Face Down among the Winchester Geese (17 page)

"Murder, madam?” Lionel goggled at her. “Again?"

He woofed out air as Jennet's fist once more connected with his ribs.

Ignoring Lionel's comment, Lady Appleton rode a little ahead and placed one gloved hand on Fulke's arm. “I count on your discretion, Fulke. No one must know of this. Not even Sir Robert. Do I have your word not to repeat anything you hear on this journey?"

"Aye, madam. Most willingly."

"And you, Lionel?” She looked back at him but kept hold of Fulke.

"Yes, madam."

"Good. Now, Fulke, you may be able to help me. In your travels with Sir Robert in Spain did you ever hear anyone mention the name Diego Cordoba?"

"No, madam."

"Ruy Vierra?"

"No, madam.” He hesitated. “Sir Robert does not like me to hear things, so most times I pretend to be both deaf and blind."

Thwarted in that line of inquiry, Lady Appleton dropped back, riding with Jennet and Lionel once more.

"Think you he is the one?” Jennet asked. “The Spaniard? Or is the murderer Master Elliott?"

"I do not know enough about Senor Cordoba to say. As for Francis Elliott, I do much pity him, knowing now that his mother died when he was just a boy. But, yes, he is still a suspect."

"Sir Robert also lost his mother at a tender age."

"And Lord Robin, though he was older, lived through the execution of his father and one of his brothers."

"Does enduring tragedy make a man more likely to kill?” Jennet asked.

Lady Appleton gave a short bark of laughter, but there was no humor in it. “If that were true, there would be few men living who did not contemplate murder."

"Do you mean to look further into Sir Walter's background?"

Lady Appleton gave her a sharp look. “I know enough. He spoke of his childhood when he visited Leigh Abbey.” During Sir Robert's sojourn in Spain, Jennet remembered. “He shared fond memories of growing up in Cornwall. And Robert has told me of a great sadness in Sir Walter's life. A woman who took her own life."

"As Mistress Elliott did?"

"We do not know that Helen Elliott died by her own hand. The woman we talked to repeated gossip."

Lady Appleton would look into the matter, Jennet thought. But would she delve deeper into the painful secrets in Sir Walter's past? Of that, Jennet was not so sure. She lost her opportunity to ask when their party caught up with another band of travelers. All discussion of murder ceased.

Bored, Jennet stared at the small, rectangular fields by the side of the highway. Some had been planted with produce, some with woad and madder. She craned her neck, trying to see around Lionel as the distant turrets and pennants of Greenwich Palace appeared ahead. The royal residence was less than a mile away.

She had seen Greenwich up close en route to London and remembered it as a gaudy place, the bricks of its exterior walls painted bright red, with the mortar joints picked out in brilliant white. Every stone window opening had been lime-washed and the battlements were topped with carved beasts holding painted poles and gilded vanes.

"We turn off here,” Lady Appleton said, bidding farewell to their temporary traveling companions. Just past an apple orchard, they came to a three-gabled house with a walled garden and a summer house. “This is Sayes Court,” she announced. “It becomes the lodging of whatever person holds the post of Clerk of the Green Cloth, he who is responsible for the finances of the royal household and for the provision of meat to Greenwich Palace. The current clerk owes Sir Walter a favor, and so we are to be made welcome here. We will spend the night, but between dinner and supper, we will be left to our own devices."

A short time later, Jennet accompanied Lady Appleton into the village proper. What she noticed first was the stench. The smell of pitch and the stink of fish she'd expected, since several fishing boats were drawn up along the graveled beach, but she'd not been prepared for the combined odors of kennels, slaughteryard, and dung boats. They walked straight into the heart of it, where blood from butchers’ row ran along a ditch to empty into the Thames.

"Look there,” Lady Appleton said, pointing directly across the river. “An even worse place, the Isle of Dogs."

Jennet had heard of it. Those swampy wastes were the haunt of criminals and fugitives. None dared pursue them there.

Deptford was better. A quiet place now that the court was not in residence, it consisted of a parish church, a few shops, a village green, the dockyards, and the kennels of the queen's buckhounds.

Sir Walter had provided Lady Appleton with the location of Sabina Dowe's house. It was a respectable-looking place, but Jennet harbored dire suspicions about Mistress Dowe's character. Had not every other victim been a whore or a woman of easy virtue?

"Jennet,” Lady Appleton said when they stood in front of the chandler's shop and its living quarters above, “I will talk to the family. You must make the acquaintance of their servants. A maid, I do think, and several apprentices. Speak with them. Win their confidence. We will compare notes later."

Pleased to have her own assignment, Jennet readily agreed. She'd been good, once, at tweaking secrets out of maidservants. She doubted she'd lost her touch. Less than a quarter hour later she was comfortably seated in the kitchen, a mug of weak ale in front of her and a scrawny serving wench eating out of her hand.

Two hours after that, she made her report to her mistress.

"Did you have any difficulty getting her to talk?” Lady Appleton asked.

"Not after I swore her to secrecy and told her we were on the queen's business.” In the privacy of the best bedchamber at Sayes Court, mistress and maid together ate dried dates and sipped more of the local ale.

Lady Appleton lifted a brow but did not criticize Jennet's methods.

"Mistress Sabina was most secretive just before she died. She hinted that she had a secret admirer. Someone special. Someone at court."

"That is not difficult to believe. A great many courtiers pass through Deptford."

"Did you know that several of the royal musicians live here? And a few minor courtiers, too. And though the queen does not go to Greenwich on St. George's Day, but rather to Windsor Castle, Her Majesty spends a great deal of time at this palace. In between visits, courtiers are frequently there on one errand or another. And messengers travel to and from court because of the shipbuilding here, as well."

Lady Appleton nodded. “No one would remark upon one more gentleman in the area. I gleaned much the same information from the family, though they were reluctant to admit their daughter might have had a lover. I am unsure if they keep their silence because they grieve for her or because they feel shame that she crept out of the house and met a grisly fate. They did not recall seeing a dark-skinned, one-eyed man in Deptford at the time of her murder. Did the servants ever catch sight of such a one?"

Jennet nibbled on a date, debating whether or not to reveal the truth. She hated to admit to any failing, but at last she confessed. “I did not remember that one of the suspects lacked an eye."

"I wonder if he does?” Lady Appleton mused. “Diego Cordoba has also called himself Ruy Vierra, and for years, so Robert tells me, he passed himself off as a Gypsy to wander the countryside."

Jennet wondered how Sir Robert knew that. And why Cordoba would have chosen such a dangerous disguise. Any Gypsy caught by the authorities was deported.

"Do you suppose it is possible Diego Cordoba is not missing an eye at all? Could he have been using the patch as part of a disguise from the very beginning?"

"Why would anyone wear an eye patch if he did not need to?” Jennet asked. That sounded passing foolish to her.

"Nothing would surprise me after some of the idiotic ruses I have known Robert to use. Codes and ciphers,” she muttered, as if she addressed some longheld personal grievance. “Robert has used disguises a few times, too. ‘Tis common practice, so he's told me, when one travels on the Continent and does not want to be recognized as an Englishman."

At this intelligence, Jennet began to have the darkest suspicions about Lady Appleton's husband. She'd understood from the beginning of this journey that her mistress's primary goal was to eliminate Sir Robert as a suspect. Lady Appleton hoped to find proof at Leigh Abbey that he'd spent at least one St. Mark's Day there with her. Any St. Mark's Day. It was only needful that she exonerate him of a single murder in order to clear him of them all.

Jennet did not believe she would succeed.

Watching Jennet and Mark together was more painful than Susanna had anticipated. This, she thought, was what a marriage could be, what it should be. She felt no envy over the two small girls clinging to Jennet's skirts or the baby boy who wanted to be carried everywhere, but in the relationship between husband and wife there was a deep and abiding affection, a respect Susanna knew would never exist in her own union with Robert.

With a sigh, she turned from her study window and attempted to put Jennet, Mark, and their little family from her mind. On her writing table, she had stacked the account books for the past six years. This was why she had come to Leigh Abbey. The sooner she bent to her task, the sooner she could return to London.

Another sigh escaped her. Robert was in London. And so, she realized with a pang of regret, was her favorite carved oak armchair, the one inlaid with holly. Seating herself in a much less comfortable turned chair, she adjusted the embroidered backing and the matching seat cushion and got to work.

An hour later, frustrated, she pushed aside both the books and the list of events she had compiled. She had wasted her time with this trip to Kent. There was nothing here to prove or disprove Robert's whereabouts when those women were killed.

Standing, she stretched and then, taking the list with her, left the study for her chamber, where she threw herself down on the bed and stared at the green silk tester above her head.

"Bodykins,” she muttered.

Her records were both accurate and detailed. Although their primary purpose was to keep track of planting and harvesting on this estate and other Appleton lands, and the myriad of tasks in between, she had also recorded any events of note. Some were personal, some local, and others of national and even international significance.

Susanna had spent most of her life at Leigh Abbey. It had been her girlhood home before her father's death. Robert had acquired it when he'd married her and been content to leave her in charge of managing the manor and home farm. They'd made this their principal residence, but the demands of a courtier's life had from the first taken him away from Kent while she remained behind. Perhaps that was why she'd begun to set down the doings of kings and princes along with her records of the price of grain and the cost of a new kirtle.

The paper crumpled in her hand summarized dates and events in the year Lora Tylney died. In the evening of the eighteenth day of March, King Philip had arrived at Dover, which was seven miles from Leigh Abbey, to begin his second visit to England. Susanna and most of her household had gone to catch a glimpse of the Spanish entourage as it passed by the next morning en route to Greenwich, a most popular entertainment for country dwellers. Had she seen the one-eyed Diego Cordoba? Susanna could not recall him, but she remembered that the king had been recovering from some illness and had worn a hood that left nothing of his face visible save for the tip of his nose.

Robert had already been at Greenwich with Queen Mary and had accompanied the court to London a few days later. He had not bothered to come home first. The next time Susanna had seen him, and then only briefly, had been in July, well after Lora Tylney's murder.

He'd been on his way to France with King Philip, and the queen, Susanna recalled, had accompanied her departing consort to Dover. On the journey from London, she'd spent one night at Sittingbourne and the second at Canterbury. That second night, Robert had been here, slept in this bed.

Rolling over onto her stomach, Susanna smoothed out the scrap of parchment, but she did not need to read what she'd written there. She knew what had happened next. Robert had left England with King Philip and fought for him at the Battle of Saint-Quentin. He'd been knighted for his valor there and might have remained in France a while longer had not word been sent to him of his father's death. He'd arrived in England early in September. He'd not taken time to visit Leigh Abbey, but traveled immediately to Lancashire, and upon his return to London he'd rejoined the court.

Unless he'd been with his mistress in Dover, Robert had been there when a whore named Little Alice was killed in Southwark.

Surging upright, Susanna seized a down pillow and flung it across the room. What irony, to choose between an Alice and an Alys. And what folly to consider confronting the other woman now. ‘Twould be awkward for them both and avail her nothing. Even if Alys would speak with her, she would refuse to help Robert. She might even lie to harm him. Just over three years ago, because he sought to mollify his wife, Robert had turned his mistress out of the comfortable house he'd kept her in and withdrawn the security of his protection. Soon after, she had married an innkeeper, reclaiming respectability, but the last Susanna had heard, Alys did much resent having to work so much harder for her comforts.

Disconsolate, Susanna went back to the list she'd compiled. The bitter truth was that Robert had been in or near the places those young women had been murdered. He might have killed any or all of them. Not in one single year had he been safely ensconced at Leigh Abbey on a St. Mark's Day.

There was no reason he should have been, she supposed, when he was rarely at home for more significant holy days. She could count on one hand the number of times they had celebrated Yuletide together. The only recent year in which they'd done so, it had been because the queen had ordered Robert to join Susanna at Madderly Castle.

As she left the bed and began to pace, Susanna's thoughts drifted further back in time, to the early months of their marriage. They had often been together that first year, both part of the duke of Northumberland's household, but even then she'd spent most of her days at Syon House with the duchess while Robert had been at King Edward's court.