Murder at Hatfield House: An Elizabethan Mystery

by Carmack, Amanda

  Kate took a quick look at the other volumes and saw they were the same sort of thing. Foxe, Cranmer, all manner of German Protestant pamphlets. And one book she remembered Queen Catherine Parr and her ladies reading in the queen’s chamber so many years ago. She carefully opened it and read over one of the pages. The parchment was a bit water-stained and the ink had run a bit, yet still she could read the words.

  In the margin, a wavering hand had written in pencil: Sinners must pay, the righteous avenged.

  Something suddenly clattered outside the door, breaking the brittle silence around her. Kate’s breath caught in her throat at the shock, and the book tumbled from her hand. No one was there, but she knew they soon would be, and she dared no longer linger.

  She hastily closed everything back in the box and ran out of the horrible little house, with all its darkness and secrets. She could see no one in the clearing, but she ran toward home anyway, still feeling the burning heat of who knew what in the woods.

  Only when she was close to Hatfield’s gates did she dare slow down and try to catch her breath. Master Payne’s books were very dangerous, to be sure, but were they indeed some clue to Braceton’s servant’s death? Perhaps if she had more time to look at them—if she could bear to face the woods and the dank stench again, if Master Payne was gone for a time—she could find out more. Find if there was a connection between Payne and Braceton.

  She was lost in her thoughts, but when she passed the gatehouse at Hatfield she glanced up at the blank gleam of the house’s windows in the sunset light. The sun skittered away and the cold wind caught at her cloak. It felt horribly as if someone watched her, the sensation palpable and physical as her skin prickled. She turned in a slow circle, trying to see if anyone was there. But there was no one.

  No one at all.

  CHAPTER 5

  She was going to get them all killed.

  The figure lurking behind the wall at Hatfield peered out at the courtyard, watching as the woman in the dark red cloak hurried toward the house. What was the foolish creature thinking to go sneaking about in the middle of the day? Princess or no, she was obviously losing her mind and dragging them all down with her.

  Not that it would be such a terrible thing to lose her. There was always a long line of eager claimants ready to leap on the throne, and at this point one was as good as another. But it wasn’t time for this little adventure to end and Braceton to be gone. Not yet.

  The lurking figure watched as the girl, the foolish princess in her pretty crimson cloak, stopped at the side door and glanced back over her shoulder as if to make sure she wasn’t followed. The hood didn’t fall back to show her red-gold hair, but who else would be running about in her fine cloak at that time of day? Elizabeth’s tale of being confined to her chamber sick with a headache was patently false.

  Just like all her lies, her craven prevarications. She wasn’t worthy of her place, the position she had stolen.

  She’d be sorry one day soon, the Boleyn bastard. All her vaunted cleverness couldn’t save her. But for now, she had to stay. Plans would take longer to come to fruition than intended—that was all.

  The watching figure curled its gloved hand into a tight fist as a wave of cold, bitter frustration washed over them. Once word came that it was Lord Braceton sent to question Elizabeth, Braceton who was lurking in the neighborhood, all seemed set to finally fall into place. Braceton was not the largest prey, but he was assuredly one of those who had to pay. And his downfall would set so many others in motion, like a carefully arranged set of dominoes. It had all seemed so very easy.

  Until the arrow went astray in the darkness. A terrible miscalculation, but not one that would be made again.

  The girl in the red cloak slipped into the house and the garden was empty again. The drapery swung into place and the figure turned away. Failure again was simply impossible.

  Braceton had to go. And Elizabeth with him.

  *

  Kate heard the shouts and sobs as she ran up the back stairs, and she felt the fear that had vanished all too briefly return. It seemed that their once quiet, if ever watchful, house was being turned upside down all over again.

  She took off the princess’s cloak and draped it over the banister post as she listened carefully, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from and what might be going on. She heard Cora, the old cook, scream, “Not in my garden, you won’t!”

  Kate turned on the landing and hurried back down into the kitchen. The cavernous space, usually warm and humid with cooking fires and pots of boiling soup, was cold and empty. The smoldering remains of a fire in the vast grate, usually assiduously tended, were down to mere cinders. A pot of stew congealed on its stirring spoon. Lumps of bread dough were deserted on the table.

  There was a flicker of movement in one corner, and Kate spun around to see it was Ned, the kitchen boy. He huddled on the floor, his arms flung protectively over his head as silent tears rolled off his chin. She started to go to him, but another cry from outside made her run out the half-open door to the walled-in kitchen garden.

  She took in the scene with one darting glance, only half-aware that things had gone terribly quiet for such a large gathering. The small courtyard, which led via narrow gravel pathways to the neat beds of herbs and vegetables, was crowded. Braceton’s men hurried by, piling up firewood in a hastily dug pit, while the man himself loomed in front of the cook and her cowering kitchen maids.

  For a tiny woman of advancing years, Cora would not back down from the hulking man before her. She stared up at him, her fists planted on her bony hips, glaring.

  “I have to prepare supper, which will never be ready in time now,” she cried. “I can’t have this nonsense in my garden.”

  “Do you call this nonsense, woman?” Braceton said coldly. He held up a ripped pamphlet, which Kate recognized as one smuggled out of Geneva in recent months and circulated among the countryside. “This filth was found in a cupboard in your own pantry.”

  “I can’t help what others here might do—I have too much work at my hearth, which I need to be getting on with,” Cora said. “And I don’t call that nonsense, or anything at all, because I can’t read a word, you dolt.”

  Suddenly, Braceton’s large hand, shimmering with jeweled rings, shot out and slapped Cora hard across the face. With a sharp cry, the slight old woman tumbled backward, caught by two of her maids before she could fall onto the paving stones.

  “I will not have such abuse in my house, Lord Braceton!” Elizabeth suddenly shouted. She hurried out from under the sheltering eaves of the roof, where she’d been standing half-hidden with Penelope behind her. Her pale cheeks were bright red, her eyes glittering with fury and pain. A shawl was wrapped hastily around her plain gown and her hair hung in loose red waves over her shoulders. She had obviously been rousted quickly from her sickbed.

  “These are my servants,” she said. “I will not allow you to treat them thusly.”

  “Madam, your servants—and anything else you have—are yours only by sufferance of the queen,” Braceton answered, turning his back on the weeping cook. “And yet you repay her by allowing such treason in your midst.”

  “Not even Bedingfield dared to treat me thus,” Elizabeth said with icy dignity, mentioning her most careful gentleman-gaoler from the terrible time at Woodstock. “The queen shall hear every detail of your deplorable behavior.”

  “Indeed she will, because I will tell her myself,” Braceton answered. He tossed the pamphlet into a puddle. “You have been treated most mercifully by the queen, madam, and you have repaid her by sheltering vipers in your house. But no more. I am here to discover the truth and that I shall do, by whatever means necessary.”

  “The truth, Lord Braceton, is that my sister has no more loyal subject than myself,” Elizabeth answered. “That is all you will discover in your brutality.”

  Braceton just laughed, and turned away as one of his men set a fire in the pit and others carried boxes into the court
yard. Penelope beckoned to Kate, and she hurried over to her friend’s side. Penelope held tightly to her hand as they watched the flames crackle to life.

  The fire recalled terrible images of burning Protestant heretics, brought by the clouds of acrid smoke stinging their eyes.

  “What is happening?” Kate whispered.

  “Braceton forced the princess to rise and come down here, along with these servants you see,” Penelope whispered back. “For what purpose but to harangue us yet again, he has not said. But surely it can be nothing good. Even Pope and his ever-watchful wife have kept away, as you see.”

  Elizabeth stared, white-faced, as Braceton opened the boxes and tossed the contents out onto the wet paving stones, just as he had done in the entrance hall that morning. Some he threw back into the case, one or two he tucked away in his doublet. The minutes ticked past, horribly drawn out with uncertainty, the only sounds the booted footsteps of Braceton’s servants and Cora’s sobs.

  A stack of letters tied up with a black ribbon landed in the dirt. Penelope’s eyes widened when she saw them, and Elizabeth took a step forward.

  Kate recognized the writing. They were missives from Elizabeth’s cousins, Henry and Catherine Carey, children of her aunt Mary Boleyn, who had fled abroad to freely practice their Protestant faith.

  “Those are no heretical tracts, sir,” Elizabeth said. “They are merely letters from my family, which have been read over by my sister’s people and which I have been given permission to receive.”

  Braceton gave a contemptuous snort. “Letters from Boleyn traitors.”

  “From my family,” Elizabeth said simply, but there was a world of danger and pain in those three words. Elizabeth never mentioned her mother and very seldom her mother’s family, but Kate knew she was very close to the Careys and missed them desperately. The few messages she was allowed to have from them were treasured.

  Braceton tossed the letters onto the fire, where they immediately burst into flame and crumpled to ash. Elizabeth froze, her lips tight, white at the edges.

  A small piece of embroidery sewn in faded colors in the pattern of Anne Boleyn’s falcon badge followed into the fire, and a manuscript of Elizabeth’s Latin translation of some writings of Catherine Parr. Somehow Braceton had found Elizabeth’s smallest, most treasured keepsakes, and since they held no clues to treason, they were destroyed. It was as if the people whose memory they evoked were being snatched away all over again.

  “Nay, you must bring that back, I say!” Kate suddenly heard her father cry. “I must have that back, it is not finished.”

  Her desperate gaze swung toward the open kitchen door just in time to see one of Braceton’s men emerge with a sheaf of parchment in his hands. Matthew Haywood stumbled out after him, leaning heavily on his stick. Tears streaked his gaunt, lined face.

  “Father, no!” Kate cried. She ran over to him, catching him as he tripped on the last step. When she’d left for the village, she had made sure he was warm by their own hearth, with a glass of the princess’s good wine beside him and hard at work on his Christmas church music. He was having a good day, relatively free of pain.

  Now here he was, barely able to walk, desperately lurching through the house, another victim of Braceton’s mission.

  “Father, you must go back to bed,” Kate whispered urgently.

  “He took my manuscript,” Matthew said, pointing a shaking hand at the servant as the man handed the papers to Braceton. As Braceton carelessly flicked through them, Kate saw it was her father’s Christmas church music, the work he had been laboring over all summer in hopes of cheering the princess’s holidays. The composition that was his only distraction, his only passion.

  “My father must have that back,” she insisted. “It has naught to do with any treason. My father is only Her Grace’s musician, and that is his livelihood.”

  “What is it, then?” Braceton said, frowning down at the notes as if he tried to decipher words in the Araby language.

  “A Christmas service for Princess Elizabeth’s chapel, that is all,” Kate said. Her father’s breath sounded strained and wheezing, and he leaned against her heavily. She feared he could not speak at all, that the exertion had only increased his illness.

  “A Protestant service?” Braceton casually tossed the manuscript into the fire.

  Matthew moaned and sagged against Kate’s shoulder as his months of work, his art, burned away. Elizabeth rushed over to wrap her arm around him and help Kate hold him up.

  “Be of good courage, Master Haywood,” she whispered. “They can burn paper, or even flesh, but never what is in our hearts. Here, Kate, let us get him back to his chamber.”

  But as they started to turn away, worse was coming toward them. Another of Braceton’s servants emerged from the house, and in his hands was Kate’s own lute. The lute that had belonged to her mother, whose spirit seemed to be with her every time she touched the strings.

  “I hear tell they sometimes hide messages in instruments, Lord Braceton,” the man said. “This was near that manuscript.”

  “Indeed so,” Braceton answered. “Good thinking, my lad. They do say that even that traitor Wyatt sent letters in a spinet. Let me see it.”

  As the man handed Braceton the instrument, Kate was so blinded by fury she strangled on the words crowding in her throat. But Elizabeth shouted, “That you shall not have!”

  She gestured to Penelope, who hurried over to take her place holding up Matthew. Then Elizabeth strode forward and actually snatched the lute from Braceton’s meaty hands. The hands that were defiling the delicate inlaid wood and precious strings. Kate had never felt such anger.

  “How dare you, madam?” Braceton shouted. “I am under orders from the queen to search every inch of this snake pit. You shall not gainsay me.”

  “Search my own rooms to your petty heart’s content,” Elizabeth said. “But Mistress Haywood is a young, innocent lady who has done nothing to earn your abuse. This is her personal possession.”

  Braceton and Elizabeth stared at each other for one eternal moment. Finally, astonishingly, Braceton stepped away and went back to searching the boxes. All was silent, but Kate knew very well that a price would be paid later.

  Elizabeth pressed the lute into Kate’s hand. “We have little enough left of our mothers,” she said quietly. “We must guard what we can. Take your father to bed now, Kate. Then wait on me in my chamber.”

  Fearing she might burst into tears if she spoke, Kate merely nodded. She would never cry in front of the likes of Braceton.

  “Let me help you,” Penelope said, and together they turned her father back to the house. He seemed to be in shock, sagging against their shoulders, muttering to himself. Kate’s heart ached as they helped him up the stairs and into his bed. What would she do if his mind snapped over this sad business?

  For a long time after Penelope left them and Kate wrapped her father up in their warmest blankets, he merely lay there, staring up at the bed curtains, plucking at the sheets with his callused fingers. Kate was so afraid; she had never seen her father like this. Even in his illness he always tried to be strong for her, her father and friend, her teacher, her only family.

  Yet losing his work so suddenly and brutally, so casually, seemed to have broken something in him. She knew she had to be strong now for them both, but her anger toward Braceton threatened to overwhelm her.

  She did the only thing she knew would calm her. She reached for her lute, the cherished instrument Princess Elizabeth saved, and started singing.

  Hark! You shadows that in darkness dwell,

  Learn to contemn light.

  Happy, happy they that in hell feel not the world’s despite . . .

  “Eleanor,” her father suddenly said, clearly and calmly, just her mother’s name. “Eleanor.”

  “Nay, Father, ’tis me. Kate,” she said, carefully laying aside the lute and leaning closer to smile at him. “Are you feeling better? Shall I fetch you something to eat?”

&n
bsp; “Kate,” he said, shaking his head as if he was emerging from a dream. If only she could make it a dream for him, erase that terrible afternoon. “I am only weary. You played that song so beautifully. It was one of your mother’s favorites. She would play it for you before you were even born.”

  “I know, Father. I love to play it.” It was the only thing that could take her out of herself, out of the fearful world they lived in now. It was her mother’s gift to her, and she had so nearly lost it.

  “You do look so much like her.” He suddenly reached out to take her hand. “That man has brought evil into this house.”

  Kate swallowed hard. She had heard those words from the madman Payne already that day. “He will soon go, just as all the queen’s men have. There is nothing for him to find here.”

  Matthew shook his head. “He is different somehow. Be careful of him, my Kate. Stay far away from him.”

  “That commandment I can happily obey,” Kate said. She gently took her hand back and tucked the bedclothes closer around him. “Now you must rest, Father. We can start to re-create your Christmas music this evening after supper. I do remember quite a lot of it.”

  “Someone must do something about him,” her father muttered as his eyes drifted shut. “He must be made to leave us alone. . . .”

  *

  “Ah, Kate, there you are.” Elizabeth was pacing the length of the floor in her bedchamber, a book held tightly between her hands but unopened. Her hair was still loose. Penelope and Lady Pope sat in the window seat, watching her in silence. Penelope still looked a bit stunned by all that had happened that day, her blue eyes wide and distant.

  The faint, sour scent of smoke drifted up through the partly opened window.

  “How does your father do?” Elizabeth asked.

  “He is resting now, Your Grace,” Kate said. “I will help him to re-create his music, but he is—we both are—much comforted to still have my mother’s lute. You have our greatest thanks.”