To Shield the Queen

by FIONA BUCKLEY

  Cecil came back to his desk and a moment later the leggy page brought some wine. I sipped it, obliged now to take my time and look suitably wan, when every fibre in my body wanted to rush to the courtyard and accost Lady Catherine Grey.

  • • •

  By the time I had finally left Cecil’s office, gathered up Brockley and Dale from the anteroom and made my way down to the courtyard, Lady Catherine Grey had disappeared, although Lady Jane Seymour and Lord Hertford were still talking together and petting the dog, which evidently belonged to Jane. I made straight for them and asked where I might find Lady Catherine.

  “Ursula! You’re back!” Lady Jane Seymour greeted me with pleasure.

  “Yes, as you see.” I didn’t want to stop and talk, however, still less discuss my experiences at Cumnor. “Just now,” I said, “I urgently need to speak to Lady Catherine. Has she gone to the queen?”

  “No, the queen’s out hunting in the park. Catherine hasn’t been very well lately,” said Jane. “She decided not to go.”

  “Not well? What’s the matter with her?” Jane was the one, I thought, who was fragile. Before her last illness, my mother had had that transparent skin and hectic colour, more like a red stain than a glow of health. I was sorry to see it on Jane, who was a likeable girl.

  “No particular illness,” said Lord Hertford worriedly. Jane’s brother was a pleasant young man, although he struck me as somewhat vacillating. “She seems melancholy,” he said, “and has at times felt too weak to get up for two or three days at a time.”

  “We try to keep her amused. Any kind of sad news distresses her,” Jane said. “She cried for days when she heard of Lady Dudley’s death, although she had never met her. My brother here has been quite anxious.”

  “She is so sensitive and warmhearted,” said Lord Hertford.

  A more unlikely description of Lady Catherine Grey I could hardly imagine. If Lord Hertford wasn’t a simpleton, I decided, he must be besotted, or else Jane had been working hard on him on Lady Catherine’s behalf. “I will look for her in her rooms,” I said.

  I went indoors with Dale and Brockley, wondering how to gain admittance to Lady Catherine. She didn’t think very much of me and might well decline to see me. I shared my problem with the others, however, and Dale offered a suggestion.

  “Oh, ma’am, she’ll surely see you if you say it’s the queen’s business. It is, I suppose?” Dale was longing to know what all this was about. Brockley shushed her reprovingly.

  “It’s the queen’s business, yes,” I said. This I could not share with either of them. “Once again,” I said, “you will have to await me in an anteroom.”

  The ploy was successful. The maid who opened Lady Catherine’s door withdrew to give my message but reappeared after a moment and let me in. In a luxurious but closed-in chamber, with too many hangings and too much clutter on the toilet table, Lady Catherine was seated on a stool with her mousy-fair tresses loose on her shoulders. The maid had evidently been brushing them. It was true that Lady Catherine was pale, I thought. She regarded me with languid impatience.

  “So here you are again, Mistress Blanchard, and you’re hardly back, it seems, before you are running confidential errands for her majesty. How can I help this particular errand?”

  “It’s delicate,” I said. “I think it best if I speak to you in complete privacy, Lady Catherine. You will agree, once you hear what it concerns.”

  Lady Catherine jerked her head, and the maid, a downtrodden, tired sort of woman, well paid, no doubt, but probably much nagged, left the room. “Well,” said Lady Catherine, tossing back her hair. “What is all this about?”

  “It’s about Peter Holme,” I said. “He came to Cumnor Place with Sir Richard Verney. I have also seen him—indeed, had him pointed out to me—in the company of Sir Thomas Smith and the Earl of Derby, Edward Stanley. Tell me, how much do you know, Lady Catherine, about the death of Amy Dudley?”

  • • •

  I don’t know exactly what reaction I expected. After all, it was perfectly possible that I was wrong; that the pattern I thought I had seen was accidental, like the patterns of the constellations in the night sky, in which case she would be naturally amazed and indignant. On the other hand, I might be right. If so, I had supposed that she would fence with me, ask me what I was talking about, and perhaps present such a blank wall of incomprehension, real or pretended, that I might never know for certain whether I had guessed the truth, or not.

  What I didn’t expect her to do was to collapse like a badly constructed house of cards. She stared at me and began to tremble, while her mouth sagged open. Then it stiffened into an unbecoming square, and she started to bawl. I stepped forward, seized her shoulders and shook her. “Stop that noise! You’ll have half the court in here! I wonder if Amy cried like this when she was about to be murdered?”

  Not altogether to my surprise, this produced an even louder bawling, which rose to a shriek. I shook her again and put my palm over her mouth until she stopped. Her eyes, huge and blue and terrified, peered at me over my hand.

  “Now,” I said. “I’m going to let go, but keep quiet.”

  I released her, and she sat there with her hair trailing wildly and tears trickling down her blanched face, looking, I thought, less like the heir to the throne than a young but very guilty witch on her execution morning. “I repeat,” I said, “what do you know about the death of Amy Dudley?”

  Much too late, she tried to regain lost territory.

  “How dare you come in here like this and shout at me and bully me? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t been well; I’m easily confused. I . . . ”

  “Do you usually burst into tears and shriek aloud when someone asks you a simple question? That’s all I did—just ask. I wasn’t shouting and I wasn’t bullying. Now, I’ll ask you again. What do you know about the death of Amy Dudley? Oh, come along, Lady Catherine. Don’t tell me again that you don’t know what I mean.”

  “But I don’t. I don’t!”

  “I was living at Cumnor Place when she died.” I said. “Now, listen.”

  I gave her the whole story, as far as Amy Dudley was concerned, from the beginning, from the moment when I first saw Peter Holme in Richmond Park. I told her how Verney and Holme had visited Cumnor and how they nearly rode me down on my way back from Abingdon Fair; and, in graphic detail, I told her about Amy’s illness, and her desperate prayers, and how she had asked to be left alone so that the murderers whose existence she had surmised, might put her out of her pain. And how she had looked, lying at the foot of the stairs.

  “I can only hope,” I said, “that she didn’t, at the last, cry out in fear and struggle for her life. But for all her brave words, I should think that being ill and in pain would make violence harder to bear, not easier. Most people, when it comes to it, would rather die in their beds than be murdered.”

  Lady Catherine Grey didn’t want to hear. Once, she put her hands over her ears, but I seized her wrists and jerked them down again, telling her that no, she would listen, whether she liked it or not.

  At the end, I stood back and leaned against the toilet table, arms folded. “Well, Lady Catherine. So what is it you know? You helped to arrange it, didn’t you? You’re the Protestant heir. You would like to remain the heir, was that it? You were afraid Lady Dudley would soon die naturally—yes? I’m on the right track, am I not?—and that the queen and Dudley would then marry and produce a child to be heir instead of you? So you conspired to make sure that Lady Dudley died unnaturally and scandalously, instead . . . ”

  “It wasn’t like that!”

  “Then what was it like?”

  “Oh, God!” wept Lady Catherine, wringing her hands. I watched this with interest, because although I had heard of people doing this, I had never before seen a demonstration.

  “I’m waiting,” I said.

  “Don’t tell anyone! Promise you won’t tell anyone! Lord Hertford would be so horrified and he . . . we .
. . hope . . . ”

  “To be married? Never mind that now. You wanted Lady Dudley to die, did you not? And not of her disease?”

  “No one could have wanted her to die of her disease! She was so very ill, and in pain—you know she was, you saw her, you’ve just told me all about it!” Lady Catherine was gabbling. “It was a kindness, really.”

  “Like putting down a sick dog? But you never saw her. Did someone tell you that it would be a kindness? You never mounted this little plot all on your own, did you? Who else was in it? The Earl of Derby? Sir Thomas Smith?”

  “I shan’t name any names,” said Lady Catherine, with an attempt at dignity. I laughed.

  “You need not. Didn’t I just say that I saw Peter Holme with those two? As a matter of fact, the Spanish ambassador noticed them as well. He drew my attention to them. He knew something. Things get about in this court. A few words overheard at a card game; someone seen in unexpected company too often and the rumours start. Derby and Smith were together quite a lot; it was such an odd combination that people remarked on it. Maybe Holme was seen with them and perhaps with Sir Richard Verney too, and I know that Holme and Verney went to Cumnor more than once. Lady Dudley told me that. Someone somewhere began to add things together.

  “Sir Thomas Smith,” I said thoughtfully, “detests Dudley, and so does the Earl of Derby. Smith wants the queen to make a good Protestant marriage and Derby wants her to make a Catholic one and you don’t want her to make one at all, but you all, equally, regarded Dudley as a threat, unless he could be ruined by a good scandal. Who thought of the scheme first and approached the others? You may as well tell me, Lady Catherine. The queen will make you tell, anyway.”

  “Not the queen!” Catherine squealed in fright. “No, you can’t, you mustn’t! She hates me already!” She dissolved into sobs, but coherent words did presently emerge. “It wasn’t real! Until I heard it had actually happened, it wasn’t real! I didn’t know how I’d feel. I’ve had nightmares every night since! I dream someone’s creeping up in the dark to kill me in my bed. I didn’t know it would be like this! It wasn’t real, I tell you!”

  No wonder she’d seemed unwell lately. Reality had come home to her, crashed on her head like a falling brick, when it was too late. I thought she was only just beginning to see that she had stepped on to a road which might lead to the Tower or the block. Her sister, Lady Jane Grey, had died under the axe at the age of sixteen, because their parents, especially her mother, Lady Frances Grey, Henry VIII’s fiercely ambitious niece, had tried to challenge Queen Mary Tudor’s right to the throne, and put Jane there instead.

  The same plot had led to the deaths of Robin Dudley’s father and his brother Guildford. Their father had married Guildford to Jane in the hope of seeing his son become king. That should have given Catherine a sense of self-preservation, as it had done to her brother-in-law Robin. But no, it seemed that she had to be caught out first, before it belatedly occurred to her that the paths of ambition had risks.

  “What was Sir Richard Verney’s motive?” I asked with interest. “I know Dudley treats him rudely, and he strikes me as a proud man. He’s also a gambler and constantly in debt. Did he join in for money? I fancy money was what bought Anthony Forster’s help, in Cumnor Place.”

  “It all began as a joke!” wailed Lady Catherine.

  “A joke? Lady Catherine, Amy was found dead at the foot of a flight of stairs, with her neck broken!”

  Lady Catherine continued to blubber. Through it, I understood her to say that Derby and Sir Thomas had really thought of it first, and she had become part of it because she happened to say, in jest—“only in jest, that’s all, that’s all!”—that it would be quite a good thing if someone were to arrange for Amy to die in a way that would make everyone think Dudley responsible because that would put an end to his ambitions.

  “Just tell me,” I said, “in order and calmly, if you can. Tell me how it all came about. Now’s your chance to put yourself in a good light, if there is one!”

  She stared at me with hatred, but she did as I said. It was informative. I had never before asked myself how a conspiracy might come into being, how whispered hints became practical action; how “if only this or that would happen” might change into “let’s see that it does.”

  Here was my answer. Once more, I saw the spoor of treason, saw how it prowled from one victim to another, a predator of fair aspect, sinking its teeth in the foolish prey who let it approach and tried to stroke it.

  “We . . . we were just talking,” Lady Catherine stammered. “In the anteroom one morning, waiting for the queen to appear. I mean, I was talking to Sir Thomas and to Derby. They . . . they said they had already been thinking about Dudley and the queen, and Amy, and that with the illness Amy had, it would be a mercy if she died soon and hardly a crime to end it for her, and . . . ”

  “Yes, and?”

  “I asked if they were serious.” Lady Catherine unconsciously favoured me with precisely the big-eyed, limpid gaze which she must have turned on to Sir Thomas and Derby. “And Derby said, well, are you? So I said, yes, only of course, I couldn’t possibly arrange a thing like that, and then Derby said, God help you if ever you repeat this, but it could be done, only we need some reliable agents to do the . . . to do . . . ”

  “The actual work,” I said, substituting the word “actual” for the word “dirty” at the last moment.

  “Yes. And that’s when I offered them Holme’s services. Holme will do anything for me. He’s my half-brother.”

  “Your what?”

  “Half-brother. He’s a love-child. My father acknowledged him and paid for his education but his mother died when he was small and I don’t think her family were very kind to him.”

  This, I thought, explained Holme’s odd air of being just, but only just, a gentleman. So he was illegitimate, and his mother’s family hadn’t been kind to him. That hit home as far as I was concerned. I knew what that was like. “But he’s in your service now?” I said.

  “Yes. His mother’s family sent him to me when he was a boy. I didn’t want him at first, but when he came, I liked him. I was nice to him, and he adores me,” said Lady Catherine defiantly.

  “Quite. So you agreed to help Sir Thomas Smith and the Earl of Derby in the scheme they were hatching, and told Holme to take their orders? Did you offer money too?”

  “I paid Peter. The others hired Verney. They paid Forster, as well. That was for, well, making it easy to reach Lady Dudley. You see . . . ” said Lady Catherine, trembling hands clutched together in a fold of embroidered satin underskirt, “to begin with—Sir Thomas told me this—the idea was to get Forster to do it. They asked Verney to sound him out. Verney was in on the scheme from the start, long before I was. He had terrible debts. Gambling debts, I mean—you were right about that. He owed Derby a lot, as a matter of fact. Derby said he would wipe out the debts as part of the payment if Verney would help him in a scheme to benefit the realm by spoiling Dudley’s ambitions. Verney was only too willing. Yes, he did—does—resent Dudley’s manner towards him. He’d often been to Cumnor on errands for Dudley and he knows Forster quite well. He said Forster would do anything for money . . . ”

  “Just as I supposed,” I said, thinking of the money which had undoubtedly gone into Forster’s pocket rather than into Lady Dudley’s furnishings or food. “Dudley clearly has some shockingly disloyal servants. How thankful I am that neither Verney nor Forster are in my employment! Well? Please do go on.”

  “Forster couldn’t do it,” Lady Catherine said. “He tried, though this was before I came into it, of course, and I never heard all the details. But . . . ”

  “He tried poison, I take it. Lady Dudley told me she had had bouts of sickness and pains in her limbs.”

  “I think, from what Derby said, that Forster didn’t know how much to give to make it look like illness. There was some doctor or other who got suspicious and started to spread rumours.”

  “Dr. Bayly,” I sai
d. So Amy had been right. She had only been mistaken in thinking that Dudley was responsible.

  “In the end, Forster backed off and said he wouldn’t do more than just leave doors open! That almost put a stop to the whole thing,” Lady Catherine said.

  She had become interested now in what she was saying, almost to the point of forgetting that it was a confession. She was an extremely stupid young woman. Recalling the limited nature of Anthony Forster’s support, she sounded positively aggrieved.

  “You mean,” I said, “that Forster wasn’t willing actually to break Lady Dudley’s neck with his own well-washed hands?”

  “Why must you put things in such a nasty way?”

  “They’re such nasty things! I’m glad to hear that Forster has some traces of a conscience! Perhaps the fact that he’s actually Dudley’s treasurer weighed with him just a little!”

  Lady Catherine looked at me as though I had kicked her, and said sulkily, “We had endless trouble with Forster. At one point—this was later—he wanted a contract, a promise of payment in writing, with my signature on it, and Sir Thomas’s and Derby’s too. And that was just for . . . for making the job easy for others!”

  “Yes, I know he wanted a contract,” I said and she stared at me, wrinkling her forehead.

  “You can’t have known!”

  “You’d be surprised. Well, go on. Forster wouldn’t soil his hands. What happened next?”

  “They—Sir Thomas and Derby—wanted Verney to do it but Verney was difficult. He was offered good money as well as having his debts cancelled, but he refused to act alone.”

  “How dreadfully annoying!”

  “They were still wondering what to do,” Catherine said, “when I made my little joke—that’s all I meant it to be, just a joke! I mentioned Holme, and said he’d do anything I asked him to, and Derby suggested that I ask him to help Verney. Sir Thomas was against bringing me into it at first. He doesn’t have a high opinion of women,” Lady Catherine explained.