The Fatal Fashione: An Elizabeth I Mystery (Elizabeth I Mysteries)

by Karen Harper

  “But—who died?” he asked, scurrying after her. “And by the same hand as Hannah?”

  “I warrant so. I fear we’ve a filthy-hearted multiple murderer loose among those of my city who labor to keep all of us clean and fashionable.”

  She noted the window was nearly waist high off the floor. In that respect, unless one had a bad leg, it would be easy enough to climb in or out. It was nearly as wide as an oriel window or a big bay but hardly the height of one. Rather, it only came to the top of her head. She lifted the heavy metal latch and hefted the window as both Rosie and Dauntsey hurried to help.

  “Stand clear,” she said and raised it a few feet. Though made of leaded, mullioned sections, it was unique in that it lifted upward in one piece instead of swinging out in separate parts. “It’s stuffy in here, Dauntsey. Did you see anything about the place to prop this open?”

  “I—no, I have not. I used one of the poking sticks the other day—here …”

  He fetched one quickly and brought it to her. It was a metal crimping iron to put S-curves in ruffs, but she’d seen similar ones for hair. It, too, was quite heavy. Too bad Hannah did not get to one of these for a weapon in time. Had she known her attacker, or had he—or she—simply taken her unawares by quietly coming up the stairs much as she herself had just done?

  “Is there anything I can do to help with this latest tragedy, Your Majesty?” Dauntsey said, rubbing his ink-stained hands together. “I would be delighted to settle that estate, too. What is the name of the murdered whitster?” he repeated.

  “There is no need, for this woman has heirs. She is—was—the sister of a woman you’ve met, Ursala Hemmings.”

  “Her sis—Not Ursala, then, but her sister?”

  “She was an identical twin, you see, so it could be that the killer made a mistake. The victim this time was Pamela Browne.”

  He looked quite dismayed. “How dreadful for Ursala, first her friend here and then …” His voice trailed off. “Terrible. By the way, I have here for Ursala the pair of perfumed gloves you wanted me to save for her. I regret if I sound confused, but I’ve been so distressed by what Lord Paulet has suggested to me—that you have heard some dreadful rumor about my cheating at stocks. I assure you, I am no such charlatan.”

  No wonder, she thought, the man was so on edge with her. She’d known Paulet would tell his minion that she had hinted about illicit stock market dealings.

  “It galls me greatly,” Dauntsey said, clearing his throat, “that such a rumor might ruin my resurrected reputation with Your Gracious Majesty, for I am innocent of such murmurings. But what galls me more is that I can guess who is spreading such lies, and you always listen to him.”

  “You know a great deal,” she countered, glancing out and down at the roof below the window. Though it did not appear so from the street, it was steeply slanted. A person would have to sprout wings to risk going out this heavy window, which could bang down if the prop holding it were disturbed. He or she would slide right off the shingle roof, not to mention being seen by a field full of whitsters.

  “It was Thomas Gresham, was it not, Your Majesty?” Dauntsey went on. “I insist I must have an opportunity to answer such slanders. Why, if duels or jousts of honor were still fought at Smithfield, I would challenge him.”

  “Slap him across the face with the perfumed gloves?”

  “I pray you are not mocking me, Your Majesty.”

  Thank God, she thought, the roof as well as the window could indeed help to clear Thomas Gresham, for with a bad leg and a cane, he’d never risk this. And a woman in skirts would have to be foolhardy and desperate to climb out, then back in.

  On the other hand, whoever had killed Hannah could have heard a noise on the stairs and hidden in the room when Marie entered and saw Hannah, newly murdered. If not behind the rolls of fabric, then behind the big starch tub. It might be not only Marie’s lack of memory protecting her but the fact that the killer knew the girl had not seen him or her.

  “I am not mocking you, man, for I believe you have served me well with Hannah’s goods so far. Besides, Sir Thomas’s leg he shattered several years ago would keep him from accepting your duel, so I want to hear no more of such tripe. If you are both to serve me in the future, you must get on—with each other as well as with me.” She finally stared full-faced into Dauntsey’s strange eyes, something she tried to avoid. As if he did not want to face her, either, he quickly gazed out the window over her shoulder.

  “You mentioned that the killer is targeting those who keep all of us clean and fashionable,” he said. “Not only, Your Majesty, does that describe a particular person, but one who is ranting this very morning in the field out there. Did you note him well?”

  She turned back toward the window, scolding herself for not looking out of it farther than the roof. Rosie came to stand beside her as Dauntsey peered out, too.

  “The Reverend Hosea Cantwell,” Elizabeth said. Occasionally, amidst the distant murmur of women working over their linens, she could hear his strident tones. She could see him, too, standing on a barrel in the midst of a field snowy with sheets.

  “He may not pose the danger your rebellious northern lords do, Your Majesty,” Dauntsey said, folding his arms over his chest, “but he’s haranguing those of us who favor following your lead with courtly fashions, and on the very morning, evidently, that a whitster just happened to be murdered near where a starcher was killed last week. He’s got quite a crowd, too, a captive audience, and when they hear one of their own has been punished by some invisible hand—”

  “I do not need you to do my thinking for me,” she clipped out, “but I’ll see him arrested if he’s preaching against me again. Let me have those gloves, if you please, man, and bring your papers to me soon.”

  He handed her the pair of gloves; they smelled of lavender and rich ambergris, the latter of which she’d seen on the perfumer Celia’s worktable. “I yet need to sell these starching goods to the van der Passes,” he called after her as she made her way around the items piled near the stairs. “Dirck is coming to look at these things and make a bid within the hour.”

  Perfect, she thought. The man had been seen in this area, and if he was culpable in or had information about these murders, this would be the perfect place for her to question him. Right now, she was going to see that Hosea Cantwell got down off his high horse.

  “Whatever can we do, Your Grace?” Rosie asked, hurrying down the steps behind her. “We need Clifford or Jenks to cart Cantwell off, don’t we?”

  “We’ll stop at the royal mews and see who’s there. As my lord Cecil would say, it’s time to stir the pot again. Then perhaps Hosea Cantwell or Dirck van der Passe will float right to the top.”

  Thomas Gresham could recall being in more pain only once before, when his leg shattered, and that had been physical instead of cerebral. This was turning into a dreadful nightmare.

  “Here are detailed renditions of all the queen asked for, my lord Cecil,” he said, and handed the sheaf of papers to the watchful man across the conference table. “May I go now?”

  “I have no authority for that,” Cecil said. “Stay while I glance through these.”

  “My building crews are expecting me on the site of the exchange today. The blocks of marble for the frieze above the front arches are being delivered.”

  “Then they will have to do without you.”

  “May I at least send my agent a note authorizing he sign for them?”

  “And send him your signet ring to seal it with?” Cecil said.

  Judas Priest. Gresham swore his father’s old oath silently. This powerful man was hostile to him, too. He was lost indeed.

  “Send the note, then,” Cecil said almost begrudgingly, “but I must read it first.”

  “And my wife? May I not let her know at least that I am detained here for a while? That way, she won’t worry something’s amiss—even though it is.”

  “You may write your wife,” Cecil said, still skimm
ing the report he’d written, as if Gresham were some criminal.

  Surely, Thomas thought, Elizabeth of England would not send him to the Tower to be questioned. He hated the place. In fact, he detested that entire end of town with the Thames rushing through the arches of London Bridge and all those small, crowded shops clinging to the very edges of it. It would be fine with him if the shops that would grace his exchange would sap the strength from that hodgepodge, where crowds of humanity shoved each other above the roaring torrent and criminals’ heads were stuck on pikes.

  He shuddered again. Surely, Her Grace did not believe he had murdered Hannah, even if the woman had been both a thorn in his side and a living reminder of his lost love. English law executed those adjudged a murderer in various ways, depending on their class, connections, and crime. Not being of the nobility, surely he would not be beheaded. The mere thought of his head displayed on the bridge for all to see horrified him. That shame would destroy the fame he had hoped to achieve through leaving London the grand edifice of his mercantile exchange.

  He fought to collect his rampaging thoughts. “I will write my wife now, that she should not worry,” he told Cecil.

  “I’m afraid she will have to,” Cecil said, turning to the next page of his report. “I want you to write her that you are here at Whitehall, and she’s to come forthwith—without the children—to join you here.”

  “You don’t suspect … don’t think … that Anne aided or abetted …”

  “I’ll consult with the queen on that. Just write the note, Sir Thomas. Then I’ll give you a comfortable room with a guard outside your door to rest up in until your wife arrives and Her Majesty returns.”

  Mounted on one of her favorite horses from the royal mews, a big bay, Elizabeth, with Rosie and four grooms also mounted, headed a block away to see if Cantwell was still raving. Indeed, he was. They heard him before they saw him as they stopped at the fringe of the field behind four oaks, which were rattling their brown leaves in the rising wind.

  “You women of England must take a stand for decency!” Cantwell was shouting. His clarion voice carried well on the breeze. The queen had always wondered how he would sound when he preached, and now she knew.

  “If there are starchers among you, renounce your tasks of stiffening neck ruffs for stiff necks, ruffs as large as cartwheels for the queen, her nobles, and even the upstart gentry who would ape their betters. But are those who are slaves to style really their betters?”

  “The rogue is as good as urging them to sedition,” she told Rosie. “Remind me not to exile him to the northern shires so he can preach more rebellion there.”

  “Remember,” Cantwell shouted, punctuating his words with grand gestures, “it is far better to have a millstone tied about your neck and be cast into the sea than to mislead someone to sin. And you laundresses and whitsters who labor to wash the fine and fancy linens of others, their ruffs or the tablecloths whereon they feast daily at bacchanals—”

  “I doubt,” the queen muttered, “that these women have a clue what that means. And it’s a lie from the pit of hell, which this man evidently thinks he has the keys to.”

  “—or the bedsheets of sin in which they cavort” he railed on. “You will answer for it, all of you, in one way or the other. Do you not think the hand of God passed judgment on the poor starcher who was murdered recently? And only today another of your ilk was so judged, when a laundress was drowned in her own laundry tub.”

  “I’m not even sure that is common news yet. I want that man brought to me,” Elizabeth ordered her men, “but dismount to take him. I do not want horses’ hoofs sullying the work of these hardworking, good Englishwomen.”

  Three of the four grooms dismounted and were about to wade into the crowd when the queen commanded, “Hold a moment!” To her amazement and amusement, despite what the rogue had been saying, she saw what was going to happen before he did.

  Some of the women behind Cantwell had lifted a so-called sheet of sin between them and were creeping toward him. Before he knew it, as the laundresses made a circular move that reminded Elizabeth of a Maypole dance, they had wrapped the man in linen and pulled him from his perch. She could hear him shouting, muffled now, and, if she stood in her stirrup with a hand on her sidesaddle, she could see him writhing on the ground as they rolled him like a great, growing snowball.

  “Let him be for a while, men, then bring him to the palace,” Elizabeth ordered. “And if you haul him to me in a linen net, be certain to pay the woman whose sheet or tablecloth you take.”

  Despite her predicament with the murders, the queen shouted a laugh as she dismounted and handed her horse’s reins to the still-mounted groom. She shot a swift glance up at the window of Hannah’s loft and saw that Dauntsey had been watching, though he quickly turned away. Could this be where Marie had stood to stare at the window? And had she seen someone there she could now not recall?

  “With me, Rosie,” she said. “Perhaps we shall yet snag another suspicious man. I intend to question Dirck van der Passe on the very site of Hannah’s murder.”

  Despite Hugh Dauntsey’s vehement protests, Elizabeth sent him away. Rosie didn’t like it much better when the queen had her lie down in the now empty starch tub in which Hannah had been drowned. “And do not show yourself until I say, ‘I can picture poor Hannah there even now,’” Elizabeth instructed.

  Then, hoping Dauntsey would not dare to warn her prey that she was lying in wait for him like a spider, she sat down on the single stool by the window to face the door. Outside in St. Martin’s fields, her grooms had rescued the disheveled, furious Puritan cleric, only to cart him off toward the palace. Though the women had bested Cantwell, they did not celebrate but whispered in clumps, probably about the dreadful demise of one of their own.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs, and her heart began to pound. Who had Hannah been waiting for, perhaps in this very place, someone she’d let her women go home for, so she could face him or her alone? Thomas with that haunting adoration for his lost Gretta, which still shone in his eyes? He might not make it in or out the window, but he could hide within. Marie had said she’d heard what must have been a liaison gone wrong or an attempted rape—if Marie had not already hit her head and been hallucinating.

  Dirck van der Passe appeared up the steps, all six feet plus of him. Suddenly she didn’t feel so brave, but she would face him down at any cost.

  “Your Majesty?” Dirck said, squinting into the daylight streaming in behind her. “I—Hugh Dauntsey said meet him here to buy some starching goods, ja, he did.”

  She walked closer so that he wouldn’t see Rosie in the tub. “You knew where to find the place, I warrant,” Elizabeth said.

  “I been by before. Ve settled that. I vas just walking.”

  “This is where poor Hannah died, you know. She fought for her life here, choked half to death before she was drowned in her own starch tub. The murderer hid at first, then crept out from where he’d secreted himself. He took poor Hannah out of her starch bath and put her on the shelf. Did you know all that, Dirck?”

  “No, but you know all that?” he whispered, his eyes darting around the room.

  “I know all that because there was an eyewitness.”

  “Ja?” he said as his jaw dropped.

  “An unseen one, one we’ve kept hidden but who will now testify so we can arrest the killer. It would be better for him if he came forward to confess, for he’ll not escape now.”

  She hadn’t meant to say all that, especially about a witness, but she would have Marie and Sally well protected. She probably should have bluffed everyone she suspected days ago—told them they had been accused by a hidden eyewitness—but she hadn’t been sure about Marie for a while.

  “Drowned there?” he asked, pointing at the tub, which was behind her and the other stacked starching goods.

  “It was under the window then, but yes,” Elizabeth said. “I can picture poor Hannah there even now. Can you?”

&nb
sp; At her cue, Rosie sat straight up as if the dead had been called to rise on Judgment Day. Dirck jumped back and stumbled over a brazier. Two poking sticks went rolling under his big feet to send him to his knees, but he was gibbering all the while, “I swear I know nothing, nothing of it. I’m an honorable Flemish knight,” he cried, his eyes still wide on Rosie.

  “I’m telling you, you were seen,” the queen accused.

  “Ja,’tis true I knew vere her shop vas, even stopped some of her customers from going in—gave them promises of better prices at our place, took some of the ruffs there myself before they went up her stairs. That’s all I did, I swear by all that’s holy!” he cried, still on his knees, gripping his hands together as if begging for absolution.

  “’S blood,” she muttered. That confession wasn’t the one she wanted, but it was one she believed. He looked distressed enough that he would have blurted out a murder, too, wouldn’t he? She herself had let slip about an eyewitness, so she had to send for Sally and Marie to be brought to the palace.

  It took Meg nearly three hours to get to Eastcheap and locate Ned. He said he’d sent Bates back to Whitehall to report their lack of a prisoner. He had, at least, discovered that Celia no longer worked for the same glover and had not returned home—if he could believe the two women she’d been living with.

  “But I tell you,” he said to Meg as they hurried westward toward the palace, “if I couldn’t get them to talk, no one could.”

  “Turned on the charm with the ladies again?” she managed to get out between gasps. She had a stitch in her side from running.

  “Meg, my Meg,” he said, swinging her around to face him. “My stock-in-trade is to convince people to like me and to believe in me.”

  “You’re a great success at both, especially with the ladies who flock to—”