Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (15 page)

“Yes, sir. That’s what surprised me.”

Carey didn’t add what had already occurred to him about that, which was that the Queen had clearly not read it. The boy was frightened enough already.

“I don’t need to tell you that everything in this matter must be kept most secret and not spoken of to anyone.”

“No, sir. I wouldn’t dream…”

“There is one circumstance when you must speak of it and that’s if I die suddenly for any reason at all without having finished my inquiries. If that happens you must immediately leave the Court, and lie low for a while. Take any papers with you and make sure you give them to…to…” Damn it, to whom? Who couldn’t be suspected in the Amy Robsart killing? “…to my father or the steward at Somerset House. Understand?”

“Yes sir. Who is your father exactly, sir?”

“The Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, Baron Hunsdon.”

A very loud gulp and then Carey thought he saw a smile. Or heard it rather, in the ambitious boy’s suddenly eager voice. “Really?”

“Yes, really. So please make notes.” There was a rustle and the soft click of a pen being dipped. “And of course be very careful of poison for both of us. Is there a man on the door now?”

“Um.” Tovey went and looked. “It’s Mr. Henshawe,” he said.

A good man, Carey remembered him. He shook his head with his eyes still closed and frowned. “That was one of the mysteries of the thing,” he said to Tovey, his restless mind drifting back to the puzzle the Queen had set him. “Why wasn’t Amy Robsart poisoned instead of being pushed down stairs? Certainly she was careful about what and how she ate, but even so…it wouldn’t have been so very hard to do by an expert. The Papists insist that it was her husband, the Earl of Leicester, who killed her. But if it was him, why the devil didn’t he poison her with belladonna or white arsenic or something? Yes, of course, there would have been rumours but the thing would have been uncertain enough that he would still have had a chance of marrying the Queen.”

No answer from Tovey who was probably too shocked.

“After all, killing his wife was a tremendous risk—why would he do it in such a way that would immediately look like murder and draw down suspicion on his head? Dudley was never the cleverest of men but he wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t stupid.”

“Did you know him, sir?”

“Oh yes, of course, he used to shout at me when I was a young idiot of a page in the sixties and seventies. Nobody ever spoke about his first wife but only fools of Papist priests ever thought it had been him that killed her.”

“They say it was him at Gloucester College, sir.”

“No doubt, being a notorious bunch of Papists there. How much recent history do you know, Mr. Tovey? I mean after the end of Holinshed’s Chronicles, about the Queen’s father King Henry and his various…er…marriages?”

“Very little, sir. Only that the Queen is his daughter by Queen Ann Boleyn and that her older sister, Bloody Mary, was by the Spanish Infanta, Katherine of Aragon.”

“Well, the Queen lost her own mother, Ann Boleyn, my great-aunt, to the axe on trumped up charges of infidelity. The next of Henry’s Queens died of a childbed fever, the Queen after that he divorced for ugliness, the Queen after that was executed for infidelity on a bill that probably was foul, and the one after that survived him but then died of childbed fever after marrying later.” Tovey said nothing. “It’s common gossip at Court that the Queen never wed to get an heir because she’s in horror of marriage, because she believes that it’s tantamount to a sentence of death for the woman. That’s why she tries to protect her maids of honour from the marriage bed. She certainly loved Robert Dudley when she came to the throne and she might have been able to bring herself to marry for his sake, but after he had killed his first wife? Just the suspicion of it was enough to set her against it. He knew that and he wasn’t stupid or reckless. If he had decided to kill Amy Robsart, the thing would have been done a lot better and would never have been known as murder, so he could in fact marry the Queen afterward and become King.”

“Y…yes, sir. Um…s…sir, isn’t talking about the Queen like this treasonous?”

“Yes, it is.” Carey said, “if she finds out.”

Silence. “Yes, sir.”

Carey hoped that Tovey wouldn’t take the bait held out to him in case he was somebody’s spy, but you never knew. And you might as well add a bit of egg to the pudding.

“Of course, it’s plain Amy was in fact killed no matter what the inquest says. And there are plenty of other suspects.”

Tovey moved restlessly. “Sir,” he said awkwardly, “I…I’m only a c…clerk and you haven’t known me long. Should you be…er…opening your mind to me like this?”

Carey beamed at the area of blur where he was. “Probably not,” he agreed, “if you’re working for someone else apart from me.”

“No, sir, of course not.”

“Mr. Tovey,” Carey admonished, “if you aren’t yet, you will be when word gets round you’re my clerk now. The people who are likely to offer you money to pass information to them are Sir Thomas Heneage, the Earl of Essex, my father, Sir Robert Cecil—any number of people here and more once we get back to Carlisle.”

“I’ll tell them ‘no,’ sir.”

“No you won’t.” He could actually hear the click of Tovey’s jaw as he shut his mouth after a shocked pause. Bless him, he was as a newborn lamb to the greedy wolves of the Court. Better educate him quickly.

“What you do is you tell me about it. Whoever it is, whatever they offer, you take it and then you tell me. Especially if it’s Sir Robert Cecil. Don’t be too quick, play innocent and shocked—they’ll expect it. Let them pressure you, especially that bastard Heneage, but then give in. Whoever it is, whatever they ask, no matter how much money you’re offered, you swear you’ll tell no one, especially not me, and you’ll work for them only, and then we’ll decide together what I want them to know. I won’t charge you commission on your bribes, so long as you tell me about each one.”

Another pause and then Tovey chuckled softly. “Was that why my father was so happy not to pay a fee for the place as your clerk?”

“Absolutely. Don’t let him drink all your bribes. And learn to lie.”

Tovey dipped his pen in a businesslike way. “Shall I put my lord of Leicester at the top of your list of suspects?”

“Why not? Make five columns, head them
Nomine, quomodo, quando ubique, quare, cui bono.
”

“Name, how, where, and when, why, whose benefit?”

Carey was quite proud of himself for remembering all that Latin.

“Yes, Walsingham’s system. He taught it to me when I was serving him in Scotland, along with many other things. He always said that practically any tangle could be solved by asking
Cui bono
, who benefits? So, Dudley first. His best method was poison, despite Lord Burghley having a man placed in Amy’s kitchen. Where and when was any where and any time since she was his wife. The why is obvious but the benefit—he could not benefit from the way the murder was actually done.”

The pen was slipping smoothly across the paper. “Unless it was a double bluff?”

“I doubt it. He hardly bluffed at primero. I don’t think he would bluff with the chance of becoming King.”

“You said there were other suspects?”

“Sir William Cecil, my lord Treasurer Burghley now.”

The pen stopped moving. “Sir?” The fear in the boy’s voice now did credit to Burghley.

“Write it down, Mr. Tovey.” Carey had an idea of what he would do with the paper later, despite the risk. “In fact put in any of the old guard, the Privy Council of the early years, the men who danced around the young Queen. By blocking out the favourite, the killing of Amy Robsart benefited anyone who hoped to marry the Queen—therefore the Spanish, all of her suitors foreign or English. Hatton, possibly even Heneage. He had the Queen’s eye once, I believe, for a couple of months.” He laughed at the thought. “Burghley is top of the list because he was desperate to stop her marrying Dudley as they hated each other then and he would have lost his place the instant King Robert was crowned.”

He paused to let Tovey catch up. “And then there’s the most obvious suspect of all,” he said softly, “the Queen herself.”

That stopped him. “I’m not writing that, sir,” said Tovey.

“Put her down as 1500,” Carey agreed, harking back to the code name for the Queen that Walsingham had used. Of course the Queen probably knew it, but it kept the thing decorous. The fact that Tovey wrote it down without arguing further showed he had a brain and could use it.

Because the fact was that the Queen was by far the most likely suspect. Not as she was now, a wise and politic prince, but as she had been in Carey’s father’s stories of the early days of her Court, when Carey himself had been a baby in swaddling bands in his wet nurse’s arms. When the Queen had been a wild laughing young woman with red hair, a flaming temper, and the power to draw men like moths to a flame. That she was ruthless enough to kill her lover’s wife could not be doubted. But was she foolish enough, impetuous enough? Had she done that?

He shook his head. If she had, why ask him to investigate? Why not, as his father had advised, leave it lie another thirty years until she was safely dead and nobody cared anymore?

Since the Queen was a woman, she might have any number of reasons, but from the information that Byrd had given him, Carey rather thought that someone else knew for sure who had done it and had sent her a message demanding money along with some kind of token proving he did. Which made things look very bad for the Queen, indeed. Had she really done as her far stupider cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, had done? As her father had done? Had she murdered to clear her path to marriage?

He shook his head, which was aching again. If it really had been the Queen who killed Amy Robsart, how had she done it and kept it secret so long? She was constantly surrounded by her women and had been even when she was running wild with Robert Dudley. The Papists were always claiming that some bastard or other was hers, even one of his father’s own byblows had been taken up in France as the Queen’s baseborn son, but nobody who knew anything about the Court ever believed a word of it. And if she had done it, surely she would have done a better job, just as Dudley would have? There would have been somebody available to swing for the murder, surely? Carey could think of half a dozen ways the Queen could have quietly abolished Dudley’s first wife, not one of which involved pushing the woman down a few stairs. That was why, if he even thought about it, he had assumed what most people now at Court did, that Dudley’s first wife had been unlucky or unwell and the thing truly was an accident. Until he read the inquest papers.

If she was being blackmailed about it, she might well ask him to investigate—but surely then she would have given him the message with the Spanish air on it and the token, whatever that was, and told him to quietly find and kill the blackmailer. Surely?

He was feeling tired again, surprisingly so. Sitting in shadows with only one candle lit for Tovey and his eyes shut was making him sleepy. He realised he had been silent a long while.

“Is that all, sir?” Tovey asked hopefully.

“Yes, thank you. I think I’ll go back to sleep now though it’s far too early. It’s infernally boring not being able to see but that might help my bloody eyes recover.”

“It might, sir. M…may I advise you to cover them when daylight comes? Your eyes pain you because they have no defence against the sunlight and too much light might actually damage them and blind you permanently.”

“Jesu.” That put fear in the pit of his stomach. “Is Mr. Henshawe on guard at the door?”

Tovey checked. “Yes, sir. And I’ve brought my pallet and I’ll sleep here tonight.”

“Good. Has Sergeant Dodd arrived?”

“No, sir, when I fetched the food, your father’s under-steward said my lord was sending riders out along the London road to see if he’d fallen off his horse, as he must have left London early on Saturday. “

Carey frowned. That didn’t sound at all plausible; Dodd had practically been born on a horse. But perhaps he was in some kind of trouble. You never knew: after all, who would have thought Carey might end up being poisoned in the Queen’s Court? Dodd’s absence was worrying—surely he wouldn’t have decided to simply head north and bypass Oxford altogether? Even if he’d walked from London to Oxford, he should have been here by now.

***

Somebody knocked on the door. Carey was instantly awake, feeling for a dagger under his pillow where there wasn’t one, blinking in the darkness of the brocade bed curtains with a pattern of fleur de lis. He heard Tovey’s voice murmuring.

“Mrs. de Paris to see Sir Robert,” said one of Thomasina’s women.

“Let her in, Mr. Tovey,” called Carey with resignation, groping at the end of the bed for his dressing gown and finding none. What was the time? He wasn’t sure because when he peered through the curtains the room seemed brighter than it should have been with just one blurry watch-candle in it. He heard people talking. “Damnit, Mistress Thomasina, wait a minute, I’m only in my shirt…”

Tovey handed him a fur dressing gown of his father’s, marten and velvet, which Carey pulled around his shoulders, opened one of the bed curtains and sat with his legs crossed.

The door was opened a little by Mr. Henshawe, and Carey could make out the small colourful blur of Thomasina still in her tumbling clothes.

“Sir, would you like me to make notes?”

“No,” said Thomasina’s high-pitched childlike voice. “Please leave us.”

Tovey stood where he was. Carey heard him swallow. “Er…?” he said. Carey was liking the scrawny clerk more and more. “It’s all right, Mr. Tovey,” he said. “Mrs. de Paris is an old friend.”

Tovey bowed awkwardly and went out into the passage to stand with Thomasina’s women.

Carey felt Thomasina jump up on the bed like a man mounting a horse and then she sat with her legs folded under her, looking like a small lump of forest of tawny and green brocade in the general blur. He smiled in her direction.

“Next time your spiced wine tastes bitter, Sir Robert, may I suggest you throw it away?”

Her voice was withering.