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

by Karen Harper

  She ran headlong into the thick, dark woods, the last place she wanted to be chased, but if she could reach her own horses or at least hide here until help came …

  Footsteps behind her, spitting leaves under boots. The Hooded Hawk was flesh and blood, hired by … By Norfolk? Her cousin Mary? King Philip or the Spanish ambassador? Someone even closer? She had no illusions now that the killer had ever pursued Drake. The murderous missiles had not come from John Hawkins or one of his men. She had always been the target, first to be terrified and now to be slain.

  A cramp seized her side. She’d never outrun him. Like a great bird of prey, could he see in the dark? Closer—she was certain he was coming closer, flapping his wings.

  Trying not to gasp aloud for breath, she stopped and pressed herself to the far side of a huge tree. Evidently, when he heard her steps cease he stopped, too, nearby.

  The breeze rustled through the leaves above. She heard the owl cry and the cuckoo she’d noted before—and, she thought, the distant sobs of a woman, or was she just going mad in her fear?

  “Here, here, here,” she heard whispered, as if the forest were giving her position away. That was what old Hern the Hunter had said he heard when the Hooded Hawk passed through the woods at night before he struck: “Here, here, here.”

  As she sucked in shallow breaths to prepare to run again, she heard the distinctive sound of the crossbow string being stretched taut by the foot stirrup crank. She could not see him, but did he have her in his sight?

  Panicked, thinking he’d be delayed by his foot in the crank, she ran.

  He came after her, even as a vine snagged her steps and she went down. She hit her head on a tree root in a spot the moon shone through. Her cape splayed out; her armor not only clanked but gleamed dully.

  “Here, here, here,” the man whispered as he stopped and stood over her. “Here lies the present and former queen, for this must be done.”

  His voice was still disguised, yet did she know it?

  “Get away from me. My men will catch you.”

  “They’re trapped, just waiting to be picked off with my bow when I’m done here. Ah, if only I had one of old Hern’s fine longbows I took from him at night. My grandfather taught me to shoot it well—the crossbow, too. Sadly, both are dying arts.”

  He laughed low in his throat at his demented pun. The demon was enjoying all this. Could someone kill simply for pleasure? Perhaps she could keep him talking until help came or she found a way out of this trap.

  “You don’t mean your grandfather was old Hern?” she asked.

  “He knew Hern years ago and told me of the Hooded Hawk, so, off and on, I brought him back to life this summer.” He began to crank his crossbow again. “I would have shot you in the heart to make it faster, but your armor is in my way. A head shot will have to do. I do regret that part of all this—such a close and easy shot.”

  “But why are you doing this? Did the Scots queen send you?”

  “Hawks don’t explain themselves. They are simply trained when young, follow their master’s orders, and want their rewards.”

  “You—are you just a hired man, then? If so, you know I can pay you more than anyone else.”

  “You once called me a hireling. I didn’t like that. Besides, first you’d bribe me, then take off my hood and hang me high.”

  “Keenan!” she cried.

  “Always clever, always sly. They told me that. Then I saw it at such close range—even this close to you. Oh, I was well paid, but best of all, my skill with the bows was finally appreciated—feared. I’d rather send my own messages instead of carry them for someone else, and this is what I say: The true Catholic Church must rule not only France and Spain but England and Scotland, too …”

  He raved on as if a dam had been loosed, but he also lifted the crossbow at such close range and aimed it straight for her head. She raised a hand to ward off the bolt, but she knew she was doomed.

  Strange how pictures truly did flash through her mind. Her father’s face, angry, fearsome. Her brother, so dear, and how they used to laugh together. Her beloved Kat Ashley, who had reared her in place of her lost mother. Robin. Dear Cecil, who had been a father to her. She’d meant to honor him with a title but now never would. She had lived through so much to be queen. In this last moment of her life, she was yet queen.

  “Stand back!” she ordered him, but he only leaned closer. As he moved to release the bolt, she jerked aside, he straddled her hips with his feet to hold her still, she heard a thud-twang, and …

  As his own shot went wild, into the tree behind her, he crumpled over, writhing and gasping atop her with an arrow through his throat.

  Elizabeth kicked and shoved him away and scrambled free as Meg and Piers burst from the dark thicket. Sim was with them, too, a small bow and arrow in his hands. Shaking, the lad fitted another short arrow in the painted bow.

  “Wait,” the queen cried. “He’s down, and I want him alive.”

  “Din’t know if I could hit him with this Robin Hood bow of Master Topside’s,” Sim cried. “He’s lots bigger than the birds I usually hit with just a stonebow.”

  Elizabeth hugged him and Piers to her sides.

  “Did you hear my cuckoo call, Majesty?” Piers asked. “That’s how Mistress Meg found us where this Hawk tied us in the woods. When she freed us and we heard your voice, we come arunning hard as we could, but she’s just been crying—can’t hardly talk.”

  Meg’s face was streaming tears, but she managed a smile through them, now on her knees, pulling Piers tight to her.

  “We’ve got to let my men out of the tunnel or the church where they may be trapped,” Elizabeth said, amazed to hear her own voice so steady. “But first, I have to know who this is for certain.”

  She bent over the thrashing man and tugged off his hood. Keenan indeed, his face contorted in agony. Keenan, gasping for air with a crimson throat and the boy’s arrow still stuck there.

  “Meg, stay here with the lads and this prisoner. I don’t put it past him to fly away!”

  The queen sprinted through the woods toward the tunnel entry, only to find that Keenan must have rolled the tree trunk against it. Yes, longbowmen had huge shoulders. He and someone else had rolled that paving stone off the ceiling of the crypt.

  She tried to shove the trunk away, but she’d need a horse to dislodge it. She almost shouted to see if her men were on the other side, but what if her enemies had been victorious and were looking for her?

  Then Elizabeth saw that the conspirators’ horses were gone. Had the traitors overcome her captain and her guards and fled? She must get to her horses, ride for help on her own.

  She wanted to dissolve in tears and tear her hair, but that was the weak woman in her, that part of her she must always control and conquer. Going at a good clip, she started toward the woods again. She’d tell Meg that she and the boys must stay with the man who must have worked so hard to use the legend of the Hawk to frighten her. That had surely not been Keenan’s idea. No, he’d admitted he had a master. Norfolk was surely behind all this. But now Keenan had a torn throat, so could he tell her all the things she was desperate to know?

  Hard hands seized her and spun her around. Before she could scream, a voice said, “I didn’t know it was you, Your Grace, but I can tell by the feel of you.”

  She hugged him hard. “Drake! My men?”

  “By my faith, beat up, cut up, but well enough. We killed two, but while we were in the tunnel trying to follow you, the rest broke out the stained glass window and fled. We escaped the same way and fanned out to look for you. We’re to meet at our horses.”

  “We have the Hawk,” she said. “It was Cecil’s man Keenan, working either for Norfolk or Queen Mary, and I fear that is one and the same. Come with me.”

  She took his hand and led him back into the woods, realizing too late that he limped badly. “Meg?” she cried, when she realized they were lost. “Meg, call out your location!”

  For on
e moment, she and Drake stood holding hands in the dark woods like lost children. “Lean on me,” she said. “I know they are out this way.” He did as she said, with his arm across her shoulders. In the unknown future, they would rely on each other, she thought, even if he were halfway across the world.

  “Here, Your Grace!” Jenks said, emerging from the trees, his sword still drawn as if there were other dragons to fight. “We’re over here, Meg and the lads, too, but that traitor Keenan—the Hawk—has bled out and died.”

  “Then I have no one to question, but I know for certain what they are planning,” she said, as Jenks bent to help Drake walk and she stepped away, on her own again. “Soon I must fight for my throne, and will again and again if I must, far in the future—forever!”

  Elizabeth the queen began to walk briskly, but she could have soared.

  Prologue

  ST. JAMES’S PARK, LONDON

  MONDAY, AUGUST 1, 1569

  Though she was riding sidesaddle with but one hand holding the reins, Elizabeth Tudor spurred her horse to a faster gait, forcing the others to keep up with her. Her crimson hair spilled loose from her snood, her skirt flapped, and the hooded hawk perched on her leather-gauntleted hand spread her great gray wings as if to fly.

  The queen was desperate to escape the palace, where problems proliferated like rabbits, or rather, she thought, like rats—perhaps even the sort that leave a leaking ship. She heaved a huge sigh.

  “Your Grace, what’s amiss?” her dear friend Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who alone kept pace beside her, asked. “Do you feel well enough to test the new hawk?”

  “Of course I do! I’ve led you a merry chase this far today.”

  Even her longtime court favorite’s fervid attentions hardly helped her disposition, however dashing he looked ahorse. He was attired much too grandly for riding and flying her new gerfalcon, the breed fit for a king. Robert, whom she had called Robin all the years they had known each other, had given her the hawk as an early birthday gift.’S blood, she was nearly thirty-six, she realized, and shook her head, which tumbled more tresses free.

  With the excuse of testing the prowess of the bird, the queen had brought a small entourage on a morning’s robust ride. She could not wait for her summer progress through Surrey and Hampshire that she had just decided on last night. Though she’d chosen hosts for the journey who needed testing themselves, it always heartened her to be out among the common folk of England.

  “This looks to be a good spot with a bit of open ground,” she announced as she reined in. “We shall fly Swift here.”

  Being watchful to keep the bird facing the wind so she wouldn’t beat the air with her huge wings, the queen dismounted with Robin’s steady hand on her free arm and her loyal guard Jenks holding her horse. The queen’s handsome, young falconer, Fenton Layne, four other guards, and two of her ladies-in-waiting hastened to follow their sovereign’s lead.

  St. James’s Park had most often been used by the Tudors to hunt deer; by ordering the surrounding marshes drained, her father, King Henry VIII, had created access to it near his country retreat of St. James’s Palace. Elizabeth seldom used the old redbrick edifice, but she loved the crooked, wooded lanes and ragged bits of open meadow. It was but a half hour’s ride from her main London palace of Whitehall, though she seldom managed a visit.

  For each time she snagged a few hours for herself, more couriers came with news of Mary, Queen of Scots’s plotting, though Mary was now England’s “guarded guest” in the north of England. Or messengers rode in with word of Spanish hostilities on the seas. Worse, couriers conveyed rumors of possible rebellion in England, a future uprising led by her own northern lords, men who were entirely too close to Elizabeth’s Catholic cousin Mary in more ways than one. And almost every time William Cecil, her trusted chief secretary of state, called on her, it boded only bad news and dire dangers.

  “The sun and wind feel good,” she told Robin. “I pray this mild weather continues as the court moves south next week. We’ll go first to Oatlands, then to Guildford and Farnham, even to the River Meon and clear to the south Channel. I seldom see the sea with its vast waters, fresh and free.”

  “You’ve made a little sonnet upon it. Our queen is a poet and doesn’t know it,” he teased, obviously trying to lighten her mood, though, since she’d declared she would not wed him, Robin had moped about a great deal himself.

  “I need diversion, it’s true,” she admitted quietly, so the others would not hear. “With all this wretched talk of attacks on our meager navy by those Spanish bullies who think they own the seas, I look forward to hearing from Captain Francis Drake. I shall send word he is to meet us at one of our destinations on the progress.”

  “Rough, untutored sea dogs, all those captains from the west country,” Robin muttered, his tone taut. “Drake and his cousin John Hawkins—they’re all pirates at heart, so beware you do not trust or heed Drake overmuch.”

  “Robin,” she said, as she stroked the gerfalcon’s gray back to calm her, “I swear, but you sound jealous—or envious.” She sighed again. “But I am envious, too. To be land-bound, England-bound, as I shall ever be, is right for a queen, but I would like not only to see the sea but go to sea.”

  He hooted a laugh but stopped in midyelp when she glared at him. He quickly sobered. “It’s a hard life, Elizabeth,” he whispered, using her first name as he did only in their moments of privacy.

  “’S blood and bones, everyone thinks I am coddled and spoiled, but I know much of a hard life, and you’ll not tease or gainsay me on that.”

  She turned away from the others pressing close and put her hand to the feathered and tufted green felt hood that covered the hawk’s head. Instantly, her falconer, Fenton, broad-shouldered, blond, and blue-eyed, stepped forward to be ready to take it from her when she freed the bird to fly.

  But before she snatched off the hood, she heard something that made her pause. Thunder on this clear day? No, hoofbeats, distant ones but coming closer. Swift sidestepped on her hand, still blinded by the hood and snared by the leather jesses that tethered the bird’s ankles to her fist. The small bells on the jesses jingled as the foot-and-a-half-tall bird of prey tensed in anticipation.

  The queen frowned into the sun to see who approached. When she was young and exiled from her father’s court for being Anne Boleyn’s daughter, she had learned to fear a quick, unheralded approach by anyone, for it usually boded ill. Queen she might be, but some things still haunted her heart.

  Robin, too, turned in the direction of the hoofbeats and covered his eyes to squint across the little meadow. Four riders burst from the line of trees. Behind her, Elizabeth heard Jenks and several others scrape their swords from their scabbards.

  “It’s Cecil and his men,” she called to them, but her pulse did not stop pounding. “He must have news that could not wait.”

  Still holding the hawk, Elizabeth strode to meet her chief advisor as he reined in several yards away. She recognized those with him, all Cecil’s underlings, a scrivener, two guards, and his favorite courier, Justin Keenan, a handsome man, who often rode back and forth with important documents between Cecil and the court when he was elsewhere on queen’s business.

  “Bad news, my lord?” she called to him.

  Though only forty-eight years of age, the man was out of breath, but then Cecil’s strength was in his intellect and loyalty, not his body. He was thin with a shovel-shaped brown beard, which was turning as silvery as frost.

  “Only the news that you yourself created, Your Grace, in your suddenly ordering the court to prepare for a progress,” he got out in one ragged burst, bowing briefly before rising to face her eye to eye. “Before word reaches those I hear will be your hosts, I need to speak to you about the wisdom of it all.”

  “Cecil, I am indeed going on my annual progress. I refuse to let either Englishman or foreigner think that threats to my kingdom rile me in the slightest, nor will my concerns about Queen Mary of Scots stop me.
She is under my control, although I warrant she hardly realizes that yet, even if her dangerous allies mayhap do.”

  “But to be out of the capital with the threat of the northern rebellion possibly exploding in support of a Catholic queen to replace you on the throne—”

  “I am heading south, not north, dear Cecil. Granted, you must needs stay behind in London at least for some of the time, to keep an eye on that serpent of a new Spanish ambassador de Spes. And I am taking along my second-least favorite cousin, Thomas Howard—the great and grand and glorious Duke of Norfolk, at least in his own eyes. That way he can’t get into mischief with Mary or the fomenting rebellion, for I’ll have him tied to me like this,” she added, and lifted her wrist with the bird to show it was firmly tethered by the straps she held.

  “But your plans to stay at both Loseley and Titchfield, hosted by Catholic hosts of highly questionable loyalty …” He cleared his throat, then lowered his voice even more. “I realize you have ever had a policy of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, but with the Spanish so on edge far too near our borders here or even in the New World—”

  “I planned to explain it all to you when I returned after flying my new falcon. Look you, Cecil,” she said as she whipped the hood from the bird and, loosing the jesses, cast her skyward. Swift’s great wings spread as she leaped free, beating the air, circling to climb to a great, soaring height from which she would see and strike her prey.

  The queen could tell Cecil still felt thwarted and overthrown. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he said, his voice hardly audible over the cheers of the others. “Not only do all your enemies make a fatal error if they believe you are off on a mere jaunt of summer diversions, but—” He stopped and hacked into his fist.

  “But what?” she asked, as she watched the gerfalcon swoop like a shot toward some feckless prey they could not yet see.

  “I was just thinking that, though that gauntlet is still on your hand, this supposedly carefree royal progress you propose is indeed throwing a gauntlet down in the face of all your enemies, be they English, Scottish, or Spanish.”