Queen of Ambition (27 page)

He eyed Wat doubtfully but I said sharply: “This man has something to tell Sir William. I will vouch for him,” and he was allowed in as well.

Wat quaked more than ever as we crossed the magnificent courtyard and I really think that if he hadn’t felt surrounded by it and intimidated by the dignified porter, he might even then have turned around and fled. As it was, he followed me obediently inside, but kept so close to me that he trod on my heels.

There was a solitary clerk in the anteroom, someone I did not know. He too gave me an odd look. Sir William Cecil was in the lodgings, he said, but was closeted with some people who had been brought to see him unexpectedly. “Master Henderson was here and insisted that they should be seen,” he said discontentedly. “And the Fellows are awaiting a summons from him, too.”

“Nevertheless, I must ask you, please, to tell Master Henderson that Mistress Ursula Blanchard is here as well,” I said crisply. The clerk’s gaze sharpened at the sound of my name.

“Ah. Yes, I do have instructions. Wait one moment, please.”

He disappeared through the door to Cecil’s private rooms. A moment later he came back, dismissed the porter, and led us through into the room where I had talked with Cecil before.

It seemed much smaller this time, because it was so crowded. Cecil was there, of course, still sitting with his bandaged foot up. There was a document-strewn
table within his reach. Near Cecil stood Rob Henderson, and there too were Dale and Brockley side by side, Brockley’s face even more expressionless than usual, Dale, pale and unhappy, her pockmarks very obvious.

Nanny sat stitching on a stool by the window, and close to her, on a bigger stool with arms, was a woman older than Nanny, bent-backed and evidently lame, for an ebony walking stick was propped beside her. She had a downturned mouth and chilly pale blue eyes set in a white face with an aquiline nose. She had been handsome once in a haughty fashion though now her skin was lined and looked as thin as paper. She wore a costly ruff edged with silver, and a dress of black satin with a wide farthingale pushed into an awkward slope by the arms of the stool. Even the stick was intricately carved and must have been expensive. I could not imagine who she was.

Standing quietly behind her, however, was another woman whose name I knew at once even though I had never met her before. She was perhaps forty years of age and plainly clad. There were worn lines in her face, and the expression in her dark eyes was not passionate but resigned. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking those strong, sweeping eyebrows or those broad nostrils.

“You’re Ambrosia’s mother!” I gasped, before the clerk could even begin announcing us. “Mistress Sybil Jester!”

Wat was anxiously bowing to everybody in turn. I hastily remembered my manners and dropped a curtsy, but I could hardly take my eyes from Sybil, who
smiled at me, somewhat sadly. The elderly lady in black observed in a sour voice: “Will no one have the courtesy to present these persons to me? These
disheveled
persons?”

Cecil opened his mouth to answer but before he could do so, Nanny let out a squeal and pointed a finger at me, while Brockley’s blank expression gave place to horror, and Dale gasped: “Oh, ma’am, whatever has happened to you?”

Suddenly, I realized that the porter and the clerk and the people in the street had had good reason to look oddly at Wat and me. Our hands and clothes were smeared with dried blood from our cut wrists and with dust from rolling about on the attic floor, while strands of our hair had been dragged loose by the passage through the cupboard. My reflection in a highly polished walnut press told me that my efforts to straighten my cap had merely given it a crazy tilt. Disheveled was a mild way of putting it. We resembled a pair of murderous scarecrows.

“Nanny,” Cecil said, “fetch some soap and warm water. And—er—my clothes brush and my comb.” Nanny scuttled out and Dale followed her. “Meanwhile,” said Cecil, waving the clerk to return to the anteroom, “I will do the presenting. Mistress Grantley, this is Ursula Blanchard, a Lady of Her Majesty’s Presence Chamber and a most trusted member of the court. Who is your companion, Ursula?”

“Wat,” I said. “His name’s Wat. He works at the pie shop.”

“Thank you. Ursula, this is Mistress Catherine Grantley, with whom Mistress Jester has been living.
And now, my dear Ursula, what indeed has happened? What in the world have you and Wat been doing? You seem to have blood on your hands, literally.”

“We haven’t been committing any violent crimes,” I said with a shaky laugh, hoping that punching Roland Jester and knocking the breath out of Giles Woodforde didn’t qualify as crimes. “We’ve barely escaped with our own lives. If I hadn’t had Wat to help me, I don’t know what would have happened. We’ve had a most exciting afternoon. We …”

I was trying to speak with lightness, to be the capable and courageous agent I was supposed to be but there were dancing black specks before my eyes and in my own ears my voice echoed as though I were in a cave. The next I knew, I seemed to be waking, but for some reason, not in a bed. I opened my eyes to find myself on the floor, with Brockley pushing a cushion under my head, while Rob and Wat stood staring worriedly down at me. “Don’t try to sit up yet, madam,” Brockley was saying. Somewhere a door latch clicked, and then I heard Dale and Nanny exclaiming in distress. Dale’s face appeared above me.

“You were supposed to be back at Master Woodforde’s lodgings,” I said vaguely to Brockley.

“He didn’t obey orders,” said Cecil’s voice.

“It was my fault,” said Rob regretfully. “When we sent Brockley back to Woodforde’s lodgings in case his master came home, I went part of the way back with him as I wished to return to my own lodgings. On the way he asked me for news of his wife, Fran Dale, and I told him that you had sent her to Brent Hay to warn Mistress Smithson that Dr. Woodforde
knew where she was and that the playlet was a trap.”

“He didn’t tell me everything, of course,” Brockley interposed. “Not that Fran had first been afraid to take the message because, well, because she was muddled about something.” Peering upward, I saw Fran biting her lip. There were tears in her eyes.

“I told him that myself, ma’am,” she said. “I told him all about it. And oh, he is so angry with me!”

“I’ve grasped,” said Rob, “that there’s something private here, which I know nothing about. And I’m not asking.”

“Thank you, Rob.” I turned my gaze toward Brockley and stared steadily up into his face. “I wish you to forgive her. That is an order,” I said, and my eyes passed on the silent message,
You know why
.

He gave me a faint nod, and I knew that the memory of a night in a Welsh dungeon was present in his mind as it was in mine. He put out a hand and touched Fran’s arm in a gesture of reassurance. Aloud, he said: “Master Henderson only said that my wife had set off for Brent Hay today. He left me at the gate of King’s, and I went in, but halfway across the courtyard, I turned round and came out again and went to the stable to get a horse and go after Fran. I felt worried about her, somehow, as if something wasn’t right with her. It can be like that, sometimes, between man and wife.”

“Yes, it can,” I said, and was glad to see that he was now giving Fran’s shoulder a kindly squeeze and that she was responding with a trace of a smile.

“Anyway,” Brockley said, “I met her on the road coming back—with Mistress Jester and Mistress Grantley.”

“When my gentlewoman companion receives a letter that flings her into a flurry and makes her insist that she should come instantly into Cambridge to find a woman called Ursula Blanchard, of whom I have never heard, and declares also that she is in a state of fear for a young relative I have never heard of before, either, I want to know what is going on,” said Catherine Grantley grimly.

“I understand, madam,” Brockley put in, “that Mistress Grantley has read the letter you sent by Fran.”

“I insisted, but much it told me! I had put forward Mistress Smithson, as I believed my companion to be called, as a candidate for presenting flowers to the queen; now it seems that if she does, she may also find herself returning to a husband I didn’t know she had. A brother-in-law called Woodforde apparently knows who she really is—which is more, it seems, than I have been allowed to know! Futhermore, the letter, from a woman claiming to be employed by Sir William Cecil, also inquired if Mistress Smithson, or whatever her name is, knew of any reason why either the husband or the brother-in-law should be laying plots against the queen, and told her that if so, she should speak at once before they ran into further danger, or led someone called Ambrosia—her daughter, apparently!—into danger with them. It made no sense at all, except that it tells me all too plainly that I have been shamefully deceived in
Mistress Smithson
….”

Cecil at this point attempted to say something but Mistress Grantley raised her voice and overrode him.

“ … All this time, instead of giving honest employment to a poor widow, recommended to me by Dr.
Edward Barley, a man I believed to be a respectable tutor, I have it seems been harboring a runaway wife who has left not only a husband but a daughter to fend for themselves. When I questioned her, she admitted it. Shameful!”

“I fled from my husband because I feared that one day he would kill me,” Mistress Jester said in a low voice. “I took the name of Smithson to help me hide from him, rather than to deceive you. Though it is true that I needed a sanctuary, and Dr. Barley said you might not take me in, not even if you knew the full truth.”

“No more I would!” snapped Mistress Grantley. “If a woman has taken the vows of marriage, she should abide by them.”

“At risk of her life?” I asked her. I reached a hand to Dale, who helped me up and steadied me onto a spare stool.

“If she tries hard enough to please her husband, her life won’t be at risk!” Mistress Grantley retorted didactically, and with every word, she banged her ornamented ebony stick on the floor by way of emphasis.

“He turned on me because of something my father did, not because of anything I did!” Sybil cried protestingly. “And attacked me with his fists when I protested!”

Cecil once more attempted to speak but Mistress Grantley, in whose mind age clearly took precedence over such minor matters as the title of Secretary of State, overrode him again.

“Concerning the plots mentioned in the letter, Mistress
Smithson
claimed that she knew nothing. In view
of the way she has deceived me, I cannot help but wonder …”

“It’s true! I wanted to come here to find out what all this talk of plots meant. I am afraid for my daughter!”

“So you say! Well, I wish to know all. I still take the air on horseback now and then, slowly, on an old footboard pillion, behind a groom. If Sybil were so determined to come to Cambridge, I said I would come with her and whatever she found out, I would find out too. On the way, we met this man Brockley, who it appears is the husband of this woman Fran, who brought the letter. He looks,” said Mistress Grantley disdainfully, “like a common serving man but had the impertinence to insist that we should all come at once to see Sir William. To see the Secretary of State, no less! Hardly had we arrived, however, before these two other people have joined us. One of them is apparently the woman who sent the letter.
Why
does an employee of Sir William Cecil look as though she has been butchering sheep with the help of a scullion?”

“Will you all kindly be quiet!” Cecil got a hearing this time by shouting. “I want to know what has happened to Ursula and Wat. Are you feeling better, Ursula? Nanny, give her the bowl of water and the comb, and let her clean and tidy herself and then pass them to Wat.”

“I’ll not give your comb to him! He’s likely got lice!”

“No, I ain’t!” said Wat indignantly.

I saw Rob and Brockley both suppressing grins. “Damn the comb!” Cecil snapped. “I can afford a few
spares! You can throw it away afterward, Nanny. Do as I bid you! Now then, Ursula, will you begin your explanation? And will someone fetch some wine. I think Ursula needs it and probably we all do.”

Nanny brought me the water. I washed the blood quickly off my hands, pulled my cap off, and then let Dale tackle my hair while I told them how I had gone up to the pie shop’s attic for another look at Master Jester’s papers and Ambrosia had caught me. I told how she had shouted for her father, who suddenly appeared from what seemed to be a secret room into which I was dragged. I described the alarming conversation between the two brothers, the arrival of Wat, and how we had been tied up and left, probably to await our doom. “We would neither of us have escaped if we’d been alone. We did it because there were two of us. I had a dagger with me that the brothers hadn’t found …”

I described how Wat and I had managed to free each other and then our escape through the cupboard and the spiral stairway. With some embarrassment I admitted that we had had to fight our way out of the garden. “Then we came straight here. The talk between Woodforde and Jester is proof enough to my mind that something else is afoot besides the entrapment of Mistress Jester.”

“There was no need for a trap,” said Mistress Jester. “Not if my brother-in-law knew where I was anyway. And precious little need for secrecy even if there was a trap. Would even the queen have cared? How many people,” she asked bitterly, “would criticize a husband for snatching a runaway wife back?”

“No one in his right mind!” snapped Catherine Grantley.

Sybil Jester looked at her. “I think Dr. Barley was in his right mind,” she said quietly.

“He was an old man, going senile, I daresay!”

Cecil banged his fist down on the table beside him. “That will do! To listen to you all snapping and snarling, anyone would think this was a bear-baiting pit! It happens to be my private apartment. The Secretary of State’s private quarters, to be precise! Mistress Grantley, you will be good enough to hold your tongue. Mistress Jester,
can
you shed any light on the secret business in which your husband and brother-in-law seem to be engaged?”