Queen of Ambition

by Buckley, Fiona

  “Did he?” I was surprised. “Was your grandfather wealthy, then?”

  “Yes, quite. He was my maternal grandfather—my mother’s father. There’s money in the family. She had very little with her when she fled, though,” Ambrosia said bleakly. “It’s a hard world for women.”

  That must mean, I thought, that the money was now in the hands of Roland Jester, which surely cut out one motive for getting involved in a conspiracy. He wouldn’t be doing it because he was desperate for money. He might still be greedy for it, of course, but it was less likely as a motive. So why should he be plotting harm to Elizabeth? It was a puzzle.

  The thunder crashed again and Phoebe whimpered and started to pray to God and the angels to protect her. I patted her shoulder consolingly and because her petition had brought religion into my mind, I remarked that I wondered what it was like in Cambridge during Queen Mary’s reign. “I’ve heard it was a hotbed of what she’d have called heresy.”

  “There was something called a visitation when I was eleven or so,” Ambrosia said as she got back into bed. “I didn’t understand it very well then. But officials from the university and from court came and searched every stationer’s shop and a lot of private dwellings for what they called heretical books, and two heretics who were already dead and buried were dug up and their coffins were burned. I saw that. My grandfather was still alive then and he was frightened, I know. He had some heretical books but he hid them. This place was searched but they weren’t found. We’re all Protestants here. Most people in Cambridge are the same, though everyone did a bit of pretending in Queen Mary’s day.”

  Lightning flashed again and thunder crashed as if making a species of cosmic comment. But there was no reason why Ambrosia should lie to me, I thought. If Jester was involved in anything he shouldn’t be, then an impassioned desire to restore Catholicism by getting rid of Elizabeth and replacing her with Mary Stuart of Scotland was an even less likely reason than money.

  But if neither of those, then what? Perhaps he had nothing to do with any plots at all. If there was a plot, it might have its roots elsewhere. Perhaps the pie shop and the students were being used by someone quite different and Jester was unaware of it. Perhaps Woodforde was fooling his brother. Perhaps …

  I was so very tired and my head was still throbbing. Both Ambrosia and I now had spectacularly bruised faces. The storm was moving away.

  I slept.

  I now knew exactly where to direct my search, which was useful. Obviously, the attic floor. But on the next day, which was a Saturday, I had no opportunity. I had to work in the shop all morning and as it rained all day from dawn to nightfall, no one went out in the afternoon. On the contrary, Jester spent the afternoon up in his attic study, presumably with his account books, and Ambrosia went up there as well, to read, she said.

  She was an odd sort of girl to find in a pie shop, I thought. Most girls in her position could hardly write their names and were as likely to spend an afternoon over a book as they were to spend it slaying a dragon or studying astronomy. It was Uncle Giles who had made the difference, of course, by persuading her father to employ a tutor for her. Although I had seen nothing of Giles Woodforde since I came to the shop he was evidently an influence here.

  It was an exhausting afternoon. Before going upstairs, Jester, still annoyed with me for being late the day before, gave me a stream of jobs to do in the kitchen and warned me that even if it hadn’t been raining, he wouldn’t have let me out of the place this time, just to teach me a lesson. “I told you, good-natured, that’s what I am, letting you all go out of an afternoon. But don’t ever rely on it!”

  I spent the afternoon peeling onions, making pastry dough, scrubbing greasy shelves, and wondering from time to time whether Rob had yet had a chance to interview the students again. Then customers began to reappear and I was working, cooking, serving, and clearing up, until late into the evening.

  The next day was Sunday, the thirtieth of July, and although the shop didn’t open, no one who lived there was free of surveillance for a single moment. Master Jester was most certainly of the Protestant persuasion. He took his household in its entirety to early service at St. Benet’s, and then again in the afternoon, and in between, we were required to gather in the first-floor parlor while he conducted a private service of his own for us, with prayers and texts. The prayers, I noticed, included a plea that the Almighty would even now soften the hard and recalcitrant heart of his vanished wife, Sybil, and cause her to repent and return to the home she had so wickedly abandoned, and to the husband who loved her, and to her duties as spouse and mother and helpmeet, and to submit humbly to the natural penances that must befall unnatural women such as herself.

  Many householders hold private prayers in a similar way. Some are reverent and touching. Master Jester’s efforts were not. My bruised face ached and so, I daresay, did Ambrosia’s. I hoped that wherever Sybil Jester was now, she was being kindly treated.

  That day, I learned why Jester had said that his generosity over our free afternoons would be made up for on Sundays. In the intervals of the religious exercises, Phoebe, Wat, and I were set to cleaning the living quarters completely while Ambrosia and her father cleaned the pantry and the shop. The Sabbath was assuredly not a day of rest in Jester’s Pie Shop.

  But on the next day, Monday, the thirty-first of July, everything changed.

  10

  Greek Letters

  On Monday, opportunity could hardly have smiled more enticingly. The sun shone. In the afternoon, Master Jester marched out carrying what I now realized was a box of sketching materials and a folded easel. I had seen him with them before without understanding what they were. Phoebe went out to spend some of her meager pay on a new ribbon for her churchgoing cap; Wat trudged off to heaven knew where although probably not to his home. (According to Phoebe, his father was a wildfowler out on the marshes, which local folk called the fens, but Wat wasn’t following the family trade because he was so big and heavy that when he went plodding through the marshes on stilts, to retrieve trapped birds from nets, the stilts sank too far into the mud and were liable to crack.)

  Ambrosia said she was going to St. Benet’s. “We’re not supposed to pray for the dead but would God really mind, do you think, Ursula, if I just knelt and asked him to look after Thomas? I needn’t pray aloud. No one would know, even if they were at my side.”

  “I’m sure God would understand,” I said. “I’ve prayed for the dead myself, secretly, in the same way.”

  “What will you do this afternoon?” Ambrosia asked.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to lie down on the bed and sleep.”

  I duly went upstairs and took my shoes off, ready to arrange myself on the bed at short notice if Ambrosia or Phoebe should come in. But I kept stealthy watch from the window and one after another, I saw all of them leave the premises. Pushing my feet back into my shoes, I made haste to the topmost floor.

  The staircase up from the middle floor was a narrow spiral that emerged in a corner of the attic at the Silver Street end of the house. Sunlight streamed in through the dormer window and the thatch was immediately overhead. The place had the warm and dusty smell that is characteristic of attics in summer. A quick survey revealed that there were three rooms up there, leading out of each other across the width of the house. Jester seemed to be using one as an office and Ambrosia’s books were in another, while the third, as she had said, was full of disused furniture and other bits and pieces.

  Jester’s room was the one into which the staircase led. It was the biggest and the best lit, because as well as the dormer window, there was a flat glass skylight let into the thatch on the other side. It had a small hearth, unused in summer. A few books and some piles of correspondence were arranged on shelves fixed to the wall at one end. The furnishings were a walnut desk with a silver writing set, a stool to match the desk, and an oak settle under the dormer. I set to work to examine whatever I could find.

  It
wasn’t a difficult task. In fact, it was the easiest search I had ever undertaken. I knew the house was empty, which gave me confidence, and by pushing one of the dormer windows slightly open, I could be sure of hearing if anyone came home. Down below, the shutter that closed the shop was bolted from within, and anyone returning would come in at the private door alongside. This led into a small lobby with inner doors to the shop and the other ground-floor rooms. It wasn’t locked during the day but its hinges squeaked. I wasn’t likely to be taken by surprise.

  There were some account books on the shelves, and I quickly discovered that Roland Jester had a firm grasp of the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, that his arithmetic was accurate, and his shop highly profitable. I learned nothing further. I then turned to the correspondence and found the two letters which Woodforde had sent to his brother from Richmond, and which Cecil had had intercepted and described to me so scathingly as dull, trivial outpourings from dull, trivial minds.

  I found the letters not so much dull as peculiar. As Cecil had said, the first began in quite reasonable fashion with an account of Woodforde’s journey to court and the people he had met and talked to on arrival, including Cecil and Dudley. He added sadly that he had seen Lady Lennox but that she continued cold to him. Remembering the remarks I had heard her make to him, I felt that this was putting it mildly.

  After that, however, the letter, which was lengthy, became oddly muddled, drifting from one topic to another and back again in haphazard fashion. He commented on the queen’s appearance, noting her liking for gowns in white and cream and silver, and said that he had seen her with ornaments of white jade in her hair. This was true, but it was observant of him to have noticed it and why, I wondered, should he mention the white jade but not the pearls, which she wore far more ostentatiously and often?

  There were several references to food, including the surprising statement that pease pottage appeared quite often at the noon meal. This was not true. I couldn’t remember ever seeing pease pottage at court. It is a peasants’ dish. He complained primly of the frivolity at the court and he undoubtedly loathed jesters—although I make an exception for you and for my dear niece, your daughter. Sometimes, I think the humor of the professional ones is too unkind and full of pepper.

  Touchingly tenderhearted, I thought, and an interesting remark from a man whose personal servant said he was badly treated.

  I read on. There was a romantic description of what he called a faery dawn at Richmond, pearly with dew and with just a trace of silvery fog drifting over the Thames. In the next paragraph he said he had bought a new hat and his companions had admired it, and a few lines later he was grumbling again about the prevalence of jesters, one of whom had irritated him so much during a mealtime that Woodforde had longed to throw something at him. For some reason, he specified that the something he wished to throw was the vinegar. Why the vinegar in particular? I wondered.

  Then came another of the comments that Cecil had mentioned, about the rattling creeper that had kept Woodforde awake. He had nailed it to another creeper stem to keep it still. Why, he asked rhetorically, should one have to spend so much energy and zeal on such matters?

  The second letter was in much the same style. I could see why Cecil had suspected a cipher. The rambling, the disjointedness, the awkwardness, was in places very marked; small incidents like the rattling creeper taking up too many words; flights of fancy about faery dawns and pearly dew mingling with repetitious references to jesters, clothes, and food. But Cecil and his code breakers knew their work. If they hadn’t found a cipher, then there wasn’t one.

  I gave up on the letters and went through to Ambrosia’s room, which was beyond the lumber room, as though she wanted to keep a distance between herself and her father. In contrast to Jester’s sanctum, this was poorly furnished with a rickety table and stool, and just one wall shelf, though here too there was a little hearth for warmth in winter. The shelf held a couple of histories, a book of poems, a Greek primer, and Caesar’s Gallic Wars in Latin. On the table was a battered wooden box and beside it, the one good item, a writing set of brass and polished wood.

  The box contained letters and to my surprise, when I picked them up, I found that although Ambrosia had told me that she hadn’t got very far with Greek, they were in the Greek alphabet and presumably in that language. Perhaps, I thought, she was not of a boastful temperament and hadn’t wanted to flaunt her education in front of someone she thought to be humble. Or perhaps her tutor—what had she said his name was? Dr. Barley, that was it—was continuing her instruction by letter. I looked at the letters with interest, wishing that my own Greek had gone further than the alphabet and a very small vocabulary. I could still remember most of the alphabet. Picking a few words at random, I murmured the sounds of the letters under my breath.

  And realized, with a jolt under my breastbone, that the sounds I had just made, if run together, did not come out as Greek at all. They came out, more or less, as aking ioints and Iama sikoldman.

  Aching joints? I am a sick old man? I whispered on, stumbling a little where my memory proved rusty. I seem to acquire a new ailment every season. My digestion will no longer let me eat some of my favorite foods, and I grow breathless when I walk far. My physician makes me take an infusion of foxglove for it, which helps a good deal …

  In passing, I thought that her correspondent’s physician and ancient Gladys Morgan back at Withysham clearly belonged to the same school of medicine. The signature, when I had deciphered that as well, was Edward Barley. Ambrosia and her tutor were corresponding in English, using the Greek alphabet.

  There were awkwardnesses here and there where the Greek letter didn’t quite match the English sound. An initial “J” or “Y” was always an “I,” for instance. But on the whole, to anyone who knew the Greek alphabet reasonably well, the letters were perfectly clear. Barley’s handwriting was a little shaky, the hand of an elderly man, but it was legible enough. I thought he was a kindly soul. Every letter began by thanking Ambrosia for writing, and the whole tone was one of affection.

  There were about a dozen letters altogether, though, and my halting recollection of the Greek alphabet made me slow. I could not read everything. I flicked through the sheets, pausing here and there at random, in case anything interesting should emerge but not expecting that it would. Even if there were plots afoot in this shop, and Ambrosia were privy to them, she surely wouldn’t chat about them to her tutor. Then, in the middle of the third letter I picked up, two words caught my eye. Iour mother …

  Iour … that would be your. Your mother. Ambrosia’s mother? The one who had run away from Roland Jester? Frowning, I tackled the surrounding text.

  Your mother sends you her love, but still forbids me to tell you where she is living. She thinks it best that you do not know. She bids me say again that she would not have left you, only she feared for her life. She hopes and prays that your father will continue to treat you well as he always did in the past. She longs to see you and hopes some day soon that she will see you, though you, perhaps, will not see her …

  Mysterious! Searching further, I found other references to Ambrosia’s mother.

  Your mother is well. She misses you but rest assured that she is safe and well provided for … Your mother does not forget that your birthday is this month of May … Your mother asks if you still use the writing set she gave you just before she went away …

  So, through her tutor, Ambrosia was in touch with her mother, and because all the correspondence was in the Greek alphabet, there was little chance of Jester finding out, even if he went through her letters. Jester, presumably, did not know any Greek.

  But none of this was any help to me. I put everything back where I had found it and went back to Jester’s study, where I suddenly realized that there was one thing I hadn’t inspected. I went to the oak settle and found that, yes, it had a lift-up seat and a storage box beneath. Here, it seemed, Jester kept his artistic efforts. There were two sets of charcoal
sketches inside, one with the sheets punched at the corners and fastened together with a thong, the other just a pile of loose sheets. I took both sets out for a closer look.

  There was no doubt that as an artist, Jester was amazingly talented. The loose sketches were mainly buildings, landscapes, and skylines like the one I had seen him drawing by the river. They were excellent, with carefully done fine detail.

  The set of drawings that were fastened together were different. They were small sheets, only about nine inches by six, and leafing through them, I found that they were a wild medley of subjects—rather like his letters!—well executed on a small scale. The top one, for instance, showed a boy or a young man—he was rather casually sketched—giving a tidbit to a horse. In the background was a field and a little church. The artist had given reverent attention to the church, which was drawn in detail, and had also lavished great care on the dappled coat of the horse and the apple which the boy (or man) was offering.

  The same mixture of casual and careful delineation appeared in quite a number of the drawings, as though some, though not all, of the pictures had been abandoned when not quite complete. Some of the sheets had more than one sketch on them, too. The top half of one such page showed people dining, one helping himself to salt from a saltcellar that was much more elaborately and beautifully depicted than he was, and beneath this was a picture of a woman apparently buying cloth, holding a length of it in one hand while giving money across a counter to the man who was selling it. The woman was a mere outline but the cloth was meticulously drawn—with highlights, showing that it was a gleaming material such as silk or satin.

  Another sheet with two pictures on it showed a girl who looked vaguely like Phoebe, working in a kitchen, and below that, a girl who looked a little like Ambrosia, walking in a formal garden. Here again, the background was more carefully shown than the figures of the girls. I shook my head, puzzled, and put the sketches carefully back in the settle. Disconcertingly, something had stirred in the depths of my mind but was refusing to surface. I had had this experience before. I had noticed something but did not myself know what it was. It would come to me, or so I hoped.