Authors: Karen Harper

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

The Hooded Hawke (16 page)

BOOK: The Hooded Hawke

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Though she strove not to give away her nervousness, Elizabeth glanced up at the inner windows of the inn. Norfolk’s room was directly across from hers. It meant that Meg could glance out to be certain the Duke of Norfolk and his servants were here in the courtyard and could not catch her upstairs where she shouldn’t be.

“All right, now!” The queen clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. “Remember to beware of the fox.”

“What fox?” Robin asked, annoyed at being chosen one of the geese. “You haven’t named a fox, so I volunteer.”

“You would be a good one,” she said, forcing a smile, and keeping her voice light, “but I have another fox in mind. My dear coz, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk!”

He looked as if he would protest at first, standing stiffly with his arms crossed over his chest and a sour look on his face, but the others pushed him into the center of the squares and
X
’s along which he would pursue the geese.

“I haven’t played this since I was ten,” he muttered, but she could tell he liked being the center of attention. “Run the rules by me again,” he said to her.

“Rules?” she told him. “How nice of you to want to play by the rules, my lord. All right, everyone! The geese can move only sideways, downward, or diagonally forward, but the fox can move in any direction. You can also jump over a goose and capture it, my lord, as in checkers, and multiple jumps are allowed in a single move. The geese only win if they pen you up so that you cannot move, and the fox wins by capturing all the geese. All right, now, Secretary Cecil is going to cast the dice and call out the numbers.”

As she had recited the rules, Norfolk’s long face had taken on an increasingly wary expression. He must have realized she was setting him up, perhaps even warning him as she had done both
indirectly and directly before. She held her breath for a moment, praying he wouldn’t take offense and stalk off to his room.

A
s she left the queen’s quarters and headed down the crooked hall toward the Duke of Norfolk’s chamber, Meg clasped the small stone jar of broad-leafed dock tincture to her stomach, hoping to still the fluttering there. The queen had invited all the servants to come down to watch the games tonight, and Meg could see with her own eyes from peeking out the queen’s windows that Norfolk and the three servants he kept with him were below in the courtyard.

Still, she felt on pins and needles, like the ones the queen had said must have been used to embroider such an intricate message and puzzle on the pillow she sought.

A floorboard creaked underfoot; she hesitated. She’d never liked the Duke of Norfolk and was kind of afraid of him, too. If he caught her here, she knew well to say that she had a bit of the salve left and wanted him to have it lest his stinging nettle rash returned. But, ever since he’d jumped out at her in Southampton’s wilderness gardens, she’d thought of him as the beast of the forest. Yes, she didn’t put it past him to be behind the Hooded Hawk rumors, in league with the Earl of Southampton.

Of course, Norfolk was not the shooter of the lethal arrows, for he’d been in plain sight twice when they came flying in, but it could be one of his servants, she reckoned. She only hoped she could make it up to the queen for being seen by Norfolk and Southampton at the window the day the queen went sailing. This had to work.

After the next turn in the hall, she counted three doors on the left, just as Ned had told her. Once Norfolk went up to his chamber to bed, Ned and Jenks were going to keep an eye on him. Jenks would guard his horse in the stables, and Ned would sit at the top of the staircase to be sure the duke didn’t sneak out for some mischief, especially once he saw his precious pillow was gone.

If
she could find it and get it to the queen. Meg thought it would be best just to examine it, leave it there, and tell the
queen what was on or in it, but Her Majesty wanted to see it herself. Wanted, she’d admitted, to see what Queen Mary had slaved over, to see her handiwork to know more the depths of her desperation.

The depths of her desperation.
That was exactly what the queen had said, when Meg was so afraid her beloved mistress was mired in those depths herself of late.

She knocked lightly on the door, hoping that didn’t draw anyone from a nearby room. Nothing. No sound, no movement. Perhaps the queen’s invitation for food and fun had cleared out the entire inn.

“Now, you are not to take time to search overlong for the pillow if you cannot find it,” the queen had said.

“But what if I spot a crossbow or longbow or more of those bolts or
quadrello
arrows?” Meg had asked.

“Then, if the coast is clear, bring those to my chamber immediately,” she’d said, her voice excited. “But no heroics, that is my point, Meg, though if you do not spot the pillow at first—without disturbing his things—you might look around briefly. Briefly, for I do not know how long I can hold him.”

Meg lifted the latch and pushed. With a creak, the door opened.

“Hello?” she said quietly. “Just brought a bit more healing salve for the duke’s poison nettle rash.”

Silence within, but cheers and laughter outside. She darted in and closed the door behind her.

T
he fox quickly gobbled up geese, including Drake and Robin. Elizabeth had been hoping Norfolk would get hemmed in so she could give him a cryptic warning, for the man had always loved intrigue. He was well suited for Mary of Scots in that respect, for she also planned and plotted, with her enigmatic
Your assured Mary
and the puzzle of the truncated vine on that pillow. Surely Lady Southampton had not made any of that up, for it was far too clever for her. That pillow existed, and Elizabeth must get her hands on it to read its implications clearly before she confronted or imprisoned Norfolk—
or let him snare himself even more with the rebellious northern lords before she trapped and punished them all.

“I can’t believe,” Norfolk said to her, “you condescended to be a goose and let me possibly catch and devour you.”

“It’s just a game, Master Fox,” she said, and forced a laugh. “Or, in your mind, is it more?”

He laughed. His teeth shone bright between his nut-brown mustache and beard.

“You see,” she said, “you haven’t caught me yet, and, with my friends and allies, I may yet surround you. Your move!”

She managed to evade him once again, though he captured Rosie.’S blood, he was going to win this time, when he said he hadn’t played in years.

Her next move, then, must be to keep him here after he’d won, and as a goose next time—though maybe she could make up a new rule that if the fox won, he played the fox yet again.

When he turned away, she glanced up at his chamber window. No sign of Meg, of course. Then she realized that where Norfolk’s three servants had been, looking on and laughing off to the side, only one remained.

T
he pillow wasn’t on his bed, where Meg had first looked. Nor was it in the tooled leather coffer at the foot of the bed. Men’s garments there; she hoped she hadn’t pushed them awry in her quick search. More coffers and boxes were stacked in a corner, seven of them, which must have been unloaded from his personal wagon. It would take her too long and more strength than she had to lift and go through them all.

Think! Think!

She opened the saddle packs she saw on the floor near the door and rifled through them. Nothing. At least she could hear the raucous game still going on full force outside.

When she moved away, she accidentally kicked the jar of salve where she’d put it on the floor beside her—hurt her toe, too. She was not to leave the salve, of course, unless she was caught and had to say that’s why she’d come. Let him wonder who had taken his pillow.

She got on her belly to reach for the salve under the bed. His sword was here in its scabbard with his belt. How she wished she’d found a crossbow or longbow, even though Her Grace said not to spend extra time looking for such when they knew the pillow was a surer bet. But behind his sword was another saddle pack.

She stretched out to reach it and dragged it toward her and felt inside. Something soft, but not silk. Many courtiers on progress followed the queen’s lead and brought their own bed bolsters or pillows, but in his saddle pack and under the bed?

When applause and cheers exploded from outside, she jumped so hard, she hit her head on the side of the bed.

She pulled out the pillow. Plain linen, that’s all. No—no, this was a cover for another one within.

Her heart thudding in her chest, she opened the linen case. Green! Pale green. But it wasn’t what Lady Mary had told the queen was on it. Meg saw some sort of embroidered bird within a wreath. Could this be the wrong pillow? Another pillow, a mate to the one the queen wanted?

She turned it over. Yes, on this side was the very thing she was sent to get.

Meg thrust it back into its linen case. Then on second thought, she took three shirts out of the coffer at the bottom of the bed and stuffed those in the place of the pillow in the leather saddle pack before she shoved it back under the bed. Holding the pillow down at her side as if it were something unimportant in a sack, she hurried out the door.

She was just around the turn in the hall when two of Norfolk’s three valets passed her. Her legs almost turned to butter as she merely nodded and went on her way. Their voices floated to her as she picked up her pace toward the queen’s chamber.

“Don’t see why he gave us the high sign we can’t stay down wi’ the others,” one groused.

“Funny, though, to see his lordship playing the fox, eh? Good choice, I’d say.”

Meg hesitated, thinking they might say something incriminating, but their voices faded and she heard a door slam. That
was close! Wait’til she told Her Grace she just missed getting caught.

She rushed into the queen’s chamber, closed the door behind her, leaned against it, and finally exhaled. Then she recalled she’d left the jar of salve under the bed where it had rolled when she accidentally kicked it.

Chapter the Fifteenth

L
ook how the woman sewed her signature,” Elizabeth muttered as she, Meg, and Rosie bent over the pilfered pillow. “Not elegant but grandiose, not bold but brazen.”

She ran her fingertip over the stitches of
Your assured Mary,
but she did not touch the green vine or the knife cutting it. All the raised work was done in a slightly darker green than the pale silk background.

“How dare she be so intimate with a man she must have surely never met!” Elizabeth exploded. “She gives no title, no family name here, just
Mary,
as if it is a simple vow to give herself to him, body and—and conspiracy, for I swear, the woman has no soul!”

She jumped at the sharp rapping on the door. “The lord secretary awaits, Your Majesty,” her yeoman’s deep voice came through the old oaken door.

“Send him in!”

“Did you get it?” Cecil asked the moment he entered and Clifford shut the door behind him. “Ah, I see you did. Good work, Mistress Milligrew!”

“But one thing,” Meg blurted, wringing her hands. “As I told Her Grace, by chance, I kicked the stone jar with the curing tincture under his bed where I found this, then left it behind, the poison nettle tincture, I mean. If the duke figures out what it is, he’ll know who was there.”

“Yes, well,” Cecil said, “let him fret that we are onto his machinations. It will either sober him up to behave, at least for a while, or push him over the edge, then we’ll have him. Jenks and Ned are at their assigned positions?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, as she turned the pillow so he could see it right side up. “I told them to man their posts as soon as darkness fell, and that is now. I wonder how long it will take Norfolk to miss this. If he sleeps with it every night, the blackguard, it may be soon. If he doesn’t put it on his bed, Meg stuffed shirts in the saddle pack where he carries this, so he may set out with us on the road and believe he has it yet.”

“The
E
-shaped vine is just as Lady Southampton said,” Cecil observed, “cut off at the head. Yes, I read this as a personal threat against you, Your Grace. Leave it to wily Norfolk and an even wilier woman who has been twice wed—not counting her liaison with Bothwell—to be so clever at a seductive and subversive sport between them.”

“Beyond that, do you think any of this is some sort of cipher they’ve developed? And look, here on the back …”

She turned the pillow over; she and Cecil moved closer to the lantern on the table. Rosie and Meg hovered on either side as Clifford’s voice sounded through the outer door again, “Captain Drake here, Your Majesty.”

“He may enter.”

Clifford opened the door for Drake, then said, “Can’t find the courier Keenan yet.”

“Keep looking,” she said, and, as the door closed, turned back to their study of the pillow again.

“Whatever is this?” Cecil asked, stooping closer to the small bird in flight embroidered on the back of the pillow in the lower right-hand corner. Its outline and eye were done in black thread, but its beak, legs, and feet were gold. Surrounding it was a wreath, seemingly attached to the beak as if the bird carried it or wore it as a halo. “Could it be a falcon—or a hawk?” Cecil inquired.

“And could that wreath be intended as a hood?” the queen mused. “I warrant this is as much of one as the sail surrounding the head of the hawk in the wax seal on John Hawkins’s letter to you, Drake.”

“It—it couldn’t be a duck, could it?” Drake asked. “A male one, a drake, meaning I’m to be cut off, too? Could that weirdlooking wreath be a sort of noose?”

“No one knew before ten days ago I would summon you to accompany me on this progress,” Elizabeth reasoned aloud. “It seems highly unlikely that the Scots queen could have learned you would be with me, then had time to sew this and have it sneaked out past her hosts and delivered to Norfolk in that amount of time. Granted, the lethal archer seems to be taking aim at you also, but I cannot fathom how this could symbolize your name.”

Rosie put in, “I rather think it’s a dove, like the symbol of the Holy Ghost coming down from heaven. I realize she didn’t embroider its body with white, but, you know,” she went on when no one responded, “the dove descending on the Lord Jesus when he was baptized in the River Jordan.”

“She’s right,” Elizabeth said. “And God spoke the words from heaven,
This is My beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.
But I can’t see how any of that relates to the current situation with the Scots queen.”

“Queen Mary has borne a son, in whom she is no doubt well pleased,” Drake put in. His gaze met Elizabeth’s over the bent heads of the others. Did he recall their discussion of how much he wanted a child, when he knew she did, too?

“At any rate, that son is hardly hers now, as the Scots lords took the boy to rear when she fled with Bothwell,” Elizabeth said. “This bird does resemble a dove more than anything, but maybe it’s the dove Noah sent out from the ark after the flood to see if there was dry ground yet—if they could rebuild. That concept seems more on the mark with Queen Mary’s current state and her hope to rebuild my kingdom with, as she believes, God’s blessing.”

“Yes,” Drake said, “but a reference to the ark could be a covert reference to a ship—one under attack as ours have been by the Scots queen’s Spanish allies. I’m trying to recall the rest of that Noah story. He sent the dove out twice from the ark, and the first time it returned with nothing.”

“And the second time,” Elizabeth said, “it came back with an olive branch to let him know the flood was receding. Since the times of the ancients, an olive wreath has meant not only peace but—”

“But victory,” Cecil finished for her.
“Your assured Mary
and her next husband Norfolk may believe they are assured of victory in cutting off the green vine of Elizabeth.”

Chills racked her. Again she felt that strange, icy circle between her breasts and her shoulder blades as if a ghostly shaft had sliced right through her. She imagined pain there; for a moment she could not catch her breath. She saw her dead falconer and felt his life bleed away as she held his hand. Poor Tom Naseby lay dead at her feet, and Drake’s sailor crashed to the deck with a flaming arrow in his back. Warnings, all dire omens of worse to come?

Her voice shook as she said, “I believe you may be right, Cecil. But if my rival queen knows of the bowman sent to slice through the vine, why a knife instead of an arrow—or bolt or
quadrello
?”

“Worse, where and when will the next attack be made?” Drake asked, and stepped between her and the window as if to shield her from the outside. “You know, Your Grace, however warm the night, Norfolk’s rooms are across the way, as is a slate roof where a bowman could look in here.”

“I have guards both outside his room and on the roof, but you are right. I have no one inside Norfolk’s chamber to know what is going on with him. But he’s wily, a fox indeed, so he would not allow his archer to shoot from his room, where he could be traced. I may have set him up in that fox and geese game tonight, my friends, but he may well be playing hoodman’s blind with me.”

“The same game as blindman’s buff?” Meg asked. “You mean he’s put a hood of sorts over your head and amuses himself by dealing blows? You can’t tell who’s hitting you so it just goes on and on until you guess right?”

“Yes, but we must do more than guess!’S blood, it has to stop here and now! If I can’t control Norfolk, though he’s daily
underfoot, I will be forced to change my royal cousin Mary’s status from guarded guest to prisoner. Once that’s done, it’s a slippery slope to worse things, and I can’t abide the idea of a queen ever being executed again. My father may have done it to my mother and to my Howard cousin, Queen Catherine, but I can’t stand the thought!”

Elizabeth lowered her voice, for it sounded nearly out of control. She could not believe she had blurted all that out, her deepest fears, when things had not yet come to such a pass.

“Maybe,” Rosie said in the awkward silence, “the Duke of Norfolk is still seething over the fact the Tudors beheaded a Howard queen.”

“I’m at the point where I don’t care
why
but
what
he’s doing. And I can hardly arrest the highest noble in the land over a pillow!”

A horrid headache suddenly clenched her forehead as if it were in a giant vise. She motioned them to leave her, and Rosie helped her into the adjoining bedchamber, where, once the door was shut, the queen burst into tears that splattered the beheaded vine like rain.

E
lizabeth drank a soothing posset Meg sent in and slept the sleep of the dead, until a repeated knocking on a distant door roused her.

Her bedroom was pitch-black. For one moment she could not recall where she was. A low-burning lantern should be on the far table. Where was Rosie? At least her headache was gone, but she felt light-headed, disembodied.

Then she remembered everything—and that she had put Norfolk’s precious pillow in its linen pillowcase under her own bed. She peered around the bedcurtain that, like the bed itself, she had hauled with her on her progress. Thank heavens, Rosie came back in with the lantern.

“What is it?”

“Justin Keenan’s outside in the hall with an important message he will give only to you.”

“Have him pass the note in.”

“He had nothing written—something he’s seen. About Norfolk, I believe.”

“’S blood. Is Cecil not with him? It must be the middle of the night.”

“After two of the clock. I can tell by the new guard on the door. All Keenan will say is to tell you it’s important.”

“Let him in the outer chamber, and have a yeoman guard come in with him.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Rosie said, shoving her bounteous hair from her face as she went back out.

Elizabeth realized she must look like one of the Furies, but Keenan was too disciplined and circumspect to come to her in the middle of the night without the sure knowledge of something dire.

She tied her long hair back and wrapped her robe around her. She felt a bit dizzy at first and thought she might lose her balance. Even this time of year, the slanted floorboards of the inn were cold where the mats did not reach. She tried to shove her feet into her woolen mules but kicked one away, just as Meg had said she’d kicked the stone jar under Norfolk’s bed. Norfolk’s bed, which the damned Queen of Scots wanted to share only so she could get the English throne and have a double claim to it through her own bloodline and Norfolk’s, too.

Elizabeth found the other slipper and went into the outer chamber. Keenan bowed low. He looked distraught.

“Tell me.”

“Both of my horses are gone. There wasn’t room for them in the inn stables, crowded as it is tonight.”

“You woke me for a horse theft, man? Are you dement—”

“I had them tethered out in back and was sleeping on the ground near them. They’re the fastest courier mounts I’ve ever had, and they cost Lord Cecil a pretty penny.”

“Then go to see Cecil!”

“The point is, Your Majesty, though I woke after the horses had been led off a ways, I glimpsed Norfolk on one, and two of
his men shared the other. I think they’re gone—horses and men.”

She gaped at him. “You
think
? Did you not check? Norfolk gone?”

Six quick raps resounded on her door to the hall, four slow and two quick ones. Cecil—and Cecil never used that knock unless something suspicious was going on.

“Enter! But where’s my guard?” she asked as Cecil, hastily dressed with his hose not even gartered, came in. He bowed jerkily to the queen and nodded to Keenan.

“When Keenan woke me, I sent one of my men and one of your guards to roust out Norfolk. Only one of his three servants is in his chamber. He’s fled.”

“How did he get past Ned? He’s on the staircase. I can see how Jenks might have missed him if he took Keenan’s mounts from out back instead of from the stables, where I had Jenks posted, but Ned? Hell’s gates, if Norfolk or his men have hurt Ned, Meg will never recover. Keenan,” she said turning to him, “I regret I was short with you. My brain is fogged, and I couldn’t grasp at first how the theft of your horses was linked to Norfolk.”

“I ask your pardon, but I was too overturned—about my mounts and the duke—to put things more carefully, Your Majesty.”

“Cecil, send my other door guard to look for Ned Topside, then summon more guards here. If Norfolk has indeed fled, it could mean the onset of the revolt. Or he found that his pillow was gone, and that panicked him.”

“His pillow?” Keenan said.

Another knock on the door. It was Ned and her guard with one of Norfolk’s three men held fast between them.

“Where has your master gone, man?” she asked Norfolk’s valet when her men hustled him before her. Keenan quickly stepped back into the corner to make room.

“Your M-Majesty, I didn’t know he’s gone’til I was waked.”

“This one sleeps just inside Norfolk’s door to the hall, Your Grace,” Ned put in.

BOOK: The Hooded Hawke

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