Murder at Hatfield House: An Elizabethan Mystery

by Carmack, Amanda

  As she took up her lute from where it lay on its stand by the fire in her small sitting room, her father leaned forward from his chair and caught her hand in his. She felt the familiar roughness of his fingertips, callused from long years on the lute strings, and it steadied her pounding heart.

  She smiled up at him. Matthew Haywood had served at royal courts since he was a child, first old King Henry, then as chief musician to Queen Catherine Parr, then Elizabeth in her years of exile and danger. But though he had written much of the new celebratory madrigals and pavanes for the coronation festivities, he couldn’t play at the processions and banquets himself. His days in the cold, damp gaol before Queen Mary died had weakened him, and he had to stay close to the fire, wrapped in warm robes and with his rheumatic leg bandaged and propped on a stool.

  Kate looked into his watery eyes, at the beard that was nearly all white now, and had to force herself to smile brightly. She would not worry her father with her own uncertainties, not for the world. He was all her family, and she his, and it had been thus since her mother, Eleanor, died when Kate was born nineteen years ago.

  “I wish you could come today, Father,” she said. “It will be so glorious! You’ve been working so hard to make the music just right. . . .”

  “And so, don’t I deserve my rest? Christmas was too merry. It has all worn me out. And it is too cold out there for an old man like me. I will do well enough here at Whitehall with Peg to look after me. You can tell me every detail when you return.”

  Kate held up the thick sheaf of vellum in her hand. “But this is your music.”

  “I can think of no safer caretaker for it than you, my Kate. You will make the notes come to true life.”

  “Kate!” Lady Mary called out again from the corridor. Kate could hear her friend’s footsteps pattering closer.

  “Go now,” Matthew said. “You cannot keep Her Majesty waiting. You did wonderfully well at all the Christmas festivities. Even Lord Robert Dudley himself praised your music. Today will be no different. There must always be a Haywood in the monarch’s musical consort.”

  Kate gave a rueful laugh. The days of Christmas had indeed been a whirl—a gala month of banquets, dances, plays, and masques, all organized to the most lavish degree by the queen’s handsome childhood friend and new Master of the Horse, Lord Robert Dudley. Kate had played and sang until her voice grew hoarse and she felt giddy with it all. Not since she was a child at Queen Catherine’s court had she seen so many people, heard such fascinating conversations, and eaten such grand food.

  Only now it was a hundred times more intense, more merry. The new queen was like the sun, brilliant and hot, to a world too long in chilly darkness; all was drawn into her orbit. And Kate was lucky enough not only to see it all, but to be given glimpses of the extraordinary woman behind the royal mask.

  “You’re quite right, Father,” she said. “It will all be grand indeed. I will do your music its justice, I promise.”

  “And don’t forget—your mother is always with you, too.” Matthew stroked a gentle touch over the polished wood of Kate’s lute. The lute that had once belonged to her mother.

  Kate felt the prickle of tears behind her eyes and blinked them away. “I don’t forget, Father. Ever.”

  “Kate!” Lady Mary’s head popped around the door. The gray-yellow rays of sunlight from the window caught on her pale red hair, twined with pearls, and the jeweled trim of her red satin bodice. “We must go.”

  With a last kiss to her father’s cheek, Kate hurried out of the room after her friend. Their rooms were at the back of the vast corridors and courtyards of Whitehall, and they ran down and up staircases, circling around servants and courtiers intent on their own important errands on this momentous day. It seemed there couldn’t possibly be anyone left on the streets of London; they were surely all packed into the palace.

  Lady Mary grabbed Kate’s free hand and pulled her along, so eager and joyful that Kate had to laugh with her. Her father was right. This was a day for celebration, not worries. All their desperate hopes and prayers had come true at last, and the future was young and bright, opening up before them all with endless promise. Elizabeth was queen now.

  And Kate had a new life at court, with the music she loved and friends to make. Lady Mary Everley had been one of the first. The daughter of a Protestant family, neighbors of the Grey family at Bradgate Manor who had lived quietly in the country under Queen Mary’s reign, Mary Everley was a bright, vivacious spirit who seemed to burst from her exiled cocoon into the whirl of court. At a Twelfth Night banquet, she had sat next to Kate and insisted on learning how to play a new song—one of Kate’s own compositions. In return, she taught Kate the new Italian dance, the volta, which was the queen’s favorite.

  It was good to have a friend again, Kate thought as Mary pulled her onward through a picture gallery. The portraits hung there—of young King Edward all puffed up in his padded satin doublet; old, bluff King Henry with his red beard and redder face; and the queen’s various stepmothers and cousins—seemed to glare down at their laughter. After— Well, after she lost her last female friend, and after Anthony Elias disappeared into his world of studying the law and making his future, Kate felt a bit lonely. But Mary banished all that.

  Just before they spun around the corner and went down the steps to the long gallery, they stopped and peeked into a large Venetian looking glass that hung on the dark wood-paneled wall. Next to Lady Mary’s sunset hair and red-and-white gown, her fashionably pointed face and pearl necklace with its jeweled E pendant, Kate’s dark blue gown and her brown hair and dark gray eyes seemed like night to day.

  But she was meant to be unobtrusive, letting her music always be at the forefront. And where she could more easily watch and listen to all that happened around her.

  Kate ruefully tucked a loose wave of hair beneath her black velvet hood. At least her hair was behaving for once, not waving wildly out of its confines. And her garnet earrings, a Christmas gift from her father, shimmered against the dark background. She would not disgrace the court.

  “Mary! Whatever are you about, girl? The procession is forming.”

  Some of the sparkle of Mary’s smile dimmed as she turned to face her father. Edward, the earl Everley, strode through the milling crowd, followed by his son Henry and their cousin Richard St. Long. Though they were all handsome, with the earl and Henry sharing Mary’s red hair and Master St. Long dark and brooding as any hero in a masque, Kate could not quite like any of them. Or rather, Master St. Long always seemed courteous enough, but the Everley men saw no need to be.

  And maybe she did not care for them because whenever the earl or Henry was near, Mary’s smile faded. But Mary herself never spoke against them; she rarely spoke of her family at all. And Kate’s job was to observe all she could around her.

  “I had to fetch Her Majesty’s pomander,” Mary said. She held up the pierced silver ball on its velvet cord, swinging it to send waves of lavender and rose scent into the air.

  “Well, hurry now,” the earl said, frowning behind his gray-streaked red beard. “You are only a maid of honor. You can’t afford to anger the queen.”

  “We can’t afford it,” Henry muttered. “Imagine us, Everleys, bowing to the arrogant Boleyn. . . .”

  “Hush, Cous,” Master St. Long interrupted. “You daren’t say anything against the the Bolyens. And Mary is doing her task excellent well. She will do us all proud.”

  Mary and her cousin smiled at each other, while the earl spun around and strode back the way he had come, the crowd making way for him. Richard offered Mary his arm, and Kate followed them down the length of the great gallery. The long, narrow space was crowded, but a wall of windows looked down to the river, letting in the cold light of day and giving the impression of infinite space and sky.

  As Kate rushed along, she glimpsed the barges brilliant with silken banners and the swirl of bright velvets and satins assembling on the water. Lush furs and the glint of jewels, long pac
ked away, were now brought out in triumph. She went down a set of water-washed stone steps to the long covered but open dock and found herself in the very midst of the pageant.

  The Lord Mayor’s barge, and the vessels of all the aldermen and guilds, the leading aristocratic familes, that were to accompany the queen to the Tower were already boarded and arrayed on the river, while the queen’s barge waited at the dock. The queen herself stood just within the palace doors, her arms held out as her Mistress of the Robes, Kat Ashley, fussed with Elizabeth’s fur-trimmed purple velvet mantle.

  Other ladies-in-waiting fluttered around the queen like a flock of bright birds, their scarlet and green and blue skirts twirling as they smoothed Elizabeth’s loose fall of red-gold hair and her cloth-of-gold train. One of them straightened the jeweled princess’s coronet on Elizabeth’s head while another hurried away at Mistress Ashley’s snapped command to fetch a needle and thread.

  Elizabeth herself was still as a statue under all the motion, a glittering figure of red, gold, and white. The only signs of her growing impatience were the twitch of her long, pale, heavily beringed fingers and the tap of her scarlet velvet shoe under her hem.

  “We must be gone before the tides are against us,” Elizabeth muttered. Her dark eyes, so striking in her pointed white face, sparkled.

  “Now, my dove, no need for such haste. You must look perfect, today of all days,” Mistress Ashley tsked. The small gray-haired lady had been with Elizabeth since she was a toddler and had practically been a second mother to the little princess. She had faced imprisonment for Elizabeth, and the two of them had only just been reunited after being kept apart so long by Queen Mary.

  Kate was quite certain only Mistress Ashley could ever call the queen “dove.”

  “Even the tides will surely wait for you today,” Mistress Ashley said.

  “As they did not when I was taken there as a prisoner,” Elizabeth said. “If I must go to that cursed place, ’tis best I go quickly. The rest of you, go aboard now. Quickly! You will drive me mad with your flutterings and fussing.”

  The ladies all bobbed hasty curtsies and scurried onto the barge, followed by the gentlemen of the queen’s household. Lord Robert Dudley was the last to go. He swept his jeweled cap from his handsome dark head and gave it a great flourish as he bowed low to Elizabeth. She gave a reluctant-sounding laugh and held out her hand for him to kiss.

  As he took his departure, Frances Grey, Duchess of Suffolk, led her two daughters forward to make their curtsies. She had lost her eldest, the studious Lady Jane, and Kate had doubts that the two left could ever replace their intellectual sister. Lady Katherine was assuredly beautiful, tall and delicately formed, with golden hair and sky blue eyes in an oval face. It was said she looked like her grandmother, the famously glorious Mary Tudor, Dowager Queen of France. But Katherine loved dancing above books and couldn’t seem to hold a thought in her head for more than a moment.

  And Lady Mary, the younger sister—Kate had heard some of the crueler courtiers call her “crouchback Mary.” Barely half her sister’s height, with a crooked spine, she also suffered from a skin condition. Yet there was a sharpness to her gaze missing from Lady Katherine’s, a quickness of observation. Kate was sure Lady Mary should never be discounted.

  Lady Frances hoped to find her way back to royal favor through her daughters, mayhap even have Lady Katherine named as Elizabeth’s successor, or so it was whispered. After all, the Greys were the queen’s cousins and Protestant. They should be preferred to Catholic, French Mary of Scotland. Yet so far Elizabeth had shown them little favor. Lady Katherine, a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Mary, was now made a mere maid of honor, and Lady Mary Grey had no official place at all. Their assigned seats were at the back of the royal barge today.

  Elizabeth waved them away, and Lady Frances’s face as she shepherded her daughters through the crowd was frozen.

  The Count de Feria, the Spanish ambassador, stopped the Grey ladies to bow over their hands. Some of Lady Frances’s hauteur melted before his dark-eyed charm—charm Kate remembered well from a visit to Brocket Hall before Elizabeth had become queen. Lady Katherine giggled behind her feathered fan at whatever he said to her. Only Lady Mary frowned up at him, twitching her furred cloak over her crooked shoulder.

  Elizabeth seemed to notice none of her family’s doings. She glimpsed Kate and Lady Mary Everley over Mistress Ashley’s head and beckoned them forward.

  “There you are, Kate,” the queen said, her voice distracted. “You are needed with the musicians at once. God’s teeth, but you would think none of them had ever deciphered a page of music in their lives!”

  “Of course, Your Majesty,” Kate said with a hasty curtsy. The queen gave her a short nod.

  In their days at Whitehall, there had been none of the strange intimacy that grew between the queen and Kate in their last, dark days at Hatfield House. With Christmas and the coronation to be planned, the queen was always closeted away at work with Sir William Cecil and her other counselors, or dancing at one of the revels planned by Lord Robert Dudley. Kate spent nearly every moment lost in her music, helping her father plan the programs for all the events and instructing all the other musicians on their parts.

  When their paths did cross, Elizabeth would nod and ask after the new songs, but her dark eyes were always full of shifting distraction. Kate knew it could be no other way.

  But knowing she could help the queen made her eager to do more. Eager to help make sure the rare promise of this day lasted and was protected. The new queen had many enemies, and most of them hid their dark thoughts behind brilliant smiles.

  Clutching her lute, Kate hurried aboard the queen’s barge. The large vessel, which had long ago belonged to the queen’s mother, Queen Anne Boleyn, had been repainted and refurbished in creamy shades of gold and white. Rich silk and taffeta hangings in the Tudor green and white fluttered from the railings, and the queen’s great thronelike chair was set at the prow. All her most-favored courtiers were taking their stools and cushions arrayed behind her, wrapping their furred cloaks against the cold wind off the river.

  The musicians were to sit behind the queen and around the railing, where the merry sound of their lutes, tambours, and flutes could be heard by the crowds along the riverbanks and on the bridges. Kate quickly took her low stool and laid her lute on her knees.

  They were ready to launch into the first planned song when the queen finally boarded the barge and made her way to her throne. Lord Robert led the way, while Lady Mary Everely and Mistress Ashley carried her golden train. The oarsmen, in shirtsleeves, took up their oars and the barge slid into the slate gray waters of the river.

  Over the polished wood of her lute, Kate glimpsed a group of lawyers from the Inns of Court aboard their own barge. For just an instant, she thought she saw a familiar handsome face among the black robes.

  Anthony, she thought with a surge of pleasure. Could it truly be him, after all these long weeks with no word at all from her friend?

  But then whoever it was turned away and was lost to sight. The other barges fell into place behind the queen’s, two hundred of them in all, and Kate could think of nothing else but her music and the cheers of pure, burning joy that greeted the new monarch on every side.

  The glory of the day was palpable—a feeling that hung in the air like a sweet perfume drifting over the whole city. Surely, it truly was a new day. And nothing could mar the bright perfection of it.