To Shield the Queen

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  “Aye, that’s right. They went straight on up there. Likely you’ll get news of them there. Important, is it?”

  I shook my head. “No, not very. It was just by chance that I heard these old friends might be ahead of us on the road. We’ll ask after them.”

  I decided not to use the short-cut story this time but to play the card of feeble health once more, because just after we left the smith, Dale confided to me that she had a headache. “I’m forty, ma’am, but I still have my monthly courses and I’ve just started one.”

  “Dale’s not feeling quite well,” I said to Brockley. “We’ll ask for shelter for her sake.”

  The track led uphill, past fields and hedgerows which had a slightly unkempt air; not as bad as those round the house of the old widower, but still untidy. The ditch beside the track was overgrown and we saw a field of corn stubble which had been harvested carelessly, with patches of wheat standing uncut in the corners.

  The house itself was smaller than it appeared from a distance. The gatehouse opened straight on to the main courtyard, with no intervening path. A mastiff on a chain leaped at us, snarling, making the horses snort and sidle, and Dale didn’t so much dismount as slither to the ground with fright. She was leaning on the Snail’s shoulder in a way which looked convincingly like near-collapse, when a thickset butler appeared and shouted at the dog to be quiet. It ignored him and continued to bay, whereupon the man enquired our business in another bellow.

  On hearing of the sorry plight of exhaustion which had overtaken poor Mistress Blanchard and her maid, he became sympathetic, however. He helped me down, directed Brockley to the stableyard, swore at the dog and took Dale and myself inside to present us, he said, to Mistress Ann Mason, the lady of the house.

  Lockhill was the very opposite of the Springwood household. It was chaotic. We stepped through the main door straight into a big hall which was strewn haphazardly with gloves and boots and goblets and jugs and letters and hooped chests with fabric trailing from under their lids. Books lay open, as though the life lived here was too frenetic ever to have time to tidy up after itself. Ann Mason, who had heard us arriving and came to meet us as we entered, was quite young and very pregnant, but except for her mounded stomach, she was thin with overwork, her brown stuff dress spattered with flour from the kitchen, fluff from a spinning wheel and dribbles from the baby on her arm.

  A crowd of children came with her, screaming and giggling, accompanied by a couple of small dogs which added to the uproar by yelping alongside them. A harassed-looking tutor appeared and tried to round up the children, but without success.

  “I am so sorry for the noise,” said Mistress Mason, joggling the baby, pushing a dog out of the way with her foot and leading us through to a parlour where the spinning wheel stood beside a basket of fleece. There seemed to be wool flecks and dog hairs on everything and someone had carelessly left a bucket of soaking nappy cloths beside the hearth. “The children do become a little excited at times but Dr. Crichton, their tutor, is much opposed to the idea of beating them.”

  Normally, I would have agreed with Dr. Crichton. I had been beaten and so had Gerald, and we had agreed that Meg should not be treated in the same way. However, as the shrieking horde tore into the parlour after us and out again, and poor Dale flinched at the racket, I began to wonder why the Masons didn’t chastise their offspring themselves or else pension off their tutor and get a firmer one.

  Mistress Mason promised us food and drink and went herself to see about it. While she was gone, a door opened somewhere close by, footsteps approached and a tall, ascetic-looking man wandered into the room. He was holding a book in one hand and keeping his place with the thumb of the other, and his lean face was scored with fretful lines. He was halfway through a querulous plea that he was trying to translate a most difficult piece of Italian verse and why could Ann not do something, my dear, about this unconscionable din, when he noticed us.

  Ann Mason came back clutching a loaded tray. She apologised anxiously and introduced us to her husband, Leonard Mason. He listened courteously to our account of headaches and exhaustion on a long journey, requested his wife to make us comfortable and provide us with beds for the night, and then took himself off again.

  “He has gone back to his study,” said Mistress Mason, and added, in a hushed and awestricken voice, “He is translating Dante’s verses, from the Italian into English. He is a scholar of languages. He also studies the devices of Leonardo da Vinci, whose namesake he is. He has a brilliant mind.” Another chorus of youthful shouts and shrieks, interspersed with excited canine barks, broke out in the distance and she sighed.

  “He can never understand why the children are so uproarious,” she said wanly. “None of them are at all studious. I try to protect him from distraction as much as I can.”

  She did her best for us. We were given food and drink, and shown to a bedchamber. It was a pleasant enough room, with plastered walls and a high, beamed ceiling, but it was in sorry need of dusting. With exclamations of annoyance, Mistress Mason went to find a maid to clean it, and after a long delay, came back with a cloth and did it herself. There was aired linen ready, however, and I helped our hostess to make up the bed so that Dale, who really was quite poorly, could lie down.

  Once Dale was settled, I went downstairs with Mistress Mason, explaining that my maid was mostly the one in need of rest; that I was now quite restored. I sat with her while she worked at her spinning wheel and encouraged her to talk.

  In the course of the next hour or two, I learned a good deal about Lockhill. Every house has its own character, and Lockhill was like two houses in one. In fact, it resembled one of the Norman castles whose design my cousins’ tutor had explained to us, drawing diagrams to show us what he meant by the keep and the outer bailey. At Lockhill, the keep and the bailey were mental rather than physical concepts, but they were real for all that.

  The outer bailey was presided over by Mistress Ann Mason, who lived in a harassed whirl of household duties, disobedient dogs, too many children and not nearly enough staff, and tried to protect the castle keep, represented by Master Leonard Mason. Leonard Mason cared for books and languages and abstruse scientific concepts to the exclusion of all else. From what his wife let fall and from what I observed myself that day, it seemed clear that he preferred to keep as detached as possible from all matters of the house, the land and his own children, and spent most of his time virtually barricaded into his study where he worked with his books and drawings. If he wanted exercise, he walked or rode alone and often ate by himself in the study.

  It was no wonder, I thought, that Mistress Mason seemed so overburdened and the estate so neglected. More was left to her than she could possibly do, and the best fertiliser for any field is its owner’s eye. Crops fail easily when the farmer pays no heed to them.

  Although I learned so much about Lockhill and the Masons, I discovered nothing else. I trailed my lures, but the hawk would not fly. Not one word would Ann Mason speak concerning any previous guests. I asked after Will Johnson by name, saying that he had been a friend of my husband, and that I believed he had recently passed through this district, with a companion who had a fine piebald horse, but she showed no sign of recognition; I asked if unexpected visitors were frequent and she said no. I ran out of ideas.

  I also became very uneasy. The smith had been quite specific. A party of three men, of whom one had ginger hair and another riding a piebald, had been coming to this house. He could have been wrong, perhaps. Maybe they had taken another track and bypassed the manor house. In that case, they probably weren’t going in the Windsor direction after all. I wished I could consult a map.

  At supper, blessedly quiet because the children had taken theirs earlier (I had heard them taking it, in their own room, and shuddered at the sound of their table behaviour), Leonard Mason joined us. This was evidently unusual and he was only doing it to be polite to me. I asked him about “my husband’s friends,” expressing surprise that they ha
d not called here. I received the same null answer. They had not been seen.

  Mason, however, did show an interest in my family in another way. He asked my maiden name and on learning that I was a Faldene, said he had met my Uncle Herbert in London. “Even a recluse like myself must occasionally bestir himself to do such things as sell wool,” he said. “I was haggling over my fleeces and your uncle was doing the same thing. I found that he and I also have shares in the same merchant vessel. Indeed, we have a number of things in common.” He gazed at me, speculatively.

  It was Ann Mason who said, in a voice both warm and timid, “The Faldene family have a loyalty still to the old religion. Perhaps Mistress Blanchard feels the same.” Her husband frowned at her and she turned pink, but added bravely, “There is no harm. There is no secret about our own worship, after all. If Mistress Blanchard belongs to our flock, surely we should make her welcome. Were you not wondering the same thing yourself?” she asked her husband. Ann Mason was clearly one of those gentle ladies who nevertheless turn into steel when it is a matter of their deepest beliefs.

  “I confess I was,” Leonard Mason said, “though I would have approached the matter with more caution. Well, Mistress Blanchard. Please speak for yourself!”

  “I follow the Anglican religion,” I said, “but I mind my own business.” I hesitated. I badly wanted the Masons to feel they could trust me. If they did, they might talk more freely. “The law’s the law,” I said, “but I must admit I sometimes miss the old mass. I was brought up with it, after all.” It went against the grain to say it, but I forced the words out. “I believe my uncle and aunt still hear it,” I said casually. “I can understand why.”

  “Really? You feel like that?” Mason too appeared to hesitate. Then he said, “If you would really care to hear a mass—well, I may say that I pay a regular fine in order to avoid attending Anglican services. So far no one has enquired into my private religious observances at home. Dr. Crichton is a priest, and celebrates mass for us each Sunday. Tomorrow is Sunday. Would you like to join us? It will be before breakfast, in the room that opens off our parlour.”

  This was going further than I meant. I didn’t want to accept the invitation, but on the other hand, it might be worth it. I also thought, with amusement, that this probably explained why they kept their disaster of a tutor on.

  Dale, sitting at the lower end of the table, was regarding me in horror. I smiled at her reassuringly. “Dale will not attend,” I said, “but I will. At what o’clock?”

  “I’m doing it to gain their confidence, that’s all,” I said to Dale as soon as we were alone in our room. “Don’t worry. And don’t talk about it, either.”

  Dale didn’t like it, though. Next morning, she dressed me in what I can only call a speaking silence. I gave her shoulder an understanding pat, and went downstairs alone.

  The mass was a very simple affair, held in a small bare room. The altar was an ordinary table with a white cloth over it. There were some candles in plain candlesticks and a modest crucifix, and nothing more. Dr. Crichton recited the service from memory, without a prayerbook. The whole family and most of the servants were there and the children, for once, behaved themselves—except that the baby cried.

  It was all very gentle and devout and seemed innocuous, ten thousand miles away from the horror in Chichester, which Uncle Herbert had described to me. It was absurd to think that the Masons were paying a fine for simply not attending the official parish church, and even more absurd to realise that if I chose to report them, they could be fined a hundred marks for hearing a mass and maybe four hundred marks for any further offence. Why could not people worship in whatever way they wanted and let others do the same?

  Why could Queen Mary not have left her subjects alone? If she had, the law now might be easier on those who clung to the rituals of their forefathers.

  Harmless . . . but I was ill at ease and only hoped that I might gain something from it. In this, however, I was disappointed. At breakfast, I took some cold beef and game pie and remarked that my husband’s friend William Johnson had been very partial to venison. Mason said, “Really? I prefer pheasant myself,” and that was all.

  We took our leave. We paused in Lockhill village to attend the Anglican service there and then once more took to the road. As we went, I asked Brockley if the Lockhill grooms were as chatty as the ones at Springwood.

  “No,” he said sourly. “If our friends were here, then for all I could find out from the grooms, they made themselves invisible.”

  “The smith thought they were coming here,” I said. “I’ve even wondered . . . when John was lying in that inn, trying to tell us things, and we found it so hard to understand him, I thought at one point that he said his own name—John. But suppose he was saying ‘Johnson?’ I believe we’re following the right men, but where on earth have they gone?”

  “It’s a funny thing, ma’am,” said Dale. “We do know they went to that other place, Springwood, and that was Catholic, like Lockhill.”

  Brockley turned to her in surprise. “Yes, Lockhill’s Catholic,” I said. “I heard mass with them this morning.”

  “You what?” I eyed him coldly and he recovered himself. “Madam,” he added belatedly.

  “I was trying to get them to trust me a little more, though it didn’t work. I expect your discretion, Brockley.”

  “That you will have, madam, and I accept what you were trying to do, but I have to say I can’t approve.”

  “No. A Popish mass!” Dale broke in. “I don’t know how you could abide to do such a thing, ma’am, but that’s not what I set out to say. I meant, it’s odd: that house and Springwood both being Catholic.”

  “What makes you think Springwood was Catholic?” I asked.

  “Because I smelt incense there. I didn’t at Lockhill—I don’t think they used any, did they?—but it was quite strong at Springwood.”

  Of course. That was it. That was the fugitive, exotic fragrance in the Westley manor house. Not a rare strewing herb, but incense, only so overwhelmed by the freshness of beeswax polish, that I hadn’t recognised it, although I had smelt it often enough at Faldene. Probably mass had been celebrated at Springwood shortly before we arrived.

  I became aware, at this point, of a very unpleasant physical sensation, as though I had swallowed a lump of ice which now lay in the pit of my stomach and refused to melt.

  What might a party of gentlemen be doing, if they were riding from one Catholic household to another through Elizabeth’s England, on business so secret that none of their hosts would mention it, or even mention that the gentlemen in question had passed that way? And what kind of business might induce these secretive travellers to murder a harmless fellow wayfarer?

  Well, one could hazard guesses. They weren’t, for instance, just itinerant priests holding masses in private for the devout. There had to be more to it than that.

  I had been frightened at Cumnor but this was worse. Much, much worse.

  I had begun, dimly, to perceive the nature of the enemy.

  I think I was more thankful than otherwise, when shortly after that, we lost the spoor.

  14

  Lost and Found

  It was when we reached Windsor. We had traced our quarry that far with some success. We crossed the Thames at Henley and there we heard of them when we asked the wherrymen and lightermen who ferried people and goods across and up and down the river. We found a lighter crew who had taken a party of horsemen over, they said, roughly a couple of weeks ago. Yes, one of the horses had been piebald. They remembered it and weren’t likely to forget it, either, the vicious brute. It had kicked one of them. The lighterman pushed his scruffy, water-stained breeches up to his knee to show the remains of what must have been a spectacular bruise.

  We also picked up traces at the next town, Maidenhead, where we found an innkeeper who thought they had stopped there for a meal, but after Windsor, the trail petered out. Up to then, we had had a kind of direction, but now our quarry
could have gone towards Southampton on one main road, or towards Dover on another, or taken a secondary track into Sussex and we would have to guess which. We spent two more days asking questions along the first few miles of each route, but learned nothing. We returned to Windsor, where we were staying in an inn, and considered the matter.

  The court was still at Windsor but I did not feel inclined to call there, in case I were somehow kept from leaving again. The queen could be capricious. Now that the trail was lost, Sussex was calling with an insistent voice. I must see Meg; I must see John Wilton’s sister; and it had also occurred to me that if I could find Matthew, I might, just might, ask his advice. I would have to be careful; after all he was Catholic, too. If my frightening guesses were right, however, then I had found the spoor of treason. Matthew would understand that. It was high time for me to go to Sussex and nothing must hinder me.

  Brockley, when I told him this, said, “Should you not report what you know to somebody in authority first?”

  I had hired a parlour and a meal for three. Constant association had made us draw close and we now ate together habitually. Brockley considered me gravely across the table.

  “I don’t think we know enough,” I said. “There are things which I think are so—but that’s guesswork.”

  “You’ve maybe guessed more than you have told us,” Brockley said, “but even guesses might be worth passing on.”

  “I wonder,” I said.

  “We’ve found out a few things, ma’am,” Dale said. “Those two houses, being Catholic; I’m sure that means something.” So, privately, was I.

  A maidservant came in with a hot mutton pie and served us, which stopped the discussion for the time being. While portions of pie were cut and put before us, I studied Brockley. He had a good deal of sense, and although he was not yet old, he was mature enough to have a considerable experience of life. He hadn’t had a formal education in the Latin and Greek sense, but he had worked as groom and manservant in more than one big house and had had at times to receive written instructions and act on them. I now knew that he could read very well and write a fair hand, albeit slowly. His advice was worth heeding.