Violet flashed her a grateful smile. “I know little of that, I fear. There have been rumors about ghosts and old curses, but my husband says I should not heed them. So I listen to tales of French fashions and new betrothals instead.” As she sipped at the wine, she whispered tales to Kate of love affairs gone awry and gaming debts yet to be settled, though she knew nothing of Lady Green’s to Lady Lennox. They seemed the greatest of friends now, Violet declared. Slowly, she began to smile again, and the two of them even laughed.
More wine passed around the chamber, and as the hour grew later, the games settled into a pattern. Coins passed from hand to hand, though it did seem a great deal ended up with Lady Lennox. Lady Green’s monkey chased the other ladies’ lapdogs and made them bark, and laughter grew freer, words sharper and less guarded. No one else was slapped. But there was something hidden, something barbed and cold concealed by the raucous atmosphere of the party, and Kate wished she could read what it was.
Chapter Four
Kate could hear the hum of laughter, the musical rise and fall of excited chatter as she made her way up the stairs to Queen Elizabeth’s bedchamber. The torches had been lit against the gathering night, and as Kate made her way closer to the bedchamber, the long day’s stress of organizing the queen’s masquerade seemed to float away, a rush of anticipation taking its place. Tonight was the night of the masquerade.
She stopped just outside the door to smooth the skirts of her costume. Violet had helped her stitch it together, a black and white satin creation, meant to look like a character from a Venetian harlequinade play. A tiny, black-edged ruff circled her throat, and her hair was pinned beneath a small, pointed white cap with black plumes. She had no fine pearls like Queen Elizabeth’s treasure, the one Lady Lennox so hotly disputed, but she had something she liked better—her tiny, enameled pendant in the shape of a lute, which Rob had given her. It hung below her ruff on a small strand of seed pearls, where none could see it.
She stepped into the chamber, and found a scene of merry chaos that made her laugh.
The queen’s ladies were like a swirling stained glass window of vivid colors—Greek goddesses in white and silver, peacocks in green, flames in scarlet, forest nymphs and clouds in the palest of pinks. They were dancing and twirling, as if the gloom of uncertainty was banished. Footmen handed out bejeweled masks at the door, their painted and gilded visages meant to conceal for only a night each courtier’s true identity.
Queen Elizabeth herself stood before her prized Italian looking glass. Two of her maids of honor, who stood on either side of the queen, held candelabras to provide enough light for Mistress Ashley to put her finishing touches on Elizabeth’s gown. It was amazing indeed, a sea-colored mermaid gown of blue and green brocade sewn with sapphires and emeralds. Her red-gold hair rippled over her shoulders, held back from her brow with a gold band set with more emeralds. Queen Anne’s pearl dangled from its center. “Are the musicians ready, Kate?” Elizabeth said, turning her head to study her coiffure in the glass.
“Aye, Your Grace,” Kate answered with a curtsy. “Master Cartman has assembled them in the gallery.”
“Good—for I mean to dance all night!” Elizabeth cried, and Kate suddenly noticed that the queen seemed rather too merry. Her cheeks glowed bright red, and her bejeweled hands fluttered over her gown.
“Now, lovey, you haven’t been well—you must not tire yourself,” Mistress Ashley murmured.
Elizabeth pushed her Mistress of the Robe’s hand away from adjusting the gold lace of her sleeve. “I am quite well! I have even more energy than I ever have, and if I want to use it to dance, then I shall.” Her gaze shifted in the mirror, and she seemed to catch sight of Lady Lennox’s reflection behind her. Unlike the others, Lady Lennox wore her usual black gown, brightened only with a trim of ruby beadwork, but her tall figure and fading Tudor red hair stood out in the shadows. “I shall dance all night, and so will everyone else! Now, let us be off.”
The queen spun around, the sapphires and emeralds on her gown flashing. For an instant, she closed her eyes, and in one quick movement she tore the band with Queen Anne’s large pearl from her hair and thrust it into Mistress Ashley’s hand. “Here, Kat, take care of this for me. I shall not need it tonight after all.”
She whirled away and swept out of the small wardrobe chamber, taking her feverish sparkle with her like the light of a candle, and her ladies fell into procession behind her. Kate glanced at Mistress Ashley, who gave a rueful smile as she carefully placed the pearl back on its velvet cushion, and closed and locked the drawer. She had been with the queen since Elizabeth was a toddler, and had seen far more impulsive royal fits and starts.
But Kate remembered that it was the sight of Lady Lennox that made the queen take off the pearl. The pearl Lady Lennox claimed had belonged to her own mother, Queen Margaret.
“We must keep a close watch on her tonight, I think, Mistress Haywood,” Mistress Ashley said quietly. “Come, if we are to dance all night, we should begin. The queen wishes to make merry, and we should make sure Lady Lennox does naught to spoil that.”
Kate nodded, and followed Mistress Ashley as she locked the wardrobe room and they made their way out of the deserted bedchamber, past the guards always posted there. She took a black and white mask from the basket and tied it over her hair.
The great hall, the scene for the queen’s masquerade, was dazzling in its party glory. Even though Kate had spent the day helping with the decoration and the costumes and practicing with Rob and the other musicians, she was still amazed by the royal splendor. The walls, lined with tapestries sewn with sparkling gold thread, led along the long, slightly narrow room to a dais where the queen’s red velvet throne waited, covered by a gold canopy of state. Red and gold satin cloth hung from the rafters, making the whole room seem to flicker with warm flames against the cold night.
Tiered buffet tables were laid with the most lavish of refreshments, platters of sugared fruit and tiny cakes, bowls of the queen’s favorite cherry suckets. In the gallery high above, half concealed by more tapestries, the musicians already played a lively galliard. Jesters and acrobats in brilliant, close-fitting silks tumbled and cavorted down the middle of the room, torches flickering on their antics.
Kate saw the queen sweep toward the dais on Lord Arundel’s arm, the plumes of his silver helmet sweeping behind them like the train of handsome young courtiers who scrambled to keep up. In Dudley’s absence, all her suitors seemed newly emboldened.
“Play a volta!” Elizabeth called to the musicians. She turned to Sir Christopher Hatton, who immediately offered his arm to lead her into the new, scandalous Italian dance.
“Will you partner me, Kate?” a voice said behind Kate, startling her. She spun around, and laughed in relief as she recognized Rob. Even in a red half mask, with a velvet short cloak thrown on over a classical tunic and bejeweled belt, she recognized his golden hair, his flashing smile.
He led her to the end of the hall, where the other dancers made room for them. Kate held tightly to his hand as they took up the opening pose. The music started, the same lively Italian tune they had only just rehearsed that afternoon, though she feared now it was slightly off to her ear. She wasn’t used to being on that side of the music, the dancing side. She took a deep breath, felt Rob’s hand on hers, and decided just to enjoy that moment. A moment where she didn’t have to be anything, worry about anything, except herself.
Kate squeezed Rob’s hand, and they stepped off into the pattern of the dance—right, left, right, left, and jump. She knew the first quick, leaping cadence, before partners could quite learn each other’s rhythms, was the most difficult, but their step went off perfectly. Rob lifted her easily, and they jumped and twirled and spun. Kate laughed at the feeling she was flying.
Rob held her by the waist as they turned, and Kate shifted onto her inside foot as she bent her knees to spring forward.
“La volta!” the crowd shouted, the signal for the dance’s famous lift. Kate bent her knees and jumped as Rob’s hand circled her waist and lifted her high, twirling her around and around as she laughed.
The patterns of the dance shifted, and Kate caught a glimpse of the queen dancing with Sir Christopher. He lifted her higher than anyone around them, and the queen was also laughing, her head thrown back. Yet that feverish red color still glowed on her cheeks, and her laughter seemed like the high, thin sound of a broken horn above the drums.
They shifted again, and Kate lost sight of the queen. She glimpsed Lady Green standing by one of the tapestries, a plate of cakes in her hand and a scowl on her face as she watched the dancers. The other spectators, applauding and laughing, turned into a blur of bright silks and jeweled masks, like a dream.
The music wound higher and higher, until it snapped in a great crescendo and fell into silence like a shower of fireworks over the river. Rob slowly lowered Kate to her feet, and she held on to him as her head still spun giddily.
Once she could see straight again, she turned to watch the queen sweep toward her dais, Mistress Ashley hurrying behind her.
“Kate, Master Cartman, to me!” Elizabeth called.
Bewildered by the sudden change, Kate took Rob’s arm and went to curtsy to the queen. “Your Grace?”
“Master Cartman, would you instruct the acrobats to come back again? I would like to see more of their antics,” the queen said, and Rob made her a low bow before going to do her bidding. He gave Kate a small, secret smile, and she bit her lip to hold back a laugh.
“And, Kat dearest, I have changed my mind,” the queen went on. Mistress Ashley hastened closer, but Elizabeth merely sipped at her wine and reached for a platter of cinnamon almonds. “I wish to wear my pearl after all. I can’t let some of my ladies have grander headdresses than I am wearing myself. Will you fetch it?”
“Queen Anne’s pearl, Your Grace?” Mistress Ashley said uncertainly. “Are you quite sure?”
“Of course I am sure! Kate will go with you,” Elizabeth said with a wave of her peacock feather fan. “Just be sure you are back quickly.”
Kate and Mistress Ashley made their way swiftly from the crowded great hall and up the stairs toward the queen’s chambers. The laughter of the party faded behind them, and the cold seemed even more biting in the empty corridors.
“I do not know what she is about tonight,” Mistress Ashley murmured. “She won’t stand still for a moment. First she wants one thing, then another, with no rhyme or reason. I am growing too old to keep up.”
The queen had many reasons to be changeable tonight, with a guard secretly dying in her wardrobe room. But Mistress Ashley was right that tonight the queen seemed positively frantic, desperate to have a merry time. What part did the pearl play in all that? Lady Lennox claiming the pearl had been her own mother’s had seemed to cast the queen into a melancholy mood, but tonight was supposed to be about dancing and making merry.
She nodded to the guards who stood outside the queen’s bedchamber door, their weapons always held ready. They seemed surprised to see anyone back so soon, but everyone let Mistress Ashley pass wherever she would. Kate followed her through the bedchamber, still littered with abandoned fans and headdresses, lengths of fabric spread like rainbows on the window seats and chairs, lapdogs slumbering by the fire. All seemed perfectly peaceful after the chaos of the dance.
At the iron-bound door of the wardrobe room, Mistress Ashley sorted through the keys attached to her gold and pearl chatelaine, muttering until she found the right one. It seemed to stick in the lock at first, the long latch catching in its slot, and she muttered and shook it until the latch gave way and the door opened.
Kate suddenly noticed something flash along the edge of the floorboard, as if it had just fallen. A glint of gold in the dim shadows. She glanced ahead to see that Mistress Ashley had turned the corner. Curious, she knelt down to get a closer look.
It was indeed a small gold object, a tube of intricate filigree work, no longer than her finger. She frowned as she studied it. Surely she had seen it, or something like it, before? But where?
She quickly tucked it into her black and white sleeve and followed Mistress Ashley. The Mistress of the Robes pushed the door open farther, holding her candle up to shine some light into the perfect darkness of the small room.
“God’s teeth!” Mistress Ashley gasped out one of the queen’s favorite curses. “What happened here?”
Her heart beating faster, Kate peered over Mistress Ashley’s shoulder, and her hand instinctively flew to her lips to muffle a curse at what she saw there. Drawers hung open, and fine brocades and velvets from the chests were strewn around in tangled heaps. The looking glass on the wall hung askew, cracked in one corner.
Kate remembered how the room looked when they left for the ball, everything locked away, perfectly tidy, as Mistress Ashley always made sure the queen’s belongings were left before leaving the wardrobe. It seemed as if a storm had swept through this one space only.
“Has anything been taken?” she asked. The door had been locked; even Mistress Ashley had trouble opening it, and she had the only key. There were guards at the queen’s bedchamber door, and no windows in the wardrobe room.
Kate knew well that everyone said Windsor was haunted. That old King Henry, so hastily buried all those years ago in the chapel, stalked the corridors, as furious as he had been in life. Yet surely no ghost had made such a mess, even one as temperamental as the old king. But who else could get in?
Mistress Ashley rushed to the jewel cases to peer carefully into each small drawer. She knew everything in the queen’s wardrobe, and where each tiny button and lace was kept. “There are a few things out of place, aye, but it looks like it is all here, except for a trinket or two, some false pearls from this drawer . . .” She seemed much relieved, even beginning to smile—until she opened the last drawer.
“The pearl! Queen Anne’s pearl,” she screamed. “It is gone!”
Chapter Five
“No one shall sleep until it is found!” Queen Elizabeth shouted. Her voice rang to the gilded ceiling like an ominous roll of thunder. She stalked around her disheveled wardrobe room, tossing bolts of cloth, footstools, and even her own shoe, at anyone who ventured close. The music and merriment of the evening was swept entirely away by the stream of Tudor temper, and everyone cowered before it. The dancing had ceased as soon as the cry of “theft” went up, and all were in confusion.
Even William Cecil, the queen’s chief secretary and closest adviser, who could weather any whirlwind of fury with a calm smile and a cool word, seemed unsure of what to do. He stood near the door, watching the queen warily.
Everyone else crowded as close to the walls as they could, packed into the small space. Mistress Ashley cried into a handkerchief. They all looked as if they longed to flee, but they dared not.
Elizabeth screamed again, and sent her other shoe sailing toward a hapless maidservant. Kate forced herself to take a deep breath and stand perfectly still in her spot near the now upright-looking glass. She couldn’t help feeling a bit frightened before the queen’s anger, just like everyone else, but she felt no urge to run. She knew how Elizabeth must feel in that moment—that pearl was her mother’s, a small link to a love long lost. Kate’s lute had once been her own mother’s, and when she played it, it felt as if Eleanor Haywood were by her side. What if someone took it, or destroyed it?
“Was it you?” Elizabeth cried, whirling toward her cousin Lady Lennox. The tall lady stood proudly at the front of the crowd, her face glowing pink under her white paint. “You declared the pearl belonged to your own mother, Queen Margaret.”
Lady Lennox fell back a step, her usual ice-like dignity cracking just like her face paint to reveal a flash of angry fire. Her friend Lady Green caught her black velvet sleeve, and Lady Lennox’s mask fell back into place. She lif
ted her chin to stare down her long, narrow nose.
“I have no need to turn thief, Your Grace,” she said loudly. “Truth, after all, is the daughter of time, and I am patient. Besides, I was in the great hall all evening, in full sight of everyone.”
“Indeed she was,” Lady Green declared. Beneath the jeweled edge of her old-fashioned headdress, she looked frightened but most pugnacious. “I was standing with her.”
“Then who was it?” Elizabeth shouted.
“Perhaps it was that actor,” Lady Lennox said with a dismissive flick of her hand. “The young one, with the curling dark hair. He lost badly at primero last night, and seemed most upset. Such people have no morals as we do. If he wanted a gem . . .”
“Nay,” Kate gasped, thinking of poor, sad Thomas and his bad poetry. Of Rob and his acting troupe, now doing so well under the patronage of Lord Hunsdon. There was much to be lost. “He would not have done such a thing.”
“How do you know?” Lady Lennox snapped. “You are a mere musician yourself. What are you even doing here?”
“Mistress Haywood is here because I sent for her,” the queen said. “And I would be careful to hold my tongue if I were you, cousin. Your family surely wants no more cause for mistrust between us, I am sure.”
Mistress Lennox bowed her head and stepped back, but her cheeks still flamed red.
Elizabeth turned toward Kate. Her temper, as it did so often, seemed to have receded like a storm cloud sweeping away over the hills. “Perhaps you could speak to the boy, Kate, and anyone else you think might have seen something suspicious. The musicians have a fine view from the gallery.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Kate gave a quick curtsy and hurried out of the crowded room. She needed to find Rob, and find out what had happened to Thomas.
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