Queen Without a Crown (31 page)

The story goes that the philosopher Socrates was executed with hemlock and died a gentle death. I doubt it, somehow. We lit more candles, so that we could see what we were doing, and tried to help him, but he thrust us away, refusing the warm salt water and even knocking away the basins we brought for the sickness and the dreadful liquid motions.

Ryder rushed out in search of a physician and brought one back eventually, but it was far too late by then for any treatment to work, even if the doctor had been able to recommend one.

Before he sank into his last coma, Bowman talked a little more, though jerkily, between gasps.

‘Always knew, one day, someone would find out. I think that manservant, Edwards, had his suspicions, but I dealt with him. Watched out for him in the Antelope inn with something ready in my pouch and spiked his drink for him. That settled him. But then you started – sent your man, Roger Brockley here – to ask questions. Soon as I saw you bringing . . . Susannah Lamb . . . that very moment . . . knew the day was here. But I’d made my plans. Grew the hemlock, had it handy, mixed with cinnamon. I’m good with potions. I sell a lot, quietly – drops to brighten a girl’s eyes, like I told you, tinctures to ease pain and give sleep, ointments for chapped hands. I make wine, too, and sell that now and again. It all helps. Keeps me solvent!’

‘You work with Catherine Mildmay?’ I said.

‘She sends me customers. We keep it quiet. Catherine gets asked . . . often . . . she’s respectable, scared for her good name . . . but she don’t mind passing ’em on to me. Girls wanting love philtres . . . then things to get rid of the results of love. Started working with Catherine after I buried Judith. I still lived in the town then but . . . I had . . . a garden. I tell my customers I can curse ’em if they talk out of turn.’ He even laughed, then, until another burst of vomiting came.

An hour after that, he died.

Go Hunting No More

T
he physician didn’t come until Bowman was unconscious and did not hear any of his last words. Nor did we repeat them to him. We told him, indeed, nothing of our purpose in visiting Bowman; only that we had chanced to call on him and found him very ill. At the inquest two days later, another physician testified that Bowman had had a disease, a growth in his abdomen, which must soon have killed him. The verdict was that because of this he had killed himself. With that, it was over.

Brockley found an inn for Susannah Lamb and a passage on a barge returning to Oxford the next day. Meanwhile, I had quietly folded the confession away in my hidden pouch. Hugh and I would obtain the other statements from Madge and Arbuckle and get them sworn. We would see that everything was sent to Mark, with a letter explaining how it was obtained and a plea that the matter should end there, without involving Susannah any further. Bowman, the prime mover in the crime, was dead, after all. Susannah, by comparison, was nothing.

I would also write separately to Pen in Tyesdale and to Ann and George Mason in Lockhill and tell them what we had learned, though without mentioning Susannah’s name. I had done my best and could only hope that it would be enough.

‘
Why
didn’t we see from the start that Bowman was a likely candidate?’ I said to Hugh. ‘Looking back now, it seems so obvious.’

‘I think I did see,’ Hugh said. ‘From the first moment I set eyes on him, I disliked him. I even noticed that parrot nose of his and remembered you telling me what Madge had said – that the man she saw had a beaky nose. Only, I saw him look at you, and he did that straight away, whether you realized it or not, and I thought my suspicions were just my jealousy. Though even then . . . I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but I think something else was at work in me when I made Brockley burn the gift. Gloves can be soaked in poison, you know.’

‘You really feared . . .?’

‘Not openly. I told myself it was simple jealousy. I know that I don’t think as clearly as I used to do, Ursula. I imperilled Hawkswood through muddled thinking, and we still don’t know for sure whether Mark will pay. The statements have only just gone off to him.’

‘I wonder how long it will be before they reach him?’ I said restlessly.

But as far as that was concerned, we need not have worried. We sent our package with a royal courier who was travelling north and would be able to change horses frequently. He made excellent time. He found Mark in Carlisle, just back from an unproductive sortie over the Scottish border, where the fugitive insurgents had hidden themselves very successfully. This was annoying, Cecil said, but at least Anne of Northumberland and her adherents were now among them, fugitives instead of active conspirators. My brief and eventful stay at Ramsfold had, it seemed, most effectively ruined Lady Northumberland’s scheming. She had had to flee from English soil, and the latest news was that her remaining supporters in the north of England had lost heart and nerve and were unlikely to regain them. Elizabeth was pleased with me.

For my part, I was pleased with Mark, whose response was immediate. In the letter that he sent back with the courier, he said he would be riding to Tyesdale at the earliest possible moment, but whatever the outcome, Hugh and I had done all that he could possibly ask of us – and here, with his love and gratitude, was the purse we had more than earned. The letter went on to say that he had successfully concluded the sale of his Devonshire property and was happy to tell us that he had done better out of it than he expected.

We counted the contents. Mark had actually paid more than he had promised. ‘Hugh!’ I said. ‘Hawkswood is safe! It’s safe!’

‘Yes, it’s safe. Thank God. And thank
you
, Ursula. Thank
you
!’

I looked at him. He was smiling, and I swear that even as I scanned his face, in that moment, the lines of pain and illness softened and grew fainter. The shadows in the sockets of his eyes lightened. Between one moment and the next, he had shed years.

‘Shall we go back to Hawkswood soon?’ I asked.

‘As fast as we can. Meg said to me yesterday that she wanted to go home. We’ve never told her in so many words that Hawkswood was in danger, but she can hardly be unaware that we’ve been anxious and that Mark’s commission was important. She may have overheard things, too. I might tell her the story, now that it’s all over, and I really think she’ll be glad to leave the court. Ursula, about Meg . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘We know now that Hawkswood will remain ours, so I don’t think we need fear that young Hillman will change his mind about us, not that I ever really thought he would. If he and Meg get on well, next time they meet, should we get her married at sixteen and not send her to court as a maid of honour? We spoke of this once before, but I feel perhaps it’s time we actually made a decision.’

‘I think it would be an excellent idea,’ I said. ‘I suggest we invite young Hillman to stay as soon as possible.’

‘I’d like to take her father’s part at her wedding, I must say. She’ll go away to Buckinghamshire, of course, but we can visit her. Even I could get there by coach in good weather, and later on, let us hope there will be grandchildren for you. I know that life isn’t so very exciting at Hawkswood – or Withysham – but it could be very pleasant.’

‘Exciting? I’ve had excitement enough for several lifetimes. What made you say that, Hugh?’

‘Even now,’ he said, ‘after all your reassurances, I still sometimes think to myself – what about Matthew de la Roche, in France?’

‘No! No, Hugh. I have told you before. I meant it then, and I mean it now. I shall remain dead to Matthew. He has a new wife, and a child, and besides . . .’

‘Yes? And besides?’

‘I have said this before, as well. I don’t want to turn time back, and I don’t want to live in France with one of Elizabeth’s most implacable enemies. I want England. I want you.’

‘I’m glad to know it. I’m so much older than you . . . You know, if anything should happen to me, I would like to think of you marrying again, and the best kind of husband for you would be someone like . . . Well, like Brockley. He’s a good man, a good pattern, as it were. In fact, if he’d been free, I sometimes wonder if you wouldn’t have preferred him to me.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t think of Brockley like that. It’s true that we’re friends. But – it is only friendship.’

I spoke the truth and spoke it with certainty. Once, long ago, it had very nearly been more than friendship, but the moment had passed and, in the end, so had the desire. To be replaced . . .

To be replaced by that extraordinary, crazy and hilarious psychic union in the hall of Ramsfold House, which still echoed in my mind. Brockley and I would remain friends, close friends, until one of us died; I knew that now. We would never be less. Nor would we ever be more.

It is a rare situation between a woman and a man, but it can happen. Elizabeth was capable of it. I believe she had such links with both Robert Dudley of Leicester and Sir William Cecil. Even her father (and mine), the terrifying Henry the Eighth, who had two wives executed, possessed some of it, for in my days at court, I had been told that he had always remained on friendly, brother and sister, terms with Anne of Cleves after their marriage was annulled. He was better as a brother than a lover.

Mary Stuart, the Queen of the Scots, though, never achieved it. She used her sex too much and her mind not enough, and perhaps that was why she ended her days without a crown and, eventually, without even a head on which to put one.

Much of this – even, I think, some faint premonition of Mary’s ultimate fate – flickered through my head as we sat there. ‘Even if . . . I found myself once more without a husband, I would have no wish to marry again,’ I said. ‘Three times should be enough for anyone! I don’t want to imitate my father.’

That made him laugh. ‘I want to go home,’ he said. ‘Now. Immediately! Perhaps Brockley could go to Hawkswood and ask for my coach to be sent. Then we can start out at once.’

‘So – Jane and Mark are married. I wish I could have been there,’ I said, folding up the letter from Mark, which Brockley had brought to me. ‘Pen and Clem didn’t take too long to arrange it.’

‘I fancy they’re relieved to hear that Mark’s family have been cleared, madam,’ Brockley said. ‘That wench Jane has an air of being good and biddable, but in my opinion she has a backbone of good strong steel. I remember how she said that if she couldn’t marry Mark, she wouldn’t marry anyone. Perhaps they were afraid she meant it and would stay at Tyesdale for ever, the spinster relative.’

‘I can imagine,’ Hugh said, from where he was engaged in tying up a rose stem which had been threatening to topple over on to the sundial which was the centrepiece of the rose garden at Hawkswood. ‘And all the neighbours would be clacking their tongues and saying that they’d probably spent Jane’s dowry and were keeping her at home as an unpaid servant.’

It was early May, a soft day, cloudy but warm, and we were spending the afternoon in the garden at Hugh’s much loved Hawkswood, now safely his for as long as he lived. I was able to watch him as he moved among his roses, examining this one and that, tut-tutting over greenfly, exclaiming in pleasure over a new plant which had taken well and was already developing its first buds, grumbling about the speed at which weeds grew at this time of year and, as now, tying up stems in need of support. The peace in his face as he worked was a reward more precious to me than rubies. It had been worth all the long frustrating struggle to find the truth of Hoxton’s death.

Above us, from an open window, came the sound of Meg practising the spinet and Sybil’s voice encouraging her, and from where I stood I could see through the window below it into a parlour and glimpse the portrait of Meg which Jocelyn Arbuckle had painted. And the letter in my hand held good news. I could recall few afternoons as happy as this one.

Brockley, remarking that he must make sure the courier had been given refreshments and that his horse was being cared for, took himself off.

‘I hope,’ I said, ‘that Mark and Jane will be as content together as we are.’

Hugh finished securing the rose plant, used his small belt-knife to cut the twine he was using and stepped back. ‘I love to hear you say you’re content. Have I ever told you how moved, how touched, I was, those times when you said to me that even though Matthew de la Roche is still alive, you wanted to stay with me and the way of life we’ve built together?’

‘Were you? But I only said what I felt.’

‘You have paid me a great compliment, my Little Bear. Do you really not miss court life?’

‘No. I never want to return to court. I never want to set foot in a palace again. That’s why I don’t want Meg to go to court, either. It’s not the happiest of lives, being a courtier, male or female.’

‘It may not always be up to you. It’s possible, you know, that the queen and Cecil may have uses for you – uses that may send you into danger.’

I shook my head. ‘The answer, from now on, will be no.’

‘Yet you enjoyed some of the work you did for them in the past. You often say you didn’t, but I know you very well.’

‘I did it for money at first,’ I said. ‘I came to enjoy a good deal of it after that – not all, but quite a lot. I was younger then and more adventurous. But as time went on . . .’

I fell silent, because it was hard to find words for the distaste which had gradually come upon me, beginning the first time I grasped the fact that to be an agent for a queen as beset as Elizabeth could mean causing deaths.

It had occurred to me before that there was a resemblance between poor Judith Easton, the woman who bewitched men without meaning to, but hadn’t the strength of mind to control her victims, and Mary Stuart, who bewitched men intentionally, but also lacked the strength to use with wisdom the power she had been given. It was a dangerous state of affairs.

Lately, observing the antics of Mary of Scotland, the queen who no longer had a crown but greatly desired one, and who would settle, it seemed, as easily for Elizabeth’s as for the crown of Scotland, I had begun to fear that one day I might have to carry out an investigation with Mary’s demise at the end of it. She was a menace, and I ought not to mind, but I had seen the terror of those who are about to die. I had seen Gladys like that. I did mind.