by Karen Harper
“That will be fine,” she told him, as Fenton placed Swift on her gauntlet. When she nodded toward her guest, Fenton placed a gauntlet, then another hawk, a fine sacret, fit for a knight, on Drake’s arm. “Indeed, I would like to see that ship,” she went on. “We will need many privately owned ones like yours and mine to bolster our defenses against the Spanish should they be foolish enough to defy England’s might in any way, isn’t that true, Norfolk?”
“Of course, Your Grace,” he clipped out. He wiped his damp brow, then swept his red velvet cap off in a circle at a fly or gnat she didn’t see.
“Fenton,” the queen said, “a hawk for the duke, too. Bring Autumn, I think, so he doesn’t have time to wish he were elsewhere.”
She forced a laugh as Norfolk frowned at her and moved back toward the crowd. He could have come up on this little elevation with them, but she was just as glad he had not. With her courtiers milling about in the shade, she stood next to Drake, ready to launch Swift. As commanded, Fenton put Autumn, a bastard hawk, fit for a baron two ranks below the breed a duke should fly, on Norfolk’s arm.
To be ready to take the hawks’ hoods from her and Drake when they plucked them off, Fenton hied himself to stand between them, perhaps before Norfolk could cuff him. With a flourish, the queen unhooded Swift and cast the bird aloft. She laughed at the sheer joy of the bird’s strength as she soared skyward. Fenton, she thought, shouted a laugh, too, as she turned to hand the hood to him.
But the delight in her falconer’s eyes turned to shock, then fright. Drake was ready to cast his bird, but he, too, saw her falconer’s plight and didn’t release the jesses.
Drake reached for Fenton as he toppled but couldn’t hold him one-handed as the man crumpled to the ground. The wings of Drake’s bird beat the air above the queen’s head as she fell to her knees beside the stricken falconer.
Someone screamed. Was it she?
Fenton Layne, his face contorted in pain, lay writhing at her feet. Bright blood bloomed from the arrow piercing his chest.
Drake cast his hawk and cradled Fenton’s shoulders. First the queen’s guard Jenks, coming at a dead run, then Robin grabbed her and dragged her flat onto the ground. She lay between the big men as Robin shouted, “Cover! Everyone, take cover! Someone’s shooting arrows!”
Chapter the Second
Screams and shrieks jolted Meg from her butchery of the yarrow herbs. She stood and shaded her eyes, then ran in the direction of the tumult. The cries of women, the shouts of men: It was like the day they lost the baby—her own shrill voice and Ned, talking incessantly, insisting that it wasn’t her fault.
“What is it?” she asked the first servant who ran past her.
“The queen’s falconer’s been shot. We’re to take cover.”
“I didn’t hear a firearm.”
“An arrow in his chest.”
“Is he dead?” Meg cried, but the woman didn’t turn back to answer.
For the first time in weeks, Meg marveled, she could feel something, care about something. “Is the queen or anyone else hurt?” she demanded of the next person, but her question was lost in the flood tide of courtiers and servants alike, fleeing the meadow and crossing the open lawn toward the gray-stone manor house.
Meg stooped to grab a handful of cut yarrow. She’d failed to save her own son. Mayhap she could save someone else’s. After all, yarrow’s other name was wound wort, and apothecaries used to pack it in the bleeding wounds of jousters or knights lying on the battlefield.
Her knife in one hand and the long-stemmed snow white yarrow in the other, Meg ran through the line of chestnut trees edging the meadow. Some courtiers crouched behind tree trunks; guards, with Jenks leading them, ran headlong away, evidently in the direction from which the attack had come.
On a slight rise in the lea, the queen, the Earl of Leicester, and the sea captain were bending over a prone figure while six standing yeomen guards surrounded them.
“Your Majesty, is he bad hurt?” Meg asked, peeking past a guard’s shoulder. “I have wound wort here.”
“Oh, Meg,” the queen cried, looking up. She was holding the falconer’s hand. “We’ve sent for Dr. Huicke, but I gave him leave to go to town. Here, see if you can help.”
Meg knelt beside the queen; the earl shifted away to give her room. “If this herb is to stop the bleeding,” Meg told them, “the shaft of the arrow will have to come out—straight out, even if it pains him more. I know this just looks like flowers, but they used to pack the wounds of soldiers with it, fresh cut like this. Maybe it’s a godsend—to save him.”
“Yes, all right,” the queen said. “We can’t just let him bleed to death like this.”
“I’ll help pull the arrow out,” the red-bearded sea captain said. “By my faith, I’ve done it oft afore.”
Though he’d lived through a terrible, bloody battle with the cursed Spanish, this simple scene in the meadow shook Francis Drake to his very boot soles. It brought it all back—the horrid memories he’d tried to bury this last year by going home to Plymouth, by wedding and bedding.
They carefully sat the poor man up and steadied the tip of the arrow, which had gone right through him to emerge barely an inch out his back, between his shoulder blades. While the Earl of Leicester cut his surcote away, then held the arrow firm, the maid named Meg sawed the point of it off with her knife so the shaft could be pulled out the front of the falconer’s chest.
The earl made a motion to throw the arrowhead away, but the queen, her voice taut, commanded, “No. Keep everything. We will need it to discover who did this, should my men not catch the culprit.”
Meg quickly decapitated the large-headed flowers and pressed two of the downy blooms against the wound where the arrow had tried to exit. When the others turned the man face up again and held him down, Drake put both hands on the arrow shaft. Not a quick jerk out, he recalled the ship’s leech had said, but a strong pull with a steady hand. His hands had hardly been steady since they’d lost so many, not since he’d been accused of deserting his duty and his cousin and commander.
Though the falconer had been fading, the slightest pull on the arrow shot him wide awake. Drake froze, his hand on the slippery shaft.
“The falcons …” the poor wretch whispered, his voice a wheeze. “I must recall the falcons.”
“Do not fear,” the queen told him, still gripping his right hand. “We will fetch them back. Now, be brave, Fenton, for we must help you.” Though it didn’t quite calm the injured man, her steady voice comforted Drake.
Do not fear … Be brave, her words echoed in his head. That dreadful day at San Juan d’Ulua on the Gulf of Mexico when their ships had been fired on by the surrounding Spanish, many sailors had died from crossbow bolts. It was his first battle, after all those early years serving as ship’s apprentice, then an officer on his cousin’s vessels on the English Channel and the North Sea. Being so secure with local tides, currents, shoals, and winds was quite unlike sailing months away into deadly danger in the unknown, not sure he’d come home, not sure he’d live, but loving the danger in his destiny.
As he withdrew the arrow in a steady pull, the falconer gave a cry, shuddered, and fainted. A new gush of the man’s lifeblood spurted, but the maid’s quick, sure hands packed the wound with the fluffy flower heads.
She was obviously someone the queen trusted. He noted almost a family resemblance, but of course that could not be. Though the maid Meg also blinked back tears, unlike the queen, she looked haunted, just the way he felt, and his heart went out to her.
As Drake sat back on his haunches with the shaft still in his hands, he saw the queen’s skirts were bloodied. For her to be bold enough to stay here in the open to tend this man—he’d heard she was brave, and he knew her subjects loved her. Now he could begin to grasp why. She was as shrewd as they said, too, for she looked straight at him and said, “I doubt, Captain, if that arrow was intended for a falconer, so which one of us was it meant for, then?”
“He was ever a good and faithful servant to me,” she said in a loud voice. “My lord,” she added, turning to Robin, “since it seems it was his last wish, will you be sure someone finds the hawks and gets them safely back to someone who can tend them.”
“At once, Your Majesty—if you are planning to go inside now.”
She nodded, for she was concerned that Meg had not moved and kept staring at the corpse. Was she seeing this death scene or another with a smaller body, one that Ned had to finally coax from her arms for burial? “Meg,” Elizabeth said, stooping to squeeze her shoulder, “do not blame yourself for this loss—or for any other.”
“Aye,” Drake put in when the maid didn’t move, “the span of our lives is God’s will, not ours.”
“Captain, I will send for you later, but there is much I must do now,” the queen told Drake. “Guards, stay with the body until Sir William tells you where the man might be buried. But first, of necessity, Sir William must summon the sheriff and coroner of the shire. I,” she went on, loosing Meg’s shoulder and producing a clean white handkerchief from up a bloodspeckled sleeve, “shall take the arrow shaft from you, Captain, and the pointed end Meg cut off from you, my lord Leicester.”
Both men gave their pieces into her keeping. “Meg, come with me,” she added, and started away.
Her guards, who had returned empty-handed from their chase in the direction of the shooter, and her courtiers, who had finally wandered back, all curious, fell in behind her, some asking questions she ignored. Striding quickly, with the rest of her guards surrounding her, all the way across the front lawn of the manor, she forced herself to calm down, to think, not just to react.
Under the stone-arched entry to Loseley House, she turned to face her whispering coterie. “We will hold a service for Fenton Layne later today in the chapel, if Sir William agrees.”
Their septuagenarian, silver-haired host emerged from the crowd. “Of course, and we can bury him in the cemetery with the Loseley House servants, if you wish, Your Majesty, though I warrant the local officials will want a look at him first.”
Elizabeth nodded in agreement. “And, since our noontide repast has already been laid out for my people under the trees near the meadow,” she went on, gesturing behind them, “perhaps that food can be brought inside to the great hall. Until the chapel service, I will be in my rooms.”
“Oh, yes, of course, Your Majesty. I’ll have the choicest viands sent up to you and your ladies.”
“My ladies will partake with the court, so just some things for me and my closest servants.”
“Closest servants?” a voice behind her repeated, as she turned to go into the house. Norfolk, arms crossed over his chest, leaned against the entryway. “Since you are sovereign, are we not all your servants, Your Grace? I should think a queen would like her closest kin about her at a time like this. After all, I fear that arrow could have been meant for you and someone missed.”
She spun back to face him just inside the door. “Someone may have missed, but I’ll not miss having closely watched and interrogated every one of those who might be responsible, my lord. Not one!” Though the light was dimmer here than out of doors, and her eyes seemed slow to adjust, she studied Norfolk’s face and stance as if he had been hauled before an inquisition.
“Your hose are all grass-stained,” she said.
“Leicester told everyone to get down, and of course I always follow the commands of someone new-fledged you’ve tried to haul up by his bootstraps—or by something.”
She almost slapped the man for his continued impudence and vile insinuations. She would have banished him, but she needed to keep an eye on him—a hood on him. Perhaps he was trying to drive her to distraction so she would order him away and he could flee north to his cronies and the Catholic queen.
“See you do not go far—or go too far—my lord,” she told him. “Should I haul in brigands who had a motive to kill their queen—or harm my new man Drake, either—’s bones, you will be the first in line!”
He bent in a stiff half bow as she spun away and went up the grand staircase. She was halfway up, still holding the bloody arrow, when she recalled that Norfolk had removed his red hat and batted at an insect she didn’t see or hear just before someone—perhaps—received that signal to shoot this arrow of death.
Thirsty, Elizabeth drank a goblet of malmsey straight down but ignored the silver platters of food. She gestured to her coterie of trusted servants to sit around the table.
“Jenks, you will ride to the first post on the north road and send the string of messengers on to inform Cecil of what happened. He’ll see the import of it. Eat, eat, all of you,” she urged, sweeping her hand toward the array of meat, bread, cheese, fruits, and puddings, “for we are all going to be busy before nightfall.”
“Of a certain, Lord Cecil will want to know if you’ll be heading back to London straightaway or just staying inside here where it’s safe,” Jenks said, as he cut off a hunk of golden cheese.
He should have known by now she’d not be cowering or fleeing, she thought. Rather, she’d be heading an investigation with her covert Privy Plot Council. But then the bold, muscular Jenks had a wit for horses, not mental machinations.
Meg’s husband, Ned, also ate heartily, trying to coax Meg at least to try some grapes. She seemed to have retreated into the dark, secret depths of herself where she’d lived these last two months.
Carefully, the queen unwrapped the two pieces of arrow and laid them on her handkerchief on the open end of the long table. “After we decide who will be delving into what, I’ll send for Francis Drake, and not only to hear of the English exploits in the New World against the Spanish,” she said, leaning stiff-armed on her hands to stare down at the arrow. “I will need to question him about any murderous enemies he might have, for we know the lengthy list of mine well enough.”
“Should the entertainments be canceled this evening, Your Grace?” Ned asked.
“Not a comedy, I hope?” she inquired.
“Truth be told,” he said with a flourish of his hand toward the open window, “a summer fantasy set in the dark woods, a ghost story about the evil Sheriff of Nottingham and the great hero Robin Hood.”
Elizabeth sighed. “Though it sounds as if that would not elicit gaiety and laughter, we’d best delay any entertainments at least until tomorrow. And for courtesy’s sake, please inquire if our host agrees.”
“Sir William will no doubt honor your wishes, Your Majesty,” Ned said, his mood suddenly somber.
To give the mercurial man his due, since Meg had been despondent, Ned’s portrayals of tragic figures had become much more genuine than his saucy dukes or romantic and comic characters. Anyway, there was naught to laugh at now. And speaking of sheriffs, the local one must be arriving soon to view the corpse and interview witnesses, including, perhaps, the queen herself.
“No, Ned and all of you, hear me now. Sir William More may owe me his recent knighthood and the honor of this visit, but he is Catholic to the core and highly sympathetic to the Duke of Norfolk and the northern lords—which is why I charge all of you to keep your ears pricked up for any gossip about our host and Norfolk being closeted together or whispering in corners. Sir William and the duke have a long history, for my lord Norfolk was once, though briefly, the ward of the Mores here at Loseley House, so he knows this entire area quite well.”
“In other words, birds of a Catholic feather flock together,” Ned said.
“True, and, as put, apropos for this sad day. But to your immediate duties. Jenks, before you ride out, take a look at this arrow. I know you’ve always been a sword-and-dagger
man, but can you tell me anything about this?”
His mouth full of cheese he hastened to gulp down, the tall man came to bend over the weapon—the part of it they could see, until her guards found the bow from which it had been shot. “First thing,” he said, “it’s not an arrow.”
“But—oh, you mean that it’s a bolt, from a crossbow? I briefly learned to shoot a crossbow as a child. I should have thought of that. I remember how hard it was to crank the bowstring taut with either a foot stirrup or hand crank. Yes, I see now this is shorter and thicker than shortbow arrows. A crossbow—so that’s why this could fly so far from the forest across the width of the meadow.”
“Either that or the bowman had a powerful pull, like the bowmen of old. But those heroic sorts from the great English yew longbow victories—you know, like Ned’s Robin Hood—are long dead now. But I think this did fly in an arched path, so that could mean a crossbow, too.”
“Did you see the angle as it approached?”
“No, but I was looking straight across the way, and no arrow flew a low path—and then Fenton just went down. Your Grace, crossbow or longbow, we’re dealing with a very fine archer.”
“And a very clever, long-distance murderer. Since my yeomen guards turned up nothing, I shall send handpicked men to search the area where the shooter hid himself, so return as soon as you can, Jenks. When my lord Cecil arrives, I shall call a formal covert Privy Plot Council meeting—with Francis Drake, perhaps the murderer’s target, in attendance, too.”
“Or,” Meg said, raising her eyes from her clasped hands at last, “it could be someone else.”
They all turned to stare at her. The once talkative woman seldom spoke of late, especially when not spoken to. Even Ned looked shocked.