The Twylight Tower (22 page)

“You see, my queen, you always leave me breathless.”

“And you me,” she countered, laughing nervously, “but only for your clever quips and puns and wordplay.”

“Alas,” he said, mock serious, with one hand on his chest as he bowed to her, “I had hoped for more than that backhanded compliment. I would die to hear you say you are left breathless by my love play.”

She shook her head but put her arm through his and walked with him on a slow circuit of all they could survey. Yet they looked only at each other. “We must not speak of dying on this sad day,” she said. “But as for love play, I hear you have another song for me.”

“Did Felicia say so?” he countered, squeezing her wrist firmly against his ribs. “And I hear you are keeping her close confined at Harry’s again.”

“Does everyone know, then?”

“Do you still believe that anything you do won’t be known, remarked on, and spread even abroad?”

Elizabeth noted, as she had before, that whenever Robin did not want to answer a question directly, he simply made his own query. “You said once, my Robin, if we were but common folk, even a country swain and milkmaid, you would love me forever. But things shall never be so simple. Would that we could be fast friends as we are and not have others scandalized.”

“ ’S blood, we can stand up to them! I wish you could trust me enough to take my advice. To let me become your next Cecil and your only love.”

She tugged her arm free and leaned her elbows on a gap in the wall. Tears prickled behind her eyes but she blinked them back, thinking of poor Luke with his desperate blinking message, of how far he and Geoffrey Hammet fell. Thinking of the burden of being queen, loving and longing as a woman but caught in this dim realm between bright surrender and dark self-control. Her mother had held her power only as long as she held her father at bay, for when she gave in to him, her world collapsed like a—a tower of cards.

“What is it, my beloved?” Robin whispered, leaning close but not touching her now.

“I am thinking of my parents. Great Harry, wed to a wife he could not love when the alluring Anne Boleyn became his passion. To have her, he thrust the Catholic church aside, he executed friends who would not back him, and made this once Papist place into the Pope’s hell on earth. The king set aside his first wife, but when he wed Anne—and she bore me—things went so bad between them.”

“Stop this melancholy train of thought, or you’ll make yourself ill,” he protested. “Our estate is naught like theirs, though I could set Amy aside, if you’d but give the word.”

She pushed away from the wall and him, pacing faster around and around while he hurried to keep up. “That’s just it, Robin, I will not give the word and not only because she is ill.”

He snagged her elbow to spin her around into his arms. “Let’s not talk of Amy then. Let’s just talk of us.”

“You know, I actually told myself I agreed to meet you here just to find out if you’d seen aught amiss when Luke Morgan fell and to ask you to go to de Quadra again so we may keep an eye on Katherine Grey from that end too.”

“Firstly, I did not see Luke fall, I swear it.”

“Then I told myself I would be bold enough to demand if you had hired Felicia Dove to spy on me as well as sing your songs to me.”

“I—spy on you? Elizabeth, my love, I watch you with my own hungry gaze and ever shall, but no, I have not asked her or anyone to spy on you,” he vowed, emphasizing each word and staring deep into her eyes while his hand on her chin made her look at him.

“I believe that, truly. I’ve just become so obsessed with finding out who’s watching me and who is murdering my men and why.”

“Murder? You believe so?”

“More and more. I long to close my eyes and have it all go away, to have our happy, carefree summer back again, to have Cecil here, keeping his mouth shut about a foreign marriage, to have Kat recovered—Meg too—and to have …”

Somewhere in her recital, she had closed her eyes. He crushed her in his arms and kissed her. His mouth moved against hers, opening her lips, tearing away her defenses. As always she felt his masterful kisses down deep in her belly. She sagged into his strength as he leaned against the outer wall.

Her head spun so that the top of the tower seemed
to tilt at them. She had to stop this madness before she begged for more. Somehow she managed to step away from him. “Whatever that changeling Felicia has done or not done,” she plunged on, clearing her throat and shaking out her skirts, “I want to hear the new song. Since she is not here, you must sing it for me.”

He grinned rakishly, making her insides flip-flop again. How quickly he’d recovered from a kiss that had shattered her poise. Dusk embraced them, and she could barely see his face clearly when she stepped away. Mayhap they should have brought a lantern, but then all could look up and see the strange light on the tower. No, they were better in this dark that followed twilight.

“Shall I order you to sing it for me, my lord?” she asked.

“I am only thinking you will no doubt also imprison me for my shoddy lyrics and unworthy voice.”

“If I ever imprison you, it shall be here in this tower, and I shall come to bring you bread and beer each day.”

“You are already my gaoler, my queen. And anything that comes from your hand, my virgin goddess Diana, is pure ambrosia. But since you command this birthday gift early, I am thinking I must find you another for that grand occasion.”

“If you can be so glib in mere conversation, I must hear this song and now.”

“All right, though it shall suffer from lack of your Dove’s lute. Really, you must free her soon, but here it is then.

“You wrote it for this place and time,” she whispered, awed. “You knew I would agree to meet you here. You are a wizard or sorcerer like your friend Dr. Dee.”

“I’d like to tell you your future,” he said, stepping forward again to press her hands in his. His breath, like sweet cloves, embraced her before the wind tugged the scent away.

“But since you cannot,” she said, fighting again for reason over passion, “at least you must interpret that falling apples dream you told me. I thought it was strange that it came just before I fell during the masque, and I wish you had rescued me then.”

“I would give my life to do so.…”

She pulled away and began to walk again. “Stop saying these life or death things,” she insisted. “I know you were vexed that Luke Morgan put his hands on me, and then to have a fantasy of rescuing me when I fell …”

He pulled her to him as he had before. He even backed her up against the curve of the outer tower wall. Elizabeth knew she should order him to unhand her, to step away, but she could not.

“I told you, my love, the dream had naught to do with rescue—for it is you who have rescued me. But
must you remain as forbidden to me as Eve’s apple? I yearn, I love and burn …”

He took her lips again, and she was lost. But for a shred of strength she could well have begged him to press her to the floor stones and ravish her body as he had her heart. When at last he released her, her knees were so weak she pressed against his legs to stand. Pulling back, she leaned against a gap in the wall, staring out over her now black kingdom and the vast reaches of her own soul.

“I shall write yet another verse of my song, which begs you to be brave in climbing the twilight tower,” he rasped, his mouth close to her ear. “I shall sing that to yield to passion is like flinging yourself from that tower, not to fall but to fly!”

She felt her bones melt but managed to take another step away. “I will think on that, my dearest Robin. But you must recall, I have already tried to fly—and fell.”

Elizabeth felt her way around the tower to the dark stairs. Suddenly she felt the fear of being up so high; a strange dizziness assailed her, like Felicia claimed on the walls of Richmond, like herself dangling on wires above the courtyard paving stones. But the queen must never fear the heights. She put her hand against the solid, steadying stone.

“Robin, stay here for a bit before you follow. And, I swear to you, when I am ready to fly—as you want—you will be the first to know.”

THE MOMENT ELIZABETH ARRIVED BACK IN HER PRIVY
rooms through the tower door, Mary, Kat, and Meg began talking at once. The queen held up her hands to silence them.

“I was simply out for a walk on the parapets with only Jenks along,” she said to fend them off. “What is all this jabbering about peering in windows? Or you mean you saw someone outside—on the roof?”

“No,” Mary said primly. “Word has come that your clever lutenist has gone out hers.”

Elizabeth cursed and sat down hard on the mounting stool for her bed, her head in her hands before she asked in a shaky voice, “Someone threw Felicia out a window at Lord Hunsdon’s? And so this dreadful pattern of murders continues, and I nearly blamed her.”

“Oh, no, that’s not it,” Kat put in, her voice still sounding slow from her medicine. “Someone leaned a ladder up to her window despite your cousin downstairs and the guard you had posted on her door. She climbed out and disappeared, for good, I hope. I’m starting to think it must have been she, not Katherine, trying on your clothes at Richmond. Why, however brilliant at the lute, that girl is like a snake that keeps shedding its skin and emerging all new and slimy once again.”

The queen clipped out one of her father’s favorite oaths. “Mary,” she said, “have a messenger send word to Lord Hunsdon that I will be there at first light, and he’s not to touch the girl’s room nor anything outside the window. I was just coming to fear Felicia was spying on me for someone—and I fear that someone has
sprung her like a woodcock from a trap. And tell them to double the guard on the ground and on the roofs of the palace here, these back stairs too. I must find Felicia—or whatever her name truly is—before she finds me again.”

“Oh, something else,” Mary said, and went to Elizabeth’s cosmetic table to fetch a torn piece of parchment. “I’m afraid Lord Hunsdon’s already touched something in Felicia’s room. He sent you this. Stuck through with the quill she wrote it with, stabbed right to the drapery at the open window she went through.”

Elizabeth took the letter with two fingers as if it would burn her. And Felicia had told everyone she could not write. She obviously was not afraid of heights either. Lies upon lies, the queen thought as she read,

“Pursues to death?”
Elizabeth muttered.

“Lord Hunsdon said it’s another song she wrote,” Kat explained.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and sank back against the side of her bed. “She didn’t write it originally,” she whispered. “It was penned by my dear friend John Harington, whom I fear may be her father.”

CLOAKED AND HOODED SO AS NOT TO DRAW A CROWD, WITH
Ned, Jenks, Gil, and two guards in attendance, Elizabeth went by working barge to Eton just after dawn the next day. The moment Harry greeted her at the side garden gate, he began his recital of events, obviously guilt-ridden his prisoner had escaped.

“It was yet light, Your Grace, so, of course, who would think such a thing could happen?” Harry rattled on. “I had no notion that, three stories up, she would get out that small window, not with your own guard on her door.”

“I shall deal with him later. She must have made some noise.”

“But how,” Harry went on, “did anyone know she was here to rescue her? I gathered only your inner circle knew, and they wouldn’t tell.”

“Be that as it may, I just hope, cousin, my guard was not nodding off and you were not downstairs drinking overmuch, from your grief about losing Luke, of course.”