Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3)

by David Crossman

De Rode, his helmet bearing the fresh impress of a horseshoe, had only time to grab at branches to slow his descent as gravity dragged him down the hill to the edge of the river where he clattered to a halt in a cataract of loose debris.

  The little congregation of escapees was arranged in a semi-circle around the fallen warrior over whom the young Henry was bent. De Rode caught Isabella’s eyes and was about to speak when she held up a silencing finger which she then pointed at her son. De Rode looked at the boy and, as he stood, flushed, from whatever labor he had been about, saw that he had a knife in his hand and, at the same time, discerned what that labor had been.

  The cut wasn’t clean, and most of the internal business that held Beauchamp’s head to his body was still in place, but a respectable start had been made so that there would be no more threat from that quarter. Henry handed De Rode the knife. “See to that, would you, de Rode? Let’s get these women and children across the bridge and safe at the manor house, so we can be on our way.”

  De Rode dropped quickly to one knee. “Your majesty,” he said, with all his heart. As he stood, he cast a glance at Isabella, knowing that he had presumed too much, but she said nothing. “The rest will be coming along the ridge and down the road. We have no time to lose.”

  There was no need for further explanation. Even now the unmistakable clash and clamor of horses and armor could be heard in the far distance. “Quickly!” said the queen, ushering her frightened flock across the narrow stone bridge. “Henry, now boy! Quickly.”

  “You go first, mother. I’ll cross when everyone’s safe.”

  Isabella hesitated for only an instant then, perceiving that the undefinable spirit of kingship—in the presence of which she had only felt herself once before, with her father-in-law—had descended upon her son, did as she was told.

  “Now you,” Henry said when the others had made the path on the opposite banking.

  “My job is to keep you safe, your majesty. Let’s not argue lest our nobility cost us all our lives.”

  Henry looked down at Beauchamp. “I think he was dead before I . . .”

  “I’m sure he was,” said de Rode.

  “I just had to make sure.”

  “You were right to do so.”

  Henry turned toward the bridge.

  “Wait!” said de Rode. He dropped to his knee beside the fallen warrior and, removing his gauntlet, dipped a naked finger in the wound around his neck. He stood up and held the bloody digit up for the boy to see. “May I?”

  Henry smiled and closed his eyes as de Rode made a cross of blood on the boy’s forehead. “May all who wish harm to you or your kingdom, share this man’s fate.”

  Once again Henry made for the bridge, and once more he stopped, staring at the water that coursed over the riverbed in a silver blanket. “Do you think the King is dead?” he asked, without turning around.

  “I don’t know,” said de Rode. “If not already, I’m afraid soon.”

  “They won’t let me rule, will they?”

  “Not until you’re of age, your majesty. You mother and your Uncle William will probably . . .”

  “Don’t call me that,” Henry interrupted. “Just call me Henry; at least until we’ve heard. . .”

  De Rode inclined his head. “As you wish.”

  “How long have we before the barons make their way down?”

  “Not long enough.”

  Henry stared for a moment in the direction from which the assault would come, ignoring the rain that had been threatening for some time, and now began in earnest. “We’ll have to hide, then. In one of these houses.”

  De Rode was too familiar with the results of such a course of action. “I’d advise against it. If they think the village is harboring you, they’ll put it to the torch.”

  The possibility had never occurred to Henry. “They would?” But he knew, even as he spoke, the truth of de Rode’s words. “What do we do?”

  “You’re not going to like this.”

  Henry steeled himself. “I’ll do as you suggest, de Rode. Whatever it is. I put my trust in you.”

  De Rode was honored, but he also knew the odds against the likelihood of his plan working, and the consequences if it did. “Two things need to happen, your maj . . . Henry. First, and most important, you and your mother need to get to Corfe Castle, together with your brother and sisters, if possible. It’s the safest place for you until we can notify Cardinal Bicchieri and Lord Marshal to meet us at Gloucester.”

  “And?”

  “The rest of us need to draw the barons off.”

  “A diversion?”

  “Yes. We need to get them to follow us in the opposite direction, to give you as much of a head start as possible.”

  “But what if they catch you? Find you out?”

  “That’s the part you’re not going to like.”

  Henry was perplexed for a moment, but his eyes widened as realization dawned. “I won’t allow it, de Rode! These people, all of you, are under my care!”

  “No, Henry. We’re in God’s care.”

  “But . . .”

  “No more. I pray not, but if a sacrifice must be made to preserve the throne, so be it.” He placed his finger beneath Henry’s chin and tilted his head up so their eyes were locked. “But remember, Henry; and rule in a manner worthy of it.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Oxburgh Hall, 1983

  “It’s really the most curious thing I’ve ever heard,” said Angela, having settled herself by the fireplace. “According to the curator at the museum, Lady Annabella Howe was in Castle Combe, in the Cotswolds, when she commissioned the painting.”

  “Is the castle still there?” asked Albert, his thought being that, if it was, one of its walls might be recognizable as the one in the background of the painting.

  “It’s not a proper castle,” said Angela. “That’s the name of the village. Castle Combe.”

  “No castle?”

  “No castle.”

  Leave it to the English.

  “There’s a manor house. Belongs to a local nib, I should imagine, besides which, it was built long after Annabella’s day. But the castle is just a nub and ruins, according to the curator. Been that way for years.”

  Albert was confused. “So, thereis a castle?”

  “Well, more like a place where a castle used to be. Ruins. There’s not really a proper castle anymore.”

  “Was it a ruin when the picture was painted?” asked Albert.

  Angela didn’t know.

  Jeremy Ash was unable to contain himself any longer. “What’s the curious part?”

  Angela looked at him through the veil of steam rising from her tea cup. “The curious part is that Annabella imported the painter, just for that painting. The curator says he’s pretty much an unknown—he painted. . .”

  “Cows,” Jeremy interjected.

  “. . . livestock,” said Angela, surprised. “Yes. He was from Lincolnshire where, as you say,” she inclined her head toward Jeremy, “he painted portraits of prize livestock for the local gentry. One of whom was Lady Annabella’s father, Emanuel Scrope.”

  This didn’t seem an economical arrangement to Jeremy Ash. “So, there were no painters in this castle place?”

  “Not so. The painters are to the Cotswolds what fleas are to a dog and, to my knowledge, there’s never been a shortage of them. Some of them pretty good—hung in the National Gallery.”

  “Lossburgh is hung there,” said Albert.

  “Well, yes, but because of the subject matter, not the execution.”

  “Robert Tiptoft.”

  “Yes. His only known portrait. He was a pretty big wind in his day.”

  “But the man in the painting is Lossburgh, not Tiptoft.”

  Angela felt she had to sit down, which she did. “Yes, but it’ssupposed to be Tiptoft. That’s what makes it important.”

  In a world where a supposedly reputable museum would allow to be hung on its walls the pigmentary abuses Albert
had seen in London, nothing needed to make sense.

  “I need to say some things out loud,” said Albert, out loud, sitting at the back-up piano.

  “You’re on,” said Angela.

  “Shoot,” said Jeremy Ash.

  “These are things I need to say so I can hear them,” Albert clarified. “They’re questions, but not the kind you have to answer.” He brushed with notes above middle C with the tips of his fingers, but didn’t press.

  “They’re rhetorical, you mean,” said Angela.

  “Rhetorical? Yes. Rhetorical.”

  Albert’s fingers danced silently on the piano, one note for each syllable. “Rhe-tor-i-cal.” He looked at Angela’s inverted reflection on the piano cabinet. “That’s what this is going to be.” He looked down again. “Robert Tiptoft lived more than two hundred years before Annabella. Why did she want a painting of him?”

  The little congregation maintained its silence.

  “And why did she have it painted by a man who painted cows and horses instead of someone who painted people?”

  Status quo.

  “And why did she bring that man all the way from Lincolnshire to the Cotswolds to paint it, when there were plenty of people-painters already in Castle Combe?” Albert’s mouth was overfilling his ears and for a moment he got what Jeremy called his ‘my head is about to explode’ look in his eyes.

  Jeremy jumped in to alleviate the pressure, and nudge Albert back on track. “And why is the man in the picture looking in the wrong direction?”

  Albert looked at him, as if he’d awaken from a long, not-very-refreshing nap. “And why was Lossburgh murdered after he finished the painting?”

  Angela rejoined the conversation. “And, lastly, who did the deed?”

  Hearing his questions out loud hadn’t helped, as Albert had hoped it would. “Annabella had a connection to Lincolnshire,” he declared at last.

  “What makes you think that?” Angela would be please for anything that made sense.

  “Lossburgh painted for her father. You said so. That must be how she knew Lossburgh, or knew about him. Maybe she stayed with someone who had one of his pictures of a cow.”

  “Or horse,” said Jeremy Ash.

  “Or horse,” said Albert, for the first time since he began his rumination, looking up from the keys. He looked at Angela. “Can you find out?”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “You’re a woman,” Albert explained.

  “So?”

  Wasn’t that enough? “Annabella was a woman.”

  “And so is half the population,” said Angela, pouring another cup of tea, more for something to do with her hands than because she was thirsty. “What has that to do with anything?”

  Albert had been looking at Jeremy, then back at Angela. “And, you have legs,” he said in summation.

  Angela sighed deeply. “I’ll find out, but from here on out, call me Watson.”

  Having read the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes stories one night at the school library in the not-to-distant past—in connection with his efforts to extricate Professor Tewksbury from a murder charge, Albert recalled Watson.

  The gaze Angela returned to him was heavily tinged with disbelief. “Nevermind, Professor. You tell me what to do, and I’ll do it, how’s that?”

  That was just what Albert wanted. “That’s good,” he said then, reading in her eyes that she wanted something more, he added. “Perfect.”

  “Then you’re gonna need to pay her something,” said Jeremy Ash.

  Angela flushed. “Oh, no! I couldn’t possibly. . .” she said, though it was evident the suggestion was not without appeal.

  “I am?” said Albert, who was aware of one thing, if nothing else, this being that Many Things didn’t occur to him, which was one of the reasons Jeremy Ash was so valuable.

  “Sure. You drag her up here from London, get her to run to museums and now you want her to track down Annabella’s connection to Lincolnshire. You’re s’posed to pay people when they do stuff like that for you, A. That’s capitalism, fair and square.”

  “Okay,” said Albert. “But I don’t have any money.” He patted his pockets, just in case.

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Jeremy, who, over time, had by default become Albert’s de facto Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  “Really, I couldn’t. . . ” Angela protested feebly.

  “You can’t busk up here, can you?”

  “Well, no. Of course not. But. . .”

  “How much do you make in your average week of busking?” Jeremy asked pointedly.

  “Well, I don’t know, really. I mean, the response is so inconsistent. And of course, one’s always in danger of being chased off a patch by the police.”

  “Mark this, A,” Jeremy said. “The dance she’s doin’ is called thehem-and-haw. It’s what someone’s mouth does while their brain is trying to catch up to the situation.”

  Albert was intimate with that dance.

  Jeremy Ash turned a sly eye on Angela. “Let’s use your best week, as an example, then. What did you make on your best week ever?”

  Reluctantly, she told him.

  “That’s just sad. Well, we’ll triple it. Fair enough?”

  “Well, that’s very generous, and I can’t say it won’t be welcome,” said Angela. “But I’m no detective, you know. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to find what you’re looking for.”

  “You helped Heather with research,” said Albert, recalling the painful episode in Angela’s life that had resulted in her incarceration.

  “Yes,” she said, flatly. “I can claim that much.”

  “Then you’ll find out,” Albert said. “Finding out things is what researchers do.”

  “Ergo,” said Jeremy Ash, concluding negotiations.

  “Ergo,” said Albert, and played a C#dim 7 +11.

  Albert couldn’t get to sleep. Usually, when that happened—which was often—it was because there was music in his head and it wouldn’t stop nagging him until he’d gotten it out. He lay there, on his side, and listened expectantly for the introduction of the theme.

  There was none.

  The room’s two large windows framed star-flecked swatches of night sky with darkness. What little light that darkness allowed, traced soft rectangles on the floor. Albert was looking at the rectangles and wondering why the carpet they illuminated, so colorful in the light of day, was now just shades of blue and gray. Like a quilt from the Civil War. Somehow nighttime stole color from the day.

  Someone should look into that.

  The carpet intersected the light and darkness obliquely, leaving a triangle of carpet-less floorboards, polished to a soft sheen by years of traffic, on the side nearest him. Into that triangle, unexpectedly, a foot stepped from the shadows. A foot in some kind of slipper with a bow on it. A woman’s foot.

  “Have you seen John?” said the woman.

  Albert shook his head. “I don’t know John.”

  Why was his heart pounding like that?

  The woman seemed to accept this. “You’d know if you did.

  “Your thoughts are keeping you awake?”

  Albert felt as if he should sit up. Something told him that’s what you did when a woman came into your room and started talking to you. But he didn’t sit up. His eyes were on the foot of the woman which, as he watched, was joined by the other as she stepped into the light, silhouetting herself against the window.

  He looked up. He couldn’t see her face, but the moisture in her eyes now and then caught an errant beam reflected by some object in the room. “Where do you go?”

  She seemed to understand the question. “I’m not sure. I’m like a fog in Ladywood; there at dawn, then gone, then back again. But it never really goes anywhere. Neither do I.”

  Albert reached for his glasses from the bedside table, but, suddenly struck by the thought that he might not be able to see the woman if he put them on, left them where they were. “I have something in my brain,” he s
aid, “that makes me see things that aren’t there. Hear things.”

  “Like me?”

  He nodded.

  The woman walked across the light, and into the shadow. He heard her footsteps as she rounded his bed and came to a stop. She was behind him now. He felt the blankets retreat across his skin as she raised them, and the rustle of the sheets as she lay down. He felt a frisson in the air as she reached toward him, and the hair on the back of his neck rose to meet her fingers.

  “Perhaps it is the thing in your head that let’s you see things thatare there,” she said.

  This was a new thought. What if, all his life, he’d been surrounded by things he couldn’t see because he hadn’t had this thing in his brain? And, now that he did, what other things might come stepping out of the shadows?

  He knew she was going to touch him. He knew she was going to lay her hand upon his shoulder, and stroke the back of his neck. He knew her fingers would be cool. A ghost’s fingers would be cool, wouldn’t they?

  And it happened as he knew it would.

  Then she began to sing. Just above a whisper. A Spanish lullaby; and he felt her breath upon his ear.

  He liked the song, and wanted to stay awake to hear it, but as her voice seeped through his senses, sleep drew down his eyelids like a shopkeeper’s curtains at the close of business. And he dreamed Spanish dreams, and somewhere a guitar played.

  He’d never dreamt in guitar.

  “What’s amazing,” said Angela as, two days later, she buttered her toast enthusiastically, “is that not only is there a connection between Annabella and Lincolnshire—therefore, as you suspected, Lossburgh, but there’s also a connection between old Robert Tiptoft—the reputed subject of the painting—and Emanuel Scrope, Annabella’s father!”

  Hiring Angela had been a Good Idea, thought Albert. As he listened, he studied the photo she had taken of the painting of the man in the blue pajamas, and saw something he hadn’t seen before, a little rectangle, painted faintly on the wall over the man’s right shoulder, that framed some barely discernible letters: F-O-S-S.

  “And that’s just the beginning, it has to do with the sudden good fortune that turned old Bobby Tiptoft from a nobleman in name only, to one of the richest nibs in all of Lincolnshire . . .”