To Shield the Queen (16 page)
Read To Shield the Queen Online
Authors: Fiona Buckley
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective
Dale said, “Perhaps you’d like to be alone here for a bit, ma’am. You knew him longer than we did.”
I nodded, and they withdrew to wait in the road with the horses. I stayed where I was, kneeling in the grass. When they were out of earshot, I spoke to John.
“John, I’m so sorry. Wherever you are, please forgive me. It need not have happened. I was wrong, foolish, imagining things. I lost my head and sent you off on a stupid errand and now you’re dead and I can’t even do anything to bring your murderers to justice. I can’t scour the forests for a robber with red hair, and perhaps a bald associate! I would if I could. Please, please forgive me.”
I was being a fool all over again. John, if he was anywhere, was in the hands of God, and what lay in the ground beside me was only his cast-off clay. He couldn’t hear me and nowadays it was not the thing to pray to the dead, or for them, either. That was Popish. I was too unhappy to be bothered with labels, though. I clasped my hands and closed my eyes and said a paternoster for John and asked God to look after him.
Then I rose and rejoined the others. “To the Cockspur,” I said. “We’ll have dinner there and set out for Sussex in the morning.”
• • •
We found the inn humming. A noisy family party, apparently on their way home from a wedding, and encumbered with two elderly ladies, one young pregnant one, two horse-litters and three very drunk gentlemen, had just arrived and seemed to have taken over every corner. The dogs were barking excitedly; the stableyard cats had taken refuge on the roof of the hayloft to get away from the shouting and singing and the trampling hoofs and we could hardly get into the yard for the crowd of people and animals and equipages.
“The attic will do very well,” I said, “and we can certainly turn the horses out for the night. We’re too tired to ride any further if we can avoid it.”
“Bay Star can’t stay out,” said Brockley firmly. “She’s too fine bred and it’s going to rain.”
“See my ostler,” said the harassed Dexter, as someone called his name in peremptory tones. “He’ll maybe get somebody else to put their horse in the meadow. Excuse me . . . ”
The ostler appeared, at an unhurried pace. He was a thin, brown, weathered man who never seemed to be in a rush, even in the midst of chaos like this. He recognised us, greeted us by name, gave Dale a hand down from her saddle and patted Bay Star. He also agreed with Brockley’s opinion about her.
“We’ll find a corner inside for your pretty little mare, Mrs. Blanchard. Your man’s right. The night’s going to be wet and chilly and she’s got Arabian blood, I fancy. They always feel the cold. I was sorry about Mr. Wilton, madam. It’s a thousand pities he wasn’t taking the same road as the gentlemen he was with when he came here. They’d have been protection
for him. Now, one of them had a half-Arabian, a very handsome beast.”
He ran Bay Star’s stirrups up and ducked his head under her saddle flap to undo the girth. “Beautiful head it had,” he said, stepping back and tossing the girth over the saddle before lifting the saddle right off. “Skin so fine you could see every vein on its face, and very striking colouring. You get that sometimes with Arabian blood. This one was piebald.”
There was a click inside my head, like a key going home in a lock. For three seconds, three heartbeats, I stood still, absorbing what he had just said, and wondering. Then I heard myself ask, oh, so very casually, “Really? That sounds familiar somehow. I wonder if they were people my husband used to know?”
“I never heard their names, madam.”
“I can’t recall the names either,” I said, still very casually, “but did one of them have red hair?”
“Red hair? Yes, in a manner of speaking. Not fire-red, but ginger, yes, one of those gentlemen was ginger.”
The world turned upside down.
• • •
There was no parlour vacant but I called Brockley up to the attic where Dale and I were to sleep and told them what I meant to do. I expected them to say I was insane, and they did. Brockley indeed interrupted me quite brusquely before I had finished explaining.
“Madam, the inquest on Mr. Wilton brought in a verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. There’s been a hue and cry out for a band of robbers, possibly including a red-haired man and a bald one, but no one’s been found. How can we hope to trace them? In any case, you shouldn’t try. Such things are not a lady’s business.”
And Matthew, I thought. And Matthew.
“I know,” I said, “and in due course, Dale, Sussex is where we’ll go. Of course it’s important! But so is this. Brockley, please listen and this time let me finish! The whole point is that I don’t think John
was
killed by robbers. I think he was killed by that party of gentlemen he was with. I think that last word he tried to whisper could have been ‘piebald’ instead of just ‘bald.’ Neither of us could hear it properly. Now I learn that one of those men was ginger haired and another had a striking piebald horse. It’s suggestive, you must admit.”
“I admit nothing of the kind, madam. He was delirious, near death. He could have said anything. If what Mr. Dexter said is right, he parted from his companions before he was killed. I understood Dexter to say that a ditcher saw Mr. Wilton go by on his own. Respectable gentlemen, the kind of folk who ride blood horses, don’t murder for money along the highway.”
“Brockley, I haven’t the faintest idea how or why they did it. Perhaps they’re a new kind of robber band, who’ve taken to going about looking respectable so as to tempt unwary travellers to trust them. John was carrying quite a full purse. I know it sounds unlikely. I know I’d be wasting my time if I went to the Sheriff of Berkshire or anyone else with such a story. They’d say what you have just said: that John was delirious. I intend to find out who those so-called gentlemen were, all the same. Are you coming with me or do I go without you?”
“I’ll take your orders, madam, naturally. Someone,”
said Brockley pointedly, “must guard you, for your own sake.”
“And Dale, what about you?”
“Of course I’ll go where you go, ma’am, but I just don’t understand
why.”
Poor Dale had found our long ride very tiring indeed. I didn’t know how old she was, but at a guess, she was in her forties and she had always worked hard. For once, I could sympathise with her aggrieved air. I spoke gently.
“We’re not setting out tonight, anyway. If you sleep soundly, Dale, you’ll feel better in the morning. As for why—there are things I can’t altogether explain. You will have to trust me, both of you.”
Dudley was innocent, although I hadn’t thought so when I let myself be turned back to Abingdon Fair. The small cold voice inside me had said that I could not save Amy and must not even seek justice for her, because the good of the realm came first, and I had listened.
In the same circumstances I would do the same again, and it had made no difference anyway, but the guilt would be with me always. The least I could do was to seek justice for John, who had also died by violence, because of my mistaken belief that Dudley was a murderer. For John, I would become a huntress, implacable as Artemis herself.
“The first thing I need to do,” I said, “is find the exact place where John was found, and look at it. Maybe that will tell us how they managed it. Brockley, please go and find Dexter and give him my compliments, and say that although I understand how busy he is, I desperately need five minutes of his time.”
The Cold Scent
D
exter was hurried and impatient and clearly growing tired of being inconvenienced by John Wilton and those connected with him. He couldn’t conceive why I should want an exact description of the place where John was found, and came very near to saying that he didn’t have time to supply one. I exerted myself to be charming and apologetic, however, and in the end he provided short, brusque directions. I didn’t ask him to take us there next day, because judging by his irritated air, I would ask in vain. I thanked him graciously and left it there, and hoped we’d find the place without him.
We set off early, through a damp grey morning. The land in this part of England is all rolling hills and broad, shallow vales. Much of it is wooded, but there are farms in plenty, too, with cornfields and hay meadows and patches of open heath where sheep and cattle graze. The road onwards from the Cockspur went past the church and roughly south-east, through woods and fields, for a mile or so, and then forked.
To the left, the way turned north, and according to
Dexter it led to one of the main northbound highways. To the right, the road took a long curve round a heathland of wiry grass with a few spinneys and some clumps of gorse. The curve, which at the beginning almost bent the road back westwards, probably followed some old land boundary, but eventually it settled again into a south-easterly direction, which would ultimately lead to the Thames and Windsor. John had been found to the left of the road, under a gorse clump, just at the end of the long curve. Dexter’s instructions had been concise enough, and the place was easy to find. We couldn’t pinpoint the precise gorse clump where the dog had found him, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“So. What next?” said Brockley.
What next indeed? The implacable huntress was feeling a good deal less implacable this morning. Low clouds scudded overhead, borne on a chilly wind, and rain spattered. My spirits were as joyless as the sky. What was I doing here?
It was three weeks since John had been discovered, mortally hurt, under one of these bushes. What had I hoped to find? Had I thought the tracks of his assailants would still be here, and even if they were, how would a few footprints, or hoofprints, guide me to a party of dubious gentlemen who had ridden away all that time ago and very likely split up since then? Did I think one of them might have been careless enough to drop a dagger with a family crest engraved into the handle, or a prayerbook with his name inside, and left it here for me to pick up?
“Madam. Whoever did it was in ambush here, waiting for an unwary traveller,” Brockley said. “It’s a lonely enough place and they could have been hidden in those trees over there.” He pointed to a little spinney about thirty yards off. “I don’t see how his assailants could have been the companions he left
back at the fork. How did they get here ahead of him?”
He was right, of course. I had been foolish.
And then I saw.
I at once realised that I didn’t want to see it; that a large part of me would have been relieved to find no clues and to give up the whole enterprise. However, it was there: a path, faint, overhung by bushes and trailing grass, but a path all the same. It joined the road a little to our left, and led off across the heath, going roughly north-eastwards. I pointed to it, saying, “I want to see where that goes.”
They humoured me, like the attendants of a lunatic. We rode along the little track, and before long I saw that my guess had been right. That unobtrusive path cut across the heath, joining the two ends of the curve on the road, as a bowstring joins the two ends of a bow. It rejoined the road, in fact, at the fork, making a narrow central prong, almost invisible because of the bushes and the grass.
It was a short cut. From time to time, people in a hurry avoided going round the curve and walked or rode this way instead. They had made the path. Indeed, horsemen who knew the lie of the land could have beaten John to the far end of the curve even without a path. They could also have done it without being seen either by John or the ditcher. There were spinneys, and a concealing hump in the ground between track and road. Brockley’s argument did not hold.
I explained what I was thinking. Brockley frowned. “I don’t doubt it’s possible, madam. You think they set on him here at the fork, and he got away from them, but they took the short cut and were waiting for him at the far end of that curve.”
“Yes. He was going fast, so the ditcher told Dexter,”
I said. “Suppose he was trying to escape from someone?”
“Well, again, madam, it’s possible, but . . . ”
He stopped. While we talked, we had both been looking about us and it was Brockley, this time, who saw something. Close to where we stood, at the meeting place of the three paths, the ends of several twigs had been sheared off clean from a bush, and the cut pieces were still lying on the ground.
“That wasn’t recent,” Brockley said. “It’s not raw; the weather’s been at it for a week, or maybe three. It’s not proof, of course, but I grant you, it looks like—”
“Someone’s been here, slashing about with a blade,” I said. I felt odd. Part of me had come alert, like a hound that picks up a scent, but another part of me once again wanted to run away, to subside into feminine diffidence and say, “But I can’t do anything about this! Who would expect it of me?” The answer to that was that if the evidence were there, then
I
would expect it of me.
I remembered the sword-thrust through John’s body. These sheared twigs weren’t evidence, exactly, but they were suggestive.
“If someone was here, laying about him with a sword,” I said,
“why
was he laying about with it? What if he were one of John’s attackers, and this is where he missed his stroke and sliced the bush instead? While John stuck in his spurs and rode for his life.”
“They took a risk,” Brockley said, “going for him on the highway, either here or where he was actually stabbed. This road’s not empty.”
This was true. At that very moment, there was a cart plodding slowly towards us, and a farmer on a shaggy pony had passed us a few minutes earlier, with a civil good day.
We rode over to look. The pond was only about fifty yards off, in the angle between the northward track and the narrow short cut. It was dark and scummy: weight a body and throw it in, and it would vanish. John’s assailants probably had been disturbed, or they would surely have brought him back here anyway. Instead, they had had to leave him under a bush where he might be found, and was.
“You think they meant to put him here,” I said.
“It could be,” said Brockley, doubtfully.
Dale looked as though the conversation had become completely beyond her. She sat on the white gelding’s back—we had dubbed the animal White Snail—with an expression of long-suffering gloom. Brockley gazed up at the dismal sky as though seeking inspiration there.
“Did he have any weapons?” he asked me at length.
“He had a dagger but it was gone when he was found,” I said bleakly.
“He might have tried to defend himself, then. I did get to know him a little at Cumnor, and I should say that he would. If he did,” said Brockley, once more with that fugitive glint of humour, “we are looking for a group of gentlemen, one with ginger hair, one with a well-bred piebald horse and possibly more than one with recent scars from a dagger.”
“Yes. Exactly,” I said. I couldn’t smile.
“Madam,” said Brockley, “you believe that John Wilton was attacked by his gentlemanly companions.
You may be right, but are you really determined on pursuing them?”
Dale looked hopeful. She was praying that I would say no, that I had had second thoughts and that we should set out for Sussex forthwith. I wanted to do that, too. I wanted to see Meg and, if I could, find Matthew. How could I put either of them aside for the sake of this ridiculous hunt, which might take heaven knew how long and would almost certainly fail anyway, and if it didn’t, might take me into peril? If these men had killed John, then they were dangerous. I remembered the bruises on his body and the horrible, rotten wound which had killed him.
I remembered how I had denied justice to Amy.
“I am determined to go on,” I said. My voice was formal. It was an undertaking, as though I had sworn an oath before a priest. All three of us knew it. Even Brockley heard the grim intent in my tone, and acknowledged it. He bent his head. “In that case, madam, may I make a suggestion?”
“Indeed you may.”
“We must begin, must we not, by picking up the scent, so to speak, of these violent gentlemen? We must find which route they took.”
“Yes.” I thought. “They went northwards—no, that was what Dexter said, because he thought they’d parted from John at the fork, but that isn’t what happened. They could equally well have been going south.”
“So we should enquire along both roads,” said Brockley. “In villages, at inns. Someone must have noticed them. Although,” he added with a sigh, “it was weeks ago. The scent may well be cold.”
• • •
“This is absurd,” said Brockley.
We were conducting what I suppose one could call a
council of war, sitting on our horses just outside a small hamlet a few miles from Henley. We were all tired, and earlier that day Dale had actually succeeded in falling off White Snail, which I had believed to be impossible. I had scolded her for being such a terrible rider, and said that one of these days I must get Brockley to give her some proper tuition, but I knew that really she was exhausted. I was not much better myself. The ankle I had turned on the day of the fair had not given trouble at first, but I had turned it again since, dismounting too quickly, and now it ached persistently. As luck would have it, it was the left ankle, which took my weight at the trot.
We had been hunting for two days, searching along both the northward and the Windsor roads for traces of our elusive group of gentlemen. We had now enquired at two posting inns, four village taverns, six farms, three blacksmiths—one of their horses might have cast a shoe—and about two dozen cottages. However, it had been too long ago and no one remembered them now, except for one old woman, and her testimony hardly made sense.
We had begun our hunt by tossing a coin to see which road we should investigate first, and accordingly started with the northward route. After failing to find a trace within five miles, we spent a night in one of the inns, bought cold food for today’s noon meal and returned to the Windsor track, to meet with another complete blank, until the afternoon, when we rode into the hamlet which was now just behind us, and found a group of village women engaged in a stormy altercation.
At the centre of the wrangle was a fierce old beldame with a jutting chin and a grubby headdress. She was standing at the door of a dirty-looking cottage, shouting and gesticulating with a spindle, from which a broken strand of wool trailed and
floated. A younger woman, much cleaner, sturdy, rosy and very angry, was standing in front of her, arms akimbo, and shouting back. The rest seemed to be interested onlookers.
Halting on the fringes of the uproar, we gathered that the younger woman was complaining because the older one did nothing “but sit there spinning at your door all day, staring at what other folks are doing, and making up mucky tales about them! Yes, my Peggy does go walking with young Walter Rigden and we know about it and so does Walter’s father and the two of them’ll get wed next spring and you can just keep your foul mouth shut in future and your filthy ideas to yourself, you old besom!”
“Don’t you call me names! Oh, I daresay you don’t care what your Peggy gets up to! I know what
you
got up to in your day, Milly Mogridge. You were no better than you should be. Like mother like daughter . . . ”
“How dare you, you . . . !”
“How dare I tell the truth? Ho, yes, the
truth!
And I don’t tell all I know, either. There’s not much I don’t know about what goes on in this place and there’s plenty I could tell but I don’t, and . . . ”
Somebody in the crowd growled, “Bloody old witch!” and the crone rounded on the voice.
“Who said that?”
Several of the women shuffled uneasily backwards, and someone made the sign to ward off the evil eye.
Brockley spurred forward and straight into the midst of it all. “Excuse me, good women!” He swept off his cap, and smiled round at them. As I watched in amazement, thinking that I would never have believed that Brockley could be so ingratiating, it struck me that he was a personable man. The entire gathering had transferred its attention from the wrangle to my manservant. The affronted mother of the over-passionate Peggy had unfolded her arms and was
gazing at him with marked interest, and despite her advanced years and aggressive temperament, the beldame had produced a toothless simper.
“It is possible,” declared Brockley, “that you good-wives may be of help to us—especially one with such great powers of observation as yourself.” He bowed to the beldame. “We are sorry to intrude, but I and Mistress Blanchard, whose servant I have the honour to be, are on an errand of vital importance. Three weeks or so ago, did you, mistress,” addressing the old dame, “or any of you . . . ” throwing his enquiry to the crowd, “chance to see, riding through this village, three gentlemen, one on a fine piebald horse, and one with ginger hair?”
Astonishingly, the old dame had, except that it wasn’t three weeks ago, but the Saturday before last.
Brockley thanked her and I handed him some silver to press into the old woman’s palm. As he gave it to her, he spoke quietly to her and she said something in answer. He looked round at the others. “Her husband’s dead and she has no children to help her. You’re her neighbours; surely you know that. Try being kind to her and don’t talk nonsense about witches. She’s lonely.”
As we rode on, Brockley said, “I hope I had an effect but I doubt it. That old woman reminds me of my mother.”
“Your mother?” That the dignified Brockley’s mother could in any way have resembled that unprepossessing crone, I found hard to believe.