Queen of Ambition (7 page)

On the side of the lane opposite the pie shop, the buildings were just cottages, small and solid and each in its own little garden, and not all the same size. The pie shop side, however, was quite different, consisting of a row of shops and houses, all adjoining and obviously all built at the same time. They were handsome affairs, with redbrick ground floors, overhanging timber and plaster stories above, and attics with dormer windows peeping out of the thatched roofs. Their architect had had a sense of style, for he had given them chimneys with decorative brickwork, and finished the line of buildings off at each end with four slender, faceted buttress towers, one at each corner. These were of redbrick as well, patterned to match the chimneys, with gray stone to pick out the facet edges, and ornamental crenellations on top.

The shops sold a variety of wares, and all of them had substantial living quarters above, with private side entrances beside the shopfronts. The pie shop itself was at the end of the lane, the last one before Silver Street, and had a walled garden that ran around it from front to back. Facing on to the lane was an open shopfront with a counter where passersby could purchase hot pies to take away. This was manned by a pink-faced lout with a bull’s voice, which he used for bellowing requests for fresh supplies back to the kitchen inside. Those who wished to sit down and eat indoors, though, could go around the end of the counter, give orders from their tables, and be waited on.

We studied the place and then Brockley looked at me inquiringly. “We go in,” I said.

It was dark inside, but clean enough, with fresh sawdust on the stone-flagged floor, and a partly open door at the rear, showing a glimpse of the kitchen beyond. Intriguingly, it also allowed us to hear that in the kitchen, a man was shouting and a girl was tearfully protesting, and as we seated ourselves at a rough table, some of the words clarified.

“… and I’m a-tellin’ you, Ambrosia, I’ve other plans for you and Thomas ain’t one of them.” The man’s East Anglian voice was aggrieved, almost shrill. “He’s not our sort and his family’ll say that, same as I do. They’re gentry even if they ain’t of the richest. We’re trade and the two don’t mix. If only your mother was here …”

“I wish she
was
here! She’d understand!” This was accompanied by a loud clatter as though the girl were rattling pots and spoons together in a fury.

“Aye, maybe she would at that! Come to think on it, your mother never did have the sense she was born with or know her own good luck when she had it. Maybe she
would
lead you on to make a fool of yourself! Well, I won’t! You’ll not leave this place without I say you can, and someone’ll allus go with you, till this here nonsense stops.”

“That’s not fair! That’s not right!”
Clatter! Crash!

“You’ll thank me one day, my girl! Once this business of the queen’s visit is over and done with, I’ll see Thomas never sets foot in here again. Now get out there and serve; I’ve heard someone come in or my name ain’t Roland Jester!”

“Mercy!” Dale whispered. “What a merry household.”

“It happens,” I told her. “You should have heard Uncle Herbert and Aunt Tabitha when they found out that there was something going on between me and young Master Gerald Blanchard, who was supposed to be marrying my cousin Mary. Roland Jester in there’s a dear little baa-lamb by comparison.”

“The girl is coming out,” muttered Brockley. “Quick, madam, talk of something else.”

“I wonder who did the carving on this settle,” I said clearly. I was facing Dale and Brockley across the table and although they were seated on a bench as rude as the table, I was on a settle with wooden arms that ended in heavy, carved lions’ heads. I fingered the mane of the lion immediately beside me and then withdrew my finger with a startled “Ouch!” and used my teeth to remove a splinter.

“They were all right when they were new but all our seats and tables are old now,” the girl said in a dull voice as she came up to us. “With the queen coming to visit Cambridge and all, we’re having new seats and tables made. Father thinks maybe courtiers might come in.” She didn’t sound as though she shared her father’s optimism. Even in the poor light, I could see that her hands were callused and chapped with work, and that her eyes were reddened; she walked as though bowed with depression. She had a dark stuff gown on with a stained white apron over it. “What’ll you eat and drink?”

I opened my mouth to ask what was on offer and then remembered that I was not here as Ursula Blanchard,
court lady, but as Ursula Faldene, cousin to Roger Brockley. I had decided to use my maiden name, in case Jester should happen to mention me to his half brother, and in case Giles Woodforde had heard my name at Richmond. I subsided and looked at Brockley, silently asking him to do the talking instead.

Brockley, therefore, inquired what was to be had. “We’ve got chicken and onion pasties,” said Ambrosia. “Or chicken pies without onion. The chicken was fresh-killed today. We don’t hang poultry in summer. We’ve got some of the mutton pie from yesterday left as well, and that’s all right, too. Or there’s bread and cheese, and radishes. With small ale or milk to drink.”

She rattled it all off efficiently, in an accent a little more educated than the man’s, but she sounded as though she had said it at least a hundred times that day and would probably be reciting it that night in her sleep. We settled for chicken pies, Brockley and Dale with onion and myself without, and small ale to go with it. Brockley gave her his best and pleasantest smile, and as though we had heard nothing of the quarrel, asked if she had worked there long.

“All my life. I’m Master Jester’s daughter,” she said, and whisked away.

“What an odd-looking girl,” whispered Dale.

“Yes, very unusual,” I agreed. She had been facing the light from the open front of the shop and I had seen her features as well as her hands and eyes. Ambrosia Jester had the kind of face that is ugly or attractive according to your personal taste. It was slightly squashed from brow to chin, as though someone had put her chin on a tabletop and then placed a
heavy weight on top of her head. Her lips were a fraction too thick, her nostrils a fraction too splayed, and her dark eyes were deep-set under brows that swept dramatically upward at the outer corners.

Yet it was a face with character and even passion, and judging from her father’s strictures, she had found a focus for that passion. She was no clod—and her indignant parent, whatever Cecil might say about his style as a correspondent, hadn’t sounded like a bore. That word didn’t fit Master Jester, any more than it fitted Giles Woodforde, whose impassioned outburst I had witnessed in the corridor at Richmond.

“This family,” I remarked, “begins to look interesting.”

“You mean to go through with this?” Brockley asked me.

“I think I must. We’re not going to find out very much just by sitting here and eating their pies. I’ve got to get right inside the place.”

“Are you sure, madam? After all, I understand the scheme was started by the students and has been taken up by this man Giles Woodforde, who is inside the university.”

“But it will involve this shop,” I said. “I’m leaving Woodforde and the students to Henderson, because he can roam round the university more easily than I can. But the shop must be investigated, too. I’m going to try.”

Our food and drink arrived, brought this time by a different girl, a skinny young one with timid blue eyes and pale hair trailing like wisps of straw from under her cap, and we stopped talking until she had gone.
Then I said: “I can’t think of any other way of finding out anything at all! I know you won’t be far away.”

“I certainly will not!” said Brockley. “I wish, madam, that you wouldn’t rush into these things so eagerly. You always say that you will be all right, that you won’t court danger, but …”

“I know, Brockley. I’m sorry.”

I smiled at him, my dear, reliable Brockley, with his gold-freckled skin and his level gray-blue eyes. Like his wife, Fran, he was in his late forties, and his wiry brown hair was now receding fast and streaked with gray. But he was, as ever, reassuringly solid in build and his calm voice with its trace of country accent never changed. The hands that were now breaking up his pie were the strong, steady hands of a horseman. Before entering my employment, he had been a groom and in the past, for a time, he had been a soldier. He smiled back at me and I saw Dale glance quickly from him to me and then look down at her food, and secretly, I sighed.

Brockley and I were not just employer and servant; we were also friends and colleagues. Once, during a terrifying night we had spent shut in the same dungeon, we had come perilously close to becoming lovers. We had not yielded, but nevertheless, somehow or other, Dale was aware of the attraction between us. Just as Mattie Henderson was aware that for all his charm and good looks, I had no desire for Rob Henderson, nor he for me.

That awareness was why I had made such a point of explaining to Fran that when Brockley and I talked so earnestly as we rode toward Cambridge, we had only
been discussing plans about the pie shop, and it was also the reason why she had been so sour about Rob Henderson going off to Cambridge and leaving his wife behind. She had been saying to me, in cipher as it were:
I feel that there is something between you and Roger that leaves me out in the cold
.

I said: “It’s a great relief to me that you will both be at hand. That is, assuming that we manage to arrange what we’ve come to arrange. Brockley … ?”

Brockley rose and went to the kitchen door. He called, and the girl Ambrosia appeared again, this time with a floury rolling pin in her hand. Brockley spoke to her quietly. She glanced quickly past him to look at me, and then disappeared into the back regions. Brockley returned to our table and a few moments later, a man came out into the shop. I saw at once that he could very well be related to Giles Woodforde. He was bigger, but he had the same oddly nondescript air about him. Five minutes after parting from him, you would be hard put to it to remember the color of his eyes or the shape of his face.

“This is the owner of the shop,” Brockley said to me, not quite in his usual respectful tones. “His name is Master Jester. Master Jester, this is my cousin, Mistress Ursula Faldene. She is in need of respectable employment …”

Life in Jester’s Pie Shop was hell.

It was nearly as bad, I thought bitterly, as I crawled out of bed at half past four after my third night there, as life at Faldene House had been, when I lived there on sufferance with Uncle Herbert and Aunt Tabitha, never knowing from one moment to the next when my aunt or uncle would decide I had said something impertinent or failed to perform a task quickly or adequately enough, with painful results. Looking back, I wonder now if I encouraged, not to say seduced, Gerald Blanchard, my cousin Mary’s betrothed, because he was a way of escape.

On the face of it, of course, I could have walked out of the pie shop at will, since I was there under false pretenses. Brockley had told Jester that he and his wife, Fran, were taking service in Cambridge, but that he wished to look after his widowed cousin Ursula and had, therefore, brought her to Cambridge
as well and was seeking a good live-in post for her. It had occurred to him, said Brockley, exuding flattery, that Cambridge was about to become very busy and perhaps such a flourishing business as the pie shop might want an extra hand. Oh yes, his cousin Ursula could cook!

Fortunately, this was true though I had come to it comparatively late. I didn’t learn much about cooking at Faldene, because while my mother still lived she had resolutely defended me from my aunt’s attempts to turn me into a kitchen maid, and made sure I was educated. Later, Uncle Herbert found my education useful, since he could make me into an unpaid clerk, to keep his accounts. But I had picked up a good deal of culinary lore once I was married to Gerald and again when I became mistress of Blanchepierre. I could act the part required.

And act it I must. The freedom to walk out was a privilege I could not use. I was here for a purpose and to achieve it, I had to put up with whatever the pie shop demanded of me and whatever Master Jester chose to throw at me: accusations of impertinence, wooden platters, or blows. In referring to him as a baa-lamb in comparison to my uncle, I had been horribly wrong. Jester and Uncle Herbert were kindred spirits.

Above the pie shop, I shared not only a room but also a bed with Ambrosia and the thin maidservant Phoebe. We rose at half past four, washed faces and hands in cold water, scrambled into our clothes (mine were all commandeered from Dale), and sped down to the kitchen to break our fast with whatever rolls were left over from the day before, smeared with dripping
and washed down with small ale, swallowing it all as best we could while simultaneously starting the bread oven, rousing up the fire, and putting the giant stockpot on to heat.

Then Phoebe would uncover the basins of dough that had been made the night before for today’s bread and pastry, and start shaping and rolling. I, however, had been given a different job. Jester, who to be fair to him was always down before time, and Wat, the pink-faced lout who manned the street counter, and slept beside the fuel store on the ground floor, would soon be busy killing the day’s supply of poultry. Master Jester, it appeared, set great store by the excellence of his ingredients. He had many regular customers, including some who did not come to the shop but had pies delivered to them, and he intended, he said, to keep their goodwill. He bought only a limited amount of meat from butchers, especially during the summer months. There was a fenced run in the back garden where he kept a dozen ducks and hens for eggs, along with the birds that were regularly bought live on market days and slaughtered as required. As Ambrosia had told us, during the summer he did not even let the birds hang.

Jester bought what he could get—capons, ducks, geese, or wildfowl brought in by fowlers from the fens—and mixed the meats if need be. I had to help Wat pluck and draw the birds and cut them up for the pot. “He never gets ’em done quick enough. Needs another pair of hands,” Jester had told me. “I was thinkin’ to get someone else, with the extra custom there’ll be while the queen’s in the city. Ambrosia’s got
the fowls to feed and the eggs to collect and the sawdust to spread and I’ve got the marketing to do. You’ve come as a bit of luck.”