The Fatal Fashione Page 9

  “I didn’t ask you,” Elizabeth interrupted, “at least not that. Jenks, is it true that you are sweet on Ursala Hemmings?”

  “I feel sorry for her, Your Grace, and just want—to help her,” the big man said, but he squirmed in his seat again.

  Meg snorted; the queen sighed. It never took much to read Jenks’s heart, which was one reason Elizabeth knew how loyal and honest he was.’S blood, why didn’t Cecil step in to help with this? Right now, she had no inkling what her brilliant secretary of state was thinking, though he kept scribbling at that damned sketch of a ruff with the names of the possibly guilty in it.

  “Let me say this,” Elizabeth told all of them, pointing like a schoolmaster, “and just once. Whatever frictions—or friendships—are among any of you, I need them to be subjugated for a time so that we, pulling as a team, can solve this murder. Is there anyone at this table who cannot swear to me that he or she can discipline himself or herself to that cause?”

  She stared at each in turn. No one so much as blinked. “Then,” the queen added, “is there anything else for the good of the order before I tell you how I think we should proceed?”

  “One thing Meg and I forgot, Your Grace,” Jenks said.

  “Say on.”

  “Ursala said one reason she missed Hannah so much was’cause Ursala used to be close to her twin sister—Pamela, married now, the one she lives with, along with Pamela’s husband. Ursala said that Hannah also has a twin sister. Both being twins brought Ursala and Hannah closer, I take it.”

  “Or had a twin sister,” Meg put in, frowning. “Ursala might have said Hannah had a twin sister, not has.”

  “Thank you, Jenks and Meg. I don’t see how that figures into this thick brew of possibilities, but anything we learn may help when we get more of the pieces put together. My lord Cecil, whose names are you filling in on your chart of suspicious persons?” she asked, leaning closer to him. “Ursala Hemmings?”

  She noted that Jenks tensed as if he would spring across the table at Cecil. “Not specifically Ursala, Your Grace,” Cecil said, squinting swiftly over at Jenks, then back down to his parchment. “I have simply added to the section marked ‘disgruntled workers’ the words ‘or one of Hannah’s friends.’ But after what you and Lady Rosie have reported to us of your visit to the van der Passes, I have also included Hosea Cantwell’s name in another section of the diagram.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “A wild card, indeed, and one I intend to keep face up by speaking with him again, on the morrow to be exact. And there’s one more possibility, though a vague one, by the name of Hugh Dauntsey, though I won’t have you add him to our list until I hire and question him.”

  “Hire him? Hugh Dauntsey?” Cecil demanded. He never raised his voice when others were about, but she had always promoted a good give-and-take in these Privy Plot Council meetings. “When we’re trying to cut back that spider’s web of a bureaucracy your royal forbearers managed to let everyone spin around them?” Cecil plunged on. “That rabidly Catholic lackbrain Dauntsey?”

  “My lord Cecil, he may have ruined his opportunity to take over Thomas Gresham’s role as chief Tudor financial advisor and foreign agent, and he may be rabidly Catholic—which is another reason he needs watching—but he’s no lackbrain.”

  “He’s Will Paulet’s lackey, at least, and has been ingratiating himself with him. For all I know, he thinks he has a large bequest coming when the old man finally dies.”

  “My point precisely—no lackbrain,” she argued. “Rather, a clever man with, no doubt, fettered and frustrated ambitions and a hatred of the Tudors for dismissing him and of me for never hiring him to do so much as count coins. And he must detest the fact he was replaced with Thomas Gresham, whom I yet favor.”

  “But hire him?” he repeated. “He’ll babble everything you tell him to Paulet, and it will upset Gresham mightily if you start to trust Hugh Dauntsey.”

  “Perhaps even more than it has upset you,” she admitted. “But I said hire him, not trust him, my lord. I learned just before this meeting that the ward constable you summoned about Hannah’s death has handed the investigation over to the chief constable at his request. And though I can’t recall his name, the chief constable—”

  “It’s Nigel Whitcomb,” Cecil said, shaking his head. “He was previously chief steward of the Skinners’ Guild. He’s that new member of the Commons in your rebellious Parliament, though he was wily enough to hide in the back row that day you took them to task for urging you to wed. The man’s a stickler for detail and has a much inflated opinion of himself. And he’s as pushy as a North Sea wind.”

  “He has moved quickly. He’s met with the coroner who examined Hannah’s body and ruled it a murder, and he’s convinced the coroner that since Hannah had no known heirs and was a royal starcher, part of the worth of her goods should come to the crown. Of course, Whitcomb’s trying to curry favor with me, but this plays right into our hands, as it will allow me to keep a better eye on Dauntsey.”

  “It’s usually a percentage of the goods of the murderers, not the murdered, that comes to the crown,” Cecil said, frowning. “But what does Whitcomb have to do with Dauntsey?”

  “I intend to hire Hugh Dauntsey to survey Hannah’s goods and reckon their worth, pretending I simply want to be sure the crown is allotted its proper share.’S blood, my lord, stop staring at me as if I’ve taken leave of my senses. You know if there is someone I do not trust, I oft bind him to me, to observe him all the better.”

  “According to Gresham,” Cecil said, while everyone else hung on each word, “Dauntsey’s always got one hand in the till—someone’s till.”

  “If he crosses me, it will be a way to permanently rid myself of him, and perhaps Paulet, too. But I will use his reports to me as opportunities to discern if he could be more than what Dingen van der Passe called her money man—a mere accountant, who just happened to be watching me from the crowd when I came calling there. What if he was doing more to help the master starcher and her husband compete with poor Hannah than tend their books and teach them how to cheat at taxes? I just plain don’t trust the man, though I am trying to overlook the fact that his appearance is so—unsettling.”

  “What if, you mean,” Rosie said in a near whisper, “Dauntsey was also hired to rid the older starcher of her younger competition?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Besides, through Dauntsey, I’ll be able to keep an eye on what Paulet and this chief constable and pushy parliamentarian Whitcomb are doing and perhaps thinking. Now, let’s see—what else was I going to say?”

  More than once at this meeting, her mind had wandered. Swimming in exhaustion, she intended to sleep well at least this night. She needed her strength to speak tomorrow with Dauntsey and Hosea Cantwell.

  “Your Grace,” Rosie said, “there is something I, too, forgot to tell you in the hubbub of all that happened at the van der Passes’ starch shop. I—I regret I’m not much help on all this thinking and planning, but I just can’t get the memory of that poor woman’s starched corpse out of my mind.”

  “Nor I,” Elizabeth said. “I warrant we are all on edge. Tell us, then.”

  “Meg said that some of her starch roots seem to be missing from Hannah’s loft—at least one sack of them.”

  Meg nodded, wide-eyed. Elizabeth saw Ned lean protectively toward Meg while Jenks just frowned.

  “You see,” Rosie went on, “you told me to keep my mouth more or less shut but my eyes open at the van der Passes’. Well, I saw a big bag of roots there like the ones scattered on the floor of Hannah’s loft that I assume were Meg’s cuckoopints. I noted that several had rolled under the worktable where we—we examined the body … Of course, I realize the van der Passes must use the same roots for that thick, gray starch paste of theirs, but what if those were Meg’s roots, taken from Hannah the day she was killed?”

  “There would be no way to prove they were mine,” Meg put in.

  “But Rosie is right. What if?” Elizabeth echoed,
hitting a fist on the table. “Until the murderer gives himself—or herself—away, that must be our battle cry as we delve deeper and turn up more evidence.

  “Jenks, you will go tomorrow morning and escort Ursala here so that she can assure us Marie Gresham is indeed the young woman she saw in the drying fields, staring up at Hannah’s window. Then, if so, with Meg and her daughter Sally’s help, I shall try to assist Marie to recall what she saw.

  “Because,” she said, standing to dismiss them, as they all rose hastily, scraping their chairs back, “the what-ifs become even more dangerous if the Gresham girl witnessed such horror.”

  More than once that night, Elizabeth wished that Rosie had not mentioned she couldn’t get the memory of Hannah’s starched corpse out of her mind. Though the queen was overtired, she slept fitfully, tossing about and slogging between nightmares that dragged her from agonizing over the present murder into the past.

  The thought came to her clearly: Her father had murdered her mother as surely as if he had struck off her head himself. Riding off to wed his new wife, he had not even thought to order a coffin for the woman who had once been his passion and who had borne him a red-haired daughter instead of the desired son.

  So the executioners had hastily placed Queen Anne Boleyn’s slender body in an empty arrow chest, her legs bent and her head by her feet. They had quickly interred her under the paving stones of St. Peter in Chains Church in the Tower, where she had been beheaded for unspeakable crimes of which she was surely innocent.

  Now, even now, in the dead of night, Elizabeth entered the cold, gray, lofty place where her mother’s corpse was laid out. But why had they put her body, wet with sticky, white blood, upon a shelf? Elizabeth looked around but found herself alone with the body. Was she a small child again, like the day she’d lost her mother, or was she now queen? Was she safe or still at great risk?

  She screamed so loudly in the dim church that all the dead must hear her. “I am your anointed queen! Do not try to force me to wed and bed! Do not dare to murder me!”

  Her voice stopped echoing, for the cold night air sucked the sounds out the window in the loft where her mother lay, not on a shelf now but in an open coffin filled with swirling mist. No arrows in it, only dense, drowning whiteness, thick as starch.

  Elizabeth struggled to close the window, but it stayed open, with a stiff breeze blowing into her face. She leaned all her weight into it but kept slipping, slipping in the thick blood, then sliding backward into the black Thames, drowning with her father’s hands about her throat …

  Drenched with sweat, Elizabeth sat straight up in bed with the sheets wrapped around her. Stunned that her hands gripped her own throat, she thrust them in her lap and bent over, trying to seize control.

  Slowly, the horror faded, but her mother had been too young to die, only thirty-four, almost exactly Elizabeth’s age now, and … Hannah … even younger …

  Sheltered in the curtains of the vast royal bed, the queen of England pressed her face into her hands and wept.

  The Puritan cleric Hosea Cantwell surprised the queen yet again when he was escorted in by Clifford, who remained at the back of the anteroom. This time the man wore not the strict black and white he had argued for last time but a blue so dark it looked black, until the shaft of window light sliced across his body.

  “Not practicing what you preach?” she challenged after proprieties had passed. “You seen quite the sport today, Mr. Cantwell, in that deep blue hue.”

  “I should have realized your hawk’s eye would find me out, Your Majesty.’Tis only that I do not pay richly for my garb, and the merchant must have sold me a shoddy doublet that would fade. Not yet, I assure you, have I gone to sporting, as you say, the frills and ruffles your followers call ruffs today.”

  “So you are not a follower of mine?”

  “Of course, though not in fashions,” he parried, “for you are the nation’s monarch, to whom I owe a certain allegiance.”

  Damn this man of the cloth, supposedly a man of peace, she fumed. Why did she always feel she was dueling with him and he knew the thrusts and feints as well as she?

  “Then, if you spend none of your hard-earned money from the church offerings on ruffs, Hosea Cantwell, why do I have it on good authority that you have visited starch shops?”

  For the first time, she felt she’d struck a hit. The slicktongued man looked at a loss for words, though he quickly recovered.

  “Surely you do not have me followed, Your Majesty. Or have your starchers tat-taled that I have urged them to mend and stiffen their ways instead of their flimsy fashions?”

  “Then you admit you have been to see the van der Passes and Hannah von Hoven?”

  “I owed it to the Maker of Mankind to challenge the makers of mere fripperies.”

  “Tell me your version of how each reacted to your intrusions.”

  Again, after the initial look of surprise flitted across the man’s handsome face, he gave no other indication he had been caught at anything. Surely, if he’d known Hannah was dead, he would be more panicked now, though she had come to think of him as the chameleon cleric. Today, whether he wanted to admit it or not, he had even changed his colors.

  “I saw the young von Hoven woman only once,” he explained, “but returned to the master starcher’s twice. The first time I visited the van der Passes, that big husband of hers declared he was still a Flemish knight and threatened me with bodily harm,” he added with a dismissive sniff and a tug at his cuffless sleeves.

  “Did he lay hands on you?”

  “He did, and as good as threw me out.”

  So, she thought, Hosea Cantwell was physically courageous, for he went back a second time. She was anxious to know how he would describe his encounter with Hannah, who had no such watchdog to ward him off.

  “And my other starcher, Hannah von Hoven?” she asked, trying to rein in her impatience.

  “She did not throw me out but threw starch on the front of my breeches,” he admitted with a little shrug. “Imagine, Your Majesty, she claimed I was too rigid, and then threw starch on me to make me more so.”

  She stared at him. Surely this man was not making a bawdy joke as well as a pun. He must have naught to do with Hannah’s demise or he would not be so flippant.

  “When did you visit her starch house?” she asked. “And did her ladies see you there?”

  “Your Majesty,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, though he stood below her level and had to look up to where she sat upon a dais, “does this interrogation have aught to do with the poor girl’s dreadful death? Word is that she fell in her starch vat, hit her crown, and drowned, so I’ve said more than one prayer that she did regret her craft but did not decide to take her own life.”

  “I—” Elizabeth got out, then shut her mouth. This man knew all along that Hannah was dead and had not let on. Still, he was only answering her questions. But she noted well he used the old word for head, “crown.” Another pun on who he’d really like to see fall and drown—the one who wears the crown?

  “From whom did you hear of her death?” she demanded.

  “From one of my parishioners. Word of the tragedy is probably all over London by now, an especially tasty bit of gossip, I don’t doubt, because she was a royal starcher as well as a common one.”

  “Your view of the world is quite jaded,” she accused.

  “Perhaps that is only because I see the world through ancient eyes,” he countered, “the eyes of the Almighty. As to your query: Did her ladies see me there?” he said, adroitly picking up on a question she’d forgotten she’d asked him. “Of course, for I went in full daylight to visit such a place.”

  Such a place, the queen thought, feeling more distraught. As if poor Hannah had been running a house with strumpets instead of starchers. Furious at herself for mishandling this interview as well as at him for his presumptions, she added, “Then I shall discover from her women when you were there and what passed between you.”
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  “Passed between us? My words of counsel, which ruffled her composure, and her words of petulance and willfulness, Your Majesty.”

  “Which then ruffled your composure?” she challenged.

  “Not at all. I offered to pray for her, and she threw starch at me from that big vat of it that I told her was a bath for the devil’s liquor. I’ll not lie about that or aught else, so you have but to ask in what must be your own investigation of this sad event. I shall pray for your success in the endeavor,” he added with a nod and a sigh, “for now, alas, I shall not be able to pray for Hannah’s changed ways, but only for her immortal soul.”

  Elizabeth silently scolded herself for letting this man irk her so. She’d let slip that she was interested in solving the puzzle of Hannah’s death. Was he merely the pompous if witty prig he seemed, or would he stoop to harm Hannah? Surely she would never have sent her women away so that she could speak with this man, however handsome and glib.

  This surprising interview had convinced the queen of one thing. She was going to tell Cecil to keep Cantwell’s name on his chart of possible murderers.

  Thomas Gresham was feeling a bit better today about Marie’s state of mind, though she was yet not responding to questions or suggestions. At least she was not hysterical or contentious, as she had been yesterday. As long as she had Sally in sight, she was not insisting she hold to her, either. Marie lay in bed, awake but restful.

  He and Anne, as well as Sally, stood when the queen entered the bedchamber at midmorning. As the door had opened, he’d glimpsed Nash Badger still in the next room, keeping guard, and again vowed to richly reward the man.

  They had not seen the queen since last evening, though one of her ladies-in-waiting had visited to assure Her Majesty that Marie was resting well.

  “Has Dr. Forrest returned?” the queen asked as they rose from their bow and curtseys.