by Karen Harper
They spoke of all else Robert had said when with no warning, the door to the room banged open. As they both shot upright, Cecil jumped in front of the queen, his hand going for the sword he realized he didn’t have. But it was Kat, out of breath.
“Oh, lovey,” she said to the queen, coming toward them, “I’ve solved the mystery of who has been wearing your clothes and impersonating you.”
“Katherine Grey, or is Hester Harington back?” the queen cried, rushing to Kat.
“I know you kept her partly because she looked like you and Ned trained her to speak like you, but now—without permission—she’s … she’s trying to become you! I saw Meg Milligrew traipsing back to the castle in your clothes and then saw her take them back to the royal wardrobe. Your blue velvet cloak and jade-green skirt and sleeves with heavy ruching and the salmon sleeves, you know the ones. Oh, lovey, surely it wasn’t Meg Milligrew harmed those other men for serving you, for I thought Geoffrey was her friend.”
“Where is she now?” Elizabeth demanded.
“Gone to her room and taken to her bed again. I followed her there and peeked in.”
“Sit down and rest, my Kat, but first send a guard to bring Meg to me. My Lord Cecil, I have tired you out, I fear,” she said, turning back to him as Kat obeyed, “so you may go if you wish.”
“I will stay, if that’s permissible, Your Grace. I want to hear the upshot of this too. I’ve been racking my brain to find who, close to you and unassuming, could be spying in your court for the illustrious new Spanish ambassador.”
“De Quadra? ’S blood, we knew from the first not to trust him. It can’t be Meg, can’t be,” Elizabeth whispered, but he saw her backbone stiffen, and he backed off across the room to a safer seat.
“IT IS THE WONDER OF THE AGE THAT THIS OBSERVATION glass brings things up so close and clear,” Ned whispered as he and Jenks took turns with Dr. Dee’s device from their night hiding place up in the old tower overlooking Cumnor House.
“They ought to call it a spyglass,” Jenks said as he moved it to gaze from window to window.
Ned, itching to take the device back, now had a fairly good idea of the layout of the downstairs of the house. They had crept around the grounds and, keeping their distance, peered though windows with the observation glass. They’d even glimpsed the fatal staircase, short and shallow as it was from a landing that evidently divided it into two flights, a “pair of stairs” most folks called them.
It was a warm enough night that no one had closed draperies, so they’d glimpsed lighted activity within and had also identified where the various people lived in the chambers across the backside of the manor house. It seemed that Amy Dudley’s rooms were on the eastern side—a nervous-looking woman who was probably her maid, Mrs. Pirto, paced in a large chamber there, and an old woman, who was probably Mrs. Owens, King Henry VIII’s doctor’s widow, appeared to have the western set of windows.
Anthony Forster and his family evidently lived in the building’s only wing, so he and Jenks could perhaps eavesdrop on them if they wanted to risk it. Too bad the queen had told them to steer clear because, of course, by affecting varied personas and voices, Ned was certain he could pry a great deal of valuable information out of the players in this tragedy.
“This is as close as we’re getting,” Jenks whispered, as if he’d read Ned’s mind, “or Bess will have our heads. One wrong move where someone links us to her, and people’s tongues will start wagging again. I won’t have them saying she has something to do with it, though I can see them pointing a finger at Lord Robert.”
“Since kings and queens get the praise, it’s only right they sometimes take the blame,” Ned muttered. “It will be our Bess’s challenge over the years to see it’s much more praise than blame. Here, give that back a minute!”
The light had gone out in old lady Owens’s rooms, but Ned was certain she stood now at the window, a pale ghostly form in white. That is, if Amy’s spirit wasn’t haunting the place already like any self-respecting ghost in an English castle or manor should. Surely a lamp from the house had not caught the glint of this glass to warn old lady Owens—no, her eyes couldn’t be that sharp. And Mrs. Pirto was still pacing, so she didn’t suspect a thing either. Ned wondered if Dr. Dee fully grasped that he could elevate the art of spying with this leather and glass tube and those little signal mirrors. They each carried one of them in a pouch slung over their shoulders because they didn’t dare to leave them back in their camp in the woods.
“Too bad we can’t stay tomorrow to watch the goings-on from this perch,” Jenks said.
“We could get trapped up here, though it doesn’t look like this tower’s ever used. Let’s go. Tomorrow at first light, we’ll watch from the woods, then search the forest for a possible camp. After all, there is a slight chance Felicia and Fletcher—”
“And Firkin—”
“—might still be about. There’s no other good place where they could have hidden close by, we’ve seen that. Here, I’ll carry the glass, and let’s watch those crumbling steps.”
They edged slowly down, creeping from stair to stair, sometimes sitting, feeling their way, helping each other in the blackness. Too bad, Ned thought, Amy Dudley hadn’t been this careful in the house, because she could have saved them all a lot of bother.
WHEN ONE OF THE QUEEN’S GUARDS ROUSED MEG FROM her bed, she prayed that Her Grace only had the need for more curing herbs. But when she saw the look on the royal face, she knew it wasn’t that. She immediately felt more nauseated than facing Ben had made her.
“You’ve been seen outside wearing my clothing, Meg,” the queen clipped out, “evidently impersonating me without my command or permission.” Her Majesty sat in her high-backed chair, while Cecil and Kat stood by the dark windows. Cecil’s presence made Meg doubly apprehensive. “Don’t just stand there gaping,” the queen said. “Why, girl?”
“I—I haven’t felt well, Your Grace.”
“I am aware of that. So are you implying your stomach complaints have affected your brain, to make you take my clothes and go outside in them? Or are you claiming forgetfulness, as you did when you came into my aunt’s employ to meet me the first time?”
“No, but what does the Lady Mary Boleyn have to do with this? It’s just that today, Your Grace, I had to see someone, someone who would listen to me more if I looked fine.”
“And that person was …?”
Covering her face with both hands, Meg burst into tears. She was doomed. The queen would brook no excuse, no lie, nor was there one that Kat or Cecil could not ferret out and expose. She saw no other path but to throw herself on the queen’s mercy and tell her about Ben. Her Majesty might be angry every time one of her ladies went behind her back to see a man, but— queen’s double or not—Meg knew she was only the herb girl. Besides, she tried to buck herself up, Her Majesty hadn’t wanted to be married either and had said more than once she didn’t trust men.
Meg fell to her knees, her head down. “It’s Sarah Scutea keeps getting me in deep distress, Your Grace, not Meg Milligrew.”
“Lift your head, as I cannot hear you when you talk to my feet, not with that work on the roof this late. But you told me you had renounced your previous name and life.”
Meg gaped up at her. “I wanted to, Your Grace,” she said, raising her voice. Yet she didn’t dare to look the queen in the eyes. Remembering Ned said a good way to avoid stage fright was to look slightly past a person or over the heads of the audience, she tried that.
“Before my—her—mother died in London and while you let me nurse her, I found out I—Sarah Scutea—was wed to a rough, hard man, one Ben Wilton, a bargeman and a bridge shooter.”
The queen leaned closer, gripping the arms of her chair so hard her long fingers went white. “Wed? You are wed? And you’ve known this nearly two years? You’ve been hiding a husband from me for nearly two years?” Her shrill voice rose to a shriek.
“But I couldn’t remember him—couldn’t love
him. I—I told you I’m not Sarah.”
“But you’ve known all this time. So the person you went out dressed as your queen to see was …”
“He’s here with your latest crew of bargemen, Your Grace, brought in from London when the others put you on the rocks. He’s a brutal man, I heard, and I cannot bear to—”
“Then you should have come to me months ago,” the queen cried, flinging wild gestures. “I will no longer be accused by anyone at any level of keeping husbands and wives apart! This Ben no doubt would have you, if he had been at least told his wife was back from the dead.”
Meg saw Kat had come closer, slack jawed in shock, though Cecil wisely kept his distance. “But—please, Your Grace, I’ve sent him away happy and none the wiser with some coins and a letter. And he doesn’t know I’m back and alive, since he thought I was you.”
“What letter, if you do not want him to know of you?”
Meg gazed up in sick awe at her queen. She had risen and loomed over her, a face carved from white marble with flashing eyes.
“I—in your name—I asked him to return to London to do his job there and praised him too.”
“But what letter? I must tell you, when I summoned you here tonight, I feared that you might have betrayed me—politically as well as personally—and be spying for some foreign power. After all, Sarah Scutea is the daughter of Spanish-bred loyalists of my sister’s Catholic cause. Have you played me for a fool all these years when I trusted you too? And now I learn you are sending letters by some bargeman into London. De Quadra is still in London, I believe, my Lord Cecil?” she demanded, turning toward him so fast her skirts swooshed across Meg’s tear-streaked face.
This was pure nightmare, Meg thought, worse than the one with Ben. Her beloved queen was now talking of spies, and that meant prison or worse. She had forged the queen’s name, though not for some evil cause. But fears of torment or prison were only slightly worse than being forced to return to Ben Wilton as his wife, she was sure of that.
“I wrote him a short note on a piece of your parchment, Your Grace,” she continued her confession, the volume of her voice amazingly picking up as she went. “I signed your name—”
“You know better than forgery, girl,” Kat interjected.
“Actually,” Cecil cut in, “considering it’s the queen’s name, it’s treason.”
“I cannot abide such deceit,” the queen went on, ignoring them both. “Even if you have not betrayed me to an enemy, you have made yourself my enemy by not trusting me with the truth. ’S bones, I’d have thought people learned their lesson when I sent the Haringtons away. I am going to have you confined until my Lord Cecil questions this Ben Wilton and then …”
The queen’s voice faded as a dark shroud wrapped tighter and tighter around Meg’s thoughts. The noise from the roof, the pounding of her heart … Then everything just stopped as Meg hit the floor.
IN THE SHORT STRETCH OF TIME BETWEEN DAWN AND daylight on the morrow, Ned and Jenks had scoured the woods within a half-mile of Cumnor House, reasoning that if Felicia-Hester and Edmund Fletcher had stayed in the area, they would not have risked residing with anyone or even staying at an inn. They had found the remnants of several camps and the skeletons of two fairly fresh campfires in the woods, but nothing that pointed to their prey.
While Jenks, who had better skills in tracking anyway, continued to survey the area, Ned tied his horse to a tree near Cumnor House. Wishing he had brought the observation glass, which was back in Jenks’s saddlepack, he at least had one of the signal mirrors with him. If one or the other of them located something important, they had found they could play sunlight from these off the side of the tower that faced away from the house. Every so often, Ned glanced up at the lofty ruins but saw no flash of light from Jenks yet. He took his mirror from its pack so that he would have it at hand if he needed it.
He crept closer to the manor house. The place lured him, as if it were a massive stage where a great drama had just been played out. Even the old, sunken graveyard and the half-toppled tower would make fine scenery. He imagined he could see each actor, especially the tragic heroine on her knees, hands clasped, giving her “deliver me from desperation” speech the Scotsman had mentioned. And of course the scene with the horrified denizens of Cumnor returning on a lovely Sabbath, laughing from the fair at Abingdon, only to shriek in dread at the sight of the corpse, before they expounded great speeches on the frailty of life. Someday mayhap he’d do that very play, though not for the queen and Lord Robert, that was certain.
Ned startled from his grand musings as a character—the doctor’s old widow—entered from around the house, leaning on a carved stick. His pulse pounded. She was alone and slowly, unsteadily coming this way as if it were fate he too should enter the scene to speak circumspectly with her. The queen had said not to meddle, but who knows what valuable proofs this old beldam might have to throw light upon the plot?
Ned strolled her way, hoping he appeared nonchalant. He got so close without any reaction on her part that he realized she, like the old woman who had provided the ladder in Eton for Felicia’s escape, did not see well. Hell’s gates, then she’d not be one whit of help either.
“Who’s there?” she called, her voice scratchy. “Halt, for I can hear you.”
“Just a peddler passing through, milady,” he said, using a warm, friendly Kentish accent.
“A peddler and not another gawker?”
“A gawker at what?”
“What kind of peddler, young man?”
He walked slowly closer. “Of, ah, mirrors, milady. See?” he said, and held the glass close to her face to test her eyes.
“A peddler who doesn’t know what happened here,” she said, tut-tutting. She put a parchment-skinned hand to the mirror and brought it closer to her face while Ned still held it. “Then you are new here and just passing through?”
“That’s right, milady.”
“Bah, nothing’s right anymore. Have you not heard of Lord Robert Dudley’s lady wife being dead of a fall?”
“Yes, but—you mean, it was near here?” he asked, pleased by the rising tenor of his voice.
“This very house, just down the hall from me—two doors,” she said with a decisive nod. “The coroner and his jury asked me if I saw anything, but I didn’t. Nor did I hear her scream, as they asked that too.”
Ned figured, since this was going nowhere, he’d best make a smooth exit. “I must be on my way, milady. Got to make a living, you know,” he said, and stepped back.
“I couldn’t tell them a thing about hearing poor Amy stumble down the stairs either—two sets of eight each I take very slowly and always count—or when she hit at the bottom. You wouldn’t think eight stairs enough to take a fatal fall, would you? My hearing’s good, but I must have dozed off then.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, still edging toward the wood. If Jenks saw he was talking to one of the household, he might tell the queen he’d disobeyed her orders and then there’d be hell to pay.
“You know, they didn’t ask about the music, though,” she said almost to herself, shaking her capped, white head. “But then, I kept dozing off and it might have just been in my head—from my days at the king’s court, you know, always fine lutenists about in the old days.”
Ned froze in his tracks. “You heard music?” Ned asked, turning back. “Lute music?”
“Probably not. But lutes were always my favorite, so sweet and soft.”
Ned wasn’t sure what parting he made with her, for he ran for the fringe of forest and frantically signaled to Jenks before he realized he was only matching another darting dot of light on the tower. Whatever Jenks had found within those woods, Ned was sure he could top him now.
MEG MILLIGREW KNEW HER LIFE WAS OVER WHEN SHE woke in the morning. Bella Harington had brought to the room where she was being held her clothes wrapped in a blanket, a purse with coins, and a wooden chest into which someone had stuffed samples of most of her herbs.
&
nbsp; “I grieve for you,” Bella had whispered, and squeezed her arm. “I know what it is to be sent away from her for—for deceits. Above all, Her Majesty must have those she can trust and who trust her in her care.”
Meg wanted to beg to see Her Grace again, but she was too numb to talk and the big lump on her forehead throbbed from where she’d fainted to the floor. She thought of poor Catherine Howard’s ghost at Hampton Court, which—even when the queen’s court was in residence there—ran down the hall at night to try to get past King Henry’s guards so she could beg for her life. But the guards hadn’t let her pass. Screaming her false innocence, like her ghost still did, the queen had been arrested, tried, and beheaded. At least Meg Milligrew was just being condemned to marriage with Ben Wilton back in London, she tried to tell herself.
This all seemed so unreal now, the days she had spent with Elizabeth Tudor when she was princess and now queen. What a heady brew was the awe and thrill and challenge and joy of being her herbalist, even her friend. Dear Kat had mothered Meg just as she had the queen. Meg would miss Jenks and—Ned. Ned was not even here to bid her farewell, and when he heard that she’d been wed all these years, would he even pity her a little bit? So stuck on himself, would he ever know how her heart had flown when he so much as looked at her? Like being near the queen, when Meg breathed his air, she soared.
She sat slumped on the cot in the dim room, as if waiting for the executioner. But Bella had explained that Cecil had spoken with Ben Wilton and had cleared her of any possible treason. Meg shrugged. What did it matter now if Ben beat or abused her? What did it matter when the dream of one’s dreary life—a dream that had come true for a time—was gone?
She stood to face Ben when he came in.
“They said—the queen’s woman said,” he began, twisting his hat in his big hands as he studied her suspiciously, “that you got kicked in the head. And you din’t know who you was for a long time and still don’t recall much, Sarah.”
