To Ruin A Queen: An Ursula Blanchard Mystery at Queen Elizabeth I's Court

by Buckley, Fiona

  “She was in a loose wrapper,” Brockley added thoughtfully. “As though she’d been fetched from her chamber. But would Mortimer really have done that? Deliberately fetched his mother and made her his accomplice? She came into the study with him and later on, lighted our way across the courtyard. She was so much a part of it. Too much, if Mortimer did it. But if she killed Rafe herself, she might well have gone to Mortimer for help.”

  Now, in the candlelit parlor, Rob said to Lady Thomasine: “We have noticed a number of things which point to you as Rafe’s killer. A lovers’ quarrel, was it? As Mistress Blanchard has said, my wife knew of the affair between you. She told me about it shortly after we took Meg away from here. It seems that one afternoon—it was before Mistress Blanchard came to the castle—she wanted to see you, and not finding you anywhere else, she went up to your room and knocked. There was no answer but the door wasn’t latched and swung open to her tap. You and Rafe were on the window seat, clasped together, she said, and when I said, well, maybe it was just a brief friendly hug, she said no. She said she knew the difference, and she’d already seen the two of you exchange looks, and noticed the way Rafe sometimes sang love songs to you. She said it was improper and it created an atmosphere and that the atmosphere had been very strong when she looked into your room. She said it was feverish and unhealthy and she’d been glad to get Meg out of it.”

  “I thought,” said Lady Thomasine now, “that you and your wife had taken Meg to London to buy clothes. Though I remember wondering at the time why Hereford wasn’t good enough. Merchants from everywhere sail up the Severn to Hereford.”

  “Hereford would have been good enough,” Rob agreed. “We just wanted Meg away from here. We waited in Tewkesbury, to be near Mistress Blanchard, should she need us.”

  “As she apparently did. Did she bring you here to back up these insane allegations against me?”

  “You have a certain reputation, my lady,” Rob said. “Your butler, Pugh, and the falconer Evans—in the past they have been more to you than just good servants, have they not?”

  “They are still devoted,” I said grimly. “They had no hesitation in helping me to my death, and my own two loyal servants with me.”

  As I said, Lady Thomasine would have made a brilliant jouster. She showed no signs of disquiet, but remained sitting regally motionless, and if the candlelight flickered on the gold and pearl rings which adorned her clasped hands, it was only because the flames were moving in the breath from the window. The hands themselves were still.

  “All this,” she said, “is an utter tarradiddle. Rafe was my son’s ward, my adopted grandson, and sometimes my minstrel. He was a good boy who respected his elders. I do not understand what Mistress Blanchard means by her talk of dying in a hut in the mountains; still less do I know why she chooses to blacken the names of two honest men whose only crime is to serve me well.” She moved at last, but only to get up. “If that was all you wanted to say …”

  “Sit down,” said Rob, so strongly that she actually did so.

  “It is not all,” said Rob. “Mistress Blanchard and Roger Brockley both recall that when Rafe died, deep in the night, you were close by and broad awake when most folk are fast asleep, abed. Also, you helped eagerly with their arrest and imprisonment and oversaw their departure for the mountains. You were so very much involved. Did your son fetch his mother to help him hide his crime—is he really so dependent on you, or so sure of you!—or did a frightened woman, with blood on her hands, call on her son for help?” He stepped across the room and stood over her, bending his face close to hers. “What did happen, Lady Thomasine? Did you have a tryst with Rafe downstairs? Or did you follow him and accost him as he set out for a meeting with Alice, or left one? Did you quarrel about Alice?”

  He was hectoring her and using his physical nearness like a bludgeon. Yet Lady Thomasine was hardly listening. Her face had changed. She edged sideways, away from him, looking toward the open window. Rob turned his head, letting his voice die away, and in the quiet that followed, we could all hear what Lady Thomasine had heard before us.

  It was so soft, so faint, no more than a ripple of music on the edge of sound. As we listened, it faded away and then waveringly resumed. “So someone is practicing music in their room,” said Rob dismissively. “What of it? Lady Thomasine …”

  The music came again, a little louder now, just enough to make the melody recognizable. Drifting through the darkness, softly, hauntingly, making the gooseflesh prickle on my skin and disturbing the hairs at the back of my neck, was the tune which Rafe had made, to which he had sung the ballad of the knight who found a shining sword in a foul and dirty cave.

  “No.” Lady Thomasine whispered it. “No.” I glanced at her and saw with satisfaction that her clasped hands were trembling at last. Her eyes glinted bright in the candlelight. Too bright; only tears caught the light with that diamond glitter. But still she did not break. Still her head was high and her body was held rigid.

  I looked at Rob, wondering what to do next. Then, beyond the door to the tower parlor, there was a sudden disturbance. I heard Barker exclaim, and a woman’s voice protesting. “That’s Nan!” Lady Thomasine was roused at last. She came to her feet. “Let her come to me! Nan! Nan!”

  “Let her in, Barker!” Rob shouted. The door was at once flung open, and Nan rushed through it. She was dressed in cap and wrapper, but her feet were bare and her face frantic. She ran to her mistress.

  “Oh, my lady, my lady! I heard the music from the window! It’s them! It’s the ghosts! They’ve come out of their tower and something terrible’s going to happen!” She had thrown herself on her knees before Lady Thomasine and clutched her mistress’s hand like a terrified child. Outside in the courtyard, Brockley, hidden in the shadow of the wellhead, went on playing his lute, changing the melody to something older, a traditional country tune. There were uncertainties in the playing, with false notes now and then, but Nan was far too distracted to notice. “There it is again! Oh, my lady, my lady! Oh, God protect us!”

  “Get up, Nan. Get up.” Lady Thomasine’s voice shook, but she still had herself in hand. “As Master Henderson has just said, someone is practicing music. That’s all it is. In any case, what harm can come to us even if the ghosts are out and about and wandering? We are all here together, safe in a well-lit room. There is no need for these vapors.”

  We were going to fail. Silently, I cursed. We had known that Lady Thomasine was strong-minded but she was far stronger than we had guessed, and she wasn’t going to admit her guilt. She was going to defend both herself and Mortimer by holding to the story that I was responsible. Short of somehow producing the phantom of Rafe himself, in a shining white shroud with spatters of blood on it, we were not going to jolt her into a confession.

  There were more sounds of disturbance, this time outside, voices and distant shrieks of alarm. Looking across to the servants’ quarters, I saw that lights were being kindled. A door opened and candlelight streamed onto the cobbles and there came a confused medley of voices. The music ceased abruptly.

  Nan, however, still on her knees, continued to gulp and shudder, and Lady Thomasine grew impatient. She shot out a daintily slippered foot, applied the sole of it to Nan’s shoulder and shoved the unfortunate lady’s maid backward so hard that she keeled over at my feet. I stooped to help her up and found myself, as I had been in the dungeon, nose to toe with Lady Thomasine’s slipper, still petulantly swinging.

  And then I saw it, and with that, from the depths of my mind, the fugitive memory surfaced, a Leviathan of proof.

  I had seen it first in the dungeon but then, confused and frightened, I hadn’t understood. I had only taken in that the slippers were dirty. Yet my eyes had made a faithful report and somewhere in my mind, the honest clerk of memory had written down what they told him.

  I hauled Nan up, sat her sobbing on a stool, and then stooped again and seized Lady Thomasine’s ankle. Ignoring her cry of protest, I held her foot so that I cou
ld look closely at the slipper. There was no doubt. I wrenched the slipper off. “Rob!”

  He came to me at once and I pushed the slipper under his nose, my finger pointing to one of the cerise roses. “Look, look at that!”

  “What’s the matter? What are you doing?” demanded Lady Thomasine.

  “Studying an embroidered rose,” I told her. “Only, it isn’t quite the right shape, and half of it is darker than the rest—nearer brown than cerise. Some of it isn’t embroidery at all. It’s a stain, a dark brown stain, like old blood. But when I saw it in the dungeon, it was nearly fresh, still red. It almost matched the embroidery then, and I didn’t take in what I was seeing—but even so, some part of me remembered it. I’ve dreamed of your slippers repeatedly since then.”

  I looked at her grimly. “Rafe bled a little, not much, but still, a little. When you came into the study with Sir Philip, you knelt beside Rafe’s body, but not where his blood could have touched your feet, or any part of you. You kept away from it, so carefully, so fastidiously, that I noticed. But you might have got his blood on your shoes when you actually stabbed him and not realized it. The stain is not so very easy to see, and neither you nor Nan did see it. You would have washed or brushed the slippers otherwise, I suppose, or made Nan do it.”

  “What is she talking about?” wailed Nan. “Ma’am, what does she mean?”

  Lady Thomasine lunged out and snatched the slipper. She stared at it for a moment and then dropped it, shaking her head as though denying what she had seen. She began to twist her ringed hands together and her mouth worked as though she were trying out phrases before uttering them. There were a dozen excuses she could have made: a nosebleed; a cut finger that dripped. That she said none of these things was itself an indictment. But her wordlessness could not be called a confession. For a moment, it was still touch and go.

  But Brockley had not finished. Outside in the darkness, the music began again. He was taking a risk, since men with lanterns were now out in the courtyard, but he was a resolute fellow and the shadow of the thatched wellhead, which we had chosen as his hiding place, concealed him well. He had changed the melody again, to another old traditional tune, a simpler one, easier to play, so that his lute now spoke with more assurance. I didn’t recognize the music but it was a lament, full of sorrow and a dreadful longing as if for something deeply beloved and irrevocably lost. It moved my heart and Nan, terrified all over again, sat up, gasping with fright.

  And Lady Thomasine’s rigidity gave way at last. She turned her head this way and that, as though she wanted first to hear the music better and then as though she were trying not to hear it at all. She began to cry. She did not wipe the tears away but let them stream as though she had not noticed them. “Nan, you are a fool,” she said. “If only you had done your work as you should and washed my slippers clean. But it doesn’t matter. Oh, stop that, Nan!” The maid had begun to sob for forgiveness. “I am so tired,” said Lady Thomasine.

  We waited, watching her.

  “Shut that window!” She almost screamed it. “Shut it, shut out that … that noise! I don’t know what it is and I don’t care. Maybe it’s a ghost and maybe it isn’t. I’m too weary to go on pretending. You’ll badger me until I die of exhaustion or give in; I can see you will. So I’ll give in now. I’ll tell you the truth.”

  22

  Grief for Times Past

  Lady Thomasine was vain and she was ruthless. She had murdered Rafe and she had tried to murder me and the Brockleys and in a most unpleasant way at that.

  And I ended up, in some weird, backhanded fashion, pitying her.

  “First of all,” she said, wiping her eyes at last and assembling her dignity around her, “I would ask mercy for my two good servants, Simon Evans and Harold Pugh. They love me and they obey me. They took you to the mountains because I ordered it. Does Queen Elizabeth not demand obedience from her servants? And after all, you did not die.”

  “I make no promises,” said Rob coldly. He had sat down behind a table, giving himself a judicial air. I remained standing. Outside, Brockley’s music had ceased. “Go on,” said Rob to Lady Thomasine.

  She turned to me. “You are young,” she said. “Not in your first youth now, but young enough. You still have beauty. I see one or two faded strands in your hair but mostly it is still dark. The hazel of your eyes has not dulled and your complexion yet has bloom. Men smile when they look at you. But one day it will change. You will be talking to a man; buying something from a market stall, perhaps; speaking to a groom in an inn yard; exchanging gossip with a young gallant in a gallery at Whitehall. And suddenly, his attention will wander; his eyes will slide away from yours. You will turn to see why and find that a lovely young girl, all dew and roses, has walked by and his gaze is following her. Even if he goes on speaking civilly to you, his mind is not on you. You might be nothing but a piece of furniture. He is thinking only of that young girl.

  “And you will go to your chamber and look in the mirror, and you will see that your hair is no longer glossy like hers; and that on your face are the first lines, time’s footprints; the marks of adult knowledge. You may be grateful then if you have a faithful husband to whom you are still dear. I,” said Lady Thomasine, “had not. Not long after the day when the mirror first told me that my looks were dwindling, I found Edward in the arms of a maidservant. My son, I am sorry to say, has the same casual habits.”

  “As I well know,” I agreed softly.

  “All that is by the way, now,” said Lady Thomasine. “Believe me, Ursula, a woman who is growing older and whose husband has turned away from her is glad of any faithful admirers in whose eyes she is still fair, as she was when first they were entranced by her. In those circumstances, you might find yourself, as I did, taking care with your dress, anointing and powdering your skin, striving with all your might to hold back the deadly years. Women have little power in this world. Even if we come to marriage with money and land, the husband takes control of it. Our only authority is vested in our looks, in being desirable. To lose that is to lose everything. Besides, we do have our longings. I was not ready,” said Lady Thomasine, “to withdraw from the lists of love.”

  I had thought of her as a jouster. It seemed that she saw herself in that way too.

  “My husband,” she said, “ceased to be my lover after the day I caught him with someone else. We hardly spoke to each other in private from then on, though in public we kept up appearances. I learned to live with it. We kept the pretense up until he died. Meanwhile, I tended such looks as I still had and for a time, at least, I still had Pugh and Evans! But in the end”—her voice grew bitter—“I knew I must let go of them too, and I knew I was right when I heard the note of relief behind their protestations that they still wanted me.

  “I set them free of me and so I kept their loyalty. No woman ever had better servants. Pugh has never married though he has had his affairs among the maids. Evans was married for a while but lost his wife in an outbreak of plague. But my own need for affection, for the satisfaction of the body, refused to die. I starved. I suffered. Then Rafe came into the house and like a young maiden, I fell in love.”

  She paused and the room was quiet, although we could still hear people moving about outside. I glanced out again and saw that the search of the courtyard had become more organized. A chain of men with torches and lanterns was working its way across. To my relief, the outer door clicked just then and Brockley glanced in. I gave him a nod, and he replied with a smile, as he withdrew.

  “Who was that?” demanded Lady Thomasine.

  “Just my manservant, who has been watching the courtyard door,” I told her. “He looked in to see if he was needed.”

  “Please continue, Lady Thomasine,” said Rob.

  “You have guessed most of it, no doubt.” She let out a heavy sigh. “I will tell you something else you may not know, Ursula. One’s taste in men does not necessarily change with time. I mean that an older woman does not necessarily fall in love
with older men. Why should she? Do not older men retain their eye for pretty young girls? I retained my eye for a virile young man. Rafe, with his smooth skin and his hard muscles and his vitality, was a wonder and a glory.

  “And he was willing. That was the marvel of it. He was willing to lend that young strength to me, to let me rejoice in the touch and smell and vigor of him. And to me, it was all as though it had never happened before. My love for Rafe was sharp-edged and bright, like a new-forged blade.”

  She was almost talking to herself now. She had brushed away her first tears, but once more, the candles picked up their glitter in her eyes.

  “I was grateful to him,” she said. “I showed it. I showered him with gifts of jewelry and money.” I shivered, seeing the pathos of it, but Lady Thomasine seemed unaware of any pathos. “I was so happy,” she said. “And then—then came Alice. Last Christmas. From that time on, Rafe was lost to me. He still played his lute for me and showed me pretty attentions in public, but he no longer came tapping on my chamber door at night or whispered to me to meet him here in the parlor after dark. He refused the gifts I offered him. And I … could not live without him.” She met our eyes defiantly. “I could not live without him. I had drunk too deeply of him. Like anyone who drinks strong wine too deeply and too often, I was caught.

  “Again and again, I pleaded with him. Sometimes he would spare me an embrace. Mattie saw us once. But that was all. I would waylay him, beg him to come to my bed, to make trysts with me, but he said it was over, that he had given his heart to Alice …”

  “His body,” I said under my breath. I did not think that Rafe had had much heart to give to anyone. Lacking Alice, he had certainly been prepared to offer himself to me. Rafe, in fact, was the kind who took whatever chances came his way.

  “On the night he died,” said Lady Thomasine, “I went to his chamber. It’s—it was—on the floor below mine. But he … he …” Her voice faltered. I saw torment in her face, the shadow of a rejection too painful to put into words. I helped her out with a question.