The Hooded Hawke: An Elizabeth I Mystery (Elizabeth I Mysteries)

by Karen Harper

  “Yes,” she mouthed in the flickering light. “And I shall find a way to shoot back at them, too.”

  Chapter the Ninth

  Meg stifled a scream as a man blocked her way. She was cutting through the wilderness gardens behind Place House. This area was left to run riot in its natural state. With all the tall, leafy bushes and bowers, it was much like walking through a maze. Worse, dawn hardly reached here, and people, but for the kitchen servants, were not yet astir.

  She gasped and jumped back. It was the Duke of Norfolk himself and evidently alone. Crushing a sweetbag of rose petals and lavender to her breasts, she managed a tipsy curtsy on the deep grass.

  “I thought that was you, herb mistress,” Norfolk clipped out. “I’ve a rash that plagues me like the very devil. The queen says you have something for it.”

  He pulled up his sleeve to display a bumpy, livid red rash that showed its fierce color even in the pearly light. It covered his right hand and crept up from his wrist toward his elbow. She squinted at it and had a good notion to ask if Elizabeth Tudor on the throne didn’t plague him like the very devil, too.

  She knew her place, though, at least with this man. Just wait’til she told the queen, for Her Majesty had suspected such. Now Meg could testify that the highest lord in the land had stinging nettle just like the lowborn Naseby lads, stinging nettle he might have touched at the site from which that fatal bolt was sent—or he could have caught it from scores of other places, she supposed.

  Surely the queen’s own cousin, however haughty and condescending, wouldn’t stoop to hiring someone to shoot deadly darts at the queen. Still, Her Majesty suspected he was secretly planning to offer himself to Mary, Queen of Scots, in wedlock. That alone could get him tossed in the Tower, but an assassination attempt would get him tried and beheaded. Either way, a mere herb girl had to tread carefully here.

  “I’ve the very remedy for it, my lord, if it’s stinging nettle,” she told him, wondering if he’d seen and followed her into the gardens or was here for some other purpose. Most unusual for a man of his stature to be out without hangers-on.

  “Yes, I warrant that’s it. Hie yourself for the cure, then, mistress, and don’t stand there gawking. I’ll wait here.”

  Again, she had to bite her tongue. She’d like to say she suspected that he’d gone five to six days with it itching already, so why the rush now? “Do you have a notion where you came by it, my lord?”

  “What in all creation does that matter?”

  “If I knew how long you had suffered from it, I could better judge the amount and strength of the cure,” she lied. Oh, if only the queen’s Privy Plot Council would meet soon again, she’d act out each word they exchanged, with Ned’s playing the duke’s part.

  “Just give me the strongest cure and dosage you have and be quick about it. It’s getting worse daily.”

  She curtsied again but could not resist one more rejoinder. This man was a plague on her beloved queen and, right now, there was no cure for that.

  “Such minor earthly maladies when we’ve done naught to deserve them,” Meg said, “make one think how dreadful the fires of hell will be for those who truly transgress the laws of the land and of heaven, too.” She rushed to get away from him before he could cuff or curse her.

  She kept up at a good clip back toward the royal servants’ rooms to fetch the broad-leafed dock tincture. No good to have Norfolk’s nose so out of joint that he complained to the queen she’d been sassy or tart with him.

  She lifted her skirts to sprint but soon came to a halt. At first she thought she’d come upon one of Norfolk’s men lurking nearby to guard him, but no. A well-dressed man all in black bent over something, holding himself still for a moment before he moved. Was he going to be sick on the ground?

  Then she noted the young man was bent over some sort of iron stick he was holding to hit at a small, round ball. It was the Earl of Southampton himself.

  A little, flat piece of metal was stuck on the end of the iron stick with which he tapped the ball away from him, again, again, until it rolled across the grass—the only sod cut quite close she’d seen in these gardens—and dropped into a hole in the ground she could not see from here. He walked over to the hole and bent to retrieve the little ball before throwing it down farther away and then standing over it to tap-tap it into the hole yet again.

  Some sort of new game. She’d never seen the like.

  Meg glanced up to the windows of the mansion to see if anyone was watching, but no windows, let alone faces, were visible from here among the tall bowers and bushes. She backed away so he wouldn’t see her but tripped and toppled over something on the ground.

  “Umph!” she grunted as she hit. Her petticoats flew up, but she quickly righted herself to a sitting position as other little balls came rolling around her.

  Southampton turned, frowning, holding the skinny stick like a club. “Who goes?”

  “Pardon, my lord,” she said, scrambling up. “Meg Milligrew, Her Majesty’s herbal mistress, just cutting through the gardens, but the Duke of Norfolk sent me on an errand, and I didn’t see the log. Oh, not a log,” she said, as she shook her skirts out. Why, she’d stumbled over a three-foot-long leather bag full of other iron sticks. Fine-looking leather, too, it was, all tooled, matched, and stitched to make pretty patterns.

  “On your way, girl, and don’t be so clumsy.”

  Meg curtsied and started away. Curse that man, too, but she hadn’t been clumsy since the queen took her in and ordered Ned to tutor her in carriage and speech, so that she could stand in for Her Majesty at a distance if need be. Clumsy just because she fell over his bag of iron sticks and little bleached-white leather balls? And why didn’t he have a servant along to carry that thing for him? It must have been weighty. Did he not want anyone to know he was out at dawn hitting at little balls with a stick?

  She wondered if the Duke of Norfolk had been heading through the gardens to meet the Earl of Southampton. Otherwise, why should two such powerful, important men be alone at such an early hour in a thick-grown place? If that was true, she doubted if the young earl intended to teach the older duke a new game, unless it included their old one of plotting against the queen.

  With obvious pride, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, escorted his queen about his large, fortified mansion and its vast grounds. Many courtiers trailed behind but at a distance, for she had requested a private tour without everyone talking at once. Besides, as well as looking for signs of troops that had trained here, Elizabeth intended both to question the young lord and to try to make one last attempt to sway him to her side. All the while, she made certain he did not take her outside the shelter of the walls, for she wanted no more arrows flying at her from the forest—or even a well-tended deer park.

  “Our gatehouse sits in the middle of the old church,” he told her, gesturing at the massive, three-story redbrick entry through which the queen’s progress had entered yesterday. “The great hall of Place House was once the monastic refectory, and the old cloisters beyond became the central courtyard, where we are planning the afternoon’s pastimes. The rest of the church was converted into domestic apartments—the two wings there,” he added, pointing at each in turn.

  The mansion was so large that, for once, it housed not only the visiting court but servants, too. No one had to scramble for local shelter nor live in tents. Seldom did the queen visit houses on a summer progress that could offer her a presence chamber, privy chamber, withdrawing chamber, and bedchamber in her suite. Place House also had a room large enough for a council meeting, should she need one. She’d given it over to Cecil for his secretaries and his couriers, through which they kept in close contact with London and other parts of the realm. How she wished for a letter telling them that the newly imported Spanish crossbowman, working for the Spanish ambassador de Spes, had been captured or at least located.

  “I believe, my lord Southampton,” she said, gazing at the ruins of the old abbey, “your sire g
ave no thought to living where the monks once worked and worshipped, but how is your conscience on that?”

  He looked taken aback and cleared his throat. “I did naught to feel guilty for, Your Grace.”

  “Yet I sense you do feel guilty about something. Do you fear the sins of the father shall be visited upon the next generation, so to speak? I admire a man of loyalty to his conscience and also to his rightful monarch. In my kingdom, I believe that is obvious, for I have kept about me such as the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Norfolk—both of whose families have gravely failed the monarchy in the past. You see, I can forgive, and I judge each man on his own merits, as, my lord, I shall accordingly judge you,” she added, leaning closer to him and forcing him to look full into her face.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. I would expect nothing less,” he said, but his tremulous voice did not match his bold words or stoic expression.

  She said no more for now and let herself enjoy the beauties of both the formal gardens and the wilderness area. Especially intriguing was a long mound, a barrow, where, he explained, the ancient Anglo-Saxon pagans used to bury their dead. Some thirty feet in length and at least ten feet high, it lay just inside the wall encircling the wilderness gardens.

  They strolled along the turfy mound. “There was once an old pagan church there,” he went on, warming to this topic as he had to his description of his home built on the ruined church. “It was dedicated to Woden, local legend says, their god of the dead.”

  She noted the broken stone foundations of a small building next to the mound. Moss and lichens etched themselves into the old stones as if they held cryptic runes that would not divulge their secrets. How she wished she could read this man’s face and voice—and heart.

  “Woden,” she echoed. “Yes, he was mentioned in the closing by the goddess Diana in your pageant yesterday. I know little of what the Anglo-Saxons believed before they were converted to Christianity. Can you tell me more?”

  “If you vow you will not laugh at me for repeating local superstitions.”

  “Say on.”

  “The area folk, especially those in the smaller forest towns, believed Woden was always attended by a pair of ravens—some say hawks—and a pair of wolves. Ravens have been spotted in great numbers this year, and wolves still inhabit the depths of these southern forests, you see. He wore a black cloak, too, said to make him invisible in the forest depths.”

  “I believe I have heard some howling as we passed through, but hawks and ravens are omnipresent in the kingdom. So this dead god of the dead supposedly used to haunt these forests?”

  “Ah, yes. He rode through the tall trees, sending arrows right and left at those whose souls he coveted, some of whom he warned before he killed them.”

  A chill shot up her spine, and she shuddered. The spots between her shoulder blades and her breasts grew cold, then hot. “And untutored folk still hold that Woden haunts these woods?” she demanded, her voice rising in pitch.

  “The thing is,” he said, frowning, “they claim he’s been reborn and lives again—that some have seen him of late, I know not who.”

  Her insides cartwheeled, but she protested, “Stuff and nonsense. Shame on Christians, Papist or Protestant, believing such pagan drivel.”

  “Agreed, but if you ask folks hereabouts, especially old men like Hern the Hunter, they claim his spirit has been reborn not as Woden but as someone called the Hooded Hawk. At first I thought they’d stolen the notion of a sort of Robin Hood figure, but they say this spirit is vengeful and dangerous like Woden.”

  She tried not to show her annoyance or her alarm. No, she lectured herself, these were not the days of yore with pagan superstitions, however much the surroundings here promoted such. This man was subtly trying to prey on her fears again for his own purposes, as he had during the pageant yesterday, or perhaps even dissuade her from venturing outside these walls into town.

  “So,” she said, keeping her temper carefully leashed, “this Hooded Hawk is said to haunt especially these nearby woods?”

  “All deep forests of Hampshire, it’s said. Of course, he’s just in people’s heads. If anything happens amiss, the superstitious need something or someone to blame.”

  “Who is this Hern the Hunter you mentioned?”

  “No one of consequence. An old, blind man, a recluse. I’ve been too busy to look him up for years, and he may be as dead as the Anglo-Saxons, for all I know.”

  He forced a smile as if he’d made a joke, but she saw nothing humorous, especially since she’d gotten him alone to unnerve him, and all his foolish chatter had managed to further rattle her.

  With Giles and Hugh riding behind him, Francis Drake kept his face turned away so they wouldn’t see his eyes fill with tears as he sighted his ship. The Judith awaited him, still safely moored along the most seaward quay on the River Meon in Fareham. Foolish man, he scolded himself, but he hadn’t missed his new wife as much as he had missed the ship, and if his bride of but six weeks knew, she’d be jealous indeed. He saw few of the crew about, but he’d told his first mate that one-third of them could go ashore each day as long as she was kept tidy and safe. Yes, she looked good—graceful, with her sails tied fast to the yards as if she’d pulled her petticoats up for him.

  As he rode up to her side, he recalled again how strong she’d been in battle, his first ship, even with her powder-blackened guns glowing hot and her sails and tidy trim riddled by shot and bolts. He’d saved her from more than one fire ship that day, and just in time to avoid flaming arrows, too—those damned Spanish flaming arrows. They’d pay, the bastard Spanish. If he had to spend a hundred other ships, spend all the years of his life—if it cost him his life—the Spanish would pay.

  Could they know of his wish for vengeance, and so were still shooting at him, and before the queen’s very face to shame him or make her think he was dangerous or cursed?

  “Keep an eye on the horses, Giles,” he said, and gestured to Hugh to board with him. Of the two, it was Hugh he mistrusted more, so he’d take a page from the queen’s book and keep him under close watch.

  He didn’t see the man who sang out from the shrouds above, but he heard him: “Cap’n’board! Cap’n’board!” It thrilled his soul.

  Jeremy Haverhill, his first mate, stocky and sturdy, appeared from the captain’s cabin, and Drake wondered if he’d made himself at home there in his absence.

  “Cap’n Drake!” he clipped out with a stiff half bow. “I’ll call up the crew.”

  “It’s you I needed to see, man. I want this entire vessel made shipshape—immaculate for an inspection on the morrow, and by midmorn. Decks sanded, scrubbed to the scuppers—and a fine meal with fine wine laid out in my cabin, too.”

  “Yes, Cap’n. And, pardon my askin’, but you seen the queen herself?”

  “It’s the queen herself who is coming, Mr. Haverhill, with how many I’m not sure. I’ll give you coin from the lockbox to lay in victuals—the finest this little town of Fareham has to offer.”

  “Don’t know a fig’bout what’s good wine, Cap’n Drake.”

  “Nor do I, but buy what’s expensive. Besides, Her Majesty seems taken by—enamored of the sea. She may want grog or beer for all I know, but lay in the wine. Get going now. With Her Majesty, it is best to be prepared for all possibilities. I’m relying on you, for I can only stay a little while and must head back.”

  “Oh, Cap’n, near forgot. A letter come from your cousin Cap’n Hawkins’bout two days ago. It’s in your cabin, and I can fetch it.”

  “I’ll see to it now. And Mr. Haverhill, do not tell the men who’s coming. I don’t want—well, I don’t want a crowd gawking at her.”

  Or the possibility, he almost added, that someone would take a shot at her, however joyously the crowds had welcomed her upon their arrival. He climbed the stairs to the halfdeck but hesitated before going into his cabin. Scanning the shore, he was relieved to see that there were no deep forests near this quay but rather fields and marshes. Still
, he planned to send men up into the crow’s nest and along the yardarms tomorrow, partly for the impact of the scene with their skyblue shirts, but also to keep his queen as safe as he had vowed to keep the Judith.

  He went inside with Haverhill and doled out thirty shillings to him, a fortune equal to nearly a gold sovereign, a month’s wages for a good craftsman. As the man put them in his purse, Drake noted they were new-minted, very much like the coins Her Majesty had found in Barnstable’s cellar—no doubt, like the one she’d said Secretary Cecil’s courier had retrieved later from the former sheriff’s house.

  Suddenly sapped of strength, he leaned back against the dark wood wall. His cousin never sent payment for the Judith’s crew in such new coins; Drake had known the money was coming but had left before it arrived this time. The queen had said such coins must have come from London, and he’d thought Hawkins was in the west country. Was this all sheer coincidence, or should he show this to Her Majesty? If he fingered Hawkins and his cousin turned out to be guiltless, he’d harm a man England admired and needed—and he might need, too.

  He dismissed Haverhill and grabbed the letter that lay on his small table. Yes, sealed with wax impressed with his cousin’s signet ring of a merchantman under full sail with a hawk swooping in the sky overhead.

  Drake—

  I command you back to port in Plymouth. Stop playing courtier immed.—If the queen wishes a report, I, sr. cap’n of the fateful battle, shall give it to her. Take care of your new wife and let me take care of the queen—or I will take care of you—