To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court (31 page)

“He wouldn’t have told you. He’s my friend. He keeps my secrets.”

“Yes, he tried,” I agreed. “But I had already learned from your brother-in-law, William Haggard, that a financial misunderstanding—your words, apparently—lay behind it and when I was wondering just what that could mean, I was reminded of the time when you helped your friend John Northcote uncover a swindle carried out by his steward, who had falsified the figures of wool sales. The two ideas: that of financial—er—misunderstanding, and that of falsified documents, suddenly came together. Perhaps these letters were not your first attempt at forgery! Perhaps you had some previous experience!”

“How dare you?” demanded Mortimer.

“Quite easily, in the circumstances,” I said. “I gambled on my idea, in fact. I told Master Lewis that I already knew it was a matter of forgery and that took him by surprise. He couldn’t deny it. He didn’t want to give any details, so I invented a rumor that shocked him so much that he felt he had to tell me the truth, for your sake, Sir Philip. I said I’d heard that you had forged a love letter from a woman who had refused to become your mistress, out of revenge, to spoil her reputation. Master Lewis was so horrified that he told me the truth.”

They were all gaping at me now. “You didn’t mention that!” Rob said.

“It didn’t seem important,” I said. “I just repeated to
you what Lewis had told me. How I got him to do it didn’t really matter.”

“Possibly not—but where on earth,” said Rob, “did you learn that particular trick?”

“There’s more to Mistress Blanchard than most people ever guess,” Brockley remarked, from across the room. Although he had taken Gladys aside, the tower parlor wasn’t big enough for them to be properly out of earshot.

I was digging in my memory. “I’ve an idea,” I said, “that my first husband, Gerald, told me once that it was how he got a particular man to admit something to him. He suggested to him that he had done something so outrageous that the fellow blurted out the truth in self-defense. He’d really committed some lesser misdemeanor. Gerald wanted him to admit it because even the lesser offense was good enough for Gerald’s purposes. He used it later to—put pressure on the man.”

Part of Gerald’s work for Sir Thomas Gresham in Antwerp had been to persuade various reluctant persons to hand over keys and, indeed, to commit forgery, so that treasure which was the rightful property of the Spanish administration in the Netherlands could be spirited away to swell Elizabeth’s treasury in the Tower of London. Gerald never had any conscience about it. He was one of Elizabeth’s most loyal servants.

“You seem to have had a very strange past, Mistress Blanchard,” said Mortimer coldly. “You are a strange kind of woman altogether.” He turned to his mother. “And you, it seems, brought her here to nose into my affairs.”

“I did,” said Lady Thomasine strongly. “I needed to
find out just how you proposed to make the queen restore the Mortimer fortune. I was sure that any such scheme must be dangerous. I kept telling you but you wouldn’t listen. I asked for help. Ursula has worked in secret for the queen, before now. I asked that she should come here and find out what you were about.”

“You betrayed me? Your own son?”

“No,” said Rob. “She may well have saved you from a horrible death. You should be down on your knees in gratitude to her.”

Rising, Rob crossed the hearth and took back the letters that Mortimer and I were holding. He held them up. “Sir William Cecil will have to see these but then they will certainly be destroyed. Forgeries or not, their contents are still so scandalous that I doubt if either Cecil or the queen will wish their existence to come into public knowledge. That simple fact may—only may—save you from a charge of treason and save your brother-in-law too. We know how you pressed him into becoming your accessory. You will have to base any plea for mercy on your willingness, and Master Haggard’s willingness, to observe lifelong secrecy. We shall see. I make no promises. Meanwhile, I recommend you to keep silence from this moment on.”

It was I who broke the shattered silence which followed by clearing my throat and saying: “This conference is not over. There is still the matter of Rafe Northcote, who did not fall from a tower, with or without the assistance of witchcraft. He was stabbed in the back.”

There was a further shattered silence. Mortimer, who had walked into the study and seen the stabbed Rafe with his own eyes, now stared at me as though I
had taken leave of my senses and demanded truculently: “What nonsense is this?”

“Nonsense?” I said. “You were there, you found Brockley and myself beside the body, and you and your mother together accused us of killing him. You had us shut in your dungeon. Then you, Lady Thomasine, took us out and sent us, in the care of Pugh and Evans, to an isolated hut in the hills and left us there to die—like the poor things who were shut in Isabel’s Tower and are said to haunt it still. Fortunately, we escaped. And then we arrived here to find Gladys being accused of bewitching Rafe into killing himself, although you both know that that is a lie.”

“Oh, my dear.” Lady Thomasine gazed at me sadly. “My dear Ursula. How very unwise of you to raise this subject. I don’t know what you mean about being shut in a hut. What can you hope to gain from such a tale, my dear? It is true that I released you and your servants early that morning. You are a kinswoman of mine and family honor is important to the Vetch family. That is partly why I sought your help in discovering my son’s unwise plans. I wished to protect him—but also, I did not want scandal in our midst. I wished to keep the whole matter within the confines of the family circle. Alas, Rafe’s murder would have been a scandal just as bad! Ursula, I know that my son wanted you and your manservant to be taken to the sheriff but I thought it best just to let you go and put out the story that Rafe had killed himself.”

“What?”
I said.

Lady Thomasine shook her head at me. “Somehow or other, despite all our efforts, the rumor still got round that his death wasn’t all it seemed. And then, to my great
distress, a whisper started that you had been concerned, and had run away the following morning. It was all most embarrassing. For this reason, we decided to sacrifice that reeking old hag over there.” She pointed at Gladys, who shuddered back toward Brockley, but glared from her safe vantage point, like a wildcat from the depths of a den.

“The fact is, Master Henderson,” Lady Thomasine said confidingly to Rob, “that there is indeed more to Mistress Blanchard than most people suspect. She is attractive, and I am sorry to say that at times, she leads men on. She did it to my son. He will tell you. She has no intention of yielding to them, but she enjoys—shall we say—disturbing them. My son, naturally, took it for an invitation and then she turned very nasty.”

“She attacked me most savagely,” said Mortimer, nodding, and looking at Rob in a manner so grave that for one dreadful, dumbfounded moment, I thought Rob might actually believe him.

“You claim I … !” Indignation came to my aid. “You were trying to force yourself on me! Yes, I hit you with a silver dish and bit your wrist! And I had every reason!”

But if Lady Thomasine had been a man she would have been a magnificent jouster; nearly impossible to unseat. “I fear,” she said to Rob, “that my son is telling the truth, and I fear that Mistress Blanchard may also have tried her wiles on Rafe. With Rafe, she perhaps aroused more desire than she could well cope with. Yes, I and my son did find her standing beside his body, and I have no doubt at all that it was she who killed him.”

“Of course I believe you!” said Rob. “Why should either you or Brockley want to stick a dagger in Rafe’s back? And if you had, you’d hardly drag the matter up now, when Rafe is safely buried, not even for Gladys.”

We were in the keep guest rooms. We had not intended to spend the night in the castle but with so much unfinished business on our hands, we couldn’t help it. At Lady Thomasine’s outrageous accusation, Rob had decided to end the meeting so that we could confer together. Brushing the accusation aside with a cool lift of his eyebrows and a request that Lady Thomasine should stop talking nonsense, he had demanded that Gladys be handed officially over to our care, and added that we expected to be accommodated and fed.

Mortimer tried to bluster but Rob more or less stated that failing proper hospitality, we would simply requisition guest rooms and supplies from the kitchen.
As Sir Philip’s only alternative was to order his men to attack ours, thereby turning the castle into a battlefield, he gave in. Susanna and Jack Raghorn were bidden to prepare our rooms; and a supper of cheese omelets and fried bacon, accompanied by a jug of ale, was (at our own request) served in our quarters. We didn’t feel we would be welcome at supper in the hall.

I supped at the parlor table with Rob and Brockley. Gladys, with unusual delicacy, had taken her food into the next room, despite my objections that we had all eaten together in Isabel’s Tower.

“Master Henderson wasn’t there then. He’s a gentleman. He don’t want a dirty old woman champing her food at his table,” said Gladys, and retired to champ it out of our hearing. I must admit we were all rather relieved. Even my protests had been largely a matter of form. I didn’t persist with them.

“Well,” I said now. “All right. We’re all agreed that neither I nor Brockley killed Rafe, but somebody did. He was found at the foot of a tower as though he’d fallen, but when we were hiding in Isabel’s Tower, Gladys found out that there were whispers saying I might have done it. Someone noticed that he—that Rafe—should have bled more if he’d been alive when he fell.”

“The whispers obviously worried Lady Thomasine and her son,” Rob said. “They wanted to hide the fact that there’d been a murder at all. Think it out. The Mortimers wanted to make Rafe’s death look like suicide, and to pretend that you had simply left the castle in the normal way, if rather early in the morning. When the rumors started up, saying that you had murdered him, that can’t have
suited them in the least! They wouldn’t want a hue and cry after you. You were on their consciences. So when they found that Gladys was within their reach, they decided to lance the gossip, like a boil. They would put the blame on Gladys and her witchcraft, and make a nice satisfying end of the business! Clever of them, really. They could put the lack of blood down to another of her magic spells. Silly, pointless spells if you stop to think about them but if you once get people worked up enough about witchcraft, they never do stop to think. They don’t ask sensible questions. They’ll believe anything.”

“You don’t believe in witches either?” I asked.

“I believe in very little, as a matter of fact,” said Rob. “I go to church because it’s the law. Still, there may be a God. Someone or something created the world and put people in it. But no, I can’t believe in witches. They seem quite absurd to me. The things they’re supposed to do are so ridiculous. Why in the world should Gladys decide to make Rafe jump off a tower? But, as I said, no one was likely to ask that. For the Mortimers, she was the perfect scapegoat.”

“It’s strange that people saw the lack of blood but not the stab wound,” I said.

“Not really.” Rob shook his head. “When you gave me that detailed report at the Feathers, didn’t you say that according to what Olwen told Gladys, he was found lying on his back?”

“Yes,” I said.

“If he landed on his back, the damage might easily hide the mark. Now then.
We
know he was stabbed, and when and where. We are not perfectly sure by whom, but the chances are it was Mortimer. From what you told me
in the Feathers, he had reasons, of more than one kind. Still, before I set about questioning him further, are there any other candidates?”

Reluctantly, I said: “It could have been Lewis. The Mortimers might want to protect him, I suppose. He’s Sir Philip’s friend, after all, and Sir Philip wants the marriage with Alice to go ahead. There’s money in it for him. Lewis was getting round Alice very nicely, and her father and her uncle were both backing him up, but I suppose a quarrel could still have blown up between him and Rafe.”

“Were Rafe and Alice actually lovers?” Rob asked.

“I think so,” I said. “The first time I tried to get into the study, I found them asleep in each other’s arms, in front of the hearth. I don’t want to think it was Lewis,” I added. “Mortimer seems a much more likely killer to me, and he was up late that night. There was still a light in his window when we set out to get into the study.”

Gladys, grumbling to herself, came back into the room. “Got any of that ale, still? They didn’t treat me proper, while they had me locked up. They gave me food and water but never enough.” Her glance fell on the dish of bacon in the middle of the table. “You goin’ to eat all that or could I have a bit more?”

“When were you arrested?” I asked. “I thought you were going back to the mountains.”

“So I was, but Blod let me down. I tried to see her again, to get a message to Hugh Cooper, but the silly girl took it into her daft head to get scared of meetin’ a witch in the woods. She ran off when I stepped out in front of her, and went and told Cooper I was creepin’ round the
place. I never had time to give her a proper message from me to him, or talk to him myself, because he went to the castle and told Lady Thomasine. I think he didn’t want another scene with the villagers, so he decided to put it in the hands of the castle people. I was still in the woods, hopin’ to find someone else to take word to Hugh, and the next thing I know, there are great big men with swords all over the place, and I was found and haled off to the castle hall. Well, you heard Lady Thomasine. Whole castle was full of rumors and talk about Rafe, and did he fall or did someone shove him? Mortimer took one look at me and decided I was a gift from heaven. The perfect explanation, I was. Better than you, ’cause he’d
got
me there to throw to the sheriff. So he had me locked up till he could put on a formal inquiry as he called it.”

I filled her beaker and handed her some bread and bacon. Brockley remarked that Rafe had not been dead long when we found him. “Mistress Blanchard pointed that out to me when we were talking it over in the dungeon. You said, madam, that a quarrel was unlikely because the Haggards were sleeping above the study. That makes Lewis less probable. I said at the time that it’s possible to quarrel quietly, and so it is, but it’s difficult. And if Lewis did it, I should think it would have been in anger. I don’t see Lewis lying in wait.”