Air of Treason, An: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (Sir Robert Carey Mysteries) (33 page)

“No, ye didn’t. That’s because ye don’t know what will happen when ye set out for vengeance,” he shouted, “ye canna ken until the fight’s over which side will win.” He was nose to nose with the little maid, full credit to her, she didn’t flinch. “People die and ye canna help it, no matter if ye love ’em or no’…
Especially
if ye love ’em! D’ye hear me?”

He stopped, realised he had hold of the front of her kirtle and let go, turned away. Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. “What?” he snarled.

“Thank you for killing Harry Hunks,” said Kat with great dignity. “It wasn’t your fault about Wolfie and Grandam. It was mine.”

“Och no, hinny,” he said, and knew she wouldn’t believe him, would never ever believe him. “It was Harry Hunks that did it.” And me, he thought.

She shook her head, went to the back of the cottage and came back with a bucket of water the old woman must have drawn, ready for the morning. She dipped a pitcher out for their drinking water. Then gratefully he put his feet in and the water went dark.

“Do you think I could marry you?” she asked after a moment, “I’m good at cheese and butter and I’ve got some bits of monkish gold I found and a shilling to my dowry?”

Dodd managed not to sputter. “Ah…no, Kat, I’m a married man mesen and ye’re by far too young for me but I’ll see ye wed tae a good man of yer ain if ye like. When yer old enough.” She frowned, puzzled so he said it more southron and she went and dug a hole in the floor under the place with the curds and pulled out a leather bag and slung it round her skinny body.

“I’m ready,” she said. “You can’t bury my grandam the way you are, so we’ll set fire to the cottage and that’ll do it.”

She had good sense. Dodd got his poor feet dry again, hobbled out and pulled the dog’s corpse into the cottage to lie next to the old woman. Harry Hunks could be buried by the foxes and the buzzards and ravens. Then they got the coals under the earthenware curfew going again, both lit handfulls of dry reeds they pulled from the thatch and the roof was dry enough and so the fire flowered where they lit it all about and it made him feel better. There was something clean about fire. He knew a couple of prayers from the Reverend Gilpin but he’d never seen the point in them. He told the ghosts of the Grandam and the dog not to let Harry Hunks walk and he warned God not to play the little maid false again.

Tuesday 19th September 1592, afternoon

Henry Carey Baron Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, first of that name, was sitting in the college garden, looking at the fallen leaves clotting the grass and worrying. He had his walking stick with him which he generally didn’t use in public because he hated to admit that he had arthritis in his knees, as if he were old.

He saw his seventh son before Robin saw him, as his bench was in a shadow between yew trees. The boy…no, even a fond father had to admit that the youngest of his sons was long past full grown, in fact, in his prime, tall, well-built with a breezy swagger that he supposed his sons had picked up from him since they all had it. In fact, of all of them, Robin reminded him of nothing so much as himself when he was a young man, although with the useful addition of his wife’s ingenuity. He knew he didn’t have that wild streak. He was profoundly grateful that Mary Boleyn had been so much less determined than her sister, that she had been married off to the complaisant William Carey while pregnant with him, the King’s bastard. If she had hung onto her virtue the way her younger sister Ann had done, well, he might have been King Henry the IX and had a much worse life, his sons would have been Princes of the Blood Royal and even more trouble than they were anyway. Or more probably they wouldn’t even exist because he would have been married off as a child to some thin-blooded crazy barren Hapsburg or Valois Princess, or God-forbid, Mary Queen of Scots herself and then…He shuddered. No Annie Morgan to marry in a whirlwind. Being a King.

Thank God for bastardy, that was all he could say. His half-sister and cousin, Ann Boleyn’s volcanic daughter, wove and politicked her way to the throne and was the finest Queen any nation had ever had since…Well, no nation had ever had such a Queen. Some fools might have been resentful at being barred the throne, he was not, he loved his firecracker of a half-sister and would do anything for her. Which was why he was Lord Chamberlain, of course, in charge of her palaces and her security, in charge of protecting her sacred person. It was the uttermost trust she could place in anyone. People called him nothing but a knight of the carpet, but when it mattered he had taken Lord Dacre’s hide in the revolt of the Northern Earls. What did he care if men thought him a fool? It made them less careful of him when they plotted.

And here he was, looking at his youngest son who was now a danger to the Queen. He was digging up the early days of her Court when she had been, frankly, a menace, a cocotte, and a flirt who scandalised the Court and the nation and the foreigners in Europe as well. And Robin was doing his considerable best to stir that dirty puddle on the Queen’s own orders.

Insanity. He had urged her to leave it, not to repeat the deadly mistake of 1566, her previous visit to Oxford. So she had used his youngest son as her tool because he had a fine mind and Walsingham had taught him a few things during those months he had spent at the Scottish Court with Walsingham’s embassy and then nineteen months in France for polish, also with Walsingham’s household. Three months he had taken to learn fluent French, a very diligent student for the first time in his life, and then sixteen months to cut a scandalous swath through the French ladies of the Court that even the French had found noteworthy. Perhaps he too had left a scatter of unknown bastard Hunsdon grandchildren among the French aristocracy, adding English yeast and Tudor blood to Parisian style.

Hunsdon smiled. He hoped so. And the boy had spent an astonishing amount of money as the French grandes dames taught vanity, luxury, and extravagance to an apt pupil. His time in a Parisian debtor’s prison had taught him very little about economy, something about power.

And here he came, a little off balance because he wasn’t wearing his sword.

Hunsdon frowned. Why? Why had his son disarmed? Had he worked it all out or made a terrible mistake?

He was on his feet, thumbs in his swordbelt, unaware how much his broad frame made him look like his royal sire—although he had never suffered the gluttony born of misery that had swelled King Henry and given him leg-ulcers and turned him into a monster.

Robin came right up to him and genuflected very properly and respectfully on one knee to his father. Hunsdon had to resist the impulse to raise and hug his son who had been so near death from poison only a couple of days before. He was wary. Generally, his son was only that respectful when there was trouble brewing. Or he wanted money.

Robin stood in front of him and hesitated. Their eyes were on a level. It was always a surprise when the baby of the family did that to you.

“Well?” said Hunsdon, guessing one reason why his son might have left his sword behind.

“Was it you, my lord?” Robin’s voice was strained and soft in the quiet garden, his face unreadable. “Was it you killed Amy Dudley for the Queen?”

For a moment it was hard for Hunsdon to speak.

“If it was you, father,” Robin went on gently, “If it
was
you…I’ll take my leave and say no more about it.”

This was tricky. The Queen had used a good young hound to find an old trail and he had done very well, far better than she could have expected. But he had to be careful. The Queen had given her orders. On the other hand…

“Do you really think I could have done a such a dishonourable thing?”

“For your sister the Queen? Yes. I would do it for Philadelphia if she needed me to.”

Hunsdon couldn’t help smiling although it might be misinterpreted. Robin and Philly as the two youngest had always been close and had constantly got into terrible scrapes together. Only the absolute cold truth would do here, that was obvious, although it had to be edited.

“Well, Robin, it’s true I would have done it if she asked me, despite the wickedness and dishonour, but the fact of the matter is that she didn’t ask me to and I didn’t kill Amy Dudley. On my word of honour.”

Robin looked no happier, standing tense with his fist where his swordhilt would have been.

“I had hoped you would say you had done the killing, father,” came Robin’s voice, softened to a breath of sound that the wind in the red and yellow leaves could cover, so he had to strain to hear it.

“Oh? Why?”

“Because otherwise all I can think is that the Queen did it herself.”

Hunsdon nearly gasped. It was clear Robin had worked out a great deal of what had happened at Cumnor place in the year of his birth. But he didn’t have all of it.

“No,” Hunsdon said positively, “I’m not saying she wasn’t capable, but no. She didn’t.”

“Nor ordered another man to do it?”

“No. My word on it, Robin, she didn’t.”

“But you and she were both at Cumnor Place when Amy Dudley née Robsart died.”

It was a statement not a question. Hunsdon’s eyes widened as he saw how he had been trapped and he couldn’t help a shout of laughter. Damn it, the boy was bright. Carey didn’t join with the laugh.

“You were there to discuss the divorce, the Queen’s Great Matter,” Robin went on remorselessly, using the term Cromwell had used for Henry VIII’s long-ago divorce from Katherine of Aragon. “Amy Dudley would petition Parliament and convocation for an annullment of her marriage to the Earl of Leicester, on grounds of non-consummation. Amy was being difficult about it so the Queen decided to convince her in person. And so she dressed up in Aunt Katherine’s riding habit, put on a black wig and a married woman’s headtire, and rode out from Windsor to Cumnor Place thirty miles away, under cover of hunting. You went with her because really you were the only person who could. A man to protect her, but her half-brother so there could be no suggestion of impropriety. You would agree the deal for freeing Dudley and perhaps make a downpayment in gold. It was a deadly secret for if Burghley had realised what was afoot, he would have put a stop to it immediately by blocking the annullment in Parliament and Convocation, much as the Pope did thirty odd years before. It was ironic, really. Nobody would have given Dudley the divorce, but they might have done it for Amy given enough oil and pressure, because there was no breath of scandal whatever against Amy and she had borne no children in ten years of marriage.”

He was good, damn, he was good. Hunsdon watched Carey’s face and his heart swelled with pride. Carey had started to pace, squinting a little when the sun poked through the clouds.

“Amy lived so quiet a life, so carefully, she couldn’t be treated the way Ann Boleyn was and have charges trumped up against her. She had to sue for her divorce. And the Queen decided to visit her personally to get the agreement.”

“Not quite,” Hunsdon said softly.

“Amy was in a panic that week, trying to get clothes fine enough to feel confident in. She had one gown ordered from London that didn’t come in time, altered another to put gold lace on the collar. That’s what told me it was the Queen for sure, that she had to dress fine. You might say it was for her husband, true, but gold lace wouldn’t have impressed Leicester. A beautiful French lady once told me that women dress for other women, not men.”

Hunsdon said nothing. He was back in the past, when he was young and the finest tournament jouster at the Queen’s Court, when the Queen was young. How often had he actually noticed what any woman was wearing?

“So you and the Queen rode to meet her at Cumnor Place, since Amy couldn’t or wouldn’t ride herself. You took remounts, rode thirty miles across country at top speed. Meanwhile Lady Dudley had bidden all her servants out of the house for the meeting, sent them off to the Abingdon fair though some of them didn’t want to go. She was alone apart from a couple of her women playing cards in the parlour.”

It had been a wild ride, the Queen egging him on, challenging him, risking her neck for joy, taking hedges and ditches on her fine hunter, named Jupiter, a fire sprite, light in her sidesaddle, laughing as their horses ate the miles with their legs.

“And then…”

Hunsdon put up his palm to stop him. “Robin, you’re very nearly right. But…I must ask Her Majesty before I break the matter fully with you? Do you understand? I simply can’t…”

Robin had taken out his warrant. “So why did she tell me to dig? Come on, father, this authorises you to break silence.”

“This is dangerous ground,” Hunsdon rumbled, “Trust me, Robin. It was neither me nor Her Majesty…”

“Then who was it?”

“We don’t know.”

“You must know. You were there!”

“We tried. I tried when it happened, but I lost him, had to get back to the Queen. Unfortunately, the Queen hired Richard Topcliffe from the Earl of Shrewsbury in ‘66 when she came to Oxford. He must have found something and I know he turned against her and…”

“He’s been a licensed monster ever since.”

“He has. He was very clever. Whatever it was he found, he took it to one of the Hamburg merchants at the Steelyard and sent it overseas. If he ever dies unexpectedly or is arrested or word gets out, the box will be sent unopened to the Jesuits at Rheims who will know how to embarrass the Queen with it.”

“Burghley? Surely if he’d known a divorce was in the wind, he might have organised the murder to stop…”

Hunsdon shook his head. “I don’t think so. It would have been safer to block it in Convocation and Parliament. Cecil was never a gambler, he has only ever bet on a sure thing. If he was going to murder anyone, it would have been Dudley, I think. And not a bad idea at that, if he didn’t mind being hanged, drawn, and quartered for it.”

“But it only had to be made obvious that Dudley had killed her. Burghley could have seen to a verdict of unlawful killing from the inquest and put Dudley in the Tower no matter what the Queen thought. She wasn’t so secure on her throne then; she would have taken notice of her entire Privy Council and her magnates calling out their tenants.”