A Web of Silk

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  Eleanor’s head came up, proudly. ‘And I wouldn’t want to marry a man who didn’t want to marry me!’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘if I find the chest, what does happen next?’

  ‘It would be best,’ said Stagg, ‘if it could be quietly returned to Eleanor, or to me, without any fuss and without anyone but ourselves knowing it was ever stolen.’

  ‘You mean,’ I said, thinking it out, ‘that if I find the chest, you would come to Knoll House and quietly request Master Frost to return it? I suppose that might work.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure,’ said Master Stagg. ‘Nor am I. The chances are that Frost would just have me thrown out, and if I then went to the authorities he would make sure the chest was moved and safely hidden where it wouldn’t be found. He would protect his good name. And again, if the authorities became involved, then Eleanor’s betrothed might hear of it, and well, he wouldn’t like it.’

  I was beginning to feel that if Eleanor’s betrothed, Martin whoever he was, were to call the marriage off, Eleanor would be well out of it. He didn’t sound at all a pleasant or reasonable man.

  ‘So just what do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, if you find the chest …’ Master Stagg hesitated and then plunged. ‘You will be taking your own servants with you, I believe?’

  ‘One or two,’ I said.

  ‘Well, could you, between you, just quietly steal it back and bring it to me in secret? After all, I – and Eleanor – are its lawful owners.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But I think you are quite … quite …’

  ‘Quite out of my mind?’ Stagg smiled. Eleanor looked at me pleadingly. ‘I can offer an inducement,’ he said. ‘I can cut the price of your new church window by half. And after all, what would you be doing that is wrong? I repeat, Eleanor and I are the legal owners of that chest and its contents! We have witnesses to that. And I don’t expect you to run any risk at all. I wouldn’t expect you to touch the chest unless you were quite sure you could do it safely.’

  ‘I can’t possibly agree to this,’ I said. ‘I’ll look for the chest. I suppose there is nothing against that. But if I find it, I will simply inform you and then it will be for you to act, or not, as the case may be. I will not attempt to steal the wretched thing back.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ said Eleanor. And with that, the big grey eyes filled with imploring tears.

  ‘I don’t think you should go to Knoll House at all,’ Christopher Spelton said. It was the next day. He had called on me while on the way to deliver a message in Guildford, found me pensive, and asked why. As it happened, Gladys was in the room when he arrived and burst into speech at once, doing the explaining before I did. I had only to say, yes, Gladys has it right. She was there.

  ‘I suppose there’s no harm in giving embroidery lessons,’ Christopher said. ‘Or in dropping a few political lies into a conversation. Even if they’re recognized as untruths, I suppose you can always take refuge in being a foolish female who gets things wrong, but …’

  ‘Thank you!’ I said.

  ‘I know you’re not,’ said Christopher comfortingly. ‘But the idea of searching for stolen goods in the house of one’s host … that does strike me as foolish.’

  ‘It doesn’t amount to anything much,’ I said. ‘Just keeping my eyes open, and little more than that. I wouldn’t be doing anything.’

  ‘I can’t quite explain,’ said Christopher, ‘but this business gives me a bad feeling. It’s so extraordinary. It makes me feel that there might be some hidden purpose behind it, though I can’t imagine what. I really do think it would be better if you didn’t go to Knoll House at all.’

  ‘That’s what I say,’ grumbled Gladys.

  ‘Walsingham’s orders,’ I said.

  Christopher gave me a wry grin. ‘Yes, Walsingham’s orders. One always feels that they have to be obeyed. But be careful, Ursula. I know Knoll House, by the way. I called there once – a long time ago, well before this man Frost took over. Carrying a message, of course. It’s a gloomy sort of place.’

  ‘I can hardly refuse Walsingham because Knoll House is gloomy!’

  Christopher sighed. He thought for a moment and then said: ‘Are you going to tell Laurence Miller about this … er … unwanted assignment? It’s the sort of thing he will want to know.’

  ‘So that he can report to Sir William Cecil? No, I don’t think I should. That would almost amount to pointing a finger of suspicion at Master Frost in a public way, and Eleanor would object to that. She is so anxious to keep it all a secret from the man she’s betrothed to. She wouldn’t want it bruited about, even to Cecil. Even to Walsingham, discreet though they are. Anyway,’ I added, perhaps pettishly, ‘I have always disliked the idea that I have someone watching me and sending reports of me to William Cecil. It’s supposed to be for my protection but I still don’t like it. No, I shan’t tell Miller. After all, as I keep telling you, I’m not going to do anything, other than look about me when I’m at Knoll House. If I find the chest, I’ll tell Master Stagg and leave the rest to him.’

  ‘You didn’t agree, madam!’ Brockley said it as a statement and a question both at the same time. ‘You’re not going to try to steal the chest back, surely! Even if the lass did behave like an overflowing river!’

  ‘No, no, no!’ I said, with exasperation. Christopher had gone, and I had gathered my close associates round me in the East Parlour: the Brockleys, Sybil and Gladys. I had placed myself on the broad window seat, while the others had disposed themselves around the room, the Brockleys side by side on a padded settle and Sybil on another, her face composed and her skirts spread tidily round her, while Gladys, with her mottled brown complexion and hooked nose and the curved back that the years had inflicted on her, was crouched on a low stool close to the empty hearth. The variable weather had varied once again, and the day was too warm for a fire.

  ‘I keep saying it,’ I declared. ‘I said it to Eleanor and Stagg, and I said it to Christopher Spelton when he came here this morning! I told him I was prepared to look for the chest, but wouldn’t attempt to spirit it away. Master Spelton would be against me going to Knoll House at all, were it not on Walsingham’s orders.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Brockley bluntly. ‘I mean, why is Master Spelton so opposed to it?’

  ‘He says he has a bad feeling about my visit. You can’t call that a reason! And I repeat, all I will do is look for the chest.’

  ‘Wild geese!’ said Brockley in exasperated tones, and everyone laughed.

  They all knew the story. Years before, on a journey to Cambridge in the company of an old friend, Rob Henderson, dead now for three years, I had heard a flight of wild geese calling as they flew overhead and said that I liked the sound they made, that it was full of salt winds and empty spaces, and Rob had said I had revealed something in my nature, something untamed. There was some truth in that, as I realized at the time. Without it, I would never have eloped with my first husband by climbing out of my bedchamber window and sliding down the sloping roof of a single-storey room jutting out below.

  Nor, I suspected, would I ever have become involved in the adventures that had befallen me over the years. I had always thought of myself as undertaking my various assignments out of loyalty to the queen, but I knew that I wouldn’t have been asked to undertake them in the first place if that strange wild streak in me hadn’t been there. But all the same …

  ‘I have always,’ I said with dignity, ‘done my best to behave like a lady. I just haven’t always been treated as one.’

  ‘Who rode through the night as one of a party who meant to assault a house, because she thought her son might be imprisoned there?’ enquired Brockley. ‘Who once crouched on the floor of a warehouse in Antwerp in the middle of the night, helping to take up floorboards in search of missing treasure? Who …?’

  ‘I had to try to rescue Harry. And I was in that warehouse because Dale’s life was in danger and I needed that treasure to buy her safety. Anyway, you wer
en’t there. You didn’t actually see me pulling up floorboards.’

  ‘No, madam. But you did tell me about it,’ Brockley said mildly.

  And suddenly, for a moment as brief as a flash of lightning, it was there – the curious rapport that Brockley and I had, which once had made Dale violently jealous and still occasionally made her unhappy, so that we tried never to let her be aware of it. This time it was our joint remembrance of more than one dangerous adventure in which Brockley and I had taken part. There was a silence.

  ‘All right,’ Brockley said at last. ‘But please, madam, please take care. Be sure that you do no more than look around you to see if your glance lights on the chest. No one’s life is in danger, no one has been kidnapped, and neither the queen nor Cecil nor Walsingham have asked you to do it. Personally, I wish they hadn’t asked you to do anything. I don’t like the idea of you – our – actually staying in the house of a questionable fellow, which is what this Giles Frost seems to be.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I agree with you. But we’re going, all the same. Moreover, I’ll be paid,’ I added brightly, ‘by Walsingham. And if I instruct the Frost girls well, I might even be paid by Master Frost!’

  They laughed, but then Brockley said soberly: ‘Ah well, there’s one thing. It may be as well for you to be away from home for a while, madam, in view of the threats which, according to Walsingham, have been made against you by the brother of Simeon Wilmot.’

  ‘Walsingham himself said as much,’ I told him.

  ‘He may well be right,’ Sybil chimed in. ‘When poor Philip was killed I even wondered if it had something to do with this brother. What were you told his name was, Ursula?’

  ‘Hunt. Anthony Hunt. I wondered too,’ I said. ‘But nothing more has come of it. It’s still a mystery.’ I looked at Brockley. ‘Perhaps you will find it helpful to be away from here for a while, it may distract your mind. Philip must be very much in your thoughts.’

  ‘He is,’ said Brockley. ‘My poor boy. Murdered by someone unknown, and since then nothing. He has been wiped out. It’s as if he had never existed at all.’

  Again there was a silence, and again one of those curious flashes between us. I knew, of course, that it had been wonderful for Brockley when he found that he had a son, and I knew what a bitter disappointment it had been for him when Philip became involved in a foolish plot. And I knew too that he had grieved like any other father when Philip died. Only, I hadn’t realized until this moment just how deeply Brockley had felt about all those things. He had not expressed his feelings very openly.

  He never did. He always put his duties first. I had left it to Dale to comfort him and I knew that she had tried. I had stepped back, as it were, and not intruded on them. Now I wondered if I should have been more openly sympathetic – except that Dale might not have liked that.

  These things could be very complicated. I smiled round at my servants, my companions, my friends, and said: ‘Remember, if any outsider wants to know where we are going, we are bound for Buckinghamshire to visit Meg.’

  Whereupon, Gladys pulled a face that made her nutcracker countenance look even less pleasing than usual and said: ‘Let’s hope, indeed, that this man Anthony Hunt don’t get on your scent. Reckon he’s likely to try, do you?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ I said.

  Gladys snorted. ‘And let’s hope there ain’t nothing dangerous in this place Knoll House, seeing that it’s that Walsingham that’s sending you there, and the kind of trouble you mostly land in when he gives you a task.’

  ‘Gladys,’ I said, ‘once again you are croaking like a raven. It’s depressing.’

  It was. And unfortunately, with Gladys, her croakings all too often came true.

  NINE

  Knoll House

  Knoll House was a little to the north of the town of Leatherhead. I had seen it from a distance often enough. It crowned its hill, a tall house, built of dark-red bricks. Standing there outlined against the sky, it had a forbidding air. All the more so on the day we arrived, because the sky was overcast.

  I noticed, as we made our way up the long sloping track to the gate, that the house had some modern mullioned windows, but there were others with the narrow, upright lancehead shapes of the previous century, when it was probably built. There was a gatehouse and a porter complete with errand boy, who escorted us for the last part of the track and hushed the noisy greeting given by a pair of enormous mastiffs, which came bounding to meet us.

  As we drew near I saw that, as Master Stagg had said, the house possessed a chapel. It was an extension, built out to the right, a miniature church with a squat tower rising from its outer end. To our left was a wall with an archway through which grooms came hastening to meet us. Eddie leapt down from the driving seat of the coach and Brockley, dismounting from Firefly, began to explain that the coach needed to be unloaded as soon as possible and asked that both Eddie and the coach horses should be fed and watered. After that, Eddie would drive the coach back to Hawkswood. I dismounted as well and Dale helped Sybil out of the coach. Brockley then disappeared into the stable yard, leading Firefly and Jaunty. Brockley always preferred to care for our horses himself when they were housed in unfamiliar stables.

  The front door of the house was a massive oak affair sunk in a deep porch. Our young escort pulled a chain attached to a big iron bell that clanged with a mournful noise, as though it were tolling for a death, but caused the door to be opened by a stern-faced black-gowned figure with a gold chain of office, who declared that he was the steward and that he was glad to welcome us, we were expected, and please to enter.

  Sybil said something about our luggage but the steward said we need not concern ourselves, it would be brought up to our bedchambers shortly. All was in readiness for us. With a wave of his hand he dismissed the boy, who ran off, back to his master in the gatehouse, and then he closed the door.

  My first impression was that this was a horrible house.

  We were standing in what seemed to be a small-scale version of a great hall. The walls were panelled in dark wood and decorated with numerous pairs of antlers, and to our right a staircase slanted upwards. To the left was a closed door and beside it a cupboard standing on legs and doubling as a table, with two tall silver candlesticks on it. Beneath our feet there was a chessboard pattern of large black and white paving stones, while above our heads were dark beams and a plaster ceiling decorated with paintings, but the place was too shadowy to see what they depicted.

  There were several tall candle stands placed along the walls, though none of the candles were lit. Some daylight did come in through an archway at the far end. Beyond it, I had the impression of a window and thought I could see the foot of another stair (as a faint smell of cooking drifted from that direction, I supposed that the kitchen quarters lay there). But apart from that, the only illumination came through the stained-glass fanlight over the door behind us. This was sizeable and might have shed a good light except that most of the stained glass was deep crimson. Such light as entered through it lay on the black-and-white floor like a stain of blood and drenched the candlesticks with red.

  ‘Please to follow me,’ said the steward. ‘I am Hamble,’ he added, confusing me (and Dale and Sybil as well, as they later told me) because it sounded as though he were saying that he was humble, and anyone less humble would be hard to imagine. He led us through a door on the right, into what was evidently the real great hall. There was dark panelling here as well, but the windows were mullioned and a respectable amount of daylight came in. A door beside the big hearth had an ecclesiastic air, with a pointed arch, and probably led to the chapel. I also noticed another door at the rear of the room, which I thought might lead out to the grounds. Logs were laid in the hearth, though they were not lit.

  In the middle of the room was a long table with high-backed benches along each side and a chair with carved arms at one end. There were also three hefty sideboards, on which dishes and goblets, ornaments and candlesticks were displ
ayed, all of them silver. So was the casing of the ornate clock which hung on one wall. Frost certainly did seem to like silver.

  ‘If you will wait here,’ said the steward, ‘I will fetch the young ladies. Master Frost is out on the home farm. We did not know what time you would arrive.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  A young maidservant appeared in the doorway, with Brockley behind her. She stepped aside to let him pass and he said: ‘I am happy with the grooms here, madam. They are rubbing down our horses for us, with Eddie to help them and keep an eye on them. They have promised, once they’ve finished with the horses, to take Eddie to the kitchen for a meal and a glass of ale before he starts for home. One of the grooms showed me the way in through the kitchen, and young Bessie here said you would have been shown into the great hall.’

  ‘I thought it best to bring Master Brockley here, Hamble,’ said the maidservant, obligingly clarifying Hamble’s name for us.

  ‘Quite correct, Bessie. Off with you now,’ said the steward. He turned to me. ‘Your names, if you will, so that I know I have them right. Yours, of course, is Mistress Ursula Stannard. But the others …?’

  I introduced Sybil and the Brockleys. Hamble gave us a brief bow, and then left. We heard his feet retreating up the staircase from the entrance hall. The stairs creaked, as though their timbers were old and tired of being trodden on. Presently we heard footsteps coming down again, and a moment later he was opening the door for two young girls and making the necessary introductions. Then he withdrew and we were left with our hostesses-cum-pupils.

  I had somehow assumed that since the girls were twins they would be identical, but they were not. They were dressed alike, though, in peach-coloured gowns with matching caps, moderate farthingales and small ruffs. Joyce was a good two inches taller than her sister, with hair of a dark-brown shade that edged towards auburn, whereas Jane was slight, not much above five feet tall, and her hair was much lighter. Their eyes however were the same greenish hazel – lighter in shade than my own – and they both had clear complexions unmarked by any pocks.