by Karen Harper
With that, she darted a sharp glance in Meg’s direction. Meg quickly plunged back to stringing flowers. Ned, she could tell, was just leaning back against the tree, staring off into the distance, so that the queen probably thought they couldn’t hear a word she said.
“Cecil has too much authority,” Lord Robin said softly, but his voice still carried on the mounting breeze. “You need someone you can trust as a counterbalance to his power and pomposity.”
Meg could not believe it when the queen nodded, took his arm, and gazed into his eyes. It was evident even to an herb girl that the queen of England was caught deep in love’s snares, just like in the words to a song Geoffrey often sang.
THE SUMMER DAYS BLURRED BY FOR THE QUEEN AS FAST AS did the other couples dancing around her and Robin two weeks later. “Another gay galliard!” she commanded her musicians in the raised gallery. “No more slow pavans. Wait—instead I shall have la volta!”
Cornets and sackbuts wailed at a faster pace while recorders, timpani, viols, lutes, and citterns picked up the romping beat. Robin partnered Elizabeth again, whirling her about between the set-piece intricate steps, then—during the women’s leap—throwing her into the air and catching her. Women squealed and men shouted in their exertion and excitement.
Elizabeth laughed and urged on the others. They ought to be grateful, she thought, that unlike in slower movements, she had no time to correct dancers who didn’t know their footwork. She was relieved she hadn’t eaten much of the huge meal, but then, she never did. If courtiers and servants ate as she, the eighteen kitchens of Richmond would hardly have to turn out the vast tables of food each day.
As Robert spun her again, Elizabeth realized these had been the most wonderful months of her life, even if she did miss her dear friends Bella and John Harington, whom she had sent into rural exile for lying to her. She doubly regretted having to do that, for their daughter had run away on top of all their other troubles. They’d been gone for over a year now and she intended to summon them back soon. A precedent about being able to trust one’s friends must be set.
Elizabeth sighed, even in the midst of a strenuous swing step. Bella had been such a fine sportswoman and dancer that Elizabeth would love to have her here to vie with for the highest volta leaps. Now she was stuck with the likes of simpering, snide Katherine Grey, a cousin with Catholic leanings whom she feared the Papists would champion behind the queen’s back. At least, Elizabeth thought as she nearly tripped on the redheaded chit, she had Katherine where she wanted her, among her ladies under watch and— curse the woman—underfoot.
“Faster, dear Robin, faster,” Elizabeth cried as he spun her just before the final vault and catch. Aha! She was certain she had flown higher than her ladies. Everyone laughed and gasped for breath, looking to see what their queen would command next.
But again, as increasingly of late, Elizabeth felt someone staring, someone hostile. Quickly, carefully, she skimmed the crowd, then scrutinized her musicians’ faces. The men, her ensemble—professional musicians were always male, of course—were leaning forward from their gallery above, waiting for her next selection. No face seemed out of place, nor a single countenance threatening. The same among the courtiers, though Elizabeth would like to smack Katherine Grey’s smug face.
“You’ve quite exhausted everyone with hunting this morn and now such dancing,” Robin said, no doubt put up to hinting she end the evening. Realizing it must be nearly midnight, she turned to face him with a smile. She knew that more and more, as people saw he was the favorite, however much some of them still resented the parvenu, upstart Dudleys, they went to him with bribes and requests much greater than this one for her ear alone.
“Have I worn you out?” she countered, trying to keep from appearing to be so out of breath.
“Never.” He leaned closer, whispering in her ear so hotly his breath made her earring bob. “Summon me or visit me alone tonight, and I will show you I am still up for whatever you would like.”
“Why, my lord, I believe you’re being bawdy. But in truth, I am exhausted. It’s Cecil’s fault, moping around here day after day since his return, and Kat’s taken to giving me her long looks again.”
She made a dour face at him, and he laughed as he escorted her back toward the table. “But I believe I shall take pity on you all and have you escort me to my chamber. Master lutenist, music!” she called with a sharp look at Ned Topside, who nodded and went to fetch his friend Geoffrey Hammet from the gallery for some privy playing.
Robert Dudley bowed, and others followed suit as Elizabeth left the great hall. He escorted her properly—if a bit dramatically—to her bedchamber door and bent to kiss her hand. Though she warranted few could tell, he always turned it up before planting a warm, sometimes wet kiss on her palm instead of the mere proper brush of the lips between her knuckles and wrist. Had any other man tried that she’d have knocked him silly.
In return, she merely cupped his bearded cheek with her other hand and disappeared inside, trailed by her ladies of the bedchamber. Best to keep even Robin guessing what was coming next, she thought. He had mocked the Scots for their hide-and-seek warfare where they’d disappear into a mist or duck into one of their glens, then jump out later to fight again. She had not said so, but that was a well-tried Tudor tactic too.
Her ladies divested her of gown and petticoats, unlaced her stays, and helped her don her gold brocade robe, a gift from Robin. “Out, out, but Kat and Mary Sidney sleeping in the trundle beds this night,” the queen commanded with a narrow-eyed look at Katherine Grey for dawdling. Elizabeth had never given the girl the honor of sleeping in here at night, for she dared not close her eyes on her.
Though Kat would no doubt snore and Mary muttered in her dreams, those were the two Elizabeth preferred to have with her. She didn’t sleep well of late and would sometimes rather be alone, but especially now with people so unreasonable about her friendship with Robin, she needed the chaperones. Ah, if only she had her friend Bella back or at least had been able to locate her and John’s runaway daughter for them. But she’d had servants, including Ned Topside, loose in London in various guises for days last year who never so much as came up with the scent of the runaway Hester Harington. Most of all, she’d like her lutenist in here, but she could hardly keep a male, servant and musician or not, in her bedchamber at night.
At least, as was usual when the court was at Richmond and it was temperate weather, Geoffrey would play the lute, sitting in a deep notch between two crenelations at the top of the tower parapet opposite her windows. Yet despite the tunes drifting in, Elizabeth thrashed her sheets to waves around her.
Geoffrey, even when he was dog drunk with his beloved sack, could play circles around anyone she’d ever heard. His straight blond hair, sky-blue eyes, and boyish face made him look like an angel, but he could drink like the very devil. She could use a stiff drink now to relax this taut coil inside her.
The queen pounded her pillows flatter behind her head as Kat did indeed begin to snore, seemingly in rhythm with Geoffrey’s ballad, one about lost love. Mary seemed to breathe evenly in sleep. Elizabeth edged out of her high bed and found the velvet mounting stool with a bare foot, climbed down, and tiptoed over to the window casement, set ajar to catch both river breeze and tunes. Some said night air was unhealthsome, but she felt she had proved that untrue. Sometimes it was simply sitting on the pinnacle of the realm, day or night, that could do one in.
But foolish superstitions like the night air must have no place in her kingdom, she’d see to that, she vowed silently. She believed in scientific thinking, like Robin, who had learned it from his friend Dr. Dee, whose home was not far from here. Mayhap tomorrow she should agree to ride with Robin to see the brilliant man’s instruments and show him the Flemish-made astrolabe Robin had given her.
The queen sank on the cushioned window seat. When Geoffrey paused between tunes, she heard that other music she loved here, the eerie humming of wind blowing through the tower van
es like heavenly lutes.
As her eyes adjusted to the shapes of walls and towers outside, she fancied she could pick out her lutenist’s silhouette on the parapet against the night sky, but perhaps that was only because she could pinpoint his music.
Elizabeth started when she heard a wooden thud from the tower, then a muffled cry that faded and stopped. Something in the courtyard below, perhaps, echoing off the walls. Now silence, but for the wind playing the vanes. Had Geoffrey dared to drop that imported Italian lute she’d given him on the Twelfth Day of Christmas? Surely not over the edge. Why didn’t he begin to play again?
And then he did, a sweet, slow madrigal, curling on the breeze into her window and her heart. The seductive tone seemed more mellow, sadder.
Elizabeth stretched, then poked her head out. The music had stopped or else merged flawlessly with the music of the dark towers. She had just pulled back inside when a man’s shout echoed from the stone courtyard below.
“Help ho! I think he’s dead!”
Chapter the Second
My lute, awake! Perform the last
Labor that thou and I shall hast,
And end that I have now begun;
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute, be still, for I have done.
— THE EARL OF ROCHFORD
“KAT! MARY! SOMETHING DREADFUL HAS happened outside! Get up, up!”
Yanking on her robe and shoving her feet in her woolen mules, Elizabeth did not await her ladies. That voice had surely been Ned’s, but who did he think was dead?
The queen’s first impulse was to go to the privy staircase that led to both the roof and garden, but if foul play were afoot, that could be dangerous. As the startled Kat and Mary scrambled into robes behind her, Elizabeth ran through the empty withdrawing room and banged a fist on the double doors to the gallery. Her yeoman guards, halberds still crossed, swept it open and gaped to see her.
“Someone’s hurt in the courtyard below,” she told them, shoving through. “Bring lanterns.”
Both hulking men fell in behind her. With them, Kat, Mary, several of her other women, and the night porter strung out behind her, the queen hurried down the lantern-lit staircase. She gestured to more startled guards to unbolt the front door, and she burst out into the courtyard.
“Ned?” she cried. Her little entourage halted behind her. A fine falling mist muted sounds and sights, but she could swear she still heard the weird wind music from the towers. “Ned Topside!”
“Here, Your Grace,” he answered, his voice breaking. She saw him huddled over a fallen form directly under the tower opposite her window. “It’s Geoffrey,” Ned choked out, “fallen to his death.”
She traversed the slick paving stones and bent next to the kneeling Ned. Her lutenist sprawled facedown, his blond hair fanned out, his arms and legs spread as if he’d tried to fly. His face was turned to the side, the angle of his neck askew. A trickle of blood from his ear puddled on the pavement.
“I—I didn’t turn him over,” Ned whispered. “That’s the way he landed, but I felt for the pulse at his neck. He’s gone.”
“Yes,” she said, “poor player.”
Ned glanced up at her, evidently unsure if she meant her lutenist or her favorite actor himself. Kat and Mary clung to Elizabeth as if to pull her back, but she shook them off. Doors slammed and feet came running amidst random cries in the courtyard.
“Oh,” the queen said, fanning the air before her face as she straightened. “No wonder the man lost his balance. I smell strong drink on him. Let that be a lesson to you all,” she said, addressing the growing circle of courtiers and servants. “Geoffrey Hammet was a fine musician who loved his lute but also loved his drink overmuch, and it must have cost him his life.”
Meg’s teary face appeared next to Ned’s stunned one. Elizabeth knew the two of them had been fast friends with Geoffrey. “We will all mourn his loss,” the queen continued, her voice gentler. “Geoffrey was dear to me and to others too.”
“Including his poor wife,” Meg blurted out.
“Wife?” Elizabeth cried. “The man told me plain when I took him on he was unwed.”
Meg’s mouth went to an O, and even in the push of people to glimpse the corpse, Elizabeth saw Ned elbow the girl. “Ned, is this true?” the queen demanded, glaring at him. “Speak up, man.”
“An early marriage,” Ned said, his voice hushed. He seemed to speak to his feet rather than to an audience for once. Someone tried to quiet the others so they could hear. “There is one child, yet of toddling years,” Ned whispered, clearing his throat. “And a babe.”
“I see,” Elizabeth pronounced. “Then I can only hope that others who serve their queen intimately do not keep such secrets from her, for whatever reasons.”
At that, Meg looked sorely stricken that she had given her friend’s secret away. As the fine mist turned to raindrops, she began to cry, but Elizabeth had no time for such indulgences. “My lord,” she said to Robin, who had appeared looking sleepy and disheveled, “have some of your men find a coffin for my musician. We shall bury him on the morrow and mourn his and his music’s loss.”
As Robin pulled three men forward, including her former guard Jenks, Elizabeth almost stopped them. She could send for young Gil Sharpe, her court artist in training, who always traveled in her retinue of servants when she was on progress. The boy was skilled at sketching people and scenes. But no—there would be no examination of a corpse or investigation of a scene for a drunken fall.
The queen stepped back as the men turned Geoffrey over. She noted well two things, neither suspicious. He had an abraded, bloodied bruise on his head and a splotch of blood—no, it looked more like wine—on his shirt. Her musician must have filched a great deal of drink to make himself dizzy and to spill that much. A thief as well as a liar, she thought sadly, but she would not speak ill of the dead. She motioned with her hand, and the men lifted the body.
Elizabeth returned the lantern and started away, then turned back. “Where is his lute?” she inquired. “Did it not fall with him? But I heard him playing it even after …” Despite the heavier rain, she paused, frowning. That music she had heard after the thud and muffled cry, which must have been Geoffrey going over the edge, could have been the sounds made by the wind on those humming old weather vanes.
“Meg, to me,” she called to her herb girl. The slumped, pale-faced redhead sniffled and wiped her nose on her sleeve. However much Meg resembled her sovereign physically, Elizabeth thought, Meg Milligrew was hard-pressed to emulate queenly carriage and control.
“Your Grace,” Meg began, “I regret I didn’t tell you about his wife, but he begged me not t—”
“Not that. I want you to go up with Ned on the parapet where Geoffrey played across from my window and fetch his lute out of the rain. Dry it off and bring to it me tomorrow, as it was my gift to him. And I shall send coin to his widow, so do not fret for that. I am not some heartless harpy, though your face seems to say so.”
“Oh, it’s not that, Your Majesty. I mean, I don’t ever think that of you. It’s just”—she lowered her voice and glanced around—“when do you want to call a covert meeting of those of us who helped you solve the murders before? You know,” she pursued when Elizabeth looked past her to see if Robin was coming this way, “to find out who killed him.”
Elizabeth looked back at the girl. “Who killed him? I said the man got literally tipsy and killed himself with a tragic and careless fall. Look at the proofs, if you must. It was an accident.”
“But that’s not sack spilled on him, and that’s all he ever drank. It smells like malmsey, your own favorite.…”
“My father’s favorite,” Elizabeth muttered. “It did indeed smell like sweet malmsey. If Geoffrey’s been into my stores of wine, that’s another strike against him. Now fetch Ned and find that lute.”
Robin joined the queen and her women as Meg scurried off. “Things are cared for as you ordered,” he told her, takin
g her arm and escorting her back into the palace. “A sad business, the sudden death of one so young, skilled, and promising. It could not be suicide, I take it?”
Elizabeth sighed heavily. “I believe not and did not summon servants or counselors alike out into this dark and rain to create rumor or myth about the poor wretch’s accident.”
“Ah. Well, at least this gives me the opportunity to see how fetching you look in that robe.”
“Not tonight, Robin. The man’s loss is a loss to me.”
“If you grieve for him, he is blessed. Will you grieve for me if I leave tomorrow for Cumnor for a few days? You know Amy hasn’t seen me in weeks, and I worry for her health. Or will you tell me again,” he said, and she saw his gaze catch lantern light to glitter over her, “that you cannot spare your Robin, your eyes?” Elizabeth had more than one pet name for him, but the latter had always amused him. He’d taken to signing notes or letters to her with two dots inside circles to show he served as an observer for her, a second vision of the court and country, as it were.
“Tomorrow?” she said. “I thought you wanted me to ride to Mortlake with you to meet your brilliant Dr. Dee.”
“But you said you had business since Cecil has returned to crack his whip,” he countered quickly.
“I am the only one who cracks the whip here,” she declared. She pulled her elbow free from his hand as she started up the stairs toward the royal apartments with Kat and Mary still in tow. “You may, of course, go to Cumnor to visit—after we make our own visit to Dr. Dee.”
“As you wish, my queen,” he said, catching up with her.
“ ’S blood, I need something to cheer and divert myself tomorrow, as the other lutenists have ham hocks for hands compared to Geoffrey’s fine ones,” she went on, gesturing broadly. “I’ll never find a decent replacement for him until we’re back in London this autumn. Though it appears at the last Geoffrey was a sneak and scoundrel, I shall miss the man. Robin,” she added, seizing his wrists, whispering now, “don’t you ever turn sneak and scoundrel. Don’t ever make me learn things I mislike about you.”
