by Karen Harper
Yrs., J. Hawkins, London
John Hawkins was in London? That aside, the last cryptic line of this order sounded like a threat, a double-headed threat against not only him but the queen, and that could be treasonous to boot.
Chapter the Tenth
Again, the seemingly solicitous young Earl of Southampton was the queen’s host as he escorted her out to observe and partake in the sporting events of the afternoon, held at the edge of the formal gardens nearest the house. Some of her ladies trailed after them; other courtiers were already outside at play. A fountain splashed merrily, and she recalled the amusement she’d had at Whitehall Palace spraying Robin years ago when they were both younger—when she still foolishly believed she might marry him.
“Watch your step here, Your Grace,” Southampton said.
“I always do so, my lord, for I am ever vigilant and canny, to use a Scots word. Remember that well, even as we oversee the sporting. Which reminds me, my herb mistress mentioned you were playing a game she did not recognize in the gardens this morning.” She smiled sweetly at him, for she felt herself well armed with that bit of knowledge.
He looked like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the Yuletide comfit box. “Ah, yes, Your Grace.”
“What was that particular game you played?”
“A game from the north, I take it. I know not much of it.”
“You are in communication with someone in the north? How far north?”
“I’m not sure—how far north, I mean.”
“I repeat in different words, lest you did not grasp my first question, my lord. What is this northern sport called?”
“I believe it is named golf, Your Grace.”
“Named so by whom?”
He still did not look her in the eye. He had much to learn, she thought, from his wily guest Norfolk. Meg supposed, and no doubt rightly so, that the two men had met privily in the wilderness area of his extensive gardens this morning. The queen rued the fact Meg had not hung about to eavesdrop on the two of them, but if Meg had not returned to salve Norfolk’s nettle rash, then hied herself away, he would have been more nettled yet.
She smiled again, not at her own private pun but at how very discomfited Southampton obviously was. She was almost enjoying herself. He kept looking away, as if gazing deep into the splash of the silver fountain.
“Called golf by whom, Your Majesty?” he echoed her question. “I—I wouldn’t know who named it. The word means naught to me.”
“You see, my lord,” she said, tapping his arm with her folded fan until he was forced to face her, “I have had a letter from my Scottish cousin, Mary Stuart, now my guest in the north of England. She asks that she might be permitted to play a Scottish game called golf. She’s always writing to beg some favor or other. Anyway, no one truly English seemed to know one whit about golf, so how interesting that you want to learn. Perhaps when you have mastered it, you could give the Duke of Norfolk lessons.”
The poor man’s eyes darted wildly toward the courtiers playing various games beyond the fountain.
“But,” she plunged on, “I asked Cecil’s messenger, Keenan, who brought the letter I just mentioned, if he had heard aught of this foreign game of golf when he was in the north. He knew little but that it takes much practice. I am certain you will soon be very adept at it, playing in private first thing in the morning, as if the sport were a jealous mistress you must please.”
She could tell he was uncertain if she goaded him or not. How different he was from clever Norfolk, who usually behaved as if the best defense was to be offensive. All this answered her question about who had planned the pageant yesterday, for this young whelp and his pretty little wife could not have concocted it. Rather, Norfolk’s double-dealing hand was in it somewhere, just as it was in planning the unrest to the north, which could explode to full-blown treason.
She was tempted also to demand why and from whence Southampton had such a finely tooled leather bag for his golf equipment, but she kept that to herself for now.
“Shall I have you teach the Scottish rules of golf to my courtiers today, my lord? No, perhaps not,” she mused aloud, now tapping the fan against her chin. “I much prefer for them to concentrate on good English games with English rules—but for Norfolk, of course, who dangerously does as he wishes.”
Though the breeze was delightful, Southampton looked as if he needed air, and his sallow skin hue had gone grayish; she feared he might pass out. She hoped his tat-taling of all this to Norfolk, who had taken to glancing at her and the young earl from across the crowd of courtiers, might settle them both down.
“I—of course—I favor good English games, too, Your Majesty,” Southampton stammered. “I am praying you will d-deign to observe matches of fives today, for I have not yet built a court for tens, nor purchased the racquets or a long net.”
At least she could give him credit for attempting a sudden change of topic, she thought. “I believe you mean ten-nis, my lord. That’s the way we always say it in London, but perhaps tens is the northern—or Scots—way to say it.”
She smacked his arm with her fan and left him as she joined the others.
Would it please Your Majesty to go hunting with us on the morrow?” Elizabeth’s hostess, Lady Mary, asked, as the two women walked down the great staircase to join more sporting and gaming in the courtyard after a noontide respite. Evidently, Southampton himself had not wanted to face her again so soon.
Elizabeth had been waiting for an invitation to the hunt, especially since the fine local deer park had been touted in the pageant. No chance she was hazarding a trip into a forest hunting, however much she excelled at the sport, but she had been surprised Southampton had not invited her this morning. Did he think that letting the invitation come from his lovely wife would make his queen more likely to accept?
“I’m still too tired from my journey for a great deal of fast riding,” Elizabeth told Lady Mary. “Best I just send my courtiers. They will be avid to take advantage of your park and its game. And on the morrow, I’m going the short distance to the River Meon to see Captain Drake’s ship.”
“Oh, how exciting. But—Your Grace,” she said, pausing at the bottom of the stairs, “I pray it is not because bows and arrows would be involved in the hunting.”
At the banquet last night, the queen had explained to her hosts her misfortune to be near two bolts from the blue, as Ned Topside termed them. As she had recounted those events to them, she had watched their faces for signs of guilt or unease, neither of which they’d displayed. Though when Cecil had mentioned that a far worse fate awaited whoever was responsible than that which had befallen poor Actaeon, the hunter in their pageant, Elizabeth was certain she had read sudden alarm on Lady Southampton’s pretty face.
“But who,” the queen asked, “is the man called Hern the Hunter whom your husband mentioned? Is he the former master of your lord’s hounds or deer keeper?”
“Old Hern?” she said, with a shake of her head. “Oh, no one that is worthy of your concern. Just a recluse in the forest to the east, a demented old man, I hear.”
The queen noted well that both her hosts had seemed eager to dismiss the man’s importance. Then, too, Southampton had looked angry with himself when he’d let Hern’s name slip. Perhaps the “demented” old soul was worth a visit.
Much as during their stay at Farnham Castle, the courtyard that afternoon echoed continually with the queen’s courtiers playing and wagering at their games. Two exquisite, inlaid shovelboard tables had been brought outside from their usual place in the great hall. Standing on sturdy legs, the boards were some thirty feet long and three feet wide. With little shovels, players pushed round, weighted pieces toward lines that were worth points. Women were as skilled as the men at this game, for oft the men shoved too hard and their pieces flew off the end of the board.
On green baize tables, others cast dice in a popular court game called hazard. The rest, including Norfolk, Leicester, and Southampton, bent o
ver a card game called primero; Elizabeth had turned down the offer to join them. By peering over shoulders, she noted that the queen cards were emblazoned with her own face, a very young, pretty face, too.
She felt smug about that until she noted that the king card was not her father or brother or any Tudor ruler. It was her sworn enemy, the Spanish King Philip. She would have ripped that card from Norfolk’s hand and stamped on it, but she did not want to show her Tudor temper, which she knew they all joked about. Besides, when Philip of Spain had been wed to her sister, he had indeed been King of England as well as Spain. Worse, after her sister’s death, he had dared to propose marriage to Elizabeth, so dead set was he to control England again. Even worse than that, she fumed, that deck of cards must be at least ten years old, and that was perhaps why she had been rendered so young and fair. Suddenly she liked this pretty and young Lady Mary who squired her about less than ever.
“Oh, let’s see how the men playing at fives are doing, Your Majesty,” Mary said for at least the fourth time, and Elizabeth let herself be led back into the courtyard.
As the earl had mentioned earlier, the game of fives was played by both courtiers and local men. It took five men at once, flinging a ball against a courtyard wall divided by chalk markings into four areas. In this sport the French called palm play, each man wore a white glove on his right hand with white cords bound around that hand to make the ball fly faster when it was bounced back against the wall. She supposed those cords had inspired the racquets used in the more refined version of the sport.
The brick court on which the players stood, like the areas on the wall, was square with four marked sections, each assigned to a particular man, with one floating player. Yes, it must indeed be the rustic game that had become tennis, played on an open, double-sized court with a net between two teams of five men each. As women never played, it hardly interested the queen. She always liked to be at the center of the action, not merely observing it.
Amazingly, Lady Mary, looked entranced by the heated game. The players sweated through their white, half-laced shirts as they lunged and flung the ball, their powerful thighs straining against their breeks and hose. At the break, Lady Mary and several other ladies applauded; Mary even bent to retrieve a ball and press it into the hand of one of the players.
Elizabeth recognized the man: the handsome youth who had played the part of Actaeon in the pageant yesterday. She was going to jest that she was glad to see he had managed to escape the hounds at his heels, when she realized the obvious. So obvious she’d almost missed it, and no one else seemed the slightest bit aware.
Mary Wriothesley, Lady Southampton, had not only returned the ball to the man but slipped him a note she’d hastily wrapped around it, one he now stuffed quickly up his sleeve.
Elizabeth remembered that Mary had called her attention to his entrance in the play yesterday, not to mention that she’d nearly fainted. And, when Cecil last night had remarked that anyone who tried to harm the queen would meet a fate worse than Actaeon’s, Mary had actually looked alarmed. The queen could only hope that the message was a billet doux and not some treasonous correspondence. Still, it did give her a good bargaining card if she interrogated the woman later.
If we don’t hurry, we’re going to miss evening meal, and I don’t want little Piers going hungry to bed tonight,” Meg groused, as she and Ned, with the boy between them holding their hands, headed into Fareham in the late afternoon. “And all to find out where some old man named Hern the Hunter lives in the forest, when Her Grace said she wasn’t going into any forest again, except in her closed and guarded coach.”
“Not the first time she’s changed her mind, my sweet,” Ned said. “Besides, Piers is glad for the adventure, yes, my boy?”
“Yes, Ned. We can practice our lines on the way.”
“What lines?” Meg asked. “Something to present to the queen?”
“Perhaps,” Ned said, and winked at the boy.
“Real lines from a play about Robin Hood,” Piers blurted, giving a little skip between them. “From Robin Hood Returns.” He began in a singsong voice. “A ghostly fantasy by Ned Topside. An outlaw bold was Robin Hood,/ Clad in Lincoln green,/’Mong Sherwood Forest’s leafy boughs,/ He scarcely could be seen. That’s all I know real good so far.”
“I know well,” Ned corrected.
“Sure you know it better than me,” the boy insisted.
Meg laughed.
“It’s good to hear you laugh again,” Ned told her. “Especially when it just hit me that Robin’s scarcely could be seen does make him sound a bit like that Hooded Hawk the queen described.”
“And Woden,” she said, “is supposedly invisible in the forest, too, in his black cloak.”
“It’s all fairies and phantoms in the forest what does the mischief,” Piers piped up. “With cobwebs for reins, they could ride the backs of hawks, I know they could.”
Over the top of the boy’s head, Ned rolled his eyes, but tears stung Meg’s. Would their own lad have been so taken by flights of fancy and clever with words, so eager to please Ned by learning lines? For one moment, she almost burst into tears, but she kept taking one step and then another. For Ned, for this boy—for her dear queen—she could now go on.
Elizabeth had invited Francis Drake to that night’s Privy Plot Council meeting, for, after the most recent attack, his fate seemed mingled with hers again. She felt a bond with him and admitted she needed all the help she could find to ferret out her—perhaps their—enemy. Both of them had hostile, powerful male cousins they wanted to rely on but could not, cousins who held grudges and might be dangerous, each in his own way.
As they sat around the table, it was deathly silent in her presence chamber, which had finally emptied of courtiers after a late supper and dancing in the great hall. Even Cecil didn’t shuffle papers but gripped his hands before him on the table. She had excused Meg Milligrew, for the boy Piers had a sour stomach, evidently from eating too many of the sweets they’d bought him in Fareham. She’d sent Meg and Ned there to discover all they could about Hern the Hunter and the Hooded Hawk and to ask if there had been men passing through town to the mansion who were not local inhabitants.
Both Jenks and her yeoman Clifford looked jumpy, but then she knew that, like Cecil, her longtime loyal guards wanted her to abandon this summer’s progress and return forthwith to Whitehall Palace in London. Lady Rosie was the only other woman in the room, and she had been driving the queen to distraction lately, sticking to her like a burr indoors as if she could protect her from flying missiles from each corner or turn of the hall.
“Tomorrow morning I am going to visit Captain Drake’s ship,” Elizabeth announced. “It is but a mile away, and I shall take a full escort of guards and several of my closest courtiers.”
“Wearing Drake’s armor under your cloak,” Cecil put in.
“Yes, which I shall remove once on board. The captain assures me,” she went on, with a glance at Drake, “that there are no sites for a bowman to hide within shooting range of the ship, and he will have men aloft in the shrouds.”
“In the shrouds,” Ned echoed. “Strange name for something people are usually buried in.”
“If you cannot speak more to the point or simply stick to your report without dark and pointless puns,” Elizabeth told him, “I shall ask you, as difficult as it is, to keep quiet, Master Topside. We are all on edge here.”
“Yes, Your Grace,” he said, shifting in his chair as if properly chastised. “Shall I recount what I learned in Fareham about Hern the Hunter and the Hooded Hawk legend that may be connected to the shootings?”
“Do so. Meg has already told me you learned of no strange men coming to the manor, though I don’t know whom to trust anyway. It seems the people hereabouts are more concerned with figments of their imaginations than with reality. Say on, but—Yes, Captain?” she said, as Drake gasped, then lifted an index finger to speak.
“This Hooded Hawk—it’s a nickname for a my
th of sorts, is that right? But—connected with the shootings at you, possibly at us? I only ask because of this—and this.”
To Elizabeth’s surprise, he placed a shiny gold sovereign on the table, then withdrew a letter from his doublet. He opened the parchment with shaking hands and laid it before her on the table next to the coin.
“The coin—with others—arrived in my absence as pay for the crew.”
“From your cousin Hawkins?” she asked, picking it up.
“Yes, Your Grace. This brief epistle was waiting for me in my captain’s cabin today, from the same.”
“A bold seaman,” Cecil put in, “so I hope to heaven he’s not behind these attacks—though, forgive me, Drake, I’d rather have you be the target than the queen.”
“I understand, my lord,” Drake said. “By my faith, I, too.”
“Sometimes,” Cecil went on, as Elizabeth bent over the epistle, “I think Hawkins’s many merchant ships are the closest thing we have to an adjunct navy, and that includes your ship, too, Drake. That’s why I think it’s important that, despite certain risks of late, Her Majesty make a great show of visiting your vessel on the morrow. And that note, Your Grace?” he said, and left the question dangling as Elizabeth read the epistle—twice.
“It is carefully worded and can be read either way,” she said, and handed it to Cecil. “‘Take care of’ could mean for good or ill, though it is clear here Hawkins wants for himself whatever glory he thinks you are basking in, Captain. After all, he is the senior man, as he notes here, and you are yet employed by him. How interesting that he must have been in London for some reason,” she added, and spun the sovereign on its edge. “Or else someone in London sent him such coins.”
“But his insignia in the wax by his signature …” Drake said.
“What?” she cried. With Cecil, she bent over it as Drake moved the lantern at the end of the table closer to them. Yes, she hadn’t seen that at first, as she hadn’t clearly seen too much of late. No wonder Drake had suddenly looked so shaken.
