20
Countercharge
Mortimer’s expression when he saw me and Brockley told us at once that he knew all about our expedition to the Black Mountains. His sheer disbelief was comical. He looked as if the mastiff had just addressed him in classical Latin. But he kept his nerve. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, and struck the right peremptory note so well that one had to admire him for it. “A judicial inquiry is in progress here. How dare you interrupt in this fashion? Guard!” He addressed the two retainers near the dais. “Fetch the accused back. We were about to hear another witness …”
“Don’t let them! Don’t let them get ahold of me!” Gladys clung to me. I put my arms around her. Within her small, wiry body, her bones were as fragile as a bird’s, and she was shaking with fear. Gladys—rude, outspoken, and deplorably smelly Gladys—was once more terrified, as she had been when Brockley had rescued her in the village.
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right. Rob, this is Gladys Morgan, who saved our lives on the Mynydd Llyr.”
“She’s a witch!” yelled someone in the crowd. “She bewitched young Rafe and made him jump off the tower!”
“Oho!” I said loudly. “So that’s the ploy, is it? There was talk that maybe he was murdered and first of all we were supposed to have done it. But now you’ve fixed on Gladys as the scapegoat, have you, Sir Philip? Don’t worry, Gladys. I’ve got you.”
“And I’m here,” said Brockley. He drew Gladys out of the crook of my arm into his own. He wrinkled his nose slightly, but went on holding her, all the same. “You’re safe now,” he said to her.
Two guards had started toward Gladys at Mortimer’s order, but three of Rob’s men stepped forward to block their way. There was a silent confrontation. From the dais, Mortimer said: “The charge is that Gladys Morgan did by divers bewitchments, induce my ward, Rafe Northcote, to throw himself from a tower to his death. It is already established that she crept back to Vetch and sought speech with a maidservant by the name of Olwen, and slyly asked after Master Northcote …”
“I knew it was dangerous, you talking to Blod and Olwen,” Brockley muttered to Gladys.
“If,” said Mortimer, “at the end of this inquiry, I find there is cause, the woman Gladys will be sent for trial at Hereford, and if the accusation of procuring a death by witchcraft stands, she will burn. This is a serious matter. I must ask you to wait while I complete it. Be good enough, Mistress Blanchard, to tell your man to hand the prisoner over and …”
“This inquiry is rubbish,” I said, “and you know it, Sir Philip. It’s all right, Gladys.”
“And our business will not wait,” said Rob, “for it is also the queen’s business. Sir Philip, we require to see you privately, at once. The matter concerns the Mortimer family as a whole and your mother has been asked to join us. Ah. Here she is.”
Lady Thomasine had come into the hall. She too reacted in gratifying fashion when she saw me for she stopped short, her eyes widening. I favored her with an ironical smile. “I suggest,” said Rob, “that we adjourn to the tower parlor forthwith.”
“We shall do nothing of the sort. This behavior is insufferable!” Mortimer exclaimed angrily.
“You find the queen’s command insufferable? Must I repeat myself?” Rob’s voice was commanding. “We are here on the queen’s confidential business and I advise you to cooperate. The tower parlor, if you please. Now.”
For a moment, I thought Mortimer would defy us, but Rob’s unwavering stare and resolute stance finally prevailed. With an air of one who yields gracefully to a superior authority, Mortimer observed that a private inquiry must naturally give way to royal business, and within minutes, the gathering had been dismissed and we were in the approximate privacy of the tower parlor.
I say approximate, for although Rob left his men outside, I had to tell Brockley to bring Gladys in, for her own protection, and so there were six of us in there: Mortimer, Lady Thomasine, Gladys and Brockley, Rob and myself. Brockley, however, took Gladys tactfully to the far side of the room. The rest of us sat down together beside the empty hearth.
“There’s no point in roaming all round the forest,” Rob said. He glanced at me, and from his doublet, he drew out the letters and handed them to me. “You did the hard work, Ursula. Show him the fruits of it.”
Rising from my seat, I went to Sir Philip and handed him the two missives I had found in his strongbox. “Do you recognize these, Sir Philip?”
For a moment I thought he was going to push my hand away but then he realized what I was offering him. He snatched them from me, his face darkening. “Where did you get these?”
“From your strongbox, Sir Philip. I confiscated them. You should be grateful to me.”
“Grateful … !”
“To use them as you intended would be treason,” I told him quietly. “The gallows, Sir Philip. The knife.”
I knew then that the theory which William Haggard and I had discussed, that his brother-in-law had been dreaming a dream and making himself believe it could be real, was right. The scheme he’d laid had substance; the letters proved that. Yet I doubted, watching him, that he would ever have used them.
I think he might have gone to Cambridge and tried to meet the queen. I think that until then, he could well have gone on imagining a wonderful future as Baron Mortimer of the Welsh March. But face-to-face with the reality of Elizabeth and the mighty, relentless machine which was her court, it is my belief that his dreams would have withered and died unspoken. He had tried to use Haggard to safeguard himself from arrest, but still, I think, he had only half-understood his danger. Now, one reference out loud, to gallows and knife, was enough. I saw the dream break; I saw him waken from it. I saw fear take hold of him. He turned green. I do mean green—the sickly kind, like mold.
It was a most agreeable moment. It almost repaid me for coming upon Rafe’s body in the dark, for being shut in a dungeon, and then left to die—and Dale and Brockley with me—in a hut on a lonely mountain called the Mynydd Llyr.
“These are not all, Sir Philip,” I said quietly. “We also have in our possession the letters which you gave to your brother-in-law, William Haggard.”
“And we know,” said Rob, “that you plotted to extract wealth from the queen as payment for not publishing them. Master Haggard has confirmed it. You are a fool. You would have been charged with treason, as Mistress Blanchard has pointed out. It is treason to suggest that Her Majesty is anything other than the lawful progeny of King Henry, eighth of that name.”
“I’d never have published them … I’d never have done it … I only thought … I only thought …”
“I don’t understand.” Lady Thomasine spoke for the first time. She was sitting with clasped hands, her eyes fixed on me, the living ghost, visibly trying to work out how I had managed to come bouncing in at the door with Henderson, dressed in sunshine yellow and sparkling with health, when I should have been lying dead and emaciated on the floor of that hut in the mountains. “What letters are these?” she asked.
“The letters,” I said to her sweetly, “which you brought me here to find. Your son’s scheme for acquiring land and money. They are forgeries, of course. They convey a very damaging lie, concerning Her Majesty …”
“They’re not forgeries!” burst out Mortimer in a high-pitched voice. “They were left me by my father. He found them in a piece of furniture he bought, when he was living here—at the end of 1536, I think! It was a desk with a little locked compartment in it. He broke the lock open and there were the letters! And it was said that it once belonged to Mark Smeaton.”
Lady Thomasine gasped and even Rob looked shaken. I laughed. “So you say! I think I know better. I did wonder if perhaps they were innocent letters between another Mark, not Smeaton, and another Anne, not Boleyn. But forgery was so much more likely. Tell me, Sir Philip, when you left court under a cloud, ten years ago, did that have nothing to do with forgery?”
“No, my Lady Cle
verness, it did not! I fought a duel and killed my man. But such things are not well seen at court, not now, not in the days of Queen Mary, either. Women are so tender of heart.”
“The reason why you were called out,” I said pitilessly, “was because you owed a gambling debt to the man concerned. You could not pay. You had spent too much on good clothes and fine horses. Some of your debtor’s friends came to ask you for it, on his behalf. You showed them a receipt. They told him and he demanded to see it for himself—and then he called you out, because he had never written it. Somebody, presumably you, had forged his signature.”
“Who told you that?” shouted Mortimer.
“Owen Lewis,” I said. “I’ve seen him. I took the opportunity to ask him why you had to leave the court, Sir Philip. I thought he might be able to tell me.”
“He wouldn’t have told you. He’s my friend. He keeps my secrets.”
“Yes, he tried,” I agreed. “But I had already learned from your brother-in-law, William Haggard, that a financial misunderstanding—your words, apparently—lay behind it and when I was wondering just what that could mean, I was reminded of the time when you helped your friend John Northcote uncover a swindle carried out by his steward, who had falsified the figures of wool sales. The two ideas: that of financial—er—misunderstanding, and that of falsified documents, suddenly came together. Perhaps these letters were not your first attempt at forgery! Perhaps you had some previous experience!”
“How dare you?” demanded Mortimer.
“Quite easily, in the circumstances,” I said. “I gambled on my idea, in fact. I told Master Lewis that I already knew it was a matter of forgery and that took him by surprise. He couldn’t deny it. He didn’t want to give any details, so I invented a rumor that shocked him so much that he felt he had to tell me the truth, for your sake, Sir Philip. I said I’d heard that you had forged a love letter from a woman who had refused to become your mistress, out of revenge, to spoil her reputation. Master Lewis was so horrified that he told me the truth.”
They were all gaping at me now. “You didn’t mention that!” Rob said.
“It didn’t seem important,” I said. “I just repeated to you what Lewis had told me. How I got him to do it didn’t really matter.”
“Possibly not—but where on earth,” said Rob, “did you learn that particular trick?”
“There’s more to Mistress Blanchard than most people ever guess,” Brockley remarked, from across the room. Although he had taken Gladys aside, the tower parlor wasn’t big enough for them to be properly out of earshot.
I was digging in my memory. “I’ve an idea,” I said, “that my first husband, Gerald, told me once that it was how he got a particular man to admit something to him. He suggested to him that he had done something so outrageous that the fellow blurted out the truth in self-defense. He’d really committed some lesser misdemeanor. Gerald wanted him to admit it because even the lesser offense was good enough for Gerald’s purposes. He used it later to—put pressure on the man.”
Part of Gerald’s work for Sir Thomas Gresham in Antwerp had been to persuade various reluctant persons to hand over keys and, indeed, to commit forgery, so that treasure which was the rightful property of the Spanish administration in the Netherlands could be spirited away to swell Elizabeth’s treasury in the Tower of London. Gerald never had any conscience about it. He was one of Elizabeth’s most loyal servants.
“You seem to have had a very strange past, Mistress Blanchard,” said Mortimer coldly. “You are a strange kind of woman altogether.” He turned to his mother. “And you, it seems, brought her here to nose into my affairs.”
“I did,” said Lady Thomasine strongly. “I needed to find out just how you proposed to make the queen restore the Mortimer fortune. I was sure that any such scheme must be dangerous. I kept telling you but you wouldn’t listen. I asked for help. Ursula has worked in secret for the queen, before now. I asked that she should come here and find out what you were about.”
“You betrayed me? Your own son?”
“No,” said Rob. “She may well have saved you from a horrible death. You should be down on your knees in gratitude to her.”
Rising, Rob crossed the hearth and took back the letters that Mortimer and I were holding. He held them up. “Sir William Cecil will have to see these but then they will certainly be destroyed. Forgeries or not, their contents are still so scandalous that I doubt if either Cecil or the queen will wish their existence to come into public knowledge. That simple fact may—only may—save you from a charge of treason and save your brother-in-law too. We know how you pressed him into becoming your accessory. You will have to base any plea for mercy on your willingness, and Master Haggard’s willingness, to observe lifelong secrecy. We shall see. I make no promises. Meanwhile, I recommend you to keep silence from this moment on.”
It was I who broke the shattered silence which followed by clearing my throat and saying: “This conference is not over. There is still the matter of Rafe Northcote, who did not fall from a tower, with or without the assistance of witchcraft. He was stabbed in the back.”
There was a further shattered silence. Mortimer, who had walked into the study and seen the stabbed Rafe with his own eyes, now stared at me as though I had taken leave of my senses and demanded truculently: “What nonsense is this?”
“Nonsense?” I said. “You were there, you found Brockley and myself beside the body, and you and your mother together accused us of killing him. You had us shut in your dungeon. Then you, Lady Thomasine, took us out and sent us, in the care of Pugh and Evans, to an isolated hut in the hills and left us there to die—like the poor things who were shut in Isabel’s Tower and are said to haunt it still. Fortunately, we escaped. And then we arrived here to find Gladys being accused of bewitching Rafe into killing himself, although you both know that that is a lie.”
“Oh, my dear.” Lady Thomasine gazed at me sadly. “My dear Ursula. How very unwise of you to raise this subject. I don’t know what you mean about being shut in a hut. What can you hope to gain from such a tale, my dear? It is true that I released you and your servants early that morning. You are a kinswoman of mine and family honor is important to the Vetch family. That is partly why I sought your help in discovering my son’s unwise plans. I wished to protect him—but also, I did not want scandal in our midst. I wished to keep the whole matter within the confines of the family circle. Alas, Rafe’s murder would have been a scandal just as bad! Ursula, I know that my son wanted you and your manservant to be taken to the sheriff but I thought it best just to let you go and put out the story that Rafe had killed himself.”
“What?” I said.
Lady Thomasine shook her head at me. “Somehow or other, despite all our efforts, the rumor still got round that his death wasn’t all it seemed. And then, to my great distress, a whisper started that you had been concerned, and had run away the following morning. It was all most embarrassing. For this reason, we decided to sacrifice that reeking old hag over there.” She pointed at Gladys, who shuddered back toward Brockley, but glared from her safe vantage point, like a wildcat from the depths of a den.
“The fact is, Master Henderson,” Lady Thomasine said confidingly to Rob, “that there is indeed more to Mistress Blanchard than most people suspect. She is attractive, and I am sorry to say that at times, she leads men on. She did it to my son. He will tell you. She has no intention of yielding to them, but she enjoys—shall we say—disturbing them. My son, naturally, took it for an invitation and then she turned very nasty.”
“She attacked me most savagely,” said Mortimer, nodding, and looking at Rob in a manner so grave that for one dreadful, dumbfounded moment, I thought Rob might actually believe him.
“You claim I … !” Indignation came to my aid. “You were trying to force yourself on me! Yes, I hit you with a silver dish and bit your wrist! And I had every reason!”
But if Lady Thomasine had been a man she would have been a magnificent jouster; nea
rly impossible to unseat. “I fear,” she said to Rob, “that my son is telling the truth, and I fear that Mistress Blanchard may also have tried her wiles on Rafe. With Rafe, she perhaps aroused more desire than she could well cope with. Yes, I and my son did find her standing beside his body, and I have no doubt at all that it was she who killed him.”
21
Music in the Night
“Of course I believe you!” said Rob. “Why should either you or Brockley want to stick a dagger in Rafe’s back? And if you had, you’d hardly drag the matter up now, when Rafe is safely buried, not even for Gladys.”
We were in the keep guest rooms. We had not intended to spend the night in the castle but with so much unfinished business on our hands, we couldn’t help it. At Lady Thomasine’s outrageous accusation, Rob had decided to end the meeting so that we could confer together. Brushing the accusation aside with a cool lift of his eyebrows and a request that Lady Thomasine should stop talking nonsense, he had demanded that Gladys be handed officially over to our care, and added that we expected to be accommodated and fed.
Mortimer tried to bluster but Rob more or less stated that failing proper hospitality, we would simply requisition guest rooms and supplies from the kitchen. As Sir Philip’s only alternative was to order his men to attack ours, thereby turning the castle into a battlefield, he gave in. Susanna and Jack Raghorn were bidden to prepare our rooms; and a supper of cheese omelets and fried bacon, accompanied by a jug of ale, was (at our own request) served in our quarters. We didn’t feel we would be welcome at supper in the hall.
I supped at the parlor table with Rob and Brockley. Gladys, with unusual delicacy, had taken her food into the next room, despite my objections that we had all eaten together in Isabel’s Tower.
“Master Henderson wasn’t there then. He’s a gentleman. He don’t want a dirty old woman champing her food at his table,” said Gladys, and retired to champ it out of our hearing. I must admit we were all rather relieved. Even my protests had been largely a matter of form. I didn’t persist with them.
To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court Page 24