Queen Without a Crown by Fiona Buckley Page A

Steadfastness is a virtue, but it can be a burden too.’
    ‘Yes. Bowman had a point,’ Hugh said. ‘Many girls are beautiful, and they don’t all have families as particular as Jane’s. Time can mend broken hearts, if the owners of the hearts will let it.’
    ‘Hugh, you’re a cynic.’
    ‘I’m a realist. You’ve just called falling in love once and for all a burden. It can even be dangerous. It’s possible that Mark’s father also fell in love once and for all and so desperately that it drove him to murder. Let us talk of something else. Isn’t it time that one of us went to see how Meg’s portrait is progressing?’
    ‘I’ve already said to Sybil that I must go with Meg to the studio one day soon. Sybil says that the whole scene is on canvas now.’
    According to Sybil, Arbuckle had created several different arrangements, by which various sections of the whole were lit up and visible through the aperture in the screen, to be caught by the lens and reflected on to the paper.
    ‘He makes a detailed study on the paper, using the reflected images, and then copies them on to the canvas,’ Sybil had told me. ‘The work on the canvas has begun, but he still needs Meg herself to look at, to help him with further details. And to study her character as deeply as he can, I think,’ she had added, perceptively. ‘There’s no harm in that. Meg’s character is all it should be.’
    Talking about the portrait did make me feel better. I think it cheered Hugh, as well. We got out our chess set and played three games before supper. I won two of them, and Hugh said: ‘You are improving.’
    I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me that, these days, Hugh was not as sharp at the game as he used to be, but I didn’t say so. ‘Just good luck,’ I told him. ‘And I think you’re tired. Let’s go to supper and then settle for the night.’
    We were coming back from supper when John Sterry accosted us, just at the foot of the stairs. Madge Goodman, he said, wished to talk to me again. She had remembered something that might be of use to me. I could see her at any time in the morning.
    I glanced at Hugh and saw the hope in his eyes. I felt it spring up anew in me. Perhaps, after all . . .
    ‘I’ll see her as early as I can, tomorrow,’ I said.
    I worried a little about getting away from the queen the next day, but after chapel she went, as so often these days, to talk with her council, and I made my way unhindered through the labyrinth of the castle and down to the Spicery where I found Sterry checking new supplies in.
    ‘I see that the castle is still being stocked up,’ I said, nodding at the pile of small boxes he was counting.
    ‘A little madly, in my view,’ Sterry said. He no longer sounded anxious; the news that the danger was receding had no doubt reached him. ‘These are all peppercorns. It’s an absurd quantity, unless we’re expecting to be besieged for a year – or we’re planning to grind them up and throw them in the enemy’s eyes.’
    I laughed, remembering what Brockley had said about his friend Carew Trelawny, who had been good at inventing new uses for pea-stick twine and other people’s washing. ‘Where is Madge?’
    Sterry ticked off a line on the list he was holding and said: ‘This way.’
    Madge was once more making comfits. Pieces of ginger root were piled on a chopping board beside her, along with a steaming jug of some brown liquid from which arose the smell of hot syrup. In her swinging charcoal-heated pan, she was stirring ginger pieces into pools of syrup. Presumably, comfit-making was her main task. I wondered what it was like, toiling at the same dull job, day after day, with scorched fingers the only break in the monotony. Sterry had said that Madge apparently preferred it to her married life, which was a sorry reflection on her husband.
    Madge, however, rosy and neat, deftly working her ingredients, greeted us with a smile, looking as though hers were the only job in the world