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themselves. The weather being damp and cold, most of them settled down indoors with their needlework. Hugh, after wishing me well, said he would go into the town and see the artist Arbuckle. Brockley had made the acquaintance of Arbuckle’s manservant and knew where they were staying. And I, seizing my chance, plunged into the kitchen regions.
    I had never before entered the kitchens at Windsor. I went down steps on which I had never before set foot, through passages I hadn’t known existed and into a maze of rooms organized into suites for Larder, Cellar, Buttery, Bakehouse, Pastry, Spicery and other departments. People male and female, mostly in stained aprons, directed me, and after passing through a huge, steamy kitchen full of culinary aromas and sweating cooks, I reached the Spicery.
    It turned out to be a cramped room lined with shelves on which stood various boxes and jars, while beneath the shelves were bigger containers: casks, chests and stone amphorae. A row of workers – chiefly male and muscular, but also including two mighty women with rolled-up sleeves and arms like legs of mutton – stood at a stone work-table, pounding spices in pestles, weighing the results and ladling it into bowls. The air was so aromatic that I was half afraid to breathe it. I felt that to open my mouth wide and take in a gulp of it would leave me reeling drunk.
    ‘I’m looking for a Master John Sterry,’ I said loudly, to be heard above the crash of the pestles. One of the women left her work, put her head round a door at the far side and called something which brought a man to the doorway. He was advanced in years though straight-backed still, and his short, stiff hair was the iron-grey of a badger’s coat, as was his small moustache. ‘John Sterry?’ I enquired.
    Elizabeth’s instructions had evidently reached him. ‘You will be Mistress Stannard?’ he said. His voice was clipped and competent. ‘I was expecting you. You have questions that I am to answer, I understand. If you will come this way . . .’
    I walked past the work table, where the woman who had summoned him was once more industriously pounding, and followed him through a passage and into what seemed to be his office. It had a table, where papers and ledgers were lying along with a writing set. There were benches on either side of the table. Here, the rhythmic thudding of the pestles was reduced to a faint and distant thunder. We sat down, and he looked at me enquiringly.
    ‘Were you here at the end of old King Henry’s reign?’ I asked. ‘When a man called Peter Hoxton was employed in these kitchens and died?’
    ‘Ah. It’s about that old business, is it? Yes, I was here. I’ve been in the Spicery for thirty years. I remember the Hoxton affair well. It isn’t,’ he added, ‘the sort of thing that happens every day, though it is the sort of thing that sticks in the memory.’
    Elizabeth had chosen me a good contact, I thought; one with a businesslike mind. ‘A man called Gervase Easton was accused of deliberately poisoning Hoxton,’ I said. ‘Two witnesses apparently saw him add something to a tray of food which had been set aside for the victim. Do you know who they were? Would it still be possible to find them and talk to them? And what about the manservant, and the physician who was called to attend Hoxton?’
    Sterry snorted. ‘You’re over-hopeful! Some of the folk you’d like to talk to are in the graveyard now. It was nigh a quarter of a century ago, and people die off. There were two physicians, and they’re both dead now. The manservant’s gone, too. Edwards, his name was. He got another place with someone here, but he had a night off, went out roistering in the town, came back dead drunk, went to sleep it off and never woke up again. He always had drunk too much,’ Sterry added disapprovingly.
    ‘But the two witnesses who actually said they saw Easton doing something to the tray?’
    ‘I’m coming to them. One of them was a