by Karen Harper
“Whatever is wrong, then?” she demanded, bustling in with her household keys clanking. “Yes, I may have moved a thing or two, for I can’t abide the jumbled way you keep things—bizarre things, as if you were yet a boy with your prizes from the woods or stables, like those strange brown pieces of soil dug from the earth of your beloved financial exchange.”
“Hell’s gates, woman, that’s precisely the shelf that’s been tampered with! It was right here,” he said, banging his fist on the oaken length of it, now all dusted and tidied.
“But you already had plugs of soil you’d kept from the day the cornerstone of this house was laid. You even had doubles of them, so I assumed you have extras of the one that broke.”
“Broke?” he echoed, raking his fingers through his hair. “Anne, just tell me where in hell are the pieces of my dried brown cake, the one that looked different from the others.”
“Cake? That one did look and smell strange.”
“About this big?” he demanded, circling together the thumbs and index fingers of both hands. “And—it broke?”
“When I moved it, it dropped and went to pieces and dust on the tiles, then dirtied the good Turkish carpet. It was a mess, and I swept it up, which I should never have to do in this huge house of servants, oh, no, not Sir Thomas Gresham’s wife. But he doesn’t want any servants in the great big room full of—of dirt in more ways than one!”
“I didn’t ask or tell you to clean here—to tamper with my things!”
“But it was just soil, wasn’t it? You look white as a sheet.”
“Only because you managed to break and discard a gift for Her Majesty, a unique and expensive one at that!”
Anne sucked in a breath and clapped her hands over her mouth. She was still fair, his Anne, with her slender, erect form and piercing blue eyes that used to so enchant him. When their love was new-fledged, she could captivate him with a smile or a touch. Fire still danced in her eyes, even if now it oft heralded a spat and not a seduction. She might look fragile, but her physical stamina and strength were deceptive. Until Marie was nearly six years old, Anne had sometimes carted her about as if she were a toddler.
Once her passion had been for him; she’d been pregnant with their son when they’d married. But the flames slowly went out, and Anne never seemed happy again. Granted, she’d served as his hostess among the rich and powerful in Europe and much favored the new fashions and furnishings the Gresham wealth provided—yet, ever homesick, she’d carped about how much time he spent away, and she’d detested living abroad all those years. Even now, back in England with occasional visits to the queen’s court, she was malcontent.
Besides a passion for power and possessions, Thomas felt he and Anne had little in common now. The tragedy of losing their only son and heir had not united them in grief but had augmented their alienation. Even their little girl, though beloved by both parents, managed to stand between them.
“Why,” Anne demanded, as her fisted hands perched on her waist, “in all of God’s creation would you give the queen a dirt cake? The pearls you found for her, the other things, including that fine Barbary horse you brought her back once, I can see, but—”
He collapsed into the nearest carved chair. His bad leg was losing its strength, and he was about to lose his temper. He felt sick, just sick. And here the queen had coerced him into visiting starch houses, one of which he’d vowed desperately to himself he’d never set foot in again, and to protect Anne, damn her.
“What was the little cake, then?” she wheedled, her voice low as she propped herself up with both hands on the edge of his worktable. As if it were a dark mirror, the polished oaken surface reflected her image. Strangely, that recalled for him the painting of the twin girls he had hidden in a locked chest in this very room, one face in sunlight, the other more in shadow.
“That cake,” he explained through gritted teeth, “was of a rare sort of dried paste the Spanish call chocolata. It is the source of a rich drink King Philip has had secretly imported from the New World. A royal drink among the Indian rulers there, good for health and worth a fortune—a perfect gift for a queen.”
She had the decency to look shocked and sorry. He slumped back in the chair, gripping the arms of it so hard his fingers went white.
“I—you never tell me things anymore,” she accused. “How was I to know? I never did know half the things you were up to. Can you get more? I know you have your sources. I know you have your secret imports, too.”
He looked up at her; their narrowed gazes met and held. His eyes, not hers, were glassy with tears. The fact that he’d once taken a mistress and had loved her utterly—still did—was what truly always lay between them. It hadn’t even helped that Anne knew the woman was dead, or that Anne deeply loved his illegitimate daughter she’d reared. She doted on the child she called Marie-Anne, as if she could pretend the child was truly hers and Gretta had never been. But she had been and seemed to stalk them yet, now not only as spirit but, lately, as flesh.
“Are you quite sure,” he asked, trying to control his voice, “the cake of chocolata is destroyed?”
“Gone out with the rubbish two days ago,” she said flatly—smugly, he thought, as if she were somehow now enjoying this. “My lord, I regret the mishap but cannot change it—like mistakes in life. Well, at least I admit and rue mistakes I have made.”
He struggled to ignore that thrust. “Then I must ask you not to come in here again, even to tend or clean this chamber. And I’d best go see Marie to tell her the same, at least that she cannot enter unless I am here.”
“Which you seldom are—never were,” Anne muttered, and swept from the room.
He was surprised to find her waiting for him in the hall. Perhaps she wanted to be sure he did not speak sharply to Marie, but then she knew he cherished the child, too, for the girl’s sake as well as for the lovely, lost woman who had borne her thirteen long years ago.
“Marie!” he called outside the girl’s apartments. He heard no answer, no movement within.
“Isn’t she about?” he asked Anne, who pushed the door open and went in. “It’s nearly midday,” he went on. “Don’t you know where she is?”
They peeked into the bedchamber together. The bed was mussed but empty. “She was here, resting because she stayed up late last night, reading, she said,” Anne explained, her voice rising. “I told her I would fetch her for midday meal when you came home. I told you we should find a young maid-companion for her, one to sleep in her room since her nurse is gone now.”
“She’s not feeling ill?”
“She said she was fine.”
Fine or no, Marie was neither in her three rooms nor in the other thirty-eight on four floors of Gresham House. The parents and servants searched the central gardens, the stables, the street.
Thomas gripped Anne’s arm when they met in their frenzy by the front entrance. Servants’ voices calling for their daughter echoed through the mansion. “I’m going to the construction site to be sure she isn’t there looking for me, though she knows better than to go out alone.” He turned away, then added, “If she’s not there, I’ll raise a force of men. We’ll search the area—the city if we must. The queen will help put out a hue and cry, I know she will.”
“Godspeed, Thomas. Godspeed,” Anne cried after him as he painfully climbed the mounting block he always used to get onto a horse with this damned leg. He blinked back tears. Those were the very words his dear Gretta had said to him before, still cradling their tiny baby, she’d closed her eyes and died.
In early afternoon, Queen Elizabeth walked in the walled privy palace gardens with her lord treasurer, William Paulet, the Marquess of Winchester. She’d chosen the fresh air because the old man always seemed to reek of the dust of the past. He’d served as comptroller of the royal household under her father and as lord treasurer under her brother and sister.
Widowed now, but looking for a wife even at age eighty-one, Paulet had entertained Elizabeth munifice
ntly at his country home in Hampshire on her royal progress last summer. She’d jested it was too bad he was so elderly or she would put him on Parliament’s list of potential suitors. The wily old man seemed unwilling to retire or to depart this earth until he achieved his aims, several of which, she feared, ran counter to her interests. Politically, he was still helpful; personally, he was untrustworthy and Catholic to the core. Worse, some of his closest friends were the northern lords she feared might rise in rebellion and support of her cousin, Queen Mary of Scots.
Of ruddy complexion, with thinning hair but thickening jowls, Will Paulet, as his friends called him, was hardly heeded these days by the monarch, and he knew it. Still, it did not keep him from lecturing her long and loud, for he was hard of hearing, too.
As ever today, he was accompanied by Hugh Dauntsey, one of his minions, who at least had the sense to stand on the other side of the large fountain to give them some privacy. Dauntsey was the charming, staunch Catholic her sister, Queen Mary Tudor, had brought in to replace Gresham in foreign finance, before she’d seen to her surprise and shame that he was all slick surface but wretched at his work. He had been summarily dismissed, and Elizabeth refused to employ the man in any position.
Though she hated to admit it, Hugh Dauntsey’s very gaze unsettled her. His eyes were so pale blue and rimless that from a distance he seemed to have only white eyeballs with no irises at all. Of a pasty complexion and sporting a thin goatee, part blond and part white, the man almost seemed an albino. He was short and thin as a rail, with deliberate movements. Dauntsey was always finely attired, almost above his station, and it annoyed her that Paulet insisted on treating the forty-year-old hanger-on, who had never wed, more as a son than as his secretary.
“I observe, Your Majesty, the tasks of your government are overburdening the greatly reduced number of secretaries and comptrollers you keep on the rolls,” Paulet lectured her in a loud voice as they took another turn on the gravel path, littered with autumn leaves from the fruit trees. He always turned the better of his two bad ears toward her and cupped it with his hand, despite how his stiff ruff got in the way. “The more subjects directly employed by the crown, the better for the country. Your father said that more than once. Keep them busy, keep them close.”
“I see you keep your man Dauntsey close, my lord. But the bureaucracy was quite bloated,” she told him, nearly shouting. She’d heard Paulet had a listening horn of some sort, but he never used it around her. “And feeding and feting so many people strained our finances. We’ve pared the government to a good level of efficiency. I expect my people not to cling to the past but to look toward new endeavors and enterprises.”
“What surprises? You listen too much to Thomas Gresham, while he’s obsessed with building that foreign exchange. It will just draw in more wily foreigners, I tell you.”
“The influx of foreigners does not distress me as much as the behavior of my own countrymen, those who covertly keep to their Catholic ways. Be sure to share that with your northern friends, for they are being closely watched.”
Despite his years of practicing a courtier’s wiles, he looked momentarily like a fish out of water, gaping for air as she went on. “As for Sir Thomas Gresham’s mercantile exchange, however much its style is inspired by the bourse in Antwerp, it is to benefit our people. He, at least, is loyal and valuable to me, though I know you do not approve of him or get along.”
“Alone—that’s exactly it. You listen to him alone these days. Why, I had advised the royal Tudors for years before Gresham was even born, Your Majesty.”
As Elizabeth made the turn back toward the palace, she saw not only Hugh Dauntsey watching them—and probably hearing their raised voices, too—but Ned Topside, half behind a tree, no less, gesturing madly to her in a most rude way. She was briefly grateful that Paulet couldn’t see well, either, these days. Whatever was the matter with her man to insist she come to him straightaway? More often than not, Ned Topside was saucy and needed his ears boxed, yet he seemed confident and almost commanding right now.
“I must leave you, my lord,” she shouted at Paulet. “We will unfortunately continue this important discussion further.” As the old man went into a creaky bow, she hurried toward Ned.
However much the buffoon Paulet sometimes seemed, she knew from privy reports he could wreak havoc and never forgot an insult. Then again, neither did she. He was fortunate she abided him at all. If he hadn’t had one secret thing in his favor, the great mark against him she would never forgive would have had him in permanent rural retirement by now—and that leech Dauntsey with him.
“Ned, whatever is it?” she demanded when she reached him. “There will be hell to pay if Lord Paulet learns I left him for my principal player. I swear that if you—”
“It’s Meg, Your Grace. I hustled her into a downstairs anteroom, as I didn’t want her riling your maids or courtiers. She’s come back nearly hysterical from the starcher’s loft and says she has to see you, only you. I tried to comfort her, but she’ll have none of me lately.”
Elizabeth did not comment on that last remark but, with her heartbeat thudding like horses’ hooves, hurried into the palace.
The queen found Meg crumpled onto a bench in a small, windowless room lit by a single lantern. The light was bright enough, though, to gild the tear tracks on her cheeks.
“Ned, step out and watch the door so we are not disturbed,” Elizabeth ordered.
“But—” he began, then did as she said, quietly closing the heavy door she assumed he’d be trying to listen through.
“Tell me,” the queen said only, and thrust the lacy handkerchief from up her sleeve into Meg’s trembling hands.
“Someone’s dead.”
“In the streets? Who and where?”
“A woman. In the starch vat at Hannah’s. I couldn’t see a face, but a hand—attached to an arm, I’m sure—floated to the top of the milky stuff. No one else was there—deserted.”
“That’s dreadful,” Elizabeth whispered, as her insides cartwheeled and her knees went weak. “Could it be Hannah or one of her workers?”
“I don’t know, Your Grace! I didn’t”—she blew her nose hard—“just couldn’t bear to pull the body up and look. I dropped my bags of roots and ran back here.”
“And well you did. But where were Hannah’s women?”
Meg shook her head wildly. “Don’t know. Don’t know anything, if it was her or one of her women or a customer or that whitster friend of hers, Ursala something … No one with a wrist ruff, that’s all I know.”
“But you’re certain,” Elizabeth muttered more to herself, “it was not a man? I commanded Thomas Gresham to visit that shop, and if he arrives to find a corpse—or worse … He has enemies, but usually takes at least one guard with him.”
She shuddered. Something had to be done about this now beyond summoning the constable and coroner. She hardly wanted Gresham walking in to find and report a body in a place she’d ordered him to visit. Perhaps it could be proved an accident or even a suicide, because the third alternative would open Pandora’s box.
“Meg,” she said, gripping the woman’s shoulder, “you must go back. I’ll send Ned, Jenks, and another guard with you. Put the guard on the door to seal the scene. Then see if you can discern who the dead woman is. Look for signs she might merely have slipped or tumbled in. I hear wet starch is slippery, so you never know. Then I will have Cecil speak to the local authorities to report the death. You are quite sure you saw no one suspicious fleeing the scene or lurking about?”
“No, but I can’t bear to go back again, Your Grace,” she insisted, twisting the handkerchief. “That hand just came floating up through that starch bath, probably made with my cuckoo-pint. And just think how red and raw starch makes skin … and a whole body steeping in there … bad enough to drown in water, but …”
“You must go back now,” Elizabeth repeated, and pulled open the door only to have Ned nearly tumble into the room. Ordinarily she w
ould have scolded him, but not now.
“Ned, help Meg settle herself, then fetch Jenks and a yeoman guard—take Adrian Bates, but tell him not to wear his livery—and the four of you head immediately for Hannah von Hoven’s starch house, where there may have been a fatal accident.”
“Hannah’s dead?”
“Meg isn’t sure. Hie yourselves there before someone else walks in, then report back to me forthwith. Leave the guard to watch the door. Tell him to just hang about there, not to look as if he’s guarding it, but no one else must go in until we can look around. I must send a message to Thomas Gresham not to visit Hannah’s today, for I fear I might have ordered him into a compromising situation. I only pray this will not turn out to be some sort of foul play, not only for Hannah’s sake but for the stability of the starchers’ booming trade here in London.”
“You mean,” Ned said, as he helped Meg to rise with his hand on her elbow, “that the insults and threats the van der Passes have made toward Hannah might make your chief starcher look guilty and, if Hannah’s gone, you’d lose both of them?”
“What?” the queen cried, snagging Ned’s arm so that he swung Meg back around and stood between the two women. “Ned, you jump far afield. I pray it isn’t Hannah, and I have heard of none such threats from the van der Passes.”
“Oh, yes, Your Grace,” he insisted, “everybody knows it. Disparaging remarks about Hannah’s work to customers, mostly from Dirck, Mrs. van der Passe’s husband. A blowhard who towers over most men and flaunts that he was a knight in the service of the low countries before they came here to—”
“Oh, no,” Meg blurted, gripping her hands together between her breasts. “He may be the man I bumped into in the street. Cursed me, he did, and said words odd, like ‘ja’ instead of ‘you,’ but then so many folks in London talk strange these days, including Hannah.”
“Get Jenks,” Elizabeth insisted, as foreboding made her shiver. “And keep your eyes open, all of you. Go the back way. I fear the twists of this so far, and we don’t even know who’s in that vat of starch.”