Murder at Westminster Abbey

by Amanda Carmack

  Then there was only cold blackness.

  CHAPTER 1

  Whitehall Palace, earlier that same day

  “Hurry, Kate! We mustn’t be late.”

  “I am coming!” Kate Haywood called after her friend Lady Mary Everley as she dashed down the palace corridor outside Kate’s chamber. It would be a terrible thing indeed to be tardy taking their places in Queen Elizabeth’s procession to the Tower, where all new monarchs spent the nights before their coronations. Kate was meant to play with the queen’s musicians on the royal barge.

  The queen. How very new and strange those words seemed, and how very wonderful. Queen Elizabeth. It seemed only a moment ago that she was mere Princess Elizabeth, and they were living quietly in the countryside. Now they were in the midst of London itself, stepping into the color and whirl of a real royal court. Into life itself.

  Kate’s head was spinning with the excitement and urgency of it all. Part of her, most of her, wanted to run out and embrace it all. And part of her . . .

  Part of her felt like she was standing tiptoe at the edge of a precipice, about to leap into something dark and unknown. Something that would catch her up like a whirlwind and toss her around until she didn’t know herself any longer.

  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 care 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 Sir 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, Sir Robert Dudley. Kate had played and sung 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 conversation, 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 were 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, Eleanor.

  Kate felt the prickle of tears behind her eyes and blinked them away. “I won’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. 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 current favorite. “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. As well as helping navigate the maze of court, Mary was just a lot of fun to be around. And Kate’s 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 with endless promise. Elizabeth was queen now.

  • • •

  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 at Hatfield House, and after the handsome Anthony Elias disappeared into his world of studying the law and making his future, Kate felt a bit lonely. But Mary banished all that. The first day they met, Mary had helped Kate retrieve precious sheets of music lost in the cold wind, and then had made herself something of Kate’s protector, sharing all the court gossip and helping her navigate the rocky shoals of a new, complicated life. Even though she had the feeling Mary did not tell her everything, they had fun together.

  Just before Kate and Mary 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 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-green eyes seemed like night to day.

  But she meant to be unobtrusive, letting her music be at the forefront, while she observed 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, Lord Henry, and their cousin Richard St. Long. Though they were all handsome, wit
h the earl and Henry sharing Mary’s red-gold 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.

  “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 Boleyns. 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 came, 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 assembling on the water, brilliant with silken banners and the swirl of bright velvets and satins, lush furs, and the glint of jewels, long packed away and 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 families, 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 sign of her growing impatience was the twitch of her long, pale, heavily beringed fingers, 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 white, pointed 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 was practically 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 swiftly. 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. Sir Robert Dudley, the new Master of the Horse, 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 Catherine 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 Catherine 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 Catherine’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 Catherine 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 Catherine, 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 was frozen as she shepherded her daughters through the crowd.

  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 became queen. Lady Catherine 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 organized by 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 once 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. Robert Dudley led the way while Lady Mary Everley and Mistress Ashley carried her golden train. The oarsmen in their 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 on 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.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Kate! Kate, wake up.”

  Kate gasped, abruptly startled from the tangle of her dreams by a hand on her shoulder and a whisper in the darkness. For an instant, she couldn’t remember where she was. It wasn’t her bed in the small chamber at Hatfield, where the roof leaked and the fire smoked, for she could hear the stirrings and sighs of people all around her.

  Then she remembered. She was in the Tower, lodged with the junior ladies-in-waiting in a large chamber below the royal suite in the Queen’s House. But the remembrance didn’t calm her, for the chilly stone walls of the room that had seen too much seemed to press in close around her. Ever since the queen’s barge docked at the gate of the Queen’s Stairs and they processed between the high watchtowers, a cold beyond the winter wind seemed to seep into her very bones.