Queen Without a Crown (5 page)

But for all her anxiety, she listened to what I had to say, and if her tone was a trifle acid when she replied, she nevertheless gave me the permission I sought.

‘Oh yes, Ursula. By all means. Poke and pry in my kitchens and ask all the questions you wish, provided you are on duty when you should be and don’t cause valued servants to give notice.’ She paused, propped on her pillows. ‘At the meeting I shall attend tomorrow, a clerk will be taking notes. I’ll dictate a note to the Lord Steward, saying that you have my permission to prowl in his territory. I suggest you start by talking to a clerk of the Spicery called John Sterry. He’s been there since I was a child. He’s as grey as a badger these days, but there’s nothing wrong with his mind. If anyone recalls anything useful, he will. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To talk to long-standing servants with long, retentive memories.’

‘Yes, ma’am. That’s it exactly. It seems my best starting point.’

‘From what you have told me, Ursula, I would say that it’s your only starting point! Well, Sterry is your man.’

The Fruit of Insanity

I
waited a day, so that the contract could be signed and Elizabeth’s note to the Lord Steward given time to do its work. But the following morning, after chapel, Elizabeth withdrew to confer with her councillors, leaving her ladies free to please themselves. The weather being damp and cold, most of them settled down indoors with their needlework. Hugh, after wishing me well, said he would go into the town and see the artist Arbuckle. Brockley had made the acquaintance of Arbuckle’s manservant and knew where they were staying. And I, seizing my chance, plunged into the kitchen regions.

I had never before entered the kitchens at Windsor. I went down steps on which I had never before set foot, through passages I hadn’t known existed and into a maze of rooms organized into suites for Larder, Cellar, Buttery, Bakehouse, Pastry, Spicery and other departments. People male and female, mostly in stained aprons, directed me, and after passing through a huge, steamy kitchen full of culinary aromas and sweating cooks, I reached the Spicery.

It turned out to be a cramped room lined with shelves on which stood various boxes and jars, while beneath the shelves were bigger containers: casks, chests and stone amphorae. A row of workers – chiefly male and muscular, but also including two mighty women with rolled-up sleeves and arms like legs of mutton – stood at a stone work-table, pounding spices in pestles, weighing the results and ladling it into bowls. The air was so aromatic that I was half afraid to breathe it. I felt that to open my mouth wide and take in a gulp of it would leave me reeling drunk.

‘I’m looking for a Master John Sterry,’ I said loudly, to be heard above the crash of the pestles. One of the women left her work, put her head round a door at the far side and called something which brought a man to the doorway. He was advanced in years though straight-backed still, and his short, stiff hair was the iron-grey of a badger’s coat, as was his small moustache. ‘John Sterry?’ I enquired.

Elizabeth’s instructions had evidently reached him. ‘You will be Mistress Stannard?’ he said. His voice was clipped and competent. ‘I was expecting you. You have questions that I am to answer, I understand. If you will come this way . . .’

I walked past the work table, where the woman who had summoned him was once more industriously pounding, and followed him through a passage and into what seemed to be his office. It had a table, where papers and ledgers were lying along with a writing set. There were benches on either side of the table. Here, the rhythmic thudding of the pestles was reduced to a faint and distant thunder. We sat down, and he looked at me enquiringly.

‘Were you here at the end of old King Henry’s reign?’ I asked. ‘When a man called Peter Hoxton was employed in these kitchens and died?’

‘Ah. It’s about that old business, is it? Yes, I was here. I’ve been in the Spicery for thirty years. I remember the Hoxton affair well. It isn’t,’ he added, ‘the sort of thing that happens every day, though it is the sort of thing that sticks in the memory.’

Elizabeth had chosen me a good contact, I thought; one with a businesslike mind. ‘A man called Gervase Easton was accused of deliberately poisoning Hoxton,’ I said. ‘Two witnesses apparently saw him add something to a tray of food which had been set aside for the victim. Do you know who they were? Would it still be possible to find them and talk to them? And what about the manservant, and the physician who was called to attend Hoxton?’

Sterry snorted. ‘You’re over-hopeful! Some of the folk you’d like to talk to are in the graveyard now. It was nigh a quarter of a century ago, and people die off. There were two physicians, and they’re both dead now. The manservant’s gone, too. Edwards, his name was. He got another place with someone here, but he had a night off, went out roistering in the town, came back dead drunk, went to sleep it off and never woke up again. He always had drunk too much,’ Sterry added disapprovingly.

‘But the two witnesses who actually said they saw Easton doing something to the tray?’

‘I’m coming to them. One of them was a pestle-woman – you’ve just come through that department. I don’t know where she is now. She left us five or six years back; said the work was over heavy for her now she wasn’t so young any more, and she was going to find something easier. She wasn’t missed. No one liked her much, for some reason. But I doubt she was lying about Easton. She didn’t have anything against him. The other one’s still here, though. Madge Dyer, her name was in those days – she’s Madge Goodman now. She left to wed, but she was back in three years, widowed and with no wish to marry again, it seemed. I don’t know what happened, but I did once hear her say her husband didn’t live up to his surname. She’s working just across the passage there.’ He pointed. ‘Making comfits. You want to talk to her?’

I said I did, and once more he led the way.

I somehow expected Madge Goodman to resemble the massive pestle-women. She proved, however, to be small and rosy and slightly wrinkled, like a russet apple which has been kept all winter. Her mild blue eyes were clear, and the hair which her white cap didn’t quite hide was still brown. She must have been very young at the time of Hoxton’s death, for even now I thought she was under forty, though the lines on her face suggested a life in which there had been considerable wear and tear.

We found her among a group of women who were all using their fingers to stir things in shallow brass bowls suspended over small charcoal fires. It looked dangerous, and when, at Sterry’s bidding, Madge left her work and washed her hands in a nearby basin, I saw old burn scars on her fingers.

Sterry led us back to his office to talk. ‘Sit down, Madge,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about your work. This business is official. This lady is Mistress Ursula Stannard, and at the queen’s wish, she is enquiring into something that happened many years ago. I’m sure you remember how, when you were young and new to the castle, a man called Peter Hoxton died mysteriously. You were a witness of some importance. Indeed, I believe it was you who found him in a state of desperate illness in the first place.’

Madge, who had been looking puzzled, brightened. ‘Oh yes, Master Sterry, ’course I remember. Who’d forget a thing like that? I never saw aught like it! I was that frightened.’

‘I’m sure you were. Well, will you tell Mistress Stannard here all about it? Every detail that comes to your mind.’

Madge shot a scared glance at me.

‘It’s all right,’ I said gently. ‘No one wants to catch you out. Don’t be afraid! A man called Gervase Easton was accused, and his son wants to know more about it. I have said I’ll try to find out for him; that’s all.’

‘Go on, Madge,’ said Sterry reassuringly, and Madge, after swallowing nervously, did as she was told.

It was the most dreadful thing she had ever encountered. Madge Dyer was only sixteen, and she had come to the Windsor kitchens to work in the Spicery barely two weeks before, straight from the shelter of her very respectable family. This was far outside her youthful experience, and she had no idea what to do about it.

Maids and lads as far down the hierarchy as she was were often sent on errands not directly connected with their official department in the royal kitchens. They were merely pairs of hands and pairs of legs, to go here, go there, fetch this, collect that, take this to so and so and do it yesterday because you’re also needed in three other places now this minute. Madge, seized upon to fetch used dishes from an ailing man’s room, because his manservant had gone into the town to buy more medicine for his employer, hadn’t dared to protest, but she went upstairs very nervously.

She had her reasons. To begin with, the territory above stairs was strange to her and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find the right room. She was also afraid that if she did find it, it might contain something alarming. Master Peter Hoxton was not just a Clerk Comptroller, which was in her eyes a very exalted being; he was also a man with a reputation. The word among the maidservants was that he couldn’t keep his hands to himself and that if he had a real fancy for a girl, she’d better say yes or she might find herself mysteriously out of a job. His only merit, according to the other women, was that he never got anyone into trouble.

In fact, she found the way easily, though she was puzzled by some curious thuds and bangs from behind the door which she thought must be Hoxton’s. The kitchen hand who had directed her had said that there was a tapestry of a hunting scene on the opposite wall, and that seemed to be right. The noises were growing louder. What on earth could Master Hoxton be doing? Doubtfully, she went to knock.

Before she could do so, however, the door was flung open and Hoxton burst out of it. Madge recognized him, but only just, since he was completely naked, and with his face flushed to crimson and his eyes so huge and dark, he looked wild enough to belong in a menagerie.

Madge shrieked and recoiled, appalled by the blatancy of him: the dark fur on his chest and arms; the unconcealed privates; the spittle in his fringe of black beard. He stopped short and stared back at her with those enormous eyes.

‘Don’t go in there. The ceiling’s coming down! It’ll squash you flat!’ he shouted. He then plunged past her, seized the wall hanging in two very hairy hands, made a noise like an animal snarling, and ripped it off the wall, rending the fabric and splintering the panels as the nails which had held the tapestry in place were torn out. The hanging fell in a heap on to the floor, whereupon he snatched it up, threw it away along the corridor, and whirled round. Thinking he meant to attack her, Madge reeled back in fright, but his target this time was a wall sconce just above his door. He grabbed hold of it and tried to wrest it off the wall.

The stout iron bracket withstood him, and with another snarl he rushed back into his room, knocking Madge impersonally aside and causing her to crash into the doorpost. Clutching at the post, gasping and petrified, she caught a glimpse of the room’s interior. And then, for several moments, gaped at it, as much in astonishment as fear.

The ceiling looked perfectly normal, but it was the only thing that did. The place was strewn with items of clothing and also with the bed curtains, which looked as if, like the wall hanging, they had been dragged forcibly down, while the door of the clothes press hung drunkenly, half off its hinges.

A chest settle had been overturned so that the spare coverlet and half a dozen candlesticks which had been stored inside were scattered across the floor as well. Hoxton himself was now tearing the legs off a stool, hurling each in turn across the room. Finally, flinging the mutilated stool away from him, he leapt at the rails which had held the bed curtains and began trying to wrench them loose.

And then, abruptly, stopped short and was sick.

Occasionally, even Madge’s healthy family ate things which didn’t agree with them, or overindulged in times of plenty. She knew about vomiting. Sufferers usually huddled over a basin and threw up miserably; they didn’t stand upright and spew in a hideous arc like the contents of a hurled bucket. At this ghastly spectacle, Madge screamed aloud and fled. She fell over the tumbled heap of tapestry, got up sobbing, and then just ran and ran.

This time, she did lose her way in the unfamiliar upper regions of the castle, until one of the White Staves, the noble and godlike beings who oversaw the counting house and the organization of the royal household, found her wandering tearfully in an upstairs gallery, where no maid from any part of the kitchens had any business to be, and pounced on her.

‘You’re a wench from the Spicery. I know from the colour of your dress. What are you doing up here?’

Madge, much alarmed by his height, his velvet gown, gold chains, white stave of office and the menacing grip on her arm, which prevented her from placating him with curtseys, gasped out her story.

‘His name? The sick man, who is he? I can’t send help unless I know. Come, come, girl,’ said the White Stave, and then, realizing that she was terrified and that his own majestic mien was making things worse, eased his grip and softened his voice. ‘Don’t be afraid of me. I am William Paulet, Lord St John, Master of the Household. Tell me who is ill and I will see something is done.’

‘Master Peter Hoxton, sir. He’s a Clerk Comptroller, sir. Oh sir, he’s . . . I think he’s out of his mind! He might kill someone! And such sickness; I never saw the like . . .!’

‘I will deal with it. Go back to the Spicery and go on with your duties. You have done nothing wrong.’

‘But sir, I can’t find the way back! I’m lost!’

Paulet, now patting her arm kindly enough, steered her rapidly to the head of a narrow staircase and pointed down it. ‘Turn left at the foot of that, and you’ll know where you are. Off with you, now.’

And after that, her responsibility was over, except that later on, when they knew that Peter Hoxton was dead and that the physician was talking about poison, she found herself remembering something that worried her, and she nervously told one of the upper maidservants about it, who passed on the information to one of the sergeants of the Spicery, who at once spoke to a Comptroller, who spoke to Paulet, and much to her distress, Madge found herself in Paulet’s office, standing before the great man once again, to answer questions. Concerning a man she had seen on the day of her frightening encounter with Hoxton. A man she had seen putting a pie on the tray which held Hoxton’s dinner and was waiting to be collected by his servant.