The Fyre Mirror: An Elizabeth I Mystery: 1 (Elizabeth I Mysteries)

by Karen Harper

  “A fire among the tents! I’ve sent men out with water buckets to help fight it—fire, like a flaming torch!”

  “Then let us go out and be sure no one is hurt,” she cried, and lifted her skirts to break into a fast walk. “Pray God it doesn’t spread, as those tents are cheek by jowl.”

  “I hear not, but they say the cries were dreadful.”

  “What cries?” she asked as she rushed from the inner courtyard to the outer, with Arundel and her ladies behind.

  “They say one of your artists was trapped in a tent,” he told her, gasping for breath.

  Elizabeth of England left him and the women in her wake as she hiked her skirts higher and broke into a dead run.

  Chapter the Second

  OUTSIDE THE PALACE GATE, ELIZABETH TURNED RIGHT and ran toward the haphazardly pitched white canvas tents. From the far fringe of the encampment, she could see and smell smoke.

  The immediate area seemed deserted. Trailed by Arundel and her women, she tore down a zigzag grass path, avoiding tables set outside the open-flapped tents. Ribbons fluttered in the breeze on tent poles; here and there were remnants of last night’s revels, a dropped tankard, spilled food, an overturned bench or stool, a cold cook fire.

  She saw everyone had gone where she surmised. Courtiers and servants stood in a circle, gaping at a collapsed, blackened tent. It was the only one, as far as she could tell, which had been engulfed in flames, though others near it looked soot-stained. The grass in an oval around the ruin lay burned and black. The tent had been pitched on the outer edge of the encampment in the meadow about fifty paces before the thick trees of the hunt park began.

  Though several men heaved useless buckets of wash water on the charred, sodden mass of canvas, it still smoked. One man tried to lift the edge of the tent with a lance, as if someone inside could yet escape the collapsed weight of devastation. Women shrieked or cried. Someone began a dreadful wail as if she were a professional mourner in a funeral procession.

  “Let me pass!” Elizabeth commanded, though her voice was tremulous and she was panting.

  People gasped to see her and parted as if she were Moses at the Red Sea. The first face that emerged from the blur of horrified countenances was that of her longtime guard and groom, Stephen Jenks. Though Jenks’s wit was mostly for horses, he was ever loyal, and she trusted the brawny man with her life. She realized it was Jenks who had pried two of the tent poles from the ground and tried to lift the canvas with a lance in an obviously doomed effort to allow those inside an escape route.

  “Jenks! Who?” she demanded.

  Still squatting, then going to one knee before her, he said, “It was the artist with the boy—”

  “Not Gil!” she shrieked.

  “No, your painter Will Kendale and his lad Niles who mixes his paints and all,” Jenks got out before Robin Dudley, Earl of Leicester, stepped between them.

  Where had Robin suddenly appeared from? She always picked him out, even in a crowd. Now she noted other individuals, some with soot- or tear-streaked faces. But for the two distraught artists, Lavina and Heatherley, who stood in her line of sight, surely not many of these people had known Master Kendale. Since he had recently come to court, her people must be reacting to the sheer horror of this. Her own stomach roiled as she fought to keep control.

  Robin’s voice was much quieter and calmer than Jenks’s had been. “Yes, Your Grace, it’s Kendale’s tent. His servant Niles was also evidently trapped inside, his artist’s aide, cook, and, ah—body servant,” he added, and lifted a sleek eyebrow at those last two words as if to insinuate something she didn’t even want to contemplate.

  “According to Lord Arundel, there were screams,” she said. “If they were awake and aware, why did they not escape?”

  “Yes, my man told me dreadful screams,” Arundel repeated, for he’d now caught up with her and had pushed his way through the crowd. He was sucking in great breaths and holding his side as if he had a stitch in it. “But then, evidently,” he went on, “either the fire or the choking smoke silenced them. The tent must have gone up quickly.” Arundel began hacking into his hand.

  Despite his coughing fit, others now stood silent, staring at the tomb of two lives snuffed out within. Again the queen fought to keep from vomiting. The odor of charred flesh emerged from the mass as surely as some strange, acrid scent she could not place.

  Her knees went weak with relief when she glimpsed Gil’s frightened face in the crowd. Thank God he was safe. Like the child he had once been, he waved to her, then signaled with quick hand gestures, I was in that tent last night. No one but one man, one boy there last night.

  At least Gil had not stayed with Kendale and Niles, but had probably been with Jenks or Ned Topside. She must question the boy about it all later. She shuddered and took Robin’s arm to steady her weak knees, but it was her trustworthy Jenks who thought to fetch a stool for her.

  “Your Grace must surely want to go back in now,” another voice behind her said as she sank onto the seat. Cecil had appeared from the palace. “Arundel, Leicester, and I,” he went on, “can see to the removal of the bodies, the clearing up of all this.”

  “Yes,” she said, and her voice rose, “the clearing up of this, indeed. My lords, send everyone back to their tents and tell them to guard their cook fires. We will hold a memorial service in the chapel later today. I will go inside the palace soon but not quite yet.”

  The three men hovering over her exchanged swift glances. Robin, the love of her life, though she prayed he did not know it, had never gotten on with the other two older, more conservative men. Nor was her indispensable Cecil liked or appreciated by Arundel, for the aristocratic earl felt Cecil was a pushy “new dealer” whom she heeded far too much. Still, at least when any sort of upheaval threatened, her triumvirate of close advisers managed to work together for queen and country.

  “Yes, Your Grace, anything to help,” Robin said, and began to urge the curious onlookers away. She heard him even mention the cook-fire explanation she had put forth, though she wasn’t sure that was the cause of the conflagration. After all, artists carted about with them all sorts of oils, resins, and strangely concocted paints and powders. It might have been an accident.

  She was not surprised to see Cecil still at her side. “Your Grace,” he said, his voice low as he bent down, “Dr. John Dee arrived just after dawn with his new wife. He’s come from Mortlake with news for you. I had planned to meet with him in my chambers just now. If you wish, I shall remain here while you see him, as it’s best you not sit out in the open here—like this. With this smell and the bodies in there, it isn’t seemly.”

  “Seemly?” she cracked out, glaring up at him, though she had to look directly into the sun. “I will be the one in this realm to say what is seemly, my lord. If you had your way, it would not be seemly that I rule without a husband or heir. What is seemly is to look into this, just to be certain it was an accident.”

  “If you mean to inquire into this tragedy, can you not do so from within the palace?” he argued quietly, not budging.

  “Cecil,” she said, her tone more tempered as she stared back at the fatal tent, “I shall go inside only if you and Jenks remain here as witnesses and report forthwith to me every detail, however dreadful. And place all the evidence of these dire events under lock and key inside the palace—the tent, its contents, however charred, except the corpses, after they are examined. I shall go inside and ask Dr. Dee to view the bodies. He may not be a medical doctor, but he is a learned, brilliant man, and I value his advice.” She lowered her voice even more. “And if I must, I shall convene my covert Privy Plot Council just to rule out any sort of foul play.”

  “Forgive me, Your Grace,” Jenks put in, stepping between her and the ruins and doffing his cap in his blackened hands, “but I’d wager foul play for certain. See,” he rushed on, gesturing, “I only tried to lift the bottom of the tent canvas to let them out after I saw the entry flaps were tied tight shut.”<
br />
  “You mean secured from the inside of the tent for the night?”

  “Oh, no, Your Grace,’cause I couldn’t have seen the ties then. If the ropes for the flaps aren’t all burned up under this mess, I think we’ll find them tied—even knotted—from the outside, not within.”

  From the outside, not within. Elizabeth kept hearing Jenks’s words as she went inside the palace and headed toward her second-floor apartments. “From the outside, not within,” she whispered.

  Had someone deliberately pulled the tent lacings—by which the flaps could be secured from the inside—to the outside and knotted them, as Jenks claimed he’d seen? She had ordered him and Cecil to be certain that that observation was correct before the bodies were removed and the interior of the tent was examined, and if it was so, to preserve whatever was left of the ties.

  “Clifford, fetch Dr. Dee to me from Secretary Cecil’s chambers,” she told her guard at the door to her apartments. She sent her ladies away and went in through her privy chamber to her bedroom by herself. Only Meg was in the room.

  “I heard what happened, so I’m mixing the strongest-scented elixirs and powders I have, Your Grace,” she told her, fussing with a wooden box of herbs and a pitcher on the table. “Though I couldn’t bear to go out to see the tragedy myself, I know you have a delicate sense of smell and—”

  “But more than that has been thoroughly ravaged today,” Elizabeth finished for her. “Two of my people are dead, under mysterious circumstances, and I’ll not abide it. This is dreadful, as if it were an attack on my painters, and on myself for finally deciding to have my approved likeness completed and made public. Here, let me have some of that stuff and throw the windows open wider, as I smell like smoke myself.”

  “Shall I send for your ladies to help you change your garments?”

  “I just sent them away and have summoned Dr. Dee.”

  “I heard he’s arrived with his new wife, Katherine Constable. She’s a London grocer’s widow, not one with a good dowry, though he’s always needing money, so I hear, but she’s a fetching, younger woman. Didn’t think he was the type to be swayed by all that, he’s so brilliant and all, so deep into examining so many things.”

  “But he is a man,” Elizabeth muttered as Meg dusted her sleeves and bodice with the sweet-smelling powder. The queen exploded in a huge sneeze. It was just as well; she was afraid she’d never get the stench of death out of her nostrils and her head. She took the scented, damp cloth Meg held out to her and rubbed her face and hands with it.

  “If you’re sending for Dr. Dee, is there something, well—that needs study and examining, Your Grace?”

  “As you said, John Dee is skilled in all pursuits,” Elizabeth muttered, giving her the cloth back, then pacing to the window. Already the bearded, black-garbed Dr. Dee was striding across the courtyard, his skullcap perched on his head, his robe billowing out behind him. Yes, his bride, a young blonde who trailed along, was beautiful, willowy and graceful, hurrying to keep up and chattering away at him.

  “Opposites attract,” Elizabeth said as Meg peeked past her shoulder. “I wonder if Dr. Dee ever proved that in his laboratories at Mortlake amidst his experiments with magnets, optical glasses, maps, and cryptic writing.”

  “Mayhap the brilliant doctor won’t be traveling so much anymore then,” Meg said.

  “He will if Cecil sends him at my command.”

  The two figures disappeared below, and the queen sank into a chair behind the table. “Meg, where is that soothing throat elixir? I feel I could spit smoke, but I’m going to probe this tragedy, beginning right now.”

  Despite his forty-two years, John Dee always felt a childlike thrill to be summoned by his queen.

  “But I don’t see why I can’t go with you to meet her now,” his wife of three months, Katherine, coaxed. She pouted prettily and laced her arm through his when they were admitted through the guarded door into the wing with the privy apartments.

  “Because, my dearest, she has summoned me. It’s something, I surmise, about that dreadful, fatal fire this morning.”

  She gasped and tugged back. “But what could you possibly know about that?”

  “Do not fret, my little love. As the Bible says, ‘Do not fret because it only causes harm.’”

  “I haven’t caused any harm! I can’t help worrying that you need to make your way with the queen and keep in her good graces.”

  He noted she managed to match him step for step up the stone staircase, however much shorter her shapely legs. She looked especially young this morning, all flushed with health and life, all passionate for building their future together on the petticoats of the brilliant, powerful queen. And, of course, he had no right to scold his Katherine for wanting to meet Elizabeth Tudor. He himself stood ever in awe of her quick mind, her tenacity to know things, her wide-reaching education, those very things which animated his being.

  “And what would I know about the fire?” he repeated her question. “I’m Her Majesty’s official court philosopher, a man in quest of universal knowledge, so she summons me for advice on many things, my dear, you’ll see.”

  Katherine was always vexed that philosophers at royal courts were paid well on the Continent, but Elizabeth always paid him in books and favors. He never intended to tell his Katherine that books were what he wanted, what he loved almost more than life itself—and now her, of course.

  “Do you think she’ll visit us at Mortlake as she has you before?” she went on. “I mean, I know we wouldn’t be worthy to entertain her there, but you promised I would meet her and—”

  “Katherine, Katherine,” he chided at the top of the staircase. Just ahead—he could tell by the two yeomen guards at the door—lay access to Her Majesty’s privy chambers. “I promise you that you shall meet her soon, and I will indeed invite her to Mortlake.”

  Katherine sighed yet still stomped a foot, which rustled her best gown. She’d insisted on wearing it, though they were coming in by horseback from their Thames-side home at Mortlake, a good six miles distant. They had left shortly after daybreak, and he fully intended to head back to his work after he delivered his message to the queen. And now Her Majesty had suddenly summoned him for reasons of her own. Perhaps the queen’s news wouldn’t wait, but his was burning in his brain too.

  “You’ll wait here, then, my dear?” he asked, patting her hand in the crook of his arm, then bending down to kiss the Cupid’s bow of her lips.

  “If I must. But you must mention to her that she should meet me.”

  “Ah, perhaps the best time to meet her might be later, when she is not so busy and you have had time to change your gown. That one looks a bit dirty. Perhaps you brushed against something in the little walk you took around the palace grounds while I was waiting for Secretary Cecil.”

  “Really? Oh, no! Where?” she cried, pulling at her skirts and turning her head to peer at the back of them. All the while, the two stoic guards at the door didn’t budge, as if they were statues like those in the courtyard below. “Well,” she said, whispering now, “at least you must tell me everything she does and says, and I mean, every word!”

  Sometimes, though John Dee usually had all the answers, he couldn’t help but wonder if his wife hadn’t married him merely to meet the queen.

  Elizabeth’s keen ears picked up voices in the hall. She shifted in her chair and downed the rest of the sweet spearmint elixir Meg had left her. Voices or footsteps, even rustling garments or the creak of boot leather outside her door—she’d never be used to them, never escape the memory of how they used to frighten her. Before she was queen, such sounds had meant spies, trouble, danger. The only noise that used to scare her more was the jingle of keys or their grating in a lock from her terrible time in the Tower.

  She had been certain then that her life could be forfeit because her sister, Mary Tudor, then queen, hated her and could not afford to let her Protestant sister inherit her throne. And now, the great cosmic wheel had turned, and Elizab
eth feared the same of the Catholic Queen Mary of Scots.

  And Elizabeth recalled, sitting up straighter, that the crackle of flames was the other sound that sometimes tormented her dreams. She had pushed a certain memory to the back of her brain, locked it tightly away, but it came back now and again in flashes of fear. Twice, she herself had been trapped in a burning building, once just last year with Cecil and Jenks, during the Yuletide holidays, when the royal boathouse somehow caught fire. Even when she’d discovered who was trying to harm her, the villain had never admitted he’d lit that nearly fatal fire. She supposed it could have been an accident, set by a vagabond trying to keep warm in the wintry weather, one who’d seen what he’d done and had scuttled off into the dark night.

  But it was an earlier blaze that had haunted her since she was thirteen. Not only had she nearly burned alive, but her sister Mary and brother Edward too, the entire hope of the Tudor dynasty. How terribly it had marred such a happy period in their lives, one of the few when they actually felt like a family. But that time, she knew who was at fault, though it was not the one who took the blame, for—

  A knock on a distant door shattered her agonizing. She rose and went from her bedroom into her council chamber and sat again behind the long table there. “Open to me!” she called.

  Her favorite yeoman guard, Clifford, stepped in. “Your Majesty, Dr. John Dee awaits.”

  “He may enter.”

  The tall, bearded man came in and bowed. He looked exactly as he had over a year ago, before he had left on one of his trips to the Continent. The learned man seemed ageless, unchanging. No wonder that during her sister’s reign, some superstitious folk had imprisoned him for being a wizard. After all, Dr. Dee had done everything from appearing to make men fly during theatrical performances to claiming to aspire to universal knowledge, which was surely the realm of only God himself.