‘Master Martin,’ I said, ‘would you happen to know where we might find Nicholas Meredith?’
‘Won’t be far away. He’s in town. Friend of yours?’
‘My cousin.’
‘You’re his cousin? From London? You en’t a lawyer, then?’
‘I… No. Not as such.’
Martin took a step back into the pooled water, inspecting me from head to feet and back again.
‘Holy blood! You en’t…?’ His eyes widened, and then his arms were thrown wide as if he’d embrace me. ‘Rowly Dee’s boy? The man who… Holy blood…’
‘You knew my father?’
‘Rowland Dee? All the talk was about him at one time. How close he was to the ole King. How well-favoured. And now it’s his son and the ole King’s daughter. Holy blood! I tell you… Master Meredith, when the pamphlets come from London after the crowning, he’s in yere reading it all out. His uncle’s boy calculing the stars for the new queen. Well, well… Do he know you’re yere?’
‘I wrote to him but… no, he doesn’t. Not yet.’
‘Aye, I thought… He’d known you was coming, we’d never’ve yeard the last of it. So you en’t nothing to do with the judge?’
I assured him we were merely travelling with the judge’s company, while inspecting manuscripts from disassembled libraries. Taking the opportunity to make a visit to my family’s old home.
‘Nant-y-groes? Master Stephen Price, he’s there now, see. You know Master Price? He was down London. MP for Radnorshire.’
‘Why’s he living at Nant-y-groes?’
‘Building a new home down the valley, by the ole monastery grange. Gotter keep his family somewhere, meanwhile.’
‘So he’s only renting it.’
‘Master Nick likely owns it yet.’
‘And much of this town?’
‘Not as much as Master Bradshaw – big wool merchant.’ Jeremy Martin beamed. ‘Wool, cloth and the law, my masters. As good a foundation as you’ll find anywhere. Used to be religion, now it’s wool, cloth and the law.’
The rain stopped not long before twilight. Within half an hour, a piercing red sun lit the street, and Dudley and I walked out into a town that you could feel to be growing around you.
Signs of building on a scale I hadn’t encountered since leaving Cecil’s house in the Strand. Piles of bricks everywhere and frames of green oak for new houses. Poke into any alleyway, and you’d find old barns and outhouses being converted into business premises.
We edged around a puddle the size of a duckpond, the sun floating there like an orange.
‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘why this town makes you shiver.’
Dudley looked across the street where the ground rose towards a castle, fallen into ruin on its green mound, much of its stone already plundered.
‘I do mistrust sudden wealth.’
‘As distinct from inherited wealth?’
He didn’t rise to that. The sun spread a glowing hearthlight over a wall of new brick, and a stout man in clerk’s apparel crossed the street in front of us, bearing a pile of leather-bound documents.
‘It’s in a hurry, this town, to leave something behind,’ Dudley said. ‘Don’t you feel that?’
‘Poverty, perhaps?’
He eyed me.
‘Why so frivolous tonight?’
‘That’s frivolous?’
Dudley frowned. The ostler, who’d stabled our horses, led two more past us towards the entrance to the mews at the side of the Bull. It was not hard to imagine my tad here, carousing with his friends on the hot summer nights of old. I felt sad.
‘Tell me about Cumnor Place,’ I said.
No reply. Doors were opening, people threatening to throng the streets. I waited until we could no longer hear the clitter of hooves.
‘Better here than back at the inn,’ I said. ‘You never know who’s listening at the door of a bedchamber.’
We’d come to the corner of the wide street leading down to the church and the sheriff’s house. All was yet quiet here. If they’d brought Prys Gethin from New Radnor, another crowd would have formed in no time, but the street was empty. At the bottom, just past the church, a stone bridge over the river carried a narrow road into the hills, where a castle occupied a gap in the forest. Probably back in England.
‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ Dudley said.
‘About what… exactly?’
He stopped, glanced behind him to where the lurid sun was down on the horizon, poking through the layered clouds like the tip of a tongue betwixt reddened lips.
‘The murder of my wife. Beyond all doubt, now.’
XXII
So She Wouldn’t Die
CUMNOR PLACE. BARELY three miles from Oxford. Hardly a demanding ride from Kew. And now his wife was dead and buried Dudley had finally made the journey.
I wondered how he’d felt, but didn’t ask.
The house was a century old, but recently made modern by Dudley’s friend and his wife’s last host, Anthony Forster. It had been divided into a number of fine apartments, one of which had become the home of Amy Dudley.
Ten years of marriage, no country house of her own and unwelcome in London town – so that the Queen could pretend she didn’t exist.
Not that she was alone at Cumnor. There were retainers, perhaps half a dozen of them. A small, itinerant household.
So where was this retinue on the day of Amy’s death?
Why… at the local fair.
Amy, it seemed, had ordered everyone – everyone, women and men – to go to the fair. Would hear no word of dissent.
I’d heard about this before and had not liked what it implied.
It had been a Sunday and the day after the Queen’s twenty-seventh birthday which Dudley, who arranged the festivities, might have claimed was also his. For his wife’s birthday, he would have sent a present.
My mother had heard gossip in Mortlake village about Amy being so stricken with darkness of mind over her husband’s neglect that she’d oft-times determined to make away with herself. And yet, not so very long before that, she seemed in good heart. Dudley had been told of a letter, dated August 24, which she’d sent to her London tailor, William Edney, with instructions for the styling of a velvet gown. She was not frugal with her clothing, having spent nearly fifty shillings on a Spanish gown of russet damask, and she urged Edney to make haste to get the latest gown to her.
Had she really wanted a new gown in which to throw herself down eight steps to a far from certain death?
Yes… a mere eight stone steps, and not even a straight flight – a bend in it, apparently.
The only sequence of events I could imagine begins in an instant of blinding despair, as Amy stands at the top of the stairs, maybe with an image all aflame in her mind of Dudley and Elizabeth dancing together on their birthday… and in her anguish she hurls herself, with some violence, from the top step to the stone flags below.
Which sat well with her ordering of everyone to the fair, so that she might be alone. No one to stop her.
‘Broken her neck.’ Dudley gazing down the sloping street and doubtless seeing stairs stretching away into a black mist. ‘That’s what I was told. What everyone was told. Including Tom Blount.’
His steward, whom he’d sent to Cumnor in his place, so that he might not be seen as attempting to interfere with the inquiry.
‘You thought she’d killed herself?’ I said.
‘My first thought, yes.’
‘Because she didn’t want to stand in your way.’