His face suddenly twisted beyond all recognition, and he stood to fling his arms up. “The Boleyn witches must be purified! Two queens have paid for their corruption already. There shall be no third,” he screamed. “The king commands it.”
Kate fell back a step in shock and grasped a handful of the tapestry to hold herself upright. Two dead queens, lakes of blood—Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard? And the old accusations of witchcraft that had led them to the block . . .
“Varlet!” Lord Hunsdon shouted. He reached for the sword at his side, but his sister stayed his hand.
“’Tis not Master Constable who says this,” Lady Knollys sobbed, tears running down her cheeks. “’Tis the spirits. Oh, by the saints, what are we to do?”
“The virgin must rule them now!” Master Constable said, his voice grown even rockier, rougher. “Born of the lecher and the witch, she shall make things whole again, shall wash away the old blood—if she remains pure. Then peace and plenty will shower over the land, and none may tear it apart.”
Master Constable suddenly collapsed to the floor, as if all the bones in his body had gone out of him and he was a mere heap of black robes. The smoke swirled again and took on a form like a flaming sword—with bright red dripping from its tip.
Kate thought suddenly of Queen Anne and the French swordsman who had ended her life as she knelt before the block. One swipe of a bloody blade, and the queen’s mother was no more. Kate had wanted to cover her eyes, but she could not look away.
The smoke collapsed, leaving not even a trace of scent behind, and everyone in the room screamed and ran.
Kate knew not how such trickery was done, how Master Constable managed to do such a thing, but she knew he could not just be left on the floor. While everyone else broke into hysterics, she hurried over to him and knelt down by his side. His box had tumbled from the table, scattering herbs and some strange grayish dust on the priceless carpet.
Among them was a small book, obviously old, water warped, bound in scarred brown leather, and tied with a loop of twine. Impulsively, she scooped it up and tucked it into the silk pouch tied at her sash. She had to find out how he had done this trickery tonight, so she could comfort Lady Knollys and assure her that the queen’s blood would not wash over the land.
She pushed Master Constable over onto his back. He was heavier than he looked. The man was milk white, his face beaded with sweat, his eyes twitching wildly behind their closed lids.
“Master Constable, wake up!” she called, shaking him by the shoulders. “You must wake now, and tell us how you did this. What it all means.”
He didn’t open his eyes, and he shook lifelessly under her hand.
Suddenly, his eyes flew open and he stared up at her for one long, silent moment. His whole body went rigid, and Kate rocked back on her heels away from him.
“Boleyn witches!” he screamed, and collapsed back to the floor in a terrifying convulsive fit.
A gentle hand on her arm almost made her scream. She twisted around to see Master Green standing above her, his handsome face gentle and concerned as he looked at her.
“Come, Mistress Haywood; this is no place for a lady. Let us see you to your chamber,” he said, quietly but firmly. “Dr. Dee has been sent for to fetch his apprentice.”
She glanced past him to see that his friend Master Roland, Violet’s brother, stood with him. His face was tight, as unsure of what to do as she was herself. “Aye, Mistress Haywood, you must come with us now.” He glanced down at Constable with a grimace of disdain.
“Thank you, Master Green. Master Roland,” she whispered. She let Master Green help her to her feet and lead her away from the frightening sight of Constable in his trance.
At the door, she glanced back to see Lord Hunsdon haul Master Constable to his feet. Constable’s eyes were open now, and he no longer trembled violently, though he looked most dazed. Lady Knollys was soothing her rattled guests, and Lady Lettice was nowhere to be seen. Things were quieter already.
But Kate feared it would be a long time before she could get the images of that night out of her mind. Would blood truly wash over England all over again? She was not a superstitious woman, but the thought of it filled her with a cold dread she couldn’t quite shake away.
CHAPTER NINE
“And now comes Sir Trueheart, to defend the honor of his lady fair, the queen of all his heart!”
A wave of applause swept over the crowd gathered on the wooden stands overlooking Nonsuch’s tournament grounds. The golden warmth of the sun, the soft wind that caught at the bright banners of green and gold seemed like a benediction, sweeping away the strange foreboding of the last few days.
No one basked in the light as much as the queen herself. Elizabeth sat on the highest dais, beneath an embroidered canopy on a velvet throne. Her gown was the same pale blue as the sky, sewn with the shimmer of pearls, her red-gold hair caught up in a crown of more pearls and diamonds shaped like twining flowers. All her ladies, gathered around her like the frilled lace of a May Day bouquet, wore real blossoms in their own loose hair, white like their gowns.
The rest of the court clustered in the stands, a rippling river of blue and silver and gold. Servants hurried among them with generously filled goblets of wine and cider and platters of sweetmeats, adding to the giddy market-day feeling of the day. Everyone was overjoyed to be freed from the chambers and corridors of indoors at last. It was as if no one had heard of the strange events in Lady Knollys’s chamber at all.
A blast of silvery trumpets sounded, and the flower-bedecked gates of the joust field opened to let in Sir Trueheart, who sat astride his prancing white horse. The ladies all giggled and whispered behind their hands and their feathered fans, trying to decipher who he was behind his chased silver helm.
It could not be Robert Dudley, Kate decided as she studied the crowd. He sat beside the queen, the two of them sharing a bowl of strawberry sweets and laughing together. Nor could it be Lord Arundel, the architect of this tournament. Their host’s jousting days were far behind him, and he watched the festivities with anxious eyes toward the queen’s amusement—and an obvious curse for Dudley.
But Kate had to admit that Lord Arundel had been a most excellent host that day. The games had been arranged hastily to take advantage of the fine weather, yet there was no hint of shabbiness about them at all. Everything looked just like a tournament for King Arthur and his knights, down to the embroidered badges of the banners, just like the ones displayed at the banquet.
The riders and their richly caparisoned horses, the trumpets, the brilliant colors, the archers on the ramparts. It was all most romantic, with the competitors vying for the favors of their fair ladies, for the most applause, and for the greatest number of flowers tossed at their horses’ hooves.
Against her will, Kate’s attention strayed to where Anthony Elias sat with Master Hardy and the Duchess of Somerset’s party behind the queen. Unlike the others, he had left behind his dark lawyer’s robes and wore a new burgundy doublet, his brown, close-cropped hair and chiseled features handsome against the rich color.
She turned away quickly, but she feared the heat on her face was not just from the sun high overhead. Romance was everywhere at court in the summer, poetry and flowers and fine words. She had thought herself immune to its lure, buried in her music, but was she really?
What was real, and what was false? Just like the spirits Dr. Dee and Master Constable claimed to see, the secrets they saw in their stone. What she had seen herself in Lady Knollys’s rooms. Kate could hardly know at all anymore.
She felt an odd prickling sensation on the back of her neck and glanced back over her shoulder at the tired wooden benches behind her. To her shock, she caught Master Constable watching her, his oddly pale eyes blazing in his damp white face. There was a shifting crowd between them, couriers gasping and laughing at the jousters and their feats, but he was un
mistakably staring at her.
A vision flared in her mind—Master Constable falling to the floor amid the bright flash of the explosion, ladies screaming, Lord Hunsdon’s fury, the sudden fear. She wished she could forget it, pretend it never happened at all, but she feared she would never forget it now. She would always hear the cryptic warnings of spirits she didn’t want to believe in.
She knew William Cecil had questioned Master Constable about both the fight at the banquet and what happened in Lady Knollys’s rooms. Surely he would not have let him go if there was any danger to the queen. Yet Kate did not like seeing him there now, remembering what happened.
She whipped back around to stare straight ahead of her, sightlessly. The two combatants on the field met in a great clash and clatter of splintered wood, nearly unhorsing one of them, but Kate couldn’t see the gaudy spectacle of it all as everyone around her gasped. She still kept seeing that chaotic scene in Lady Knollys’s room. She shivered, despite the heat of the sun.
“I know ’tis a bit frightening after the news earlier this summer from France,” the man next to her said.
Kate was pulled back down into the day and the festive crowd around her. She looked over, remembering that Master Roland sat beside her, his sister, Violet, at his other side. He gave Kate a kind smile and offered her a goblet of chilled wine.
“Thank you,” she murmured as she accepted it. “It is a very warm day, I fear. But I am sure nothing will happen here like what occurred in France.” She had quite forgotten about King Henri, dying so horribly from the jousting lance that caught him in the eye, but it only added to the strange feeling that wouldn’t let her go.
“The poor French king!” Violet cried. “And Monsieur Noailles, the French ambassador, does look rather green, does he not? Such a thing can’t happen here, can it, Thomas?”
“Certainly not, sis. Such an accident is most rare, and I promise you Lord Arundel was very scrupulous about the arrangements for this tournament. I assisted with them myself,” Master Roland said with a small flash of pride. “I saw the lances blunted and helped in drawing up the matches. His lordship trusts all his employees.”
“It sounds as if Lord Arundel is an excellent master,” Kate said, trying to forget about the darkness and see only the sunlit day. She took another deep sip of the wine.
“Indeed he is,” Master Roland answered. “I was most fortunate to gain a place in his household and to have his trust. With his help, I hope to advance far at court, perhaps even one day gain a foreign post. There is no telling how far I might take my family with such a patron. Even find a high lord for you to wed, eh, Vi?”
His words were teasing, and Violet laughed in response, but Kate saw her friend’s gaze shift away. Kate remembered Master Longville, his touch on Violet’s arm—and the tenderness in her gaze when she looked at Master Green instead. “Oh, but I need no title! Just a cozy little home somewhere, some lovely babes . . .”
“As you say now, but there is no need for haste, Vi. Who knows what may happen for us soon enough?” For an instant, Master Roland frowned and his hands curled into fists, as if he caught a glimpse of something in the distance he could not yet quite grasp. But then he smiled again. “We need only have a bit of patience.”
“How does your friend Master Green today, Master Roland?” Kate asked. “I have not yet seen him at the tournament.”
Master Roland shrugged, but Violet suddenly looked at him closely. “I think he was sent on an errand by his master, Lord Hunsdon, Mistress Haywood, but I assure you he has recovered from that—business—at the banquet. It’s a shock that a man such as Dr. Dee, with so very much in his favor, would keep such a man as Constable around him. We all know so little of him.”
Kate felt again that prickling on the back of her neck, heard the unearthly cry. Boleyn witches. Before she could think of what to answer, Master Roland turned away to tease his blushing sister again.
“If you need no lordship for your husband, Vi, then what of Longville? He quite adores you, I think. He is always following you about. And I hear his house in Warwickshire is cozy indeed.”
“Nay!” Violet cried. “I do not think I can like him.”
Master Roland’s smile darkened. “Has he bothered you?”
“Not bother. Just . . . I cannot like him that way, and I have told him so. He just does not yet believe me.” Violet fussed with the folds of her pale lavender skirt. “Pray, brother, say no more about him. Oh, look, the silver knight has won! Who is he, do you think?”
The silver knight leaped gracefully from his saddle and knelt before the queen, sweeping off his plumed helmet just like a defender of Arthur’s time. Sunlight gleamed on golden hair and a wide smile spread across his face as he looked up at the queen, who was laughing and applauding, much to Dudley’s obvious dismay.
Kate, too, was shocked. For the silver knight who had won the tournament so handily was Rob Cartman. Her heart suddenly beat faster at the sight of him, so dashing, his smile so bright at his victory. He looked so very much like a knight in a poem, and she found that, no matter how much she might want to, she couldn’t look away from him.
* * *
After the tournament, Lord Arundel had invited the court to explore his maze, and Kate had flocked with the rest of them to the labyrinthine paths. The garden maze felt like a different world, Kate thought, as she tilted back her head to gaze up at the square of blue sky above the walls of the sculpted hedges. The heels of her new shoes sank into the soft, rain-soaked earth, as if they were trying to hold her down so she couldn’t fly away.
Voices and laughter were muffled, almost eerie, and she couldn’t tell if they came from just beyond the wall beside her, or if they were very far away indeed.
Violet and Master Green, who had returned to see the last of the tournament, had been just ahead of her, Violet’s lavender-colored brocade skirts a purple-plumage glow against all the shadowy green. They held hands, wrapped in their own moment, until they’d vanished around a corner.
For an instant, Kate felt as if she was completely alone in a world tossed upside down. Then she glanced back and saw Rob Cartman walking behind her.
He had washed after his victory in the tournament, and his damp golden hair appeared darker, his blue eyes shadowed. He had scored a great moment before the queen and all the court, surely impressing all the nobles he hoped to gain patronage from, yet he looked so serious. Was he not there to gain attention from someone, possibly Lord Hunsdon? Kate, on the other hand, felt anything but serious, just for a moment.
She smiled at him, feeling suddenly giddy in this world of sky and grass and summer laughter. It was as if the false romance of the tournament was reality for a moment. The darkness of the séance, Master Constable’s scrying, and the horror of that faraway joust in France seemed far away. She wanted to hold on to that feeling as long as she could.
“So, Sir Silver Knight,” she said. “You even had the queen smiling upon you today. Your trip to Nonsuch was never in vain.”
He did finally smile at that, a quick, brilliant, concealing flash. “I could only see your smile, Kate. I never thought I could surprise you.”
“How did you come to have such a place in the tournament? I didn’t know you could ride like that.”
“All actors must know how to ride. How to fight. How to be a chivalrous knight. Or a dark villain. Or the enchanter at the banquet putting the revelers under a spell.”
Kate shook her head, thinking of the smoke, the screams, at Lady Knollys’s gathering. Surely Nonsuch held enough enchanters. “And you have always wanted to be an actor,” she said, remembering the tale he once told her when they first met at Hatfield House. His parents, simple farm folk; his uncle, the glamorous actor who took Rob away to teach him the trade. The years of wandering, hunger, hardship, passionate desire for art. She knew how such things felt.
“It was always within me,
” he answered simply. They walked slowly together down the winding path, close but not touching. “I knew I could never live in just one place, as my parents did, seeing the same people every day, talking of the same things over and over. I could never just be one person, when there were so many within me. Is it not the same with you, Kate? Is music not like many worlds in your heart?”
Kate was surprised he understood. So few people did. Her father; the queen, mayhap. Music was more than a dance. It was emotion contained in a sound. An escape. Just like helping Elizabeth was a sort of escape, going places she would never otherwise see, learning new things. “Aye, just so. But music has always been in my life, even before I was born, since it is everything to my father. I grew up not knowing anything else.”
And also everything for the mother she had never known. Her Boleyn mother.
Rob reached out to pluck a stray twig from the hedge near her head. It was dark against his long, scarred fingers, and he turned it over in smooth, practiced movements. “My uncle once came to Nonsuch. Did you know?”
Kate remembered Rob’s murdered uncle, his underhanded doings at Hatfield, which had led to his death. She was surprised, but she knew she should not be. Actors were always traveling, always meeting people of different sorts. Rob’s uncle seemed to be a man with an eye to a profit all the time, an eye for a powerful patron.
Just like Rob? What would he do for his acting troupe?
“You seldom tell me much at all, Rob,” she said. “Surely you know that. Yet I think you did mention such, there by the lake.”
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