The Twylight Tower (24 page)

Amy’s thin face broke into a tight smile.

“Do you like it then, milady?” Felicia asked. “ ’Tis all the fashion at court, I hear, both song
and
sentiment.”

“At court? My husband lives at court and promises he shall send me the finest gift from there, fit for a queen. Have you seen the queen?”

Felicia played on to give herself time to digest all that. She should have realized that Lord Robert would send gifts to his wife since he often gave them to the queen. Either men were skilled at keeping women on a leash with courtesies, gifts, and sentiments, or they weren’t, and that man was.

“A gift fit for a queen?” Felicia repeated, fitting those words into her new song. “Then I must tell you, I have played at court and have seen your handsome husband there—”

“Oh,” Amy said as her face lit. “Then do you know the lutenist Franklin Dove?” While Felicia gaped at her, the woman picked her way closer through the long grass around the turfy mounds. “My lord hired him once to sing a song for the queen, and I wished—prayed—he would do the same for me and come here to sing it himself. He used to sing to me—we’d sing together.” Her voice trailed off and she looked away, frowning and tilting her head as if listening to something.

Felicia fought to keep from cheering at the perfect opening she’d been given. “Yes, I’m Franklin Dove’s sister Felicia, whom he himself taught to play the lute,” she said, throwing all caution to the winds. She had been told to use an alias and a far different tale, but this was too good to be true. Young Moneybags, whom her sponsor had sent to guide her here, would
have to admit it when she joined him at their forest encampment again this evening.

“Indeed
I am
,” she said, beginning to play again, “not only Felicia Dove but the gift fit for a queen Lord Robert had promised you. I’ve defied Her Majesty by playing in disguise with my brother at court, and so I beg you not to tell the others in the manor house that I’m here. I will come each day to meet you privily but will not go into the house.”

Amy grasped her hands together. Her eyes, once flat and dull as gray stones, now shone. “It’s the best gift he could have given me and just like him to have the lutenist be a woman and not a man, so I would know to trust you. And if you’re out of favor with the queen, you are especially in favor with Lady Dudley of Cumnor. You know, Robert used to be so jealous of me at first. But I thought I’d truly lost him to the queen.”

Felicia kept playing. She didn’t want to press her fine fortune, but she needed to get Amy off by herself, as soon as possible, down by the stream perhaps or for a walk along that ravine with all the protruding tree roots. Still, it would be so much better if this could happen in a common place and not in one Amy seldom went.

“Play that first song again, Felicia Dove,” Amy commanded quietly with a sweep of her hand, but the lutenist saw her flinch at some inward pain. She hardened her heart for what she must do.

“Sing with me then, but let’s stroll a ways farther
from the house. I believe your beloved Robert would be in trouble with the queen if she knew he sent me, and someone in your household might tell.”

“I’ll keep your secret, but all right then,” Amy said, stretching her strides as she led Felicia out through the cemetery gate. “Let’s both sing as loud as we can to drown out other voices.”

ELIZABETH COULD HAVE CRIED AS SHE WELCOMED HER OLD
friends John and Isabella Harington back to court from twenty months in exile. Their eyes, too, glittered with unshed tears, and it wasn’t until Bella rose from her deep curtsy that the queen saw their enforced time in the countryside had given them a great gift, even if they had perchance lost Hester now.

“Bella, dearest,” Elizabeth cried. “You are … finally, a baby?”

“Is it so obvious already, then?” Bella asked as John beamed. “You know, Your Grace, how desperately I—we—have longed for our own child. But what is the word on my lord’s Hester? We don’t believe we passed her on the road, not that she’d come home to Kelston, especially after all your messenger told us. We nearly feared you would banish us again for rearing such a child.”

“No, no, I would never punish parents for a wayward child,” the queen protested as she hugged Bella and John kissed her on each cheek. “Especially those who served me so well before I was queen, even in the bad times.”

“We are grateful to be back for this special day of your birth celebration,” Bella added.

“Bless you both for not forgetting,” Elizabeth told them, pressing their hands between hers. “Twenty-seven, a lofty age for an unwed queen, some say, but we shall see. You both, of course, will attend the banquet and dancing tonight, though you must see Bella takes to her bed early, my lord.”

“Anything you say, Your Grace.”

“John, you have always been loyal to those you served, and I have missed you both,” the queen declared. “Especially now, I have need of loyal friends.”

The Haringtons exchanged unspoken looks that somehow said so much. Elizabeth felt that strange yearning for her own love again. Well, she’d see Robin tonight and pray God he never failed her as these usually loyal people had. Yet the Haringtons had gone to the Tower with Elizabeth when her sister imprisoned her there, and if John had not defied her and lied to her the month she was crowned, they would never have been apart in the first place, sent to their rural home at Kelston near Bath. But all that was over now.

“I deeply regret,” Elizabeth told them as they walked together into the royal withdrawing room, “that I had to bring you back to such unsettling news. Once I saw the lutenist was a lass, I should have known she was Hester, but she kept changing her name, her appearance, her sex.…” She smacked her hands on her huge skirts. “You did tell her who she is?” she asked them both. “Her heritage—descended from the king, my father, I mean.”

“Her mother told her early and often,” John admitted. “Knowing Audrey, she probably embellished each detail about the court and her Tudor ties.”

“Ties,” the queen whispered. “Yes, ties, all right.”

“Hester is a brilliant girl,” Bella put in, “like her father, skilled in the arts. But even when she was young, she seemed to tread the edge of reality at times.”

“Made up fantastical plays and stories, all with music, and wrote them down,” John explained, gesturing broadly. “In most of her elaborate musical dramas,” he went on, “she became noble or royal—harmless head-in-the-clouds sort of things.”

Elizabeth nearly stumbled. Not harmless, perhaps, if one felt thwarted
and
had that treacherous trace of Tudor blood rampaging through one’s veins. Elizabeth herself had chafed for years in exile, but she’d had hope for her future; Felicia—Hester—mayhap raged from adoration of and abhorrence for the Tudor queen.
The seething passion held within, I cannot fathom,
Harry had said of Felicia when he first heard her play. The depths of both love and hate she must feel for her aunt, Elizabeth of England, could be staggering.

“Bella couldn’t convince or constrain Hester to take up needlework and the womanly arts,” John Harington’s words rolled on. “But her music—the girl was obsessed with her music.”

Elizabeth indicated they should sit and partake of the wine and their favorite dishes she had had prepared for them. “Always good mixed with ill,” the queen tried to comfort them, however distressed she
felt at what they’d said. “Joy with sadness, hard times with prosperity.”

“Your Majesty,” John said, clearing his throat, “though I have failed you in the past, I would die to protect your reputation here and anywhere.”

Elizabeth stayed her goblet halfway to her mouth. “Why do you stress my reputation now, my lord?”

Bella shifted in her seat. The months away had made this tall, big-boned companion of Elizabeth’s youth seem to grow in the queen’s mind, and not just because she was showing a belly now. Bella was beautiful, yet athletic and determined as an Amazon. And John looked, as ever, stalwart but a bit willful, with his slightly unruly mustache and beard. That and the single gold hoop in his left ear gave him the air of a brigand, but his eyes were steady and his mouth firm. The queen fought not to see Felicia’s face when she gazed upon him now.

“Your Grace,” Bella spoke up, turning her goblet around in her hands without drinking, “even in the countryside, your subjects say the wildest things about court doings. I’m sure it is exaggerated, but …”

Bella glanced at John as if for support. He nodded.

“Your Majesty,” Bella plunged on, “we mean not to be harbingers of bad news when we are so glad to be back with you, but the likes of cowherds and carters say you will marry Robert Dudley one way or the other.”

The queen cracked her goblet on the table, slopping crimson claret. She banged her other fist down too, and things rattled a second time. “Then the likes of
cowherds and carters—courtiers and foreign queens—are much mistaken! ’S blood and bones, I cannot wed with Robert Dudley because he is already wed, and that is that. And the next person who says different shall spend time in Windsor’s old dungeon under the Round Tower! Now drink and eat,” she muttered, sliding the sweetmeat dish over the bloodred stain she’d made on the table carpet.

AMY HAD BEEN TOO TIRED EARLIER TO GO FOR MUCH OF A
walk with Robert’s lutenist. But after dark, when Mrs. Pirto was sleeping sitting upright in her chair, she sneaked out to meet the musician again. It was all so delicious and forbidden, Amy thought with a little shudder. It reminded her of when she and Robert used to meet for trysts when he first courted her.

She didn’t like it, though, that Felicia refused to come into the house, so at supper that evening she had cleverly solved the problem. She couldn’t wait to tell Felicia, who said she was staying at an Oxford inn but wouldn’t say which one. She feared the queen would track her there and be angry she was singing Robert’s songs for Amy.

“Oh, there you are,” Amy called out as she followed the muted lute music around the far side of the tower. “Good news! Besides this apple tart I brought you, I mean,” she said, and extended it to the girl. “You know, I worry about you being out in the dark, not that there’s been any trouble with ruffians or such.
Robert should have sent Fletcher or one of his men with you.”

“I’m quite all right, and dedicated only to making you feel better in all ways,” Felicia said, and sang,

“Oh—did Robert write me that—send me that?” Amy asked, her voice shaken. “But it’s so sad, and I thought he meant to cheer me.”

“He sends it to apologize for any possible grief he has caused you,” Felicia said, pleased she’d planted the seed. “He admits guilt for staying away.…”

“But it speaks of death and I … like not to think on that—though I do sometimes.”

“Do you? Then no more of that song. Off with the head of whomever wrote it, though I truly think the more melancholy songs are the best sometimes, the most truthful.”

“I—yes, I suppose. But what I wanted to tell you is that I’ve talked nearly everyone in the house but an old woman, who sleeps away the afternoons, into going to the fair in Abingdon on the morrow, and I shall stay
here and you shall sing me songs all day. Then I can feed you and reward you, for I mislike a musician of the queen—especially one who is defying her— staying in an inn. So we shall have a special day to remember.”

“Yes, a special day, as you say.”

Amy patted her hand even while she was playing a lively ballad and hurried back toward the house.

“YOU LOOK BEAUTIFUL, JUST RADIANT, DESPITE ALL THESE
other wretched goings on,” Kat told the queen as her ladies bedecked her for her birthday banquet and dancing. Still, even left-handed, Kat kept fussing with the little details of curls and lace ruff and the way her scented pomander hung. The women, without Katherine Grey, whom the queen had banished to her room, oohed and aahed. As Mary Sidney held a mirror for her, the queen straightened the huge strand of pearls Robin had given her an hour ago. They were big as chickpeas and the double strand looped to her waist. She’d partly pinned them to her with a big brooch so they wouldn’t bounce right off her shoulders during the dancing.

A knock sounded on the door, and Kat answered it even as the queen’s women swept out to complete their own last-minute preparations. When the swish of skirts and chatter quieted, Elizabeth could hear Kat whispering.

“Who is it, Kat?” she called, fully expecting that Robin had come calling a bit early to escort her.

Kat bustled back in. “Two things, Your Grace,” she began. “One, Katherine Grey is insisting she be allowed to attend the banquet.”

“She will not. What else?”

“You realize she’s got everyone saying the queen will permanently imprison her next, just as you did Felicia Dove, only this time in the deepest, darkest dungeon of the realm for her affinity of blood to you.”

“How dare she! I am trying to save her from that by teaching her a lesson now, though, God knows, she deserves exactly that or worse!”

“Yes, Your Grace. I just wanted to add that Katherine Grey seems to have known that Felicia was sprung from her prison nearly as soon as it happened.”

The queen arched her penciled brows. “Did she? Then, as much as I mislike dealing with her, she needs to be questioned again, but not today, not this special night. She and Felicia and their ilk shall not ruin this night!”

But as Robin escorted her toward the great hall a few minutes later, the queen noted Ned Topside standing at the top of the staircase where he shouldn’t be, waving his hand and gesturing toward the musicians’ gallery. If the knave was just going to tell her that the lack of Felicia would make the music sound shallow until she was replaced, she already knew that.