The Fugitive Queen (10 page)

“Yes. Only a few miles from here,” said Ryder briskly. “It's a long story. We shall need to send a report to the nearest place of authority and ask for some assistance. Not only was one of our men killed, but his body was taken away as well. And now, if we could dismount and come inside? Are there no grooms?”

While Ryder was speaking, the woman had been staring at us with her mouth open. She now recovered herself, however. “My man's somewhere about,” she said and disappeared again, this time through a small door into the undercroft, returning a moment later with a broad, fair fellow, whose smile, I was glad to see, offered the friendly greeting that Magnus Whitely hadn't given us.

“This is Jamie Appletree,” said Whitely. “And this is Mistress Agnes Appletree, his wife. She sees to the house. He'll help you with the animals. There's no staff at the house here except us three.”

“What about the farm?” inquired Dick Dodd.

“Oh, the
farm,
” said Master Whitely sniffily. “There's a shepherd and a
handful
of men to work the fields, but they live in the cottages, half a mile off. If you'll get down and come inside, Mistress Appletree will see to some food for you.” There is a surprisingly narrow edge between respect and insolence and he was right on that edge.

“I realize that our party will make extra work,” I said as I dismounted. “Get more help in if you need it—perhaps the laborers have daughters or wives who would like to earn a penny or two?”

“Happen they would,” Mistress Appletree agreed, clearly relieved now that we were talking of something that made sense to her. Her little red face, indeed, glowed at the notion of being given assistance. “I'll have a couple here by tomorrow, if thee can see they're paid right. Now, if thee'll come this way . . .”

 • • • 

As soon as we were inside, in the big, old-fashioned hall that was evidently the main room, Sybil took charge of Meg, found a settle on which she could rest, and tucked her up with cushions to lie on and a blanket over her.

Meanwhile, Ryder and I led Jamie Appletree, who looked as if he might be cooperative, to one side and asked him what we should do about reporting the attack on us. His recommendation was that we should apply at once to the constable in Fritton. “If he thinks fit, he'll send word to York, but it's him we ought to ask first.” He offered to carry the message for us. “You'll be wanting Master Whitely to show you about t'place, no doubt.”

Before I had even taken a glass of wine or shed my cloak, therefore, I asked Whitely for writing materials and was shown to his office, a cramped little room off the hall. Swiftly, I wrote a letter of explanation, sealed it, and handed it to Appletree, who departed with it at once.

I would have to send the news back to Hugh, as well, I thought, and he would have to tell Harry's parents, and it was a terrible thing that I couldn't even report that he had had decent Christian burial. But for the moment there was no more that I, or any of us, could do. I went to find Agnes. “We need food and drink,” I said. “All of us.” I had noticed that the interior of Tyesdale was far from satisfactory. I felt extremely tired, but before we could take our ease in this place, we would first have to inspect it. “After that,” I said dispiritedly, “we would like to look over the house.”

Dudley, of course, had never seen his legacy. I must be fair to
Dudley, though this wasn't easy, for I didn't like or trust him, an opinion shared by most of Elizabeth's council, and I knew that once at least he came near to betraying Elizabeth and all England with her. He was both ambitious and ruthless. Yet, by hindsight, I see that in the end he did Elizabeth more good than harm. If it was partly a case of knowing where his own best interests lay, well, never mind. She wasn't a fool. She knew him through and through, but she forgave him because for all his shortcomings, he was able to offer her the vigorous masculine friendship that she needed.

And for all his faults he wasn't shabby. He might well have had doubts about the steward, but if he had really known what Tyesdale was like, I don't think he would have handed it to Pen as a dowry.

Tyesdale, in fact, was in a deplorable mess.

Agnes brought us some ale and wine—it was unexpectedly good wine—and some food in the form of chopped ham cooked in beaten eggs, with bread on the side. I sat on the edge of Meg's settle to eat mine and watch her eat hers and drink her small ale. Afterward, I think we all felt better. Bracing myself for the effort, I got out the inventory that Dudley had provided and requested Whitely and Mistress Appletree to show us around. The degree of mess became instantly apparent.

The trouble was partly the lack of servants, of course. Mistress Appletree had obviously tried hard. Within the encircling wall there was a herb and vegetable plot, small and with very few herbs, but was properly weeded, and indoors, the floors were reasonably clean. The stores were low but there was a modest supply of salt and other foodstuffs, spare candles, and lengths of cloth and dyestuffs for making and coloring clothes and curtains at home. As I had noticed on arrival, however, most of the furniture was in a shocking state. Scratched tables, chipped benches, and wobbly stools had not been replaced; and the wall hangings were frankly moth-eaten.

We began the tour in the lookout tower. It contained three rooms, which Agnes had evidently decided were beyond her and had ignored. On the ground floor was a small, dusty chapel.
Here we found a gilded cross, a statue of a Virgin and Child in a wall niche, and a Latin Bible on a lectern. It was printed, but splendidly illuminated and probably valuable even though its leaves were spotted brown with damp. I fancied that there had once been a Catholic chaplain at Tyesdale. Indeed, when he rejoined us the following day, Brockley poked about in the chapel and in a cupboard found a cassock wrapped around a silver crucifix on a chain and a Latin prayerbook.

At the top of the tower was a music room and in between was a study. In them we found tables gray with dust, a lute and a spinet, both made useless by neglect and damp. Cobwebs festooned every corner. If cared for, the rooms could have been charming, which made their condition even sadder.

The big hall had a parlor adjoining it at one end. At the other was a small minstrels' gallery with the doors to the kitchen and to Whitely's office beneath it. The hall had probably been lofty to begin with but at some point an extra floor had been put in so that new rooms could be built above (as a result, the minstrels' gallery was now suitable only for rather short minstrels). A staircase led up from the hall, emerging into a passageway with windows at each end and doors leading to bedchambers, two at the back and two at the front. They were spacious and had been kept dusted; in fact, Whitely was using one of those at the back. The beds in the others were not made up, but each had a supply of linen in a window-seat chest.

A farther narrow staircase went on up to four small attic bedchambers under the slope of the roof. “Jamie and I sleep up here,” Agnes said.

I led us back to the hall after that, because there, in addition to a scarred table and an array of battered-looking stools and benches, I had noticed a large sideboard. It was as scratched and unpolished as everything else, but I had been wondering what was in it.

Pulling it open, Sybil and I found silverware inside. We got it out for a closer look and compared it with the inventory. It hadn't been cleaned for a long time, and if the inventory was accurate, some of it was missing. “Where's the rest?” I said to Whitely.
“And
why
has none of this dreadful furniture or any of those out-worn hangings been replaced?”

Whitely was indignant. He couldn't, he said,
think
of taking it upon himself to authorize the purchase of new furniture or hangings unless the owner had inspected the old ones first, and as for the silver, what was in the sideboard was all of it. The missing items had never existed. Dudley's agent, whom he said he remembered very well, had been careless and apt to write things down twice.

“There never was but one of those ornate salts, Mistress Stannard. The old master wasn't such a wealthy man. The wealth of this place is in the sheep. And we
never
had but the half dozen silver candlesticks, not two dozen as it says here . . .”

I didn't believe him. It would be hard to prove that he had disposed of the absent items himself, but by this time I had taken in the fact that Master Whitely's plain buff garments were actually made of very good materials and had been cut by a highly competent tailor. A doublet that fit across the shoulders like a second skin was a telling sign. Like Dudley, I was beginning to feel suspicious of Master Whitely.

The inspection over, it was time to decide who was to sleep where. I chose one of the front bedchambers over the hall for myself, to share with Sybil. It was sunny and overlooked the courtyard. The rooms at the back also had a pleasant outlook, though, over the fields and moorland to the north and there was no outer wall at the back to interrupt the view. The wall we had seen on the way in only enclosed the courtyard and the sides of the house. At the rear, the house wall went virtually straight down into the moat.

Sybil and I helped Agnes to light a fire in the hall and put the bed linen to air, and we agreed with Ryder that when our party was reunited, he, Tom Smith, and the Brockleys should have the three spare attic rooms. Meg, by this time, had become restless and wanted to get up from her settle, so I set her to cleaning the surviving silver. A quiet manual occupation, I thought, might be steadying for her.

During the afternoon, the bright weather faded once more
and a rainstorm swept down. It cleared presently, however, and soon after that Jamie Appletree reappeared, accompanied by a large, loud-voiced man with a drooping ginger mustache and a workmanlike suit of russet brown, who announced himself as Master Toft, by trade a tiler, but for this year burdened with the duty of being the constable of Fritton, and what was all this about one of our men being murdered?

I looked at Master Toft and felt a terrible new weight of weariness descend on me. I knew his type. Constables are local men, usually with other trades to follow as well, who take on the task of upholding the law for a year or two, after which someone else replaces them. Some are good at the task, conscientious and intelligent. Some enjoy the power and become too zealous, arresting people for foolish reasons.

And some have too little experience of the world outside their town or village. They don't know what is important and what isn't, and automatically distrust all strangers, assuming that anything they say is only half as reliable as the testimony of local folk. They may be energetic but they're often ineffectual. On sight, I judged that Master Thomas Toft was one of that kind. And I was right.

Jamie had taken the gray cob to Fritton. It apparently belonged to Whitely but was used by anyone who needed a horse, since Whitely himself spent most of his time at the house. Ryder borrowed it next, because our horses were all tired and he wished to show Toft the scene of Harry's death.

Ryder hurried Toft off straightaway and did not return until dusk. Ryder was visibly in a temper. Toft, unmoved, declared patronizingly to me that nothing had been found that could be investigated. He declined my request that he should speak to Meg about her kidnapping. “T'lass is back unharmed, and like enough they meant marriage, any road. That's nearly always the way of it and t'girls get husbands as good that way as any other.” He then took himself off back to Fritton and his tiling business, and by that time, I was in a temper, too.

“The rainstorm did for us,” Ryder told me bitterly, as we sat by the fire, glad of its warmth, for all that this was July. “The blood had all gone and even a lot of the hoofprints had been washed out. Toft, who is a complete fool, kept saying that if we didn't have Harry's body and there was no sign of bloodletting, how did he know Harry had ever existed? Well, we can all take oaths that he did and there are the Grimsdales and all the innkeepers between here and Richmond, but I don't think Toft thinks anywhere outside of Yorkshire really exists either!”

“The Grimsdales aren't outside of Yorkshire! Did you see them?”

“Yes, oh yes. And Mistress Pen is better and all the rest of our party will be here tomorrow. Dick's with them. Yes, the Grimsdales said they thought we'd had a third fellow with us when we set off in the morning, but they couldn't be sure. They hadn't counted the heads in our party and what with it being so dark inside their place . . .”

“Oh, for the love of heaven!”

“Quite. But that's what they said. At least, the men did. The women looked as if they might have said more, only they were too scared. The younger one did start to say something at one point but her husband told her to hold her tongue and not interfere in men's business. Toft, of course, thought nothing of it. That's the way these farming folk always treat their wives, he said, and it didn't mean anything. I thought it did, but . . . well, we went to other places, too, in the direction more or less that we went to find Meg. There're quite a few little farmsteads over that way; there's a sort of long valley with usable land in it—though not good land, by any standards—and farms, poor places, all of them, are dotted here and there. We didn't find anything suspicious in any of them. We didn't notice anything that might be a new grave anywhere, either. Toft says that unless we can prove to him there ever was a murder, there's not much he can do, and there have been no reports of robbers in this district since Dickson Morley. Why the devil he should think we'd made it all up, I can't imagine, but I really believe he does!”

I thumped an exasperated fist down on the arm of my chair, which creaked alarmingly. “So what next? What am I to write to Hugh about Harry's death? And what else can we do to find out what has happened to his body? I have all these other things to see to! I have to . . . to deliver a message to Mary Stuart in Bolton! And help Pen put this place in order and look for a husband for her and . . .”