The Dark and the Light

by Josephine Bell

  The children recognized the wide figure of the alderman in his short cloak and pork pie hat as he rode up to the house, followed by Walter on another horse with the luggage.

  ‘’Tis Master Angus come again!’ George shouted to his sister. ‘Let us go greet him in the yard.’

  ‘Kirstie must stay with me,’ said their nursemaid, rising to take the little girl’s hand.

  ‘Nay, she shall not!’ George yelled. He caught his sister’s hand and pulled. The nurse pulled, Kirstie screamed loudly and pulled, the alderman turned to stare at the noise, reined in his horse and called a greeting.

  George let go his sister’s hand so abruptly that the nursemaid lost her balance and sat down heavily on the grass. Kirstie, freed by this, ran after her brother who was already at Master Leslie’s stirrup looking up and laughing.

  ‘She meant to stay us from greeting you,’ George said, pointing to the nurse who had scrambled up scarlet-faced and begun to pursue her charges.

  ‘A rescue, a rescue!’ laughed Master Leslie. He put a hand down, the boy stepped up to his foot and in a moment was seated before him in the saddle.

  ‘Me too!’ implored little Kirstie, holding up her arms.

  ‘Walt, take thou the lady!’ Master Leslie ordered. In a moment the cavalcade moved on laughing, the children yelling defiance as well as mirth, the discomfited nursemaid shaking her fist at them helplessly.

  It was not easy after such a merry arrival for Master Angus Leslie to break his bad news to Francis. That some serious business must have brought him to Oxford was altogether obvious, Francis thought, seeing the expression on his kins-man’s face that evening, whenever his gaze fell upon Katharine as she went about her duties of hostess to an honoured guest. When she had left them and Master Angus had explained the reason for his visit Francis fell silent for so long that his kinsman feared some great explosion of anger would shortly descend upon his meddling head.

  But nothing of the sort took place. Instead the alderman slowly became aware, with deep compassion, that Francis was grieved beyond tears, wounded more deeply and more despairingly than he could bear except in utter silence. He waited a little longer then got up and said, ‘I’ll leave thee, Francis. I would I had come with better news. But I think Kate’s long absence from the Court will serve to keep her from the sharp eye of the Commission, for surely she can have had no direct part in this abomination. Go to her, Francis. Persuade her to tell thee the whole truth of her commerce with that evil pair.’

  He felt like adding ‘and with the young whelp, Carr’s brother’ for he remembered the duel in his garden and the trouble he had been put to hushing that up.

  Francis rose too, very wearily, his hand to his head that was throbbing now as he moved.

  ‘I will go to her,’ he said, staggering a little.

  Master Leslie put a hand on his arm to steady him. He remembered that in just such silent pain had Francis received the news eight years before of Alec Nimmo’s sudden peril, flight and outlawry, that might have engulfed them all but was dispersed by the apprehension and death on the scaffold of his bastard nephew Malcolm Munro. Was this danger to be met in similar fashion? Must Katharine be helped to flee? But how? Where to? With what possible future before her?

  Francis took his kinsman to the room prepared for him, bade him good night and went in search of his wife.

  He found her in the garden, a shadowy figure in the fading evening light, idly wandering to draw him out to her, for she feared Master Leslie’s purpose, though she had heard no positive news.

  Francis lost no time enlightening her.

  ‘Thy late friends will be proved murderers,’ he said, bluntly. ‘This cannot be denied or softened. That being so their cronies, I will not call them friends, must come under scrutiny, if not censure. Thou art one of them, Kate. If I can help to spare thee the consequence of that ill-judgement, that crass folly, I must know every least circumstance of thy contact.’

  Katharine was appalled, but she still fought to deceive him. Chiefly it was to deceive herself, for it was impossible, she thought, that the very highest in the land should be imagined, far less found, guilty of base crime. She talked of audiences, balls, of masques and plays, of lesser gatherings, where the Viscount Rochester as he then was, entertained his friends, among them the Lady Frances Howard.

  ‘This lady commanded thy attendance, did she not?’ Francis insisted.

  ‘I was pleased to serve her.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘By attending her, by—by—conveying messages.’

  ‘To whom? With what purpose?’

  Katharine became angry.

  ‘How can I remember now, after so long a time?’

  ‘Was it to do with the lady’s separation from her first husband? There were rumours of witchcraft—’

  ‘That none believed to be true, though the thought of it pleased the King, as he is much ta’en with the idea.’

  She kept her answers vague, she struggled all the time to make it appear she had not been very intimate with the Somersets mainly because her chief fear was that her intimacy with Alan Carr might now come to light. Unjustly, she told herself, since that liaison was most certainly at an end.

  Francis endured the prevarications and the direct lies as long as he could. Even then his real fear for her, apart from his own danger, directed him.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he cried at last, ‘understand the peril you stand in! I have told you King James hath set up a Commission of inquiry. I have told you Lady Somerset’s creature, Mistress Anne Turner, is before them and will never face compulsion to speak. She is already accused by her false friend, the countess. How may those others in their minor parts, escape? So if thou hast done ought, Kate, that might even falsely be construed as assisting the plot against Over-bury, for thine own sake and for all our sakes, in Christ’s name speak, that we may devise a remedy!’

  ‘I have done nothing,’ Katharine repeated ‘Nothing!’

  Nothing she could endure to tell this husband who pricked and pulled and twisted her towards a confession. Nothing. Her fatal obstinacy ruled her that evening as never before, until Francis gave up the attempt and left her. Before he went he said, with tears in his voice, ‘I wronged thee, Kate, by loving thee too well when a little misfortune might have been thy salvation. I have wronged thee since by withdrawing my heart from thee for fear I should suffer in my work.’

  He went close to her and put his hands on her shoulders, looking down at the fair face turned up to his with its accustomed fearlessness. ‘I would thou could’st have loved me, even a little,’ he said.

  Her expression did not alter. She gave a small exasperated sigh, as if this topic had lost all but its nuisance value. But she spoke truth for the first time that evening, much as she had once told Alan Carr.

  ‘I think I have never loved, or but a very little,’ she answered.

  He turned from her, acknowledging defeat with a sad motion of his hand. But Katharine stayed in the garden until after nightfall, her movements as slow as before but her mind hurrying hither and thither, searching for some means to escape the fate Francis had shown so clearly now lay before her. She had remembered the package she had brought to Mistress Turner from the apothecary Franklin. A medicine to promote the Lord Essex’s impotence, Lady Frances had told her. But she remembered the date. About that time the prisoner in the Tower had begun to suffer, had not Francis said? So was it she who had supplied Turner with a murderous potion, not a laughable one?

  It might be so. The stone had been lifted. The evil ones lurking beneath had scattered, running for shelter, for alibis, for excuses. Could she, must she, count herself one of them?

  At last Katharine went indoors and up to the bedchamber she still shared with Francis. He was not there, nor did he come later. Alone in the great bed she cursed her sometime friends, accepting her betrayal. Only one course remained to her, to escape out of the country. But how and where and when?

  Chapter T
wenty-Two

  Alderman Leslie stayed at Luscombe for one more day but left early on the morning after. He did not discuss his dangerous mission with Katharine, though he managed to sustain a conversation that included the lady during those meals at which she was present.

  But before he went away, he had another talk with Francis to discover what he had been able to learn from his wife.

  ‘Nothing of any substance,’ Francis told him. ‘It is clear to me she was more deeply in the Somersets’ confidence than she will disclose. She feigns total ignorance of any plot against Sir Thomas Overbury. She repeats over and over again that the only help and encouragement she afforded Lady Frances was in the woman’s efforts to discard her first husband, my Lord Essex. She will not tell me how she gave help; only that her sympathy lay with her patron, as indeed we know, so did the King’s. But she is frightened. I have never seen her more moved.’

  As he is himself, thought Master Leslie, looking at his kinsman with sad eyes. Poor good young man, poor scholar to be so plagued by an evil wife. Or not perhaps evil so much as stupid, insensitive, shallow, like that tiresome mother of hers.

  However, he kept these thoughts to himself, only helping Francis to devise some means of keeping close in touch with events in London. The usual messenger for the two families of Ogilvy and Leslie would bear news direct to Luscombe, written by himself in a code invented by them and purporting to refer to a mare belonging to the alderman, now at stud with a farmer near Islington beyond the northern wall of the City. Master Leslie promised to report any news of the Commission, any arrests made, any trials begun, in language set in this code and at suitable intervals, but not too close, so as to avoid suspicion if, as was possible, a watch was being kept on Lady Leslie’s movements and behaviour.

  So with a heavy heart Alderman Leslie set out again for London, his faithful Walter riding beside him. As they rode along, Master Leslie’s state of anxiety got the better of his total caution and he confided the main cause of it to the servant. He was instantly rewarded.

  ‘I understand your worship very well,’ Walter answered. ‘I waited but to hear this from you direct, sir, before speaking in my turn. For Luscombe is an unhappy house, sir, a house divided against itself, as always when the master and mistress fall out and are known to fall out.’

  Alderman Leslie sighed. Walter’s lined face was grave. He was growing old; the hair below his livery hat was white, his trimmed beard white also. But he sat his horse with a straight back still and the eyes he turned to his master were clear and bright and full of a life-time’s devotion.

  ‘Tell me,’ Master Leslie ordered.

  ‘For the most part the indoor maids and men are loyal to the young master,’ Walter began. ‘The cook, who served as apprentice in the art at one of the great colleges, speaks of Sir Francis with great love and loyalty. The housekeeper, too, endures some slights from her ladyship, begging your pardon, sir, with patience. Also the children’s nurse, though she be over young for such a charge, for she cannot well control them in the presence of their mother.’

  ‘I have seen it, Walter. Sir Francis dotes upon those two, my lady doth not, but resents their preference, so clearly observable for their father. What else?’

  ‘There is one, by trade a scullion, whom I suspect to be a spy.’

  ‘A spy? Oh, God, this is what I feared. For whom? For the Law?’

  ‘Nay, sir. For my Lady Somerset.’

  ‘Then are we indeed lost!’ Master Leslie exclaimed in despair.

  But Walter had not finished.

  ‘Outside the house, sir,’ he went on, ‘’tis different. The head groom, the gardeners, are indifferent, but would be loyal if pressed for an opinion. All but one young stable lad who is so besotted with her ladyship he would willingly give his life for her. Or so he assured me in a moment of extravagance.’

  ‘Oh Walter, Walter,’ Master Leslie said, laughing. ‘We are too old for these ploys! And yet,’ he added soberly, with an inward shudder, ‘they are deadly.’

  The pair rode on in silence. Walter’s conclusions were most valuable, the alderman thought. He stored them in his memory. At any time he could get more particular descriptions of the two men his servant had described, the spy and the champion. Either or both could be dealt with if need be. In the meantime there was nothing further he could do in the matter but press on to London where he would find the news he sought.

  It was bad news. Bad for the conspirators and therefore dangerous for the Leslies. Good for the public order and the public morals. The Commission had succeeded; there had been several arrests; trials had begun under Lord Justice Coke of these minor villains, Mistress Anne Turner and the two apothecaries, James Franklin and William de Lombell.

  But this was only a beginning. As witnesses appeared, willing or forced, the net spread. Mary Woods, ‘Cunning Mary’, had supplied poison. Weston, appointed by Sir Gervase Helwys to guard Sir Thomas Overbury, was discovered to be Turner’s servant throughout the whole period of the knight’s imprisonment and death. This brought the unfortunate Lieutenant to the dock, for he could not dispute making the appointment, nor failing to disclose the attempts to poison his prisoner. He could only make known he had himself been appointed Lieutenant of the Tower by Sir Thomas Monson, directed by the late Earl of Northampton. A clear pointer to the Howard faction and Lady Somerset.

  And so it went on, reel within reel, as the wicked schemes were unwound, displayed and condemned. Plot within plot, centring upon Mistress Anne Turner whom Sir Francis Bacon, Attorney-General, described as the ‘lay-mistress of the Poisons’.

  A horrified public, those who were literate, read the broad-sheets sold in the streets, those who were not, listened to those who proclaimed them aloud.

  Early in this crescendo of conviction, a young man appeared at Gracious Street, demanding to see Alderman Angus Leslie in private. He would not give his name, he would not disclose his business.

  He was brought first to Walter, whom he mistook for the latter’s master.

  ‘I wish to see my Lady Leslie,’ he began. ‘I believe that she lives in this house.’

  ‘You are mistaken,’ Walter told him. ‘But what is your business with the lady?’

  ‘I feared she might be gone,’ the youth answered, looking distracted. ‘That is why I demanded to speak to your honour.’

  ‘You mistake again,’ Walter said. ‘I am Alderman Leslie’s confidential servant. Unless you tell me the purpose of your visit, you cannot see him.’

  ‘That is all one to me,’ the youth said, moving quickly towards the door. ‘I have come here, mayhap at my peril, to tell her ladyship out of respect for her beauty, that I will say no word of her visit to my master, Apothecary Franklin, these two years gone, for a purpose she and I and my master alone wot of, and he being in custody and in fear of his life, my lady be also in peril.’

  ‘I think you lie,’ Walter said in a steady voice. ‘But tell me what manner of errand this was of my Lady Leslie.’

  ‘She came to demand a package.’

  ‘For herself?’

  ‘Nay, for Mistress Anne Turner.’

  ‘Was the package labelled for Mistress Turner?’

  ‘Nay, it bore no label at all.’

  ‘Did Master Franklin give it to my lady?’

  ‘He gave it to me to give to her.’

  ‘You knew who she was?’

  ‘She gave me her name and said she came from Mistress Turner to fetch the package.’

  ‘Which she took and delivered?’

  ‘Of that I know nothing. But I have never forgotten her. I have never seen so fair a lady. I would help her now by a-warning of her.’

  ‘You demand money for your pains?’

  The youth grinned, but shook his head.

  ‘That were a risk I dare not undertake. I give nothing but the one fact of the package, and I take nothing but my leave of you.’

  ‘You are very wise,’ Walter said. ‘But before you leave this house I mu
st ask you your name and where you can be found.’

  ‘I will give you neither,’ the youth said, unsheathing a knife he wore at his belt, ‘and I demand now to see the alderman.’

  ‘I will go fetch him,’ Walter said and went out, locking the door behind him, making play with the key so that the boy should hear what he did.

  When he came back a quarter hour later, alone, for he knew all the time Master Leslie was away from the house, he found the window of the room open and the boy gone. Later that day the post messenger set off for Oxford with a letter in code for Francis, informing him that the mare had suffered a mischance by reason of a package of medicinal powder delivered from a wrong source by a mistaken order.

  But Master Leslie had reckoned without Katharine’s near crazy obstinacy. Where he hoped to force her confession and set them all in the way of helping her, she still denied doing anything that might connect her with Mistress Turner’s crimes. She was made desperate by this letter, but she would not put herself in the wrong before Francis. Not for a second time. Not even to escape the possible danger to her liberty, if not her life.

  Francis showed her the letter, explained the code, begged to know what exactly had passed, all to no purpose. When at last he let her go, seeing she would deny all and would never be persuaded for his sake, for her children’s sake, even for her own sake, to acknowledge her folly, her wicked folly, she went to her own room, dismissed her maid and shut herself in to plan what she must do.

  To stay in Oxford in the same house with Francis was now finally impossible. With such peril hanging over her she must go abroad. But where? By what means? She had a little money by her and her jewels. Not a great sum in all but enough to start her on a journey.

  She thought of Alan Carr, wishing now she had dared all and gone with him when he invited her. But perhaps if she had agreed he would have found some excuse to put her off. Nevertheless he had gone to Holland, she had heard, but perhaps that was a rumour. But he had meant to go to Holland. She was so confused she could not remember if the news was real or she had imagined it.