Let Slip the Dogs

by Anna Castle

  “Lady Rich! What a lovely surprise!” Trumpet dropped a curtsy.

  Lady Rich’s eyes narrowed as she cut a glance at Tom. “You’re no better than I am, my lady.”

  “I never claimed to be.”

  Sir Charles posed the same question Ralegh had, though he said it with a rueful smile. “What will you do now?”

  “Say nothing,” Tom answered. “None of us, to anyone, anywhere. Does that sound fair?”

  “It does,” Sir Charles said. “I agree.”

  They each reached out a hand for shaking, then thought better of it. Sir Charles appeared to be naked, though all Tom could see around the rickety door was his chest — well-covered with manly curls of hair as black as those on his head.

  Tom touched his hat instead. The ladies traded nods. Trumpet restored her hat and veil while Tom collected the dogs, repocketing their bones with some resistance.

  As they wandered on down the path, Trumpet said, “We still have an earl to make.”

  “How do you feel about dallying under the clear blue sky?”

  “Out in the open, in a field? With nothing around us anywhere?” Trumpet sounded more intrigued than dismayed.

  Maybe someday, when she owned the fields and every point from which they could be viewed. “I was thinking of another glade, my lady.”

  “Oh.”

  They found one not far away that seemed private enough and free of huts, dovecotes, or other structures likely to be inhabited by yet another trysting pair. Tom tied the dogs to a tree a few yards off, restoring their treats. They’d sound the alarm if anyone approached.

  He and Trumpet stripped as naked as Adam and Eve, feeling like those two originals in their unspoiled Eden. They loved one another without haste or hesitation. Tom gallantly offered to lay his own back against the stiff grass; besides, he delighted in the play of dappled light on Trumpet’s fair skin as she arched above him. In this setting, with her elf-tilted eyes in that uncanny green, he imagined he was being taken by a fairy queen.

  “Tomorrow, let’s bring a cloak,” she said as they helped each other get dressed. “Your back is covered in little scratches. Can we find this place again? I like it.”

  “The dogs could, maybe. But this can’t be the only quiet clearing in Richmond Park.”

  They stopped for a breath when the dome-topped towers of the palace came into view. “What now?” Tom asked. “With Stephen gone, I have nothing to do.”

  “Me neither. The queen went to visit Syon House with a delegation from the King of Denmark.”

  Tom gaped at her. “We could have done this in the comfort of your bed!”

  “Best not. Two of Stephen’s men are still idling about. I could send them out to exercise the horses, but they’d think it odd coming from me and would certainly mention it to him when he gets back.”

  “Hmph.” Tom should’ve guessed she’d work through all their options before they had walked three yards beyond that hut.

  “Besides, I like doing it outside. Do you think we could find a haystack next?”

  Tom had a vision of Trumpet, mother-naked, bouncing in the hay with green straw in her black hair. “I’ll cut the grass myself.”

  “Let’s look for one now. We have half the afternoon.”

  “I should bring the dogs back. And then we really should find Mr. Bacon and hold a council. I’ll grant you’ve been distracted by my exceptional prowess, but you must have noticed that we now have two more important people with a secret to protect.”

  She snorted, but didn’t dispute the claim. “We agreed to say nothing to anyone.”

  “I had my fingers crossed behind my back.” Tom took her by the shoulders and countered her outraged eyes with serious intent. “We have to tell him. We need him. If Anne’s death wasn’t an accident, then she was murdered, probably by someone who meant to murder you. And if you think I’m going to let a little thing like a casual promise keep me from using everything I’ve got to catch that evil son of a mongrel whore and watch him hang, you don’t know me at all, Alice. Not one little bit.”

  Her eyes welled with tears. Then she drew in a long breath and let it out in a sigh. “What’s your guess? The library? He’s probably spending this magnificent day in the darkest corner he can find with his nose in Henry the Seventh’s statutes.”

  She got it right — almost. They found Bacon in the library, sure enough, and even in the darkest corner of it, or rather inside a cubicle in the farthest corner with the door closed. But his nose wasn’t in a statute. When Tom opened the door, they found him mashed into the tiny space with Michel Joubert, their arms and legs entwined and their mouths pressed together in a passionate kiss. They barely managed to peel their lips apart before Tom swung the narrow door shut with an echoing thunk.

  “That’s it!” he declared. “I’m not opening any more doors. Not ever. I’ll get into my own room through the window every night.” He stalked past the shelves loaded with rolls of parchment and leather-bound books, heading straight outside. Trumpet pattered behind him, sputtering giggles.

  TWENTY

  TRUMPET FOLLOWED TOM out to the fountain, where they sat on the wide rim of the cistern under the baleful eye of a red stone dragon. “Now what?” she asked. It would appear that Francis Bacon owed her a favor. Her supper table arrangements had worked out better for him than she had imagined.

  “We wait, I guess. We still need him. Or else I camp in front of your door and sample all your food and drink until we go home.” Tom glared sourly at a handsome group in splendid clothes strolling from the turreted gatehouse to the Privy Lodgings, with its multicolored stones and towers capped with golden weathervanes.

  Richmond Palace seemed to have lost its allure for him.

  “I feel I should apologize,” Bacon said, turning up beside them with his clothes as tidy as if he’d been dressed by his tailor.

  “Not to us,” Trumpet said. “Although I don’t know why you don’t use your own room.” He didn’t have a husband with retainers lurking about all afternoon.

  “Too hot,” Bacon mumbled. “Also, that wasn’t a planned . . . er . . .”

  Tom held up a hand to stop him. “Trust us, we don’t care. But we should go somewhere and talk about the murders.”

  “Oh.” Bacon gazed blankly around the populous yard. “Where’s my lord of Dorchester?”

  “In East Moseley,” Tom said. “At a brothel called the Goat and Compasses. Supposedly very famous.”

  Bacon gave him an odd look. “I’ve heard of it. Well, then, let’s go to the kennel office. His Lordship did retain me to look into Anne Courtenay’s death, if anyone should wonder. Your ladyship will have graciously consented to join us to look after your husband’s interests.”

  “Naturally,” Trumpet said, “since his interests and mine are now one. Sometimes.” She vowed to make Tom take her to that famous brothel just to have a look inside. She and Catalina could change clothes somewhere on the way . . . at the Old Ship in Petersham, perhaps. They seemed to have satisfying lax standards.

  As they passed through the stable yard, Tom tagged a boy to bring them wine and cool water. “And something fruity, little tarts or something. And some cheese.” The refreshments arrived before Trumpet and Bacon could finish admiring the framed pedigrees hanging on the wall. Tom pointed out some notables, like a mastiff named Paladin who had sired a litter of puppies that spring.

  Bacon took the seat behind the desk, beating Tom to it by a hair. Trumpet patted the place beside her on the bench she’d chosen for that very reason. He took her hand as he sat down, holding it in one of his and stroking it with the other.

  Bacon cast a chilly eye on the caresses. “I wish you wouldn’t do that in front of me. It makes me complicit in your treachery.”

  “Treachery!” Tom scoffed. But he let go of her hand and went to stand beside the window, where he could see if anyone loitered outside.

  “Adultery is a form of betrayal.” Bacon shrugged. “Call it what you like.”
>
  “I call it taking charge of my own fate,” Trumpet said. “I would also call it no concern of yours.”

  “That was my central point,” Bacon said mildly. “I meant no disrespect, my lady.”

  She pursed her lips but decided to let it go. He had kept her secrets for years, after all, even from his own aunt. “If you want to throw stones, we have better targets for you.”

  “I have no desire to throw stones, even if I were in any position to do so. Who are the new targets?”

  “Sir Walter Ralegh and Bess Throckmorton, for one,” Tom said. “Or rather, two.”

  “No.” Bacon shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “We caught them in the act, Mr. Bacon,” Trumpet said. “In the dovecote beyond the gar —”

  “Don’t tell me.” Bacon shielded his face with both hands. “I don’t want to know.”

  “Too late,” Tom said, getting him back for that treachery barb. True or not, it still stung. “Then this afternoon we stumbled on another groaning couple in a gamekeeper’s hut in the woods.”

  Bacon pressed his lips together and shook his head, refusing to look at them.

  “You’ll never guess,” Trumpet said. “Lady Penelope Rich and Sir Charles Blount.”

  “No. I won’t hear it. I don’t want to know such things.” Bacon turned his chair toward the wall behind him as if to hide from words already spoken. “These private matters have no bearing on policy or anything else of consequence.”

  Trumpet and Tom traded looks of mingled sympathy and exasperation. “They have consequences, Mr. Bacon,” Tom said. “These affairs could do these people great harm if exposed.”

  “They’re precisely the kind of secrets we think Arthur Grenville discovered,” Trumpet added. “Remember? He could have told Anne. Or” — she cocked her head as a new idea emerged — “maybe she saw him being killed. I have the strongest sense that I already knew that. Someone must have said something . . .” She shook herself. Whatever had tickled her memory had slipped away. “At any rate, everyone was on their way to the feast. She might have followed him just for fun. Either way, she must have said something that made the killer realize she knew more than she ought.”

  Tom pointed his finger at her. “I like that idea. I like it because it means Anne was the poisoner’s original target, not you. You’re safe.”

  Bacon heaved a sigh and turned back around. “All right. We’ll discuss it. I agree that the deaths are most likely linked, if we apply Occam’s Razor.”

  “We applied it already,” Tom said. “We listen to the things you tell us, you know, especially when you repeat them over and over again.”

  Trumpet laughed, but in truth she loved knowing these things — philosophy, law, optics — subjects usually reserved for men.

  Bacon gave them the wry smile of a much-abused tutor. “My life has meaning, after all. But to return to the matter at hand, I must state without equivocation that I refuse to consider Sir Walter Ralegh. Both of these murders were acts of cowardice. Sir Walter may be many things, and while I agree” — he held up a hand to stop their sputtering objections — “that he has the most to lose, he’s not a coward.”

  “Penelope Rich isn’t a coward either,” Trumpet said.

  “But she is a woman,” Bacon said, “so her options are limited. She couldn’t throw Grenville a sword and tell him to defend himself, as Tom suggested last time.”

  She growled under her breath, but couldn’t dispute it. Penelope had better ways to silence a man than by hitting him with a brick, but their assumption was that the killer had been surprised and acted without thinking.

  “He must really love her,” Bacon said softly, as if talking to himself. “She’s virtually penniless, and it truly will destroy him.”

  Tom said, “He thinks Her Majesty will forgive him in time, the way she forgave the Earl of Leicester.”

  Bacon’s eyebrows rose to the brim of his hat. “You’ve discussed this with him?”

  “When?” Trumpet asked. “I thought we all agreed to say nothing. And why didn’t you tell me?”

  Tom scratched his beard, looking from Trumpet to Bacon and back again. “I didn’t tell you because we have other things on our minds when we’re together. I forgot.” He shrugged an apology. Of course she forgave him.

  To Bacon he said, “Sir Walter came to visit me on Thursday. Here, as it happens. He wanted to make sure I would hold my peace. First, he offered me a place among his retainers. I told him I was content where I was. Then he said he would owe me a favor if nobody found out before he was ready to let it slip.”

  “Ask him for a share of the monopoly on tin.” Trumpet admired the offhand way Tom dismissed the part about entering Ralegh’s service. Sir Walter didn’t make such offers lightly. But it was part of Tom’s charm to underestimate his own worth.

  “He’s playing a dangerous game. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal.” Bacon’s brow had furrowed at the mention of Ralegh’s offer too, but he would never admit how much he relied on Tom. Or, heaven forfend, how much he liked him.

  Tom licked his lips. “That’s not all. I had another visitor right after Sir Walter.” He told them about Sir Robert Cecil turning up to ask questions, this time offering cool, hard coin in exchange. Tom took a golden angel out of his purse to show them as proof.

  “That’s interesting,” Bacon said. “And I’ll allow that I should have told you about visiting the midwife. But as you said yourself, there hasn’t been much opportunity for us to meet.”

  “It’s not like Gray’s, where we have the Antelope Inn just down the hill. But don’t worry. I didn’t tell Sir Robert I wouldn’t tell you everything I tell him, if I tell him anything.”

  “He’ll assume it,” Bacon said, long before Trumpet had managed to parse that ungainly sentence. It tickled a jealous bone somewhere that Bacon should know something more about Tom than she did. But she supposed it couldn’t be helped.

  Bacon added, “You should tell him something more. Today, perhaps. You could tell him what Stephen told us. It will sound like a unique bit of news, but it doesn’t reveal anything we don’t want him to know.” He folded his hands on the desk and gave them a tutorly look. “Well, then, what do we know? Anything new?”

  “One thing,” Tom said. “While I was out with the dogs yesterday, I started thinking about that ladder and how stupid it was to leave it lying right beside the body. Why bother, I asked myself.”

  “Did you ever get around to answering yourself?” Bacon had clearly recovered from his earlier shocks.

  Tom grinned, long accustomed to this routine. “It occurred to me the killer might have used the ladder to reach that loose brick.”

  “That explains why I couldn’t find it,” Trumpet said. “I only looked at eye level.”

  “Your eye level, Mr. Shrimpington?” No one but Tom would call her by that old nickname. She stuck her tongue out him and he laughed. “One foot up for a normal person, higher to account for their reach. Higher still if you used the ladder, and then you’d be on the ladder when Grenville popped up. Higher than him, looking down. You’d move the ladder afterward to protect your secret letter hole.”

  “So the killer needn’t have been taller than Grenville,” Bacon said. “That means it could be anyone. It’s a good observation, Tom, but it woefully lengthens our list of suspects.”

  “I can shorten it,” Trumpet said. “In fact, I can count the names on my fingers. It has to be a gentlewoman of the Privy Chambers. Or Lady Stafford.”

  “We’ll rule her out.” Bacon made a decisive slicing motion. “As one of Her Majesty’s oldest friends, she’s more untouchable than Sir Walter. What’s your evidence?”

  “The phial. I know where it came from.”

  “Venice,” Bacon said.

  Trumpet clucked her tongue. “More recently. It’s one of a set of twelve given to Her Majesty by Sir Horatio Palavicino.”

  “Nice work, Trumpington!” Tom said.

  She preened herself. I
t was indeed a major piece of evidence that only she could have supplied. They needed her to solve these cases. They just refused to admit it.

  “Twelve?” Bacon asked.

  “Only seven now. They’re kept in a cedar box at the top of a cabinet in Her Majesty’s dressing room. I was asking the ladies about that phial on Saturday, trying to find out who had it first. It was obviously a rare piece. Penelope Rich was helping out that day. She said she hadn’t seen it at the wedding supper, but she knew where it came from. She climbed up on a stool and took down the box and there they were.”

  “Seven out of twelve,” Bacon asked. “One is in Lord Dorchester’s possession. Where are the other four?”

  “Her Majesty uses two for her own perfumes. Penelope said she gave one to the Earl of Essex and one to the French ambassador.”

  “Who else can get into that cabinet?” Tom asked.

  “No one,” Trumpet said, “apart from the chamberers who do the sweeping and so forth. We haven’t been thinking about servants. Should we be?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bacon said. “Most palace servants are born into their posts, especially the ones allowed into the queen’s private apartments.”

  “We can rule out Lady Rich too,” Tom said. “Could she really be so crafty as to show you that box if she’s the one who stole a phial to poison Lady Anne?”

  “Yes,” Trumpet and Bacon answered in unison.

  “Oh.” Tom shrugged, letting it go easily. He’d lost his old fascination for the famous Stella. In fact, Trumpet hadn’t seen him so much as grin with that extra touch of Tomliness at another woman since he’d arrived.

  “That does shorten our list,” Bacon said. “How many gentlewomen are there?”

  “Five,” Trumpet said. “Me, Bess Throckmorton, Mary Buckleigh, Mary Ratcliffe, and Anne Courtenay. Mary Ratcliffe had a boil on her leg or something so she went home. Penelope Rich joins us sometimes. She makes a cooling mask the queen particularly likes. The maids of honor are in and out of the Privy Bedchamber too and they love gossip as much as anybody. That’s Elizabeth Brydges and her sister Frances, Elizabeth Vernon, Mary Fitton, Bridget Manners, and Elizabeth Cecil.”