The Twylight Tower

by Karen Harper

  Elizabeth stepped forward to take Bella’s and John’s hands, then pressed their palms together. They were blessed to have each other and must never be parted. Though she did not want to gaze on Hester’s face again, she frowned down at her peaceful profile.

  “In this sad turn of events, it is best to let the truth sleep with the dead,” she said, realizing she spoke of Amy Dudley as well. Suddenly she understood and felt kin to both women who had been kept in country exile when they longed for so much more. “John,” she added, “find some decent lutenist to play something beautiful before you bury her. Godspeed. Jenks will care for you, and you must come back to me soon so the child can be born at court with my doctors in attendance.”

  She slipped out into the dim corridor. Flanked by two guards, the queen climbed the broad, lighted stairs toward the royal apartments. She was halfway up when Ned came running after her.

  “Your Grace!” he whispered, gesturing her to the side. “There is something you must have.”

  Frowning, she turned back to him under a hanging lantern as he extended a folded, wrinkled parchment to her. “Not a petition to me about Meg Milligrew,” she said. “I will not change my mind on that.”

  “No,” he whispered, though he looked deeply distressed as well as exhausted. “It’s a note I found on the body—Hester’s—earlier and nearly forgot I’d slid it in my shirt.”

  She opened it where she stood, unable to wait to see the last insulting song the demented girl must have kept on herself to be found if her cause were lost. Or would it be another letter for Hester linking her to her patron, like the one Jenks had brought back from Cumnor, this time mayhap from the wily de Quadra himself?

  Her trembling hands smoothed the small piece of paper on the thick oak banister. She squinted to read it, then gasped.

  It was a mere four lines of a flippant little song she had heard Hester sing more than once:

  I shall do anything for you

  To stand in your good graces.

  Perhaps if you won’t favor this,

  I’ll put on other faces.

  But it was not the ditty itself that stunned her. The lines were addressed To My Master, the Queen’s High Man, Lord Cecil.

  A MESSENGER WITH THE VERDICT FROM CUMNOR ARRIVED the next week when the court was preparing to return to London. The coroner’s jury had ruled the cause of Amy Robsart Dudley’s demise was Fatal Mischance, adding, No one person is deemed directly to blame.

  Yet Elizabeth stared at her face in her looking glass for a good hour after secluding herself, as she said, to pray, and then used her black window like a mirror again that night. Was she to blame, even if indirectly? Or Robert? His man, Edmund Fletcher, had been with Hester, but he could have been in someone else’s employ, since Robert had told Cecil that he knew not where the man had gone. At any rate, the queen had summoned Robert Dudley back to court on the morrow.

  De Quadra? A mere paper one of his aides had signed saying money was owed the lutenist meant naught, at least not enough to confront the man or banish him from England. The wily King Philip of Spain would just send another Spanish snake, mayhap worse than this one. Cecil and de Quadra seemed to get on, and that would be helpful to keep the peace, wouldn’t it?

  But Cecil … What were the true implications of the note Ned had given her? She had not asked him—was afraid to ask him and thereby mayhap lose her closest adviser and the bulwark of her strength. But Cecil was hardly the type to pay for songs or have time to mentor musical talent. She recalled how quickly he had bent to retrieve the papers that had fallen with Hester’s coins. And she could only guess at the depths to which his absence from court had plunged him and to what lengths he might go to be certain he and not Robert was the one to whom she turned in the running of the realm. She recalled how hard Cecil had argued that Hester would have no motive to harm Amy, but was he protesting too much? And on the rooftop, had he reached for Hester to seize her or to shove her over so she would not implicate him?

  “Cecil, can I not trust you either?” she cracked out, jumping up so hard her chair fell backward on the floor. “Then I swear I shall trust but myself!”

  Stomping over to her jewelry box, she smacked the lid open against the wall. She folded the Cecil note with the one implicating de Quadra, then rummaged through the deep, crowded chest to the very bottom. She snatched out a flat box. She’d keep both these papers for ammunition if it was needed.

  “ ’S bones and blood!” she muttered as she jammed the papers flat under the velvet lining of the box of pearls Robin had given her. “I alone am queen, and that is that.”

  The Afterword

  Vengeance shall fall on thy disdain,

  That makest but game on earnest pain:

  Think not alone under the sun

  Unquit to cause thy lover’s complaints,

  Although my lute and I have done.

  — SIR THOMAS WYATT, the Elder

  DECEMBER 18, 1560

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON

  “MY ANSWER TO HER INQUIRY IS STILL no,” Elizabeth told Cecil.

  She noted well her courtiers ceased their chatter and pricked up their ears as if they were all in de Quadra’s hire to spy on anything she said, even in her presence chamber. Indeed, she herself had grown wiser about using informants lately: She had not only sent Dr. Dee to France for several months, but had dispatched a handsome messenger to her cousin Margaret Douglas in Yorkshire with a fine Christmas gift—and the command he come back with intelligence about what was going on up there in the wilds.

  “But, Your Majesty,” Cecil protested gently, taking the petition she shoved back at him across the table, “Queen Mary Stuart writes of the burdens of barren widowhood in her young age and how far she has fallen.…”

  His voice trailed off, and he exchanged a hooded look with the queen before plunging on. “Therefore, the Queen of Scots and France—”

  “Former queen of France now her young husband is dead of an ear infection,” she interrupted. “We all know her mother-in-law, Catherine de Medici, is regent of France for her second young son, so let Mary of Scots go home and try to rule her nation on her own, as I do—until, of course, my Lord Cecil, we make a fine foreign marriage for me.”

  “Then let me bring to your attention, Your Grace, that the former queen of France did at least finally ratify the Treaty of Edinburgh.”

  “Which you worked hard for, my lord. But the woman dared to slander me and to quarter England’s insignia on her coat-of-arms and to say she should rule here in place of me. I will not have her passing through my kingdom, foul North Seas weather or not. If she means to go home to Scotland, she may land in Scotland.”

  She noted Cecil sighed heavily before he placed the petition up his sleeve. He would not look so melancholy for long, she thought, not when she sprang her surprise on him today. And the one she had for Robin.

  As if her thoughts had summoned him, Robin stepped forward from her coterie, handsome and glittering in his black and gold, the colors he had worn since he had been back at court. She supposed the gold was to imply he could yet be royalty, the black that he remained in mourning. Mayhap he was the latter since she had made him her friend but not her favorite these last months.

  Elizabeth inhaled deeply to steady herself for this. The halls, even this presence chamber, smelled of fir and holly boughs the servants had been hanging for the coming holidays. Her own scent of rosewater and lavender—she wondered again how Meg Milligrew was faring, for she missed her hand on the herbs—made her nostrils flare.

  “My friends, as you know,” she said to quiet them again, “I have summoned you today for the bestowment of an earldom on Lord Robert Dudley. But first, now that my comptroller, Sir Thomas Parry, has departed this life to leave the office of Master of the Court of Wards open, I must tell you I am bestowing that great office on William Cecil, in addition to his duties as my chief secretary.”

  It pleased her to see she had taken Cecil by surprise. And Robert, who
no doubt thought that lucrative post should be his. In addition, of course, to his elevation to the peerage he’d dared to push for as a outward sign that she believed he was innocent of Amy’s death.

  “Ah, here is the other matter,” the queen said, holding up the patent for the peerage that would create him Earl of Leicester and place him permanently in the House of Lords, as he thought was his due.

  Robert Dudley glowed with confidence. He could not help it, she thought. It was his way, and that would make him a dominating king and difficult husband. But she could not help loving him, though she had grieved for and buried all those girlish dreams now.

  She reached for Amy Dudley’s knife, which she now used to break seals on correspondence. Whether or not Robin recognized it did not matter, for it was the queen’s keepsake, a reminder of many things.

  “No,” she said, frowning and cocking her head, as she gazed at the document so dramatically that she knew Ned Topside would approve. “I fear not just now, for certain pains still smart and cause agony to us all. Mayhap at a later time.”

  She stuck the knife in the ornately lettered patent and sliced it cleanly in two.

  Some gasped audibly; others stood speechless. Cecil got a coughing fit. A telltale vein throbbed in Robin’s neck, and he simply looked the angriest she had ever seen him.

  “Are you mad?” he cried, balling up his fists, one on the ornate hilt of his dress sword. “You shame me and my name!”

  She stood and, tossing the knife and the torn paper to the table, leveled a straight arm and index finger at him. “I have raised you to where you now stand, my lord, and may someday raise you higher. But I tell you—all of you—there is no master and but one mistress here!”

  No one breathed. Cecil knelt first, then the others randomly until only she and Robin were left standing. Their eyes met and held, his fury fading to fear, hers unblinking and steady.

  Then Robert Dudley went down on both knees before the queen of England as she swept from the room. By the time her ladies caught up with her, she walked alone through the frozen privy garden in the shadow of the palace towers.

  The Author’s Note

  THE QUESTION OF WHO KILLED AMY ROBSART DUDLEY IS one of the most intriguing historical mysteries of all time. Although the evidence was closely examined and the case formally tried at the time, no definitive conclusion was reached. Robert Dudley was implicated and reviled on and off over the years of his life and even after. In recent times it has even been conjectured that Amy’s death was not a murder, suicide, or accident of falling down the stairs: From the distance of centuries, one modern-day sleuth has claimed her broken neck was caused by a spontaneous fracture, a side effect of her advanced breast cancer.

  I believe, however, that someone powerful hired a “hit man”—or woman—to dispatch Amy, either hoping to free Elizabeth to wed Dudley or to shame her publicly and discredit him permanently. The candidates for such a “sponsor” are highlighted in this novel. The undisputed fact that Amy herself insisted that nearly everyone in the household go to the Abingdon fair suggests that she had a compelling reason beyond mere whim to be alone that day.

  Among the many suspicious circumstances and theories (including my fictional version), one thing, however, seems clear. As writer George Adlard put it after studying the Dudley case for years, “The mystery connected with the death of Amye [multiple spellings were common in Elizabeth’s England] Robsart will probably never be cleared up.”

  The poems and song lyrics included in this story are those that could have been popular at this early stage of Elizabeth’s reign. The ones attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt I found especially pertinent, since he was twice arrested and imprisoned in connection with charges of adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn and in both cases received a pardon and returned to King Henry VIII’s favor. It is fitting that a man with such apparent appeal be quoted in a story about the charismatic Dudley’s hold on Queen Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth.

  Katherine Grey is yet to cause the queen much travail; the very month this story ends the girl committed an act of high treason that Elizabeth does not discover until later, with dreadful results. Mary, Queen of Scots, will remain the thorn in the queen’s side for years. The people who caused Elizabeth the most concern in her reign were those “blood-kin” who had various claims, however convoluted, to her throne.

  Lord Robert Dudley’s story hardly ends here, nor does Cecil’s, Kat’s, Dr. Dee’s, or even Meg Milligrew’s. Look for the continuation of their tales in The Queene’s Cure.

  I will close with a few lines from a 1559 song that highlights the young queen’s increasingly tense and dangerous personal and political dilemma about marriage. It is fascinating that so early in her reign, this songwriter read the queen’s dawning realization of her destiny so well:

  Here is my hand,

  My dear lover England.

  I am thine both

  With mind and with heart.

  — WILLIAM BIRCH

  from A Song Between the

  Queen’s Majesty and England

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KAREN HARPER is the author of three other Elizabeth I mysteries: The Tidal Poole, The Poyson Garden, and The Queene’s Cure, as well as a number of contemporary suspense and historical novels. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, and Naples, Florida.

  Turn the page for an exclusive preview of

  The Queene’s Cure

  The next book in Karen Harper’s thrilling

  Elizabeth I Mystery series

  Now Available from Dell

  Chapter The First

  Other distinctions and difference I leave to the learned Physicians of our London College, who are very well able to search this matter, as a thing far above my reach … none fitter than the learned Physicians of the College of London.

  —JOHN GERARD

  The Herball

  SEPTEMBER 25, 1562

  QUEEN ELIZABETH WAS MOUNTED AND WAITING. She shaded her eyes and waved up at the parapet of Whitehall Palace where Kat Ashley was taking her first constitutional walk in the ten days since Dr. Burcote had cured her fever.

  Kat smiled wanly and waved back. The old woman’s recovery would have ordinarily been enough to make the royal spirits soar, but Elizabeth Tudor was en route to visit the Royal College of Physicians in the City. She was even less pleased with them than she had been ten days ago when she had needed them and they were gone. For since then, they had begged off a royal visit—twice.

  “A lovely day for an outing,” Mary Sidney nearly sang the words as her brother, Robert Dudley, whom they both affectionately called Robin, helped her mount directly behind the queen. Ever the optimist, Mary was quite as pretty as she was pleasant, though that lighthearted humor ill-suited the queen today.

  Her Majesty heard a rumbling noise and glanced behind. Boonen, her coachman, was bringing up her round-topped, wooden and leather coach, pulled by the eight matched white mules. Though a ride in it over ruts or cobbles could shake the teeth out of one’s head, Elizabeth’s use of the three she had ordered had set a new trend.

  This one, her oldest, was upholstered inside with black velvet embossed with gold and outside was richly gilded. Like all of them, it was adorned with ostrich plumes. The effect of the equipage was exactly the awe she wanted, though folk had finally stopped calling it “the monster.” She had not wanted to ride in it on the way today, but perhaps it would do for her return if the weather changed or the visit was as trying as she expected. She could, of course, have summoned the College fellows here, but she had wanted to beard the lions in their own den and see exactly what prey they had been hunting lately.

  After all, that pride of lions was lorded over by two men who did not wish her well. Peter Pascal, their past president, gossip said, had never forgiven a personal tragedy for which he blamed the Tudors. When the Catholic Church was cast from England, her royal father had ordered Pascal’s beloved mentor, Sir Thomas More, imprisoned and beheaded. Some said Great Henry could have save
d More, but was angry with his former friend for censuring the king’s conscience.

  Elizabeth felt that Sir Thomas and others were legally judged guilty only for their refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy. This act granted Henry and his heirs—especially, at that time, the newborn Protestant Princess Elizabeth for whose mother the Catholic Church was dissolved—the right to head both the kingdom and the new Church of England.

  But all that was before the torrent crashed over the mill dam: Anne Boleyn beheaded, Elizabeth declared bastard, and four other stepmothers paraded through her young life. Elizabeth could grasp bitterness over someone beloved being beheaded, but she was not to be blamed for what her father had done or for being Protestant either. She was willing to let men, even Papists like Pascal, follow their consciences as long as they didn’t rock the royal ship of state.

  But of even more immediate concern was the eminent physician John Caius, the current president of the college. Also an ardent Papist, he had never forgiven Elizabeth for dismissing him from his lucrative, prestigious post as court physician when she came to the throne four years ago. But it was precisely the fact that he had served their Catholic majesties, Queen Mary and the Spanish King Philip, so assiduously that made her mistrust the man.

  Actually, she didn’t approve of Pascal’s and Caius’s actions any more than they did hers. Though both were learned men, she felt they had their feet mired in the past. Surely new methods and remedies were needed to fight disease today, not old physick. Yes, those two heading the Royal College of Physicians needed a close watch as she urged them to lead England’s struggle against common workaday disease and the tragedy of random, sweeping pestilence.