The Doublet Affair (Ursula Blanchard Mysteries) (12 page)

“Only by paying him more,” said Mason gloomily, “which would not be convenient. I’ll have a word with him some time and tell him to brush that gown of his, if you wish.” He had a restless air, as though he were longing to escape to his private researches into the mystery of flight. He flinched as the uproar crescendoed. “What a noise! I really am considering a school for the boys—which is why I can’t even think of raising Crichton’s wages. How I am to afford school fees, I can scarcely imagine. For the moment, however, I have work to do. I don’t wish to be disturbed.” He added, rising to his feet, “If the house catches fire, or some other emergency occurs which means that my presence is
essential,
I shall be in my workshop. I am going to make a new version of my gliding engine.”

Ann sighed again. Mason gave her an enigmatic look, favoured me with a brooding one, and strode out. I smile at Ann and said that it was time I set to work as well.

That was the Friday. The weekend passed without incident, but my discomfort did not abate. Mason and Crichton alike remained aloof, rarely speaking to me unless they had to, but I had the feeling all the time that I was being watched. I saw little of Mr. Mason, but when I did encounter him, his unsmiling manner towards me was disconcerting. As for Crichton, when I moved about the house, which I did as much as possible, because I wished to learn its layout, I several
times encountered him unexpectedly, as though he were dogging my footsteps.

Leonard Mason: Dr. Crichton. I had set out thinking that Mason, the Catholic master of Lockhill, was the likely conspirator, if anyone was, but Crichton, his priest, was no less probable. That curious lie about the tapestries certainly united them. Both quite plainly distrusted me, and I distrusted them. Now, whenever I saw a door standing ajar, I glanced covertly at it to see if one of them was behind it. I had a continual urge to look over my shoulder.

Monday morning found me sitting in the dormer window of the top-floor room which Ann had given me for sewing lessons. It looked out over rolling countryside, meadow and wood and ploughland, under a windy grey sky. The girls were with me, sewing industriously. I had fitted their lessons into the existing routine quite easily. The children began the day with study, and then the boys were supposed to practise archery and swordsmanship, of which Crichton apparently had some knowledge. “Archery is out of date for warfare,” George told me solemnly, “but excellent training for marksmanship and the arm muscles.”

Hitherto, the girls had looked on, and I gathered, also cheered, jeered, and during the swordplay, recommended their brothers to slit each others’ gizzards. Henceforth, I declared, they should spend this part of the day sewing with me. The new regime had begun on Friday. They were sulky at first but I tried to make the lessons pleasant and this soon wore off. Ann had made spasmodic attempts to teach them to sew and
Penelope had quite a repertoire of stitches. Cathy, though the youngest, wasn’t far behind her and even showed signs of talent. Jane was clumsy and apt to stick needles in her fingers but in time I hoped to teach her how not to get blood all over her work.

I had also begun dancing lessons, in which the boys took part, because dancing was a pastime shared by men and women. In fact, by Saturday evening I had been promoted to teach music as well.

“My husband plays the spinet,” Ann said, “but he has no time to teach the children. We had an outside music master once but he doesn’t come now, at least as an instructor. He visits now and then as a friend.” Mason had had to pay him for giving lessons, I supposed. “He takes an interest in my husband’s researches and inventions,” Ann told me, “so he’s always welcome when he calls, but he and Leonard just disappear into the study or the workshop. It’s pleasant for Leonard to have someone to talk to, though. He sometimes gets Crichton to help him, but Crichton doesn’t like it. He’s not that kind of man.”

I already knew that. I had once or twice walked through the yew garden to look at the workshop, and on my second visit I had found Mason pounding nails into his new brainchild, which was made of wood and canvas, while Crichton nervously held the nails straight, obviously afraid for his thumbs and just as obviously not enjoying himself.

In the afternoon, the children sometimes rode. Ann said that she also tried at times to instruct the girls in house-wifery, but without must success, because the cook, Stephen Logan, who was large and aggressive,
and his wife, the lean angular housekeeper, disliked having them “under our feet.”

In the evenings, I had undertaken to see the girls to bed, and then Dale and I would go to the kitchen to talk to the Logans and the maids while we made warm bedtime possets for ourselves. The Logans were civil enough to us. They worked hard and Stephen had reason for his bad temper, since the spitboy had lately died and not been replaced. Logan had to turn his own spit.

The Logans had a son, Edwin, a powerful and unsmiling young man who lived in the village but ran the Lockhill garden with the help of two other village lads. He also acted as the household butcher, slaughtering any animals or poultry needed for the table, and dealing with the carcasses in a gruesome back room off the kitchen, furnished with chopping blocks and an array of knives and cleavers.

I had not really become acquainted with the butler, Redman, but I made a point of chatting with the two maids when I could. Joan was a widow in the middle of years, while Jennet, as I had surmised, was only fifteen. They too worked hard. Lockhill was badly understaffed.

The last member of the household was Ann’s maid, Tilly. Tilly was elderly and ailing, and as far as I could make out, Ann looked after her rather than the other way about. Tilly had a little room of her own where she took most of her meals on a tray, and all I had ever seen of her was a wraithlike figure in grey, drifting aimlessly here and there in the house. I had never yet spoken to her.

I had succeeded by now in learning my way about. Lockhill manor house consisted essentially of a
frontage with two wings stretching back. The yew garden lay between them. The great hall, which went the height of two storeys and occupied much of the frontage, had once been much wider, but part of it had at some time been walled off and given a lower ceiling so that two extra bedrooms—one of which was mine—could be built above. The cut-off piece of hall was called the Long Room and was used as a passageway between the two wings.

When there was company, Joan had told me, dinner was served in the hall and the dishes were assembled in the Long Room, on top of the arrow chests which held the shafts used by the boys in their archery.

I had also learned, depressingly, that Mason’s study was not only apt to be occupied at night, but was inaccessibly placed at the far end of the west wing and could only be reached by first going through Dr. Crichton’s schoolroom, then a long, chilly gallery, and then the anteroom where Leonard sometimes slept. To get there from his bedchamber, he would have to pass my door. The footsteps in the night had no doubt been his.

I stitched slowly, repairing snagged embroidery on Mason’s fawn doublet. On the Saturday, I had discovered Ann, in an unusually irritable mood, trying to do it in a hurry. “Leonard is fond of this doublet,” she had said, “but embroidery takes up time, and poor Tilly can’t help, not just now.”

I had offered to do it for her, and now I worked at it with a distracted mind, glad that the new project I had found for the girls seemed to be absorbing them. Over the weekend, Mason had worn a cream satin doublet, decorated with the striking geometrical patterns
of Spanish blackwork, which was highly fashionable, despite its origins in Spain. I had marked out some similar patterns on pieces of cloth, shown my pupils the basic stitches and set them to work. It was keeping them quiet, and I needed quiet in order to think. I was worried. Three days had passed already and still I had not found a chance to search Mason’s study.

The reason was deplorable. Yes, it was true that an opportunity was hard to come by, but as yet I hadn’t even tried. The air of unfriendliness and suspicion in Lockhill had affected me, and I had again had a nightmare about being shut in that cold boathouse. Now, I was quite simply afraid of entering that study with my wire lockpicks. What if Mason caught me? What would happen next? I could imagine various answers to that and I didn’t care for any of them.

I stitched miserably away and lectured myself. If a plot did exist, then how advanced was it? What if it ripened? What if it succeeded because I had let the chance of foiling it slip through my silly feminine fingers?

Well, Mason’s nocturnal habits made a night attempt too risky, but there could be a chance this afternoon. Ann and Leonard had gone out, in their lumbering coach, to dine with friends in Maidenhead. They wouldn’t be back until supper. A clear field beckoned. I dared not refuse the invitation.

This afternoon, all the children would be riding, taking turns on the three ponies which the stables boasted. Nearly everyone would be out of the way.

Yes. Brace yourself, Ursula. This afternoon.

• • •

I needed Dale and Brockley to help me by standing guard. After dinner, therefore, Dale and I went to the stableyard, where Brockley was most likely to be found. As a married man, he had been allowed a room of his own which Dale could sometimes share with him. It was next to the grooms’ attic over the stables, and Dale said he was putting up some extra hooks for their clothes.

We found him, however, standing with the gangling groom Thomas, at the foot of the outside staircase which led up to the room, and we could tell, even from a distance, that he was taking Thomas to task. We waited, tactfully, until he had finished before going nearer.

When Brockley had had his say, Thomas, not noticeably disturbed, lounged away towards the door of the kitchen, and tried to steal a kiss from Jennet, who had just stepped out with a bucket of leftovers for the pig-barrow, which stood by the kitchen door and was taken, every day, down the hill for the benefit of the pigs, who lived in a noisome sty out of smelling distance of the house. Jennet swiped at him with the emptied bucket and darted back indoors and Thomas, whistling, sauntered off into the harness room.

“Jennet doesn’t like him, either,” Dale said. “He’s sweet on her, Joan says, but she won’t have him and no wonder. It’s the way he looks at one. As if he was imagining . . . well, I hardly like to say, ma’am.”

“I know,” I said. Thomas was a bleached individual with disconcertingly light eyes and I too had noticed that appraising stare. He had turned it on me, once or twice.

“Trouble, Brockley?” I said as we joined him.

“That Thomas! I caught him putting fresh straw down in Bay Star’s stall without taking the old straw away first. She’ll get foot-rot if she stands in old bedding. He’s as idle as a broken millwheel. If I were in charge here, he’d be sent off with no character and a sore back. You’re looking for me, madam?”

“Yes, Brockley. Have the children gone riding yet?”

“They have. The two younger grooms have gone with them.”

“Good. Brockley, it’s time.”

• • •

At this hour of the day, the house was quiet. The Logans and the maids were in the kitchen, clearing up the dinner things and taking their ease before beginning the first preparations for supper. My bedtime gossiping in the kitchen had told me nothing about conspiracies but had yielded a good deal of useful information on the habits of the household members. I knew that Redman usually retired after dinner for an afternoon nap in his attic room, and that when the children went riding, Crichton also liked a snooze. Both of them should be safely out of the way.

I stood with Brockley and Dale just outside the schoolroom. “You know what to do?” I said to them.

“I am to wait here,” said Brockley, “and listen for movement downstairs and on this floor. Fran goes up to the top floor to listen for anyone stirring up there. If need arises, we fetch you, as fast as we can. It doesn’t matter if you’re found in the gallery, but you mustn’t be caught in the rooms beyond it.”

“That’s it.”

“Madam, I wish you were not doing this.”

“Frankly,” I said, “so do I, but it can’t be helped. I have written to Cecil asking him to start certain enquiries at his end, but I haven’t heard from him yet and I think it’s too soon for results, anyway. Meanwhile, I must try to carry out the task I’m here for.” I cocked my head. The house was perfectly quiet. “Now,” I said.

Dale went softly up the stairs to her post. I nodded to Brockley and went into the schoolroom. It was very untidy, chairs not pushed properly under the two tables, and the tabletops carelessly strewn with books and slates and pens. I longed to restore it to order but I wasn’t here for that. I hurried through to the gallery.

This had been created partly as a place for the ladies of the house to walk in during cold or wet weather, and it took some moments to traverse it. During those moments, I was still Ursula Blanchard, gentlewoman, on leave from court, instructress to the Mason girls. If anyone were to come on me unexpectedly, it would not matter; I had done nothing yet that Ursula Blanchard should not do.

The instant I passed through the door at the far end, however, I would step out of character, would become a spy, performing deeds which must be secret because they couldn’t be explained away. Since I came to Lockhill, no one had tried to harm me, but if I were discovered at this . . .

Jack Dawson, otherwise Jackdaw, had suspected that something was wrong here at Lockhill. Had he
been caught doing something untoward? And who
had
been behind that lying trap that led me to a deserted boathouse?

Jackdaw was dead.

The gallery was cold and draughty. A fire had been laid in its hearth, but not yet lit. The door at the far end was bolted, and I drew back the bolt with chilled fingers. Here was the little room where Leonard Mason sometimes slept. Rugs and a pillow lay ready on a couch. I left the gallery door open behind me, in case Brockley or Dale called me, and crossed to the door of the study. Ann had shown it to me briefly when taking me round the house, although she had not let me do more than glance inside. To Ann, her husband’s study was a shrine of learning, to be treated with hushed respect. It had a lock and key, but the door opened when I pushed it. Leonard took it for granted that no one would go uninvited into his sanctum.