Queen of Ambition (21 page)

“You were watching? We never saw you! Where were you?”

“You did see me, ma’am, and so did Roger but you didn’t know me. I wore black and put a veil over my face.”

“You were the woman in the mourning veil!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But she had a big ruff on, not the sort of thing you ever wear … oh, I see! I
see
! You used one of
my
ruffs!”

“And that old mourning veil, ma’am, that’s always with your things.”

“I’ve had that since I was a child,” I said distractedly. “I used it for my grandparents’ funerals, and my mother’s and Gerald’s.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Dale wearily. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t harm your things. I washed the ruff and pleated it fresh and I folded the veil away, just as it was …” Her dignity fell from her again. She sagged back, turning her face away from me, waiting to hear her fate.

I said nothing for a moment, for I was badly shaken. I was also thanking heaven that although it was true that Brockley and I had once nearly forgotten our marriage vows, we had not actually done so.

I took her chin in my hand and turned her face toward me again. She met my eyes miserably, searching them for the answer to a question she dared not ask.

“Never mind about the ruff and veil,” I said. “Now, listen. Be assured—and I will swear it on a Bible if you wish—that there has never been any impropriety between me and Brockley.” I hoped she would believe
me. Among the items of gossip I had gleaned during my visit to court had been the fact that while I was in France, Elizabeth had fallen sick of the smallpox and when she believed herself to be dying, had sworn that there had been no impropriety between her and Robert Dudley. I had reason to know that she spoke the truth but plenty of people didn’t think so. Words are cheap, after all.

“Brockley and I are friends,” I said. “We have shared peril together. But I promise you, his heart is yours. When we first went to France and you fell into danger, he was nearly out of his mind with fear for you. As for me, my heart belongs to Master de la Roche and the sooner I am home with him again, the better. You know very well that I intend to leave Brockley behind at Withysham as its steward, and you with him as its housekeeper.”

I had decided on that because my husband, Matthew, had himself concluded that Brockley and I were rather more than just friends; but Dale mustn’t know that. “You have nothing to fear from me,” I said. “Nothing. You can go on any errand I choose for you in the perfect certainty that nothing amiss is happening behind your back and you need never lie to me.”

“Is it possible,” said Dale, “for a man and a woman to be friends and nothing more?”

“Many people think not,” I said. “But the queen manages it.”

“Dudley?” asked Dale, a little too acutely. She knew the court gossip just as well as I did.

“Yes, in a way,” I said. “She and Dudley aren’t lovers, though she loves him—and what she meant by
offering him to Mary of Scotland as a husband, I can’t imagine. You know about that?”

“The whole court and half the world knows it, ma’am.” Dale was calm now, reassured because I was willing to gossip with her.

“The queen would never let Dudley go,” I said. “Cecil said as much and I think he’s right. But nevertheless, they are
not
lovers. We were speaking of friendship between men and women. The queen and Dudley are one kind of example. She and Cecil are another. They are genuine friends, and there are many others in her council whom she trusts and regards with friendship. It can be done, and one needn’t be a queen, either.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, letting the wound between us heal. Then I said: “I still need to get word to Mistress Smithson. I will write another letter. I now know for sure that she
is
Mistress Jester. While I am at it, I may as well ask her whether she knows of anything else that her husband and brother-in-law may be planning. I can put it to her that if she does, she should speak before they fall deeper in. What if her daughter were somehow to be dragged in as well? Bring me my writing things. Then, Dale, you must again set out for Brent Hay Manor house, and this time, for the love of God,
go
! Make sure that you actually see Mistress Smithson, who lives as a companion to a Mistress Catherine Grantley, and give her the letter in person. Once more, I can’t go myself. I need to call on Cecil.”

Rob Henderson was not in the lodging, but I hoped that he had kept his word and asked Cecil to expect me. I changed into a suitable gown and waited for a while, since it was too early for Cecil to have arrived, and I hoped Rob would come back. However, he did not, and eventually I set out for St. John’s College alone, since I had dispatched Dale to Brent Hay.

When I reached it, people were coming and going, carrying fuel and supplies through an imposing entrance, and the work was being supervised by a porter, an extremely dignified figure with a gold chain of office. I inquired of him whether Master Robert Henderson was there. He immediately called an underling and I was led through the archway into a wide, splendid quadrangle surrounded by buildings in rosy brick, with graciously mullioned windows and towers at the corners.

I was shown in at the door of a tall, slender tower,
its angles picked out in gray stone, and topped with crenellations. Although it was larger and less ornamented, it was in many ways so like the buttress towers that finished the terraced houses of Jackman’s Lane that I thought Jester’s father-in-law must have imitated them. I was taken up some stairs to a set of rooms where I discovered Rob busily harassing a number of clerks, who were checking baggage items against a list.

“Yes, he’s arrived,” Rob said to me. “But his gout is troubling him. He made the journey in his coach, for comfort, and he’s sent instructions that the college dignitaries aren’t to wait on him until he summons them. He’s brought his old family nurse to attend to him, with her simples and her bandages. I haven’t had a chance yet to ask if he’ll see you. I didn’t think you’d be free until this afternoon, anyway. Since you’re here, I’ll ask him now, but …”

Shaking a dubious head, he went out, leaving me to gaze irritably out of the window into the quadrangle, while behind me, the clerks went on checking baggage and giving me inquisitive looks. Rob was not long, however. “You can come through,” he said, reappearing in the doorway, and I followed him into a paneled chamber where Cecil was resting on a settle with his bandaged foot up, while an elderly woman, with a soft, wrinkled face and a very neat cap and apron, crouched nearby on a low stool, stirring a pot in which she was brewing something sweet and aromatic over a small portable brazier.

Rob took himself back to the clerks and the baggage. Cecil’s face was drawn with pain but he gave me a smile. “You find me at a disadvantage, Ursula. These
attacks always come at the most inconvenient moment. Will you dine with me? I am about to have a very plain meal with no spices or pepper or white wine. My physician says it will help if I avoid such things. Nothing makes any difference that I can detect but I try to follow orders.”

“If you followed my orders, my boy,” said the elderly woman, “you’d have stayed at home and sent some trustworthy fellow or other to see to things in Cambridge. That ’ud be my advice but there, you always did go your own way.”

“And you’re proud of me for it, Nanny,” said Cecil.

“Maybe. Maybe. Going your own way’s got you into high places, I grant you. But there’s a price for everything, that’s what I always say.”

“I know, Nanny. As I think I once told you,” he added, addressing me, “to Nanny I am still the little boy whose grazed knees she had to bathe when I’d fallen down …”

“Fallen out of a tree, more like, after you’d been told a dozen times not to climb it!”

I laughed. The affection between them was heartwarming and obvious. I became sober again very quickly, however. I was there, after all, on serious business. Cecil read my face and said: “You have something to report?”

“Yes. And I want to ask you to do something for me.”

I hesitated, since we were not alone, and Cecil, again, understood. “There is no need to worry about Nanny. She understands discretion. I’ve known more talkative tombs.”

“Now, don’t you go chattering about tombs; it’s unlucky,” Nanny said reprovingly. She wrapped her hands in her apron, lifted the pot off the brazier, and set it down on a couple of bricks that were ready at her side. “There, that can cool. A dose of that this evening and you’ll sleep easy tonight, sir. Is the lady dining? If she is, I’ll go to the kitchen and ask for extra.”

“I’d like to dine. Thank you,” I said. Nanny gave me a grin that was nothing short of mischievous, and said: “Well, now you can talk all the scandal you like and no one to hear,” and departed in a cloud of conscious tact as palpable as the aromatic fumes from the brew.

“Ursula?” said Cecil.

“I haven’t discovered any plots,” I said. “But there’s been a death …”

Cecil heard me out. As I talked to him, I felt more strongly than ever that my narrative lacked cohesion. A silly, unnecessary scheme to bring Mistress Jester back to her husband’s home, when all Woodforde really needed to do was tell Roland Jester where she lived. A worried student, who wanted a secret meeting to discuss vague suspicions that had probably been aroused by nothing more sinister than the said ridiculous scheme. The death of the same student—but in what seemed to be a simple riding accident. Nothing more, except for a persistent sense of something wrong.

“And that’s all,” I said. “But I can tell you this: Roland Jester is an unpleasant man and if I had been his wife I think I would have run away too. I have sent Dale off to warn her against taking part in this playlet and warn her too that Woodforde knows where she
is. You may call it interfering, but I am on her side.”

“You can be quite militant at times,” Cecil said. “Rob Henderson has been saying as much. You’ve been ordering him about, he says, as though he were your slave.”

“Oh.” I felt uncomfortable. “I’m sorry. But I’m worried and I needed his help to find things out.”

“Yes, I know. He’s told me some of it though he made it clear that he doesn’t agree with your conclusions. I’m not sure if I do, either. No, it’s all right.” He raised a hand to stop me as I was about to speak. “With the queen, I will not take chances. Thomas Shawe’s death is enough on its own to make my mind up for me. She will agree, I think, when she hears of it. The playlet will indeed be canceled, and I think we will have both Jester and Woodforde brought in for a little questioning. Even if it
is
just a matter of Woodforde using the playlet to set up this melodramatic reunion, he has no right to make use of the queen in such a fashion. He isn’t showing proper respect. He seems sadly lacking in that particular virtue. I wonder if that was the reason why Lady Lennox dismissed him?”

“In a way,” I told him. “I suppose one could call it lack of respect. He wrote love letters to her and one evening he was found hiding under her bed.”

“He was
what
?” Cecil, caught between laughter and disbelief, moved jerkily, jarred his swollen foot, and subsided with a gasp. “A thousand curses on this malady. Who told you that?”

“Brockley,” I said. “He had it from Woodforde’s previous manservant.”

My explanation had included Brockley’s new position as our spy in the enemy camp and indeed his impressive piece of information extraction in the King’s College retiring room. Despite his obvious pain, Cecil smiled.

“So that was it. Hid under her bed, you say? Like you in the retiring room—or rather,
not
like you. Lady Lennox would have had a shock if her servants hadn’t found him before he jumped out on her. Well, well,
well
!”

Cecil was a man of propriety. In my presence, I never knew him to utter a single word that could not have been said in the presence of archangels. In his presence, I too was always a perfect lady. We were, however, a man and a woman of the world. For a few silent moments we each privately considered Giles Woodforde’s unlikely passion for Lady Margaret Lennox and imagined it in consummation. At least, I did, and I don’t think I misinterpreted the sparkle in Cecil’s eyes.

Then he said: “To business,” and shouted for Rob. Within moments, he had dictated a note and Rob had been dispatched with orders to Cecil’s retainers to bring Woodforde and Jester to us. “I’ll question them myself,” Cecil said.

Rob returned presently to say that the men had set off, and a few moments later, Nanny also reappeared, followed by a string of servants with our dinner. While the three of us and Nanny sat eating it, in informal fashion, Cecil brought Rob up-to-date on all that I had told him and I explained, when Rob asked, that I had come unattended because I had had to send Fran to
Brent Hay, although I didn’t say why her first attempt to take a letter to Mistress Smithson had miscarried, only that it had.

The meal was heavenly, I must say: a shoulder of veal with a sweetened mustard sauce that Cecil didn’t take, capons in a bland sauce that he did, cabbage, peas, fresh manchet bread, a salad of radishes and cucumber, a fruit pie, some orange- and nutmeg-flavored custards (which Cecil also passed by with a regretful sigh), and red wine to wash it all down. In the pie shop, we snatched food at midday much as we did at breakfast—usually some of the stewed meat that went into the pies—and had our main meal together in the kitchen in the evening, after the shop was closed. It was more varied then and there was always enough, but it couldn’t compare with this.

We had just finished when two of Cecil’s officers arrived, looking worried and accompanied by Brockley. I knew both of the officers, having had them as part of my escort when first I went to France. Stocky, sandy-haired Dick Dodd was solidly reliable, and the brindle-bearded John Ryder had been a good friend to both Brockley and myself. Dodd had apparently taken a couple of men to the pie shop while Ryder, also with two men, had gone to collect Woodforde from his rooms. Both had returned without their quarry.

Ryder had found only Brockley alone in Woodforde’s lodgings. “Master Woodforde went out two hours ago and he didn’t say where he was going,” Brockley said, repeating to us what he had already told Ryder. “Master Jester came to see him early in the morning and spoke to him in private. Then they went
off out together. I tried to follow, but I couldn’t risk getting too near them and I lost them in Cambridge. So I went back to the lodging to wait. They were going toward the pie shop, I think, but that’s all I know. Only, there’s something I want to tell Mistress Blanchard,” he added, turning to me. “When I saw you the other day in the pie shop, madam, I was with Master Woodforde and I couldn’t speak to you then.”