The Twylight Tower (16 page)

A set smile on her face under her half mask, she heard the winch Luke used to elevate her. She rose only about ten feet above the pavement of the courtyard and, strangely, hung there suspended. Why was she not swung over? The trumpets played, longer and louder, evidently holding their last note not to leave her dangling like a target on the archery range. When the trumpeters were out of breath, Felicia’s lute filled the void. At least, the queen thought in the back of her mind, the girl got to play for the royal exit.

“Curse Luke Morgan,” Elizabeth muttered, trying to keep control. The two main wires above her, cantilevered out from the corner tower above the scenery, did not seem snagged. Where those two joined behind the scenery, Luke held a master rope. He needed to counterbalance her weight by walking his scaffold plank to pull her over. Then he must put her down gently, and he knew that well enough. If this was his idea of a jest…

She saw Dr. Dee leap to his feet in the front row of the audience where she’d had him sit. He’d been watching with his observation cylinder to see close-up that his wires and ropes worked. But now he took the cylinder and his hands from his face. He looked so
alarmed she panicked too, her eyes darting up, all around, though a scream snagged in her throat. Horrified, Ned ceased his speech and ran behind the scenery.

Everyone looked up, gaping at her. No music sounded, neither trumpets nor lute. Her heart began to thud against the constricting harness. Surely the ribs of it and of her body would break. Though the breeze was cool, she began to sweat. Her mask slipped from her forehead and nose so she could not see but she could not right it. No one could reach her from above or below. A trembling began deep inside her. She kicked her feet, trying to swing over. Was this all happening in a moment or eternity?

The wires jerked her hard once, twice to lower her a bit. Dr. Dee began to run toward the stage, while Harry, Jenks, and others gathered under her to break her fall. Another jolt shook her and then the lines went slack.

The men below her broke her fall; yet she went off balance to her hands and knees on the pavement. Her voluminous skirts both slowed her fall and cushioned her, but for a goddess and queen it was damned undignified. Disheveled and dismayed, she could have skewered Luke Morgan.

The final trumpet fanfare pierced her ears, the crowd’s shouts, a woman’s scream, then a man’s voice—Ned’s—shouting from behind the scaffolding.

“Luke Morgan tripped and fell, and he’s not moving!” Ned cried, bringing back her black memories of Geoffrey’s fatal fall. At least she was alive. Shakily, Elizabeth got to her feet, helped by those around her.

“
HE FELL JUST LIKE GEOFFREY!” THE QUEEN
heard Meg cry.

’S blood, Elizabeth thought, it was not just like Geoffrey, for Luke Morgan lay flat on his back. Wrapped yet around one hand, the rope that worked Dr. Dee’s flying wires had evidently snapped from the master rigging. But from ten feet away, the queen could see Ned had been correct that Luke was not moving. He looked dead.

As Elizabeth neared the fallen man, her snagged harness ropes pulled her back as if she were a child in leading strings. When Jenks saw her struggling, he rushed to take their weight upon himself. With one hand, he drew his stage sword to cut her free, but she stopped him.

“We will not tamper with things yet,” she whispered, ripping her mask strings from around her neck.
Looking startled, Jenks nodded. With his strength giving her slack, she strode closer to the prone, unmoving body.

Tears blurred her vision. Two strange falls by those who had served her well, both strong, young men, Elizabeth grieved. What tragedy in the midst of her happy summer.

She bent over as Dr. Dee came running and knelt quickly. His observation cylinder still in his hand, he held the larger glass end of it under Luke’s nostrils. He studied the slight misting of the glass.

“Breathing but faintly,” he announced, looking up at her. “Keep the others back, if you please, Your Majesty.”

“Stand clear, all of you but Dr. Dee. Give them space and air,” the queen commanded until she saw her cousin Harry was among the gathering. “All but for Lord Hunsdon,” she added, and Harry fell to his knees beside his wife’s injured cousin. This close, Elizabeth thought Luke looked merely asleep.

“You had best send for your physicians, Your Majesty,” John Dee told her, not looking up this time, “for though I have studied the medicinal arts, they are not my forte. But I warn that this man must be lifted carefully. We must hold his head still, for he’s not moved any of his limbs, and I fear some sort of paralysis through a broken neck or back.”

“Will he be long unconscious?” Harry asked, his voice breaking. He pressed his hand to Luke’s shoulder as if to comfort him. “How can we be certain he has not just knocked himself out?”

Dr. Dee did not answer, but pulled up each eyelid and stared into the man’s pupils. “Perhaps no severe head injury, as his irises are not dilated,” he muttered. “Your Majesty, a tabletop or door would be best on which to move the man, not just jostling hands.”

“Jenks, fetch such as Dr. Dee requires and summon my doctors from the audience,” she ordered.

Elizabeth saw Robin was helping to hold the crowd at bay. Their gazes snagged as if she’d called his name. He nodded to her, but she looked back to Dr. Dee as he carefully unwrapped the broken rope from Luke’s right hand. His fingers had gone white, though color came slowly back to them now.

The thick, twisted hemp had nearly cut into his skin while his left hand, with which he should have held it too, looked barely bruised. Then, Elizabeth reasoned, he must have fallen from the scaffold with but one hand on the rope, not two as should have been. And that rope had not broken in rehearsal. It looked not frayed but cut clean. Had he let go of the rope with one hand to try to retain or regain his balance? That could have been the two jerks she felt.

As Dr. Dee oversaw Luke’s carefully designed exit to the palace where her physicians would tend to him, Elizabeth squinted up at the walkway where Luke had held the master rope.

Nothing she saw could have tripped him unless his unknown stumbling block had tumbled down too and then been quickly removed. The four boards were narrow, but the man had practiced on them. What had gone amiss that he had begun to lift her, then stopped,
then fell evidently just as his rope broke—or was cut free?

Only then did Elizabeth recall she was still tied to the scenery. She began to tremble again, not this time at her deliverance or even her fierce concern for Luke’s recovery, but from the fact that—as had not happened during the performance—she sensed she was being watched with great hostility.

Frowning, she looked around, only to see familiar faces: Kat’s, Katherine Grey’s, both women still in their masks; Robin, of course; Harry, who had played a bit part; Felicia, cradling the lute Elizabeth had once given Geoffrey; and the huddle of servants who had been in the masque, Meg, Ned, Jenks.

She looked upward again, this time scanning not only the entire backside of scenery and the castle courtyard walls against which it was nestled, but the tall, dominating Round Tower beyond. Had it now been midnight rather than noontide with the sun streaming down, she could not have felt more frightened.

“Dr. Dee,” she called in a wavering voice to the obviously distressed man, “loose me now.”

The man’s skin looked ashen as he hastened to obey. “Your Majesty, I swear by all I hold dear I cannot fathom what could have gone wrong. Though Luke Morgan seemed surefooted, the man must have simply stumbled and perhaps cut himself free so he would not hang by his hand.”

Just, she thought, as Geoffrey must have suddenly been drunk or dizzy and had fallen or thrown himself
off, after carefully preserving his lute. Ned and Meg had been certain her musician had met with foul play, and she was certain that life-loving, ambitious Luke Morgan would never have just stumbled. The man had instinctive aplomb and grace, nearly as much as Robin, though with none of the breeding nor training.

“Your Majesty,” Dr. Dee’s voice droned on, “neither was your getting suspended in mid-flight any part of my plan.”

“Not
your
plan, perhaps,” she muttered, more to herself than him.

As the hovering Jenks and Dr. Dee unhooked the wires and ropes from her shoulders and the back of her bodice, she felt she could breathe again. Her feet stood steadier on the ground. And for the first time in days, mayhap the entire summer, she knew she had business to which she must attend, however much she simply wanted to throw herself in Robin’s arms and be carried off to safety in the palace or that sturdy old Round Tower.

“Everyone stay well back from this scenery,” the queen commanded. “Do not so much as touch any of it. Lord Robert, clear out even the players of this masque, but tell them they may be summoned to give witness later. And find my little artist, Gil.” Yes, Elizabeth thought, Gil had started out life as a climber—indeed, as a thief who had helped his mother hook goods from other people’s lofty windows in London. Climbing and sketching were needed now.

“Doctor,” she added in a more muted voice, “please show me again exactly how the ropes were rigged back
here and how that man—my counterbalance—could possibly have fallen.”

“Fallen,” Dr. Dee whispered, “at the precise moment that—”

“That I as well as Luke could have been harmed or killed,” she finished for him.

“HARRY, I WOULD SPEAK WITH YOU,” ELIZABETH TOLD HER
cousin as he entered her withdrawing chamber where she sat alone an hour later.

“So I heard, Your Grace, and came forthwith.”

She had sent for her cousin from Luke’s bedside on the first floor of the palace. Her physicians had decided it was best the gravely injured man not be carried upstairs.

“First, how fares Luke?” she inquired, clasping her hands tightly in her silken lap.

“Unconscious and unchanged, though he may yet wake. Your doctors say it may not be permanent insensibility,” he went on, his voice wavering, “though he stands—lies—in danger of death.”

“Sit, Harry,” she said, her voice soft. He slumped in the big chair next to hers at the table where she had eaten next to nothing despite Kat’s coaxing. She saw Harry had crumpled his hat in his hand and his hose were stained from kneeling on the paving stones. Now, in darkest despair, Harry stared at those smudged knees.

“Have you sent word to Anne that her cousin has been injured?”

“Not yet,” he replied, head down. “I was hoping— praying—he would regain sensibility or movement, so I would have some hopeful news to tell her. She trusted me to care for him, you see, and …”

Elizabeth heaved such a sigh he stopped talking and looked up. “I know, I know,” she said. “He is a man full grown and yet you feel responsible for him. ’S blood, imagine what it is to feel that for an entire kingdom! It is more sometimes than one can bear.” He nodded but still did not seemed to be listening, his eyes unfocused, his expression distracted.

“Harry, I have decided we must probe this seeming accident, though it is not yet a murder like the tragedies we have delved. But perhaps it was attempted murder and tied somehow to Geoffrey Hammet’s demise—and to intent to harm me.”

“A conspiracy?” he whispered. “A plot?”

“I cannot believe Luke simply stumbled, can you?” He shook his head, then looked away. “I regret to cross-question you at this difficult time, but if foul play is afoot we must move swiftly before the trail to—to someone dangerous grows cold. Is there any reason you can give me that Luke could have fallen? When Geoffrey took his fatal tumble at Richmond, evidence suggested he had been drinking heavily, and Meg tells me he had suffered at least one dizzy spell.”

“Luke had
not
been drinking, not at midday, not with something like holding your flying wires in his charge. He yearned to please, you know, please you especially, Your Grace. Besides, I was with him most of the morning to know whereof I speak. I admit
that at times he did drink, but not much—not as much …”

“Not as much as you?”

He sat up straight. “If I drink overmuch, it is always in privy chambers, Your Grace. Did Luke tell you such? I know he had told you other things—about Felicia. Why, you’d think he was your man, ordered to report to you with—”

“No, Luke did not say aught amiss about you, nor is he my man, as you put it. I have not stooped to using domestic spies—yet.” She hugged herself as a chill swept her. Though closeted with her trusted cousin, she yet felt the walls had evil ears and eyes. And she was still terribly shaken from her fall.