Later, riding through the crowded London streets in his coach, Cecil mulled over both. Feeling the burden of Matthew Stocks failure himself, he tried to think whom he might send to Derbyshire. The Queen was right, of course. No use sending some hanger-on, overjoyed to travel at the Queen’s expense. A dependable sort was what was needed, someone keen of mind and discerning of falsehood, should it be presented in the guise of truth. Someone like Matthew Stock.
There was his own personal secretary. No, he wouldn’t do. There was too much work for him in London. Besides, the man detested travel. There was Sir John Harington, the Queen’s own godson. A witty fellow, with experience in Ireland, but perhaps too witty for his own good. He had, too, barely escaped disgrace in Essex’s rebellion. No, Harington wouldn’t do, either.
By the time his coach had stopped at his own residence on the Strand, Cecil had considered and dismissed from consideration twenty candidates for the assignment. Some were clearly deficient in some requisite, others merely unavailable for service. By the time he was being made comfortable in his own apartment by his servant, he had concluded there was but one person to send. Cecil needed a change from the smoky, unhealthy London air. The Queen had given him leave to send whomever he chose. Could he presume that included himself?
When, within the next hour, Matthew Stock’s letter arrived (unexplicably delayed), recounting the horrible murder of a female servant of the castle, Cecil was fully resolved.
Frances Challoner had indeed been gone from London for three days, but she had not yet reached Thorncombe. Her journey had been troubled by minor accidents and consequent delays: a broken axle near Coventry; a misdirection farther on that took them thirty miles out of their way, to the great embarrassment of their
guide, who was beside himself with anxiety that his master would flog him for distressing the ladies; and by Priscillas severe stomach cramps, so severe that she thought she would die from them.
“It must have been something I ate,” she complained when she had recovered sufficiently and they could continue their journey.
Nor were the roads a help. For the rains of late autumn had set in, and the earth was soggy and the skies so dreary that both young women felt an oppression of spirit that made them poor traveling companions.
And the worst, for Frances, was the night before their arrival. They had stopped in Buxton, it being too dark to continue to the castle that day. Their inn was small but clean and comfortable. But there she experienced another disturbing dream. She dreamed she was in what must have been the master s chamber in the castle. She could tell because of its size, its fine furnishings, its massive hearth with the Challoner arms carved in the stone. She was sitting in bed, wearing a loose-fitting nightgown of silk. Her body was sweetly scented with rosemary and lavender and other perfumes; her flaxen hair was loose about her alabaster shoulders. It was her wedding night, and he for whom she waited was her bridegroom.
In her dream she was very excited but apprehensive, too. Her hands trembled on the bedcovers.
Thomas did seem to dawdle. Whatever was he doing? she wondered impatiently. She could hear voices in distant rooms— whisperings, footfalls, knockings, giggles. These she ignored, never wondering at the incongruity of such an apparent company of folk in her castle.
Finally, when she was as close to despair as sleep from waiting, a soft knocking came at the door, and she heard a voice say her name. “Frances?”
“Come,” she said, alert and quaking.
Her chamber was very dark, the fire having burned low on the hearth, and she could not clearly distinguish her bridegroom s face. But she knew it was Thomas. Her heart raced and she almost swooned with happiness as he knelt down by the bed. She shut her eyes and leaned her head back on the bolster, sensing him arching
over her. She felt his lips touch hers, his hand upon her cheek, a gentle, slow caress of admiration and devotion.
But no! The lips were hard lips and the touch was cold and the breath upon her face was foul like the odor of wet ashes when the rain had run down the chimney.
After the revulsion, the disgust, she felt offense—offense at his inexplicable delay, offense at his failure to sweeten so foul a breath with cloves or mint. She opened her eyes to rebuke him for his discourtesy. Did he think because God and law had made her his, that he could treat her as chattel?
It was then she saw her visitor was not Thomas.
The thing was in burial weeds, misshapen and ghastly to look upon. And the face was the very image of Death, a grinning skull.
She awoke in a sweat as cold as the bony hand that had caressed her cheek, struggling for air and with a heavy weight upon her chest, as though the creature of her nightmare, invisible to the waking eye, lay there still, sprawled upon her like an incubus of old legend, satisfying its lust upon her white, vulnerable body.
The next day, the day of their arrival at Thorncombe, Frances did not tell her dream to Priscilla. Two dreams of a deaths-head within the week? She would not have to pay tuppence to a cunning woman in Cow Lane to tell her what that portended.
“I hope your thoughts are pleasant ones,” Priscilla said, noticing Frances’ silence.
“I am thinking,” Frances lied, “of how sadly beautiful the country is.”
Priscilla said she had traveled this road before. “Soon there will be but few habitations and only hill, wood, and open sky.”
“You have seen Thorncombe before, then?” Frances asked, turning sideways to her companion.
“Never, but I suppose it to be a fitting place for your marriage. You need but a poet to celebrate your solemnities with an epithalamium or two.”
“Pray God it be fit,” Frances said, shuddering.
Priscilla seemed to notice Frances’ reaction. “Why shouldn’t it
be?”
Priscilla then jokingly accused Frances of having cold feet
about her marriage, but Frances paid only half attention to her friend. The road was rougher now; the coach labored over the ruts and bumps of a steep incline, and the coachmans whip was in constant use to urge the team of horses to greater effort. Then suddenly the coach came to a stop and, above the angry shouts of the driver telling someone to make way, Frances heard the anguished screams of an injured animal. She lifted the window flap to see what had caused the stop.
A little way ahead, a cart lay overturned in the middle of the r^ad. A man she took to be a farmer by his ragged coat and cap stood looking helplessly at the beast that had pulled the load and now struggled on the ground, kicking its hind legs against the overturned cart. Another man, perhaps the firsts son, stood by also watching the scene. The coach jolted forward, pulled over to the side of the cart, and Frances had a full view of the accident.
The horse had apparently broken its forelegs in the fall. Its remaining vitality was now being expended in its hindquarters in a futile effort to stand. The horses eyes were wide and bright with fear, and its screams were terrible. Frances leaned out the window and told the coachman to give what aid he could, but the farmer, overhearing, turned to her and said, with a brutal insolence that shocked her, that no help was needed, as though he and his son and his fallen horse were above her charity.
The footman climbed down off the top of the coach mumbling to himself, and with pistol in hand he went up to the farmer. Frances watched as the two men came to some agreement and then the footman went over to the injured animal and put the muzzle of the pistol to the horses head.
She jumped at the loud report and turned away quickly—but not before she glimpsed the great splash of blood and the mortal shudder of the horse.
The footman fired again, but Frances did not see. She had buried her face in her hands. She heard the footman climbing back atop the coach and only in her mind’s eye saw the white, accusing faces of the farmer and his son.
“You shouldn’t have looked,” Priscilla said prudently.
Frances heard the driver command the team, heard a sharp crack of his whip; the coach
lurched forward and resumed speed.
The coach carrying Mistress Frances Challoner and her companion came into view, and Matthew and Joan, standing somewhat apart from the other servants in the castle courtyard, continued to debate what Matthew should say to the new mistress of the house now that the necessity of a report was beyond question.
“She must be told of Aileen Mogaill,,, Joan advised in a whisper. “Not to tell her would itself be criminal.”
“Perhaps she does know already,” Matthew whispered back. “I wrote of it in my letter to Sir Robert.”
“Which letter pray God he received,” Joan responded doubtfully. The silence from London since their arrival had been ominous, even though Cecil had warned them not to expect official letters. She forced a smile for the occasion’s sake now that the coach was coming to a halt just a dozen feet away, but she felt no joy in her heart tor the young woman whom Joan could only deem unfortunate to have come into such a bloody inheritance.
“All evidence points to Conroy. That I'll say to her,” Matthew said resolutely.
The rub, Joan reflected in these final moments before Mistress Frances’ face appeared in the coach window, was that evidence of Conroys guilt was small. A brute, prowler, and treasure hunter— Conroy was undoubtedly all that; but that he was a murderer, too, did not necessarily follow. Besides, Joan retained the strong impression that the Irishman was dead—as dead as Aileen Mogaill or Sir John. And, for all she knew, dead by the same hand that had killed them!
Mistress Frances waved in greeting and Joan and Matthew waved back. Matthew murmured, hopefully, “The wedding will put her in a better mood, I warrant.”
But Joans returning glance—there was no more time for words—was not intended to affirm her husband’s optimism. Joan had grave doubts in her heart and a multitude of unanswered questions in her head. No pessimist herself, yet she was of no mind to temporize the facts, much less prevaricate. Blood had been shed at Thorncombe, blood shed by an inhabitant or neighbor of the house and not by some passing stranger, as Matthew had told her Edward Bastian had suggested, or by ghostly agency, as the Fludds supposed. Surely more blood would flow. The facts were horrifying and threatening, mind-numbing to contemplate, so that she wondered that she had had the hardihood to stay in the castle so long. No, Joan was convinced Mistress Frances must be told—and told the unvarnished truth.
As for the wedding—it was scheduled for that very week—Joan thought the timing most ill advised. It was not that she doubted the bridegroom’s qualifications, or that she revered the proverbial wisdom that those who married in haste might repent at leisure. And certainly Mistress Frances was old enough to consider and consent. It was, rather, that the circumstances of doubt and violence in the castle could only poison the feast, and that, to Joan’s mind, was theleast harm that might befall it. After all, when she had married Matthew, her mind, properly, had been fixed on marriage, not murder; she had delighted in the newfound paradise of their common bed, not agonized with visions of decapitated corpses, ghostly legends, and ancient family curses. Yet the letter she had received from Mistress Frances a week earlier had made the headstrong young woman’s determination perfectly clear. The wedding date had been announced to family and friends, the precise day had been named, the minister’s services had been secured, and all requisite documents and deeds had been engrossed. Most
importantly, the advancement of the wedding had received the Queens special blessing and commendation.
Joans only consolation among these worries was that the coming event and attendant festivities had put a better face on the grim old castle. The new house had been cleaned from top to bottom. The banqueting hall, before as uninviting as an abandoned barn and as filthy, now had been redeemed by a veritable forest of boughs, mixed in with brave martial banners untrunked for the nonce and draped where before only spiders spun their silken habitations.
Then all pondering stopped, and, with a graceful curtsy, Joan welcomed the new mistress of Thorncombe to her domain.
“Let me see if I understand you aright/’ Mistress Frances said when later in the day Matthew and Joan had opportunity to speak to her privily. “This Irish captain and manservant to my late uncle drowned him for his treasure, or knowledge of where it was hid. Then, shortly before your arrival, the same man murdered a young servingwoman of the castle, who you think may have been his confederate.”
“There may have been a falling-out,” Matthew conjectured. “Or Conroy, having discovered the treasure’s whereabouts, or so he believed, then killed her for her share.”
“Which treasure was concealed on the island in the lake?”
“So Conroy believed.”
Matthew provided a shortened version of his own voyage to the island. He told her of observing Conroy’s digging and assured her that the Irishman had found nothing.
“So there may have been no treasure at all.”
“That’s possible,” Joan said, thinking at the same time that there remained some mystery about the island, even though it might not be a treasure.
“The treasure consisted of Irish plate, jewels—all pillaged from Irish Catholics in the wars,” Matthew explained. “Or so minor alleges.”
The allegation did not seem to faze the accused man’s niece. Preoccupied, she sat erectly in a chair by the window overlooking
the courtyard while the slanting afternoon sun streamed into her lap. There was a short silence, then she sighed heavily and said, as though she were coming back to the subject of her uncles crimes from some other, more personal, concerns: “Whatever my uncle may have done, he has doubtlessly paid for his sins with his most treacherous murder. You are in a better position than I, Master Stock, to assess the strength of your contention that this Michael Conroy drowned my uncle for his treasure and cruelly murdered his former helpmate. All seems within the scope of belief, and so I fear his menace. He has disappeared, you say, but there’s no proof hes left the neighborhood?”
Matthew hesitated before answering, then spoke the blunt truth Joan had advised: “Conroy has disappeared. 1 have no evidence he has left the neighborhood.”
“Why, then he’s still at large and dangerous to me and mine!” she exclaimed, a sudden wild look in her eyes.
Matthew assured her she should have every protection. “It’s a mad murderer indeed who would invade a house full of guests,” he observed.
“But after the wedding, when the guests have gone home? Am I to fear for my life and the lives of my servants until this dreadful person is arrested?”
To th is Matthew and Joan could give no answer, and the young woman stared dolefully from the window as though the solution to her quandary were etched upon the glass.
Mistress Frances had arrived on a Tuesday, the wedding was scheduled for Friday, and in the hectic interim, Joan, still functioning as housekeeper, had precious little time for contemplating mysteries, for there was still much to do to make the castle ready for the guests, many of whom would be lodged there for the better part of a week. These included the bridegroom’s immediate family; fifteen to twenty other persons allied to the Cookes by blood or business; and a half-dozen friends of the groom—young bachelors from the Middle Temple. The sheer number of servants alone was not inconsiderable.
Along with the gentlefolk were a larger number of guests not to be housed at the castle because they lived within a day’s journey or
because they lacked the requisite social standing. The latter category included Buxton burghers and their wives, officials of the town and their wives, several local clergymen, none of whom was married, the local justice of the peace, his secretary, and several other dignitaries and lesser dignitaries. All these, too, were accompanied by servants, who would be feasted in the courtyard and on the greensward along with most of the local villagers, who would regard a share of the feast as their traditional right.
The Staffords, to no ones surprise, had not been invited.
To help serve this great company of guests, th
e Fludds had been recalled to duty, and many of the Challoner tenants and their wives had been impressed as doormen, waiters, drawers, and maids. Una, half hysterical for worry as to how she would prepare food for such a multitude, had been given the assistance of three cooks and four bakers—all very experienced, according to Moll, who had been put in charge of recruitment because of her superior knowledge of the local work force—and a dozen scullions of such villainous countenance that Joan swore they had been snatched that very day from the Buxton almshouse.
Meanwhile, Matthew was no less occupied. To his lot had fallen the provisioning of the castle, the supervision of the carts that daily brought foodstuffs from the village and from Buxton, the slaughtering of cattle and sheep, the securing of fish and fowl, and the procurement of the great quantities of wine and ale that on no account could fall short of what was needed for fear that bad luck should haunt the wedded couple ever after.
In all this bustle, however, Joan thought in her periodic interviews with the mistress of Thorncombe that the shadow of apprehension had not passed—indeed it seemed to have lengthened and deepened as the hour of the wedding approached, if Joan was any judge. Since, to Mistress Frances’ way of thinking, the alleged perpetrator of the Challoner murders remained at large, Joan could understand this apprehension even though Joan herself continued to be dubious about Conroy’s guilt. Indeed, she and Matthew had had several heated discussions upon this very point.
Matthew, of course, had informed Thomas Cooke of Conroy’s history, but the pleasant young man had hardly seemed to believe it. “What,” he had declared with a broad smile rich in incredulity,
“my sweet Frances’ uncle drowned by a manservant! A tale hardly to be credited. This talk of treasure likewise, Master Stock, as though Sir John had been a crusty old pirate instead of a soldier of distinction and valor. Yet if there’s danger, my brothers and I will see to it quickly enough. An Irishman, you say, named Conroy? We’ll give him a taste of good English steel if he sets a foot within the park pale, mark my words!”
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