Queen Without a Crown (27 page)

I had had this maddening experience before. It was as though, deep in my brain, was vital knowledge which would not surface into the light. The feeling seemed to stem from the conversation I had had with Sterry, but as yet I could go no further than that. I could only press on along the road that lay clear before me.

‘We have to get to the bottom of this now,’ I said to Hugh. ‘If only we can once find out the truth! I don’t want to leave you again, but . . .’

‘I’m reasonably well at the moment,’ Hugh said. ‘Just tired at times, and my joints will always be too stiff for riding in future, I think. I wish I could come with you, but my coach is at Hawkswood, and even if I had it here, the roads may well be too boggy for it. But Abingdon isn’t far, as you said yesterday, and if there’s a chance of solving Mark’s mystery . . .’

‘I know.’

It was a winter afternoon, already grey and shadowy, already candlelit. It was too late now to set out for Abingdon, which must wait until tomorrow. Hugh and I were alone together. I studied his face. He did seem better than he had when I left for the north, but there was something else to disturb me. He looked so unhappy. For the first time, ever, I saw the shine of moisture in his eyes.

‘I am prepared to send you from me again,’ he said, ‘because there is a chance, just a chance, that you might yet save Hawkswood for us. Oh yes, for you and for Meg as well as for me. It’s part of the inheritance that I’ll leave behind me – I hope. I am not a sentimental man normally, Ursula, but Hawkswood is part of me. I’ve known it from childhood. I know every cranny, every stone. I’ve seen trees grow from saplings into a tall chestnuts and beeches; I’ve coaxed and nurtured the rose garden and brought in cartloads of clay because roses like clay . . .’

‘And Hawkswood’s soil is chalk,’ I said. ‘Yes. I even helped to spread the clay soil once or twice.’

‘Every room in the house has its memories,’ Hugh said. ‘Boyhood studies, my father teaching me how to play chess, family Christmases, wedding parties, funeral gatherings, the gallery where two of my father’s female cousins – who didn’t like each other – were unbelievably rude about each other’s taste in dress and one of them stormed out of the house in a temper; the hall where a dog belonging to a very influential guest was chased in at one door and out of another by our enormous, bad-tempered old tomcat . . . it took half an hour and about a gallon of our best canary wine to restore our lordly visitor’s temper . . . so many moments, so many. The thought of losing it horrifies me. That’s why I’m willing to let you go away again – in fact, am virtually sending you. I wouldn’t, otherwise. But don’t run into danger this time, Ursula,
please
! I suppose we’re all free to leave Windsor now, but I can’t travel anyway until my coach is brought from home. Meg and I will wait here for you.’

This was wise, in any case, for Windsor was closer to Abingdon than either of our homes were. Abingdon was on the Thames, upstream, thirty miles or so in a straight line, but further if one used the river. I had decided to do so, for I wanted Dale with me as well as Brockley. Dale hated horseback travel so.

Though horseback travel remained a possibility.

‘If Susannah has been in Abingdon but moved on,’ I told Dale, ‘and we have to go after her on land, we’ll hire horses there and you’ll have to make the best of it. If it comes to it, please don’t tell me that you can’t abide riding in the cold, unless you want me to put you on the first barge going back to Windsor.’

Brockley hired a barge for us. He did more. He also went to see Sir William Cecil and begged the loan of John Ryder as an extra companion. ‘In case we have trouble with Susannah,’ he said. ‘The more impressive we look, the better. Sir William says, madam, that we can have Ryder for a week, but please will we bring him back in one piece, since the last time he lent us a man, we didn’t manage to bring him back at all.’ For a moment, his mouth twisted with remembered grief.

Sir William Cecil did at times have a dark sense of humour.

The barge that Brockley found had a covered cabin, which gave us shelter from the weather. The day after we had talked to Arbuckle, we set out, upstream.

Abingdon was a small place, but when we first arrived, we were at a loss. Where did we begin to look for a widow called Susannah Lamb who had lived here long ago, gone away and possibly – only possibly – returned five or six years back?

‘We could be on completely the wrong path,’ I said glumly. ‘We don’t
know
that she came back here.’

‘Try the church,’ said Brockley, pointing towards a slender spire. ‘We could start with the vicar, the way we did in Kendal. If Susannah is here, she could be one of his flock.’

The vicar of St Helen’s, as the church was called, wasn’t immediately available. We began by going to the church itself, where we found the sexton scything the grass between the graves. He told us that the Reverend Bell was conducting a wedding at that very moment, would be going on to the feast and would stay to bless the bridal bed in the evening. We took rooms at an inn and tried again the following morning.

This was not immediately successful either, for the vicar turned out to have a dragon-like housekeeper, who said that her employer couldn’t receive us until noon. ‘He was late to bed last night,’ she explained, in disapproving tones.

When we did eventually come face to face with him, the Reverend Arthur Bell proved to be a round little man with a bald crown, tufts of ginger hair sprouting above his ears and a face which was probably pink as a rule, but just now was unwontedly pale.

‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,’ he said, peering at us as though his eyes found the light painful. ‘I was at a feast yesterday, and I am not accustomed to drinking wine . . . Even a little has such an effect . . .’

The good vicar, in fact, had a wine-headache. Avoiding details, I explained that Susannah might have useful testimony which could help to solve a crime.

Bell shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m temporary here. The usual vicar has had to go away for a while – the death of a relative – and I am on loan from another parish. My curate is looking after my own church for three weeks. I know little of the parishioners here. However –’ he brightened – ‘Mistress Freeman, the housekeeper, may know. She goes with the vicarage, so to speak.’

The dragon-like housekeeper, when summoned, recognized the name of Susannah Lamb at once. And stiffened.

‘Oh yes. I know of
her.
She came back from Windsor – a bit over five years ago I think it was – to live with her kinfolk. Not parents – they were dead and gone – but she had a brother here, Master Hayward. He was a lot younger than she was, and he’d wed late, I think. He had a wife and some children not yet grown, and Susannah more or less pushed herself into their house.

‘But not for long,’ said Mistress Freeman with satisfaction. ‘They couldn’t put up with her, and that’s a fact. I knew the wife quite well; she often brought flowers for the church here. Kate, she was called. She said Susannah was loud-mouthed, spiteful and kept on clouting the children. Well, Kate’s gone too now; died in childbed, like so many women. I’ve never married, myself, and I’m glad of it. Kate Hayward wasn’t a bitter woman as a rule, but on the subject of Mistress Lamb, well! In the end, the brother found a post for Susannah, as a cook-housekeeper somewhere in Nettlebury.’

‘Nettlebury?’ Brockley enquired.

‘It’s a village a few miles away,’ said Bell. ‘Not far. To the north – a mile or so off the main track to Oxford. I can give you full directions. You might find her there, I suppose.’

‘We’d better talk to the brother,’ I said. ‘And ask him the name of her employers. I suppose he’d know.’

‘Oh, he’s left Abingdon,’ Mistress Freeman said. ‘When Kate died and left him with a brood of children to look after, he went to live with some cousins who had children too, or so I heard, roundabout. I don’t know where. Oxford, was it? He was a tailor by trade; that’s work a man can do anywhere.’ She noticed my disappointed expression. ‘I am sorry I can’t tell you more, but I don’t pay much attention to gossip,’ she told me primly and, I suspected, inaccurately.

Brockley said: ‘What’s the best stable for hiring horses?’

‘Quiet ones,’ said Dale.

‘At reasonable prices,’ added John Ryder.

We were on our way to Nettlebury that same afternoon, having acquired a nice little skewbald mare and a side-saddle for me, while Ryder had a brown cob and Brockley a well-built chestnut gelding with a pillion for Dale, who much preferred this arrangement, since it meant that she didn’t have to control the horse herself.

Like the journey from Carlisle to Tyesdale, it was a silent ride, although the reasons were different. I was thinking. The feeling that there was something I ought to remember, something relevant, still gnawed at me. Sooner or later it would reveal itself, and I knew that it would probably do so when I was thinking of something else. The problem was to make myself think of something else, when all the time my mind niggled at the puzzle just as one’s tongue niggles at a broken tooth.

The track was muddy but no worse than that, and though the skies were overcast, it didn’t actually rain. We covered the seven or eight miles to Nettlebury by dinner time. In the village, a pleasant community of grey stone cottages, we found an inn and a small church. ‘I think we’ll have to try the parish vicar again,’ I said. ‘I hope it’s the real one this time.’

Ryder suggested that we first of all went to the inn for some dinner. ‘If the place is decent, we can arrange to spend the night here. We might be wise to stay overnight. The dark still falls early.’

‘Most of the houses seem to be just small cottages,’ I said. ‘There are only a few that would need a household of servants. If the vicar can’t help, we could call at all the likely ones, one at a time.’

‘We could ask the innkeeper, too,’ Dale offered. ‘Likely enough he knows most of the people hereabouts.’

Master Medland, the landlord of the Unicorn, was a heavily built fellow with a face which was as near to a genuine rectangle as a human face can be: square of chin, straight of hairline, flat of cheekbone. Small broken veins in his nose and the whites of his stone-coloured eyes suggested that he made free with his own wares. He was, however, a competent man, able to provide rooms, dinner and information with equal ease. Dale had been right.

‘Susannah Lamb?’ he said, when we enquired. ‘Oh,
her
!’ He snorted. He sounded remarkably like Mistress Freeman.

‘You recognize the name, then,’ I said. ‘Was something wrong with her? Who was it she worked for?’

‘Me,’ said Master Medland. ‘And bloody nearly wrecked my reputation, she did. Folk stopping here kept missing this and that, and I couldn’t find out who was doing it, at first. I was damn near accused of stealing, myself! It could have ended my good name and my trade or worse! And I was doing well. I can do without light-fingered Susannah Lamb driving my customers away.’

‘What happened to her?’ asked Brockley.

‘She’s bloody gone, that’s what! She was here nigh on a year, and then I caught her thieving from my wife’s purse and after that it was plain enough to me where folks’ knick-knacks were going to!’

The women in the Windsor kitchens who said there had been whispers that Mistress Lamb was dishonest had probably been right. ‘Where is she now?’ I asked.

Medland snorted again. ‘She should have been hanged. She would have been, except that I locked her in an empty room upstairs and left her there while I went for the constable. I couldn’t find him – the fellow we had as constable that year was a lazy bugger and didn’t want to be found oftener than he could help, if you ask me. I came home again, knowing I’d customers to see to and my wife would need to go marketing. All this happened early in the morning, before the day got going. When I got back I found that our dear Susannah had used a bench that was in the room to smash her way out of it and she’d gone and all her things with her. There was no one here capable of stopping her. She was a big hefty lump with a short temper and a bigger fist than mine is.

‘The maidservants were scared of her, and the tapster lives out and wasn’t on duty yet. I let her go. We never put out a hue and cry. I’m a bit funny that way. I didn’t mind locking her up and going for the constable, but I never like the notion of hunting a fellow creature like a stag, not unless it’s murder or something of that sort. She was gone, and good riddance. If you want to talk to her, you’re about four years too late.’

‘But where did she go?’ asked Brockley. ‘Have you no idea?’

‘My wife reckoned she’d go to her brother in Oxford.’

‘Master Hayward?’ I asked, and he nodded.

‘That ’ud be right, yes. He came here to see her a couple of times. He was a widower, but he got married again, and I recall he brought his new wife here so as Susannah could meet her. I did hear Susannah had been seen in Abingdon haggling with a boatman, the same day that she ran off from here, so likely enough she took a hired boat upstream to Oxford. As I said, I didn’t bother about her any more. She’s no loss. Nothing worse than a light-fingered servant; not in my line of business, anyhow.’

Light-fingered.
The word brought Jonathan Bowman to my mind. I could see him, sitting by his hearth, embroidering gloves while he talked to us. I remembered thinking that the back of the hand that held the needle must be uncomfortably near the fire. I remembered his complaints about his maidservants.
Lazy, Saucy, Lightfingers, that’s what I called them.

The women who worked with her had said that Susannah had probably lost her previous post through dishonesty . . .

And it was then that the fugitive idea that had been hiding in the depths of my mind suddenly chose to surface.

We would need dinner, and by the time we had eaten it, the short hours of daylight would be already passing. I hired rooms for us all at the Unicorn, and over our meal I said: ‘I have remembered something. It’s to do with left-handedness . . .’

We spent the night at the inn and set out for Oxford the next morning, early, reaching it well before noon.