Queen of Ambition (23 page)

If these pictures were the key to a cipher, how would such a code work? It would mean … long, rambling, disjointed letters often awkwardly worded …

And what kinds of letters did Jester and Woodforde write to each other?

Long, rambling, disjointed missives, often awkwardly worded …

I needed time and secure privacy to study these. I folded the sheets double and thrust them quickly into my hidden pouch. I had better take something to work on, I thought, and went over to the shelves where I
had found Woodforde’s letters. Yes, here they were….

I had them in my hand when I heard a sound behind me and swung around.

“And just what,” said Ambrosia, staring at me, her dark, slanting brows drawn together and her eyes hard with suspicion, “do you think you’re doing, poking about among my father’s papers?”

“I was just … looking. I’ve never been up here before,” I said untruthfully. “But I wondered if your father had left any … any note or sign of where he had gone. You were resting—you don’t look well, not well at all—and I thought, if I could find something helpful …”

It wasn’t good enough. Ambrosia strode up to me and snatched away the letters I was holding. She stared into my face. “You’re not just a cookmaid, are you?” she said. “You don’t even speak like one, or not all the time. You didn’t just now. You sounded like a lady….”

“I was educated above my station,” I said. “My … my mother worked for a lady who let me share her daughters’ lessons.” It wasn’t far off the truth. Aunt Tabitha had made my mother run errands just as, later on, she made me run them. I had shared my cousins’ tutor very largely at my mother’s insistence and my uncle and aunt considered me to be lower down the
social scale than they were, even if I didn’t agree with them.

“Then why pretend, and sometimes talk like a common person and at other times, when you forget, sound like a court lady?” I clearly had much to learn about working in disguise, I thought grimly. “You know people above your station as well as talking like them!” Ambrosia said. She stared at me more intently than ever. “You were so sure you could get that playlet stopped, so sure you could get word to important people and be listened to. And the queen will be here in a couple of days. You’re a court spy, that’s what you are!”

“A court spy? Spying on what? Spying in a
pie shop?
” I attempted a light laugh. “No, really, Ambrosia, I never heard such nonsense….”

Ambrosia raised her voice. “
Father! Father!
”

It was no rhetorical appeal to an absent parent, but a shout to attract the attention of one very much within earshot. There was a scraping noise behind me and I spun around once more, just as a whole section of the wall where the shelving was swung inward, shelves, books, papers, and all. The shelving was attached to what was actually a hidden door and in the doorway, as hard-eyed as his daughter, stood Roland Jester, and behind him, looking over his shoulder, was his half brother, Giles Woodforde.

“She’s a spy!” said Ambrosia hysterically. “I didn’t know. I didn’t realize. I’m sorry! She
knows
court people! I wouldn’t be surprised if they sent her!”

I whirled again and would have fled, but Ambrosia barred my way, springing into my path again when I tried to dodge past her. I tried to thrust her aside but
she withstood me and then Jester’s hands closed on my upper arms and dragged me backward, through the secret door, with Ambrosia following. When we were all inside, the door was shut. On the inside, it was a perfectly ordinary door with a latch and a bolt.

“I told you this morning you were a fool of a girl,” Jester said breathlessly to his daughter. “Now you’ve done another damn daft thing! Why did you call to me like that? Now she knows our hiding place!”

It was a very uncomfortable hiding place, just a cramped, stifling, boarded-off space at one end of the attic. The only light and air came from what seemed to be a long, narrow grating just under the eaves of the thatch at the rear of the house. From the outside, it would be overshadowed and nearly invisible. There was also a very small skylight that from its position looked as though it were one end of the bigger skylight in Jester’s office.

In the resultant murk, I could just make out the faces of the others, and see the meager furnishings: a couple of stools, a very small square table, an ironbound chest pushed up against the thatch, where it came down to meet the floor at the front of the house, and a lidded pail. Despite the lid, the pail smelled.

“I tell you, she’s a
spy
!” said Ambrosia. “I had to stop her getting away! Lord knows what she’s learned. I found her looking at your letters.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Have you all gone mad?” I took refuge in a panicky bluster, which wasn’t difficult, for I felt very panicky indeed. “You were in a great fuss because you didn’t know where your father was—you
said
”—I scowled at
Ambrosia. “So I thought I’d look in case he’d written a note you hadn’t seen. And all the time he was in here and you knew it—and what is all this about spies? Why have I been dragged in here? What’s going on?”

“I wanted that playlet stopped and she said she could do it! I told you!” Ambrosia threw the words not at me but at her father. She sounded completely frantic. “For my mother’s sake! I told you that, too! I don’t want her dragged back here to be hit!”

“Will somebody
explain
?” I shouted, partly in the hope that someone, somewhere would hear and come to my rescue, though it was hardly likely, since the building was empty except for us.

Ambrosia at last paid me some attention. “I know, I said to you: go and stop the playlet if you can. But as soon as Phoebe said to me that you’d gone, I started thinking. I got frightened. My father’s still my father and Uncle Giles is my uncle. I … it isn’t just that you’ve tried to use the queen’s visit to fetch my mother back, is it, Uncle Giles? There’s something else. You and my father … I’ve been worrying and wondering for a long time. You’ve been talking together in private so much and I know Father’s been anxious over something and …”

“For the love of God, girl, will you hold your tongue!” shouted Woodforde.

“I told Father where you’d gone,” Ambrosia said to me, ignoring her uncle. “I told him you’d gone to see your cousin because he worked for someone who was from court and you hoped to get the playlet canceled. I had to! I had to warn him!” I stared at her in amazement. She looked back at me defiantly. “When it’s
your own father and your own uncle; when it’s
family
… and now I find you in my father’s office, fiddling with his things …”

“If only you’d minded your own business in the first place. Would’ve thought you’d want your mother home yourself!” Jester snapped. “Suppose I should be grateful you at least took some thought for me and your uncle but I tell you, this could be the end of us all!”

“Mother’s not to be fetched back to be knocked about by you!” Ambrosia almost screamed at him. “You shouldn’t have treated her like that in the first place. And what do you mean, this could be the end of us all? What are you
talking
about? Oh, I knew it, I knew it! There is more, something important, isn’t there?”

Woodforde stepped across and gripped my chin, turning my head this way and that. He wasn’t in a scholar’s gown this time, but in a dull brown doublet of some thin and, from the smell of it, none-too-clean material. “I knew I’d seen you somewhere before,” he said as he released me. “I saw you at Richmond. Oh yes, I did! Dressed very fine, you were, coming along a passage with a maid at your heels and people carrying luggage for you. You’re from the court all right! What are you doing here, pretending to be a cookmaid? How much do you really know? I wonder.”

There was an awkward, almost comical, silence while we all peered at one another with intense suspicion, no one knowing quite what anyone else knew for certain. Except that it was now quite plain that there was far more to this than a needlessly complicated plot
to drag Mistress Jester back to her husband.
This could be the end of us all
, Jester had said. Like Ambrosia, I was wondering just what that meant.

One thing it clearly meant, however, was that although whatever else was being planned remained a mystery to me, it had to be serious and dangerous. In some way, surely, it involved a threat to someone and in all probability, that someone was the queen.

The silence lasted for several moments. I would call it a frozen silence except that the heat in that confined space under the sun-warmed thatch was nearly unbearable. Then Woodforde drew a dagger.

Ambrosia gasped and said: “No, Uncle, please!” and Jester said protestingly: “No, Giles. You can’t kill a young woman.”

“I want to know what she knows,” said Woodforde. “Just hold on to her, will you?” He took hold of my chin again and laid the blade against my throat. Jester let out a moan but kept his grip on me. Ambrosia stared with huge eyes, biting her lips. “Now,” Woodforde said. “Just why did you want to look at Master Jester’s papers? Just what did you expect to find?”

“A note to say where he’d gone! That’s all! And I should tell you that Cecil knows I’m here! I saw him this morning. Yes, all right, I come from the court. Cecil sent me to Cambridge in the first place to find out if the playlet was all it seemed to be. Which,” I added desperately, “it obviously isn’t!”

“Hark at you,” said Woodforde. “Cecil. Not
Sir William Cecil
. Not
Her Majesty’s Secretary of State
. Just Cecil. You’re on familiar terms with him, that’s plain enough. Very well. Go on.”

“That’s all!
Sir William
was suspicious of the playlet,” I said. “And no wonder. A snare to catch Mistress Jester—and something else as well, it seems! I have told
Sir William Cecil
”—I was sardonic on purpose, to hide my fear—“all about the snare, at least, and the whole business of the playlet will indeed be stopped.”

“Why,” lamented Jester, “did God have to saddle me not only with a faithless wife but also a wantwit of a daughter?”

“And Cecil knows where you are,” Woodforde remarked to me. To my relief, he withdrew his dagger from my throat, but still kept it unsheathed. “But he can’t know about this little hidey-hole and he’d better not find out.”

A wish to ease the tension combined with genuine curiosity made me say: “What’s this place for, anyway? How did it come to be made?”

“One could call it a legacy from Queen Mary,” Jester informed me. “My father-in-law, Master Jackman, he was an ardent Protestant, and in Queen Mary’s day he was scared all the time he’d be taken up for heresy. When folk started sayin’ that heretics were goin’ to be hunted out, he got nightmares. Sybil and me slept in the next room and he used to wake us up, screamin’ out in his sleep. So he planned how he’d escape bein’ caught. When he built the houses on this side of Jackman’s Lane, he used builders—a father and two sons—who thought the same way as he did. They were the only ones that knew about this hidden room. Dead and gone they are now—with the lung-rot, last winter. The houses were built very quickly, in a matter
of weeks.” (That, I thought, explained the afterthought air of the linen cupboard and the resultant awkward corner in the passage. Haste never did equal efficiency.)

“This room,” Jester was saying, “was made as a place to hide and there’re ways out of the house as well, so that if hiding wasn’t enough, if someone needed to get right away, out of Cambridge and away to the river and the sea, they could. My father-in-law always had arrangements in place, a boat ready on the river and contacts among ships’ captains at Lynn.”

I wondered where the ways out were. I couldn’t see any sign of one in the attic, which seemed an unlikely starting point for such a thing in any case. Perhaps he just meant hidden ways of escape from other parts of the house.

Woodforde said impatiently: “Oh, stop wasting time. And keep your voices down. We’ve got to deal with this … this interloper.”

“There’s no need,” said Jester. “The playlet’s going to be canceled and that’s the end of the matter, ain’t it? I don’t see why we have to hide here anyway. We’ve done nothin’. This mornin’ Ambrosia tells me that her tutor, the one that’s just died, that she used to write to all innocentlike, left a message to be sent to her, sayin’ that this Mistress Smithson is her mother and that you were plannin’ to get the students to hand her back to me.” Ambrosia, by telling that lie, had evidently made some sort of attempt to protect me. “I come and tell you that the court folk are goin’ to find out about it,” said Jester in aggrieved tones, “and you get in a panic, but I don’t see what about. That’s all anyone
knows, ain’t it? We’ve done naught wrong yet!”

“I’m still not sure she doesn’t know more than she’s saying,” said Woodforde, glaring at me.

Jester snorted. “It’s not wrong for a man to want his wife back and I’m not afraid to say it to Cecil’s face. Why shouldn’t I? I got a right to my wife’s company, ain’t I? She swore to be bonny and buxom for me and always faithful, and then she ran off and I tell you and I’d tell Cecil, too, or the queen her own self, that I need her. I love her, for all her father cheated me. I can’t do without her!” There was a startling note in his voice, like the whine of a hurt dog, or one deprived of the essentials of life, like food or water. “Why should the queen mind that? If we just leave it at that …”

“We’re not going to leave it at that.” Woodforde spoke with steely obstinacy. “Your wife has you under a spell and you can’t do without her, you say. Well, there’s things I can’t do without, either. You want Sybil; I want … what I want. We can both have what we want but that means you keep to our bargain.”

They were talking to each other as though they were alone together. More than that; as though each, inside his mind, was gazing upon some dazzling vision that blinded him to everything else: to me, to Ambrosia, even to the reality of a world that contained powerful people like Queen Elizabeth and Sir William Cecil, who did not like to be used and would not tolerate threats.

The two brothers resembled each other in the color of their hair and the nondescript design of their faces, but in other respects they weren’t very alike. Woodforde was weedy, while Jester was by comparison
almost burly, and their speech was different, Woodforde’s being educated while Jester spoke roughly. Their minds, however, seemed cast in the same mold and I did not like what I sensed about that mold.