To Shield the Queen (28 page)

I was being ridiculous. It
couldn’t
be. The shape which for a moment I thought I had glimpsed through a confusion of odd little facts couldn’t really be there. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m making a fool of myself, but in the summer, I did see Holme about the court and—” I thought quickly—“and just for a moment, I thought I had recognised him as someone I saw at Withysham. But I’m wrong. Now that I look at him again, I can see that it’s not the same man at all. One of the men at Withysham was a similar type, that’s all. Sir William, these last few days have taken their toll of me. Could I sit down for a few minutes?”

“Of course.” Cecil eyed me doubtfully and gestured me to a stool. “You may well be feeling out of sorts. A restorative would do you no harm.”

He went to the door to call for wine, and I sat on the stool and concentrated on my spinning thoughts. Amid the chaos, the half-perceived shape was still there.

Suppose Amy had been murdered after all. If so, then her killers were surely Verney and Holme. Although Verney was Dudley’s man he was not, in this case, acting for Dudley. Of that I was sure. That letter had revealed Dudley’s mind to me completely and Cecil agreed with my conclusions. Dudley was no victimised saint, but he hadn’t had his wife killed. Too careful of his own skin, probably! His father and one of his brothers had died on the block; he knew what the shadow of the axe was like.

In that case, Verney and Holme were acting for someone else. And Holme was Lady Catherine Grey’s man.

I didn’t think so. And there inside my head, I saw a little scene. A morning in Richmond Park. Myself, walking with the Spanish ambassador, de Quadra. A few yards away, Peter Holme was walking with Sir Thomas Smith and Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, and de Quadra was drawing my attention to them. De Quadra was a wary man. If he wasn’t sure of his facts, he might well hesitate to speak openly. Had he, obliquely, been trying to warn me of danger from those three? Of danger, perhaps, to Amy?

Cecil came back to his desk and a moment later the leggy page brought some wine. I sipped it, obliged now to take my time and look suitably wan, when every fibre in my body wanted to rush to the courtyard and accost Lady Catherine Grey.

• • •

By the time I had finally left Cecil’s office, gathered up Brockley and Dale from the anteroom and made my way down to the courtyard, Lady Catherine Grey had disappeared, although Lady Jane Seymour and Lord Hertford were still talking together and petting the dog, which evidently belonged to Jane. I made straight for them and asked where I might find Lady Catherine.

“Ursula! You’re back!” Lady Jane Seymour greeted me with pleasure.

“Yes, as you see.” I didn’t want to stop and talk, however, still less discuss my experiences at Cumnor. “Just now,” I said, “I urgently need to speak to Lady Catherine. Has she gone to the queen?”

“No, the queen’s out hunting in the park. Catherine hasn’t been very well lately,” said Jane. “She decided not to go.”

“No particular illness,” said Lord Hertford worriedly. Jane’s brother was a pleasant young man, although he struck me as somewhat vacillating. “She seems melancholy,” he said, “and has at times felt too weak to get up for two or three days at a time.”

“We try to keep her amused. Any kind of sad news distresses her,” Jane said. “She cried for days when she heard of Lady Dudley’s death, although she had never met her. My brother here has been quite anxious.”

“She is so sensitive and warmhearted,” said Lord Hertford.

A more unlikely description of Lady Catherine Grey I could hardly imagine. If Lord Hertford wasn’t a simpleton, I decided, he must be besotted, or else Jane had been working hard on him on Lady Catherine’s behalf. “I will look for her in her rooms,” I said.

I went indoors with Dale and Brockley, wondering how to gain admittance to Lady Catherine. She didn’t think very much of me and might well decline to see me. I shared my problem with the others, however, and Dale offered a suggestion.

“Oh, ma’am, she’ll surely see you if you say it’s the queen’s business. It is, I suppose?” Dale was longing to know what all this was about. Brockley shushed her reprovingly.

“It’s the queen’s business, yes,” I said. This I could not share with either of them. “Once again,” I said, “you will have to await me in an anteroom.”

“So here you are again, Mistress Blanchard, and you’re hardly back, it seems, before you are running confidential errands for her majesty. How can I help this particular errand?”

“It’s delicate,” I said. “I think it best if I speak to you in complete privacy, Lady Catherine. You will agree, once you hear what it concerns.”

Lady Catherine jerked her head, and the maid, a downtrodden, tired sort of woman, well paid, no doubt, but probably much nagged, left the room. “Well,” said Lady Catherine, tossing back her hair. “What is all this about?”

“It’s about Peter Holme,” I said. “He came to Cumnor Place with Sir Richard Verney. I have also seen him—indeed, had him pointed out to me—in the company of Sir Thomas Smith and the Earl of Derby, Edward Stanley. Tell me, how much do you know, Lady Catherine, about the death of Amy Dudley?”

• • •

What I didn’t expect her to do was to collapse like a badly constructed house of cards. She stared at me and began to tremble, while her mouth sagged open. Then it stiffened into an unbecoming square, and she started to bawl. I stepped forward, seized her shoulders and shook her. “Stop that noise! You’ll have half the court in here! I wonder if Amy cried like this when she was about to be murdered?”

Not altogether to my surprise, this produced an even louder bawling, which rose to a shriek. I shook her again and put my palm over her mouth until she stopped. Her eyes, huge and blue and terrified, peered at me over my hand.

“Now,” I said. “I’m going to let go, but keep quiet.”

I released her, and she sat there with her hair trailing wildly and tears trickling down her blanched face, looking, I thought, less like the heir to the throne than a young but very guilty witch on her execution morning. “I repeat,” I said, “what do you know about the death of Amy Dudley?”

Much too late, she tried to regain lost territory.

“How dare you come in here like this and shout at me and bully me? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t been well; I’m easily confused. I . . . ”

“Do you usually burst into tears and shriek aloud when someone asks you a simple question? That’s all I did—just ask. I wasn’t shouting and I wasn’t bullying. Now, I’ll ask you again.
What do you know about the death of Amy Dudley?
Oh, come along, Lady Catherine. Don’t tell me again that you don’t know what I mean.”

“But I don’t. I don’t!”

“I was living at Cumnor Place when she died.” I said. “Now, listen.”

“I can only hope,” I said, “that she didn’t, at the last, cry out in fear and struggle for her life. But for all her brave words, I should think that being ill and in pain would make violence harder to bear, not easier. Most people, when it comes to it, would rather die in their beds than be murdered.”

Lady Catherine Grey didn’t want to hear. Once, she put her hands over her ears, but I seized her wrists and jerked them down again, telling her that no, she would listen, whether she liked it or not.

At the end, I stood back and leaned against the toilet table, arms folded. “Well,
Lady
Catherine. So what is it you know? You helped to arrange it, didn’t you? You’re the Protestant heir. You would like to remain the heir, was that it? You were afraid Lady Dudley would soon die naturally—yes? I’m on the right track, am I not?—and that the queen and Dudley would then marry and produce a child to be heir instead of you? So you conspired to make sure that Lady Dudley died
un
naturally and scandalously, instead . . . ”

“It wasn’t like that!”

“Then what was it like?”

“Oh, God!” wept Lady Catherine, wringing her hands. I watched this with interest, because although I had heard of people doing this, I had never before seen a demonstration.

“Don’t tell anyone! Promise you won’t tell anyone! Lord Hertford would be so horrified and he . . . we . . . hope . . . ”

“To be married? Never mind that now. You wanted Lady Dudley to die, did you not? And not of her disease?”

“No one could have wanted her to die of her disease! She was so very ill, and in pain—you know she was, you saw her, you’ve just told me all about it!” Lady Catherine was gabbling. “It was a kindness, really.”

“Like putting down a sick dog? But you never saw her. Did someone tell you that it would be a kindness? You never mounted this little plot all on your own, did you? Who else was in it? The Earl of Derby? Sir Thomas Smith?”

“I shan’t name any names,” said Lady Catherine, with an attempt at dignity. I laughed.

“You need not. Didn’t I just say that I saw Peter Holme with those two? As a matter of fact, the Spanish ambassador noticed them as well. He drew my attention to them. He knew something. Things get about in this court. A few words overheard at a card game; someone seen in unexpected company too often and the rumours start. Derby and Smith were together quite a lot; it was such an odd combination that people remarked on it. Maybe Holme was seen with them and perhaps with Sir Richard Verney too, and I know that Holme and Verney went to Cumnor more than once. Lady Dudley told me that. Someone somewhere began to add things together.

“Not the queen!” Catherine squealed in fright. “No, you can’t, you mustn’t! She hates me already!” She dissolved into sobs, but coherent words did presently emerge. “It wasn’t real! Until I heard it had actually happened, it wasn’t real! I didn’t know how I’d feel. I’ve had nightmares every night since! I dream someone’s creeping up in the dark to kill me in my bed. I didn’t know it would be like this! It wasn’t real, I tell you!”

No wonder she’d seemed unwell lately. Reality had come home to her, crashed on her head like a falling brick, when it was too late. I thought she was only just beginning to see that she had stepped on to a road which might lead to the Tower or the block. Her sister, Lady Jane Grey, had died under the axe at the age of sixteen, because their parents, especially her mother, Lady Frances Grey, Henry VIII’s fiercely ambitious niece, had tried to challenge Queen Mary Tudor’s right to the throne, and put Jane there instead.

The same plot had led to the deaths of Robin Dudley’s father and his brother Guildford. Their father had married Guildford to Jane in the hope of seeing his son become king. That should have given Catherine a sense of self-preservation, as it had done to her brother-in-law Robin. But no, it seemed that she had to be caught out first, before it belatedly occurred to her that the paths of ambition had risks.