Queen of Ambition (8 page)

When Wat and I had finished, the pieces went into a cauldron with some ladlefuls of stock, to be stewed slowly till they were tender. Then the meat could be stripped from the bone, cut small, and mixed with mushrooms, oatmeal, onions, and spices to make pie fillings. When Jester did buy from butchers, he usually purchased sheep or pig carcasses, and these were similarly prepared. He never bought beef. It was twice the price of mutton and, therefore, too expensive.

We had to toil hard but it could have been companionable if we could have worked together in a friendly fashion. Alas, instead of amiable cooperation, we had Roland Jester continually finding fault in the shrill, aggrieved voice that went so ill with his big physique.

“Phoebe, what’re you doin’ with that dough? Get the loaves into the oven for the love of God; we’ll have the customers poundin’ at the shutters afore long. Hurry
up
, girl, or I’ll be after you with a stick, I will. Ambrosia, take that basket of eggs to the pantry afore someone knocks ’em clean off the shelf! Ain’t them fowl drawn yet? What are they—freaks? They got twice as much inside ’em as ordinary fowl? You’ve not got time to stand still and eat, Wat. Leave off guzzlin’ that roll and get busy with the cleaver … and don’t answer me back, you great loon; I’ll give you
I’m working as fast as I can, Master Jester!
” And with that, Roland Jester’s callused palm would crack against the back of Wat’s head.

The most frequent victim was Wat, because he was
the only one who deliberately answered back. Wat himself paid these onslaughts little heed, because he was so hefty that he merely shook his head when Jester’s palm landed, as though to discourage a bluebottle.

For all his loutish appearance, though, Wat had a chivalrous streak. Once or twice, Jester had hit him for stepping in the way with a disapproving, broad Norfolk: “Aisy naow, aisy!” when the real target was Phoebe. Phoebe, who could be no more than fourteen, was too timid to do any answering back, but she was sometimes awkward and often drew Jester’s ire by dropping things or clattering them.

Wat seemed shy of me and so far I hadn’t had anything like a conversation with him; indeed, because his accent was so broad, I found it hard to understand him. All the same, he had twice come wordlessly to help me haul the insides out of a difficult bird.

However, he wasn’t always there to interfere on Phoebe’s behalf and as yet hadn’t actually tried to defend me from Jester, though I would have been grateful if he had. I was deft enough and I tried to be respectful, but I seemed to have a positive knack of inadvertently saying things that Jester considered impertinent. Phoebe and I were both liable at times to find ourselves ducking a hurled platter or seeing stars as Jester’s powerful palm sent one or the other of us reeling across the kitchen.

He didn’t, I noticed, hit Ambrosia or throw things at her. When one morning her father actually knocked me flat on the kitchen floor, Ambrosia picked me up and since Jester had by then marched out of the room, she
explained, in apologetic tones, why she was exempt.

“I have to give orders when he’s not here and he thinks I’ll be respected more if the rest of you don’t see him knocking me about, so most of the time he doesn’t—though it happens now and again. He used to treat my mother very badly, though. I hope you’re not much hurt. Sit here for a moment.”

She helped me to a stool. A wave of her heavy dark brown hair slid free of her headdress as she did so. Ambrosia had beautiful hair, although no one ever saw much of it because her father made her wear very concealing caps. I opened my mouth to ask her how long it was since her mother left, but my throbbing head managed, just in time, to remind me that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about the household. Instead, I said: “Is your mother dead? How old were you when you lost her?”

“She isn’t dead,” said Ambrosia. “She ran away five years ago. I miss her but I don’t blame her for going. My father cried after she went—sat and sobbed, if you can believe it—but he’d made her life a misery and that’s a fact.”

Roland Jester certainly made his servants’ lives a misery. It was no better once we started serving customers. We were hurried and harried every moment, constantly urged to produce pies more quickly, although it was a mystery to me how we were supposed to make the oven bake pastry faster. The time that Jester knocked me down, it was for saying so. I was too used to speaking my mind, I suppose, and couldn’t get out of the habit.

Time and again—because the simple fact that I was
not really Master Jester’s helpless employee meant that his blows made me more furious than frightened—I yearned to storm out of that hateful shop and send Roger Brockley or Rob Henderson (or better still, both of them together) around to have a few words with its proprietor. I had fantasies of the two of them putting him in bed for a week. Meanwhile, I strove to suppress my fury and endure. The days were passing and what, so far, had I found out? I had tried my best and until now I had achieved next to nothing.

My efforts in the last three days had included trying to eavesdrop when Master Jester talked to anyone—his daughter, his customers, or his neighbors. We had no neighbor on the Silver Street side of the pie shop, of course, but the adjoining house on the other side was occupied by a Master Brady, a bronzesmith who had separate business premises elsewhere, and his wife and family. So far, this had revealed such breathless secrets as the fact that the weather was very warm, that the prospects for the wheat harvest were good, and that students were an unruly breed.

I had also tried to pump Master Jester by asking artless questions. When he bothered to answer me, which wasn’t always, his replies were just as unhelpful. Yes, of course, he was looking forward to the royal visit. He was a loyal subject of the queen and hoped that her presence in Cambridge would bring in business. It was an honor for the shop to be involved in this playlet that the students and his half brother had concocted. A blank sheet of paper would have told me more.

Rob Henderson had furnished me with the names of the students involved in the playlet. So far, they had
come to the pie shop only once. This was a lively occasion because they broke off in the middle of their meal to rehearse the sword fight for the playlet, with one of them pretending to be Dudley. They did it in slow, stylized fashion, but I had with some amusement watched Master Jester snatching tankards off tables, out of the way of the sticks they were using instead of actual swords, and listened while a young man called Thomas Shawe, who had an engaging grin and an extraordinary head of hair, which was neither fair nor red but was the color of slightly dulled brass, kept insisting that the boy who was taking Dudley’s part must turn
this
way, not that, “or the public won’t see properly and Master Woodforde says we’ve to give a proper show.”

I understood that Dudley had been told of the moves and would have studied them in advance and that when he reached Cambridge, there would be a further rehearsal with him but probably only one, for lack of time. I wondered if the Master of the Queen’s Horse realized how very amateurish the whole affair was going to be.

I had also gathered from Ambrosia that Shawe was the Thomas she was in love with, and that he was the one who had actually thought of the original rag. She told me about him by way of explaining why her father wouldn’t let her serve at the tables when he was in the shop.

“We want to marry but Father was so angry when he found out. He won’t hear of it. Maybe you overheard him shouting at me about it the time you first came into the shop.”

“I did hear something, yes,” I admitted.

“And it’s not just that I’m trade and Thomas isn’t,” she said resentfully. “Father just doesn’t want to lose me. I work hard and he doesn’t have to pay me. He’ll stop me marrying at all if he can.”

“Oh, my dear!” I said, suddenly very sorry for her indeed, and conscious that I was at least ten years older than she was and had had two husbands. I felt I ought to be able to advise her, but couldn’t think how.

Unexpectedly, however, she said: “I understand him, in a way. We’re not hard up—far from it—but he was poor as a boy and he’ll be tight with money all his life. And he’s not good at … at”—she frowned, as though she had never sought words for this before and was finding it difficult—“at impressing people, making them do what he wants, so he shouts and hits out. I sometimes feel I ought to stay with him to look after him. He’s my father, after all.” She saw the sympathy in my face and added: “When I was younger, Uncle Giles—he’s my father’s half brother; he teaches at the university nowadays—urged Father to get a tutor for me so that I could be educated, and Father agreed, though I think my uncle helped with the fees. I had a good tutor, too. Dr. Barley, his name was. He taught me Latin, though with Greek I never got much further than the alphabet …”

Just like me, I thought, but remembered in time not to say so. Such accomplishments would seem very odd in a hired cookmaid.

“Dr. Barley is old and retired,” Ambrosia said, with affection in her voice, “but before he left he told me to keep up the Latin he taught me, and Father lets me read a little most afternoons when we all have some
time off. That’s because the university insists on the shop being closed, if the students are to come here. Did you know that was the reason?”

“Yes. Master Jester explained that. I can understand your liking for books,” I said, thinking with sudden wistfulness of Withysham, and those peaceful hours of reading with Meg.

“My father wants me to be happy, really,” Ambrosia said earnestly. “But he wants the business to prosper, too, and to feel safe from poverty.”

It wasn’t my business. The Jesters weren’t my family. I said no more.

On the day when the students came in, Phoebe and I were told to serve them and I tried to seize the chance to talk to them, but Jester caught me wasting time, as he put it, and promised me a drastic beating with a wooden ladle if I did it again. When I told him that my cousin Roger would half kill him if he did, he laughed.

“Masters have rights over servants. Your cousin’s a servant hisself and he knows,” he told me.

One day, I said grimly to myself as I went down the steep wooden stairs on that third morning, one day, please God, may I see Master Jester weeping at my feet and begging my pardon.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs, unexpected noises of thumps and bumps and male expletives reached my ears. I started interestedly toward them, rounded an awkward corner where the passageway bent and narrowed, and almost collided with Phoebe as she emerged from the storeroom with a pile of aprons. The living quarters of the pie shop were neatly enough arranged above stairs, where the bedchambers
and parlor were, but on the ground floor, the storeroom, which housed the linen and some odd pieces of furniture—Jester put extra tables in the shop at busy seasons—had apparently been pushed in as an afterthought between pantry and stairs. It stuck out into the passage and people were forever bumping into each other at that corner. Whoever had designed the building had been less than perfect at his job.

This time, having edged around Phoebe, I discovered Wat and Jester crossing the passage between the shop and the kitchen and carrying one of the benches from the shop between them. They disappeared through the kitchen, Wat walking backward and being exhorted not to knock into things, and I heard the door to the backyard being kicked open.

Investigating further, I found that early though it was, a cartload of new tables and settles, elaborately carved with leaves and fruit, was being brought in, while the old furniture was being carried out, and that a carpenter was also busy putting up a screen to shield customers in the shop from a view of the kitchen.

“If great folk from the court come in,” said Wat, reappearing in the shop, “we ’on’t want ’em able to look across the passage right to where the cookin’ goes on. They’ll want to eat their pies, Maister says, not watch the maids rollin’ pastry and stirrin’ the cauldrons.”

“No more they will,” snapped Jester, stumping back into the shop. “And they’ll want decent benches to sit on, not ones that put splinters in their fingers. I’ll chop the old stuff up for firewood this very day; useful, that’ll be. What you gawpin’ at, Mistress Ursula? Sometimes you act as if you thought you were a fine lady instead of
a cookmaid. Get back inside and start seein’ to they fowl. We got three customers want pies delivered in time for dinner, an’ when I promise to send things round in time, I mean in time!” He sounded thoroughly irritable. I went to work in a hurry.

Sometime later, when I had my hand inside a chicken, trying to get a grip on what seemed to be extraordinarily well-anchored innards, Jester came into the kitchen and said shortly: “You and Phoebe’ll do all the servin’ again this mornin’. One o’ they students just came by and they’d all be in again afore noon today an’ I ’on’t have Ambrosia out there when that fellow Shawe’s there. You hear that, Ambrosia? You’ll stop in the kitchen.”

Ambrosia, who was by the fire, stirring a pan of stock with a long-handled spoon, nodded without speaking.

I did not speak either, but I was thinking quickly. Today I would have another chance to talk to the students. Somehow or other, whatever Jester did to me, I
must
make use of it.

Time was pressing. The queen would be here in little more than a week. I knew now that Jester wouldn’t tolerate gossip, so there was no question of casually talking to the students, winning their confidence, and dropping a few well-chosen questions in. This was not a prey that could be stalked with too much caution. This time, the huntress must show herself and hope to start the quarry out of covert.

“ … and if you muddle your lines again, young Morland,” the metallic-haired Thomas Shawe said, swallowing a mouthful of chicken pie and banging ominously on the top of one of the brandnew tables with the hilt of his meat knife, “one of us will do it instead. The name of the lady who is presenting the flowers is Mistress Smithson—
Smithson
, not Smitherson—and your first words are
Your most gracious majesty
, not
Your m … m … most glori-gracious majesty
. You look right for the part but what use is that if you stammer?
Why
do you stammer?
I
don’t stammer!” He certainly didn’t. Thomas’s voice was as resonant and unhesitating as though he had spent his life as a strolling player. He waved impatiently toward me as I was handing a supply of pies to Wat at the street counter. “More bread, my wench! Francis Morland’s got to feed his brain!”