To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court (35 page)

“In the morning,” said Rob, when we were downstairs again, “we will take Mortimer in charge, and those two men, Pugh and Evans. As they haven’t been alarmed, they presumably won’t run for it and we’ll collect them at breakfast. Just now, I feel more inclined to go to bed for what’s left of the night.”

We all agreed with him. Once in bed, I fell instantly asleep. It seemed only a moment before I woke to find Gladys shaking me and saying: “Wake up, mistress! Wake up! Master Henderson wants to see you. Something’s happened—terrible it is, terrible—get up, do.”

I scrambled out of bed, got myself into a wrapper, and rushed out of my room. Rob, fully dressed and pale of face, was just coming to fetch me. “It’s Lady Thomasine,” he said. “She’s lying in the courtyard, below the Mortimer Tower. She’s dead.”

“I never expected this,” Rob said to me as we stood side by side, looking down on Lady Thomasine. She had not changed her clothes, and lay on the cobbles in last night’s finery. One twisted, shattered leg protruded from her disordered skirts, and its slipper had come off. The other leg was decorously hidden except for the
foot, which still wore the slipper stained with Rafe’s blood. The pearl-edged cap had tumbled awry so that her hair flowed loosely about her head.

Beneath it was something at which I did not want to look closely; a dreadful hint of blood and brains and splintered bone. But her face was unharmed and perfectly quiet, as though the shock of death had been so swift that she had felt no pain. I hoped this was so.

“So many of the windows in the towers are arrow slits,” Rob said. “But not in her room. I’ve just been up there and the casement is modern. There are mullions, and the windows in between can be opened and they’re wide enough for someone to get through who isn’t fat. Lady Thomasine was quite slender. She must have been very quiet about it. Barker was outside her door but he heard nothing.”

“I think her father modernized the windows,” I said. “I—am not as surprised by this as you are. I wondered, even last night.”

“Did you, indeed? Typical of you not to say anything. I know,” said Rob, “of a previous occasion when you helped a condemned man evade the gallows. Cecil told me.”

A footfall made us turn. Mortimer was there, with two servants, who were carrying a tabletop between them. A dark cloth lay on it. “We want to move her,” Mortimer said. “She is to be taken into the chapel and laid out decently.”

I moved aside for him, and his almond-shaped, greenish eyes met mine with bitterness. “Why didn’t you leave Rafe’s death alone?” he said. “Nothing now will bring him back. I blame you for my mother’s
death. Master Henderson has told me all that passed last night. All else apart, I gather that I am myself under house arrest as an accessory. As though I would not have done anything—anything—to protect her.”

He stared down at her and I heard the gasp of a muffled sob. “Look at her. Look at her. She was the best of mothers to me. She couldn’t bear to grow old, that was all. She couldn’t bear the loss of her beauty. You never knew her when she was young. She was the most exquisite being you ever beheld. And to see her now like this … I adored her when I was a boy and I still do, whatever she has done.”

“I am sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what it was I was sorry for—his bereavement, Lady Thomasine’s grief for her lost youth, or the hopeless disaster in which they and Rafe had become enmeshed.

“No doubt. Oh, I’m sure you thought you were doing right. That’s what busybodies always say.” He raised his eyes to me again, his face more bitter than ever. “Well, it is better this way, perhaps. The inquest will be bad enough but perhaps, Mistress Blanchard, you would not enjoy thinking of Lady Thomasine with a rope round her neck. Any more than I.”

The following morning, Rob Henderson ordered Pugh and Evans to be locked into their respective rooms, and then took two men with him to Mortimer’s chamber and questioned Sir Philip for an hour. Then he returned to the guest keep, his face grim.

“We have to ride for the court without delay,” he said. “Before we go, I must send a messenger to St. Catherine’s Well. When I come back, I want to find William Haggard here. He will have to be questioned as well. And just what am I to do meanwhile with Mortimer and those two delightful henchmen of Lady Thomasine’s—Pugh and Evans? Last night, I decided to arrest all three of them and be done with it. But now—I find myself uncertain. I don’t want to make a mistake. Once in a while,” said Rob with regret, “I do make mistakes.”

I didn’t comment. Matthew was alive and free
because Rob had once forgotten to place a guard at the back of a house. I recalled the occasion with thankfulness but I knew that Rob didn’t.

“From the start,” he said now, “the queen and Cecil said that discretion was important. And the more I look at these horrible forgeries, the more I agree with that! I long to bundle Mortimer into his own dungeon on a charge of treason and being an accessory to murder. I long to drag him to the Tower. I’d dearly love to put him in the charge of the sheriff of Herefordshire. But I can’t be sure if the queen would have me do so—and there’s another difficulty.”

“What difficulty?” I asked.

“When I was questioning Mortimer, he said something highly disquieting.” Rob’s good-looking face was grimmer than ever. “Damn the man. Damn him!” He took to pulling at his flaxen beard in indecision.

I said: “Brockley and I have been to the stables. Our horses are not there, nor is our saddlery. Before we leave, will you ask Pugh and Evans what was done with them?”

Rob looked at me as though he thought me incurably frivolous but he did as I asked. Under his bullying, Pugh and Evans admitted that before they collected me and my servants at dawn to take us to the Black Mountains, they had led Bay Star and Speckle quietly from their stable and turned them out in a secluded pasture near the castle. “And after they returned from locking you in that hut,” Rob said, “they went back to the horses and took them off to turn them loose on the Malvern Hills. God knows where they are now. Your saddlery’s all right—pushed under a heap of oddments in a storeroom.
Too good to throw in the moat, I fancy! They seem to be provident folk at Vetch! I’ve retrieved it. It’s in Barker’s quarters for the time being.”

“We might find the horses yet,” I said.

“We’ve no time to worry about them now,” said Rob shortly. “What
am
I to do with Mortimer and those two cretinous oafs who so devotedly served his mother?’

Eventually, he decided to leave the three of them confined to their rooms, except that Mortimer was to be allowed, under escort, to attend his mother’s funeral. Geoffrey Barker and two other men were to guard them. Mortimer’s men were warned of dire consequences if they attempted to interfere. Rob’s remaining two men came with us. We were carrying the deadly letters and felt the need for guards of our own.

We took Gladys with us as far as Ledbury. Since half the people in Vetch still seemed to think she was a witch, she wouldn’t be safe in either the castle or the village and she had now decided not to go back to the hermitage after all. She had, in fact, attached herself to me and was demanding to go where I did. “Well, you can wait for me at the Feathers,” I told her.

When we reached Ledbury, we found Dale still ailing. The cold had turned into a bad cough and she had become feverish again. I left Brockley there with her, but Rob would not let me stay there myself. He even made us ride straight past Tewkesbury without calling in on Mattie and Meg, so great was his haste to reach the court at Richmond.

I understood the urgency. I also dreaded having to watch Elizabeth’s face when she read those letters. We
made our first report to Cecil, and he took us to an audience with Elizabeth in a private room shut away beyond an antechamber. It was here that the letters were put into her hands. I can only say that if I hadn’t already been sure that Elizabeth was a true daughter of King Henry, I would have become sure of it then. I shrank back out of her way as she strode up and down, a lioness rampant, satin skirts swishing, golden-brown eyes hot with rage. It was the authentic Tudor fury, the kind for which King Henry was famed. Anger like this had sent men and women to the Tower, to the block. In Elizabeth at that moment, her father lived again.

“I want Mortimer dead!” she shouted at us, brandishing the offending letters in Cecil’s face as she passed him. “I want him dismembered before my eyes!”

Cecil had had leave to sit in the royal presence because his gout was troubling him. His left foot was propped on a stool and his face was lined with pain. “Ma’am,” he said patiently, “the less said about this in public, the better, even though the letters are not genuine, which is beyond question, thank God. Mortimer has confessed to forging them. It wasn’t his first foray into forgery! It seems, from what Mistress Ursula says, that when he left the court ten years ago, it was because of a forgery scandal.”

Elizabeth had interrupted our report when she lost her temper and we hadn’t finished it. She slowed her furious pacing at the mention of a forgery scandal, and Rob now set about telling her the rest.

“Before we left Vetch, I spent an hour questioning Mortimer. It wasn’t difficult. A graphic description of the
death awaiting traitors, from someone with authority to set him on the road to it, had him almost pissing blood,” said Rob dispassionately. “And it unlocked his tongue like magic. I got everything out of him. He admitted forging the letters but assured me, on his knees, in tears, that he never, never meant to publish them—and didn’t really mean ever to threaten such a thing. It was all just a dream in his mind, he says. He swore he was innocent of everything but foolish imaginings. He got the idea from something that really was found in a piece of furniture, but it wasn’t the letters.”

“I’m relieved to hear it,” observed Elizabeth.

“It seems,” Rob said, “that Sir Philip’s father, Edward Mortimer, once bought a piece of furniture, some kind of desk, which had formerly belonged to Mark Smeaton, the minstrel. The name … will be known to you, I expect.”

“Yes, what of it?” barked Elizabeth.

“When I first began to question Mortimer,” Rob said, “he blustered and tried to pretend that the letters really were discovered in the desk, but once I’d got him past that, he told me that what Edward Mortimer found was nothing more than a harmless ballad about springtime and cuckoos, signed by Smeaton. But there was a note at the foot in a different handwriting. The note says: “A pretty song. Thank you, Mark.” It is signed with an
A.
Edward told his son about the ballad, and Sir Philip found it among his father’s things when Edward died, about eight years ago. He found it and gave it to me and I have it here. It would seem that he assumed the note signed
A
to be the writing of Queen Anne Boleyn. He imitated it for the purpose of the forgeries.
He was so terrified of me by that time that I am sure he spoke the truth.”

“Are you trying to convince
me
the damned things are forgeries?” Elizabeth spat. “What else can they be?” She brandished the letters again. “Show me this note!”

Rob had it ready and handed it to her. She went to the window and stood in the light, comparing it with the letters. Watching her, I realized that although Rob and I were both sure that Mortimer’s confession was true, Elizabeth herself, for all her protestations, had secret doubts. I actually saw the moment when those doubts were dispelled, saw the relaxation of her muscles. I heard her faint sigh.

Elizabeth never spoke of her mother. Well, almost never. I did once hear her break that private rule but she did not break it now. What she did do was go to the anteroom door and shout. A lady-in-waiting hurried to her and curtsied. “Fetch my oaken box from my bedchamber! Quickly!” Elizabeth snapped.

She went back to the window and stood staring out of it, with her back to us, until the box was brought. I took it at the door and carried it to her. She put it down on the broad windowsill, took a couple of sheets of paper from it, and beckoned us to look. We gathered around her, Cecil included, leaning on a stick.

“This is a list of clothes and toilet things to be packed for some journey or other,” she said, pointing. “And this, an old letter to my aunt Mary when she was still Mary Boleyn. Her daughter, Lady Katherine Knollys, gave it to me as … as a keepsake. A note that says: ‘A pretty song. Thank you, Mark,’ does not contain all the letters of the alphabet. Our clever Mortimer imitated the letters in
the note well enough but he had to guess what the rest ought to look like, and he guessed wrong. There is no letter
j
in the note found in Smeaton’s desk, but here it is in one of these vile concoctions where it says ‘my heart’s joy’ and here it is in this list where it says ‘a jar of elder-flower ointment.’ Behold the difference.”

We understood, without being told, that Anne Boleyn had written the list and the letter to her sister Mary.

We understood too that we had been vouchsafed a glimpse into an unmentionable sorrow and a searing conflict. Elizabeth remembered her father well and often said that as a child she had admired him and sought his affection. Her throne depended on her claim to be his legitimate daughter. Yet he had had her mother beheaded and she might well have some faint recollection of Anne Boleyn: a presence, a scent, a voice. A memory of love.

Surely she had, for though she never spoke of Anne, she had kept these little bits of her mother’s writing; these souvenirs.

If she would not speak openly of Anne Boleyn, then we must not presume to do so. We must not offer sympathy. Our loyalty would have to do instead.

Elizabeth swept on triumphantly: “There is no
q
in the note either, but here in the forgery are the words ‘queen of the realm’ and in the letter to my aunt Mary is the word ‘question’ and also many words such as ‘liking’ and ‘lovely’ with the letter
l
in them, and see how different it is from the way it is written in these abominable letters, in the words ‘wholly’ and ‘revels.’”

“He was clever,” Cecil said. “He has used parchment already old and somehow faded the ink.”