Queen Without a Crown (7 page)

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ said Dale in a whisper.

‘Our apologies,’ said Brockley. ‘It isn’t important.’

I began to say something about Arbuckle, but Brockley started to shake his head before I reached the end of the sentence.

It was Dale, plunging her needle fiercely into the green satin of the sleeve, who explained. ‘It’s not to do with Master Arbuckle, ma’am. But Roger says he wishes he could join Lord Sussex’s army! Did you ever hear the like?’

‘I seem, madam,’ said Brockley, ‘in the last nine or so years, since I entered your service, to have accustomed myself to being useful in times of emergency. It feels odd, at a time like this, to be doing nothing. If I could volunteer . . .’

‘Please don’t, Brockley. I value your services far too much.’

‘And I’m thankful that we’re not all riding north to risk our lives prying into secrets!’ Dale snapped.

I considered them both thoughtfully and with compassion.

The three of us had seen many adventures in our years together. The Brockleys had been my comrades in the sometimes dangerous tasks I had carried out for the queen and Cecil. The tasks weren’t usually meant to be dangerous, but I seemed to have a regrettable instinct for going beyond my instructions and pressing on when it would have been wiser to turn back and leave the work to others.

I had brought my servants into peril along with myself, all too often. In France, Dale had once found herself in a dungeon, threatened with a charge of heresy. In a Welsh border castle, Brockley and I had once been shut in a dungeon too, and that was an embarrassing memory, for that night we had come close, so close, to crossing the divide between lady and steward and becoming lovers.

I had never spoken of that episode to anyone, but my second husband, Matthew, had sensed the hidden thing between Roger Brockley and myself and been jealous. The same was true of Dale. Yet she had always been faithful. She had complained a good deal (with reason) about the hardships I inflicted on her; she had been at times frightened, exhausted and ill; but she had never failed either me or Brockley. As for Brockley himself, I knew he deplored what he felt was my unfeminine thirst for adventure, and yet he had a strongly adventurous streak himself, which always surfaced when called upon.

‘I won’t volunteer, madam,’ he said. ‘Not if you ask me to stay.’

‘If
I
ask him to stay,’ said Fran furiously, ‘he just tells me I don’t understand.’

‘Fran, I wouldn’t go without your consent and you know it,’ said Brockley. ‘But if only you
did
understand. I think the mistress does, even though she still wants to keep me here.’ He looked at me, still holding Hugh’s cloak. ‘Madam, I was a soldier once, as you know, back in the days of King Henry. When I was twenty-nine years old, I was on campaign in France. I’m fifty-four now and I notice it, but the further away the past gets, the more vivid the memories become. Sometimes, I long to be on a campaign again and I think to myself: soon I shall be too old. I long for just one more chance to – yes, to see action again.’

‘Anyone would think he’d been sleeping in the full moon,’ lamented Dale. ‘Men are just not
reasonable
.’

‘You’re mourning your lost youth?’ I said to Brockley. ‘Is that it?’

‘Lost youth and lost comrades, I suppose, madam. That fellow of Cecil’s, John Ryder – you know the one?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Ryder, a retainer in Cecil’s employ, had accompanied us on more than one of our missions. He was about Brockley’s age and had changed little since I first met him, seven years ago now. I had seen him the previous summer, and except that he was now completely grey instead of partially, he still looked the same, fatherly and reliable. I liked him; we all did.

‘I’m as sure as I can be that I met him in France, in King Henry’s army. He was a captain there. We had a mutual acquaintance, a Cornish fellow called Trelawny, Carew Trelawny. It’s odd. I haven’t thought of him for years, but somehow he’s been in my mind lately. He was the most resourceful man I ever came across. When we lost touch with our supply wagons once on a march through France, we had to camp out in a wood, in the wet, and make ourselves rough shelters. He had a knack of looking at a tree and saying:
That branch is the right shape for a ridge pole already; all we have to do is lop it.
He’d seen what the rest of us hadn’t. And there was the time the mule harness broke on one of the wagons. It was rotten old harness; even knotting it up wouldn’t have been any use . . .’

Brockley’s voice tailed off a little, and his eyes by now were reminiscent. He was looking back into the past, into his youth. Then he focused on me again and smiled his rare smile. ‘But we were near a cottage where someone was growing peas. There were pea-sticks, fixed together with a strong twine, quite a lot of it. Carew saw it straightaway, and in a trice he was over the fence and grabbing the twine. It repaired the harness well enough to get us to the nearest leather-worker. Though,’ Brockley added, ‘next day, after a skirmish, an old biddy called him all the names under the sun – in French, of course – because he stole a shirt she’d hung to dry on a bush in her garden, so as to make bandages in a hurry.’

‘I can’t help feeling,’ I said, ‘that your friend Trelawny may have made himself unpopular with some of the French peasantry! After all, there was one poor man trying to grow peas, to help feed his family, no doubt, and another poor woman trying to keep her husband’s clothes clean, and he just walks up and seizes their things!’

‘True,’ said Brockley. ‘But he did have a way of seeing that things made for one purpose can work just as well for another. It came in useful time and again. They were grand days.’

‘You’re a fraud, Brockley,’ I said. ‘You are always telling me that I should live a quiet and dignified life, and all the time you’re secretly hankering to go on campaign in the rain and steal things from peasants’ gardens.’

‘Well, there’s this,’ said Dale, still stitching furiously. ‘You’ve said now that you won’t go if I’m against it, and I am! I’ll be down on my knees this evening, thanking God for it.’

‘Don’t thank him too soon,’ said Brockley with another sudden grin. ‘You never know!’

We were interrupted just then as Hugh came in. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that it’s time to give Meg a rest from her studies. She’s translated quite enough Latin for one day. Arbuckle would like to see her, and why not now? Before I went to find him, I called on the gentleman whose wife he has just painted and saw the picture. I was impressed. It was as good as that miniature that Mark Easton showed us – rather like it, on a bigger scale. Arbuckle isn’t cheap, but I think he could be worth what he charges. Shall we rescue Meg and set off at once?’

Meg, who had been at her books all morning, was glad enough to leave off, and Dr Lambert, who wasn’t young, also looked thankful. In return for taking a note to Mark, giving a brief account of my interview with Sterry and Madge, I gave Lambert the rest of the day off and instructed Dale to brush Meg’s hair and help her into a fresh gown.

‘Something bright,’ I said. ‘The orange-tawny, I think.’ Meg’s dark colouring always rewarded lively hues. ‘After all, we’re going to introduce her to a portrait painter.’

Except for Gladys, who preferred to stay where she was and not struggle with the stairs (‘No better than a ladder, they are, and no good to my old legs’), we were all curious to see a portrait painter on his own territory. We set off in a body: Hugh, Meg and myself, Sybil and the Brockleys, who were interested enough, thank goodness, to put aside their quarrel. Indeed, their interest was greater than mine. I kept thinking of the fear which now haunted the castle and my own unsuccessful efforts to carry out Mark Easton’s commission, and I did not look to Master Arbuckle either to help or hinder. He had nothing to do with any of my anxieties. I think I hoped that visiting him might divert me a little, let my mind rest from my troubles awhile.

Which it did, or so it seemed then. It was quite some time before I understood that fate was going to entangle Master Arbuckle very thoroughly in the northern rebellion and the affairs of Mark Easton, and that as I walked with the others along Peascod Street towards this first meeting, I was taking the first steps on a very perilous road.

Peascod Street was and is a long, busy, narrow thoroughfare leading south into the town from the castle’s Lower Ward. Master Arbuckle had taken the upper floor of a house halfway along. ‘The landlady is a Mistress Browne,’ said Hugh as Brockley went to knock.

The door was opened by a faded wisp of a woman who turned out to be Mistress Browne herself. ‘Ah, Master Stannard again. Master Arbuckle’s expecting you. He’s upstairs as usual. Getting ready.’

Her voice had a resigned note. ‘Is he a difficult tenant?’ I asked. Whereupon, in a flood of speech, she proceeded to tell us just how difficult Master Jocelyn Arbuckle was.

‘He pays regular, I grant you that, and his manservant does for him and has all his own utensils, so I don’t have to cook or even lend pans, just let the fellow use the kitchen fire. But the
mess
!’ She flung up her hands. ‘Paint on the floor, and how I’ll ever get it off when he leaves . . . and there goes that hammering
again
.’

A banging noise had begun upstairs. ‘He does that now and then,’ said Mistress Browne exasperatedly, ‘and what he’s about, I can’t think. Making nail-holes in my walls by the sound of it.’

‘He does fine work, mistress,’ Hugh said mildly. ‘I’ve seen the portrait he’s just finished.’

‘Oh no doubt, no doubt, but such a disturbance – and the way he goes about it. I’ve had artists here before, and they weren’t like this. The man has all manner of gadgets – silver hoods for candles, to make their light brighter, and mirrors and –’ here her pale brown eyes widened and her voice dropped to a near whisper – ‘he uses a magic glass!’

‘A what?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Well, that’s what I call it. He’s got a glass hanging up that gives me the creeps to look at it. It’s not like a mirror; it’s got something about it,’ said Mistress Browne, ‘that makes me think of an
eye
. Witchcraft, that’s what I’m afraid it is, and I cross myself, always, before I go into that room. I dursen’t say aught to him; he scares me, and that’s a fact. I wouldn’t let him paint a picture of me, not for any gold sovereigns, no I wouldn’t.’

Hugh and Brockley were both impatient with superstition. Hugh, sensing Brockley’s irritation, grinned at him in a silent permission to speak, and Brockley addressed the landlady sternly.

‘Master Arbuckle,’ he said, ‘is a man of reputation and has been in his profession for many years. There can’t be much amiss with him. Now, may we go up?’

Intimidated, the faded Mistress Browne turned towards a steep wooden staircase and led the way to the floor above.

The hammering, which had ceased while Brockley was talking, broke out again as we climbed. We emerged into a room furnished, decently enough, as a bedchamber, though some shelves next to a door on the opposite side held an array of the silver-hooded candlesticks the landlady had mentioned, along with half a dozen mirrors on stands and bundles of candles. They were all being shaken by the hammering.

Mistress Browne went across to it and knocked, loudly, so as to be heard above the racket. ‘Master Arbuckle? The Stannards have brought their daughter!’

‘Then let them enter!’ called a muffled voice from inside. ‘Door’s not locked!’

We went in, and Mistress Browne’s exasperation was now explained. We had passed on the instant from order to chaos. As we soon came to realize, Jocelyn Arbuckle was an artist whose gifts made him a close rival to the legendary Hans Holbein. He was also, assuredly, the untidiest artist in England, if not Europe.

A trestle table stood before us, under the front window. It was laden with a wild clutter of dishes and bottles and jars, some containing vivid pigments, others full of more mysterious liquids, some with brushes steeping in them. Stained, crumpled cloths lay about, and there was a pestle and mortar, a set of scales and a measuring jug. A number of these assorted objects had overflowed the space on top of the table and were now dotted about on the floor beside it, like an advancing army. Table and floor were indeed copiously splashed with paint, and the air was full of an odd smell, a mingling of the exciting and the soothing, compounded, I thought, of pigments and oils.

There was little other furniture, but there was a stool under a side window and an easel beside it. A folding screen made of wooden panels, painted black, was propped against one wall, while in a corner were some spindly ironwork tables, stacked roughly into a pile.

Beside them, the strange glass which the landlady had mentioned was poised on top of a thin metal stand. It was a lens of some sort, I thought, a thicker version of the lenses which are put into eyeglasses. It did indeed resemble an eye. I wondered what it was for.

The place wasn’t cold or gloomy. A lively wood fire burnt in a hearth to our right, with a wood-basket and a stout fireguard at hand, and the room was bright, because even as we were climbing the stairs, the sun had come out and light was streaming through the side window. It illuminated the muddle on the work table rather well.

Finally, there was Arbuckle himself. He had been nailing a large sheet of white paper to the folding easel, and he had a hammer in his grasp and a row of nails in his mouth, which explained why his voice had been muffled. Master Arbuckle was not prepossessing; nor was he any tidier than his studio. He was tall and lanky, with small dark eyes, badly combed grey locks and a scruffy grey beard adorning a long chin. His gown was made of cheap material, probably from choice because he obviously had no intention of looking after it. It was basically dark, but like the floor and the table, it was splashed with paint. There were even flecks of paint in Arbuckle’s beard.

He nodded at us, and then, seeing Meg, his gaze sharpened. He put a last nail to a corner of the paper, hammered it quickly home, swept the other nails out of his mouth and said, in a voice which was deep and vigorous for a man of his obvious years: ‘Welcome. Is this the young lady? Bring her into the light. Such as it is,’ he added sourly, apparently not impressed by the efforts of the winter sun. ‘The climate of England should be forbidden by law.’