A Web of Silk Read online

  ‘As soon as you hear from Frost. You will await his invitation. You are clear about what we want you to do? Have you any questions?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ It didn’t sound dangerous, I said to myself. I had only to behave like a gossipy woman. Wait, though! I would have to be careful about that. If Frost really knew of my reputation, then he would know quite well that I wasn’t that type of woman at all. Perhaps I could put on a show of being very discreet but then appear to let my tongue off the leash under the influence of wine. Or perhaps I could get Sybil to be the one who talked unwisely …

  I was rising to my feet, about to take my leave, when Walsingham said: ‘There is one more thing.’

  Oh, there would be! Of course there would, there always was!

  ‘Yes?’ I said, sitting down again.

  ‘It may be as well for you to be away from home, under someone else’s roof, for a while. Warn your household not to tell others where you are. Let it be thought that you are visiting your daughter in Buckinghamshire.’

  ‘I see … At least, I don’t see. If I am to go officially to instruct the Frost girls in embroidery …’

  ‘Simeon Wilmot, who led last year’s wicked attempt on you and your son, was duly executed,’ said Walsingham. ‘He died cursing you. No doubt you remember him all too well.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said, recalling with a shudder the man who had threatened Harry in order to force me to agree to be used as a means of assassinating Mary Stuart. I remembered his cold eyes, his authoritative voice, the unnaturally long fingers that could do card tricks, flicking through the pack as though it were made of water. I was glad he was dead.

  ‘I spoke with him myself once,’ said Walsingham. ‘Questioned him personally. A dangerous man, I think. He had a mind like a sprained ankle.’

  ‘A …?’ Such a flight of fancy was unlike Walsingham.

  But his face was serious. He nodded. ‘Hot and hard, and absolutely rigid. The kind of mind that can’t shift its position or adapt in any way, because it’s too stiff to move and trying would actually hurt. Well, he is dead. But we have learned that he has a half-brother, a man apparently called Anthony Hunt. We have tried to find him but without success. However, I have eyes and ears in many places, including taverns and markets and so on where people gather and meet and talk.’ Another part of his spider’s web. All in black, with long arms and legs … sometimes I thought he even looked like a spider. ‘I have heard that this man Hunt has made threats against you. He apparently wants to avenge his brother. I know, and so do you, that the plot Wilmot and his friends hatched was foolish and ramshackle, but it was dangerous just the same. This threat may be dangerous, too. Especially if Hunt’s mentality is the same as Wilmot’s. You should take care until such time as we lay hands on him. Which we no doubt will do before too long.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir Francis,’ I said grimly.

  ‘I knew it,’ said Dale when I told her what had transpired. Brockley just shook his head and sighed.

  ‘I knew it, too,’ I said. ‘I’m not so very surprised. Some things never seem to be quite finished. It’s happened before, when something we all thought was past and over has risen up like an unfriendly spectre to haunt me.’

  ‘I suspect,’ said Brockley, ‘that what is needed is for that woman Mary of Scotland to be quite finished! She has been at the bottom of so many of our troubles.’

  ‘Walsingham thinks the same,’ I said. ‘But the queen is against beheading her cousin, not least because this cousin is a queen, as she is herself. It would be a kind of impiety to behead an anointed queen and would reduce her own sanctity, which is some sort of protection for her. I understand that.’

  ‘What now, madam?’ Brockley asked. ‘Are you to have an audience with Her Majesty?’

  ‘I think not,’ I said. ‘Before I left Walsingham I asked if I should seek an audience with her, but she is apparently so busy dealing with ambassadors and delegations that I might have to wait a week or more. I have decided to go home at once. We’ll dine and then leave. Get out my travelling dress, Dale. We’ll sleep at Hawkswood tonight.’

  I was glad to change out of my burdensome court dress and to start on our journey, though Walsingham’s warning was working in my mind like yeast in bread dough and I was glad that Brockley, as usual, had his sword with him. The roads we used had all been properly tended, with trees cut back further than a bowshot – or musket range – to discourage footpads, but I still felt that Brockley, up in the driving seat, was exposed. However, nothing happened. The journey was pleasant, as the weather had turned cooler, and by nightfall we were safely back at Hawkswood.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ I said as Sybil and Wilder came out of the house to greet us. ‘With plenty of news, and a task not only for me but for you as well. And we have little choice but to accept it. I’ll tell you all about it when we are indoors.’

  ‘Dr Joynings was here earlier,’ said Sybil. ‘He is anxious to see you about something. He asked to be told when you returned.’

  ‘Send young Eddie to tell him, in the morning,’ I said.

  FIVE

  Broken Glass

  There was no need to send a message to Dr Joynings the next morning, for he arrived in person and highly agitated while I was still eating breakfast in the great hall along with the Brockleys and Sybil, Gladys, my son Harry and his tutor. The weather was no longer hot but had suddenly turned wet and chilly, with a sharp wind, a first harbinger of the autumn to come. I had ordered a fire to be lit for us. Our short, rotund vicar had a stout cloak wrapped over his black cassock. He bounced in on Wilder’s heels like a clerical tennis ball, wiping his nose as he came. His round face, always rubicund, had been scoured by the cold wind to a deeper shade of red, and his somewhat childlike blue eyes were watering.

  He was so close behind Wilder that there was little point in announcing him, though my steward, being very correct, nevertheless stopped just inside the door to declare in formal style that Dr Joynings from St Mary’s had arrived. Ignoring him, our guest stepped past him and made straight for the hearth, clearly in need of its warmth, and gasped out that he was sorry to interrupt our meal.

  ‘I am sorry to have come so early, but oh, Mistress Stannard, I am thankful that you are home. Such a business! I have never in all my life encountered such a thing. I could not believe my eyes, indeed I could not! I am ashamed that such a thing could happen in a church that is in my care. I have always been a friend to my parishioners, wherever I have served, and I could never have believed …’

  At this point, he realized from the bewildered faces turned to him from where we sat round our breakfast board that none of us had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

  ‘Wilder,’ I said, ‘take the good doctor’s cloak and mull some red wine for him and call someone to bring him some food. Dr Joynings, do please be calm. Take a seat. Come to the table – if you sit on the bench nearest the fire, you will be quite warm. And then tell us what all this is about. Start at the beginning.’

  ‘The beginning!’ Joynings left the hearth as requested and came to the table. Wilder, having shouted some orders from the door, had pushed a poker into the fire to get hot and was now stooping with his head in the sideboard cupboard, reaching for the wine. My youngest maidservant, Margery, appeared in haste with bread and cold meat, which Joynings accepted, though absently, as if hardly aware of them. Through a mouthful of veal, he said jerkily: ‘It happened yesterday. In the afternoon. The village was quiet. I was in the church. The carpenter had just delivered the new benches and we were arranging them.’

  He looked at me very straightly. ‘I was in the church with the carpenter, Rob Dodd. I was not alone.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘We heard a crash,’ said Joynings. ‘And then another. We turned round, and there were two big stones lying on the floor amid a great strewing of broken glass. Stained glass. Someone had thrown those stones through the Judgement Window.’

&
nbsp; ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t like that window and nor do you, Mistress Stannard, and some of the villagers don’t, either. But neither I nor you would actually attack it, and I find it hard to believe that anyone in Hawkswood village would. But it has happened. We stood there gaping for a moment and then rushed out – but though we heard feet running away, there’s that belt of trees behind the church and whoever it was got away through that. I can’t run fast, and nor can Rob Dodd. He’s got a limp, ever since he had an accident with an axe, and I’m fifty-eight.’ I nodded sympathetically. There was a hiss as Wilder applied the hot poker to a jug of wine.

  ‘I don’t believe,’ said Joynings wretchedly, ‘that anyone among my parishioners would do such a thing. There are some lively boys among them, but I can’t believe it of them. Their fathers would be outraged! Mistress Stannard, what’s to be done?’

  ‘We must try to find out who was responsible,’ I said, ‘and make them pay for a replacement. Which need not be exactly like the one it’s replacing! That one was no doubt the sort of thing that they liked in medieval times, but it didn’t suit the world of today. Perhaps in a way this is a good thing.’

  I thought for a moment, while Wilder filled a goblet and brought it to Joynings, who sipped it.

  Brockley said: ‘But who did this? Whatever we think of that Judgement Window, it was a destructive act. First there was Philip …’ His voice faded for a moment and shook. ‘The inquest hasn’t yet been held,’ he said, steadying himself. ‘And now this. I don’t like it!’

  Neither did I. Nor did any of us. Notification of the inquest arrived that morning. It was to be held in Guildford on the twenty-first of August, the day after tomorrow. Meanwhile, I sent Brockley, Adam Wilder and also Laurence Miller, who was the principal groom at my stud of trotters, to Hawkswood village to make some enquiries. The lean, unsmiling Miller was not only a competent stud groom but was also in the employ of Lord Burghley – otherwise Sir William Cecil – who, because I was the queen’s sister and also a queen’s agent, liked to have someone near me who would report to him on my welfare. Miller was good at enquiries.

  There is no need to go into detail about their visit to the village. It produced nothing.

  The village itself wasn’t big. It lay to the east of my land and consisted of one straggling street of thatched cottages with the church at the southern end, and at the north end a forge, the carpenter’s shop, a bakery and a tavern called the Sign of the Roebuck. The carpenter was Rob Dodd, who lived with his family over their shop. Rob’s brother Luke and their father, Harry, were the village thatchers. They lived halfway along the street and were already beginning to train Luke’s two little sons, small as they were, to be thatchers as well.

  The Dodds were, to me, an interesting family, because some years before I married Hugh and came to Hawkswood I had encountered a couple of brothers called Dodd who were in the service of William Cecil. I was intrigued to find a Dodd family in Hawkswood village, and thought it a pleasant coincidence when I learned that they were in fact cousins – third cousins, I think – of the Dodds who served Cecil. Our Dodds were all thoroughly capable craftsmen, though somewhat inclined to be talkative.

  In addition, the village boasted a potter and a saddler, who had workshops behind their homes, on the patch of land that went with every cottage. Other villagers used their patch for fruit trees or vegetables or to grow a little corn. Or to keep livestock: chickens, a pig or two, goats for milk, a donkey or a pony for transport. The whole community was pervaded by a warm farmyard smell, and in wet weather the track that formed the single street was deep in mud.

  My late husband, Hugh Stannard, had thought about having the track cobbled, but died before he got round to it. I had never done so, either. It was one of those costly projects, like replacing a large stained-glass window, that one kept on thinking about and then put off for another day.

  Hugh had been a good landlord, as had his father before him, and the villagers were usually well-conducted. There would be the occasional fight over a girl, or a squabble in the tavern over a game of darts. But rarely anything worse.

  The darts game was popular. In the days of the last King Henry, someone had invented it as a way by which archers could sharpen up their marksmanship even in bad weather, as it was played indoors. Players threw small arrows at a target. At the Sign of the Roebuck, they used a circular section of a tree trunk. Colourful circles were painted on it and points awarded for hitting the little centre circle, with diminishing points for the outer ones. There were occasional disputes when a dart landed on the very edge of a circle. And that was virtually the limit of bad behaviour in Hawkswood. The villagers were not at all pleased to be questioned about anything so outrageous as throwing stones through church windows.

  ‘I spent most of the day going round our land, talking to the men working on it, and come the evening I went into the Roebuck,’ said Brockley, returning home late and cross. ‘Some of the men in there I’d questioned already and the rest had already heard about it, and none of them were glad to see me. I got a dart in the chest!’

  It had been thrown from a distance and not very hard, since it had lost impetus before it arrived, whereupon it had stuck in Brockley’s doublet and then fallen to the floor. It had been a gesture rather than an attack. But it was an indication of just how offended the villagers were.

  Wilder and Miller had returned earlier, having gone from house to house to talk to the women. They had taken one side of the street each. Most of the women had been shocked, and sympathetic towards Dr Joynings, but had sprung to the defence of their young. The mere suggestion that any of the village boys could have been responsible had them bristling like indignant hedgehogs.

  ‘And I thought that old biddy in the last cottage, the widow Marge Reed, meant to assault me!’ said Miller with feeling, talkative for once. ‘She lives squashed in that place along with her ancient father – who’s got the joint evil in his knees and sits in a chair all day with a rug over them, grousing all the time and demanding to be waited on – and her son and daughter-in-law, and six grandsons between twelve and twenty. I don’t know where they all sleep—’

  ‘Some of them are apprentices in Woking. The others sleep in an attic under the thatch,’ Wilder said helpfully.

  ‘There’s two sets of twins among them,’ said Miller, unheeding. ‘And the eldest grandson’s now married, and his wife, Bridget, is breeding. And when she and Marge heard what I was there about, well, Bridget stood there in the kitchen with her hands on her hips, and her stomach full of another pair of twins, judging by the size of the bulge, and said her husband had gone to Guildford with their donkey cart to buy flour and cloth and a new hammer for his work at the carpentry place, where he’s an assistant, it seems. And she said that when he came back he’d use the hammer to knock my head off for talking insults about their boys, what are all well behaved. Three of them are apprentices in Woking – like you said, Wilder – and two go most days to a school there, and the married one works in the Roebuck. Throwing stones at windows, church or otherwise, she said, is what they wouldn’t do. And how did I dare come to the house saying they had? Then Marge – my God, that woman has arms like legs of mutton and great big feet in sloppy slippers and shoulders fit for an ox – well, she upped with a meat cleaver.

  ‘And at that point,’ said Miller, with what I realized was a kind of grim humour, ‘I left.’

  There was, evidently, nothing to be learned in the village. However, I thought, we had at least got rid of that unpleasant window. And soon there was a prospect of getting a new one made promptly. Julius Stagg arrived the next morning.

  It was another grey morning, with spatters of rain now and then and the wind still cold. It was a Sunday, and when the unexpected visitor rode in I and most of my household had just returned from church. I was in the small parlour with Sybil, starting to embroider the pair of sleeves that were to be decorated with Sybil’s new design. They were for a new gown I wa
s making for myself, of a tawny wool cloth, and the design of buttercup flowers on slender, curling green-silk stems would go well with tawny.

  At the sound of hooves, I looked up and glanced through the window. The newcomer was just drawing rein in the courtyard. I observed that his horse was a businesslike bay cob with hairy fetlocks and a Roman nose. And also that it was well fed and glossy with grooming, and the rider was well fed and glossy too.

  Dismounting, he tossed back a black cloak to reveal a spruce narrow ruff and a brown doublet and hose of good plain wool set off with yellow slashings that had the gleam of silk. His high-crowned black hat had a silver brooch in front, and his riding boots were polished. He was still fairly young, perhaps in his late twenties, but he had a mature and self-possessed air as he stood there pulling off a pair of leather gauntlets and declaring his business to Wilder, who had gone out to meet him. In fact, he had Prosperous Tradesman written all over him.

  A moment later, Wilder was bringing him in and announcing that this was Master Julius Stagg from Guildford, a designer and creator of stained glass with a workshop and a staff of skilled craftsmen.

  ‘Stagg?’ I said. ‘There’s a firm on the far side of Guildford that creates stained glass, but the proprietor’s name is John Hines.’

  ‘Master Stagg has come to Guildford only lately,’ said Wilder, ‘and you may not have noticed his signboard yet. He previously had a business in Taunton, in Somerset. He decided that he wanted to be nearer to London. I understand that he is already doing well – to the annoyance of Master Hines, I daresay! Stagg’s workshop is on our side of Guildford, closer to us than the Hines one, and he has heard that we may have need of his services.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I said. I put my stitchwork aside. ‘You are welcome, Master Stagg. Please be seated. It is true that we have had trouble here. Someone has damaged a window in our village church. How did you chance to hear about it?’