Queen Without a Crown Read online

  Old Gladys rarely left the suite, because she said (or, to be more accurate, grumbled) that the stairs were a struggle, but if anything, this was an advantage, since Gladys didn’t get on well with other servants, though she was less of a liability than she had been. A narrow escape from being hanged on a charge of witchcraft – I had managed to save her, but only just – had had its effect. She no longer spat curses at people she disliked, and she washed, these days, without being told.

  I had at one time feared that old age was damaging her mind, but it was as though the shock of coming so close to death had jolted her back to normality. All the same, I wasn’t sure that she’d stay there, and I felt that the less she mingled with other people, the better.

  She did light cleaning and plain sewing for us, for her eyesight was good, despite her age. She slept on a truckle bed in the room where the Brockleys occupied a small four-poster. They didn’t like the arrangement, but could hardly complain, for few servants had a room of their own and a curtained bed. To have an extra person in the room was a minor inconvenience.

  In any case, Roger Brockley was responsible for Gladys’ presence in my household in the first place. Brockley, my groom, manservant, steward whenever we were at Withysham and sometimes my invaluable co-agent, had a chivalrous kindness for the aged. Gladys had been charged with witchcraft more than once. Years ago, when we first came across her on the Welsh border, Brockley, seeing her as a helpless, frightened old woman, had intervened to protect her from a similar accusation. ‘So you really can’t object to sharing a room with Gladys now,’ I had told him. ‘She wouldn’t be here at all, but for you!’

  Within the suite, Hugh and I had done our best to create the illusion of a home. We had given the second largest room to Meg and Sybil, while the main room was ours. It had a vast four-poster and a deep mullioned window bay with a practical window seat which lifted up to reveal a chest below. By moving a table and a couple of settles into the bay, we had created a miniature parlour, and this was where we talked to Mark Easton, after Elizabeth had sent us away to discuss his mysterious family business in private.

  He joined us there after a brief visit to his own quarters for a much-needed wash and a change of clothes, and his first comment was: ‘This is like being inside a private house. How delightful!’

  ‘We do our best,’ Hugh said, leading him to one of the settles in the bay, where they both sat down. ‘Will you have mulled ale, or wine?’

  For purposes of hospitality, we always kept a cask or two of good liquor in our chamber. Fran Brockley (though I still often called her Dale, her surname before she married Brockley) was by the fire with Gladys, mulling pewter jugs of ale and wine with hot pokers. My daughter Meg was next door, out of the way, at her books with Lambert, but I had called Sybil Jester, who had been with them, in to join us. She was partly Meg’s chaperone but very much more my friend. She was in the middle years, and her looks were unusual: her features just too wide for their height, her nose a little splayed, her dark, strong eyebrows stretching towards her temples. Yet there was charm in those distinctive features and in her serene smile. As she came in, following Mark, she gave us that familiar smile, but looked enquiringly at our visitor.

  ‘This is Mark Easton, messenger from Lord Sussex in York,’ I said, motioning her to the window seat. ‘But he has family news for us, though what it is, I’ve no idea.’

  Easton accepted mulled ale, and Brockley, who had been warming his hands at the hearth alongside Fran, brought it to him. ‘I called it family business,’ Mark said, ‘but it’s really to do with friends of Mistress Stannard. One of them, mistress, was formerly your ward, I think. Mistress Penelope Mason, she used to be, I believe, before she married a fellow called Clem Moss.’

  ‘Pen!’ I said, enlightened. ‘Yes, I was her guardian for a short while. She still writes to me. She had a son not long ago.’ I had been glad to hear news of Pen. I was fond of her, but there was no denying that as a girl she had been both highly intelligent and emotionally unsteady. I was most relieved when she took the sensible, strong-minded Clem Moss as her husband. Taking the settle opposite Master Easton, I said: ‘I hope you aren’t bringing bad news. She and the baby – are they all right?’

  ‘Indeed, yes, mistress. The baby’s as bonny a little fellow as ever I saw. He’s been named Leonard after his grandfather. No, this concerns a young lady called Jane Mason – sister to Mistress Pen Moss. You’ll have heard of her?’

  ‘I remember her as a child, when I had occasion to visit the Masons,’ I said. ‘She was about nine, then. I stayed with them for a while and taught the girls embroidery.’

  I had also disrupted the household by discovering treason in it. The original Leonard Mason, now deceased, had taken a dislike to me after that, and only his death had made it possible for his wife Ann and myself to become friends.

  ‘Jane is eighteen now,’ said Mark Easton. He put his tankard down, and his handsome young face took on an anxious look. ‘I met her when I was travelling for Lord Sussex, in Yorkshire, and the Moss household put me up for a few days. Jane Mason was sent to live with her sister some months ago; it seems that the idea is for Mistress Moss to find a husband for her.’

  I nodded. I had done the same for Pen. Ann Mason had thought me better placed than herself to launch her daughter into the world and arrange a marriage for her, and an onerous task it had proved to be.

  ‘Jane is . . . a joy,’ said Mark. ‘I fell in love with her and she with me and there shouldn’t be any impediment, not really. I’m not Catholic, as she is, but I wouldn’t interfere with her private observances. I’m willing to promise that. I have a good house I can take her to. A steward runs it for me now because I want to make my way in public life; that’s why I’m in the service of Lord Sussex. A man needs achievements as well as legacies if he is to amount to anything. My home is in Derbyshire, and I also have a property in Devon. But . . .’

  ‘But?’ I said. ‘There is a difficulty? Jane’s family feel that for some reason the match isn’t suitable?’

  ‘They’ve nothing against me personally,’ said Easton. ‘But Mistress Penelope wrote to their mother and their elder brother George in Berkshire, asking their opinion, and when the answer came back it was no, and Mistress Penelope said she agreed, and her husband nodded and said that so did he. I begged time off from Lord Sussex to visit Berkshire, to explain things in person. But—’

  ‘What things would those be? You haven’t explained,’ said Hugh.

  Easton looked at us unhappily. He was clearly a young man of means, and he was in a position of responsibility in the service of Lord Sussex. He should have been full of self-assurance. Instead, he now seemed vulnerable, almost desperate.

  ‘They say,’ he told us carefully, ‘that is, the Masons say, and the Mosses agree with them, that they are sorry for me, and they don’t hold me to blame in any way, but there it is. They can’t sanction the marriage of the second Mason daughter, my lovely Jane, to the son of a poisoner.’

  Dale dropped a poker into the hearth with a clatter. Her protuberant blue eyes were bulging, and the pockmarks of a long-ago attack of smallpox stood out as they always did when she was tired or ill or disturbed.

  Even Roger Brockley, who had gone back to stand beside her, let his eyebrows rise, wrinkling his high forehead with its dusting of gold freckles. Which was remarkable, for it took a great deal to shake Brockley. Mark had achieved the rare feat of startling him. He had startled us all. Gladys was gaping; Sybil looked appalled. Hugh had visibly stiffened.

  ‘A poisoner?’ he asked. ‘Er . . . which of your parents . . .?’

  ‘My father,’ said Mark miserably. ‘Or so it was said. I didn’t tell Jane or her family about it myself,’ he added in a bitter tone. ‘It isn’t the sort of thing one blithely announces across a dining table or when playing cards with one’s hosts in a parlour! But Mistress Penelope had heard the story before she met me. She was at court before her marriage, and apparently it was a scand
alous tale that the maids of honour still tattle about. She recognized my name and then asked my father’s first name and said to me: was he the Gervase Easton who was accused of poisoning a man called Peter Hoxton? He was. I’d have been a fool to deny it – she and her husband could have found out easily enough whether or not I was lying.’

  ‘I didn’t hear the story when I was at court,’ I said. ‘But I suppose I was never there for all that long at a time, and I didn’t mix much with the maids of honour.’

  ‘My father was never charged with the crime,’ Mark said, ‘but that was because he took his own life first. I was only three at the time.’ He put a hand inside his doublet and drew out a miniature portrait which hung round his neck on a chain. Lifting the chain over his head, he handed it to me. ‘The man he was said to have killed had been making advances to my mother. It was supposed to be a crime of jealousy. This was my mother. Judith, her name was. Look.’

  Hugh came over to me, and we examined it together. Sybil slipped off the window seat to look as well. The miniature was exquisite. It showed the face of a young woman, dressed in the style of twenty or so years ago, with a small ruff and a round French hood. The dark hair in front of the hood and the almond-shaped brown eyes were just like Easton’s. She did not have her son’s upward swooping eyebrows, but her own slim dark brows perfectly suited her face. Her face, altogether, was . . .

  Beautiful. There was no other word for it, and the artist, whoever he was, had understood it and paid homage to it. Even in this tiny portrait, he had shown not only the shape and colour of the eyes, but also their lustrousness. He had shown the dewiness of the skin and the lovely bone structure, so clearly defined and yet so delicate, as though the bone were made of polished ivory. He had shown the generosity in the mouth and captured the little tilt of the head, which was not coquettish but enquiring; as though its owner were shyly asking a question. He had wrought a miracle of fine detail in a minuscule space.

  ‘I can’t remember my father’s face,’ Easton said. ‘But I was five when I last saw my mother, and I can remember her and she was just like that. It’s a good picture. May I tell you the story? You see, I need someone to help me. I have never believed my father was guilty. I want to prove that I’m right, because if I can, then I’ll be able to marry Jane.’

  The Brockleys came over to us as well, and after a glance at Mark for his permission, Hugh held out the miniature for them to see. ‘What a lovely face,’ Fran said, while Brockley nodded in agreement.

  Hugh handed the picture back to its owner. ‘So, tell your tale,’ he said briefly.

  ‘I said I had a house in Derbyshire,’ Mark said. ‘My father – Gervase Easton – should have inherited it; he was the eldest son. But he fell in love with my mother—’

  ‘Who could blame him?’ Brockley remarked suddenly.

  ‘Quite,’ said Mark. ‘She was the daughter of one of our smallholder tenants and that wasn’t the kind of match that his parents wanted for him. But he insisted on marrying her, so he was disinherited. His younger brother, my Uncle Robert, was to have everything; my father would have to shift for himself. So he came south, with his bride. Her family had friends in court service, apparently, and someone helped him to get a place at court. The friends weren’t very influential, though, and it wasn’t a very splendid place.’

  Mark’s lip curled, which didn’t suit him. His handsomeness was meant for friendly candour. Anything like a sneer sat badly on him.

  ‘Go on,’ Hugh said.

  ‘It was 1543,’ Easton said. ‘In the days of King Henry. He’d just married his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. My father became a Clerk of the King’s Kitchen, helping to check larders, collect supplies for the cooks, that sort of thing. He was paid only sixteen pence a day, though I understand that he had hopes of promotion. My mother found work at court too – as a maid to one of Queen Catherine’s ladies. Until I came into the world, the following year, in April.’

  ‘And then?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘There was another man employed about the royal kitchens, higher up the hierarchy,’ said Easton. ‘A Clerk Comptroller, though I don’t quite know what that means.’

  ‘You seem to know a good deal, even so,’ I remarked. ‘Yet you say your father died when you were three.’

  ‘People told me things later. Uncle Robert brought me up, and he told me about my father’s work and what he was paid. He knew all about it from my mother. I’ll come to that in a moment, if I may . . .?’

  ‘Of course,’ Hugh said. ‘You were speaking of a Clerk Comptroller, whatever that may be.’

  ‘Yes. Peter Hoxton. He had a reputation as a womanizer, I believe, but it seems that he truly fell in love with my mother. He wouldn’t leave her alone. He waylaid her and found chances to talk to her and pay her compliments, and it made my father angry. Once, after dark, someone attacked Hoxton in a courtyard here in this castle, and had a fight with him, and put him in bed for four days, and the court gossip said that my father did it.

  ‘Well, it seems that not long after that, Hoxton fell ill. It was still summer – well, early September – but he was caught in a downpour and developed a heavy cold which turned to a fever. The court was still here at Windsor. For a few days, his manservant brought food to his room. The kitchens got it ready for him, and the servant collected it. Hoxton was mending, but on the third day, he fell ill again, with sickness and a kind of madness, and he died two days later. The physicians said it was poison.’

  ‘Wasn’t the manservant suspected?’ Hugh cut in.

  Mark shook his head. ‘No. I don’t know why not. My uncle did once say that the man had been proved innocent. I think perhaps he was never seriously suspected, though, because . . .’ He paused and swallowed. ‘Perhaps,’ he said at last, ‘it was because apparently there were two witnesses who actually saw my father, with a bag, come to where Hoxton’s food was waiting for collection, take out a pie from the bag and set it on the tray with the other dishes. Hoxton ate it, or most of it. It was shortly after that that he . . . apparently went insane and began to vomit. Later, he fell into a stupor and never recovered.’

  ‘What was it?’ Hugh asked. ‘The poison, I mean?’

  ‘Deadly nightshade, so I’ve been told,’ said Mark. ‘The berries were in the pie. I believe they look something like bilberries, and it seems he was fond of those. I’ve never seen either of them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t recognize nightshade,’ I said. ‘But I’ve eaten bilberries. They grow on wild heathlands in the west of England, I think. They can be stewed and either put in pies or baked under a topping of sweetened breadcrumbs. They’re delicious.’

  ‘I don’t know what that pie would have tasted like,’ said Mark dryly. ‘The physicians said the nightshade berries would taste strange, but not foul, and the flavour could be disguised by sugar or honey, and anyway, it seems that Hoxton’s nose was so blocked with the rheum that he had lost nearly all his sense of taste and smell. My mother told my uncle all this as well. She attended the inquest.’

  ‘How did the physicians know what it was?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘It seems that some of the pie was left, and one of them recognized the berries. He’d used nightshade himself in a medicine – apparently, in very tiny doses, its essence can relieve pain. He knew the symptoms, too. He’d had cases of children eating the berries. Everyone,’ said Easton, ‘believed my father was responsible. Everyone at court knew he hated Hoxton. Like poison.’ He made the very word sound venomous.

  ‘But you believe he didn’t do it?’ Hugh said. ‘Why?’

  He spoke mildly, yet the words sounded harsh and Easton flinched. He felt once more inside his doublet, and this time he brought out a folded letter. ‘Because of this,’ he said.

  He gave it to us, and we read it together, Hugh and I, with Sybil and Brockley still looking over our shoulders. It was an old document, the creases deep, the ink faded:

  My beloved Judith, when you read this, I shall be gone. I have to leave you, becau
se if I do not, I am likely to be taken from you in a worse way, which will leave an even darker shadow over your life than my death by my own act. They say it is sin to take one’s own life, but the Romans did it in the name of honour and they had their own wisdom.

  There is something I must tell you, something of which you must be certain. I did not kill Peter Hoxton. I never touched his food; never dreamed of such a thing. It’s true I once fought him and gave him bruises so remarkable that he hid from the world for half a week, but what of it? He made me angry, but men do fight sometimes. That’s very different from serving venom disguised as bilberry pie. I do not know who poisoned him or why. But whatever those two women may say, I was not the man they saw tampering with Hoxton’s meal.

  I shall die soon; I swear, upon my hopes of resurrection to eternal life, that this is the truth. I, your husband, am innocent of this thing.

  When our son Mark is old enough to understand, make sure he knows. Keep this letter and show it to him. Assure him that he is the son of an honest man.

  Dear Judith, I know well that you truly love me and have been ever faithful to me; that I had no need to fear Peter Hoxton or any other man. When I fought him, it was not because I feared that he would take you from me, but because I knew his pursuit distressed you.

  Now and ever, you are my love, my friend, my trusted companion. I regret nothing; not my estrangement from my home, nor anything else that has befallen me because I made you my wife. I only wish I could have given you more, a better way of living. It would have come in time, but for this disastrous chance. Now the only thing I can do is slip out of your life, and out of my own, before the name I have shared with you is stained beyond hope of cleansing. I say it again: I am not guilty. Rest assured of that and hold on to it for such comfort as it can give you. I love you. I always will.

  Your most true husband, Gervase.

  My eyes stung. It seemed to me that from those words there rose such a declaration of devotion that reading them was like walking accidentally into a room where a couple are making love. I was happy with Hugh, but the loves I had had before him had been more passionate (one of them even stormy). I recognized the feeling in these written words.