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Authors: Karen Harper

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

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BOOK: The Fatal Fashione
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“I warrant we are having one now, so all of you are sworn to secrecy on this. As soon as darkness falls, all but Cecil are off for Hannah’s. Then first thing tomorrow morning, here is how we will proceed. Ned,” she said, looking at him, “will ask Hannah’s neighbors if they saw anyone suspicious lurking about today. Meg, you will speak with the women Hannah employed, if they arrive for work, and if not, you must try to track them down. Why was she evidently alone when they all should have been there, with the demands on their time?”
“I can also talk to the laundresses and whitsters who frequent that area to ask if they noted anything amiss,” Meg said. “Hannah had that friend Ursala who might know if the poor woman had been courted by anyone—or more than one, fair as she was.”
“Yes, of course,” Cecil said, folding his arms. “That sort of passion possibly gone awry could be a motive for murder, too.”
“Jenks,” Elizabeth went on, regarding him now, “you will stick close to me when I venture out tonight to visit Hannah’s. Then, from when we arrive at the starch house until the time we summon the authorities and they arrive, you will help Bates guard the door to Hannah’s rooms so that no one else enters or leaves.”
“Which reminds me, Your Grace,” Meg put in, “I’m sure the intruder—mayhap the murderer—took some of my roots with him. Two sacks of them were missing, and one of those emptied out. The thing is, if cuckoo-pint roots are ingested, they are deadly poison.”
“Hell’s gates, that’s all we need,” Cecil said. “Poison starch, a unique weapon, I’ll say that. One murder’s bad enough, let alone the means for more at large somewhere in London.”
“Which is another reason we must look into this, and quickly,” the queen said. “Later tomorrow, Meg, you and Clifford will go with me when I visit Hannah’s rival, Dingen van der Passe, and speak with her husband, too. But Rosie, first thing in the morning, you will take two guards and ride to Gresham House to inquire how the search for their child goes and to keep me well informed of any progress.”
“And I, Your Grace?” Cecil asked.
“You, my advisor and friend, will remain here lest decisions need to be made—or the fact the queen is going out dressed as a market woman on the streets needs to be hidden from my courtiers. And, as usual, my lord, you will fret for all these dire and dangerous doings, but I wager you will help me to think them all through, too.”
The girl stood staring up at the blood-red windows set in the tall brick walls of yet another building. The sun was setting, gilding the already russet bricks and reflecting its face in the glass. The palace of the queen, she’d heard someone say, pointing it out to his companion. Whitehall Palace of the queen.
She knew she wanted to get through a tall window like that. To get past the stonework and wood and brick. To remember. But all she could recall was a surprised face staring up at her, the mouth open in a silent scream filled with gray … a face with open glassy eyes, a lovely face marred by swirling white, floating, then sinking into the depths of memory …
In her dreams she saw her mother’s face, a mother she could not recall …
A face in the shadow of a hood floated into her vision. A scarred face. Under the pox marks, perhaps pretty. And yet young. She stared into that puckered visage, and it stared back at her. Was this girl a part of herself, her reflection in the glass? Did this other self know what must be remembered?
“Hello,” the girl, younger and shorter than herself, said. “I come from the country, but my mother lives here, and I needs find her.” She pulled her deep hood closer about her face, as if to hide. Perhaps they could hide together. The girl was speaking again.
“But they told me to get’way from this gate.”
Get away, get away.
Yes, those words sounded like ones she had to remember. She reached out and took the younger girl’s hand. They were both trembling.
“Could you please tell them for me?” the scarred girl went on in her slow country drawl. “Tell them my mother’s the queen’s herbal woman? My name’s Sally Downs, really Sarah Milligrew. Her name’s Mother Meg, Meg Milligrew. My other mother said Mother Meg told them to tell me the truth’bout my poxed face, but they didn’t’til now. Ten whole years, so I ran’way. Why did they have to hide it all from me? They told me years ago I wasn’t their daughter but’dopted.”
That, too, struck a chord.
Adopted.
And something was hidden. They should have told her, told her, but she went to find out for herself …
This girl had said she ran away. Those words echoed.
I ran away … get away, get away … No, no, don’t!
screamed in her head. She wanted to hold Sally’s hand and run away, but again her feet wouldn’t move. Why hadn’t she called for help when someone screamed,
Get away, get away?
She couldn’t swallow the jagged pieces of fear in her throat that choked her voice, even her breath. Her knees shook, and she crumpled against Sally and slid down her to the cobbled street, but she did not let go of her hand.
“Help!” she heard Sally scream. “Help, this lady’s ill! Stand’way! Give her some air, then!”
The small crowd near the palace entry shifted slightly, but not, she could see, to give her air. They backed away from a thunder of hoofbeats, the thud-thud as a skull struck the wooden tub. No, there was no wooden tub here. Men, at least six of them on horseback, and one of them gaping down at her and Sally.
He reined in and shouted, pointing right at her. “My lord, hold there! Look, that girl with the other!”
The party of riders reined in, strung out toward the guarded entrance of the palace. She felt Sally start to tug free of her, but then she felt the younger girl’s arm go around her shoulders to prop her up.
“Badger, I owe you my life, my life!” a man was shouting. He sounded as if he were crying—a man, crying. “Yes, it looks like her …”
Sights and sounds swirled around her as she held hard to Sally and stared straight up. The sky, the tall palace walls sinking into shadows … the wooden, slanted walls of a loft somewhere … a woman, sinking.
“Marie!” the second man cried. “Thank God, Marie!”
He managed to slide off his high horse, but he almost crumpled when he hit the ground. The man who had seen her first helped him, a short, quick man with eyebrows that came together like a dark stroke of a pen. The taller man who nearly fell took a long stick from the one he’d called Badger.
She went still as death as the stranger fell to his knees and grasped her to him, breathing hard, choking back sobs that shook him. She wanted to scream,
Get away, no, please don’t … stop,
but she was too weak.
“Men, haste to the queen and say we’ve found my daughter!” the man cried. “One of you, ride to tell my wife that Marie has been found. Dearest girl,” he said, bending back over her, “your mother is beside herself—I, too … whatever happened?” He tried to free her hand from Sally’s, tried to lift her to break their grasp.
“No, don’t!” she cried, with great effort. Had he said her name was Marie? “She is—with me!”
She saw the man who was her father turn to Sally. He saw the girl’s face and shuddered slightly.
“Yes, yes, of course,” he muttered. “She will come with us. You’re tired, sweetling, hurt, too, or hit your head.”
Had she hit her head? Was that why she could not swim up through the slippery, suffocating press of stairs and windowpanes? Was that why she kept hiding, so afraid to scream or flee?
Still holding tightly to Sally’s hand as her father held to hers, the girl he had called Marie surrendered in his arms to sudden, drowning sleep.
 
“YOUR MAJESTY, THEY HAVE FOUND GRESHAM’S daughter, just outside the palace!” Ned Topside called to her. With the others, he had just left her to prepare for their foray this night, but he’d darted back in even before the door was closed behind Cecil.
“Here? Had someone taken her?”
“I know naught else, but she’s being carried in, quite dazed.”
“Fetch Doctor Forrest—but first tell them I said to put her in Mary Sidney’s rooms, as they are empty now. And that I want someone to bring Lady Gresham to the palace. Where is Sir Thomas?”
“I heard he’s the one found her, so I assume—”
She waved him away and hurried out into the hall herself. Ned was already running toward the stairs. With two guards falling in behind, Elizabeth went down the central staircase. Leaning over the bannister, she could hear the hubbub coming from the entry by the Kings Street courtyard.
Ned must have done as commanded, for she saw Sir Thomas coming up the staircase, laboriously limping, though he would hand over the child to no one else. Flanked by three of the queen’s men and two of his own, his awkward progress rocked his daughter to and fro as if they had set sail upon a windy sea.
Marie Gresham, the queen saw now, was hardly a child, but a young lady. Ned said she looked dazed; her eyes were open and fixed on nothing. Pale and pretty, she did not cling to her adoptive father but rather to another child whose hand she held, pulling the smaller girl along. Marie’s blue cloak would have dragged on the stairs and tripped her father had not her companion, in a mud-splattered brown cape and large hood, lifted Marie’s hems with her free hand as if she carried her train. Perhaps Marie Gresham had run off with a servant girl. The queen paid the smaller child no more heed as she waited for the men to reach her around the turn of the stairs.
“Your Majesty!” Thomas cried, perspiring and panting. “The lost sheep is found, but frightened or stunned. Your man said we could tend her here, so—”
“Yes, follow me. I’ve sent for one of my physicians.”
The queen led Gresham down the corridor away from the royal apartments toward the wing overlooking the kitchens. With the court in residence here, it provided the only empty rooms she could think of, though the area made her uneasy. Not only was this hallway supposedly haunted by the ghost of one of her stepmothers, but memories of her dear friend Mary Sidney, who had been so ill here, seemed to cling to the place. Now another patient, Marie instead of Mary, would be cared for in the same chamber and bed.
Elizabeth hesitated at the door, then opened it herself to usher them in. She motioned Thomas through the first chamber, where his entourage waited, into the bedchamber within.
“Put her on the bed,” she said, her voice wavering. Before she banished the image, she could yet imagine her friend lying ill here.
Mary Sidney was the sister of Elizabeth’s dear Robin, Earl of Leicester. How the queen missed her at court, her laughter, her loyalty—and the way she used to serve as gobetween with their love letters.
But after tending Elizabeth when she nearly died of the pox four years ago, Mary had been ravaged by the disease. The queen had escaped with a few permanent pocks on her face and arms—and with the burden of guilt for infecting her friend. For beautiful Mary became horribly disfigured, and now kept mostly to her husband’s seat at Pembroke Castle. The queen could seldom entice her to court or get away to visit her, and she missed her sorely.
Elizabeth turned toward the bed and gasped. All shadowed, Mary’s face peered at her from within the mystery child’s hood! It was as if her friend yet stood here, poxed and scarred, desperate to hide her ruined visage.
Those in the room turned to the queen as she stared at the companion of Marie. But before anyone glimpsed her face, the child curtsied as low as she could with Marie still gripping her hand.
“Your Majesty, whatever is it?” Gresham asked. Two yeomen were instantly at her side. For one moment, Elizabeth thought she might faint.
The child in the hood rose from her shaky curtsy and exploded in tears, murmuring something about her mother, or was it two mothers?
“Is this Marie’s maid?” the queen asked Thomas, though her voice still shook.
“I never saw her before I found Marie outside. Sally something, but they seem most devoted,” he muttered, as Dr. Forrest bustled into the room so quickly his black gown flapped and the strings of his cap fluttered.
As most attention turned toward the doctor, Elizabeth reached over the corner of the big bed and touched the hooded girl’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “You simply surprised me by reminding me of a dear friend. Who are you, then?”
“Your Maj’sty,” the child choked out between sobs, “I met you once—on the heath years ago—with Mother Meg.”
“Meg Milligrew’s Sally? But how you have grown! And to find you here in London … I’ll take you to your mother in a moment, if your friend Marie will let you go.”
“But she won’t,” Sally said with a sniff. “She’s holding on so tight it hurts, but I’d best not leave her.”
Elizabeth stepped to the doorway of the bedchamber and spoke quietly to her yeoman guard. “Clifford, find and fetch my herb mistress, Meg Milligrew. Say her daughter has come for a visit.” As she turned back toward the bed, she saw Dr. Forrest lean over his patient and put his hand on the girl’s forehead.
“Forgive my wretched tears, Maj’sty,” Sally whispered when the queen returned to the bedside. “I’m so mighty joyous to be here. Ran’way from home, I did. And I know I caused much grief, but I was so o’erturned.”
Countrified or not, Elizabeth thought, the child had natural wit, grace, and much heart. She had questions for both girls, but Marie’s health—and Hannah’s death—must be seen to first. The doctor was running his hands over Marie’s scalp.
To clear the crowded outer chamber, the queen sent Gresham’s party down to the great hall for food and ale, though she saw that one man hung behind, peering through the doorway. She recognized him as the fellow who had stayed close to Gresham when she toured the exchange, the quick, wiry watchman with the solid slash of eyebrow across his sun-browned face. For all she knew, the man was Gresham’s bodyguard. Once again, she smelled that acrid scent about him, which she’d once thought was from construction supplies.
Thomas must have seen her staring. “Your Majesty,” he said, “that is Nash Badger, the man who noted Marie in the crowd. I owe him much.”
“Then I do, too,” she said with a nod at Badger as he bent to a quick bow, then backed away. “At least perhaps the quiet here will help Marie—”
As if to mock those words, Meg came running in so fast she nearly skidded into Badger. “Where, Your Grace?” she cried, out of breath. “She can’t be here. Did they bring her clear from the heath?”
Elizabeth motioned for Meg to hush and come closer. At the sight of her mother, Sally threw her hood back and finally tugged her hand free of Marie’s grip. “Mother Meg, I know I done wrong to hurt them, but they hurt me, too, aye, they did! I hid in a hay wain and rode into London town, then asked where the palace was to find you.”
Meg bent over to hug Sally hard. “Loose on the road and in London—you—you could have been hurt—been killed,” Meg said through her own sobs.
Suddenly Marie Gresham was shrieking, “No! No, don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me! Unhand me!”
Raising his voice, Dr. Forrest asked Thomas, “Is she fearful of physicians?” Both men fought to restrain the screaming girl as she thrashed and hit against them. “I find no nodules or lesions on her skull under that thick hair,” the doctor went on, “so I haven’t hit a tender spot to set her off so.”
“She wouldn’t even talk before,” Thomas cried. “Mistress Sally, will you come back here?”
Meg and Sally moved together; Marie grabbed Sally’s hand. Sally flinched at the ferocity of the grip.
“I can’t breathe, can’t breathe!” Marie cried as her eyes darted wildly around the room. But it was obvious to all that she was indeed inhaling, even gasping in huge, heavy breaths.
“A soothing potion, that’s what she needs,” Meg said to Elizabeth.
Dr. Forrest glared at the herbalist. “I am here to tend her with proper medical treatments, Mistress Milligrew,” he pronounced over the girl’s shouts. “If my patient needs a soporific, I shall see to it.”
Elizabeth felt on the verge of hysteria herself. She didn’t hold out much hope that visiting a dead woman in her starch shop after dark would be much better.
As darkness fell, Elizabeth felt even more on edge. Marie Gresham appeared to have no injury or physical ailment, not even a fever. Dr. Forrest had deduced that her humors were severely unbalanced from the malady of melancholia and that she was suffering from fantasies of the brain. Nearly incoherent, the girl could tell them nothing of how or why she left Gresham House or how she had come to stand in the crowd outside the palace gates.
Nor could Sally Downs, Meg’s daughter, offer anything about Marie that would help, though her mere presence by the ill girl’s bed finally allowed the doctor to get a sleeping potion down the distraught young woman. Marie’s mother had arrived, but that had hardly calmed the child. Both parents hovered over her as the queen slipped away to join her covert detectors for their stealthy visit to Hannah’s starch house.
Elizabeth was taking no chances of running into a marauding murderer who might have returned to the scene of his crime in the dead of night. Though she had ordered a guard posted at Hannah’s door, she had the men in her party arm themselves with swords and knives, while her yeoman Clifford also carried his halberd. She added two more guards at the last minute, planning to leave them behind in the nearby royal mews while the Privy Plot Council members went on from there.
The stomping and snorting of the horses in their stalls in the vast, dim royal mews made her even more nervous. Ordinarily she loved proximity to these big beasts, but tonight they were acting as if a storm were lurking just off the black horizon.
“Bit jumpy tonight, every rogue one of them,” Jenks said from behind her, as if, for once, he’d read her mind. “Maybe it’s just this fitful wind outside.” His sword clanked in its scabbard until he put his hand down to still it.
“Never mind that,” the queen said. “They’ve got their grooms nearby. Where are the lanterns you said we could take? Two will suffice. And don’t forget the horse blankets. Do you think four of them will be enough, Meg?”
“We better take five, Your Grace. The window over the starch vat is quite large, so it will take two to blacken it against our lanterns, I warrant. There are two smaller windows over the street. And none,” she added more quietly, “over the back alley or on the side running along the stairs.”
As her cohorts gathered blankets and lights, the queen noted that all straw and feed near the few lanterns had been raked away for safety’s sake.
Thank God,
she thought, for ever since she’d solved the mystery of the fire-mirror murders, she had been even more wary of possible conflagrations.
The queen carried both lanterns, and the others bore the blankets as they made their way from the stables. Leaving the two extra guards behind at the edge of the mews just four buildings from Hannah’s house, they plunged into the darkness of the brisk October night. Ned now led the way, with the queen, Jenks, Rosie, Meg, and then Clifford in his wake.
As they approached the covered stairwell, the queen’s guard Bates emerged from the shadows.
“Hold there!” he said, and blocked Ned’s path with a staff.
“We been sent by the queen, Bates,” Jenks said. “I’m to stay down here with you while the others go on up for a look round.”
“Has anyone else tried to use these stairs?” the queen asked Bates. She could see in their lantern light that he nearly fell over at her voice and, no doubt, from the fact that it came from a plainly garbed and hooded woman.
Bates cleared his throat and shifted on his big feet. “Only one. A friend of Mistress von Hoven’s named Ursala Hemmings been by. I told her not to go up, that her friend was ill. That all right, Your Maj—my lady?”
“Yes. Ill. Very ill,” Elizabeth said, and turned away to head upstairs. She’d chosen well, she thought, to trust Bates. The trouble was, had she known or trusted someone else who had done this terrible deed, or was poor Hannah’s slaying merely tragic happenstance? A robbery gone awry? Meg, who had evidently haggled with Hannah over the price of cuckoo-pint, had said Hannah was tight with her money, so perhaps she kept some on the premises and word had gotten out. Or, since she was so fetching, had she played some man false, or more than one, and paid the ultimate penalty? But why, evidently, in broad day had her workwomen not been with her? There was, Elizabeth prayed, always safety in numbers.
Thomas Gresham’s heart had finally settled to a slower thud in his thin chest. Sally, who had turned out to be the daughter of the queen’s strewing woman, had agreed to stay with Marie, and both girls had fallen asleep. Neither had so much as moved, as if they shared the sleep of the dead. He thought again of the precious portrait he had hidden at home of the two girls, so close and yet so different.
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