Doublet Affair

Chapter One: Unlocking Secrets "Gently, now, gently. That's the way. Let's take our time. Let there be nothing rough or crude, but only care and delicacy. Let us see with our fingertips. Aah! The word one might use," said Master Alexander Bone, creased face rapt, eyes closed, "is exquisite."His movements were all finesse, his hands as tense and sensitive as a pair of pricked ears. Those same hands were also old and worn, with liver spots and prominent veins. Alexander Bone was old and worn altogether. His dust-coloured woollen gown was mended in several places and deplorably marred by foodstains, and the grey hair which straggled round his ears was in sorry need of trimming. He smelt musty. I didn't like being so close to him. Not for the first time, I asked myself what I was doing here with the likes of Master Bone. I would so much rather have been somewhere else. With somebody quite different.There was a faint click from inside the little pewter casket he was holding, and he opened his eyes. Carefully, he drew out the wire device with which he had been picking the lock, and raised the domed lid."There!" he said. "There you are, Mistress Blanchard. Sweet as you please. You can lock it again -- " he demonstrated -- "as if nothing had ever happened." Master Bone gave me a grin which went further up one side of his face than it did the other. He handed me the wire lock-pick. "Try again. Remember: feel your way and go slow. You can't see the mechanism with your eyes, so close them. Work through your fingers. They'll make pictures in your head if you let them. They'll know when the lock-picks find the spring. Then you push it aside. It should resist first, and then yield to pressure. Press against it, steady and smooth."It was February, and cold. Beyond the window, the Thames flowed sullenly under a leaden sky. The little room off Sir William Cecil's study in Whitehall Palace had thick curtains over the doors to keep out draughts, but although they made the air stuffy they didn't make it warmer. My waiting woman, Fran Dale, who was sitting in a corner of the room, had mittens on. My fingers were chilled and slow and I paused to rub them before I slipped the wire into the keyhole and made a fresh attempt to coax the lock to turn.It would be interesting, I thought, to know where on earth the highly respectable and well-bred Sir William Cecil, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, had found Alexander Bone. The man clearly had some education, and was an expert locksmith who, according to Cecil, had a shop in the City of London near London Bridge, yet Bone's acquaintance with wire lock-picks strongly suggested criminal connections. As I came to know Cecil better, however, I had learned that he had contacts in many unlikely places, acquired over the years as a provident farmer might acquire useful tools -- not despising battered third-hand items but repairing and burnishing them for future use.I couldn't imagine why a skilled man like Alexander Bone should ever have sunk into the underworld in the first place, but he might well have been offered a financial leg-up back into the realms of virtue, in exchange for teaching Cecil's growing network of agents and informers how to get at the private correspondence of people suspected of plotting against the Queen.It was a fact that there were those who wanted to end our peaceful Protestant days and turn back the clock to the time when all must be Catholic, or die most horribly. Some of them believed that Elizabeth was not legitimate and that Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and also of France until her husband's recent death, should be on our throne instead. There was also one who wished to marry Elizabeth, and who was willing to invite a foreign army on to English soil to support him if the people of England rose against a king consort they disliked.Thinking of that almost made me lose my grip on the wire because it madeBuckley, Fiona is the author of 'Doublet Affair' with ISBN 9780671015329 and ISBN 067101532X.