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

by Karen Harper

  “Chief Constable, we brought the things you needed for—hey, then. You there. You’re the man was with the murderess we brought in from St. Mar—”

  The rest was drowned in a chaos of shouts, overturned furniture, and the slamming of bodies into walls and doors. Meg imagined she could hear fists striking flesh and bone. As far as she could tell, it was Ned and Jenks against Whitcomb and one of his men—maybe more. She had never prayed so hard in her life.

  “Look,” the queen cried to Clifford, pointing. “Near the far side of the arch across the starling. A wooden ladder affixed to the stone!”

  “Hard to reach,” he shouted back, “but I’ll try for it. I’ll take a couple of the oarsmen to make a human chain, in case I fall climbing over the starlings.”

  Above them, Sally had managed to swing the shutter back toward the wall, but she hung between the wooden slats and the building. Marie looked frozen in place like a statue, wide-eyed, looking not at Sally nor the barge but just beyond at the seething waters. She edged farther out as if she meant to jump. What was so dreadful inside the open window that she did not try to go back to safety?

  Suddenly the queen’s head cleared. She beat down her own fears.

  “No,” she told Clifford, “the oarsmen need to stay with the barge. You and I can make it to that ladder and up to the bridge.”

  “But, Your Grace,” both he and Rosie chorused.

  “You can go first,” she told him, taking off her cloak and handing it to Rosie. “If the ladder holds someone as big as you, it will hold me. I’m in my riding skirts. I can do it.”

  The bargemen held the craft somewhat steady as Clifford climbed onto the starlings and helped the queen out. It actually felt better here at first, off the pitching deck, but she saw new dangers. Waves lashed the soaked planks, and stray debris, including tree limbs and boards, had jammed here.

  The spray reminded her of a great rainstorm. Standing under the vaulted arch, she recalled that day her royal sister had sent her to the nearby Tower through the river entrance called Traitor’s Gate. There, in driving rain, the young Princess Elizabeth had sat down and refused to go in that way—with Lord Paulet insisting she must obey the queen. Now she was queen, and yet she was not free, not safe.

  Once the two of them had stumbled and crawled their way to the ladder, sometimes holding to each other, sometimes bending over and scuttling sideways like crabs, they saw that the bottom three rungs were not only waterlogged but crumbling.

  “They won’t take your weight!” she shouted at him. “Boost me above them.”

  “Your Majesty, I cannot—”

  “You can and will, man! You’ll be here to break my fall. Now!”

  He hoisted her up to grab the fourth rung, then higher, so she could get a foothold. It felt so strange to have a man’s hard hands on her person, her back, waist, and hips.

  She looked up as she climbed. What if she got to the top and this went nowhere, or she could not get over the edge of the bridge?

  For the first time, she saw people gazing over at her from above. Someone threw a rope down; she wrapped it around her left wrist in case she fell, but she was hardly going to let them haul her up on it. At least this side of the bridge was sheltered from the flying spray of the other side.

  Riding skirts or no, they were still a problem—heavy, a burden each time she went up another rung. A problem to be a woman and rule, she told herself, but she could do it. No matter how demanding the men of her Parliament became with carpers like Cantwell or renegades like Whitcomb, she would survive and thrive. Even if the northern shires exploded in rebellion, she would put it down. Her life would be spent helping all who were loyal in her kingdom, men and boys, but women and girls, too.

  Many hands pulled her up over the wooden rail in an open spot between shops and buildings. People gaped at her, but at least they didn’t recognize their queen, looking like a drowned rat.

  “Did you fall from a boat? What … How?” the growing crowd peppered her with questions.

  Exhausted, she righted herself, pushed away, and shoved through the crowd, running toward the other side of the bridge. But exactly what building to enter to find the girls?

  Then she saw a yellow glover’s sign and ran for that door.

  Meg feared the worst when the sounds of the fight halted in the other room. She wished she could scream for Ned through her gag. What if he had been bested and Whitcomb or his man came in? But no, Jenks was with him, and she’d never known him to lose a fight.

  Tears of gratitude blinded her when she heard both familiar voices shouting, “Meg? Meg Milligrew, you here?”

  She tried to answer them but began to choke again. The door to the room banged open against the wall. Ned stood there, his once handsome countenance bruised and bloodied anew. Jenks towered behind him, not looking so good, either.

  They rushed to her and had the rag out of her mouth in a trice, but she was so dry she still couldn’t talk and only coughed and gasped. Jenks sliced her bonds with his knife, but it was Ned who lifted her in his arms.

  She held hard to him, pressing her cheek to his, even though her arms were numb and his face swollen, black and blue and slick with blood.

  “He … going to torture and maim me,” she tried to say. “Hates … the queen.”

  They took her out into the large front room but headed toward the back of the guildhall and out a rear door. Bless them, they must have sent that earlier fellow to look around the area, but how did they know she was here?

  No matter now. She had never felt safer. The queen and Sally would sure be shocked when they heard what she’d been through.

  The door to the shop was closed but not locked. The queen burst in. The other glover’s shop came to mind, where Celia struck Meg, then led her a merry chase out the back door. But the back door here was splintered and led to a small room in chaos and a window overlooking a steep fall to fastflowing water.

  She heard several others behind her, but once she saw that the shop was empty, she didn’t look back. Hands on the ledge, she thrust her head out the window.

  Like part of the carved stone of the bridge beneath, Marie stared fixedly into the roiling waters and Sally yet held to the shutter. Who to save first?

  “Marie, I’m here. Just stand still. Sally, I’m going to swing the shutter out, then into the window and help you inside. Don’t be afraid, now,” she said as she glanced down at the barge, still held under the window by raging waters and her valiant men. “If you fall, they will catch you below.”

  Holding her breath, Elizabeth slowly, steadily pulled the shutter toward her and grabbed Sally’s shoulders, then pulled her through the window, head first. Others pressed into the room, taking Sally from her as she turned back to Marie, still unmoving, pressed against the stone wall, staring down.

  “Get back,” the queen told the people in the room, and motioned them away with one arm.

  Though no one knew who she was, they obeyed, but for one tall, thin man who demanded, “What’s going on here? This is my shop. Just what is going on?”

  One of her guards she’d sent to ride the bridge appeared, too. “Clear this room, but for this girl,” she said, pointing at Sally, collapsed and panting on the floor. Again, she leaned out the window and turned toward Marie.

  “Marie,” she said, when there was only the sound of rushing river again, “give me your hand. Slowly, just give me your left hand.”

  “I heard her struggling, then drowning, and didn’t try to save her,” she said, still not turning or moving. “Are Badger and Celia gone?”

  “Yes, they’re gone.” Celia, the queen thought. She should have known the woman with Badger was Celia. “It’s just Sally and me. Give me your hand now, and I’ll take you to your parents.”

  “They didn’t kill her, you know, kill my Aunt Hannah. I was afraid they did, but they didn’t.”

  “I was afraid they did, too.” She was still terrified of the connection between Thomas and Badger—afra
id that her financial genius might have hired Badger to rid him of a problem—but she said only, “Give me your hand, Marie. Your queen is commanding you take my hand.”

  “But through the window—of the starch house—I saw who killed her.”

  Elizabeth jerked so hard she grabbed the ledge and held on tight. “Who, then?”

  “Someone dressed like Badger,” she said. “Badger’s height.”

  “Are you sure it was not him?” The queen leaned way out and over. She had Marie’s hand now, but she was afraid to tug at her. The girl went even more rigid. Dear God, Elizabeth prayed, don’t let her throw herself off, for I could never hold her.

  “Yes,” Marie mouthed so quietly that the noise drowned her words. “I remember now that I could see through the window he wasn’t Badger, even when he picked her out of the starch and carried her away.”

  “You remember that now?” she said, trying to sound soothing when her heart was about to beat out of her breast. She tried to move Marie closer, but the girl didn’t budge beyond letting the queen lift her left hand.

  “Yes, and his voice wasn’t Badger’s when he struggled with her—when I heard them and should have helped her.”

  “If his voice wasn’t Badger’s, whose was it? Come here and tell me, Marie. It’s cold out here, so come in with Sally and me through this window and get warm.”

  “I looked through the window of the starch shop,” she repeated. “I wanted to fly, to climb through the window, but I was frozen—afraid.”

  “Everything’s all right now. This isn’t the same window. You don’t have to be afraid of what you find in here.”

  “I didn’t cause my mother’s death. You said I didn’t,” she insisted, turning to look at Elizabeth at last.

  “No, you did not. Nor did you cause your aunt’s in any way. Sally needs you, Marie. Come in here with Sally.”

  The girl moved at last, shuffling sideways closer, though the queen feared she still might fall or jump. Then she wrapped the girl in her arms and pulled her inside, collapsing to the floor beside Sally with Marie sprawled across her lap.

  The three of them huddled there, the two girls sobbing and Elizabeth weak with relief. Finally, sniffling, Sally said, “Even if Badger didn’t kill anyone, he’s still really mean. He’s a killer, too,’cause he was going to kill us, going to drop us down a hole under that closestool to the river.”

  Elizabeth glanced at the crude wooden jakes. The wooden closestool itself had been shoved back over the hole hastily but not positioned properly.

  “We cut both him and Celia, Your Grace,” Marie put in. “With scissors and some other glove-cutting tool.”

  “Maybe if they’re bleeding bad,” Sally said, “you can follow their path, but I guess it’s getting dark outside.”

  Elizabeth glanced around the dimming room. She had not noted it before, but perhaps that wasn’t just the water she had dripped on the floor. It could be smeared blood. At least, if she found Badger and Celia, which she doubted after they’d done all this, their wounds would prove the girls’ story.

  “I wager one thing,” Marie said, seeming fully alert at last. “Their cuts might slow them down if you mean to chase them, Your Grace.”

  “’Cause,” Sally added, “bet we know now who hurt Marie’s aunt.”

  From the mouths of babes, the queen thought, sitting up straighter, then scrambling to her knees. “Tell me,” she said. “Marie said it wasn’t Badger she saw in the upstairs starch house window, lifting Hannah—that it was a man in Badger’s clothes. Who, then?”

  “He’s called the stocking man,” Sally said, and Marie nodded.

  “But who’s that?” the queen countered.

  “One time, Sally, don’t you remember that Celia said the stocking market man?” Marie said. “And Badger got angry at her for that, like she gave too much away?”

  “The stocking market man,” Elizabeth echoed, still sitting on her haunches. “Did they say aught else about him?”

  “Two things,” Sally said. “One, that the stocking man would have their heads if they didn’t get things out of us. Two, that Marie was worth a fortune no matter what the stocking man said’bout final revenge meaning more.”

  “Final revenge … the stocking man … the stocking market man,” Elizabeth repeated in a monotone while her mind raced. She felt fury flood her again. Why hadn’t she reasoned that out before? But she had needed the motive to put all the pieces together.

  She stood in her sodden skirts and shoved her wild hair back from her face. “Guard!” she called. The splintered door, which no doubt told another tale of horror, opened immediately to reveal not one but three of her yeomen guards, including Bates.

  “One of you stay here to be certain these girls are taken by my barge to Whitehall to be reunited with Marie’s parents,” Elizabeth ordered. “Bates and Stiller will go with me on horseback.” She would have to ride astride, but, truth be told, she preferred that.

  She walked to the still-open window. The royal oarsmen had managed to pole or row the barge away from the bridge. She pointed back toward the Old Swan Stairs, where they had put in earlier today. Though dusk was falling, they saw her, waved, and bent their backs to row.

  “Where are we going, Your Majesty?” Bates asked as she accepted the man’s cape he offered her and wrapped it around her shoulders. It came only to her knees.

  “To see the stocking man,” she told him, striding for the street as he and her other yeoman, Stiller, hurried along behind her. “And the first place we’re looking is Smithfield Market. Nothing quite so fatal a fashion as final revenge, but I shall turn it to queen’s justice.”

  Chapter the Seventeenth

  DESPITE DEEPENING DUSK, THE QUEEN AND HER two yeomen started for Smithfield. At least the bridge was not so crowded now. They must ride nearly the width of the City, and she hoped the gates would not be closed before they went through.

  Approaching night had greatly cleared the streets. Despite the fact she had only two guards, she was relying on surprise to take Dauntsey, if Badger and Celia had not managed to get to him first. If she could trust what Marie had finally recalled she’d seen through the starch house window, Hannah’s murderer had not been Badger himself but someone wearing his clothes. How clever of the popinjay Dauntsey to exchange his usual flamboyant fashion for Badger’s plain garb. No wonder eyewitnesses noticed no one unusual.

  Besides, both Dauntsey and Badger were short, nearly the same height. Another thing had finally hit her, too. Those dark smudges on the linen rolls of fabric that had been placed to hide Hannah’s body and perhaps the killer, too. The rolls had bluish blurs on them, which she’d attributed to smears from the dye in Hannah’s gown. But could they have been ink stains from Dauntsey’s fingers?

  Elizabeth had no way of knowing how much of a head start Badger and Celia had or even if they were heading for “the stocking market man’s” place at Smithfield. If not, she might have to drag the wretch out of Paulet’s house. Worse, if Paulet were also involved, she’d have to bring him down, and that would cause more upheaval in Parliament.

  “Where at Smithfield is Dauntsey’s establishment?” Bates asked as they turned onto Thames Street to follow the river westward.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. Giving up on keeping the man’s cape she wore pulled over her head like a hood, she let it flap behind her. Should anyone recognize their queen in hot pursuit, she would be gone before they could blink. “I just know he needs to be arrested and questioned,” she told her men. “If we snare Badger and Celia, that will be a bonus, but I’ll have a hue and cry out for all of them by dawn.”

  As they rode past the corner of Dowgate Street, on which sat the Skinners’ Guildhall, Elizabeth hoped her men had found Meg. She wondered if Nigel Whitcomb would back down when she insisted his prisoner be freed. She’d like to toss him in prison, and drum him out of Parliament, too, but perhaps she was going to have to handle the Lords and Commons as she did potential suitors—c
oddle rather than confront them. She might be her father’s daughter, but these were not her father’s times.

  “Will we go to the palace for more men?” Bates asked over the clatter of their horses’ hooves on cobbles.

  “I’m trying to decide whether to send Stiller for help or keep him with us.”

  “You don’t intend to ride into Smithfield this time of day—night? We should go for help, and you can remain at the palace while guards go out to find—”

  “Bates, I favor and trust you to help me keep order, not give me orders.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  Her horse was in a lather, and so was she as they rode through Newgate and plunged outside the city walls. It was even darker out here, for lanterns or torches were fewer and farther apart.

  With their horses wheezing from the pace she’d set, they cut up St. Sepulchre’s Alley. Smithfield lay beyond, a large, dark pentagon under the slope of night sky.

  When the breeze shifted, the sudden assault of the stench almost staggered them, but Elizabeth discovered that if she took several deep, dusty breaths, the potency lessened. She remembered Meg saying she sometimes, her nose being overfull of them, couldn’t smell the sweet herbs she handled; it must hold true for reeking aromas, too. The sounds of vast herds kept here until the big Wednesday market tomorrow blew at them with the smell.

  Their mounts tried to pull back, even as the three of them reined in. Torches at sporadic distances framed the field; their lights flared doubly, reflected in the wooden water troughs at which the animals drank. Now and then, the sharp silhouettes of watchful herdsmen cut through the lights.

  “Bates, walk up and ask one of those fellows if he knows the location of the stock market office of Hugh Dauntsey. If the man doesn’t know who Dauntsey is, describe him—peacock-hued clothes and strange, pale eyes.”

  He dismounted and walked away but was back in a trice. “The clothes were the key,” he called to them, sounding almost jaunty as he remounted. “Hugh Dauntsey lets a twostory building at the corner of Long Lane, across the field.”