To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court (24 page)

I pushed off my fleece and blanket and joined him, in time to see Susanna walking across the cobbles with two large feeding bowls. Then I drew back quickly, because she was coming straight toward Isabel’s Tower.

“It’s all right,” Brockley whispered. “I’ve seen her feed them outside before. She always puts the bowls down in this corner of the courtyard, I suppose because it’s out of the way. She never pays any heed to the
tower. Yes, she’s setting them down now. No need to be alarmed.”

But I had already moved hastily away from the window, and in my hurry, I caught my foot on a corner of a blanket. I slipped, lurched back toward the window, put out a hand to save myself, and fended myself off from the window with a thud.

“Shh!” said Brockley urgently, and too late. I hadn’t really made much noise, but dogs have acute ears as well as acute noses. From outside, the mastiff suddenly set up a furious baying.

Brockley swore under his breath. “I’m sorry!” I whispered. Keeping to one side of the window, I risked another glance outside. The wretched hound was standing up foursquare and barking at the tower as though it had challenged him. Susanna was shouting at him to be quiet and demanding to know what was the matter with him, and her husband, Jack, had run into the courtyard to see what was happening. The rotund second cook Higg came out too, hurrying from the kitchen to investigate the din.

The hound’s nose was pointing upward, straight at our windows. The Raghorns and Higg were staring at them as well. Once more, I stepped back. Brockley shook his head despairingly. “Sir Philip’ll be out there in a minute, in person; I’d put a bet on it. Madam, really!”

“Jackdaws make as much noise as I did,” I muttered, aggrievedly.

“Dogs are sharp. They’d know the difference,” Brockley informed me.

“Are they coming in? Will they find us?” Dale had
stayed where she was, clutching her fleece around her, her blue eyes distended in fright. Gladys, however, clambered to her feet and came to see for herself what was happening.

“It’s only them Raghorns. They’re as scared of Isabel’s Tower as they well can be, and that Higg not much better. Soon see them off,” said Gladys. She rubbed her palm across the dirt-caked sill and then across her face, and before we realized what she was about, she leaned over the deep sill and pressed what was now a sickly gray countenance to the panes.

Susanna let out a shriek of pure terror. Brockley cursed and yanked Gladys away. Cautiously, I approached another window, slightly less dirty than the first, once more positioned myself to one side, and peered. Lady Thomasine’s maid Nan was just stepping out of the hall porch. She saw Susanna clutching her husband’s arm and pointing upward, and Higg anxiously questioning her, and started across the courtyard toward them.

With surprising strength, Gladys shook Brockley off and pressed her dusty features to the leaded panes again, whereupon Nan shrieked, even more loudly than Susanna; Higg trumped her with a howl of panic; and Jack Raghorn, reverting instinctively to the Catholic customs of his childhood, crossed himself. All four then turned and fled. Susanna fell over the mastiff in her hurry and all but went sprawling, but Jack grabbed her hand and dragged her up again. Gladys drew back and said: “There’s the last of them, don’t you worry.”

“It’ll bring the whole damned garrison here in a crowd, you silly old woman!” Brockley almost snarled.

“No, it won’t,” said Gladys calmly.

Nor did it. Dale remained shivering in her coverings but the rest of us, watching fearfully from the very edges of the windows, saw Mortimer and Lady Thomasine and various other people appear from different doorways and saw the Raghorns and Higg gesturing wildly toward the tower. Jack crossed himself compulsively half a dozen times more. But the dogs’ feeding bowls had been left where Susanna had put them down, and the mastiff, which had dodged away with a yelp when Susanna nearly fell on him, noticed that his friends were eating and might well eat his share too. Losing interest in the tower, he shoved his way into the pack to get at his dinner. Mortimer strode across the courtyard, followed by several others, most of them people I didn’t recognize, except for Owen Lewis, who was hard behind Mortimer. They stopped, looking upward. “Don’t move,” Brockley muttered. “They just might see a movement. If we don’t stir, they’ll see nothing.”

We froze. Mortimer spoke to Lewis; Lewis laughed and shrugged. They came right up to the tower and tried the locked courtyard door. Mortimer shouted up to someone on the walls, and a moment later we heard someone trying the doors which led out onto the walls from the floor above us.

“Thank heaven I locked the door out to the grass,” I whispered. “They may try that, too.”

Whether or not they did, we couldn’t tell. It was far away below and we couldn’t have heard. The excitement in the courtyard, however, seemed to be over. Mortimer was spreading his arms to herd the crowd
away and Lewis making gestures which clearly said: “It’s nothing. Just nonsense. Forget it.”

“Dear God!” said Brockley faintly, leaning against the wall and then sliding down to a sitting position. “I thought we were two steps away from that damned dungeon again. Gladys, how could you?”

“How could I? Told you I’d see them off,” said Gladys smugly. “I knew you’d need me along with you, Master Brockley. I found out what was goin’ on in the castle and now I’ve scared those pests away. I’m more than a sweetly pretty face, I am.” She favored us with one of her dreadful leers, her fangs more ghastly than ever in the midst of her smeared features. “They wouldn’t have come in,” she said. “No fear of that. I know the Vetch folk. They come into the tower once in a while to sweep the place and that’s all. But now and again, someone’ll make out they’ve seen a face at the window. Then a crowd collects down below and goes hysterical, and Sir Philip comes out and tries the door down there and has the other doors tried as well, and finds them all fast, and shoos everyone away again. Just a ritual, that’s what it is. Happens over and over, and it’s all that ever happens. It’s nothing new.”

“Here, Gladys,” said Dale, pushing off her fleece and blanket. She produced a handkerchief, spared a few drops of water from her bottle to wet it, and came to wipe Gladys’s face. Brockley, rolling his eyes in exasperation, pushed the tumbled coverings out of the way before anyone else could trip over them.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It was an accident.”

“No doubt, madam,” said Brockley primly. “But we can’t afford accidents.”

“There. You look better now,” Dale said to Gladys. “You were enough to frighten anyone, with your face all gray like that.”

“You could have left it gray, for my part,” said Gladys. “Fun, it is, frightening people, when you get to my age.”

“You surely don’t mean that,” I said. We sat down again. Brockley portioned out a bread and cheese supper and we pulled our wrappings around us again, for warmth. “You can’t really like frightening people,” I said reprovingly. “Look at the trouble you made for yourself in Vetch Village.”

I didn’t expect the answer that I got. Suddenly Gladys’s old eyes, which had probably once been a deep and sparkling brown but were now faded and rheumy with a faint pink web of blood vessels in their whites, blazed at me with such a fury that I drew back in alarm.

“Trouble? Bah! In the end, frightening people’s all that’s left. What do you know about it? Can’t really like it? It’s what keeps me warm at night, better than a blanket. Laugh myself to sleep over it, I do.”

“But …” I was too taken aback to say any more.

“Young you are, yet awhile,” said Gladys contemptuously. “And pretty. People are mostly kind to you. Wait till you’ve lost your teeth and your looks; then you won’t be quite so easy to shock, my lady. It’s not so bad when your young ones are with you. But they grow up and leave you and then it’s different. Ho, yes! How different, you’ve yet to learn. That’s when other folks’ children start pointin’ and laughin’, or runnin’ away from you. Ugly old Gladys! That’s what they used to
yell after me. What’ll you do if, when you’re old, the brats run after you callin’ you ugly?”

Dale said sincerely: “But that’s dreadful. Dreadful.”

“Yes, it is,” said Gladys pugnaciously. “But that ain’t all. You can’t do things the way you did. Your back hurts; your knees hurt. But the peas and onions still got to be weeded, ain’t they? You don’t notice it at your age, but I tell you, when you pull hard, weedin’, the effort goes down into your knees. When your knees start to ache, the effort’s got to go somewhere else, so you make faces. Then the children and the silly girls—there’s silly that most girls are, it’s their nature and the men seem to like it, which makes them sillier—then they don’t just call you ugly. They call you the ugly old woman that makes faces.”

The yellow evening was fading toward dusk, but I could still see her face quite clearly. Suddenly, I knew her leers and her cackles for what they were—a gallant defense against a harsh world. Her next words brought still more illumination.

“You need help and you can’t get it,” Gladys said. “I’ll have some more of that bread and cheese, Brockley, if you don’t mind. My knees might hurt but my guts still work. Well, I couldn’t get enough help. I’m from the mountains. I’m not a Vetch woman. Still a stranger, I am, to them, or maybe they’d have told their nasty children to behave. So I got angry. They’d shout after me and I’d turn and I’d show them what makin’ faces really means.” She demonstrated, so horribly that we all shied back, even Brockley. Gladys, when she really tried, could make the worst gargoyle you ever saw on a church tower look angelic by comparison.

“I did that a time or two and they ran off screaming,” said Gladys with satisfaction. “And I heard ’em screeching: ‘The evil eye! The evil eye!’ Good, I thought. That’ll keep ’em off. Then one of the nasty little creatures climbed a tree and fell out and broke his arm and I told his mother he’d jeered at me, and this was what came to them as did that. Next thing I knew, the silly girls took to slinking to my cottage after dark, wanting love potions.”

“What … what did you do?” asked Dale breathlessly.

Gladys chuckled wickedly. “I know a bit about potions. Never could do my knees much good but I cured my children’s coughs with my own horehound brew. So for these daft girls, I’d mix up something that wouldn’t do much harm, beyond a touch of the trots, maybe, and they’d go and slip it in some lad’s ale, and sometimes it worked, because,” said Gladys, becoming instructive, “the girl ’ud start believin’ he’d be hers and that ’ud give her some confidence. Half the battle, that is, for a girl—makin’ the man notice she’s there. Maybe she’s just the daughter of his da’s best friend and he’s too used to seein’ her about, to realize she’s eyein’ him till she starts givin’ him knowin’ looks and little smiles. Anyhow, sometimes it works, and then she’ll tell her friends, and soon an old biddy like me might have quite a business. And not just love potions.”

“Gladys!” said Dale. “You never … ?”

“I never poisoned anyone that I know of, no. Not even when I was asked, and asked I have been,” Gladys said. “But I helped Olwen out of trouble, like I told you, and others like her. People pay. In kind mostly. A jar of honey, a bag of flour, a basket of eggs, some peas, some onions, to make up for what I lose when I can’t weed
properly. Got to live somehow and got to find a way to put one over on them as jeer at me for my lost teeth and my lost youth. Ho! It’ll be their turn one day if they live long enough. It’ll be your turn one day, if
you
live long enough.” She stared at me, and I saw the resentment in those faded eyes. “Your future, I am,” she said. “So look well.”

I shuddered. I wanted to cry for her and I wanted to scream: “No, no!” It was unbearable to think I might one day resemble Gladys. It was still more unbearable to think that Meg might. So as not to hurt her by turning my head away, I said: “How old are you, Gladys?” and made myself sound interested.

“Two year short of my three score and ten. Not many live to be that old.”

“Well, it’s true you saved us just now,” Brockley said. “Though I swear I thought you’d bring the roof in on us.” He reached out and put his hand over hers. I knew I should have done the same but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. I noticed, though, that I had to peer to see what he was about; that the faces of my companions were fading in the dusk.

“It’s nearly night,” I said.

“We’ve a while to wait yet,” Brockley said. “But we mustn’t go to sleep. It won’t be safe to move till a couple of hours after midnight, at least. But we’d better be ready when the right time comes.”

As darkness fell, we crept downstairs again and I set about picking the lock of the courtyard door. It was stiff and difficult and I became panicky, thinking that I wouldn’t be able to do it. The light was fading with every moment and soon I could hardly see the lock, which made things worse. “Brockley,” I whispered, “can you light a lantern?”

We had brought one of our candle-lanterns downstairs with us. Taking great care to ensure that it couldn’t be glimpsed from outside, Brockley lit it. The little light was comforting, for we were all unpleasantly conscious of the dark and empty tower around and above us. At the least creak, at the slightest sigh of a night wind through an arrow slit, we would stiffen and startle like coneys when they hear a fox bark, and Dale’s wide blue eyes would turn affrightedly this way and that.

Once, while I was still struggling with the lock, she
said: “I
did
see footprints in that dust,” but I told her to stop saying that. If something not canny was abroad in the tower and stirring the dust with ghostly feet, I didn’t want to know about it.

The lock yielded at last, just as I was at the point of despair. Relieved, I said, “Well, we’ll have no delay when it’s time to go.”

The castle settled slowly to its vigil. Candlelight shone from the chapel and the hall; people with torches and lanterns crossed the courtyard from time to time. After a while, we heard a murmur of voices from the hall, which grew louder and once or twice burst into singing. The wake, lubricated with good wine, was turning into a party, just as Gladys had foretold. Brockley clicked a disapproving tongue and growled that it was shockingly disrespectful.