by Karen Harper
With Her Majesty rode Ned, her guards Jenks and Clifford, and Justin Keenan. At the last minute, over Cecil’s protests, she’d brought him along. No one else, not even Robin or Jenks, sat a horse as well as Keenan.
“I pray,” Elizabeth said to Ned, as they rode into the woods east of the mansion, “that your directions from that shopkeeper are good enough to get us there and back directly and quickly. If any of the servants ask Meg later why this party rode into the forest, she is to say she went to bring back curing herbs, and I insisted she take guards.”
Even though she had donned Meg’s clothes, she wore Drake’s armor again under her cloak. She was getting used to it, and it made her feel not only safer but more alert. Then, too, it reminded her she was looking forward to her second visit to his ship on the morrow.
“Hern’s hut is supposed to be a few furlongs in, east and then to the north of this path,” Ned told her, as he rode just slightly behind her horse. “A boy from town sometimes takes him bread and cheese. I couldn’t find the lad to lead us in, but I can go ahead of Jenks now if you’d like.”
“No, let him lead. Ned, Meg is much better—in spirit and temperament—isn’t she? I would not have left her in my stead if she were not.”
“She has moments when she stares off into emptiness, but fewer of those. I’d like to claim credit for that, but it’s the boy Piers who’s changed her—that, and your bolstering her through it all.”
“Perhaps,” Keenan spoke up from behind, “we’d best stop talking. If the old man is blind, as I have heard, his hearing might be quite acute. We could startle him or even make him hide before you can question him, Your Grace.”
“Point well taken,” she said, as they turned in single file onto a narrower path through the thickening stands of trees, taller ones here, stretching for their share of the sun.
Yes, Elizabeth thought, she had been wise to demand that Cecil share Keenan with her. The man was useful for more than just carrying messages hither and yon; he spoke not often but always circumspectly. He’d even managed to pick up the fact that this old man was blind.
Still, Keenan had reported earlier that he hadn’t seen Norfolk and Southampton together while she’d been at Drake’s ship, whereas Meg and Ned had reported the opposite. It turned out that the duke and the earl had been huddled over a card game in the center of the sunny courtyard for hours, where they could be seen but not overheard. Yes, Cecil kept his chief courier closeted with him too much these days, or he would have informed her of that, too.
On this narrower path, branches and bushes seemed to reach in, grabbing at them. They even snagged her narrow skirts and smacked against her new riding boots.
In a whisper, Jenks asked, “Can this be the way? It doesn’t look like many come through here.”
“He’s a recluse,” Ned hissed, “and the only one allowed to live this close to Lord Southampton’s deer park. They know, however skilled an archer the old man once was, he’ll not be poaching game.”
Even here, outside the boundaries of the earl’s hunt park, they saw and startled several deer, which bounded away to be swallowed by the depths of deep foliage. A snorting boar charged across their path to drown the rat-a-tat of a lone woodpecker, as if someone were knocking on a door. Chattering squirrels and twittering birds suddenly went silent, though Elizabeth noted well, through the screen of leaves above, a hawk soaring aloft in an updraft as if spying on them.
Again she recalled her poor falconer, Fenton, who might have died in her place—or in Drake’s. But for the occasional creak of a saddle and the sighing of a breeze through the trees, their horses’ hooves became the only sound.
“There!” Jenks whispered, pointing ahead of them. “A clearing.”
At first the sight of the rough stone cottage with its ragged shake roof reminded Elizabeth of another place deep in a forest she had once come upon during an investigation of a murder, the very autumn she became queen, eleven years ago. An enemy, the first one she and her Privy Plot Council had delved into and discovered, was a poisoner, and they’d found her hut and a garden of poison herbs deep in a forest. Unlike then, no deadly plants grew here to guard the premises, only a strangelooking wooden hedge. No, she saw it was a row of barrels and piles of wood stacked high.
They dismounted and walked their horses closer. In a single shaft of sun, which had somehow found its way through the thick canopy of oaks and horse chestnuts, a humpbacked, white-haired man with gnarled hands sat, holding a great, stringless bow.
“Heard you coming,” he called to them, looking up with vacant pale blue eyes as he rose slowly to his feet. His eyebrows looked like snow-covered thatch, and his pale beard was scraggly. The gaunt but wide-shouldered old man seemed as ancient as the trees. He held on to the longbow as if it were a staff to support and steady him.
“Greetings to you, Hern the Hunter,” the queen called out.
“’Tis five or six of you, I’d say,” he went on, “all ahorse, and hardly the earl or his lady with a retinue. To what, then, do I owe this honor?” His voice sounded muffled, as if he spoke from within one of his barrels.
“Your fine reputation as a bowyer is well known in these parts,” Elizabeth went on. “No, we are not the earl and his lady, but how did you know that?”
“They ne’ er visit, but would know the way and ride quicker.” He inclined his head in her direction and seemed to study her as if his blind eyes could take her in. “You one o’ her women, then, or someone come in wi’ the queen’s party wants a bow for her lord, milady? If so, it’s for display or sport these days, not to defend the realm no more.”
So he could tell by her voice that she was at least a lady, she marveled, and, even in the forest, word had spread of the royal visit.
“Yes, I would like to buy a longbow,” she said.
“Making’em keeps me young, you see,” he added, and his shoulders shook with silent, wheezing laughter. “There’s some ready enough out back, in their last stage of seasoning after being soaked and bent in here.” He gestured broadly at the barrels, where she could see raw-cut bows soaking.
“Can’t take yew wood inside the cot, you know,” he went on. “Yew brought into the home can lead to a death in the family. E’ en damaging the tree is bad luck,’less it’s treated with all due honor and worked with outside. But it’s that strange quality’bout yew wood makes it so good for an instrument of sudden death.”
The queen shuddered. That same haunting feeling returned with sudden impact: Her breastbone and the spot between her shoulder blades seemed to grow fiery hot, then instantly icy.
“But you’ll not shoot it yourself,” he went on. “Takes a man’s pull, and one wi’ broad shoulders at that. Stooped as I am, I used to be the best.”
“Don’t you want to sell one, man?” Ned put in, evidently impatient.
Elizabeth gestured him to silence. At least Clifford and Keenan knew to let her do the talking. Without being asked, Keenan stood far back, holding the horses, though they obviously weren’t going to wander off in this thick forest.
“I want one for old time’s sake,” she told the hoary-headed man. “You are Hern, then, called Hern the Hunter?”
“At your service, milady. You come from London wi’ the queen, then?”
“Yes, from London.”
“This queen’s sire was a fine bowman in his youth. I went to France in his army once nigh on a quarter century ago, saw him close up, too, heard him address his troops. There used to be a song,” he said, then chanted in a scratchy voice, “Great Harry could outshoot all archers and e’en hit a ring/ No man drew the longbow with more strength than the king/ Nor could shoot further and with truer aim at anything.” Suddenly shy, he bowed his head and shuffled his feet.
She blinked back tears. Her father had been dead for twenty-two years, and of all the myriad songs she knew, she’d never come across that one. It was like finding a bright coin on a dark floor—yes, she was obsessed with shiny coins right now. The one Dr
ake had showed her had perfectly matched the one found on the cellar floor where Tom Naseby had been hanged. Treachery and perhaps treason were afoot, and she must stick to the task at hand and not let emotions rule her.
“I have heard King Henry tried hard to maintain the use of the longbow, but it has certainly been replaced by crossbows and shortbows,” she said. “I warrant that the advent of powder and shot as well as better armor will make those obsolete, too, but does anyone you know still shoot a longbow?”
He gave a little snort. “Nary a one, not enough to speak of. It takes big shoulders, lots of pull. Just for show now, sad to say.”
“None of these are to be given for gifts?”
“Forgive me, milady, but no one’s worthy of that no more—not that I know.”
“So no one else has come to buy a longbow from you of late, even if it is just for show?”
“Not sold’em for years, though some blackguard stole two o’ them in the dark’bout a fortnight ago. I called out, ‘Who’s there,’ but only heard him walking’way, quick strides, with the bows snapping the bushes back. The thief coulda had a lantern and I wouldn’ta knowed it. Otherwise he could see in the dark—like a ghost or phantom.”
Ned and Jenks exchanged quick glances. Elizabeth felt the too familiar chill race down her spine. “Surely you don’t believe in such, Master Hern.”
“Lived too long not to, milady. The folk here’bouts tell you the Hooded Hawk is back?”
“I’ve heard it mentioned. What do you know of him?”
“Used to use blackthorn arrows, he did. Could shoot with any sort of bow, shortbow, longbow, even crossbow best of anyone ever.”
“He sounds like a fantasy indeed. But have you ever heard of arrows wrapped with leather?”
“Not in this land, nor from the Frenchies. The Hooded Hawk wore a hood, they say, to cover his grotesque face been gored by a stag. Him and his hounds ride the forest at night—it’s not just the wind in the trees. Sometimes it’s real still when he passes.”
“You’ve heard him in this forest or ones nearby?”
“All forests in Hampshire, they say. Aye, I’ve heard him, and the trees whisper, ‘Here, here, here,’ though some say’tis really ‘Hawk, hawk, hawk,’ real breathy like a strange sigh.”
“Then maybe he’s the one stole your bows,” Ned said, but the old man only shook his head. His blind stare, which had been turned her way, now darted past her toward the depths of the dark woods, as if he heard the Hooded Hawk even now. She shuddered, then silently scolded herself for falling into this old man’s morbid mood. Yet, despite his talk of ghostly events, his brain seemed sharp and his senses even sharper.
“So you truly believe in the Hooded Hawk?” she asked, gripping her hands so tightly together her fingers went numb.
“Someone’s out to make the whole shire believe in him. Speak of the old times, used to be he was an avenger for good, could shoot a yew bow full three hundred fifty yards, while the best I ever did was three hundred. Now he’s turned to harm and hurt, what they call Woden’s way’round these parts, maiming and killing animals, setting hayricks and thatched roofs afire. Just pray he don’t come here,’cause my shake roof goes tinder dry.”
Elizabeth noted Hern’s nostrils flare as he spoke. From fear, or was he trying to scent her perfume? However keen his sense of hearing and smell, he had a heightened sense of the dramatic. Ned hung on his every word, and Clifford and Jenks, big and brawny as they were, reminded her of little, lost boys. Only Keenan, at a distance, stood calmly watchful.
As if she’d requested it, the old man shuffled around his small yard to explain the process of hewing the slightly S-shaped bows from sapwood next to the heartwood in the yew. “Cut the sapwood, then it’s three months in clear, running water in a brook, then to a damp place for o’ er a year, then bit by bit to drier surroundings. Their last year’s in open air and wind—from my line o’ those seasoning in back, the two bows were stolen,” he said, and repeated that story almost word for word again.
He took her around to the back of his cottage, where nearly twenty beautifully crafted longbows, which would never be wanted or used again, she thought sadly, weighed down wooden poles. To pay him well for the bow she would take, she dug in the purse she’d brought. He obviously heard the clink of the coins.
“No recompense,” he said, raising both knotted hands. “Don’t want money laying’bout someone might come for. Your visit, your wanting a bow’s worth a fortune to me, milady. But,” he said, whispering now, his blank stare boring into her face as if he saw her, “compensate me this way. You are more than a lady, eh?”
“Why do you say so?” she whispered back.
“Your voice, your sweet scent, the squeak of new boots. Your lesson to me of England’s war weapons, and from a woman. The way your man quieted when you musta but frowned or looked at him. But mostly, your coming a purpose here to have a fine longbow’cause your royal sire loved and honored them.”
Tears blurred her view of the old man, and she bit her lower lip. He had miscalculated the reason she had come, but, however blind and old, he had the wits to know who she was. Yet she herself, young and healthy, could not be certain who her enemy was, even perhaps someone close by daily.
“Yes, Hern the Hunter,” she told him, “I am the daughter and heir of the one who could outshoot all archers and even hit a ring. No, don’t kneel,” she said, and caught at his hands as he started to go down. “I’m in plain garb with plain purpose, and glad I have come to see a great bowyer and one who fought well and proudly for our England.”
Tears puddled in his eyes and tracked down his pale, wizened cheeks. She let him cling to her hand before he leaned back on his longbow again. He turned away to choose by touch a finely grained and elegantly carved, huge bow for her from off the line of them on the drying pole.
She hefted it and noted how long it was—three-fourths of her height, and so heavy that it pulled at her shoulder muscles simply to lift it as she handed it to Jenks to carry.
Of all she had learned on this visit today, what sobered her the most was that whoever had shot a longbow at her or Drake from the forest was not only wily but more skilled and strong than she had imagined. But surely, whoever had dropped a finger tab and shot a very real Spanish arrow could not be the phantom of the forests.
Chapter the Twelfth
Fear for nothing, for I will be back just after sunset,” Elizabeth told Meg, as the sun rose over the treetops of the distant hunt park to light the queen’s bedchamber. “Cecil has put out word that I will see only Lady Rosie and himself today. Things worked out well when you were queen for a few hours yesterday, and I know you can do this.”
“Queen for a day but queen away from everyone—that’s me,” Meg said with a pert nod. “Today’s the longest I’ve ever ruled, but I’m still in exile. Just hope someone doesn’t wing another arrow my way.”
“You are to keep clear not only from people but from these windows,” Elizabeth ordered, though she was relieved that Meg sounded so lighthearted today. “And no waving down to those strolling in the gardens, for the queen is supposed to be resting. Can you do this, my Meg?”
“Of course, though I’ll miss Piers something awful, especially since you’re taking Ned and Jenks. He feels comfortable with them.”
“But he’ll be with his brother and under the care of Jenks’s wife and quite well.”
Elizabeth endeavored to sound calm, but she was as excited as a young girl. She had changed her mind and garbed herself as a man in Ned’s clothing instead of riding out disguised as an herb woman to visit Drake’s ship, though that meant not wearing the armor today. She’d decided to leave Rosie here and take only three guards. She was planning to sneak out the servants’ entrance, for the entire Southampton household was here today, and someone might recognize that she was not the herb mistress, even if she were dressed as Meg. The way crowds had cheered for her in the streets, if she wore any sort of women’s garb or took as
pretty a lady as Rosie with her, folk might notice and create a fuss again.
She shoved wayward tendrils of hair up under her cap, where she had the bulk of it pinned close to her head. Her heart thudded as she went down the narrow back staircase to meet Ned, Clifford, and Jenks, who had the horses waiting below. She held her breath when she heard footsteps coming up the stairs toward her, but the young woman who passed by—either a Southampton servant or one from her own courtiers’ households—had her arms full of ale jugs and gave her neither word nor glance. That alone was a heady experience. She felt drunk with the idea that anonymity and freedom were hers.
She was relieved Jenks had changed her sidesaddle for a man’s and brought her a more common-looking horse; he gave her a quick boost up. How strange but good it felt to ride astride, as if one were really part of the horse and not just sitting on it. So many adventures on this day, she thought, as her pulse pounded harder.
Then, as the sun crested the treetops, she saw in the distance a flash of shimmering light—surely not a forest phantasm. All this talk of the Hooded Hawk was starting to affect her. No, it was a woman in pale silk or satin running beyond the edge of the gardens, evidently heading for the Anglo-Saxon burial mound.
Elizabeth squinted in the pearly morning light: A second figure, a dark-cloaked man, met the woman, and arm in arm they darted into the depths of the wilderness garden. Not the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Southampton skulking off today, she thought, for even from so far away she recognized the graceful woman and could guess at the man.
“Ned,” she said, “I’ve changed my mind about your going with me.”
“But I—”
“Listen for once. Southampton’s wife, Lady Mary, just met a man I’d wager is the one who played Actaeon when we arrived, and they’ve darted off into the wilderness gardens. I already have some things I can use to question her about her husband’s doings, but if you could be certain she is meeting another man, it could be invaluable. Try to follow them and do not be seen.”