Blackness welcomed him with strange dreams that broke apart and fought each other. One was of Elizabeth Widdrington holding him tight and him kissing her the way he had longed to since the Armada year. One was of a prison cell.
Sunday 17th September 1592, late afternoon
He woke up to a darker chamber, restless, his stomach aching and his head hurting again, so he sat up on the bed among the pillows and tried to think.
The important things were the inquest report and witness statements. Had Thomasina herself realised just how damning they were? The men of the jury had clearly been stout honest gentlemen because despite extreme pressure from powerful people, they had reported some things that made a nonsense of their obedient verdict of accidental death. Everyone knew that Amy Robsart had died of a broken neck. What everyone knew was wrong.
A little while later someone knocked. It was John Tovey, coming in carrying candles which hurt Carey’s eyes. He got the fire going again.
“Mr. Tovey, I want you to go to whichever kitchen is serving the Queen and ask them for food for me and when you come back, bring your penner and paper. Make sure the food is taken from a common pot, no small meat pies or penny loaves, for instance.”
“Will you want me to taste the meal, sir?”
The lad caught on quickly; that was good. “Yes please, Mr. Tovey, if you would. When you come back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Was Tovey the poisoner or in league with him or her? Very unlikely since all he’d had to do when Carey called him the night before was set up a cry of “Plague” and leave him until he was dead. Certainly the poisoner or his or her accomplice wouldn’t instantly identify what was wrong and get him to purge. Besides, Carey had picked him out personally, almost at random.
By the time Tovey got back with more food from the Queen’s kitchen, set up in one of the manor’s parlours, Carey was hungry and bored. He’d tried reading his papers but he couldn’t make anything out, in fact he couldn’t even look out of the windows for the dazzle. Goddamn it. Although come to think of it, that was a very promising metaphor to use on the Queen sometime-being dazzled blind by Cynthia, the Moon Goddess and so on and so forth.
Tovey ate most of the bread, cheese, butter, and sausage plus a good half of the large wedge of game pie he’d brought. Once he started eating, Carey found his stomach and gullet were still sore from being sick and so he mostly just drank the ale.
“Mr. Tovey, where did you learn to spot belladonna poisoning?”
“Ah…my mother was a wise woman, sir. She taught me some things. When she died, I went to my father. He sent me to a good Oxford apothecary to prentice to him and learn my letters better than he could teach me.”
“And then?”
“My master taught me Latin as well as many other things and when he found I was an apt pupil he sent me to the grammar school. I was able for all things to do with letters so I went to study at Balliol, sir, as a servitor. He died of plague a little after I took my degree, alas. God keep him. He was a good and kindly master-we often spoke about the mysteries of alchemy and the different qualities of matter. I found it hard to get work in Oxford where there are so many clerks, so I went back to my father and that’s why I came to clerk for the Queen’s secretaries, in hopes of finding a place.”
“Good thing for me you did. Now then, those papers I asked you to translate. You understood the significance of them?”
Silence. Carey couldn’t even see the boy’s face, much less read it. His voice came as a whisper. “Yes, sir.”
“Explain it to me.”
“I have friends at Gloucester College where she was buried. Everyone knows Lady Dudley fell down the stairs at Cumnor Place and broke her neck and everyone says she was murdered, but I didn’t…I couldn’t understand why the inquest found for accidental death.”
“Somebody very important told them to,” Carey said.
“Well yes, sir, but why then did they say she had neither stain nor bruise on her?”
“Go on.”
“She fell down the stairs and hit her head with two dints, one-half an inch, the other a couple of inches deep so her skull must have been broken. How come she didn’t bleed?”
“And?”
“And what, sir?”
Carey was surprised he hadn’t spotted the other ridiculous thing. “According to witnesses, her headdress was untouched and on her head.”
A pause. “Oh.”
“Yes, oh. No bruises-possibly that could be because when she actually fell down the stairs she was already dead, though I doubt it. You can bruise for a while after death. No stains-maybe, just perhaps, her skin wasn’t broken even though her skull was and so she didn’t bleed. But her headdress untouched? With a two-inch dent in her head? I don’t think so.”
Silence. Carey continued, “They reported it truly even though they had been told what their verdict should be, because they were under oath. I assume that whoever was pressuring them didn’t bother to read the whole report because if they had, I expect they would have sent it back to be rewritten.”
“Yes, sir. That’s what surprised me.”
Carey didn’t add what had already occurred to him about that, which was that the Queen had clearly not read it. The boy was frightened enough already.
“I don’t need to tell you that everything in this matter must be kept most secret and not spoken of to anyone.”
“No, sir. I wouldn’t dream…”
“There is one circumstance when you must speak of it and that’s if I die suddenly for any reason at all without having finished my inquiries. If that happens you must immediately leave the Court, and lie low for a while. Take any papers with you and make sure you give them to…to…” Damn it, to whom? Who couldn’t be suspected in the Amy Robsart killing? “…to my father or the steward at Somerset House. Understand?”
“Yes sir. Who is your father exactly, sir?”
“The Queen’s Lord Chamberlain, Baron Hunsdon.”
A very loud gulp and then Carey thought he saw a smile. Or heard it rather, in the ambitious boy’s suddenly eager voice. “Really?”
“Yes, really. So please make notes.” There was a rustle and the soft click of a pen being dipped. “And of course be very careful of poison for both of us. Is there a man on the door now?”
“Um.” Tovey went and looked. “It’s Mr. Henshawe,” he said.
A good man, Carey remembered him. He shook his head with his eyes still closed and frowned. “That was one of the mysteries of the thing,” he said to Tovey, his restless mind drifting back to the puzzle the Queen had set him. “Why wasn’t Amy Robsart poisoned instead of being pushed down stairs? Certainly she was careful about what and how she ate, but even so…it wouldn’t have been so very hard to do by an expert. The Papists insist that it was her husband, the Earl of Leicester, who killed her. But if it was him, why the devil didn’t he poison her with belladonna or white arsenic or something? Yes, of course, there would have been rumours but the thing would have been uncertain enough that he would still have had a chance of marrying the Queen.”
No answer from Tovey who was probably too shocked.
“After all, killing his wife was a tremendous risk-why would he do it in such a way that would immediately look like murder and draw down suspicion on his head? Dudley was never the cleverest of men but he wasn’t crazy and he wasn’t stupid.”
“Did you know him, sir?”
“Oh yes, of course, he used to shout at me when I was a young idiot of a page in the sixties and seventies. Nobody ever spoke about his first wife but only fools of Papist priests ever thought it had been him that killed her.”
“They say it was him at Gloucester College, sir.”
“No doubt, being a notorious bunch of Papists there. How much recent history do you know, Mr. Tovey? I mean after the end of Holinshed’s Chronicles, about the Queen’s father King Henry and his various…er…marriages?”