The Fatal Fashione (3 page)

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Authors: Karen Harper

Tags: #Fiction - Historical, #England/Great Britain, #16th Century, #Mystery, #Tudors

BOOK: The Fatal Fashione
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“I must leave you, my lord,” she shouted at Paulet. “We will unfortunately continue this important discussion further.” As the old man went into a creaky bow, she hurried toward Ned.
However much the buffoon Paulet sometimes seemed, she knew from privy reports he could wreak havoc and never forgot an insult. Then again, neither did she. He was fortunate she abided him at all. If he hadn’t had one secret thing in his favor, the great mark against him she would never forgive would have had him in permanent rural retirement by now—and that leech Dauntsey with him.
“Ned, whatever is it?” she demanded when she reached him. “There will be hell to pay if Lord Paulet learns I left him for my principal player. I swear that if you—”
“It’s Meg, Your Grace. I hustled her into a downstairs anteroom, as I didn’t want her riling your maids or courtiers. She’s come back nearly hysterical from the starcher’s loft and says she has to see you, only you. I tried to comfort her, but she’ll have none of me lately.”
Elizabeth did not comment on that last remark but, with her heartbeat thudding like horses’ hooves, hurried into the palace.
The queen found Meg crumpled onto a bench in a small, windowless room lit by a single lantern. The light was bright enough, though, to gild the tear tracks on her cheeks.
“Ned, step out and watch the door so we are not disturbed,” Elizabeth ordered.
“But—” he began, then did as she said, quietly closing the heavy door she assumed he’d be trying to listen through.
“Tell me,” the queen said only, and thrust the lacy handkerchief from up her sleeve into Meg’s trembling hands.
“Someone’s dead.”
“In the streets? Who and where?”
“A woman. In the starch vat at Hannah’s. I couldn’t see a face, but a hand—attached to an arm, I’m sure—floated to the top of the milky stuff. No one else was there—deserted.”
“That’s dreadful,” Elizabeth whispered, as her insides cartwheeled and her knees went weak. “Could it be Hannah or one of her workers?”
“I don’t know, Your Grace! I didn’t”—she blew her nose hard—“just couldn’t bear to pull the body up and look. I dropped my bags of roots and ran back here.”
“And well you did. But where were Hannah’s women?”
Meg shook her head wildly. “Don’t know. Don’t know anything, if it was her or one of her women or a customer or that whitster friend of hers, Ursala something … No one with a wrist ruff, that’s all I know.”
“But you’re certain,” Elizabeth muttered more to herself, “it was not a man? I commanded Thomas Gresham to visit that shop, and if he arrives to find a corpse—or worse … He has enemies, but usually takes at least one guard with him.”
She shuddered. Something had to be done about this now beyond summoning the constable and coroner. She hardly wanted Gresham walking in to find and report a body in a place she’d ordered him to visit. Perhaps it could be proved an accident or even a suicide, because the third alternative would open Pandora’s box.
“Meg,” she said, gripping the woman’s shoulder, “you must go back. I’ll send Ned, Jenks, and another guard with you. Put the guard on the door to seal the scene. Then see if you can discern who the dead woman is. Look for signs she might merely have slipped or tumbled in. I hear wet starch is slippery, so you never know. Then I will have Cecil speak to the local authorities to report the death. You are quite sure you saw no one suspicious fleeing the scene or lurking about?”
“No, but I can’t bear to go back again, Your Grace,” she insisted, twisting the handkerchief. “That hand just came floating up through that starch bath, probably made with my cuckoo-pint. And just think how red and raw starch makes skin … and a whole body steeping in there … bad enough to drown in water, but …”
“You must go back now,” Elizabeth repeated, and pulled open the door only to have Ned nearly tumble into the room. Ordinarily she would have scolded him, but not now.
“Ned, help Meg settle herself, then fetch Jenks and a yeoman guard—take Adrian Bates, but tell him not to wear his livery—and the four of you head immediately for Hannah von Hoven’s starch house, where there may have been a fatal accident.”
“Hannah’s dead?”
“Meg isn’t sure. Hie yourselves there before someone else walks in, then report back to me forthwith. Leave the guard to watch the door. Tell him to just hang about there, not to look as if he’s guarding it, but no one else must go in until we can look around. I must send a message to Thomas Gresham not to visit Hannah’s today, for I fear I might have ordered him into a compromising situation. I only pray this will not turn out to be some sort of foul play, not only for Hannah’s sake but for the stability of the starchers’ booming trade here in London.”
“You mean,” Ned said, as he helped Meg to rise with his hand on her elbow, “that the insults and threats the van der Passes have made toward Hannah might make your chief starcher look guilty and, if Hannah’s gone, you’d lose both of them?”
“What?” the queen cried, snagging Ned’s arm so that he swung Meg back around and stood between the two women. “Ned, you jump far afield. I pray it isn’t Hannah, and I have heard of none such threats from the van der Passes.”
“Oh, yes, Your Grace,” he insisted, “everybody knows it. Disparaging remarks about Hannah’s work to customers, mostly from Dirck, Mrs. van der Passe’s husband. A blowhard who towers over most men and flaunts that he was a knight in the service of the low countries before they came here to—”
“Oh, no,” Meg blurted, gripping her hands together between her breasts. “He may be the man I bumped into in the street. Cursed me, he did, and said words odd, like
‘ja’
instead of ‘you,’ but then so many folks in London talk strange these days, including Hannah.”
“Get Jenks,” Elizabeth insisted, as foreboding made her shiver. “And keep your eyes open, all of you. Go the back way. I fear the twists of this so far, and we don’t even know who’s in that vat of starch.”
The queen pressed her royal insignia into the wax seal of her hasty note to Thomas Gresham and took it to the hall doorway herself. “Clifford,” she ordered her big yeoman standing guard there with his ceremonial halberd, “this must go straightaway to Gresham House on Bishopsgate to Sir Thomas Gresham, or if he’s not there, to the building site of the mercantile exchange.”
But as she glanced beyond him at the clusters of her ladies, chatting with each other and the courtiers who stood about, she saw Thomas Gresham himself coming down the corridor with great speed, especially for one who limped so badly. His walking stick thumped out a quick beat on the oaken floor as if someone were pounding on a door. He looked frantic.
Thank God he was safe, but his haste boded nothing good. As she snatched the note back, she realized Gresham might have been to Hannah’s loft and found the body. He’d probably already reported it, and a public inquiry might turn up that Dirck van der Passe had been in the vicinity—or that her servant Meg was.
“Your Majesty, may I have leave to speak?” Thomas cried out when he was yet twenty feet away.
“Enter first,” she called to him, and gestured toward her withdrawing chamber.
She could tell he was loath not to shout to her from where he was, yet he followed her into the room and went down on his good knee. “My dear daughter’s missing, Your Grace,” he cried before she even gave him leave to speak. “I and my men have searched everywhere near Gresham House and the exchange site, but I beg your help to put out a hue and cry for any news of her.”
“Yes, of course. She’s twelve, I believe?”
“Thirteen, Your Grace, but seems to believe she is older and more responsible than that.”
“Ah, yes, I remember. Thomas, you haven’t been to either of the starch houses, have you?”
“Why, no. I planned to go today, but we discovered Marie was missing and …”
“I’ll summon men to help you hunt for her. You must try to calm yourself and think of places she might be, places you haven’t looked yet, or even admitted to yourself she might have gone. You must write a good description of her and perhaps what she was wearing for me to give my men.”
“At once, Your Majesty. I warrant she had on her dark blue cloak on this windy day, a recent gift.” As he spoke, he seemed to stare into space. “Very blonde like the mother who gave her birth,” he went on, as if to himself. “Comely and fair, tall for her age, pert nose, graceful, delicate-looking, she is, but made of stiffer stuff than she seems …”
“Get up, Thomas,” Elizabeth said, when his voice drifted off and it looked as if he would slump to the floor. She helped the trembling man to his feet and led him to a chair. “Sit here while I summon my yeomen guards, and do not fear.”
The queen knew her words were bolder than her heart. She feared not only for a pretty female child of a rich and well-known man in big, busy London but for the female who floated, yet unidentified, in a vat of thickening starch not far from here.
Meg was relieved Jenks knew a back way to Hannah’s loft through the vast royal mews and down a narrow, dim alley. At least their solemn assignment kept Ned and Jenks—and her, she admitted—from quarreling. They planted Bates, one of the queen’s elite yeomen guards, now wearing daily garb, near the place. Jenks led the way up the dim stairs she’d climbed earlier today; they were much darker now. Ned brought up the rear, silent for once. The breeze had picked up even more. A blast of air swooped down the enclosed staircase from above, and Meg recalled that the large window overlooking the fields had been open.
“All clear,” Jenks whispered, and motioned them up into the loft.
“Hardly all clear,” she whispered. “Oh!”
“What?” Ned asked.
“My sacks of roots I dropped right here and left behind. Someone’s dragged them off a bit—and two of them are missing! That’s precious herb they’ve taken!”
“They who? And keep your voice down,” Ned ordered. “But are you certain? I mean, in your panic to flee and fetch help—”
“Yes, I’m certain! You saw I had four sacks when you lifted two of them from my shoulders,” she whispered. Jenks frowned at both of them, but she had no time to explain. Ignoring his rival’s glare, Ned moved quietly but quickly to peer into the narrow rectangular vat she’d described to them. He squinted, trying in vain to see into the dense liquid.
“What if the body’s been moved, too?” she whispered.
“Stuff and nonsense,” Ned said. “I’d sooner say you imagined a hand floating beneath that viscous, opaque liquor.”
“Stow the fancy words and dramatic speeches,” Meg hissed at him. “You may live in a world of fancy, but not I!”
“Devil take it,” Jenks said, also trying to peer in, “the vat is shaped like a coffin, but I don’t see anything in it. Not hand nor hair nor hem of a gown.”
“That can’t be!” She leaned over the murky vat, which seemed not as full now. The liquid looked much grayer than she remembered. “It’s just beneath the surface, that’s all,” she cried.
“Corpses in the river sink until they’ve partly rotted, then they float,” Jenks put in.
“Hell’s gates, would you stow it, man?” Ned demanded. “This isn’t the river.”
Meg watched as the breeze, through the open window over the starch bath, made the surface seem to shudder. Both Ned and Jenks were making her so overwrought she’d like to shove their thick heads into this thick stuff.
“Just find me a stirring stick or hand me one of those poking rods, and I’ll show you,” she ordered. “I know I saw part of a body in there, a dainty hand, graceful, too.”
“Was it limp?” Jenks asked.
“Not,” Ned said, “in a stiffening vat of starch.”
“Leave off, both of you!” she demanded. As she took another step toward the vat, the soles of her shoes stuck slightly to the floor. She looked down and saw that they were standing in a half-dried, flaking puddle she was certain had not been there when she saw the hand. She knew she hadn’t splashed anything out.
“Someone else has been here for sure,” she whispered wide-eyed, as Jenks thrust the long wooden stirring stick into her hands. Suddenly even more scared, Meg stood still as a statue. Air through the large window moved loose tendrils of her hair against her sweating forehead and cheeks. Out the window, she could see the patchwork of drying linens and hear in the distance a woman’s shouts. Shaking, she pushed the long stick down by inches into the starch bath and moved it slowly toward each of the sides of the vat, then the corners. Nothing. Nothing.
“God as my judge, I saw a human hand in here!” she wailed.
Ned took the stick from her and stirred to make slow ripples swirl. “Could it have been some sort of apparition? Some twist of light in this strange brew, perhaps a reflection of your own hand?”
Almost ready to explode into sobs, she just shook her head wildly.
“Then,” Ned went on, “the body’s either been pilfered or it’s taken itself for a walk. Maybe those were ghostly footprints on the stairs we came up.”
“What?” Jenks challenged. His feet making light crunching sounds, he went over to stare down the steps. “Oh, those small spots of pale white? But they only go partway down and then seem to just fade into nothing.”

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