The Midsummer Crown (26 page)

Before I was able to make any rejoinder, however, the door to the ante-room opened and the page ushered in Godfrey and Lewis Fitzalan. Neither appeared to be in a very good humour.

‘What's all this about?' the former demanded truculently, addressing me and ignoring Timothy. ‘Lewis and I have told you everything we know concerning our nephew's disappearance, chapman.' I noticed wryly that I was no longer worthy of the courtesy of ‘Master'. ‘The Protector has work for us to do. We can ill be spared at this present.'

His twin nodded in agreement.

Timothy rose majestically to his feet. In spite of his lack of inches, he could impose his presence on a room when he was so minded.

‘I think you'll find, sirs,' he said, ‘that His Grace regards your nephew's abduction as a serious matter, and one which he is very anxious to have resolved. He'll be extremely displeased, take it from me, if you fail to give Master Chapman –' was there the faintest emphasis on my title? – ‘all the help he needs.'

Godfrey flushed angrily and Lewis looked resentful, but they nevertheless stood aside respectfully for the spymaster to leave the room, which he did with magnificent aplomb. Fortunately, neither noticed the wink he gave as he passed me.

‘Well, master,' Godfrey asked impatiently as the door closed behind Timothy, ‘what do you want to know?'

‘I want to ask if either one of you can think of anything – anything at all, however trivial – that might account for Gideon having been taken? Ransom is clearly not the reason, therefore why him? Whoever snatched him was prepared to go to the length of killing the person he was with in order to make certain of his abduction.'

The brothers seemed somewhat taken aback by this request, but after a moment or two, when I thought they were going to laugh it to scorn, they relented and gave it their serious consideration. In other words, they hummed and hawed a lot and screwed up their faces to give the impression that they were doing a deal of thinking, but all without any result. I don't really know that I had expected any, but there had always been a faint chance that one of them might dredge up something, some little known, half-forgotten fact, from the depths of memory.

It was a forlorn hope.

‘The truth is that neither of us had much to do with Gideon,' Lewis admitted at last.

‘Better acquainted with his brothers,' Godfrey added.

‘Although not much,' his twin amended. ‘Oddly enough, we've no children of our own, but our five brothers more than make up for our lack. We've a whole flock of nephews, Master Chapman –' he was careful to address me formally, but there was a derisive gleam in his eyes – ‘and keeping track of them all is difficult.'

Godfrey nodded his agreement. ‘You'd do much better to talk to Bevis or young Blaise. They're the two of Pomfret's brood nearest to Gideon in age.'

‘Unfortunately,' I said, ‘they are no longer at Baynard's Castle. They've gone to attend upon the king in the royal apartments at the Tower.'

‘Surely there's no problem with that,' Lewis protested. ‘You seem to have the ear of the duke, or at least of that pompous little spymaster of his. I've no doubt you could obtain the necessary authorization to speak to the boys if you wanted to.'

This had already occurred to me, and as it was obvious that I should get nothing from the twins of any value – indeed, it had been plain from the start that they knew of nothing that could help me – I let them go and went to seek out Timothy. He, however, had vanished to attend to business of his own, and my request to other ducal officials for a word with the Lord Protector was treated with scorn. It was the lawyer, William Catesby, last seen by me (although he did not know it) in a house in Old Dean's Lane, who came to my rescue. Overhearing yet another of my pleas to an over-officious lackey, he took me in charge.

‘Come with me, Master Chapman. I know who you are and I know that His Grace will wish to see you.'

I was unaware of it at the time, but I later learned that this unassuming man had just been made Chancellor of the Earldom of March, but I should never have guessed it from his demeanour. His quiet friendliness was in stark contrast to the brusque treatment I had suffered at the hands of inferiors. Within a very short space of time, I was being ushered once again into the duke's presence.

He came forward to greet me, hand outstretched, and as I knelt to kiss it, I was conscious of an air of suppressed excitement about him. Looking up into his face, I noticed a glitter in his eyes that I could not remember ever having seen before. He had lost his usual pallor and seemed suddenly taller. In spite of his lack of height, he dominated the room.

‘Roger! Have you solved this mystery for me? Do you know what has happened to young Gideon Fitzalan?'

‘Not yet, my lord. But,' I added, thankful to be able to report some progress, ‘I do know how Gregory Machin's body came to be found in a locked room.'

He waved me to a chair and sat down himself, listening attentively while I explained the details to him. He always had the ability to concentrate on one thing at a time, no matter how many others were vying for his attention. When I had finished, he took a deep breath and nodded.

‘Now you put me in mind of it, I believe I have heard of such cases. Death is not instantaneous even though the wound is fatal. Well, that would appear to be one part of the mystery solved. But where is Gideon Fitzalan? His uncles tell me that no ransom has been demanded of his father.'

‘No, my lord. Why he has been taken is as great a riddle as where he is being held. Which is why I am asking for your authority to question his brothers. They are at present at the Tower, in attendance upon the . . . the . . .' For some reason, I was totally unable to pronounce the word ‘king'.

‘The lord Edward,' he finished for me.

My gaze jerked up to meet his. The eyes glittered more than ever and the thin lips curved into a triumphant smile. And yet it was the same sweet smile that I had always known. I realized then that he truly believed himself to be the rightful king. And in my heart, I agreed with him.

But I knew that there were hundreds who wouldn't.

FIFTEEN

Ihad never before seen the Tower at close quarters, although it dominated much of the London skyline. As, of course, it was meant to. Like everything that was built on the orders of William of Normandy it stressed Norman domination over the conquered Saxon. Throughout the kingdom, these great castles and fortresses were intended to let us know who was the master and who the serf, and woe betide anyone who ever forgot it. I had said to Etheldreda Simpkins that surely after five hundred years we were all one people, and she had scoffed at this idea. And she was right. The divide, however subtle, was always there, and maybe always would be.

Armed with Duke Richard's authorization, written at his dictation by his secretary, John Kendall, I obtained easy access to the royal apartments, passed from one guard-post to the next without so much as a raised eyebrow, and was finally left kicking my heels in a small, barely furnished room while an usher went in search of Bevis and Blaise Fitzalan. Staring out of the window at a stretch of sun-washed greensward and a magnificent beech tree in full leaf, I thought back to my recent interview with Duke Richard and realized that events were gathering momentum. It could not be long now until he made his intentions public and claimed the crown. Twelve weeks had elapsed since the death of the late King Edward and the acclamation of his young son as Edward the fifth, and now the lad's reign seemed to be drawing to a close. What would happen to him and his siblings? In particular to him and his younger brother, the Duke of York? Or should one even call the boy by that title any longer? ‘May you live in exciting times,' was generally held to be a curse. I was beginning to think that it was true . . .

The usher returned to conduct me to another, more comfortably furnished chamber where the two Fitzalan brothers awaited me, curious to know why I wished to see them, but at the same time a little resentful at having been dragged away from whatever it was they had been doing.

‘I hope this isn't going to take long, Master Chapman,' Bevis said in a fair imitation of his uncle Godfrey. ‘We're in attendance upon the king this morning, and it's very nearly dinner time.'

I could have told him that by the rumblings in my belly.

I explained my mission as briefly as possible and begged them both to think as hard as they could of everything they knew about Gideon. Was there something, however slight, that might set him apart from other boys? Anything at all that would explain his abduction?

The brothers seemed astonished by the request.

‘He's always been a miserable little fart, if that's what you mean,' Bevis said, not mincing matters.

‘Always got something wrong with him,' Blaise contributed. ‘Always running to old Mother Copley with a headache or a bellyache or earache or some such ache.'

‘And she doses him up with physic and tells the rest of us off for not being more sympathetic towards our dear little brother.' Bevis made a gagging sound. ‘It makes us all puke.'

‘All of us being?'

‘Well, us –' he waved a hand at Blaise – ‘and our other brothers, Thomas and Peter and Maurice and Cornelius. We all call him a whinging little toad.'

I sighed and urged them to think of Gideon with something other than a healthy young man's contempt for an ailing younger brother. It was quite possible that, as the runt of the litter, the boy was genuinely delicate. Was there something different about him that distinguished him from the rest of the family?

But this appeared to confuse Bevis and Blaise more than ever. They didn't understand what I meant – which led me, of course, to the reluctant conclusion that there was nothing either peculiar or extraordinary about Gideon Fitzalan which might explain why he had been taken, or, indeed, what he had been taken for.

I was about to return to the attack for one last time, in the vain hope of eliciting some fragment of information, when the door to the room burst open and a young man came in, a petulant grimace on his pretty lips. Although I had only set eyes on him once before – some weeks earlier, riding into his capital between his uncles of Gloucester and Buckingham – I recognized him immediately. It was the king.

Or then again, perhaps not.

For the moment, however, I had no choice but to treat him as the former. Following Bevis's and Blaise's example, I sank to one knee and bowed my head.

‘What's going on?' he demanded querulously. ‘I thought we were playing cards.' He caught sight of me and gave me an imperious stare. ‘Who's this?'

Bevis saved me the trouble of replying. ‘Roger Chapman, Sire. He's enquiring into the mysterious disappearance of our brother, Gideon, at the request of your uncle, the Protector.'

Something very like a scowl marred the delicate features. ‘I don't like my uncle Gloucester,' was the petulant reply, but there was also something akin to fear lurking in the blue eyes that were so much like his mother's. ‘I want my uncle Rivers.'

An icy hand squeezed my bowels. In a very few days his uncle Rivers would be executed at Pontefract along with Edward's half-brother, Sir Richard Grey, and his cousin, Sir Thomas Vaughan. I stared hard at the floor, watching the royal fleas hopping in and out among the sweet-smelling rushes.

‘And have you found out what's happened to Gideon Fitzalan?' asked that small, cold voice which had none of the warmth and bonhomie of the late King Edward's.

I raised my eyes to that sour little face, then realized with a jolt of compassion that one side of the boy's jaw was badly swollen and that it was obviously giving him pain. He kept rubbing it with one beringed hand and screwing up the eye above it.

‘Not yet, Sire,' I said gently. ‘I came to see if either of Master Gideon's brothers knows anything that could assist me. That's why I'm here.'

The fair head turned sharply in the direction of Blaise and Bevis. ‘And do you?' Edward asked abruptly. When they shrugged and looked blank, he gave a high-pitched crow of laughter. ‘I didn't think you would.'

The door opened once again and the nine-years-old Duke of York – it was difficult as yet to think of him as anything else – entered the room. There was no doubt that he was Edward's brother; indeed, except for a marked disparity in height, they could have been twins. They were both fair-haired, blue-eyed and displayed the handsome Woodville features of their maternal family. But there the similarity ended. Whereas the elder boy was all gloom and acidity, the younger was sweetness and light.

He grinned at me and gave me a friendly nod before turning to his brother. ‘Ned, it's almost dinner time and we haven't finished our game.' He smiled mischievously. ‘Or don't you want to finish because you're losing?'

The other turned on him, the pale face suddenly crimson. ‘Don't you dare speak to me like that!' he screamed. ‘I am your king and don't you forget it!'

I think we were all shocked and the younger boy flinched. Bastard or not, there was no doubt that Edward had the Plantagenet temper. Wasn't the whole race reputed to be descended from a daughter of the Devil?

‘Sire,' Bevis said hastily, ‘His Grace didn't mean . . . He's only little . . .'

‘He's nine! Old enough to know how to address his sovereign.' Edward glared at his frightened sibling for a moment, then put up a hand to rub his cheek ‘My jaw's hurting again. Where's Doctor Argentine? Why is he never around when he's needed?' He waved a hand at Blaise and Bevis. ‘One of you go and find him and tell him I want him. Now!'