The Twylight Tower

by Karen Harper

  Holding up her skirts, she nearly ran herself.

  “KAT, DEAREST, WHAT HAPPENED?” ELIZABETH CROONED as she held the old woman’s shoulders while both of her court physicians set her broken arm. She was old now, the queen had to admit, shocked into viewing Kat truly for the first time in years. Seeing her in pain like this made Elizabeth admit to the gray hairs and fragility of the yet ample frame. She knew Kat had become forgetful of late too, but she’d written that off to her being busy and a bit burdened with her double duties.

  “I—I simply turned away from overseeing the maid scrubbing out your hip bath, and the floor came up to meet me. Perhaps it was slippery with the boiled soap and scouring powder. My leg—I think it just twisted under me and I came down on my elbow. However will I tend to everything with but one arm, and my left one at that?”

  “Worry not for that, for you must rest. But, Kat, many are left-handed, and you shall learn to be too,” Elizabeth said to encourage her, but the mention of left-handedness made her think of Felicia again.

  Sui bono? as Cecil would say. Felicia had certainly profited from Geoffrey’s death, as that had vacated the spot of royal master lutenist, but Felicia had not even been at Richmond then. Could it be Felicia was angry that Luke Morgan had exposed both of her disguises? Yet Elizabeth admired the girl and felt fervent sympathy for her pluck in conquering the world of men through masterful lute playing. But as Luke’s eyes had darted so in the Dove of the lute’s direction, she must question the girl. Mayhap those sour notes at the masque were caused by Felicia having to walk across the scaffolding to get to Luke. If only she could recall if the sound of lute music had moved behind the painted canvas during the play, but her mind had been on too much else. And if only she knew if Felicia resembled the runaway Hester Harington.

  Elizabeth held tight to Kat’s shoulders as the doctors splinted the painfully set arm. “I pray it won’t heal crooked, Your Majesty,” Dr. Browne said as Kat swooned. “A woman of this age—one can never tell.”

  “A woman of any age,” Elizabeth whispered to herself, “one can never tell.”

  EXHAUSTED, THE QUEEN LEFT KAT IN MARY SIDNEY’S capable hands and headed back to Luke’s bedside. It was getting late, but she must wake him if he slept and get this over with. The first name she would start with was Felicia Dove, though it was folly to think the girl could keep playing the lute, not to mention topple a sturdy, alert man like Luke Morgan. And something else had been nagging at her that she wanted to ask the girl. Perhaps with Gil Sharpe’s help she wouldn’t even have to ask that directly.

  When she came to the doorway of the sickroom, the queen saw not only Harry kneeling by Luke’s bed, but a black-garbed figure bending over him. At first she feared a stranger in disguise, and she’d told the guard—who was now going down on both knees before her—to keep strangers clear.

  But then she saw the black-garbed man was a cleric, the Reverend Mr. Martin, who assisted the chapel minister she’d sent to Northumbria for his preaching against her friendship with Robin.

  “What—is this?” she whispered, fearing the worst.

  “Luke became most agitated,” Harry told her, lifting his head. His face was a mask of grief. “A few minutes ago, he began to choke. He gasped—and died. I sent for the minister, sent for you and the doctors … even Dr. Dee.”

  As if merely saying his name had conjured him up, Dr. Dee filled the door behind the queen. She turned to stare at him.

  “I see I’m too late,” he intoned. “Your Majesty, it was probably too late for the man the moment he fell.”

  KAT WAS SNORING LOUDLY IN THE ROYAL BED, BUT ELIZABETH knew she could not sleep anyway. And Felicia was not at her assigned post just outside the chamber door to play soothing music. Though she had not been anywhere nearby when Luke died, Elizabeth would send for the girl first thing in the morning.

  But now, what to do about so many things and people. Not only Felicia, but Cecil. Robin—she longed to meet him atop the Round Tower as they’d discussed. Katherine Grey, still suspect in Luke’s fall. Meg, ill of the greensickness had taken to her bed. Assigning Mary Sidney to Kat’s duties for a time without unsettling Kat. And she would order that Luke be buried in Eton’s graveyard on the morrow, she decided.

  Beyond her own servants and courtiers lay her countrymen and beyond that, hostile foreign kings and other countries. Things seemed to be slipping from her control somehow, the queen thought, pacing back and forth between her bedchamber and adjoining privy closet.

  Since most of that must wait until tomorrow and she could not sleep, the queen sent one of the door guards to wake and summon Katherine Grey. And, at the last moment, she told the other guard to fetch maids to pour her bathwater from the kitchen kettles.

  Katherine came tardily and bleary eyed, her usually smoothly combed, Tudor-hued red hair resembling a bird’s nest in her haste. She wore only a robe and flannel mules on her feet.

  “Oh, Your Grace,” she said in that insipid voice with the bovine look she affected lately, “I thought you wanted help with Kat, and here she’s snoring like a pikeman in your bed.”

  “Then we shall keep our voices down. Ah, here come the maids with my bathwater. You may scrub my back instead of Kat, as I would talk to you,” Elizabeth said, gesturing the two kitchen girls in with the four buckets of steaming water.

  “In other words, I am to take over some of her duties?” Katherine whispered. “But you know, taking a bath in the night air can be unhealthsome.”

  Elizabeth ignored that and motioned Katherine into the small tiled room behind her. Though it was not widespread custom to bathe the body often and most certainly not at night, Elizabeth wanted to keep Katherine Grey off balance. She suddenly wished, for the first time all summer, that she were back at cozy old Whitehall in London, where her father had installed in his privy chamber a sunken tub with glazed tiles heated by hot air. Like much of aging Windsor, this room for her bath paled by comparison.

  “Luke Morgan died earlier tonight,” Elizabeth began as the maids sloshed water in the scrubbed tin tub.

  “I heard,” Katherine said, stepping behind the tub to rearrange the stack of flannel towels. “Choked on his own saliva, desperate to talk, I heard.”

  “You hear things quickly, do you not?” Elizabeth inquired as she nodded to the sleepy maids and they scurried out. For one moment she reconsidered the wisdom of facing this ambitious little chit alone in the dead of night, but that must be part of her plan to get this girl to—well, to come clean, the queen thought with a small smirk as she removed her own robe and settled down into the hot water. Her knees were nearly in her face.

  “Fetch that sponge and a handful of those rose petals over there,” she said. Looking mutinous, Katherine obeyed. The girl handed the queen the sponge, then scattered the petals wildly, with deliberate abandon, so most fluttered beyond the tub.

  “Did you note anything amiss during the masque?” Elizabeth asked as Katherine stepped back behind her. Perhaps the girl did not realize that her interrogator could glimpse her face in the mirror on the far wall.

  “About his fall, you mean? I didn’t know a thing of it until I heard the shout that Luke had fallen.”

  “You noted no stranger behind the set?” Elizabeth said, sloshing water up over her shoulders, her eyes fixed on the mirror.

  “No one,” Katherine maintained, straight-faced.

  “Then was someone you did recognize lurking backstage—say, your secret friend and confidant, Edward Seymour?”

  Katherine gasped. Ah, mayhap she had her now, Elizabeth thought, craning her neck to look up at the girl.

  “Not Edward either,” Katherine said, recovering quickly. “Frankly, Your Majesty, I had my hands full, forced by you to play the villain of the piece and trying to parrot all those wretched lines. ‘I vow I shall vanquish one and all and drub Leto’s reputation in the dust of time.’ Such drivel and—”

  “It is drivel indeed. Now why did I ever think to give you such a part
or lines? And then the ones about your willfully disobeying the goddess Diana—”

  “Yes, but at least my character Niobe had children while Diana was forced to be so chaste and virginal that—”

  Elizabeth threw the sponge behind her, splatting the girl full in the face. “Kat catches that,” the queen said, reaching up to seize a towel from Katherine’s arm. “You have a great deal to learn. And one thing is not to lurk behind me, all eyes and ears like a spy. And I hear you raced off to see Edward Seymour the other day, when you know he is forbidden you and you know why, with his seditious family’s past and your veins flowing with some part of royal Tudor blood.”

  “But you yourself have set the standard that one’s most intimate friends and paramours can come from treasonous families,” Katherine countered cheekily. “Robert Dudley’s past shows—”

  Half rising from the bath, Elizabeth slapped her face and nearly slipped back in. Katherine, looking down her nose haughtily, lifted her hand to her cheek but did not flinch or flee. “And this is how you treat someone of your blood,” the girl dared whisper.

  “Only ones that devoutly wish my downfall and are open to treasonous plots against my person.”

  “Then you’d best send someone to Paris to slap down Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and France, Your Grace, or to chastise your other cousin, Margaret Douglas, spinning her webs in Yorkshire, for I am innocent of all such compared to them.”

  “Comparing yourself to them is as foolish and dangerous as your ever trying to compare yourself to me,” Elizabeth said, boldly turning her back on the girl again. “I hope, for your own good, that you understand this warning, cousin Katherine. You may go now.”

  Elizabeth saw in the mirror that the girl opened her mouth to say something else, then evidently thought the better of it. Flipping another flannel towel onto the edge of the bath, where it immediately became half-soaked, Katherine stalked from the room. Slowly, carefully, Elizabeth rose from her bath, which was usually such a fine, protracted exercise in blessed rest. The water had gone very cold.

  Though the interview with Katherine had rattled her, the queen turned her mind again to Robin. She stared at herself in the mirror as she dried off, shifting to see her entire body. If she ever ungarbed for him, what would Robin think of her long limbs, flat breasts, and tiny waist? And if he gazed upon her like this, what would he do and how would she respond? The birthday gift of himself he had mentioned—ah, that would be a fine package to unwrap.

  Chapter the Tenth

  Set me in earth, in heaven, or yet in hell;

  In hill, in dale, or in the foaming flood;

  Thrall, or at large—alive whereso I dwell;

  Sick or in health, in ill fame or in good;

  Yours I will be, and with that only thought

  Comfort myself when that my hap in naught.

  — HENRY HOWARD, Earl of Surrey

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, ELIZABETH stared aghast at her bathtub and the devastated room where she’d interviewed Katherine Grey. Someone had tossed the stack of flannel towels hither and yon. All Meg’s rose petals had been flung about. Sodden spots of pink littered the floor and stuck to walls and ceiling. Lavender and fragrant herbs from other baskets peppered every inch of space. The smell sat in the pit of the queen’s stomach, sickening sweet, rank, and overpowering.

  It looked as if some wild animal had shredded the sponge and cast bits of it everywhere. Though the tin tub had not been tipped, its water had been sloshed out to make a flood on the tiled floors and sop the Turkish carpet. And in the midst of that mess, the velvet-seated close stool that traveled everywhere with her was tipped to add its acrid smell to the chaos.

  “Katherine Grey must be demented,” the queen whispered, staggering back out.

  But then she stopped. Fresh footsteps, which surely would have dried from last night, tracked into the bedroom in which she’d just arisen. Her head down, she followed the wet prints—shod feet, not bare—past the wide bed, where she gasped as she nearly bumped into Mary Sidney. Meg stood dressed but disheveled behind Mary with a tray of what appeared to be herbal remedies. They had evidently just entered from the next room.

  “I got Meg up to see if we could tend Kat,” Mary whispered with a quick curtsy Meg mimicked, “but since it’s you astir and not her, I suppose we’d best let her sleep.”

  “Were either of you just in my privy bathing chamber?” Elizabeth asked, whispering in deference to Kat, when she wanted to scream.

  “Just now?” Mary asked, looking puzzled. Meg shook her head.

  “ ’S blood, of course you weren’t,” the queen muttered, yanking a heavy robe over the towel she’d slept wrapped in last night. “It was that dissembling, whey-faced bitch Katherine Grey, and she’s getting damned dangerous. Mary, run to her room and see if she’s in bed—pull her covers off to see if she’s dressed or wet.”

  “But I saw no one come out into the hall past the guards,” Mary protested. “And I stood outside the door a good quarter hour until I heard you in here.” But she went back out posthaste as commanded.

  Meg came closer as Elizabeth followed the footprints toward the concealed door of the outer wall, rather than the one to the main hall. As in all of King Henry’s palaces, a back exit led to hidden stairs. They went down to ground level, where Elizabeth had posted a guard who also frequently checked that the roof door was bolted from inside.

  “Meg, fetch me a light,” she ordered, seeing the door was not latched from the inside as it should be. Was this how someone had been spying on her? Never in this room had she felt that unease. Half expecting to see Katherine lurking on the other side, the queen put her hand to the latch, lifted it, and yanked the door wide. It creaked slightly but revealed nothing except the stairs up and down from the small stone landing.

  Yet even before the girl came with a lantern, a glimmer of morning light reflected in the silhouette of a damp footprint going up, clearly a small foot, not a guard’s boot. But someone must know the guard was at the door below. And that someone had been here recently.

  “Toward the roof,” the queen whispered. “I don’t like this. Katherine Grey on the roof?”

  “You’re certain it was her, Your Grace?” Meg asked, hovering so close she stepped on the edge of Elizabeth’s robe. “So if she’s on the roof and sneaking into your apartments, you think she could have pushed Geoffrey off at Richmond?”

  Pulling her hems free, the queen shook her head, but she knew the girl could be right. Mayhap Katherine Grey was behind all this, for she’d have the motive to terrify the queen at the least and to have her murdered at most. But committing violent deeds on her own did not seem like the sly, snide Katherine.

  Nor could Elizabeth believe that of Felicia Dove, though the girl was adept at a medley of sexes and stories as well as songs. Mayhap Felicia was working for Katherine, though Elizabeth couldn’t fathom that this Grey girl, unlike her bright sister, Lady Jane, had enough brains to mastermind a plot. Maybe the wily de Quadra had his hand in this. She must again send Robin to him to try to learn more.

  But then her two other distant, though close-as-kin enemies, Mary Stuart and Margaret Douglas, were Catholic up to their ears. They could be behind a long-distance conspiracy. Why must it always be that those most dangerous were blood related? Even her archenemy King Philip of Spain, her brother-in-law, had dared propose marriage after her sister died, and he’d like nothing better than to possess her entire country, not her body or heart.

  “But,” Meg’s voice interrupted Elizabeth’s agonized thoughts, “this door’s always locked from inside.”

  “Kat’s the one who secures it, and who knows if she did last night?” She spun back two steps up. “Come with me, but fetch us a guard first.”

  When Meg had summoned the guard from his post below, Elizabeth took the light from Meg and let him precede her up the twist of stairs. She could feel the breeze now and see wan daylight from above.

  “Door’s blown open up here to the roof,
Your Majesty,” the guard called down. “I checked it several times last night. Best let me look out first if you’re set on this.”

  Yes, she was set on this, on all of it now, Elizabeth fumed as she waited impatiently for his all-clear call or a shout he’d spotted someone. The queen tapped her slippered foot. “ ’S blood,” she whispered more to herself than to Meg, “it wasn’t many years ago my father had the Earl of Devonshire arrested and executed on the charge of merely being an aspirant to the throne that was not his by right. I may have to return to such measures!”

  Wide-eyed, her face white as whey, Meg nodded.

  “No one here ’bouts,” the guard called down.

  “Let’s go back to Kat then,” Meg wheedled. “I brought comfrey knitbone tea and a wreath of pennyroyal for her head, since she says she’s been dizzy of late and—”

  “Fine, but I want to look out up here,” Elizabeth interrupted, and shoved the door wider behind the guard.

  The view was breathtaking with the roll of land and town to the sparkling ribbon of river and the deep blue-green of forests beyond. Surveying the span of flat roof that stretched to small turrets overlooking the courtyards below, the queen gazed at the top of the massive Round Tower. Standing sentinel on its mound, it was the last sanctuary if the enemy encroached or invaded. And Robert had asked—pleaded—that she should meet him there.

  She stood as if entranced until her hair blew in her eyes and Meg said, “Shouldn’t we go back down now, Your Grace?”

  Elizabeth spun to look her full in the face. “I meant to tell you that I am glad to see you out of your sickbed, Meg Milligrew.”

  “I still would rather not get up, but Kat has done so much for me.…”

  “As have I. Therefore, you will bring sweet strewing herbs and accompany my entourage today but a short way by barge to Eton, to Luke Morgan’s funeral and burial.”

  “By barge?” Meg cried, looking truly anguished. “If it’s by barge with all that rocking, I just know I’d lose my insides again, Your Grace, so if I could just beg off, I pray you.”