P. Chisholm - An Air of Treason

They sat in silence for a moment.

Just as Carey was about to open proceedings by asking conventionally after the Queen her mistress’ good health, Thomasina took a sealed letter from the rug beside her and handed it to him without a word. She was looking immensely disapproving.

Carey held it in his fingers, looked at it. That was the Queen’s personal seal, the small one. The one she never gave to anyone else.

Fingers a little unsteady, he opened it. The letter was in fact a warrant from the Queen, stating that Sir Robert Carey was her trusty and well-beloved cousin and acting in her behalf and requiring any who read it to assist him in any way he asked.

It wasn’t the warrant for his deputyship; it was very much better than that. But it didn’t say anything about what his office was nor why exactly he might need assistance.

Heart pounding, Carey refolded the letter carefully and put it in his inside doublet pocket.

“I have been asked to ask you…” began Thomasina judiciously.

“Mistress Thomasina, I know how Her Majesty’s mind works insofar as any mere man can. Bear with me, please. If you are speaking on behalf of anyone other than our dread sovereign Queen Elizabeth, would you please say so now?”

Thomasina nodded her head once and then folded her lips. Carey counted twenty of his heartbeats because they were going faster than normal. “Thank you, mistress. You were saying?”

“I have been asked to ask you to investigate a…a death that happened some thirty-two years ago.”

What? Carey didn’t say that. He tried to think whose death, then asked, “Before or after I was born?”

“Do you know the month?”

“The Queen was godmother at my baptism, I know that, but it was a little late for some reason. My mother always said I was a summer baby and bound to be lucky.”

“In which case the death happened after your birth. It was on the 8th September in the year of Our Lord 1560.”

There was something about the date, but he wasn’t sure what. Something important to be sure, family stories from when he was very little, family gossip, something about his Aunt Katherine’s gown being ruined on the hunting field. Something that had caused arguments between his father and mother. Carey closed his eyes for a moment. He had been such a little boy, still in skirts, riding experienced barrel-shaped ponies, youngest of a string of seven boys and two girls that lived. Only Philadelphia was younger than him, and he was hardly ever noticed except by his wet nurse, which suited both him and Philly very well indeed. What was it?

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.