The Twylight Tower

by Karen Harper

  “Everyone had best hold on,” Luke announced to the entire barge when he returned to sit at the queen’s feet for the fortieth time. “The barge master says the rain in this area’s been bad and the rapids below are up a bit.”

  Several ladies giggled in anticipation, though Cecil could see no white water ahead. Perhaps it was rocks newly hidden in the swirls that made the danger, for the bottom of the barge bumped and scraped. Cecil saw Dudley immediately seize the queen’s arm to steady her. At least, Cecil thought, the blackguard wouldn’t let her perish in the water, even if he was willy-nilly drowning her reputation.

  A woman screamed. Everyone looked up; some bent over the side.

  “It’s Dove, your lutenist, Your Grace,” Dudley’s sister Mary cried. “Perched on the side, he’s fallen in!”

  “Fetch him out!” Her Majesty shouted, rising to her feet despite the barge tilting on the rock. She shoved several, including Robert, aside to clamber to the back of the barge near where the lad had popped up in the rush of water, still holding his lute. Shivers shook Cecil. Whatever her flaws, the courage of Elizabeth Tudor was magnificent.

  Before her oarsmen or guards could reach an oar to help, Luke jumped off and fought his way through coursing currents to the lad. At first they were swept too far to reach the oars, but Luke half dragged, half swam them toward the barge. Oarsmen towed them in, both sputtering and hacking river water.

  Men cheered, ladies applauded, and Elizabeth leaned over the side to take the lute from Franklin and clap the sopping Luke on the back. She refused to step back even when the two men were hauled over the side and drenched her skirts.

  “I believe, Franklin,” Her Majesty said, “I must indeed let you use Geoffrey’s lute now, as this one will warp.” Mary Sidney threw a swag of satin bunting over the boy and sat him down in the back of the barge. Cecil saw the queen speak to Luke and shuffled closer to hear.

  “You are a good man, Luke Morgan,” Her Majesty said.

  “But Your Grace,” Cecil heard him say, out of breath, “I led you wrong about the lad’s being a eunuch.”

  “What?” she asked as the others made their way back to their places to hold on while the oarsmen got the barge off the rocks. “You could tell when your hands were on him? You could feel he’s not been gelded?”

  “I could feel,” he gasped out, “full breasts that were bandaged tight and popped free under that sopping shirt. Majesty, your he—your eunuch—is a she.”

  Chapter the Sixth

  I have endured pain and travail,

  So much grief and misery

  What must I do for you

  To stand in your good grace?

  With grief my heart is dead

  If it look not on your face.

  — PIERRE ATTAINGNANT

  AFTER THE ROYAL BARGE SWEPT PAST THE palaces of Hampton Court and Oatlands, Meg saw the gray stone mass of Windsor Castle hove into sight with the little town sprawled around its stony skirts. Though the queen liked her other palaces well enough, the lofty view and fresh air of Windsor always brought her back in late summer. Sometimes Her Grace complained the place itself was like to tumble down about her ears, but she had plans to rebuild it when she got the money.

  Peering over the walls sat ornate St. George’s Chapel, where the queen had made Lord Robin a Knight of the Garter in a fancy ceremony Meg had only heard about. Rising above the chapel, the hulk of the old Norman Round Tower frowned down on them all, but right now its heavy brooding could not outdo the queen’s.

  Meg could tell Elizabeth was seething, but she wasn’t sure why. Even when Franklin fell in the river, Her Majesty had been in a soaring mood, glad to see him plucked out. It was only his old lute he’d ruined, but now the queen kept glaring daggers at the bedraggled lad. No, more like it was that the barge had sprung a leak. Most of the men were bailing with hats or even boots, and the queen, like the rest of her ladies, had sopped her skirts and shoes.

  “Franklin,” Meg heard the queen say in a sharp voice, “or what must I call you now?”

  Meg edged closer as Franklin shuffled through the four inches of water to the queen and bowed very low. “In truth, Felicia Dove, Your Gracious Majesty, but I thought if you knew I was really a—”

  “Indeed,” the queen cut him off. “Evidently you deem yourself worthy to do my thinking for me and to dupe me. When we dock, you are to go with Lord Hunsdon and Luke Morgan to Eton and return to court only when I send for you—accompanied by one or the other of those men.”

  “If you please, I can explain, Your Maj—”

  “I do not please. Go write songs about deceivers for that wet, warped lute, if you can!”

  Baron Hunsdon’s man Luke, as if he knew what the queen was ranting about, stepped forward and seemed to take the poor lutenist prisoner. Felicia Dove? Meg thought. And then, when Franklin had to unwrap himself from the satin swag he’d clung to like a shawl, Meg saw that the lad was indeed a maid. Despite the barrier of the lute, the sodden shirt clung to a feminine form.

  Meg gasped at the wench’s trick, crafty as Ned’s turning lads to ladies for the stage with wigs, face paint, and padded breasts. Mercy, thought Meg, the queen had gone about as a lad a time or two herself, so why hadn’t she discovered that ruse? Though, of course, Meg and Ned hadn’t either. Still, she was certain more was expected of queens, and that must be why Her Grace was out of sorts.

  Set between town and castle, the royal barge landing was a bit past the bustling public one. Under a grassy bank where Meg tended the queen’s rose and herb gardens, the palace’s wooden dock soon swarmed with townsfolk who saw the queen’s barge. After her betters had disembarked, Meg clambered out. The queen’s castle steward, a portly man whose name Meg could not recall, greeted Her Majesty with a low bow. The royal litter with carriers awaited her short ride up to the castle. Though it wasn’t far, someone produced horses for Lord Robin and other men to make an escort.

  “A difficult journey, I take it, Your Grace,” the steward intoned, “but we can no doubt repair the barge.”

  “Do so, but also send for another back in London,” the queen clipped out, settling herself in her litter with Lord Robin’s helping hand. “And,” she said, speaking loudly enough for everyone on the landing to hear, including the barge crew, “order new oarsmen sent with it who know how to keep me off the rocks, hidden or not.”

  Meg’s insides cartwheeled. Not only were the poor oarsmen shamed and dismayed, but Felicia Dove was also downcast. Her Grace’s command could hurt Meg too. Meg’s estranged husband was an oarsman in London, and she’d told the queen not one thing about him—not even that she’d been wed before she lost her memory.

  Meg had learned of him in London and seen him too, close-up, the ruffian. So every time new rowers were hired for the royal barges, Meg shuddered to think one might be Ben Wilton, come to work for Her Majesty. He would see Meg, whose name had once been Sarah Scutea, and claim his wayward wife. And what if, like Felicia Dove, Meg thought as she hurried to keep up on foot with the queen’s entourage, the queen cast her off for lying? If she ever had to stop being Meg Milligrew and leave Elizabeth Tudor, she’d just as soon throw herself off a tower, maybe like poor Geoffrey’d done.

  As Meg hurried through the King Henry VIII gateway of the palace, she glanced up to see fierce gargoyles glaring down at her.

  ELIZABETH ORDERED A CANDLELIGHT SERVICE THAT EVEning in St. George’s Chapel in gratitude for her safe deliverance on the river. She sat in the first row between Robin and her cousin Harry, staring at the altar, hardly hearing what the minister said. However much she loved this ornate, gilded, and carved place, which lifted hearts to heaven with its soaring arches and spires, she could not help but stare at the high altar. The black-and-white tiled floor before it seemed to shift and shudder in flickering light as a thunderstorm rumbled into the valley outside.

  For beneath the tile and stone, interred in lead caskets, lay her father and his third queen, Jane Seymour. Somehow, whatever sermo
nizing tone the current cleric took, in her ears it always turned to her father’s outrage at something she had done amiss.

  You shall not speak of your mother in my presence! he had thundered once and stomped toward Elizabeth, favoring his sore tree trunk of a leg. Be grateful, girl, you are not declared bastard again! You and your sister had best learn to hold your tongues and tend to your brother’s wants, as he shall rule here after me, not a weakling in petticoats. No woman shall sit on this throne without a man to guide her, is that not right, my darling Tudor rose?

  He’d softened then as he turned to beam at his young fifth wife, Catherine Howard. He’d not gone closer to Elizabeth but chucked his Catherine under the chin while she giggled and preened. And then the silly chit had trusted him and, worse, trusted a young, dashing paramour and got her head cut off for following her heart.

  Elizabeth jolted back to reality as Robin shifted in his seat beside her, bumping her skirts. She forced her brain back to the sermon from the Old Testament about King David.

  “And David saw and coveted a married woman, wife of his trusted soldier Uriah. ‘And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.’ And the monarch sent Uriah,” the elderly minister went on, “to be killed in battle so that he might possess another man’s wife.”

  Again Robin shifted sharply beside her. Elizabeth heard whispers, mayhap even titters farther back in the congregation of courtiers. Her quick mind closed on the sermon like a trap: Did this man dare to imply she, as monarch, was acting in like manner? Did her own people believe she would dare to possess Robin and rid herself of his spouse?

  The queen stood. “Leave off, man!” she shouted at the cleric, who jumped back so far he almost tumbled off his lofty lectern. “You have preached too long and too far.”

  She turned to walk out. Her father had done such when the Papists preached against his will. She needed not some pious insult about her and Robin. This preacher would find himself lecturing the northern sheep of her realm next week, indeed he would!

  The queen did not glance behind her until she left the long aisle of the chapel. Her ladies followed her out in disarray and Robin, bless him, sat still and rose slowly, as if the message had naught to do with him at all.

  THE NEXT MORNING ELIZABETH WALKED OUTSIDE ON THE north terrace with her ladies to survey her favorite lofty view of parks and woodland below. She’d rather be hunting, but she had promised Cecil an hour for business and had also sent for that two-faced liar, Franklin, alias Felicia Dove. First he—she—had claimed to be a lad, then admitted to being a eunuch, but had turned out to be a woman.

  “ ’S blood!” Elizabeth muttered, and did not deign to explain herself when several of her ladies asked if she were in pain. It vexed her too that Robin was packing to go to London to try to cozen the Spanish ambassador on her behalf—and she was the one who would miss him. And if it weren’t for her sister Queen Mary being besotted by her husband, King Philip of Spain, the money to repair this terrace would not have been squandered on a damned Spanish war. Planks and rails, some decaying, covered the earth and stones at the top of the escarpment and made footing a bit slippery, however lovely the blue-green vista below.

  “Your Grace,” her cousin Harry called to her. Both he and Luke Morgan joined her, with the lutenist between them as if she were some vile state prisoner. “You wished to see Mistress Dove.”

  Despite the muddy wooden walk and the fact she was finally garbed as a girl, Felicia went down on both knees and stayed there. She was quite a fetching female, slender as was the style.

  “Rise and walk with me,” the queen ordered, treading the very edge of the terrace, turning away to overlook the stretch of vibrant scene again. “Well,” she said when Felicia stood at her side, shaking soil from her gray skirts, “is there some excuse, some explanation?”

  “Aye, Your Gracious Majesty. I feared you’d never take a mere lass in, not on a lute. ’Tisn’t done, no more than wenches on the stage, and I so longed—”

  “Women play the lute and sing in their own homes,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I play passably well, but not in public.”

  “You play very well, Your Majesty, and I was thrilled you asked me for a bit of further instruction. You see, I knew the music was God’s gift to me and I yearned to play for you, to know you, to just be near you, a woman who is queen in her own right, and that is not done either, as e’en your royal sister was wed.”

  Elizabeth’s temper flared again, but this was not Cecil in some you-must-wed harangue. “Well said, Felicia,” she admitted. “It is Felicia, with no more surprises, is it not?”

  “Oh, yes, Your Grace. If I can no longer play in your gallery with the men, can I not be your privy player and—”

  “I have not decided,” Elizabeth interrupted, turning to study the girl’s eager face. “I will not—cannot—abide those who deal treacherously with me, not a lutenist, not the highest peer in the realm, not the dearest friend. I had friends who lied to me the very month I was crowned, the Haringtons, and they are yet cooling their heels in the country out of my sight.”

  She saw that revelation startled Felicia. Elizabeth bit her lower lip and glanced away again, remembering how she had sent her dear friend Bella and her Lord John into rural exile. She longed to summon them back. Yes, perhaps it was time. With these unfair rumors about her and Robert flying hither and yon, she needed all the friends she could grapple to her.

  “Your Majesty?” Felicia broke into her thoughts, sounding even more shaken now. “I admire you greatly. I am so honored to be at your court, so please do not send me back to oblivion.”

  “Not to oblivion, girl, but you cannot get off scot-free for such deceptions, and you will remain in Lord Hunsdon’s household until I send for you again. He has a soft spot for brilliant talent and, no doubt, a lute or two for you to practice on there. Practice hard— lute playing and truth telling—and mayhap I shall decide to trust you again.”

  Tears puddled in the girl’s eyes, and her face flushed. She gripped her hands together so hard in supplication that those skilled fingers turned white as sausages.

  “Will you argue more?” Elizabeth challenged, sensing anger battled with the girl’s shame. “N-no, Your Majesty.”

  “What has saved you, Felicia, is your clever point that you dared only to do what I have done in my own realm. We’ll show them, won’t we, those men who say a woman cannot play in public, cannot rule?”

  “I MUST REPORT,” CECIL INTONED AS THEY SAT AT A TABLE in the withdrawing room where he’d finally gotten the queen off alone to attend to business, “an affair of state that I believe will not please you.” When she looked up from the pile of papers, frowning, he added hastily, “Bishop de Quadra has followed us to Windsor.”

  “He has?” Elizabeth cried, breaking into a smile and clapping her hands, astounding Cecil. “He’s here? Then I must stop Robert’s plans to go to London.”

  She jumped up from the table with the top document only half-signed. She threw her quill down, spattering ink.

  “Lord Robert was going to London to see de Quadra?” Cecil asked. “On what business? I thought the bishop annoyed you, and why send Dudley?”

  As she ran from the room, he cursed and hit his fist on the pile of papers. He gathered his work, refusing to sit here waiting while the queen of England bounded after a married man like some tavern doxy. On his way out, he ran nearly headlong into de Quadra on his way in.

  “She’s not here,” Cecil muttered as de Quadra wheeled about and fell into step beside him down the long gallery.

  “In other words, you told her I was coming,” the man said with a hint of a grim grin.

  Cecil almost chuckled despite his frustration with the queen.

  “I hear she’s been in a mercurial mood for days,” de Quadra continued, as careful as Cecil not to talk when they passe
d clusters of courtiers in the hall.

  “To put it mildly.”

  “Even banished that brilliant new lutenist she was so enamored of,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Cecil tried not to act surprised at the depth and breadth of the Spaniard’s knowledge of the queen. “Your eyes and ears here keep you apprised of the most minute details, bishop. Or should I ask instead if you have some other, special interest in the lutenist?”

  “Now that he has been found a she, you mean?” he parried. “Why, my Lord Cecil, do you suggest I covet the girl? I tell you, I do not take my vow of chastity that lightly.”

  “I meant, bishop, that my eyes and ears tell me that your eyes and ears are someone close to the queen, so why not a lutenist?”

  “But a woman? Like Eve in the garden, as I hear Lord Robert called the queen, women are too fickle and untrustworthy. Best guess again.”

  They exchanged wary yet bemused looks of admiration. But Cecil’s observations of the so-called Dove of the lute had convinced him, at least, that the lass was a survivor and a clever one at that. Chameleons who could change their skin and story and had fire in their fingertips and in their belly always were. After all, that was how Elizabeth had survived to claim her crown.

  FELICIA DOVE, USING A BORROWED LUTE SHE’D NEVER SO much as seen before, played for Lord Hunsdon while he ate a little venison stew and drank a great deal of Burgundy wine that evening at his small leased house at Eton. The tiny college town was just upriver from Windsor, where Felicia longed to be.