The Fatal Fashione (13 page)

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Authors: Karen Harper

Tags: #Fiction - Historical, #England/Great Britain, #16th Century, #Mystery, #Tudors

BOOK: The Fatal Fashione
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“Marie wouldn’t harm Hannah—wouldn’t harm anyone.”
“Thomas, someone has harmed Hannah, and if it’s not Marie, we must work together to discover who it was.”
“As always, Your Majesty, absolutely anything I can do to advise and help you, I will do.”
She nodded, but she felt afraid to trust him now. Besides, she could see from the corner of her eye that Cecil was scribbling on his diagram exactly what she was thinking. In separate sections, he’d added to his list of possible killers not Marie’s name but those of Thomas Gresham and his wife, Anne. And Thomas’s name had gone in the place where Cecil had previously written
Lover?
Monday morning, Hugh Dauntsey requested an early audience with the queen, so she summoned him to the privy gardens, where she was taking her morning constitutional with her ladies trailing behind. The brisk breeze tugged at their clothes, and everyone’s feet crunched gravel on the angular paths.
Besides hearing what he had to say, Elizabeth hoped to learn more from him about his ties to her other starcher. Now that the Greshams had a motive to silence Hannah—to keep her from perhaps extorting funds from them, embarrassing them, or even alienating them from their daughter’s affections—the queen was desperate to prove someone else had murdered her. Even if she lost her master starcher and the entire ruff market crashed to ruins, she could not lose Thomas Gresham.
“Your findings so far?” she asked, looking not into Dauntsey’s rimless eyes but straight ahead as she walked.
“I simply wish to give you a preliminary inventory, Your Majesty,” he said, walking briskly to keep up with her. He wore a doublet and matching cape of canary yellow, but at least it was not adorned with jewels or slashings. Did the man actually visit that dirty, smelly stock market in such garb? The stranger thing was that each time they took a turn onto the path facing eastward, between the sun in her eyes and his pale clothes and coloring, he almost seemed to disappear.
“But,” he went on, “I have a question, too. Although Hannah von Hoven’s starch shop seemed quite untouched, but for her body being found there, of course, her earthly personal goods in her privy chamber nearby were obviously picked over, to say the least.”
“I cannot account for that,” she told him, not mentioning she’d taken a look at the place the night she’d seen the body. “Whether someone heard that she had died and broke in to pilfer her things, or the murderer himself went through looking for something that might implicate him, I know not.”
She forced from her mind the image of Thomas ransacking Hannah’s room, looking for something that would link him to her.
No,
she told herself for the hundredth time,
it cannot be Thomas.
“You assume the murderer and pilferer was a man, Your Majesty,” Dauntsey went on. “But in speaking yesterday with Chief Constable Nigel Whitcomb, he mentioned the murderer could well be a woman. That is, I’m quite sure he said ‘she,’ not ‘he.’”
Elizabeth nearly stumbled. “He has told me no such thing,” she declared. Could Whitcomb have found a link to Anne Gresham so soon?
“He mentioned he was coming here with particular proofs and even a warrant for you to sign—to question someone under duress, I think he said. Here are the separate inventories of the shop and house of the deceased,” he went on, handing her two folded lists from the soft leather pouch at his waist. She noted for the first time that his fingers were stained with black ink. “I also have quite a list of those who must have ruffs or fees returned, so that will cut into her estate a bit. But you see how short the household list of goods is.”
She skimmed it quickly. The accounting amounted to large items that could not easily be moved, such as a bed, washstand, chair, and table. Very few garments—but for four shifts, a night rail, and a pair of perfumed gloves! It could mean the notes from Marie went through the perfumer to Hannah—or it could be mere coincidence. Perfumed gloves were expensive, but they were all the rage. Would a starcher who had evidently borrowed money more than once own a pair that wasn’t a gift?
“This pair of perfumed gloves,” she said, pointing to the item in his bold, slanted writing. “I would like to have them to give to a woman who was Hannah’s close friend, a whitster who lived nearby and has been of great assistance to me. I know they would mean a great deal to her.”
“Ursala Hemmings, Your Majesty? She came round today while I was working in the loft, but I sent her scurrying. No good to have her in the way or trying to make off with something, but I didn’t know you favored her. I’ll see that the gloves are included with the reckoning that comes to you, along with the worth of each item, when I find fair market value for the things.”
“That would be fine. How long will it take, do you think?”
“I am making it my first priority, though some of the starching items I’ll have to price by speaking with the van der Passes or perhaps your own herbalist. She evidently sold Mistress von Hoven the starch herbs—ah, here,” he said, pointing to the longer list. “Cuckoo-pint herbs with the name Meg Milligrew, queen’s herbalist. Strange name, cuckoo-pint, isn’t it? Do you know what it means?”
He was glib and ingratiating today, while she felt simply stunned. Could her chief constable have solved this crime? If Anne Gresham had discovered Marie was entranced by Hannah, could she have followed the girl that day but found Hannah alone? After all, Hannah could have dismissed her women so she could meet secretly with Marie—or even with Anne herself.
Then Anne’s argument with Hannah might have turned violent. If Anne could yet carry Marie about so easily, she could surely choke Hannah, then heft her into a tub of starch to finish her by drowning. So, did she return hastily home to join the search when Marie was discovered missing?
No. If Anne were so protective of their child, surely she would not have left her out on the streets—unless she had no idea Marie had seen her kill Hannah. Such a terrible thing could be what caused the girl to lose her senses. But then, who took Hannah out of her starch-water coffin and put her on that shelf?
“Your Majesty?” Dauntsey prompted when she did not answer whatever he had just asked. “Are you quite well?”
“Of course, and pleased with your progress so far. I shall see you again when your sums of the goods are ready for me.”
Though the queen had a full agenda planned that day, she ordered Nigel Whitcomb to be brought to her forthwith when his request for a hearing was announced. “Cecil,” she said, “send someone ahead to the council chamber to delay the meeting with my advisors, but come back to hear this. I think the chief constable of London may have some interesting news for us. Perhaps our local law enforcement is not as impotent as I believed.”
Nigel Whitcomb was built like a tree trunk, straight up and down and sturdy. Somewhere between thirty and forty years old, he was balding and, no doubt, had grown a long beard to make up for that. Elizabeth barely recalled seeing him, but Cecil had said he had more or less cowered in the back row the day the delegation from Parliament visited to urge her to wed. Cecil had also said the man was pushy, picky, and vain. She was reminded that he had been head of the Skinners’ Guild when she saw the fine fur trim on the cape and cap he held in his nervous hands.
“Your Majesty, I bring good news—and sad news, too,” he told her as he produced an official-looking parchment, sealed with a big blob of wax, and proffered it to her. “My immediate and thorough investigation of the starcher’s untimely demise indeed shows murder, and the coroner has agreed. I have petitioned here to question the chief possible perpetrator of this heinous crime.”
In uneasy anticipation, Elizabeth shifted forward in her seat, took the warrant, and handed it to Cecil, who stood behind her.
“Why is this sad news?” she asked Whitcomb as she heard Cecil break the seal. She steadied herself to hear the chief constable or even Cecil pronounce Anne Gresham’s name. She would have to deal with it, she thought. At least suppress Anne’s being examined until she could break the news to Thomas and assure him that his wife was merely being questioned to provide information.
“Because the person I must accuse and examine is in your charge, Your Majesty.”
“All my subjects are ultimately in my charge, Master Whitcomb.”
“I have it on good authority from several witnesses that jealousy was part of the motive,” he went on.
“Yes, I understand that.”
So he had somehow ferreted out that Anne Gresham was still jealous over the fact that Hannah’s twin sister had been the love of her husband’s life. Surely Hannah’s resemblance to Gretta had not lured Thomas to desire her, too? Could Anne have yet been so incensed about Gretta that she took her fury out on the dead woman’s living image, or had Hannah been blackmailing Anne? And how did this man uncover all of that so swiftly?
Whitcomb was still speaking. “I also have the sworn statements of several women who overheard an argument over prices for supplies between the deceased and the accused herein.”
“What?” Elizabeth demanded.
“Your Grace,” Cecil said quietly behind her, “best brace yourself. This warrant for interrogation and arrest names Meg Milligrew and no other.”
 
AS MEG SAT WITH NED AND SALLY ON A BENCH IN the corner of the courtyard gardens at Gresham House, she had never been happier. Marie was to join them soon, but for now it was just the three of them, so Meg could pretend that they were a family with a fine home of their own. Ned was attentive to her and so very kind to Sally.
“I still love my other mother and father,” Sally told them, “though they let me down something dreadful, not telling me’bout how I was poxed and all.”
“They wanted to protect you,” Meg said, reaching for her hand. “Just as Marie’s parents have tried to shelter her, they didn’t want you to be hurt.”
“And now look what it got my folks and the Greshams!’Sides, just like Marie, I think this place is so fine—the city, I mean, not just Gresham House.” Though no one was nearby, Sally lowered her voice. “It’s kind of a pretty prison here, Marie says, and I know what she means. It’s lots more of a lark to go out and’bout. Bet her real mother’d never take her out for a day picking herbs with fairy lights,” she added with a pert smile and a squeeze of Meg’s hand.
Meg gaze snagged Ned’s. He, too, must be thinking not only of Sally’s two mothers but of Marie’s. At the Privy Plot Council meeting last night, the queen had explained about the von Hoven connection to the Greshams and how neither Sir Thomas nor Lady Anne had really gotten over it.
But Ned asked only, “Fairy lights? It sounds like something I could use to present a fantasy at court.”
“You know, you could,” Meg said, “but you’d better use them for a tragedy. We could dust one of your ghosts with cuckoo-pint pollen—I’ve a box of it saved—because it would give an eerie glow in the dark.”
“I believe both you ladies are going to come in very handy to me,” Ned said, and bathed them both in his brightest smile. “Sally, is there anything you have to tell the queen? Has Marie remembered anything else?”
Sally darted a glance up toward Marie’s second-story rooms. “Don’t look now,” she whispered, “but Lady Gresham’s staring down at us.”
“That’s all right,” Meg assured her. “Tell us if there’s aught else before Marie comes down to join us.”
“Don’t know if she really will,’specially with Lady Gresham nearby.” She hunched forward, gripping her hands on her knees. “Each time Marie looks down into this garden, she says it’minds her of something bad, something lost. I know her mother don’t really want her to talk to you each day, Master Topside, or to you either, Mother Meg, but Marie don’t, either, not here anyway.”
“Because of something she’s lost in this garden?” Ned repeated, frowning. “A trinket or another letter like she gave the queen or—”
“I think it’s’bout someone she saw here, or argued with here—a woman.”
“She told you that?” Meg asked.
“No, but she said it in her sleep last night, over and over. I’m in a trundle bed next to her tall one, and she kept saying she looked like the woman she met in the garden. I thought she meant like the girl in the painting, but she was saying ‘woman’ and ‘garden’ and then that she lost her, lost her and can’t find her anymore. And then crying for her lost mother, too, not Lady Gresham,’cause she’s’dopted like me. Honest, I heard her aright, e’en if she was all upset in her nightmare.”
“Listen, lovey,” Meg told her, reaching into the girl’s hood to stroke her rough cheek, “if she has a nightmare again like that, wake her up, won’t you?”
“So she won’t keep having it so bad?”
“Yes, but also because when you’re waked from a nightmare, you might remember things from it you can’t recall the next morning.”
“Marie would like to remember. Last night she said she’s afraid, but she wants to recall things and doesn’t know how. Lady Gresham told me never wake her, but should I do it and ask her who’s the woman in the garden?”
“Ask her anything she can remember about anything,” Ned put in, nodding at Meg. “If she can’t recall what happened in waking life, maybe her dreams will give the answers.”
“Yes,” Meg said, looking now only at him. “Sometimes you have to just trust your dreams.”
“What?” the queen cracked out so loud that Nigel Whitcomb scurried back several steps. “You accuse my herbalist, Meg Milligrew, of this foul murder?”
She seized the parchment from Cecil’s hands and skimmed it. The document listed the names of four women—evidently some of Hannah’s workers—who claimed to have overheard an argument about the prices of starch herbs between
said victim
and
said accused.
Worse, it listed the names of several
servants of the queen
who had witnessed an argument between Ned Topside and Meg Milligrew in the
public place of Kings Street on Wednesday, the 23rd day of October, hard by Whitehall Palace.
This concerned how Meg was jealous that
a person who went by the name of Ned Topside had visited the victim privily after the queen had sent the same Ned Topside once to see her publicly.
“’S blood,” Elizabeth swore, and followed that with a string of curses.
“Of course, I would be willing to question her here on these premises,” Whitcomb said, his voice at first a mere squeak, “Your Majesty, if you would just sign the document, since she’s your—”
“I know these people intimately,” the queen interrupted, waving the parchment. “I can attest to their character, especially Mistress Milligrew, and she did
not
murder Hannah von Hoven! She’s the one who stumbled on the body and first reported the crime.”
“More than once in my experience, Your Majesty,” Whitcomb said, “the one who supposedly discovers the deceased has been the one who killed said person. It is a wonder to me how they can be attracted to the site of their crime and the victim’s corpse, too. Why, I once heard of a murderer who not only attended the funeral but kept visiting his victim’s burial site.”
“This is outrageous!” she insisted, brandishing the warrant again. “Chief Constable, I will look into this, but it is entirely beyond the pale. You are dismissed now, and I shall summon you again if you are needed.”
“Pardon, Your Gracious Majesty, but I must ask that this woman be handed over for questioning at the least. My inquiries have determined that she is the only possible—”
“You do not know whereof you speak,” Elizabeth went on, her voice steady and quieter now. “My lord Cecil and I have knowledge of several persons who might have wanted to kill Hannah von Hoven.”
“You—but …
I,
Your Majesty,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, “by the power vested in me, am the one entrusted by the laws of our realm to inquire into this, and I’ll not cower, as too many of us did that day you scolded us for simply asking that the future of the throne be preserved through your marriage and the bearing of an heir or—or …”
“Or what?” she demanded. “Or there will be a treasonous uprising, led, of course, by my northern Popish subjects who are all cozy with my Scottish royal cousin? You are dismissed,” she said, flinging out an arm and rising. “However, I vow to you I will see to these accusations you have made and give Meg Milligrew over to your questioning tomorrow, should I see a need. I am certain in your lofty position you have many more important things to see to now. Good day to you.”
When the still-sputtering man left the chamber, Elizabeth reread the warrant, threw it to the floor, then collapsed in her chair with her head in her hands.
“Your Grace?” Cecil said, his voice so close he must be nearly leaning over her.
“I’ll be all right in a moment. I’m thinking that I told Parliament that day that I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. Yet just now, I could have wrung that man’s neck. Is that what could have happened to Hannah? That someone who is always in control lost his—or her—temper?”
“Over the years you have struggled to rein in that Tudor temper, and you will yet be victorious—in all things.”
“I also told Parliament that fatal fashions are treasons, greed and lust, adultery and murder—and rebellions—in my kingdom. I told them that I do not fear death and that I have good courage, but this is wearing me down, Cecil. Yet, especially now, I cannot and will not turn this over to others to solve and punish.”
“You also said to them that day, Your Grace, that England must take a stand for justice. You are doing that, always, even if it seems to some that you are obstructing that very justice. But you surely must hold to your pledge to let Whitcomb question Meg on the morrow.”
She lifted her head from her hands and twisted around to look at him. “Hand Meg over to Whitcomb?”
“Not if we can clear her quickly and find who did put Hannah in that devil’s liquor Hosea Cantwell’s always pontificating about.”
“Meg’s gone to Gresham House with Ned, but I will see both of them, separately, the moment they return—Ned first. And, my friend,” she said, rising to face him, “don’t you dare add Meg’s name to that diagram you have—not, at least, until I speak with her.”
As she hurried down the corridor to meet with her council of advisors, Elizabeth prayed the day would not get even worse. The northern shires were yet Catholic and seethed with their desire to champion Queen Mary of Scots over their God-given queen.
Passing through her crowded presence chamber, she saw Hugh Dauntsey, whispering to Lord Paulet. She nodded to them and strode on until she heard Dauntsey call to her, “One thing I forgot, Your Most Gracious Majesty.”
She halted so quickly that Lady Rosie nearly bumped into her.’S blood, she didn’t need Dauntsey calling out something private in this crowd. Though she gestured the man to her, she did not turn to him until she was in the corridor.
“The thing you forgot?” she asked, trying to keep her voice reined in. Meg and Ned weren’t back from Gresham House yet. She felt twisted so tight about everything that she’d like to scream.
“Something I found in the bottom of the fatal starch bath when I drained it,” he whispered to her. He held out a small black velvet pouch; she took it from his ink-stained fingers. “Not the pouch itself or it would be stiff as a board,” he went on as if she were a dunderhead. “Within is something that must have slipped off in a struggle. Wet starch is quite slippery, they say.”
“I will examine it and speak with you later.”
She entered the council chamber, sat at the head of the long table, and nodded permission that others could be seated and business begun, but she kept fingering the pouch in her lap. Something small within, perhaps a thimble or an earbob. Unable to wait to see, even though Cecil began to speak, she opened the pouch and dropped the item in her lap.
She touched it, then turned it in her fingers. It was a ring, large, heavy, evidently a man’s.
“Her Majesty has summoned us today,” Cecil began, “to consider the northern shires and the dangers they could cause should the Catholic queen of Scotland become even more deceitful.”
Definitely a signet ring, probably one used to imprint a coat of arms on wax seals.
“We are talking about a large number of rogues,” Cecil said, “some nobles, some rabble, who may go to open rebellion, should Queen Mary give them either further covert or overt indications she would become the figurehead for such an uprising.”
Elizabeth’s stomach began to knot. Glancing down in the shadow of her lap, she wasn’t certain what the figure on the raised part of the ring was at first, and she must not bow her head, or her men could think she was downhearted or fearful of her enemies. She looked straight ahead again at Cecil, who was still speaking.
“We must lay plans to keep our realm and our ruler safe, so the floor is open to reports and discussions.”
Then she knew. She knew—and feared—the figure on the ring was a grasshopper.
“I swear to you, Your Grace, chief constable of London or not, the man is wrong!” Meg cried. She felt her skin flush hot; tears flooded her eyes, making two queens and two Cecils before she blinked. “Hannah was dead when I got there, and I didn’t do it!”
“I believe you,” the queen said as she rose from the table and walked around Cecil to come over to take her hand. Meg tried to keep some semblance of poise, but she clung to the queen’s fingers. “Meg,” Elizabeth went on, putting her other hand on her shoulder, “I’m just telling you what the constable has come up with. Since he’s been looking in the wrong place, I fear he’s jumped to the wrong conclusions.”
“I treasure your support, Your Grace. I am so undone that—”
“Just listen now. Unfortunately, there is no denying the two events witnessed by multiple persons that might be construed to mean you held a double grudge against Hannah. And that would make two powerful motives—disagreements with her over money and over a man.”
“But I don’t blame her for Ned’s going back to see her—that’s just him,” Meg blurted as the queen stepped back. Meg wrapped both arms tightly around herself to shop shaking. “Though lately,” she added, “Ned’s vowed to change his ways.”
“So he tells me. I spoke with him briefly just now. This formal accusation makes me even more desperate to solve this murder. You are not the only one at your wit’s end.”

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