by Karen Harper
Elizabeth motioned for Meg to hush and come closer. At the sight of her mother, Sally threw her hood back and finally tugged her hand free of Marie’s grip. “Mother Meg, I know I done wrong to hurt them, but they hurt me, too, aye, they did! I hid in a hay wain and rode into London town, then asked where the palace was to find you.”
Meg bent over to hug Sally hard. “Loose on the road and in London—you—you could have been hurt—been killed,” Meg said through her own sobs.
Suddenly Marie Gresham was shrieking, “No! No, don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me! Unhand me!”
Raising his voice, Dr. Forrest asked Thomas, “Is she fearful of physicians?” Both men fought to restrain the screaming girl as she thrashed and hit against them. “I find no nodules or lesions on her skull under that thick hair,” the doctor went on, “so I haven’t hit a tender spot to set her off so.”
“She wouldn’t even talk before,” Thomas cried. “Mistress Sally, will you come back here?”
Meg and Sally moved together; Marie grabbed Sally’s hand. Sally flinched at the ferocity of the grip.
“I can’t breathe, can’t breathe!” Marie cried as her eyes darted wildly around the room. But it was obvious to all that she was indeed inhaling, even gasping in huge, heavy breaths.
“A soothing potion, that’s what she needs,” Meg said to Elizabeth.
Dr. Forrest glared at the herbalist. “I am here to tend her with proper medical treatments, Mistress Milligrew,” he pronounced over the girl’s shouts. “If my patient needs a soporific, I shall see to it.”
Elizabeth felt on the verge of hysteria herself. She didn’t hold out much hope that visiting a dead woman in her starch shop after dark would be much better.
As darkness fell, Elizabeth felt even more on edge. Marie Gresham appeared to have no injury or physical ailment, not even a fever. Dr. Forrest had deduced that her humors were severely unbalanced from the malady of melancholia and that she was suffering from fantasies of the brain. Nearly incoherent, the girl could tell them nothing of how or why she left Gresham House or how she had come to stand in the crowd outside the palace gates.
Nor could Sally Downs, Meg’s daughter, offer anything about Marie that would help, though her mere presence by the ill girl’s bed finally allowed the doctor to get a sleeping potion down the distraught young woman. Marie’s mother had arrived, but that had hardly calmed the child. Both parents hovered over her as the queen slipped away to join her covert detectors for their stealthy visit to Hannah’s starch house.
Elizabeth was taking no chances of running into a marauding murderer who might have returned to the scene of his crime in the dead of night. Though she had ordered a guard posted at Hannah’s door, she had the men in her party arm themselves with swords and knives, while her yeoman Clifford also carried his halberd. She added two more guards at the last minute, planning to leave them behind in the nearby royal mews while the Privy Plot Council members went on from there.
The stomping and snorting of the horses in their stalls in the vast, dim royal mews made her even more nervous. Ordinarily she loved proximity to these big beasts, but tonight they were acting as if a storm were lurking just off the black horizon.
“Bit jumpy tonight, every rogue one of them,” Jenks said from behind her, as if, for once, he’d read her mind. “Maybe it’s just this fitful wind outside.” His sword clanked in its scabbard until he put his hand down to still it.
“Never mind that,” the queen said. “They’ve got their grooms nearby. Where are the lanterns you said we could take? Two will suffice. And don’t forget the horse blankets. Do you think four of them will be enough, Meg?”
“We better take five, Your Grace. The window over the starch vat is quite large, so it will take two to blacken it against our lanterns, I warrant. There are two smaller windows over the street. And none,” she added more quietly, “over the back alley or on the side running along the stairs.”
As her cohorts gathered blankets and lights, the queen noted that all straw and feed near the few lanterns had been raked away for safety’s sake. Thank God, she thought, for ever since she’d solved the mystery of the fire-mirror murders, she had been even more wary of possible conflagrations.
The queen carried both lanterns, and the others bore the blankets as they made their way from the stables. Leaving the two extra guards behind at the edge of the mews just four buildings from Hannah’s house, they plunged into the darkness of the brisk October night. Ned now led the way, with the queen, Jenks, Rosie, Meg, and then Clifford in his wake.
As they approached the covered stairwell, the queen’s guard Bates emerged from the shadows.
“Hold there!” he said, and blocked Ned’s path with a staff.
“We been sent by the queen, Bates,” Jenks said. “I’m to stay down here with you while the others go on up for a look round.”
“Has anyone else tried to use these stairs?” the queen asked Bates. She could see in their lantern light that he nearly fell over at her voice and, no doubt, from the fact that it came from a plainly garbed and hooded woman.
Bates cleared his throat and shifted on his big feet. “Only one. A friend of Mistress von Hoven’s named Ursala Hemmings been by. I told her not to go up, that her friend was ill. That all right, Your Maj—my lady?”
“Yes. Ill. Very ill,” Elizabeth said, and turned away to head upstairs. She’d chosen well, she thought, to trust Bates. The trouble was, had she known or trusted someone else who had done this terrible deed, or was poor Hannah’s slaying merely tragic happenstance? A robbery gone awry? Meg, who had evidently haggled with Hannah over the price of cuckoopint, had said Hannah was tight with her money, so perhaps she kept some on the premises and word had gotten out. Or, since she was so fetching, had she played some man false, or more than one, and paid the ultimate penalty? But why, evidently, in broad day had her workwomen not been with her? There was, Elizabeth prayed, always safety in numbers.
Thomas Gresham’s heart had finally settled to a slower thud in his thin chest. Sally, who had turned out to be the daughter of the queen’s strewing woman, had agreed to stay with Marie, and both girls had fallen asleep. Neither had so much as moved, as if they shared the sleep of the dead. He thought again of the precious portrait he had hidden at home of the two girls, so close and yet so different.
Marie is safe, she’s safe, he kept repeating to himself. And, in a sort of frenzied litany, My dearly beloved Gretta, she’s safe, she’s safe. He still couldn’t fathom why Marie had gone out alone, and why to this area of the city a goodly ways from their home. The possibilities of that terrified him almost as much as the looming loss of her had, almost as much as the queen’s sending him to see Hannah von Hoven’s starch shop had. He’d feared Her Majesty would suggest he sponsor Hannah’s fledgling endeavor. What then if Anne found out?
He forced himself to put his arm around Anne’s shoulders. She did not settle into his embrace but leaned stiffly toward the bed again. “My poor, dear Marie-Anne,” she mouthed for the hundredth time since the queen’s doctor had left. “Thomas, I can’t believe our daughter clings to this girl and not to us.” Biting her lower lip, she wiped her eyes again.
“You heard Dr. Forrest,” he whispered. “Given time, rest, and quiet, she may come out of this on her own and retrieve her memory.”
Another thing Thomas could not fathom was what this other child meant to Marie, especially since she must just have met her, not to mention the sad fact that Sally was so heavily poxed. Most children sheltered like Marie, who had not seen such horror, would be repulsed, but his dear child was like the mother who bore her—calm, at least usually, and tenderhearted.
He pictured Marie’s mother again, his Gretta, fine and fair. Desperately, he summoned up the memory of her laughing, not crying as she’d been those last few days when the childbed fever racked her and she feared that she would die. Not sobbing as she’d been when she’d entrusted to him the portrait of herself as a child—so much like
Marie now—with her twin sister. Yes, now he saw Gretta laughing like that time she had introduced him to Hannah, her near image, not only in the painting but in the flesh.
Two of you? he had teased, kissing each one on the cheek. Double the delight of such beauty in the world?
“Thomas,” Anne hissed in his ear, “what in all creation are you smiling for at a time like this?”
The smile and the memory faded. “Hasn’t our dear girl always brought us joy?” he countered. “And we have her back safe.”
“Safe in body, perhaps, but something dire and dreadful has happened to her—something she must recover to tell us. Let’s offer to keep this Sally as her companion and maid, if the queen and the herbalist will allow it. With Sally’s help, Marie-Anne must recover to tell us the truth!”
In Hannah’s chill and breezy loft, they closed the windows, then draped the horse blankets over them to hide their lights. Meg pointed out the dipping vat, still full of thickening, settling starch, and then the shelf where the body lay. The six fat bolts of cloth hid all but the top of Hannah’s head, with hair so stiff it stuck out in all directions.
Elizabeth observed everything in silence, then glanced back toward the starch vat. “That large window overlooking the street and St. Martin’s fields was open even now, so we might assume it was open during the murder. Ned, be sure to ask those you question tomorrow if they heard a scream or a fray—or glanced in to note a stranger inside, and I don’t mean Meg.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And try to discern if there’s a way to escape through the window without being seen from the street or the fields, which I doubt.”
“It looks l-large enough for someone to c-creep in or out,” Rosie whispered. Not only had the woman gone to stammering, but her eyes kept darting everywhere in the dim room with its shadows shifting from their lanterns. She looked as if she were certain something was going to leap out at them, and it didn’t help Elizabeth’s pluck to have her companion so knock-kneed.
“But now,” Elizabeth plunged on, “to the terrible tasks at hand. Are these bolts of fabric placed, do you recall, Meg and Ned, much the way you and Jenks found them—and her?”
“Quite sure that’s the way they were when the men put them back in place before we ran to the palace,” Meg assured her, “though I think her head was more hidden when we found her. Do you—want us to take the bolts away?”
“Yes, in a minute. What are these bluish blurs on the linen roll? Let me have more lantern light here.”
“I saw that before,” Meg murmured, “but just thought it was damp seeping into it from her body or garments. Her skirt is blue, so maybe the dye—it bled. I think it’s on more than one of the rolls.”
“Yes, two others, only more faded. Perhaps all these rolls were defective or stained, so they were just left on the shelf and not used. The blue tinge is probably not from the murderer but from someone who simply mishandled them earlier. Now, we must study the way she’s been set on the shelf. Then we will lift her out onto the worktable over there. Rosie, note carefully what is on it, and if there is naught suspicious, clear things away and spread this last blanket there.”
Giving Rosie a lantern and holding their other one high, the queen watched as Meg and Ned removed the six wide rolls of fabric. Stiff as a stone effigy—body, garments, and hair—Hannah von Hoven lay as if encased in crystal.
“Now that it’s gone dark, even in our lantern light, she seems to glow,” Meg whispered, sounding awed. “You know, the pollen from the cuckoopint herbs the starch is made from glows in the dark.”
“She is not glowing in the dark,” Elizabeth insisted. “She just looks pearl-coated because of our lights on that sheen of starch. Men, lift her over here and carefully.”
Ned grimaced as he helped Clifford, and not, she suspected, from the weight of the corpse. “Never felt anything quite like this,” he muttered. “She’s slick but sticky, too. And she looks like—like she’s flying with her hems and hair like this.”
“Or been caught in the big breezes outside,” Clifford put in.
Elizabeth nodded. In the starch vat, Hannah’s hair must have drifted or floated, then set into this bizarre shape, which made it look as if her tresses were wings sprouting from the sides of her head. Her skirts—she wore a brown work gown with only one petticoat—also had assumed a strange shape, perhaps that of the coffin-like vat.
Elizabeth jumped as Meg broke the solemn silence. “She looks peaceful with her eyes and mouth closed, not like she’s met a violent end, but gone to sleep.”
“Or has been arranged in death to look so,” Elizabeth surmised, “just as someone might close the eyes of a corpse and compose the features before burial. Men, stand away for propriety’s sake and search the loft for anything you deem unusual. We women will examine the corpse.”
Wiping their hands off, Ned and Clifford seemed only too eager to obey. They took one lantern, and Rosie held the other over the body.
“I only met Hannah once,” Elizabeth said, “but she was so bright, in more ways than one. This is foul play, I fear, and I mean for us to discover what happened here. I will not have unwed women who strive to make their own way in my kingdom become victims of brutal men.”
Elizabeth’s own words to Parliament danced through her brain again: Fatal fashions are treasons, greed and lust, adultery and murder, in my kingdom …
Both Rosie and Meg looked at her wide-eyed, as if they had caught on to another reason—besides affordable, fashionable ruffs—the queen had favored Hannah von Hoven.
“I see,” Rosie said, and Meg nodded solemnly.
“Then let us see what we can discover here. Untie that little neck ruff of hers, if you please. It looks crushed in places, yet seems to have sprung back in others.”
“Mayhap,” Meg murmured, “in its starch bath, it popped back.”
But they had to find scissors and cut the stiff, S-shaped curves of the four-inch-deep ruff carefully away. Discolored bruises lay not under it but lower on her neck, like a mottled necklace against Hannah’s alabaster throat.
“Choked or strangled,” Elizabeth whispered, “but that does not mean for certain it was the cause of her death. Pin that ruff back on, and let’s see if we can find other marks on her.”
Pulling up sleeves so stiff they crackled, they scanned her white flesh and found blue and brown bruises on both wrists.
“She struggled,” Meg whispered, tears in her eyes, “but someone bigger and stronger held her down in that starch. A killer strong enough or tall enough to lift her up into the vat’s liquid, either to drown her or hide her.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, “strong enough to lift her high so the vat did not tip and, evidently, not that much of the liquid starch sloshed out. Men,” she called over to them, “see how stable that long vat is and what holds it.”
They moved immediately to peer under it and tried to move it.
“Seems solid,” Ned called to her. “It’s set in a sturdy wooden base, kind of like a wooden cradle, but one that doesn’t rock.”
“There was some starch spilled on the floor,” Meg put in. “Not the first time I saw her floating hand, I think, but when Jenks, Ned, and I came back.”
“Then it was spilled when he—surely it was a man—lifted her out to hide her on the shelf,” the queen pronounced. “Why didn’t he just leave her in the vat? His garments must have become sodden with that starch. Perhaps that is what we are looking for—a man with dried starch slopped upon his doublet or cape. But what would that look like?”
“And he could easily change or destroy that garb. But I just remembered something,” Meg added. “Jenks noted sticky footsteps on the stairs, but they had mostly dried when I saw them.”
“Which would mean,” Rosie whispered, “the murderer left by the stairs and not the window.”
“We shall examine all possibilities,” the queen declared, “and any person we even slightly suspect.”
She turned back
to the corpse again. “Rosie and Meg, stand firm, for we are almost finished here. Before we summon the authorities of this ward, we must see if she has marks on her backside. I’ve seen dead bodies where the blood settles and so reveals what position they were in when they died—and this poor, strangled woman …”
But as they rolled her on her side, white starch water gushed from her nose and dribbled from her mouth.
“’S blood, or was she drowned?” Elizabeth cried as her skirts took the stream of what Hosea Cantwell had called the devil’s liquor. “If she were dead when she was put in the vat, would she have that stuff inside of her?”
“I guess some could seep in, but that much?” Rosie cried, dabbing at the queen’s skirts with a corner of the blanket.
“No, don’t,” Elizabeth insisted. “Leave it be so we can see what we might be looking for on the murderer’s garments. But I warrant, then, she was still breathing when she went into the vat and took several gasps of that stuff as she died.”
She braced her hands on the edge of the worktable and shuddered at the image that brought to mind. She prayed poor Hannah had not been ravished, too, but she could not bear to examine her private parts for bruising. That would somehow be the final insult, especially with the men in the room, and whether Hannah had been raped or not, she was still dead. Elizabeth meant to find the murderer, and then he would confess all the how and why, she swore it.
Besides, the body had gone as solid as the wooden vat itself, not only in the starch but in what doctors called rigor mortis. Elizabeth had noted that even Hannah’s face was stiff, so she must have swallowed much starch for it to seep out through clenched jaw muscles, teeth, and lips.
“Meg, you said that the cuckoopint herb is poison,” the queen said. “But mixed with water for starch, it would be diluted from being fatal, wouldn’t it? I mean, if she somehow toppled in, hit her head to knock herself out, then imbibed a huge draft of the starch by mistake—”