The Heresy of Dr Dee (19 page)

‘Just telling you what he said. He also thought it worth talking to my cousin Nicholas Meredith. Who also seems to be a substantial property owner.’

I was recalling how Scory had laughed on learning that Meredith was my cousin, when a man appeared in the doorway, bearing a broom and glowering at the remains of the window.

‘God’s blood! Profuse apologies, my masters. The glazier’s art is yet in its infancy round yere.’

He began sweeping the shards of glass into a corner with his broom, then gave up and tossed the broom across the parlour.

‘I’ll have it shuttered. He’ll not get paid for
this
.’ Wiping his wet hands on his apron, straightening up and jabbing a thumb at his chest. ‘Jeremy Martin.
Keeper of this inn.’

A powerfully built man of late middle-years. Dense grey hair winged back behind his ears.

‘Least there’ll be no broken glass in your bedchamber this night, my masters.’

‘Although wouldn’t that be because it’s yet without any kind of glass?’ Dudley said.

Jeremy Martin grinned.

‘On the list, that is. Glass in all the windows next year, sure to be. Proper glass. I en’t been yere long enough to do all as needs doing, but this’ll be the finest inn in the
west ’fore long. Can I replenish your jug, my masters? On the house?’ Picking up the beer jug, he sniffed it with suspicion. ‘Holy blood, you’re drinking ale! You have a
flagon of my ole cider, masters, and I’ll tell you, you en’t gonner go back to this bat’s piss in a hurry.’

Dudley looked pained. One virtue of high social status, he’d been known to remark, was that it spared you the crude predations of the serving classes.

‘Master Martin,’ I said, ‘would you happen to know where we might find Nicholas Meredith?’

‘Won’t be far away. He’s in town. Friend of yours?’

‘My cousin.’

‘You’re his cousin? From London? You en’t a lawyer, then?’

‘I… No. Not as such.’

Martin took a step back into the pooled water, inspecting me from head to feet and back again.

‘Holy blood! You en’t…?’ His eyes widened, and then his arms were thrown wide as if he’d embrace me. ‘Rowly Dee’s boy? The man who… Holy
blood…
’

‘You knew my father?’

‘Rowland Dee? All the talk was about him at one time. How close he was to the ole King. How well-favoured. And now it’s his son and the ole King’s daughter. Holy blood! I tell
you… Master Meredith, when the pamphlets come from London after the crowning, he’s in yere reading it all out. His uncle’s boy calculing the stars for the new queen. Well,
well… Do he know you’re yere?’

‘I wrote to him but… no, he doesn’t. Not yet.’

‘Aye, I thought… He’d known you was coming, we’d never’ve yeard the last of it. So you en’t nothing to do with the judge?’

I assured him we were merely travelling with the judge’s company, while inspecting manuscripts from disassembled libraries. Taking the opportunity to make a visit to my family’s old
home.

‘Nant-y-groes? Master Stephen Price, he’s there now, see. You know Master Price?
He
was down London. MP for Radnorshire.’

‘Why’s he living at Nant-y-groes?’

‘Building a new home down the valley, by the ole monastery grange. Gotter keep his family somewhere, meanwhile.’

‘So he’s only renting it.’

‘Master Nick likely owns it yet.’

‘And much of this town?’

‘Not as much as Master Bradshaw – big wool merchant.’ Jeremy Martin beamed. ‘Wool, cloth and the law, my masters. As good a foundation as you’ll find anywhere. Used
to be religion, now it’s wool, cloth and the law.’

The rain stopped not long before twilight. Within half an hour, a piercing red sun lit the street, and Dudley and I walked out into a town that you could feel to be growing
around you.

Signs of building on a scale I hadn’t encountered since leaving Cecil’s house in the Strand. Piles of bricks everywhere and frames of green oak for new houses. Poke into any
alleyway, and you’d find old barns and outhouses being converted into business premises.

We edged around a puddle the size of a duckpond, the sun floating there like an orange.

‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘why this town makes you shiver.’

Dudley looked across the street where the ground rose towards a castle, fallen into ruin on its green mound, much of its stone already plundered.

‘I do mistrust sudden wealth.’

‘As distinct from inherited wealth?’

He didn’t rise to that. The sun spread a glowing hearthlight over a wall of new brick, and a stout man in clerk’s apparel crossed the street in front of us, bearing a pile of
leather-bound documents.

‘It’s in a hurry, this town, to leave something behind,’ Dudley said. ‘Don’t you feel that?’

‘Poverty, perhaps?’

He eyed me.

‘Why so frivolous tonight?’

‘That’s frivolous?’

Dudley frowned. The ostler, who’d stabled our horses, led two more past us towards the entrance to the mews at the side of the Bull. It was not hard to imagine my tad here, carousing with
his friends on the hot summer nights of old. I felt sad.

‘Tell me about Cumnor Place,’ I said.

No reply. Doors were opening, people threatening to throng the streets. I waited until we could no longer hear the clitter of hooves.

‘Better here than back at the inn,’ I said. ‘You never know who’s listening at the door of a bedchamber.’

We’d come to the corner of the wide street leading down to the church and the sheriff’s house. All was yet quiet here. If they’d brought Prys Gethin from New Radnor, another
crowd would have formed in no time, but the street was empty. At the bottom, just past the church, a stone bridge over the river carried a narrow road into the hills, where a castle occupied a gap
in the forest. Probably back in England.

‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ Dudley said.

‘About what… exactly?’

He stopped, glanced behind him to where the lurid sun was down on the horizon, poking through the layered clouds like the tip of a tongue betwixt reddened lips.

‘The murder of my wife. Beyond all doubt, now.’

XXII

C
UMNOR
P
LACE.
B
ARELY
three miles from Oxford. Hardly a demanding ride from Kew. And now his wife was
dead and buried Dudley had finally made the journey.

I wondered how he’d felt, but didn’t ask.

The house was a century old, but recently made modern by Dudley’s friend and his wife’s last host, Anthony Forster. It had been divided into a number of fine apartments, one of which
had become the home of Amy Dudley.

Ten years of marriage, no country house of her own and unwelcome in London town – so that the Queen could pretend she didn’t exist.

Not that she was alone at Cumnor. There were retainers, perhaps half a dozen of them. A small, itinerant household.

So where was this retinue on the day of Amy’s death?

Why… at the local fair.

Amy, it seemed, had ordered everyone –
everyone
, women and men – to go to the fair. Would hear no word of dissent.

I’d heard about this before and had not liked what it implied.

It had been a Sunday and the day after the Queen’s twenty-seventh birthday which Dudley, who arranged the festivities, might have claimed was also his. For his wife’s birthday, he
would have
sent a present.

My mother had heard gossip in Mortlake village about Amy being so stricken with darkness of mind over her husband’s neglect that she’d oft-times determined to make away with herself.
And yet, not so very long before that, she seemed in good heart. Dudley had been told of a letter, dated August 24, which she’d sent to her London tailor, William Edney, with instructions for
the styling of a velvet gown. She was not frugal with her clothing, having spent nearly fifty shillings on a Spanish gown of russet damask, and she urged Edney to make haste to get the latest gown
to her.

Had she really wanted a new gown in which to throw herself down eight steps to a far from certain death?

Yes… a mere eight stone steps, and not even a straight flight – a bend in it, apparently.

The only sequence of events I could imagine begins in an instant of blinding despair, as Amy stands at the top of the stairs, maybe with an image all aflame in her mind of Dudley and Elizabeth
dancing together on
their
birthday… and in her anguish she hurls herself, with some violence, from the top step to the stone flags below.

Which sat well with her ordering of everyone to the fair, so that she might be alone. No one to stop her.

‘Broken her neck.’ Dudley gazing down the sloping street and doubtless seeing stairs stretching away into a black mist. ‘That’s what I was told. What everyone was told.
Including Tom Blount.’

His steward, whom he’d sent to Cumnor in his place, so that he might not be seen as attempting to interfere with the inquiry.

‘
You
thought she’d killed herself?’ I said.

‘My first thought, yes.’

‘Because she didn’t want to stand in your way.’

His eyes closed.

‘Yet you told me earlier this year that she believed herself mortally ill.’

‘From what she told me. But what if she was lying?’

I thought that if a wife of mine had suggested she was dying of some malady, I’d not leave her side. Must needs stop thinking like this. I was not Robert Dudley. Had never been blinded by
an all-consuming sense of destiny.

There was yet more to this. Some private matter which, even as one of Dudley’s oldest friends, I’d never be told. Nor should be, I supposed.

‘Did you tell the Queen what Amy said?’

In my head the voice of Bishop Bonner.

… heard that, some days before your friend Dudley was widowed, the Queen confided to the esteemed Spanish ambassador, Bishop la Quadra, that Lady Dudley would very soon be departing
this life.

Dudley having told her was the only reason I could think of for the Queen’s terrifying foresight. The only reason I dare allow myself to think of.

No reply. He’d gone to sit on the remains of a stone wall, where part of an old house was being taken down.

‘Blount told me a report had been written about the state of the… of Amy’s body. He couldn’t get a sight of the document.’

‘When it’s put before the coroner, its content should be made public.’

‘
When…
No date’s set for the resumption of the inquest. Knew I could demand to see it, though. If I pulled rank.’

‘And you thought that wise?’

‘God no. Didn’t even try. But did have a quiet meeting with Anthony Forster. Well, if it was your house, you’d want to know everything, wouldn’t you?’

Forster, of course, had not been there either when Amy died but, yes, he’d want to know.

‘We arrived the day after two servants had seen her ghost at the top of the stairs. Forster said the rest of them were afraid to go into that part of the house, day or night.’

‘But you went there.’

‘Oh yes. I saw the place. The chances of falling to your death from those stairs are… slight.’

‘But her neck
was
—’

‘Broken, yes. And she was found at the bottom of the stairs. But there were…’ He thought for a moment. ‘What’s never been talked about is that there were other
injuries. Dints. In her head. Which may have been caused by hitting the stone, but one was a good two inches deep. What does that suggest to you?’

‘Something sharp. Maybe the sharp edge of a stair?’

Had the feeling I was clutching at reeds here.

‘Oh, John, come
on
…’

‘It might also suggest she was struck. A two-inch dint… speaks to me of a blow from a… a sword blade.’

‘If you saw that stair, then you’d know nothing else explains it. And yet… Tom Blount says he understands, from his inquiries, that the jury is not disposed to see evidence of
evil.’

Dudley stood up and faced what remained of the sun. I only hoped he wasn’t seeing it as I was. The clouds like reddened lips had become the slit of an open wound, so that the sun – a
sun which this day had scarce lived – looked to be dying in an ooze of sticky blood.

I said, ‘Anyone seeing the entire household, apart from Amy, at the fair… would have a good idea that she was alone. Might this be a robbery? Was anything taken?’

‘No. I’m telling you, somebody killed her, John. Somebody went into Cumnor to kill her. No doubt left.’

His face looked very dark against the low light. The gipsy, they called him, those who sought to dishonour him, and the change wrought by the butchery to his beard and moustache made this seem
not unjust. Without those trademark facial twirls, even a friend might take some time to recognise Lord Dudley.

‘Let’s bring this into the air,’ I said. ‘You think someone killed her to damage you.’

‘I
know
it.’

‘Who?’

‘Make a list.’

‘But if it was someone who wanted to make sure you would not wed the Queen, surely it were better than Amy lived.’

‘Ah, well, you would think that, wouldn’t you? But then… perhaps you wouldn’t.’