by Karen Harper
“Let’s go, then,” Elizabeth insisted, and turned her horse the way he indicated.
They picked their way along between water troughs, which helped to pen in the herds, and the encircling buildings. Despite how her stomach knotted and her pulse pounded, the queen fought to stay calm. No more jousting knights in mock battle here, but at least no martyrs’ screams as they were burned to death—murdered—either. It was, she hoped, the perfect place to catch a killer.
“Must be that building there,” Stiller said, pointing. “Look, lights upstairs and down.”
“A bull’s-eye,” she said, noting that one of the shutters stood ajar. “Stiller, I will ask you to take these skittish horses around to the back door of the place and block any rear exits with them. Bates will go with me, but we will try peeking in that front window first to see who is within.”
Stiller yet hovered while Bates looked as if he’d like to argue again, but he dismounted and helped her down. “Draw swords, both of you,” she ordered, “and one of you give me a dagger.” She held up her hand to Stiller, and he handed his to her, hilt first. He dismounted and led the three nervous horses away while Elizabeth and Bates peeked in the dusty window.
She gasped. Indeed her bad fortune had turned, for, in the light of a single lantern, Niles Badger slumped at a table, looking exhausted, filthy, and bloody. She could not see Celia or anyone else. She wondered at first if he was unconscious, but he lifted his head and one arm, then put to his mouth a small carved wooden object with a bowl and a stem from which he seemed to be sucking smoke.
“Even if Dauntsey’s in a back room or upstairs, I want to take that man now,” she said in a normal voice, to be heard over the noise of the animals. “He looks too beaten to fight back, or else I’d send for more men. Let’s try the door, but if it’s locked, you kick it in. I don’t think the herders will hear with all this noise. If Dauntsey or Celia should be here and dart out the back, Stiller will stop them.”
Among the lowing, snorting cattle, someone was singing “Bonny Barbara Allen” in a fine tenor voice. A dog barked. In that instant, sounds and scents seemed to assault the queen more clearly. She thought she even smelled the smoke Badger was drinking.
Her efforts to slowly lift the latch failed. It stopped partway up.
“Let me try a trick with the sword before we startle him,” Bates said.
Elizabeth nodded and went back to peer in the window. Wreathed in smoke, Badger looked as if he’d topple over in a stupor. This might be easier than she’d feared, but she deserved a boon in all this.
She watched Bates jiggle his sword tip in the crack between the door and the frame. “Now!” he cried, startling even her as he slammed the door open and, sword raised, vaulted in.
Elizabeth rushed behind him, closing and relatching the door. Badger leaped straight up, then seemed to droop back over the table. Though the queen was wearing a man’s cape, he evidently knew her instantly.
“You—here!” he cried, and started coughing so hard his shoulders shook.
“Is Dauntsey here, too? And Celia?” she demanded.
He shook his head. “Fled. I was too weak with blood loss from those two little bitches.”
She almost slapped him, but she needed him to talk, and he already looked ashen. Still holding the dagger in one hand, suddenly exhausted herself, she sat on the other bench across the table from him. Between them lay wet, bloody cloths he’d evidently tried to use for bandages. The smell of his tobacco was strong, but she preferred it to the stench of the animals.
“Tie this man, then watch the staircase, Bates,” she said. “He looks done in, but he’s not to be trusted. We don’t need him trying to dive out a back window the way he forced the girls to.”
Badger looked surprised at that. The yeoman took his smoking piece away and put it on the table, then tied him with torn cloths to the room’s only chair, which he shoved to the end of the table, close to the queen. Quickly she glanced about at stacks of parchment neatly aligned on the shelves. Several big leather-bound boxes sat on the floor; those should be searched, too. Yes, this looked like a place of business and not some sham. She wondered, if she’d come in pursuit of a stock market criminal instead of a murderer, was enough evidence here to have Dauntsey arrested and convicted?
“Unless you want to be charged with double murder,” Elizabeth told Badger, rapping her knuckles on the table, “you’d best tell me all about your relationship with Hugh Dauntsey. I take it you’re working for him as well as for Gresham, but Dauntsey has your true loyalty.”
“Paid better,” he said with a snort. “Gresham’ s filthy rich, but Dauntsey paid better. Can I make a bargain with you, then?” His voice was slow and barely audible. “I explain things, and you let me walk out of here—if I can.”
“No bargains. By noon tomorrow, I’ll have him as well as you in prison being examined by much more skilled interrogators than I. How long have you worked for Dauntsey?”
“Let me put it this way, Your Majesty,” he said, strangely rolling his eyes upward before he looked at her again. Was he going to faint? “My first big task for Dauntsey was shooting a firearm at Gresham in Flanders the day his horse crushed his leg. I was to kill him and missed.”
A hint of a rueful grin crimped his mouth. “Dauntsey was furious at first,” he went on, “’til he realized how much pain the man was in, even after his leg supposedly healed. He relished that, making him a cripple. Decided to take his reputation, too, ruin his family’fore killing him … so my missing him that day worked out for the best.”
His words slowed even more; he seemed to drawl them. Again his eyes rolled upward before he squinted across the table at her.
“You need medical help, Badger, so answer my questions quickly, and we shall get some for you.”
“I just need a puff on that pipe—if I’m to go on.”
Elizabeth nodded, and Bates came over to put it to his lips. The man drew on it greedily before Bates put it down again. The big guard peeked out through the front shutters and rechecked the latch on the door. He went to peer out the single back window. “Can’t see Stiller since there are shutters closed from the outside,” he reported, then returned to his post at the bottom of the stairs.
“I assume,” Elizabeth questioned Badger, “you took Sir Thomas’s signet ring and made certain it appeared in the starch bath in which Hannah von Hoven drowned?”
He nodded almost imperceptibly; his head lowered, and his eyes closed. She must know so much more and couldn’t let him slip away before she learned the truth—if he was telling the truth.
“Did you harm and drown those two women or did Dauntsey?”
“They were just pawns to him … it’s Gresham he’s hated for years. Dauntsey killed the starcher to set him up, the whitster to shut her up. Rich bastard Gresham got Dauntsey’s position, ruined his dreams, kept close to you. I just did what Dauntsey said, set things up, got the ring, the chocolata drink he took to the laundress—told her it was sent from you.”
His shoulders heaved; he coughed again. Over the muted noise from outside, Elizabeth strained to hear him.
“Dauntsey found out,” Badger went on, “about the poison roots from the other starchers he did the books for. But he did the drownings,” he said, lifting his head and turning to give Bates a long look.
“Say on,” she prompted, when he seemed to forget her.
“I can’t—can’t.”
“Then I’m going to have to throw you over the rump of a horse and have you taken to the palace, where—”
“One more pull on the pipe, that’s all.”
She leaned toward his chair to put it to his mouth herself, then took it back and set it down on her side of the table.
“He loved to do the drownings, craved it—like I do that pipe,” Badger whispered, as if to himself. “Said so, more’n once. Boasted he drowned a playfellow, a pretty little girl, years ago in a fishpond and … the passion of it was like nothing else …”
As Badger slumped forward in his bonds, she told Bates, “We must look swiftly for more evidence, then get this man to my physician at Whitehall.”
“I’ll glance upstairs and try to call out a window there to Stiller.”
“All right. I’ll stand at the bottom of the stairs to keep an eye on this one, and you can shout down to me what you find.”
Bates went quietly, quickly, up the narrow stairs, which were lit from above. Their prisoner had sat up again but kept shaking his head and rolling his eyes upward, as if he could see through the ceiling and floor over their heads.
“Be careful up there!” she called to Bates. She gripped her dagger so hard her fingers cramped. She couldn’t stand this place any longer. The sounds of the penned beasts awaiting their fates outside, the smell, dust, and tobacco smoke seemed to suffocate her. Striding to the stairs, she shouted up them, “Bates? Did you call out to Stiller?”
“Come up here!” he cried at last, when she was getting so panicked she was about to leave Badger and shout for Stiller herself. Bates sounded nervous; he, too, was hard to hear over the outside sounds.
She glanced at Badger. He looked unconscious, his head lolling forward. His eyes were closed, and he drooled. Grasping her dagger and holding her skirts close, she went up the narrow, dim stairs to the small landing. There she tried to look out the back window. Her dark reflection as well as more closed shutters on the outside of the glass kept her from seeing Stiller or the horses.
She would quickly see what Bates had discovered, then send him outside to fetch the other guard. She went up a few more steps until her head was even with the floor upstairs. A single lantern hung from a wall peg in the short hall. Why hadn’t Bates taken the light with him into the two small, darker rooms, which both had their doors open?
“Bates? Where are you? What is it?”
“Here!” he called gruffly over the continual hum of noise from outside.
She went up the rest of the stairs and looked left, into the room from which Bates had called. She expected to find Dauntsey’s illicit gold heaped in a trunk, or even the murderer himself, hanging from his own noose, trapped … a suicide.
It all happened fast. On the floor of the room at her left, she saw Bates’s legs stretched out in spilled water—or blood. And next to him, with her back to the door, sat a headless woman!
Elizabeth screamed. Beheaded? In horror, the queen bucked back into the wall.
No, no, it was a woman on her knees with her head thrust in a bucket.
Dauntsey leaped to the doorway at which she stared.
She screamed again and lifted her dagger, but he heaved a bucket of water and lunged at her. Wooden … hit her face … water exploded over her. Before she could see, he wrenched her weapon from her hand and seized a fistful of her hair, which tumbled loose from its pins and snood.
She thought he might shove her down the stairs, but he yanked her head back, forcing her to stare into those rimless, invisible eyes. She read hatred there, teetering on madness.
“This will top them all,” he said through gritted teeth. His voice—he’d spoken for Bates and sounded like him. “My most thrilling drowning. How much do you think the northern lords will pay me for a dead Tudor queen?”
“You and Paulet—”
“That bumbling fool knows nothing of all this,” he hissed.
All this … Buckets—he had six or seven big buckets in the room he dragged her into, and the woman who must be Celia was drowned in one.
Elizabeth fought hard as he tripped her and threw her to her knees—thrust her face into a big bucket. Cold water. His strength surprised her. Hannah … Pamela. Had it been like this, wanting to breathe but knowing that meant death?
She held her breath until she thought her lungs would explode. Pain in her scalp. Clawed and kicked. Grabbed some air before he shoved her down again. She reached blindly for a nearby bucket. Tipped it empty, smashed it backward at him.
He went off balance. She hit him again with it, shoved him, rolled away into Bates. He was bleeding from his head. She scrambled to her feet, bounced off one wall. Lifting her sopped skirts, she tore down the stairs, one flight. Turn corner, down the rest.
Outside. Get outside. Find Stiller. Scream for people—her subjects outside to help. Get help … help …
She heard Dauntsey pounding downstairs after her. Badger still slumped in his chair. The door. She’d latched it herself. If he caught her here …
But as she jerked at the latch, she heard him stop across the room at the bottom of the stairs. She glanced back; he opened a big box. “All right, then,” he called to her, strangely calm, as she lifted the latch, “I’ll just provide a little distraction, like poor Badger did that day he shot at your damned lackey, Sir Thomas Gresham. I thought you’d rather be drowned in private, but if you, oh great and glorious queen, always need an audience, so be it.”
A firearm. He had a matchlock!
She tore outside, screaming for help. Stiller came barreling around the corner of the building, but a herd of baaing sheep blocked him from reaching her and blocked her escape toward him. Cattle had shifted closer; she had only one direction to flee.
At first no one heard her cries. Then a few herdsmen looked her way. She must look wild, demented, pointing back toward Dauntsey, forced to run forward into the field.
Darting behind the first water trough she came to, she bent down and peered over it as light in the open door silhouetted Dauntsey and the firearm. Marie had stared at Hannah’s lighted window. She’d seen Dauntsey, but in Badger’s clothes, lifting Hannah from the tub. He’d drowned her, hoping to blame Gresham. After Marie came inside, he’d lifted Hannah out and onto the shelf, because that was something Thomas would have done. Perhaps he’d hidden himself on that shelf while Marie was in the room.
Elizabeth saw that Dauntsey had lit the wick that would ignite the gunpowder in the pan. Could Dauntsey aim and hit her from this distance and through the wooden trough?
She heard Stiller’s shouts. Her yeoman was wading thighhigh through sheep toward Dauntsey as if through deep water, but, unfortunately, the path between her and that madman was now clear.
Just as she opened her mouth to scream for help again, the matchlock belched a flash of light and noise. He’d fired not at her but into the air.
At first the cattle seemed to go still as stone. Several shifted, snorted; some began to bump into others in a growing panic. She heard the warning shouts of several herdsmen and Stiller’s voice again, ordering Dauntsey to put the firearm down.
In that short time, he must have reprimed and loaded again, for one more blast followed. As one great beast, the animals bolted in a churning mass as all hell broke loose in a wild rampage of horns and hoofs around her.
Pressing herself between two drinking troughs, Elizabeth was forced to stand; that made her a better target, should Dauntsey shoot a third time. Instead, swinging at the beasts with the butt of the matchlock, he fought toward her, into the edges of the writhing herd, which now forced Stiller even farther away. On the side of the troughs temporarily holding back the onslaught, though that put her closer to Dauntsey, she edged along while the water in them rocked like waves.
Then she realized what the human beast intended. Amidst the chaos of the crashing cattle and sheep, the water trough reminded her of Hannah’s starch-tub coffin—of Ursala and Pamela’s washtub.
Dauntsey reached the troughs and pursued her down the line of them. In the deafening noise and rising dust, she saw she must face him alone. If she could only fight her way to the sturdy tree trunk that was the memorial to martyrs here, she could climb it and be safe, but it was too far away.
The animals slammed into the barrier of the troughs, overturning some toward her. The two c
losest still stood, but soon she would lose her last bulwark of protection. Water slopped over the edges in swift surges as some beasts slammed into them before they swerved away.
Trapped by the circle of surrounding buildings with only narrow escape routes, the mingled herds seemed to be circling, swinging toward the center of the field where they had been penned in. Dauntsey was almost to her. Only two troughs yet stood against the rush, and Elizabeth had to either stand and face him or be trampled. Her hand on a quaking tub, she turned and pointed directly into his frenzied face.
“Stand back from me, Hugh Dauntsey! You are finished here!”
He seized her wrist and shouted so close in her face that his saliva speckled her. “For years, I wanted to torment and kill Gresham, but you’ll do! You’ve ruined everything, but losing you will ruin him, too!”
Holding to the trough, she wrenched away, kicking out at him. He went down. She did, too, hitting hard on her elbows and knees—but found herself sheltered by a tipped trough even as its water slammed into and over her. She saw Dauntsey battered down and trampled, a shocked look on his face before his entire body disappeared in the mad rampage of beasts.
She threw herself backward into the tipped trough. Knees curled up, arms tucked against her chest, Elizabeth huddled, tears streaming down her face, praying this would not be her coffin. The animals rushed past or vaulted it in churning dust, trying to rend her apart, like her enemies trying to crush her under the weight of her duties, her fears …
But then, when the herdsmen had rushed past, attempting to retrieve and pen in their stock, Stiller found her, shaken and stunned. He fell to his knees, leaning close to peer into the darkness of her shelter.
At first, she blinked back tears and simply stared at him. Yes, this was how poor Marie must have felt when she hid within herself, stunned, haunted by the evil deeds of others. But queens could not hide or waver.
“Your Majesty,” Stiller whispered, horrified, still hacking in the dust, “are … are you … all right?”
