There were bloody smears on Tancred’s golden armour. There was blood on his face, on his moustaches, and on his hands. Tears sprang from his staring eyes and his red mouth gaped as if pain turned him dumb.
The Countess of Scaith was first to reach him, to take his arm. “Sir Tancred. What has happened?”
The Queen’s Champion groaned and heaved words out of him. “She is dead,” he said. “The Lady Mary. I have…I have come…Oh, she is murdered!”
“Free me!” cried Gloriana, struggling from behind them, the great pole swaying. “Free me, someone!”
THE SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER
In Which Lord Montfallcon Begins to Fear a Return of Terror and the Queen Begins to Question the Value of the Virtuous Myth
IT HAS BEEN THIRTEEN YEARS,” said Lord Montfallcon distantly, “since I have seen so much blood.” He looked down at Lady Mary Perrott’s head, half-severed at the neck, at Sir Tancred’s sword, which had created the wound, and he was sad, not for the girl who had died so terribly, nor for Sir Tancred for his sin, but for the security of his great dream. Vice had been discovered to be disguised as Chivalry. He was resentful of both the killer and the killed, who so ominously disturbed a harmony he had maintained with such fortitude since Gloriana’s accession.
Lord Ingleborough, gasping in his formal wear—with casque and breastplate squeezing throat and chest and threatening to bring another heart attack upon him—still uncertain as to what had taken place, said: “Why should Tancred destroy her? It is frequently jealousy, of course, which makes a man go mad….”
Montfallcon was impatient of his old friend’s platitudes. “I must report to the Queen. Is Sir Tancred restrained?”
“Lord Rhoone took him.”
“He must be questioned.”
“He is mad.” Ingleborough sat himself weightily upon one of the few chairs which were still standing upright, for Lady Mary’s room was all wreckage. “Oh, the poor child. And gay. A favourite of the Queen’s. The Queen…?”
“She is in her apartments,” said Lord Montfallcon with a sigh. “The Countess comforts her, most likely. The Perrotts are one of the most powerful families in the land. They will need more than a conventional explanation for what has happened here.”
“We’ll try him, eh? In the old secret court.” Ingleborough mopped his head. He was sweating, perhaps with fever.
“If the Queen allows it. But I see no good can be served by undue punishment. He can be confined to apartments in Bran’s Tower. Where Prince Lamartis is—and those two nobles brought us by the Thane of Hermiston.”
“But Tancred’s no outland lunatic.”
“Bran’s Tower. ‘Tis best,” said Montfallcon firmly.
“If he’s guilty.” Ingleborough stooped, grunting and feeble, and attempted to pick up the sword, but he could not lift it. It fell back upon the blood-soaked damask of Mary’s dress.
“Who else?” Montfallcon said. “In Hern’s time there might have been an hundred to suspect. Now there are none. I am fearful, Lisuarte.” With a final, disapproving glance at the young girl’s corpse, Lord Montfallcon began to move through the apartment, a surviving ship sailing through carnage after a sea-fight. Ingleborough hauled himself out of it, like a weary, beaten beast.
“You are unwell.” Lord Montfallcon gave his friend an arm. They stood in the corridor where green-clad Patch, a little faun, awaited them. “Patch, take your master home. Sleep, Lisuarte. Be firm with him, Patch.” He smiled at the handsome boy.
“Aye, sir.”
“You’ll accompany me?” enquired Lisuarte Ingleborough, gripping Patch’s slender shoulders and looking back at his friend. “Eh?”
“I must to the Queen to make my report.”
“The Quintain is cancelled, then?”
Montfallcon was dry. “Aye, since the chief participant, the Champion, is indisposed.”
Lord Ingleborough shrugged. “The Quintain is all I care for in these entertainments. And even those are tame compared to the Tilts of my youth.”
“By the Queen’s command we mourn, all of us, for Lady Mary.”
“Aha!” Ingleborough retreated.
Lord Montfallcon wondered if he, too, had become a dotard. He looked sadly after his hobbling friend.
“My lord?” It was Wheldrake, half-stripped of his feathers, his bird-mask under his arm. “Is Lady Mary truly murdered?”
“Aye.”
“By whom?” The poet’s voice was so high as to be almost inaudible. “By Tancred?”
“It would seem so. His sword. Her throat.”
“Hermes!”
Lord Montfallcon put a steady hand on the tiny poet’s twitching shoulder. “A funeral ode, perhaps, eh, Wheldrake? The Court’s in mourning from this hour, by order of the Queen.”
“She was a child. Sixteen summers.” Wheldrake trembled. “A merry child. And she loved Sir Tancred so, with such innocence. They were model lovers, we thought, and happy friends. She gave him all.”
“But not enough for the romantic soul, perhaps. Such as Sir Tancred demand a response as intense as their own. Recall how he burns to serve the Queen. His belief in Chivalry is absolute. It is why such as he are so often rejected, so often thwarted or wounded in love. Too passionate, too furious in their loyalty…”
“No,” said Wheldrake, “she was killed by another, I’d swear.”
“Who else?” They walked slowly, side by side through the silent, golden halls.
“A servant? Who tried to seduce her and failed, taking vengeance?”
“Unlikely, Master Poet.”
“Another lover?”
“She had none.” Lord Montfallcon licked his lips. “Her father must be told. I’ll send a messenger to Hever. I am full of doubt, Master Wheldrake. I suspect a portent. Once this palace ran with innocent blood. It stank of blood, you know. Blood boomed on tapestries, stained walls, crusted guilty blades. Girls like Lady Mary died almost daily—stabbed, poisoned, strangled. It was a time of dark madness, and Fear drove Virtue into hiding. It was Albion’s Age of Iron. I would not have even a hint of its return.”
“One murder is not enough to call back tyranny.” Master Wheldrake was comforting, though he also felt the chill, as of an ominous wind. “If Sir Tancred committed the crime then he’ll be tried, found guilty, and we’ll all be sad for a month or two, no more.”
“If?”
“Aye. If.” Wheldrake was confident. “The true murderer shall be found, however, if it be not Tancred. Lord Rhoone and Sir Christopher’s successor, working together, will question any suspect person. There are so many who cannot be suspect, for so many attended the May Day ceremony.”
“So you think a servant?”
“A mad servant, aye—for it’s a madman’s work, sure enough. If calculated, the crime could have been hidden. Poison, stifling, imitation suicide. A madman, without a doubt.”
“But Sir Tancred seems mad.” Montfallcon shrugged.
“With grief.”
“Just that?”
They stood now outside the Queen’s apartments.
“It’s my instinct,” said Wheldrake, “and I cannot give you rational explanation.” He bowed, his feathers dripping, and made his adieux.
Lord Montfallcon knocked upon Her Majesty’s door. He was brooding, for he could only agree with Wheldrake, and he did not wish to do so. Sir Tancred was, at least, a convenient and uncomplicated culprit, with no surviving family. His own suspicions lay towards certain foreign envoys domiciled at Court. Oubacha Khan, for instance, was coldblooded but determined and hated to be thwarted. Also his vow of celibacy would make him all the more tense. And the blow had been struck once, skillfully, by someone used to handling a large blade. Or there was the warlike ambassador from Bengahl, who, Montfallcon knew, had once killed two girls of Lady Mary’s age when he had caught them together in his palace bed-chamber. Or secretive Li Pao, who had courted more than one mistress here and who had revenged himself on Maeve ap Rhys by branding his family mark
upon her buttocks. Or the Icelandic envoy, who had been Lady Mary’s sister’s lover until she had been married to Sir Amadis Cornfield. Or the envoy from Peru, a land notorious for its casual letting of blood, its human sacrifice. Montfallcon would investigate them all, and again he regretted Quire’s absence, as he regretted Sir Christopher’s death. But more he regretted the darkness, the confusion in his brain, a familiar Chaos he had fought daily in the reign of Hern.
Wearily, he knocked again upon the Queen’s door.
He hoped that Tancred was not innocent. It was better to have a culprit, cut and dried, than a Court which simmered with speculation. Rumour, gossip, suspicion and fear. He could sense them now, threatening his Golden Age, his Reign of Piety, his Age of Virtue.
For a third time he knocked and at last the doors were opened by a white-faced maid of honour, still clad in the flimsy costume of a dryad.
“My lord?”
He pushed through. “The Queen? How is the Queen?”
“She weeps, my lord. She loved Mary Perrott.”
“Aye.” Nonplussed, Montfallcon stalked to the window and stared moodily at the lawns, the fountains and the fanciful shrubs. It was raining forcefully now. Great drops splashed from an uncertain sky through which the sun flashed an occasional ray. Montfallcon scowled and put his back to the window. The room, with its flower-scents and its thick curtains, was in half-light, occupied only by the nervous dryad.
“Announce me,” he said.
“My lord, I was instructed to leave her in complete peace for an hour.” A curtsey.
Montfallcon, his face like furious rock, marched grumbling from the room.
“You’ll say I was here, girl.”
“Of course, my lord.”
She closed the door on the terrifying Chancellor and began to shudder. From through the other door there came the sound of weeping, imploring cries, as Gloriana mourned her protégée, her sweet, happy lover, her child….
For Gloriana recalled the jealousy she had felt of Lady Mary’s happiness and, in a brain confused by the day’s chivalry and fantasy, had conceived the notion that she had by some charm brought death to the girl, had secretly willed it, had somehow, by frustrating Sir Tancred’s enthusiasm for arms, arranged it. Perhaps denied satisfaction for his passions, yearning to use his monstrous blade, he had turned it upon the creature he loved….
Moreover, this miserable logic was sustained by her training. For she knew she represented the whole Realm, that she held responsibility for all that occurred in the Realm and that if this terrible crime had taken place then it was because she had not been assiduous in anticipating it and therefore preventing it. And if such horror could come about in her own palace, how much more horror must exist throughout her Empire, how much unseen injustice, hidden cruelty…?
Is all this Golden Age a myth to hide a darker truth? Merely a cleverer disguise protecting an actuality as bad as my father’s dreadful Age of Iron? Worse, for this also has hypocrisy. Montfallcon since I was a child convinced me that the dream, if followed and believed, must soon become the truth. Yet Tancred, most of all, believed that dream, and most of all, has been destroyed by it, might even have used it to justify his deed. I allowed Montfallcon to make me his chief Symbol. I accepted the necessity. And Albion prospered, became more joyous, attracted the envy of all other lands, brought scholars and their wisdom, merchants and their trade. Or is it mere gilding that soon must crack to reveal the rotten wood beneath? Are we all enchanted by this charming fancy of Montfallcon and his fellow dreamers? My father’s eye sustained the Myth of Cynicism, denying piety and virtue. Does my own sustain a Myth of Happiness, denying crime? Is the succession of the seasons of Man no more than a pretty tale, to encourage us, to offer us empty Hope, an attempt to give the lie to a grimmer truth than we’ll allow? Do we impose this shape on Chaos, as a child imposes shapes upon a pond’s weedy surface and is surprised when he returns to find that weed and water have joined together, mutable and never firm? Or do we frame a turbulent sky with our fingers and believe that, because we have narrowed our vision to that small sphere, we have captured and contained the elements? Or is it Gloriana who is at fault, unworthy to represent the Age…?
“Oh, Mary! Mary! Mary!”
Instantly, the Countess of Scaith was upon her, bearing down on her with her strong, boyish body, gripping her, kissing her.
“Hush!”
“Oh, Mary!”
“Hush, my dear.”
“I was her mother. Sir Thomas Perrott entrusted her to me. I swore she would be protected. I took her virtue, her virginity. I took her innocence. I allowed her this assignation. I encouraged it. I relished it. And I hated it, as well, but could not deny her that affectionate Sir Tancred, for she seemed so happy, and I had taken—”
“You took nothing. You gave. You were generous and she loved you for that generosity. Like all of us, she would do anything for you, not because you are the Queen, but because you are Gloriana.”
“Tancred shall hang.”
“No!”
“Hang!”
“He shall not.”
“He should—”
“Where’s the proof he murdered Mary? None.”
“His sword.” Gloriana raised red eyes.
“The only weapon of its kind, save those carried by Lord Rhoone and his men. Any wishing to kill her could have used the sword. What did Tancred say?”
“Lady Mary is murdered. Little else.”
“Has he admitted guilt?”
“He wept too bitterly.”
“Tancred is innocent.” Una was adamant. “Rather blame Montfallcon. Tancred has no habit of violence. His lust for it, in your name, is proof of that. His only experience has been at the Tilt, in mock-battle. He could not kill anyone. We have both of us always known that. It is why you made him Champion, you’ll recall.”
Gloriana nodded. “True.”
“The murderer’s one of Rhoone’s guard, with a passion for Lady Mary. You’ll discover he was there. Servants will be questioned. A guard. Certainly.”
“But murder should not happen at my Court, Una!”
“Murder has happened. The first in thirteen years. And public. Why, I doubt if there’s a Court in all the world could claim such an untroubled span.”
“By what effort, by what hypocrisies is this peace maintained?”
“By good will, by Faith, by a belief in justice, Your Majesty.” The Countess of Scaith was tired. “Honour’s but an invention of Man and by Man’s honour is maintained. Do not doubt that Gloriana’s Court is virtuous—”
“I spend too long about my own affairs, my own conceits, my own satisfactions.”
“You spend too little, my dear.” The Countess of Scaith stroked her friend’s sobbing head. It seemed to Una, in her heart, that all this had come about as a result of her irresponsible adventure into the walls. Since that day, when they had both discovered the secret nomads of the depths, Una had had the entrance to her passage bricked in. But still she felt as if, by breaking through, she had released a dark spirit into the brilliance of the palace proper—a spirit which had inhabited one of them (possibly Sir Tancred) and destroyed Lady Mary. Now, even if the spirit had fled, it had left an inheritance. It would be many months before life at the Court would recapture any of its old optimism.
A tap at the door.
The Countess of Scaith left her friend’s side and went to speak to the maid of honour.
“Lord Montfallcon was here, my lady, and left a message. Now Doctor Dee awaits outside.”
Una left the Queen’s room and closed the door. “I will speak to him.”
The dryad pulled back the door and in strode Dee, magnificent in mourning black, his white beard emphasising the dark dignity of his robes.
“The Queen rests,” said the Countess of Scaith.
“I have encouraging news,” Doctor Dee told her. “I am convinced of Sir Tancred’s innocence.”
“A witness?” Una moved towards t
he Queen’s door, to call the news.
“No.”
Una paused.
“Not exactly,” continued Dee. “I believe that a visitor of Master Tolcharde’s could have committed the crime. He came but recently, accompanying the Thane of Hermiston, who had been on one of his journeys to some astral plane. A ferocious creature this—a barbarian, with sword, axe and mace—daggers—in iron and polished copper, fur and horn—with some outlandish name I forget. Well, in short, he escaped the Thane and we thought him borne back by demons into his own netherworld. Now I believe he is somewhere in the palace.”
“But what proof have you, Doctor Dee?”
“I know Sir Tancred for a gentle, chivalrous creature whose love for Lady Mary matched his love for Albion.”
“His sword,” she reminded the sage. “Her blood on his armour.”
“From where he held her against him. I have visited him. Lord Rhoone has him in one of the older apartments—with bars and locks and so forth.”
“He is comfortable?”
“His physical needs are provided for. But he screams. He raves. He is possessed.”
“Possessed by your demon?” she said.
“Mine? My demon visitors are tame, I assure you, and their work is beneficial.”
“I say what others might,” she told him.
“Aye. You are a sceptic, my lady, I know.”
“Not a sceptic exactly, Doctor Dee. I differ so far as interpretation is concerned. But we discuss Sir Tancred.”
“I believe him sane. That is to say, I believe that he was sane until the moment he found her murdered corpse. Now he cannot believe what has happened. His mind seeks to escape the truth. Alternately, he weeps and then his countenance grows sunny and he seems to speak rationally, save that he refers to Lady Mary and how they are soon to be wed, and asks that she may visit him, and so forth. It is a sad madness he has. Not the madness of guilt, but the madness of grief.”
“So this escaped barbarian is the culprit?”
“I can think of no other who would perform such a bestial, such a meaningless deed. For it is not ordinary wickedness that inspired her death.”
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