by Karen Harper
Perhaps, Elizabeth thought, as the young couple dismounted and approached her coach still all smiles, Henry Wriothesley was somehow trying to atone for his father’s headlong ruination of the Catholic faith in England.’S blood, she’d smarted silently for the brutal way it had been accomplished by her father, but she’d never say so. After all, Great Henry had done it to wed her mother as surely as he’d meant to get his hands on the wealth of the corrupt old church—and for his conscience’s sake, of course.
“Your Gracious Majesty, it is our honor and delight to welcome you to Fareham,” the earl declared as he, then his wife, Mary, dismounted and bent to kiss the beringed hand the queen offered them.
“I am pleased at the fine greeting, my lord, and look forward to our time with you.”
“If you would deign to delay your further progress for but a few moments,” he went on, “we—my family and the town folk—have prepared a short fantasy in your honor. If you would but mount the rural throne we have built under the leafy bower on the dais, we can commence and then, afterward, head onward to our domicile, which we have readied for you and the court.”
“I would be pleased to see the play,” she said, nodding and smiling as a footman put down the wooden steps for her to dismount. Behind the Wriothesleys, she could see Cecil frowning and shifting from one foot to the other. “If,” she added, “you, my lord and lady, will both stand close beside me during it all.”
“A great honor,” the pretty, green-eyed Mary declared with another quick curtsy. “I have been looking forward to this moment ever since we heard you would bestow a visit on us, here in the deep south country.”
It was a good thing, Elizabeth thought as she climbed down, that noble marriages were arranged early, or this skinny, sallow-faced boy, however fine his attire and smooth his manners, would never catch a beauty like this one.
Elizabeth made certain she walked close between the two of them, keeping a light touch on their arms as if to escort them to the leafy bower they had built, which arched over the silkdraped wooden throne. “Sit,” she said, “each of you on one of the arms of my chair, yes, like that.”
The poor girl blushed a bit to be pulled so close, perhaps to have her satin skirts overspill the queen’s own costume. Elizabeth knew she would have taken to the earl if Cecil’s spies and the young man’s intercepted notes to that traitor Norfolk hadn’t revealed his true colors. Now he fidgeted, too, and spent a long moment getting his clanking sword and scabbard out of the way as he perched on the outer edge of the other arm of her chair.
Among the crowd turned expectantly her way, the queen noted well that Cecil had deftly deployed her red-liveried yeomen guards. Most were facing out toward the crowd, keeping a good eye on them, though a few closer watched her courtiers and scrutinized the approaching players. In this imagined forest setting, she wondered if her guards who had plunged into the real forest several hours ago would find the shooter or any sign of him.
Well, Elizabeth thought, as she settled back to watch the little fantasy, just let someone dare to shoot at her right now.
A handsome lad began the entertainment by reading from a scroll in a loud voice, proclaiming that “the great deer hunt park of the Earl of Southampton at Titchfield near the town of Fareham in Hampshire welcomes the queen of the realm, Elizabeth of England, the great virgin goddess of the hunt, as was the Roman virgin goddess Diana!”
Everyone nodded and whispered at that. The queen did love to ride and hunt, but she had no desire to do so in the near future, not since she was evidently the hunted lately.
Glancing off to the side, she saw Ned Topside studying each gesture on the stage, no doubt wishing he were the principal player this time. He had on his shoulders the younger Naseby boy, Piers, all eager eyes at the stage before him.
She saw that handsome courier of Cecil’s, too, Justin Keenan, perhaps just arrived. Off to the side, he still held his lathered horse with his wheezing second horse behind, so he must have ridden them hard. Cecil had sent him, not to London this time, but only back to Guildford to learn if Sheriff Barnstable’s men had come back into town so they could be questioned.
“And so, we begin,” the prologue went on. “As our queen has emerged from the forest, so once did the virgin goddess Diana return from the hunt!” The man rolled the scroll closed, bowed to her, and exited.
Traipsing in from the side of the makeshift stage depicting a forest, to stand before the queen’s seat on the dais, came a beautiful, red-haired, slender girl in green satin with a fine leather quiver over her shoulders and a bow in her hand against which rested a ready arrow.
Elizabeth realized she was leaning forward and sat back in her seat. No, the arrow bore no resemblance to the quadrello that had been shot at her earlier.
What else caught her eye was that the woman was played by a female and not a young boy whose voice had not deepened. Behind the goddess trailed a bevy of beautiful nymphs—actually girls, too—ones to rival the queen’s own ladies in fair countenance if not in poise, for they were, no doubt, women selected from the town. Two of them squirmed in their tight-laced bodices, and one scratched an itch under her arm. Their stilted dialogue told of the fine aim and skill of the goddess Diana, who was tired and wanted to bathe and rest after the long hunt on this day.
Her nymphs divested Diana of her weapons and cloak, then stood around her as if to block the view while she supposedly bent to bathe in a forest pool, made from a circle of shimmering blue silk laid on the rough floor of the stage.
“Now comes Actaeon on the scene, Your Grace,” Mary Wriothesley blurted in a whisper, as if, like a child, she could not help but tell what was coming next.
Elizabeth knew the mythological tale of Diana and Actaeon well, as did most of her court, no doubt. She watched as Prince Actaeon, the comely son of King Camus, entered with four hunt hounds at his heels. He spoke of his own hunting expedition on this day. Now he was, he said, “led thither to my destiny.”
The prince accidentally came upon Diana bathing. He gasped as he peeked past her nymphs to gaze upon her nakedness. Beside the queen, Lady Mary sighed so hard she inadvertently elbowed Elizabeth’s shoulder.
The nymphs screamed and tried to protect the goddess from the eyes of a strange man and mere mortal. Diana stretched her arm for her bow and arrow, but they were out of reach; instead, she splashed water, cut pieces of silk, in Actaeon’s eyes.
Then, cleverly for a rustic player, the queen thought, as Diana’s curses met the man’s ears, for his punishment, he began to turn into a stag. From under her garment, one nymph slipped a deer hide on the actor, and another passed him stag’s horns he cunningly strapped on his head.
Staggering about the stage, horrified at feeling himself turning into the animal he had oft hunted, the doomed man gasped as his hounds bayed at his heels. Surreptitiously dropping pieces of meat to them, crying out in horror, he rushed headlong away through the counterfeit trees before the pack supposedly attacked and devoured him in the unseen forest depths.
When his cries halted and the audience heard only the howling of the dogs, everyone grew quiet for a moment before exploding into cheers and applause. They hushed again when Diana held up her hands for silence, then turned sideways between audience and queen and spoke.
“Just as,” the red-haired maiden declared in a clear, high voice, much like her own, Elizabeth realized, “when the ancient Romans lived in this area and replaced the old Anglo-Saxon deities like Woden, later Catholicism came to conquer all pagan gods, so I, the virgin goddess Diana, a mere figment of foolish minds, was displaced by the true faith.”
The queen wondered if she would mention that Catholicism, too, had been replaced by the truer faith of Protestantism, but then this area was yet a stronghold for the old religion.
“And so, in honor of that,” the young woman went on, “I, the virgin queen of the hunt, must give way to the Virgin Mary, the rightful queen of heaven.”
Elizabeth stiffened as another fai
r young woman, draped in a blue robe, even over her head, came out and took the place of the banished goddess Diana, who fled offstage with her nymphs. This woman’s hands were clasped as if in prayer, and she gazed up toward heaven while the awed crowd finally began to cheer again.
The queen’s wide stare snagged Cecil’s. He had suddenly appeared in her line of sight, just over the shoulders of Robin, who looked most annoyed, and Norfolk, who seemed to be stifling a grin.
Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed as her brain took in the clever words: the virgin queen … must give way to Mary … the rightful queen … Surely they did not dare to insult her with clever treason favoring Mary, Queen of Scots! Still, it was not blatant, and she would appear a fearful, weak woman if she acted like one.
“An interesting turn of words at the end,” she said, rising so quickly she almost toppled her hosts off their tenuous perches. “’Tis much more pleasant, I warrant, to be queen of heaven than queen of this earthly realm, for everyone in heaven is good and true.”
Ignoring the wary expressions on their faces, she turned to wave at the crowd as their cheers swelled and broke over her. At least, despite Southampton’s—or maybe Norfolk’s—duplicity, the common folk, who probably didn’t discern the deeper meanings of this play, were simply glad to see their queen.
Elizabeth marched straight back to her coach and told Boonen to head for Place House, following their hosts on their fine horses.
“I’m not running away with the dogs at my heels,” she muttered to herself as the coach jerked into motion. “I intend to stay and fight.”
I was not deceived for long, I’ll tell you that!” Elizabeth ranted to her Privy Plot counselors—without Drake this time—as they met in her chamber in her suite of rooms at Place House that evening after dark. Fortunately, a thunderstorm was raging outside, for she was finding it difficult to keep her voice in check. The more she realized how slyly her hosts had pulled her into the snare of their pageant, the more she wanted to shake down the rafters of this place.
“I was dead set against it from the first,” Cecil put in, his voice eternally calm, as he tapped a stack of documents together. “But, as you realized from the first, Your Grace, that little farce hardly affected the local people’s goodwill.”
“But to be forced to ignore the badwill of my hosts, after all my family has done for theirs! I could barely choke down those fine dishes at the feast this evening, especially the venison! However much I love to hunt, I’ll not go prancing through their damned deer park, mayhap to be attacked from the forest again as was poor, hapless Actaeon!”
“I was thinking, Your Grace,” Ned put in, “that you were meant to be the goddess Diana instead of Actaeon.”
“Do you think I am some claybrained ninnyhammer?” she demanded. “You missed my point. I know that!”
“Then, too,” he went on, evidently as used to her tantrums as Cecil, “since the main role of the virgin goddess Diana was played by a female instead of a boy, I had another thought. Could that have been a snide reference to the fact that as a woman you should not rule, but it should have been a boy—a male—in that part? I mean, after all, your brother became king at an early age, and Southampton was but a boy when he took the earldom, so perhaps the message is that you should wed and bear a son who could rule.”
“Too far-fetched,” she muttered, lowering her voice at last. “That is, unless it’s a half-cocked reference to the fact that Mary of Scots has produced a son and heir who has more right to rule than I do, too. But he is only three years old now. Besides, the pro-Papist forces in this country and abroad adored having my sister Mary on the throne and would hazard all to have my cousin Mary in my stead.”
“We could keep for evidence,” Cecil said, still shuffling papers, “the next correspondence that passes between Norfolk and Southampton about support for your cousin, then arrest them on suspicion of treason.”
“Oh, indeed I would like to toss them in the Tower and the key in the Thames. But I want to give them more rope to hang themselves first, my lord—hang themselves by the neck and not just by their thumbs, which is all we’ll be able to do if we can’t completely establish the fact they’ve been financially supporting the northern Catholic lords. If a rebellion explodes there, I’d actually like all the traitors in on it tooth and nail, so we can catch them in the same trap and be done with them.”
She jolted as someone knocked on the door. “Jenks, see to that and step outside to speak to whoever it is without letting them look in,” she ordered. As he hastened to obey, she told the others almost in a whisper, “I do intend to have Southampton give me a thorough tour of this place and these grounds, rain or shine, on the morrow, for I am looking for evidence he’s been training troops here. If he can stage that play, perhaps he can stage help for a northern uprising.”
“He’s had weeks to hide any such troops or evidence, Your Grace,” Cecil said.
“That is why I—we—shall also search the outer grounds and surrounding area if we must. I refuse to just—Jenks, what?” she asked, as he stepped back inside, holding a small hempen sack out stiff-armed, as if it would bite him.
“The guards who searched the woods after the arrow was shot are here,” he said, bolting the door behind him and returning to the table. “The yeoman guard outside handed this in.”
“Well, what news? What is in the sack?”
“They found sure evidence of where the man shot from, about twenty feet off the road, but not the man himself,” he told her, extending the sack.
“Twenty feet—a longbow, indeed, then,” she said, as she took the sack. It was light, as if empty. She opened it to peer inside while everyone leaned her way. “It can’t be more than the string of a bow,” she said, tipping it toward the lantern in the center of the table, not wanting to just plunge her hand in.
It was empty! No, something here—fletching feathers from an arrow?
Instead, she pulled out a calfskin tab that protected the skin of two fingers, the thumb, and the bend of the hand when the shooter drew back the bowstring. Some shooters, especially ladies, used gloves instead. This leather tab trailed strings by which it could be tied over the wrist, but one of the strings had broken.
“A shooting tab to avoid calluses,” Ned said.
“Stained with dirt and sweat. Well used,” Meg put in, squinting at it.
Cecil stood and leaned closer. “Someone with quite large fingers, unless it is simply, as Mistress Meg implied, well worn and has stretched a bit.”
“At any rate,” Elizabeth said, as she sank into her chair, staring at the very tab that had surely belonged to the shooter, “I’ll wager this, too, is Spanish leather.”
Elizabeth’s body was exhausted that night, but her brain was wide-awake. She plunged in and out of disjointed sleep. Again, again, she saw in her mind, like scenes in a play, that first arrow racing in her direction. Again, Fenton fell to the ground with his life’s blood pouring from him. Again, she saw the poor, hanged Thomas Naseby.
Her mind skipped to her brief interview with Cecil’s courier, Keenan, this evening after the banquet. He’d reported that the former sheriff Barnstable, like the two louts who had been his henchmen, had disappeared from Guildford; he’d not even taken clothes or coins from his house, his manservant had said. Keenan had added, extending a newly minted silver shilling to her, “I made the man give me one of the coins, and I warrant they are all like these.”
It was identical to the one she’d found on the floor of Barnstable’s cellar, the room where Tom Naseby had been hanged.
Clever, Keenan was, as well as handsome and strong, she thought as she teetered on the edge of sleep. Cecil’s best courier, no doubt, a man she’d like to have working more directly for her. But what Keenan did was important, bringing intelligence back and forth from London and parts north for Cecil. She should have a messenger who could report directly to the Privy Plot Council …
Drifting away again, once more she saw the arrow that had bar
ely missed her and Meg. It hissed at her as it sliced through the leather curtain of her coach and thudded deep into the gilded wood just over her head.
Elizabeth turned over and tried to find a more comfortable position. She’d churned her sheets to waves, waves like those that buffeted Drake’s ship, just as homicidal arrows had hit its decks. He and his surviving men had kept them as bizarre tokens of the enemy … she could see the death arrows when she visited his ship … arrows, bolts, finger tabs, quivers, she was quivering in fear when she must show none …
She sat bolt upright in bed, her heart pounding. What had wakened her? She heard naught but Rosie’s heavy, steady breathing from her trundle as if she slept the sleep of the dead.
Finally, Elizabeth got out of the big bed and in her night rail padded barefoot to the window overlooking the central courtyard. The storm had ended, but clots of clouds still scudded across the sky, sometimes obscuring the pale three-quarter moon. Drake was riding at dawn tomorrow to prepare for her visit aboard the Judith the day after that; she looked forward to seeing his ship and the River Meon. But nothing else, except seeing the sea beyond the river lifted her spirits. She felt weighed down by burdens and frightened when she could not afford to be.
She went into the deserted privy chamber and lit a fat beeswax candle from the low-burning lantern and sat at the table to read her Bible. She knew just where she would find the passage she wanted. Let her enemies present their plays of pagan virgin goddesses supplanted by the great symbol of Catholic queens, the Virgin Mary. Elizabeth of England would somehow prevail; she would see this through.
She moved her lips as she read the words in Psalm 64 she needed so desperately for comfort: Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer: preserve my life from fear of the enemy. Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked; from the insurrection of the workers of iniquity; who whet their tongue like a sword and bend their bows to shoot their arrows, even bitter words: that they may shoot in secret at the perfect: suddenly do they shoot at him, and fear him not. They encourage themselves in an evil matter: they commune of laying snares privily … but God shall shoot at them with an arrow …