The Twylight Tower (28 page)

She turned sharply in her chair to face him. “Can you assure me there was no foul play in her death, my lord?”

His usually steady gaze wavered before he looked back at her. “Of course not,” he said.

“Then I mean to send Ned Topside and Jenks covertly to Cumnor, not to get near the formal investigation but to learn whether Hester Harington, alias Franklin and Felicia Dove, could have possibly been in the vicinity. I suspect her of culpability and mayhap complicity in Luke’s death, perhaps even Geoffrey’s, so why not Amy’s, though that is a long shot? Well, what is it you know you are not saying?” she demanded when she saw the usually stolid Cecil blanch white as marzipan.

When he did not have an immediate answer, she went on. “My Lord Cecil, do not tell me to tread carefully here, as I shall do that. But the lutenist has been
snagged in many a lie, changed her identity, and then fled before I could question her more.”

“But what motive? If deep-seated anger at her parents, would she not attack them somehow? Because she wanted to be at court, and then became insanely jealous of others you favored? But a motive for three apparently disrelated murders?
Sui bono,
Your Grace, what can be her reasons, not only for harming the men but Amy, if you are striving to link all this together?”

She gaped at him one moment. Why was he arguing so hard, as if this girl were his client in court and not the queen herself? “Cecil, she might have pushed Geoffrey to be able to take his place. As for Luke, he was on to her guise and warned me twice about her, so who knows what else she thought he knew? And,” her words came out halting now, “her parents tell me that Hester used to love me—her kinswoman on the throne she feels could have been hers—but now I think she hates me because she thinks I’ve betrayed her.”

“Yes, all right. I can see that much,” he admitted, shifting slightly away from her in his armed chair.

“I believe,” the queen plunged on, “she’s stalked me the way a hunter does his prey. I’ve felt for weeks someone was watching me, over and above the fact I assume de Quadra and his ilk have spies at court, but it wasn’t like that. Hester would, I fear, actually like to
be me,
and with her Tudor blood, however diluted in her veins—My lord, are you quite well? You look too pale, so the barge trip here and then my working you so hard …”

As she reached to touch his arm, he shook his head and gathered the last of his papers. “I’m fine. But you said Hester might be guilty of complicity earlier. Do you think there is some sort of plot here?”

“I don’t know. Harry says she had a fat purse, and I know she must have been in the employ, even briefly, of others besides—besides Robert Dudley.”

She got up and went to the window, leaning her hands on the sills to support her shaking legs. She tried to go on but her voice snagged. Robin. He could have hired Felicia-Hester to go to Cumnor. But he would have had to defy his queen to spring the girl first, mayhap so she would not be further questioned and reveal who had hired her and for what. But if Robin had sent Hester to harm Amy and someone saw her there, what would be easily traced and proved is that Felicia-Hester had been in the employ of the queen of England. Her stomach knotted at the dreadful possibilities that could come from that twisted knowledge.

“Your Grace,” Cecil’s voice interrupted her thoughts, “I will do all I can to help delve into this. Shall I summon the others, your cousin Harry too, for our Privy Plot meeting?”

“Yes, after dark when I shall supposedly retire, let us say at nine of the clock. And about my needing rest, my lord,” she said, turning to face him, “I swear if I let down one moment I will turn into a screaming banshee and everyone will know that I am a mere weak woman.”

He rose and came toward her. “A woman indeed, Your Grace, but never mere and never weak, not you.”

“Oh, Cecil,” she blurted, “Mildred is blessed to have you and I shall never, never have someone to love.”

“But you—”

“The other thing you must do, of course,” she plunged on, sniffing back tears, “is make marital overtures again to Archduke Charles, Catholic or not.” She drew her handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. “Send some sort of grand gifts to keep the Holy Roman Hapsburgs calm and happy right now, my lord. I may want no part of him, but I must put up a bold front. Well, are you speechless at last that I am broaching a marriage, a foreign marriage, or that I can think politically about it and not just personally?”

“Of course not,” he insisted.

She thought he lied gallantly, trying to buck her up again, her dear Cecil whom she—God forgive her—had treated abominably but never would again.

“You are a queen who has learned to face necessity,” he said.

“Necessity,” she repeated, and added a long list of her father’s favorite curse words. “And shall that be my bedfellow all these years to come?” She glanced out the window, toward the roofline where Hester or someone had come to spy on her. “Send for our fellow conspirators, my lord,” she ordered, “including young Gil. And send the barge to fetch Dr. Dee too, though he won’t make it here in time for the meeting. He must bring his signal mirrors, observation glass, and flying harness back again forthwith.”

IT HAD BEEN NEARLY TWO YEARS SINCE ELIZABETH HAD
sat with her entire Privy Plot Council. Ned, Jenks, and Meg looked excited, probably that Geoffrey’s death would now fully be addressed. Kat still seemed drained and tired; Harry and Cecil resigned. Gil sat drawing Elizabeth’s face until she rapped the table with her knuckles and gave him a cut-off signal, so he sat up and paid attention.

“Now, before we turn to the main subject, the latest death and Hester Harington’s possible crimes, I just want to say that I have never needed all of you more than now,” Elizabeth began their meeting. Her voice caught. She had been talking so much today, fearing her own silences within, that her voice was turning rough and made her sound ever on the edge of tears.

“Anything we can do to help, Bess,” Harry said, using her sobriquet for such sessions and investigations. “Of course, I’m especially interested in Luke’s strange demise, but if Felicia’s flight from right under my nose is somehow tied to Amy Dudley’s death …”

His voice trailed off and he fidgeted in his chair. It flickered through Elizabeth’s brain that Harry had once wanted to be the brilliant lutenist’s sponsor and mentor. But he never would have dared to think he could help his queen find happiness by dispatching Amy through Felicia. Surely he would have seen the ramifications of that. But did he sympathize with the girl perhaps knowing she was the result of one of King Henry’s brazen liaisons? Those rumors Harry himself was King Henry’s bastard never seemed to die.

“I brought Geoffrey’s shirt I been keeping,” Meg piped up in the awkward pause, pulling out the garment from her lap under the table. “Ned, Jenks, and I think it proves that he was pushed, at least that someone else was on the roof with him.”

“How so?” Elizabeth asked, strangely relieved to put off talking about Amy’s death.

The girl flapped the garment open on the table and everyone craned or leaned forward. “This red stain is from the malmsey that you thought was a sign of his drinking. Don’t you think it looks like someone threw it on him? See this burst of stain, not like he dribbled his own drink, ’cause this is right over his heart, not down under his throat. And since he left the musicians’ gallery in a clean shirt with only his own flask of sack like always, because we looked into that, someone else threw this on him for spite or—”

“Or lame proof he was drunk and fell of his own accord,” Jenks added, frowning. “And we learned a bottle of your personal malmsey was pilfered from the wine cellar that very night, from the ones marked with your name.”

“Not her whole name but just E R,” Meg prompted him.

“I am indeed impressed with all you have done,” Elizabeth admitted. Jenks sat up even straighter on the bench he shared with the other two. Ned beamed, but Meg’s eyes filled with tears again.

“You know, Bess,” Kat said, resting her broken, splinted arm on the edge of the table, “I thought some of your food and drink was filched more than once.
Besides, that would fit the pattern of Katherine Grey mayhap wearing your clothes and using your bathwater.…”

Everyone stared at the old woman, who blinked back owlishly at them. Though stricken with amazement that Kat had somehow not realized they were all thinking the culprit they would investigate was Hester-Felicia, Elizabeth reached for Kat’s good wrist and clasped it. “We are going to focus first on Hester Harington. But I do believe, Kat,” the queen said, “that Katherine is a problem and may be in league with the Spanish ambassador.”

“I believe so too,” Cecil agreed. “I warrant he has had one or two spying for him here at court, and it is possible Felicia Dove, alias Hester, was one of these.”

“Ah,” Elizabeth observed, “then you have been keeping an eye on him—and on the court—even from afar.”

“I have,” Cecil declared a bit testily.

“At any rate, Kat,” Elizabeth went on, “I cannot fathom Katherine doing de Quadra’s dirty work for him, if it entailed either spying or murder. She’s too spoiled and haughty to stoop to either, even if she’d like to see the deed done or to replace me as queen. But we are going to try to link Hester Harington to all three crimes. Do you see, Kat?”

“Of course I do. That’s what I meant,” she insisted.

Elizabeth expected people to speak up, but no one so much as moved. They too seemed disturbed that Kat had drifted far afield. It was the first time Kat had been more than just forgetful or slightly befuddled. If
Elizabeth lost her support on top of Robert’s, she would never make it through this.

“Bess, I believe you had an assignment for Ned and Jenks,” Cecil urged.

“A key one of the utmost importance and secrecy,” she said, grateful for his lead. “I want the two of you to ride to Cumnor tomorrow, pretend to be players just passing through to Oxford.”

“To covertly keep an eye on the inquest and investigation there?” Ned asked, looking even more somber and important.

“You are to steer completely clear of that,” she ordered, pointing a finger in each of their faces, “or you will implicate me in something of which I am innocent, except perhaps of bad judgment.”

Silence slammed into the room. No one breathed. Did they think she did not partly blame herself? She cleared her throat and said, “You are to work closely together to circumspectly discover whether or not a traveling lutenist—male, female, or eunuch—was in the vicinity of Cumnor House recently. Gil will draw from memory two more sketches of Hester Harington, which you may show around with the story of a runaway sister or some such. Meanwhile, the rest of us will sit tight but try to discover more about Geoffrey’s and Luke’s … murders.”

Everyone reacted differently to that pronouncement from their queen. Meg and Ned looked triumphant and Jenks solemn. Kat nodded, while Cecil and Harry frowned, and Gil began to sketch Hester-Felicia’s face from memory.
They hashed over much else before the queen sent them all to bed, Ned and Jenks with coin for their journey and permission to pick sturdy mounts from the stables since Lord Robert was not here to choose for them. She told Meg to take Kat to Mary Sidney to sleep in her ladies’ rooms tonight because she could not bear to see her as distracted as she was. Cecil was the last to head for the door.

“My lord, I want you to visit Robert Dudley at Kew after our council meeting tomorrow. I do not want you to leave me now, but you are the only one to do it.”

“To comfort him?” he asked, astounded. “I?”

“I know you don’t get on with him, but I trust you to tell me true. My master lawyer, you must accuse Robert Dudley—the fortune-hunting gypsy, others call him—and tell me if you believe he could be … could be guilty, and I then have loved—do love—a murderer, who has done me in too when he had someone kill his wife. He’s hired Felicia to sing his songs, and I must know if he’s paid her to do—his other bidding,” she choked out before she felt the last remnants of control desert her.

Elizabeth sank sobbing to her knees. William Cecil knelt with her, holding her as a father might while she soaked his shirt and shook against him like a thin reed in the harsh wind.