Face Down among the Winchester Geese (15 page)

Susanna stared at the pageant wagon. “'Tis passing small for eight."

"In such intimate quarters you may be sure all four lords took liberties with the ladies."

"And the ... damsels allowed it?"

"What woman dares say nay when it might be her liege lord kissing and fondling her?"

Susanna said nothing, but did not care for the picture he painted of life at court. Or of himself and Robert and their friends.

Sir Walter looked uneasy, as if he wished he had not been so forthcoming. “When people are caught up in a fantasy,” he said softly, “it is ofttimes difficult to remember the realities of everyday life."

"No doubt the difficulty becomes more pronounced when all parties are cup-shotten."

Stiffly courteous now, Sir Walter stepped back, motioning for Susanna to precede him down the rope ladder. Jennet waited below.

Reality, Susanna thought as she descended. Just as well to return to it. She had not come here simply to enjoy the company of a charming man.

That Sir Walter had gone out of his way to be pleasant troubled Susanna. She did not want his admiration, not man to woman, even though the attention was flattering. Had he gotten the wrong idea from the fact that she kept contacting him?

Absurdly uncomfortable with that notion, she was glad they were surrounded by other people. Jennet. The current keeper and his staff. Although none of the men working in the room had come near Sir Walter's small party or spoken to any of them, they slanted surreptitious glances in their direction. Susanna would wager they missed little of the interplay between herself and the knight, even if they were too far away to overhear what was said.

"Have you seen enough?” Sir Walter asked.

"I would inspect the tower, though it is not likely to be the same one Lora hid in."

"It might be,” he mused. “But she did not die there. She was found in an open space on the floor.” He glanced around. “I doubt anyone could say precisely where."

"The man who found her?"

"That was the keeper I spoke of, but he was elderly. He died a year or so ago."

Susanna supposed it made little difference. There was nothing to be seen here, and less, she was sure, at the places where the other women had been found.

"Where did the feather come from?” she asked as she inspected the canvas tower.

"Another pageant wagon."

"The killer did not bring it with him, then?"

"Why should he?"

"I wish I knew. It did seem the feather by Diane's body had been brought there deliberately.” She made a rueful sound. “Perhaps the feathers are only coincidence, after all. Tell me again of that night. Do you recall any more, being here again?"

"The rushlights were sputtering."

Susanna glanced at the iron wall brackets. Each one held a two-foot torch. One would burn but an hour before it needed to be replaced. Had the room been almost dark when Lora's murderer returned? She shivered at the thought, feeling pity for a young woman she'd never met. To hide her reaction, she ducked inside the gaudily painted wood-and-canvas tower through an opening at the back.

Experimentally, Susanna sat, clasping her knees to her chest to make herself as small as possible. She could hear Sir Walter moving just outside the canvas walls. He sounded as if he were right on top of her hiding place.

Lora would have been able to hear every word they spoke while they'd searched for her, she realized. Ribald jests. Salacious speculation. That Robert and Sir Walter should have been part of that sickened Susanna.

"Do you want me to trip the mechanism that lowers the drawbridge?” Sir Walter asked. “It is at the front of the tower."

As soon as she agreed, it began to descend. Inch by inch, the opening grew. Sir Walter filled it. As the murderer might have on that long-ago night?

She came to her feet and, with more speed than grace, exited the set piece. “I have seen enough."

"What will you do now?” Sir Walter asked as he escorted Susanna and Jennet through the connecting buildings toward the water gate called Whitehall Stairs. The Privy Stairs, which Susanna had used on her previous visit, were farther upriver.

''I must continue to ask questions."

He sighed and helped her aboard the waiting wherry.

"I have a need to clear mine own husband of suspicion,” Susanna added when they were on their way downstream.

"You cannot believe—"

"I will not condemn Senor Cordoba out of hand. I must continue to ask questions until I am convinced of his guilt. By the same token, I must ask questions dealing with Robert's whereabouts on past St. Mark's Days. And Lord Robin's whereabouts. And Master Elliott's and Master Marsdon's. And yours, Sir Walter."

"You may dismiss Lord Robin from your list of suspects,” he assured her.

Susanna thought it odd he did not first exempt himself. “Why?” she asked. “Indeed, he seems to have been the leader in much that went on at court.” He still was, come to think of it.

"He was the nobleman among us, for all that his father had so recently been attainted and executed for treason. He took precedence over knights’ sons and the sons of mere gentlemen, but he is also some years younger than the rest of us. Closer to your age than to mine."

"You believe the young do not perpetrate crimes as foul as their seniors?” She smiled at that thought. Young men could be far more vicious. Why else were they so assiduously recruited in wartime?

"I mean that he rarely did anything unaccompanied. All of us were with him that night, but so were several servants."

"I have heard too much about the amount of drink consumed to believe any of you can account for every moment.” She remembered Robert's flippant comment. “If naught else, even Lord Robin must have made at least one visit to the privy."

Sir Walter regarded her with a somber, unblinking gaze she found disquieting. “The queen,” he said, “will not be pleased if she should hear you suspect her favorite of murder."

He did not have to explain why this would be a particularly sensitive issue. A little more than two and a half years earlier, when Lord Robin's estranged wife had been found at the foot of a flight of stairs, her neck broken, people had wondered if he'd had a hand in her demise. If he had, Susanna had thought at the time, he'd miscalculated badly. True, his wife's death left him free to remarry, but the queen would never have him with such an allegation forever in his past.

"I will be discreet,” she promised. Queen Elizabeth could ruin Robert's career if she blamed him for more scandal attaching itself to the Dudley name. “But do not forget I, too, know Lord Robin of old."

Lord Robin's father had been Susanna's guardian, responsible for arranging her marriage after her own father's death. The young gentlemen in his household, a goodly number of them over the years, had gone out into the world trained to be clever, charming, and devious. Some years younger than Robert, Sir Walter, Francis Elliott, and Peregrine Marsdon, Susanna had not known them when she was a girl, but she had spent hours with her guardian's sons, especially Lord Robin. He'd stolen a kiss from her once, when she was thirteen. She'd daydreamed about him for weeks thereafter.

"So, you mean to ask more questions,” Sir Walter said, breaking a lengthy silence.

"Aye. I have spoken with Master Elliott already. What do you know of Peregrine Marsdon? Is he in London or at court?"

"Marsdon raises hawks and falcons on his estate in Essex. He gave up playing courtier years ago to devote himself to his birds, and to marrying off a flock of sisters.” He smiled at her sudden alertness. “I said marry off, not kill off."

"What do they look like, his sisters?"

"I do not know, but I warn you, if you plan to pay Marsdon a visit, he is not the most sociable of men. He prefers to avoid the company of women. His betrothed left him at the church to run off with another man. And before you ask, she was a tall, thin, yellow-haired lass."

"You do not consider Master Marsdon a suspect?"

"Cordoba's behavior is far more suspicious. But you will go your own way. Come, madam, have at me!” For a moment, he sounded almost jovial. “You must have more questions about my dissolute youth."

"Only one. You were in France in the autumn of 1559. Were you already there on St. Mark's Day?"

"I was sent to Paris soon after Elizabeth ascended the throne and I did not return to England until the following Yuletide. Does that clear my good name?"

"It does if you speak the truth."

When he smiled and made a little bow to acknowledge her point, Susanna realized she believed him. Oh, she still intended to see if she could discover what the weather conditions had been in late April of that year. Petronella had been correct to say a man could journey from Paris to London and back in a week. Robert had often bragged, in the days when he made frequent forays to the Continent, that on a good horse a man could travel a hundred miles in a single day. Such times were also possible with post horses ridden in relays.

But Six Walter seemed the least likely of all of them to be a cold-blooded killer. He was organized enough, but even that argued against his guilt. If he'd been intent on murdering a woman every St. Mark's Day, then in 1559 he'd have found a victim in Paris. He'd never have disrupted his schedule by returning to England.

More relieved than she wished to acknowledge by this logic, Susanna crossed Sir Walter Pendennis off her mental list of suspects.

Jennet's feet hurt. She wanted to go back to Catte Street, sit and put them up, and drink a nice soothing posset. “Do you mean to speak with every man in London who has ever held the post of sheriff?” she asked in a deliberately plaintive voice.

The current sheriffs were William Allen, a leather seller who lived in Bow Lane, and Richard Chamurlayn, ironmonger, of the parish of St. Olave in Hart Street. Visits to both places had yielded naught but a blister on Jennet's left heel.

A great waste of time, Jennet thought.

"Look upon this as a shopping trip,” Lady Appleton suggested. “We shop for information."

It seemed to Jennet that they'd walked over half of London already. First they'd gone to the Guildhall. No great sacrifice, that. The place was in sight of the house. But all Lady Appleton had learned there was that this was indeed where any coroner for the city presented the results of his inquests. Master Speedwell was next scheduled to appear on the Wednesday of Whitsun week at one in the afternoon, nearly a month away.

Both coroners and sheriffs kept records of the proceedings of courts held at the Guildhall. That should have made matters simple. It did not. Lady Appleton had been told she could not see these records.

Her first reaction had been to seek an audience with the lord mayor, Sir Thomas Lodge. It turned out he'd served as one of the two sheriffs of London three years ago, but Sir Thomas not only denied remembering anything about the death of an unnamed prostitute in Southwark on St. Mark's Day but grew pedantic when Lady Appleton asked more questions, delivering very little information but using a lecturing tone that raised Jennet's hackles.

In a nutshell, his explanation for this lack of helpfulness was that sheriffs were concerned with administration, not the catching of criminals. The watch and constables did that, but each ward had its own watch, and there was little cooperation among them. Unless a thief or murderer was taken during the initial hue and cry, he was rarely caught. No one troubled to pursue a malefactor to another part of the city.

Two more grueling hours passed before Lady Appleton gave up and returned to the Catte Street house. By that time she looked as tired and dejected as Jennet felt.

"I suppose,” Lady Appleton said as they reached the comfort of the solar, “that there is little use in trying to locate the constables who found the bodies."

Jennet huffed audibly and limped to the nearest bench. “There are two hundred and forty of them, madam, and they are drawn from the ranks of householders. They change."

"Some are more permanent,” Lady Appleton argued. “Paid to take the place of householders who do not wish to be bothered with such service."

"And how many of them would have noted the death of a whore?” Jennet eased off her shoe and rubbed her ankles, then her toes, and finally her heels. She winced when her fingers came in contact with the blister through her wool stocking.

At once Lady Appleton was at her side, all concern and contrition. “Bare your foot,” she ordered. “We must bathe that and apply a poultice,” she declared when she'd finished poking and prodding. “I'll not have you risk infection."

Jennet protested, for form's sake, then yielded to her mistress's ministrations. They did not speak again of the day's fruitless quest. Jennet dared hope the investigation was over.

She should have known better.

That very evening a missive came from Sir Walter.

"There was a murder on St. Mark's Day in 1561,” Lady Appleton announced. “A young woman fitting the same description as Lora and Diane and the others was killed in Deptford."

"Not Windsor?"

"No, but Deptford is a small village less than a mile from the queen's palace at Greenwich. For that reason, this murder came to the attention of the Coroner of the Royal Household. He has shared what information he has with Sir Walter. The victim's name was Sabina Dowe, the daughter of a local chandler.” She tapped the edge of the parchment against her chin. “I think, Jennet, that we must make a trip."

"To Deptford?"

"To Deptford, but that will be but one stop on our journey. First, we will visit Bermondsey, where Master Elliott claims to have been when Diane St. Cyr died."

That meant traveling on horseback. Jennet bit back a groan. Even more than she disliked excessive walking on paved streets, Jennet hated to ride pillion. The little benchlike seat attached to the back of a saddle was uncomfortable no matter how well it was padded. She'd be bounced black and blue in no time.

"And after Deptford,” Lady Appleton said, smiling benignly, “we will continue on to Leigh Abbey."

Where Mark and the children waited. Jennet sighed. Seeing them again would almost make the bruising worthwhile.