Authors: Karen Harper

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

The Fatal Fashione (6 page)

BOOK: The Fatal Fashione

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Marie is safe, she’s safe,
he kept repeating to himself. And, in a sort of frenzied litany,
My dearly beloved Gretta, she’s safe, she’s safe.
He still couldn’t fathom why Marie had gone out alone, and why to this area of the city a goodly ways from their home. The possibilities of that terrified him almost as much as the looming loss of her had, almost as much as the queen’s sending him to see Hannah von Hoven’s starch shop had. He’d feared Her Majesty would suggest he sponsor Hannah’s fledgling endeavor. What then if Anne found out?

He forced himself to put his arm around Anne’s shoulders. She did not settle into his embrace but leaned stiffly toward the bed again. “My poor, dear Marie-Anne,” she mouthed for the hundredth time since the queen’s doctor had left. “Thomas, I can’t believe our daughter clings to this girl and not to us.” Biting her lower lip, she wiped her eyes again.

“You heard Dr. Forrest,” he whispered. “Given time, rest, and quiet, she may come out of this on her own and retrieve her memory.”

Another thing Thomas could not fathom was what this other child meant to Marie, especially since she must just have met her, not to mention the sad fact that Sally was so heavily poxed. Most children sheltered like Marie, who had not seen such horror, would be repulsed, but his dear child was like the mother who bore her—calm, at least usually, and tenderhearted.

He pictured Marie’s mother again, his Gretta, fine and fair. Desperately, he summoned up the memory of her laughing, not crying as she’d been those last few days when the childbed fever racked her and she feared that she would die. Not sobbing as she’d been when she’d entrusted to him the portrait of herself as a child—so much like Marie now—with her twin sister. Yes, now he saw Gretta laughing like that time she had introduced him to Hannah, her near image, not only in the painting but in the flesh.

Two of you?
he had teased, kissing each one on the cheek.
Double the delight of such beauty in the world?

“Thomas,” Anne hissed in his ear, “what in all creation are you smiling for at a time like this?”

The smile and the memory faded. “Hasn’t our dear girl always brought us joy?” he countered. “And we have her back safe.”

“Safe in body, perhaps, but something dire and dreadful has happened to her—something she must recover to tell us. Let’s offer to keep this Sally as her companion and maid, if the queen and the herbalist will allow it. With Sally’s help, Marie-Anne must recover to tell us the truth!”

In Hannah’s chill and breezy loft, they closed the windows, then draped the horse blankets over them to hide their lights. Meg pointed out the dipping vat, still full of thickening, settling starch, and then the shelf where the body lay. The six fat bolts of cloth hid all but the top of Hannah’s head, with hair so stiff it stuck out in all directions.

Elizabeth observed everything in silence, then glanced back toward the starch vat. “That large window overlooking the street and St. Martin’s fields was open even now, so we might assume it was open during the murder. Ned, be sure to ask those you question tomorrow if they heard a scream or a fray—or glanced in to note a stranger inside, and I don’t mean Meg.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“And try to discern if there’s a way to escape through the window without being seen from the street or the fields, which I doubt.”

“It looks l-large enough for someone to c-creep in or out,” Rosie whispered. Not only had the woman gone to stammering, but her eyes kept darting everywhere in the dim room with its shadows shifting from their lanterns. She looked as if she were certain something was going to leap out at them, and it didn’t help Elizabeth’s pluck to have her companion so knock-kneed.

“But now,” Elizabeth plunged on, “to the terrible tasks at hand. Are these bolts of fabric placed, do you recall, Meg and Ned, much the way you and Jenks found them—and her?”

“Quite sure that’s the way they were when the men put them back in place before we ran to the palace,” Meg assured her, “though I think her head was more hidden when we found her. Do you—want us to take the bolts away?”

“Yes, in a minute. What are these bluish blurs on the linen roll? Let me have more lantern light here.”

“I saw that before,” Meg murmured, “but just thought it was damp seeping into it from her body or garments. Her skirt is blue, so maybe the dye—it bled. I think it’s on more than one of the rolls.”

“Yes, two others, only more faded. Perhaps all these rolls were defective or stained, so they were just left on the shelf and not used. The blue tinge is probably not from the murderer but from someone who simply mishandled them earlier. Now, we must study the way she’s been set on the shelf. Then we will lift her out onto the worktable over there. Rosie, note carefully what is on it, and if there is naught suspicious, clear things away and spread this last blanket there.”

Giving Rosie a lantern and holding their other one high, the queen watched as Meg and Ned removed the six wide rolls of fabric. Stiff as a stone effigy—body, garments, and hair—Hannah von Hoven lay as if encased in crystal.

“Now that it’s gone dark, even in our lantern light, she seems to glow,” Meg whispered, sounding awed. “You know, the pollen from the cuckoo-pint herbs the starch is made from glows in the dark.”

“She is not glowing in the dark,” Elizabeth insisted. “She just looks pearl-coated because of our lights on that sheen of starch. Men, lift her over here and carefully.”

Ned grimaced as he helped Clifford, and not, she suspected, from the weight of the corpse. “Never felt anything quite like this,” he muttered. “She’s slick but sticky, too. And she looks like—like she’s flying with her hems and hair like this.”

“Or been caught in the big breezes outside,” Clifford put in.

Elizabeth nodded. In the starch vat, Hannah’s hair must have drifted or floated, then set into this bizarre shape, which made it look as if her tresses were wings sprouting from the sides of her head. Her skirts—she wore a brown work gown with only one petticoat—also had assumed a strange shape, perhaps that of the coffin-like vat.

Elizabeth jumped as Meg broke the solemn silence. “She looks peaceful with her eyes and mouth closed, not like she’s met a violent end, but gone to sleep.”

“Or has been arranged in death to look so,” Elizabeth surmised, “just as someone might close the eyes of a corpse and compose the features before burial. Men, stand away for propriety’s sake and search the loft for anything you deem unusual. We women will examine the corpse.”

Wiping their hands off, Ned and Clifford seemed only too eager to obey. They took one lantern, and Rosie held the other over the body.

“I only met Hannah once,” Elizabeth said, “but she was so bright, in more ways than one. This is foul play, I fear, and I mean for us to discover what happened here. I will not have unwed women who strive to make their own way in my kingdom become victims of brutal men.”

Elizabeth’s own words to Parliament danced through her brain again:
Fatal fashions are treasons, greed and lust, adultery and murder, in my kingdom …

Both Rosie and Meg looked at her wide-eyed, as if they had caught on to another reason—besides affordable, fashionable ruffs—the queen had favored Hannah von Hoven.

“I see,” Rosie said, and Meg nodded solemnly.

“Then let us see what we can discover here. Untie that little neck ruff of hers, if you please. It looks crushed in places, yet seems to have sprung back in others.”

“Mayhap,” Meg murmured, “in its starch bath, it popped back.”

But they had to find scissors and cut the stiff, S-shaped curves of the four-inch-deep ruff carefully away. Discolored bruises lay not under it but lower on her neck, like a mottled necklace against Hannah’s alabaster throat.

“Choked or strangled,” Elizabeth whispered, “but that does not mean for certain it was the cause of her death. Pin that ruff back on, and let’s see if we can find other marks on her.”

Pulling up sleeves so stiff they crackled, they scanned her white flesh and found blue and brown bruises on both wrists.

“She struggled,” Meg whispered, tears in her eyes, “but someone bigger and stronger held her down in that starch. A killer strong enough or tall enough to lift her up into the vat’s liquid, either to drown her or hide her.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, “strong enough to lift her high so the vat did not tip and, evidently, not that much of the liquid starch sloshed out. Men,” she called over to them, “see how stable that long vat is and what holds it.”

They moved immediately to peer under it and tried to move it.

“Seems solid,” Ned called to her. “It’s set in a sturdy wooden base, kind of like a wooden cradle, but one that doesn’t rock.”

“There was some starch spilled on the floor,” Meg put in. “Not the first time I saw her floating hand, I think, but when Jenks, Ned, and I came back.”

“Then it was spilled when he—surely it was a man—lifted her out to hide her on the shelf,” the queen pronounced. “Why didn’t he just leave her in the vat? His garments must have become sodden with that starch. Perhaps that is what we are looking for—a man with dried starch slopped upon his doublet or cape. But what would that look like?”

“And he could easily change or destroy that garb. But I just remembered something,” Meg added. “Jenks noted sticky footsteps on the stairs, but they had mostly dried when I saw them.”

“Which would mean,” Rosie whispered, “the murderer left by the stairs and not the window.”

“We shall examine all possibilities,” the queen declared, “and any person we even slightly suspect.”

She turned back to the corpse again. “Rosie and Meg, stand firm, for we are almost finished here. Before we summon the authorities of this ward, we must see if she has marks on her backside. I’ve seen dead bodies where the blood settles and so reveals what position they were in when they died—and this poor, strangled woman …”

But as they rolled her on her side, white starch water gushed from her nose and dribbled from her mouth.

“’S blood, or
was
she drowned?” Elizabeth cried as her skirts took the stream of what Hosea Cantwell had called the devil’s liquor. “If she were dead when she was put in the vat, would she have that stuff inside of her?”

“I guess some could seep in, but that much?” Rosie cried, dabbing at the queen’s skirts with a corner of the blanket.

“No, don’t,” Elizabeth insisted. “Leave it be so we can see what we might be looking for on the murderer’s garments. But I warrant, then, she was still breathing when she went into the vat and took several gasps of that stuff as she died.”

She braced her hands on the edge of the worktable and shuddered at the image that brought to mind. She prayed poor Hannah had not been ravished, too, but she could not bear to examine her private parts for bruising. That would somehow be the final insult, especially with the men in the room, and whether Hannah had been raped or not, she was still dead. Elizabeth meant to find the murderer, and then he would confess all the how and why, she swore it.

Besides, the body had gone as solid as the wooden vat itself, not only in the starch but in what doctors called
rigor mortis.
Elizabeth had noted that even Hannah’s face was stiff, so she must have swallowed much starch for it to seep out through clenched jaw muscles, teeth, and lips.

“Meg, you said that the cuckoo-pint herb is poison,” the queen said. “But mixed with water for starch, it would be diluted from being fatal, wouldn’t it? I mean, if she somehow toppled in, hit her head to knock herself out, then imbibed a huge draft of the starch by mistake—”

“I think so much water mixed in would weaken the power of the herb. I warrant it does not poison instantly. Yet it’s strong enough to chafe skin and turn it red, like a laundresses’s hands.”

“Yet Hannah’s hands and skin look as smooth and white as carved ivory under that glaze of starch,” Rosie observed. “Maybe it’s because she was already dead when put in there, and dead skin won’t chap.”

“I don’t know for certain how fast it even works on a living person’s skin,” Meg admitted. “I can ask a laundress or a whitster about that. This area teems with them, and I’m sure I could find you one who—”

They all jolted at the muted yet shrill sound of a woman’s voice. The queen’s stomach cartwheeled. For one wild moment, she thought the corpse could be exhaling one last breath to produce the sound.

“Sounds like much ado downstairs,” Meg muttered as they laid Hannah on her back again. “Jenks’s voice, too.” Ned and Clifford rushed toward the steps, but the queen motioned them back. Below, at the bottom of the dark staircase, she could barely make out Jenks with his arms around a struggling woman.

Chapter the Fifth

“WHAT GOES?” ELIZABETH CALLED DOWN TO JENKS.

“Caught this one trying to sneak up the stairs.”

“Hold her, and we will come down.”

“I just had a thought,” Meg whispered behind Elizabeth. “Hannah was real tight with her money. What if her work-women rebelled at their wages or some such, and an accident happened? More than one woman could manage to lift her. Then they felt guilty about leaving her in the vat because they knew what it would do to her skin.”

“Hold all that for later,” Elizabeth said. “For now, we must speak with that woman. Men, put the body back on the shelf, then continue your search for anything unusual. Rosie and Meg, with me, for I will speak with Jenks’s captive.”

Meg took the second lantern and, as the queen ordered, preceded Her Majesty down the staircase, lighting their way. Lady Rosie, who seemed only too relieved to depart the loft, hurried behind them.

“Unhand me, you great oaf!” the struggling woman cried, and landed an elbow in Jenks’s solid midriff.

Meg noted she was nearly as shapely a blonde as Hannah. With one arm around the woman’s narrow waist and the other over her bouncing breasts as she tried to wriggle free, Jenks looked as if he were actually enjoying himself.

“I’ll not loose you. Hold there!” he ordered. Bates hovered a short distance off, scanning the alley.

The wench was hardly a goodwife but a laborer in brown homespun with a well-worn apron. She looked ready to cry. Her long hair spilled from her cap in such disarray it reminded Meg of poor Hannah’s.

“Stop struggling!” the queen ordered, though she kept her voice low. “I would but ask you a few questions, mistress, and my man will not harm you.”

Evidently at the sound of a woman’s cultured voice and tone of command, Jenks’s prisoner went still in his arms. Reluctantly, Meg could tell, he released her but for one hand on her forearm.

“Who are you, then?” the queen asked the disheveled woman.

“Ursala Hemmings, whitster, that’s me, and live nearby, a friend to the starcher what works here,” she said in one long, ragged breath. “Thought you be night thieves or anglers breaking in and these your spotters, that’s what. I meant to send out a hue and cry for the night watch, but this basecourt codpiece grabbed me—”

“Hold your tongue!” the queen ordered. “We came to see the starcher ourselves, for we do business with her.”

Ursala gasped, then blurted, “Hey then, you ladies from the queen’s court come to fetch the royal starched goods? But where’s Hannah? Heard she’s ill. Or she been hurt?”

“Yes, I regret to tell you she’s been hurt.”

Ursala broke into tears. “That one, there,” she accused, pointing past Jenks at Bates, “been guarding her door and wouldn’t let me pass to see or help her earlier. Thought I’d sneak in at night,’cause Hannah’s not in her room near mine, and—something else gone amiss, hasn’t it? Something’s dreadful wrong!”

Meg could always tell when Her Majesty had decided on someone, that is, whether to trust the person or not. She could see the queen was going to take this plucky woman into her confidence, at least to get out of her anything she could.

“Yes, I regret to tell you, Mistress Hemmings,” the queen said quietly, “that Hannah has died, and not of her own hand.”

“Murder?” Ursala screeched before Jenks clapped his hand over her mouth and held her tight again.

“Meg,” the queen said, “run upstairs to tell the men to douse their lantern, uncover the windows, and follow us to the mews forthwith. Jenks, bring Mistress Hemmings along where we can talk more privily and quietly than shouting bloody murder in the night streets. Hie yourself now, before someone summons the night watch and we must explain more than just a whitster’s skulking about.”

“I can’t believe it’s come to this,” Cecil told Elizabeth as they sat in the royal withdrawing room the next morning over mulled wine and partridge pie that had long gone cold. “A young woman, a starcher, of all things, murdered,” he went on, taking some sort of notes—Cecil was always writing something. “A great tragedy and a mighty mystery, I admit, Your Grace, but why not allow the ward constable and the coroner to deal with it?”

“Because they might
not
be able to deal with it.” She pushed back her chair and went to look out the window. “Sad to say, some of this country’s constables reason things out on a level with my dear Jenks—’s blood, you know what I mean. Oh, for certain, they inquire of neighbors if anything was noted amiss, but if no one saw the murder directly, they close the books on it. Besides, I just have an inkling that this death might have ramifications.”

“Are you worried, as Ned suggested, that clues and suspicions might lead straight to your master starcher and her husband?”

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out. Meg and Jenks may have gotten something out of the hysterical Mistress Hemmings by now, but I intend to pay a visit to the van der Passes’ starch house this morning. At the least, I will observe closely how they react when I give them the news of Hannah’s tragic death.”

“You could summon them here.”

“That might alarm them and give them time to hide something. Now that I’ve seen Hannah’s shop, I want a good look at theirs.”

“Do you intend to search their residence as you did Hannah’s?”

“A lot of good that did us,” she muttered. On the way back to the palace last night, the queen and Clifford had gone one street behind Hannah’s shop to her small single room, which Ursala had described. They’d found it stripped of whatever garments, personal effects, or money she might have had there. Someone had been in a big rush but had, once again, been clever enough not to leave clues to his or her own identity behind, besides the fact they were dealing with someone obviously dangerous and desperate. Elizabeth meant to have Ned inquire if those neighbors heard or saw anything strange, too.

“If the van der Passes are to blame,” Cecil said, “I doubt you’d find one thing in their starch house or privy chambers to cast guilt on them.”

“Yet I keep hoping,” she told him, her voice trembling, “that if we turn over enough rocks—or, in this case, stir up enough starch—a clue will turn up.”

Frowning, she gazed over the broad Thames as it sprang to life with horse ferries, barges, and wherries plying the white-capped waves. The dawn sky tinted the water a pewter hue, and she thought again of the starch bath that had held poor Hannah.

Elizabeth knew that she herself could have been killed in her youth, her future obliterated by her Catholic sister, Queen Mary, when she sent her to the Tower for her supposed part in a Protestant rebellion. Through a slit of window, she’d glimpsed the Thames and wished she could escape on it. Mary had wanted to execute—to murder—her. For more than justice’s sake in her realm, Elizabeth felt compelled to discover and punish whoever was guilty of Hannah’s horrible death. Murder was always an immoral act, but murder of a clever, ambitious young woman in her prime was intolerable.

She turned back and walked toward Cecil, who had become as silent as she. Neither of them had gone to bed last night; he looked normal, but exhaustion drained her. As she glanced down, she saw that, as if from a bird’s-eye view, he’d sketched a huge neck ruff with an open circle in the center, the outer part in sections like a pie cut in wedges.

“I was fearful I’d see starched ruffs in my sleep,” she admitted, “but they obsess you, too? And why only six sections in it instead of many?”

“Because, Your Majesty,” he said as he scribbled something else in, “that has oft been the number of guilty parties we must investigate when your privy plot counselors probe a murder.”

She steadied herself with her hand on the back of his chair and leaned over his shoulder. As she watched, he made a big question mark in the center of the ruff where the wearer’s neck would go. He’d left three sections of the ruff itself blank, but he’d written in three others:
Competitors Dirck and Dingen v. d. Passe? Lover? Disgruntled worker?

“It bolsters me to know, Cecil, that your mind is already at work on this, too. I warrant we shall have additions to that chart, and hopefully deletions, for, yes, it could lead to economic chaos with our tailoring and textile commerce if our fledgling starch industry collapsed. If, that is, the van der Passes are somehow involved with the murder, so that I would lose Dingen as well as Hannah.”

“Please, Your Grace,” Cecil said, jumping to his feet, evidently when he realized she stood while he sat, “just see that in all this, in addition to your regular royal duties,
you
don’t collapse.”

“As dreadful as this is, I’ve been through worse,” she assured him. “I just pray God this investigation will not come near the throne or those I must rely on to rule and reign. Who would have known,” she added under her breath as she turned away to call for her coach and cloak, “that starch could become a fatal fashion?”

“Can’t thank your lady and you both enough for your help,” Ursala Hemmings told Meg and Jenks for the fourth time since they’d awakened.

Last night the woman had become nearly incoherent when she’d learned her friend had been murdered, so Her Majesty had asked the two of them to take her home and stay the night with her. As of yet, Meg realized, Ursala did not know the one she called “your lady” was England’s queen.

Ursala Hemmings lived in two back rooms near St. Martin’s fields with her sister and sister’s husband, whom they had not roused. When Meg, Jenks, and Ursala finally became exhausted, they curled up for fitful sleep in big baskets of sheets amid washtubs and smaller soaking vats and barrels. As daylight crept into London’s narrow streets, only now, Meg judged, did Ursala Hemmings seem calm enough to question.

Meg herself didn’t feel calm, though, and not only because she was anxious to get back to her daughter. Meg feared that if she hadn’t been sent along to watch him, Jenks might have comforted Ursala in more ways than one. The man was obviously smitten with this—this laundress, when Meg had never known him to be one bit fond of any woman but the queen and herself.

And what if it turned out that Ursala was racked by guilt instead of grief? More than one woman—even purported friends—had murdered another over something or other, usually a man, which reminded Meg that she’d have to ask Ned privily if he had ever tried to entice Hannah with his charms. That’s all she’d need, Ned involved personally with the dead woman when the queen was hell-bent on solving this crime.

As light seeped into the room to replace the glow of two tallow candles, Meg realized the laundry room’s vats and barrels of liquids reminded her of the starch tub in Hannah’s loft. Shelves lined two walls here, and Ursala had long wooden stirring sticks.

“What’s all this liquid besides wash water?” she asked as the woman started to open the two small front street shutters. Though he wasn’t needed, Jenks scurried over to help. Meg glared at him behind Ursala’s back.

“That first tub’s for soaking stubborn stains,” she explained, pointing. “Got alkaline water of lye in it. We buy wood ash from ovens, strain and mix it here. Real good to take out grease, tallow, and fat stains, sure is.”

“And this?” Meg asked.

“Oh, that’s just powder from ground sheep’s hooves for treating grease spots. Lots of those on tablecloths. Lemon juice takes out iron stains, and we rub fruit stains with butter, then wash them quick in hot milk. Fur pieces like those hanging over there just get brushed through with bran.”

“Sounds like,” Jenks put in, “you’ve got everything in store we’d need for breakfast. But what are those big hooks on the wall?”

“Oh, those,” she said with a slight smile his way. “Twisting hooks to wring water out’fore drying things outside. We reuse as much water as we can,’cause it’s such a burden, hauling it from city cisterns.”

Meg hoped Ursala would answer questions about Hannah with the ease and equanimity with which she was talking now. “And this barrel is hard cider?” Meg asked, staring down into a potent-smelling vat.

“Oh, that’s just sheep urine for soaking sweat-stained shirts. Then we wash them in hot water.”

“That would cover up the sweat smell, all right,” Jenks said in a wry comment worthy of Ned. Meg jumped away from the vat, but the hint of another wan smile at Jenks lit Ursala’s tear-streaked face and tilted her blue eyes.

“Mistress Hemmings,” Meg said, trying as much as she could to sound like the queen as she steered the woman over toward the big worktable, “I must ask you several questions about your friend Hannah. Do you know why her workers weren’t with her yesterday after midmorn?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, nodding vigorously as she sat and gripped her hands on the table. “Saw one of them, Dorothy, in the drying fields, said Hannah gave them a holiday after they came in. Surprised they were, every one of them.”

“So that was unusual?” Meg prompted as Jenks came over to sit silently by Ursala on the plank bench.

“You think the likes of us can afford giving our girls time off?” Ursala cried. “She promised them pay, and Hannah was close with money, too.”

BOOK: The Fatal Fashione

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