Queen of Ambition (26 page)

Wat was evidently thinking along similar lines. “Looks like we’ll have to lie in wait and brain ’em when they come back. Any of these things heavy enough, you reckon?” Edging past me, he pulled out a tall earthenware ewer and then, pausing, ran a hand over the plank wall at the rear of the cupboard. “No knothole this time,” he said regretfully.

As he backed out, however, I peered in. There were indeed no knotholes in the planking. There was, however, a vertical crack where it looked as though two pieces of planking had been used instead of one longer one. The crack was where the two ends met. On impulse, I reached forward, hooked my fingertips into the crack, and pulled sideways. Nothing happened.

“What you doin’, mistress?” Wat whispered, peering over my shoulder.

“Nothing useful,” I said, and would have given up, except that Wat muttered urgently: “Turn the other way, mistress. Pull left instead of right.”

“It won’t go left either … oh, wait a minute.” I had been using my right hand. I changed to the left one, which gave me a better purchase. A section of plank obligingly slid a few inches, leaving an square opening big enough for a hand to be thrust through.

“Here,” Wat said. Dumping the earthenware ewer on the floor of the cupboard, he leaned past me, pushed his massive paw through the hole, and groped downward. “Got it!” There was a click, and the back of
the cupboard swung open. It was the same principle, evidently, as the door to the secret room.

“Wat! You’re a wonder!” I could have kissed him but this was no time for playing games. Death could walk in on us at any moment. “Come on,” I said. “You first, so that I can shut this door behind us. God knows where this leads but it must lead somewhere.”

Wat went through on all fours and then stopped. “What’s the matter?” I demanded. “Go
on!
”

“Just a minute,” said Wat, shuffling awkwardly. Then at last, he went forward and out of my path, and following in too much haste, I first knocked over the ewer with a clatter that terrified me, and then realized too late what had caused Wat to stop. Had he not been there to block the way with his bulk, I would have pitched headfirst down the stone spiral staircase which was immediately beyond the back of the cupboard.

Wat, fortunately, was there to catch hold of me. I twisted about, got my skirt caught on something, wrenched it free, somehow maneuvered my feet in front of me, and slithered down onto the stair.

Peering around, I realized that the back of the cupboard opened straight into what must be one of the ornamental buttress towers at the corners of the Jackman’s Lane terrace. This would be the one at the back corner of the pie shop. The towers were evidently not as slender as they looked, though they were scarcely roomy. We were inside a tall brick cylinder, with a stone pillar rising through the middle, around which ran a very narrow, very precipitous, very tightly wound spiral staircase of stone. A pattern of chinks in the wall
provided weak light, just enough to make out this much.

I could still hear nothing to suggest that our foes were returning. Delay scared me but if I had time to close the way behind us, I must use it. Urging Wat down a few steps farther, to give myself room, I set about shutting the cupboard.

By edging down a couple of steps myself, I could reach a point from which I could lean into the cupboard and try to lock its outer door again. In this, however, I failed. The lock, which had been easy enough to open, resisted my attempts to secure it. Since I was stretched across the cupboard floor, I was too awkwardly placed to work efficiently and I dared not waste time. Below me, Wat was muttering: “Come on, mistress, do; we did ought to get on!” And he was right. I gave up and slithered backward. As I did so, my fingers unexpectedly touched something soft.

Momentarily I recoiled and then, peering, saw that it was nothing worse than a roll of what looked like quite fresh linen, which had half slid out of the overturned ewer. I finished scrambling out of the cupboard, got myself onto the stairs again, and then, inquisitively, reached in to pick the linen roll up. I found that I was holding a solid object, about two feet long and narrow, apparently wrapped in cloth.

As I drew it toward me, the linen wrappings unrolled themselves. The faint light showed them to be a man’s shirt, and inside, to my surprise, was the heavy wooden arm of one of the discarded and broken-up settles from the shop. I recognized the lion’s head carved into the end of it. Puzzled I held it up, close to
the nearest chinks, and then my whole body went still.

The lion had been eating meat. Its mane and muzzle were darkly stained but under the light there was little doubt about the nature of the stain. It was blood, and not only blood, either. As I moved it I saw something glint and held the carving closer to one of the chinks. There were hairs caught in the dried-up, dark red stain, and a couple of them had free ends, clear of the blood, which were still clean and showed their color. In the bright streak of daylight, they glinted like brass.

“What is it?” Wat asked me. “Mistress, do come on, afore we’re caught!”

I cocked my head but there was still no sound from the room behind us. “This … it’s … just rubbish,” I said, and made my mind up quickly. My first impulse was to take it with me, but the place where evidence is found is evidence in itself.

I wrapped the wooden arm up and reached back into the cupboard again. I shoved the bundle back inside the ewer, though I left the ewer lying on its side, and then moved down once more, out of the way of the swing of the cupboard’s false back. I could close this, at least. Gripping it by its bottom edge, I pushed it nearly shut. Its own latch stopped it from closing altogether but I hopped quickly up a step or two, to work the latch, and noticed as I did so that on this side, the door had bolts, top and bottom. With a gasp of relief, I shot them.

It takes time to tell it all, but in fact we had lingered for no more than a minute, and now, if our captors came after us, their way was barred.

“Now we can go,” I whispered.

We moved warily downward. Further gleams of light came in through more little apertures here and there in the stone. The stonework outside was ornamental, I remembered, more so than the tower at St.John’s College. Small slits would be lost in the pattern and not easily visible from outside unless one were looking for them.

I was beginning to have considerable respect for Master Jackman, Jester’s father-in-law and the ardently Protestant parent of the fugitive Sybil. He had seen the peril coming in time, and he had laid his escape route with remarkable thoroughness. A disguised door, leading to an attic room where he could hide if the heresy hunters came to the house. A second line of defense in the shape of an innocent-looking cupboard with a false back, and beyond that, if he needed to get out of Cambridge and flee England altogether, a hidden stairway to the ground.

We were halfway down when we heard the sounds we had feared: angry voices from above and then a pounding as of fists against the cupboard back. We tried to hurry, though to make any kind of speed on such a steep, tight spiral of a stair was dangerous and difficult; to miss one’s footing would be all too easy.

We went as fast as we dared, always ready to put out a hand to help each other. By the time we reached the foot of the stairs, the pounding had stopped and there had been no sound of splintering wood or feet on the stairs above us. The barrier, mercifully, had held.

At ground level, we found a further door, nearly as small and low as that of the cupboard, oddly shaped
with an angle in the middle of it, and provided with a bolt and an iron latch. The bolt was pushed home. As I slid it hurriedly back, I noticed that it moved silently, and under my fingers, I felt the smoothness of oil. Like the lock of the cupboard, this had been used recently.

I pressed the latch and let the door open an inch or so while I peered through the gap. Immediately in front of me was the strip of garden—just grass and weeds at this point—between the side of Jester’s house and the surrounding wall, but just to the right was a side gate. “Come on,” I whispered, and stepped out, beckoning Wat to follow. As I closed the door, I saw how skillfully it was made, of wood faced with thin brick and how neatly it was fitted, across two facets of the tower. From outside, the latch was worked from a tiny lever in a crevice of the ornamentation. The patterned brick and the line of the facet through the middle of the door confused the eye and made the outline of the door extremely hard to see when it was closed. Master Jackman had probably intended to use his secret exit after dark, if he had to use it at all.

“This way,” I said to Wat, making for the side gate, with my hand outstretched to open it, just as dark shadows loomed up to left and right, and Woodforde’s voice said: “Ah. There you are. You argued too long, Roland, but it seems we’re just in time,” and there was Jester closing in from one side, while on the other, Woodforde’s hands were reaching out to seize me.

The next couple of moments were a blur. I had never used my dagger in earnest before. I had sometimes wondered if I could, if I would be able to bring myself to lunge with the blade at a living body. Now
that the moment was here, I didn’t even pause to think. On the instant, I had flicked back my overskirt, and grasped the sheath through the fabric with one hand, while I plunged the other into the pouch and whisked the weapon out. I struck straight at Woodforde’s right arm. He sprang aside with an oath and the blade went through his doublet sleeve. At the same time, I was aware with half my mind that Wat had raised a mighty fist and landed it on Roland Jester’s jaw. The weight of the blow was probably backed by years of banked-up resentment for all the blows Wat had endured in the past. Jester went flat, immediately, and didn’t get up again.

Then Wat was at my side, and as I tore my dagger free, he charged forward, got hold of Woodforde around the ribs, and picked him up bodily. Woodforde had his own dagger out by now but it did him no good because before he could make use of it, he had been thrown down on the ground with such force that he could only lie there rolling his eyes and gasping.

Wat, becoming resourceful under the stimulus of excitement, promptly ripped Woodforde’s doublet open, tore a piece from his shirt, rolled him over, administering a couple of kicks in the process, and used the shirt to bind his hands and feet. Woodforde started to recover his breath and his powers of resistance, but I went to Wat’s aid, pressing my own dagger against Woodforde’s neck and recommending him not to struggle.

Jester was just coming to his senses, but he was still dazed and it was easy enough for the two of us to serve him the same way. “Ambrosia can’t be far off. She’ll
rescue them, I expect,” I said, as Wat tightened the last knot and I put my dagger away, “so we’d better be out of sight before she finds them.”

Leaving our defeated foes, we opened the side gate and slipped out into Silver Street. Our pursuers were for the moment immobilized and could not rush out after us, shouting: “
Stop thieves!
” or demanding that the populace should help them retrieve an eloping couple. We were safe, in the open air, out in a public street, back in the world of the living, back into the midst of sunshine and daily business. People were about, striding, strolling. Two fashionably dressed ladies were walking toward the river with a small dog on a lead, and a crowd had gathered, laughing, around a stall whose raucous proprietor was claiming incredible virtues for his array of pots and pans. I straightened my cap, which had been been pulled awry by my adventures.

“Mistress, where do we go now?” Wat asked.

“St. John’s College,” I said. “To see the Secretary of State.”

Wat didn’t know what a Secretary of State was. As I hurried us back to the main thoroughfare of Cambridge, I tried to explain. It seemed that he had hitherto believed that the queen simply ruled and that was that. The idea that she had councillors who advised her was quite unfamiliar to him. When at last he did, more or less, understand, he stopped dead and said in frightened tones: “But I can’t go and see anyone like that, mistress! Wat from the pie shop can’t go talkin’ with folk like that! An’ you said summat about a college. I can’t go into one of they places, neither!”

“It’s just a building. And Sir William Cecil …” I began.

“What? Oh, mistress, you didn’t tell me he was a Sir!” In Wat’s mind, this evidently made things worse. “Mistress, I
can’t!
” He came to a dead stop in the street.

“William Cecil,” I said patiently, leaving out the title
and taking Wat’s arm so as to get him moving again, “is just a man like any other. He’s middle-aged and has gout and he’s brought his old nurse to Cambridge with him to look after him. He won’t frighten you any more than Master Jester did. A good deal less, I should think, and look how you’ve just served Jester! You
have
to come. I want you to be a witness to all that’s happened today.” I considered him anxiously, looking at him sideways as I continued, virtually, to drag him along. Passersby looked at us strangely, but I was too worried to care. The afternoon’s events had to be reported to Cecil and placed under his control, and that meant placing Wat under his control as well. What had happened was enough to make even the untalkative Wat become garrulous, and Cecil certainly wouldn’t want him rolling around Cambridge like a loose cannon on the deck of a ship, describing the day’s events to family and friends. I clearly remembered Cecil saying that he preferred the very notion of plots against the queen to be unthinkable and, therefore, unmentionable.

“If you’re there to say that everything I describe is true,” I said deviously, “they’ll know that I’m not lying or imagining things. I’m just a woman, you see.”

With his chivalrous instincts thus aroused, Wat, though still quaking like a blancmange, at last consented to come with me, and stopped resisting my tug on his arm. When we reached St. John’s, a groom who was waiting in the street, holding a stolid-looking gray cob with an old footboard sidesaddle behind the cross-saddle, gave us a curious glance and so did the door porter, although to my relief, he recognized me and let
me in because he said that he had instructions from Cecil to admit me.