The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's (7 page)

“Is he vomiting?” I asked in practical tones.

“No. He keeps trying but he can’t. He’s sweating, holding his stomach, and throwing himself about. He’s only half conscious! He can’t purge himself either.”

“Dale and I will see that the servants upstairs are looked after. We know what to do,” said Sybil briskly. “Leave it to us, Mistress Stannard. You go and see to Gale.”

“Thank you, Sybil. Meg, go and fetch Gladys. She’s got the makings of medicines with her. Master Gale may need a purge.”

“Not Gladys!” said Dean. “She cursed all the servants and Gale as well and it could be that . . . ”

“Nonsense,” said Hugh. “They’ve eaten chicken that’s been kept too long, that’s all. Gladys is clever at physicking people. Go, Meg!”

Meg sped off. Sybil and Dale each seized a loaded tray and made off up the stairs in her wake. Dean stood glaring at us.

“I don’t agree with this!” he said angrily. “That Gladys creature shouldn’t go near any of the sick. If harm comes of it, it’s on your heads.”

“I daresay our heads will survive,” snapped Hugh. “Are you ready, Ursula? We’d better hurry.”

Hugh’s stiff joints were painful for him on stairs, and Dean took over his tray, which held a goblet of salt water and a basin. Then, however, we had to make what haste we could, to keep up as Dean led the way back to the passageway past our room, on across the head of the main stairs and into another wing with a further wide corridor, where Higford, the senior secretary, now appeared, holding up a branched candlestick with four lit candles in it and looking anxious.

“Thank God you’re here. The duke is awake; he knows Gale is ill and he values Gale highly. Come in, quickly!”

We crowded into Gale’s room on Higford’s heels. There was just one bed; the messenger had been given a small guest chamber to himself. The only light came from Higford’s candlestick and a second, similar one on a table, and the glow of a dying fire. Much of the room was in shadow, and the shadows were full of anguish. Master Gale was very sick indeed and his pain was almost palpable.

Hugh went to fetch more light. I put my arm round the patient, placed the basin before him and set about dosing him with the salt water. A few minutes later, Gladys arrived with a nasty-smelling herbal purge. We set about getting that into him, too.

I didn’t know how near to death Julius Gale really was. He was a healthy young man, after all. We tended him, though,
through the small hours when human vitality is always at its lowest and the whole world feels dead and haunted. Wavering candlelight and distorted shadows make that feeling stronger. If we weren’t actually fighting for Gale’s life, we felt as though we were. The struggle lasted until dawn and at one point Hugh did say, uncertainly: “Should we send for the chaplain?” However, Gale himself chose to emerge from near unconsciousness just at that moment and said, clearly if weakly: “No, thank you.”

By daybreak we had won. The gripes and the nausea, brought on by the salt water and Gladys’s potion, had done their work and ceased. We had found some clean sheets in a chest under the window seat and changed the bedding. Once he could answer questions, we learned that being, as I said, a healthy young man, he had an appetite to match, especially after that long ride from Dover, and had eaten not one but three helpings of the wretched stew.

In the morning, by which time we ourselves were utterly exhausted, we handed him over to a couple of servants who, like the butler, had patronized the salmon rather than the stew and were not affected. Dean, who had left us and gone to bed just before dawn, came back and said that he would keep an eye on Gale and his attendants and we retired to our beds. We woke in time for a late dinner with a harassed and apologetic duke, who was so horrified that such a thing could have happened in his kitchens that we found ourselves comforting him as though he were an upset child, with Hugh patting his shoulder while I poured him a glass of wine and made reassuring noises.

Most of the servants were recovering by then, and so, we heard, were three people from outside, who had chanced to eat with them the previous evening.

It seemed that the duke regarded the servants’ quarters as an establishment separate from his own and never queried their visitors. Indeed, he was generous enough to give Conley an allowance for kitchen hospitality. If a beggar came to the door, he wasn’t chased away at the end of a broom but sent away with food; and if the servants had friends, such friends were welcome—at least as long as the allowance held out—to share their meals.

As a result, strangers apparently wandered freely in and out of Thomas Howard’s house. Apart from stray beggars at the back door, tradesmen, town criers, night watchmen, off-duty servants from neighboring houses dropped in regularly. Beside that, the duke himself often had visitors who came accompanied by their own servants, who would also be entertained there. Brockley and Dale, who had eaten with us, had been lucky. Last night’s disaster had laid low one night watchman, the assistant butler from a nearby merchant’s house, and the aunt of one of Norfolk’s maidservants.

Gale, however, was still far from well. During the morning, we heard, he had suffered a renewed bout of nausea and gripes, and in the afternoon, Sybil and I went together to sit with him. We found him feverish, and fretting because his journey north was being delayed.

“You cannot set out until you’ve recovered,” Sybil told him. “How would it help your employers if you were taken ill on the road?”

“I’ve got letters to deliver from my master, and His Grace, the duke, has given me letters as well and . . . ” His eyes widened. “Dear God, where did I put them? I can’t remember!” He sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. “I must make sure they’re safe. Both my master and the duke especially charged me to take care of them and . . . ”

He stood up, sagged, sat down again with a thud, and grabbed for the basin, which was waiting on a table by the bed. I held it for him while Sybil wrung out a napkin in the warm water that we had ready on the washstand. When he lifted his head, Sybil gently wiped the sweat from his pallid face. “Better out than in,” she said encouragingly.

“Maybe, but it’s taking the strength out of me. My legs feel like wet string. I can’t stand. Will one of you go through my things and try to find those letters? I must know where they are.”

“Come. Get back into bed,” I said, lifting his ankles, to swing them up. “You need to sleep if you can.”

“Yes, but the letters!”

“We’ll find them,” said Sybil, catching my eye. Her expression said
Better do as he wants otherwise he won’t rest.

We took some time to find them because we began by examining his doublet. I was in the habit of wearing open-fronted overskirts and when I was working as an agent, I stitched pouches inside them, in which I could carry such things as money, confidential documents, a small dagger, and a set of lockpicks. My mind worked in terms of hidden pouches. There were none, however, in Master Gale’s garments. We didn’t find what we were looking for until Sybil came upon his saddlebags pushed into the corner of a clothespress, and drew them out. The letters were in one of the compartments, three of them, tied together with a silk cord. We carried them to the bed so that Gale could check that they were all there.

With a sigh of relief, he said that they were. He tucked them under his pillow and then, with a hot brick wrapped in flannel pressed against his stomach to comfort his aching abdominal muscles, he slept.

Presently, when we felt fairly sure that he was mending, we handed our watch back to the servants who had looked after him in the morning, and went out. Once outside the door, we exchanged glances. “May I come to your room, with you, Mistress Stannard?” said Sybil.

Sybil and I were good friends. She was a mature woman who had seen trouble in her life and overcome it. She wasn’t handsome, since her features had a curious quality, as though they had been compressed between a board under her chin and a heavy weight on top of her head so that her mouth and nostrils were a fraction too wide and her eyebrows swept out too far toward her temples. Yet hers was a face with strength and a surprising amount of attraction. I was very fond of Sybil and trusted her just as I trusted Hugh, or Brockley. She knew about my past adventures. I led the way to Hugh’s and my chamber. No one was there save for ourselves. We stood looking at each other. “Sybil?” I said.

“I take it that you noticed too,” said Sybil. “Those letters.”

“One was addressed to the Earl of Moray, Regent of Scotland,” I said. “I take it the seal is that of Gale’s employer. He’s called Ridolfi. I think he’s a banker. Well, a man in Moray’s position
might well be in touch with a banker. That seems natural enough. The letter with Norfolk’s seal on it, addressed to My Lady Mary Stuart, is natural enough as well. He told us he was corresponding with her direct, and Gale mentioned that he meant to travel by way of Staffordshire. But that third one . . . ”

“Had a superscription which was nothing but a row of figures. A cipher of some kind, I suppose,” said Sybil. “In which case, what’s inside is probably in cipher as well.”

“The seal was the same as the one on the letter to Moray,” I said. “Presumably it was Ridolfi’s again. We don’t know who it was for, but most probably either Mary or Moray.”

“In
cipher,
” repeated Sybil, driving the point home.

People only write letters in cipher in order to hide something. When such a letter is bundled together with missives to people like the Scottish regent and the deposed Scottish queen, in a world where the said queen is ardently scheming to get herself back on to the Scottish throne and also on to that of England, if she can possibly manage it, then the presence of the cipher is a warning signal. Both Sybil and I knew it.

Obliquely, Sybil said: “It would be such . . . such bad manners.”

“I know. That’s more or less what Hugh said. Last night, we were wondering whether we should report our good host’s obsession with Mary. Then the servants started being taken ill and we were interrupted. We had more or less decided that it wasn’t necessary, but we didn’t know then about that cipher letter.”

“We were invited here in good faith,” said Sybil.

I nodded unhappily. “And what would I think of a guest who listened to my confidences, saw my correspondence by chance, and then trotted off to Cecil with the news that I was in contact with questionable people? I’ve investigated and reported on people’s private documents in the past, but that was under orders. This is different.”

“Is the Earl of Moray really questionable? He’s Protestant,” said Sybil. “That doesn’t make him an enemy to England.”

“Mary’s questionable enough and Moray is her half brother and he may be interested in getting his sister put back on her throne. If so, then an enemy to England is exactly what he is.”

“Are we talking about treason?” asked Sybil.

The word was out that had been nagging silently at our minds ever since we saw that row of incomprehensible numerals.

We were still staring blankly at each other when my husband appeared. I turned to him thankfully. “Hugh! We need your advice!”

I explained. Hugh listened silently and then said: “Let us all sit down. We must think carefully.” He took his own advice and moved to the padded window seat. Sybil and I took the settle by the hearth.

“Ursula,” said my husband, “tell me all you can remember about what happened when this business of Norfolk and Mary came up before.”

“I learned of it last year, when I went north and saw Mary Stuart,” I said. “When I came back, I spoke of it to Cecil, but he already knew. He said the matter would go no further, that the queen herself would speak to Norfolk. I was left with the impression that they meant to warn him off but I don’t know if they did. It’s possible that the idea
wasn’t
quelled after all. Perhaps the queen and her council decided on reflection that it might be safer to have Mary married to an English nobleman than to some foreign prince with an army at his back. When she hears that the idea has been revived, Elizabeth may be quite agreeable. Only . . . ”

“It’s the cipher that disturbs you, isn’t it?”

“Yes. I think,” I said, “that it’s from Gale’s employer, who is a banker. It’s probably meant for either the regent, or Mary. Perhaps one of them wants money advanced for some purpose or other—but if so . . . ”

I stopped and Hugh finished the sentence for me. “It must be very secret, or why put it in code?”

“And in times such as these,” I said, “secret purposes tend to be—unlawful.”

Hugh’s face was growing lined now, with the years, and watching him, I saw the lines deepen with irritation. “Mary Stuart! I think of her as That Woman, you know. Do you know what she reminds me of?”

“No, what?”

“One of those sirens in an Ancient Greek legend, sitting on a
rock, singing and combing her hair and luring sailors to destruction. I think she’s luring Norfolk! Cecil has eyes and ears in most great houses and he
may
know all about—whatever is going on. But . . . ”

“We’re not sure,” I finished for him. “We’ve been so long away from court. We’re not up-to-date.”

“A marriage of this kind . . . ” Hugh’s voice tailed off, as he thought it out. Then he reached a conclusion. “We all have qualms. I think we’re bound to have. But you’ve been right all along, Ursula. Cecil
ought
to know of this! We must make certain. Damn it,” said Hugh. “Dealings with Mary could concern the succession. They mustn’t be secret. No, we can
not
just say: Norfolk is our host and so we mustn’t report what we’ve seen. I think . . . I think,” said Hugh heavily, “that when we leave for home, we must go by way of Cecil’s house.”

Taking our leave, however, didn’t prove to be so easy.

We sought the duke out at once and with great tact, Hugh explained that we fully appreciated his kindness in arranging for us to meet Master Dean, but that we had concluded that Meg, after all, was too young for such plans just yet. “We would rather take her home and give ourselves more time to consider her future.”