Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (5 page)

Sweet wine. Essex had the farm of sweet wines and he would be looking for a suitable agent to run it for him. What would Essex make of Emilia, Carey wondered.

“How is your husband, Signora?” Carey asked, still sticking to English.

“Well,” she said with a little pout of her lips, “the Irish…’ow you say?…zey drink like ducks but not appreciate good wine and when zey promise to pay, zey lie.”

“Tut,” said Carey.

“So, we are here now. At least ze English like to drink well…And perrrhaps…zey will pay?”

The opening was there, so he took it, simply on general principles, with no idea of where it might lead. And he did owe her something for the trick with the guns. “I wonder if you’ve spoken to my lord of Essex yet, Signora?”

The faintest shadow crossed Emilia’s face, followed by another diamond smile. “Not yet…’e has been very…
occupé
with the Queen who is verry cross.…To be a
mignon
is ’ard, no? ‘Oo would do such a thing?”

And she tilted her head in a way which Carey suddenly found annoying. “Mignon” had several loaded meanings on top of the simple translation of “King’s favourite.” In the context of the Scottish Court it meant the King’s catamite. In the context of the English Court and the Queen…

“Indeed,” he agreed blandly.

“You could put in a good word for the Signora, Sir Robert, couldn’t you?” said the ever-helpful Cumberland. “My lord of Essex often speaks of how you saved his bacon with the Queen a year ago in France.”

“If I could get to see him, yes, perhaps,” Carey said. “As he doesn’t know I’m here…”

“You are friends wiz milord Essex?”

Emilia was looking intent, the way she had when they bargained in the summer. Carey couldn’t help himself, he smiled cagily and spread his hands. “He gave me my knighthood in France, Signora, and was my commander when we fought for the King of Navarre. He’s also my second cousin.”

Her lips compressed. For some reason she was furious and Carey wondered why. It’s all right, he wanted to tell her, if you’re not trying to buy guns to sell to the Irish to be used against the Queen’s soldiers, I won’t cheat you. Of course, she might not be after just the farm of sweet wines from Essex; she was likely to be here for quite other reasons as well as the obvious one of espionage.

“
M. le deputé
,” she said to him with a nice curtsey. “We must speak about this when my ’usband is ’ere, as I am only a poor little woman oo knows nossing of money or farms.”

Cumberland laughed, caught her shoulders and gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek.

“I love it when she talks English,” he said to Carey. “It sounds so funny.”

Emilia’s tinkling laugh told Carey a lot more than it seemingly did George Clifford. He didn’t give the Earl of Cumberland much chance against the Earl of Essex if Emilia met the noble lord. From her sideways look at him under her remarkably long lashes, it seemed that she and her complaisant, well-horned husband might be willing to negotiate a fee for the all-important introduction to Essex. Possibly some of that fee could be in-kind…

No, came the sternly righteous part of him. That’s enough. You have to find a way to pay the men for the autumn if the Queen is too ill-humoured to give you your fee. And after what Elizabeth did for you in Scotland!

Could he take the risk of dealing with the Italian spies again? If he could find a way of spreading the responsibility a little as he had not been able to do before, perhaps? If he had some kind of authorisation? Perhaps he could talk to Thomasina again? There would be dancing that evening, another less cautious part of him thought, and perhaps I will dance with Signora Bonnetti again? Perhaps. No more than that, of course, but…

At least Elizabeth won’t be watching, that part of him explained to the stern-faced puritan who came from Walsingham; she’d never find out.…But that was another unexpectedly bleak thought. And she probably would, somehow.

Cumberland had started rubbing noses with Emilia. She laughed again and nipped his nose between her knuckles and he squawked.

“Be’ave, milord,” she said severely. “What will Sir Robert think?”

“I know exactly what he’s thinking, my little darling,” said Cumberland, piratical grin at full force. “Aren’t you, Carey?”

So she’s told him, or he’s guessed, Carey decided philosophically, so probably no chance of even a polite pavane with the Signora. Maybe for the best.

“Indeed, I am, my lord,” he said with diplomatic ruefulness. “So I’d better go and see if my new servingman has made off with my Court suit. My lord…Signora…”

He bowed elaborately to both of them and plodded back through the mud to the horse-crammed kitchen yard of the little cottage that Cumberland had taken over.

There he found that Hughie Tyndale had done quite creditably. All three of the horses were munching away at nosebags, had been untacked and rubbed down and were tied up at the corner of the yard, next to Cumberland’s carthorses and a string of pack ponies.

The packs with Carey’s Court suit and jewels in it had been piled next to the wall and Hughie was squatting watchfully next to them, munching a pennyloaf with some cheese and drinking ale from a jack.

“We’ll stay with my lord Cumberland tonight, Hughie,” Carey said as he pushed between the horses, “Not sure where exactly, but we can hope to be in the dry.”

“Ay, sir.”

“Have you looked at my suit?”

“I had a quick look but Ah couldnae unpack it out here in case o’ the wet, sir.”

“Quite right. Let’s see if Clifford will loan me a dressing room or similar.”

The Earl of Cumberland was busy, said Mr. Simmonds stolidly, but had given orders that Sir Robert should have anything he wanted—except the delightful Signora, since, as his friend, the Earl wanted to make sure he did nothing rash to upset his headlong pursuit of romantical ruin.

Ha ha, George, very funny, thought Carey, oddly relieved. Simmonds showed him to a shed that was being used as a tiring room as it was dry and reasonably well-lit with a stone-flagged floor and bars on the window—no doubt a dry-goods store since it didn’t even smell of salt fish or cheese.

He and Hughie carefully unwrapped the pearl-encrusted velvet doublet and hose from the hessian protecting it and hung it all up on a bracket on the wall. With Hughie’s help he tried on the doublet and knew at once from the way Hughie went about it that the man had indeed worked for a tailor. No, the costly doublet was far too tight on the shoulders—he might even split a seam if he danced a volta and needed to lift the woman. Before they had finished deciding what to do about letting it out, a boy knocked and squeaked, “Message for Sir Robert.”

“Eh? Who from?”

“I’m not to say, sir, I’m just to take you there.”

“Should I…er…shift my shirt to meet this person?” Carey asked hopefully, but the child shook his head vigorously.

“No, sir, just come straight along…she’s in a hurry, she said.”

Perhaps it was the Signora wanting to cheapen over his commission for putting the Bonnettis in touch with the Earl of Essex? Perhaps she was bored with Cumberland? Perhaps she had fond memories of their dalliance in Dumfries? He certainly did.

“Just take the padding out of the armholes and wings,” Carey told Hughie cheerfully. “It’ll do the job and look fine. You know how to do it, don’t you?”

“Ay, sir,” said Hughie, ducking his head, “Ah’ll come in fra the lining and reseam after though.”

Carey shifted the doublet up and down again, tight across the back too and flatteringly looser around the waist. Carlisle and the incessant riding and training was improving his figure even more than war in France had, but it was annoying that all the improvements were in places difficult to alter. No doubt about it, ten years of Court life had softened him badly despite jousting and tennis and swordplay. Now he was back in form again. That was pleasing and might please the Queen, too.

Carey smiled complacently at the half mirror nailed on the wall. He hadn’t tried on his cannions and would have to hope they were all right; altering them would be even more complicated. He would have to use his riding boots as well or find and borrow some dancing slippers—it didn’t really matter so much on progress, but still…Mind, his hose were in a poor state, having been darned several times by Barnabus. So boots were the better choice.

“You’re sure I shouldn’t change?” Carey asked, glaring at the boy severely. Whose child was he, anyway? Carey thought back fondly to his days as a page at the young Queen’s Court, with his father, just before the Revolt of the Northern Earls.

“No, sir,” said the boy, luckily bright enough to understand what he was worrying about. “Oh no, sir, it isn’t Her Majesty, I’d make sure and tell you if it was and check for musk-scented boots too.”

“So I should hope,” said Carey, disappointed. He unbuttoned the heavy pearl-embroidered doublet and Hughie helped it from his shoulders, unlaced the sleeves, and turned it inside out before hanging it up.

Still buttoning up his old hunting doublet, Carey followed the page boy out of the cottage, along the rutted lane and down another lane to a small tithe barn. There he came upon another scene of chaos because clearly the place had been commandeered by all the mummers and musicians of the Court. On the ground floor, already eaten bare by the Court, bad-tempered choristers of the chapel in their livery coats were practising polyphony very poorly. In another corner, by some feed bins, were acrobats and tumblers, practising a complicated sequence of somersaults and jumps to build a pyramid. The master of the tumblers, a slightly built handsome Moor in a black brocade doublet and hose, was supervising with iron patience. The pyramid wobbled and collapsed.

“Try again,” he said, “this time Master Skeggs as second rank base, and Will the Tun as first rank.”

The page boy was climbing a ladder in front of them that led to a half-loft still full of hay that made your nose twitch. When Carey followed him, he took a narrow path through the sweetly smelling piles of fodder to a nook at the back which had been laid over with rugs. There none other than Mistress Thomasina de Paris was sitting neatly with her knees folded under her in her white damask and gold tissue gown, with her costume trunks behind her.

Carey flourished a bow to her. “Mistress,” he said, “I have to say I was hoping to meet another Queen, but I would like to ask your advice on…”

She skewered him with a look. “Tom,” she said to the page boy, “go sit at the top of the ladder and…no, in fact, pull it up and sit next to it. Understand?”

“Yes, missus,” said the boy and forged a path back through the hay, looking determined.

Carey shut his mouth and looked quizzically at the Queen’s Fool. She gestured for him to sit down and he decided against trying to sit on a rug as the points of his doublet were too tight to his hose to allow it. He perched on one of the boxes.

They sat in silence for a moment.

Just as Carey was about to open proceedings by asking conventionally after the Queen her mistress’ good health, Thomasina took a sealed letter from the rug beside her and handed it to him without a word. She was looking immensely disapproving.

Carey held it in his fingers, looked at it. That was the Queen’s personal seal, the small one. The one she never gave to anyone else.

Fingers a little unsteady, he opened it. The letter was in fact a warrant from the Queen, stating that Sir Robert Carey was her trusty and well-beloved cousin and acting in her behalf and requiring any who read it to assist him in any way he asked.

It wasn’t the warrant for his deputyship; it was very much better than that. But it didn’t say anything about what his office was nor why exactly he might need assistance.

Heart pounding, Carey refolded the letter carefully and put it in his inside doublet pocket.

“I have been asked to ask you…” began Thomasina judiciously.

“Mistress Thomasina, I know how Her Majesty’s mind works insofar as any mere man can. Bear with me, please. If you are speaking on behalf of anyone other than our dread sovereign Queen Elizabeth, would you please say so now?”

Thomasina nodded her head once and then folded her lips. Carey counted twenty of his heartbeats because they were going faster than normal. “Thank you, mistress. You were saying?”

“I have been asked to ask you to investigate a…a death that happened some thirty-two years ago.”

What? Carey didn’t say that. He tried to think whose death, then asked, “Before or after I was born?”

“Do you know the month?”

“The Queen was godmother at my baptism, I know that, but it was a little late for some reason. My mother always said I was a summer baby and bound to be lucky.”

“In which case the death happened after your birth. It was on the 8th September in the year of Our Lord 1560.”

There was something about the date, but he wasn’t sure what. Something important to be sure, family stories from when he was very little, family gossip, something about his Aunt Katherine’s gown being ruined on the hunting field. Something that had caused arguments between his father and mother. Carey closed his eyes for a moment. He had been such a little boy, still in skirts, riding experienced barrel-shaped ponies, youngest of a string of seven boys and two girls that lived. Only Philadelphia was younger than him, and he was hardly ever noticed except by his wet nurse, which suited both him and Philly very well indeed. What was it?

He opened his eyes and smiled. “I deny it,” he said. “The bill is clean, I was nowhere near. I have an excellent alibi from my wet nurse, as well as being hampered by my swaddling bands.”

Mistress Thomasina looked unamused.

“This…death changed many lives,” she said, obviously expecting him to have heard of it nonetheless. “It happened only a few miles from Oxford, at Cumnor Place.”

“Cumnor?” Damn it, what was it about that name?

Thomasina rolled her eyes. “I suppose most of our generation were never concerned by it and your parents wouldn’t speak of it,” she said, pouring wine from a flask into a small coral cup for herself and twice as much for Carey into a silver goblet. From a sandalwood box, she offered sweet wafers which Carey refused. “I had no idea myself who Her Ma…who was being spoken of. I didn’t even recognise the name of the victim.”