The Cardinal's Court Read online

  ‘What wonderful embroidery, Your Grace can do,’ I said hastily. ‘I have seen nothing like that in Ireland.’

  ‘It is the way that we work in Spain.’ Her smile was sweet and it lit up her face. ‘This is for the king’s highness. I make all of his shirts.’

  I almost said: ‘Lucky man!’ but decided it would be too familiar. I had spotted Gilbert Tailboys chatting to Mistress Bessie Blount over a chessboard and turned my gaze towards them.

  ‘You play chess.’ The queen’s glance followed mine and then she said swiftly: ‘Go and finish the game with Master Tailboys. Mistress Blount!’ She had not raised her voice above the sound of the lutenists in the corner, but Bessie immediately jumped to her feet and hurried over to the queen and was presented with some sewing. Anne Boleyn, who was sitting on the windowsill, laughing with Harry Percy, received a similar summoning glance, but deliberately turned her face towards the window, rubbing moisture from one of the diamond-shaped panes with a long finger and gazing up into young Harry’s face with a teasing expression. I passed them on my way to Gilbert and paused for a moment, removing my cap and bowing to them both. Neither said anything and barely acknowledged the bow, but I waited. After all, Harry Percy and James had been pages together for many years in the cardinal’s household. Did he feel any compunction that he had driven his one-time friend from shelter and protection?

  ‘You’ve heard about James?’ I asked him then and he nodded reluctantly, looking at Mistress Anne as though she were his master.

  ‘When you saw that arrow …’ I began.

  ‘It was quite clear,’ interrupted Mistress Anne.

  ‘That’s what puzzles me, you know,’ I said confidentially to Harry. ‘Let me just understand how it went. You saw James take an arrow from his bag – I understand that they were bags supplied by the household artist, that’s right, isn’t it? Not your usual quivers.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Again the lady answered. Harry was very flushed. He suffered from bouts of ague; I knew that. Now he looked as though he were running a fever. I began to be sorry that I had not seen him when he was alone. He looked at Mistress Boleyn as a boy looks at a schoolmaster, hoping for approbation, but fearing a reproof.

  ‘I’ve been at some of those pageants,’ I said, injecting a note of confidence into my voice. ‘I’ve watched them and I know how hard it is to see anything. People move, shadows are cast, candles flicker.’

  ‘I have good sight and I was standing up on the dais, looking over the castle wall.’ Her voice rose to a shrill note and I saw Lady Willoughby get to her feet and thread her way down towards us. I pictured the scene. Candlelight picking out faces and hands, perhaps the white Milan lace on gowns and scarves, the silver flash from a mask. ‘But a dark brown arrow,’ I said aloud. ‘How can you be so sure that it was a real arrow?’

  ‘It looked quite different,’ she snapped. She looked as though she were enjoying this keen encounter of our wits.

  ‘But I have been to the artist and have seen the false arrows,’ I said. ‘They were, you know, Lady Anne, similar in colour, length and size to the real arrows. One difference only. They did not have a point, neither bodkin nor broad-headed, but they had a pointed tip, painted in silver, that must have been virtually impossible to pick out. So how could you possibly distinguish the real from the false?’

  ‘Mistress Anne, the queen wishes to speak to you,’ said Lady Willoughby from behind me.

  I snatched off my cap again and bowed at the queen’s favourite lady-in-waiting. She gave me a smile, but waited until Anne had swung her long legs from the window seat and had begun to move towards the queen. Then she gave me another smile and followed the girl.

  I was glad to see them both go. Harry would be an easier target for my questions than the young lady. I gave him no time to think.

  ‘This is all rubbish, Harry, you know,’ I said roughly. ‘You couldn’t possibly be certain that it was a real arrow, not by candlelight, not with those crowds of people milling about. And if it were, wouldn’t you cry out an alarm? How could you possibly risk the king being shot with a real arrow if James, by mistake, had fitted it to his bow? That’s treason, you know, risking the king’s life,’ I said warming to my subject, though I was a little sorry when I saw the hectic flush on his cheeks turn to livid spots of colour. He was white around his mouth and at the side of his nostrils.

  ‘Look,’ I said more gently. ‘I know what it’s like. I remember when I was about your age and I was deeply in love with someone, married to another man. You’ll get over it, Harry. You and James, you have to do what your fathers want you to do. You’re both to be betrothed for reasons of state; you to Mistress Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, and he to the lady there.’ I jerked my head towards where Anne Boleyn was reluctantly accepting a piece of sewing from the hand of the queen.

  ‘I would have thought that I could have chosen a wife for myself.’ Harry’s voice was sulky, but my heart leapt at his words.

  ‘Perhaps you might,’ I said soothingly, though I doubted it. Things didn’t work out that way, not for the heir to an earldom. ‘But, Harry, take my advice, take advice from a man much older than you. Don’t take on the cardinal or the king. If it comes to a joust, you are not up to their weight.’

  He had not, I noticed, reasserted that he had seen a real arrow in James’s hand on the night of the pageant.

  ‘I’m commanded to play chess with Gilbert Tailboys; come and support me,’ I said, throwing a careless arm around Harry’s shoulders. He had not denied the charge that he could not possibly have noticed whether it was a real or a mock arrow. Let him admit it, admit that he was unsure in front of a witness, and I might have the beginnings of a defence for my poor James.

  He shrugged me off, however.

  ‘I know what you want; you want me to take back my words. I did see the arrow,’ he said, his tone loud and emphatic. I saw the queen look across the room. She had no objection to young men coming in to chat to the ladies, to play cards, or chess, to sing to the lute, but she was a stickler for good order in her rooms. I didn’t want her to think that loud voices followed in my wake and so I went across and sat down at the red and white chess board in front of Gilbert Tailboys.

  ‘We’ll start again,’ I said after a cursory look at the board with its exposed king and underdeveloped pieces. ‘Pretty girl, your future wife, Gilbert, but not much idea about chess.’ Quickly I set up the board, giving him the white pieces, and within seconds our two king pawns faced each other across the centre of the board.

  ‘I’ve been promised a barony,’ he said as he pushed out a second pawn to eye mine.

  ‘Worth a lot of bad chess play,’ I said flippantly. I moved my knight. I would allow him to take the pawn; I could always win it back later, but I wanted him relaxed and in a good mood. I noticed that the Spanish doctor Ramirez had arrived and was bowing to the queen. I saw them laugh together and guessed that she was teasing him about his late arrival.

  ‘The wedding will be at Easter,’ Gilbert said, moving out his king’s knight’s pawn. ‘Will you still be here for it? If so, you would be very welcome to attend. The king himself has promised to grace our nuptials with his presence.’ He said the last words stiffly, as though someone had taught them to him.

  The least he could do after making the girl pregnant, discarding her, taking her little son away from her and then marrying her off to a man she had never met before. I felt sorry for Gilbert. He asked so little and lived with the terror that his father’s insanity would be inherited by him. I would handle him gently, but I had to find out what he knew, I resolved as I turned back to the chessboard. I recklessly sacrificed the opportunity to exploit Gilbert’s weakness on the king’s side and offered him another tempting little pawn. ‘I’m not sure whether I will be still here,’ I said. ‘It depends on whether this coil around James has been sorted out. I thought it was all nonsense in the beginning but what you told me has made me a little worried.’ I advanced a
bishop and allowed it to hang uselessly in the centre of the board. He flushed guiltily and bent his head.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ I said. ‘You were in a quandary. It’s just that I wonder how James found out about the secret, the one that Master Pace held over his head; do you know who told him?’ I said, keeping my eyes averted from Gilbert and fixed on the board. The music from the lutes was loud enough now to cloak my voice, but I kept it low as I asked the question.

  ‘Well, you probably know the secret, James thought that you might, but he said that you didn’t know that he knew.’ He had missed the tempting little gift of my bishop while he formulated this convoluted sentence. His mind was on other things. Although I kept my eyes down, I could sense that he looked up at me a couple of times, while I was pretending to study the board. I looked away, studied the picture of a woven David playing a woven harp on the arras hung to cloak the wall beside us and observed him surreptitiously from beneath my eyelids as I waited patiently for Gilbert to make his move.

  This time he spotted the defenceless bishop and snatched it triumphantly from the board. The coup brought a rush of words to his lips.

  ‘He was furious that nobody had told him before now. At least, he said that he had been furious first when he found out, but then, afterwards, he was thinking about it when he was riding back from Bristol to London, when he had come back from a visit to Ireland with the Earl of Surrey …’

  ‘And what conclusion did James come to?’ Coming back from Ireland. I knew now the answer to my question as to who had told James the secret. I said no more, though, and contemplated the board. I considered using the new Spanish move of castling but it might be unfamiliar to Gilbert and I didn’t want him to lose his thread of thought. I moved my queen instead. She might be a useful weapon.

  ‘Well, he thought – this is what he said – he thought that you all were probably acting for the best when you didn’t tell him. He said you might even have thought that it didn’t matter. He said that under Gaelic law, under Brehon law that it wouldn’t matter that much.’

  Very true. But Master Piers Rua Butler might be the son of an Irish mother, might be a fluent speaker of the Irish language, might employ lawyers and judges learned in old Irish law, what we called the law of the Brehons, nevertheless, he was a hard, ambitious man who knew that fame and fortune were in the hands of the English monarchy and that English laws of inheritance would prevail when it came to his heir. The earldom was of huge importance to Piers. He had been unofficially known in Ireland as Earl of Ormond ever since the death of his distant relative Sir Thomas Butler.

  And, under English law the secret certainly did matter.

  ‘It was his mother, I suppose.’ Savagely I baited a trap for Gilbert’s unprotected castle. He would be better off away from court, I reflected. He had neither the stamina nor the guile for the dangerous life that was led by the favourites of kings. Let him take his Bessie, shut his eyes to her past and settle down in the country and breed sons. Perhaps Piers Rua would have been happier if he had stayed at Polestown and not laid claim to Kilkenny Castle and an earldom.

  Gilbert stared at my red queen in a perplexed fashion. ‘I don’t know,’ he said almost absent-mindedly. ‘Perhaps it was his mother. Just before he came over to England. Perhaps she thought he should know.’

  I tightened my lips and swept his castle from the board. This matter was very, very serious. The motive would be established if Gilbert gabbled about this to anyone other than me.

  ‘Speak to no one else about this, Gilbert.’ I kept my voice low and my temper under control. ‘You will put a noose around James’s neck if you betray his confidence.’

  ‘I resign.’ He tipped his king over and rose to his feet. His face had a stubborn, angry expression and I feared that I might have mishandled the matter. I did not follow him as he walked away and perched on the window seat beside William Carey and his wife, Mary, the amiable sister of Anne Boleyn, but stayed where I was, eyes down on the chessboard as though studying the position.

  And then I saw young Tom Seymour. He should have been at his studies, of course, but the death of the instructor of the wards had left the four young boys at a loose end. The young Earl of Derby, Edward Stanley, was there with him. His mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the queen, and Her Grace was reputed to have a motherly feeling for this orphaned boy. And Tom Seymour, ever an opportunist, came with him.

  But that was not what interested me.

  Tom Seymour had a knife in his hand. A long, thin, very sharp knife. He was displaying it to his friend.

  I started to go forward, but then stopped and waited. Dr Ramirez had finished his conversation with the queen and was bowing deeply and backing away from her presence. I waited until he came close to me. And then I spoke in his ear.

  ‘See that knife, in young Seymour’s hand.’

  He looked startled, but I saw a flash from his eyes and knew that he had understood my meaning.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Just like that.’ He whispered the words in my ear while I considered the best way to handle this. Tom Seymour was quick-witted and sly. I did not want to give him any food for gossip.

  And then, while we both watched, Tom, accompanied by young Stanley, strolled nonchalantly over to the side of the room. He gave a quick conspiratorial grin at his friend and then rapidly he sliced the penis from one of the moulded putti on the waist-high frieze that ran across one wall of the room. The little naked figures, I noticed, seeing the brown mark where the incision had been made, were formed from that same leather mâché used in the making of the mock arrows. It had been skilfully painted in a blue-white colour so that the effect was that of stone.

  In an instant I had young Seymour by the scruff of the neck, standing right behind him so that my action went unnoticed by the others in room. He had the sense to keep quiet and I allowed him a few minutes in which to get really worried about what punishment defacing a frieze in the queen’s own room would incur.

  And then I said in his ear: ‘Where did you get that knife?’

  Tom Seymour was used to trouble. His gaze into my face was limpid, as innocent as the leather mâché putti themselves.

  ‘Just picked it up in the long gallery, that’s right, isn’t it, Edward?’ he asked his friend, who nodded hastily and turned a shade of puce.

  ‘Go and play with the monkey, Your Grace,’ I snapped. He was a fairly stupid boy, the Earl of Derby, but the cardinal, very conscious of rank, treated him with a great show of ceremony and I did not want to get into the cardinal’s bad books.

  Tom Seymour watched as his friend made his way awkwardly up the room towards the queen. His dark-skinned face was inscrutable, mouth well under control, eyes hooded, but I guessed that his mind was working fast. The small leather mâché penis fell from his hand onto the floor and he made an effort to cover it with his shoe.

  ‘Pick that up,’ I said. I released his neck, but took a firm grip of his left wrist. He bent down obediently, but there was a slightly scornful twitch of his lips as he turned towards me and politely offered the scrap to me.

  ‘Put it in your pocket. And I’ll have this.’

  He made no move to resist as I took the knife from him. Ramirez, the Spanish doctor, was a man of my own size, a big man, also, and together we towered over him. Tom looked from one to the other. His dark brown eyes twinkled and he had a deprecating look on his face. I viewed the knife. I had thought so when I had seen it in his hand and now there was no mistaking it. On the plain ash of the handle the owner’s initial had been drawn and then burned into the wood. There was no mistaking that elaborate and ornate S. I hesitated for a moment, but then handed it to Ramirez. My first duty was to James. I would cope with other considerations later on.

  I glanced around. The little Earl of Derby, small for his age, and fragile-looking, had obediently gone to play with Queen Katherine’s monkey and the spectacle of boy and furry animal provided an excuse for the ladies to abandon their sewing and cluster aroun
d, cooing and exclaiming. The queen’s attention was fully occupied. She would not miss us.

  ‘Let’s go and return this knife,’ I said to Tom Seymour, still keeping a bruising grasp on his arm. I could see by Ramirez’s face as he examined the knife that he had seen its significance.

  ‘You know the owner.’ Although we were now outside the presence chamber and walking through the ranks of yeoman who guarded the entrance to the queen’s rooms, he still kept his voice very low.

  ‘I think so.’ But I knew. I remembered then what had been in my mind when Ramirez had described the knife that had made the fatal incision into the heart of Edmund Pace.

  9

  Susannah opened the door as soon as I knocked. Her face lit up when she saw me and it gave me a pang to watch the full lips parting and the sapphire blue of her eyes warming with pleasure.

  ‘This young man has something to say to you.’ I pushed young Tom roughly with a hand between his shoulder blades.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Tom immediately. I guessed that he spent most of his time saying that word to the adults in his life. It popped from his mouth with an automatic ease.

  ‘Sorry for what?’ She looked from him to me at the dark Spanish face of Ramirez and then back at me again. Her own face grew suddenly serious, and I guessed that she had seen something in his eyes, some shock, some regret, perhaps.