Review: The Doublet Affair

Second in the Ursula Blanchard series, this tale of intrigue in the reign of Elizabeth I, moves right along in both plot and series storyline. Ursula is trained in lockpicking and sent by the Queen and her chief minister to the home of a friend as temporary sewing instructor to the girls of the household, to uncover a mystery of national importance. All the threads of the tangled plot are tied in a neat little knot at the end. Ursula and her servants work diligently to discover the answer while plenty of tangled subplots including a possible plot to put Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne.

The Catholic household includes a distracted academic type husband always buried in his books, or experimenting with failed inventions like DaVinci's flying machine; a distracted wife with too many children and too few servants; their nurse who needs care rather than gives it; a Catholic priest masquerading as a tutor in academics, fencing and riding; a music tutor/clockmaker who comes and goes, and servants better at gossip and stealing kisses than doing their job.

Ursula's own life takes a lot of twists and turns as she applies to the Queen to leave service and reunite in France with the Catholic husband who plotted against Elizabeth but was betrayed by Ursula. Denied her request, Ursula plans to secretly flee but fate forces her to once again into a position of suspecting her husband is part of another Catholic plot, and having to choose between her preferance for a Protestant England , and a quiet life in France as wife to her Catholic husband.

I found the story lively, suspenseful, and engaging with Ursula and her servants coping with mysterious strangers, poisons, secret rooms, kidnapping, and a tragicomic impromptu wedding; and a paragraph or two of passion as Ursula and her husband share a night together and try to reconcile their marriage in the middle of political intrigue, desperate flights from danger, sinister night journey's, swashbuckling swordplay, and crimes against the realm.

However I wonder if all readers would be familiar with an embroidery technique called "blackwork" which was common in that era. A blackwork doublet features prominently in the storyline although even with the book title the reason escaped me until the end, excellent writing hiding a clue of importance in plain site. But it might have been helpful to have blackwork either illustrated or discussed in a foreward or something.

Book Review: The Doublet Affair