Queen of Ambition (30 page)

I caught up the sheet for
U
. “We couldn’t make out what the crying child meant. Could that be a reminder for the word
unkind
?”

“It might be. So we’ve got PROMITTO ERIS …”

“What comes next?” I said eagerly.

“It goes on about Richmond being a beautiful palace.” Sybil went on reading aloud. “‘
I woke at an early time
’—time!—‘
this morning and looked out on to a faery dawn. Of a verity that is what it was, with just a trace of silvery fog drifting over the Thames’ … time, faery
—that’s
F
—!”

“A pretty picture of an ethereal female being with wings,” I agreed, picking up the page of drawings in question.

“And
dawn, verity, silvery
—both
silvery
and
silver
can
be used for
S
—and
fog
, that can stand for
F
, too … TFDVSF. Go back one …”

“
S, E, C, U, R, E!
” I almost shouted. “
Secure
—safe!
I promise you will be safe!
The word for
safe
is almost the same in Latin as it is in English. I think …” I wrestled with a part of Latin that was slightly hazy in my mind “ … I think he’s used the adverb—maybe it ought to be
securus
—but the meaning’s clear enough.”

“The adverb was shorter, I expect,” Sybil said. “It’s not easy, writing letters in this fashion.”

I stared at the list we had made of the code words and laughed. “To get the letter
U
, they’d need the letter
V
. The words for that are quite difficult to drag in!
Verity, veil, vinegar, vanity
… I daresay neither of them would worry too much about grammar as long as the meaning was clear!”

“I’m going to fetch Dudley,” said Cecil. “Meanwhile, continue!”

He was some time in bringing Dudley. No doubt it was difficult to detach him smoothly from the Fellows. By the time the two of them came back, we had made progress. Dudley and Cecil joined us at the writing desk, a contrasting pair, Cecil drawn with the pain of his gout, Dudley athletic and splendid, dressed as so often in the favorite crimson that set off his dark complexion.

He greeted me with a nod, as someone he knew well, which clearly impressed Sybil, who at the sight of him had instantly got up and dropped a curtsy, and then actually blushed when this magnificent being put out a hand and graciously raised her. Then we looked at the message that Sybil and I had decoded into Latin
and that I had then translated into English, and although his brown face did not stir a muscle, I began to feel sorry for the magnificent being.

I promise you will be safe. Consider! If Dudley dies, he cannot marry Mary. My grateful lady will love me again and I will give your wife to you.

“I understand what this is,” Dudley said, speaking to me. “I am fully informed, Mistress Blanchard. Cecil dictated a letter to me and sent it to my lodgings this afternoon—and described the latest developments while he was bringing me up to this writing room. A disturbing account, I must say! You have had a terrifying brush with death and it seems,” he added dryly, “that the same could be said of me. We all believed that the playlet concealed a threat against the person of the queen. But it looks as though the target is myself!”

“It would appear so,” Cecil agreed. “It certainly sounds like it. Woodforde’s aim, I fancy, is to please Lady Lennox and your demise would probably please her very much. She is afraid you’ll go to Scotland, marry Mary Stuart, and destroy her son Henry Darnley’s chances of marrying her instead.”

“If she’d simply asked me,” said Dudley, “I would happily have sworn on a pile of Bibles that I have no intention of doing any such thing! As the queen herself well knows. Though the suggestion was serious when she made it. You have never believed that, but I can assure you that it was so. I have been much afraid that she would actually order me to Scotland and in that case I would have had to go. I’ve been in the Tower once in my life and that was enough! As matters turned out, by the time she understood that I didn’t wish to go—and that Mary didn’t wish to receive me, either—she was relieved. But at the start—oh yes, she
meant it. At that time, she was willing to sacrifice me in order to cut young Henry Darnley out. I mean much to her—though not as much as some people think.”

I glanced at him curiously. I did not like Dudley for I knew him to be ambitious and ruthless with an icy core to his heart. Yet I also knew that I must not condemn him too much, at least not for the latter, for Elizabeth had that same core of ice within her and I understood it because to some extent I shared it. I could not have worked as an agent without it. Rob knew. He had commented on it during our journey to Cambridge, when he talked of the affinity between me and the wild geese. Now as I covertly studied Dudley, I found that I really was sorry for him. In his way, I think he did love Elizabeth and still harbored hopes of winning her, though I had reasons for believing that he wouldn’t succeed.

“She is changing her opinion on the matter of Darnley,” Cecil said. “So am I. Before I left Richmond, we discussed him at some length. I have learned recently that although Darnley is officially a Catholic, like his mother, he has Protestant leanings. The queen and I are now wondering if we might do better with him as king consort in Scotland than with some Catholic prince or other—and that would be Mary’s likely alternative choice. I didn’t, of course, say this to her, but I feel that the Darnley marriage could have one great advantage. It might produce an heir with the right credentials! A legitimate child, descended twice over from Henry VII, would certainly be that and such a child would have to grow up
before it could be a rival. By then, I trust, Elizabeth would be too secure to fear it. I’m beginning to despair of Elizabeth herself ever providing us with an heir. I believe I said something of the kind to you, Ursula, before you left for Cambridge. Since discussing it with the queen, I have come to feel it more strongly.”

“Yes,” I said. “But surely …”

“But surely all this is by the way,” said Dudley abruptly. “However little Lady Lennox has to fear from me,
she
doesn’t know it, nor, apparently, does this lunatic Woodforde. I wonder, Cecil, if your men have been able to lay their hands on the brothers, or not?” He paused, his head on one side. “I can hear booted feet on the stairs. I think we are about to find out.”

The tap on the door came almost at once. Cecil called: “Enter!” and Rob Henderson came in, accompanied by John Ryder and Dick Dodd. Cecil looked at them with raised brows.

“Too late,” Rob said in exasperated tones. He looked both weary and hot, and no doubt was still suffering from the weakening aftereffects of his fever. “If you left them in the garden at the side of the house, Ursula, they’re not there now. We took four extra men and put them round the house and then, with Ryder and Dodd here, I went in through the private door. It was locked and we had to break in. We went right through the house and the garden as well. We found the secret room and the way out through the cupboard and the tower. What we didn’t find was any sign of human life. They could have got away either by river or by road.”

“My husband kept a boat on the river,” Sybil said. “They may have used that.”

“Maybe. We sent two men galloping toward Lynn and two toward Norwich, straightaway, and now others have gone after them to help if need be, and to follow the course of the river. We’re doing all we can,” Rob said, somewhat defensively.

I said: “They meant to kill us, you know. At least, Woodforde did.” It was evening now, but still warm. Nevertheless, the gooseflesh came up on my arms. “We’ve had a narrow escape.”

“I trust that they won’t have an escape at all,” said Cecil ominously. “I hope they are overtaken very soon, Master Henderson.”

I took a grip on myself, and said: “Should we decode the rest of these letters? In case there is something more?”

By ten o’clock that night, Sybil and I had finished decoding all the material we had. By the end, we had mastered virtually all of the code words including the additions since the days when Sybil was at home. We worked out that the mysterious sleeping man on the page for
J
meant
jaded
—or
jade
. The Latin was very simple, dog Latin, in fact, with the words more or less in English order. Since Woodforde actually taught the language, he had probably done that to make things easier for the less accomplished Jester. There were a few grammatical errors. There were several of these in the letters written by Jester, but some occurred even in Woodforde’s, usually, we thought, for the
sake of brevity. It didn’t matter. We could always arrive at the gist.

Jester had written twice to his brother while Woodforde was at Richmond, stating that he was afraid, but not specifying why, although he did complain that Thomas Shawe was courting Ambrosia and that this might lead to trouble, its nature again unspecified. In Woodforde’s second letter back, he had again told his brother not to fear for his safety, but recommended him to put a stop to Thomas’s wooing.

That was all, but with what we had already, it was enough. Once Jester and Woodforde were caught and brought back, a very little questioning should get results. “Woodforde keeps telling his brother that he will be safe—from what?” Cecil said. “Then he exhorts Jester to consider: if Dudley should die, then he can’t—obviously!—marry Mary and that must mean Mary of Scotland. In that case, Woodforde’s lady will love him again. That can only mean Lady Lennox. Judging from what you witnessed and what Brockley has reported, he’s obsessed with her and she certainly doesn’t want Dudley to marry Mary Stuart. He ends one letter by saying that he will give Jester’s wife to him. Both Lady Lennox’s love and the return of Jester’s wife to Jester appear to be conditions following the death of Dudley. That’s the heart of the plot. We’ll get the rest when we bring them in, and bring them in we will, and that before long, I trust.”

He contemplated the letters in silence for a further moment and then added: “Sir Robert, it was Woodforde, was it not, who invited you to be the queen’s champion in that tiresome playlet—and, therefore,
arranged for you to step forward, out to the front of the queen’s dais, to act out your duel?”

“I was provided, in writing, with a list of moves,” said Dudley. “A very precise list. I imagine its purpose was to position me as a convenient target. Well, well.”

“There have been reports from an agent in Scotland that Mary has been in touch with Lady Lennox,” Cecil observed. “We haven’t managed to trace the couriers or intercept any letters, but I daresay that the subject was the good looks and excellent education of Henry Darnley. Margaret Lennox may well see you as a threat, yes.” Cecil looked Dudley up and down in a most remarkable way, one man assessing the stallion potential of another. “The interesting point that we still have to deal with is whether all this springs only from an aberration in the mind of Woodforde, or whether Lady Lennox employed him to murder you.”

Sybil Jester had hardly been listening. Her mind was taking another path. “Wherever my husband and brother-in-law are,” she said in distress, “Ambrosia must be with them. When you fetch them in, what of my daughter?”

“From what Ursula says, she knows little if anything of the plot,” Cecil said. “I think you need not fear too much for your girl, Mistress Jester.”

We were all tired. Rob had been dismissed to rest, some time ago. Dale was dozing on her stool. I had tried to bear up, but that afternoon I had not been far from death at Woodforde’s hands and it had drained me. Now I felt exhausted, and Sybil’s white face and shadowed eyes revealed a weariness nearly as great as my own. “I do believe,” she said, “that all this goes
back to my father and his terrible fear of being arrested for heresy. You have no idea how
fast
those houses in Jackman’s Lane were built!”

“How do you mean?” Dudley asked her. Cecil’s explanations had evidently not covered this. Sybil explained how the secret escape route had been provided because of her father’s dread that one day he might need it to escape Queen Mary’s commissioners.

“In 1556, only months after we moved to Jackman’s Lane,” she said, “the place actually was searched, by a party of royal commissioners—some of them from London and some from the university. Nothing was found to incriminate any of us though Father had an English Bible and various Protestant works in his possession. He told me afterward that he had hidden them. In the secret room, I imagine, though I didn’t know that then. The searchers didn’t find it, anyway, though they went through every cranny they could see. I remember how we all stayed in the parlor while they did it. Father was very brave when it came to the point. He told us we had nothing to fear and must not hinder the officials in their work. My mother was some years dead by then. My husband, Roland, was downstairs, serving customers. Father sat reading a book of verse and Ambrosia and I sat with him and I taught her a new embroidery stitch … but I remember seeing my father’s hands tremble as he held his book. It seemed forever until the men apologized for troubling us and went away.”

We were silent. Sybil’s eyes were remote as she gazed back into the past. “But when the commissioners had gone,” she said, “Father broke down. He cried.
I didn’t know what to do. He was my father, you see; someone I’d always trusted to stand between us and danger, someone invincible. But he cried and I put my arms round him as though I were his mother and he were my child. He told me that if he was ever taken up for heresy and threatened with burning, he thought he would lose his mind with terror, and that if it ever happened, he would have to rely on us to get in to see him, and smuggle a knife to him so that he could end his life himself. If not, he said he would beat out his brains against the wall. No wonder there were secret hiding places in the house! Yet—if it hadn’t had that secret way out … then perhaps none of this would have happened.”

“Why do you say that?” Dudley asked her.