Queen of Ambition (14 page)

“And?” I asked.

“She’s not young,” said Brockley, thoughtfully. “About Fran’s age, perhaps, and she has a … a tired look about her. She said I was to tell Master Woodforde that she understood and would follow his instructions. She also said—to me, this wasn’t part of the message—that she couldn’t refuse this honor, that Mistress Grantley had put her forward for it and wouldn’t permit her to say no. Then she gave such a heavy sigh, madam, and looked at the letter again and, as though she were talking to herself, she said: “‘Jackman’s Lane. Well, well. Still, surely nothing can go wrong in the presence of the queen.’”

“You mean she seemed afraid that something
would
go wrong?”

“Yes, it sounded like that. And then the next thing she said was: ‘I suppose it will only take a few minutes. I’ll give the queen my flowers and then slip away into the crowd.’ She obviously hasn’t been told yet about the playlet and the kidnap, so she doesn’t know she’s to be brought into the pie shop. I would have told her that myself, madam, except that I didn’t start to wonder
until I was already halfway back to Cambridge. I’m not always such a quick thinker, I’m sorry to say. But once I’d started wondering—well—Master Jester’s wife ran away from him, didn’t she? She would certainly be frightened of having to come back to Jackman’s Lane. Could this Mistress Smithson be her? Living under another name?”

I gazed at him in astonishment. “I suppose it’s possible. But …” A thought occurred to me. “I’m living here as Mistress Faldene, but I’m still using my own Christian name of Ursula, because I’m used to it. If this is Mistress Jester pretending to be someone else, she might be doing the same. Do you know what Mistress Smithson’s first name is?”

“Yes, madam. The letter I carried today was addressed to Mistress Sybil Smithson.”

“Oh, my God,” I said, remembering Master Jester’s household prayers on Sunday and the way he had importuned the Almighty for his wife’s return. “Yes. You’re quite right.
Sybil!
”

“It
could
be,” said Brockley cautiously. “Though Sybil’s a common enough name.”

“I know. But if this particular Sybil is afraid of coming to Jackman’s Lane—then we have a coincidence.” I could hear Cecil’s voice in my mind.
If there were an eleventh commandment, it would be Never Trust Coincidences
. He was right, too. I knew that from experience. Coincidences do exist but when they occur in suspect situations, one should look at them twice, or three times, or even four, before believing that they are what they seem.

“If Mistress Smithson is really Mistress Jester, then she is Woodforde’s sister-in-law,” I said. “Does he know, I wonder?”

Brockley frowned. “Master Woodforde—well, in the university people call him Dr. Woodforde—didn’t say anything about being related to her or even knowing her. He just gave me a letter to be delivered to Mistress Sybil Smithson at a manor known as Brent Hay,
out on the road to the north of Cambridge. ‘On the right, half a mile past some cottages and a smelly place where someone’s rearing pigs,’ he told me. I found it quite easily. When I got back, he simply asked if I had delivered the letter safely and when I said yes, he nodded. That’s all.”

“It doesn’t make sense.” I was trying to puzzle it out and feeling more lost every moment. “If Woodforde does know who she is, then he also knows
where
she is, so why hasn’t he told his brother? He surely knows that Roland wants her back. The two brothers are close, they must be. They write interminable letters to each other whenever Woodforde is away from Cambridge.”

“Perhaps he’s on Mistress Jester’s side,” Brockley suggested. “Why did she run away, after all? Did Jester hit her, as he seemingly hits his servants?”

“I think so,” I said. “Ambrosia told me that he treated her very badly and the way I’ve heard him talk about her—yes, indeed, I think so.”

“Maybe Woodforde’s in sympathy with her,” Brockley said, “and doesn’t want to tell his brother where to find her. Only in that case …”

“He doesn’t sound the sort of man who would be in sympathy with her and in any case, if by any unlikely chance he is, why on earth is he arranging for her to be kidnapped right outside the pie shop and then brought into it?”

“So he probably
doesn’t
realize who she is. Someone from the university must have seen her and talked to her before settling the arrangement, but maybe it wasn’t Woodforde.”

“Which brings us back to a coincidence,” I said restively. “
And I don’t like coincidences!
I don’t like the feel of this at all, Brockley, but I can’t make sense of it.” I put my head in my hands and gripped my temples. “I can’t make sense of any of these
people
!” I groaned. “I’ve never met anyone quite like them in my life. I’ve met oddities, but these … !”

I had undoubtedly met oddities. I had once met a man who tried to build a flying machine. I had encountered a merchant adventurer whose delight in the adventuring part of his calling verged on the suicidal, and a woman in her sixth decade who fell in love with a boy of twenty. I had even—though I didn’t want to believe it—once encountered a ghost.

And, to my sorrow, I had met the love of my life and found that he was a sworn enemy to my queen.

But mostly, those people had been odd in ways that sprang from their own natures. It was possible to understand them. For instance, Matthew’s innocent belief in Mary Stuart’s claim to Elizabeth’s crown sprang naturally from his Gallic upbringing. Never before had I come across people like the Jesters, whose characters seemed to be made up of hopelessly incompatible facets.

“Look at them!” I said to Brockley. “A pie shop owner who has the temper of a devil and sketches like an angel. A pie shop owner’s daughter who writes to her former tutor in English, but in the Greek alphabet. That’s Ambrosia—I’ve just found out about that.

“And now there’s a runaway wife who quite by chance, it seems, is going to be brought within her husband’s reach, through the agency of a brother-in-law
who doesn’t realize who she is … and by a strange coincidence, this is to happen as part of a peculiar scheme to turn a students’ rag into an entertainment for the queen, which has Cecil gnawing his beard with worry—and I think he’s right. Thomas Shawe thought something was amiss and where is Thomas Shawe now? By the way, did you find out where Woodforde was when Thomas was killed?”

“Yes. I asked the fellow I replaced,” said Brockley. “I was pretending to be asking questions about his routine. The answer was: in bed with a touch of the marsh fever and being waited on hand and foot. He certainly wasn’t out in King’s Grove murdering Thomas.”

“But what happened to Thomas
can’t
have been an accident,” I said mulishly. “That would be just another impossible coincidence.” I sat up, pushing my cap back from my forehead. “Look, Brockley. One thing is certain. If Mistress Jester and Mistress Smithson really are the same person, I want to warn her. Because from what I’ve seen and heard here, I don’t want to see her thrown back into Roland Jester’s power—not against her will, anyway. You’ll have to take that ride again and tell her about the playlet and the kidnap and that she’s going to be brought right into this very shop! Then she can decide what to do, for herself.”

Brockley scratched his head. “Madam, I can’t. I have another hour or so and then I must be back at my duties. If I fail, I could be thrown out and then I’ll have lost my chance to study Woodforde, or keep watch on him.”

“Then tell Master Henderson and let him arrange a messenger … now what is it?”

“I have several pieces of news,” said Brockley gloomily. “That’s another one. Woodforde isn’t the only one who’s had the marsh fever. Master Henderson can’t leave his bed. I called at his lodgings before I came here—to report all this to him—and he could hardly raise his head from his pillow and obviously didn’t want to talk. He woke up yesterday morning with a high fever on him.”

“
What?
”

“Don’t be too alarmed, madam. The physician was there—Henderson’s man had called him. He said that Master Henderson would probably recover quite soon—that he was strong and that this type of fever rarely lasted long. But …”

“He didn’t look well when we saw him on Friday,” I said. “So you had no chance to ask if he’d yet talked to those students, to see if Thomas Shawe confided in any of them?” He shook his head. Another thought occurred to me. “Is there an outbreak of fever in Cambridge? If there is, the queen’s whole visit could be canceled.” I would be heartily relieved if it was.

But once more, Brockley shook his head. “There are always a few cases. Woodforde is prone to these attacks, apparently, and I understand that Master Henderson had been out to the fens on some errand or other to do with arranging fuel supplies. They use peat a lot in this district. The fever breeds in the fens. Her Majesty won’t be going anywhere near them. But I don’t think Master Henderson will be much help to us for a day or two and I haven’t got the right to give orders to his men.

“In any case,” added Brockley in his expressionless
way, “there’s a big fuss going on for other reasons. All the harbingers have reached Cambridge now and they and their servants and Master Henderson’s men are running here, there, and everywhere. It seems—I got this from Master Henderson’s valet—that there’s been a muddle over the list of household servants who are to accompany Her Majesty. No lodgings have been arranged for the sewing maids and laundresses and the vice chancellor has only just found out that the queen is bringing her own dining plate. He’s upset as apparently King’s has some fine silver plate which he wanted to show off and he wants to arrange to use it for at least one dinner and he’s actually arguing about it and making a to-do …”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” I said.

“And there’s another to-do involving Master Woodforde,” Brockley said. “He’s quite a connoisseur of wine, it appears, or thinks he is. It seems he took it upon himself to advise the vice chancellor on which vintages should be served to the queen. But the vice chancellor consults his butler on these matters and when the butler heard that Woodforde was interfering, he actually came round to Woodforde’s rooms to tell him to keep his nose out of other folks’ business. I was there when the butler arrived and there was a fine old shouting match. And on top of all that, the Gentlemen Ushers are expected tomorrow, to inspect all the arrangements …”

I peered suspiciously across the table at Brockley. His voice and face might be expressionless but I knew him well enough to detect the glimmer of amusement in his eyes. Like most people, he quite enjoyed a panic
as long as he was allowed to watch it and not join in. But if he didn’t feel directly involved in this particular panic, I did. If Brockley couldn’t go to Brent Hay, and Rob and his men couldn’t take a message for me, either, someone else must do it instead. I took a deep breath and raised my voice. “
Ambrosia!
”

She had been upstairs, but the urgency in my voice brought her to us at a run. “What is it? Ursula?”

“Sit down,” I said. “Here at the table with us. Roger, tell Ambrosia what you have just told me, about your errand to Mistress Smithson, and what she said to you.”

Ambrosia sat, linking her hands together on top of the table. Brockley embarked on his account. When he had done, I said: “Ambrosia, I don’t want to pry. But is it possible that this Mistress Smithson of Brent Hay could be your mother?”

I looked down at her laced fingers. They were trembling.

“Yes. It might be so. It might be,” she said unsteadily.

“I take it,” Brockley said, in his slow, calm voice, the voice which was so good at soothing the fears of nervous horses, “that Mistress Jester, your lady mother, had her own good reasons for leaving home. I’ve seen the world, mistress. I know what life can be like for a woman when she is not kindly treated.”

“My mother,” said Ambrosia, “used to be scared that one day, my father might actually kill her. I used to try to stop him when he was beating her, but he’d always just get hold of me and run me into another room and lock the door. The day she ran away from
here, she had a black eye and so many welts and bruises … she showed me before she went. She went in the morning when Father had gone to the market but she warned me first. She said I was old enough to understand why she was leaving me. She said I could come with her, if I wanted, only it would be harder for two of us than for one and my father didn’t hate me as he hated her….”

“He really does hate her, then?” I hardly knew why I asked, since Jester’s treatment of his wife was so detestable that the reason behind it was scarcely relevant. I think I was just curious about the extraordinary Jester family. “I’ve heard him say terrible things about her,” I said, “but at prayers on Sunday he did say he loved her and you said he cried when she left him.”

“Oh, don’t you understand?” said Ambrosia impatiently. “He says he loves her—yes, he did weep when he found she’d run away—but he used to treat her as though he hated her and besides, she’s his, she belongs to him, he thinks she had no right to desert him. I know more about it now than I did then. Listen …”

She plunged into a description of her family history. Roland Jester’s father had apparently been a Cambridge tavernkeeper. “He didn’t own the place, just rented it,” Ambrosia said. “Though it was doing quite well, I believe.” He had died when Roland was little more than a baby and his brother and sister-in-law, who until then had been keeping another inn, very small and far from prosperous, in Yarmouth, had seized their chance and moved in to “help” the poor widow, left with a tavern and a small child on her hands.

Mistress Jester, however, had meanwhile caught the eye of a good matrimonial prospect, an educated man called Geoffrey Woodforde, who was employed as secretary to a Cambridge merchant. She had handed the lease thankfully over to her husband’s relatives (“They paid her something, I think,” Ambrosia said. “Not much but I suppose it was a dowry of sorts”) and married Woodforde. While she was about it, she handed little Roland over to her husband’s brother and his wife, as well. They had no children of their own and Geoffrey Woodforde, apparently, was not enthusiastic about being a stepfather.