by Karen Harper
That, too, was crossed out, even more heavily with big X’s. What appeared to be teardrops blurred some of the words. Elizabeth gazed out the window without speaking.
“Did Sir Thomas or Lady Anne recommend a good glover, Your Grace?” Meg asked, breaking the silence.
“No, but Marie did.”
Thomas didn’t even try to comfort Anne as she lay facedown across their bed, sobbing. “What if she never gets her memory back?” she wailed. Finally she sat up to blow her nose into her handkerchief. “But I’m more fearful she will. Something dreadful happened to her that day.”
“Anne, for all we know, she might have just felt too cooped up here and dared to go out for a walk. I’ll talk to her about that, explain about rogues who would prey on young women from wealthy families. Perhaps she simply darted in front of a horse and was temporarily knocked witless. Her gazing up at that window could be pure happenstance, as you said before.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” she said, dabbing under her eyes. “Of course, that’s it, but it’s so … tawdry, that she could have seen something of a starcher’s murder—and that the queen obviously suspects that or more.”
“The dead woman was not just any starcher but a royal starcher.”
“I don’t care what she was. It’s Marie-Anne’s reputation we must safeguard. Good young women from important families in service to the queen do not simply go about the streets by themselves! But then, neither do good husbands keep portraits of their mistress and her twin sister! They are the ones in the portrait—I know it!”
“It was just a charming painting to me, that’s all,” he said, but he felt like the low liar he was.
“And that’s why you never showed it to me? Why you display it only in your privy chest in your privy chamber? You lied to me years ago when you said you were oft away on business, but you were meeting—to put it prettily—with her!” she shrieked, her face contorting into an angry mask. “And if the great and mighty Sir Thomas Gresham can lie with impunity to his wife, is he not lying to others, even his queen?”
He cracked his walking stick so hard on the carved bedpost that his signet ring bit into his flesh and the stick splintered. At the sudden explosion of violence, she rolled off the other side of the wide bed. God help him, he felt the reins of his control slipping again.
“You got Marie in the bargain,” he shouted, “so you’d best take better care of her—and my reputation, too!” He pulled the Gresham grasshopper ring off his bruised finger and threw it at her. It missed and rolled off the bed onto the floor. “And I don’t mean keeping her a virtual prisoner here as you do, so she has to flee to find friends of her own!”
“That’s not fair! And you’d best calm yourself before that leech Badger overhears you,” she hissed at him as she edged toward the door. “You may have sent him down to the kitchen, but I wouldn’t put it past him to be hovering just outside even this door, at your behest and with your blessing! I can’t abide his foul smell, I tell you, nor the way his hands are all stained—dirty hands from drinking tobacco.”
He felt so pent up he was ready to explode again. “I’ll not have you judging my staff when it’s Marie who is your concern. At least she is making progress daily,” he said softly, slowly, hoping she would accept his quieter voice and calmer temper as a peace offering. The last thing in the world he needed was his wife openly hostile to him.
But, he thought, Anne was right. What if Marie’s progress led her to recall what he most feared? That she’d seen a murderer. If she wanted to face and accuse him, that could put her—put them all—in grave danger.
He swore under his breath as Anne fled the room, slamming the door behind her. He limped over to a chair and slumped in it, flexing his painful ring finger. It might hurt, but his bad leg—like his conscience—was killing him.
At least, Elizabeth thought, the stench in the long, broad street called Eastcheap was not as potent as that of Smithfield Market. Unlike many of her subjects, she had a very sharp sense of smell. She always insisted the court change palaces more than the other Tudors had, for she smelled the too-full jakes before anyone else. Without a personal strewing herb woman to scent her clothing and linens daily and to fill the pomanders she always carried with sweet herbs, she would have nearly died of the scents of her own city. Unlike others, too, she both washed and bathed often—so often that, more than once, Robin had called her “his mermaid.”
The sounds here jolted her, too, as the coach jerked to a stop. Shoppers shouted, hawkers cried out their wares, and the undercurrent bellows of beef and the shriller sheep awaiting their fates nearby thrummed beneath all that.
“Eastcheap at Abchurch, Your Majesty,” Boonen announced from outside the coach.
Holding her pomander to her nose, Elizabeth peered out under the leather window flap. “Do you see a glover’s shop nearby?” she asked.
“One on this very corner, other side of the coach,” Boonen said, pointing as both Jenks and Clifford joined him beneath her window. Elizabeth slid over on her seat, opened the opposite flap, and squinted out into the afternoon sun. Yes, a large wooden glove painted bright yellow hung above a narrow shop entrance to identify the goods within.
“Meg, you go in so as not to startle the girl who perfumes gloves there. Her name is Celia. Give her a groat from the pouch of coins I gave you and ask her to come out to the coach to speak with the queen, as I would like to order some gloves. Boonen, you and Clifford remain here, and Jenks, go with Meg but wait for her outside. If this Celia is not there now,” she called to Meg as she climbed down from the coach, “be sure to discover where she lives.”
Once people in the street discerned the queen herself was in the grand coach, they began to gather around it. Elizabeth took to waving out the street side, then sliding across the seat to watch how things were going for Meg. When she disappeared inside, Jenks lingered near the door of the shop, then began pacing back and forth across it, craning his neck to look in each time he passed.
“Should I go in, too, Your Grace?” Rosie asked, peering out her window.
“It should not be taking this long. Something’s amiss.”
“Perhaps the woman needed to ask the shop owner for permission to leave.”
“No, I shouldn’t have sent Meg. We’ll both go in.”
“But—”
The queen opened the door facing the shop and stepped out onto the step; instantly Clifford ran around to offer his hand. As she appeared, the crowd rushed around to her side and cheered.
“Make way!” Clifford shouted. “Make way for the queen’s majesty!”
When the crowd noise swelled, Jenks came running.
“Where is she?” Elizabeth shouted to him.
“Went into a back room, I think. Guess the shop owner’s not there right now,’cause I didn’t see anyone but Meg and a woman. Hard to see well when the shop’s dark and I’m in the sun. I figure the woman had to fetch a cloak, and Meg went with her to keep an eye on her or something.”
Or something. Elizabeth’s stomach cartwheeled. She rushed inside with both big men behind her. “Close the street door and open that back one!” she ordered, glancing around. In the corner nearest the window, through which the perfumer could have seen the coach coming, was a worktable with leather and glove linings and pots of rich ambergris and sweet-scent unguents.
Jenks banged the back door open. It revealed not a dim room but a narrow, dim alley. “Gone!” he shouted as the queen pushed past him and Jenks to peer out.
“’S blood!” she spit out, and hit her fist on the door frame.
She strode into the alley and looked both ways, then up. Nothing, as if two women could have vanished into the ether. She scanned the dirt for tracks and saw something bright nearly at their feet.
She bent herself to retrieve it. A groat.
“It could be a coin Meg dropped, either on purpose or accidentally,” she said. “She had a pouch of them.”
“Look—another farther down!” Jenk
s cried, bending to pick it up.
“She’s leaving us a trail,” Elizabeth said. “We must go now, before others find them and pick them up. Rosie, return to the coach and tell Boonen to wait there. Jenks and Clifford, with me.”
“Just the two of us can follow these, lest there be danger,” Jenks protested, but she had already hefted her skirts and was running down the alley, not bothering to pick up the next coins she saw. She heard her guards pounding behind her; one, then both, scraped their swords from their scabbards.
Crossing the next crowded thoroughfare, they lost the trail, but Clifford picked it up again on the other side. Elizabeth spotted the first drops of blood, following the same path as the coins.
“She could be wounded,” she muttered. “Dear God in heaven, what if I sent her to question a murderer who attacked her and forced or dragged her out?”
The coins became sparser and the blood heavier. Gobbets of pink flesh now dotted the path of coins. The queen’s heart was thudding, and she was out of breath, but her mind was racing faster. Could Marie Gresham somehow be the connection to the person who murdered Hannah and now had attacked Meg when she was cornered? But a glove perfumer named Celia in Eastcheap? Too many links were missing. Something was so very wrong.
“There!” Jenks shouted, and pointed.
Elizabeth looked farther ahead. Meg’s body was slumped in the alley, her shoulders and head against the wall. Everyone ran, though Jenks got there first.
“No!” the queen cried when she saw Meg’s face and chest blood-splattered—but she did have good color for a corpse.
“You found me,” Meg gasped out, opening her eyes. “I just got so exhausted. I—she ran and I lost her. I’m sorry, Your Grace.”
Elizabeth knelt in the dirt and looked Meg over. Until that moment when she thought Meg might be dead, she’d forgotten how much she meant to her. Though a servant, Meg had spirit and spunk and could look so much like her queen that they could have had a painting done as sisters.
“Thank God you are all right, my Meg. I should not have sent you in, but this investigation keeps surprising me. Though it was the hard way, we have learned the perfumer had something serious to hide, or she surely would not have fled.”
“I can describe her,” Meg said. “Rough-looking with a scar on her chin. And I’m sure we can find where she lives when the glover gets back. Then we can go there and sneak up on her.”
“If she fled like that, she might be too afraid to go home, though we’ll send someone to find out. Let me help you up. Meg, when I saw that trail of blood and worse—”
“I know,” she said as Jenks and the queen helped her to her feet. “Well, she did hit me in the face. I got a bloody nose, but the blood in the alley isn’t mine. I just thought if I dropped the coins near it, you’d be more likely to find them. Bet someone just carried a carcass down this way, since we’re so near the slaughterhouses.”
“Do you want Jenks to carry you?” Elizabeth asked.
“No,” Meg muttered, shaking his hand from her arm and not so much as looking his way as she brushed herself off. “He happily carried Ursala partway home the other night when she was so distraught, but I’ll be fine without him.”
Elizabeth watched the look that flashed between Meg and Jenks. It lacked the bitterness and anger they had shown at the Privy Plot Council meeting the other night. Now the queen herself was feeling bitter and angry. Since we’re so near the slaughterhouses, Meg had said. Elizabeth knew she was not anywhere near solving the slaughter of Hannah von Hoven in her starch house.
Chapter the Ninth
MEG NEARLY JUMPED OUT OF HER SKIN AS A shadow plunged the inside of her herb-drying shed into darkness. “Is there no rest, even on a lovely Sabbath afternoon?” said the mellow voice behind her.
Ned!
She spun to face him, standing in the doorway, looking jaunty and charming. “I’m not really working,” she told him. “I just wanted to take a walk and thought I’d see if these herbs are dry yet.”
“They look fine to me.” He stepped inside the little shed, set among the jumble of outbuildings behind the palace. Touching one of the suspended bunches of lavender and harebell, he sent them swinging. “Mmm, sweet-smelling, too. Anything here to make a poultice for that black eye of yours?”
“I’m afraid that glove perfumer who hit me wasn’t sweet at all.”
Though her jest was a lame one, he chuckled and stepped closer, tipping her face up with his hand on her chin and shifting his big body slightly to get better light. “The bruise looks more green and yellow to me—very pretty, Mistress Starch.”
“You’re not to call me that. And the bruise looks dreadful. I saw it in the queen’s mirror.”
“If it’s really bothering you—the look of it, not the soreness—I have just the thing to cover it in my actor’s bag of tricks.”
“You have more than skin paint in your actor’s bag of tricks, Ned Topside, and always have.”
At least she was giving as good as she got today. She was determined not to let her feelings for this man turn her to a babbler, a scold, nor a mere melted hunk of butter in his hands ever again.
“I came to find you not for that, though,” he said. As he took a small step back, his green eyes swept her down, then up. The impact was delicious; she felt as if he’d caressed her right through her cloak and gown. “You still look fine to me,” he went on, with a slight tilt of the corners of his mouth. Then he turned more sober. “Meg, Her Grace is sending me daily to Gresham House to ascertain your daughter’s well-being—and, of course, pick up any information Sally gets from the Gresham girl. Sometimes, I hear, we’re to go together, and I want us to get on.”
“I’m glad Her Grace chose you,” she admitted, skirting his implication. “Sally will like you. You’ll take my messages to her, too?”
“Of course, when I’m not taking you with me.”
“Ned, I know you fancy pretty faces, so please don’t let her think you find her odd or ugly.”
“Of course I won’t. She has the same spunk and inner beauty her mother has, and nothing will ever change that.”
So much, Meg thought, for not wanting to melt at his feet. All along she’d known why women adored Edward Thompson, alias Ned Topside, and it wasn’t just for his face and form. She’d loved him from the first, despite his flaws—but then, he was a man.
They stared into each other’s eyes. He came closer again and reached up to gently stroke the puffy area around her eye. Not only did it not hurt, but she wondered if he had some healing touch—at least on that single spot, because the rest of her was on fire.
He smoothed tendrils of her wayward hair back behind her ears, then placed his cheek against her right temple, slowly, as if afraid she’d balk. He turned his head and nibbled her earlobe. “Such lovely seashell ears and satin skin,” he whispered.
She had to remind herself to breathe and wondered if he could hear the pounding of her pulse. Evidently not yet daring to take her lips, he puckered his and brushed them across her forehead, then pecked the tip of her nose, working his way down much too slowly.
She thought it probably surprised him when she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hard.
Thomas Gresham was usually too busy with worldly duties to spend much time in prayer, but this Sabbath afternoon, even as he entered Whitehall Palace and was shown into the presence of his queen in her withdrawing room, he prayed harder than he ever had. He feared she would question him about more than the building of the exchange or financial matters. Worse, she had Secretary of State Cecil with her, who kept taking some sort of notes.
“First of all,” the queen said as he stood before them, for they were both seated, “I want to inform you that I have hired Hugh Dauntsey to oversee the accounting and dispersing of Hannah von Hoven’s worldly goods, as it seems she has no heir.”
That alone knocked him back. Did she already know more than she let on? To cover his shock, he began, “But Hugh Daunt—”<
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“Ordinarily I might have consulted you, but you are busy overseeing your building project and, of course, tending to the needs of your daughter and your wife.”
“I have it on good authority that Dauntsey is head over heels in risky investments, Your Majesty,” he said, fighting to keep his voice in check. “I’ve heard he’s making what they call a killing in the stock market from illegal practices such as forestalling and engrossing, and, as you know, he has ties to Paulet. I can’t advise trusting him and—”
“Sadly, Thomas, there are many I can’t trust.” Her dark stare bored into him. His heartbeat kicked up, and he began to sweat. He twisted his grasshopper signet ring around his still-sore finger. He hadn’t been able to find the one he’d thrown at his wife, but he had several of them.
“I am not asking for advice on this,” she went on in a cold tone, “but merely informing you of his special appointment. What I do need from you concerns the double portrait of two young girls that is in your possession and disturbed your daughter so. I am hoping you can tell me why.”
He wanted to lie, but he couldn’t. Not to Elizabeth Tudor, who had saved the country from the financial excesses of her father and sister. Not to this queen who had trusted him so, and on whom the good of the realm rested. He decided to tell the truth, but as little of it as he could get away with.
“It’s a work I acquired in Antwerp years ago, Your Majesty.”
“It’s quite charming, so why not display it?”
“My wife doesn’t like it.”
“Really? You seem to be lord and master of that inner sanctum and what is displayed there. Besides, I had the distinct impression Anne hadn’t even seen the portrait. Then, when she did, I agree that she seemed to dislike it instantly and immensely, however much she tried to cloak her reaction.”
He saw he’d have to give her something more, to make an offer, like giving someone a small loan at low interest hoping he’d be appeased and not ask for more capital.
