Queen of Ambition

by Buckley, Fiona

  We sat in silence for a few moments, letting the wound between us heal. Then I said: “I still need to get word to Mistress Smithson. I will write another letter. I now know for sure that she is Mistress Jester. While I am at it, I may as well ask her whether she knows of anything else that her husband and brother-in-law may be planning. I can put it to her that if she does, she should speak before they fall deeper in. What if her daughter were somehow to be dragged in as well? Bring me my writing things. Then, Dale, you must again set out for Brent Hay Manor house, and this time, for the love of God, go! Make sure that you actually see Mistress Smithson, who lives as a companion to a Mistress Catherine Grantley, and give her the letter in person. Once more, I can’t go myself. I need to call on Cecil.”

  15

  The Lonely Mouse

  Rob Henderson was not in the lodging, but I hoped that he had kept his word and asked Cecil to expect me. I changed into a suitable gown and waited for a while, since it was too early for Cecil to have arrived, and I hoped Rob would come back. However, he did not, and eventually I set out for St. John’s College alone, since I had dispatched Dale to Brent Hay.

  When I reached it, people were coming and going, carrying fuel and supplies through an imposing entrance, and the work was being supervised by a porter, an extremely dignified figure with a gold chain of office. I inquired of him whether Master Robert Henderson was there. He immediately called an underling and I was led through the archway into a wide, splendid quadrangle surrounded by buildings in rosy brick, with graciously mullioned windows and towers at the corners.

  I was shown in at the door of a tall, slender tower, its angles picked out in gray stone, and topped with crenellations. Although it was larger and less ornamented, it was in many ways so like the buttress towers that finished the terraced houses of Jackman’s Lane that I thought Jester’s father-in-law must have imitated them. I was taken up some stairs to a set of rooms where I discovered Rob busily harassing a number of clerks, who were checking baggage items against a list.

  “Yes, he’s arrived,” Rob said to me. “But his gout is troubling him. He made the journey in his coach, for comfort, and he’s sent instructions that the college dignitaries aren’t to wait on him until he summons them. He’s brought his old family nurse to attend to him, with her simples and her bandages. I haven’t had a chance yet to ask if he’ll see you. I didn’t think you’d be free until this afternoon, anyway. Since you’re here, I’ll ask him now, but …”

  Shaking a dubious head, he went out, leaving me to gaze irritably out of the window into the quadrangle, while behind me, the clerks went on checking baggage and giving me inquisitive looks. Rob was not long, however. “You can come through,” he said, reappearing in the doorway, and I followed him into a paneled chamber where Cecil was resting on a settle with his bandaged foot up, while an elderly woman, with a soft, wrinkled face and a very neat cap and apron, crouched nearby on a low stool, stirring a pot in which she was brewing something sweet and aromatic over a small portable brazier.

  Rob took himself back to the clerks and the baggage. Cecil’s face was drawn with pain but he gave me a smile. “You find me at a disadvantage, Ursula. These attacks always come at the most inconvenient moment. Will you dine with me? I am about to have a very plain meal with no spices or pepper or white wine. My physician says it will help if I avoid such things. Nothing makes any difference that I can detect but I try to follow orders.”

  “If you followed my orders, my boy,” said the elderly woman, “you’d have stayed at home and sent some trustworthy fellow or other to see to things in Cambridge. That ’ud be my advice but there, you always did go your own way.”

  “And you’re proud of me for it, Nanny,” said Cecil.

  “Maybe. Maybe. Going your own way’s got you into high places, I grant you. But there’s a price for everything, that’s what I always say.”

  “I know, Nanny. As I think I once told you,” he added, addressing me, “to Nanny I am still the little boy whose grazed knees she had to bathe when I’d fallen down …”

  “Fallen out of a tree, more like, after you’d been told a dozen times not to climb it!”

  I laughed. The affection between them was heartwarming and obvious. I became sober again very quickly, however. I was there, after all, on serious business. Cecil read my face and said: “You have something to report?”

  “Yes. And I want to ask you to do something for me.”

  I hesitated, since we were not alone, and Cecil, again, understood. “There is no need to worry about Nanny. She understands discretion. I’ve known more talkative tombs.”

  “Now, don’t you go chattering about tombs; it’s unlucky,” Nanny said reprovingly. She wrapped her hands in her apron, lifted the pot off the brazier, and set it down on a couple of bricks that were ready at her side. “There, that can cool. A dose of that this evening and you’ll sleep easy tonight, sir. Is the lady dining? If she is, I’ll go to the kitchen and ask for extra.”

  “I’d like to dine. Thank you,” I said. Nanny gave me a grin that was nothing short of mischievous, and said: “Well, now you can talk all the scandal you like and no one to hear,” and departed in a cloud of conscious tact as palpable as the aromatic fumes from the brew.

  “Ursula?” said Cecil.

  “I haven’t discovered any plots,” I said. “But there’s been a death …”

  Cecil heard me out. As I talked to him, I felt more strongly than ever that my narrative lacked cohesion. A silly, unnecessary scheme to bring Mistress Jester back to her husband’s home, when all Woodforde really needed to do was tell Roland Jester where she lived. A worried student, who wanted a secret meeting to discuss vague suspicions that had probably been aroused by nothing more sinister than the said ridiculous scheme. The death of the same student—but in what seemed to be a simple riding accident. Nothing more, except for a persistent sense of something wrong.

  “And that’s all,” I said. “But I can tell you this: Roland Jester is an unpleasant man and if I had been his wife I think I would have run away too. I have sent Dale off to warn her against taking part in this playlet and warn her too that Woodforde knows where she is. You may call it interfering, but I am on her side.”

  “You can be quite militant at times,” Cecil said. “Rob Henderson has been saying as much. You’ve been ordering him about, he says, as though he were your slave.”

  “Oh.” I felt uncomfortable. “I’m sorry. But I’m worried and I needed his help to find things out.”

  “Yes, I know. He’s told me some of it though he made it clear that he doesn’t agree with your conclusions. I’m not sure if I do, either. No, it’s all right.” He raised a hand to stop me as I was about to speak. “With the queen, I will not take chances. Thomas Shawe’s death is enough on its own to make my mind up for me. She will agree, I think, when she hears of it. The playlet will indeed be canceled, and I think we will have both Jester and Woodforde brought in for a little questioning. Even if it is just a matter of Woodforde using the playlet to set up this melodramatic reunion, he has no right to make use of the queen in such a fashion. He isn’t showing proper respect. He seems sadly lacking in that particular virtue. I wonder if that was the reason why Lady Lennox dismissed him?”

  “In a way,” I told him. “I suppose one could call it lack of respect. He wrote love letters to her and one evening he was found hiding under her bed.”

  “He was what?” Cecil, caught between laughter and disbelief, moved jerkily, jarred his swollen foot, and subsided with a gasp. “A thousand curses on this malady. Who told you that?”

  “Brockley,” I said. “He had it from Woodforde’s previous manservant.”

  My explanation had included Brockley’s new position as our spy in the enemy camp and indeed his impressive piece of information extraction in the King’s College retiring room. Despite his obvious pain, Cecil smiled.

  “So that was it. Hid under her bed, you say? Like you in the retiring room—or rather, not
like you. Lady Lennox would have had a shock if her servants hadn’t found him before he jumped out on her. Well, well, well!”

  Cecil was a man of propriety. In my presence, I never knew him to utter a single word that could not have been said in the presence of archangels. In his presence, I too was always a perfect lady. We were, however, a man and a woman of the world. For a few silent moments we each privately considered Giles Woodforde’s unlikely passion for Lady Margaret Lennox and imagined it in consummation. At least, I did, and I don’t think I misinterpreted the sparkle in Cecil’s eyes.

  Then he said: “To business,” and shouted for Rob. Within moments, he had dictated a note and Rob had been dispatched with orders to Cecil’s retainers to bring Woodforde and Jester to us. “I’ll question them myself,” Cecil said.

  Rob returned presently to say that the men had set off, and a few moments later, Nanny also reappeared, followed by a string of servants with our dinner. While the three of us and Nanny sat eating it, in informal fashion, Cecil brought Rob up-to-date on all that I had told him and I explained, when Rob asked, that I had come unattended because I had had to send Fran to Brent Hay, although I didn’t say why her first attempt to take a letter to Mistress Smithson had miscarried, only that it had.

  The meal was heavenly, I must say: a shoulder of veal with a sweetened mustard sauce that Cecil didn’t take, capons in a bland sauce that he did, cabbage, peas, fresh manchet bread, a salad of radishes and cucumber, a fruit pie, some orange- and nutmeg-flavored custards (which Cecil also passed by with a regretful sigh), and red wine to wash it all down. In the pie shop, we snatched food at midday much as we did at breakfast—usually some of the stewed meat that went into the pies—and had our main meal together in the kitchen in the evening, after the shop was closed. It was more varied then and there was always enough, but it couldn’t compare with this.

  We had just finished when two of Cecil’s officers arrived, looking worried and accompanied by Brockley. I knew both of the officers, having had them as part of my escort when first I went to France. Stocky, sandy-haired Dick Dodd was solidly reliable, and the brindle-bearded John Ryder had been a good friend to both Brockley and myself. Dodd had apparently taken a couple of men to the pie shop while Ryder, also with two men, had gone to collect Woodforde from his rooms. Both had returned without their quarry.

  Ryder had found only Brockley alone in Woodforde’s lodgings. “Master Woodforde went out two hours ago and he didn’t say where he was going,” Brockley said, repeating to us what he had already told Ryder. “Master Jester came to see him early in the morning and spoke to him in private. Then they went off out together. I tried to follow, but I couldn’t risk getting too near them and I lost them in Cambridge. So I went back to the lodging to wait. They were going toward the pie shop, I think, but that’s all I know. Only, there’s something I want to tell Mistress Blanchard,” he added, turning to me. “When I saw you the other day in the pie shop, madam, I was with Master Woodforde and I couldn’t speak to you then.”

  “Would that be,” inquired Cecil, “that you have found that Master Woodforde knows very well who Mistress Smithson really is?”

  Brockley blinked. “How did you know, sir?”

  Cecil explained for me, while all those present listened with burning interest and visible astonishment. At the end, however, he said: “But this is not the matter in hand just now. What we are interested in just now isn’t the whereabouts of Mistress Jester; it’s the whereabouts of Master Jester and his brother. You didn’t find your man either, Dodd?”

  “No, sir. Master Brockley is right to think that he and Woodforde were going to the pie shop but we found it closed, and inside it nothing but a young girl acting all distracted. She said her father went out this morning and came back with her uncle Woodforde right enough, but that the two of them went off again and she didn’t know where they’d gone or why and she was scared. It seems the shop employed another girl to cook and wait at table, and a fellow to man the street counter …”

  “Phoebe and Wat,” I said.

  “Those’re their names? According to the girl, before Jester and Woodforde went off together, Jester paid them off and told them to take their things and go back to their homes. The wench—she was Jester’s daughter—said her father wouldn’t tell her anything but she knew something was amiss, and she was left there wringing her hands and crying, not knowing what’s afoot or why. We asked her a lot of questions but she didn’t seem to know any answers and we had no orders to bring her in, so we left her for the time being. We can go back for her if need be.”

  Cecil looked at me. “Have you any idea where Jester and Woodforde could have gone?”

  I shook my head. “No, I haven’t. But I think I should go back to the shop. Ambrosia’s there alone. I may be able to help her—or if she does know anything helpful, I may find it out. Besides”—the memory of those curious sketches came back to me—“there’s still something in that shop that I want to pry into, if truth be told.”

  “I’ve got a dog like you,” Rob said to me unexpectedly, causing everyone to look at him in astonishment.

  “A dog?” Cecil queried.

  “Yes. Oh, a very lovable dog! But he’s the most inquisitive animal God ever made. I call him Pokenose because that’s what he does—pokes his nose into everything. Twice he’s been caught with it stuck in a jug—a jug of milk once, and wine the second time. Once he got it stuck in one of my boots. I found him crashing round our bedchamber, trying to shake it off. You’re just the same, Ursula. You’re inquisitive—and you’ve been in danger before now because of it. I’m always afraid that one day you’ll get into danger that you can’t get out of.”

  “In the autumn,” I said, “I’m going home to my husband, in France. I shan’t run into danger anymore then.”

  “Seriously,” said Rob, “I’ll be glad. You ought to be at home. You worry me—and if you and your husband hope for children, you shouldn’t leave it much later.”

  “Are you very worried about Mattie?” I asked him suddenly, and he nodded.

  “Yes, I am. Nearly forty is late for having a child even if it isn’t her first child. You should be at home with your husband, Ursula, having your children now!”

  “I hope I soon will be,” I said, not letting him see that his remarks were making me uneasy. In France, I had had a stillborn son and nearly lost my life in the process. I was still afraid of trying again.

  It occurred to me that perhaps I should also be afraid of returning to the pie shop. Yet, what use was I as either wife or agent, if I gave in to fears?

  “For the moment,” I said, “I feel that I have to go back to that pie shop anyway. I can’t leave Ambrosia alone there.”

  Brockley at once said that he would come with me, but just as I was drawing breath to thank him gratefully, Cecil vetoed the idea. “Brockley still has his place as Woodforde’s manservant and I would prefer it, Brockley, if you went back to his lodgings in case he returns. If he does, let us know. By us, I mean myself and Sir Robert Dudley, who arrived in Cambridge with me and is lodging in Trinity College. I will make sure that he is told of all this. I am sure you need not worry about Mistress Blanchard. She has an established place at the shop and I trust she can go back there without running into danger.”

  Cecil’s wishes, like the queen’s, had the force of orders, no matter how politely he expressed them.

  So I went back to the pie shop alone, drawn thither by Ambrosia, and by a set of partly finished drawings, just as a mouse is drawn by cheese, straight into a trap.

  16

  Rambling,Disjointed,

  and Awkward

  The afternoon was wearing away by the time I reached the pie shop, where I found closed shutters and a group of disconsolate students, waiting hopefully for signs of life. One of them was Francis Morland, who hailed me eagerly. “Have you come to open up? What’s amiss?”

  I said I wasn’t sure but had heard that a family friend, Mistress Ambrosia’s
former tutor, had died. It was the first thing I could think of. “I don’t know much about it—I’m not family—but the shop may not open today. I’m sorry.”

  They made polite noises of condolence and began to drift away. I tried the private door, found it open, and slipped inside.

  The place was silent. I went quickly through the ground floor: shop, kitchen, pantry, fuel store, and windowless cupboard of a room next to it, where Wat slept. His bedding lay there, folded for the day. There was no sign of Ambrosia downstairs but when I went up to our bedchamber, I found her there. Once more, she was lying on the bed. She looked ill. “Ambrosia?” I said questioningly.

  She sat up, staring at me. “You’ve come back? I wondered if you would. Where did you go?”

  “To get on as quickly as possible with getting that playlet stopped,” I said. “Which I have done. Another letter has gone to Brent Hay, too. You can stop worrying about your mother. I was scared to come back, I don’t mind admitting, but after all, this is where I live just now and I need the work. Is your father very angry?”

  Ambrosia gazed at me without speaking and I rushed on with remarks that I hoped were suitable to my character as Mistress Faldene, Brockley’s widowed and hard-up cousin.

  “I’ll have to tell him some taradiddle or other, I suppose. I have a child, as it happens, being fostered. I can say that I had a message that she was ill, but that I found her recovering, so I came back at once. But, Ambrosia, why is the shop closed? Where’s your father?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ambrosia blankly. “He went this morning to see my uncle and then they both came back here, shut the shop, and sent Wat and Phoebe away. Then they went out again, together. I don’t know what’s happening or what’s going on. There was a bit of a scene with Wat and Phoebe. Phoebe thought she’d done something wrong and she’s afraid of her own father; she said if she lost her job and was sent home, he’d just kick her out again. She started crying and then Father was angry and shouted at her to stop and raised his hand, and Wat stepped in and told him to leave her alone and, yes, what had she done, or what had Wat himself done, come to that….”