“And then … ?”
“Father calmed down and said that neither of them had done anything wrong but he just wanted to close the shop for a while, and he paid them off. He paid them a month’s wages each!” said Ambrosia.
I shared her amazement. It sounded most unlike the provident Master Jester.
“And now … ?” I said, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“Now I don’t know what to think or what to do!” Ambrosia put her face in her hands and once more began to cry, in a deep, unhappy way that worried me because it sounded as though it were coming from something more intense than a closed pie shop and a father who had gone out one morning in the company of his brother, and had as yet been away for no more than a few hours, all of them in broad daylight.
I considered her thoughtfully. “Have you had any dinner?” I asked.
“Yes. Some stewed lamb that should have gone into pies for this evening, and some bread.”
“Good. Now,” I said briskly and, I hoped, with an air of authority, “I think you should rest. Try to sleep. I’ll go and tidy up so that all’s in good order when your father comes back.”
“All right,” said Ambrosia with a sigh. She rolled over, drew up her knees, and closed her eyes, and I went out quietly, shutting the door after me. I went down the stairs and along the passage as far as the awkward corner by the jutting-out cupboard, letting my feet clatter a little, but then I stopped, took off my shoes, and holding them in my hand, I crept back again, stole up the stairs and past the bedchamber door, and went on up the spiral staircase to the attic floor.
Making straight for the settle in Jester’s office, I lifted up the seat. The drawings were still there. I took out the set of small sheets that bore the curious array of semifinished sketches.
They had been nagging at my mind ever since I first saw them. Somehow, in some way, they had reminded me of something …
I stared again at the first one, in which a man or youth was giving an apple to a horse and once more noted that the apple, the dappled coat of the horse, and the church in the background were vastly more detailed than anything else in the drawing. I turned to the second, which was one of the sheets with more than one drawing on it. At the top was a sketch of a woman reading by a window. A humble bee was buzzing on the pane.
The woman was a mere outline but the book and the bee were painstakingly shown. One could even see the furriness of the bee’s fat body. There was no such patchiness, however, in the picture beneath, which was a lively depiction of a battle, with visored knights and warhorses and foot soldiers, all flourishing weapons, and all very clearly drawn. I looked at that for some time, wondering.
The third sheet also had two pictures on it: a rather good rendering of a stormy sea, and beneath that, a cat lapping from a saucer. Here, too, everything was properly drawn. But on the fourth page, which showed a room with a rising or setting sun visible through a window, the only really finished items were the sun, which had striking rays and was half visible above the horizon, and the door on the other side of the room.
I flipped on through the set, looking at sheet after sheet. Some had quite a number of little drawings on them. One was dotted all over with small sketches: a schoolmaster looking with pop-eyed disapproval at a pupil who had dropped blots all over his work; the sea with an island in the distance; a wall covered in creeper; people skating on a frozen river.
I noticed that Jester must have spent a very long time indeed over the triangular leaves of the ivy on the wall, on the wide, indignant eyes of the schoolmaster, and the gleam of the blots, but other details were scarcely roughed in. The picture of the island was properly finished, but the feet of the skaters and the furrows their skates left in the ice were much better drawn than the people themselves.
A couple of pages further on I came to the sheet that showed a girl in a carefully depicted kitchen, with, below her, a girl walking in a formal knot garden. The girls did look as though he had used Phoebe and Ambrosia as models, but all the same, he had lavished far more love and care on the kitchen hearth and the pots and pans, and the plants and flowers in the garden.
The following page showed two very elegant ladies, one of them playing a lute. Ladies and lute were all carefully drawn. On the next page, for some incomprehensible reason, was a picture of a woman milking a cow under a crescent moon. The moon was strongly outlined and so was the stream of milk as it plunged into the pail. The cow and the woman were merely silhouettes.
This one had a second picture below it: people dancing in a great hall, with a band of musicians in a minstrels’ gallery above. The musicians and their instruments were very thoroughly delineated but though the dancers had clearly drawn smiling faces, their bodies were vague.
Further on came another page that I remembered: people dining, one helping himself to salt from an elaborately detailed saltcellar, and in a separate scene below, a woman buying cloth. The highlights on that cloth really were clever draftsmanship. I noticed that the coins the woman was handing to the vendor were disproportionately large.
I moved to and fro through the set. There was a royal hunting scene, although the huntsmen and the hounds were casually outlined. Clearly drawn, however, and right in the foreground, was a queen, possibly Elizabeth although the resemblance wasn’t striking. She had a detailed crown on her head, however, and she carried a longbow and a quiver. The quiver, with its protruding arrows, had been shown in most loving detail, even to the flight feathers on the shafts.
I went back to the top page. Apple. Dapples. A small church or chapel. Apple. Dapple. Chapel. The nagging idea in the depths of my mind, which had brought me back to look once more at these pictures, began to take a definite shape. It seemed far-fetched and yet … I turned again to the second sheet. This emphasized a book and a bee and below that, a battle. The third, a sea and a cat. The fourth … that was the room with the door on one side and a rising or setting sun beyond a window. In my chest, my heart began to thump like a pounding fist. Rapidly, I counted the sheets.
There were twenty-six of them.
Twenty-six sheets. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Was this—could it possibly be?—an aide-mémoire to a cipher? A rather extraordinary cipher, in which the letters of the alphabet were represented by words, usually nouns, but not by the same one every time!
A is for apple—it had said that in the hornbook from which I took my first reading lessons. Dapple and chapel rhymed with apple. It would make them easier to remember, perhaps. B is for book … or if you say it aloud, what does it sound like? Bee! And the third sheet … C is for cat. Or, if you say it aloud, sea. In the fourth … a door and a sunrise … sunrise! … no, daybreak, dawn!
If these pictures were the key to a cipher, how would such a code work? It would mean … long, rambling, disjointed letters often awkwardly worded …
And what kinds of letters did Jester and Woodforde write to each other?
Long, rambling, disjointed missives, often awkwardly worded …
I needed time and secure privacy to study these. I folded the sheets double and thrust them quickly into my hidden pouch. I had better take something to work on, I thought, and went over to the shelves where I had found Woodforde’s letters. Yes, here they were….
I had them in my hand when I heard a sound behind me and swung around.
“And just what,” said Ambrosia, staring at me, her dark, slanting brows drawn together and her eyes hard with suspicion, “do you think you’re doing, poking about among my father’s papers?”
17
Legacy from a Queen
“I was just … looking. I’ve never been up here before,” I said untruthfully. “But I wondered if your father had left any … any note or sign of where he had gone. You were resting—you don’t look well, not well at all—and I thought, if I could find something helpful …”
It wasn’t good enough. Ambrosia strode up to me and snatched away the letters I was holding. She stared into my face. “You’re not j
ust a cookmaid, are you?” she said. “You don’t even speak like one, or not all the time. You didn’t just now. You sounded like a lady….”
“I was educated above my station,” I said. “My … my mother worked for a lady who let me share her daughters’ lessons.” It wasn’t far off the truth. Aunt Tabitha had made my mother run errands just as, later on, she made me run them. I had shared my cousins’ tutor very largely at my mother’s insistence and my uncle and aunt considered me to be lower down the social scale than they were, even if I didn’t agree with them.
“Then why pretend, and sometimes talk like a common person and at other times, when you forget, sound like a court lady?” I clearly had much to learn about working in disguise, I thought grimly. “You know people above your station as well as talking like them!” Ambrosia said. She stared at me more intently than ever. “You were so sure you could get that playlet stopped, so sure you could get word to important people and be listened to. And the queen will be here in a couple of days. You’re a court spy, that’s what you are!”
“A court spy? Spying on what? Spying in a pie shop?” I attempted a light laugh. “No, really, Ambrosia, I never heard such nonsense….”
Ambrosia raised her voice. “Father! Father!”
It was no rhetorical appeal to an absent parent, but a shout to attract the attention of one very much within earshot. There was a scraping noise behind me and I spun around once more, just as a whole section of the wall where the shelving was swung inward, shelves, books, papers, and all. The shelving was attached to what was actually a hidden door and in the doorway, as hard-eyed as his daughter, stood Roland Jester, and behind him, looking over his shoulder, was his half brother, Giles Woodforde.
“She’s a spy!” said Ambrosia hysterically. “I didn’t know. I didn’t realize. I’m sorry! She knows court people! I wouldn’t be surprised if they sent her!”
I whirled again and would have fled, but Ambrosia barred my way, springing into my path again when I tried to dodge past her. I tried to thrust her aside but she withstood me and then Jester’s hands closed on my upper arms and dragged me backward, through the secret door, with Ambrosia following. When we were all inside, the door was shut. On the inside, it was a perfectly ordinary door with a latch and a bolt.
“I told you this morning you were a fool of a girl,” Jester said breathlessly to his daughter. “Now you’ve done another damn daft thing! Why did you call to me like that? Now she knows our hiding place!”
It was a very uncomfortable hiding place, just a cramped, stifling, boarded-off space at one end of the attic. The only light and air came from what seemed to be a long, narrow grating just under the eaves of the thatch at the rear of the house. From the outside, it would be overshadowed and nearly invisible. There was also a very small skylight that from its position looked as though it were one end of the bigger skylight in Jester’s office.
In the resultant murk, I could just make out the faces of the others, and see the meager furnishings: a couple of stools, a very small square table, an ironbound chest pushed up against the thatch, where it came down to meet the floor at the front of the house, and a lidded pail. Despite the lid, the pail smelled.
“I tell you, she’s a spy!” said Ambrosia. “I had to stop her getting away! Lord knows what she’s learned. I found her looking at your letters.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Have you all gone mad?” I took refuge in a panicky bluster, which wasn’t difficult, for I felt very panicky indeed. “You were in a great fuss because you didn’t know where your father was—you said”—I scowled at Ambrosia. “So I thought I’d look in case he’d written a note you hadn’t seen. And all the time he was in here and you knew it—and what is all this about spies? Why have I been dragged in here? What’s going on?”
“I wanted that playlet stopped and she said she could do it! I told you!” Ambrosia threw the words not at me but at her father. She sounded completely frantic. “For my mother’s sake! I told you that, too! I don’t want her dragged back here to be hit!”
“Will somebody explain?” I shouted, partly in the hope that someone, somewhere would hear and come to my rescue, though it was hardly likely, since the building was empty except for us.
Ambrosia at last paid me some attention. “I know, I said to you: go and stop the playlet if you can. But as soon as Phoebe said to me that you’d gone, I started thinking. I got frightened. My father’s still my father and Uncle Giles is my uncle. I … it isn’t just that you’ve tried to use the queen’s visit to fetch my mother back, is it, Uncle Giles? There’s something else. You and my father … I’ve been worrying and wondering for a long time. You’ve been talking together in private so much and I know Father’s been anxious over something and …”
“For the love of God, girl, will you hold your tongue!” shouted Woodforde.
“I told Father where you’d gone,” Ambrosia said to me, ignoring her uncle. “I told him you’d gone to see your cousin because he worked for someone who was from court and you hoped to get the playlet canceled. I had to! I had to warn him!” I stared at her in amazement. She looked back at me defiantly. “When it’s your own father and your own uncle; when it’s family … and now I find you in my father’s office, fiddling with his things …”
“If only you’d minded your own business in the first place. Would’ve thought you’d want your mother home yourself!” Jester snapped. “Suppose I should be grateful you at least took some thought for me and your uncle but I tell you, this could be the end of us all!”
“Mother’s not to be fetched back to be knocked about by you!” Ambrosia almost screamed at him. “You shouldn’t have treated her like that in the first place. And what do you mean, this could be the end of us all? What are you talking about? Oh, I knew it, I knew it! There is more, something important, isn’t there?”
Woodforde stepped across and gripped my chin, turning my head this way and that. He wasn’t in a scholar’s gown this time, but in a dull brown doublet of some thin and, from the smell of it, none-too-clean material. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere before,” he said as he released me. “I saw you at Richmond. Oh yes, I did! Dressed very fine, you were, coming along a passage with a maid at your heels and people carrying luggage for you. You’re from the court all right! What are you doing here, pretending to be a cookmaid? How much do you really know? I wonder.”
There was an awkward, almost comical, silence while we all peered at one another with intense suspicion, no one knowing quite what anyone else knew for certain. Except that it was now quite plain that there was far more to this than a needlessly complicated plot to drag Mistress Jester back to her husband. This could be the end of us all, Jester had said. Like Ambrosia, I was wondering just what that meant.
One thing it clearly meant, however, was that although whatever else was being planned remained a mystery to me, it had to be serious and dangerous. In some way, surely, it involved a threat to someone and in all probability, that someone was the queen.
The silence lasted for several moments. I would call it a frozen silence except that the heat in that confined space under the sun-warmed thatch was nearly unbearable. Then Woodforde drew a dagger.
Ambrosia gasped and said: “No, Uncle, please!” and Jester said protestingly: “No, Giles. You can’t kill a young woman.”
“I want to know what she knows,” said Woodforde. “Just hold on to her, will you?” He took hold of my chin again and laid the blade against my throat. Jester let out a moan but kept his grip on me. Ambrosia stared with huge eyes, biting her lips. “Now,” Woodforde said. “Just why did you want to look at Master Jester’s papers? Just what did you expect to find?”
“A note to say where he’d gone! That’s all! And I should tell you that Cecil knows I’m here! I saw him this morning. Yes, all right, I come from the court. Cecil sent me to Cambridge in the first place to find out if the playlet was all it seemed to be. Which,” I added desperately, “it obviously isn�
��t!”
“Hark at you,” said Woodforde. “Cecil. Not Sir William Cecil. Not Her Majesty’s Secretary of State. Just Cecil. You’re on familiar terms with him, that’s plain enough. Very well. Go on.”
“That’s all! Sir William was suspicious of the playlet,” I said. “And no wonder. A snare to catch Mistress Jester—and something else as well, it seems! I have told Sir William Cecil”—I was sardonic on purpose, to hide my fear—“all about the snare, at least, and the whole business of the playlet will indeed be stopped.”
“Why,” lamented Jester, “did God have to saddle me not only with a faithless wife but also a wantwit of a daughter?”
“And Cecil knows where you are,” Woodforde remarked to me. To my relief, he withdrew his dagger from my throat, but still kept it unsheathed. “But he can’t know about this little hidey-hole and he’d better not find out.”
A wish to ease the tension combined with genuine curiosity made me say: “What’s this place for, anyway? How did it come to be made?”
“One could call it a legacy from Queen Mary,” Jester informed me. “My father-in-law, Master Jackman, he was an ardent Protestant, and in Queen Mary’s day he was scared all the time he’d be taken up for heresy. When folk started sayin’ that heretics were goin’ to be hunted out, he got nightmares. Sybil and me slept in the next room and he used to wake us up, screamin’ out in his sleep. So he planned how he’d escape bein’ caught. When he built the houses on this side of Jackman’s Lane, he used builders—a father and two sons—who thought the same way as he did. They were the only ones that knew about this hidden room. Dead and gone they are now—with the lung-rot, last winter. The houses were built very quickly, in a matter of weeks.” (That, I thought, explained the afterthought air of the linen cupboard and the resultant awkward corner in the passage. Haste never did equal efficiency.)
Queen of Ambition Page 18