The Twylight Tower (33 page)

“Do you think I do not know you told my parents to exile me to the countryside, make me marry a man unworthy of me so I could breed his brats and dilute my heirs’ royal blood? You must have always feared my heritage!”

“Hester, I gave you no thought for years, as I had other problems, other people to worry about, and—”

“That’s it, try to belittle me again, the granddaughter of a king and your own niece and heir,” she cried, hitting her breastbone with her fist. “Try to say my mother came from an illegitimate affair. The true Catholic believers of this country and this world say
you
came from an
affaire de coeur
the king had with Anne Boleyn when only he believed he had divorced his true wife!” she ranted. “Wait until I tell your French and Spanish enemies who I really am when you are gone, Aunt Elizabeth!”

“But I am going nowhere, Hester,” she insisted, fighting to keep calm when she longed to leap forward and smack the girl to her knees. The queen knew well
enough zealous Papists would gladly swarm to promote even the likes of Hester Harington as queen over Protestant Anne Boleyn’s daughter.

“Had you
known
who I was,” Hester was saying quietly, as if she had never slipped into a tirade, “you would never have taken me in—never have taken me
unknown
without my brilliant music. You would never have raised me high, as you have our kin Lady Katherine Grey or Baron Hunsdon.”

“ ‘Raised me high,’ Hester? Is that why you’ve thrown others down from heights? Was it simply that they were in your way, or was it some sort of warning to me that you stood above them in your regard?”

“Here is my last warning for you,” Hester whispered, then sang in an eerie voice the children’s rhyme,
“Her fall is nigh who climbs so high.
You see, dear aunt, your master lutenist Geoffrey came upon me gazing in your windows at Richmond, but I knocked him unconscious with a brick with which I had thought to break your window. I seized his lute and played as he had before, even after I pushed him. It did not enter his mind that a mere girl who seemed drunk and was offering him a drink—”

“You stole, then splashed my wine on him,” the queen accused, gripping her hands hard together. “For many weeks, Hester, you have watched me and stalked me as prey you would entrap. Then Luke Morgan got in your way, but what of Amy Dudley?”

“Amy Dudley?” Hester asked, crossing her arms over her chest and rocking slightly back on her heels as if she were enjoying this. “You mean your lover Lord
Robert’s wife, whom you arranged to have pushed down the stairs by some lackey you hired? I just might confess to your counselors, like Lord Cecil—to your entire court and beyond—that you sent me to do it. You only detained me in Eton first so it would look as if I escaped and then harmed Amy at the behest of someone else.”

Elizabeth stared at the girl, aghast. For once the depth and breadth of her twisted hatred stunned the queen to silence.

“You think I had something to do with her fall?” Hester went on, taking the inquisitor’s part now. “No, I accuse you of causing her death, and you must be cast down from your arrogance for that as well as other crimes and sins.”

“Stop playing me for the simpleton, as you have in the past,” the queen commanded, her muscles tightening against what she sensed was coming. But she must press on to find out who else was involved. “You and whoever sent you to Amy could only hope her death would be my downfall. That someone was either de Quadra or—ah,” Elizabeth said, as Hester sucked in a sharp breath at his name, “that figures, since you mentioned the Spanish Papists. De Quadra it is, then?”

“I am just astounded how you blame everyone but yourself, aunt. Besides, many have hired me to do their bidding, including yourself and your precious Lord Robert.
He
deserves to be brought down too, for the way he treated Amy. But for an accident of birth and cruelty of chance—and your hatred of me because you are in league with my parents—I could be queen.”

Her voice became sharper, her expression, even seen through thickening twilight, more contorted.

“I adored you from afar,” Hester plunged on in her disjointed tirade. “I worshiped you when I saw you in the crowds, or riding with Robert Dudley, or on your barge, or through many a window. But now it is all over.”

“You know I admire your brilliance and talent. Will you not tell me how you managed to kill Amy? You fooled me many times before, but I know your handprints were on her death. However did you carry it off so cleverly?”

Hester swept off her hat and threw it aside. She had severely hacked her hair with a knife or sword. “She sent them all away, her entire household, just to be with me,” she boasted. “After all, I told her I was sent from Robert—and it killed me to kill her instead of you.”

Hester lunged with both hands raised. The queen shoved her back. She had expected and prepared for this: the double ropes would hold and Cecil and Dr. Dee would rush to her aid from the small roof atop the narrow turret where they waited. But she must know if Robert had sent Hester to Cumnor.

“Hester, who sent you there?” she cried, shoving her back yet again. But the demented woman flashed a knife at her, above her in a huge arcing swipe. It glinted in thin moonlight as it caught one of the harness ropes. The queen feared she had fatally miscalculated. Who could fathom that a murderess who pushed people to their deaths would have a knife?

Though thrown off balance, Elizabeth hardly budged as the shoulder ties yanked. The girl was slashing, sawing at them.

“Now!” the queen cried to Dee and Cecil, and heard an answering shout. She longed for Jenks, for he could have just leaped to her aid, not climbed down a damned, shaky wooden ladder.

Ducking Hester’s high swings with the weapon, the queen fumbled for the small stone cudgel she had at her belt, but it was pressed between them. Her shoulder ropes went slack and fell free. Hester heaved her back. They struggled for eternity, the queen pressed to the very edge, the knifepoint nearly in her chest while, with all her might, she counterbalanced Hester’s thrust of it. Though the queen kept her feet fairly anchored, Hester pressed her head and shoulders into the wall’s deep niche, just like the one Geoffrey had gone through at Richmond.

Elizabeth wrenched the knife away, cutting her palm. They grappled for the weapon at waist level. Despite the slice of pain and her bloodied, slippery hand, she tried to stab at Hester’s midriff. The girl’s purse broke free, and coins cascaded and clattered at their feet even as the knife skittered away.

“That was her knife—Amy’s,” Hester gritted out. “She wanted to die, fell so easily—but you …”

Elizabeth could have held her ground, except Hester seemed willing to go over with her. Everywhere the queen hit or grabbed at the girl with her right hand, she left a slippery mark of blood. Suddenly Cecil’s face appeared, John Dee’s too, but Hester clawed
and kicked at them. Cecil tried to reach for Hester, Dee for the queen, as both women teetered on the edge of night.

In one last, mad moment, writhing, struggling, their weight took them over. Hester grabbed for Elizabeth, but the queen pulled free. With the queen’s blood smeared across her face, the girl shouted a curse and simply vanished.

Flailing upside down, Elizabeth saw only blackness. No, her skirts shrouded her head as her ankle ropes jerked taut and held. Under her skirts, the hidden ropes she and Dr. Dee had tied down from her harness to new stone fastenings on the floor as double anchors had saved her. But where in hell were Dee and Cecil while she dangled upside down?

The men hauled her, ignominiously, back up.

“Thank God, thank God,” Cecil kept muttering as he wrapped her cut hand in a handkerchief.

“What took you so long after I shouted?” Elizabeth cried, sucking in a breath of clean, fresh air.

“We came immediately,” Cecil insisted, “but it just seemed like a year—to me too.”

But, she thought, as Dee cut her free of the foothold ropes, she had outsmarted and outlasted Hester, just as she would anyone else, sane or insane, who wanted her throne.

“There would never have been that much slack to allow you to budge if she hadn’t cut the ropes above,” Dr. Dee was saying fretfully. “I’ll have to restring those better next time.”

The queen would have laughed if she were not
afraid of plunging into hysteria. “There will not be a next time for me, good doctor, not trying to fly,” Elizabeth assured them, still gasping for breath and fighting dizziness. Cecil was so white it looked as if he were the one who had nearly been lost.

“At least all this, Dr. Dee,” Cecil said, his hand steadying her arm, “shows Her Majesty has now learned to keep her feet firmly on the ground.”

“Ha!” she countered. “I may have had my feet tied down, but to a high roof under the heavens.”

Gingerly, as if they all had fought that slip of demon girl, they leaned over the edge of the parapet to look below. It appeared the dark-clad body of a thin man was splayed on the courtyard stones.

“It ends as it began,” Elizabeth whispered. “Dr. Dee, I must get out of this harness, as I shall never wear anyone’s again.”

Let clever Cecil wonder what that meant, she thought as she saw him hastily stoop to gather some folded papers Hester must have lost amidst her coins.

Still shaken, the queen walked unsteadily down her privy stairs to her rooms, with Dr. Dee and Cecil close behind, carrying a lantern they had lit. She walked into her bedchamber the same moment someone began pounding on the door.

“Your Majesty, it’s Jenks!”

“Enter!”

Jenks and Ned, mud-spattered with a cluster of guards behind them, nearly fell into the room in their haste.

“Hester’s on her way back in man’s guise and she’s
got a knife!” Jenks cried, scanning the room wide-eyed.

“And we think,” Ned added, breathless, “de Quadra is behind Lady Dudley’s death.”

“What would I ever do without all of you?” the queen said, turning to take Cecil’s arm. “My lord, stay with me, and the rest of you get Hester’s body out of the courtyard,” she told her astounded men. “Bring her inside and lay her out carefully. I shall tell her parents the dreadful news.”

“I will go down with your men and then tell them myself,” Cecil insisted.

“No, it is my place.”

Cecil stood straighter, as if at attention. “The pinnacle of all England,” he said, “is your place and ever shall be.”

BELLA SHOOK WITH SOBS BUT JOHN HARINGTON STOOD
dry-eyed at Hester’s makeshift bier. They would set out toward home at dawn. The queen slipped back into the lantern-lit chamber—the same one Luke Morgan had died in—from which Hester’s coffin would be carried to a wagon for the journey back to the Harington home. Her death and burial would be private for many reasons.

“Your Grace, our gratitude is unending,” John said when he saw she had stepped back in. “For not making what she did—tried to do—public. For giving us the gift of our son’s being born without a cloud over his head and his name.”

Elizabeth stepped forward to take Bella’s and John’s hands, then pressed their palms together. They were blessed to have each other and must never be parted. Though she did not want to gaze on Hester’s face again, she frowned down at her peaceful profile.

“In this sad turn of events, it is best to let the truth sleep with the dead,” she said, realizing she spoke of Amy Dudley as well. Suddenly she understood and felt kin to both women who had been kept in country exile when they longed for so much more. “John,” she added, “find some decent lutenist to play something beautiful before you bury her. Godspeed. Jenks will care for you, and you must come back to me soon so the child can be born at court with my doctors in attendance.”

She slipped out into the dim corridor. Flanked by two guards, the queen climbed the broad, lighted stairs toward the royal apartments. She was halfway up when Ned came running after her.

“Your Grace!” he whispered, gesturing her to the side. “There is something you must have.”

Frowning, she turned back to him under a hanging lantern as he extended a folded, wrinkled parchment to her. “Not a petition to me about Meg Milligrew,” she said. “I will not change my mind on that.”

“No,” he whispered, though he looked deeply distressed as well as exhausted. “It’s a note I found on the body—Hester’s—earlier and nearly forgot I’d slid it in my shirt.”

She opened it where she stood, unable to wait to see the last insulting song the demented girl must have
kept on herself to be found if her cause were lost. Or would it be another letter for Hester linking her to her patron, like the one Jenks had brought back from Cumnor, this time mayhap from the wily de Quadra himself?

Her trembling hands smoothed the small piece of paper on the thick oak banister. She squinted to read it, then gasped.

It was a mere four lines of a flippant little song she had heard Hester sing more than once:

But it was not the ditty itself that stunned her. The lines were addressed
To My Master, the Queen’s High Man, Lord Cecil.

A MESSENGER WITH THE VERDICT FROM CUMNOR ARRIVED
the next week when the court was preparing to return to London. The coroner’s jury had ruled the cause of Amy Robsart Dudley’s demise was
Fatal Mischance,
adding,
No one person is deemed directly to blame.

Yet Elizabeth stared at her face in her looking glass for a good hour after secluding herself, as she said, to pray, and then used her black window like a mirror again that night. Was she to blame, even if indirectly? Or Robert? His man, Edmund Fletcher, had been
with Hester, but he could have been in someone else’s employ, since Robert had told Cecil that he knew not where the man had gone. At any rate, the queen had summoned Robert Dudley back to court on the morrow.

De Quadra? A mere paper one of his aides had signed saying money was owed the lutenist meant naught, at least not enough to confront the man or banish him from England. The wily King Philip of Spain would just send another Spanish snake, mayhap worse than this one. Cecil and de Quadra seemed to get on, and that would be helpful to keep the peace, wouldn’t it?