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

by Karen Harper

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Certain to please fans of historical mysteries. Harper’s careful plotting and keen historical eye render this a true delight to read. Best of all, though, is Harper’s characterization of Elizabeth and her detecting acumen…What better way to spend wintry weekends than in catching up on the previous novels in this series, starting with The Poyson Garden.”

  —Mystery Lovers Bookshop

  The Queene’s Christmas

  “An excellent historical series.”

  —Library Journal

  “Harper immerses the reader in the monarch’s sixteenth-century world with a realism that brings the characters to life.”

  —RT BOOK Club Magazine

  More…

  “Karen Harper brings England alive.”

  —Rendezvous

  The Thorne Maze

  “Brisk, energetic writing and terrific historical color.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  The Queene’s Cure

  “Fascinating series.”

  —Library Journal

  The Twylight Tower

  “Her attention to the details of the Elizabethan court—dress, food, pomp and circumstance—works very well … Conspiracies and lies within lies take the story through twists and turns.”

  —Booklist

  “Ms. Harper has done her research well and comes up with an interesting spin on the story. Fans of historicals as well as mysteries will enjoy this book.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Karen Harper has written an exciting Elizabethan mystery that contains meticulous research and detail … The sleuthing is fun, but what makes The Twylight Tower comparable to the fine works of Allison Weir is the strong writing of the author, interweaving historical tidbits into a powerful story line.”

  —Internet Book Watch

  The Tidal Poole

  “Fans of Elizabethan historical mysteries will find ample sustenance here: a fiercely independent young queen, a loyal but feisty band of assistants, a plethora of historical characters, and an all-encompassing knowledge of the times. Excellent.”

  —Library Journal

  “A page-turner … Readers will welcome Elizabeth I and her colorful supporters … This well-researched volume puts readers in the midst of sixteenth-century England. They will enjoy the trip immensely.”

  —Booklist

  “Peopled with historical figures and bounding with intrigue and mystery, The Tidal Poole is a triumphant read. Harper does a masterful job at recreating the era and her portrait of the young queen is brilliant. The intricate plot will immediately carry readers away to Elizabethan times.”

  —Romantic Times

  “The author excels at weaving historical details into an intricately patterned plot, painting a vibrant picture of the Elizabethan world … This mystery is an enjoyable read. Recommend this royal detective story to older teens, especially those who enjoy historical fiction or who like other Elizabethan mysteries by authors such as Fiona Buckley, Edward Marston, or Kathy Lynn Emerson.”

  —VOYA

  The Poyson Garden

  “Lively action and well-tempered prose make it a winner.”

  —Library Journal

  “An entertaining cross between a swashbuckling historical romance and a mystery novel. The heroine is spunky, the courtiers scheme and truckle, capes swirl, daggers flash and horses gallop.”

  —Portland Oregonian

  Afterword

  MAY 16, 1565

  “HERE IS DOROTHEA’S MIRROR BACK, GILBERTO SHARPINO,” the queen said, handing it to him as she joined him in the privy garden at Whitehall Palace nine days later. She also greeted Cecil, Dr. Dee, and Jenks, whom she’d summoned to meet her and Gil here this morning.

  Already from over the palace walls and down the street, they could hear workmen pounding iron nails into boards to rebuild the Ring and Crown Inn, which had burned to its cellars. Only one nearby thatch-roofed edifice had caught floating cinders and ignited, so the plan of Flavia, alias Floris, to kill the queen and burn London had ended with her own death, a flaming torch still in her hands, on the cobbles of the street.

  Gil was busy setting up the experiment he had explained in his written confession of why he’d lied to his queen more than once since his return from Italy. Cecil had forgiven Gil for his escape from custody when he’d learned that the lad had gone to try to warn the queen that the fire-mirror murderer was in London.

  “Will the mirror be a keepsake of your first love, Gil, or will you use it to make copies of your art?” she asked as the lad merely glanced into the mirror, then laid it aside on the ground.

  “I did adore her, Your Grace,” he admitted. “Still, she was not the first woman I adored, but the second. And that other paragon has told me I can recover from this lovesickness, so I shall.”

  “That paragon has learned the hard way that we must all recover from dreadful losses in our lives,” Elizabeth intoned. Then deciding she sounded too somber for this lovely day, she sat on the bench outside the tent which had been pitched for Gil’s demonstration.

  Though they were all nervous to be near tents and mirrors on such a sunny day, Gil had written that he needed such to show the secret he had nearly died for and thought he was protecting her from. But there is power in knowledge, dear Gil, Elizabeth had written him during her period of grieving Kat’s death, so I wager it is best if I know all.

  Now their eyes met and held; for the first time since Kat had died, a small smile lifted the corners of the queen’s lips as she nodded her encouragement to him. Cecil and Dr. Dee both moved to positions behind her, while Jenks kept a watch over them all. Gil—using Dr. Dee’s now famous concave mirror—kept popping in and out of the tent.

  Her men were obviously not certain whether to make conversation or not. She had taken the loss of Kat hard, despite the fact that she had been preparing for it for months. Kat had lived through the terror and fall from the burning roof, but had slipped into a coma and died the next day without another word. But at the end, she had known Elizabeth was queen, and that was some solace. Although the queen considered Kat to be Floris’s victim too, she had still ordered the murderess buried on Nonsuch land, under the tree where Dench had died—but without a marker on her grave.

  Still, but for sending out written instructions the week before, the queen had emerged only once for her brief appearance and briefer pronouncement at Kat’s memorial service in the palace chapel: “Katherine Ashley,” she had declared in her clarion voice, “was like a mother to me and will never be forgotten by her friend and sovereign, Elizabeth Tudor. Queen Anne Boleyn gave me life, but Kat Ashley gave me love.”

  And that was all. She had returned to her royal apartments as soon as the service ended. She had not even seen Cecil, but had communicated to him only through writing. To take courage from the past to prepare for the future, she had simply needed time in silence and solitude. Mary, Queen of Scots, whose name Floris had invoked on the roof, would not go away, but perhaps, with care, she could be kept at bay.

  It amused Elizabeth to see Dr. Dee staring in awe as Gil set up the demonstration, checking angles and distances for his mirror and other equipment. She announced to everyone, “Just as the artists’ guild of Urbino takes a secrecy oath to protect this so-called camera obscura, the five of us shall not speak of this beyond these walls, even if we decide to use this technique to replicate my official portrait.

  “And Gil,” she added, rising and stepping closer to watch him adjust the chair his subject would sit in, “I’m expecting you to get busy on your new portrait of me, as close to the lost original as possible. My two remaining artists got burns on their hands in the fire at the inn, meeting as they must have been,” she said, lifting her eyebrows, “to confer about painting the human form or some such.”

  Shaking his head, Cecil said, “They came tearing out of there like scalded cats, half dressed. That will teach them not to burn with lust, I wager.”

  “I�
��ve already begun to repaint the portrait, Your Grace,” Gil said as he motioned Jenks to the chair. He would pose outside the tent, in which had been cut a square window. “All right, Jenks,” Gil went on, “don’t move.”

  Looking more nervous that he would have in combat, Jenks settled himself. Gil indicated the rest of them should step into the tent.

  They went inside and gasped. On a piece of parchment Gil had positioned inside the tent was Jenks’s living picture, in color, though upside down. When he sneezed, it sneezed. Gil explained how the image was reflected through the window cut in the tent and bounced off the mirror to the opposite side to the parchment. Moving the mirror or parchment could make the image come into clear focus or blur and fade.

  “You see,” Gil said, “if I were doing Jenks’s portrait, all I would now need to do would be to sketch what I see down to the last detail, rather than painting if from just looking—from life.”

  “Why, the perspective is perfect,” Dr. Dee said, bending close to the image. “Once the outlines are sketched in, of course, it can be turned right side up. But it reverses everything, just like a mirror, so that right-handed people—say, holding a pen or paper—would be made left-handed.”

  “Or their hair would be parted on the wrong side,” Cecil put in.

  “But no one cares,” Gil said, “not when they see how exacting this is. It’s made some Italian fortunes. And now that I realize how detailed even Hans Holbein’s portraits are, I wonder if he hadn’t learned of it somehow.”

  “Wouldn’t that unsettle Heatherley even more?” the queen cut in, and even Gil, as nervous and engrossed as he was, had to grin.

  “Camera obscura means ‘dark room,’” he explained, still evidently relishing lecturing Cecil and Dee, not to mention his queen. “Of course, the darker the artist’s area, the better.”

  “But in a way,” Cecil said, “this is cheating—a falsehood, for the viewer and owner of the portrait believe it is all the artist’s inherent, God-given skill.”

  “And so it becomes a secret,” Elizabeth said, “one some misguided men will kill for by sending an assassin after my English subject, the lad I entrusted to their court to learn to paint. The damned Catholic plotters. Why, I’ll take raw English talent over fancy foreign fripperies any day!”

  “As I said before,” Gil replied, nodding, “Maestro Titian doesn’t use it. But I tell you, it still takes great skill to fill it all in. Each detail is needed to complete the whole.”

  “Much like solving any puzzle,” Dee said.

  “Or crime,” Cecil added. “But if we keep working at it long enough, it comes into view, even shading and shadows.”

  “Exactly,” Elizabeth said, unwilling to dwell on all they had just been through. “Gil, will you also paint me a portrait of Kat Ashley, one from memory?”

  He followed her out of the tent, where she motioned to Jenks that he could stop posing. “Of course I can,” Gil vowed, hurrying to keep up with her. “I can paint her from heart.”

  “From heart, that’s good. Just remember that working that way is more important than reflecting someone else’s talent, however much you admire that person. Even when life becomes fearful, always paint—and live—from the heart.”

  She dismissed him and the others with a simple gesture and walked the sharp angles of the garden paths alone.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  QUEEN ELIZABETH I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST RULERS TO USE PORTRAITS of herself, grand and symbolic, as what we today call PR. Her and Cecil’s brilliance to use art this way was part of the inspiration for this book. She had not yet begun to use all of the symbolic Gloriana and Virgin Queen imagery she employed later, but the impact of her propaganda began at this time. The portraits of previous English rulers recorded how they looked and were displayed in the homes of royalty or nobility; Elizabeth Tudor meant for her portraits to speak of her virtues and power to a much broader audience.

  The summer I was writing this book, which also happened to be the four hundredth anniversary of the queen’s death, I was able to revisit London and see a marvelous exhibition on her life at the Maritime Museum on the site of the long-gone Tudor Palace of Greenwich. The treasures on display included the queen’s original poem that begins this novel (“No crooked leg …”) in her own hand; her gift to Katherine Parr, the translation of The Mirror of the Sinful Soul; and many items about Dr. Dee.

  The brilliant Dee was one of the wonders of the Elizabethan age and did sign secret notes to the queen with his 007 sobriquet. Some say that author Ian Fleming used that as partial inspiration for his character James Bond, who served in another Queen Elizabeth’s “secret service.”

  Cuddington’s cruel fate under King Henry VIII is fact, although the Mooring family is my fiction. Mortlake and Cheam are charming towns yet today. Fabulously decorated Nonsuch Palace is no longer standing (the site was excavated in 1959), but the vast hunt park, now called Nonsuch Park, remains. Elizabeth regained the palace in 1591 from Lord Arundel’s heir, Lord Lumley, and spent several weeks there each year through much of her reign. The palace on the cover of this book is Nonsuch from the north gate, though the artistic grandeurs of the palace lie within.

  When I began to research this book (the seventh in the Queen Elizabeth I Mystery Series), I found that between 1550 and 1650, mirror titles abounded in English books. In his book The Mutable Glass, Herbert Grabes calls the mirror “the central metaphor of a literary era, especially in Elizabethan England.” I could not pass up mirrors, or “glasses” as they were sometimes called then, as a hook for a book, especially when I found an old engraving from a 1488 manuscript in which a man holds a mirror up to the sun to start a fire.

  The subplot about Gil Sharpe’s forbidden knowledge of the camera obscura is based on a recent fascinating and controversial book called Secret Knowledge by artist David Hockney. It is also true that some of the Italian Renaissance craftsmen’s guilds took secrecy oaths which could be enforced by pain of death. And so I included an early “mafia hit man.”

  Titian’s paintings Woman at the Mirror and Venus of Urbino actually exist as described in this story. The painting of the queen on the cover of this book is from the title page of Christopher Saxon’s Atlas of the Counties of England and Wales, 1579, though I like to imagine it is Gil Sharpe’s painting of his queen. Lavina Teerlinc was a real artist who painted miniatures at court, before the genius Nicholas Hilliard eclipsed her later in the queen’s reign.

  The queen’s beloved companion Lady Katherine “Kat” Ashley did indeed die “greatly lamented” in 1565.

  Katherine Constable was the first of Dr. John Dee’s three wives. Little is recorded of her but that she was the widow of a London grocer. She herself died in 1575, only ten years after this story, but Dee’s second wife lived barely a year before he married a third. Hm, do I scent a story there?

  Karen Harper

  December 2003

  KEEP READING FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

  KAREN HARPER’S NEXT ELIZABETH I MYSTERY

  The Fatal Fashione

  AVAILABLE IN HARDCOVER FROM ST. MARTIN’S MINOTAUR

  WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON

  OCTOBER 21 , 1566

  “IF THE MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT ARE HERE, THEY MAY cool their heels for a while!” Elizabeth Tudor a nounced the moment William Cecil, her trusted seretary of state, was admitted to her withdrawing room. “They have come to urge me to marriage and motherhood, but I know what they are thinking even beyond that impertinence.”

  “That if—when—you refuse,” Cecil said, “they will urge you to name your cousin Queen Mary of Scots as your heir, even if she is a Catholic?”

  “Exactly. And I’ll not play into their hands.”

  “They do await your presence, Your Grace. But you sent for me?”

  Though she had been attired in her bedchamber, her ladies were still arranging her large neck ruff and long strands of pearls. Yet she’d wanted to see Cecil before she faced down the men who forever tried to tell her how
to govern. At least Cecil merely advised.

  “I cannot abide their audacity,” Elizabeth went on, flinging gestures despite her women’s attempted ministrations. “They think because my cousin Queen Mary of Scots has wed again and produced a son, that I must wed posthaste and go to breeding, too. They believe they have me trapped. For if I choose not to wed and name Mary my successor, I risk my safety, for my death would place her on the throne.’S blood, my Catholic shires to the north could rise in open rebellion. And my Parliament is one step from that, I swear they are!”

  “Yes, Your Grace, but I believe their concerns about the succession have some validity and merit, and their words to you—”

  “Were rude and rash so far.” She took the last loop of pearls from Lady Rosie’s hands—Rosie always panicked when her queen raised her voice—and finished the job herself. Leaving her ladies behind, she strode toward Cecil with her huge black satin skirts swishing.

  “You saw what they dared write to me!” she told him. ‘It sets a fatal fashion if a young queen does not wed, and endangers the realm.’ I set the fashions here, my lord, not only for garments and ornament, such as what they are calling these ‘pearls of the virgin’ set off against my favorite black, but for manners, behavior—even morals.”

  “I understand, Your Grace.”

  “Do they think I am some green girl or schoolroom dunce to be lectured and set aright? I’ll not be preached to about suitors, foreign or domestic, nor about who should get my throne if I departed this earth. For I do not plan to do that for years, God willing!”