Old Saxon Blood

by Leonard Tourney

  Now voices were heard outside the cave. Matthew recognized Stafford’s voice and warned Cecil and the others. They concealed themselves, Matthew where he could see the cave entrance without himself being seen.

  He saw Stafford peering into the cave. With him were two other men, servants by their dress, one armed with pick and the other a shovel. There was no sign of Wylkin.

  “You've come late for your treasure, Master Stafford,” Cecil said, emerging from his hiding place as Stafford entered. “We're here before you and have made our claim on whatever of value is here.”

  Stafford squinted, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. Cecil moved closer, but Stafford showed no sign of recognizing him. “And who, sir, might you be to speak so? I have drained the lake and exposed this cave. Its contents are therefore mine by law.”

  “A very strange law would justify such a ridiculous claim.” Cecil laughed. Behind him Moppitt, Hargrove, and Edward now emerged. Matthew also stepped out into the open.

  Matthew said, “What, Master Stafford! Have you turned brigand, you, and these with you, that with impunity you invade a neighbors property? Have you no shame?”

  “Ha, our little Stock, the steward,” said Stafford. “Brave words from a servant. But pray tell me, who's this minuscule hunchback that leads you? He looks as though he has escaped from an actor's troupe where he daily delights the multitude of unwashed and unlearned too stupid to appreciate better. Stand aside, the lot of you."

  The two servants behind Stafford raised the tools they carried threateningly. In an instant, Cecil and his companions had drawn swords.

  “If you would know my name, sir,” Cecil said coldly. “I am Cecil, Robert Cecil, and she whom I serve is England's Queen. Perhaps you've heard her spoken of?”

  Stafford’s jaw fell open and the effect of this announcement was even greater on his companions, who immediately dropped their tools to the ground.

  Cecil said, “I arrest you, Thomas Stafford, for arson, assault upon a Queen's officer, and trespass—and for such other crimes as times and fact shall prove. You and these varlets with you.”

  One of Stafford's servants dropped to his knees; the other bolted and began running across the lake. Stafford himself seemed too terrified to speak.

  Cedi motioned to Moppitt to move forward and take Stafford into his charge, while Edward went after Stafford's escaping servant. Cecil said,

  “Before we take you back with us, Master Stafford, I’ll be pleased to show you what a treasure our foreknowledge of your mischief has deprived you of.”

  Matthew reminded Cecil that Wylkin was yet to appear.

  “He shall not appear." Stafford mumbled. “He's gone to hell in the flood. We found his body before we came."

  “Then there's justice in the world after all," said Cecil.

  While later that morning Matthew and Cecil questioned Stafford further about his strategems against the Challoners, it fell to Joan to bear the news of their discovery in the island cave to the person it concerned most, Mistress Frances. Of course immediately upon his return, Matthew had told Joan the whole story, and she was therefore adequately equipped to convey the same to the new bride.

  It was well past noon before Mistress Frances came down, looking no better than should have been expected, given her night s ordeal. The two women spoke in the withdrawing room.

  In the telling, Joan tried to be gentle, but she had no gift for mincing, and upon reflection later she feared she had been much too direct. But Matthew had presented to her all the facts, and Joan agreed they allowed but one conclusion. Certainly no other explanation came to mind to offer a palliative: Sir John had murdered his brother—and Mistress Frances' father—years before, doubtlessly for his title and his land, and concealed his body in the island crypt. The only good news was that the morning's expedition had not confirmed Sir John’s extortion, since no Irish treasure had been found. As for the drained lake, Mistress Frances said, when Joan mentioned it, that she cared not a fig for the lake, which she regarded as her wicked uncle's toy.

  Indeed, Mistress Frances took these revelations more calmly than Joan would have supposed. The young woman did not decry her father’s profane burial without appropriate honors, exequies, or other tributes, nor did she roundly condemn his murderer, his treacherous brother. Compared to the horrors of Hugh Bastian’s attempt on her life and the prophetic dreams that preceded it, she could cast a cold eye on these ancient wrongs.

  Joan also explained—for there had been no opportunity the night before—what Edward Bastian had revealed when questioned by Cecil.

  “But Edward was not his fathers confederate?” Mistress Frances was concerned to know.

  Joan answered in the negative. She herself was sure of that point, however many other doubts she might have, for no confederate would have acted with such bravery as the hostler did, or make himself the instrument of his own undoing when he might have kept silent and let his fathers vicious plan take its course.

  Joans reasoning seemed to satisfy Mistress Frances, who said she was heartily glad to have Edward exonerated from any blame, for she owed him a great debt of gratitude for saving her life. Thomas Cooke, who presently joined them, agreed wholeheartedly with his wife's estimation. Shamefaced, he admitted his own negligence the night before. “I should have protected my wife. I did not. God curse me if I ever drink to excess again.”

  Thomas also said he would not hold the fathers malice to the son s charge. “He shall be my personal servant henceforth, and in the matter of compensation he shall not find me ungenerous.” Mistress Frances said she, too, would like to reward Edward, and that she was sure the Queen would do likewise upon their return.

  “Return?” asked Joan. “You intend to return to London then? I thought you planned to make Thorncombe your home.”

  Mistress Frances and Thomas exchanged glances, then she said, “Our plans have changed. This house, cursed with ghosts before, will now have more to haunt it. I could never be happy here, or feel safe. Thomas agrees. We will return to London and live for the time being in my father-in-laws house near the Strand. It would please us both if you and your good husband would accompany us on our way and be our guests in London until such time as you can see the Queen and make your report. I trust it will prove as satisfying to you as it is to us, now that these hidden facts are known at long last.”

  Joan received these thanks gratefully and said that she and Matthew would indeed keep the young couple company on their journey to London, which was to be accomplished as soon as possible; for Mistress Frances was of no mind to spend another night in the castle, which she said might burn to the ground, for all she cared, and its ancient curses with it.

  But as to the mystery of Thorncombe and its recent deaths, Joan was not as satisfied as was Mistress Frances. Even as she had concluded her report, she had felt some material fact eluding them all, and she would not rest easy until she had put a name to it.

  With the horrors of the previous few days behind them, the journey south was a pleasant one, and the weather, typically unpredictable for so late in the year, was on its best behavior, with dry days and clear skies of the most marvelous azure that no artist could have reproduced the like.

  Matthew and Joan, who accompanied the Cookes in their spacious coach, were in very good humor, and Matthew most of all, for, as he said several times in the course of the journey, what was past was past, and having commenced a marriage, it was unwise for either the young husband or wife to look behind them.

  Mistress Frances and Master Thomas accepted this counsel with good grace. And by the second day of their journey, the bloom of Mistress Frances' complexion had been restored; her eyes were bright, and her wit had returned as well, for she entertained them all with court gossip and in her banter with her friend Priscilla Holmes, who traveled with them—as did Edward Bastian, who had left Brigid and her child behind at Thorncombe until they could be more conveniently removed to London and who had his seat by the coachman and relie
ved the same of his duties from time to time, showing how great his skill with horses really was.

  But although Matthew was content to think his duty done, Joan s doubts increased. She could not rid her mind of the notion

  that even murder must have a method in it, which in Hugh Bastian’s case had been cruel dismemberment of the victim by that dreadful sickle. But what was she to make of his first alleged venture into homicide—the drowning of Sir John—subtly done and covert and perpetrated against one who might reasonably have been supposed capable of defending himself against it? While she therefore was content to believe that Hugh Bastian had killed Aileen Mogaill and Michael Conroy, revived from his senility for the nonce to disable his victims by surprise and terror, and that he would have given Mistress Frances her quietus by the same instrument, her feelings about Sir John’s death were more complex. In sum, she believed the mad old man not guilty of that charge against him.

  There was also the matter of Joans vision by the lake, prompted by her finding of the chest. That this was a vision pregnant with significance for the case at hand she had no doubt at all. Yet she still could not determine its place in the pattern of events, as Matthew now construed that pattern. For Joan, all that had been revealed to date was chaff; she had yet to come to the kernel.

  When they arrived in London, Cecil left them to go at once to court. He returned the same afternoon to the Cookes’ house to report the Queen was indisposed and under the advice of her physicians was granting no audiences but to certain members of the Privy Counsel and her astrologer, the renowned Dr. Dee.

  “Your report must wait,” Cecil told Matthew. “Which saddens me greatly, for I relish the thought of your presenting it within the Queen’s allotted time.”

  That, Cecil did not have to remind them, was within three days, it being now twenty-seven days since the commission to investigate Sir John’s death was first issued.

  While they waited for the Queen’s indisposition to pass, Matthew and Joan saw the sights of London, many of which they had seen on earlier visits but which remained a source of inexhaustible fascination—and especially those connected with the Stocks’ earlier forays in the world of crime and treason: stinking Smithfield, site of Bartholomew Fair; the Tower of London, once a royal palace, now a prison; the Globe Theater, where the notorious

  Sir Henry Saltmarsh had been apprehended while watching one of Master Shakespeare's plays; and the most unpleasant recollection of all, Newgate Prison, where both Joan and Matthew had been briefly but perilously incarcerated during the most life-threatening of their adventures.

  Then, just as their month was about to expire, word came that the Queen had recovered. An audience had been arranged, and Cecil was delighted. As was Matthew. But Joan continued to nurse her doubts, and with such constant care they grew so as to displace any little confidence she had earlier had that the matter of Sir John Challoners murder had been resolved.

  She had spent most of the day before in the company of Mistress Frances, since Priscilla Holmes had returned to her own house and husband, and Thomas, having been elected one of the controllers of the Middle Temple Revelers, had gone off to that worthy institution, dragging Matthew with him, to supervise rehearsals for a Christmas entertainment not to be surpassed, or so Thomas boasted. The men gone, both women felt somewhat abandoned and licensed thereby to go abroad and shop, which they presently did with full purses and wills to bring them home empty

  It was in a certain shop that Joan, seeing a locket of excellent workmanship, admired it, whereupon Mistress Frances said it was nothing compared to one she had among her own jewels. Mistress Frances promised to show Joan the locket as soon as they reached home again.

  Later, Mistress Frances fetched the locket as she had promised and handed it to Joan. “Here, good Mistress Stock. You shall wear it on the morrow for your audience with the Queen. Keep it—its yours, for friendships sake and in part reward for your service to me."

  Joan protested that the gift was of too great a value, but Mistress Frances insisted. She said it was part of her inheritance from her uncle, and had no personal worth that she should keep it.

  Joan held the locket in her hand admiringly. It was indeed exquisitely made, of finelv wrought gold and equipped with a chain of delicate workmanship—obviously of much greater value than the one she had admired at the jewelers. Noticing, upon closer inspection, that it was fitted with a clasp, she flicked it open.

  Inside was a miniature portrait of a young man with bread, smooth forehead, deep-set intelligent eyes, and firm, beardless chin. She asked whose picture it was, and Mistress Frances, surprised at its being there, said it was her father, for there was a portrait much like it that her mother had had.

  “Oh, you must have your gift back again/’ Joan urged. “This is a most precious keepsake. Why, see, the initials are engraved opposite as well.”

  But having said that and extended the locket so that her companion could see, Joan realized the initials were “J. C.,” not “A. C.”

  Mistress Frances noticed this too. “Why, it’s of my uncle, which explains how the locket came to be among his things.” She said that Joan might have the locket after all, and might throw away the portrait inside, for she wanted no further part of her uncle or any images of him.

  Joan took the locket and said, “He seems to have been a proper, handsome man.”

  “Ironically,” Mistress Frances said, “the depiction you see there would have better served my father than my uncle.”

  “Why, how so?” Joan asked, interested in every aspect of Challoner family history.

  “My father and uncle were born the very same hour,” the young woman explained. “My mother said they were so much alike in stature and visage that had it not been for a deformity in my uncle, you could not have distinguished the one from the other.”

  “A deformity?” Joan searched the features of the likeness for some blemish she had overlooked. “Why, I see no deformity at all. Your uncle, for all his crimes, seems endowed with great beauty.”

  “My father was so endowed,” Mistress Frances said proudly. “As for my uncle, the artist whose work you see here flattered, as artists often do, improving upon nature. Believe me, there was much to improve upon. My uncle suffered an accident of birth—a harelip that so disfigured his mouth that one could see from ragged teeth up to his swollen gums, giving him the fierce grimace that put to flight his enemies. But for that flaw, my father and he were cut of the same cloth. Except for their souls, which I pray to God were as different as night from day.”

  Mistress Frances now excused herself to change, leaving Joan

  with the locket to contemplate. Fascinated by the striking handsomeness of the face and intrigued by the incongruity of semblance and reality, she remembered Edwards infant son, a victim too of John Challoners affliction.

  At the same moment the material fact she had overlooked— the fact she could not have known before—took its proper place in the line of other facts she had been so long in finding.

  Upon the return that evening of Thomas and Matthew, Joan had little opportunity to share her discovery with her husband, for the two men were no sooner through the door than supper was laid, and thereafter young Master Cooke so pressed upon Matthew to sing for the company that he could not refuse. He sang for nearly two hours, until he had gone practically from the first of Master Dowland s Second Booke of Songs and Ayres to the last, and still those at table called for more.

  While Matthew sang, Joan listened with appreciation, but it was lessened by her eagerness to discuss the Challoner matter with him. Finally the evening came to an end and good-nights were said. Joan and Matthew went to their chamber and Joan told Matthew what she believed had really happened the day Sir John Challoner came home from Ireland.

  Matthew listened, thought, and concurred. And in good time, for now he understood that the report he had intended for the Queen s approbation was only partly true, and being true in part, it was, by order of log
ic, false.

  Their audience with the Queen was for nine o’clock, but they were not led into the Queen’s apartment until nearly eleven and then were forced to wait in a drafty corridor until Cecil appeared to inform them that Her Majesty had been late in rising and would not see them in the Presence Chamber but in the Privy Chamber instead. There, Cecil warned, they should not be dismayed to find the Queen of England squat like a Mohammedan upon floor cushions, which she had taken to do of late, despite the contrary opinion of her physicians, who thought that way of sitting harmful to the bowels.

  “Marry, you’ve come in good time,” Cecil said good-humoredly. “It was the very devil to get the Queen to see you. I do believe she has forgotten entirely your mission, for she asked who Matthew Stock was and supposed you were the mayor of Cambridge who had sent her some strawberries last year because he heard she delighted in them.”

  “If Her Majesty is not well, perhaps we should come another time,” Joan ventured to say, thinking how frail the old Queen had appeared in their last interview and not wishing to cause her any distress.

  “Believe me, now is the time,” Cecil said adamantly. “The learned Dr. Dec has warned the Queen to beware of Whitehall, andeven now she contemplates spending January in Richmond, the warmest of her palaces. No, now is the time, or not at all. It is here you saw her last; seeing you again in the same place may quicken her memory."

  Cecil told them a gentleman usher would presently appear to show them inside. Joan waited with the Cookes and Edward Bastian, chatting quietly, while Matthew went into a corner to have private words with Cecil.