The Fatal Fashione Read online

  He looked shocked. “Why—it’s intercepting goods before they get to market, buying them direct from the herdsman for a cut price before anyone else can bid on them. But why—”

  “And engrossing, my lord? What is that?”

  Paulet’s ruddy face blanched. “Ah—it’s buying up the entire supply of something to resell at an inflated price, Your Majesty. If you have interest in such practices, you can, no doubt, shave off more of what’s called the overhead—”

  “You, my lord, are in over your head with me and always have been,” she cried, and threw her filigreed pomander at him. It bounced off his hip and rolled on the floor. She knew she should play along and try to give this man enough rope to hang both himself and Dauntsey with their double dealings, but she was at the end of that very rope.

  “You’ve never trusted me, never favored me!” he pouted as if he were a spoiled child. Behind her, Clifford and Bates looked ready to lunge at the man if he made a move toward her, but it was she who rose and stalked him.

  “Let me tell you why that is true!” she shouted at him. “Or perhaps if your long memory were not so very short, you could tell me. Who is it, my lord, what dyed-in-the-wool Catholic volunteered to escort the Princess Elizabeth to the Tower when her sister, Queen Mary, wanted her imprisoned there?”

  “Why, she asked me, and I could not gainsay the queen.”

  “But you gainsay this queen, do you not, hanging about with the men who would force me to choose a husband, and with those northern lords who question my right to rule? Dare I ask in turn if you favor the Catholic Queen Mary of Scots over me, too?”

  He looked as if he’d like to fall through the floor.

  “I have it on the best authority,” she went on, “that you volunteered to conduct me to the Tower when I was so afraid to go there—and enjoyed the task! No doubt, you might enjoy it again if another Queen Mary bid you do the very same.”

  “I—of course not. Never!” he cried, and nearly stumbled over his own feet backing away from her. “But then why do you abide me at all?” he choked out, then looked as if he’d like to eat those words.

  “Because, man, I try to abide all my subjects! But let your memory take you even further back,” she demanded, still advancing on him so that he backed into the door with a small thud.

  “You mean—when your mother was accused of treason?”

  “Treason, adultery, incest—anything that could be thrown at her, all false, all lies.”

  “I—I was just concerned with the king’s finances, not with that,” he gasped out.

  “A dear friend of mine who is dead now told me that you were, in the words of Queen Anne Boleyn, ‘a gentleman’ through it all, unlike some of the other, newer breed.”

  “I was—yes, I was. I tried not to judge her.”

  “So in return, I do not judge you now—that is, on the issue of risky ventures in the stock market. But beware that you do not cross me, for you have quite used up your favors here, Lord Paulet.”

  Even as the man managed an escape, she felt torn about how she had handled him. On one hand, she had been wanting to tell him off for years. On the other, she’d alienated him now and, since she liked to keep her enemies close and unsuspecting, she might just have made her murder investigation ten times worse.

  Chapter the Eleventh

  MEG WAS SHOCKED TO SEE THAT THE QUEEN HAD evidently invited Ursala Hemmings not only to the palace but into her withdrawing room. Jenks brought her up the back staircase from the river, no less, a private way only the queen’s most trusted servants knew about. And Jenks looked starry-eyed.

  “Why is she here?” Meg whispered to Ned.

  “Her Grace is going to use her in the little drama we’re doing in the dark at Gresham House tonight,” he whispered back. “Her twin sister Pamela, too.”

  “What? Don’t tell me Ursala will also be sitting in a Privy Plot Council meeting!”

  “This isn’t a meeting, sweetheart. It’s just rehearsal for tonight. Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be off to see Sally?”

  He darted away, showing Ursala where she would stand and how the miming would go so she could tell her sister later. One of the twins had to be at the laundry until dark to receive customers, so at least Pamela hadn’t tagged along.

  “Only the two of us will speak, and in whispers,” Ned told the young woman, who, Meg had to admit, looked at least clean—actually, spotless—today, compared to the other time she’d seen her. “I’ve written a short script we must learn by heart,” Ned added. Ursala nodded, eyes wide, while Meg just rolled hers.

  The queen swept in with Lady Rosie close behind, as well as Clifford and Bates in her wake. “One of my yeomen will guard the gate,” the queen told Ned, “and the other Marie’s door to the main corridor. I don’t put it past the ubiquitous Nash Badger to stay awake all night, and we don’t want chaos. This all has to be beautifully organized.

  “Oh, Meg,” she said, noticing her at last, “you’d best set out for Gresham House to be certain Sally understands her part. She’s to tiptoe down to the side courtyard door to let us in as soon as the moon rises, which, I am assured, will be eleven of the clock. And tell her not to be afraid, for if things go awry, it is the queen herself who will tell the Greshams why this needed to be done.”

  Meg dragged her feet to the door. She was loath to be sent away with Ursala taking such a large part, adored by Jenks, who never could hide his feelings. And fussed over by Ned. Worse, Meg felt she’d almost been replaced in the queen’s trust and affections. Then, as she put her hand to the door latch, Her Majesty called, “Oh, Meg.”

  She turned quickly, hoping she’d be asked to stay at least a bit longer. Perhaps she would be included in Ned’s playacting, too.

  “You did leave some of the cuckoopint pollen we need to make Ursala and her sister glow, didn’t you?” Her Majesty inquired.

  “What’s needed is with Ned, Your Grace. But I repeat that it’s not to get in anyone’s mouth. It will glow beautifully for your specters, but any bit of the herb could make one sick—or worse.”

  “Good,” Elizabeth said, and turned away.

  Hadn’t she been listening? Meg’s precious pollen was all she wanted when, after all, this entire dream drama had been Meg’s idea. Now she was shuffled off to the side, even though it did give her a reason to see her Sally.

  As she turned toward the door again, she heard Ursala speak. “Your Majesty, I been pondering something I’d best say. Jenks said I should.”

  Yet again Meg turned to watch the others. Ursala hung back from the queen a bit, half hidden by Jenks’s big body, then went into a rocky curtsy. It reminded Meg how bad she herself had used to be at that.

  “Yes, Ursala,” the queen said, her voice calm and encouraging, even though Meg knew she’d been on pins and needles lately. “Speak up, for anything that can help us is greatly appreciated.”

  Meg pressed her lips together. Would the queen take this woman in if she kept clinging to Jenks? Would she even allow them to wed?

  “I don’t mean to speak poorly of anyone, Your Majesty,” Ursala began as Jenks took her arm and moved her closer to the queen. “’Specially not someone so grieved over her girl’s condition.”

  Meg gasped. Was Ursala going to say something harmful about her? All she needed was this laundress chiming in on Chief Constable Whitcomb’s dreadful accusations.

  “Tell us what you recall,” the queen urged Ursala, “no matter of whom you are speaking. We need to follow any and all clues.”

  “Well, I could swear I seen that Marie Gresham’s mother afore—the lady standing by the child’s bed that night I’dentifed Marie. I seen her in Hannah’s starch house, not near the day Hannah died or nothing, so I wouldn’t want to get the lady in trouble.”

  Meg breathed a sigh of relief as Ursala seemed to speak faster and faster. Didn’t she know not to rattle things off to Her Grace?

  “Acourse,” Ursala plunged on, “some ladies drop off their own ru
ffs, but I’m sure I passed her once on the stairs to Hannah’s loft, I going up and her coming down. Told me to stand aside, she did, not dirty her gown, and me spending my whole life keeping gowns like hers clean, that’s why I’member her.”

  “Thank you, Ursala,” the queen said—real sweetly, Meg thought. If she’d come up with that information in such a tardy fashion, Her Grace would probably have let loose a curse and thrown something. The last persons the queen wanted to see guilty—except for her, Meg hoped—were the Greshams.

  “I can see you are going to be very helpful to all of us,” Elizabeth told Ursala.

  Meg snorted and lifted the door latch. Clifford usually did that for her, but he, too, was intent on the queen’s exchange with Ursala. Tears in her eyes, for no one’s plight but her own, Meg went out and closed the door.

  Things went so smoothly that night that Elizabeth began to worry. Sally let them in promptly at the street door to the courtyard. No Gresham guards were there, where they left Bates behind, nor at the door to the great house itself. Sally, the queen, the twins, and Ned, with Clifford bringing up the rear, moved stealthily down a vast corridor and up the grand staircase, lit by only the fat candlestick Sally held and the full moon.

  Since it was newly risen, it bloomed big as a ripe peach, which appeared to teeter on the top of the roof across the courtyard. Its light washed into the windows of the grand house almost as if it were day.

  In the dim second-story corridor, where moonlight did not reach, the queen half expected Nash Badger to leap from the shadows, but all seemed silent. No one spoke before they were in the antechamber to Marie’s bedroom, when Sally turned to the queen to whisper something.

  “What?” Elizabeth mouthed, bending to hear the girl’s words.

  “Sometimes Marie’s mother peeks in on us. But usually not’til later. Don’t think she sleeps well, either. Marie’s not had a bad dream tonight—not one where she woke or cried out, but she oft has one by midnight.”

  Elizabeth nodded, lifted her finger to her lips, and then turned away to whisper in Clifford’s ear, “Man this outer door, and let us know immediately if anyone approaches. Just one knock on that far bedchamber door, and we will get under the girl’s bed. With Sally’s trundle out, we should have room. Then you hide behind drapery or furniture out here.”

  Clifford nodded as Sally slipped back into Marie’s room, leaving the door ajar. Anxious, wishing Ned would hurry, the queen watched him dust Ursala’s and Pamela’s hair and shoulders with cuckoopint pollen. It did indeed glow in the dark, especially in the moonlight as its particles etched each of the women in shimmering silver.

  How strange, Elizabeth marveled, that the Creator God had made such lovely, shiny dust a poison. It was like the fruit on the tree in the Garden of Eden, so alluring but strictly forbidden. It was also like the dual nature of people—the good and the bad all mingled.

  And how much these twins resembled each other, another God-given miracle. Ned had arranged their hair the same and dressed them alike. In the darkness, would they remind Marie of the younger women in the portrait her father cherished? They were risking all on the hunch that Hannah had told Marie about her mother and that the child knew something of her aunt’s murder.

  They had told Sally she should slightly rouse Marie, and evidently she had. “Another dream?” they heard Sally’s quavering voice within. “Here, sit up a moment, and let me get some water to wash your face.”

  That, too, was planned, since Sally had said Marie reacted so emotionally to having her face washed before. Besides, it gave Sally the excuse to step away from the bed, to clear Marie’s line of vision.

  The twins glided into the bedchamber, arm in arm, with Ned hunched down behind them so he could soon seem to rise from nothing. The queen crept in, too, hovering in the bedchamber’s shadows. Goose bumps skimmed her skin, so she sensed how eerie this must seem to Marie.

  The twins drifted closer to her bed, whispering nonsense words between themselves before one of them—she thought it was Pamela, but she’d lost track now—went from her sister’s arms into Ned’s as he seemed to appear from nowhere. They embraced each other, then she sank onto the floor with a breathy sigh.

  “No,” Marie whispered, then called out in a hiss of air that would have done a ghost proud, “S-S-Sally?”

  As ordered, Sally stayed away from the bed. Ned was at his best, dark-cloaked with no dust on his person except what he had either apurpose or accidentally spilled on his hands, the only part of him that glowed. He now put those hands around the standing woman’s throat, and when she went limp, he lifted her, then laid her on the ground.

  The queen sensed Marie would scream before she even opened her mouth. Hell’s gates, they’d gone too far. They would all be trapped here now.

  Elizabeth lunged for Marie even as Sally did. Marie hit out, shoving the queen away, but threw her arms around her companion. Marie’s mouth opened in a soundless scream.

  “It’s all right,” Elizabeth whispered. “Sally’s here, and you’re all right, and you remember.”

  Looking dazed, Marie peered at her over Sally’s shoulder.

  “You do remember some things, don’t you?” Elizabeth asked, perching on the edge of the bed.

  Marie blinked, as if she still couldn’t believe who it was she saw. Perhaps she thought she was still asleep, but at last she spoke.

  “I—yes. I remember from a dream last night, not this one,” the child choked out. “Some of it. I remember some of it. Are my parents here?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said, motioning the others away with her hand behind her back. “Just Sally and me, and we need to know everything you can recall.”

  Marie tried to peer around the queen as the players vacated the room, but Elizabeth shifted so she couldn’t see. In reflected moonlight through the window, the queen saw tears track down the girl’s face. Her heart went out to her for more reasons than she could say or share. Still, she must try. If she told her own dreadful truths, perhaps Marie would trust her.

  “You lost your real mother so young you don’t remember her,” Elizabeth whispered. “The same happened to me, so I understand your pain and longing. And years ago—the year I became queen—I heard from my aunt, too, my dead mother’s sister, and risked everything to go to see her.”

  Wide-eyed, Marie nodded. She seemed instantly calmer. She set Sally a bit off to the side. “Was she a twin, too?” she asked, leaning closer.

  “No, but I was desperate to see her. I lied to people, disguised myself, and went. And spent time with her—before she died.”

  “My Aunt Hannah looked just like my mother, Gretta,” Marie said, her voice a monotone as if she were in a sleeper’s trance. “Aunt Hannah told me so. My mother had a slightly rounder face, and their hair grew opposite ways from their parts, and Mother was left-handed and Hannah right, but they were so alike. My mother was an extension of herself, Hannah told me. They never lived apart until my mother fell in love with—with my father.”

  “You did know you were adopted, before Hannah told you?”

  “Oh, they told me that, but I never asked about my mother—I just always knew not to.”

  Elizabeth nodded and blinked back tears herself. As a child, she’d been scolded more than once and even sent from court for asking her father or others about Anne Boleyn and her family.

  “Did Hannah tell you those things when you first met her in the garden here or at her starch house? You did see her out your window and go out to see her, didn’t you?”

  Marie nodded, frowning. Elizabeth feared her memories might be slipping away again, but the girl went on. “I sent her gifts and epistles, but she didn’t answer, so I had to go there. My last note told her when I was coming, so mayhap she let her workwomen go, because they weren’t there.”

  “Did anyone else know you were going to see her? Could your parents have found out?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Could Nash Badger have known and told them
? Or Celia, the glove perfumer?”

  “She helped me, Celia, just for the purchase of the gloves, though I had to work through Badger after the first time Mother and I were in her shop. Then Celia sent word by Badger that he should bring no more notes, that she was afraid she was just too busy to deliver them.”

  Hadn’t Badger said he never brought a message from Celia to Marie? the queen thought. No, in a way he had skirted that question, saying only that he’d never taken a letter back from whomever she was corresponding with.

  “But Celia said she was afraid she was too busy?” Elizabeth repeated Marie’s words.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would she say it that way—afraid? Of what?”

  “I don’t know. She said Master Badger dare not come back again.”

  Badger had not told her that, Elizabeth thought, but perhaps that was because they were interrupted in the corridor when the Greshams returned. That reminded her that she must hurry now.

  “Sally and I are here with you,” Elizabeth assured her, “so you must not be afraid. Tell us, when you went to Hannah’s starch house, what did you see?”

  “I heard it first—someone with her upstairs.”

  “Voices?”

  “No, a tussle—or maybe something else.”

  The queen clenched her fists so hard her fingernails bit into her palms. “Something else?” she prodded when Marie only frowned.

  “I went into my parents’ room one night when I was smaller. I saw what I shouldn’t, with heavings and sighs and thrashing about.”

  “Oh. And Hannah’s struggle—sounded like that?”

  “I—I think so. When the sounds quieted, I waited, then crept the rest of the way up and peeked. But she was not there. No one came down the stairs, but no one was there, as if they’d flown away.”

  Marie’s eyes were wide now. She didn’t blink or cry as she had earlier but stared fixedly at a spot above the queen’s head. For a moment, Elizabeth became aware of Sally again, silent, rapt.