Agnes seemed relieved. “So, why do you ask?”
“Pardon?”
“Why did you ask about Mirth? She’s a very obscure character. How did you come across her?”
Albert prodded his nest of threads. “She was a poet.”
“A poetess?” Agnes editorialized. If true, this was the kind of information that should be exclusive to historians. Not piano players, however gifted. “How do you know?”
“I’ve read one of her poems,” said Albert and, as much for himself as for her, he recited it verbatim.
The literary critic in Agnes bridled. “Hardly poetry, that. The sort of thing a mother might have recited to her child at bedtime.
“Jibberish, of course.”
Meaning, Albert decided, that it made no sense to her, not that it had had no sense for the one who wrote it.
Agnes compounded literary appraisal with historical. “Women of her station, in those days, were seldom educated, certainly not enough to have written something like that. They were chattel. Baby machines whose job was to produce the next generation of farmers; as likely to turn out poetry—even of questionable literary merit—as the sheep in the fold and pigs in their pen.
“Still, Mirth. There’s the name.”
Albert thought it was a good poem. “Yes. There it is.”
The tea was gone. For a few moments they sat opposite one another but world’s apart, subconsciously withdrawing into their cardigan and greatcoat respectively against the invading cold. The steam of their breath mingled and rose in whispers above their heads.
“So the stone was moved in . . .” Albert said at last.
“1375, yes. Or earlier.”
Affirming, by Albert’s calculations, that it had most probably been moved by a Tiptoft. “But why?”
“Is it important?”
That was a good question. Whatwas important? Miss Bjork being shot and dying in his arms, that was important, he could tell because it tore his insides out. This wasn’t important like that.
Neither was anything else.
Was it important like being late for class . . . again? The School seemed to think that was The Most Important Thing. It didn’t seem so to Albert. He’d been late many times, and no one had died in consequence; at least as far as he aware. Even if he forgot about class altogether; there was that other person who showed up and took his place. He or she was probably there now.
The fact that someone, at sometime, had for reasons unknown moved the Foss stone from one wall to the other in an obscure little English chapel wouldn’t register with The School.
Very likely the fact that Melissa Bjork had died in his arms wouldn’t either—except as related to its affect on his schedule.
The Foss stone was only important to Albert, and even he wasn’t sure why. “Probably not.”
“F. Shakestaff,” said Albert as he got on the bus that would take him, by dinner time about four hours hence, to Castle Combe where Angela and Jeremy Ash had arranged to meet him.
“Welcome aboard Mr. Shakestaff,” said the bus driver. “Got your choice of seats today.”
“Oh, no, I’m. . .” Did it matter who he was. “You want some money?”
“That would be nice, aye,” said the driver, whose badge, Albert saw at a glance, declared to be Donald O’Shields.
Jeremy Ash had given him a ten pound note that morning to cover such expenses. Since Balfour had delivered him to Langar on his way to Stratford-on-Avon where he had to go to do whatever butlers do, he hadn’t spent any yet. He handed the note to the driver and headed for the back of the bus.
“Here!” said the driver. “Your change!”
Albert sat down. “You can have it.”
“But, fare’s only five pound eighty.”
Then ten would cover it. “Good.”
“F. Shakestaff,” Albert said to his reflection in the window. Foss Shakestaff. Mirth was Foss’s wife. They were, many generations ago, Shakespeare’s grandparents, one a dwarf, and the other a poetess.
Hamnet Farm, Rowlington, 1293
“You’re gonna work yourself blind, girl,” said Foss. He was beginning to wonder if teaching Mirth to write had been such a good idea after all. Day and night, ever since the children had outgrown their hourly need of her, she’d been at it. He smiled at the memory of their early lessons.
“Just twenty-six letters?” Mirth had said skeptically.
“That’s the lot.”
She pulled a face at her little husband. Try as she might, she could never entirely dismiss the notion there was more than a dollop of the fey about him; a telltale pointedness to the ears? An unnatural affection for colored cloth? A little too much mischief in the eyes?
“You ‘spect me to believe that everything said—and written—all them grand thoughts, the Bible and Bede and everything, was all done with just twenty-six letters?”
“Want to know something even more alarming?” said Foss, tapping the side of his nose with a stunted finger. “Music—the whole of it, what the fiddler plays and the choir sings—is made of only eight principle notes!”
Mirth laughed wholeheartedly. “Now I know you’re havin’ me on, Mr. Foss!” She still called him that, even after nine years of marriage, and he loved it.
“Nay, the truth is all.”
She looked at him sidelong. “I never know when to believe you.”
“Do you believe that I love you?”
“Aye.”
“Then you believe enough.”
Mirth labored a little longer, driving into her brain the opposing loops of ‘d’ and ‘b’ and which was which. But she was of two minds, and the other mind was wrinkling with doubt as to whether her husband could be entirely trusted in the matter of letters.
Perhaps his education hadn’t been everything he’d led her to believe. Perhaps, as she’d heard of her own pa, he’d had to leave off formal education at an early age to take up labor in the field.
Not that Foss had ever worked a field in his life. He’d have been lost! Buried in a furrow! The thought erupted in laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
Not wanting to hurt his feelings, she voiced a vagrant thought. “What about cough?”
“What about it?”
“It’s a noise, ain’t it? Not a proper word.”
“So?”
“How d’you spell it?”
“C-o-f-f.”
“No, that’s the word. How d’you spell the sound, you know. . .” She coughed. “How do you spell that?”
“You can’t,” said Foss patiently. “You spell the word that stands for the sound. C-o-f-f.”
“Then we need more letters,” Mirth announced. “We got sneezes, farts, groans and moans, snores . . . Lord we got snores . . . we got the noises your belly makes when you’re tryin’ to sit still in church, we need letters that when you read ‘em you’ll be sneezin’ or fartin’ or moanin’ and groanin’, not just sayin’ words that mean them things.
“An’ why two ‘f’s?”
Now here she was, years later, writing her own composition, bent over her labor with an intensity that shut out all else, her tongue peeking out the side of her mouth to see what all the effort was about. What exactly it was Foss had no way of knowing; she had adamantly declined to share that information, but she’d been at it for two days straight. He’d even had to make his own soup the night before.
Of course, he could have taken a look at any time. The velum, when she wasn’t working on it, was always on the sideboard beneath the stairs, but he respected her wishes and would patiently await its revelation which, judging from her agitation, wouldn’t be long in coming.
Meantime, he studied her as she worked and marveled; a woman well past the first bloom but, even after four children—and pushin’ all them normal-size kine out that little soeaÞ can’t’ve been a picnic—as pleasing a site as any he could conjure. He knew what she didn’t; what his overspent little assortment of bones and sinew had been telling him,
with increasing authority, for some months past; he was dying.
He was glad that, having saved the girl’s life, he’d been able to help make it one worth living. She’d been more companion to him than he deserved, for all he was a murderer and a deceiver, about which he would soon be called to account.
Uninvited, his memory served up a cursory overview of his many sins; most of them performed in service of one King or another, but sins nonetheless.
His sins.
“Jesus, save me,” he whispered almost involuntarily.
The words intruded on his wife’s concentration. “What’s that?”
At the sound of her voice, Foss’s mind struggled to remember the way back to her from its brief side-trip, but fog was sweeping over the path.
“It’s finished!”
The voice was his wife’s, but the words were the Lord’s. ‘It is finished.’
“Jesus, save me,” said Foss.
In response to the rasp that fell from her husband’s lips, inviting Death to come collect him, Mirth rose and sank to her place on the floor in front of his chair, putting her more-or-less eye-to-eye with him. She wasn’t shocked. She’d allowed him to let himself believe he was being brave for her sake but, in chance glances, she saw the call of the grave in his eyes.
She placed her hands on the stunted little fingers that had known her so well, and had loved her so tenderly; massaged the small of her back night-after-night since, after the birth of their last child, she had complained of a pain there. She had never told him the ache had gone long ago; he never asked.
“I finished it, Mr. Foss, with three letters I never even used!” And she read the poem she had written, a three stanza chronicle of their life together, to her husband’s shrunken, misshapen little body as if he was still there, but he wasn’t. She knew that.
“A fistful of jewels from a bag
A treasury fit for a King
Ye little man laughed
At his word ‘pon the wall
‘My Lord, thour’t a wicked ol’ thing!”
Said he
For his Lord was a wicked old thing.
“Welf got a hole in his head
And Larky, he drug him away
Where the wall meets the stair
They’re both buried there.
Hear what the bells above say.
Says Mirth
Hear what the bells have to say.
“Ma, who’d have thought her a lady?
But a stone, it can buy an estate
From a gambling earl
Who wagered his pearl
And John says: “surprises await!”
Crafty John
Says “surprises await!”
When she finished her recital, she knelt there and, for many minutes, absorbed him with her eyes, etching him on her memory.
“Thank you, Mr. Foss,” she said at last, drawing a tear-dampened finger across his brow. She kissed his wrinkled forehead. “I’m gonna miss you fierce.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Whitehall Palace, London - 1662
“I wonder you’ve given me no children,” said Charles, son of Charles the First, King of England. He rolled to his side in the royal bed for a better perspective of Annabella, completing her toilet at the dressing table. “The rest of my lady friends breed like rabbits; my dear wife excepted. Plow that field as ever I might, I have not a single heir—even a girl—to show for all my labors.”
“There are little precautions,” said Annabella.
As she brushed her hair, the King watched her reflection in the mirror. A pleasant sight and one not the least diminished by the fact that, at thirty-three, she was two years his senior, nor by the fact that she had proven a fertile quiver for John Howe’s arrows to the tune of six children. He noticed, too, that not once, by so much as a glance, did her eyes acknowledge his existence.
“Besides, you have more heirs than subjects already, Your Majesty and as they all live off the public purse, you’ll soon have no one left to tax.”
The King laughed, but Annabella knew she was about to venture onto thin ice. The Merry Monarch he may be, but Charles’s moods were volatile, and he was quick to imagine offense, even when none was intended. Annabella’s campaign for recognition had taken years of careful planning, the painstaking orchestration of events and building of relationships she would not otherwise have pursued, ultimately to gain an invitation to the King’s bed—and the application of all her imagination to ensure she remained a favorite. She played haughty and proud, but not too haughty and proud. A coquette, but not a whore, witty enough to be charming, but not wise enough to be threatening. One wrong move now, an unguarded glance, a misplaced word, and she could find herself quickly out of favor.
The ice, she knew, was about to become considerably thinner. But the time had come, and the prospects for whatever family fate might grant her rested on the outcome.
She turned and faced the King, presenting him with her considerable charms, swathed in candlelight, pulsing with shadows. “You are pleased?”
Charles said nothing for a moment.
“If not. . .”
He smiled. “That is your gift, Annabella, to please.”
She acknowledged the compliment with a slight bow of the head.
“Still. . .” the King continued.
Her heart suddenly leapt. Had she done something to displease him? Had she misread him somehow? “Majesty?”
“I have yet to discover what it is you want from me.”
“Want? It’s enough that you honor me with your attentions, your Majesty. What should I want?”
“Everyone wants something.”
“And if I don’t?”
“But you do. I am not unaware of the efforts you have taken to bring yourself to my notice.”
Annabella blushed and lowered her eyes. She had underestimated her quarry. Such a miscalculation could prove fatal. “It is enough that you find me pleasing. However, should you wish to express your . . . appreciation. . .”
“Ah! Here we go!” Charles sat up in bed, patting the mattress, prompting the exodus of a tiny cloud of goose down feathers. “Come, come. Tell me what it is you want from your fairy godfather. I will command Goodwoman Gross to trouble the atmosphere with her silver wand and summon the Seely Wight to your bidding!”
She returned to his bed and allowed herself to be cradled in his arms. “You’re wicked to tease me so.”
He stroked her hair, releasing a perfume of rose water and lavender.
Annabella tried to position herself so he couldn’t feel her heart smashing against her ribs. “You spoke earlier of the difficulty you have securing a legitimate heir.”
“So, is that what you’re proposing? Circumventing these little precautions of yours and providing me with an heir!” Charles was enjoying the game and laughed heartily. “Not in the blood, I fear, dear Madam Howe.”
“Ah! You’ve hit upon the very thing!”
“Have I, indeed? And what is that?”
“Madam Howe.”
“You prefer another form of address?”
She hesitated just long enough to make sure she had his full attention. “Lady Howe.”
Seeing that his bedmate was in ernest, Charles became suddenly serious and, sitting up, pushed her lightly from him. “Ah! You wish me to make you a Lady! The scales leap from my eyes. However, your would-be ladyship, I’m afraid that. . .”
Annabella didn’t want to allow the King to say something he would feel unable to retract. “Hear me out, Your Majesty. Please. . .”
Before he could reply, she continued. “Who knows better than Your Majesty the frustration of being unable to produce a legitimate heir? My father! He has only to wink at a woman and nine months later, another coin stamped with his likeness, but all bastards.”
“Saints preserve me from so fertile a wink!” said the King.
“. . . all from the same mint, mind,” Annabella hastened to add. “I don’t wish to l
eave your Majesty with the impression that he was a. . .”
“Careful, madam. . .”
“That he was anything but loyal to his wife, Elizabeth,” she amended quickly, “but her womb is sealed. So my birth mother—and that of my two sisters and late brother, God rest him—is Elizabeth’s maid, Martha Janes.”
Annabella could feel the King becoming restless. “I don’t wish to bore you with my family history.”
“You concern comes late, Madam.”
She had expected to win him to her side with sex; failing that, with supplication, even begging, and it was quickly coming to that. Thereafter only one arrow remained, and once put to the string, it could not be returned to the quiver. She was becoming desperate.
“I wish only that which would be mine but for an accident of birth, your Majesty. My sisters have married well and are titled. . .”
“And you have made a match that makes you every bit their equal.”
“Now, there’s the thing, your Majesty,” she said, pressing herself against him, “Like you, I’m no republican.”
Charles was taken aback. “How did politics enter the conversation? Am I to be pilloried by twins, and in my own bed!” He reached for the bell pull.
Risking all, she seized his hand. “No, your Majesty!Please! Hear me out.”
“You must imagine my ears as capacious as canyons.” He sighed and retrieved his hand to his side. “No more beating about the Maypole, Madam Howe.”
“Equality with my sisters is of little interest to me, if I am to be direct, then.” Swallow. Breathe deeply. “My wish, your Majesty, is to be issued a patent of precedence as the daughter of an Earl.”
Charles’s eyelids, which had grown heavy, flew open. “An Earl!?”
“Elizabeth, my father’s own wife, was the daughter of an Earl!” Annabella interjected. “Had she not been barren, I’d have been born to her.”
Charles laughed. “And had you been born of a donkey, you’d have been an ass!”
Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Page 31