Queen of Ambition (10 page)

“Aye, I am her father and I know my own business best, and hers,” Jester snapped. “You’ve brought the news, which you had no call to do, though I daresay you thought you were doin’ right. Well, now you see what’s come of it. Time you were off.”

He advanced on Francis Morland, who retreated in alarm, and fairly shooed him out of the shop. He then came back to glare at his daughter and also at me. “You still here, flappin’ your ears, Mistress Faldene? As for you, Ambrosia, just pull yourself together and …”

“I’m going to faint,” announced Ambrosia in a blurred voice, and slumping forward, she slid off the settle. I caught her just before she struck the floor, and lowered her. I looked up at Jester. “Please fetch some water. She really has fainted.”

“Tchah!” said Jester. “
Phoebe!
”

“And a basin!” I added hurriedly. Ambrosia was stirring and I knew what was likely to happen next.

Phoebe brought the water and the basin just in time. Jester, making a disgusted face, withdrew from the spectacle of me holding Ambrosia’s head while she
threw up her breakfast. “When she’s reasonable again, tell her she needn’t work today. Tell her to go and sit in her room and read. She likes doin’ that an’ it cost enough havin’ her educated, God knows.” He then vanished into the back regions and I seized my chance.

“I’ll go to see Thomas for you,” I whispered into her ear. “I’ll kiss him good-bye for you and tell you how he looked. This afternoon. Will that do?”

Feebly, Ambrosia nodded. Phoebe knelt down beside us. The water was cold and she had thought of adding a cloth. Gently, she soaked the cloth and held it to the crimson bruise on Ambrosia’s face. “I was a-peepin’ out of the kitchen and I seed him do that. You’ll have such a mark, Mistress Ambrosia. But the cold water’ll help.”

Phoebe was a timid thing but she had a good heart. “I heard you say you’d go to see Master Shawe,” she whispered to me. “I won’t tell anyone. Promise.”

I gave her a smile. “I never thought you would,” I told her.

In the company of Edward Hawford, vice chancellor of Cambridge, Rob Henderson, and Brockley, I viewed Thomas’s body and for Ambrosia’s sake, I kissed him farewell, wondering all the time if he had died because of the assignation he had made with me. I knew, as we left the chapel, that his young face, already stamped with the terrifying calm of death, would haunt my dreams for a long time.

In the courtyard outside the chapel, when Hawford had gone, Rob listened thoughtfully as I said that I didn’t think this was just an untimely accident.

“It looks like an accident to me,” he said.

I shook my head. “It was far too pat,” I said.

“So that was Thomas Shawe. Poor lad,” Brockley said sympathetically. “I’ve seen him before, you know, madam. If you remember, when we first came to Cambridge and I went with the other men to stable our horses, I told you that I met a young man in
Radley’s stable, and that he warned me against the place?”

“Yes. Was that Thomas?”

“For certain it was, madam. There’s no mistaking that hair.”

“No, indeed.” I turned to Rob. “I want to see the place where it happened. I have time.”

“I should hope so! The pie shop doesn’t own you, I suppose,” said Rob.

Brockley said uneasily: “Madam, if you believe that Master Shawe was killed, who do you think did it? Do you suspect Master Jester?”

“No. It can’t have been him.” I said it reluctantly. I would very much have liked to put the blame on the odious Master Jester but it wasn’t possible. “Francis Morland brought us the news and he told us that according to the groom at Radley’s, Thomas went out at five in the morning as usual, and the horse came back within half an hour. So Thomas must have been killed between five and about twenty minutes past. I was up and about before half past four, and Master Jester came downstairs not long after me. All he was killing during that half hour was poultry. I don’t think he could have overheard me making an appointment to meet Thomas, anyway. He was in the kitchen and we were out of his sight and keeping our voices down. But it looks as if someone knew.”

I frowned, trying to think. “Whatever was worrying him, Thomas didn’t want to talk about it officially. He didn’t want Jester to hear and I don’t think he’d have said anything to Woodforde. But he could have mentioned it to another student, who went and
repeated it to someone—Woodforde, for instance. Rob, can you … ?”

“Talk to the students again? Yes, I suppose I should do that.”

He didn’t sound overenthusiastic. I looked at him in surprise and some distress. “Rob, I really do believe that Thomas was killed, and it’s horrible. But there is this—it does at least mean that we’re not chasing shadows. There’s something to be found.”

“You may be right. Well, if there is, I’ve no doubt that you’ll find it,” said Rob. And then surprised me by adding quite sourly: “Even if I don’t.”

The curious momentary sourness vanished, however, as I repeated that we ought to see the place where Thomas had died. “Yes, indeed we should,” Rob agreed. “The groom at Radley’s will know where it happened.” We set off there at once and found Master Radley, stocky, weather-beaten, and surly, standing in the yard, holding a piece of paper and muttering, while the harried under-groom scuttled about with bales of straw. “Bill for corn,” Radley said when he saw us. “Bloody ould disgrace, it is, what corn costs in the summer, afore harvesttime. Times I see a bill like this, I wish my ould dad hadn’t had me taught to read.”

“The corn would still cost the same, whether you could read the bill or not,” said Rob. “We want to talk to your groom—the one who found Master Shawe.”

Radley obviously didn’t want us to waste his groom’s time, but equally obviously was impressed by Rob’s fashionable garments and commanding mien.
He shouted for the groom, whose name appeared to be Jem, to come over and Rob did the questioning.

“We have just been paying our respects to the poor young man who was killed this morning. I understand it was you that went out to find him when his mare came home with an empty saddle?”

“Aye. Thass right.” Brockley had said the groom was weedy and he was right. Jem was undersized and thin, with brown teeth, a nose that had at some time been broken, and stooped shoulders, possibly because he spent so much of his time bent nearly double under bales of hay and straw, and also, as like as not, because he had been hit so often that cowering had become habitual. “I get here of a mornin’ afore five. Master Radley sometimes don’t come into the yard till later, but I start the day’s work, like, and saddle up Master Shawe’s mare for him, most days, too. Thass how it was this mornin’.”

“What time did Master Shawe go out today?” Rob inquired.

“Everyone keep on axin’ that. Five or thereabout. Same as usual,” said Jem shortly.

“We’d like to see the exact place,” Rob told him. “Will you take us there?”

Master Radley cleared a disapproving throat. Rob fished a gold sovereign out of his belt purse, took Radley’s right hand, pressed the coin into the palm, and closed the ostler’s callused fingers over it. Radley murmured: “Well, thanks, sir. That’s real gentlemanly,” and thereafter, kept quiet.

“Take you all, sir?” Jem asked. “The lady, too?”

“I am here on someone’s behalf,” I said. “Someone
who can’t come herself. She and Thomas were secretly betrothed.”

The groom grinned lasciviously, met my cold eye, and became serious. “I can show you the place all right. Now?”

“Now,” Rob confirmed.

King’s Grove, the scene of Thomas’s death, proved to be a fair walk away. We had to cross the river on the bridge from Silver Street and then make our way along the farther bank, with the river on our right and the city beyond it, and on our left, a wide flat expanse of fields where corn was ripening and cattle grazed. When we reached the grove, we found that, being private, it was fenced around. Jem, however, led us to a gate, which turned out to be unlocked. The King’s College authorities evidently expected people to respect their boundaries without the aid of padlocks.

Beyond the gate was a narrow track that wound among the trees and joined a broader track, coming from a different direction. Jem took us along this for a few yards and then stopped. “Here, it were. Under that there tree.”

The tree was an oak. There was little now to see; even the flattened grass where Thomas had lain had almost sprung up again. Only by looking closely could I see the few bent and flattened grass stems that remained. Jem, without speaking, and with an anxious glance at me, pointed to a small brownish smear on the bole of the oak, perhaps four feet from the ground. “Thass where the poor young gentleman went headlong into the tree, seemin’ly.”

We looked at it carefully and then, of one mind
without needing to discuss it, we moved about, examining the ground. Apart from the little patches of green grass that flourished here and there, and the odd spindly bush or sapling, there was hardly any undergrowth, nothing but decaying leaves. There were hoofmarks in them and footmarks, too, where people had come to carry Thomas’s body away. If there had been any other and more informative footmarks there, they had been trampled to destruction. Nothing was lying about which could have been used as a weapon.

There was nothing to be learned here. It did indeed look as though what had killed Thomas was the collision with the tree. We came back to it and stood there for a few moments in silence.

I was trying to take the surroundings in so that I could tell Ambrosia about them. The grove was cool and quiet, except for a little birdsong. The leaves filtered the July sunshine into golden dapples. It was no place to die. Though there were worse ones. If whatever Thomas knew had really led him to his death, then someone somewhere was playing a dangerous game. Perhaps a game that could lead to a dungeon and a gallows.

Once away from his bullying employer, Jem seemed sensible enough. After showing us the mark on the tree, he had moved tactfully away and now we could speak to one another in privacy.

“There’s no evidence here,” I said. “But I stand by my belief. I don’t think this was an accident. Jester didn’t do it, but what about Woodforde? You’ve been investigating him—have you found out anything useful?”

“I wish I had, but no,” Rob said. “I searched his rooms here, just as I did at Richmond …”

“It was you who did it at Richmond, then?” I was intrigued.

“Yes. I now understand why searching people’s correspondence is a job you hate,” said Rob wryly. “At the time, I knew Woodforde was closeted with Cecil and his manservant was out on an errand. Cecil promised me he would make sure of it and he did. But every moment I was in Woodforde’s chamber, I was straining my ears for footsteps and expecting him to come through the door or step out from behind the bed curtains and ask me what I was doing there. But to get back to the point: I found nothing amiss at Richmond and nothing amiss here in Cambridge either. There were some dull and interminable letters from Roland—Cecil has told you of those, I believe—and there were bills from tailors and bootmakers and a livery stable—not Radley’s—and lecture notes and some students’ exercises with rude remarks in Latin, scribbled in the margins in Woodforde’s writing. As a tutor, he goes in for sarcasm.
But
…”

He gave Brockley a conspiratorial glance. I looked at their two faces with interest. “You two have been hatching a scheme of your own?” I asked.

Somewhere in the distance, carried on the soft July wind, a clock struck the half hour. “It’s half past three,” I said. “I need to get back. Can we talk as we go?”

Rob signaled to Jem that we had finished and we started back, parting company with the groom outside King’s Grove because he said that Master Radley wouldn’t like it if he took too long, sovereign or no
sovereign. “Here,” said Rob, groping in his purse once more. “Have one of your very own.”

“My thanks, sir. Thass real generous, that is!” Jem pulled his forelock, favored us with a wide, discolored grin, and then added: “But ’scuse me all the same. Master Radley’s not a patient man, no he ain’t,” and sped off ahead of us to resume his purgatorial existence at the stable.

We followed more slowly, once more taking the track along the riverbank toward the bridge into Silver Street. It was very warm. Sweat prickled under my arms and Brockley, also feeling the heat, took off his fustian doublet and strolled along in his linen shirtsleeves. Rob, always attentive to his appearance, remained encased in linen ruff and peacock-hued doublet but his face was crimson, with perspiration trickling down his temples.

I was anxious to know what new plans my companions had made but Rob murmured warningly that we should not talk until we were sure that no one could possibly overhear us. There were only a few other people about in that heat, but there were still some: a couple of workmen, in calf-length breeches and no shirts at all, coming from the fields with mattocks over their sunburnt shoulders, and behind them, a man in a long black gown, with gray hair trailing from under his dark cap, wandering along with his hands linked behind him and a preoccupied frown on his ascetic face.

Our view ahead was blocked until they had all passed us and then we saw that just ahead was an artist, busily sketching at an easel, his back partly turned toward us. At the sight of him, Rob slowed down and
Brockley said softly: “Careful, Master Henderson, sir …”

Rob stopped short. “I’ll contemplate the ducks on the river,” he said in a low voice. “Wait for me on the bridge. What are you gaping at me for, Ursula? Don’t you see who it is? Brockley pointed him out to me when we saw him here the other day. Best if he doesn’t see Mistress Faldene, pie shop cookmaid, chatting like an old friend to Master Henderson, gentleman employed by the Secretary of State. You’re strolling with your cousin Roger, Ursula. I’m nothing to do with you.”

Still bewildered, although I supposed that they probably knew what they were about, I walked silently on with Brockley. And then, at last, I realized that the back view of the artist was familiar. Though its owner was about the last person I would have expected to find in that capacity. That morning I had seen him wringing chickens’ necks, making out a marketing list, and quarreling violently with his daughter. The spectacle of Roland Jester inscribing lines on paper with delicacy and precision was odd to the point of being weird.