Elizabeth I - 05 - The Thorne Maze

by Karen Harper

  “Prefer, you see,” she parried, “that is the key word. As full of himself as Darnley is, perhaps he’ll think—for him—you changed your mind. You are a fine actor, and I’d bet a throne you can convince almost anyone to anything. So you must play the part of getting close to Darnley. I am certain you can string him along and not get too close, if you take my meaning. You offered before to spy on my cousin Margaret, and just mentioned cozening the Earl of Lennox. But Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, will have to do.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. I can manage it, of course, and get him to sing like a canary—about his whereabouts during your attack and Templar’s murder, I assume you mean.”

  “That will be a start, though you must discern if his parents have plans for him—romantic plans—with Queen Mary.”

  “Oh,” he whispered. “His taste for men aside, you mean you see Darnley as an—an actor of sorts, too. He could obviously dupe and deceive Queen Mary for his own—his parents’—purposes.”

  “Just do it circumspectly and quickly,” she ordered. “You wanted to write an elaborate masque for court, but now you’ve got one to act in.”

  “Yes, I see. Of course, there will be naught to it, and I’ll report back soon.” He bowed himself out so only she and Cecil still sat at the table.

  “Who is on Bettina’s list?” Cecil asked.

  “About every colleague or student Templar ever had,” the queen told him with a sigh. “The distraught woman obviously went overboard on this, citing everyone Templar ever so much as scolded or who talked back. I will question her again and pare the list down when she is not so unhinged.”

  “Then—my name is on it?”

  “Templar’s berating you was evidently too far back for her to know about. No, it’s a list of people with whom Templar had any bone to pick since Bettina was his wife, stretching back about nine years—as long as you’ve been wed to Mildred—I take it.”

  “Yes, I see,” he said, looking even more unsettled. “Then are Chris Hatton and Jamie Barstow on it?”

  “Cecil, don’t fret. I can’t take this lengthy list seriously. Chris Hatton told me last night that Templar was even angry with me—me!—for ‘luring’ his students to serve at court. Bettina admitted she never could come up to her husband’s lofty standards either. By the way, did you hear her speak of him in the past tense last evening when she simply told us he was missing? ‘He loved this maze,’ she said.”

  “I did. But she’s hardly a killer, and why would she do it at court, even if she wanted him gone for some reason?”

  “Maybe she thought, since she’d helped me, I’d help her, even if she came under investigation. Hence, after someone attacked me, she could kill Templar with impunity because we would assume it was the same attacker. I just don’t know, but I—we—must reason out something soon, besides just keeping everyone out of the maze, before this phantom assaults someone else.”

  “May I see the list then?”

  “We’ve much of royal business to do, is that not so?” she asked, rising. “As I said, I’ll winnow the list down, and we shall concentrate on persons we consider our best bets.”

  “All right then. Let me summon my secretaries to bring in the warrants and such for us to go over.”

  As he turned away, the queen was glad she’d not brought the list with her, or she might have given in to his entreaties to see it. No good to vex him that, for some odd reason she would ferret out without upsetting him, Mildred’s name was on it.

  “But did your sister say why she wanted to leave court—leave me—so suddenly?” Elizabeth demanded. “Robin, I invited Mary here for a fortnight, and she begs my leave to go after but three days?”

  “You know she covets your company, Your Grace,” Robin assured her, “but she knows you’ve been busy.”

  It was true that she’d spent scant time with Mary. She must feel she was being neglected, perhaps because she’d refused to be in the masque. Though Elizabeth and Robin now stood in her presence chamber surrounded by her women, the queen slowly steered him toward the seat set in the open oriel window so they might have some privacy. She sat, then indicated he might, too.

  “The thing is, Your Grace,” Robin went on, leaning close, “Mary misses her home and children. Lord Cecil’s son Tom is visiting there too, but even the Sidney sons bear watching.”

  “Mm, I’ll warrant they do, but why by Mary? Oh, ’s blood, never mind. I know she feels trapped in her rooms, even if she does go abroad at night, which is doubly dangerous now we’ve had this dreadful murder.”

  “And shall I tell her she can go?” Robin pursued. “Besides, she says Queen Catherine Howard’s rushing about outside her door is keeping her from getting any sleep at night … .”

  Elizabeth gaped at him, ready to take his bait when she saw his smug smile. He had no notion, of course, that she actually thought she had sensed a ghostly presence in that hall.

  “I am not in the mood for games and teasing, my lord,” she said and smacked his arm. “Damn, but you’d think a queen could have things the way she wants at least. I cannot make my dear Mary stay with me, and I must needs make my treacherous cousin Margaret Stewart stay!”

  “The word’s out you changed your mind to let Lennox and Darnley go to Scotland soon. People are wondering why.”

  She nodded, frowning. She wished she’d told Ned to find out if Darnley had had any sort of conversation with Templar since he’d been at court. The convoluted possibilities of this puzzle were driving her to distraction.

  “But as you have said, Elizabeth,” he whispered her name as he used to so her attendants would not hear, “you are queen. You can command my sister to stay at court, and you can command anything of me.”

  With one hand on his gartered knee and the other on his heart, he gazed expectantly at her. She felt the treacherous embers of her buried love for him kick into sparks, but fought her feelings.

  “Good,” she declared. “Then I command you to be prepared to go to Scotland yourself someday soon, and with a royal suitor’s pleasant manners—and with the title I shall give you this autumn, of course.”

  “But if you are letting Darnley go, I thought that meant that you had given up on your earlier idea of my courting her,” he protested. “Your Gracious Majesty, I will not allow whatever legal minds you bring to court—those who would like to get rid of me—Cecil, Chris Hatton, Jamie Barstow, too, for all I know, tell you what to do about—”

  “You’ll not allow?” she began, then bridled her temper. “And Templar Sutton?” she probed. “Do you believe, my lord, I brought Templar Sutton to court to advise me on how to most effectively, legally, force you to do my bidding to court and perhaps wed Mary, Queen of Scots?”

  “Of course not. You don’t mean you suspect that I had aught to do with the man’s death?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said, flopping her hand helplessly in her lap. She nearly blurted out to him that she’d been attacked but held back. Always she held back from Robin, fearing she could not trust giving in to him. But who else in the bosom of her court should she not trust? “It’s only,” she tried to explain, “because I have no one certain I suspect of Templar’s death that I am sadly suspicious of far too many.”

  “What made you change your mind—about acting lessons for some sort of romantic play?” Lord Darnley asked Ned as they slipped away from everyone and strolled out toward the grape arbor. Ned had thought it clever to try to steer him out here, even to the very spot from which the brick murder weapon had been taken, but Darnley himself was the one who’d suggested the route.

  “I heard rumors you might be leaving court,” Ned answered, with a slight shrug, “and just couldn’t let you slip away.” He felt nervous, very nervous, and that wasn’t like him.

  “Those are not rumors,” Darnley told him with a lewd wink, “though I know I often arouse them.”

  At that sly turn of phrase, he leaned closer to Ned to bump his shoulder and displayed a bright, hopeful smile. Ned’s f
irst instinct was to smack the sot silly, but he followed Darnley into the shadow of the heavily laden, arching grape vines.

  “What happened to your hands—and what’s that mark on your face?” Ned asked, deciding those questions gave no cause for suspicion.

  “Oh, that. I got so angry with my mount the other day when it got all skittish and ran me through the trees that I plucked off a branch and switched him good. The poor dumb brute looks worse than I!” he added with a sharp laugh.

  “Can you get out at night for assignations?” Ned asked Darnley. “Away from your parents and staff, I mean?”

  “I can and do, but why wait for night?”

  “Surely, not now,” Ned blurted a bit too loudly. “We can meet out behind the maze, I suppose.”

  “Not such a good site as it was once, is it?”

  “It will do as long as the queen or her watchdog Cecil don’t catch on or, worse, catch us.”

  “As long as my mother doesn’t find out,” Darnley countered with a snicker, “though she’d get over it. She has before. She needs me more than any land or fortune.”

  “I suppose you detest Cecil for refusing to let your family return to Scotland all this time—and if you detest him, you’d probably hate those he was close to.”

  “His wife Mildred? Or do you mean the queen? Surely, not the poor, departed Templar Sutton, an outsider who got the queen’s ear immediately when my poor mother, of royal Tudor blood, never could? Ah, Topside, you’ll never get me to say a word against our Gracious Majesty, not at least since she’s said father and I can go to Scotland to pursue our family’s destiny.”

  “And before Her Grace changed her mind? Did you use to resent her power over you? Granted she can wield it with a heavy hand.”

  “You know I’d like to play along with all this, Topside, because I still fancy you,” Darnley said, propping his beringed hands on his hips. “I’ve adored watching you up on the dais or stage, with your fine face and turn of leg. I’d almost risk much for a roll with you, but you’re too close in Her Majesty’s affections to find a place in mine, clever Ned. Best stick with that stupid skirt of a red-headed herb girl who’s always making cow eyes at you no matter how many times you lie in some other maid’s lap.”

  Darnley shook his head ruefully and walked away. Both relieved and disappointed, Ned watched the whoreson codpiece run his hand over the spot where now not one, but two missing bricks made a gap-toothed hole in the arbor’s arch. Darnley eyed the double space there—perhaps he’d been expecting only the first brick he took to be gone.

  Ned watched Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, swagger toward the back of the maze. He fancied for one moment he’d actually walk through it like some sort of specter, but he turned and disappeared around its leafy corner.

  Ned was furious. He’d never failed Her Grace before, not in being asked to play a part. And how dare Darnley call Meg a stupid skirt and in the same breath imply she was enamored of him? After all, most wenches were.

  Two days later, standing between Kat and Rosie on the warm, windy walkway atop the palace’s Great Gatehouse, the queen watched Templar Sutton’s black-draped funeral barge rowed into the main current of the Thames. William Cecil had donated a grave plot at St. Clements Dane in London where his infant son was interred. But the queen couldn’t spare Cecil to attend, nor did she want her people back in her unhealthsome capital. Sir Christopher Hatton and Jamie Barstow, chief mourners accompanying the coffin, were under orders not to enter the city but to wait for the returning barge at Chelsea.

  Spouses by tradition did not attend funerals or interments, so Bettina had kept to her chamber, still induced to sleep by a potion of mullein and rosemary which Meg Milligrew had brewed. The widow had not even come to the funeral feast. All during the repast, Elizabeth had been as distracted as Kat and nearly as despondent as Mildred. There, the queen thought when Templar’s draped coffin was carried to the barge, but for the Grace of God go I, murdered in a maze.

  Now, she startled as Robin Dudley approached her on the parapet. He spoke loudly to be heard above the flap of royal pennants just overhead.

  “The coroner’s report has come at last, Your Majesty.”

  “And why did it follow long hours after the body was returned to us?”

  “They said they wanted to be through.”

  That only bolstered the queen’s belief the parish officials were bumbling rustics, for a coroner’s inquest consisted only of a thorough external examination of the corpse. A civilized Christian nation would never pronounce it legal or moral to dissect a dead body, as a doctor in rare instances might a pauper’s or criminal’s corpse. She noted that Robin, too, looked sorrowful, though he had not even known Templar Sutton. No doubt he was still saddened by his sister’s precipitous leave-taking in but an hour.

  “If their examination of the body was complete, good,” Elizabeth said, walking him a bit apart from the others. “Let me hear their verdict, my lord.”

  “Coroner Malvern’s ruling is one of deliberate mischief—”

  “Mischief? Murder, he means!”

  “Yes, Your Grace. Deliberate mischief resulting in a murder, a homicide, were his exact words, though I warrant you could have told him that.”

  Robin bit his lip, as if afraid to go on; the queen realized his emotions could be colored by the wrenching investigation into his own wife’s sudden death four years before, a death for which many had blamed—still blamed—him. Fatal mischance, the verdict had been in the inquiry over Amy Dudley’s mysterious death, with the further explanation: No one person is deemed directly to blame. But if Templar’s murder went to a trial, she would never allow that judgment. Murder most foul had been committed and by someone who had threatened—perhaps yet did—the queen’s own sacred life.

  “Say on, Robin,” she said, narrowing her eyes against the sun to watch the funeral barge turn the bend of river.

  “Without witnesses, of course, the parish officials ordinarily could not proceed, but since this occurred at court and caused the loss of a royal subject of importance to both you and Lord Cecil, the coroner and bailiff are bound to investigate and will report anon to me on your behalf. Servants and courtiers alike must be prepared to answer questions put to them.”

  “Fine. And they must keep us apprised of their progress.”

  Let them turn something up if they could, she thought. Yet she believed there would be no progress because she had not made any when she had done more than the traditional search for witnesses and turned up naught.

  “Look, Your Majesty,” Kat’s voice interrupted as she came over, pointing into the distance. “Isn’t that the funeral barge returning in great haste instead of stately manner? Why, you’d think Templar has risen from the dead.”

  “Robin,” the queen said, “go see why they are returning and—and what Hatton and Barstow are shouting.”

  She could see them windmilling their arms, but the west wind pulled their impassioned words away. Elizabeth waited nervously, her fists bouncing on top of the gatehouse wall under the flapping pennants. Word of the barge’s return evidently spread, for Cecil and Mildred came up on the gatehouse walkway. Cecil held his wife’s arm while Mildred’s black skirts flapped like ravens’ wings.

  “Something’s amiss,” the queen cried to them and pointed below.

  They watched Robin ride out of the gates beneath them and pound across the wooden bridge over the moat, then gallop down to the barge landing as the queen’s oarsmen put the black-draped barge back in.

  But even before Robin nodded and rode back toward the palace, she knew it was dreadful news of some sort. Her stomach knotted tighter than those garters had to cut off her breath. Though she had told no one, since that moment she’d been fearful of foes and fierce death.

  Robin reined in on the bridge below and cupped his gloved hands around his mouth to be heard. “Plague, the black death!” he shouted to them. “It’s come upriver but a few miles away!”

  Chapter the Ninthr />
  AFTER GIVING THE ORDER THAT SHE WOULD LEAVE for Hatfield House with a train of courtiers and guards the next morning, Elizabeth made her way to bid farewell to Mary Sidney. Now her friend’s sudden departure seemed only wise.

  “Wait here in the hall for me, and do not leave under any circumstances,” she told Clifford, but she took Kat inside Mary’s chamber with her.

  “Dearest Mary,” she greeted her friend, “I shall miss you and regret if I’ve made a shambles of our time together here.”

  “I know it is ever court business for you, even when we should simply be enjoying midsummer madness,” Mary said, hugging Kat after bobbing the queen a quick curtsy. “Your Grace, I hear you’ll be leaving, too, thank God. How close has the plague come?”

  “Within a few miles. You must not allow your bargemen to put in anywhere along the river until you are well past London.”

  Mary sniffed so hard behind her veil that it bobbed. “Do you think I would take that chance, since I have cheated disease and death once? Though, trapped as I am with this body and face, I sometimes think I might have as well have died then!”

  The depth of fury in Mary’s voice surprised the queen, for she usually seemed so stoic. Had she gravely misread her friend? “It will be good for you to be home again,” she assured Mary. “At least Robin said you rode out at night—but alone?”

  “Yes, rode, walked. At home I am oft surrounded by people, but here—in the midst of your busy court—I feel even more alone.”

  A rebuke? An accusation? Elizabeth almost argued with her that she had tried to lure her out among company, but she decided to shift the subject. “Mary, Robin was teasing me, was he not, when he said you’ve heard Catherine Howard’s ghost in the hall?”

  “I have heard—things, but then I’ve been so overwrought these last few days it might have been the raving in my own head. It is here I was admired, courted, and beautiful. I almost take leave of my senses sometimes to think how things once were. And now you have everything at court, and I have nothing, and I wish I could do something to make you understand.”