Murder at Hatfield House: An Elizabethan Mystery

by Carmack, Amanda

  “What has happened?” she said again. “Show me.”

  The maid whipped around and ran back up the street without a word, leaving Kate to follow. Anthony took her hand.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said simply, firmly.

  Kate hated to admit it, but she was glad to have him beside her. There was no telling what they would find, and she knew she had to be brave and face it. She nodded, and they hurried after the girl’s fleeing figure. A few people followed—Master Smythson and his wife, the blacksmith. The others still watched with their tense pale faces.

  The girl led them to the church, past the same tilting headstones that Kate and Anthony had talked beside, and up the overgrown pathway. The carved door stood open.

  Kate’s steps faltered a bit as she stared at the shadows just beyond the gaping doorway. She could see nothing in that dimness, and somehow that heavy quiet was the worst. The girl stopped on the stone steps and shook her head.

  “In there, mistress,” she whispered.

  Kate nodded and took a deep breath as she stepped through the door. The air smelled cool and faintly musty, touched with the tinge of old candle smoke and wood polish. As Elizabeth kept her own chaplains at Hatfield since the church closed, Kate hadn’t been inside the village church in some time. The windows that were uncovered were dirty, letting in very little daylight, and the old columns and pews were mere hulking shadows. A candle burned on the altar table, which seemed a very long way away. Faint sobs echoed in the empty space.

  “You should wait outside, Kate,” Anthony said quietly. “Let me see what this is about.”

  Kate shook her head. “Her Grace will want to know exactly what happened. It might have to do with her—her guests at Hatfield. I am quite all right, Anthony, I promise. I will not faint.”

  He frowned deeply, but finally he nodded. Surely they had been friends long enough that he knew he couldn’t stop her. They walked quickly up the aisle toward the circle of light, their boots echoing on the old stone floors, over the faded etchings of the memorial stones.

  It was the girl’s mother, the maidservant called Meg, who knelt at the front of the altar, sobbing. Kate remembered that she sometimes cleaned in the church, and there were buckets and cloths spilled on the floor around her. Meg didn’t look up when Kate and Anthony stopped beside her.

  Or even when Kate let out a cry at the sight that greeted her. The candlelight fell over a body sprawled across the bare altar table. A very still, very stiff body. A dark stain had dripped down the table to the floor.

  As if compelled, Kate moved slowly closer.

  “Kate, nay!” Anthony called, his voice loud in the stony silence. He reached out to pull her back, but she had already seen what it was.

  Ned, the mute kitchen boy, was the body on the altar. But not Ned as she always saw him, scurrying around Hatfield, watching everything with his large eyes and long limbs. His little face was white and stiff, blank. Like the stone he lay on—except for the hideous, gaping red gash across his throat.

  “Oh, Ned,” she whispered, her heart aching as she stared down at him. That poor young man. He had surely never hurt anyone in his short teenage life. Who would do such a hideous thing? What evil had come upon them?

  She reached out to touch his cold hand, and then she saw it. The girl’s anguished shout echoed in her head. Blasphemy. Heresy.

  Ned was dressed in the chasuble, cope, and surplice of a priest. Elaborate, richly embroidered garments meant for a feast day, much too large for his small body, but most carefully arranged. His hands were crossed on his thin chest, and a gold crucifix and onyx-beaded rosary were between his blood-reddened fingers.

  Kate’s stomach heaved and she feared she would be sick, profaning the church even more. It was as if she could feel the sticky black miasma of evil wrapping tight around her, around them all. No one was safe. Not even a child.

  “Oh, Ned, I am so sorry,” she whispered.

  “Come away now, Kate,” Anthony said, and this time he wrapped his arm around her waist and guided her down the altar steps. The others moved forward, blocking her view of the body, and Anthony took her out of the church and into the fresh, chilly air.

  “Here, sit down,” he said, leading her to one of the flat stone crypts. It was cold, but she sank down gratefully. Her legs were trembling so much she feared they would collapse beneath her and she would lie in the dirt and the dead leaves, sobbing helplessly. And there was no time to be helpless now.

  “That poor, poor boy,” she whispered, her throat tight. “Such a vile, wicked thing.”

  “These are wicked days, I fear,” Anthony said quietly. He took a clean handkerchief from inside his plain dark russet doublet and pressed it into her shaking hand. “Master Hardy returned from London yesterday and brought news of more burnings at Smithfield. But this—I have never seen the likes of this. It is . . .”

  “Hideous?” Kate murmured. She wiped at her eyes and nodded. Surely she would never forget the terrible sight. Whenever she slept, it would be there, waiting for her. Poor Ned, horribly murdered and his body thus profaned.

  “I should have tried harder to keep you away,” Anthony said. “I am not much of a friend.”

  Kate laughed hoarsely. “How, Anthony? Tied me to a tree? Locked me in Master Hardy’s offices? Nay, you know I will not be stopped sometimes. If only . . .”

  She heard a ragged sob, and looked over to see that Meg had left the church and huddled beneath a tree with her daughter. Eager to speak with the woman, Kate made her best effort to compose herself. She slid down from her stone seat and made her way across the churchyard to them.

  “You were the one who found Ned, mistress?” Kate asked gently.

  Meg glanced up, her thin face gray and streaked with tears. She seemed to recognize Kate as one of Elizabeth’s ladies, for she struggled to her feet and tried to curtsy, but Kate took her arm and made her sit back down.

  “Aye, ’twas me who found—that,” she said. She put her arm around her sobbing daughter.

  “Such a dreadful thing,” Kate said. “Dreadful” was such a small word, but she couldn’t think what could fully encompass the horror of Ned’s desecrated body.

  “The door was open when I got here to do my usual cleaning, but I thought nothing of it.”

  “Is the door often open?”

  Meg shook her head. “It’s meant to be kept bolted, of course, but ofttimes old Master Payne likes to come in and look about. He shouldn’t, but—well, it seems to do no harm and keeps him quiet-like. After what happened to him and all.”

  “Master Payne?” Kate said sharply. She remembered well the old vicar shouting “fornicators” at her and Anthony here in this very churchyard. His wild eyes. The way he lurked around the village, seeing sin and damnation at every turn. “Was he there today?”

  “Oh, nay, mistress,” Meg cried, her eyes wide. She glanced around guiltily. “No one was about at all, especially not the old vicar. I went to light a candle—it’s so gloomy in there—and that was when I found the poor boy.”

  “So you saw nothing at all? You heard nothing out of the ordinary? No footsteps or doors slamming?”

  The woman went very still for an instant, and Kate was sure she would say something else. Something more. But Meg just shook her head, refusing to look at Kate. “Nothing at all. ’Twas silent, like it always is.”

  “A demon did it, Mother. I know it!” her daughter cried. “Master Payne is right when he says we will pay for our sins. God is punishing all of us for going back to popish ways—”

  “Hush now!” her mother shouted. “You must not say such things. Not here. Who knows who might be listening?”

  The girl’s face went red, but she shook her head. “It was a demon. I saw it, that black cloak—”

  “Black cloak?” Kate said. Braceton too had mentioned a cloaked figure who vanished into the woods after firing on him. And there was the veiled woman who frightened Ned in the halls of Hatfield. Could they be one
and the same? What were they seeking? Was Braceton the only common factor?

  But Braceton’s assailant used bows and arrows to kill from a distance. Ned’s throat was slashed by a blade before he was dressed in those vestments.

  A blade wielded not by a demon, but by an all too human attacker.

  Kate knew whoever had done these things had to be human, someone embroiled in the complex, sticky web of the politics around them. But the hysterical talk of demons still made her shiver.

  “You saw someone in a black cloak? Fleeing from the church?” she said.

  “We saw nothing at all,” Meg said, grabbing her daughter’s hand. “She is upset, and rightly so. She knows not what she says. If it was a demon, we didn’t see it. We are God-fearing people, of a certes.”

  “But then—” Kate began, only to be interrupted by a shout. She looked over her shoulder to see a man racing up the pathway toward the church. Some of the villagers ran after him, reaching out to try to hold him back.

  He was an older man, thin and bent, one shoulder twisted higher than the other, clad in rough gray garments. Yet he managed to evade the people who chased him in a tangle of shouts and confusion, and kept running toward the door.

  “You shall not hold me back, varlets!” he cried. “’Tis my own son in there, and I’ll see him.”

  “Ned’s father?” Kate whispered. She hadn’t even known the boy had any family. He was always alone at Hatfield. Yet as she hurried closer, she could see the old man had the same eyes as the boy.

  He tripped on the stone steps, giving someone the chance to grab his arm.

  Master Smythson appeared in the doorway. Blood streaked his doublet and his face was as gray as the sky, but he blocked the old man’s path.

  “You must not come in here,” he said, his voice gentle but implacable. “It’s not a fit sight for you.”

  “Not a fit sight!” the old man shouted. “They say my boy is dead in there, but I know ’tis not true. If I see, I can tell you it’s not Ned.”

  “I fear it is him,” Master Smythson said. “We are sending word to Hatfield—”

  “Hatfield!” the old man spat. “I never should have let him go work in that place. ’Tis cursed, and now it’s killed him. He should never have even looked on princes!”

  First demons, now princes. Kate’s mind was racing.

  Master Smythson shook his head. “Until we hear back from there, you should go home and wait. Please, believe me. . . .”

  “Nay!” The old man yanked himself free and dashed into the church, pushing Master Smythson out of the way.

  Kate longed to turn away from the cloud of grief that lowered over them, but she could not. She could only stand there, until she heard the terrible howl of raw pain.

  “I will find whoever did this—and kill him in a thousand ways worse than what he did here on this day!” Ned’s father shouted. “We are all cursed.”

  *

  The cloaked figure watched from a distance all the comings and goings to the church. The old building had surely not seen so much activity in a very long time. Every person in all the village seemed bent on catching a glimpse of the horror in their midst—and then bewailing the judgment fallen upon them all.

  They did not even know yet the full extent of judgment.

  The watcher saw Mistress Haywood talk to the charwoman and her daughter, a most solemn look on her face before the handsome lawyer’s apprentice took her hand and led her away. It was too bad she had had to see the kitchen boy, but alas it could not be helped. Sometimes terrible things had to be endured to reach the greater good. One day even sweet Mistress Haywood would know that.

  Or not. It hardly mattered.

  The figure saw the boy’s father fight his way into the church, and heard him vow bloody vengeance on whoever had done the foul deed. Vengeance—aye, that was something the watcher knew well, indeed. Perhaps one day the old man would have his blood price. Rumor said he had been a mercenary in old King Hal’s day, willing to rid the king of any annoyance for a price. He would know how to do it, even weakened as he was. Everyone had his day eventually. But that was another thing that mattered not.

  The old man was carried out of the church by the burly blacksmith, followed by the grim-faced shopkeeper Master Smythson, who locked the doors with rusty keys he had found who knew where. They did not bring the boy out, but several of the villagers stood sentinel outside the doors. They whispered frantically among themselves. The scene needed only Master Payne to come along shrieking of hellfire.

  Aye, it would not be long now. The figure waited patiently, having learned long ago the art of staying hidden and going unnoticed. The quarry was within sight of the traps so carefully laid for so long.

  Before the hour was out, the rickety churchyard gate slammed open and Lord Braceton barreled up the pathway, his men close behind him with swords drawn. He was shouting and furious, invoking the queen’s name and her royal heresy laws, swearing her wrath upon them all. Just as full of threats and violence as the day he arrived in the neighborhood.

  The day his manservant met the fate meant for Braceton himself. An unfortunate mistake, that. But it had all worked out for the best in the end. Because now Braceton had time to see what was coming for him. See it—and fear it.

  The boy had mercifully seen nothing—the mere flash of a silver blade in the dark and it was over. He had been a sad sacrifice. But life taught many lessons, one of the most important being that when the cause was just, no sacrifice was too great. God would be merciful to His own.

  And now, when the watcher glimpsed the flash of raw, burning fear in Braceton’s eyes as he demanded the doors be opened and the blasphemy be shown to him, it seemed the sacrifice was indeed worth it.

  His man Wat. The kitchen boy. Braceton surely knew he was next. And the man was deservedly terrified. He had used his religion as justification for his acts; now he could see where his Catholic God had gotten him.

  The figure turned away with a satisfied smile and hurried toward the stream to rinse away the blood, leaving a black cloak behind in the water to wash downstream, unseen.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ned’s father lived just beyond the edge of the village, in a cluster of older cottages. Most of them were tidy, but his had a distinct air of neglect about it. Kate studied the house from beyond the garden gate, unsure how she should approach the man in his terrible, violently wrenching grief. It had been hours since Ned was found, but she didn’t want to further distress his family. Yet she knew she had to try to find answers now, before whoever did this to Ned could get too far away.

  Perhaps Ned’s father, with his palpable volcanic fury, knew more than he thought he did. Or perhaps he was more involved than she wanted to think he was.

  In such complicated days, tangled up in twisted loyalties and religious ideals, anyone could be swept away on the bloody tides, even men who kept to themselves like Ned’s father. Perhaps she was wrong in her surety that Ned’s death had something to do with Braceton. Perhaps it was to do with Ned’s own family. After all, she knew so little about them, even though Ned had lived in the same house with her.

  And yet some urgent instinct told her it did have to do with Braceton. Why else would poor Ned be dressed like a Catholic priest, unless it was to somehow get at the ardently Catholic queen’s man?

  Kate shielded her eyes from the fading sunlight and studied the cottage more closely. Unlike Master Payne’s hut in the woods, it wasn’t falling down in squalor, but it was unkempt. The shutters were loose, the garden overgrown and tangled, but once it had been tidy and even somewhat pretty. It also seemed to be empty.

  She glanced back over her shoulder to see that no one watched her. It was as if the terrible crime had already spread like a poisoned well. She would have to hurry back to Hatfield soon, as Anthony already thought she had done, or he wouldn’t have left her alone. But she wanted to find out all she could to tell Elizabeth. She didn’t have much time.

  She pushed open
the gate, which swung easily on its broken hinges, and hurried up the weed-choked path. Taking a deep, steadying breath, she raised her hand and knocked on the door. There was only silence.

  “Please! I must speak to you,” she called, just in case the man was lurking behind the walls. Even as she said the words she knew it was a vain hope. The house was too still, and unlike in the woods, she had no prickling sense of any eyes watching her.

  She walked around the cottage anyway, searching for any signs that someone was there, for any clues. She found nothing but more weeds, more peeling whitewash.

  As she hurried back to the garden gate, she saw a woman in the doorway of the nearest cottage. The woman leaned on her broom as she watched Kate with frowning suspicion on her reddened face.

  “You won’t find him there,” the woman called. “His sister came and took him away already. Drunk he was, almost falling down from it. He probably was at the tavern before he stumbled here.”

  “His sister?” Kate answered. She could tell the woman wasn’t inclined to be helpful, but perhaps she would be nonetheless. Kate carefully shut the gate behind her and made her way toward the housewife’s doorway, trying to seem as nonthreatening as possible. “Poor Ned’s aunt, you mean?”

  “Aye. She came to keep house for them once in a while, though you wouldn’t notice anyone cleaned at all. Not since he came back from the wars and his wife died,” the woman said with a sniff.

  “He was in the wars?” Kate asked. The man had seemed in no fit shape to fight, but so often the war took men like that, making them not right in the head.

  “Aye, once. I even heard he fought with that high and mighty lord that’s up at Hatfield now. Hard to believe.”

  “With Lord Braceton?” Kate asked, shocked. Ned’s father somehow knew Braceton from long ago?

  “Aye, so I heard. But you can’t believe anything he says.”

  “And he is gone now? I need to talk to him.”

  “I told you. His sister came as soon as she heard what happened to the boy today and took her brother away. He was shouting and angry, but at least he went with her. So you won’t find him there anyway.”