Queen of Ambition (12 page)

I reached the pie shop rather late, though well ahead of Master Jester, but I found that Phoebe, Ambrosia, and Wat were back already and full of lamentation because Wat had just dropped a trayload of pies on the floor, and a pile of chopped chicken that had been in the pantry meat safe, awaiting its turn in the stockpot, had gone off
in the sultry heat. Ambrosia, already upset enough over Thomas’s death and her quarrel with her father, was in tears.

I was also upset about Thomas, very tired, and far too hot. I would have sold my soul to retreat to my bed, strip off my dress, and fall asleep. Pie shop servants, however, can’t indulge themselves like that. I had to buckle down to work. When Jester arrived and heard Ambrosia’s account of the various disasters, he cursed us all roundly and raised his fist to Wat, who dodged behind one of the nice new tables and by way of excuse shouted he was that sorry, but he was tryin’ to get the pies set out on the street counter all in a hurry and on his own and he’d only got one pair of hands!

Whereupon, Jester rounded on me, demanded to know why I hadn’t been back in time to help and for the second time during my short employment at the pie shop, I found myself sprawling on the floor with my head ringing like a gong.

He did himself no service. As he stormed off toward the fowl run to execute a couple of mallard he had bought that morning at the market and brought back in coops on a handcart, I picked myself up, brushed sawdust off my clothes, thanked Wat coldly for his kind and helpful remarks, and then while poor Wat, who was really a most amiable soul, stumbled an apology, I came to a grim conclusion.

Almost every task I had undertaken as an agent had eventually led me to poking my nose into other people’s private letters and although one of the reasons why I detested this was my dread of being caught, it
wasn’t the only one. I also hated it because it made me feel like an intruder.

But not this time. This time, I would still be afraid of being caught by Jester but I wasn’t going to worry about intruding. I would positively enjoy invading my unpleasant employer’s privacy, and I hoped I would find any number of embarrassing and undignified secrets.

I worked hard all the rest of the day, while my head throbbed where Jester had struck me, and I poured with sweat under my servant’s dress. I told myself that I was lucky in a way, for I had an open linen collar instead of a ruff and at least did not have starched linen pleats irritating my neck as the fine ladies did. The fine ladies, however, didn’t have to stand in a sweltering back room and yank the guts out of mallard ducks, or stir bubbling stewpots next to the fire in a kitchen as hot as Hades, or serve pies and small ale at a run. I managed a few private words with Ambrosia and told her that I had seen Thomas.

“He looked very serene. I’m sure he never knew what had happened to him,” I said, trying to comfort her as best I could. “I gave him your kiss. His family are taking him away tomorrow.”

“And I can’t go to his burial,” Ambrosia said bitterly. But she thanked me, nevertheless, and gave me a wan smile. It struck me that when her mother ran off, Ambrosia had probably been younger than I was when my mother died. I had missed mine badly enough; Ambrosia might well have missed hers even more.
She had a forlorn look, as though she had lacked mothering.

Rob’s promised storm arrived that night, with a majestic display of lightning and a roar of thunder that had Phoebe squeaking with fright. It brought relief from the heat, which for me had made sharing a bed with two other people nearly intolerable. The only person I would have welcomed in the same bed as myself was Matthew. That would be different, I thought longingly. The heat of a sultry night and the glow of Matthew’s skin would melt and blend together into the heat of love, and after love came sleep, no matter how stifling the weather. But Matthew was far away. I must endure as best I could.

The storm and Phoebe’s pathetic fear of the sizzling lightning and the prowling thunder took my mind off both my discomfort and my yearning. Because of the heat, we had left the window open and when the rain began, it blew through the window and spattered our faces. Ambrosia got up to shut it, remarking that we were lucky that her father had had the thatch repaired in the spring. “It was leaking then and we were all glad we weren’t sleeping on the attic floor.”

“What’s on the attic floor?” I asked casually. “If no one sleeps up there, what’s it used for?”

“Father has a study there,” Ambrosia said. “He does his accounts there. And I’m allowed to keep some books there and sometimes I go up there to write to my old tutor. There’s a lumber room too, with all sorts of odds and ends in it, leftovers from my grandfather’s day. He had this whole row of houses built, did you know?”

“Did he?” I was surprised. “Was your grandfather wealthy, then?”

“Yes, quite. He was my maternal grandfather—my mother’s father. There’s money in the family. She had very little with her when she fled, though,” Ambrosia said bleakly. “It’s a hard world for women.”

That must mean, I thought, that the money was now in the hands of Roland Jester, which surely cut out one motive for getting involved in a conspiracy. He wouldn’t be doing it because he was desperate for money. He might still be greedy for it, of course, but it was less likely as a motive. So why should he be plotting harm to Elizabeth? It was a puzzle.

The thunder crashed again and Phoebe whimpered and started to pray to God and the angels to protect her. I patted her shoulder consolingly and because her petition had brought religion into my mind, I remarked that I wondered what it was like in Cambridge during Queen Mary’s reign. “I’ve heard it was a hotbed of what she’d have called heresy.”

“There was something called a visitation when I was eleven or so,” Ambrosia said as she got back into bed. “I didn’t understand it very well then. But officials from the university and from court came and searched every stationer’s shop and a lot of private dwellings for what they called heretical books, and two heretics who were already dead and buried were dug up and their coffins were burned. I saw that. My grandfather was still alive then and he was frightened, I know. He had some heretical books but he hid them. This place was searched but they weren’t found. We’re all Protestants here. Most people in Cambridge are the same, though
everyone did a bit of pretending in Queen Mary’s day.”

Lightning flashed again and thunder crashed as if making a species of cosmic comment. But there was no reason why Ambrosia should lie to me, I thought. If Jester was involved in anything he shouldn’t be, then an impassioned desire to restore Catholicism by getting rid of Elizabeth and replacing her with Mary Stuart of Scotland was an even less likely reason than money.

But if neither of those, then what? Perhaps he had nothing to do with any plots at all. If there was a plot, it might have its roots elsewhere. Perhaps the pie shop and the students were being used by someone quite different and Jester was unaware of it. Perhaps Woodforde was fooling his brother. Perhaps …

I was so very tired and my head was still throbbing. Both Ambrosia and I now had spectacularly bruised faces. The storm was moving away.

I slept.

I now knew exactly where to direct my search, which was useful. Obviously, the attic floor. But on the next day, which was a Saturday, I had no opportunity. I had to work in the shop all morning and as it rained all day from dawn to nightfall, no one went out in the afternoon. On the contrary, Jester spent the afternoon up in his attic study, presumably with his account books, and Ambrosia went up there as well, to read, she said.

She was an odd sort of girl to find in a pie shop, I thought. Most girls in her position could hardly write their names and were as likely to spend an afternoon over a book as they were to spend it slaying a dragon or
studying astronomy. It was Uncle Giles who had made the difference, of course, by persuading her father to employ a tutor for her. Although I had seen nothing of Giles Woodforde since I came to the shop he was evidently an influence here.

It was an exhausting afternoon. Before going upstairs, Jester, still annoyed with me for being late the day before, gave me a stream of jobs to do in the kitchen and warned me that even if it hadn’t been raining, he wouldn’t have let me out of the place this time, just to teach me a lesson. “I told you, good-natured, that’s what I am, letting you all go out of an afternoon. But don’t ever rely on it!”

I spent the afternoon peeling onions, making pastry dough, scrubbing greasy shelves, and wondering from time to time whether Rob had yet had a chance to interview the students again. Then customers began to reappear and I was working, cooking, serving, and clearing up, until late into the evening.

The next day was Sunday, the thirtieth of July, and although the shop didn’t open, no one who lived there was free of surveillance for a single moment. Master Jester was most certainly of the Protestant persuasion. He took his household in its entirety to early service at St. Benet’s, and then again in the afternoon, and in between, we were required to gather in the first-floor parlor while he conducted a private service of his own for us, with prayers and texts. The prayers, I noticed, included a plea that the Almighty would even now soften the hard and recalcitrant heart of his vanished wife, Sybil, and cause her to repent and return to the home she had so wickedly abandoned, and to the husband
who loved her, and to her duties as spouse and mother and helpmeet, and to submit humbly to the natural penances that must befall unnatural women such as herself.

Many householders hold private prayers in a similar way. Some are reverent and touching. Master Jester’s efforts were not. My bruised face ached and so, I daresay, did Ambrosia’s. I hoped that wherever Sybil Jester was now, she was being kindly treated.

That day, I learned why Jester had said that his generosity over our free afternoons would be made up for on Sundays. In the intervals of the religious exercises, Phoebe, Wat, and I were set to cleaning the living quarters completely while Ambrosia and her father cleaned the pantry and the shop. The Sabbath was assuredly not a day of rest in Jester’s Pie Shop.

But on the next day, Monday, the thirty-first of July, everything changed.

On Monday, opportunity could hardly have smiled more enticingly. The sun shone. In the afternoon, Master Jester marched out carrying what I now realized was a box of sketching materials and a folded easel. I had seen him with them before without understanding what they were. Phoebe went out to spend some of her meager pay on a new ribbon for her churchgoing cap; Wat trudged off to heaven knew where although probably not to his home. (According to Phoebe, his father was a wildfowler out on the marshes, which local folk called the fens, but Wat wasn’t following the family trade because he was so big and heavy that when he went plodding through the marshes on stilts, to retrieve trapped birds from nets, the stilts sank too far into the mud and were liable to crack.)

Ambrosia said she was going to St. Benet’s. “We’re not supposed to pray for the dead but would God
really mind, do you think, Ursula, if I just knelt and asked him to look after Thomas? I needn’t pray aloud. No one would know, even if they were at my side.”

“I’m sure God would understand,” I said. “I’ve prayed for the dead myself, secretly, in the same way.”

“What will you do this afternoon?” Ambrosia asked.

“I’m tired,” I said. “I’m going to lie down on the bed and sleep.”

I duly went upstairs and took my shoes off, ready to arrange myself on the bed at short notice if Ambrosia or Phoebe should come in. But I kept stealthy watch from the window and one after another, I saw all of them leave the premises. Pushing my feet back into my shoes, I made haste to the topmost floor.

The staircase up from the middle floor was a narrow spiral that emerged in a corner of the attic at the Silver Street end of the house. Sunlight streamed in through the dormer window and the thatch was immediately overhead. The place had the warm and dusty smell that is characteristic of attics in summer. A quick survey revealed that there were three rooms up there, leading out of each other across the width of the house. Jester seemed to be using one as an office and Ambrosia’s books were in another, while the third, as she had said, was full of disused furniture and other bits and pieces.

Jester’s room was the one into which the staircase led. It was the biggest and the best lit, because as well as the dormer window, there was a flat glass skylight let into the thatch on the other side. It had a small hearth, unused in summer. A few books and some piles of correspondence were arranged on shelves fixed to the wall
at one end. The furnishings were a walnut desk with a silver writing set, a stool to match the desk, and an oak settle under the dormer. I set to work to examine whatever I could find.

It wasn’t a difficult task. In fact, it was the easiest search I had ever undertaken. I knew the house was empty, which gave me confidence, and by pushing one of the dormer windows slightly open, I could be sure of hearing if anyone came home. Down below, the shutter that closed the shop was bolted from within, and anyone returning would come in at the private door alongside. This led into a small lobby with inner doors to the shop and the other ground-floor rooms. It wasn’t locked during the day but its hinges squeaked. I wasn’t likely to be taken by surprise.

There were some account books on the shelves, and I quickly discovered that Roland Jester had a firm grasp of the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, that his arithmetic was accurate, and his shop highly profitable. I learned nothing further. I then turned to the correspondence and found the two letters which Woodforde had sent to his brother from Richmond, and which Cecil had had intercepted and described to me so scathingly as dull, trivial outpourings from dull, trivial minds.

I found the letters not so much dull as peculiar. As Cecil had said, the first began in quite reasonable fashion with an account of Woodforde’s journey to court and the people he had met and talked to on arrival, including Cecil and Dudley. He added sadly that he had seen Lady Lennox but that she continued cold to him. Remembering the remarks I had heard
her make to him, I felt that this was putting it mildly.