He opened his eyes and smiled. “I deny it,” he said. “The bill is clean, I was nowhere near. I have an excellent alibi from my wet nurse, as well as being hampered by my swaddling bands.”
Mistress Thomasina looked unamused.
“This…death changed many lives,” she said, obviously expecting him to have heard of it nonetheless. “It happened only a few miles from Oxford, at Cumnor Place.”
“Cumnor?” Damn it, what was it about that name?
Thomasina rolled her eyes. “I suppose most of our generation were never concerned by it and your parents wouldn’t speak of it,” she said, pouring wine from a flask into a small coral cup for herself and twice as much for Carey into a silver goblet. From a sandalwood box, she offered sweet wafers which Carey refused. “I had no idea myself who Her Ma…who was being spoken of. I didn’t even recognise the name of the victim.”
Carey said nothing, watching carefully. Who the devil had died thirty-two years ago; why all the mystery?
“I say death,” Thomasina was being judicious again, “but at the time the word being whispered was murder.”
Well of course it was; that wasn’t surprising. After all, why bother to investigate a death if you didn’t think it was murder?
“Was there an inquest?”
“Oh yes,” said Thomasina, “though it took a year to decide on death by misadventure.”
That and her tone of voice did send Carey’s eyebrows upwards. “A year?” Most inquests had decided within a week.
“Yes. It didn’t matter, though. The suspicion was enough.”
Would the bloody midget give him the name? Why was he supposed to guess? He felt doltish at all these riddles, actually sighed for the brutal simplicity of Carlisle where people tended to tell you to your face that they hated you and had put a price on your head. He was quite proud of the fact that his own head was rumoured to be worth at least?10 in gold to the Graham surname.
Thomasina wasn’t even looking at him anymore but into a corner where there was nothing but a particularly fine Turkish rug, woven with strange squared-off houses and birds.
“I told her to let it be, that the trail was thirty-two years cold and that no one really cared anymore.…And she snapped at me that she cares and that as her goddamned nephew is so clever at ferreting out the truth of things that don’t concern him, he may as well make himself useful in her behalf for a change.”
He grinned. That had the authentic ring of the Queen’s voice. Thomasina was an excellent mimic. Carey could almost see his cousin’s high-bridged nose and snapping brown eyes under her red wig, the red lead giving bright colour to her white-leaded cheeks.
Nephew. That was an important message to him in itself. He was also her cousin through his grandmother, Mary Boleyn, sister to the beheaded Ann. But he was the Queen’s nephew through his father, bastard son of Henry VIII, and her half-brother. That meant that this was Tudor family business.
“Mistress,” he began as tactfully as he could, “I’m afraid I’m too young and ignorant to…”
“This death is that of Amy Dudley, nee Robsart.”
All his breath puffed out of his chest. Carey knew that name.
“The Earl of Leicester’s first wife…” he asked, just to be sure, “who fell down the stairs at Cumnor Place and…?”
“And died,” said Thomasina. “Sir Robert, something happened two days ago that upset Her Majesty and put her clean out of countenance. She has been in a rage ever since and was even let blood out of season for it. When she had news that you were coming, she told me to…I was told to tell you to look into it.”
“Look into the death of Robert Dudley’s first wife?”
“Or her goddamned murder, as the Queen calls it,” added Thomasina quietly.
“She knows it was murder?”
Thomasina nodded. “But…but…” Carey was horrified. The Queen was telling him to look into it, a direct order. Usually she allowed at least the polite semblance of choice. Of all things the Queen could have ordered him to do, this was surely the most perverse, the most ridiculous, the most-well, for God’s sake, the most dangerous. To him. He was being ordered to go and stir up a thirty-two-year-old nest of vipers. There had indeed been family gossip about it when Carey was a boy and worse than that. Carey knew that his father had quietly bought up and burned a number of inflammatory pamphlets published secretly by the English Jesuits until the presses could be found and destroyed. Those pamphlets accused the Queen and her then-favourite, Robert Dudley of murdering Dudley’s innocent wife between them. Other suspects in the case were, of course, Sir William Cecil; later Lord Treasurer Burghley; Christopher Hatton, the attorney general who danced his way into the Queen’s favour and never married; even Lettice Knollys, the Earl of Leicester’s eventual second wife and the Earl of Essex’s scandalous mother. There had been something going on that his father dealt with when he was fourteen, something about a man called Appleyard, Amy Robsart’s brother.
Quite possibly every single member of the 1560 Privy Council could be a suspect for the killing.
“But why?” he burst out. “The woman has been in the ground for thirty-two years and…”
“In Gloucester Hall chapel in Oxford, in fact,” Thomasina corrected him.
“In Oxford and…Why now?”
“The last time she came to Oxford was in 1566,” said Thomasina, seemingly at random.
“Yes?”
“She’s very clear, Sir Robert. She wants the death investigated and she wants you to do it, but she will not tell you why. She shouted at me when I pressed her about it.”
“But, mistress,” said Carey carefully, “the Queen must know she is by far the most…er…the one most likely to be suspected as the murderer now as well as then. What were the words she used to you exactly?”
“You do it as you see fit, and you report to her through me-directly to her if necessary.”
“She knows that this is a very ugly swamp and she may not like the smells that come up if I stir the mud?”
Thomasina smiled shortly. “She wants it done and she will have you do it.”
“And if I find irrefutable proof that she was the murderer?”
The midget’s eyes were cold. “She didn’t tell me, but no doubt she would expect you to keep it quiet.”
He could do that, of course, he wasn’t a fool, but God, he hoped he wouldn’t have to. “And what if it is simply that the evidence I find points to her?”
Thomasina shrugged which made her look both worldly wise and girlish. “She didn’t say. But how could it have been her, Sir Robert? Surely she would simply have married Leicester anyway once the wife was dead and gone, no matter what the scandal? If she’d done it? Once she had damned her soul that way, where was the problem damning herself again? You can only hang once.”
Clearly Thomasina had been worrying about it, too. She sounded reasonable, but…the Queen was a woman and therefore by nature unreasonable.
“I’ll need to see the report by the coroner and the inquest jury’s verdict and any witness statements,” he said, hoping to play for time while the documents were searched for and copied.
Thomasina reached into a box beside her and brought out a sheaf of papers which she handed to him. They were all certified copies, written in the cramped secretary script of one of the older Exchequer clerks.
“I have to say what I’m investigating when I ask questions. I can’t possibly keep it secret.” Thomasina shrugged again. This was an impossible task, Carey thought with a sigh. “Does Her Majesty know I haven’t yet been paid my wardenry fee?”
Thomasina looked blank. “You had two chests of coin from her…”
“They were free loans. This is my fee of?400 which I was also promised. Separate and different.” Nothing. “Mention it to my loving aunt, will you, Mrs. Thomasina? Try and get it into her head that soldiers need to be paid or they won’t fight, that’s all I ask. And by the way…I wanted to ask your…advice on the Bonnettis.”
“The Italian spies?”