Elizabeth I - 05 - The Thorne Maze

by Karen Harper

  Glancing up, he could tell she almost said “lucky them,” or something of the sort. His hopes fell that being here at court would buck her up. Mildred’s mental malady baffled him. She had once been so calm and confident, so sure of him and proud of his achievements. But since Robert had been born lame with a bent backbone, icicles could have hung from her, though that was better than her occasional fiery outbursts.

  Surely, he agonized, as much as she knew he admired Elizabeth Tudor, it couldn’t be jealousy for the time he spent with his royal mistress. She wasn’t that sort of mistress, and he’d never been untrue that way in all their years of marriage.

  “Her Majesty only mentioned she’d drop by because she’d be nearby,” he rushed on, letting the parchment recoil itself. “She’ll be staying at Hatfield en route to a visit to Cambridge.”

  “Cambridge? Your old stomping grounds, as they say. After all, she did name you Chancellor of Cambridge when you didn’t even finish a degree there, but of course, Her Majesty must know that and why. Your only grand mistake, you once said and yet you risked all for it, your family’s wrath, all your plans, all your dreams.”

  He smacked his goblet down. He did not need to be reminded of those days when passion and not prudence ruled his life.

  “After all,” she went on, “I rather think—”

  A rap resounded on the hall door. Mildred nearly leaped to answer it as if she welcomed the excuse to say no more. It was Jason Nye, one of his most trustworthy assistants.

  “Lady Cecil, milord.” He greeted them with a nod. “You said, milord, to tell you if Matthew Stewart came back to court, and he just rode in. Don’t even think his countess or son knows he’s back yet.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Cecil said and rushed to seize the correct leather satchel from his array of them in his brass-bound coffer. “My dear, let’s dine here and go over the plans … .” he began as he spun around to bid farewell to Mildred.

  She was not in the room.

  “Her ladyship went out in a hurry,” Jason said, standing wide-eyed in the open door and gesturing into the hallway.

  “So I see. She needs a breath of air, I believe.”

  “Aye, that’s it. Saw her walking in this very corridor late last night, too.”

  “No,” Cecil corrected him as they dashed out and Jason closed the door behind them, “Lady Cecil was not herself last night and kept to her bed.”

  “Must have been someone else, milord,” he amended, but it was Cecil’s own words which echoed in his head. Mildred was not herself, so who was she of late? He obviously needed more than a single servant girl to watch her. Thank God he had her away from the children for a while. He was actually starting to fear that in her strange moods, she might do damage to herself—or to someone else.

  “We’re going where, Your Grace?” Rosie asked. “The kitchens?”

  “The flower garden was one thing,” Anne Carey put in as the two of them stretched their strides to keep up with their royal mistress, “but the kitchens? The hearths will make this hot day absolutely stifling in there. Your Majesty, are you certain you meant the kitchens?”

  “You two sound like that parrot my brother once had,” Elizabeth teased them. “I believe I am queen here, and will visit my kitchens if I so desire, when I so desire.”

  “I’ve seen them, vast and smoky,” Anne said, still sounding miffed, as two yeomen guards fell in behind the three women. “Hold your skirts close, or you’ll get grease-speckled, Your Grace. But it will give the staff something to talk about besides what such-and-such dish was fit for you, or what lord just dumped what for his dogs.”

  The queen ignored their prating. She was not paying a surprise visit to the kitchen block on a whim. Nor was Stackpole one of the guards with her for no reason. The scent of gillyflowers in the so-called haunted gallery outside Mary Sidney’s rooms had—damn, had haunted her. Despite the fact Meg Milligrew had claimed there were no such flowers in the kitchen herbal beds, she must be mistaken. That spicy scent was distinctive and she was intent on tracking it.

  Like the entire sprawling palace of Hampton Court, the kitchen block was a veritable warren of chambers. Commonly called Cooks Court, it encompassed numerous passageways and backstairs connecting pallet chambers, irregular cobbled courtyards, and work rooms. These included a bakehouse, brewhouse, dove house, pastry house, flesh storage, confectionery, boiling house, garnish room, larders, the wine cellar with its three hundred barrels, and an ale storage. The great kitchen block, which produced the prodigious meals for up to one thousand courtiers twice a day, was staffed by eighty servants with a system of rank all their own, from chief cook to scullery maids and slop boys.

  But now, as the queen entered unannounced, multiple hubbubs slowly ceased as heads turned and workers elbowed others to silence.

  “I came to tell you how much your hard work is appreciated,” Elizabeth declared in ringing tones. She noted well the mingled aromas that assailed her, but none seemed the scent she was seeking. Still talking, greeting folk who beamed or looked as if they’d cry in pride at this arm’s-length glimpse of her, she led her small party through the garnish room, where a roast peacock was having its feathers arranged and a crown-shaped marzipan was being colored and decorated. Soon, Roger Stout, the garrulous chief cook, appeared and trailed along, overanswering each question as fast as she asked it.

  The intensity of mingled smells amazingly increased as they stepped out into a court which boasted not one but two herb gardens stuffed with the green and flowering savories Meg helped to oversee. The queen sniffed. Yes, the scent was here, but faint. Trailing gawkers and her original entourage, Elizabeth perused the beds of herbs, recognizing most, but, as Meg had said, she saw no pale rose-hued gillyflowers with pinked edges here. She turned to Roger Stout again.

  “I would have sworn I smelled gillyflowers strongly in the upstairs gallery where I was walking yesterday,” she told him, pointing. “There, just to the east.”

  His face, like a plump apple, permanently bronzed from peering into pots and at spitted, rotating joints, broke into a relieved smile. “Yesterday? Aye, Your Majesty, we were crushing cloves, pounding them to powder, right here. As for gillyflower petals, we had none, though they ever lend a faint clove spice smell, aye, and taste to everything. Not that you were mistaken, Your Majesty, but perhaps you just thought it was gillyflowers and here it was our precious cloves, though they’re much stronger—more expensive, too. Aye, we take a care not to drop a one, we do, and not to give too many out when servants come abegging or bartering for cloves for their lords and ladies.”

  “Cloves, was it? My courtiers want cloves to spice their own foods when they eat gratis at my table?”

  “Not so much that, but chewed whole, for sweetening the breath, Your Majesty, like lovers wont to do, eh?” the man finally managed a short answer.

  She favored Master Stout with a nod, then turned to her guard Stackpole and said low, “Is this clove smell what was on the note, do you think?”

  “Not sure, Your Grace,” he boomed out. “All I know is that note smelt good.”

  So far, the queen thought, her wretched attempts to tie proofs to her strangler had made her path wider, not narrower. Many of her court could write notes and hire some apprentice from town or even an itinerant ruffian to deliver them. Many flaunted those silver garters, and could have cloves, chewed or stored, about their persons, let alone gillyflowers. Elizabeth made her way out of one of the numerous exits from Cooks Court, but she considered her foray into it a dead end.

  As she walked around to the riverside lawns, hoping to calm herself, she glared at the roped-off maze, then decided to walk its outer circumference. She was perspiring and knew Rosie and Anne were shooting each other arrow-tipped looks, evidently wondering if their queen had taken leave of her senses. Stackpole, toting his ceremonial pike and sword, huffed along as if he was exhausted or chagrined. Only the other guard, Geoffrey Clifford, kept up well.

  Indeed, s
he was angry with herself as she still had no notion what she was looking for. A break in the outer hedges perhaps, which was not discernible from within but which someone inside the maze could have broken out to escape?

  “That pin you lost in the maze yesterday,” Rosie piped up. “Do you think you lost it outside the hedges instead of in? And I didn’t notice one missing from your jewel boxes.”

  “If it’s lost, how do I know where it is?” She spun to face the two of them. The sheen of sun and exertions gilded their pretty faces, and they both plied their fans so fast they even sent a breeze her way. In her inner tumult, she’d quite forgotten her own fan, which dangled at her wrist.

  Elizabeth decided it best to lessen the number of observers. She was tempted to keep Rosie with her, for she hoped to include her in her Privy Plot Council. But she supposed it would build morale among her people if she told them first—at least Cecil. If she sent one lady back, she’d be hard pressed to explain keeping the other with her.

  “Stackpole, accompany Lady Anne and Lady Rosie back to the palace. Clifford, come with me.” Indeed, she was not keeping Stackpole with her, when he seemed so dense. Clifford she had known and trusted for years.

  Despite their protests and fussing, the two women headed back toward the palace with their plodding guard, while the queen, trailing Clifford, walked on. Near the back of the maze’s exterior, closer to the goal within, trees shaded the area. She saw no breaks in the venerable hedges here at least. Standing on tiptoe, she scanned the trees and their foliage. Could someone have climbed in or out of the maze via a big tree limb? But none seemed to hang far or low enough. She supposed someone could have used a ladder, but damned if she was going to look for ladder marks around this huge stretch of hedge. She’d send Jenks and Ned out to do it.

  “Seeing I’m taller, Your Grace, what is it you’re looking for, if I may ask. Not some pin you lost, for certain.”

  “I was pondering whether I should have the maze replanted here or moved. Go along this back length, and see if you can spot any breaks big enough to see through or get through, as that would quite ruin the whole effect.”

  As he instantly obeyed, she realized Clifford might also be a good man to swell the ranks of the Privy Plot Council. Of course, there was always Chris or Jamie, both young but always ready and able to assist her.

  She watched Clifford move slowly away to scrutinize the hedges. Deflated she was still getting nowhere, she paced the opposite direction, around the farthest back corner of the maze where the tree trunks were the thickest.

  A bright blur of color near the distant, shady grape arbors snagged her gaze—the peacock blue of a man’s doublet beyond the low brick wall. A tall, slender man had a lady pressed against a tree in wildest, passionate abandon. If the queen had not been too warm already, she would have blushed, for even from here, she could tell the blond man—who was that?—ground his loins against the lady’s thighs and belly.

  No, she was sore mistaken. They were both men. Sodomites? It was a crime which, if proven in court, was punishable by death, so it was almost never prosecuted. At least they both looked quite young, for it would be a pity if they had wives. She would send Clifford over at once to learn their names and see they were banished from her court.

  She narrowed her eyes, shaded them with her open fan, and realized where she’d seen that peacock blue doublet before—and the blond man in it. One whom she’d heard only today was selfish, sadistic, and—now this. It was Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, her cousin Margaret’s son and heir.

  Since the queen was evidently out somewhere—and courtiers hardly hung about when she wasn’t here—Cecil used her empty presence chamber to meet with Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox. He’d managed to waylay him even before the man could huddle with his wife and son.

  Cecil, who had spent time in dealing and treaty-making with the wily Scots, had a certain grudging admiration for their stiffnecked independence, but the sandy-haired, strapping Lennox had always vexed him. Cecil knew the man could put on or off the burr and broad accent of his speech, but with Cecil, he always flaunted it.

  “Och, and wha’ a great honor the queen’s own secret’ry hies himself to me the moment I arrive for a braw greetin’!” Lennox declared, though he looked like he had one of those Scottish thistles up the tartan trunks he always wore.

  “I knew you would be most anxious to hear Her Majesty’s reply to your continued petitions and pleas about—”

  “They be my lawful and rightful requests, mon, if you mean tha’ I should be allowed to go home to Scotland to petition—not plead—for my bonny ancestral lands to be returned to me. You ken wantin’ land and house for your heir, dinna you?”

  “I do. However, since the queen does not wish for you—and your heir, Lord Darnley—to have to bend the knee in supplication to the Scottish queen, she has refused—”

  “Ah, my Lord Lennox, back from visiting his friends,” the queen’s voice rang out behind Cecil as she swept into the room with but one yeoman guard, who bowed his way out and dosed the door behind himself. To Cecil’s surprise, Elizabeth extended her hand to Lennox, who smoothly kissed it as he rose from his bow. Not only her sudden arrival had shocked Cecil but—he could see the wariness in Lennox’s eyes, too—her demeanor toward the man had changed. Though the queen kept the earl, his countess, and their fawning whelp about the court to keep an eye on them, she could neither trust nor stomach the lot of them.

  “My lord Cecil,” Her Grace said, “has this travel-worn man come straightaway to ask again that he and Lord Darnley be allowed to visit Scotland to see about the return of their heritage and holdings?”

  “I summoned him because you—”

  “And have you explained my answer to him?”

  “I was about to, Your Grace, when you so fortuitously joined us.”

  Cecil expected her to take her leave, for they had decided he would buffer her from the Stewarts by being the one to refuse them permission to return to Scotland, while the queen simply insisted she could not bear to part with her kin. Under no circumstances were they to go, especially Lord Darnley, whom his parents had tried to dangle before Mary, Queen of Scots in France when she was first widowed.

  “Then I shall explain to the earl,” she said with an almost beatific smile. Cecil noted she was windblown and perspiring; her usually pale complexion looked heated, and the corners of her mouth were tight. He stood awed anew at Elizabeth Tudor; she had no need for Ned Topside about her court to play parts or create a fiction. She was in her element now, though it frightened him that he did not know what in hell she was going to say or do next.

  “Since you’ve been away, my lord Lennox, Secretary Cecil and I have been discussing his new lands at Theobalds, the house he intends to build there for his second son, since his heir will have his family lands at Stamford. Isn’t that right, my lord?”

  “Indeed, Your Majesty,” Cecil put in and shut his mouth again.

  Lennox looked as rapt as Cecil felt. It was obvious the canny Scot had not the slightest clue what was coming next either.

  “I shall leave it up to you to tell your wife and son the happy news,” the queen declared to Lennox. “After having considered your request again, I am giving you and Lord Darnley leave to go to Scotland to ask Queen Mary and the Scots lords for your lands back. Surely, they will not begrudge the family of my dear cousin Margaret their ancestral lands!”

  Cecil thought Lennox’s stiff jaw might hit the floor. His eyes darted to Cecil, evidently for confirmation of this sudden shift in the royal wind.

  “One favor only, I would ask—no, two,” Elizabeth added.

  “Anythin’, Your Gracious Majesty, och, anythin’,” Lennox said, though Cecil sensed he was flinching for a blow.

  “First, you must promote Robert Dudley as a possible candidate for Queen Mary’s husband,” she clipped out. Hell’s gates, Cecil had known that was brewing. But she was much mistaken if she thought Lennox and Darnley were the proper messengers
—or that Mary of Scots would ever countenance Dudley. “And secondly,” the queen said, “you must leave your countess behind with me for company, as I don’t know what I would ever do without her.”

  Even after Lennox thanked the queen profusely and bowed himself from her presence, Cecil was so in shock he hardly heard the queen’s question.

  “I said, well, my lord?”

  “I meant to tell him the utter opposite, which you yourself commanded only yesterday, Your Grace.”

  “One of the things I value most about you, Cecil, is you never gainsay me in front of others, but only scold me in private later. You think I’ve taken leave of my senses, like poor Kat, don’t you?” she demanded, tapping her closed fan on his arm.

  “Never. Not you. Yet I cannot fathom you think Queen Mary would take Robert Dudley, and especially not if Darnley’s paraded before her. She’d balk like a fractious filly at Dudley and dash right into Darnley’s puny arms. You said you wanted someone loyal to you for her or one who would bring her down.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “If you’d discovered such proofs as I have stumbled on today, you would grasp my reasoning. And by such hooks or crooks, I shall somehow trap my would-be strangler, too.”

  “Met by moonlight in the maze,” Ned Topside declared in his velvety voice. “I believe I shall use it as the opening of the play I am writing for the courtiers.”

  “Leave off, Ned,” Elizabeth ordered, though Meg Milligrew looked thoroughly enchanted. “As soon as the Suttons arrive, we have work to do. And I told you, we do not need a play with a huge cast but only the suggestions of one so you can collect all their handwriting.”

  “I’ve been doing that, Your Grace, and have nineteen samples already, none of which seems to match the note we have as evidence.”

  Elizabeth frowned. She had dearly commanded that she and Cecil would assess the handwriting, but what was important now was getting through this re-enactment of her attack.