The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's (30 page)

It seemed, in fact, the right moment to rise, make my curtsy and go. Norfolk called Conley to show me out. “Conley,” I said, as we went through the vestibule, “is Arthur Johnson here today?”

“No, Mistress Stannard. He is working at the Ridolfi house at present, I believe.”

“Thank you. Please fetch my servants.”

He gave me an unfriendly look but did as I asked. I led my companions back to the river. We were in luck, for the tide was turning and getting a boat back the way we had come would not be difficult.

“What happened?” Brockley asked.

“I think he’ll testify to the existence of that stab wound and make Dean admit it as well. That should put an end to the charge of encompassing Gale’s death.”

“That’s a mercy.”

“Are we going back to Sir William’s house?” Dale asked.

“No,” I said. “We’re going to Signor Ridolfi. There’s still a charge against Gladys connected with Hillman. I don’t particularly want to have to stand up in court and explain that she put a sleeping draft in his nighttime drink on my instructions! There are two people at the Ridolfi house that I want to see. One’s Edmund Dean. I may as well speak to him if I can. The other one is Johnson.”

The boatman put us down at the Ridolfi landing stage. People could not arrive at the landing stage unobserved; there was always someone on the watch and Greaves met us as we walked through the knot garden.

“Mistress Stannard! Madame sent me out to meet you. She will be glad to see you. Come this way.”

Perforce, we followed him to the terrace where we found Donna and her maid, a pretty Italian girl, industriously stitching, seated on either side of a worktable. Donna jumped up when she saw me. “But how delightful! Have you come to see how I am getting on without you? I miss you so much! But I have profited from your company! Look!” She held up the work she was doing; a half-finished sleeve of silvery damask with buttons to secure it at the shoulder. “I bought this material from Master Paige—and I beat him down to twenty-six shillings a yard!”

The average price for such a material
was
twenty-six shillings a yard. Paige had probably asked thirty shillings and then let himself be hammered down to the price he had meant to charge all along. I smiled at her, admired the damask, and complimented her on her stitchwork, but when Donna invited me to join her, I shook my head. “This isn’t just a social visit, Madame Ridolfi. Something has happened. It concerns my woman, Gladys Morgan.”

Briefly, I explained. Donna’s maid interrupted me once, exclaiming in bad French that she had been afraid of Gladys and that she was not surprised that the old woman had been taken up for witchcraft, but Donna, quite sharply, told her to keep her place and not interfere. “Naturally, Mistress Stannard will do what she can for her servants! Would I not do the same for you?” The maid subsided and I said, “I must speak to Edmund Dean, if I can. I heard that he was here.”

“Dean? Not that I know. However . . . ” She picked up a little silver bell from the worktable and rang it. Greaves appeared very quickly. “Madam?”

“Has Edmund Dean been here today, Greaves?”

“Yes, madam. He came on foot, bringing a letter from his master. Signor Ridolfi was out, though expected shortly, and Dean wasn’t sure whether to wait for an answer or not. Then a message reached him here and he said he was going off somewhere by river. I didn’t see the messenger and can’t say whether the message was from Howard House or not.”

“I see,” I said. Well, the Duke of Norfolk would deal with Edmund Dean, or so I hoped. Johnson was now more important. “Is Arthur Johnson here?” I asked. “I must talk to him too, if possible.”

“Yes, madam,” Greaves said. “He’s working on the topiary. Everything grows so fast at this time of year.”

“Then if you will excuse me . . . ?”

“Yes, of course,” said Donna, her nice brown eyes full of regret that I hadn’t come for the sake of her company.

As we went into the topiary garden, Brockley said, “Madam, will you let me start the talking?”

I looked at him gratefully. He had done this before—taken over when I had a problem difficult for a woman to solve. Johnson might well turn out to be such a problem. “I wish you would,” I said.

We found Johnson up a ladder, clipping the mane of a rearing horse. “Can’t come down,” he said when we halted below and Brockley called to him. “Too busy.” His brown gnome’s face peered down at us. “This here mane’s grown out of shape in a
week. In summer, I don’t know how I keep up. You want to talk to me; you just do it while I keep on clippin’.”

“This is important,” said Brockley. “We can’t talk to you properly while you’re up there. You must come down.”

“You tell me what it’s about and maybe I will and maybe I won’t.”

“Gladys Morgan,” said Brockley.

“What about ’er? Rotten old besom, and a witch, to boot.”

“Come
down
!” said Brockley. “Or I’ll make you.” He seized the ladder and shook it in a threatening manner, and Johnson descended, backward, stepped off the last rung and stood there glaring at us.

“What about old Gladys, then? Her and her curses!”

“She’s been arrested,” I said, unable after all, to leave it to Brockley. “As well you know! But you also know very well that she’s not a witch! Witchy nonsense, you called it once. You said it to me!”

“Oh, I did, did I?”

“Yes, you did. I heard you,” Brockley told him roughly. “You only laid information because she turned you down and didn’t appreciate your topiary work enough!”

“Turned me down? Yes, so she did! A decent man offers her his hand and heart an’ all she can do is laugh at them! Wounded me, she did!”

For a moment, the feeling in his voice changed from malice to pain and I realized that the pain was real. Gladys really had hurt him. But the malice returned fast enough. His bright old eyes sparkled with it.

“But it weren’t long afore I were thinkin’ I’m better off without the likes of her because I saw her, I did, putting summat in Master Hillman’s drink, the night afore he said he’d had wild dreams and so forth,
and
I’d seen her a-pickin’ summat in the herb garden that same evening!” His voice was triumphant now, as though he thought he had checkmated us.

“I’ll enjoy coming to the trial and hearing you explain what you were doing up a ladder, peering in at windows,” Brockley said. “The window just above is that of the maidservants. I take it
you were peeping at them again, for all you claim you were clearing a drain!”

“So I were. You try and prove I weren’t.”

“Gladys,” I said boldly, deciding to go for half the truth, at least, “was adding extra spices. Master Hillman had sipped his drink and found that he wanted more flavorings. Gladys and I met him when he came out of his room in search of them. He mentioned where he was going and Gladys said she would see to it for him.”

Hillman would come back from Scotland in due course and might quarrel with this, but I would worry about that later. If necessary, I would tell him what Gladys and I had really done and why. Cecil would surely back me up. Hillman was Gale’s kinsman and Walsingham hoped he would be Gale’s replacement. He would very likely understand.

“Then what were that old hag a-doin’ in the herb garden?” demanded Johnson truculently.

“You will not call Mistress Morgan a hag,” said Brockley coldly. Now that Gladys was in grave trouble, all his gallantry toward her had returned.

“She was picking herbs for a potion against sick headaches,” I said, truthfully. “My headaches, to be precise. That’s all.”

“You see,” said Brockley, “your evidence amounts to nothing. We may as well tell you that Edmund Dean is likely to withdraw his evidence as well. You’ll be on your own and we’ll refute you.”

“What does that mean—refute?”

“It means we’ll make it clear that what you saw wasn’t what you thought,” said Dale, joining in, shrill in her support for me and Brockley.

“All right,” said the gnome, showing his gap teeth—so very like Gladys’s own fangs—in a far from genial smile. “So what I say don’t count for nothing. But them as Gladys cursed at Howard House,
they’ll
likely speak up. I know all about that, from them. I work there, same as I do here. They’ll say how she cursed ’em and they all fell sick . . . ”

“They ate stew with bad chicken in it!”

“So
you
say.” The crafty old eyes smiled unpleasantly at me. “But it ain’t only them. There’s more.”

“More?” I said.

Again, that fanged grin, that cunning leer. “Gladys told me this an’ that as well, in the days when it were sweet talk atween us. Like how she cursed folk at those places where you lot live as a rule. Somewhere called Hawks something or other, and somewhere called Withysham, and there were a third . . . Faldene or some such.”

I felt myself become very still.

“Makes sense to you, do it?” The sly old eyes were watching me. “Went fer the vicar there, she did, over how he was treatin’ some other crazy old soul. She cursed folk at all three places, she told me, and she laughed at how they looked when she let fly at ’em, and how she made the physicians wild, makin’ potions that were better than what theirs were.”

“Oh, God,” I said.

“You may well call on God. So may she. Justice’ll be sendin’ to all them places, to the physicians there and that vicar. They’ll be called to witness, too. Goin’ to go and bully them, are you? Think they’ll listen? More likely to have you up as well, I reckon!”

We said nothing. There would be no silencing any of the physicians, while Dr. Fleet, the vicar of Faldene, would be the most lethal of all and would probably call on his fellow vicars at Hawkswood and Withysham to back him up. They would, too. Any misfortune that had befallen anyone at whom Gladys had aimed a curse would be put down to it. And life is full of misfortunes. Had anything gone amiss with Dr. Fleet . . . I remembered, shivering, the curse Gladys had leveled at him.

I curse ye by a cold hearth and a cold bed, a cold heart and a cold head, a cold belly and cold breath, a cold life and a cold death!

The words had stuck in my head.

It was because Gladys had uttered that curse that we had set out for Howard House at all. Now it might well destroy her. In those few words she had very likely started something which she could not stop.

If she had hurt Johnson’s feelings, he looked like getting his revenge. The gnome had checkmated us, it seemed.

 • • • 

“I hate him,” I said passionately, as the three of us marched out of the garden. For once, Brockley hadn’t even noticed that Dale had been exposed to the scandalous topiary. “I
hate
him. He’s disgusting!”

“I’ve seen things very like him in stagnant ponds,” Brockley agreed, straight-faced as ever when he was joking.

I snorted, a noise between rage and bitter laughter. We returned to Donna to make our farewells. She asked if Johnson had been helpful and was clearly sorry when I said no, but said sadly that she had no influence over him and could not help. I kissed her good-bye and then the three of us walked dejectedly back along the Strand to Cecil’s house.

And once more, there in the entrance hall, were the Cecils, with anxious faces. It was weird, as though time had slipped backward. Feeling suddenly almost too tired to stand, I said: “What is it now?”

“Dear Ursula, thank goodness you’re back!” They said it in unison. “We’ve been looking out for you,” Mildred added.

“What’s happened?”

“You must come upstairs,” said Cecil. “It’s Meg.”

“
Meg!
” I couldn’t bear this. I had enough to endure. The thought of what might happen to Gladys sickened me, and though my guts twisted at the very thought of telling Hugh that Matthew was still alive, I knew I must soon brace myself to do so. I couldn’t endure another calamity, least of all one involving my daughter. “What’s wrong with her?”

Mildred caught at my arm as I was about to plunge past them on the way to the stairs. “It’s all right. She’s here, quite safe. But she did give us the slip earlier. She was supposed to have stayed with me. I asked her to read to me while I did some embroidery, but she seemed very distracted—and after a while, I was called to deal with some household matter and when I returned, she had gone! One of our maids saw her going out but didn’t stop her, assuming that she had permission . . . ”

“But she’s back, you say? In that case, what . . . ”

“She came back some time ago,” said Cecil. “But she is in
tears. She won’t stop crying. She keeps asking for you, and she won’t tell anyone else what the matter is.”

“Where
is
she?” I demanded, once more making for the stairs.

“In your chamber!” Mildred called.

I was already halfway there, going up the stairs two at a time. I rushed straight to my room and there, indeed, was Meg, lying on my bed, her cap awry and her dark hair soaked at the temples with sweat and tears. She was huddled, with her knees close to her chest, and her nose turned into the pillow but she looked around as I came in, and then, with a wail, she threw herself off the bed and into my arms. I held her tightly.

“Meg! Meg, sweetheart. It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here.” I saw Dale hovering at the door. “Mulled wine!” I said. It is a sovereign answer to shock and hysteria. Dale disappeared and I sat down on the bed, holding Meg as close as I could and crooning to her.

“What is it, darling? You can tell me!”

“I went to see Edmund Dean.”

“You—
what
? I’ve been looking for him, too, though I didn’t find him. I’ll tell you all about that later. Why did you go alone? Did he do something to you?” Horrible visions of assault, of rape, rushed through my mind.

Meg, though, was shaking her head furiously. “Not that. Not what you’re thinking. But it’s just as bad.”

“
Just as bad?
It can’t be. Meg, what are you talking about? And
why
did you go?”

“Because of Gladys. I thought, if I asked him, he wouldn’t give evidence against Gladys. He might even be able to stop the whole thing, get her set free. If he would say that Master Gale really was stabbed, and if he pooh-poohed the servants at Howard House who might talk about her curses, well, a jury might listen to him. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He said he couldn’t even though he was in love with me, and then, to prove he was in love with me, he gave me a present. He gave me this.”