Queen Without a Crown (16 page)

‘Was Master Gervase Easton left-handed? Do you know, madam?’ Brockley asked suddenly.

‘Good God, I don’t know. I never set eyes on the fellow. He was my younger brother’s son, and he wasn’t born till I was wed and had come here to Westmorland. Did you come all this way just to ask me that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I understand that a portrait of Gervase was painted – by an artist called Jocelyn Arbuckle. It is said to show him sitting at a table with a pen in his hand. That would reveal, I think, which hand he used for writing. The portrait is not at Mark’s family home. He thought you might know where it was – might even have it yourself.’

‘Ah,’ said Mistress Tracy. ‘Gervase’s picture. So that’s what you’re after. I had it at one time, yes. Gervase’s brother Robert commissioned it about a year before Gervase died. Robert took it home, but his father – my brother Richard – wouldn’t have it in the house. He had a real spite against Gervase for running off with a tenant’s daughter. He wrote to me about it. Her only dowry’s her pretty face, that’s what his letter said. I did hear that he had someone else in mind for Gervase, someone with money and land behind her.

‘And quite right too,’ added our hostess, staring at us as though challenging us to contradict her. ‘Pretty faces don’t stay pretty for ever, but property’s different. Look after it when you’re young and it’ll look after you when you’re old. I’ve been none the worse for making a good marriage and nor was my husband, though I hardly knew him before we wed. He stayed at our house once when he was travelling back from Southampton after selling wool there. He had an introduction from someone my father knew. He took a fancy to me, and when he found I had a dowry worth looking at, it was all settled. And settled well, to my mind. Gervase was a young fool.’

My own first marriage had been a runaway match involving, on my part, a midnight escape out of a window and a perilous clamber down a fortunately sturdy growth of ivy to reach the arms of Gerald Blanchard, who was supposed to be betrothed to my cousin Mary. I opened my mouth to say so, caught Brockley’s warning glance and held my tongue.

On that subject, at least. Instead, I asked: ‘You say the portrait came to you, Mistress Tracy? How did that come about? Is it still here?’

‘My brother sent it to me,’ said Bess Tracy. ‘Richard was a man of culture. He wrote songs and played the spinet very well. He greatly admired painting and sculpture. The letter he sent to me with the picture explained that, in his opinion, it was fine work and the artist had done him no harm; he would not destroy the skilled creation of another man. He could not tolerate a portrait of Gervase in his home, but he hoped I might find pleasure in it. And so I did. I never saw Gervase in the flesh, but his picture showed a fine young fellow. But I never noticed which hand he used to hold his pen.’

‘And now?’ I prompted, as she seemed to have sunk into a reverie. ‘Is the portrait here still?’

She had said
his picture showed
and
I never noticed which hand he used to hold his pen.
Showed. Noticed. Both in the past tense. I waited anxiously for her reply.

‘No, it is not. When my youngest daughter Blanche was married – oh, it was over twenty years ago – she asked to have the portrait. She liked it and wanted it to help ward off homesickness.

‘Blanche was soft,’ her mother added dispassionately. ‘I hope she’s grown up a trifle since she was a bride. She was nearly twenty-one then, but young for her years, soft as thistledown; nothing like me. She was frightened of leaving home; said she’d pine and she was afeared of the marriage bed. I’d found her a good man, believe me. Hal Winthorpe was kind-hearted and well off, though I grant you he was nothing much to look at. You wouldn’t bother to put him in an oil painting. I told her all the pining and so on would pass, within a week, like as not.’

She looked at me and read my face. ‘You’re wondering if it did or didn’t. I don’t know. We sent her off with a wagonload of fine things – clothes, jewellery, furniture, tapestries and the deeds of two farms – and I’ve not seen her since. My rheumatics set in the year after she left. But I let her take the portrait with her, poor toad. She pleaded for it, and I thought, well, if she has a familiar face near her, even just a painted one, maybe it’ll help her to settle. I was considering Hal as much as her. Marriage is a bargain, and a pining bride isn’t a good bargain in my opinion.’

Mistress Tracy, I thought, hated admitting to any soft feelings of her own, but I suspected that she had some, if in a limited sense.

‘She sounded happy enough when she wrote home,’ Bess said. ‘She said she had a fine house and that Hal was good to her. I fancy she settled all right, and maybe the portrait helped. If so, I’m glad I let her have it. I dare say she has it still. She’s never had any children she could pass it on to, any road.’

I began to ask where Blanche lived, but Bess was in full nostalgic spate and cut across me.

‘She’s widowed now. I did hear roundabout that Hal wasn’t as clever with his property as he ought to have been and got into debt at one point. But it can’t have been serious; he died a few years back, and though I couldn’t get to his funeral, one of my other daughters did, and she told me that the house was in good order and Blanche dressed as fine as a countess. She still lives in the same place. She’s never remarried.’

I got my question asked at last. ‘Where can we find her?’

‘Oh – it’s a fair way off, about twenty miles north-east of Carlisle. I can show you a map with the place marked on it. Ramsfold, it’s called.’

‘Ramsfold,’ I repeated.

Ramsfold was number three on the list provided by Lord Sussex.

Pursuit of a Portrait

W
e reached the town of Carlisle two days later. It was full of Lord Sussex’s soldiers, and just inside the gate we came face to face with a gibbet on which a dozen sad bodies swung. Their garments were cheap; they looked like poor men. Elizabeth’s orders concerning reprisals had arrived ahead of us, it seemed, and the ugly business had begun.

As one of the queen’s ladies, I could have sought shelter for the night at the castle, but I could not agree with either Sussex or my royal half-sister that the wealthy should be allowed to buy their lives, while poverty meant doom. I preferred not to sit at meat in the castle hall with those who had carried out the hangings. ‘An inn will suit me better,’ I said. ‘Let’s find one.’

We were lucky in our choice of hostelry, for in it we discovered a man who made his living partly by serving drinks but also by guiding travellers who did not know the locality. Rab Fuller was a stolid, pink-faced fellow with a nearly incomprehensible northern accent, but he knew where Ramsfold was. I had made a rough copy of Mistress Tracy’s map, but he had no need of it. He could lead us straight there in the morning, he said. He had his own mule and could go as fast as we could, in these snowy conditions. We could be there before sunset.

Carlisle was in Cumberland, whose earl had declared for the queen, but Ramsfold lay a few miles over the Northumbrian border, in what had been enemy territory. Our guide steered us competently, in a north-easterly direction. We passed through a hamlet, where we crossed a river on a bridge and rode on through land which grew progressively wilder and weather which had turned bitter again. There had been a fresh snowfall the previous night.

It was a lonely district. The few small villages were isolated signs of human life amid hills and moorlands. To the north the land was lower, and we saw dense forest in the distance. Rab told us that we were now in Northumberland, and a few miles further on he said that we had reached Ramsfold land. The country became less forbidding. We passed through a village where a number of people came to their cottage doors to stare. The path led on through a fir wood to emerge at the foot of a knoll, and the track, heavily trodden and covered with slush and broken ice, climbed towards a building at the top. ‘That’s Ramsfold,’ said Rab.

I looked at the place with interest. Like many manor houses near the border, it was fortified. There was no moat, but the gradient to the gatehouse was steep, a defence in itself. Our horses were already tired. They were drooping wearily before we got to the gatehouse.

The porter, when we finally reached him, greeted us with restrained politeness. I explained that I had come from Mistress Blanche Winthorpe’s mother, Mistress Bess Tracy. He said grumblingly that he would announce us and that we could come through the gatehouse but must remain mounted and wait in the outer courtyard. Obeying him, we found ourselves arousing interest from some cross-bred hounds in a fenced run to our left. As if they had mistaken us for a dinner which was being unkindly withheld from them, they threw themselves, baying, against their fence. Our horses stamped uneasily. ‘I hope they can’t get out,’ said Trelawny, eyeing the hounds with dislike.

I patted Roundel to calm her and studied the main house, which faced us across the courtyard. Built of yellowish-grey stone, it had a crenellated watchtower at one end and arrow-slit windows. In front of us, at the top of a short flight of steps, was a massive door, shut fast and studded with iron. Even within its surrounding walls, the face which Ramsfold presented to visitors was hardly friendly.

‘My, my,’ said Trelawny. ‘What a merry place this is. Always ready for a siege or a funeral, I’d say.’

‘I think the idea is to avoid funerals,’ Brockley told him. ‘Whoever lives here is determined to defend themselves.’

Trelawny laughed, and the rest of us chuckled with him. Then the gatekeeper, who had disappeared not through the front door but round the right-hand end of the house, came back, accompanied by a groom and a stable boy. ‘You can dismount. We’ll see to your animals,’ he said.

We had gained entrance, at least. We dismounted and handed our horses over. Brockley, who had been fretted by my recent insistence that he should masquerade as my relative, because it prevented him from going with the horses to see them properly cared for, now showed signs of wanting to go to the stables anyway, but I put my hand on his arm. ‘No, Brockley. I want help from this Blanche Winthorpe, and I don’t know what she’s like. Her mother says she was soft as a girl, but she may have changed by now. She may be just like Bess!’

‘Did that female peregrine falcon scare you?’ Trelawny asked.

‘You saw her like that too?’ I said with interest. ‘I thought of her as a she-eagle. I hope her daughter is gentler!’

Rab said in his broad accent that he would go with the grooms; he wanted to see to his own mule, anyway. He’d have to start back to Carlisle soon, he added, and looked at me questioningly.

‘I don’t know when we’ll leave or quite where we’ll go next,’ I said. ‘We’ll find a guide from here when we go. Pay him, Brockley.’

As Rab went off with the grooms, the iron-studded door was opened, although the person who came through it was manifestly not Blanche Winthorpe. This was an upper manservant, very dignified in a black doublet adorned with a gold chain. He also had a face as stony as any outcrop on the northern moors.

‘Good day. I am Ulverdale, butler and steward of this house.’ He halted on the lowest step, and not at all in the attitude of one who bids welcome to a party of wayfarers. He looked as though he wished to bar our way and, if possible, send us on it.

From the corner of his mouth, Trelawny muttered: ‘Dear God, he’s one of
those
butlers. Satan employs a demon blacksmith to forge them on an anvil in hell.’

‘Quiet, Trelawny,’ Brockley growled, also out of the corner of his mouth.

‘My name,’ I said to the butler, ‘is Ursula Stannard. I am from the court of Queen Elizabeth and have at times served as one of her ladies. If, as I believe, the lady of this house is Mistress Blanche Winthorpe, then I have business with her. I was directed here by her mother, Bess Tracy of Kendal. My companions are relatives of mine: Master Roger Brockley and Master Carew Trelawny. Is Mistress Winthorpe at home?’

‘The mistress has been unwell and may not wish to receive visitors.’ Ulverdale’s northern voice was as dignified as his mien. ‘However . . .’

The day was passing, and the wind was sharp, and anyway, in the north of England, it is customary to make travellers welcome even if a wake is in progress. Ulverdale bowed to custom. ‘If you will come this way, I will arrange refreshments for you and enquire if my mistress can see you,’ he said, turning to lead the way up to the door.

We climbed the steps behind him, following him into a short stone passageway through a thick protective wall. This in turn delivered us to an inner courtyard at a higher level. Here, the snow had mostly been swept out of the way, and chickens scattered before us. A girl shaking a cloth out of a kitchen door to our left, and another drawing water from a well in the middle of the court, paused interestedly to watch us.

The house, which was bigger than it appeared from the outside, was built all round this inner court. From the style of the building, the place was a good century old or more, but some of its inner windows were not depressing slits like the outer ones, but modern mullions, though the ground-floor ones, I noticed, were smaller than those higher up and wouldn’t admit much light.

The stables, where the grooms were now tending our mounts, were on our right, and our horses had evidently been brought in through a double-leaved gate on that side. Stabling, harness rooms and hay store occupied the ground floor of the right-hand wing, but the true main entrance to the house was on the left, flanked on either side by mullions, and this was where the butler led us.

Entering on his heels, we found ourselves at once in a big panelled hall not unlike the one at Littlebeck House though much less gracious. It certainly wasn’t well lit, for although there were three big iron candle chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, none of them were in use. The shadowy minstrels’ balcony which overlooked one end had a forlorn and dusty air, as though it hadn’t seen a minstrel for a hundred years, and the slatted wooden stair that led down from it, into the hall, looked rickety.

I also noticed with regret that the white cloth on the big table in the middle was stained and the elaborate silver salt, which stood on the table among other miscellaneous objects such as knives and tankards, was tarnished. A film of dust covered the oak sideboard which stood between two of the mullioned windows, and the pewter dishes and tankards on its shelves looked dull. This was a sadly uncared for place.