To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court (32 page)

“So we’re back to Mortimer,” I said. “And he really is the likely one. He was heir to the manor of Rowans after Rafe, he needed money, and he had several reasons to be angry with Rafe—over Alice, and even, perhaps, because he felt that Rafe was too close to Lady Thomasine or else unfaithful to her. Either might be possible, with a man
like Mortimer. His brother-in-law says he’s not a wicked man but I’d say there’s a good streak of sheer badness in him.” Mindful of Gladys’s presence, I watched my words, but I added: “His plans for getting money out of the queen prove
that.”

Gladys, in the act of leaving the room, stopped and turned back. “I bin thinkin’. It maybe wasn’t Mortimer as did for Rafe.”

Rob looked affronted. Gladys had been right to eat apart from us. He was willing to champion her in the cause of justice, and to please his friend Ursula Blanchard, but to well-bred Rob Henderson, who wore velvet caps on his carefully barbered fair head and spent a small fortune on his shirts and doublets, Gladys was a lower form of life. Unlike Lady Thomasine, he wouldn’t actually call her a reeking old hag, but he probably thought it.

Brockley, however, said: “Who else could it have been—assuming that it wasn’t Lewis?”

“I said, I bin thinkin’,” Gladys repeated. “Not much else to do, locked up in a dungeon. How about this for an idea?”

We listened to Gladys’s theory with incredulity at first. Rob said it was ridiculous and I found it simply bewildering.

“I don’t see
why,”
I said. “Mortimer’s the one with the good reasons for getting rid of Rafe.”

“Reasons he might have but when it comes to actually
doin’
things, it’s another matter,” said Gladys, which gave me pause. I remembered doubting whether
Mortimer would ever actually have tried to use his forged letters.

Brockley, frowning, said: “It’s possible …”

“I think about it and I don’t see him stabbin’ the boy,” Gladys said. “Not
doin’
it, not even if he wanted to and who’s to say he wanted to anyhow? Never even thought of it, likely as not. Look at what he did with you! He could have had you done in and carted out in sacks, and dumped somewhere but no, you’re taken to the mountains and locked up instead and not a finger laid on you. All that was his notion, mark my words.”

Rob said thoughtfully: “There was something that my wife said to me. It was the reason why she was so anxious to get Meg out of the castle. Yes, it could add up. Mattie said …”

I was frowning as deeply as Brockley. Something was astir in my mind; a fugitive memory which kept slipping away before I could grasp it. Rob, while he was recounting what Mattie had told him, was also watching me. “What is it?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. I don’t know. I just—somehow—think Gladys may be right. I can’t …” I put my hands to my temples, and felt them throb ominously with the strain of trying to remember. “There is something I ought to remember but it won’t come. I just think—that, yes, it could be. It’s as though it
feels
right. Yes …” The fugitive memory wouldn’t surface but one or two other things now did so. I spoke of them. Brockley, his brow clearing, bore me out.

“But what can we do about it now?” I said. “It’s a matter of questioning, I suppose.”

“Ye … es.” Rob sounded doubtful. “Hard questioning
can achieve results but it has drawbacks. In the last few years, Cecil has sometimes employed me as an interrogator, and I’ve learned that people can be forced into confessing to things they didn’t do. I want to get this right and know for sure I’ve got it right. I would like to get my hands on some solid evidence, I must say. So far, all we have are hints and pointers. What I would like,” said Rob wistfully, “is blood on someone’s hands or an eyewitness or an unforced confession. Ursula, Brockley, think hard. Is there anything more that you noticed or heard that might show us a way forward or help us to find one?”

For a moment, we were all silent. Then my mind, searching for inspiration, flickered over the events of the last few days and showed me a picture, of myself standing at night in Sir Philip’s study, with the incriminating letters in my hand, telling Brockley that we must get out of the castle quickly, and warning him on no account even to breathe on the lute he was carrying. “Brockley,” I said, “that lute we bought on the way back to Vetch—do you still have it with you or did you leave it in the Feathers?”

“I still have it,” he said, puzzled. “I suppose so, at least. I never took it out of my shoulder pack so I suppose it came back here with me. But …”

“I have an idea,” I said.

It was not a kindly idea. Brockley was doubtful. “What if we’re wrong, madam?”

“Then we’re wrong,” I said briefly. “But we could at least try.”

“But what if we just wait all night and no one comes?”

“That won’t happen. I’ll make it an order,” said Rob decisively. “I wish we had more time to lay our plans, though.”

“I think,” I said, “that the foundations have been laid already. Quite unintentionally, Gladys did that for us. Maybe we could build on that, so to speak.”

The May night was warm and there was no fire in the blue parlor. I had opened one of the windows a little. The room was well lit, however, for Rob, ruthlessly giving orders as though Vetch were his castle instead of Mortimer’s, had seen to it that there were four triple candlesticks, all provided with new candles. The ornamental clock said it was the hour of midnight. Outside, the sky was clear and pricked with stars, but there was no moon. The castle walls, the battlements and towers around the courtyard, were solid masses of blackness, barely discernible, and yet I could feel them there, looming over us, encircling us, watching what we did. As on the night when I had made my first attempt to get at the strongbox, I was acutely aware of the castle’s age and its past. The darkness seemed full of the shades of those who had lived and died at Vetch.

We waited, watching the door to the tower parlor, four of us. Rob and I were the principals, and each of us had a supporter, Brockley for me, and Geoffrey Barker for Rob. Barker was interested by the scheme if not very sanguine about its outcome.

“I’ve got my doubts, like Brockley here,” he said in
a low voice, as we waited. “Orders must be obeyed, yes, but if games with that lute fool anyone, my name isn’t Barker.”

“You haven’t lived all your life at Vetch,” I said, and then caught my breath. As well as watching the door, we had all been listening for footsteps. We hadn’t heard any. But the door was opening. My heart lurched. If Gladys was right, then Rafe’s murderer was about to come through it. I could see the glow of a candle, carried in the hand that in all probability had wielded the dagger. Then, quietly, her slippered feet making no sound, Lady Thomasine stepped forward into the brightly lit room.

“Well, Master Henderson, Mistress Blanchard, I am here, as you see, and alone, as I was bidden.” She was perfectly self-possessed.

“My maid could not have come, in any case,” she remarked. “Nan is a foolish woman, I fear, and lately she has not been doing her work well. First she was distracted like all the rest because of Rafe’s death and then, a few days ago, there was a great stir because some of the servants swore they had seen a face at a window in the haunted tower. Nan was one of them.

“She was almost prostrate with shock that day, and this afternoon, believe it or not, it all happened again! She and Olwen and a couple of the menservants were gossiping in the courtyard and Olwen cried out that someone was looking out of the tower and then, of course, all the others imagined they could see it too. Nan came running to me in hysterics. I had to give her a soothing draft and put her to bed and then I had to wake her up to help me dress for this meeting—her hands were still so shaky that I needed to do half the
work myself. Anyone would think she was the mistress and I the maid!”

Despite Nan’s shaky hands, Lady Thomasine was as elegant as I had ever seen her. Although she lived on the borders of Wales and rarely left home as far as I knew, she still kept up with the latest fashions. She was wearing the newest kind of ruff, a little bigger than its predecessors and edged with lace, and her rose-colored overgown, embroidered with golden flowers, adorned with high shoulder puffs, and worn over a pale blue kirtle and undersleeves also sewn with golden flowers, could have appeared at any court function.

She was wearing the slippers with the cerise roses, and she also wore a great deal of the pearl jewelry which Elizabeth had made so popular. Her hair, crimped in front of a pearl-edged cap, was noticeably faded at the temples, as though recent events had aged her. But her face was smoothly powdered and her lips carmined. She was dressed for battle, I thought, as a medieval knight might put on armor.

“I hope Nan will be better tomorrow,” said Rob gravely. “But I think that in a moment, you will agree that it is best that you came alone. I apologize for keeping you from your sleep and for summoning you from your chamber. As a matter of delicacy, I did not wish to intrude on your private quarters; and by holding this interview at this late hour, we can avoid letting the rest of the household know that you have been questioned.”

Lady Thomasine’s fine brows rose. “I have no need to fear your questions. It is a matter of indifference to me whether the household knows or not. You have come here with armed men and virtually taken charge
of this castle. You have taken it upon yourself to give orders. I thought it best to comply with grace, that is all.”

“Barker,” said Rob, taking no notice of this, “will you go into the tower parlor and make sure that no one comes through it? And, Brockley, will you guard the door into the courtyard, please? Go and stand just outside it.”

They went out. I heard the courtyard door click as Brockley passed through. Rob invited Lady Thomasine to sit down.

“Is it necessary,” she asked, as she arranged herself gracefully on a settle, ringed hands clasped in her lap, “for Mistress Blanchard to be here as well? I have not made public my accusation against her. She is a member of my family after all and I have been concerned from the start with my family honor. But why must I be troubled by her presence now?”

“I am innocent of the charge, as well you know,” I said coldly.

“I know nothing of the kind. Well, Master Henderson. You have questions for me, it seems. You may ask them. I am listening.”

There was a short silence. The candle flames wavered in a draft from the open window. Lady Thomasine looked at us inquiringly, and as the silence lengthened, we saw her become nervous.

Then, in a perfectly ordinary voice, as though he were merely wondering whether it would rain again soon, Rob said: “When you stabbed Rafe, was it in here or in the study where he was found?”

Surprise tactics sometimes work but these failed
dismally. “When I did what?” said Lady Thomasine disdainfully.

“We know you killed Rafe,” I said. “Why else did you want Brockley and me to disappear and die in that hut in the mountains? If we had come to trial, too much might have emerged. Master Henderson and his wife would certainly have attended the trial and Mistress Henderson knew that you and Rafe were lovers—or had been, till he turned away from you to a young girl.”

“You are mad,” said Lady Thomasine coolly, and so convincingly that for one unpleasant moment, I almost wondered if we were wrong.

Then I heard Gladys’s voice in my head, justifying her remarkable theory.

“Told you, didn’t I, up at the hermitage, that she’d had Pugh and Evans in her time? Past taking lovers now, she is, I said to you, and I believed it then. I thought Rafe just flattered her and played music to her. Hardly more than a boy, he was, and she nigh to sixty. Didn’t think it could go further. You think I’m just an old woman with a mind as grimy as me shawl”—Rob at this point had turned an embarrassed crimson—“but I got my sense of decency. All the same, thinkin’ about it: she’s vain. A cock pigeon spreading his tail isn’t any vainer than Thomasine. She got rid of me from the castle because I was old age on feet and she’d look at me and think: Gladys today is Thomasine tomorrow. She couldn’t stand it, so she threw me out. If it did go further, between her and Rafe, how d’you think she’d feel when she found out he’d fallen for Alice?”

Then, as we sat there talking it over among the supper things, and I tried to drag into the light a haunting
memory that wouldn’t come (and still wouldn’t, although I was conscious of its shadow even now), I had recalled other things. I had remembered how very funereal Lady Thomasine’s mien had been the day that Rafe declared his love for Alice. Her mood hadn’t lightened, even though Owen Lewis was in a fair way to ousting Rafe from Alice’s affections, almost at once. And I had also recalled that Lady Thomasine had been surprisingly close at hand that night. “She and Mortimer came into the study together,” I had said, remembering. “Yes. If Mortimer did it, why was Lady Thomasine involved at all? What was she doing out of bed at such an hour?”

“She was in a loose wrapper,” Brockley added thoughtfully. “As though she’d been fetched from her chamber. But would Mortimer really have done that? Deliberately fetched his mother and made her his accomplice? She came into the study with him and later on, lighted our way across the courtyard. She was so much a part of it. Too much, if Mortimer did it. But if she killed Rafe herself, she might well have gone to Mortimer for help.”

Now, in the candlelit parlor, Rob said to Lady Thomasine: “We have noticed a number of things which point to you as Rafe’s killer. A lovers’ quarrel, was it? As Mistress Blanchard has said, my wife knew of the affair between you. She told me about it shortly after we took Meg away from here. It seems that one afternoon—it was before Mistress Blanchard came to the castle—she wanted to see you, and not finding you anywhere else, she went up to your room and knocked. There was no answer but the door wasn’t latched and swung open to her tap. You and Rafe were on the window seat, clasped
together, she said, and when I said, well, maybe it was just a brief friendly hug, she said no. She said she knew the difference, and she’d already seen the two of you exchange looks, and noticed the way Rafe sometimes sang love songs to you. She said it was improper and it created an atmosphere and that the atmosphere had been very strong when she looked into your room. She said it was feverish and unhealthy and she’d been glad to get Meg out of it.”