A Pawn for a Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's (Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court)

by Buckley, Fiona

  She showed us through a small entrance hall to a back room, where we were presented to Master Macnab, a stocky, sandy fellow, who was just coming in at the back door accompanied by a serving lad, both of them carrying big baskets of firewood. Macnab had a dour face but was obliging enough and had a fairly lucid accent. Dumping his load on the floor and telling the boy to get on with filling the hearthside baskets, he turned to a staircase that came down into the corner of the room. Over his shoulder, he said: “Best come up with me. I’ll shout to him to be sure he’s fit to be seen, and then if ye’ve private matters to discuss, ye can talk in his room.”

  We followed him up the stairs. They led up through a bedchamber where the maidservant was working half in and half out of what I at first took to be a large cupboard. Only as I passed close to it did I realize that it was actually a double bed, and that whoever used it must be shutting themselves in at night like walled-up anchorites. The very idea made me choke. Macnab, however, was leading us on up a farther flight, through another bedchamber (with two bed-cupboards in it), and finally to a tiny top-floor landing where it ended abruptly at an attic door, presumably the attic that Mistress Macnab had mentioned.

  “We’ve nae other room to spare, but Master Faldene’s stayed here before and said he was happy enough with it,” Macnab said, rather defensively, as though we had criticized the accommodation.

  I murmured something to the effect that I was sure of it and Macnab rapped on the door. There was no answer, and he clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Master Faldene! There’s folk here to see ye and it’s past time for breakfast!”

  Still, there was no reply. Macnab lifted the latch and pushed the door ajar.

  The hoarse yell he let out must have shaken the whole house. He plunged forward into the room and we plunged after him. When it was too late, he stopped and turned to us, gasping, “Dinna come in!” but we already had, all three of us. We could see what he had seen.

  Dale screamed. I did not, because I clapped my hands to my mouth just in time. Brockley drew in his breath with a horrified hiss.

  The room was cold, with bitter air sweeping through it from the one small window, which was swinging open. The bed was not a cupboard one but a small four-poster, its curtains pulled open. Edward lay sprawled amid a disordered pile of sheets and rugs. He had been stabbed through the chest, probably with a broad-bladed sword. He had not died at once. He had struggled and hemorrhaged from mouth and nose before the end. His mouth was open in a rictus of pain and terror. His face, his nightgown, the bedding, the curtains, and the lime-washed wall behind the bed were all splashed and hideous with dark, dried blood.

  His gown was torn away from one shoulder and there were black bruises on his arm, and when, shuddering, I stepped forward to look at him closely, I saw that there was a lump on his jaw and more bruises under the blood around his mouth, where powerful hands had held him down and struck him half-senseless and then stopped his mouth until there was no longer any need to restrain him.

  There were bloody footprints on the floor and a length of sheet that had been pulled out from under Edward’s body bore red-brown smears, as though the murderer had used it to wipe blood off himself. It was easy enough to see how the assassin had got in. The attic floor was smaller than the rest of the house. Under the window was the roof of the story below and from there it was not a very long drop to the wall that divided the Macnabs’ house from an alleyway running alongside on the left, leading from the High Street to some other street to the rear. From alleyway to wall to roof to attic window would be an easy progression for an active man, and the return journey just as easy. Furthermore, it was clear that someone had made it, for the bloodstained footprints led to the window and there were other traces of blood on the attic windowsill and on the roof below.

  I had caught up with my cousin Edward but somebody else had got there first.

  7

  Dissolving into Chaos

  The Macnab household dissolved into chaos. Dale rushed downstairs, shouted an incoherent explanation to Mistress Macnab, who was on her way up to investigate the outcry, and then fled to the back door to be sick out of it. The little maidservant who had been making a bed stopped making it, and without knowing what had happened but sensing that some terrible disaster had struck the house, started to wail.

  Shivering and swallowing, I began to follow Dale down the stairs and encountered a bewildered Mistress Macnab in the first-floor bedchamber, where she was trying to quiet the maidservant. I managed to explain matters more clearly than Dale had, although this was hardly useful at first, since the maidservant only wailed the louder while Mistress Macnab, after listening to me with her mouth open, lost her businesslike air in an even noisier outburst of wild and tearful lamentations.

  However, some sort of order was presently restored. Mistress Macnab regained a white-faced but resolute command of herself, hushed the maidservant at last, and led her down to the kitchen. Brockley shut Edward’s door and stood guard outside it, while Dale, my dear Dale, who was so frail in some ways but so gallant in others, also pulled herself together, went to the kitchen to cleanse her mouth with a beaker of the well water, which was apparently kept there in a clean pail, and then sensibly suggested that the maid should occupy herself by mulling some ale for everyone. This proved a bigger task than expected, involving rather a lot of ale, because the screams and lamentations had been heard by the neighbors and half a dozen people had by now arrived at the door to ask what was amiss.

  Master Macnab, though, had kept his head. The Thursbys had talked as though Scotland were a nightmare of anarchy, but of course, it was not. Edinburgh was a city of renown with a provost, a town council, a constable, and a sturdy band of law enforcement officers. Macnab, after asking one of his neighbors to go up to Holyrood and explain why he would not be at work that day, dispatched his serving lad to fetch authority to the scene.

  Before it arrived, however, and while Mistress Macnab was in the kitchen dispensing mulled ale to her uninvited guests, I slipped upstairs again and said to Brockley: “Quick. I want to look at Edward’s things, to see if I can find anything that looks like a list. It might be in cipher.”

  Had I not had a harsh experience of life over the last few years, I couldn’t have made that search, in that room where Edward’s body lay. I could do it—just—only because I had seen civil war in France and murder in my own land too. I had been hardened, perhaps more than a young woman with a daughter to bring up should ever be hardened. Even so, it took all my courage to enter that chamber again, and when I did, I stopped short, trembling, because Edward was lying with his face toward me. The sight of the distorted, bloodstained mouth and staring eyes was almost too much for me.

  Brockley, however, had come in with me, and there were times when he had an instinctive, not to say uncanny, knowledge of what was going on in my mind. Stepping quickly past me, he caught up the stained sheet that had been pulled out of the bed and tossed it over Edward’s face. “We need not work with him staring at us like that,” he said. “Now, where do we start?”

  We made a rapid but thorough search of my cousin’s belongings. It didn’t take long because, just as we had done, he had traveled with only such things as he could carry in a couple of saddlebags and a satchel for his back. Apart from his nightgown and the clothes he had been wearing yesterday, he had a spare pair of shoes, a couple of shirts, some underlinen, a fustian doublet and hose for riding, and one decent doublet and hose for use when dining in good houses.

  This last outfit was obviously costly, as though he had expected to be entertained at some very good houses indeed. The material was black velvet, the hose embellished with thin stripes of silver thread and the doublet embroidered with a scattered pattern of small silver stars. It was fastened with matching buttons, each covered in black with a silver star on it.

  The doublet had seen some wear. I noticed, as I handled it, that a couple of buttons were missing from the front, one at the bottom, at waistline
level, and one halfway up. Their absence wouldn’t be noticeable, though. A belt would obscure the waistline one and a well-placed pendant would hide the other. This was still a fine garment fit for formal use. It was probably his best one. Had Edward, I wondered, hoped to find his way into Queen Mary’s court after all?

  All his things had been carefully unpacked and arranged in the clothes press and the chest that were part of the room’s furnishings. He also had a belt pouch of money, a silver cross on a chain—just the right length for concealing that missing button, I saw—and a leather bag containing soap and razor. “Whoever attacked him wasn’t interested in plain robbery,” Brockley observed.

  What Edward did not have, however, in any form, enciphered or otherwise, was anything resembling a list of names. We not only searched his saddlebags and satchel, but also felt each item of clothing in case a paper had been stitched into it. We investigated both the press and the chest with care, and Brockley, without comment, performed for me the grim task of feeling under the stained pillow and the mattress, and then, as a last resort, examined the nightgown.

  He did it carefully, so that the constable’s men should see the scene as it had been when we found it. He also did it in vain. Straightening up at last, he shook his head. “There’s nowhere more to look,” he said.

  Just as he turned away from the bed, however, he stooped and picked something up from the floor.

  “Being jammed into saddlebags doesn’t do fine clothes much good, madam. I reckon this is a button off his doublet.”

  I took the little black and silver thing and then paused, looking around me again. Then I swore.

  “Madam?” said Brockley, faintly disapproving.

  “I wonder if he delivered that list before he was killed, Brockley. From what Mistress Macnab said, it didn’t sound as though he went out yesterday but he might have done. She didn’t really know. Because I think he’s worn that black velvet doublet since he’s been here, and that means a formal call of some kind. Look. His saddlebags and satchel are on the floor over in that far corner and the press is on one side of them and the chest on the other. If the button came off during unpacking, it would most likely be over there, not here by the bed. He must have lost it when he was dressing or undressing.” I shrugged wearily. “Well, we tried, but that’s probably the end of it. Anyway, our other reason for coming after him was to get him home again before he came to any harm and . . .”

  “Quite. I think,” said Brockley, “that we should leave this room now. I’m sorry you should ever have seen what’s under that sheet.”

  We went out. Brockley resumed his vigil outside the door and I went back to the kitchen. No one asked where I had been but I said, by way of explanation: “I felt unwell,” and I know I looked it. I accepted some mulled ale and asked for some to be taken to Brockley. Five minutes after that, the constable’s men arrived, cold-faced and efficient.

  The next few days were busy and frightening. The body was removed. The Macnabs, shuddering, set about cleaning the attic. I was given permission to gather up my cousin’s belongings to send to his wife in Sussex. I was also permitted to arrange his funeral and see him buried.

  It was a strange feeling, to stand in a cold, wet wind by a graveside in Edinburgh, watching the coffin that contained my cousin Edward as it was lowered into the earth.

  Edward and I were about the same age. He had been twelve when he was sent to Northumberland to complete his education and I had been glad to see the last of him. For my taste, he was far too much like Uncle Herbert, his father, by which I mean that he was overweight but remarkably soft-footed in spite of it and liked nothing so much as stealing up on servants—or his illegitimate cousin Ursula, who lived at Faldene only through his father’s charity—to catch them doing something amiss. Then he would gleefully report the matter to his parents and enjoy the result.

  At twelve years old, I hadn’t liked Edward at all. Nevertheless, the image of him lying dead in his room was stamped into my brain and it had outraged me. When they put him in the ground, just as though he had been beloved and would be sorely missed, I cried.

  But after that, of course, inevitably, came an inquiry, which in England we would have called an inquest. And that was the point at which the entire business followed the example of the Macnab household at the beginning, and chaos took command.

  8

  Muddy Waters

  The inquiry should properly have preceded the burial, but we gathered, through Master Macnab, who had an acquaintance on the town council, that there had been confusion over setting up an inquest because of a matter that was nothing whatever to do with Edward himself.

  The Burgh Court had begun to make the arrangements but it happened that the Burgh Court was at loggerheads with the provost just then, because the provost suspected that a recent Burgh Court verdict had been swayed by bribery. The provost and the town council therefore demanded to take this new case over themselves. The wrangling looked at first as though it would go on for a long time, which was why I was allowed to lay my cousin to rest.

  The day after that, however, an edict came from Holyrood House, from the queen’s representatives there, to say that this unsavory business must be investigated at once, no matter who undertook it, and the provost seized the initiative. A proclamation was read at the Cross of St. Giles, announcing that the provost himself would preside and that the inquiry would open on Wednesday the fourteenth day of February and that all concerned were required to present themselves at somewhere called the Tolbooth at ten of the clock on that morning.

  Which we duly did, feeling nervous.

  By we, I mean Brockley, Dale, myself, and the Macnabs. We all felt that suspicion had gathered around us, the Macnabs in whose house Edward had died, and the cousin who had descended on Edward in such haste. We had all been forbidden to leave the city and, indeed, I think we came within a hairs-breadth of being actually arrested.

  I worried over what to wear, for although the one good dress I had brought was appropriately black, as became a lady recently widowed, it had no farthingale and had suffered, like Edward’s clothing, from being squashed into a traveling bag, not to mention acquiring stains from being worn at several dinner tables.

  However, while the town council and the Burgh Court were arguing, I reduced some of the heavy weight of coinage I had brought with me, by buying some materials. I found a tailor willing to accept an urgent commission, thus acquiring a black velvet overgown with an ash-colored satin kirtle and a fresh, black-edged ruff. For Dale, I had a new gown made in dark blue. It was as well, for the proceedings began in a fashion both somber and formal.

  The Tolbooth turned out to be a civic building like a small castle, next to the High Kirk of St. Giles. We went in through an intimidatingly massive entrance, and the gatekeeper shut the door after us so quickly that the tunnel-like passage beyond was in near-darkness. As we followed him through it, I became uncomfortably aware that prisoners were kept in this building. Somewhere, faintly, I could hear raucous shouting, and a woman crying, and, most unpleasantly, someone hammering on a door and hoarsely bellowing that he didn’t want to hang; he didn’t want to die, in God’s name he was innocent! It made the gooseflesh rise on my arms.

  The gatekeeper, who could apparently see in the dark, brought us out of the tunnel and handed us over to an usher at the door of the hall, and once we were inside the ugly sounds faded. The hall was impressive. There was a pulpit at one corner and the usher told us that the room was used as a chapel for the prisoners, and that the famous Reformist leader John Knox sometimes came to preach. Today, the pulpit was empty. Instead, a thronelike chair and a table with a gavel had been set upon a dais, and beside the dais was a long bench.

  Presently a jury of twelve dark-clad men came in and stood in a line beside the bench, and then the provost, in a black, floor-length clerical gown, arrived with his clerks and six guards and took his place on the dais.

  I never learned his name. He was addressed throughout
the proceedings as My Lord Provost. I can see him in my mind’s eye, though: a small, fussy man with flyaway white hair under his cap, and a pink, purse-lipped face. I was surprised that this murder, which on the face of it was a squalid killing in an unimportant household, was being taken so seriously that Holyrood had intervened, but I soon learned why.

  Whether or not Edward had meant to go to Queen Mary’s court in person, Queen Mary apparently had heard of him. In his opening speech, the provost stated that the death in such circumstances of one whose name was known to Queen Mary and whose family, by repute, was well regarded by her, was a most shocking event. It was as well, he said, that Her Majesty was absent from Edinburgh on a Progress to Fife on the far side of the firth, since her good and gracious spirit would be most grieved to think of such a heinous crime occurring to such a man in her capital city.

  Interestingly, he then announced that an illustrious visitor from England, the queen’s cousin Henry Lord Darnley, was now in Edinburgh and being entertained at the palace of Holyrood. What a poor impression of Scotland this disgraceful business would give him! said the provost in shocked tones. So Darnley had arrived, I thought, and even if the general public didn’t know it, they must know at Holyrood that he was here to court the Scottish queen. No wonder the authorities were on edge.

  The provost was now declaring that all present should ask for the guidance of God in illuminating the truth and reaching a true verdict. Having delivered himself of these pious sentiments, and having led us briefly in prayer, he signed to the jury to be seated on their bench, and then got on with the inquiry briskly enough.

  It began conventionally with testimonies from Mistress Keith, the Macnabs, the officers who had investigated, myself, and various supporting witnesses. To my relief, it was soon established that the Brockleys and I had all been in the company of others throughout the night of the killing. Mistress Keith herself, representing her husband, who, apparently, was recovering from his illness though still unable to bear witness in person, declared that since I and my servants were strangers, none of us could have got out of her house at night without rousing the guard dogs, whose baying would have wakened the whole district.