Queen Without a Crown (12 page)

Was he really ill? He was almost twenty years older than I was, after all.

I don’t remember much more of that sitting. I was overwhelmed, once more, with homesickness. I wanted to get out of Windsor and take Hugh to Hawkswood to enjoy whatever time he could still spend there.

I should have known. Sometimes I think it’s a kind of precognition in reverse, so to speak. Whenever I am away from home and longing desperately to get back, I am liable to find myself being sent further away from it than ever.

Merry Yuletide

‘
A
portrait of my father?’ Mark said, when Brockley sought him out for me and brought him to our quarters. ‘And Uncle Robert may have had it? Well, I lived with Uncle Robert from the age of five, but I never saw it. I wish I had. I’ve never known what my father looked like.’

Mark himself looked harassed. Since his reappearance at Windsor we gathered that he had been kept continually busy, being questioned in detail about events in the north and the movements of troops, ours and theirs. Now he was preparing to leave for York yet again, with letters from the queen and Cecil for Lord Sussex.

‘I have a great aunt on my father’s side,’ he said, ‘living up in the north-west. Great Aunt Bess, her name is. My Aunt Kate told me once that after her marriage to my uncle she was taken to see Bess and given a lecture on the Easton family history that lasted two and a half hours. If the portrait still exists, she might know where it is. It’s the sort of thing to interest her, by all accounts. She might even have it! I’ll send word to her as soon as I can. I can’t go to see her – she lives in Westmorland, far away from York and in the heart of enemy territory, too. Her home is somewhere called Kendal, near a great lake.’

‘Have you met her?’ I asked.

‘Yes, as a small boy. I remember we rode through a town – Kendal, I suppose – and came to the lake. My great aunt’s manor house was beside it. I can’t remember its name, but her husband’s name was Edmund Tracy and he owned a lot of land. The rising won’t concern her, though. She’s a respectable well-off widow now with far too much sense to get involved in any rebellions. If a single one of her tenants has gone to join Westmorland’s army, I’ll be surprised.’

‘She sounds as though she has a strong character,’ I said.

‘I’m sure she has. According to my uncle, Great Aunt Bess’s tenants do what she tells them, and always did, even when her husband was alive. If they don’t, she eats them grilled for breakfast. My uncle’s own words!’ He laughed, lightening his handsome face into something quite delightful. However in love with Jane Mason he was, I thought that she was probably even more in love with him.

Mark, however, was still thinking about his great aunt. ‘Uncle said her three daughters always did exactly what mamma told them to do and married the men she chose for them, and she did the choosing, not their father. She’s still alive, or was a few months ago. My uncle had a letter from her last spring, and she told him she was in good health then.’

Mark left for York the next morning. He was back a fortnight later. The news he brought was a blank as far as the portrait was concerned. He had been unable to communicate with his great aunt, since no one could be spared to take a private message across the snowbound moors to Westmorland.

But he brought good news about the war. The insurgents were in retreat, stumbling northwards through blizzard and snowdrift, towards the sanctuary of Scotland. Lord Sussex’s forces were in pursuit, unable to overtake their prey because they, too, were delayed by the weather, but on the spoor of the quarry nevertheless, baying like a hound-pack. If they didn’t catch the retreating earls before they crossed the Scottish border, Sussex would make sure that they’d never dare to put their noses back over it again.

‘Ursula,’ said the queen, having summoned me to hear the good tidings, ‘the danger is past, I think, but you and Master Stannard will stay here for the Christmas celebrations, will you not?’

We more or less had to stay, in any case. Meg’s portrait was not yet finished, and Hugh, though now much better, was still not quite well, and the weather was very cold for travelling, even for a fit man. ‘We’ll spend Christmas here,’ he said. ‘But in the new year, Ursula, we’ll go home.’

Only a few weeks before, Windsor had been tense and nervous, provisioning itself against catastrophe. Now, the extra supplies formed the wherewithal for feasts of unusual splendour, even at a royal Christmas. The queen’s ladies and the maids of honour spent hours preparing new clothes and practising new dances. Masques were being created and rehearsed. Passageways through which armaments had been carried were now infested by people carrying musical instruments, clutching scripts and muttering their lines and, sometimes, wearing extraordinary costumes.

In the kitchens, cooks experimented with fantastic new dishes, throwing dramatic tantrums when the said dishes went wrong, trying to blame inefficient underlings for these disasters and on occasion flinging the dishes at the heads of the said underlings.

Mark Easton, weather notwithstanding, set valiantly off to York, with a further letter to Sussex from the queen – this time full of congratulations on his deft handling of the crisis – and a personal gift. The castle hummed and throbbed with excitement and laughter and music.

‘I suppose it’s relief,’ Hugh said to me as we made our way towards dinner on Christmas Eve. ‘I think everyone was afraid, whether or not they said so out loud.’

‘It was an ugly thought,’ I said. ‘The idea of armies riding towards us with murderous intent! Mary Stuart is the greatest nuisance God ever made.’

The Christmas Eve dinner was to be a special affair. A whole crowd was converging on the anteroom where we would wait for the meal to be announced. In a wide gallery we came across Sir William Cecil, back at court after a brief visit to his home. He was evidently being troubled, as he so often was, by gout and was walking slowly, accompanied by his wife Mildred, their entourage following. We exchanged greetings. We, too, had our people with us, except for Gladys, who preferred to stay (‘Skulk,’ said Dale) in our rooms and have her food there. Brockley, seeing John Ryder in the Cecils’ party, turned aside to speak to him.

As he did so, another man in the Cecils’ group suddenly looked at Brockley and grinned. He was a short, bearded fellow, with a snub nose, slate-coloured eyes and dark hair silvering at the temples. He was not young, but he moved with the fluid stealth of a cat stalking a blackbird, and to our astonishment, as soon as he saw Brockley, he edged sideways to get behind him, using Cecil as a shield. He appeared to have cast my manservant in the role of the blackbird.

Brockley must have been aware of him, but for some reason ignored him, until the stalk turned to a pounce, as the stranger sprang forward, seized Brockley’s left arm from behind and jerked it up my manservant’s back in a way that looked anything but friendly.

Beside me, Meg let out a squeak, Dale clicked her tongue and Sybil Jester went round-eyed.

‘Greetings, Roger,’ said the stranger softly, in a marked west country accent. ‘How many years is it since we met?’

‘Oh, I should have said at once,’ remarked Ryder. ‘Our old friend Carew Trelawny has joined Sir William’s service. You surely remember Carew, don’t you, Brockley?’ He caught my eye, and added: ‘It’s all right, Mistress Stannard. Carew Trelawny always greets old friends like that. When he encounters old enemies, we usually have to bury them.’

‘Some people,’ said Brockley calmly, ‘prefer not to associate with him at all. Personally, though, I’m always happy to see my friends, and if you’d let me turn round, Trelawny, I might actually be
able
to see you.’

He then disengaged himself by applying his right elbow to his assailant’s ribs in a manner quite as aggressive as Trelawny’s assault on him, swung round and embraced him. They were both chuckling. It had all happened so swiftly and quietly that hardly anyone else in the crowded gallery had noticed it.

A memory suddenly returned to me: of my first husband, Gerald, back in the days when we were a young couple in Antwerp, in the service of one of the queen’s financiers. Gerald had made friends with a colleague of his own age, and I could recall a wet afternoon when we were all together in our lodgings. In the midst of a good-natured argument – I could no longer remember what it was about – the two of them swooped on each other and rolled round the floor, wrestling and pummelling in a manner only just short of genuine violence, so that I had to get out of the way in a hurry and a small table was knocked over, sending a glass goblet on to the floor, where it broke.

‘Moon-mad, both of you,’ I said to Gerald afterwards. ‘We only have four glass goblets left now, and you’ve cracked the leg of the table!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gerald unrepentantly, ‘but it’s a kind of ritual we’ve invented for dealing with our little arguments. You don’t understand men, sweetheart.’

‘I understand broken glass and cracked table-legs,’ I said.

‘We’re not paupers. I’ll buy you some new goblets
and
another table if you’re going to be as pernickety as that!’

The greeting between Brockley and Trelawny, I thought, was a ritual of the same mysterious masculine kind. Sir William Cecil and Hugh, who had clearly understood it at once, were both laughing. Mildred Cecil was shaking her head, but she looked amused too. I allowed myself to be introduced to Brockley’s old friend. So this, I thought, was the fellow with the original ideas about pea-stick twine and other men’s shirts. A useful individual in a crisis, no doubt, and it was plain that he, Ryder and Brockley were three of a kind and pleased with each other’s company.

Trumpets sounded, and those of us still in the gallery made haste to go into the dining chamber before the queen, preceded by her heralds and followed by her day’s selection of courtiers, ladies and maids of honour, swept in to take her place. I was able to remain with my family, for I was not on duty at the queen’s side that day, although I would have to be there at tomorrow’s Christmas feast. This time, standing behind my seat, I had only to sink into the formal curtsey as her majesty entered the chamber.

The feast began, a merry affair, made all the merrier by the brilliant colours worn by the diners, by jokes and laughter, excellent food and fine wine and tuneful music. It went on unabated for two hours, until a small swirl of disturbance broke out among the maids of honour.

The mistress of the maids was no longer Kat Ashley, the queen’s friend from childhood, whom I had once known well, for Kat had died over four years ago. Her replacement – whom I scarcely knew but who had the watchful and harried air common to all duennas with lively charges – was leaning over the table and, to judge from her expression, speaking sharply to the girl opposite. I watched with only mild interest, until I saw the girl turn ashen pale, close her eyes and slide from her seat in a faint.

In the midst of all the rejoicing, it was just a minor awkwardness. The mistress of the maids joined two other girls who had slipped to their knees beside the sufferer. She came round, and after a few moments they helped her up and steered her out of the room. There was a mild buzz of conversation about it, and then the next course was served and we all forgot her.

The feast was followed by a masque and dancing in another room, and it was late that day before Hugh and I returned to our suite. To be greeted by a Gladys all agog.

Gladys, it appeared, had not after all stayed in the suite. Growing bored, she had plodded off down the tower stairs and, at the foot of them, encountered a party of ladies half-carrying a sick girl along. ‘Deathly white, she were, indeed to goodness,’ Gladys said.

Gladys had a vague reputation in the castle for being clever at potions of one sort and another. One of the ladies had asked her to come with them and give her advice.

‘Not that it was any use,’ Gladys said. ‘They got her to her quarters – maid of honour, she is, or was . . .’

‘Was?’ I said. ‘Do you mean . . . is she . . .?’

‘Aye.’ Gladys nodded. ‘There weren’t nothing I could do for her, nor any other mortal being. These girls are so silly, look you. They get into trouble and kill themselves trying to get out of it, when if they’d asked me in the first place I’d have told them how
not
to land in trouble.’

‘She was miscarrying?’ I asked with sympathy, having been through that myself in my time. ‘Because she’d taken something?’

‘Aye. It was that lass I saw playing the fool with a young fellow in the garden, the day you first took Meg to see that artist. She’d taken something all right – some sort of yew-tree brew, from what she said. I asked her. It was when we first got her on to the bed – before we knew it was too late. Then the mistress of the maids said to her:
where did you get it? The law will have something to say about this.
The girl wouldn’t tell her, except that right at the end she didn’t know what she was saying and muttered something about a woman with a house on the edge of the town. Then . . . you never saw aught like it. All the blood in her body came out of her, I’d reckon, and a poor sad thing like a big dark-red tadpole . . .’

‘All right, Gladys,’ said Hugh. ‘There’s no need to go on.’

‘I hate seeing it,’ Gladys said, a little unexpectedly, for there was little sentiment in our Gladys. ‘It never happened to me, God be thanked. To see a poor thing cast out into the world long before its time, when it ought to be safe and warm inside, in the dark. Silly, silly girl, to let it start and then to go taking potions. A merry Yuletide her parents are going to have, when they hear. Mistress . . .’

‘Yes, Gladys?’

‘You’ve been wanting to know who really poisoned a man called Hoxton in this castle, many years ago. You ever thought that whoever did it maybe got advice, or ingredients, from someone else? What if that someone else, and this woman that girl that died today went to, were one and the same?’

I wanted to say: ‘Oh no, it’s no use, let’s not go hunting up yet another dead-end alleyway to bang our noses on yet another stone wall,
please
.’ But I didn’t speak, and Sybil said: ‘But wasn’t it just a matter of nightshade berries in a pie? Everyone knows that nightshade berries can kill.’