To Shield the Queen (18 page)
Read To Shield the Queen Online
Authors: Fiona Buckley
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Mystery & Detective
The following morning, Dale said bravely that she could face the saddle again, and with many expressions of gratitude, the three of us set out again. We rode along the lane, back to the main road, and then, by mutual consent, we reined in. Dale and Brockley looked at me expectantly and I wondered what to say. I had decided during the night that we would put the search aside and set out for Sussex at once. However, I must make some comment on what I had, or rather hadn’t, discovered.
“I did ask about recent guests,” I said, “but Mistress Westley said they hadn’t had any for weeks. There’s no sign that the men we’re looking for were here.”
“Oh, they’ve been here right enough,” said Brockley.
I stared at him. He responded with a smile which was little short of smug.
“What? How do you know? Well, come along, Brockley. Let’s hear it!”
Brockley considered me thoughtfully. “Up to now, madam,” he said, “though you’ve believed that Mr. Wilton was murdered by this respectable-seeming trio, one with red hair and one with a piebald horse, I’ve been doubtful. I’m not doubtful any more. They’ve been here, and yet it seems that these people, the Westleys, don’t care to mention them, and that looks to me as if all isn’t as it should be. I owe you an apology, madam.”
“Never mind about that!” I almost shouted. My interest in hunting had reawoken in a hurry. I was like
an old hound who hears a horn. “It’s nice to be vindicated, but what have you found out, and how?”
“I got it from the grooms, madam. You remember I said I meant to go to the tavern with them? Over the beer, I talked about Bay Star and Arabian blood and out it came. Three men, one mounted on a striking piebald, spent almost two weeks here not long ago. And one of them was hurt.”
“Was he now?” I said.
Brockley nodded. “Dick Lane—he’s the young stable lad—said one of them had a bandage round one forearm, and when he arrived he was reeling in the saddle. He had a black eye, too. Lane took his horse from him and got a close sight of him. The boy reckoned he’d been in a fight. Well, we reckoned that John Wilton would have fought back.”
“Yes. And that’s why they stayed so long, to let the injured man recover!” I added, with relief, “I expect they spun the Westleys a tale. I can’t see the Westleys protecting a murderer but they’re kind people who might help someone who said he’d done damage in a fair fight, and was afraid of the law and hadn’t meant to get into trouble. That would explain why they didn’t want to talk about their guests.”
“Especially, madam, if the guests were friends of theirs.”
“Why should we think that?” I didn’t want the Westleys to have friends like the men who had killed John and robbed him. “If the man who was hurt felt too ill to go any further, he and his companions could well just have called at the first big house they saw and asked for help.”
“Lane’s quite a bit of a gossip, madam, especially after a pint or two,” said Brockley disapprovingly. “My father was in service, like me, and he always said a good servant usually knows most of his master’s business but never talks about it. He wouldn’t have
thought much of Lane and neither do I, though, as I said, he’s only young. No doubt he’ll learn. It was useful to us, anyway. According to Lane, as they were all getting off their horses, one of them said what good luck it was that Springwood was their next port of call. They were coming here, madam, all along.”
House to House
“W
hat are our plans now, madam?” Brockley enquired.
I considered, sitting in my saddle and fretting. The hunt was on again. We had picked up a scent and must follow it. I owed that both to my dead manservant and to the shade of Amy.
I sighed inwardly and once more put Meg aside, and Matthew too.
“It’s the twenty-seventh of September,” I said. “I need not return to court until the end of October. During that time I must get to Sussex and spend some days there. I think I have to set a time limit. Another fortnight—yes, I can give another two weeks to this business and let’s hope it will be much less. All I need to know is who our murderously inclined friends are and perhaps get some idea of where they might be now. Then I will report what I know—to a county sheriff, perhaps, or I may ask advice at court.” Brockley nodded, apparently finding all this reasonable. “Our
friends,”
I said, with ironic emphasis, “did apparently stay at Springwood House, and then
passed through the village. That means they were going towards Windsor. We’d better search for them along that line. We can take it at an easy pace, Dale. Don’t worry.”
It was a misty, brooding morning, with the promise of autumn in it. The rolling hills faded away into greyness in the distance; a line of trees on a nearby skyline were ghostly shapes, with no colour. The air was damp and still, but it wasn’t particularly cold. Riding was pleasant enough and I could think without interference. I was trying to make sense of what little we had learned so far, though I wasn’t very successful. All that I achieved was a long list of unanswered questions.
To start with, I just could not see the Westleys conniving to protect murderers. Whether they knew their injured visitor or not, they couldn’t possibly have known how he really got his wounds, but it did seem that our quarry had intended going to Springwood House. That didn’t necessarily mean that they already knew the Westleys, though, only that they had business which had taken them there. Either way, however, I couldn’t believe that we were trailing a trio of sophisticated robbers. People like that just didn’t fit together with the Westleys.
I then paused in my reasoning again, because the next idea taking shadowy shape in my mind was disagreeable. I faced it eventually. If our quarry were not robbers, then who were they? Whatever their mysterious business at Springwood might be, could it nevertheless, unknown to the Westleys, be somehow connected with their crime? Had John’s money been stolen just to make robbery appear to be the motive?
The Westleys had evidently wanted to conceal the visit. Was that because they thought the wounded man had been hurt in a way which might get him into trouble and they were sorry for him? Or for some
other reason? It was odd, I thought, puzzling over it, that the Westleys hadn’t sworn their servants to secrecy. Lane had been quite open with Brockley, who had said there was another groom with them, who had evidently not protested.
Perhaps the Westleys were wise. Impressing secrecy on one’s servants is apt to arouse their curiosity. Maybe Edward and Kate had thought it best to let the wounded man and his friends simply sink back into the haze of commonplace events. That way, they would be more forgettable.
When I had reached this point in my deliberations, I shared my thoughts with the others, and they agreed with my conclusions, such as they were, but none of us could get any further. We must wait until we knew more.
We made a number of enquiries that day. We called at more taverns and blacksmiths’, where we asked openly if a group of gentlemen, one on a fine piebald horse, had been seen lately. We had become better at it by this time and developed quite a convincing and detailed story of friends who might have passed this way ahead of us.
We also visited two manor houses, using the excuse that we had lost our way while attempting short cuts, and wanted directions, and here we were more roundabout in our questions. In the big houses, the trio might be known, or might have come on a dubious errand. Someone might find a way to warn them of our enquiries.
“If they did attack John, they’re not safe people to annoy,” said Brockley, expressing my own feelings precisely.
That day yielded nothing. The road was always fairly busy, with folk travelling on foot, on horseback, in wagons and carts, and no one remembered any
particular party of riders. Of the two big houses, one was full of very busy people and when I asked its young, bustling and officious mistress if she had many unexpected callers (“Living so near the Windsor road, I expect you have a stream of them!”) she said roundly that she didn’t encourage them; it interfered with getting things done. She couldn’t think how we had missed our way;
that
was the main Windsor Road, down there on the other side of the fields; you could see carts going by from here, and we could have a cup of buttermilk each if we liked but we must forgive her, she had a thousand things to do.
The other was occupied by a childless old widower who was crippled by the joint evil and alone except for his servants. When he heard us arrive, he shouted to his butler to bring us to him. He was delighted to see us and here we had no need to ask questions; before we were well over the threshold, he was telling us what a pleasure it was to see fresh faces; he hadn’t had a visitor for three months at least. He pounded on the floor with his stick to bring the butler back and demanded wine and cold chicken and fresh bread for us. The bread was all right, if coarse, but the wine was acid and the chicken underdone.
“Poor old man,” said Brockley, when, with some difficulty, we had made our escape. “He must be very lonely. He must have constant indigestion as well! I pity our friends if they stayed there. Only, madam, I don’t think they did. I doubt they were at either place.”
We spent a night at a village inn—a very uncomfortable one—and started off again in the morning, making at once for the next set of ornate brick chimneys we could see amid the rolling fields and woodlands. We took a lane which led in the right direction, and from a small boy who was moving
sheep into an adjacent field, we found that it did indeed go to the manor house, and that it was called Lockhill.
We came to another village before we reached Lockhill. It contained about a dozen thatched hovels and a couple of slightly bigger houses, one of which was a vicarage attached to a church smaller than itself. The village also had an alehouse and a well and, at the far end of the single street, a blacksmith, who plied his trade in a cave-like building made of the mellow local stone. Iron goods such as spades, rakes and firebaskets hung on the walls to advertise his wares. Here, for the first time, we struck ore.
“A fellow on a piebald?” said the smith, through clouds of steam from a piece of hot iron which he was tempering in cold water. “And one with ginger hair? Oh, aye, they’ve been through here. A matter of a fortnight back, that’ll be. The ginger-haired man was on a grey and it had a shoe hanging by only two nails. I saw to it for him. The others tied their horses up outside and hung about waiting. They didn’t go to the alehouse, daft things. Mistress Lambert makes a decent brew, not like that Pocky Peter that had the place afore her and used to water it, till we had him marched out and made to drink a gallon of his own ale and poured the rest over his head . . . ”
He was not the sort of man who can ever keep to the point, but Brockley eventually got him back to it, and then he asked us what our friends were called. I snatched a name from my recent past. “The one who is a friend of my family is called Mr. Pinto.”
“Pinto? That’s a funny-sounding thing to call anyone. No, none of them mentioned that. The one with the piebald, he was Will Johnson; I heard the others use both names.”
“Why, yes. Mr. Pinto had a . . . a cousin Johnson. My husband knew them quite well,” I said mendaciously.
“Well, well, what a tiny world it is. Perhaps we shall catch them up in due course. Were they going to Lockhill?”
“Aye, that’s right. They went straight on up there. Likely you’ll get news of them there. Important, is it?”
I shook my head. “No, not very. It was just by chance that I heard these old friends might be ahead of us on the road. We’ll ask after them.”
I decided not to use the short-cut story this time but to play the card of feeble health once more, because just after we left the smith, Dale confided to me that she had a headache. “I’m forty, ma’am, but I still have my monthly courses and I’ve just started one.”
“Dale’s not feeling quite well,” I said to Brockley. “We’ll ask for shelter for her sake.”
The track led uphill, past fields and hedgerows which had a slightly unkempt air; not as bad as those round the house of the old widower, but still untidy. The ditch beside the track was overgrown and we saw a field of corn stubble which had been harvested carelessly, with patches of wheat standing uncut in the corners.
The house itself was smaller than it appeared from a distance. The gatehouse opened straight on to the main courtyard, with no intervening path. A mastiff on a chain leaped at us, snarling, making the horses snort and sidle, and Dale didn’t so much dismount as slither to the ground with fright. She was leaning on the Snail’s shoulder in a way which looked convincingly like near-collapse, when a thickset butler appeared and shouted at the dog to be quiet. It ignored him and continued to bay, whereupon the man enquired our business in another bellow.
On hearing of the sorry plight of exhaustion which had overtaken poor Mistress Blanchard and her maid, he became sympathetic, however. He helped me
down, directed Brockley to the stableyard, swore at the dog and took Dale and myself inside to present us, he said, to Mistress Ann Mason, the lady of the house.
Lockhill was the very opposite of the Springwood household. It was chaotic. We stepped through the main door straight into a big hall which was strewn haphazardly with gloves and boots and goblets and jugs and letters and hooped chests with fabric trailing from under their lids. Books lay open, as though the life lived here was too frenetic ever to have time to tidy up after itself. Ann Mason, who had heard us arriving and came to meet us as we entered, was quite young and very pregnant, but except for her mounded stomach, she was thin with overwork, her brown stuff dress spattered with flour from the kitchen, fluff from a spinning wheel and dribbles from the baby on her arm.
A crowd of children came with her, screaming and giggling, accompanied by a couple of small dogs which added to the uproar by yelping alongside them. A harassed-looking tutor appeared and tried to round up the children, but without success.
“I am so sorry for the noise,” said Mistress Mason, joggling the baby, pushing a dog out of the way with her foot and leading us through to a parlour where the spinning wheel stood beside a basket of fleece. There seemed to be wool flecks and dog hairs on everything and someone had carelessly left a bucket of soaking nappy cloths beside the hearth. “The children do become a little excited at times but Dr. Crichton, their tutor, is much opposed to the idea of beating them.”
Normally, I would have agreed with Dr. Crichton. I had been beaten and so had Gerald, and we had agreed that Meg should not be treated in the same way. However, as the shrieking horde tore into the
parlour after us and out again, and poor Dale flinched at the racket, I began to wonder why the Masons didn’t chastise their offspring themselves or else pension off their tutor and get a firmer one.
Mistress Mason promised us food and drink and went herself to see about it. While she was gone, a door opened somewhere close by, footsteps approached and a tall, ascetic-looking man wandered into the room. He was holding a book in one hand and keeping his place with the thumb of the other, and his lean face was scored with fretful lines. He was halfway through a querulous plea that he was trying to translate a most difficult piece of Italian verse and why could Ann not do
something,
my dear, about this unconscionable din, when he noticed us.
Ann Mason came back clutching a loaded tray. She apologised anxiously and introduced us to her husband, Leonard Mason. He listened courteously to our account of headaches and exhaustion on a long journey, requested his wife to make us comfortable and provide us with beds for the night, and then took himself off again.
“He has gone back to his study,” said Mistress Mason, and added, in a hushed and awestricken voice, “He is translating Dante’s verses, from the Italian into English. He is a scholar of languages. He also studies the devices of Leonardo da Vinci, whose namesake he is. He has a brilliant mind.” Another chorus of youthful shouts and shrieks, interspersed with excited canine barks, broke out in the distance and she sighed.
“He can never understand why the children are so uproarious,” she said wanly. “None of them are at all studious. I try to protect him from distraction as much as I can.”
She did her best for us. We were given food and
drink, and shown to a bedchamber. It was a pleasant enough room, with plastered walls and a high, beamed ceiling, but it was in sorry need of dusting. With exclamations of annoyance, Mistress Mason went to find a maid to clean it, and after a long delay, came back with a cloth and did it herself. There was aired linen ready, however, and I helped our hostess to make up the bed so that Dale, who really was quite poorly, could lie down.
Once Dale was settled, I went downstairs with Mistress Mason, explaining that my maid was mostly the one in need of rest; that I was now quite restored. I sat with her while she worked at her spinning wheel and encouraged her to talk.
In the course of the next hour or two, I learned a good deal about Lockhill. Every house has its own character, and Lockhill was like two houses in one. In fact, it resembled one of the Norman castles whose design my cousins’ tutor had explained to us, drawing diagrams to show us what he meant by the keep and the outer bailey. At Lockhill, the keep and the bailey were mental rather than physical concepts, but they were real for all that.