The Siren Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's

by Buckley, Fiona

  We said nothing. There would be no silencing any of the physicians, while Dr. Fleet, the vicar of Faldene, would be the most lethal of all and would probably call on his fellow vicars at Hawkswood and Withysham to back him up. They would, too. Any misfortune that had befallen anyone at whom Gladys had aimed a curse would be put down to it. And life is full of misfortunes. Had anything gone amiss with Dr. Fleet . . . I remembered, shivering, the curse Gladys had leveled at him.

  I curse ye by a cold hearth and a cold bed, a cold heart and a cold head, a cold belly and cold breath, a cold life and a cold death!

  The words had stuck in my head.

  It was because Gladys had uttered that curse that we had set out for Howard House at all. Now it might well destroy her. In those few words she had very likely started something which she could not stop.

  If she had hurt Johnson’s feelings, he looked like getting his revenge. The gnome had checkmated us, it seemed.

  • • •

  “I hate him,” I said passionately, as the three of us marched out of the garden. For once, Brockley hadn’t even noticed that Dale had been exposed to the scandalous topiary. “I hate him. He’s disgusting!”

  “I’ve seen things very like him in stagnant ponds,” Brockley agreed, straight-faced as ever when he was joking.

  I snorted, a noise between rage and bitter laughter. We returned to Donna to make our farewells. She asked if Johnson had been helpful and was clearly sorry when I said no, but said sadly that she had no influence over him and could not help. I kissed her good-bye and then the three of us walked dejectedly back along the Strand to Cecil’s house.

  And once more, there in the entrance hall, were the Cecils, with anxious faces. It was weird, as though time had slipped backward. Feeling suddenly almost too tired to stand, I said: “What is it now?”

  “Dear Ursula, thank goodness you’re back!” They said it in unison. “We’ve been looking out for you,” Mildred added.

  “What’s happened?”

  “You must come upstairs,” said Cecil. “It’s Meg.”

  “Meg!” I couldn’t bear this. I had enough to endure. The thought of what might happen to Gladys sickened me, and though my guts twisted at the very thought of telling Hugh that Matthew was still alive, I knew I must soon brace myself to do so. I couldn’t endure another calamity, least of all one involving my daughter. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Mildred caught at my arm as I was about to plunge past them on the way to the stairs. “It’s all right. She’s here, quite safe. But she did give us the slip earlier. She was supposed to have stayed with me. I asked her to read to me while I did some embroidery, but she seemed very distracted—and after a while, I was called to deal with some household matter and when I returned, she had gone! One of our maids saw her going out but didn’t stop her, assuming that she had permission . . . ”

  “But she’s back, you say? In that case, what . . . ”

  “She came back some time ago,” said Cecil. “But she is in tears. She won’t stop crying. She keeps asking for you, and she won’t tell anyone else what the matter is.”

  “Where is she?” I demanded, once more making for the stairs.

  “In your chamber!” Mildred called.

  I was already halfway there, going up the stairs two at a time. I rushed straight to my room and there, indeed, was Meg, lying on my bed, her cap awry and her dark hair soaked at the temples with sweat and tears. She was huddled, with her knees close to her chest, and her nose turned into the pillow but she looked around as I came in, and then, with a wail, she threw herself off the bed and into my arms. I held her tightly.

  “Meg! Meg, sweetheart. It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here.” I saw Dale hovering at the door. “Mulled wine!” I said. It is a sovereign answer to shock and hysteria. Dale disappeared and I sat down on the bed, holding Meg as close as I could and crooning to her.

  “What is it, darling? You can tell me!”

  “I went to see Edmund Dean.”

  “You—what? I’ve been looking for him, too, though I didn’t find him. I’ll tell you all about that later. Why did you go alone? Did he do something to you?” Horrible visions of assault, of rape, rushed through my mind.

  Meg, though, was shaking her head furiously. “Not that. Not what you’re thinking. But it’s just as bad.”

  “Just as bad? It can’t be. Meg, what are you talking about? And why did you go?”

  “Because of Gladys. I thought, if I asked him, he wouldn’t give evidence against Gladys. He might even be able to stop the whole thing, get her set free. If he would say that Master Gale really was stabbed, and if he pooh-poohed the servants at Howard House who might talk about her curses, well, a jury might listen to him. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He said he couldn’t even though he was in love with me, and then, to prove he was in love with me, he gave me a present. He gave me this.”

  She pulled something from under her pillow, and held it out to me on her palm. It was a slim, coiled silver chain, with a small silver heart strung on it. A simple pendant. The pendant she had given to Walt, as a gift for Bessie, his future wife. The pendant we had last seen being slipped into the pocket of his sleeveless jerkin.

  “I knew it at once. There are markings on the back that I recognized. How did it come to Edmund?” whispered Meg.

  I said: “Tell me exactly what happened. Everything.”

  25

  The Voice of Meg

  This part of the story rightly belongs to Meg. I will let her speak for herself, telling the tale as she told it to me. Now that I was with her, she was able to dry her tears, and although she held my hand tightly while she talked, once she had begun, she spoke with surprising calm and coherence. I had never loved her more.

  • • •

  Mother, I know it was wrong (said Meg). I know I shouldn’t have gone out to find Master Dean on my own, but it was for Gladys. You weren’t here when the men took her away. You didn’t see. She couldn’t believe it. I think they asked to see Sir William first of all—at least, he was with them when they came to fetch her. He looked so anxious. She and I were here, because I was embroidering and your window seat has a better light than the one in my room. She was telling me one of her stories about Wales, about how she left home when she was only twelve, and earned her living tending sheep . . .

  I’m sorry. I’m getting off the point. These men came into the room and straightaway, I didn’t like them. They were so big and . . . and quiet in a threatening sort of way and they didn’t look as if they’d ever smiled in their lives. One of them said: I arrest you, Mistress Morgan, on a charge of having unlawful dealings with demons, and encompassing death by witchcraft and Gladys . . . Gladys stared at them and she changed. She shrank and started to shiver and she cried out that her curses never meant anything; that they were just a way of making people respect her, and they—she meant the two men—ought to try being old and ugly and see what it did to them . . .

  Sir William tried to explain to us. He said the gardener, Arthur Johnson, had lodged the first complaint, but that Edmund Dean had made another, which was more serious because he said Gladys had something to do with Master Gale’s death. I knew about Master Gale because although we were already on our way home when his body was found, you wrote about it to Mistress Jester at Hawkswood. From what your letter said, it was obvious that Gladys wasn’t responsible. That’s just silly. Master Gale was stabbed, wasn’t he?

  Sir William said he would go with her and that she must be calm but she struggled when the men took hold of her. She screamed and bit one of them and she fought as they dragged her out, and on the way down the stairs she started to cry, and to shout out that she’d done nothing, she was just a poor old woman. And she is; that’s the truth of it. She is.

  I thought that if I went to talk to Master Dean, perhaps he’d listen to me. I knew you wouldn’t like me to go but it was for Gladys.

  Mother, when you and Stepfather brought me to Howard House in
the first place, it was to meet Master Dean, perhaps to become betrothed to him. I thought that you wanted me to like him. Well, when I met him—I don’t think I liked him exactly, but the moment I saw him, well, after that I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I kept thinking about him! It was exciting. His eyes . . .

  Later on, you changed your minds and you weren’t pleased when he took me for walks in the gardens of Howard House. I thought you weren’t being fair. First I was supposed to like him, and then I was supposed not to, just to start and stop to order, as though I were a pony with a rider, but I couldn’t.

  I know I’ve only just reached fourteen, but I do know what it means to like someone and that didn’t seem to be what I felt for Master Dean. It was more as though I were a moth, being drawn toward a flame. He didn’t touch me often, but he did take my hand now and then, or put an arm about me; once I remember he pushed back my cap and stroked my hair, and once he kissed me. Whenever he did that I felt . . . I can’t explain. I wanted more, and yet I was afraid of it, too. I couldn’t leave off thinking about him but when I thought about marrying him, being left alone with him, being in his power forever, I felt scared. I wanted it to happen, and yet I didn’t want it to happen or not for a long time, maybe not ever.

  But I did keep thinking about him, even after you sent me home. I dreamed of him at night. I carved his name on the stem of a rose tree. When Stepfather said he’d got to take Gladys back to London, I cried because he wouldn’t take me as well. When Madame Ridolfi sent for me to come and join you, I was thrilled! Stepfather let me go because he thought that you knew of the invitation and wanted me with you.

  When I arrived at the Ridolfi house, you weren’t there, but Master Dean was. A little later, you came back and found us in the topiary garden. I didn’t like that garden, Mother; it’s embarrassing. But Edmund took me there and tried to get me to laugh at some of the . . . the shapes, and then we sat down and he said something that frightened me very much. I’d asked him just what had happened to Master Gale. I said: “You were at Howard House at the time. Was he really killed in the street, in broad daylight?”

  “Not quite. It was around dawn,” he said. “He’d made an early start.” I said, what a dreadful thing. Then he said: “Don’t waste your sympathy on Gale, Margaret. I follow the old, true religion, which I hope will one day hold sway again in England. I can tell you this—that Gale was no friend to it. He deserved what he got.”

  I hated hearing him say that. He sounded so cold, not quite human. But then he put his arm around me and told me that I was growing beautiful and that he loved me and hoped one day to make me his wife and then he brought out a book of poetry and began reading. I was horrified when the men came for Gladys and I heard that it was partly because of him that Gladys was taken away.

  I was still thinking about it when you came back from visiting the Earl of Leicester. When you heard what had happened, you went off again, I didn’t know where. I thought probably to the justice who’d issued the warrant. I didn’t think of you going to find Dean, or Johnson either. You’d told me to stay with Lady Cecil and I did for a while, but she was called away and suddenly I couldn’t, any longer, sit there fretting and not do anything. I thought, Surely, if Edmund loves me, he’ll stop all this if I ask it of him. So I went out and along the Strand to the Ridolfi house . . .

  “How did you know Edmund might be there?”

  He told me yesterday, in the topiary garden, that the Duke of Norfolk is doing business of some kind with Ridolfi, raising money for something, I think, and is very often with the Ridolfis, and that Edmund frequently goes with him, or takes messages there. I thought I’d try there first and he was there. The minute I was let in, I saw him crossing the vestibule. He saw me and came to me, and I said: “Please, Master Dean, I must speak to you privately. It’s very important. Please.”

  He was nice, then. He put his head around a door and told someone that he’d been called away by a messenger, and was leaving by river—could he borrow the Ridolfi dinghy for a short time? Someone answered yes, and then he came back to me and said that now we could be completely private and free from interruption. He led me straight through the house and the garden, and untied the dinghy from the landing stage. “We don’t want a boatman listening,” he said. “We’ll be quite alone out on the river.”

  And that’s what we did. He rowed us out and then let us drift, and he said to me: “Now, what’s it all about?”

  Well, I told him. How Gladys had been arrested and how frightened she was, and how Sir William had said that Edmund himself was a witness against her and was accusing her of killing Julius Gale through her curses. I said I’d known Gladys for years, and she was only a harmless old woman if a little foolish, and her curses nothing but empty words. And I said that my mother had written to my gentlewoman at Hawkswood, telling her how Master Gale had been murdered by stabbing. Curses had nothing to do with it. But he said . . .

  He said: “Do you think, dear little Margaret, that the devil cannot use human hands to do his work? Once the door is opened to him, as it can be opened by those who practice the black arts, he will use what tools are available. A knife may have been thrust into Julius Gale, though I myself am not sure of that. But even if it’s true, how was the killer inspired to use it? Who is to say the devil wasn’t whispering in his ear? The devil having been summoned by, as you say, a foolish old woman. It is very foolish to have commerce with the forces of evil but that doesn’t excuse it. It is still a mortal sin.”

  I pleaded, I implored. I promised anything, anything . . . I even said I’d run away with him and marry him in secret, if only he would help Gladys. He just shook his head and said no. He said that he was not yet ready to marry. He said he loved me truly, but that I was still little more than a child and I did not understand such things as the wiles of the devil.

  I was in tears by then. He laughed and said he couldn’t comfort me properly in a boat; that perhaps the boat had been a mistake! “Quite useless for courtship!” he said. And then he said: “But I have a little gift that I bought for you. I meant to give it to you when I was reading to you in the topiary garden, but we were interrupted. Here it is.”

  Then he put his hand in his belt pouch and brought out that silver pendant. He leaned forward and gave me a kiss and showed me the pendant. Then he put it round my neck. He was treating me like a little girl whose troubles can be put right by a sweetmeat, and all of a sudden I wasn’t fascinated by him anymore. I could see myself through his eyes: a piece of soft clay that he thought he could mold into anything he wanted, train to think in any way he chose. I hated him. But that wasn’t all.

  He can’t have bought that pendant. It’s my pendant, which I gave to Walt! I know those markings; they’re the device of the jeweler who made it. How did it get into Edmund’s hands? Walt wouldn’t have given it to him! Why should he? What had Dean to do with Walt? Mother, suppose, just suppose, it was Dean who murdered Walt and . . . and, well, just came upon the pendant at the same time and thought, ah, here’s a pretty trinket for silly little Margaret?

  I suppose Walt could have sold it or lost it and Edmund could have bought it or picked it up, but we only gave it to Walt the day before he was killed! And he was so pleased with it, so touched! I’m sure he wouldn’t have sold it or been careless with it. Edmund said that Master Gale deserved all he got. Suppose he was the one who killed Gale, and Walt found out? All of a sudden, he was saying he’d be able to marry Bessie after all, wasn’t he? I wondered if he’d asked Edmund to give him money for his silence. And what if Edmund is using Gladys to carry the blame for Gale’s death, and divert attention well and truly away from him?

  It all went through my head in a flash. It wasn’t clear at first. Just a muddle—but I did know that now I hated Edmund and that I was also frightened to death of him. I thanked him for the pendant. I stopped crying. I asked to go home. He rowed me along the bank to the landing place here and put me ashore. By the time I’d got back to my room,
my head had cleared. I knew what I believed he had done. Oh, Mother—it’s so horrible. Poor, poor Gladys!

  • • •

  I looked in astonishment at my daughter. When we set out for Norfolk’s house originally, she had been still a child. Now I saw that although she had only just passed her fourteenth birthday, she had moved, suddenly, into womanhood. Intelligent womanhood. She inherited that, I thought, from both sides of her family. Her father, Gerald Blanchard, had certainly had brains, but I too was sharp-minded, and her half aunt, Queen Elizabeth, had a formidable intellect.

  How many young girls of Meg’s age could have understood, so quickly, what that pendant meant? I looked at her with new eyes, knowing that she was unique and that I was proud of her, and that I must safeguard her future as though she were a rare and precious gem.

  I looked at the pendant. That too was surely unique. It had originally been made for her, and probably there were no others quite like it. In which case, Dean had lied about the way he came by it.

  “Walt still had the pendant on the day he was killed,” I said. “Dale and I spoke to him that morning. He said he would be giving it to Bessie as a wedding gift before many weeks were out. He was dead within hours of saying that. My darling Meg,” I said. “We need to talk to Sir William. Will you tell this story to Sir William Cecil? Now?”

  “Yes, Mother. Yes, of course. Mother . . . ”

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “Will it save Gladys? If Edmund withdraws his charges, or it’s proved that he was the one who killed Master Gale, for reasons of his own—nothing to do with witchcraft!—will Gladys be released?”

  I put my arms around her and held her tightly. I was thinking of the physicians and vicars of Hawkswood and Withysham; and of Dr. Fleet, the vicar of Faldene, and of the chances of life and the things that could have happened to people in those places since I was last there.