To Shield the Queen

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  “We haven’t, and my husband would be horrified if I didn’t look after you properly. He will be home soon; he is going round his fields. I often go with him, but I have been making preserves today. We have had a fine fruit crop this year. You must taste some of our apples and cherries. They are quite famous in the district.”

  I laughed. “Do people make excuse to call at this time of year? Perhaps we’re very lucky that you have no other chance guests at present.”

  It wasn’t a very good way of asking the question but I could hardly just say, “Who else has stayed here lately?” I must not be too blunt. I felt that even this sounded a little obvious, and to my stretched nerves it seemed that Kate Westley paused half a second too long before she said, “We haven’t had anyone to stay for weeks. You are a welcome change—though I am sorry for your ill health. Now, I’ll bandage this for you, and then I think we must get you and your woman there upstairs to a bedchamber to rest quietly until supper.”

  “You are indeed kind,” I said.

  • • •

  No one could fault the hospitality of the Westleys. Dale and I were shown up a wide, polished staircase to a walnut-panelled guest room. The big bed had embroidered hangings and the window looked out on an orchard. It must be beautiful in spring, I thought, when the trees were in bloom.

  Hot water was brought so that we could wash away our travel-grime, and our panniers were borne upstairs. After a couple of hours, Dale, restored by sleep, did my hair and helped me into a fresh gown before we joined the family at table.

  The master of the house, Edward Westley, had returned by now and proved to be a beaming, thickset individual, tanned by weather and full of concern for the welfare of his unexpected guests. The children were at supper too: two little girls of perhaps four and seven; a boy of about nine and his elder brother, who must have been twelve or so, and was already leggy with approaching manhood. The girls were accompanied by a young nursemaid, little more than a child herself, and very much inclined to bob respectful curtsies to me. A tutor, middle aged, quiet spoken and inky fingered, came in with the boys.

  The children showed no fear of parents or tutor. When their father asked the boys how their Latin studies had progressed, they chattered freely of how Arthur had mastered the ablative absolute, and when the tutor interrupted to regret that Paul, the older boy, had not had the same success with the gerund, he did it kindly and Edward Westley laughed.

  “Never mind. It will exercise your brain and you won’t need gerunds anyway when you’re full-grown and I’m in my dotage, and you’re running the farm for me,” he said unconcernedly.

  We were asked if we felt better, and where we were bound. I said we were recovering, and were very grateful for their hospitality. I explained, without going into details, that I was on leave from the court, and had been on a visit to Oxfordshire but was now going to see my daughter Meg in Sussex.

  The table almost creaked under the weight of the food; the maids who waited were deft and willing. I had never been in a more pleasant household.

  However, that night, the memory of that fractional pause when I asked Kate Westley if any other guests had been there lately, came back to me. In the morning, I asked Dale if she would like another day out of the saddle, and on receiving a hearty “Yes, please,” I asked Mistress Westley if we could accept her offer and stay for a second night.

  “But of course! As long as you need to—just as I said. You are more than welcome!”

  I thanked her and after sending Dale upstairs again to rest a little more, I made for the stableyard where I found Brockley. He had White Snail outside, tied to a stable door, and was rubbing the gelding down with a wisp.

  “I’ve arranged for us to stay another night. I just might find something out.”

  Brockley continued to work, with sweeping strokes of the wisp. “Very well, madam. I’ve been cultivating the grooms. They go out of an evening for a jar of ale in the village near here. I’ll go with them tonight if I can. Maybe they’ll gossip.”

  • • •

  “I wonder,” said Kate Westley, when I went back to the house, “if you’d like to help me this morning. I’m preserving cherries and making an apple syrup. We’ll be in the kitchen, and there are plenty of stools to sit on, if your ankle is worrying you.”

  I said, truthfully enough, that my ankle was improving but would be all the better if I kept my weight off it for a little longer, but that I would be delighted to work in the kitchen with her and chat.

  “We shall enjoy each other’s company,” said Kate.

  We did. The kitchen was sunny, with a vaulted stone ceiling and a generous hearth. There was a cook and a spitboy and a couple of maids but it was clear that they were all accustomed to having the mistress of the house among them, and that they worked as a team, on friendly terms. While Kate carefully boiled cherries with red wine, sliced apples and sugar, I perched on a stool by the hearth with a long-handled spoon and stirred a simmering pot of apples. When the apples were fluffy, they had to be simmered again, with sugar, until the mixture thickened and it was time to spoon the syrup into jars.

  With Gerald, I had mostly lived in town lodgings, in London or Antwerp, and we didn’t grow things. I had helped often enough in the kitchens at Faldene but I couldn’t remember ever being shown how to preserve fruit.

  “I’m learning something new,” I said to Kate.

  I stirred and poured and then peeled apples for another potful, and as the quiet domestic morning wore on, I became convinced that, after all, this house was as innocent and happy as it seemed. What I had thought was Kate Westley’s suspicious hesitation yesterday, could only have been my imagination. I was glad that my quest had brought me here. I needed this. Working here amid these pleasant, normal women, breathing in the heavy sweetness of simmering fruit, I found an unexpected peace, a sense of healing. I had not realised, until now, how the fears and sorrows of the last few weeks had lacerated my spirit.

  I was no further on with my search and perhaps I never would be, but perhaps, after all, it didn’t matter as much as I had thought. Brockley was probably right. It was not a lady’s business. Ladies made apple syrup, or attended to their children . . .

  Or served Queen Elizabeth, by dancing for her and walking with her. And if they were lucky, were wooed by someone like Matthew. Where was Matthew now? Was he thinking of me at all? In that spacious kitchen, with the early autumn sun streaming through the window, my quest began to fall away from me, and I was not sorry.

  The following morning, Dale said bravely that she could face the saddle again, and with many expressions of gratitude, the three of us set out again. We rode along the lane, back to the main road, and then, by mutual consent, we reined in. Dale and Brockley looked at me expectantly and I wondered what to say. I had decided during the night that we would put the search aside and set out for Sussex at once. However, I must make some comment on what I had, or rather hadn’t, discovered.

  “I did ask about recent guests,” I said, “but Mistress Westley said they hadn’t had any for weeks. There’s no sign that the men we’re looking for were here.”

  “Oh, they’ve been here right enough,” said Brockley.

  I stared at him. He responded with a smile which was little short of smug.

  “What? How do you know? Well, come along, Brockley. Let’s hear it!”

  Brockley considered me thoughtfully. “Up to now, madam,” he said, “though you’ve believed that Mr. Wilton was murdered by this respectable-seeming trio, one with red hair and one with a piebald horse, I’ve been doubtful. I’m not doubtful any more. They’ve been here, and yet it seems that these people, the Westleys, don’t care to mention them, and that looks to me as if all isn’t as it should be. I owe you an apology, madam.”

  “Never mind about that!” I almost shouted. My interest in hunting had reawoken in a hurry. I was like an old hound who hears a horn. “It’s nice to be vindicated, but what have you found out, and how?”

&n
bsp; “I got it from the grooms, madam. You remember I said I meant to go to the tavern with them? Over the beer, I talked about Bay Star and Arabian blood and out it came. Three men, one mounted on a striking piebald, spent almost two weeks here not long ago. And one of them was hurt.”

  “Was he now?” I said.

  Brockley nodded. “Dick Lane—he’s the young stable lad—said one of them had a bandage round one forearm, and when he arrived he was reeling in the saddle. He had a black eye, too. Lane took his horse from him and got a close sight of him. The boy reckoned he’d been in a fight. Well, we reckoned that John Wilton would have fought back.”

  “Yes. And that’s why they stayed so long, to let the injured man recover!” I added, with relief, “I expect they spun the Westleys a tale. I can’t see the Westleys protecting a murderer but they’re kind people who might help someone who said he’d done damage in a fair fight, and was afraid of the law and hadn’t meant to get into trouble. That would explain why they didn’t want to talk about their guests.”

  “Especially, madam, if the guests were friends of theirs.”

  “Why should we think that?” I didn’t want the Westleys to have friends like the men who had killed John and robbed him. “If the man who was hurt felt too ill to go any further, he and his companions could well just have called at the first big house they saw and asked for help.”

  “Lane’s quite a bit of a gossip, madam, especially after a pint or two,” said Brockley disapprovingly. “My father was in service, like me, and he always said a good servant usually knows most of his master’s business but never talks about it. He wouldn’t have thought much of Lane and neither do I, though, as I said, he’s only young. No doubt he’ll learn. It was useful to us, anyway. According to Lane, as they were all getting off their horses, one of them said what good luck it was that Springwood was their next port of call. They were coming here, madam, all along.”

  13

  House to House

  “What are our plans now, madam?” Brockley enquired.

  I considered, sitting in my saddle and fretting. The hunt was on again. We had picked up a scent and must follow it. I owed that both to my dead manservant and to the shade of Amy.

  I sighed inwardly and once more put Meg aside, and Matthew too.

  “It’s the twenty-seventh of September,” I said. “I need not return to court until the end of October. During that time I must get to Sussex and spend some days there. I think I have to set a time limit. Another fortnight—yes, I can give another two weeks to this business and let’s hope it will be much less. All I need to know is who our murderously inclined friends are and perhaps get some idea of where they might be now. Then I will report what I know—to a county sheriff, perhaps, or I may ask advice at court.” Brockley nodded, apparently finding all this reasonable. “Our friends,” I said, with ironic emphasis, “did apparently stay at Springwood House, and then passed through the village. That means they were going towards Windsor. We’d better search for them along that line. We can take it at an easy pace, Dale. Don’t worry.”

  It was a misty, brooding morning, with the promise of autumn in it. The rolling hills faded away into greyness in the distance; a line of trees on a nearby skyline were ghostly shapes, with no colour. The air was damp and still, but it wasn’t particularly cold. Riding was pleasant enough and I could think without interference. I was trying to make sense of what little we had learned so far, though I wasn’t very successful. All that I achieved was a long list of unanswered questions.

  To start with, I just could not see the Westleys conniving to protect murderers. Whether they knew their injured visitor or not, they couldn’t possibly have known how he really got his wounds, but it did seem that our quarry had intended going to Springwood House. That didn’t necessarily mean that they already knew the Westleys, though, only that they had business which had taken them there. Either way, however, I couldn’t believe that we were trailing a trio of sophisticated robbers. People like that just didn’t fit together with the Westleys.

  I then paused in my reasoning again, because the next idea taking shadowy shape in my mind was disagreeable. I faced it eventually. If our quarry were not robbers, then who were they? Whatever their mysterious business at Springwood might be, could it nevertheless, unknown to the Westleys, be somehow connected with their crime? Had John’s money been stolen just to make robbery appear to be the motive?

  The Westleys had evidently wanted to conceal the visit. Was that because they thought the wounded man had been hurt in a way which might get him into trouble and they were sorry for him? Or for some other reason? It was odd, I thought, puzzling over it, that the Westleys hadn’t sworn their servants to secrecy. Lane had been quite open with Brockley, who had said there was another groom with them, who had evidently not protested.

  Perhaps the Westleys were wise. Impressing secrecy on one’s servants is apt to arouse their curiosity. Maybe Edward and Kate had thought it best to let the wounded man and his friends simply sink back into the haze of commonplace events. That way, they would be more forgettable.

  When I had reached this point in my deliberations, I shared my thoughts with the others, and they agreed with my conclusions, such as they were, but none of us could get any further. We must wait until we knew more.

  We made a number of enquiries that day. We called at more taverns and blacksmiths’, where we asked openly if a group of gentlemen, one on a fine piebald horse, had been seen lately. We had become better at it by this time and developed quite a convincing and detailed story of friends who might have passed this way ahead of us.

  We also visited two manor houses, using the excuse that we had lost our way while attempting short cuts, and wanted directions, and here we were more roundabout in our questions. In the big houses, the trio might be known, or might have come on a dubious errand. Someone might find a way to warn them of our enquiries.

  “If they did attack John, they’re not safe people to annoy,” said Brockley, expressing my own feelings precisely.

  That day yielded nothing. The road was always fairly busy, with folk travelling on foot, on horseback, in wagons and carts, and no one remembered any particular party of riders. Of the two big houses, one was full of very busy people and when I asked its young, bustling and officious mistress if she had many unexpected callers (“Living so near the Windsor road, I expect you have a stream of them!”) she said roundly that she didn’t encourage them; it interfered with getting things done. She couldn’t think how we had missed our way; that was the main Windsor Road, down there on the other side of the fields; you could see carts going by from here, and we could have a cup of buttermilk each if we liked but we must forgive her, she had a thousand things to do.

  The other was occupied by a childless old widower who was crippled by the joint evil and alone except for his servants. When he heard us arrive, he shouted to his butler to bring us to him. He was delighted to see us and here we had no need to ask questions; before we were well over the threshold, he was telling us what a pleasure it was to see fresh faces; he hadn’t had a visitor for three months at least. He pounded on the floor with his stick to bring the butler back and demanded wine and cold chicken and fresh bread for us. The bread was all right, if coarse, but the wine was acid and the chicken underdone.

  “Poor old man,” said Brockley, when, with some difficulty, we had made our escape. “He must be very lonely. He must have constant indigestion as well! I pity our friends if they stayed there. Only, madam, I don’t think they did. I doubt they were at either place.”

  We spent a night at a village inn—a very uncomfortable one—and started off again in the morning, making at once for the next set of ornate brick chimneys we could see amid the rolling fields and woodlands. We took a lane which led in the right direction, and from a small boy who was moving sheep into an adjacent field, we found that it did indeed go to the manor house, and that it was called Lockhill.

  We came to another village before we rea
ched Lockhill. It contained about a dozen thatched hovels and a couple of slightly bigger houses, one of which was a vicarage attached to a church smaller than itself. The village also had an alehouse and a well and, at the far end of the single street, a blacksmith, who plied his trade in a cave-like building made of the mellow local stone. Iron goods such as spades, rakes and firebaskets hung on the walls to advertise his wares. Here, for the first time, we struck ore.

  “A fellow on a piebald?” said the smith, through clouds of steam from a piece of hot iron which he was tempering in cold water. “And one with ginger hair? Oh, aye, they’ve been through here. A matter of a fortnight back, that’ll be. The ginger-haired man was on a grey and it had a shoe hanging by only two nails. I saw to it for him. The others tied their horses up outside and hung about waiting. They didn’t go to the alehouse, daft things. Mistress Lambert makes a decent brew, not like that Pocky Peter that had the place afore her and used to water it, till we had him marched out and made to drink a gallon of his own ale and poured the rest over his head . . . ”

  He was not the sort of man who can ever keep to the point, but Brockley eventually got him back to it, and then he asked us what our friends were called. I snatched a name from my recent past. “The one who is a friend of my family is called Mr. Pinto.”

  “Pinto? That’s a funny-sounding thing to call anyone. No, none of them mentioned that. The one with the piebald, he was Will Johnson; I heard the others use both names.”

  “Why, yes. Mr. Pinto had a . . . a cousin Johnson. My husband knew them quite well,” I said mendaciously. “Well, well, what a tiny world it is. Perhaps we shall catch them up in due course. Were they going to Lockhill?”