Queen of Ambition (32 page)

“There’s no one on this floor. Come on. Upstairs. Quickly, now.”

We crept up toward the attic. Rob went first, followed by Dodd and Ryder. I came next, and then Brockley, who had indicated to me in sign language that he wished to bring up the rear, presumably to protect me from anyone who might creep out of a hiding place we hadn’t found, and attack from behind. We had all kept our shoes on but the hubbub from outside completely drowned any sounds we might make. At the top of the stairs, where they emerged into Jester’s study, Rob halted. Ryder and Dodd were hard on his
heels. I was still one step down but by standing on tiptoe and craning my neck I could just see into the room.

We were in full view of its occupants, had any of them looked around but none of them had. Ambrosia was sitting by the desk, her face turned away from us and her eyes fixed on her father. The sunlight, slanting through the dormer window, touched her cheekbones and I could see that although her face was apparently in repose, tears were flowing steadily down it. Her father was standing by the window, staring out of it, riveted, it seemed, by the scene below, while Woodforde, leaning across the lidded settle, was opening one of the casements. On the floor beside him, for some reason, was a lit candle in a holder.

There was a fresh surge of noise below and some laughter, and the voice of Francis Morland floated up.
Your most gracious Majesty, light of our firmament and guiding star that shines through the leaves of the forest … the bright eyes of fair ladies … heed our pleas and let us take Your Majesty’s handmaiden Mistress Smithson away with us as a keepsake
…

Laughter, shouts, the clash—in slow and stylized time—of swords. Then Woodforde stooped and from the top of the lidded chest he snatched up something that was lying there, hidden from us by his body. As he leaned across to the window again, I saw that what he was holding was a musket.

I had time to think: of course, a musket. Brockley had found out that in the Lennox household, Woodforde had joined in military training, and in Cambridge, he kept his eye in by practicing with the cross-bow.
The candle was there to provide the necessary flame. The ball would strike Dudley, but for a moment no one would realize what had happened. The report would probably be lost in the excited hubbub of the crowd, and though Woodforde could hardly have planned for it, the blood from the wound would be scarcely visible on Dudley’s crimson garments. When he fell, everyone would think he had been wounded by accident in the mock duel. There would be confusion and a gap of time before anyone knew what had happened, before men came to search the houses. Ample time for the musketeer to escape into the secret room and the cupboard entrance to the tower.

Except that the room and the tower stairs weren’t secret anymore! Woodforde and Jester must be completely insane….

Then everything erupted at once. Rob muttered: “Hold the stairs!” to Dodd and then he and Ryder leaped forward, just as Ambrosia turned, saw us, and screamed, and her father spun around. Woodforde, ignoring them, was thrusting the muzzle of his weapon through the open casement and had caught his candle up. Ambrosia sprang up, apparently to rush to her uncle and drag him back. Rob and Ryder collided with her and the three of them clutched at one another as if in some demented dance. Rob let out a stream of curses. Jester, though he was staring at us all in white-faced horror, did not move.

Woodforde fired.

Or tried to. But there was no puff of smoke, and I saw him try again, and then fling the musket down on
the floor in a rage. He shook impotent fists at it and sank onto the settle, his face blank, his fists clenching and unclenching.

Ryder jumped back and Rob, throwing Ambrosia off him, shoved her roughly down onto her seat again. “Women! Always where you’re not wanted!” The happy racket outside rose to a chorus of laughter and cheers and then subsided.

“There ain’t no need for alarm, anyone,” said Jester in a tense, high voice. “I made sure the gun wouldn’t work. It was too big a risk. I damped the powder. Did it yesterday and made sure again a half hour since. I’m not putting my neck in the noose for you, Giles. Ambrosia told me that my wife was goin’ to present the flowers and she was callin’ herself Mistress Smithson. You know that. Well, I worked it out in the end, though I grant you it took me too long. I reckoned that surely I could find out for myself where a Mistress Smithson, so-called, was living, even if she never did present any flowers. I just wish I’d seen it sooner. But I saw it in time to make sure that damned hackbut wouldn’t fire, all the same.”

“You damped my powder?
You … ?
” said Woodforde in a bewildered voice.

“
Father!
” sobbed Ambrosia. I went to her, avoiding Rob’s angry eyes. He turned his rage on the two miscreants by the window.

“As for you, Master Jester and Master Woodforde, both your necks are in the noose … believe me … oh no, you don’t … !”

As if impelled by a single brain, Woodforde and
Jester had both flung themselves toward the stairs, where Dodd was blocking the way as ordered. Brockley at once appeared beside him. Jester raised a fist and Woodforde snatched out his dagger but Rob and Ryder were hard behind them and this time reached their target. Rob seized Woodforde’s arms from the rear, while Ryder’s forearm went around Jester’s neck. Brockley sprang to lend a hand and the two captives were dragged, struggling, back into the room.

Dodd, running to the window, whistled sharply out of it before he too joined in the scrimmage. In moments, guards’ feet were clattering upward but by the time they arrived, Woodforde and Jester were already facedown with their noses crushed against the floor and heavy knees pressing into their backs and necks. When they were finally allowed to get up, the guards were standing around them, pikes at the ready. All chance of escape was gone. Deftly, their hands were bound and they were thrust side by side onto the settle.

“And there you will wait until Her Majesty has gone on to Queens’ and her reception there, and we can remove you without occasioning comment,” Rob said coldly.

“It isn’t fair! They haven’t done anything!” Ambrosia wailed. I patted her shoulder uselessly, but she shook my hand off. “You can’t take my father away!”

“There has been a plot,” said Rob, “to assassinate Sir Robert Dudley. We understand, Master Woodforde, that your motive is to please Lady Lennox, who fears that Dudley may marry Mary of Scotland when she wants her own son to become that happy bridegroom.”
Woodforde gaped at him. “Oh yes,” said Rob, enjoying his triumph after that moment of embarrassing muddle. “We know all about it!”

“But my father
stopped
it!” Ambrosia shrieked. “You saw what happened. He stopped it!”

“Only because he no longer needed it to earn his reward,” Rob told her savagely. “The reward was to have been Mistress Jester, brought back into this house and into his hands, was it not?”

“I was going to stop it anyway!” Jester shouted.

“Were you?” I asked him. “Your brother was bribing you to help him by promising to restore your wife to you. I fancy you meant to cooperate—because at that time, you didn’t know where she was or how she would be restored. Once you knew that your wife and Mistress Smithson were the same person, and you had had time to think about it, you saw that you no longer needed your brother’s help to find her.”

“I wanted her back! I can’t go on without her. Doesn’t anyone understand? She’s
mine
!” Jester almost howled.

“You can’t do this! You can’t! My father
stopped
it, he
stopped
it; you can’t say he didn’t! Don’t take my father away!” Ambrosia was nearly hysterical and this time when I made another attempt to put a calming hand on her, she struck out so fiercely that I stumbled aside and was caught by Brockley.

“You must have been crazy to try to go on with it,” I said angrily to Woodforde. “After Wat and I had escaped, you must have known that we would report everything to the authorities—including the news of your secret room. If that gun had fired, this house
would have been the first to be searched, secret room, tower stairs, and all.”

“You don’t know everything,” Woodforde informed me. “You’re not as clever as you think, though you’re too clever to be decent for a woman. We’d none of us have been found.”

“My father
stopped
it! He damped the gunpowder!” Ambrosia wailed persistently.

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I wanted to say to Rob:
But he did damp the powder. Surely it may count as mitigation
. But I couldn’t say that. I had stood in the chapel of King’s College and looked down on the face of Thomas Shawe, dead before his time and Thomas Shawe’s blood cried out for justice.

“Rob,” I said. “There is something more.”

“And what might that be?” Rob’s tone was slightly acid. I could understand. Dudley’s life had been saved by Jester, not by Rob, who had collided with Ambrosia before he could get to the would-be assassin and I had seen it happen.

“In the cupboard—the one that leads into the tower—there’s a tall earthenware ewer lying on its side. Inside it, there’s a bundle wrapped in linen. I found it. I looked at it and then put it back…. I would like to fetch it now and show it to you. You may think it important.”

Rob stared at me. Then he saw Jester’s face. It had been pale before but now it was as blanched as death, and his lips were shaking. Rob considered him curiously and then nodded to me. “By all means, if you wish. The door of the cupboard is unlocked and unbolted, by the way. We came through from the
tower when we searched on Thursday, and undid the bolts.”

I was not sure if I could open the door from the attic to the secret room but it would have been in such bad taste to make Ambrosia do it that I tried on my own. It turned out to be one of those things that is easy once you understand how it works. The knothole was obvious if you knew it was significant. I put my thumb in and pushed; the opening appeared, and I put in my hand to use the latch. I went in.

As Rob had said, the cupboard was unlocked. I found the bundle where I had left it. I don’t like to remember Jester’s eyes when I came back and he saw it in my hands. I put the bundle down on the desk and opened it, and the settle arm, with its bloodstained lion head, lay revealed.

“What’s this?” Rob asked.

“I think,” I said, “that it’s the weapon that killed Thomas Shawe. There are hairs stuck to it, caught in the blood, and unless I am very much mistaken, they are his. His hair was that same brassy color.”

“But who … ?” Rob picked up the evidence and examined it, holding it to the light. “I understood, Ursula, that it was impossible for either Woodforde here, or for Jester, to have killed Master Shawe.”

“No,” I said. “We all supposed that he was killed after five o’clock in the morning, and at five o’clock, Woodforde was in his rooms—I think that is true and that his former manservant is not concerned in thisand Master Jester was here.

“But all that rests on the testimony of the groom, Jem, at Radley’s. He arrives at the stable before Radley
himself does in the morning and he said he saw Thomas ride out at his usual time, which was at about five. But I fancy that his master, Radley, was by when he said that. I spoke to him yesterday, however, without Radley overhearing. Jem was forever in trouble for being late and if Radley finds out, he beats him for it. He wouldn’t admit in Radley’s presence that he’d been late that day. He admitted it to me, though, once I had promised him that I wouldn’t tell Radley—and why knowing the truth mattered.”

“I expect you bribed him to say whatever you wanted him to say!” shouted Jester.

“No,” I said. “Though I would like him to be rewarded now.” I had in fact, bullied Jem considerably but I had felt it wiser that no money should change hands. “Thomas took the mare out before Jem got there. So Thomas could have ridden out much earlier. I rather think he did.”

Hardening my heart, I turned to the trembling Jester.

“I think you met him in the grove, Master Jester. How did you get him there? He would hardly have gone to a tryst with you! Did you use Ambrosia’s name instead? Not that it matters. You got him there. You took a weapon wrapped in an old shirt so that if anyone saw you, you were only carrying a harmless roll of linen. But not many people are about so early; I daresay no one saw you who knew you. You went out by way of the secret room and the tower, and when you’d killed him, you came back by the same route, slipped in through the side gate, came up through the tower, and there you were in the house, upstairs, able to come innocently down them just before five of the clock. Am I right?”

“What is all this?” Ambrosia cried out. “Ursula, what are you talking about? Are you saying that Thomas was murdered? Are you saying that my father did it? How dare you? It isn’t true; it can’t be true! Thomas and I were going to be married. Father, you didn’t, you couldn’t … !”

“Just what did Thomas know that was so dangerous?” I asked Jester. “And how did you know he had arranged to talk to me about it?”

“
Father!
” Ambrosia shrieked. “Say it isn’t true! If it is, I hope … yes, I hope you hang! I mean it! Thomas and I … Thomas and I … !”

“Hold your noise, girl! If you’d been a good, dutiful, obedient daughter, it wouldn’t have happened. If Thomas is dead, it’s your own fault! Your fine young lover would have been my death and your uncle’s!”

Woodforde, who had been listening with the air of one who can hardly believe his ears, at this point shouted: “Roland, be quiet!” but it was as though Jester and Ambrosia, lost in the passion of their private quarrel, had completely forgotten the rest of us.

“I come up here one day and I find you’ve got that Thomas up here for lovemakin’ an’ kissin’ and I ordered you downstairs and I was tellin’ him what I thought of him and what happens? He’s grinnin’ at me and sayin’ he’ll have you to wife whatever your father may say …”

“Why shouldn’t he?” Ambrosia was sobbing out loud. “Why shouldn’t we have married? Why not? Why
not
?”

“ … an’ he’s fidgetin’ about with my things and he opens the lid of that chest there and says,
What’s this
?
and picks that old musket out of it that we thought we could store there safe enough …”