I interrupted. ‘Is this a state visit on behalf of the Dowager Duchess’s stepdaughter? Or just a family reunion?’
Timothy pulled another face. ‘A little of both, perhaps. The Dowager Duchess hasn’t set foot on English soil since her marriage to Charles of Burgundy almost twelve years ago, so in one way, yes, I suppose it is a sentimental journey for her. And there are members of her family — although not, of course, the King and Duke Richard — whom she hasn’t seen for the same length of time. But it’s also a formal visit on behalf of the Duchess Mary and her husband, Maximilian of Austria, to renew old ties with England — ties that have been somewhat eroded in the last three years since Duke Charles was killed. As you may or may not know — and this benighted city never seems to have any idea of what’s happening anywhere else in the world except Ireland — King Louis has wrested back great swathes of Picardy, Artois and the Franche-Comté for the French Crown.’
I flung up a hand. ‘Spare me the politics, Timothy! I do know King Edward has done nothing to support Burgundy because he receives a fat annual pension from King Louis … Oh, don’t pretend to look surprised. I was in France with Duke Richard, if you remember, when the Treaty of Picquigny was signed. So, how does Duchess Margaret’s visit affect me? King Edward surely can’t be in need of my diplomatic skills.’
Timothy shuddered. ‘Heaven forfend! You’d be like a bull let loose among the stalls on market day. No, no! But he does want his sister kept sweet and happy during her visit. Or as sweet and happy as possible considering that the young son of Duchess Margaret’s favourite waiting-woman has recently been murdered. There’s nothing His Highness can do about that, but he and the Duke of Gloucester would at least like to satisfy their sister’s desire for vengeance by bringing the killer to justice.’
I was a little confused. ‘Wait a moment! Where exactly did this murder take place? In Burgundy?’
‘Of course not! Would I be asking for your help to solve it if it had? No. The young man was done to death in London.’
I was even more confused. ‘What was he doing in London? I thought you said-’
It was Timothy’s turn to hold up his hand. ‘Let me explain. I think perhaps I’d better start at the beginning.’
I nodded vigorously. ‘I think perhaps you had.’
So Timothy talked. I listened.
Throughout Margaret of York’s troubled childhood, when, with her two younger brothers, George and Richard, she had been passed from one noble household to another, sometimes as a guest, sometimes as a prisoner, while her father, the Duke of York, fought King Henry VI for possession of the throne, her closest companions had been twins, seamstresses, Judith and Veronica Fennyman. Some five years older than Margaret herself, the girls had been reared in the York household from birth, both their parents having been loyal servants of Duchess Cicely. But when, in 1461, the widowed Duchess’s eldest son had deposed King Henry, avenged his father’s defeat and execution and been proclaimed King Edward IV, the twins had at last considered themselves free to leave Margaret’s employ and marry.
Judith had done very well for herself, marrying a certain Edmund Broderer, ten years her senior — a man with sufficient income from a thriving embroidery business in Needlers Lane to enable him to live at the Fleet Street end of the Strand. At twenty years of age, therefore, Judith had found herself mistress of a comfortable three-storey house which, if not quite as opulent as the neighbouring dwellings (most of which belonged to members of the nobility), still had a garden running down to its own private water-stairs on the bank of the Thames.
The other twin, Veronica, had been satisfied with finding a husband among her fellow servants, and had married one of Duchess Cicely’s grooms, James Quantrell, by whom, the following year, she had had a son, Fulk. Two weeks after the birth, James had been thrown by a wild young stallion he had been trying to tame and trampled underfoot. He had been dead within hours.
The grieving widow and her baby son, invited by Judith and Edmund, had gone to live in the Broderer household, where they had remained for the next six years. No young cousins had arrived to keep Fulk company, and Edmund Broderer’s closest male relative remained his cousin’s son, Lionel, who lived with his mother in Needlers Lane.
Lionel had been apprenticed early to his cousin, and shown such an aptitude for the embroidery trade that by the time he was eighteen he had been running the business for Edmund almost single-handed, while the older man led a life of leisure. Then, on a wild and stormy March evening in the year 1468, Edmund had disappeared while returning home from one of London’s many taverns, his corpse being washed up near Saint Botolph’s wharf three weeks later, stripped of clothes and valuables by the water scavengers who made a gruesome living out of the Thames’s many casualties. He had only been identified by his wife’s intimate knowledge of his body.
In the summer of the same year, Margaret of York, together with a trousseau that had cost the King, her brother, the awesome sum of two and a half thousand pounds, had left England to become the third wife of Charles of Charolais, Duke of Burgundy. Lonely and more than a little frightened — like many a pawn in the royal marriage game before her — she had begged Veronica Quantrell to accompany her as her seamstress-in-chief and, more importantly, as a familiar face and childhood friend. Veronica, in spite of her sister’s recent bereavement, had agreed, and for the next twelve years she and Fulk had made their home in the Burguadian court, wherever it happened to be. Veronica had comforted her mistress as Margaret’s hopes of presenting her lord with a male heir — with an heir of either sex — slowly faded, and were finally snuffed out altogether with Charles’s death. She had become indispensable to the Duchess, and her handsome young son hardly less so. At eighteen, he was Margaret’s favourite male attendant.
‘Then,’ said Timothy, helping himself to more ale, ‘just after last Christmas, Veronica died, and young Fulk decided that he must bring the news to his aunt himself. It would seem that the sisters had always kept in touch and remained on good terms.’
In the intervening twelve years, Judith had married twice more; first to a Justin Threadgold, who had been carried off four years later by the plague, and secondly to a man thirteen years older than herself, her present husband, Godfrey St Clair. Still childless herself, Judith had two stepchildren, Alcina Threadgold and her present husband’s son, Jocelyn St Clair.
Both these young people were treated as Judith’s own, lavished with affection and everything that money could buy. (She was now a very wealthy woman, thanks to Lionel Broderer’s management of the embroidery business.)
‘But it’s the old, familiar story,’ Timothy went on, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Faced with her own flesh and blood, warmed by the young man’s apparent devotion and affection, Judith had barely known him a month before she made him her heir, presented him with extravagant gifts of money and jewels, and allowed herself to become besotted by him …’ There was a pause before Timothy added grimly, ‘Two weeks ago, he was found battered to death in Fleet Street, not two or three hundred yards from his aunt’s home in the Strand.’