The Twylight Tower (25 page)

“Wait, Robin,” the queen said, halting at the top of the stairs, though all those below looked up and a hush held the crowded room. “Ned Topside,” she said, keeping her voice down as she turned her back on the others, “this had better be good.”

“It’s bad, but best you know now,” he told her, somber-faced. “A note was delivered by a town boy to your chief lutenist—chief, now that Felicia’s flown.”

“A note from her?” Elizabeth whispered. When he nodded, she ordered, “Then trace that boy, find out where he got the note. Find her!”

“Jenks and I are already working on that, though it may be a dead end.”

“I want no dead ends. And the note?”

He pressed it into her hand, all folded up. “At least your lutenist in the gallery could tell it was a song he should
not
sing, not today or ever. And now, Your Gracious Majesty,” Ned said, his actor’s voice booming, “your musicians and players wish you the bounty of this day and look forward to entertaining you before the dancing!”

In his best bombastic style, Ned swept his arm and graceful body into a low bow. Elizabeth descended the staircase, treading carefully in her long skirts, holding tight to Robin’s steady arm. The applause was deafening and the smiles and blinking gems in lantern- and candlelight quite blinding. Surely she could put all the pain of Felicia Dove away for this one evening, Elizabeth tried to tell herself. But the note burned a hole in her hand and she opened it behind the banquet table on the dais to read it.

The poem or song lyrics were attributed to Sir Edmund Knevet, but the queen knew he’d been gone for several years, dead by his own hand. But none of that mattered. This was utmost defiance thrown in her face, a fierce admission of guilt but also a challenge. More than that, it threatened that she was yet being watched and hinted that there were more falls to come. Whether from a tower or from a throne mattered not at all. However much grief it would cause the Haringtons, Felicia Dove—Hester Harington—must be found and stopped before she lived another day to do more destruction.

“LADY DUDLEY,” AMY HEARD ROBERT’S STEWARD, ANTHONY
Forster, calling up the staircase as the last of the inhabitants of Cumnor House—but for the Widow Owens, who was staying in her rooms—departed for the fair, “his lordship has sent a gift for you!”

Amy hurried into the hallway and down the top flight of shallow stairs to the landing above the lower
flight. “Another gift for me?” she gasped, looking down at him.

“Allow me to bring it to you,” he said, and hurried up the stairs. “I didn’t want to startle you by just appearing, since we and the old lady are the only ones left in the house.”

“But who brought it?”

“His favorite man, Fletcher, my lady, who said he had to head direct back to court. I suppose there is a note with it, but you know how they say good things come in small packages.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that.”

As he extended the small leather satchel to her, he added, “It was kind of you, my lady, to insist everyone, even the servants, go for the day. Have a care then,” he said, nodding with a half bow. He hurried down the stairs and went out the front door.

Amy stood listening a moment until he rode away, then hurried into her chamber to signal Felicia from the window, waving the fringed shawl Robert had brought her on his last brief visit. It was most unusual for Fletcher not to stay the night, but whatever was this second gift?

She pulled a flat, blue, crushed-velvet box from the satchel and opened it with trembling hands. It was lined with white satin. A short, single string of fat pearls, so fine. And with it a note that said,
“As promised … a gift fit for a queen. R.”

But, Amy thought, if the pearls were that gift, what of the lutenist? She heard her come in the front door
downstairs, as Amy had bid, and then a stair creaked. Lute music came closer.

It mattered not, Amy decided, that there was a bounty of gifts from Robert. That was good, not bad.

She hurried down the landing and looked over as Felicia came up strumming and smiling. “Look at the other gift my lord sent me,” Amy cried, and reached up to fasten them, despite the ache of pain that spread through her breast and arm again.

“How generous he is!” Felicia declared, and leaned the lute carefully against the banister. “Let me help you.”

Eyes shining, Amy turned her back and let the other woman fasten them around her neck. She thought the lutenist hesitated for one moment but she must have simply been fumbling with the clasp. And then the weight of pearls fell against her slender throat and neck, so heavy and so huge.

“COME THEN,
MY
LORD CECIL—
MINE,
NOT
the queen’s anymore,” Mildred called to her husband, gesturing for him to join her at the shuttlecock net their children had just deserted for a game of noisy bowling-on-the-green across the hedge. Sitting in the shade where he looked up from his book, Cecil saw his wife stood in full sunlight, hands on hips, as if daring him not to obey. He’d been reading the same paragraph repeatedly anyway, without retaining one thing, so he got up from the bench.

“I haven’t played such in years,” he protested. His mental inactivity and lack of purpose, even when he kept busy with the family, was driving him to distraction, and maybe Mildred too. He removed his jerkin to play in his shirt. Trying to appear in a good mood when he was not—for this woman could ferret out secrets better than a master torturer in the Tower—he
picked up the wooden battledore and playfully smacked her across the back of her skirts.

She laughed and shoved her sleeves up to her elbows as he took his place across the net. He had to smile. What would he ever do without Mildred? But then, in truth, what would he ever do without Elizabeth? He had not sent her his formal resignation yet, but neither did she summon him to court, so she must be furious with him. She was closer to Robert Dudley than ever, closeted with him at all hours while her kingdom seethed with rumor. If only he could treat the volatile, spoiled queen like a father would and pound some sense into her.

“Not so hard, Will!” Mildred chided when he smacked the little cork-and-feather shuttlecock far over her head. He tried to settle down, concentrating on hitting it back to her, but he soon sailed it wayward again.

“Your mind is elsewhere, and I know where,” she declared, plucking it out of the hedge and hitting it back. “Mired in the depths of despair, that’s where you are.”

“I can’t help it,” he countered with a whack of the paddle. “More than my shuttlecock game will go to perdition if Dudley helps Her Grace rule this realm. I fear he already rules her heart and there are so few ways of”—he smacked it again—“reversing that.”

“But there are ways?” she asked as a coil of hair bounced loose from under her big-brimmed hat. “And if so, you are desperate enough to try them.”

“Don’t read in overmuch. Though I admit that if
Lord Robert thinks he’s in paradise now, I’d much rather see him in that great paradise beyond, one way or the other.”

“Will, the servants might hear,” she protested, and let the shuttlecock nose into the grass. She came to the net and plucked nervously at it. “The careful, cautious lawyer and counselor I wed seems sometimes dangerously foolhardy lately. My love, if what you just shouted was overheard, someone might construe that you had a plot afoot to dispatch Lord Robert to that very place.”

“Ridiculous,” he declared, approaching the net, “however tempting. No, he may hang himself if given enough rope. The problem is, he is stringing up Her Grace too, and I cannot bear to let that happen. Yesterday was her birthday, and for the first time since the throne was hers, I was not with her.…”

“And de Quadra?” Mildred asked, obviously refusing to allow his own foolish sentiments, so unlike him, to pull him down. “You mentioned he needed watching. Do you think he’s doing more than setting up a plan to elevate Katherine Grey if the queen stumbles?”

“The queen has already stumbled, and I fear a great fall.”

“Like Humpty Dumpty?
And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men …
But do you think de Quadra would try to harm Dudley or the queen? Mayhap not a direct assassination attempt, but something else, something subtle? There would certainly be no one else to strike at to separate the two of them or to bring her down.”

“There is one …” Cecil muttered, frowning and hitting the paddle against his thigh in a regular beat that reminded him of one of Felicia’s songs.

“Who?” Mildred prompted when his voice drifted off.

As astute as she was, she—and therefore most people—did not see that subtle way out of this damned dilemma, Cecil mused. De Quadra no doubt did, for he knew all the angles. As for Dudley himself, he’d probably not see beyond how it would free him, for the man was the shortsighted type, one who had trouble looking past his own desires and advancements. He might mistake temporary deliverance for ultimate victory.

“My lord, you are woolgathering again,” Mildred’s sweet voice broke into his agonizings.

“Suffice it to say, God only knows what de Quadra’s really thinking or doing,” he muttered, turning away so she wouldn’t read his face.

“And the same with my beloved William Cecil,” he heard her say with a sigh. “God only knows …”

Whatever else she said was drowned by the children screeching across the hedge about whose turn came next at bowls.

“SUCH A GRIEVOUS PITY YOU LIVE HERE WITHOUT YOUR LORD,”
Felicia sang to Amy.
“You, not she, should be loved and adored.”

Her feet on a padded stool, leaning back in the cushioned chair while Amy slumped in hers across the
table, Felicia took another swig of wine and bite of apple before she went back to singing. Amy had ceased crying, ceased protesting that Robert could not have meant all these sad, cruel songs for her. She now just stared into space, though she had stuck her fruit knife into the wooden tabletop in her frustration. It was a pretty, sharp little knife with an inlaid handle, but Felicia really thought she’d best stick to her original plans. Amy seemed not so much afraid now as somehow resigned.

“I told you before, milady, your Lord Robert regrets some of what he’s done. Not enough to change his ways or come back again, though he’ll no doubt try to ease his conscience with gifts like pearls and notes—and these songs. But I do know how you feel,” she said, and sang,

“Did
she
send you, and not my lord?” Amy asked, as if emerging from a fog again. Felicia had thought about drugging her, maybe with her own medicine, but she felt she wouldn’t have to now.

“What does it really matter who sent me?” Felicia asked, just picking out the sad tune now. “They both want the same thing—each other—and you alone have the power to stop that.”

“Stop that? I?” Amy said, sitting up straighter.
“Haven’t you been hinting just the opposite? I am ill and cannot abide the court. Did someone who hates them pay you to take me to court to stop or shame them? But—who sent you then?”

“Someone rich and powerful, but it doesn’t really matter. It might as well have been Robert—maybe it was Robert. Only your ability to fight back matters. No, I have not come to take you back to court. There is a better way, a supreme gesture of defiance you can make. Why, if something happened to you, something suspicious, everyone would blame them, and could the queen then ever follow her heart’s desire at the expense of her honor? It would forever ruin them and his plans to rule with her as counselor or consort. And, of course, solve your problems too.”

“So you cannot come from him,” Amy reasoned aloud, getting to her feet. “He did not mean those cruel songs for me. Are you here to abduct me and blame them for it?” she cried. She didn’t flee as Felicia suddenly feared, but put both hands on the table to steady herself.

Felicia knew the woman had drunk far too much wine after she’d said the doctor had told her not to when she took her medicine. Mayhap Amy really knew what was coming, what had to be done, and would cooperate. It must be done cleanly, cleverly, with no scuffle, and time was flying. Someone could get ill at the fair and return early. The old widow down the hall could awaken or emerge from her chamber.

Felicia stood and washed her pewter mug in the
water from the ewer. She shoved her chair back under the table and wiped her plate before putting it and the mug back on the sideboard from which she’d seen Amy take it.