by Karen Harper
“What do you mean?” the queen asked.
“If the bowman was so good, perhaps he hit who he was aiming at. Most like an assassin would strike at Your Majesty or maybe a sea captain, however obscure Drake is to most—but what if the person wanted to kill Fenton Layne? I mean, poor Fenton had a life, so he must have had both his lovers and his enemies.”
“Meg, what would I—we—do without you?” Elizabeth said, as Ned squeezed his wife’s shoulders. “Of course he had a life, and it’s the thief of that we must bring to justice, whomever the killer meant to strike down.”
As steady and sure as she sounded, the queen began to shake. She could feel a cold spot in the center of her chest and middle of her back—as if someone would shoot her, or as if a spirit had touched her there. Whyever had Ned mentioned that he planned a play about ghosts this evening?
“You are all dismissed,” she told them. “Jenks, hie yourself onto the north road and be watchful, even as we all must be.”
Chapter the Third
Sheriff Adrian Barnstable, Your Majesty,” Sir William said, and stepped aside so that the queen might see the man he presented to her. It had taken the sheriff two hours after Fenton’s death to arrive. According to Sir William, Barnstable had brought with him the coroner, Richard Gilburne, who was examining the body.
Sheriff Barnstable was built, Elizabeth thought, if not like the barn or stable his name evoked, much like a barrel. His rocking gait and tipsy bow did not inspire confidence, but she knew better than to judge by appearances.
“You may rise,” she said. “Have you seen the site of the tragedy?”
“I have, but first, Your Most Gracious and Esteemed Majesty, allow me to beg your pardon for my not greeting you the moment you crossed the boundary to our shire. Of all times for my gout and dropsy to worsen and make me—albeit briefly—bedridden …”
“I am sorry for that, but you are here to help now.”
The sheriff had jowls like a hunt hound, and folds of flesh hooded his eyes, so she wondered just how well the man could see. He did not look aged, yet acted so, leaning on a stout wooden cane. Why someone so sluggish, ill, and mayhap halfsighted should be a sheriff in the kingdom was beyond her.
“And I shall remain at my task,” he informed her, “until I solve this heinous murder of one of your household. I was to lay down the burdens of office after this momentous visit you and the court have blessed us with, Your Most Gracious and Esteemed Majesty, but now I shall stay on. Why, your very being might have been endangered in this murderous attack on one of your own, but I shall lend heart and mind to your well-being during this blessed time you are within our shire.”
The man talked in circles; she prayed he didn’t work that way. This interview only made her more certain she must take solving this crime into her own hands.
“Then I charge you to find a witness or some clue in the area from which the crossbow arrow must have been launched—and to find the villain himself.”
“I believe I heard you have the murderous arrow in your possession, Your Most Gracious and Esteemed—”
“As time is of the essence, you may address me simply as Your Majesty. And, yes, I have the arrow and wish to keep it, but of course you may examine it.” She went over to the table where she’d left it wrapped in her handkerchief and brought it to him. As she came closer, the man looked as awestruck as if she were going to knight him with a silver sword to his shoulder.
She handed the wrapped bolt to Jenks instead. “My man Stephen Jenks will go with you. You are dismissed, Sheriff, to go about your important business.”
He bowed again, and she could almost hear the poor man’s joints creaking. Just outside the doorway, she saw Jenks unwrap the bolt to display it to him. As Elizabeth went back to the work Cecil had sent her by courier yesterday—how she wished he were here already from London—she heard a gasp and a yelp.
“What goes?” she asked Sir William, as he made to follow the other men out into the hall.
Adrian Barnstable came back in, faster than she thought he could move. “The crossbow bolt,” he cried. “I recognize the fletching on it from one of our finest shooters in the shire. The man fashions his own shafts and fletches them, too, keeps birds on our tables all the time, even brought them in for your larder here, Your Most—Majesty.”
“Who is this man?” she asked, but Barnstable was out the door again. This time, his words alone rolled back in: “I’ll have him arrested, interrogated, and charged in a trice, Your Majesty. Fear not!”
She almost sent Sir William after him to demand who it was he suspected, but she trusted Jenks to report back straightaway. If someone local had tried to kill the queen, at least the murderer couldn’t be those of national import she most feared might want her dead.
The battle at San Juan d’Ulua was a disaster from beginning to end, Your Majesty,” Francis Drake explained that evening, as they sat over wine and apricots by the open window of her withdrawing chamber. The night was warm, but a western breeze wafted in to shift the velvet draperies. Elizabeth had sent all her women out except for Rosie Radcliffe and kept only one yeoman guard inside the door. When she’d asked Drake if he could have been the target of the fatal attack today, he’d admitted he did have an enemy who might want to harm him—besides the Spanish—but said she’d understand more if he unburdened himself about the battle.
Unburdened, that’s what he’d said. “Take your time, Captain, and tell me all that matters,” she said.
“All that matters—the bloody defeat and its aftermath, my flight—have haunted me since, but, by my faith, I’ll brook no words to tell you how it truly was. As you know,” he went on, frowning out the window at the blowing, rustling oak leaves as if he saw the sea again, “my cousin John Hawkins, England’s hero for his earlier voyages, was in command of our little band of ships, two of which you had loaned us.”
She nodded. “The Jesus of Lubeck and the Minion, both small and old, but all I could spare. Our royal navy leaves much to be desired, but we shall get to that. Say on, man.”
“Preparing to return home from our voyage to the New World last August—’twas almost exactly a year ago—we were hit by a violent storm and had to set in for repairs at San Juan d’Ulua, a small, isolated Spanish outpost on the Gulf of Mexico. We heard from people ashore that a massive Spanish fleet would be arriving soon, so we hastened to be out of their way in time. God’s truth, Your Majesty, we had no desire to pick a fight, for we were outnumbered and far from any friendly town to lend us sustenance. They could barely be convinced to sell us water. But too soon we spotted thirteen sails—indeed an unlucky number that day.
“We knew if the Spanish fleet trapped us in their harbor, we were doomed, and all our bounty we had traded for would be forfeit. We trained our cannon on them to keep them at bay until we could slip out. I repeat, we did not want a battle, for more than one reason. We thought they might let us go so their little town would not be caught or harmed in possible crossfire. With our spyglasses, we could see they had cannon on deck and crossbowmen in their rigging, but so did we.”
She nodded, picturing the scene, though another dreadful image kept intruding: a crossbowman, perhaps aloft, maybe in a tree, ready to catch her or Drake in crossfire of another sort.
“I warrant you’ve heard the rest,” he said, his voice now harsher, faster. “Deceit, betrayal. The local governor, Enriquez, had signed a pact he would let us leave peaceably. But he began to fire on us from the shore as their fleet closed in for a kill, like—like huge hawks swooping down on pigeons already caught in a trap and disabled,” he said with broad gestures. “But, even when they sent fire ships against us—”
“Fire ships? They burned some of their own ships and sent them against ours?”
“Yes. Even then, Your Majesty, our smaller ships maneuvered better, but we were battered. So many were maimed or killed. I commanded the Judith and, after six hours in battle, saw the opportunity to escape and did—to save those
of my crewmen who were still alive, to hope to fight another day, for I thought all else was lost, that my cousin was lost. I had no idea he’d managed to fight his way free and would be looking for me to back him up—or would have a hellish voyage home. Or that,” he said, and heaved a huge sigh that hoisted his shoulders, “he would blame me for deserting him in his direst hour of need.”
They sat silent for a moment. Somewhere outside in the darkness an owl called, who, whooo.
“I fear my cousin hates me now,” Drake admitted, turning to look at her again. “Yet he needs me, for I know those distant waters and how treacherous the Spanish can be. And I hate them as he does—it burns deep in my belly and my soul!”
“In mine as well. Which is why you must, if not put that dreadful past incident aside, learn from it. We must both learn from it. Our smaller, darting ships in the face of their lumbering galleons, the use of fire ships, and the brave tenacity of our men even when treachery strikes are lessons we must hold to. You see, Captain Drake, you and I are much alike.”
“Indeed, Your Majesty?” he asked, sitting up straight as a board in his padded chair.
“We both have learned things the hard way, through our losses, and it has made us wiser and stronger,” she declared, rhythmically hitting both fists on the arms of her chair. “And we both must deal with cousins who hate us and might wish to make us suffer—or even die.”
“Yes,” he whispered, “by my faith, that’s true. But as that owl out the window is asking again, if someone meant that arrow for one of our hearts today, who? Who?”
William Cecil wished he could look as rested and ready as his favorite messenger, Justin Keenan, who rode abreast of him as they reached the vast grounds of Loseley House near noon. They trailed four guards and four scriveners. Only Keenan seemed to look about with relish, while Cecil felt crazed to get off this horse. He supposed a professional courier who rode so much and so well would have to find the passing scenery of some interest, or he’d go stark mad with all the time he spent in the saddle.
A good courier covered about fourteen miles per hour, and with post horses every ten miles, the man could almost fly. Then, too, if a courier could claim he was on royal business, he could commandeer horses along the way as long as they were later returned by a postboy. Keenan, however, often favored pulling one horse and riding the other to make tracks between Cecil and the queen.
No wonder the man did not seem to have a care in the world. Mere couriers did not have to live day and night with the fear something would happen to England’s monarch, nor did the man have to deal with that carping, complaining Spanish ambassador, Guerau de Spes.
“Will you convince Her Majesty to return to the safety of one of her own castles or palaces, then, my lord?” Keenan asked as their horses’ hooves spit gravel on the lane to Loseley House.
Usually, the man never spoke unless spoken to, another admirable trait in servants. Keenan was mature, at least thirty, with years of experience in the livery of one earl or another until last year, when he’d come into Cecil’s employ. Despite sweat and road dust, he always looked neatly turned out, today even bedecked in new-looking riding gloves and leather doublet. The man’s chestnut hair was kept clipped unfashionably short, but his strong, square jaw and broad shoulders made him just the sort the queen wanted in her employ. Like her sire, she favored good-looking servants; Cecil tried to keep Keenan out of her way so she wouldn’t pirate the man.
“I fear not even God can convince this queen to do what she will not, man,” Cecil muttered, and began to brush dust from his sleeves and breeches. He was certain he’d have little time to rest before he was drawn into the thick of things. It had been three years since the queen had taken it upon herself to solve a murder, but once committed she was always in tooth and nail.
Cecil was only too glad to ride into the huge block of shade the big house threw across the sunny lawn. He had seen Sir William More’s county seat but once, years ago, before the queen had suggested More enlarge it to host royal visits—actually, of course, to keep him from spending his fortune supporting Catholic causes. It must have taken thousands of pounds for More to haul in more of the mellow stone from the ruins of Waverley Abbey near Farnham.
Cecil noted well the stone badge of the Mores carved grandly above the central entry: The strutting moor hen and moor cock symbolized the family name—and attitude. The only thing missing, Cecil groused to himself, was the Virgin Mary, or perhaps the unvirginal Mary, Queen of Scots, whom Cecil’s spies said Sir William secretly idolized.
Keenan dismounted quickly to hold Cecil’s horse for him before his following scriveners or guards could do that service. “Any other task, then?” the man asked.
“After you see to the horses, get a bite to eat, but wait about lest I have need of you.”
Cecil gritted his teeth as he took a few steps on solid ground to try to loosen his muscles, for they ached as if he had the ague. House servants spilled through the arched entry to greet his party; one man offered him a quaff of cold wine, which he downed in almost one gulp.
The last wine he’d had was yesterday, with Ambassador de Spes, and, however good it was for a Spanish claret, it had tasted like sand. As ever, de Spes had been sleekly attired with his hair slicked down with some sort of sweet-smelling pomade, the sly fox. Yes, a fox, one that should be sniffed out and hunted down.
“You understand my dilemma, of course, Secretary Cecil,” de Spes had said in his heavily accented English. He always pronounced Cecil’s name Ses-seel. “On behalf of my liege lord, King Philip, I must insist that your queen and her sea captains honor our laws.”
“This is old business, Ambassador,” Cecil had said, “and Her Majesty has responded clearly to your claims more than once.”
“But by Spanish law, English ships have no right to ply the Gulf of Mexico or venture along the Spanish Main off the coast of the Americas. Spain has strongly stated, ‘No peace beyond the line.’”
“To repeat our stance, Ambassador de Spes, your king may declare all he wants of ‘Spanish law,’ but such is not compulsory for our countrymen, our queen, or our ships, which have every right to trade in and explore the New World. As Her Majesty herself has put it, no one country owns the open ocean. No one can declare some fictitious line in God’s great sea which others may not cross—not but for the boundaries near one’s own homeland.”
“But Secretary Cecil, quite simply, we were there first. And if your countrymen continue to act like brigands and freebooters, then they shall be challenged and treated as such.”
“If your countrymen dare to fire upon sovereign English ships again, it can only lead to war, de Spes!”
In short, what Cecil had to report to the queen today was not good news. At least he had every reason to think he could offer her a motive for someone shooting an arrow at her—or, for that matter, at the sea captain Drake.
Now that Cecil had joined them, the queen intended to call a Privy Plot Council meeting later in her chambers. For now, with Cecil, her court, and the Loseley household, she sat on the back lawn pretending to enjoy Ned Topside’s ghostly fantasy, Robin Hood Returns.
The real sheriff, the blustering Adrian Barnstable, was evidently also a blundering one, for he had not yet returned with his quarry as he had promised, though he had sent word back with Jenks that he was personally searching for the man, a hedger and birder named Tom Naseby. If he didn’t produce the man by morning—though the queen could not fathom why some rural laborer would want to kill anyone—she was going to send Jenks and her yeoman Clifford after both Barnstable and Naseby.
“Of course, many of fair England’s sheriffs are honorable men, but the Sheriff of Nottingham was most disloyal to our good King Richard,” Ned, decked out as Robin Hood’s spirit come back to life, was declaiming. To glow ghostly in the distant flickering torchlight, the clever actor had smeared some sort of sticky substance on himself, then evidently rolled in crushed flowers—Meg’s yarrow, perhaps, which had not m
anaged to save poor Fenton.
The queen’s thoughts drifted. Richard Gilburne, the local coroner, had done little more than pronounce Fenton Layne “deceased of blood loss by an arrow to the most vital part of his chest.” She was getting nowhere, relying on the local, rustic upholders of her laws. Tomorrow she must take matters more into her own hands, beginning with a thorough search of the area from which the crossbowman must have shot.
From asking other servants who knew Fenton, Ned had learned naught about the falconer’s private life that could be a motive for murder. Elizabeth was beginning to hope it was just some demented local lad or pure accident, a poacher letting a bolt fly wrong. How much simpler her life would be without some convoluted motive to trace.
She tried to listen to the play, but she could not concentrate. Instead, she kept pondering the Spanish problem, which Cecil had also weighed in on today, and the letter he’d brought from Mary of Scots, carping about “how depressing it is to live in the countryside where chill winds blow, you cannot imagine …” Chill winds indeed, the queen fumed—winds of possible civil war.
She worried, too, that Meg had greatly gone back into the shadows of her past. And, as much as the queen intended to trust Francis Drake, she had argued with Cecil over Drake’s being a hothead. “Then I’m a hothead against the Spanish, too!” she’d ranted at Cecil, when she’d actually been so glad he had come.
“An outlaw bold was Robin Hood,
Clad in Lincoln green,
’Mong Sherwood Forest’s leafy boughs,
He could be scarcely seen.
He drew six feet of English bow
To aid plain folk in their despair.
Resistance’gainst the sheriff
And loyalty to England’s throne
Was needed then and there …”
Ned’s fine message drew the queen’s thoughts back. She rather liked the words; at least Ned knew how to bolster the monarchy in these tenuous times. Too bad Robin Hood had been dead for nigh on three hundred years, for she could use him now to draw his yew longbow and shoot evil shooters.
