Queen of Ambition (13 page)

After that, however, the letter, which was lengthy, became oddly muddled, drifting from one topic to another and back again in haphazard fashion. He commented on the queen’s appearance, noting her liking for gowns in white and cream and silver, and said that he had seen her with ornaments of white jade in her hair. This was true, but it was observant of him to have noticed it and why, I wondered, should he mention the white jade but not the pearls, which she wore far more ostentatiously and often?

There were several references to food, including the surprising statement that pease pottage appeared quite often at the noon meal. This was
not
true. I couldn’t remember ever seeing pease pottage at court. It is a peasants’ dish. He complained primly of the frivolity at the court and he undoubtedly loathed jesters—
although I make an exception for you and for my dear niece, your daughter. Sometimes, I think the humor of the professional ones is too unkind and full of pepper
.

Touchingly tenderhearted, I thought, and an interesting remark from a man whose personal servant said he was badly treated.

I read on. There was a romantic description of what he called a faery dawn at Richmond, pearly with dew and with just a trace of silvery fog drifting over the Thames. In the next paragraph he said he had bought a new hat and his companions had admired it, and a few lines later he was grumbling again about the prevalence of jesters, one of whom had irritated him so much during a mealtime that Woodforde had longed to throw something at him. For some reason, he specified
that the something he wished to throw was the vinegar. Why the vinegar in particular? I wondered.

Then came another of the comments that Cecil had mentioned, about the rattling creeper that had kept Woodforde awake. He had nailed it to another creeper stem to keep it still. Why, he asked rhetorically, should one have to spend so much energy and zeal on such matters?

The second letter was in much the same style. I could see why Cecil had suspected a cipher. The rambling, the disjointedness, the awkwardness, was in places very marked; small incidents like the rattling creeper taking up too many words; flights of fancy about faery dawns and pearly dew mingling with repetitious references to jesters, clothes, and food. But Cecil and his code breakers knew their work. If they hadn’t found a cipher, then there wasn’t one.

I gave up on the letters and went through to Ambrosia’s room, which was beyond the lumber room, as though she wanted to keep a distance between herself and her father. In contrast to Jester’s sanctum, this was poorly furnished with a rickety table and stool, and just one wall shelf, though here too there was a little hearth for warmth in winter. The shelf held a couple of histories, a book of poems, a Greek primer, and
Caesar’s Gallic Wars
in Latin. On the table was a battered wooden box and beside it, the one good item, a writing set of brass and polished wood.

The box contained letters and to my surprise, when I picked them up, I found that although Ambrosia had told me that she hadn’t got very far with Greek, they were in the Greek alphabet and presumably in that language.
Perhaps, I thought, she was not of a boastful temperament and hadn’t wanted to flaunt her education in front of someone she thought to be humble. Or perhaps her tutor—what had she said his name was? Dr. Barley, that was it—was continuing her instruction by letter. I looked at the letters with interest, wishing that my own Greek had gone further than the alphabet and a very small vocabulary. I could still remember most of the alphabet. Picking a few words at random, I murmured the sounds of the letters under my breath.

And realized, with a jolt under my breastbone, that the sounds I had just made, if run together, did not come out as Greek at all. They came out, more or less, as
aking ioints
and
Iama sikoldman
.

Aching joints? I am a sick old man?
I whispered on, stumbling a little where my memory proved rusty.
I seem to acquire a new ailment every season. My digestion will no longer let me eat some of my favorite foods, and I grow breathless when I walk far. My physician makes me take an infusion of foxglove for it, which helps a good deal
…

In passing, I thought that her correspondent’s physician and ancient Gladys Morgan back at Withysham clearly belonged to the same school of medicine. The signature, when I had deciphered that as well, was
Edward Barley
. Ambrosia and her tutor were corresponding in English, using the Greek alphabet.

There were awkwardnesses here and there where the Greek letter didn’t quite match the English sound. An initial “J” or “Y” was always an “I,” for instance. But on the whole, to anyone who knew the Greek
alphabet reasonably well, the letters were perfectly clear. Barley’s handwriting was a little shaky, the hand of an elderly man, but it was legible enough. I thought he was a kindly soul. Every letter began by thanking Ambrosia for writing, and the whole tone was one of affection.

There were about a dozen letters altogether, though, and my halting recollection of the Greek alphabet made me slow. I could not read everything. I flicked through the sheets, pausing here and there at random, in case anything interesting should emerge but not expecting that it would. Even if there were plots afoot in this shop, and Ambrosia were privy to them, she surely wouldn’t chat about them to her tutor. Then, in the middle of the third letter I picked up, two words caught my eye.
Iour mother
…

Iour
… that would be
your
. Your mother. Ambrosia’s mother? The one who had run away from Roland Jester? Frowning, I tackled the surrounding text.

Your mother sends you her love, but still forbids me to tell you where she is living. She thinks it best that you do not know. She bids me say again that she would not have left you, only she feared for her life. She hopes and prays that your father will continue to treat you well as he always did in the past. She longs to see you and hopes some day soon that she will see you, though you, perhaps, will not see her
…

Mysterious! Searching further, I found other references to Ambrosia’s mother.

Your mother is well. She misses you but rest assured that she is safe and well provided for … Your mother does not forget that your birthday is this month of May … Your mother
asks if you still use the writing set she gave you just before she went away
…

So, through her tutor, Ambrosia was in touch with her mother, and because all the correspondence was in the Greek alphabet, there was little chance of Jester finding out, even if he went through her letters. Jester, presumably, did not know any Greek.

But none of this was any help to me. I put everything back where I had found it and went back to Jester’s study, where I suddenly realized that there was one thing I hadn’t inspected. I went to the oak settle and found that, yes, it had a lift-up seat and a storage box beneath. Here, it seemed, Jester kept his artistic efforts. There were two sets of charcoal sketches inside, one with the sheets punched at the corners and fastened together with a thong, the other just a pile of loose sheets. I took both sets out for a closer look.

There was no doubt that as an artist, Jester was amazingly talented. The loose sketches were mainly buildings, landscapes, and skylines like the one I had seen him drawing by the river. They were excellent, with carefully done fine detail.

The set of drawings that were fastened together were different. They were small sheets, only about nine inches by six, and leafing through them, I found that they were a wild medley of subjects—rather like his letters!—well executed on a small scale. The top one, for instance, showed a boy or a young man—he was rather casually sketched—giving a tidbit to a horse. In the background was a field and a little church. The artist had given reverent attention to the church, which was drawn in detail, and had also lavished great care on
the dappled coat of the horse and the apple which the boy (or man) was offering.

The same mixture of casual and careful delineation appeared in quite a number of the drawings, as though some, though not all, of the pictures had been abandoned when not quite complete. Some of the sheets had more than one sketch on them, too. The top half of one such page showed people dining, one helping himself to salt from a saltcellar that was much more elaborately and beautifully depicted than he was, and beneath this was a picture of a woman apparently buying cloth, holding a length of it in one hand while giving money across a counter to the man who was selling it. The woman was a mere outline but the cloth was meticulously drawn—with highlights, showing that it was a gleaming material such as silk or satin.

Another sheet with two pictures on it showed a girl who looked vaguely like Phoebe, working in a kitchen, and below that, a girl who looked a little like Ambrosia, walking in a formal garden. Here again, the background was more carefully shown than the figures of the girls. I shook my head, puzzled, and put the sketches carefully back in the settle. Disconcertingly, something had stirred in the depths of my mind but was refusing to surface. I had had this experience before. I had noticed something but did not myself know what it was. It would come to me, or so I hoped.

I was looking around, to see if I had missed anything, when I heard the squeak of door hinges from below, and then the sound of voices.

I glanced swiftly about to make sure that I had left everything as I had found it and then, as quietly as possible, I sped down the spiral stairs. I blessed the peculiar architecture of the house now because the door of the bedchamber was not visible from the lower flight of stairs, the one leading down to ground level. I was able to dart into the bedroom unseen. Then I heard someone coming up the stairs, and Ambrosia’s voice called my name. “Ursula! Are you there? Your cousin wants to see you!”

A picture of innocence, I emerged from the bedchamber with my shoes in my hand, just as Ambrosia arrived at the door. “Did I wake you? I’m so sorry. But your cousin Roger …”

“Is he here? I’ll come down at once. Thank you, Ambrosia.”

“I’ve pulled the shutters down a little,” Ambrosia said. “You’ll be able to see each other’s faces.”

The pie shop wasn’t due to open for another half an hour. Brockley was waiting for me, therefore, at a table in an otherwise empty shop, cool and dim although Ambrosia’s thoughtful arrangement with the shutters did let in a little light. Seating myself opposite him, I could just about make out his face. “What news?” I asked.

“I got away from Woodforde for a while. He’s not a man I’d work for from choice. He threw a pair of boots at me this morning, out of sheer bad temper, and his aim is good,” said Brockley. “I understand that he did some training with arms when he was with the Lennoxes, and that he goes to the college butts every Saturday and practices with the crossbow. I daresay it
keeps his eye in.” He peered across the table at me. “I can’t see you too clearly but is that a bruise on your face?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Roland Jester?”

“Yes.”

“If at the end of all this, he isn’t gallows meat,” said my manservant coolly, “I promise you, madam, I’ll kill him myself.”

“Please don’t. I don’t want you to become gallows meat too! What brings you here, Brockley?”

“I’ve some pieces of news, madam. Whether they’re important or not, I don’t know, but I wanted to tell you about them. One’s a pretty little bit of gossip I got from the man I replaced in Woodforde’s service. He stayed on for half a day to show me what to do. He didn’t like Master Woodforde and he talked out of malice but it was interesting malice. I now know why Woodforde was thrown out of Lady Lennox’s service.”

“Oh?”

Brockley let out his rare chuckle. “He fell in love with her and kept on writing her love letters and leaving them on her pillow, accompanied by roses, and finally, her servants found him one evening hiding under her bed.”

“He fell in love with Lady
Lennox
? The man must be out of his mind. One might as well fall in love with … a stone monument!”

“Ladies sometimes don’t quite understand how men see other ladies. Lady Lennox is a handsome woman still, madam, and there is something about her—an air of banked fires, if you understand.”

“I understand very well,” I said, “but—banked fires in Lady Lennox!”

“Yes,” said Brockley calmly. “I’ve seen her at court, of course. I wouldn’t call her a stone monument. A she-dragon, perhaps. And dragons breathe fire.”

“I suppose you know what you’re talking about. No wonder she threw him out! Good God! Did her husband know?”

“Oh yes, and laughed himself silly, according to the fellow I was replacing,” said Brockley. “I tell you, that man hates Woodforde. He’d been beaten with a riding whip and had everything you can think of thrown at his head—not just boots but pewter tankards, glassware, even a knife on one occasion though that time Woodforde did have the decency—or the caution—to miss.”

“Brockley, if he tries to whip you, or throws anything dangerous at you, you may leave his employment at once and knock him down on the way out.”

“Thank you, madam.”

“Is there anything else? You said you had pieces of news, plural.”

Brockley nodded. “There is something else and this may be important though I can’t quite see why. It’s just a feeling. You’ll know, perhaps, that the lucky lady who is going to be kidnapped by the students and brought into the pie shop is a Mistress Smithson?”

“Yes.”

“I am wondering, madam, if that’s her real name.”

“Really? What is her real name, then?”

“This morning, Woodforde sent me on an errand,” Brockley said. “I had to ride out to a place called Brent
Hay Manor just outside the city and deliver a letter to this Mistress Smithson. She may have been Cambridge born but it seems she doesn’t live in the town itself. She’s a companion to a Mistress Grantley, who is a widow and the owner of the manor. From something Master Woodforde casually said, I think the letter was to do with what kind of dress Mistress Smithson should wear for meeting the queen. I was allowed to see her privately, in a little parlor, and give her the letter. She read it in my presence.”