The Midsummer Crown

NINE

The next two days yielded nothing of any worth. By the end of the second, when I retired to my cell-like chamber for such sleep as the long, light evenings, my frustration and the hardness of the mattress would allow, I was almost ready to declare the mystery unsolvable.

On Saturday morning, half my mind still taken up with the duke’s revelation of the day before and its possible consequences, I had again closely examined the room where Gregory Machin was killed, but the most minute inspection had failed to reveal anything new. There seemed to be no way the murderer could have entered from either within or without the castle if the chamber door had been bolted; and everyone concerned, plus the evidence of the smashed door, testified to the fact that it had been. I again looked closely at the bolt and its socket, two fine examples of the iron worker’s art, which even the shattering of the wood with an axe had not budged; while no wishful thinking or silent prayers could make the window any wider or any easier of access than it had been the previous afternoon. It was impossible that the murderer could have lain in wait inside the chamber and then, having done the deed, escaped by that route. Besides which, the lad who had accompanied me on Friday had sworn that the shutters had been closed. Even a second reconnoitre of the window from the landing-stage offered no sudden enlightenment. No footholds had miraculously appeared on the outside wall during the night. The mystery remained as baffling and bewildering as ever.

Yet, I told myself, there had to be an answer apart from that of some supernatural power at work. And I refused, in this case at least, to believe in demons and ghosts. The reason for this certainty was hard to explain other than my conviction that God’s hand was in this, as it usually was in everything I did, and that He would not pit me against unseen forces. This was a human crime and I was here to solve it.

‘All right, Lord,’ I said, strolling back indoors, ‘then give me a little help.’

Why had the tutor been murdered? A few moments’ reflection suggested that the most probable solution was to enable the boy to be snatched and abducted without interference from the man. But that meant Gideon Fitzalan must also have been inside the room. Had he, too, been killed? But why, therefore, had he been taken away? And why had he not made an outcry? Could it mean that he had gone willingly? Had he been a party to the plot, whatever it was?

By this time, my head was reeling, and I had decided to abandon this aspect of the mystery, going, instead, in search of the uncle, Godfrey Fitzalan, whom I managed at last to run to earth in the tilting-yard, where he was putting in a little practice with the quintain.

‘Stand clear!’ he yelled as he galloped up on a showy grey and hit the sand-filled bag an almighty clout with his lance. He then turned on me. ‘Don’t you know better than to get too close, you fool?’

‘I was nowhere near the thing,’ I retorted angrily, and was about to trade insult for insult when I recollected that I needed the cooperation of this man and that putting up his back was not the most sensible way to go about it. ‘A beautiful hit, sir,’ I toadied, despising myself as I did so.

He nodded, accepting such praise as his due, couched his weapon and dismounted, eyeing me up and down.

‘Were you looking for me?’

‘Yes, sir. I’m enquiring into the disappearance of your nephew for the Protector.’

He grunted. ‘Oh, you’re this chapman fellow, are you, that I’ve been hearing about? Quite one of my lord Gloucester’s favourites, by all accounts. Sir Francis tells me the duke sets a lot of store by your ability to solve these sorts of mysteries, so what do you want to know? And poor old Gregory Machin dead! A bad business! A bad business!’

He was very like his twin whom I had met the preceding day, with the same shock of curly brown hair and light blue eyes beneath surprisingly dark, almost black, brows. But he was not quite so tall and somewhat broader than his brother.

What did I want to know? ‘Anything you can tell me, sir,’ I said after a second’s hesitation. ‘Anything you think might have a bearing on Master Gideon’s disappearance.’

‘Why in God’s name should I have any information?’ he demanded irascibly. ‘You’d do better to ask his brothers, young Bevis and Blaise.’ He waved an airy hand. ‘They’re around somewhere. Half the damn family seems to be here for one reason or another. And Bevis and Blaise are the two boys nearest to Gideon in age. He’s the baby of Pomfret’s family. You’d never have guessed that that whey-faced creature Pom married would have bred so prolifically. Seven of ’em she’s produced as easily as falling off a log.’ Godfrey looked glum. ‘And there’s my old mare can’t get one. Not for lack of trying, mind you,’ he added with a lascivious wink.

I ignored this. ‘And you can’t think of any reason, sir, why someone might want to abduct your youngest nephew?’

‘Gideon ain’t my youngest nephew,’ he replied almost gloomily. ‘He was, mind you, until a short time ago. But last month my brother Henry’s new wife presented him with a bouncing boy. And Hal’s the eldest of all of us, sixty-one if he’s a day, and she’s a third of his age, if that. My old mare says it’s disgusting — ’ he shrugged — ‘but I don’t know! If a man’s up to it, well, why not? If he’s able to bed a young filly, good luck to him, is my motto. But another boy! Our family runs to boys. Can’t seem to get a single girl between us. Shouldn’t complain, I suppose. There’s many a king and nobleman who’d envy our family, I daresay.’

‘So you can’t help me, sir?’

He shook his head. ‘Though I feel sure Pomfret will manage to blame me or Lewis for the boy’s disappearance when he finally arrives. Still on his way down from Yorkshire, you know.’ I nodded. ‘You’d better find my nephew, Blaise — or the other one, Bevis. Like I said, they’re about somewhere.’ He added vaguely, ‘They’re in attendance on Sir Francis.’

But when I at last managed to track down these two young gentlemen, I found them kicking their heels in the servants’ hall, playing a desultory game of three men’s morris. It appeared that Sir Francis Lovell had been urgently summoned to Crosby’s Place to wait upon my lord of Gloucester — and, well, I could guess what for! The duke would gradually be testing the opinions of his friends, gaining their support for what I feared was no longer just an idea at the back of his mind, but a definite and fully-fledged plan.

I tried not to think about it — after all, there was nothing I could do — and seated myself beside one of the boys, both of whom bore a strong family resemblance to their twin uncles. Briefly, I explained what I wanted to know.

Neither was purposely unhelpful. It was just that they had no idea what could have happened to their youngest brother or why.

‘Did Tutor Machin have any particular enemies?’ I asked in desperation when they showed signs of tiring of the subject and returning to their game.

They shook their curly heads in unison.

‘Nobody liked him enough to dislike him,’ the elder, Bevis, said, adding, ‘if you know what I mean.’

‘He was a dry old stick, but a good teacher.’ This was Blaise’s contribution. ‘But harmless enough. He never quarrelled with anyone to my knowledge.’

‘Except Mother Copley,’ his brother added with a grin.

I seized on this. ‘He and Dame Copley didn’t get on?’

Bevis hunched his shoulders. He was a handsome lad of, I judged, about nineteen or twenty summers.

‘They fought over Gideon. He’s always been the old girl’s favourite, just as he’s our mother’s. He’s a sickly little beast, although not near as sickly as he likes to make out. At least, that’s my opinion.’

‘It’s everyone’s opinion,’ Blaise concurred heartily. ‘Gid’s a bit of a weasel. Likes to be coddled and made a fuss of. God’s toenails! Wasn’t there an almighty row when Mother insisted that Dame Copley accompany him to Minster Lovell?’ He chuckled reminiscently. ‘I thought Father was going to die of an apoplexy. Never seen anyone so mad in all my life.’

’But the women carried the day,’ his brother pointed out. ‘In the end, Father was no match for them, with their wailing and sulking and wringing of hands. And of course, Tutor Machin didn’t like it much, either. In fact, to say truth, he was furious. He’d hoped to get Gideon to himself, toughen him up a bit. And get some book learning into his silly little noddle.’

‘What about young Piers Daubenay?’ I asked.

But it seemed that there had been no objection to Piers.

‘He’s Gid’s servant,’ the older boy replied with a shrug. ‘Gid has to have a servant. We all do. Nothing wrong with Piers. Bit vain, mind you. Prinks and preens in front of any mirror he happens to come across. But I think he has Gideon’s measure. Or had,’ he added, suddenly sober.

It seemed to hit both of them at once that they might never see their youngest brother again. They discarded their mocking tone and Bevis asked seriously, ‘Do you think he’s dead?’

‘I don’t know,’ I told them truthfully. ‘It’s possible, but in that case, I can’t see any reason why he would have been abducted. If it was necessary to get rid of him because he’d been a witness to murder, then he could have been disposed of on the spot. Why go to the trouble of taking him away?’

‘So what do they want with him? Whoever “they” are?’

Regretfully, I shook my head. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you just at present.’ Or in the near future at this rate, I added mentally, but was careful not to express my thought aloud.

And that was as far as I got on Saturday, while the Dowager Duchess of York’s insistence that everyone under her roof should attend Mass at least twice, if not three, times on Sunday, as well as observing a Sabbath calm throughout the intervening hours, effectively put a stop to my investigation until the following day. I used the respite by trying to assemble my thoughts and impressions in some sort of order, but found that, at the moment, they were too jumbled to form any kind of pattern. The murder of Gregory Machin in his locked room frustrated me at every turn for the simple reason that although it was an impossibility, it was also a fact. But how could one have an impossible fact? It was a paradox, a contradiction that sent my mind reeling. There would appear to be only one answer; that some supernatural agency was involved, but that I refused to allow. Once again, I examined the reason as to why I was so adamantly set against this solution, and again accepted that my instinct told me it wasn’t so. And over the years, I had learnt to trust that feeling which seemed to emanate from somewhere deep down in my guts.

I saw very little of Piers during these two days. Once or twice, I recognized him at a distance during meals in the servants’ hall, but he made no move to come over to my table; indeed, he returned my salutations with the briefest of nods or waves. He was in company with a group of younger men, all about his own age, and there was a good deal of laughter and joking as well as a certain amount of horseplay when the steward’s stern eye was not upon them. It made me uncomfortably aware that in a few months’ time, on October the second, I would be thirty-one years old. I was approaching middle-age.

And it was this realization as much as anything that made me so restless that Sunday night, chasing sleep from my pillow and keeping me awake into the small hours of Monday morning. And when I did finally fall asleep, it was to dream of Eloise Grey of all people; a muddled farrago of nonsense in which I was chasing her through the twisting passageways of Baynard’s Castle, never quite catching up with her, but always a frustrating step or two behind. I woke just before dawn with the changing of the light, then slept again almost immediately to resume the same dream. Although not quite the same. This time it was Piers Daubenay whom I was pursuing — but still with the same lack of success. .

I awoke with a start to find the morning well advanced if the bustle and clatter and raised voices within the castle were anything to judge by. And when I had eased my aching body from my hard pallet and opened the shutters of my cell-like room, the sun streaming in upon my face, the amount of traffic already on the river and the shouting of the boatmen as they vied with one another for trade convinced me that it was even later than I had thought.

I dressed as quickly as I could in my own comfortable old clothes, leaving the better stuff in my saddlebags, which I stowed away in a dark corner to reduce the possibility of theft. Next, I went down to the kitchen courtyard to stand in line for my turn at the pump, before making my way to one of the sculleries where bowls of hot water had been set out for shaving. By this time the water was tepid and my knife blunt, so I managed to cut myself twice, once on my cheek and once on my chin, and went to breakfast in a foul mood not improved by the usual meal of porridge, dried fish and yesterday’s stale oatcakes. Silently, I cursed the dowager duchess and her parsimonious ways.

While I munched laboriously at my final oatcake, swilled down with some exceedingly weak small beer, I decided that I must speak again with Amphillis Hill. Accordingly, when I had finished, I directed my steps towards the sewing room.

‘I’m sorry, Master Chapman, but I can’t spare any of the girls just now.’ The pleasant, elderly supervisor looked genuinely upset at having to deny my request, but her tone was determined. No blandishments or persuasion were going to make her change her mind. She indicated the silent girls, their heads bent diligently over their work, not a word or a giggle to be had from any of them. ‘The duchess has ordered extra embroidery on the train of her coronation robe, and we’re going to be hard pressed to get it done in time. If you wish to speak to Amphillis, you must do it later. Perhaps this evening.’

I glanced round the room, but there was no telling which girl was which. None of them looked up or gave me greeting. I could have urged it, citing my work for the Duke of Gloucester as my authority, but the dame in charge appeared harassed, overburdened with responsibility, so I gave in with as much grace as I could muster.

Once outside the room, I paused, wondering what to do next. Finally I decided to visit Dame Copley again in the hope that she might, now that she was calmer, remember something of value.

As I approached the twisting stair leading to the nurse’s chamber, I heard the soft murmur of women’s voices and then the gentle closing of a door. Two swift strides brought me to the head of the steps and I tiptoed down them, steadying myself with a hand against the left-hand wall, just in time to see Amphillis Hill let herself out of the door at the end of the passageway which gave access to the landing-stage. That same Amphillis Hill who, according to the sewing-mistress was busily plying her needle somewhere upstairs with the rest of the seamstresses.

For half a second I toyed with the notion that I must be mistaken, but the evidence of my own eyes assured me I was not. There was something immediately recognizable about the girl. Besides which, the faint echo remaining in my head of the voices I had heard told me that one of them was hers. She must have been visiting Rosina Copley. There was no alternative: the nurse’s room seemed to be the only one occupied along this corridor.

Abandoning my original intention of going to see the dame myself, I followed Amphillis out of doors. She was in the act of summoning a passing boat and, keeping to the shadows cast by various small buildings to my left, I was lucky enough to hear her direction to the oarsman.

‘Westminster. And hurry!’

I waited until the vessel was in midstream before descending the water-stairs and shouting to another boat. I gave the same direction.

As we pulled away, turning upstream, the oarsman grumbled, ‘Westminster! Westminster! No one’s going anywhere else today it seems. You’re the fifth person I’ve taken there this morning, and the day’s hardly begun. Doing the same run all the time gets monot’nous. I’m the sort what likes variety in me work, I am. Howsoever — ’ he shrugged resignedly — ‘it’s only t’ be expected, I suppose.’

‘Why?’ I asked, listening to him with only half an ear while my eyes strained to keep Amphillis’s boat in sight.

‘D’you mean you don’t know?’ He sounded incredulous. ‘Why you going there, then?’

I ignored this intrusion into my private affairs and asked again, ‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re bringing the young Duke o’ York out of sanctuary. They say the Duke o’ Gloucester — him what calls himself Protector now — has ordered it. Says he wants the lad to be with his brother in the Tower, ready fer the little king’s coronation.’ He sniffed. ‘You really mean you ain’t heard?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve only been in London since Friday.’

‘Ho! Friday is it? In that case, you surely must have heard about the ’heading o’ the Lord Chamberlain in the Tower.’

‘He wasn’t beheaded,’ I said loudly. ‘He’s awaiting trial.’

The man gave a sort of snorting hiccough which I took to be a laugh. ‘Who told you that fairy story? Them little elves at the bottom o’ the garden? You don’t want to believe everything you hear, y’ know.’

‘And neither do you!’ I could feel my temper rising. Timothy had been right. Once those sorts of lies were disseminated, they quickly took root. ‘You don’t like the Protector?’ I asked in a quieter tone, noting with relief that Amphillis’s boat was still within view. The influx of river traffic was making it difficult to proceed with any speed.

‘Don’t know much about him down here, do we? Barely set eyes on him these past few years. Caught a glimpse or two of him last year, o’ course, when there was all that fuss about him having won back some godforsaken, piddling little town in Scotland. What I say as a good Englishmen is bugger the Scots! Barbarians, all o’ them. No good t’ man nor beast. Same with northerners,’ he added darkly, speaking as a man of the south. ‘Weird, they are. Who knows what goes on up there? And he’s one o’ them. The Duke o’ Gloucester, I mean.’

There seemed to be no argument against such entrenched prejudice, so I held my tongue, concentrating instead on keeping the other boat in sight. I became aware, however, that we and all the smaller vessels on the northern side of the river were being forced closer to the bank as a number of great gilded barges rowed past. And I noted that the leading barge flew the Gloucester standard, while others sported those of the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Howard. But the most worrying aspect was the boatloads of armed men following in their wake. It at once suggested to me, as it most certainly must to others, that the queen dowager was not willingly parting with her younger son. My heart sank. If force were to be the order of the day, Prince Richard would forfeit a great deal of goodwill.

My boatman suddenly rested on his oars.

‘Might as well let ’em go,’ he grunted. ‘It’ll be easier when that lot have landed.’

‘Nonsense!’ I said sharply. ‘Go on, man! Go on!’

But he was not to be shifted, with the inevitable result that, by the time I did disembark at Westminster stairs, Amphillis was nowhere to be seen, having vanished into the crowds that were assembled in front of the sanctuary. I stood still perforce, but even though I was a head taller than most of my neighbours, looking for her was as much use as searching for a needle in a bottle of hay.

I could see that the sanctuary was surrounded by my lord of Gloucester’s men-at-arms. My lord himself, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Howard and various other exalted personages, whom I failed to recognize, seemed to be locked in a violent altercation with a member of the queen dowager’s household. The lady was obviously proving recalcitrant, refusing to release the little Duke of York without a fight. Indeed, no one could force her to give up the boy without violating the law of sanctuary.

A fat, red-cheeked woman standing next to me yelled out, ‘Leave the child alone! He needs to be with his mother! Don’t you let him go, my dear!’

There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd and other voices, mainly women’s, were raised on Elizabeth’s behalf.

‘What’s he want with the lad, anyway,’ someone else, a man this time, grunted. ‘Seems suspicious to me.’

‘He’ I took to be the Duke of Gloucester, and there was a further mutter of assent, now definitely hostile. I could feel the charge of menace in the air, and began to sweat uncomfortably, as if my affection for the duke made me culpable as well.

As well? Did I then believe that my lord was wrong to wish for the brothers to be together on the eve of the elder’s coronation? Or, deep down, did I believe that Edward V would never be crowned? Did I secretly fear that there was a more sinister motive in removing little Prince Richard from sanctuary? Hastily I suppressed the idea. I had known Duke Richard for years and recognized him as a man of principle and honour. Whatever he did would never be from any ulterior motive.

Something was happening. My lords Gloucester, Buckingham and other dignitaries now withdrew to the nearby building which housed the Star Chamber, while Lord Howard and an old grey-haired man in episcopal robes — identified by the red-cheeked woman as Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury — disappeared in the direction of the abbot’s quarters, presumably to confront the queen dowager herself.

It was at this moment that I spotted Amphillis at the back of the crowd in earnest conversation with another woman whose back was turned towards me. Neither seemed to be interested in the drama unfolding in front of them, nor, I was certain, had Amphillis noticed me. Cautiously, and with bent knees in order to reduce my height, I began to push my way through the crowd. It was a struggle, but I had the advantage of moving in the direction no one else wanted to go, everyone being eager to get nearer the sanctuary rather than further from it. But even so, my passage was necessarily slow, and by the time I found myself close to the door of St Margaret’s church, where I had seen the two women, they had vanished.

Hot, frustrated and angry, I propped myself against the wall, stretched my bent and aching knees and once more looked about me. There was a sudden sibilance, a hissing that ran through the crowd like wind through corn, and I could see that the Archbishop had emerged from the sanctuary, the nine-year-old Duke of York clutching his hand; a small, bewildered and plainly — even from where I was standing — frightened child, his fair hair shining in the morning sun and what looked like tears glistening on his cheeks.

I saw my lord Gloucester go forward to greet his nephew, stooping to take the boy’s hand in his and obviously trying to reassure him that all was well: he was being taken to be with his brother in the royal apartments in the Tower. I could hardly imagine that either boy was looking forward with any eagerness to the encounter. They didn’t know each other. The king had been brought up in his own household in faraway Ludlow, on the Welsh marches, while Prince Richard had lived with his mother and ever increasing brood of sisters, all of whom no doubt had made a great pet of him, as women will.

The royal party moved off to the water-stairs and the waiting barges and the crowd began to disperse. In what seemed like only a few minutes, the space in front of the abbey had cleared, and suddenly there was Amphillis again, walking with her companion towards Westminster Gate. The second woman still had her back to me, but there was something familiar about it. I felt sure I had met her before somewhere, but without seeing her face, I couldn’t be certain. Dodging around the street vendors with their trays of hats and spectacles, and keeping a firm grip on the pouch at my waist — Westminster was notorious for the speed and dexterity of its thieves — I tried to catch up with the two women, but they were moving too swiftly. For several moments I lost them as a troop of jugglers and mummers headed into Westminster with a great deal of unnecessary rattling of tambourines and blowing of trumpets in order to announce their arrival. And when I did at last catch sight of Amphillis again, she was alone, munching a pasty at one of the dozens of cook-stalls that proliferate around the gate.

It reminded me that I, too, was hungry, and although it was not yet dinner time, I bought a couple of eel pies which I ate standing up while never taking my eyes from my quarry. At least, that’s what I thought, but between one blink and the next it seemed that she had gone, and there was still no sign of the other woman, either. Disgusted with myself, telling myself that I was getting old and slow, I finished and paid for my meal, bought a cup — well, two cups — of ale from a neighbouring stall and decided there was nothing for it but to return to Baynard’s Castle and see if any more was to be discovered there.

As I walked back along the Strand towards the city, I wondered why I had been so reluctant to accost Amphillis openly, and came to the conclusion that there had been something furtive in her manner that had aroused my suspicions, although exactly what I was unable to say.

And then I saw her, ahead of me, passing the Chère Reine Cross. Every now and then, she glanced over her shoulder as if to make certain that she wasn’t being followed. I was right. She was uneasy.

I dodged into the shadows cast by the overhanging houses and went after her.