Queen of Ambition (34 page)

I said: “You are making a brave new start. But it can’t be easy.”

“No.” Sybil sighed. “It is not. I have to endure the thought, all day and every day, that my husband has been taken away on a charge of treason, and his brother with him. I fled from Roland because I feared him and believed I hated him … but when I think of him in a cell, awaiting trial on such a charge, and with such a death beyond it …

“Believe me, I have cried for him, the silly, obsessed fool, and in time to come I foresee I shall cry still more. I have even cried for Giles Woodforde, and I really do hate
him
, for this is all his fault. On the day they die, the pie shop will be closed and I will pass their last hours in a church, praying for the solace of God for them and for me and for Ambrosia. I would rather stay in the place I know and keep myself occupied. The whispers
will
die out in time. And to have something to do,” said Sybil with forced cheerfulness, “can keep one from thinking too much.”

I had no idea what Dr. Barley’s house would be like. It turned out to be a cottage with a huge thatched roof
that seemed to weigh the walls down. The dormer windows of the upper story peered through the thatch rather than out of it. There was a small garden, front and back, not well kept, with straggling weeds among the gillyflowers and sunflowers and pansies. The herb patch alone was well tended. The place was already a scene of activity, with two carts outside being loaded with furniture, which was being brought down from the upper rooms.

“Barley’s kinsfolk,” Sybil said. “He left them the rest of his goods. The cottage itself belongs to Mistress Grantley and she wants all trace of him out of it as soon as may be. She is still angry with him even though he’s dead—for foisting a wicked runaway wife like me on to her! His man of business, who came to the pie shop to explain the terms of the will, told me about that. He was a tall, thin, solemn fellow and in sympathy with her, I think. He had the impertinence,” said Sybil with feeling, “to
preach
to me on wifely duty, and him a celibate! I told him to mind his own business.”

I laughed, liking her for her even temperament and her courage. For all her troubles, there was humor now and then in her deep-set dark eyes, a spark of mirth I had never seen in Ambrosia’s. Sybil responded to me with a smile. “One must not be crushed down. Or obsessed, either. That was the trouble with both Giles and Roland and also, I believe, with their mother before them. They would fasten on things, on people, and refuse to let go. Ambrosia has something of the same nature. I fear that life will never be easy for her.”

Her face became grave again. “She has decided to be angry with you, Mistress Blanchard, to blame you for Thomas’s death, and I am afraid that she will never change her mind. It would be best if you didn’t meet her again. She can’t help herself, I think. But I am not like that.”

“I have a conscience over Thomas’s death,” I said. “You can tell her that, if you like.”

“I will, but it will make no difference. She
knows
it wasn’t really your fault, you see. But she will not be reasonable. Just like her father.”

Barley’s housekeeper reminded me of Cecil’s nanny, although she was a couple of decades younger and much thinner—in fact, decidedly spry on her feet. I had sent Brockley cantering ahead to announce us and she came out to meet us as we pulled up at the gate.

“There’s a bit of common land with tethering posts at the back where the horses can go. We’ve got long tethers handy for visitors’ horses. So many of the doctor’s old pupils used to come riding to see him. Now, Mistress Smithson … no, it’s Mistress Jester, isn’t it, so Mistress Grantley says. I don’t understand why there’s been a muddle over your name, my dear, or what Mistress Grantley’s got against you, but there it is—not that we need worry. Dr. Barley liked you so I’ve no quarrel with you and Mistress Grantley’s not here. I just wanted to say that there’s food nearby. Got to give a bite to these as well,” she added, waving a hand at the hired men who were at that moment stacking bedsteads and presses behind a team of dozing oxen. “Come you in and take something, and then you can see about the books.”

“We’ve ordered a cart for tomorrow morning,” I said as I dismounted. “Today Mistress Jester wishes to see the books and pack them up in some sort of order.”

“Whatever you like, whatever you like. Packing them’ll take some time. Such a man for books, he was. I used to think if he got any more of them, he’d have a job to get to his bed between the piles on the floor!”

We didn’t see the books at first because our good hostess, whose name was Mistress Cottrell, was anxious to serve us with mutton pie and homemade elderflower wine. We had it in a cramped little parlor, while she trotted in and out with extras and talked incessantly about “poor Dr. Barley,” of whom she had obviously been very fond.

“Poor dear man, I can see him sitting at his desk now, pouring himself a glass of wine, or maybe I’d pour it for him. He used to be well looking as a young fellow, he told me, but to me he’ll always be little Dr. Barley with his bald head and his ring of white hair round it, and his nice pink face, though his physician said once his color was too high. So good-hearted, too, never short-tempered, and never said I was nagging, either, when I urged him to take his medicine regularly. I
did
the same thing for my poor late husband and he did complain that I nagged, though I meant it for the best. But the both of them would get that short of breath if they didn’t take their doses.”

“The steward who used to run my manor Withysham has a similar illness,” I remarked.

“Has he, dear? I kept Dr. Barley’s medicine up in his bedroom on the windowsill and I’d see he had it, every night, regular,” Mistress Cottrell said. “Nasty stuff it was, but it did some good, I think, right up to the last and then it failed him. I’ve thrown it out now.”

With the meal behind us, we were able to examine the books in Dr. Barley’s bedchamber and his study. Mistress Cottrell had exaggerated the number of them, but he really did have some piled on the floor of his bedchamber, probably because there were no shelves in the room. When she took us to his study though, we found some shelves there and they were all full. He had no doubt been collecting books throughout his life. Most were printed but we found two or three illuminated medieval manuscripts, which he had probably gone without meals and new clothes to afford.

The study was comfortable, evidently a place that he had loved, but it was even more cramped than the parlor, since the desk and the two well-cushioned chairs, not yet removed, were much too big for it and nearly filled it up. The shelves were fixed to a wall behind the desk and the only shelf space not occupied by reading matter was across the corner of the room, and held a wine flask, with glasses placed beside it.

“That’s red Rhône wine in that flask in front,” the housekeeper said, when she saw me looking at the shelf. “Oh, he liked his drop of wine. ‘Mistress Cottrell,’ he’d say to me, ‘I sometimes think my wine does
me more good than my medicine.’ But neither physic nor wine did him any good the day he was took ill, with throwing up like I’d never seen before.”

Mistress Cottrell, remembering, began to cry, and Sybil and I hastened to comfort her.

“He
did
like his drop of wine,” she said, sniffing. “He didn’t care for my elderflower, but Master Woodforde—well, he was Dr. Woodforde rightly, only somehow hardly anyone ever called him that—that was a friend of his from university, used to bring him fine wines from France and Italy and all over, to try every now and then. That Rhône wine that’s up there now, he brought that out here just the day before poor Dr. Barley died, and they drank of it together, here in this very room, using the desk as a table, just as they always did.”

“Woodforde was here the day before?” I asked in surprise.

“Why, yes, my dear. I was glad that Dr. Barley had had a chat with a friend for the last, and at least he didn’t have a long miserable illness and a deal of pain. Though the stairs were hard for him in his last months. He’d come down in the morning and haul himself up again at night and that was all. I’ve tried to think that it was all for the best.”

“Did they both drink the wine?” I asked.

“Oh yes!” Mistress Cottrell was pleased to talk about her ex-employer and saw nothing strange in my questions. “Master Woodforde brought a flask of it in his saddlebags, riding very slow, he said, not to jolt it, and the two of them sat here and drank it all. I poured for them my own self. Master Woodforde
stayed all afternoon and then left to go home. Poor Dr. Barley was took ill that night, and sadly sick, but seemed to be better by the morning. And then, later that day …”

Shaking her head in sorrow, the poor woman was completely overcome. Well, the wine could hardly have been poisoned, I thought, not if Woodforde had been sharing it himself. The moment Mistress Cottrell had spoken of Woodforde being there only the day before Dr. Barley died, I had come alert. If I had been a hound, my ears would have pricked. But the thought that had come into my head was horrible. Dr. Barley sounded such a pleasant and kindly soul and I couldn’t bear to think of him being another of the ruthless Woodforde’s victims.

For Woodforde might have had a motive. Woodforde could well have known that his niece was still writing to her former tutor and once he found out that Mistress Jester was visiting Barley, the possibility that she was in touch with her daughter would have been all too obvious. That wouldn’t have suited Master Woodforde at all. What if Ambrosia discovered that her mother was the woman who was to present the flowers to the queen—and was to be brought straight into the pie shop! Sybil had been Woodforde’s lever, his means of controlling his brother.

And he had not mentioned that he had seen Barley on the very day before the tutor’s death.

It seemed unlikely, though. He might have brought a vial of poison with him, but poisons are not as easy to come by as all that, unless one knows how to brew them from plants. I wondered if an academic like
Woodforde would know such things. Failing that, he would have to buy it from somewhere and apothecaries have a way of remembering sales of poisonous substances. No. Barley’s death had surely been fortuitous. God had called him. Woodforde must have been relieved. Perhaps he had thought it merely wise not to mention the time of his last visit, or perhaps, busy with his own machinations, he had simply forgotten exactly when his last visit was.

We set about packing the books. We had brought some sacks with us and we stowed the volumes into these, securing them firmly with twine, ready to be collected the next day. At last, we took our leave and rode back to Cambridge. I dismounted at the lodgings and parted with Sybil, who rode on with Brockley to Radley’s. In the entrance hall of the lodgings, I once more found Rob Henderson. He eyed me with a slight smile, which, however, was more malicious than friendly.

“I’ve been to the pie shop,” he informed me. “Following up something Mistress Jester told me this morning before you got here. She’d been questioning her daughter, it seems, about that odd remark that Woodforde made when we caught him—that if his plan had gone through, we would never have found him.”

“Oh?” I began to draw off my stiff, embroidered riding gloves, wondering why being a lady of position meant wearing such inconvenient objects in hot weather.

“Did you know there was another secret room in that place?”

“No. Is there? Where?”

“There’s a funny kink in the passageway downstairs, where the storeroom juts out, as it were. It’s misleading. It tricks the eye so that you don’t realize that the length of the passage between the store and the door of the kitchen is a good bit
too
long, even if you take the larder into account. At the back of one of the larder shelves there’s a knothole like the one that opens the hidden attic room. This one lets you into a space between the larder and the store. It’s a nasty little place; only about eight feet by four, with hardly any light and not much air, except from a few cracks up at the top of the pantry wall and chinks that were left on purpose in the brickwork. But it’s hidden enough.”

I remembered, when we crept into the pie shop after seeing that movement upstairs, that I had looked into the larder and seen that things had been moved about on one of the shelves. I remembered too, returning from that invented errand to buy peppers and mushrooms, and finding Roland Jester in the pantry, looking flustered. He had at once started shouting at me and saying that we had plenty of peppers and mushrooms, and flourishing them at me. But had he, perhaps, just been into the room behind the wall and was he afraid I had seen something odd?

“Sybil said that her father was truly terrified of being taken up for heresy,” I said slowly. “He had one line of defense after another. As we said about the ciphers—moat, walls, and keep.”

“Very likely. Well, that nasty little hole is where Woodforde, Jester, and Ambrosia hid when the house
was searched, after you and Wat escaped. And that was where Woodforde meant them all to hide after he’d shot Dudley. It’s got a table and bedding and buckets and candles in there, all ready, and they could have got food from the larder, of course. They’d have skulked there until things became quiet and they could slip out and get away by night. So at least,” said Rob, smiling at me with his teeth but not with his eyes, “I have managed to find out one thing that you didn’t discover, my dear Ursula.”

“Rob, don’t.”

Rob didn’t deign to answer, but as he turned to go upstairs, I said: “I know you’re worried about Mattie. Everyone who cares about her will be praying for her and the child, you know. I’m quite sure that …”

At the foot of the stairs, he paused and glanced back. “Have done with patronizing me, Ursula. I have no time for it. Oh, I nearly forgot. I am charged with a message for you from Cecil. Woodforde is pleading—demanding, almost!—to be allowed to see Lady Lennox. He wants a final meeting with the object of his passion, just as his brother had with Mistress Jester. When the court returns to London, his wish is to be granted. We shall both be allowed to eavesdrop on that most interesting meeting. I am very grateful to Cecil and to Dudley for their graciousness in permitting me to join you!”