Queen of Ambition (22 page)

“Would that be,” inquired Cecil, “that you have found that Master Woodforde knows very well who Mistress Smithson really is?”

Brockley blinked. “How did you know, sir?”

Cecil explained for me, while all those present listened with burning interest and visible astonishment. At the end, however, he said: “But this is not the matter in hand just now. What we are interested in just now isn’t the whereabouts of Mistress Jester; it’s the whereabouts of Master Jester and his brother. You didn’t find your man either, Dodd?”

“No, sir. Master Brockley is right to think that he and Woodforde were going to the pie shop but we found it closed, and inside it nothing but a young girl acting all distracted. She said her father went out this morning and came back with her uncle Woodforde right enough, but that the two of them went off again and she didn’t know where they’d gone or why and she was scared. It seems the shop employed another girl to cook and wait at table, and a fellow to man the street counter …”

“Phoebe and Wat,” I said.

“Those’re their names? According to the girl, before Jester and Woodforde went off together, Jester paid
them off and told them to take their things and go back to their homes. The wench—she was Jester’s daughter—said her father wouldn’t tell her anything but she knew something was amiss, and she was left there wringing her hands and crying, not knowing what’s afoot or why. We asked her a lot of questions but she didn’t seem to know any answers and we had no orders to bring her in, so we left her for the time being. We can go back for her if need be.”

Cecil looked at me. “Have you any idea where Jester and Woodforde could have gone?”

I shook my head. “No, I haven’t. But I think I should go back to the shop. Ambrosia’s there alone. I may be able to help her—or if she
does
know anything helpful, I may find it out. Besides”—the memory of those curious sketches came back to me—“there’s still something in that shop that I want to pry into, if truth be told.”

“I’ve got a dog like you,” Rob said to me unexpectedly, causing everyone to look at him in astonishment.

“A dog?” Cecil queried.

“Yes. Oh, a very lovable dog! But he’s the most inquisitive animal God ever made. I call him Pokenose because that’s what he does—pokes his nose into everything. Twice he’s been caught with it stuck in a jug—a jug of milk once, and wine the second time. Once he got it stuck in one of my boots. I found him crashing round our bedchamber, trying to shake it off. You’re just the same, Ursula. You’re inquisitive—and you’ve been in danger before now because of it. I’m always afraid that one day you’ll get into danger that you can’t get out of.”

“In the autumn,” I said, “I’m going home to my
husband, in France. I shan’t run into danger anymore then.”

“Seriously,” said Rob, “I’ll be glad. You ought to be at home. You worry me—and if you and your husband hope for children, you shouldn’t leave it much later.”

“Are you very worried about Mattie?” I asked him suddenly, and he nodded.

“Yes, I am. Nearly forty is late for having a child even if it isn’t her first child. You should be at home with your husband, Ursula, having your children
now
!”

“I hope I soon will be,” I said, not letting him see that his remarks were making me uneasy. In France, I had had a stillborn son and nearly lost my life in the process. I was still afraid of trying again.

It occurred to me that perhaps I should also be afraid of returning to the pie shop. Yet, what use was I as either wife or agent, if I gave in to fears?

“For the moment,” I said, “I feel that I have to go back to that pie shop anyway. I
can’t
leave Ambrosia alone there.”

Brockley at once said that he would come with me, but just as I was drawing breath to thank him gratefully, Cecil vetoed the idea. “Brockley still has his place as Woodforde’s manservant and I would prefer it, Brockley, if you went back to his lodgings in case he returns. If he does, let us know. By
us
, I mean myself and Sir Robert Dudley, who arrived in Cambridge with me and is lodging in Trinity College. I will make sure that he is told of all this. I am sure you need not worry about Mistress Blanchard. She has an established place at the shop and I trust
she can go back there without running into danger.”

Cecil’s wishes, like the queen’s, had the force of orders, no matter how politely he expressed them.

So I went back to the pie shop alone, drawn thither by Ambrosia, and by a set of partly finished drawings, just as a mouse is drawn by cheese, straight into a trap.

The afternoon was wearing away by the time I reached the pie shop, where I found closed shutters and a group of disconsolate students, waiting hopefully for signs of life. One of them was Francis Morland, who hailed me eagerly. “Have you come to open up? What’s amiss?”

I said I wasn’t sure but had heard that a family friend, Mistress Ambrosia’s former tutor, had died. It was the first thing I could think of. “I don’t know much about it—I’m not family—but the shop may not open today. I’m sorry.”

They made polite noises of condolence and began to drift away. I tried the private door, found it open, and slipped inside.

The place was silent. I went quickly through the ground floor: shop, kitchen, pantry, fuel store, and windowless cupboard of a room next to it, where Wat
slept. His bedding lay there, folded for the day. There was no sign of Ambrosia downstairs but when I went up to our bedchamber, I found her there. Once more, she was lying on the bed. She looked ill. “Ambrosia?” I said questioningly.

She sat up, staring at me. “You’ve come back? I wondered if you would. Where did you go?”

“To get on as quickly as possible with getting that playlet stopped,” I said. “Which I have done. Another letter has gone to Brent Hay, too. You can stop worrying about your mother. I was scared to come back, I don’t mind admitting, but after all, this is where I live just now and I need the work. Is your father very angry?”

Ambrosia gazed at me without speaking and I rushed on with remarks that I hoped were suitable to my character as Mistress Faldene, Brockley’s widowed and hard-up cousin.

“I’ll have to tell him some taradiddle or other, I suppose. I have a child, as it happens, being fostered. I can say that I had a message that she was ill, but that I found her recovering, so I came back at once. But, Ambrosia, why is the shop closed? Where’s your father?”

“I don’t know,” said Ambrosia blankly. “He went this morning to see my uncle and then they both came back here, shut the shop, and sent Wat and Phoebe away. Then they went out again, together. I don’t know what’s happening or what’s going on. There was a bit of a scene with Wat and Phoebe. Phoebe thought she’d done something wrong and she’s afraid of her own father; she said if she lost her job and was sent home,
he’d just kick her out again. She started crying and then Father was angry and shouted at her to stop and raised his hand, and Wat stepped in and told him to leave her alone and, yes, what
had
she done, or what had Wat himself done, come to that….”

“And then … ?”

“Father calmed down and said that neither of them had done anything wrong but he just wanted to close the shop for a while, and he paid them off. He paid them a month’s wages each!” said Ambrosia.

I shared her amazement. It sounded most unlike the provident Master Jester.

“And now … ?” I said, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“Now I don’t know what to think or what to do!” Ambrosia put her face in her hands and once more began to cry, in a deep, unhappy way that worried me because it sounded as though it were coming from something more intense than a closed pie shop and a father who had gone out one morning in the company of his brother, and had as yet been away for no more than a few hours, all of them in broad daylight.

I considered her thoughtfully. “Have you had any dinner?” I asked.

“Yes. Some stewed lamb that should have gone into pies for this evening, and some bread.”

“Good. Now,” I said briskly and, I hoped, with an air of authority, “I think you should rest. Try to sleep. I’ll go and tidy up so that all’s in good order when your father comes back.”

“All right,” said Ambrosia with a sigh. She rolled over, drew up her knees, and closed her eyes, and I
went out quietly, shutting the door after me. I went down the stairs and along the passage as far as the awkward corner by the jutting-out cupboard, letting my feet clatter a little, but then I stopped, took off my shoes, and holding them in my hand, I crept back again, stole up the stairs and past the bedchamber door, and went on up the spiral staircase to the attic floor.

Making straight for the settle in Jester’s office, I lifted up the seat. The drawings were still there. I took out the set of small sheets that bore the curious array of semifinished sketches.

They had been nagging at my mind ever since I first saw them. Somehow, in some way, they had reminded me of something …

I stared again at the first one, in which a man or youth was giving an apple to a horse and once more noted that the apple, the dappled coat of the horse, and the church in the background were vastly more detailed than anything else in the drawing. I turned to the second, which was one of the sheets with more than one drawing on it. At the top was a sketch of a woman reading by a window. A humble bee was buzzing on the pane.

The woman was a mere outline but the book and the bee were painstakingly shown. One could even see the furriness of the bee’s fat body. There was no such patchiness, however, in the picture beneath, which was a lively depiction of a battle, with visored knights and warhorses and foot soldiers, all flourishing weapons, and all very clearly drawn. I looked at that for some time, wondering.

The third sheet also had two pictures on it: a rather
good rendering of a stormy sea, and beneath that, a cat lapping from a saucer. Here, too, everything was properly drawn. But on the fourth page, which showed a room with a rising or setting sun visible through a window, the only really finished items were the sun, which had striking rays and was half visible above the horizon, and the door on the other side of the room.

I flipped on through the set, looking at sheet after sheet. Some had quite a number of little drawings on them. One was dotted all over with small sketches: a schoolmaster looking with pop-eyed disapproval at a pupil who had dropped blots all over his work; the sea with an island in the distance; a wall covered in creeper; people skating on a frozen river.

I noticed that Jester must have spent a very long time indeed over the triangular leaves of the ivy on the wall, on the wide, indignant eyes of the schoolmaster, and the gleam of the blots, but other details were scarcely roughed in. The picture of the island was properly finished, but the feet of the skaters and the furrows their skates left in the ice were much better drawn than the people themselves.

A couple of pages further on I came to the sheet that showed a girl in a carefully depicted kitchen, with, below her, a girl walking in a formal knot garden. The girls did look as though he had used Phoebe and Ambrosia as models, but all the same, he had lavished far more love and care on the kitchen hearth and the pots and pans, and the plants and flowers in the garden.

The following page showed two very elegant ladies, one of them playing a lute. Ladies and lute were all
carefully drawn. On the next page, for some incomprehensible reason, was a picture of a woman milking a cow under a crescent moon. The moon was strongly outlined and so was the stream of milk as it plunged into the pail. The cow and the woman were merely silhouettes.

This one had a second picture below it: people dancing in a great hall, with a band of musicians in a minstrels’ gallery above. The musicians and their instruments were very thoroughly delineated but though the dancers had clearly drawn smiling faces, their bodies were vague.

Further on came another page that I remembered: people dining, one helping himself to salt from an elaborately detailed saltcellar, and in a separate scene below, a woman buying cloth. The highlights on that cloth really were clever draftsmanship. I noticed that the coins the woman was handing to the vendor were disproportionately large.

I moved to and fro through the set. There was a royal hunting scene, although the huntsmen and the hounds were casually outlined. Clearly drawn, however, and right in the foreground, was a queen, possibly Elizabeth although the resemblance wasn’t striking. She had a detailed crown on her head, however, and she carried a longbow and a quiver. The quiver, with its protruding arrows, had been shown in most loving detail, even to the flight feathers on the shafts.

I went back to the top page. Apple. Dapples. A small church or chapel. Apple. Dapple. Chapel. The nagging idea in the depths of my mind, which had brought me back to look once more at these pictures, began to take
a definite shape. It seemed far-fetched and yet … I turned again to the second sheet. This emphasized a book and a bee and below that, a battle. The third, a sea and a cat. The fourth … that was the room with the door on one side and a rising or setting sun beyond a window. In my chest, my heart began to thump like a pounding fist. Rapidly, I counted the sheets.

There were twenty-six of them.

Twenty-six sheets. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Was this—could it
possibly
be?—an aide-mémoire to a cipher? A rather extraordinary cipher, in which the letters of the alphabet were represented by
words
, usually nouns, but not by the same one every time!

A
is for
apple
—it had said that in the hornbook from which I took my first reading lessons.
Dapple
and
chapel
rhymed with
apple
. It would make them easier to remember, perhaps.
B
is for
book
… or if you say it aloud, what does it sound like?
Bee!
And the third sheet …
C
is for
cat
. Or, if you say it aloud,
sea
. In the fourth … a door and a sunrise … sunrise! … no, daybreak, dawn!