The Twylight Tower (29 page)

THE NEXT MORNING, THE QUEEN MET PRIVILY
with Ned and Jenks, garbed for their ride to Cumnor, and with Dr. John Dee, who had recently arrived. “Has Dr. Dee made it clear to you how you can use the signaling mirrors he is lending us?” the queen asked again. “And if you break that precious observation glass, I shall break your skulls.”

“We will not harm a thing nor get caught,” Jenks vowed, “and be back to report to you as soon as we can—if Ned can keep up a fast pace.”

“If you can keep up with posing as a traveling player,” Ned put in, affecting an educated London voice.

“And
that,”
the queen said, seizing both their wrists
in a hard grip, “is what I mean by you must get on with each other for this trip. No lording it over him, Ned. And, Jenks, no gibes about your outracing or outfighting him.”

When they went down the back way as she had bid, the queen turned to Dr. Dee again. “I cannot thank you enough for your help and the use of your brilliant devices, doctor. I would reward you with a sinecure or coinage, but I do not want it noised abroad that you are in the service of the queen. I regret to tell you there are spies about my court who would proclaim that to their hostile foreign masters.”

His eyebrows hiked higher. “It will ever be honor enough for me to be covertly in your employ, Your Majesty.”

“But I have something else yet to ask of you.”

“You mean you will dare to use the flying rig again?” he asked, glancing at the big bag of ropes and harness he’d hauled in with him. “Since you didn’t send it with your men, I surmised so.”

“I would speak of that, but come with me now, and I shall show you the drift of my gratitude from one bibliophile to another.”

“Bibliophile?” he said, sounding puzzled for once, though she realized full well he knew what that word meant.

She led him from her privy chamber down the short hall to the small, wainscotted room that served as her library when she lived here. His swift intake of breath when he glimpsed the rows of volumes was reward enough for her.

“I bring only a small portion of the royal library with me on progress from London but have numbers of books at all my palaces,” she explained, waiting for him to follow her into the room. “But I want you to select three books for yourself from these, one for each of your clever devices you have entrusted to me so that I might climb from the pit my enemies think I have fallen into—or mayhap we shall call it a book apiece for the three deaths we must solve.”

“Oh, Majesty, choose from all these? I said it is my joy and honor to serve you,” he said, staring at the books instead of her.

“And serve me you shall. But this will be our coinage, good doctor. You shall build a fine library over the years and tell no one its source, and if either of us needs to borrow aught from the other—books or ideas, intelligence, as you say—we shall.”

She left him staring at those crowded shelves with the same intent expression on his face she had seen on Robin’s when he’d gazed upon her with her skirts up and stocking down.

THE FIRST THING CECIL NOTED IN ROBERT DUDLEY’S SMALL
manor house at Kew was that no lamps nor tapers were lit and the draperies were pulled closed. He nearly stumbled in the front hall when Dudley’s steward closed the door behind them. One would think it were night outside instead of broad afternoon.

“Ah, some light in here at least,” Cecil observed to the queen’s prisoner in this velvet cage as the steward
led him to the short walking gallery. Hand outstretched, Dudley hurried to greet him. Though there was a row of windows here, the sun did not enter in late afternoon, and the gallery too seemed muted and grim.

This manor the queen had given Dudley—it had once been the dairy house of a fine estate—had no more than twenty chambers and was tucked away under a slant of hill. Still the land gave him tenants, rents, and men to draw on in his climb back to respectability. But that, Cecil thought, might be all water over the mill dam if Her Majesty learned that Dudley had betrayed her. That was what he was here to discern, yet the man looked actually glad to see him.

“How fares Her Grace? What is her feeling toward me now?” Dudley began to pepper him with questions as soon as they shook hands. He sounded desperate, but was that a mark against him? As ever, his focus centered on his own status and only the queen’s welfare as it served his own.

“Her Majesty is endeavoring to stay purposefully busy about the realm’s business and prays that all will be settled by the coroner’s jury of inquiry,” Cecil told him as they fell into stride together down the length of the old flagstone floor.

“She is stronger than I,” Dudley murmured, folding his arms across his chest.

“Stronger than most of us, if the truth were known—and it must be known, Lord Robert.”

“Through the inquest, you mean?”

“Yes, but I am sent to ask you straight if you had any foreknowledge that your wife would come to harm.”

“That she would try to harm herself, you mean? And did I encourage her suicide?” he asked, acting either intentionally or obstinately dense. “No, Cecil, and believe me, I could have. With the tumor in her breast, she was, of course, in pain and deeply melancholy at times.”

“But you were hardly pained nor melancholy to hear of her death, I take it,” Cecil threw at him. “You would see that as clearing your way to the queen, I have no doubt.”

Dudley stopped walking. His chin lifted. “No, my Lord Cecil, I was not saddened by her death, except the loss of life of one so young and that she suffered greatly alone these last years when I was absent to earn my family’s way back in the world. I will not—cannot—pretend to grieve for her loss in my own life. Amy and I burned our flame out long ago and had little in common after that, but she was my wife. I sent condolences but not false feelings to her family and do not express them now. But as to your original question,” he said, his voice rising again, “I would not doubt the shallow, spoiled woman could kill herself just to spite me!”

Cecil stared straight into Dudley’s steady gaze. A frown—perhaps a perpetual one now—furrowed his high brow and his eyes blazed. But in them, the seat of the soul, lurked not deceit but flamed raw self-serving
arrogance. The blatant honesty was a mark for his innocence, Cecil decided, however much it condemned him as a dreadful husband.

Cecil cleared his throat, uncertain he could find his voice for once. “You realize the evidence, such as we know of it now, looks suspicious for foul play,” he told Dudley as they began to walk again. They changed directions often as the corridor had nothing of the length of the queen’s galleries or even the one he and Mildred walked in inclement weather at Stamford or in their small country seat at Wimbledon. Suddenly Cecil pitied as well as detested this man: He’d never had a wife capable of comforting him and had been through hell for his family’s fierce ambition. And Cecil, of all men, understood ambition.

“As for suspicious evidence, I heard,” Dudley was saying, ticking things off on his long fingers, “that her neck was broken and her head at an odd angle, yet her cap was not awry. Two, her body bore no discernible bruises. Three, that Amy had insisted everyone but Mrs. Owens, the doctor’s old widow who gets about only with a walking stick, leave for the fair. Bowes also said they questioned Amy’s lady’s maid, Mrs. Pirto, and she said Lady Dudley had a strange mind. Hell’s gates, I could have told them that!”

“That she had a strange mind or all the other details?”

A muscle kept working in Dudley’s jaw, Cecil observed. “No one but my brother-in-law in a letter—he sits on the coroner’s jury—has told me aught of her demise, I swear it,” Dudley insisted, his voice rising in
pitch to sound nearly hysterical again. “I have lost my wife, my position at court, my reputation, my hopes, my men … my queen. I went to the Tower once and nearly faced the headsman, Cecil, and cannot bear to again.”

“But if you are innocent—”

“If!
Does Elizabeth not believe me—believe
in
me? Then I am doomed indeed!”

“Keep calm, my lord.
Since
you are innocent, once things are settled, you will be returned to court, I believe.”

Dudley clasped Cecil’s hand and looked intently into his eyes again. “If I can but believe that—that she will take me back …”

Cecil gently pulled away from him. “But if she does, it may be only as Master of the Horse, Lord Lieutenant of the Castle, and not as her favorite. I believe you are clear-sighted enough to see all the ramifications of that reasoning. I leave you to contemplate them, as I must be heading back now.”

“You know, I entertained her here once when she was at Richmond,” Dudley said, almost as if talking to himself. “All glittering and happy, she came riding in for dinner with her ladies and praised all I had done for her, our friendship. Her voice rang out here and her very presence lit this quiet tomb of a place like a torch.”

Dudley’s voice drifted off as he stared dazedly around the gallery, no doubt seeing, hearing the ghosts here. Cecil shivered.

“I can only pray your name—and hers too—will be
soon cleared, my lord,” Cecil said. Strangely, he found he meant it. Though he had often wished to run Robert Dudley through with the sharpest sword, this living death, suspended in dark exile, reminded him too much of his own recent plight. And made him almost, but not quite, regret the lengths to which he’d gone and would yet go to keep Dudley from ever being king.

“Cecil, I am deeply grateful you came to see me, even if she commanded it, and that you have listened to my side. Tell Her Grace I am innocent of all but adoring her. If I come back …” he said, and his voice drifted off again as he turned away to stare down the length of flagstone floor.

“If you come back, we must find a way to work together for the common good—her good,” Cecil said. Though he didn’t want to, he clapped the man on the shoulder before he headed for the door.

“Are the guards treating you well enough?” he asked, turning back. “You said you’ve lost your men, but they may be returned to you. Do you have a word for them, then?”

“I command they see to the royal stables in my stead, but there is one close groom I may indeed have lost. He disappeared even before any of this happened. I trusted him but fear he might have pilfered the pearls I sent by him to Amy and disappeared with the profit. I long favored and trusted him, one Edmund Fletcher. So if he turns up, tell him I demand an accounting of where he’s been or I may send him permanently packing.”

“I’ll pass the word along,” Cecil said, intrigued at how Dudley could do unto others what he did not want done unto him. That hardened his heart for the whole of what he had been sent to do—to confront, not comfort. Hoping it seemed an apparent afterthought, Cecil waited a moment, reopened the door to the gallery, and stuck his head back in.

“I forgot to tell you, Lord Robert, the queen is beginning to believe whomever that lutenist Felicia Dove worked for may have spied on her and urged Felicia to cause Geoffrey Hammet’s and Luke Morgan’s strange falls too when they got in the way. Put it in writing to me if you can think of any possible ties the lutenist could have had to any courtier who might have wanted your wife dispatched. After all, Felicia was sprung from her confinement two days before your wife’s death, so who knows she wasn’t sent to Cumnor too.”

He went out quickly and, this time, slammed the door as loudly as his heart slammed again his ribs.

IN LATE AFTERNOON STEPHEN JENKS AND NED TOPSIDE
rode through the remnants of the country fair in the small town of Abingdon before wheeling back and reining in. Only the booths of a few itinerant vendors who had not yet moved on remained on the central town green. They could see where the crowd’s feet had trod the grass between the aisles of makeshift tables of wares and the burned-out circles where meat had been cooked and sold on the day Lady Dudley died nearby.

Splendid, Ned groused to himself. Her Grace had sent them to look for one girl and an unknown man in the area where a popular country fair had drawn people from all over. Talk about a needle in a haystack.

“Yer a wee bit late for the festivities,” a big bear of a man called to them, emerging from a low-slung tent and shading his eyes from the setting sun.

One more person they might as well question, Ned thought. He and Jenks had stopped to question numerous people on the road, showing them the drawing of Hester Harington, saying their sister had run off, mayhap with a man on a single horse. Absolutely no one had claimed to have seen her, though many remarked on the fine portrait and touched Gil’s charcoal sketch with their dirty, calloused fingertips until they’d smeared it. At least they had a second one. They were completely out of sorts, late, tired, and so hungry that even the smell of rank meat made their mouths water.

This man did not blend in with the rest. He had massive shoulders, a bull neck, no waist at all, and spoke in a broad Scots accent. “Abingdon Fair coupla days over, lads, ’cept for those of us stayed to sell off wares,” he told them in a friendly enough voice, though, of course, not every Scot had to be crude and rude, Ned thought magnanimously.