by Karen Harper
“No, though I would like to be someday—a long ways off, I pray, since I am but twenty-four. My grandfather and father lie in the crypt of the old Catholic church in Basingstoke, the Church of the Holy Ghost.”
Elizabeth heard Rosie’s swift intake of breath behind her. Rosie had said the bird embroidered on the green pillow reminded her of the dove that represented the Holy Ghost, descending from heaven to bless the Lord Jesus. Elizabeth wondered if Queen Mary of Scots saw herself as the Lord’s approved and anointed one.
“I should like to see that church on the morrow, too,” she told Sandys.
“I had no idea you were so interested in church architecture, Your Grace.”
“A current pursuit.”
“Actually,” he added, “since the new religion has come to the fore, the Church of the Holy Ghost is used as a meeting place sometimes, too, as you inquired of this chapel.”
“How interesting. I shall thank you for not sharing our planned visit there with my courtiers. It rather ruins the sacred mood of a church tour to have a large entourage traipsing along. Ah, I see Captain Drake has returned, and I would like you to meet him,” she told Baron Sandys when she saw her captain, cap in hand, awaiting her at the back of the chapel.
The queen steered Sandys to where Drake stood, but none too patiently, first on one foot and then the other. She was anxious to hear his report.
Taking Drake’s arm, she preceded the others out into the Oak Gallery, which led toward the great hall, where supper awaited them.
“Any sort of success?” she asked Drake quietly.
“I found my men, but one was truly ill, and the other I questioned—and believed. I would wager my future in the royal navy, Your Grace, that neither of them is our shooter or in league with my cousin Hawkins.”
“Then you have done me a service. That leaves the Spanish hireling and my cousin Norfolk—and whomever he has made a devil’s deal with to overthrow me. Likewise, I would wager my future that deal could include a Spanish king, a Scottish queen, and far too many knights and pawns.”
“It sounds like a chess match, Your Grace.”
“Precisely put, and I intend to win. You must tell me all the details, and we shall lay our plans after we smile our way through the feast. It’s lovely to feel safe inside the walls of this grand house, but I’d almost rather be back dining out under God’s great sky on the deck of your ship, Drake, fire arrows or not.”
She forced a laugh, but the smile she summoned up for him was real. Too bad Robin’s glowering countenance was the first thing she saw when she entered the great hall.
Chapter the Seventeenth
The Church of the Holy Ghost sat on the edge of the little town of Basingstoke, a charming building, the queen thought at first glance. Its old stones wore a cloak of ivy, though it was turning reddish in the waning summer, as if the walls were bleeding.
’S bones, she scolded herself, everything she looked at now seemed somehow sinister. She was grateful she’d brought Drake and Rosie as well as Sandys and two guards, Jenks and Clifford. Ned and Meg had been left behind to complete their daily tasks and tend the Naseby boys.
Lord Sandys lifted a rusty iron bar from across the entry. The key grated in the lock; the wooden door screeched on its hinges.
“Sad to keep a house of worship locked and barred,” Elizabeth observed as Sandys turned the key.
“There have been disputes in town about that very thing, Your Majesty. Though it’s been converted to a Protestant church, most attend the one on the other side of town. But some die-hard, dissident Catholics on occasion come in to celebrate the Mass or perform some sort of rites after dark.”
“Are those the kinds of meetings you mentioned?”
“I fear so. I’ll not call whatever goes on here at night a holy service.”
“If the church is secured like this,” she said, sweeping her hand toward the door they passed through, “how do they get in?”
“I’ll show you, but allow me to light a lantern or two first.”
Though it was morning with the sun bright outside, two things darkened the stone interior of the church. The ivy had greatly overgrown the east-side stained glass window, dimming the splotches of multihued colors cast inside upon the raised stone lectern and baptismal font. Also, the church backed up to a thick stand of old oaks, with only the mounded, turfy headstones of a small burial ground separating the building from the wooded area.
The church had but few pews near the front, which was not unusual, for the common folk used to stand behind their seated betters in services. Elizabeth stared up again at the ivydarkened stained glass window. Her mouth fell open; she jerked even more alert. She seized Rosie’s arm and motioned for her to look upward but keep silent.
The window scene included a dove, the symbol of the Holy Ghost, descending on the Lord as he emerged from baptism in the waters of the River Jordan. The dove looked very like the one on the back of the green pillow, though its maker could never have seen this very church. Still, such a symbol was common enough that Rosie had recognized it earlier. And the glass bird had a halo around its head, so could that be what the wreath on the pillow was to suggest? The embroidered halo was dark green, though, and looked more like a tiny crown of thorns.
“Sorry, Your Grace.” Her host’s voice interrupted her agonizing. “This lantern does not want to catch—ah, there.” He carried it over to light the second one, gesturing that they should join him across the narrow nave of the church. “The effigies before you,” he explained, “are of my parents and my grandsire and his wife.”
As he lifted both lanterns, the pairs of effigies on the two grand tombs leaped to life. The stone replicas seemed to shift and breathe.
“Their tombs are quite fine,” she observed. Her voice echoed from the vaulted arches above, she noted, and Sandys’s had carried clearly to her across the width of the nave as if this were a whispering gallery, as in great houses with rounded ceilings.
“My four ancestors share a common crypt below, though in separate caskets,” he said, suddenly whispering as if a funeral service were being conducted even now. “Come and look behind my grandsire’s monument, and you will see what I mean about how we believe Papists come in for their secret rites at night.”
She followed him around the back of the effigies of two knights and their wives, staring blank-eyed straight up toward the stone canopy over their heads. It was, she thought, as if they yet shared a bed, though in attitudes of perpetual prayer.
Her thoughts skipped to how cruelly her mother’s body had been interred under the stones of St. Peter in Chains Church in the Tower of London after she had been beheaded. No monument, no proper coffin, only an empty arrow box the body and head were stuffed in … an arrow box.
For a moment, Elizabeth thought she would be ill; she put her hand against the cold stone monument to steady herself. An arrow chest for a coffin … Again she felt that icy ache between her breasts and shoulder blades. Haunted, hunted, she was terrified by her memories and her present fears.
“See here, Your Grace?” Sandys was saying. The others in her little party crowded closer, leaning in to look where he pointed. Behind the effigy of the first Baron Sandys was a narrow set of stone stairs going down, perhaps to the crypt itself.
“Then this is the entrance to the burial vault?” Drake asked. “Your ancestors weren’t just interred under the stones of the church floor?”
“There are some tombs like this in Westminster Abbey in London,” Sandys declared almost defensively. More quietly, he added, “The thing is, my grandsire was afraid of being buried alive. He insisted an air duct and release latch be fashioned inside his casket and that there be two unlocked ways out of the crypt—even to fresh air.”
“Then are you also saying,” the queen questioned, “that the crypt below leads to an exit outside the church?”
Sandys nodded. “Strange, I know, but he would have it so and spent a great deal of money on a narrow escape tunn
el, which exits just beyond the burial ground at the edge of the woods. I’ll show you when we go outside, assuming you would not want to go down and through this way. It’s dank and noisome in there.”
Elizabeth recalled that was almost the way Keenan had described Tutbury Castle—damp and noisome. She’d ordered him to leave by noon after he met with Cecil. He was taking the order for Huntingdon and Shrewsbury to imprison the Queen of Scots. How Elizabeth had agonized over sending the command, for once she made her royal cousin her avowed prisoner, it was making her indeed her public enemy, abolishing all pretense that her rival queen was a guest in England. How she would like to understand Mary more so that she could read what her next move would be.
“You know, Sandys,” she said, “if you can manage it, I would like a glimpse inside the crypt.”
“Actually,” he said, as he put both hands to the latch of the narrow wooden door at the bottom of the steps, “a single floor stone above does slide away to make an entrance also, but you have to put a little ladder down or take a jump. My father put that in, as embarrassed by his father’s whims as I, but the old man said he heard once of a man buried alive.”
“However did people know the man had accidentally been interred that way?” Drake asked. “Did they hear him shouting in his casket? How did he get out to tell his tale?”
“They opened his coffin about a year after his death to take a ring from his finger that his son decided he wanted and saw he’d clawed the inside of the coffin, trying to get out,” Sandys muttered. “His fingernails were ripped back and his hands bloodied to the bone. And the expression on his face—well …”
If the door to the church creaked, this iron-grated and unlocked tiny one shrieked like a woman’s scream. “Sandys,” the queen said to him, “if personae non gratae are gaining access through this door and traipsing through your family’s burial vault, why don’t you or the caretakers put in locks?”
“It’s in my grandsire’s will not to seal the doorways out— ever. May I precede you with the lantern, then? It will be hard going to keep your skirts clean squeezing through here.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, holding her garments close and following him into the low-ceilinged vault. In a small, stale space lay four lead caskets, one of which had a little grate on top, no doubt for breathing, but she did not ask about that. Sandys was already opening the door that evidently led to a tunnel to the outside. Surely that underground exit didn’t burrow through the graveyard but went deeper than those burials. Looking up at the low stone ceiling, she could see the very thin, faint outline of the paving stone that could evidently be moved away to access this vault, too.
“You’re right,” she told Sandys, “it’s moldy and damp here—and dusty.” As if to punctuate her words, Drake, the only other one who had stepped into the small space, sneezed behind her.
Surely, she thought, Mary of Scots’s place of imprisonment at Tutbury Castle she so hated wasn’t this chill and damp, but she must feel closed in like this. Perhaps the Queen of England would be plotting in secret, too, if she were so confined.
Elizabeth peered down the narrow, low tunnel Sandys lit with his lantern. “Even in these riding skirts, I’ll not go farther, nor into the forest where you say the door comes out,” she told him. Her gaze snagged with Drake’s. That’s all they needed, to be together in another forest when they weren’t even safe in the open air in the middle of a river on a ship.
“I’ll go,” Drake said. “If you’ll just let me take one of the lights from you, Baron Sandys, I’ll be right back.”
“That outer door at the edge of the woods is never locked, either,” he told Drake, “though more than once I’ve been tempted to cover the entire exit over with a dirt mound. I must admit I have left a tree trunk close by that I’m always tempted to roll across it.” He heaved a huge sigh.
“I’ll just close the door behind myself and meet you all outside, then,” Drake said. Adventurer that he was, he nodded to her, then, bending over, plunged inside, where his form and light soon faded into darkness.
Sandys closed the door after him and ushered her out of the crypt and back upstairs into the nave. Before they went outside, the queen again studied the dove in the stained glass window, then gazed up at the altar with the priest’s lectern on one side and the baptismal font on the other. Above and behind the altar she could see a vaguely lighter area where a large cross of Christ crucified must have hung for many years. During the Reformation, many of those had been replaced by a bare cross, for was not the Savior’s redeeming work done and he long out of his torment?
Yet in this Church of the Holy Ghost, she felt frightened that her work and pain had just begun.
Is this room as pretty as the ones at the queen’s palace?” Piers asked Meg.
“Now you just sit where I said with your cup-and-ball game,” she told him. “No, hardly as pretty as those in her palaces, though she brings many of her favorite things along on progress with her. I’ll be done with these fresh strewing herbs in just a moment, so you are to stay right where I put you on that Turkey carpet, my boy.”
She bustled about the spacious guest bedchamber, relieved, as the queen had been, that they weren’t stuck in another tiny room at an old inn. This was Meg’s favorite place so far on this entire trip, because she felt safe here, and she thought Her Majesty did, too.
She kept an eye on Piers as she rubbed dried lavender into the bed curtains. He was quite adept at tossing the little leather ball in the air from the cup, then catching it again. It was a game Ned had bought him as reward for learning his lines so well. If they could only keep the boy as their own! If only—
“Oops!” he said, as the ball went skittering past her feet under the big bed. “Guess that was a clumsy miss, eh, Mistress Meg?” he said with a laugh, as if he had made some sort of jest.
“Mayhap it runs in the family,” she muttered, remembering how she’d managed to leave her stone jar of healing salve under Norfolk’s bed. “Crawl under, then, and fetch it back,” she said, and kept working. She’d overslept and had to finish this before the queen came back from Basingstoke, but what she was thinking of now was that she’d blurted out that she felt as if the boy were family. Yes, she could imagine that, and it warmed her heart.
“There’s a real pretty pillow in a cloth sack under here,” came muffled from under the bed.
“Now you leave that alone, you little knave!” she scolded, and dropped to her knees to peer under. “Piers, that’s not to be touched, so put that back—no, I’ll do it,” she added, and scooted farther under.
“But the thing is, I seen it afore,” he told her.
“Stuff and nonsense. Not this one, for it’s special. It came from far to the north and belonged to—”
“To that grand Duke of Norfolk, didn’t it?”
Meg, stretched out on her stomach, reaching for the pillow he had partly uncovered, gaped at him in the dim light under the bed.
“How’d you know that, then, Piers?”
“I was just across the hedge, the one Sim and me heard was broke with a stile and all. You know, back home. We were going to climb over when a man gave that pillow to the duke. Didn’t know’twas the duke’til later when the queen took us in.”
“The other man who gave it to him—what did he look like?”
“Don’t rightly know. Mostly he was looking the other way, but had big shoulders and a fancy leather quiver of arrows on his back.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“Sorry! Didn’t know it was of any account.”
“I don’t mean to scold. Of course you didn’t. And when you hid back behind the hedge, you and Sim overheard what the two men said?” she asked, frozen in anticipation.
“Sure, but can’t remember too much. Like, ‘She sends it to you with love and hope and trust’—real fancy talk. And the duke, he says something like ‘This will seal my part with her,’ or ‘my pact with her,’ I guess it was. Did the quee
n send the pillow to Norfolk, but now he gave it back?”
“Wrong queen,” Meg muttered. “Leave that pillow there, get your ball, and come with me.”
“I thought you weren’t done. Are you going to punish me?”
“Come with me, I said. No, I’m not going to punish you, but we must find Ned and wait for the queen to come back.”
They scooted back out from under the bed. Meg left her strewing herbs, took the boy’s hand, and pulled him out of the queen’s suite and down the long second-floor corridor that overlooked the forecourt through which they had arrived yesterday. Glancing outside, she saw the queen returning with Lord Sandys and the others she’d taken riding to see the church in town.
“Piers,” she said, pulling him close and pointing out the window, “you run down to wherever the queen dismounts. You stand there quiet til she sees you, hear? When she motions you to her or says you can speak, you tell her that Mistress Meg sent you to tell her something important and then—for her ears only—tell her exactly what you told me about the duke receiving the pillow.”
“But won’t she be angry I trifled with her pillow? And under her bed?”
“She’ll understand. And you tell her I’ve gone to fetch Secretary Cecil and Ned, because I wager she’ll think we need to talk about all that. You understand me, now? And don’t forget to bow real low to her, like Ned taught you. And let me hold your cup-and-ball game. Now, go!”
He was off at a run, skidding around the corner toward the staircase. Meg looked out the window as the queen’s party rode so close to the building she could no longer see them, then she rushed to find Ned and Lord Cecil.
Chapter the Eighteenth
Elizabeth was surprised to see Cecil, Ned, and Meg waiting in her privy chamber when she and Rosie came in from their ride to Basingstoke. Perhaps they had guessed she’d find something at the church that needed discussion, as indeed she had. She was risking the assumption that the Church of the Holy Ghost, with its descending dove in the stained glass, was the place that some of Mary of Scots’s supporters—perhaps Norfolk included—intended to meet. It was on a crossroads, it had a secret way in, and the place was obviously sacred to Catholics. The entire thing stank of sedition and insurrection.