Sybil and I did not sleep much that night. We talked instead. One thing seemed very clear to me – that she must not remain at Knoll House. ‘If you do, you may be liable to further harassment,’ I said. ‘It sounds as though there is some unknown threat hanging over you. I can’t imagine what it is, but …’
‘There isn’t any threat,’ said Sybil. ‘That’s nonsense. How could there be? It was just talk, an attempt to bully me. I refuse to be bullied. I would like to go back to Hawkswood, of course I would, but we haven’t finished searching for that wretched chest yet, and I have become rather interested in teaching those two girls how to create designs. Joyce seems to have quite a talent. I am prepared to stay. I shall just make sure I’m never alone with Master Frost again.’
‘That may be difficult. If he is determined to approach you again, he will.’
‘It’s a compliment in a way,’ said Sybil. ‘I did acknowledge that, to him.’
I was silent. Again, something in her voice seemed strange, just as it had during her outburst when she rushed into our room. His eyes were like blue dagger points! I felt impaled by them! Those words had carried an undertone. Of what? Had he attacked her in a more serious way than she would admit? Or was it excitement …? Had Sybil not felt quite as indifferent or shocked as she wished to appear? Had something in Master Frost stirred her? Touched the heart that had been frozen for so long because her husband had ill-used her? How piquant it would be, I thought dryly, that a frozen heart should be melted – even just a little – by a man called Frost?
Even by a man who was spying for Spain!
‘We had better go to sleep,’ I said at last. ‘Most of the night is gone already. We’ll talk more in the morning.’
In the morning, as usual, breakfast was announced by the scent of newly baked bread permeating through the house. All four of us felt awkward about going down to the meal and encountering Frost, but we had to break our fasts and the appetizing aroma was a compelling summons. Dale in particular said that she really wanted her breakfast. She had eaten poorly during her illness, and her appetite had now apparently come back with a vengeance.
So, responding to an instinctive wish to keep together, we didn’t go down to the great hall in pairs as we usually did, but went down as a quartet. We found Master Frost and his daughters there before us, seated at the table, but although bread and ale were set out none of them were yet eating or drinking. The twins looked serious and somewhat embarrassed and were evidently not surprised when their father rose to his feet as we entered, clearing his throat so meaningfully that we realized we were about to be addressed, like an audience. We stopped and, as we stood there in a group, drew a little closer together.
‘I have something to say,’ Frost declared. ‘Especially to Mistress Jester, but because she has no doubt told you what happened yesterday evening, and I have myself admitted it to my daughters here, I will say it to all of you. I have to apologize. I had perhaps had too much wine at the evening meal. Yesterday evening I proposed marriage to Mistress Jester. I have acquired the greatest regard for her.’ He bowed towards her. ‘It was truly meant as an honourable proposal, but I’m afraid I was more pressing than I should have been. I am sorry, Mistress Jester. I will not inflict such bad manners on you again. But I will say this. The offer remains open and I do indeed implore you to consider it. I have for some time felt that I ought to marry again, for my daughters’ sake as well as my own.’
He glanced aside, towards the twins, who both nodded though they did not speak.
‘Joyce and Jane both like you, Mistress Jester, and I more than just like you. You are skilled in womanly crafts and have already taught them much. Before I came to breakfast this morning, I looked at the parterre pattern, which I didn’t do yesterday evening. Oh yes, I know that Mistress Stannard has taught them much as well, and I would not for a moment fail to give due credit for that. But it happens to be you, Mistress Jester, who has touched my heart, just when I feared that no woman would ever do so again. I don’t want a marriage of convenience. I want to wed where my heart is. So, please forgive me my bad behaviour yesterday evening, and please think about what I can offer. A steady love, a home of your own, security for life, two ready-made daughters. Please think about this, Mistress Jester. That is all I ask.’
He stepped back and resumed his seat, gesturing for us to sit down as well. Bemused, we did so. Sybil said graciously: ‘Thank you for your apology, sir. I said at the time that I knew you were paying me a compliment. I am sorry, in my turn, that I cannot say yes, but I am well content with my life as it is. I will continue to instruct your daughters for the time agreed.’
As gracious in movement as in speech, she reached for the ale jug and filled his tankard for him.
For all the world, I thought, as though they have been married for years. Was she tempted? If so, well, that’s a turn of events that we never foresaw.
For a little while, no one spoke. We helped ourselves to bread and butter and honey, and poured ale for ourselves. Then the maid Bessie, a little wan from her recent illness, came in with more bread and Hamble followed with a serving dish of cold meat slices. Breakfast proceeded in silence at first, until Jane – visibly trying to behave normally – said: ‘Mistress Stannard, shall we go up to the attic presently and see if we can find my lute?’
‘Certainly,’ I said.
Sybil said she and Joyce wanted to go on working with the parterre design. ‘You and Jane go lute-hunting,’ she said.
‘If Master Frost comes to the parlour …?’ I said in a low voice, but Sybil shook her head.
‘I have Joyce as a chaperone. What could be better?’
‘You shall have Dale as well,’ I said. ‘It’s still chilly, Dale, you had better keep within doors and not do too much. Stay in the parlour and don’t trouble about mending or pressing anything. Jane and I will go to the attic. And Brockley too, in case we need to move anything heavy. Ask the other grooms to see to our horses. I will give you some money to persuade them with.’
Before we joined Jane to go up to the attic, Brockley said to me: ‘Do you have your picklocks? I never thought to ask before.’
‘Yes. I’ve had them with me every time we’ve gone searching,’ I told him, and patted the skirt of the open-fronted gown I was wearing. It was one of those that have a pouch sewn inside to hold useful items for someone engaged on secret matters. Such as picklocks and a small dagger.
‘We can’t use them in Mistress Jane’s presence,’ Brockley said. ‘If she finds her lute, we must somehow get her to leave us alone up there. We can say we want to help unpack Frost’s belongings. If only Mistress Jane will let us do so without her!’
‘We must find an excuse to send her downstairs with her lute,’ I said. ‘Use what’s there.’ I was quoting a precept we had heard more than once from one of Brockley’s friends, dead now for many years, who had been a most gifted exponent of the art of seizing opportunities. I remember hearing him explain how the objects in a most ordinary room could in an emergency be turned into weapons.
Brockley chuckled and, into my ear, murmured: ‘We did indeed learn from him.’
The day was not only chilly, it was also still windy. Climbing the narrow, twisty attic stairs, which not only creaked but seemed to stir a little underfoot, could not be done silently. However, there was no need for secrecy; we were on legitimate business. Jane had even brought a flask of wine and a raisin pastry with her to give to the sick man in the menservants’ room. We all went in with her, commiserated with the victim, who was on his pallet, surrounded by used handkerchiefs and looking sorry for himself, though capable, I was glad to see, of eating his pastry with enthusiasm and enjoying his wine.
We left him still busy with them and went across the little passageway landing, where the stairs began, into the attics on the other side.
The first one was small and dusty, with sloping ceilings supported on heavy beams. It was lavishly supplied with cobwebs, and streaks of damp on one wall suggested that rain was getting in somewhere. There were numerous pieces of discarded furniture and other superseded household goods presumably left by the previous tenant – stools and a small table, all with broken legs, a saucepan with a hole in the base (someone had probably put it on a trivet to heat soup or water and let it boil dry), an old basket with bits of broken cane sticking out and several torn sheets stuffed carelessly into it, a pallet with straw stuffing oozing through a tear … Through doors to our left and right, we could glimpse other dusty, cobwebbed rooms.
Jane lifted the corner of a sheet and pulled it out. ‘This isn’t ours. It was here already. How wasteful! We would have mended this, and I should think that that table could have been mended, too. And surely … Ooh!’
Something had found a use for the pallet. A mouse came skittering out of it and dashed across the floor, veering round Brockley’s booted feet and then running across my slippered toes – frightened by the boots, no doubt, but not bothered by a minor velvet obstacle. Jane squealed and the mouse vanished down a hole by the wall.
‘You have three kitchen cats, I’ve seen them,’ said Brockley, unperturbed. ‘You ought to bring them up here sometime and let them have some sport.’
‘Where are your own things?’ I asked Jane.
‘Not in here.’ Jane was looking about her in some puzzlement. ‘I think … yes.’ She pointed to the door on the left. ‘I think our things were carried in there. Joyce and I weren’t allowed to help carry luggage about, of course. The menservants did that. But we did ask where our boxes and so forth had gone, and Barney Vaughan said go into the room to the left at the top of the stairs and then left again into another, because the first room you come to is damp. It is, too.’ She pointed to the streaks on the wall. ‘Father said he would get the cause of the damp traced and have it put right, but he’s been too busy so far.’
‘Well, let’s see,’ said Brockley and led the way.
This second attic room was smaller and it was dry, though there was plenty of dust. From one corner, a large spider in the middle of a web eyed us malevolently. ‘Ugh!’ said Jane, shuddering away from it.
I looked round. Here there were more household rejects. A couple of dented frying pans, a wooden armchair riddled with woodworm, a roll of something which, when I inquisitively picked it up and began to unroll it, proved to be a faded tapestry with moth holes in it …
‘Those things are ours!’ said Jane, pointing, and I turned to see that she meant a group of objects in the opposite corner. There were two big clothes hampers and a massive oak chest. It had a lock but the key was in it and Jane, hurrying across the room, tried to turn it. Brockley went to help her. It was stiff but yielded to his strength. He threw the lid back and Jane exclaimed with joy because there, on top of other things, was a lute case. She lifted it out and opened it. ‘Oh, here it is! Lovely!’
‘Jane,’ I said, ‘why don’t you take it downstairs and tune it? It probably needs it after being up here for so long. I’m sure the air is damp in here, even though the walls are dry. And you don’t like mice and spiders.’
‘We don’t mind so much,’ said Brockley, smoothly continuing my line of thought. ‘We can be useful, Mistress Jane. Since we’re here, we could look through these attic rooms and perhaps find other stray pieces of baggage that ought to be rescued. I agree about the damp air. All this seems very careless, I must say.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Jane. Reunited with her lute, she had little attention for anything else. ‘Do please bring down anything you think may belong to us. I’d much rather go downstairs. No, I don’t like spiders and mice – nor dust and cobwebs, either!’
As she departed, Brockley and I looked at each other and exchanged pleased smiles. ‘Quick!’ I said. ‘What else is in this big chest? It’s large enough to swallow the one we’re looking for.’
‘It must have been brought up here empty,’ said Brockley. ‘It would be far too heavy if it was full. Then things were just stuffed into it to keep them together until they could be attended to. Well, let’s see what’s here.’
He plunged his hands into the big chest and came up with a heavy roll of fabric. ‘More tapestry …’ He let it unroll. ‘One of those hunting scenes. But the moths haven’t got at this one yet. We’d better take it down. There are plenty of bare walls in this house, and Master Frost may well be pleased to see it.’
‘I expect he will. Now, what’s this?’ I delved into the chest and hauled out a thick woven blanket.
‘That looks useful. We’ll take that down as well. What a casual way to treat a perfectly good tapestry and a fine thick blanket.’ Brockley placed the tapestry on to the turned-back lid of the chest, which was clean, took the blanket from me, and put it on top of the tapestry. He exuded disapproval, as though we really were in the attic for the purpose of rescuing ill-used Frost property.
I remarked: ‘I expect in the bustle of moving in, these things were just dumped here and forgotten, and will stay here until someone looks at a stretch of bare wall and says “Where is that tapestry with the hunting scenes?”’
‘But of course we’re not really here to unpack for the Frost family,’ said Brockley, resuming his grip on our true purpose and turning back to the chest. ‘We’re here to … Madam!’
He was staring down into the chest. I came beside him and looked into it. Then we straightened up and looked at each other.
‘It’s it!’ said Brockley, almost in a whisper.
And there it was, Eleanor Liversedge’s dowry chest. Buried under a thick blanket and a roll of tapestry, it had presumably lain there since its disappearance from Stagg’s premises.
Brockley reached down and heaved, grunting. I quickly lent a hand. The dowry chest was extremely heavy. We lifted it out and set it down so that we could see it clearly.
We both recognized it, recognized the warm red colour of the wood and its lovely grain, the spray of leaves inlaid with silver that decorated each of its sides, the pattern like a twisted rope of silver round the edges of its domed lid. It was padlocked, and there was no sign of the key.
I got out my picklocks.
The lock proved easy to open. I put back the lid of the chest and got out the salt, wrapped in cloth, inside. I freed it from the cloth and we stood contemplating it in admiration. Its amethyst decorations gleamed softly blue and lavender in the gloom of the attic.
‘So now what do we do?’ Brockley muttered.
‘We inform Master Stagg,’ I said. I began to wrap the salt up again. ‘I had better …’
A shadow fell across my hands. Black-gowned and black-browed, Dr Lambert was standing in the doorway, staring at us.
‘Just what is going on here? Do you have permission to hunt through Master Frost’s attics? What is that that you are holding?’
It sounded like: ‘Just what is goink on here? Do you have berbission to hunt through Baster Frost’s attics? What is that that you are holdinck?’ But it would be tedious to repeat all of Dr Lambert’s conversation in Dr Lambert’s weird accent.
He stepped forward, took the salt out of my hands and stared at it. ‘What is this? It’s the bridal gift for the niece of Master Stagg, who makes stained-glass windows, is it not?’
‘You have seen it before?’ I said. Or rather, blurted out.
Lambert stared at me. ‘When Master Frost came to inspect this property before moving in, I was with him,’ he intoned. ‘We found two badly cracked windows in the chapel, and I took a message about it to Master Stagg’s Guildford workshop. The chapel is my charge, after all. Master Stagg had the chest there, at his works.’
‘And he showed it to you?’ asked Brockley, quite sharply. Sharply enough, anyway, to jerk a reply from Lambert, who said ‘Certainly!’ quite defensively and then went on to explain.
‘I had to wait for Master Stagg in his room upstairs. One of his apprentices came in to say that his master would not be long and asked me if I wanted any refreshment while I was waiting. This chest was there under a table. The boy saw me looking at it and told me what it was. I didn’t see the contents then, but the lad had apparently seen that salt when Master Stagg first acquired it and he described it to me. He was greatly impressed. “Amethysts!” he said, in such an awed voice. He told me he had asked Master Stagg what they were because he’d never seen an amethyst before. When Master Stagg came, I mentioned what the lad had said to me and he showed me the salt. I recognize both it and that rosewood chest.’
He stopped and seemed to recollect himself. ‘Why am I troubling to explain all this? It is none of your business. What right have you to question me? I have caught you interfering where you should not. You are the ones to explain.’
I had pulled myself together by now. I said: ‘Mistress Jane could not find her lute yesterday and thought it might be in some luggage that had been put up here during the move and not yet unpacked. We came up here this morning to help her look. She found her lute in this big chest and took it downstairs. We – that is, Brockley and myself – thought that probably there were other things up here that ought to be unpacked and Mistress Jane agreed. She wanted to go down and retune her lute somewhere more comfortable and gave us permission to look around to see if anything else ought to be taken downstairs. That is what we were doing when you came in. I assure you that we are here with Mistress Jane’s permission. I must say, I am surprised to find Mistress Liversedge’s dowry chest here. We too recognized it, having seen it at Master Stagg’s place.’
The mention of Jane obviously mollified Lambert. The suspicion faded out of his face; instead, he now seemed bewildered. I realized that I was looking at him properly for the first time. Hitherto, he had been a thin man with a dark gown and cap and an irritating voice. Now, it occurred to me that here was a man who was worried. His brown eyes were the anxious eyes of a spaniel trying to understand the speech of its human owners. Eventually, he said: ‘Well, I suppose Master Frost knows his own business best. Perhaps he is looking after the salt for the time being. He and Master Stagg are old friends, after all.’
We stared at him in such surprise that he noticed it and asked: ‘Why are you astonished? Did you not know? I know little about it myself, as I have only been Master Frost’s chaplain for a few months. But when he told me that we were to move down to Surrey, he said that it would be pleasant to be near his friend Julius Stagg, a master glazier living in Guildford. Only two days after we arrived here, Master Stagg came to dine. And a fine muddle it all was!’ There was a retrospective amusement in his voice, and I realized that Lambert’s speech was suddenly less weird. Interested in what he was saying, he was forgetting his affectations.
‘It was all arranged so quickly,’ he said, ‘that the preparations needed to entertain a guest had to be done in a rush. Half of the kitchen utensils still hadn’t been unpacked, and the Hambles had to be sent out to Guildford early in the morning to buy extra victuals. They had trouble finding sugar and cinnamon and couldn’t find any fresh fish at all. By the time they’d bought what they could and brought it back, the cook was going out of his mind because he had a leg of mutton on the spit and was waiting for capons, needed the ingredients for some special sauce or other, and couldn’t start on the desserts without sugar … The whole house was upside down in panic! No one who was here is likely to forget the day that Master Julius Stagg came to dinner.’
‘But …’ I said, and then stopped. This was utterly at variance with what Stagg had told us. He had said that he had only come to Knoll House to work and had lacked sufficient social status for anything more. I sensed that Brockley’s mind was following the same bewildered track.
‘We will leave things as they are,’ I said at last. ‘You are right, of course. Master Frost must know what he is about, and the same applies to Master Stagg.’ With Lambert standing there, I could not use my picklocks to secure the padlock so I turned away, leaving it open.
‘I will mention the matter to my employer,’ said Lambert. This time he remembered to intone, and he seemed to be soothed.
Which is more than either Brockley or I were.
There was no question of going straight back to the parlour and sitting down for a quiet morning of instruction in needlework. I told Brockley to bring Dale to my room and then called Sybil to join us. ‘Please forgive the interruption,’ I said to the twins. ‘A private matter has arisen. Go on with what you are doing until we return.’
Once I had all three of them in my bedchamber with the door closed, I told Sybil and Dale what we had found in the attic and what had been said when Dr Lambert caught us. Bewildered, Sybil observed: ‘Master Stagg said he came here just as a workman. But now the chaplain is saying that they’re old friends!’
‘I know.’ I felt just as confused. ‘We’re supposed to be here because Stagg says he can’t just come here himself and make any kind of attempt to do his own searching.’
Brockley said: ‘I think we should simply tell Stagg what we’ve found and what Lambert said about it, and leave it at that. With your permission, madam, I’ll ride over to Guildford straight away and do so. Yes?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘At least, not on your own. I shall come with you.’