An agonizing hour later she was shown upstairs to a larger office occupied by the Deputy Receiver of Customs, Claude Ronsard, a sour-looking individual in a brown doublet and a velvet cap. While he was asking her all the same questions, she wondered uneasily whether she was supposed to bribe any of these people. She had not noticed this happening downstairs but it would not be done openly, she supposed.
Eventually Ronsard said: ‘Your cargo must be inspected.’
‘Very well,’ she said, trying to affect a light tone of voice, as if this were a minor inconvenience; but her heart was pounding. She jingled her purse discreetly, hinting at bribery, but Ronsard seemed not to notice. Perhaps he took bribes only from people he knew well. Now she did not know what she had to do to save her cargo – and perhaps her life.
Ronsard stood up and they left his office. Sylvie felt shaky and walked unsteadily, but Ronsard seemed oblivious to any signs of her distress. He summoned the clerk whom Sylvie had spoken to first, and they walked along the quay to the boat.
To Sylvie’s surprise, her mother was there. She had hired a porter with a heavy four-wheeled cart to take the boxes to the warehouse in the rue du Mur. Sylvie explained what was happening, and Isabelle looked frightened.
Ronsard and the clerk went on board and selected a box to be unloaded and inspected. The porter carried it onshore and put it down on the quayside. It was made of light wood, nailed, and on its side were the Italian words: ‘Carta di Fabriano.’
Now, Sylvie thought, they were hardly likely to go to all this trouble without emptying the box – and then they would find inside forty Geneva Bibles in French, complete with inflammatory Protestant comments in the margins.
The porter prised open the box with a crowbar. There, on top, were several packages of plain paper.
At that moment, Luc Mauriac arrived.
‘Ronsard, my friend, I’ve been looking for you,’ he said breezily. He was carrying a bottle. ‘There’s a consignment of wine from Jerez, and I thought you ought to try some, just to make sure it’s, you know, what it should be.’ He winked broadly.
Sylvie could not take her eyes off the box. Just under those reams of paper were the Bibles that would condemn her.
Ronsard shook Luc’s hand warmly, took the bottle, and introduced the clerk. ‘We’re just inspecting the cargo of this person,’ he said, indicating Sylvie.
Luc looked at Sylvie and pretended surprise. ‘Hello, Mademoiselle, are you back? You don’t need to worry about her, Ronsard. I know her well – sells paper and ink to the students on the Left Bank.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes, I’ll vouch for her. Listen, old pal, I’ve just got a cargo of furs from the Baltic, and there’s a blond wolf that would look wonderful on Madame Ronsard. I can just see her hair against that fur collar. If you like it, the captain will give it to you – gesture of goodwill, you know what I mean. Come with me and take a look.’
‘By all means,’ Ronsard said eagerly. He turned to his clerk. ‘Sign her papers.’ He and Luc went off arm in arm.
Sylvie almost fainted with relief.
She paid the customs duty to the clerk. He asked for one gold ecu ‘for ink’, an obvious shakedown, but Sylvie paid without protest, and he went away happy.
Then the porter began to load the boxes onto the cart.
*
EARLY IN1561, Ned Willard was given his first international mission for Queen Elizabeth. He was daunted by the weight of responsibility, and desperately keen to succeed.
He was briefed by Sir William Cecil at Cecil’s fine new house in the Strand, sitting in a bay window at the rear that looked over the fields of Covent Garden. ‘We want Mary Stuart to stay in France,’ Cecil said. ‘If she goes to Scotland as queen, there will be trouble. The religious balance there is delicate, and a strongly Catholic monarch will probably start a civil war. And then, if she should defeat the Protestants and win the civil war, she might turn her attention to England.’
Ned understood. Mary Stuart was the rightful queen of England in the eyes of most European leaders. She would be even more of a threat to Elizabeth if she crossed the Channel. He said: ‘And for that same reason, I suppose the Guise family want her in Scotland.’
‘Exactly. So your job will be to persuade her that she’s better off staying where she is.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ Ned said, though for the moment he could not imagine how he could do it.
‘We’re sending you with her brother.’
‘She doesn’t have a brother!’ Ned knew that Mary was the only child of King James V of Scotland and his queen, Marie de Guise.
‘She has many brothers,’ Cecil said with a disapproving sniff. ‘Her father was unfaithful to his wife on a scale that was spectacular even by the standards of kings, and he had at least nine bastard sons.’ Cecil, the grandson of an innkeeper, had a middle-class disdain for royal shenanigans. ‘This one is called James Stuart. Mary Stuart likes him, even though he’s a Protestant. He, too, wants her to stay in France, where she can’t cause much trouble. You will pose as his secretary: we don’t want the French to know that Queen Elizabeth is interfering in this.’
James turned out to be a solemn sandy-haired man of twenty-eight or twenty-nine, wearing a chestnut-brown doublet studded with jewels. All Scottish noblemen spoke French, but some did so better than others: James’s French was hesitant and heavily accented, but Ned would be able to help him out.
They went by ship to Paris, a relatively easy journey now that England and France were no longer at war. There Ned was disappointed to learn that Mary Stuart had gone to Reims for Easter. ‘The Guise dynasty have retired en masse to Champagne to lick their wounds,’ he was told by Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, the English ambassador. Throckmorton was a sharp-eyed man in his forties with a beard that was still a youthful red-brown. He wore a black doublet with small but exquisitely embroidered ruffs at the neck and sleeves. ‘Queen Caterina outmanoeuvred them brilliantly in Orléans, and, since then, she has encountered no serious opposition, which has left the Guises frustrated.’
