The Fatal Fashione: An Elizabeth I Mystery (Elizabeth I Mysteries) Read online

A knock on the door startled them, and Anne darted away to answer it. Nash Badger stood there, holding a tray with three small bowls and an engraved silver pot as if he were now a server instead of a bodyguard. Another man, a fat, nervous-looking one, stood behind him.

  “You found some?” Thomas called to Badger, who, rather begrudgingly, Elizabeth thought, let Anne take the tray from him. Perhaps, she thought, he had wanted to bring it in himself. Recalling all he had done to help find Marie, she went to the door herself. Thomas followed, his walking stick tapping on the floor. Anne, holding the tray, looked as if she were caught at something.

  “I believe much thanks is owed you, Master Badger,” Elizabeth told him, “for your help to this family, and so, indirectly, to me.”

  He bowed, as did the man behind him, one garbed like a cook fresh out of the kitchens. As Badger stood straight again, an acrid aroma floated to her nostrils; she sneezed and stepped away.

  “Anything I can ever do to help—” Badger was saying as Anne closed the door with her foot.

  “He was letting in a draft,” she said as she carried the tray to the table before the hearth. “Or it was that dreadful smell from his drinking tobacco that made you sneeze so, Your Majesty? If he hadn’t found Marie, he’d be back just guarding the building site, if I had my way.”

  “He is useful to me,” Thomas said only, gesturing that Elizabeth should come sit on the largest chair of the three grouped around the hearth. “The tobacco drinking is an annoyance, though.”

  “I have heard of this new practice, especially that sailors inhale fumes of the burned stuff,” the queen said. “Since it reeks so, what is the good of it?”

  “It evidently tempers one’s moods, Your Majesty,” Thomas explained, “so perhaps we could all use a whiff of it. The user inhales it into the mouth and throat and blows out smoke, as if a smoldering fire burned within the belly or brain. But I have here a new drink that will please you mightily and smells and tastes delicious—”

  “I can’t recommend it, as I haven’t had it yet,” Anne put in.

  “—because it is laced with sugar to balance the flavor perfectly.” Thomas finished his thought while ignoring his wife. Again, the queen felt her hosts were at great odds and wondered why. Had they argued over whether to bring Marie home or not? She had thought they agreed on that.

  “Where did you obtain this new drink?” Elizabeth asked Thomas.

  “I am hesitant to tell you, because of certain inimical international relations, Your Grace.” He smiled as if he had made a jest, but twisted his signet ring again. “Actually, it’s from Spain, though it has been imported from the New World, where it was the drink of royalty.”

  “The rulers of the indigenous folk there, the ones with all the gold their explorers have found?”

  “I warrant that is so, and some say this liquid is as dear as their gold to them. It’s a sacred and magical drink to those New World natives, and King Philip and the Catholic Spanish are guarding it practically on pain of death.”

  “Then if it is a Spanish secret, I shall try it.”

  “It’s called,” Anne put in as she poured three bowls of it, “chocolata and comes in little cakes, round, brown ones, dry as dust and likely to break into dust, too, and bitter as can be without sugar. We had such a cake of it lost but found a way to get another one.”

  “Badger did,” Thomas muttered, leaning forward to watch his wife pour the precious stuff as if he thought she’d spill it.

  Elizabeth sipped the dark drink. Both tart and sweet. Rich. It was as if merely tasting it could convey the exotic nature of the place from which it had come. If starch was, as Hosea Cantwell had said, the devil’s liquor, this was surely the drink of angels.

  “Chocolata,” the queen said, “is quite lovely and soothing, though I don’t suppose it will catch on with the common people. Sugar alone is expensive, and to import the chocolata in little cakes from the New World will drive the price up even more. But now we must talk about how we can best help your Marie to remem—”

  The three of them turned toward the door as it creaked open without a knock, swung inward, and banged into the wall. With Sally just behind, Marie herself stood there. As if she were sleepwalking, she looked at none of them but headed straight for the corner of the room.

  “I remembered something,” she said, quite clearly, though she still did not look their way. Anne put her drink down and stared as if she’d seen a ghost. Thomas rose to go to Marie, but Elizabeth seized his arm to stay him. Sally trailed behind Marie, bobbing a curtsy at the queen as she passed.

  Marie approached a large coffer, made from a hollowed tree trunk, and opened it. She bent over it, then knelt, digging down under papers and who knows what else like a dog after a bone. Elizabeth stood to see better. From the dark depths of the big hump-backed trunk she pulled a small framed painting, two hands wide and slightly narrower in height, though a painting of what, the queen could not tell at that distance.

  Holding up her other hand to stop the Greshams’ rush toward their child, Elizabeth asked softly, “What is it you recall, Marie?”

  The girl cradled the front of the picture to her, then turned it around so Sally could see. Elizabeth rose and walked slowly forward to look at it, too.

  The portrait was of two young girls, no doubt sisters, perhaps even twins. They looked to be near ten years old. One was in light, the other more in shade. Except for the open window with blue sky behind them, the painting had no background.

  “It reminds me of us,” Marie told Sally. “Or, if I am not this girl,” she said, pointing to the one in the light, “I am part of her.”

  Anne gasped, and Thomas cut in, “Marie, you must return to bed. You are not yet well, sweetling.” Elizabeth thought he would pick his daughter up as he had the day she was found. To her surprise, it was Anne who lifted her, as easily as if she were still small. Marie still cradled the painting until Thomas took it from her.

  “I pray you will forgive us for one moment, Your Majesty,” he said and, leaning heavily on his walking stick, hurried from the room after them.

  “Sally!” the queen called as she, too, started out. “Your mother is waiting to speak with you downstairs with Lady Rosie. But I need to talk to you first.”

  The girl came back and curtsied yet again.

  “What else did Marie say about that painting? What else has she recalled?”

  “She doesn’t want to’member more, Your Majesty, that’s what I think. She saw something terrible that’s unhinged her. Sometimes she thinks I’m part of her—or her twin sister, like in that picture.”

  Hannah was a twin, the queen thought. And Ursala Hemmings, too, but what did that all add up to? Thomas Gresham had some questioning coming, and not with his angry wife hanging on.

  “Go down to see your mother,” the queen told the girl. “The Greshams will tend to Marie until you return. And, Sally, I am absolutely relying on you to tell your mother Meg or me immediately if Marie says anything else about what she saw that could have rattled her so. Promise?”

  “Oh,’course. Should I send Badger with the news then, like Marie done?”

  “Marie sent Badger to someone? To whom and about what?”

  “Don’t know. She just said he took privy messages for her.”

  “Thank you, Sally. No, do not use Badger, for I will send a man named Ned from the palace every day to ask you personally how you are doing, as well as Marie. If you need to send a message to me or your mother—especially about anything Marie recalls—you tell Ned. He has curly hair and green eyes, and you will like him immensely. Off with you now.”

  ’S blood, Elizabeth thought, starting to pace in Gresham’s sollar, she’d told Cecil if they just stirred the starch long enough something else would float to the top. Now she not only had to corner Thomas alone but also had to discover from the smoke drinker Nash Badger what privy messages he’d carried for the coddled and sheltered Marie Gresham.

  Chapter the Eighth
/>   AS THE QUEEN PEERED OUT INTO THE LONG SECOND-FLOOR corridor of Gresham House, she saw Nash Badger standing by a distant door, through which she assumed the Greshams had gone. She stepped out and motioned him to her. Though he seemed reluctant to leave his post, he obeyed.

  “I would ask you a question or two, Master Badger,” she called to him as he came closer. He bowed, then kept his gaze cast down as if he were pondering the hems of her gown. Again, the acrid scent of tobacco floated to her like an invisible mist around the man.

  “Anything I can do, Your Majesty.”

  “I have observed that is your service to Sir Thomas—anything you can do.”

  “I admit that I have hitched my future to his rising star. He is a man much to be admired.”

  “And protected from his enemies, evidently. You are primarily his bodyguard?”

  “I do whatever needs to be done.”

  “That includes acting as courier for Marie Gresham’s secret messages to …” She left the question hanging. He looked up at last—wide-eyed, before he narrowed his gaze.

  “Mistress Marie told you, then, or her new companion did?” he asked.

  “Do you deny you have done such for Marie?”

  “I promised her I would tell no one.”

  “Not even your lord Thomas? And your queen, who is asking you directly and for good purpose?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, closed it, then said, “I’d rue the day I caused the child trouble, Your Majesty. With her parents, I mean. Harmless fun, I thought, her sending letters to a friend, though doing it round Robin’s barn.’Fore she found little Sally she was too often alone, I wager. She was ofttimes with her mother and servants, that is, but no friends.”

  “I believe you have an avid eye and kind heart, Badger, but back to the question at hand. If the child has had no opportunity to make friends, to whom would she send these epistles? I, too, am trying to help Marie. Tell me quickly all you know about your errands of kindness.”

  “Four times, Your Majesty. The letters were sealed, and I didn’t look within, God’s truth, I didn’t, so I can’t tell you more.”

  “You delivered them to …”

  “A glover’s shop on Eastcheap just at the edge of the shambles—you know, the butchers’ district.”

  Elizabeth shuddered at the memory of Smithfield’s livestock milling about, soon to be executed, like the many martyrs who had died there. “Yes. Say on.”

  “That’s it,” he said with a shrug. “As a favor to the girl, I took the notes to the glover’s hard by Abchurch Lane. Left them with a young woman named Celia who perfumes gloves, rough-looking though she is. Doubt if that’s Marie’s friend, but didn’t ask. This Celia’s little corner in that shop was’bout the only sweet-smelling place with the shambles nearby, if you get my drift.”

  “So you took no notes back to Marie in turn?”

  “If she had a return from her friend, it was by someone else’s hand.”

  “You know nothing else about this friend?”

  He shook his head. “I just dropped the letters off in a roundabout way, heading for my duties on the site of the exchange.”

  “Then who was guarding Sir Thomas during those times?”

  “He hadn’t left this house yet.”

  “But you then went ahead to the exchange, so he was unprotected during his short journey there?”

  A flash of frustration swept his face before he could control it again. “He has other men with him.”

  “I believe,” she went on, “he never rides anywhere alone since that strange accident that nearly took his life six years ago. Were you with him then?”

  “No, Your Majesty. He took me on shortly after.”

  “What were you doing before that?”

  She noted well Badger had begun to shift his weight from one foot to the other and flex his fists at his side. “The same, but for lesser men,” he said. “Anything that needs to be done.”

  Though she meant to question him more, the queen saw Anne Gresham rush out the door down the hall. Without a glance their way, she hurried downstairs as Thomas, again leaning heavily on his walking stick, came toward them.

  “Your Majesty, forgive us for rushing off like that,” he said, sounding out of breath. Badger bowed and stepped out of their way. Each time he moved, the tobacco smell emanated from his person.

  “I completely understand, Thomas. Is she resting, then?”

  “Better than we could have hoped, though the nonsense about the painting shows she is not yet back in her right mind.”

  “I must be going, but I will bid her farewell first,” the queen declared. She walked quickly toward the girl’s room, with Thomas thumping along behind and Badger trailing them.

  “So kind of you, Your Majesty,” Thomas cried, “but perhaps another day when she is more herself.”

  “Sir Thomas Gresham,” she said, stopping before Marie’s door so fast her skirts swayed, “you know I lost my dear companion Kat Ashley not long ago. In her last years she was quite delusional and yet in such spells always revealed aspects of her deepest self. I will bid a swift farewell to Marie, alone,” she added pointedly, went in, and closed the door in his face.

  She rushed across the outer room, for she knew that Anne would be back soon, probably with Sally or a servant in tow. She found Marie in her bedchamber, though not in bed as she’d expected. The girl was sitting in a deep window seat, propped against pillows with a coverlet over her legs. The room was warm and stuffy with the sun pouring in and no windows open.

  “Your Majesty!” she said, looking surprised. She started to scoot to the edge of the seat, but the queen raised her hand and sat down facing her. The view was of the sheltered central courtyard and gardens gone to riot with leggy autumn blooms.

  “Marie, since that double portrait of the sisters is not really of you and Sally, who do you think it is?”

  Her composure crumbled. Her eyes filled with tears; her chin and lower lip trembled. “I don’t know,” she whispered, “but I’m sure it’s important. My parents just say it’s no one I know. Yet if it isn’t me in that painting, it’s something about me.”

  “How long have you known it was there?”

  “I found it several months ago—I recall that. But then I—I just thought it was pretty, but now—there is something else about it now.”

  “All right. Who did you send the four secret letters to, the ones Badger delivered for you to the glover’s shop on Abchurch Lane in Eastcheap?”

  She blinked. Tears matted her lashes and trickled from her eyes. “I remember writing them, but not why or to whom,” she said, swiping at her cheeks. She propped her elbows on her knees, bent over, and covered her eyes with both hands. “But I—I think I have a copy of one of them, an epistle I started but put away …”

  She got up and went to a corner of the room to a dropleaf table and opened its single small drawer. Elizabeth heard Anne in the hall, talking to Thomas in urgent tones. This time the queen felt they might be hostile not only to each other but to her. Though she had not meant to unhinge Marie more, she, too, rose and went closer to the desk and peered in the drawer.

  The girl was scrabbling through pieces of parchment. “Here,” she said as the queen heard the door to the outer room open, “it might be this.”

  Elizabeth took the note from the girl, folded it once, and thrust it in the folds of her skirt. “Let me worry about it. Don’t even fret your parents over this,” she urged, and shoved the drawer closed with her knee as Anne, pulling Sally, burst into the bedchamber with Thomas behind. Elizabeth watched as Anne gazed first at the window seat and was startled to see it empty. She looked even more distressed when she saw them standing by the table together.

  “Your Majesty, we are so grateful for your care and support in all this,” Anne cried, rushing to them, “and we will surely send you news of Marie’s continued recovery, but we believe she needs her rest now.”

  “I do indeed expect to be kept informed,�
� she told both Greshams as Thomas entered the bedchamber. They looked, she thought, distraught yet defiant. “Sally,” Elizabeth said, turning to the girl, “your mother Meg will visit from time to time as well, but my man Ned Topside will see you each day, should you wish to send your mother news of your stay here. Marie,” she said, turning to take the girl’s hand, “do not worry yourself, and perhaps what we need to know of your difficulties will solve themselves some other way.

  “Thomas,” she said. He stood leaning against the door now, as if he had need to prop himself up. “Attend me at Whitehall tomorrow afternoon. It may be the Lord’s Day, but your queen needs some advice.”

  “About the mercantile exchange, Your Majesty?” he asked, looking as if he were about to be put on the rack.

  Still clutching the draft of Marie’s letter, the queen realized the girl must surely have traded it with someone forbidden to her. “Yes,” she said, “about the exchange.”

  “Boonen,” Elizabeth said as she climbed into her coach and looked back out at him, “to Eastcheap. To be exact, the edge of the shambles hard by Abchurch Lane, to a glover’s shop.”

  After their detour to Smithfield, evidently nothing surprised the man, for he merely nodded and closed the door. Elizabeth kept the rolled window flap halfway up, not for air or a view but to read Marie’s letter in decent daylight.

  “What is that, Your Grace?” Rosie asked.

  “Maybe nothing, maybe everything,” Elizabeth told her, and bent over the small, ornate script.

  Dearest Friend,

  I pray you let me visit, for I can manage it without their knowing, I vow I can. Please, for I would know so much more of her, more than just seeing her in your lovely face. Or could you not come here again and I will slip out where we spoke before? I hope you will wear these sweet gloves, my gift to you, in exchange for any sweet memories you can give, and if you still need money to

  Here the last words about the money were crossed out, and below was scribbled in: and if you would accept from me money as you asked others for earlier