Let Slip the Dogs

by Anna Castle

  She was more interested in Sir Walter’s question about seeing the phial at the feast. Why mention it if he were the one who brought it there? He seemed genuinely surprised and saddened by this needless death.

  Trumpet didn’t trust her gut half as much as Tom trusted his, but her gut told her the queen’s favorite had nothing to do with Anne’s murder. That didn’t mean he hadn’t killed Arthur Grenville, however. The two deaths might well be unrelated.

  Mr. Bacon distrusted a superfluity of causes, often citing Occam’s Razor. But Sir Occam had obviously never traveled on the queen’s summer progress with its superfluity of deadly secrets.

  EIGHTEEN

  FRANCIS HAD BARELY finished his impromptu breakfast when he saw a litter borne by two men emerge from Stephen’s door and go through the arched gate in the corner of the yard. That would lead them to the laundry house and the utility room where the midwife did her work. He waited until the chapel bell tolled the next quarter hour, resting his mind in the contemplation of the length of shadows, the height of the sun, and what those elements revealed about the science of perspective.

  At the bell, he rose, leaving his cup on a barrel, and walked out the main gate to go around the east range. He didn’t want to cross paths with Sir Walter just yet.

  When he entered the midwife’s domain, she looked up and smiled. “I wondered if I would see you this morning, Mr. Bacon.”

  “Here I am, Mrs. Woolley.”

  She took a sheet from her shelf and spread it over the woman’s body. “I’m afraid I can’t help you this time. Poison doesn’t leave marks. I’m told this poor lady fell victim to a badly made love potion, from the sound of it. A foolish act and a sad waste.”

  “That isn’t quite how it happened,” Francis said.

  The midwife’s eyes brightened with interest. “Do you know more? I’m told she was alone.”

  “She was not.” Francis took the silver spoon from his purse and handed it to her. “The witness prefers that the official story remain uncontested. I believe he had no part in this, and I’m hoping you’ll tell me what killed her.”

  “I learned to keep my own counsel long ago, Mr. Bacon.” She tucked the spoon inside a fold of her commodious skirts. “Now anything you can tell me about what she drank or ate, and how she acted after taking it, will help.”

  Francis gave her the full account, as Stephen had told it to him. Mrs. Woolley nodded several times as if recognizing features of interest. When he finished, she said, “Putting all that together with the idea of a love potion suggests henbane to me, Mr. Bacon. The flushed skin, giddiness, delirium, and then her collapse into unwakeable sleep. Especially the delusion of flying into the stars. That’s very telling. Victims don’t always vomit, though it’s nasty-tasting stuff, from what I’ve heard. I suppose that distilled liquor and the spicy cinnamon might mask it enough, especially if she drank it down in one gulp.”

  “Henbane.” Francis searched his memory. “It sounds familiar.”

  “I’m not surprised, sir. It’s common enough. It grows in ditches everywhere, especially near privies. It can be very beneficial — if you don’t swallow it. We use the leaves to soothe inflammations of the eyes or gouty joints, for instance. My brother makes a decoction of the seeds to kill lice. Women make a black hair dye of it as well. My brother is an apothecary, like my father before him. I know my herbs.”

  “I felt certain you would, Mrs. Woolley. Is it never taken into the body?”

  “It can be, though it’s a very risky business. They say witches use it to summon spirits when they dance under the moon.” She shrugged to show her opinion of that bit of folk wisdom. “It is sometimes used in love potions, which is why I thought of it. I couldn’t tell you why; the giddiness, perhaps, or the delusions.”

  Francis grimaced at the thought of putting a loved one into that condition. “Could this have been a genuine accident, then? Could someone have tried to make an honest love potion, if there can be such a thing, and added too much henbane?”

  “That’s possible, Mr. Bacon. It’s a very powerful drug, easy to make a mistake. Not like striking a man with a brick, is it?”

  Francis met her eyes. “And yet I have reason to suspect these deaths are not unrelated.”

  She pursed her lips. “I hope you’re wrong. I don’t want to find another healthy young person lying on my table this month.” She picked up her washing cloth, holding it in the attitude of a woman who wanted to return to her work.

  Francis thanked her and left, walking slowly through the bustling service yard. Could this death have been a simple accident? Had that potion been meant as a harmless joke or even a genuine attempt to help a reluctant bride overcome her fears on her wedding night?

  He might be guilty of a most egregious fallacy, one he treated with disdain when committed by others: allowing the desire to maintain an established opinion color one’s perception of new information. Arthur Grenville’s death had not been an accident. Francis was increasingly certain that the poor lad had interrupted an exchange of political intelligences, not amorous notes. But that did not prevent Lady Anne’s death from being the tragic result of a youthful prank.

  He should know better. Was he going to lay every subsequent death on this summer progress at the door of his mythical French spy?

  “SURELY YOU DON’T HAVE to be here today, Lady Alice,” Mr. Folsham said when Trumpet presented herself at the door of the Privy Bedchamber. “I mean, Lady Dorchester.”

  Lady Stafford said the same thing after Trumpet slipped inside.

  “I’d rather be useful, my lady,” she answered, looking as demure as possible. “Besides, where else would I go?”

  The other ladies were less delicate. They dropped their tasks and crowded around, peppering her with questions about Anne’s untimely death. She saw the tassels over the bed curtains twitch and knew the queen was listening, so she pitched her voice in that direction and repeated Catalina’s story, leaving out the more dramatic stylings.

  “A terrible, terrible accident,” Lady Stafford said in a tone meant to bar further discussion. “But one with a moral to teach us about the wages of sin. Lady Anne did not deserve so dire a death, but she placed herself in harm’s way.” She gave each of them a stern look to be sure the lesson was understood. Then she sighed and said, “Foolish child. May God forgive her. But now, ladies, while we grieve for the loss of our friend, the business of the court must go on. We all have our jobs to do, don’t we?”

  They took the hint. Trumpet joined the other ladies in the dressing room, which they put in order every Saturday. Mary, as usual, attempted to take charge of the paint cabinet. Today, however, she was elbowed aside by Lady Penelope Rich, who liked to offer her services for a morning or two when she was at court. The queen was especially fond of her soothing facial mask, which she would apply during her nap that afternoon.

  Penelope took charge, as she always did in a group of women of lesser rank than the queen. Trumpet set herself to inspecting each wig in turn to remove its covering and poke about with her fine comb, making sure no nits or spiders had taken up residence during the week.

  Mary sidled up to set her dish of eggshells on the counter beside the wig and began crushing them noisily with a pestle. “Is it true that potion was meant for you?” Mary dropped her voice as if for Trumpet’s ears alone, but the room wasn’t big enough for such tactics.

  “Me?” Trumpet shrilled. “What in the name of heaven would make you think such a terrible thing?”

  Bess answered, “They were passing it around last night. It was a love potion, supposedly, to help you overcome your fears.” Her right eyelid flickered in the tiniest of winks.

  Trumpet ignored the wink — this wasn’t the time or place — but she did want to hear more about the phial. “I saw my lord with some pretty glass thing. Was that the poison? He gave it back to you, didn’t he?” She pointed her comb at Mary.

  “Not me! What would I do with it? Anne took it. I thought it was h
er idea. Or Bess’s.”

  “Not mine,” Bess said. “I would never interfere in your affairs. Maybe one of the men brought it.”

  “It isn’t the sort of thing a man would do,” Penelope said with authority. “If curing your timidity was the goal, they would take the groom aside and make lewd jokes. I didn’t see the phial, but if Anne mixed that potion herself, she made it wrong and has paid dearly for the mistake.”

  They all murmured prayers for her departed soul. Trumpet’s sorrow made her all the more determined to find out who had given Anne that potion. She didn’t believe Anne had mixed it herself. She’d never been particularly clever with herbs and ointments.

  She returned to her original question. “Where did the phial come from? It’s a pretty bauble. I saw it in the room when . . . Well, I saw it. It’s glass, thicker than usual, and etched all around with an intricate design traced in the finest sliver of gold.”

  “Venetian glass?” Penelope asked.

  Trumpet shrugged. “Something rare and costly.”

  “Something like this?” Penelope pulled out a step stool and stood on it, reaching to the topmost shelf of the cabinet where the herbs and oils were kept. She took down a cedar box and set it on the worktable to open it. Inside were seven small glass bottles, each nestled in a velvet hollow. Five more hollows were empty.

  Penelope picked up one of the bottles and displayed it on her open hand.

  Trumpet’s jaw dropped. She hadn’t expected this answer. “Why, that’s it! The very same thing. I’d swear to it.”

  Penelope smiled, pleased at the effect of her surprise. She handed it to Bess, who hummed appreciatively as she turned it in her hands. “It looks like the very twin of the one we were passing around.”

  She handed it to Mary, who asked, “How did you know it was there, my lady?”

  “Oh, I’ve been coveting these beautiful objects since Sir Horatio Palavicino first brought them back from Italy. He presented a dozen of them to Her Majesty. She uses them sparingly for fear of breaking them, which is why you haven’t seen them. She mainly reserves them for gifts to special friends and favorites.”

  “How did you know about them?” Trumpet asked. And which of these ladies was feigning ignorance now?

  “Her Majesty gave one to my lord brother. I saw it in his house in Westminster. He was with the queen when Sir Horatio presented them. She told him, laughingly, in that way she has, to go home and fill it with an elixir of youth. Of course he refused on the grounds that she was youthful enough already and they didn’t need an unschooled girl on the throne. She gave another one to the French ambassador for his elixir of youth, as he calls it.” Penelope raised her slender eyebrows. “A tonic meant to enhance a man’s desire, one supposes. One also hopes his apothecary is more skilled than Anne’s.”

  “One does,” Trumpet said, wondering who that might be. She went back to inspecting her wig. Did the French ambassador still possess his little glass bauble? Or had one of his clerks borrowed it to rid himself of an inquisitive lady? It wouldn’t be hard to persuade one of Stephen’s cup-shot friends to take the thing as a joke. That exquisite phial would have been irresistible; perhaps that was why he chose it.

  The clerk would have to speak English . . . But no, he wouldn’t. Many courtiers spoke French. She did, for one. It was a skill persons of a certain station were expected to acquire.

  But why would this postulated clerk feel the need to poison Anne? Unless the clerk was a spy, although the present French regime was more ally than enemy, as she understood the current state of affairs. She wished she knew more about politics. Trumpet glanced at Penelope — she would know. But at the moment she was haughtily resisting Mary’s attempt to reassert her dominance in this tiny realm.

  A futile effort. Mary had little to recommend her other than her looks and her bottomless store of gossip. Now that Anne and Arthur Grenville were gone, she’d lost her two best friends, as well as the best suppliers of her principal stock.

  Trumpet judged the seldom-used black wig free of vermin and replaced its gauze wrapper. She put it back and got out another one and unwrapped it. She concentrated on her work to keep from being dragged into the debate about the correct proportions of mercury in a blemish remover.

  Maybe the French spy waited until the wedding supper to do his foul deed under cover of the festivities. And what if she had been the intended target? She’d been asking questions, lots of them, mainly of the ladies. But she’d been poking at that orchard wall again; perhaps he’d seen her and guessed what she was after.

  That was a sobering thought. She resolved to have Catalina fetch all her meals directly from the kitchen until this matter was resolved. And she’d threaten to take them in Mr. Bacon’s rooms until he consented to hold a council with her and Tom to share their findings and consider the alternatives.

  NINETEEN

  SUNDAY MORNING, TOM watched Trumpet and Stephen sit side by side in the Chapel Royal, heads held high as if nothing had happened. They kept those chins lifted all the way back to Stephen’s rooms afterward. Anyone who tried to wheedle an extra bit of gossip was met with stony silence.

  The earl and his wife remained behind closed doors for the rest of the day. Tom would bet a golden angel that Trumpet spent the hours lying on her bed reading Robert Greene’s Spanish Masquerado while Stephen played cards in the anteroom with his retainers.

  They’d switched bedchambers; he knew that much from a hasty conversation with Catalina. Stephen couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping in the room where his sweet Anne had met her death, so Trumpet offered to trade. She’d had the bed and all its fittings replaced and every scrap of Stephen’s belongings removed. The offer was contingent on his agreeing to make no attempt to enter the redecorated chamber for any reason whatsoever, most especially not to claim his supposed conjugal rights. There would be no more physical contact between them until further notice.

  Not that there had ever been any such contact, not in actuality. But the new rule would relieve the hired substitute of bed-duty for a while.

  Tom could only shake his head in admiration at her ability to turn adversity to advantage. Not only had she leapt at the excuse to keep Stephen out of her bed, she’d gained a larger chamber, furnished to her taste, with ground-floor windows to boot. Easier to climb in and out of in the dead of night.

  On Monday after dinner, when most of the palace folk were resting, Tom put Lancelot and Guinevere on their leashes and walked up past the palace gardens to the park. He was meeting Trumpet at the place with the view; from there, they would walk down to Petersham to settle with Jane Switt and send her back to London. They wouldn’t need her services again in Richmond, although Trumpet raised the possibility of a month-long stay in Dorchester.

  The native Londoner shook her head. “You’d have to pay me triple to live out in the wilderness, my lady.”

  Trumpet had worn her hunting clothes with a veil to hide her face, but they weren’t much worried about running into anyone this far from the palace. Stephen had gone off with his friends to that bawdy house in East Moseley, leaving a note saying he might not return that night at all.

  “If he catches something nasty, I’ll never need Mrs. Switt again,” Trumpet said.

  Tom wasn’t so sure. “Don’t count on it. We should’ve kept her here. One time isn’t enough to put a child in your belly, you know.”

  “Catalina says that happens all the time.”

  Who was he to argue with so great an authority? “We’ll just have to get to work, then, my lady.” He sighed as if his labor never ended.

  “A thankless job, but if it must be done, then let’s get to it.” Trumpet looked around the forest as if a bed might suddenly appear between the trees. “Didn’t you say you’d found a place?”

  “Not much of one. It looked like a gamekeeper’s shelter. Not far from here, directly that way.” He pointed into the woods. “I’m sure I can find it again.”

  “What will we do with the dogs?”<
br />
  “Tie them to a tree. They won’t mind.” Lance and Gwen were the most agreeable companions Tom had ever known, bar none. He’d managed to beg a couple of soup bones at the Old Ship to keep them busy while he and Trumpet enjoyed the amenities of the gamekeeper’s hut.

  They admired the breathtaking view for a moment. Trumpet stood as close to the brink as she dared, peering down into shrubs and boulders covering the steep slope. “Someone should put up a fence.”

  “That would spoil it.”

  They turned away and followed a path into the forest. The bracken grew thicker and higher the farther they went. The dogs walked with heads up and tails wagging, delighted by the abundance of scents in the air. Tom and Trumpet walked in silence, reveling in the simple pleasure of one another’s company and the cool sanctuary of the woods on a summer afternoon.

  Soon they came to a small clearing in which stood a rude hut, barely big enough for a man — and a woman — to lie down in. Trumpet pulled off her hat and veil while Tom tied the dogs to the trunk of a straggling beech. They turned toward one another, eyes shining, hands reaching for beloved hands. Then someone moaned in ecstasy.

  “Was that you?” Tom asked.

  Trumpet snorted. “That was a man.”

  “Oh no! Not again!” Tom raised his arms to heaven. “Is there no place in the whole of Surrey free of jumbling lovers?”

  Voices rose inside the hut. “Someone’s out there!” “Hush, let me listen!”

  “Should we take a peek?” Trumpet asked.

  Tom shook his head. “I don’t even want to know.”

  But before Trumpet could straighten her veil, Sir Charles Blount poked his head out the door to gape at them. “Oh, it’s you!”

  “Who is it?” A woman’s head appeared beside his — Lady Penelope Rich, looking more like a wanton shepherdess than the imperious sister of England’s most popular earl. Her fair curls tumbled loose around her shoulders, and her cheeks shone pink. But her voice held its customary tartness as she echoed her lover’s cry of recognition. “Oh, you!”