The Fatal Fashione (9 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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“There would be no way to prove they were mine,” Meg put in.
“But Rosie is right. What if?” Elizabeth echoed, hitting a fist on the table. “Until the murderer gives himself—or herself—away, that must be our battle cry as we delve deeper and turn up more evidence.
“Jenks, you will go tomorrow morning and escort Ursala here so that she can assure us Marie Gresham is indeed the young woman she saw in the drying fields, staring up at Hannah’s window. Then, if so, with Meg and her daughter Sally’s help, I shall try to assist Marie to recall what she saw.
“Because,” she said, standing to dismiss them, as they all rose hastily, scraping their chairs back, “the what-ifs become even more dangerous if the Gresham girl witnessed such horror.”
More than once that night, Elizabeth wished that Rosie had not mentioned she couldn’t get the memory of Hannah’s starched corpse out of her mind. Though the queen was overtired, she slept fitfully, tossing about and slogging between nightmares that dragged her from agonizing over the present murder into the past.
The thought came to her clearly: Her father had murdered her mother as surely as if he had struck off her head himself. Riding off to wed his new wife, he had not even thought to order a coffin for the woman who had once been his passion and who had borne him a red-haired daughter instead of the desired son.
So the executioners had hastily placed Queen Anne Boleyn’s slender body in an empty arrow chest, her legs bent and her head by her feet. They had quickly interred her under the paving stones of St. Peter in Chains Church in the Tower, where she had been beheaded for unspeakable crimes of which she was surely innocent.
Now, even now, in the dead of night, Elizabeth entered the cold, gray, lofty place where her mother’s corpse was laid out. But why had they put her body, wet with sticky, white blood, upon a shelf? Elizabeth looked around but found herself alone with the body. Was she a small child again, like the day she’d lost her mother, or was she now queen? Was she safe or still at great risk?
She screamed so loudly in the dim church that all the dead must hear her. “I am your anointed queen! Do not try to force me to wed and bed! Do not dare to murder me!”
Her voice stopped echoing, for the cold night air sucked the sounds out the window in the loft where her mother lay, not on a shelf now but in an open coffin filled with swirling mist. No arrows in it, only dense, drowning whiteness, thick as starch.
Elizabeth struggled to close the window, but it stayed open, with a stiff breeze blowing into her face. She leaned all her weight into it but kept slipping, slipping in the thick blood, then sliding backward into the black Thames, drowning with her father’s hands about her throat …
Drenched with sweat, Elizabeth sat straight up in bed with the sheets wrapped around her. Stunned that her hands gripped her own throat, she thrust them in her lap and bent over, trying to seize control.
Slowly, the horror faded, but her mother had been too young to die, only thirty-four, almost exactly Elizabeth’s age now, and … Hannah … even younger …
Sheltered in the curtains of the vast royal bed, the queen of England pressed her face into her hands and wept.
The Puritan cleric Hosea Cantwell surprised the queen yet again when he was escorted in by Clifford, who remained at the back of the anteroom. This time the man wore not the strict black and white he had argued for last time but a blue so dark it looked black, until the shaft of window light sliced across his body.
“Not practicing what you preach?” she challenged after proprieties had passed. “You seen quite the sport today, Mr. Cantwell, in that deep blue hue.”
“I should have realized your hawk’s eye would find me out, Your Majesty.’Tis only that I do not pay richly for my garb, and the merchant must have sold me a shoddy doublet that would fade. Not yet, I assure you, have I gone to sporting, as you say, the frills and ruffles your followers call ruffs today.”
“So you are not a follower of mine?”
“Of course, though not in fashions,” he parried, “for you are the nation’s monarch, to whom I owe a certain allegiance.”
Damn this man of the cloth, supposedly a man of peace, she fumed. Why did she always feel she was dueling with him and he knew the thrusts and feints as well as she?
“Then, if you spend none of your hard-earned money from the church offerings on ruffs, Hosea Cantwell, why do I have it on good authority that you have visited starch shops?”
For the first time, she felt she’d struck a hit. The slicktongued man looked at a loss for words, though he quickly recovered.
“Surely you do not have me followed, Your Majesty. Or have your starchers tat-taled that I have urged them to mend and stiffen their ways instead of their flimsy fashions?”
“Then you admit you
have
been to see the van der Passes and Hannah von Hoven?”
“I owed it to the Maker of Mankind to challenge the makers of mere fripperies.”
“Tell me your version of how each reacted to your intrusions.”
Again, after the initial look of surprise flitted across the man’s handsome face, he gave no other indication he had been caught at anything. Surely, if he’d known Hannah was dead, he would be more panicked now, though she had come to think of him as the chameleon cleric. Today, whether he wanted to admit it or not, he had even changed his colors.
“I saw the young von Hoven woman only once,” he explained, “but returned to the master starcher’s twice. The first time I visited the van der Passes, that big husband of hers declared he was still a Flemish knight and threatened me with bodily harm,” he added with a dismissive sniff and a tug at his cuffless sleeves.
“Did he lay hands on you?”
“He did, and as good as threw me out.”
So, she thought, Hosea Cantwell was physically courageous, for he went back a second time. She was anxious to know how he would describe his encounter with Hannah, who had no such watchdog to ward him off.
“And my other starcher, Hannah von Hoven?” she asked, trying to rein in her impatience.
“She did not throw me out but threw starch on the front of my breeches,” he admitted with a little shrug. “Imagine, Your Majesty, she claimed I was too rigid, and then threw starch on me to make me more so.”
She stared at him. Surely this man was not making a bawdy joke as well as a pun. He must have naught to do with Hannah’s demise or he would not be so flippant.
“When did you visit her starch house?” she asked. “And did her ladies see you there?”
“Your Majesty,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height, though he stood below her level and had to look up to where she sat upon a dais, “does this interrogation have aught to do with the poor girl’s dreadful death? Word is that she fell in her starch vat, hit her crown, and drowned, so I’ve said more than one prayer that she
did
regret her craft but
did not
decide to take her own life.”
“I—” Elizabeth got out, then shut her mouth. This man knew all along that Hannah was dead and had not let on. Still, he was only answering her questions. But she noted well he used the old word for head, “crown.” Another pun on who he’d really like to see fall and drown—the one who wears the crown?
“From whom did you hear of her death?” she demanded.
“From one of my parishioners. Word of the tragedy is probably all over London by now, an especially tasty bit of gossip, I don’t doubt, because she was a royal starcher as well as a common one.”
“Your view of the world is quite jaded,” she accused.
“Perhaps that is only because I see the world through ancient eyes,” he countered, “the eyes of the Almighty. As to your query: Did her ladies see me there?” he said, adroitly picking up on a question she’d forgotten she’d asked him. “Of course, for I went in full daylight to visit such a place.”
Such a place,
the queen thought, feeling more distraught. As if poor Hannah had been running a house with strumpets instead of starchers. Furious at herself for mishandling this interview as well as at him for his presumptions, she added, “Then I shall discover from her women when you were there and what passed between you.”
“Passed between us? My words of counsel, which ruffled her composure, and her words of petulance and willfulness, Your Majesty.”
“Which then ruffled your composure?” she challenged.
“Not at all. I offered to pray for her, and she threw starch at me from that big vat of it that I told her was a bath for the devil’s liquor. I’ll not lie about that or aught else, so you have but to ask in what must be your own investigation of this sad event. I shall pray for your success in the endeavor,” he added with a nod and a sigh, “for now, alas, I shall not be able to pray for Hannah’s changed ways, but only for her immortal soul.”
Elizabeth silently scolded herself for letting this man irk her so. She’d let slip that she was interested in solving the puzzle of Hannah’s death. Was he merely the pompous if witty prig he seemed, or would he stoop to harm Hannah? Surely she would never have sent her women away so that she could speak with this man, however handsome and glib.
This surprising interview had convinced the queen of one thing. She was going to tell Cecil to keep Cantwell’s name on his chart of possible murderers.
Thomas Gresham was feeling a bit better today about Marie’s state of mind, though she was yet not responding to questions or suggestions. At least she was not hysterical or contentious, as she had been yesterday. As long as she had Sally in sight, she was not insisting she hold to her, either. Marie lay in bed, awake but restful.
He and Anne, as well as Sally, stood when the queen entered the bedchamber at midmorning. As the door had opened, he’d glimpsed Nash Badger still in the next room, keeping guard, and again vowed to richly reward the man.
They had not seen the queen since last evening, though one of her ladies-in-waiting had visited to assure Her Majesty that Marie was resting well.
“Has Dr. Forrest returned?” the queen asked as they rose from their bow and curtseys.
“Yes, with more soothing tonic, which, as you can see, may be helping,” Thomas told her, gesturing toward the bed. He was deeply moved and honored by her concern.
“She’s told you nothing of why she left your home or where she went?” the queen pursued, keeping her voice low.
“Nothing, Your Majesty,” Anne answered. “We are grateful for your hospitality here, but feel we should take her home. And we are wondering,” she said, speaking even more quietly now, “if we could hire the girl Sally to go with us as a lady’s maid for Marie-Anne. We’d pay her well, and, of course, her mother could visit her whenever—”
“I think it best you not move her yet and keep her near Dr. Forrest,” the queen said. “But first, I have someone who can perhaps help us discover where Marie was before she was found dazed outside the palace. If you will allow me to bring someone in—”
“Who is it?” Thomas asked. He realized Anne had spoken those very words in unison with him. His heart started to pound. What if his worst fears were realized and Marie had discovered who had come to town? And had gone there to learn all he had tried so hard to hide? Anne looked totally distraught, too, though she’d said earlier she wanted to learn where Marie had gone when she was missing.
“It is just a woman I know,” Elizabeth explained, “who lives not far from the palace, near the royal mews. Ursala!”
At first he saw only Sally’s mother, the queen’s strewing woman, in the doorway, but then another, a comely but unkempt young woman behind her. The queen motioned again, and the stranger came into the room, to the foot of Marie’s bed, and stared a silent moment at her.
“That’s the one for sure,” she whispered before the queen’s strewing woman whisked her out as fast as she had come. Sally ran after her mother, and Marie started to stir and fuss again.
“Who was that?” Thomas asked the queen. “And where was Marie seen? Anne, won’t you go and fetch Sally back?” he added, turning toward his wife. “We can’t have Marie distressed again.”
“In a minute,” Anne said, standing her ground. It was no surprise that his wife gainsayed him, but that she did it before the queen astonished him.
“I don’t understand the how or why yet,” the queen told them, “but that woman observed your daughter standing in St. Martin’s fields, staring up at a window of a loft near the royal mews.”
“She’s been asking for a horse of her own,” Anne said, sounding entirely rattled. “Perhaps she simply wandered to the royal mews—to look at the horses.”
“She told me nothing of wanting a horse, and she knows she can ask me for things,” Thomas blurted. He realized he should just listen, but he was so fearful of what he might hear.
“She appeared,” the queen went on, “to be looking up at the window of the starch house of a woman who worked for me, a Hannah von Hoven.”
Thomas fought to keep from falling to his knees. He felt as if he’d been poleaxed. To his amazement, Anne leaned against the high bed, holding the carved post as if the name meant something to her, too. How had it come to this?

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