, despite all the efforts of her tiring-women, bore the unmistakably traces of much weeping.
We were not so different, this great monarch and I.
She was speaking now, thanking me for exposing the treason of Parker and van Leyden.
‘And we understand,’ the Queen said, and there was a faint tremor in her voice, though she strove valiantly to conceal it, ‘we understand that it was you who saved a dear friend from an evil plan to poison him. We shall not forget that you gave him a few more weeks of life.’
‘Your Majesty,’ I said, bowing again and moving backwards toward the door.
I raised my eyes a final time and something flashed between us, across that jewel casket of a room.
Her eyes widened. And I thought: She knows.
More by This Author
The Anniversary
The Travellers
A Running Tide
The Testament of Mariam
Flood
The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez
Praise for Ann Swinfen’s Novels
‘an absorbing and intricate tapestry of family history and private memories … warm, generous, healing and hopeful’
Victoria Glendinning
‘I very much admired the pace of the story. The changes of place and time and the echoes and repetitions – things lost and found, and meetings and partings’
Penelope Fitzgerald
‘I enjoyed this serious, scrupulous novel … a novel of character … [and] a suspense story in which present and past mysteries are gradually explained’
Jessica Mann, Sunday Telegraph
'The author … has written a powerful new tale of passion and heartbreak ... What a marvellous storyteller Ann Swinfen is – she has a wonderful ear for dialogue and she brings her characters vividly to life.'
Publishing News
‘Her writing …[paints] an amazingly detailed and vibrant picture of flesh and blood human beings, not only the symbols many of them have become…but real and believable and understandable.’
Helen Brown, Courier and Advertiser
‘She writes with passion and the book, her fourth, is shot through with brilliant description and scholarship...[it] is a timely reminder of the harsh realities, and the daily humiliations, of the Roman occupation of First Century Israel. You can almost smell the dust and blood.’
Peter Rhodes, Express and Star
The Author
Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America. She was educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Classics and Mathematics and married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen. While bringing up their five children and studying for a postgraduate MSc in Mathematics and a BA and PhD in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer. She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching. In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also an historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German. The Testament of Mariam marks something of a departure. Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history. At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day. Her second historical novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fought desperately to save their land from greedy and unscrupulous speculators.
Currently she is working on a late sixteenth century series, featuring a young Marrano physician who is recruited as a code-breaker and spy in Walsingham’s secret service. The first book in the series is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez and the second is The Enterprise of England.
She now lives in Broughty Ferry, on the northeast coast of Scotland, with her husband, formerly vice-principal of the University of Dundee, a cocker spaniel, and two Maine coon cats.
http://www.annswinfen.com