Queen of Ambition

by Buckley, Fiona

  “I insisted, but much it told me! I had put forward Mistress Smithson, as I believed my companion to be called, as a candidate for presenting flowers to the queen; now it seems that if she does, she may also find herself returning to a husband I didn’t know she had. A brother-in-law called Woodforde apparently knows who she really is—which is more, it seems, than I have been allowed to know! Futhermore, the letter, from a woman claiming to be employed by Sir William Cecil, also inquired if Mistress Smithson, or whatever her name is, knew of any reason why either the husband or the brother-in-law should be laying plots against the queen, and told her that if so, she should speak at once before they ran into further danger, or led someone called Ambrosia—her daughter, apparently!—into danger with them. It made no sense at all, except that it tells me all too plainly that I have been shamefully deceived in Mistress Smithson….”

  Cecil at this point attempted to say something but Mistress Grantley raised her voice and overrode him.

  “ … All this time, instead of giving honest employment to a poor widow, recommended to me by Dr. Edward Barley, a man I believed to be a respectable tutor, I have it seems been harboring a runaway wife who has left not only a husband but a daughter to fend for themselves. When I questioned her, she admitted it. Shameful!”

  “I fled from my husband because I feared that one day he would kill me,” Mistress Jester said in a low voice. “I took the name of Smithson to help me hide from him, rather than to deceive you. Though it is true that I needed a sanctuary, and Dr. Barley said you might not take me in, not even if you knew the full truth.”

  “No more I would!” snapped Mistress Grantley. “If a woman has taken the vows of marriage, she should abide by them.”

  “At risk of her life?” I asked her. I reached a hand to Dale, who helped me up and steadied me onto a spare stool.

  “If she tries hard enough to please her husband, her life won’t be at risk!” Mistress Grantley retorted didactically, and with every word, she banged her ornamented ebony stick on the floor by way of emphasis.

  “He turned on me because of something my father did, not because of anything I did!” Sybil cried protestingly. “And attacked me with his fists when I protested!”

  Cecil once more attempted to speak but Mistress Grantley, in whose mind age clearly took precedence over such minor matters as the title of Secretary of State, overrode him again.

  “Concerning the plots mentioned in the letter, Mistress Smithson claimed that she knew nothing. In view of the way she has deceived me, I cannot help but wonder …”

  “It’s true! I wanted to come here to find out what all this talk of plots meant. I am afraid for my daughter!”

  “So you say! Well, I wish to know all. I still take the air on horseback now and then, slowly, on an old footboard pillion, behind a groom. If Sybil were so determined to come to Cambridge, I said I would come with her and whatever she found out, I would find out too. On the way, we met this man Brockley, who it appears is the husband of this woman Fran, who brought the letter. He looks,” said Mistress Grantley disdainfully, “like a common serving man but had the impertinence to insist that we should all come at once to see Sir William. To see the Secretary of State, no less! Hardly had we arrived, however, before these two other people have joined us. One of them is apparently the woman who sent the letter. Why does an employee of Sir William Cecil look as though she has been butchering sheep with the help of a scullion?”

  “Will you all kindly be quiet!” Cecil got a hearing this time by shouting. “I want to know what has happened to Ursula and Wat. Are you feeling better, Ursula? Nanny, give her the bowl of water and the comb, and let her clean and tidy herself and then pass them to Wat.”

  “I’ll not give your comb to him! He’s likely got lice!”

  “No, I ain’t!” said Wat indignantly.

  I saw Rob and Brockley both suppressing grins. “Damn the comb!” Cecil snapped. “I can afford a few spares! You can throw it away afterward, Nanny. Do as I bid you! Now then, Ursula, will you begin your explanation? And will someone fetch some wine. I think Ursula needs it and probably we all do.”

  Nanny brought me the water. I washed the blood quickly off my hands, pulled my cap off, and then let Dale tackle my hair while I told them how I had gone up to the pie shop’s attic for another look at Master Jester’s papers and Ambrosia had caught me. I told how she had shouted for her father, who suddenly appeared from what seemed to be a secret room into which I was dragged. I described the alarming conversation between the two brothers, the arrival of Wat, and how we had been tied up and left, probably to await our doom. “We would neither of us have escaped if we’d been alone. We did it because there were two of us. I had a dagger with me that the brothers hadn’t found …”

  I described how Wat and I had managed to free each other and then our escape through the cupboard and the spiral stairway. With some embarrassment I admitted that we had had to fight our way out of the garden. “Then we came straight here. The talk between Woodforde and Jester is proof enough to my mind that something else is afoot besides the entrapment of Mistress Jester.”

  “There was no need for a trap,” said Mistress Jester. “Not if my brother-in-law knew where I was anyway. And precious little need for secrecy even if there was a trap. Would even the queen have cared? How many people,” she asked bitterly, “would criticize a husband for snatching a runaway wife back?”

  “No one in his right mind!” snapped Catherine Grantley.

  Sybil Jester looked at her. “I think Dr. Barley was in his right mind,” she said quietly.

  “He was an old man, going senile, I daresay!”

  Cecil banged his fist down on the table beside him. “That will do! To listen to you all snapping and snarling, anyone would think this was a bear-baiting pit! It happens to be my private apartment. The Secretary of State’s private quarters, to be precise! Mistress Grantley, you will be good enough to hold your tongue. Mistress Jester, can you shed any light on the secret business in which your husband and brother-in-law seem to be engaged?”

  “No,” said Mistress Jester. “No, I cannot. I only know that the mere idea terrifies me, for my daughter’s sake, and yes—because although I fled from my husband, he is still my husband and I would not like to think of him … facing a traitor’s end.”

  “Did you know of the secret room or the stairway in the buttress tower?” Rob asked her.

  “No,” said Sybil. “Athough my father—who had the house built—did tell me that he had built hidden ways of escape into it. He wanted them in case he had to flee from a charge of heresy. He was terrified of that. He had … seen a burning once. He told me that it haunted him; that he couldn’t forget it.”

  “I heard a description of it once,” I said. “The uncle and aunt who brought me up forced me to listen. It gave me nightmares.” Of all the things I had against Aunt Tabitha and Uncle Herbert, that hideous incident, when they held me so that I could not stop my ears while they poured horrors into them, was and always would be among the most powerful.

  “When my mother was alive,” Sybil said, “she told me once that my father used to have nightmares, too. He was a good Protestant. And so is my husband—it was one thing on which he and my father agreed. I can’t believe that my husband is caught up in a plot against the life of the queen. That is what you fear, is it not? As for Master Woodforde, he has little interest in politics or religion. I think,” said Sybil with unexpected, dry humor, “that he worships a goddess called Lady Lennox.”

  “Lady Lennox wouldn’t care if the queen were killed,” said Henderson bluntly.

  “Lady Lennox isn’t fool enough to risk her neck on the block,” said Cecil. “If you mean that she is paying Woodforde to act as an assassin on her behalf, I find it difficult to believe. There was nothing at all in the letters you saw that might help, Ursula?”

  “Not overtly,” I said. “But I think they may be in cipher. I found …”

  “They weren’t in
cipher. We tested several of them, from both men, and there was no sign of such a thing,” Cecil cut me short. “I told you that.”

  I opened my mouth to persist but Sybil was quicker. “But my husband and Giles Woodforde did correspond in cipher!”

  Cecil turned to her. “Did they? But my expert clerks insisted … What kind of cipher?”

  “Oh, a very clumsy one. They had to write letters a hundred miles long in order to exchange quite short messages. It was a game between them. They started it as boys. They kept a note of the key, in the form of drawings.”

  “Drawings?” Cecil frowned.

  I reached into my hidden pocket and drew out the set of sketches that I had stolen from the chest in Jester’s attic.

  “Like these?” I asked.

  21

  Moat, Walls, and Keep

  Mistress Grantley took hold of her stick and levered herself to her feet. “I have learned all I need to know. I have not only been lied to by Dr. Barley, whom I trusted, and led into giving my countenance, unawares, to an errant wife and mother, but it seems that the family she comes from is less than respectable. They correspond in cipher and are suspected of treachery. I will take my leave. Will someone be good enough to assist me to the street? My groom is waiting there for me.”

  “I saw him as we came in,” I remarked politely. “By the way, Brockley, where are our horses?”

  “I paid a college serving boy to take them back to Radley’s,” Brockley said. “I will help you, Mistress Grantley, if Mistress Blanchard permits.”

  “Certainly,” I said.

  Mistress Grantley gave me a cold glare. “I will accept his aid, but it would have been more courteous to ask me first whether it was agreeable to me. I fancy, however, that he is simply your servant and is obedient as servants should be. I will overlook his impertinence in taking it on himself to decide that we should be brought here. It was the right place, after all.” She turned to Sybil and Cecil together. “There is no question, of course, of Mistress Jester returning to Brent Hay. She is dismissed. My charitable gifts to the university will, however, continue as before; I do not blame the university for any of this. With Mistress Jester I will have no more to do. I am a woman of standing and of moral standards. You must fend for yourself, my lady. Your friends perhaps will help you.”

  “I must ask you, before you leave, to give an undertaking not to discuss this matter with any other person,” said Cecil smoothly. “It is state business.”

  Mistress Grantley, not in the least impressed either by Cecil’s position or his air of gravitas, shifted her chilly blue stare to him. “No one has ever challenged my discretion in the past and I trust will have no cause so to do in the future,” she informed him, with awe-inspiring dignity. “On that you may depend.”

  “Thank you. And if there are outstanding wages due to Mistress Jester, I trust they will be paid?” Cecil added.

  “I am also an honest woman. The wages, and her personal belongings too, will be dispatched to her if Mistress Jester will send word of where she is staying.”

  “Show Mistress Grantley out, Brockley,” said Cecil. “When you return, you and Wat may go to the buttery and ask for some food. You must need it. My clerk out there will show you the way. You are not to leave the college, however. My clerk will also arrange for you to have somewhere to sleep. Don’t look so frightened, Wat. You are not under arrest! I merely don’t want wild talk spreading all over Cambridge. You will go home when the queen’s visit is safely over. For the moment, go and wait in the anteroom till Brockley comes back. Master Henderson, take Ryder and Dodd and go to the pie shop. If Woodforde and Jester are still there, though I doubt it, fetch them in. If they’re not there, give chase. They may have made for Norwich or Lynn in the hope of getting away by sea.”

  Rob went quickly out. Brockley took Mistress Grantley’s arm and helped her from the room and Wat, looking like a worried ox, followed them. The rest of us regarded one another with raised brows. “You have been living with Mistress Grantley forwhat? Five years?” I asked Sybil.

  “She isn’t—wasn’t—such a bad mistress,” Sybil said calmly. She seemed to have a calm temperament altogether. “While she believed I was a widowed relative of Dr. Barley—that was the tale we told her—she treated me quite well. She is autocratic, but as long as I did her bidding and was respectful, I had nothing of which to complain. She keeps her tenants’ roofs in good repair, dresses cuts and burns if her servants hurt themselves, gives them generous presents at Christmas. But—there are things she doesn’t understand.”

  “Obviously!” I said.

  Cecil had been looking at the drawings I had stolen. “There is a cipher to break. It looks as though you were right, Ursula. As it happens, because I brought a number of document boxes with me in order to carry on with various items of business, I also have with me copies of the letters we intercepted at Richmond. I didn’t expect them to feature in the business but nevertheless, they’re stored in one of the boxes, so they’re here. Would you put your head out of the door and ask the clerk out there to bring in box number three?”

  I did so, and after leafing through the box for a moment he had found what he wanted. He handed me a sheaf of papers. “Here they are. Since I have clerks who are skilled at deciphering codes, I would normally call on them to deal with this, but they are still in Richmond. However, it seems that you and Mistress Jester between you may in any case have the edge on them as regards this one. Are you feeling quite better now?”

  “Yes, thank you, Sir William. It was only—I’d had a fright,” I said candidly. “I am sorry I was so foolish.”

  “I wouldn’t call it foolish. Where on earth is that wine I sent for? Nanny, go and hurry them up, will you? And ask for some food as well, for the ladies. Now, Mistress Jester and Mistress Blanchard, can you make a start on the deciphering? I, alas, must see the Fellows. I can’t keep them waiting any longer, and Dudley is supposed to be coming with them, so I am expecting him as well.”

  Cecil’s quarters included a writing room, to which Sybil and I, attended by Dale, now took the letters and drawings. There was a desk, placed in front of the mullioned window for the sake of a good light, and equipped with inkstand, prepared quills, sander, and paper. There were a couple of side tables too, and several padded stools. The wine and food arrived, and Dale, still subdued, filled glasses for us. “Fill one for yourself,” I said gently. “And eat something as well. Brockley has forgiven you now, you know. Was he so very angry with you?”

  “We were riding along together, coming back to Cambridge, when I told him, ma’am. He couldn’t say much because Mistress Grantley and Mistress Jester were there, but, oh, what he did say … !”

  “It will be all right now,” I said. “I promise. Most men are pleased enough to know that their wives love them, you know. Think no more about it.” I paused and reinforced what I had said to her in the lodging that morning. “If I have ever seemed to be too friendly toward Brockley, please excuse me. I am sorry if it gave you pain, but truly, there was no harm in it.” That was a lie, but I said it for Dale’s sake, and from now on it must become the truth I had sworn that it was.

  We set out the food. Dale ate at a side table, while Sybil and I sat down together at the desk with our platters, wineglasses, and documents all arranged before us. I thought with a touch of amusement that to anyone glancing into the room, we would present a most misleading picture. Such an onlooker would see two women quietly taking refreshments while reading letters and looking at drawings. No doubt the onlooker would have smiled fondly, assuming the letters to be from husbands or friends, full of affectionate phrases, dignified pious sentiments, and instructions about family or household business; the drawings to be examples of our feminine pastimes, probably inexpert, but a source of innocent amusement.

  The notion that we were a pair of code breakers, hoping to decipher proof of a treacherous plot against the queen, would never have entered such a person’s head.

 
Although he might have been surprised at the lack of feminine chatter and laughter. We had no inclination for either. Sybil, spreading the drawings out on the table, said: “It looks as though they have extended the code since I last saw it. It was clever of you to suspect that these might contain a key, Mistress Blanchard …”

  “Ursula,” I said to her. “Since we are to work together.”

  “Well, it was very sharp of you, and sharper still to seize your chance and bring them away.” Sybil’s dark eyes, so like her daughter’s except for their gravely tranquil expression, scanned my face. “I must say I admire you. I suppose you have guessed at the principle?”

  “I think so. There are twenty-six sheets here. That was what made me so certain. I take it that each is a key to a letter of the alphabet, and each letter must be”—I paused, rubbing my forehead—“am I right? Each letter is represented by a word, or sometimes by alternative words, and these drawings are to help anyone using the code to remember what the words are. The parts of the drawings that … that illustrate the words, are very clearly shown, while the rest isn’t. Is that it? This first one, which would be the letter A, has an apple clearly drawn, and the dapples on the pony, and a church or perhaps a chapel. Is that it?”

  “Yes, and either chapel or church could be used as code words for A,” Sybil said, “along with apple and dapple. In the days before Roland and I began to quarrel, I used to help him write and read the cipher letters—I was allowed to take part in the game, as it were. That’s how it all started; just as a game between Roland and Giles. I enjoyed it! At first, when they were just boys, they used words that began with the letter of the alphabet they represented, and only one for each letter. Then they decided that this was too obvious—the same words would keep on reappearing and it was difficult to write anything that read like an ordinary letter. So they decided to have a choice of words for each letter, and not all with the same initial letter. They said let’s use words which rhyme with the original code word as dapple rhymes with apple—as you seem to have worked out.”