by Karen Harper
“He had been drinking heavily,” the queen countered, though she realized he’d had little time to do so between playing for the dancing and starting his music up here. Had she just been so angry with him for falling and for smelling of strong drink that she’d blamed him unfairly for his own death? Or had she not wanted anything dire to interrupt her fine summer with Robert and resented Geoffrey for that?
“At least, Your Grace,” Harry’s voice broke into her agonizing, “Geoffrey carefully preserved that lute you gave him, honoring mayhap both his music and you before he—he must have fallen or leaped, as you say.”
“It could have been thus,” she put in as she pictured it all. “He had recklessly mixed his sack and my malmsey and knew he would puke. Wanting to protect the lute, he put it carefully down a bit away from him,” she explained, pacing and mimicking motions, “then leaned over the edge to throw up—and simply toppled.”
“Whatever we can deduce, one thing is sure,” Harry said when she stood gazing overlong into the night. “Though it was no doubt as black as this, you must be the only eyewitness. How much time elapsed between the moment he ceased to play and when you heard Ned Topside shout from below? How much could you really see?”
Harry was cleverly playing on her guilty conscience, but it was hardly her fault that the man died, she thought, growing more frustrated and furious each moment Harry kept meddling. In each of the other two murders she had solved, she owed a debt to the deceased or was at risk herself. But she could not—would not—go willy-nilly about her realm solving the deaths, however dubious, of anyone she knew, liked, or admired.
“I cannot say!” she protested, smacking her hands on her skirts. “The timing of the sounds were a blur, and as for seeing—take a look yourself. I hardly had some magnifying scope like Dr. Dee’s, and it can’t pierce the darkness either,” she added sarcastically. She turned away from their stares. If only Geoffrey had worn Dee’s flying harness and soared safely to the ground, her little band would not keep looking for high-flying solutions.
“Harry, I cannot be sure about the timing between sounds,” she admitted, her voice more controlled. “I may have heard a thud and muted shout as he went over, but I cannot be certain when he stopped playing because I could have heard the wind in these vanes.”
Frozen like statues, they all listened to the eerie hum above their heads. Then Franklin began to strum a melody that blended perfectly with the vanes.
Wrapping her arms around herself in a sudden chill, the queen said, “Yes, you see? That’s why I cannot be certain of things.”
“Your Majesty,” Franklin put in with a thump of his thumb on the hollow lute, “could this have been the thud you heard? Mayhap Geoffrey added a finger beat accompaniment to what he played.”
“I just don’t know! But I heard no clear voice before Ned’s below, no one calling out in surprise or fear. Without other proofs, I cannot but judge that poor Geoffrey fell either by accident or by intent.”
Franklin stopped playing and asked, “Majesty, where is that fine lute you gave him?”
“Safe, and I shall let you try it out tomorrow, my Dove,” she said, and started wearily away. Kat, who had waited near the steps, fell in behind her, then Harry and Franklin, but Luke stepped close to hold the door for her.
“A word about your lutenist,” Luke whispered.
“Geoffrey?”
“That one,” he said, nodding surreptitiously at Franklin.
“One moment,” she told the others, and let only Kat into the tower with them. “Well?” she asked the avid man when she faced him in flickering torchlight at the top of the turret.
“I was in the jakes when the lad was, and I fear he’s misled Your Gracious Majesty,” he said in a rush.
He did not waver under her withering frown. The jakes? What could the palace’s public latrine have to do with this? “Say on, man,” she ordered.
“He is much older than fifteen years and, Your Majesty, I am certain Franklin Dove is a eunuch.”
She gasped. “A castrato? That would make sense, for he seemed older to me too, and that high voice … I need no lutenist—no one—who misleads his queen. Still, I understand his reluctance to be gawked at. We English do not favor such barbarian practices like the Italians and French do, at least not but in our gelded horses. Luke Morgan, I shall remember your honesty to your queen. Have you told Lord Hunsdon this?”
“I was going to tell him so that he might broach it with you, but when I saw the opportunity to warn you …”
“Warn me? This will suit me well, for no one will blink an eye if the queen keeps such a lutenist close in her bedchamber. I’ve had enough of music coming through windows.”
She nodded at Kat to open the door behind them again. Harry looked a thundercloud and Franklin white-faced with fear. Could he have realized what Luke just told her?
“I made the mistake of looking over the edge of the parapet, Majesty,” the lad explained. “I never knew I had a fear of heights before, but I feel sick enough to puke, and dizzy too.”
“Then let your heights be only with your art,” the queen declared, thinking that same malady could have suddenly afflicted Geoffrey. But if Geoffrey had been queasy on heights, would he not have protested playing on the parapet long ago?
She turned to Harry but nodded toward Luke Morgan. “Lord Hunsdon, you have a fine new man here. And I have a fine new lutenist to play for me. Franklin, come along. I’ll let you try out Geoffrey’s lute, playing not from the tower through a window but from the next room to me through an open door. And we have much else to discuss.”
WHEN AMY WOKE, IT ALL CAME TUMBLING BACK TO HER. Robert was here. He had finally come to bed with her, though he had only held her hand. Now his side of the sheets was as cold as if he’d not been there at all. It was pitch black, but she was sure she heard men’s voices like last night, not the monks’ singing this time, just quiet talk.
She cracked the hanging bed curtains to see where he had gone, annoyed he’d closed them on her in the warm house. Though daylight dusted the horizon, Robert had lit a lamp on the table in the corner of the room.
Amy rose when she realized Robert was talking to Anthony, mayhap in the hall or on the stairs. His words came clear when she cracked the door. “Wake Fletcher for me to take a missive to Richmond Palace today,” Robert told his steward.
“Straightaway, my lord. You still want to ride out to survey the fields this morn? Your lady won’t mind?”
“We’ll do it early so I still have time for her. And send for that Oxford physician to visit her again after I leave.”
As Anthony started to detail the things they should see on the farm, Amy glanced down at the table where Robert had evidently been writing. She wondered what message he would have to send the queen so soon. That he was safely arrived? That his wife was weaker, sicker?
She bent over the letter he had obviously just written and sanded. He had dumped the gritty stuff on the floor, where she could feel it under her bare feet. Amy was slow at letters and reading. She did little more with pen and ink than sign her name and add simple numbers. But she studied the first line to know how Robert would address the queen and saw it wasn’t written to her at all. It was for someone named Franklin Dove, a lut—lut-en-i-s-t. And there was something about a song—the words were here, but so many of them. Moving her lips to sound them out, she tried to read the letters. The first three words, mayhap the name of the song, she could not get at all, so she forced herself to try to decipher the others:
CHI AMA CREDE
Though she be glittering and wise
With flaming hair and sparkling eyes,
Excelling in each art she tries
Are her vows she loves me lies?
For chi ama crede.
Day by day great grows my need,
And hers seems also to indeed,
Yet my plea she does not heed
And my hopes begin to bleed,
For chi ama crede.
“To bleed?” Amy repeated. Hopes bleed, she tried to puzzle out. She did know one thing though. The first few lines meant the poem was never destined to be sung to or for Amy Robsart Dudley, abandoned wife.
She scurried back to bed when she heard Robert coming. Perhaps seeing the curtains were agape, he came and stood over her, but she pretended to sleep. He went to the table and folded the letter. She watched, squinting, as he sealed it with wax and his signet ring, then went out.
Since her rooms looked over the back gardens and the old tower, she pulled on a wrapper and hurried barefoot to the end of the hall with its window fronting the road. This corridor connected her suite of rooms and those of Dr. Owens’s elderly widow. She got around only with a walking stick, but her mind was still sharp. She was always talking about cures as if she’d been trained in the medical arts too, and Amy felt jealous of the fact the deceased doctor had shared so much of his life and knowledge with his wife.
Amy glanced out to see Robert hand the letter to his man Fletcher, already mounted on his brown-and-white horse. The man carried the letter not in his pouch but on his person. Robert also handed him a small coin purse. Amy could hear the bell-like ringing of those coins vying with the chants of the abbots and monks.
“Oh, good morning, Lady Dudley.” Amy jumped at the Widow Owens’s scratchy voice. She at least should have heard the clunk, clunk of her walking stick. The old woman did not see well, but her hearing was still sharp.
“Good morning, Mrs. Owens,” Amy said, stepping back from the window as if the widow would report her spying.
“Feeling a bit better with his lordship here?” Mrs. Owens asked. The old woman had actually given her medical advice from time to time, but Amy preferred the Oxford doctor Robert paid to treat her.
“Oh, of course,” she lied. “But—could I ask you what some words mean, if you know? And please don’t tell Robert, because I don’t want him to think I didn’t know what he—he said.”
When the old woman nodded, Amy blurted, “I cannot really spell or say them.”
“Just repeat however he pronounced them,” Mrs. Owens urged.
“Chi ama crayda or creeda.” Amy did her best to sound out what she had read, praying Robert took his time coming back upstairs.
“Hmm,” the widow said, nodding sagely, as if she’d been asked to diagnose some dire illness. “You know, I think he slipped in an Italian phrase on you. Yes, I warrant that’s Italian for ‘Whoever loves trusts’ or mayhap, ‘Who loves must trust.’ ”
“Oh, right, that’s it,” Amy said, and made for her rooms. “Thank you, Mrs. Owens,” she called back before she closed the door behind her and, crumpled against it, broke into smothered sobs. She still loved Robert Dudley, but how could she trust him now?
“I SHALL SPEAK TO MY LUTENIST ALONE,” ELIZABETH told Kat when the three of them returned to her bedchamber from the roof. Kat nodded jerkily and went out into the withdrawing room, leaving the door slightly ajar. Franklin, who had been obviously surprised to see a secret back way into the queen’s rooms from the roof, held his lute before him like a shield.
“Sometimes, Franklin, leaving something unsaid is as bad as lying,” Elizabeth began. “Luke Morgan has told me the truth of your—of your sex—and you should have trusted your queen to tell her yourself.”
Her glib, clever lad stammered like a deaf and dumb man, eyes darting, mouth opening, then closing again. “B-but, Your Majesty,” he finally choked out, “I can explain, but … Luke Morgan told you?”
“You feared I would cast you off, thinking you not a man? Rather you are an angel with your heavenly melodies and sweet voice, and the Bible says angels are neither male nor female nor married, so do not fret. Castratos have long made fine musicians.”
“I—yes, I’m relieved—that you know. I hated to keep such from you, but knew people would whisper and point, spread rumors if they knew how this state befell me—castration, you mean, is that not it? Majesty, drunken louts did it to me in France several years ago”—the words spilled from him when she nodded—“when they caught me playing and singing for a man’s wife, though I myself was not the lover, but the messenger.…”
“I need not the dreadful details. Years ago, becoming a castrato was a gift one gave to the church, to God’s music, you know. Perhaps He meant your sacrifice as a gift to me. And, Franklin,” she said, stepping closer and patting his shoulder, “I understand your fear of people talking because you are different, because you do not fit the pattern that we should marry and multiply.…
“Then too,” she went on as she paced to her window and glanced toward where Robin’s bedchamber would be blazing with lights if he were here, “there is another blessing in it. You see, if you are alone with me—say, here in my privy chamber—naught can be amiss, since you are but a eunuch. You know what I mean,” she added hastily.
But even after bucking him up—actually, Franklin looked quite smug about it now—the queen shuddered. When her father had let his vile henchman, Thomas Cromwell, bring her mother down, they had made Anne Boleyn’s favorite lutenist, Mark Smeaton, no eunuch, tell all he knew of the queen’s private life behind closed doors. They had tortured him to make him say what they wanted, including that he too had committed adultery with the queen. Though unwilling, the lutenist had been their spy in the ruination of the queen’s reputation.
But, Elizabeth told herself, striding to the door to let Franklin out and Kat back in, her safety did not hang by a thread on any man’s goodwill. She was queen in her own right and had naught to fear.
Chapter the Fifth
In thine array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal so sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said: dear heart, how like you this?
— SIR THOMAS WYATT, the Elder
ON THE ROYAL BED, KAT ASHLEY CAREFULLY laid out the garments the queen would wear to welcome Robert Dudley formally back to court that afternoon. She even checked the points at which the ribbons and eyelet holes would lace together the separate pieces of bodice, sleeves, and skirts. And then Kat realized the ninnies had not brought the right farthingale. This one had bell-shaped whalebone ribs knit by canvas strips, and the huge, black-and-silver skirts draped over them would drag. The new-fledged style of the fuller, wheel-shaped underpinnings was needed for this gown.
“God save us, but the fan’s the wrong one too,” Kat muttered. “Nary a tinsel ribbon on it.”
She was horrified to realize the slip-up might be her own. But that would never do. Furious, she did not bother to send someone to fetch the right ones, but went herself, hauling the farthingale and fan, however out of breath she felt, down the gallery toward the three rooms that housed Elizabeth’s modest traveling wardrobe.
Kat was not only First Lady of the Bedchamber but also Mistress of the Robes, so she oversaw the staff that cared for the queen’s garments. In London for the long winter, an entire suite and additional storage building were used to house the royal array, but on summer progress they had to make do.
Kat didn’t begrudge the young queen’s passion for clothes, not after all the years the princess had been out of favor and sometimes even declared bastard. Exiled from court, the poor, thin thing had been clad in outmoded or overworn clothes. And after the nearly disastrous scandal with that smooth seducer, Thomas Seymour, Elizabeth had purposefully dressed in plain, dark garb. Now Kat only prayed that the queen’s dazzling rainbow of fabrics and fashions with which she adorned her slim body was not to seduce Lord Robert Dudley.
“ ’Tis Mistress Ashley!” she called out to the keeper of the keys, and rapped her knuckles on the door that led to the wardrobe rooms. “Let me in this instant, or I’ll have your thick heads on a platter!”
The door swept open, and Kat swept in. “You sent the small farthingale and the French fan,” Kat told the guard and two girls who were ru
bbing crushed lavender—the queen’s favorite summer scent—on the rows of heavy, hanging garments. Bodices hung separate from sleeves; petticoats from kirtles. Smocked, embroidered, and patterned undergarments, which the queen changed daily, were rotated to take their weekly turns at the vast royal laundry down by the main kitchen block.
“This fan, you lackbrains,” Kat said, snatching the one she wanted from the clothes press shelf. “And fetch that biggest wheel farthingale forthwith!”
When the wardrobe girl hesitated, Kat stepped forward to unhook the disjointed, skeletal thing herself, but she nearly tripped over a basket of lavender.
“Oh, sorry, milady,” the girl gushed, and bent to scrape the sweet-scented flower heads back in. “The queen’s strewing mistress just been up with these fresh from the gardens and coming back, she is.”
Kat glanced down at the tipped basket and saw amidst the pale purple bounty a man’s shirt. “Men’s clothes in here?” she demanded. “Surely that shirt is not Meg Milligrew’s.”
As the girl shrugged, then spread the shirt out on her knees, Kat knew from whence it came. Meg had been hiding or hoarding the shirt Geoffrey Hammet died in. Its red malmsey stain was clearly etched as if it were faded blood, right over where the man’s heart would be. And the shoulder where the poor wretch hit the pavement was filth-smudged.
Kat gathered the clattering whalebone farthingale to her. Perhaps her leaving the meeting in the stables early last week had made Meg and the others decide not to keep her apprised of their investigation. Or was the shirt a mere keepsake for the girl? Had she stubbornly wanted to make it smell sweet instead of reek with drink?
“Give me that shirt and open the door,” Kat ordered gruffly. She cut a huge swath down the hall, the loose-boned farthingale swaying, the fan in one hand and poor Geoffrey’s shirt over her arm.
But just when she was certain nothing else could go amiss, she nearly bumped into that smug chit Katherine Grey, coming full speed around the corner. “Best heed where you are going, my lady,” Kat said, her voice sharp. She hoped the girl took that as a warning against attracting a Catholic rebellion to her as well as against charging about the palace like a knight at a tilt rail.