Queen Without a Crown (3 page)

‘My father was never charged with the crime,’ Mark said, ‘but that was because he took his own life first. I was only three at the time.’ He put a hand inside his doublet and drew out a miniature portrait which hung round his neck on a chain. Lifting the chain over his head, he handed it to me. ‘The man he was said to have killed had been making advances to my mother. It was supposed to be a crime of jealousy. This was my mother. Judith, her name was. Look.’

Hugh came over to me, and we examined it together. Sybil slipped off the window seat to look as well. The miniature was exquisite. It showed the face of a young woman, dressed in the style of twenty or so years ago, with a small ruff and a round French hood. The dark hair in front of the hood and the almond-shaped brown eyes were just like Easton’s. She did not have her son’s upward swooping eyebrows, but her own slim dark brows perfectly suited her face. Her face, altogether, was . . .

Beautiful. There was no other word for it, and the artist, whoever he was, had understood it and paid homage to it. Even in this tiny portrait, he had shown not only the shape and colour of the eyes, but also their lustrousness. He had shown the dewiness of the skin and the lovely bone structure, so clearly defined and yet so delicate, as though the bone were made of polished ivory. He had shown the generosity in the mouth and captured the little tilt of the head, which was not coquettish but enquiring; as though its owner were shyly asking a question. He had wrought a miracle of fine detail in a minuscule space.

‘I can’t remember my father’s face,’ Easton said. ‘But I was five when I last saw my mother, and I can remember her and she was just like that. It’s a good picture. May I tell you the story? You see, I need someone to help me. I have never believed my father was guilty. I want to prove that I’m right, because if I can, then I’ll be able to marry Jane.’

The Brockleys came over to us as well, and after a glance at Mark for his permission, Hugh held out the miniature for them to see. ‘What a lovely face,’ Fran said, while Brockley nodded in agreement.

Hugh handed the picture back to its owner. ‘So, tell your tale,’ he said briefly.

‘I said I had a house in Derbyshire,’ Mark said. ‘My father – Gervase Easton – should have inherited it; he was the eldest son. But he fell in love with my mother—’

‘Who could blame him?’ Brockley remarked suddenly.

‘Quite,’ said Mark. ‘She was the daughter of one of our smallholder tenants and that wasn’t the kind of match that his parents wanted for him. But he insisted on marrying her, so he was disinherited. His younger brother, my Uncle Robert, was to have everything; my father would have to shift for himself. So he came south, with his bride. Her family had friends in court service, apparently, and someone helped him to get a place at court. The friends weren’t very influential, though, and it wasn’t a very splendid place.’

Mark’s lip curled, which didn’t suit him. His handsomeness was meant for friendly candour. Anything like a sneer sat badly on him.

‘Go on,’ Hugh said.

‘It was 1543,’ Easton said. ‘In the days of King Henry. He’d just married his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. My father became a Clerk of the King’s Kitchen, helping to check larders, collect supplies for the cooks, that sort of thing. He was paid only sixteen pence a day, though I understand that he had hopes of promotion. My mother found work at court too – as a maid to one of Queen Catherine’s ladies. Until I came into the world, the following year, in April.’

‘And then?’ Hugh asked.

‘There was another man employed about the royal kitchens, higher up the hierarchy,’ said Easton. ‘A Clerk Comptroller, though I don’t quite know what that means.’

‘You seem to know a good deal, even so,’ I remarked. ‘Yet you say your father died when you were three.’

‘People told me things later. Uncle Robert brought me up, and he told me about my father’s work and what he was paid. He knew all about it from my mother. I’ll come to that in a moment, if I may . . .?’

‘Of course,’ Hugh said. ‘You were speaking of a Clerk Comptroller, whatever that may be.’

‘Yes. Peter Hoxton. He had a reputation as a womanizer, I believe, but it seems that he truly fell in love with my mother. He wouldn’t leave her alone. He waylaid her and found chances to talk to her and pay her compliments, and it made my father angry. Once, after dark, someone attacked Hoxton in a courtyard here in this castle, and had a fight with him, and put him in bed for four days, and the court gossip said that my father did it.

‘Well, it seems that not long after that, Hoxton fell ill. It was still summer – well, early September – but he was caught in a downpour and developed a heavy cold which turned to a fever. The court was still here at Windsor. For a few days, his manservant brought food to his room. The kitchens got it ready for him, and the servant collected it. Hoxton was mending, but on the third day, he fell ill again, with sickness and a kind of madness, and he died two days later. The physicians said it was poison.’

‘Wasn’t the manservant suspected?’ Hugh cut in.

Mark shook his head. ‘No. I don’t know why not. My uncle did once say that the man had been proved innocent. I think perhaps he was never seriously suspected, though, because . . .’ He paused and swallowed. ‘Perhaps,’ he said at last, ‘it was because apparently there were two witnesses who actually saw my father, with a bag, come to where Hoxton’s food was waiting for collection, take out a pie from the bag and set it on the tray with the other dishes. Hoxton ate it, or most of it. It was shortly after that that he . . . apparently went insane and began to vomit. Later, he fell into a stupor and never recovered.’

‘What was it?’ Hugh asked. ‘The poison, I mean?’

‘Deadly nightshade, so I’ve been told,’ said Mark. ‘The berries were in the pie. I believe they look something like bilberries, and it seems he was fond of those. I’ve never seen either of them.’

‘I wouldn’t recognize nightshade,’ I said. ‘But I’ve eaten bilberries. They grow on wild heathlands in the west of England, I think. They can be stewed and either put in pies or baked under a topping of sweetened breadcrumbs. They’re delicious.’

‘I don’t know what that pie would have tasted like,’ said Mark dryly. ‘The physicians said the nightshade berries would taste strange, but not foul, and the flavour could be disguised by sugar or honey, and anyway, it seems that Hoxton’s nose was so blocked with the rheum that he had lost nearly all his sense of taste and smell. My mother told my uncle all this as well. She attended the inquest.’

‘How did the physicians know what it was?’ Hugh asked.

‘It seems that some of the pie was left, and one of them recognized the berries. He’d used nightshade himself in a medicine – apparently, in very tiny doses, its essence can relieve pain. He knew the symptoms, too. He’d had cases of children eating the berries. Everyone,’ said Easton, ‘believed my father was responsible. Everyone at court knew he hated Hoxton. Like poison.’ He made the very word sound venomous.

‘But you believe he didn’t do it?’ Hugh said. ‘Why?’

He spoke mildly, yet the words sounded harsh and Easton flinched. He felt once more inside his doublet, and this time he brought out a folded letter. ‘Because of this,’ he said.

He gave it to us, and we read it together, Hugh and I, with Sybil and Brockley still looking over our shoulders. It was an old document, the creases deep, the ink faded:

My eyes stung. It seemed to me that from those words there rose such a declaration of devotion that reading them was like walking accidentally into a room where a couple are making love. I was happy with Hugh, but the loves I had had before him had been more passionate (one of them even stormy). I recognized the feeling in these written words.

There was no hint in the letter that Gervase expected his son to clear his name, only that he desperately wished that Mark would believe it to be clean. Silently, we handed the letter back. ‘When did this come to you?’ Hugh asked. ‘You have never done anything about it before – never made any enquiries? How did your father die, by the way?’

‘He drank geneva,’ Mark Easton said. ‘The spirit made from juniper berries. A lot of it – the empty flask was found by his bed. Then he went down to the river and plunged in. He couldn’t swim, anyway. His body was washed ashore later that day. He left this for my mother. She married again, the following Easter. I think she needed someone to provide for her and me; she couldn’t manage well enough alone. She was so lovely that she had no difficulty in finding a new husband. Myself, I wish she had taken more time and found a nicer stepfather for me, though. I believe my stepfather is still alive and lives near here. He didn’t like me. He used to hit me and shout at me, even though I was so small.’

‘But you said you were brought up by your uncle,’ Hugh said, frowning.

‘When I was just turned five, my grandfather died – the one who had disinherited us. He left Uncle Robert everything, but even though my father was dead by then, my uncle was a good man and he wasn’t happy about it. He came to see my mother, to tell her the news, and he saw that things were not right between me and my stepfather. My mother could not leave, being married, but Uncle Robert offered me a home. Mother kissed me goodbye and gave me to him, for my own peace and safety, she said.

‘He took me back to Derbyshire. He was married, but no children ever came, and in the end, he made me his heir. He was very prosperous by then – in fact he had just acquired the Devonshire property. He said he was glad to give me a future, that it would put right the injustice my grandfather had done. He said he’d married for love as well, only in his case, the girl was someone his father thought “suitable”. She was nice,’ Mark said, wistfully. ‘Aunt Kate, I called her. She was always kind to me. We lost her to the lung-rot, one bad winter, when I was about eighteen.

‘Well, I hadn’t been with them more than a few months before word came that I had lost my mother as well as my father. I think my stepfather ill-used her, just as he’d ill-used me. Her belongings were sent to us, but they were put away in a chest and mostly forgotten, until three months ago when Uncle Robert died too and everything came to me. I had to go through his possessions, and I found the chest pushed into an attic, up under the roof. This letter was inside it.’

Hugh said: ‘And you believe what it says? Because it would be very natural for your father to want his wife and son to think well of him, to believe in his innocence, even if it were not true.’

‘He swears,’ said Easton, ‘on his hopes of the resurrection. That is a very serious thing. Who would take an oath on that, on the very edge of the grave, unless he spoke the truth?’

He said it with sincerity, a young man evidently unable to believe in anyone devious or cynical enough to play games with oath-taking. Studying him further, I saw that he was essentially a straightforward individual, quite lacking in guile.

But clear-headed. ‘
Someone
poisoned Peter Hoxton,’ he said, ‘though I’m convinced it wasn’t my father. I want to know who it really was. Mistress Stannard, according to Lord Sussex, who knows something about you, you have a reputation for being able . . . able to find things out. You are said to be clever at it. I would try on my own account, but I have duties which occupy all my time. Will you help?’

‘What if it’s the wrong answer?’ Hugh asked.

‘It won’t be,’ said Easton fiercely. ‘I know it won’t.’

We were all silent. The fire crackled, and rain spattered on the windows, as though impatient fingers were tapping at them, as if ghosts from the past were trying to get in.

‘It will be difficult,’ said Easton at length. ‘I know that. But if you do uncover the truth, I would reward you. I . . . could sell that Devonshire property. It’s leased to someone now and brings in some extra income, but I can do without it. In fact, I already have a possible buyer. My Derbyshire land is profitable. I could give Jane a comfortable life there. I believe,’ he added, ‘that the value of the Devonshire house and land would be around two and a half thousand pounds.’