The Heresy of Dr Dee

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.’

His eyes closed.

‘Yet you told me earlier this year that she believed herself mortally ill.’

‘From what she told me. But what if she was lying?’

I thought that if a wife of mine had suggested she was dying of some malady, I’d not leave her side. Must needs stop thinking like this. I was not Robert Dudley. Had never been blinded by an all-consuming sense of destiny.

There was yet more to this. Some private matter which, even as one of Dudley’s oldest friends, I’d never be told. Nor should be, I supposed.

‘Did you tell the Queen what Amy said?’

In my head the voice of Bishop Bonner.

… heard that, some days before your friend Dudley was widowed, the Queen confided to the esteemed Spanish ambassador, Bishop la Quadra, that Lady Dudley would very soon be departing this life.

Dudley having told her was the only reason I could think of for the Queen’s terrifying foresight. The only reason I dare allow myself to think of.

No reply. He’d gone to sit on the remains of a stone wall, where part of an old house was being taken down.

‘Blount told me a report had been written about the state of the… of Amy’s body. He couldn’t get a sight of the document.’

‘When it’s put before the coroner, its content should be made public.’

‘When… No date’s set for the resumption of the inquest. Knew I could demand to see it, though. If I pulled rank.’

‘And you thought that wise?’

‘God no. Didn’t even try. But did have a quiet meeting with Anthony Forster. Well, if it was your house, you’d want to know everything, wouldn’t you?’

Forster, of course, had not been there either when Amy died but, yes, he’d want to know.

‘We arrived the day after two servants had seen her ghost at the top of the stairs. Forster said the rest of them were afraid to go into that part of the house, day or night.’

‘But you went there.’

‘Oh yes. I saw the place. The chances of falling to your death from those stairs are… slight.’

‘But her neck was—’

‘Broken, yes. And she was found at the bottom of the stairs. But there were…’ He thought for a moment. ‘What’s never been talked about is that there were other injuries. Dints. In her head. Which may have been caused by hitting the stone, but one was a good two inches deep. What does that suggest to you?’

‘Something sharp. Maybe the sharp edge of a stair?’

Had the feeling I was clutching at reeds here.

‘Oh, John, come on…’

‘It might also suggest she was struck. A two-inch dint… speaks to me of a blow from a… a sword blade.’

‘If you saw that stair, then you’d know nothing else explains it. And yet… Tom Blount says he understands, from his inquiries, that the jury is not disposed to see evidence of evil.’

Dudley stood up and faced what remained of the sun. I only hoped he wasn’t seeing it as I was. The clouds like reddened lips had become the slit of an open wound, so that the sun – a sun which this day had scarce lived – looked to be dying in an ooze of sticky blood.

I said, ‘Anyone seeing the entire household, apart from Amy, at the fair… would have a good idea that she was alone. Might this be a robbery? Was anything taken?’

‘No. I’m telling you, somebody killed her, John. Somebody went into Cumnor to kill her. No doubt left.’

His face looked very dark against the low light. The gipsy, they called him, those who sought to dishonour him, and the change wrought by the butchery to his beard and moustache made this seem not unjust. Without those trademark facial twirls, even a friend might take some time to recognise Lord Dudley.

‘Let’s bring this into the air,’ I said. ‘You think someone killed her to damage you.’

‘I know it.’

‘Who?’

‘Make a list.’

‘But if it was someone who wanted to make sure you would not wed the Queen, surely it were better than Amy lived.’

‘Ah, well, you would think that, wouldn’t you? But then… perhaps you wouldn’t.’

He turned sharply and began to walk quickly away, back along the route we’d come, across the street towards the castle mound, me striding after him.

And then he called back, over a shoulder,

‘Suppose someone killed her… so she wouldn’t die?’

‘What?’

He stopped, panting, at the foot of the castle mound.

‘Yes, all right… I may have told Bess what Amy had said. About having a mortal illness. Maybe a sickness of the breast, I don’t know exactly what I said. But why the hell she had to tell that scheming bastard la Quadra, who yet wants her for the King of Spain… or some muffin appointed by Spain to snatch England back for Rome…’

‘She’d have told the Spanish ambassador simply to give Spain the message that marriage to you might no longer be out of the question. She probably regretted it as soon as it was out.’

Both of us knowing the Queen was sometimes inclined to speak with insufficient forethought, even on matters of world significance.

‘And meanwhile la Quadra blabs,’ Dudley said. ‘The man has a mouth like a slop pail. How many people have told you what the Queen said?’

He’d started to climb the castle mound between shadowy stacks of broken masonry and bushes of broom and gorse, snatching at handfuls of grass, calling back at me.

‘Jesu, John, are you not seeing this yet? If my wife had died of natural cause…’

Close to dark now, bats flittering overhead, and…

… and dear God, yes, I was seeing it now. I followed him up the mound, tripping over a slab of masonry, picking myself up, my hands slimed with mud and dew, Dudley shouting back at me, too loud.

‘If it was a natural cause, then I’d be not only free but blameless.’

Yes. For his enemies, the worst of all situations. So if Amy was to die in an unnatural way before her time – however short that time might be…

I reached the flattened top of the mound just as the last of the sun, dull as an old coin, slid down into the western hills. Soot-dark hills which gave a sense of the real Wales, its isolation, its secrecy.

… killed… so she wouldn’t die.

God…

Dudley was facing me with hands on hips.

‘If her death is unnatural, then I’m yet free but, in most people’s eyes, far from blameless. Even if nothing can be proved against me.’

‘What are you going to do, Robbie?’

‘Try not to get killed as well, I suppose. A good many men would feel justified in doing it, if I’m seen to have escaped justice for the wilful murder of my wife.’

If someone had killed Amy expecting Dudley to be held responsible and then to walk away in shame, retire to the country to live out his years in the comparative seclusion of the English squirearchy… then they knew him not as I did.

He ran fingers across the wreckage of his beard.

‘Life seems as dark to me now as when I was in the Tower awaiting the block.’

‘But if you were to find out who killed Amy…?’

‘How? Through a f*cking shewstone?’ He raised both hands. ‘Ah… mercy. Look… even if it were possible to discover the killer, it would rather depend, methinks, on who it was.’

There were names I wouldn’t say out loud beyond the walls of my own home. What a wasp’s nest this country was become.

It was cold on that mound. I knew not who’d built the castle or who had destroyed it – maybe Glyndwr. But there was a feeling of hostility here; we were not wanted. I looked down at Presteigne. How tidily it sat. Glimmerings, as tapers were lit behind the windows of the wealthy.

‘Let’s go back,’ Dudley said.

I followed him, feeling sad to the soul. What if Amy had been lying about her illness to see what response she’d get from Dudley? What if she was suffering from no more than a malady of the mind, grown out of a profound loneliness?

A plea for love answered by death.